Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  But it’s difficult to believe this imagined future, these speculative news stories that come churning off the wire in the bowels of Johnston Hall, providing possible filler for the Marquette Tribune. “Many government agencies have not begun to deal with the prospect of worldwide weather changes resulting from the greenhouse effect, the name scientists have given to a global warming trend they say is occurring because of pollutants in the atmosphere.” These stories read like 1984 and sound like “1999.”

  “Scientists,” the story says, “warn of unprecedented catastrophes.”

  Sophomore year proves from the start to be every bit as sophomoric as freshman year. I’m in another high-rise dorm called M. Carpenter Tower, but this time on the sixteenth floor. The exterior rooms look onto Wisconsin Avenue, the city’s main drag, and a few of my dorm mates are fond of dropping water balloons out the windows and onto the bus stop below, exploding at the feet of innocent Milwaukeeans, waiting freshly dressed-and-pressed for a city bus to take them to work.

  I don’t feel good about these “stunts,” as Dad would call them if he knew about them, and he doesn’t. Watching from a safe remove, I laugh along with everyone else, but maybe the guilt this time is less a fear of getting in trouble than a desire to do right, to grow up.

  There are weekdays when I’ll go sit in the century-old Church of the Gesù on campus—a dead ringer for Chartres Cathedral—and wallow in the near silence. The hum of traffic on Wisconsin Avenue reminds me of similar sounds from South Brook: the oscillating fan in my bedroom there; the churning and thrumming of the washer and dryer in the laundry room; the purr of the engine as Dad’s car pulls into the garage and idles for a split second, signaling that dinner is imminent; the gurgle of the dishwasher after dinner, when Mom and Dad have their evening coffee. The muffled traffic on Wisconsin Avenue heard from a pew in Gesù is a reminder of home and hominess. I’m a sophomore in college and still a little homesick. Is it possible this feeling will never leave me, even when 2809 West 96th Street belongs to someone else and there is no longer a home for which to be sick?

  There is comfort in the ritual of attending Mass, even if the ritual is rather different in Milwaukee—homeless men snoozing in the back—than in Bloomington (where the snoozing men have homes). Here, for instance, there is a Hangover Mass on Sunday evenings, attended almost exclusively by cotton-mouthed congregants lip-syncing through the hymnal. We place our faces in our palms to still our throbbing temples—but it looks like an act of piety. We are praying, yes, but mostly that the priest doesn’t pass by with his brass censer, swinging a burning perfume in our direction.

  At Notre Dame, there’s a Sunday night Hangover Mass as well, and Jim is a regular attendee. My biggest brother is no longer collecting celebrity signatures on American Express receipts in the accounting office of the Sheraton O’Hare. He’s a Notre Dame graduate student in pursuit of his MBA, which was the best method he could think of to become eligible for season tickets to the Fighting Irish football games. The happy result of all this is that Jim is home for a few days over Christmas break, when Mom requires all of us in college—Tom, Jim, and I—to register with an agency that will find us temporary jobs over the holidays. It happens every Christmas: I return home to register with this local authority, as if I’m a convicted sex offender or a parolee checking in with his PO.

  The temp jobs are almost always ridiculous. At an auto-parts warehouse, we have to conduct the year-end inventory, pulling boxes off shelves and counting the number of spark plugs inside, then dutifully recording the number on a form that has six carbon copies. One of our fellow temps wears a Walkman with Iron Maiden spilling out the headphones. At least two temps climb to the third level of shelving, ostensibly to inventory the fan belts up there, and lie down among the boxes to take a nap. Tom and I stage what the papers call a “work slowdown,” counting as sluggishly as possible, not out of any ideological labor protest but because we’re apathetic. Lethargy is our school-break default setting. But Jim—Jim is doing his job and all of ours, happily counting box after box of wiper blades and gas caps and ignition coils and about a million other auto parts. How many? Only Jim can say for sure, because he’s done a painstaking count of this entire warehouse—happily, enthusiastically, whistling while he works.

  Each job is more tedious than the last. Our piecemeal assignments are given to us by a woman named Sally Ann. She is disembodied, faceless, a voice on the telephone like Charlie from Charlie’s Angels. One morning she dispatches Tom, Jim, and me to the world headquarters of the Softsoap manufacturer in Chaska. Minnetonka Corporation is the maker of liquid hand soap flatulently dispensed from a pump at your kitchen sink or bathroom vanity. Our job is to look at hundreds of empty plastic bottles not yet filled with liquefied hand soap and note the number embossed on the bottom of each. Whenever we see a number 6, presumably defective, we are to cull that bottle from the herd. We do this for eight hours, with thirty minutes off for lunch, throwing the 6s into a separate bin. By the second hour, Tom and I are dispatching the 6s into their bin by means of hook shot, turnaround jumper, or tomahawk dunk. By the third hour, we are attempting to block each other’s shots, vigorously defending drives to the basket, fouling the shooter when necessary. Talk about money for nothing.

  “Thank you, everybody,” the supervisor tells us when we’ve assembled in front of him at the end of the day. “Excellent work. We’ll see you all here tomorrow morning.”

  He points at Tom and me. “Except you two. We won’t need you back.”

  We find this hilarious. We’ll just tell Mom what the guy told us—we won’t be needed the next day. At some point in the past two years Tom and I have gone from combatants to coconspirators. But our transformation is nothing compared to Jim’s. He finds joy in manual labor. Who is this guy? As a teenager hospitalized with two black eyes and a broken nose suffered in a hockey game—though his face resembled a Halloween mask and he couldn’t see his interlocutor—he could still find the energy to say: “What are you lookin’ at?”

  This same guy now ingratiates himself with warehouse managers and happily performs the most menial tasks on offer. He has channeled his hockey-playing intensity into work. Here’s a man, nearly twenty-five years old, on his way to an advanced degree, examining Softsoap bottles with the care and evident fascination of a jeweler gazing through his loupe at the Hope Diamond. Tom and I have the very same epiphany at the very same time: that Jim is becoming Dad, embracing work, recognizing the imperative of making money, and choosing to be happy in the necessary—in the salutary—pursuit of it.

  I’m not there yet. One evening Sally Ann sends me on a solo mission to a suburban printing plant not far from the Softsoap site in Chaska. This is always the best part of temp work: getting the call. In that moment, Sally Ann is M, and I am James Bond being dispatched to an exotic location for an invigorating misadventure. And then I turn up at an industrial park an hour before midnight to spend the night shift in a windowless warehouse made of corrugated metal and lit like the White Castle parking lot, so that my coworkers have the skin tone and ocular health of the living-dead extras in the “Thriller” video.

  My job is to stack pads of generic green restaurant checks and place them into boxes for shipping. These are the kind of pads on which a gum-snapping waitress (I think of Flo on Alice) jots down your order before tearing it off and leaving it on the table as your bill. The stacked pads will only fit in the shipping boxes if their edges all align perfectly, and the quickest way to do this is to place the pads on a vibrating metal platform that shakes them into neat columns. After an hour of working the vibrating table, I’ve gone numb from the elbows down. Which is a blessing—in this condition, I don’t feel the fresh paper cuts that score my fingers and palms. By 3 a.m., I find myself wondering if any of my coworkers has ever thumped his Johnson onto this vibrating plate just to feel something. By 5 a.m., I’m half contemplating it myself. Sometime after 7 a.m., when I’ve arrived home, long after Dad has gone to work but be
fore anyone else has risen, I stick a Post-it note next to the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen. The Post-it note is another miraculous product from the 3M Company. Dad brings them home in bulk from the company store. On it, I write a poem I composed in my head while driving home:

  Sally Ann will ring this phone.

  “Will Steve work?” she’ll ask ya.

  Tell Sally Ann to go to hell.

  Or better yet, to Chaska.

  When I come down to breakfast at two in the afternoon, the note is still by the phone. Mom has left it there. If she didn’t find it funny, it would be gone. But it isn’t. Quite why this makes me so happy I cannot say, but making Mom laugh is still my primary aim in writing. Which is a challenge when the class assignment subject is a public-records search or a state congressional race or the theft of a bicycle. The best part of watching The Carol Burnett Show on Saturday nights as a kid was when Tim Conway made the other actors—usually Harvey Korman, sometimes Carol herself—“break.” This was Hollywood shorthand for breaking character, but it appeared to me that they were literally breaking: their faces fissured with stifled laughter, tears appeared at the corners of their eyes, and their shoulders shook, as if some great rupture were taking place. That’s what happens when I make Mom laugh at the dinner table. The impending rupture often involves her bladder, and she races to the bathroom five feet from her chair. In journalism classes I’m told to serve the reader, remember who my audience is. But there is only ever one reader, and really only one goal in writing for her. Breaking Mom.

  In that golden hour of late afternoon, having just risen from bed, supine and concave on the maroon love seat as if lying in a wheelbarrow, I open the paper and turn first to the comics. It’s a ritual as familiar as Mass but performed with greater religious zeal. It’s also more comforting: even more than the soap operas that so many of my dorm mates at Marquette find absorbing—killing their afternoons with Days and All My Kids—the comics are unchanging and timeless. When exactly is Blondie set? Blondie herself wears a formal dress and a string of pearls to the movies, while Dagwood goes in a suit and bow tie. The boys in Beetle Bailey take leave in the big city, as if they’re Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh in 1945. (I saw it on Mel’s Matinee Movie on a school sick day in the ’70s, thermometer plugged into me like a Thanksgiving turkey.) There has happily been no character development in the comics in the fifteen years I’ve been reading them. Every husband and wife bicker: Hägar the Horrible and his wife, Helga; Andy Capp and his missus; and the passive-aggressive spouses in The Lockhorns, who remind me of Stanley and Helen Roper on Three’s Company, or Archie and Edith on All in the Family, or Ralph and Alice on The Honeymooners reruns that have aired every weeknight for years on local TV. Even the comedians on The Tonight Show—Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman, and Johnny himself—treat marriage as a combat sport.

  Mom and Dad aren’t like that at all, which may be why my favorite comics are about big families in chaotic houses. The Family Circus is about Bil and Thelma and their four kids, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, and P.J. Their family isn’t as big as our own, and is far better behaved, but they have the advantage of never aging, remaining forever nuclear, under one roof; the babies are forever babies, the teens perpetual teens. This has an appeal to me. The best comic strip of all, better even than the brilliant The Far Side, is Calvin and Hobbes, about an ageless boy and his faithful stuffed tiger, alive only to him.

  On New Year’s Day of 1986, Calvin approaches his dad, reading a book in an armchair like my own dad’s, next to a lamp exactly like ours, and asks, “Dad, how come you live in this house with Mom instead of in an apartment with several scantily clad female roommates?” After Dad stares for a panel into the middle distance, Calvin has his TV privileges revoked. This is what it was like in our house, for the better part of a dozen years, which may be why I’m so happy at home, all seven of us under one roof: because these moments are finite, numbered, limited to Christmas breaks and summer vacations and Thanksgivings. And even during these brief homecomings, much of my time is taken up not reading the comics or watching movies in the basement but with temporary jobs of unbelievable, unrelievable boredom, each one a cautionary tale that betokens a potential future of daily despair, of existential ennui. I don’t want any of these temp jobs to become my permanent job. I’m actively opposed to becoming a yuppie or a corporate fat cat, whatever my khakis and docksiders and kelly-green Izod cardigan might say to the contrary. I will live a modest life rich in fulfillment but bereft of luxuries, in the manner of Jesus, or James and Florida Evans on Good Times. I have no real interest in making money, and when I say so, Dad replies, “But you might someday. When you have a family to support.”

  A family to support. As with my long-ago dreams of flying to the moon, this distant land—A Family of My Own—is at once unreachable and unavoidable. Marriage seems inevitable and impossible. Even my literary hero, the divorced sportswriter Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple, had to get married before he became single, free to roam—in his Mets cap and sweatshirt, sandwich in hand—through his eight-room apartment in Manhattan. Which isn’t to suggest that those dreams of flying to the moon have been entirely extinguished.

  Shortly after returning from Christmas break in January, getting out of bed with just enough time to make it to Johnston Hall for my eleven o’clock class if I make brazen use of the elevator override button—evidently a universal feature in Marquette dormitories—I try to turn off the muted TV. But I can’t immediately find the remote and see on the screen that the space shuttle is about to launch from Cape Canaveral. The sky is cerulean. A radio voice says, “T minus fifteen seconds.” I was not quite three when my family moved from Lisle, Illinois, to Bloomington, stopping overnight in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin, where my parents tucked me and Tom and Jim into bed at the Shady Lawn Motel and watched the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was six when the men of Apollo 17 landed on the moon in the final Apollo mission. There followed a succession of astronautical bath toys and at least one Apollo rocket ship model that was broken when used as a pointy-ended billy club on my brothers. Childhood vacation tours of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, and of NASA headquarters when Uncle Pat and Aunt Sandy lived in Houston, and of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum when I was thirteen, remain vivid in my imagination. One of my unspoken dreams is to somehow slip the surly bonds of earth without slipping the cozy bonds of Bloomington.

  I sit on the edge of the bottom bunk and watch. I am powerless to do otherwise. “We have main engine start,” says a disembodied voice, though in my head that voice is attached to a man in a short-sleeved white dress shirt and skinny tie from the 1960s and the kind of glasses that Malcolm X wore. “Four, three, two, one, and liftoff. Liftoff!” The crowd is applauding. It’s not a moon shot, but the goose bumps appear nonetheless. “The twenty-fifth space shuttle mission has cleared the tower.” The great phallus climbs on a column of fire.

  I stand to leave. The audio transmission is a beautiful mission-control mumbo jumbo about “engines throttling down” and the Challenger drifting “downrange,” all said in that comforting Chuck Yeager Southern drawl first celebrated by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, another book recommended by a journalism professor. That drawl has been adopted by every airline pilot in the U.S., if not the world. In that voice, danger is rendered routine, the heroic made mundane. “We apologize for the bumps,” the Yeager-inspired pilot says as your 727 is tempest tossed. “Uh, we’ll try to find us some smooth air so you won’t spill your drinks. Flight attendants, please be seated…”

  Textbooks in hand, I stand beside the bed for another beat, soaking it in. The shuttle is racing away from me now and so apparently is CNN, preparing to cut away from this enchanting tableau, their man on the scene—VOICE OF TOM MINTIER CNN CORRESPONDENT reads the chroma-key—wrapping things up neatly. “So the twenty-fifth space shuttle mission is now on the way,” he says, pausing as another explosion—a booster, perhaps?—causes the white column in the ro
cket’s wake to split into two. There is momentary confusion. “It looks like a couple of solid rocket boosters blew away from the side of the shuttle in an explosion,” says the announcer, whose incomprehension slowly yields to disbelief. The smoky contrail is still rising upward like a wraith with two arms. “Flight controllers looking very carefully at the situation,” says a tinny monotone. “Obviously a major malfunction.”

  I stand for thirty minutes, then sit back down on the bed. Every channel shows the same scene: the clear blue sky, the billowing white clouds, the anonymous death from above. I watch it again and again, this explosion that will have its echo on another bright Tuesday morning, fifteen years from now.

  11.

  Another One Rides the Bus

  There are happier signs that point to a future that may be utopian rather than dystopian, more George Jetson than George Orwell. It’s evident in a late-night commercial. “First came the pocket watch,” goes the voice-over. “Then the pocket radio. Then, even, a pocket camera! But who would have thought of a pocket TV? Casio, of course!” Barely larger than a deck of cards, this TV runs on two AA batteries—included!—“sending a clear black-and-white picture from a name we know and trust.” I have no intention of sending a check or money order for just $99.95 plus $5.00 postage and handling to a PO box in West Caldwell, New Jersey, but am fascinated to consider the result if I did: a television in my pocket. To get many of the channels I now watch, I’d have to be tethered to a prodigious length of coaxial cable. But with enough pockets, conceivably, I could walk around with a TV, a camera, a digital clock, and a Walkman—every one of them smaller than a house brick—at my immediate disposal.