by Steve Rushin
“Hmm,” I say. “That would be his BS, I presume?”
But I’m overcoming my fear, acquiring a life independent of Minnesota and Milwaukee. I open a bank account at Manufacturers Hanover and learn to call it Manny Hanny. I’m now saying “graduated high school” instead of “graduated from high school.” The NCAAs are now a “tore-na-ment,” not a “turn-a-mint.”
My grocery store is now Gristedes, not Red Owl, my church is Saint Patrick’s, not Captivity, my local news anchors are now WNBC’s Chuck and Sue, whom I like to think of as Suck and Chew.
Mike and Ope visit from Bloomington. We drink in every Irish bar on Second Avenue and hit White Castle in Manhattan, though the visit is redundant, because so many places in Manhattan approximate White Castle: Tad’s Steaks, the Blarney Stone chain of watering holes, the Port Authority Bus Terminal—each provides a constituent part of the Castle ambience.
Otherwise, what passes for leisure is reading Bonfire of the Vanities in my shorts in front of the window AC unit on another brick-oven afternoon. Tom Wolfe’s crack and Wall Street blockbuster has a black-and-white photo on the back: the author in white double-breasted suit with billowing pocket square. As jacket photos go, Wolfe’s is better than mine. Without Mom here to buy them, I have no interest in clothes and remain loyal to a small rotation of khakis and golf shirts that I sniff in the morning. My graduation suit was dry-cleaned once in a joint wallpapered with eight-by-ten headshots of Broadway and soap-opera and prime-time-television stars, so that it’s a small thrill to be given the same light starch once enjoyed by Hong Kong Phooey himself, the late Scatman Crothers. My suit hangs in the closet, chemically embalmed beneath its dry-cleaning bag, never again to be worn to work.
A complimentary copy of the New York Times is delivered to my desk every day so I supplement it by buying the Post off the newsstand on the walk in. A poor sap in Queens has slipped while climbing a wrought-iron fence and impaled himself through the soft tissues beneath his chin. The man was rescued by firemen after dangling there like a fish for a couple of hours. The Post headline—MR. LUCKY—makes me wonder out loud: “If this is Mr. Lucky, who is Mr. Unlucky?”
Another day a man in Turtle Bay menaces a midday crowd of pedestrians with a Gurkha sword.
One Sunday morning I emerge from Mass to see a homeless man in a raincoat squat to the ground. When he stands, there is something on the sidewalk that hadn’t been there before, and I wonder if this man has just laid an egg. But it’s not an egg.
When I call home on Sunday nights and report these stories back to Mom and Dad, there is a stereophonic howl from the two phones they’re on, before one or both say, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” And then Mom asks, “Are you eating?” and “How’s your social life?”
Every evening after work I stop at Original Ray’s for two plain slices on a greased paper plate and again at Smiler’s Deli for two Coors Lights and thus resume my Silver Bullet Nights. I’m alone in a crowd, living with four guys who played football together at Yale and work for the same bank and go out together at night. Upon Alex Wolff’s return from abroad, I’ve moved to a shared bedroom in a high-rise building overlooking Sparks Steak House, on East 46th, where Big Paul Castellano—head of the Gambino crime family, the “beleaguered kingpin of American organized crime,” as the Daily Snooze called him—was whacked while getting out of a town car on a December day at 5:30 p.m., in broad twilight. Big Paul has been replaced by John Gotti, the “Dapper Don,” in jocular tabloid headlines, in the daily soap opera of a city whose characters we’re supposed to know by their headline epithets: Preppie Killer. Iron Mike. Doc. Darryl. The Donald.
On civilian weekends—midweek at the magazine—my roommates throw parties attended by women who prefer bankers to fact-checkers. I learn to sleep through George Michael and the B-52’s. Tom visits from Chicago and takes a leak off our balcony on the thirty-first floor, despite the presumed presence of Gambino lieutenants disembarking from town cars below. More likely, the urine is only making it to the balconies on the twenty-ninth floor. Still, I’m never quite convinced that the random precipitation I feel as a pedestrian on clear days in New York is condensation from window unit air conditioners. I know it could be anything.
One September morning, as my three-month job is about to expire, I arrive in the office and am told to return to my apartment, pack a bag, and join the New York Rangers hockey team for their exhibition game tonight in Edmonton. On arrival, I’m supposed to tell the Rangers that I’m traveling with them to their next game in Denver. I’m twenty-one, don’t have a credit card, don’t know where Edmonton is, and have never been to Canada. The $1,000 cash advance I’m given in the Time & Life Building takes me as far as LaGuardia, where I spend $925 to retrieve my plane ticket at the American Airlines check-in counter, unaware that the ticket was prepaid and that I’ve now purchased it twice.
The Rangers aren’t expecting me because I haven’t called them, nor would anyone in their organization know who I am. I don’t have a business card. I simply turn up at the Northlands Coliseum with no return plane ticket, no hotel reservations, and scarcely enough money—seventy-five bucks—to cover meals and cab fare for three days on the road. Nor do I have a press credential to enter the Northlands Coliseum. But I’ve worked at Met Center and sneaked into at least five dozen movies in five separate theaters, and I know that a confident stride and an air of purpose can get me in just about any place. I walk into a construction zone outside the arena, which leads me to an open door, which leads me into the empty stands for the Rangers’ afternoon skate around. There is one man on the concourse, and I recognize his face as one I scissored out of Goal! magazine in the 1970s. Phil Esposito, now the Rangers’ general manager, was then a star for the Bruins. He is not a god but something greater. Bumper stickers in Boston once read JESUS SAVES BUT ESPO SCORES ON THE REBOUND.
My fear of Espo is exceeded only by the terror of being stranded in Edmonton with no money, no plane ticket, and—far worse—no story. So I approach the great suited man, clear my throat, introduce myself, tell him I’m here to write a story on Guy Lafleur, the thirty-seven-year-old former Montreal Canadien and future Hall of Famer who has come out of retirement to play for the Rangers. And oh, by the way, may I fly to Denver with the team after tonight’s game?
“Sure,” Esposito says, eyes locked on the ice. “No problem.”
After the game that night, I board the team bus last, as instructed by the traveling secretary, and take the only empty seat, an aisle. Next to me, staring out at the rain, his face reflected in the window, is “The Flower” himself, Guy Lafleur, whose photo graced—still graces—our basement in South Brook, cut out of Goal! magazine like Espo’s and Bobby Clarke’s and J. P. Parise’s and all the hockey heroes that Jim and Tom and John and I pretended to be in our stocking-footed Saturday morning donnybrooks.
I want to tell Lafleur that I vended popcorn at his games in Bloomington, but I find myself incapable of speech. We ride in silence toward the airport for five minutes until he turns to me and says: “Sports Illustrated did a front-page story on me in 1977.” As if I don’t know! THE FLYING FRENCHMAN OF MONTREAL was the cover headline, above an action photo of Lafleur, hair swept back in the self-made breeze of the Flying Frenchman, steering the puck with his Koho around some poor sap on the Capitals.
“I know,” I squeak, and we’re off, Lafleur anticipating the questions I can’t bring myself to pose, asking and answering them in what the Jesuits taught me was a rhetorical device called “hypophora.” As with popcorn vending and girls, I’m relying on my silence to prevail. “Ask me, ask me, ask me,” as Morrissey sings. And for the first time since Willie Mosconi, silence has worked.
The Rangers’ team charter doesn’t take off until 1 a.m. The notion that I’m part of the traveling party of an Original Six team in the National Hockey League is absurd. We arrive at the Westin in Denver at 4:30 a.m. There will be another exhibition game tonight, against the Pittsburgh Penguins, after which I�
�ll compose a story on my state-of-the-art Tandy TRS-80 Model 100, a computer that was handed to me, without instructions, on my way out of the Time & Life Building. It runs on four AA batteries, has a screen that displays eight lines of text, forty characters per line, and yet the whole thing is small enough to fit on my lap. To file the story, I attach two linked black cups to the Tandy, place the handset of my hotel telephone into this device, called an “acoustic coupler,” and say a prayer. After three failed attempts, my story magically flies from Denver to Manhattan through the telephone lines, by way of a rubber brassiere.
I’ve listened to Paul Simon’s “Graceland” a thousand times on a Walkman since leaving Edmonton, and can attest: these are the days of miracle and wonder.
The woman who assigned me this story, Bambi’s deputy, J. E. Vader, has FedEx’d her American Express card to the front desk of the Westin, so that I might pay for my room and a plane ticket back to New York. When I return to the office from Denver, I’m told that prepaid airline tickets by their very nature don’t require a second, redundant payment; that if I hope to work at Sports Illustrated—or anywhere else for that matter—I had better apply for an American Express card; that it’s necessary to phone teams in advance to secure a press credential if I expect to cover their games; and that my reportage—rewritten by hockey writer Austin Murphy, and running under his byline, replete with the details of Lafleur riding the bus in the rain and checking into the Westin at 4:30 a.m.—received positive reviews in the office. My three-month job has been extended for six more months.
On a Saturday night in October I’m enjoying my usual dinner in front of the TV, plain slices and Silver Bullets off a coffee table found on the street, when hobbled Dodgers slugger Kirk Gibson swings at a backdoor slider with a full count and two outs in the bottom of the ninth, a runner on second, his team down 4–3 against untouchable Dennis Eckersley of the A’s in Game 1 of the World Series. “High fly ball into right field,” sings Vin Scully on NBC. “And she…is…gone!” For the next minute and fifteen seconds, as Gibson circles the bases like some evangelical churchgoer commanded to rise from his wheelchair and walk, the only sound is the levitational roar of Dodger Stadium. I’m alone in the apartment, hands on head in disbelief. I walk out to the balcony, hear the honking of the indifferent city a mile below, then return to the TV, to the televised roar, and am overwhelmed with the sensation that I want to be there, not here. To watch this without being able to tell anyone about it—in prose—is a kind of torture.
For now, though, I’m downwardly mobile. With the high-rise lease expiring, my roommates and I decamp to East 77th Street, where I get a single room with a single barred half window in a basement. A giant water bug crawls out of my shower drain every morning. I think I see a smoldering cigarette pincered in one of its raptorial front legs. With the other appendage he appears to be flipping me the bird. On the phone, I ask Mom to send more of my “personal effects,” a phrase I’ve picked up from celebrity obituaries. And she does, but continues to hedge her bet, holding back the books in my bedroom because they’re heavy and expensive to ship and—though she never actually says it out loud—let’s see if I’m still living in New York in six months.
Or perhaps those books on the shelf above my bedroom desk—Jim’s handwritten Gettysburg Address is taped to the same bookcase, near Tom’s prom photos in their cardboard frames—are a happy reminder, eggshells left in an empty nest.
Sundays have become dread inducing. One Sunday morning, sitting at my desk, anticipating a long night of fact-checking, my lips begin to tingle and my fingertips go numb and I’m sent to see a nurse, who tells me it’s stress and I need to walk around the block now and then. When the Calgary Flames win the Stanley Cup, and Al MacInnis is named the MVP, and I have to fact-check the magazine’s instant feature on him that Sunday, I wait by the phone for twelve hours, assured by the Flames that their star defenseman will call me. Ravenous at 10 p.m., I ask my colleague Albert Kim in the office down the hall if he’ll cover my phone while I run to A & K for a bologna sandwich. When I return twenty minutes later, there is a yellow “While You Were Out” slip on my chair, and a message, in Albert’s hand:
Al MacInnis
(403) 555-736
“Is this a joke?” I ask Albert.
“No,” he says. “He really called.”
“But the phone number,” I say, vein twitching in my forehead. “It’s missing a digit.”
Albert stares at the message slip. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know what happened.” But the missing number, Albert’s certain, is the last one.
For the next five minutes, Albert and I stand at my desk, phone on speaker, taking turns dialing the last digit: 555-7360, 555-7361, 555-7362, and so forth, asking Calgarians hungover from the weekend’s Stanley Cup victory if their most celebrated citizen could come to the phone. Everyone who answers hangs up, some of them profanely. When Albert gets to 555-7367, and asks for Al MacInnis, Al MacInnis replies, “This is Al.” And I am so grateful that I nearly weep.
My hair, meanwhile, has begun to fall into the shower drain, to the annoyance of its resident water bug, and I sometimes linger in Saint Patrick’s after Mass, dreading the Sunday ahead. But I am eventually rewarded for surviving these Sunday nights when my employment status is made permanent. After an eternal probation, I have the fact-checking job. “First prize is two tickets,” as Dad used to say when the Twins were terrible. “Second prize is four tickets.”
The good news is that I’m suddenly salaried with benefits, though an SI writer warns me that the company’s 401(k) scheme is really a scam. “You can lose two or three grand at a pop,” he says. When I mention this to Jim on the phone—he’s now a benefits consultant in Chicago—he laughs for a solid minute before telling me to enroll in the 401(k) and never take financial advice from a sportswriter.
With my newly minted business card, and my shiny American Express (“Member Since 88”), I am duly dispatched to Florida to write a one-page story on fifty-year-old Jack Nicklaus, who is playing in his first major golf tournament on the Senior PGA Tour. Again, I leave for the airport hours after learning of the assignment, and that evening, arriving straight from the rental car lot at twilight at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, I see Nicklaus walking off the driving range. He is instantly recognizable from, among everything else, the American Express commercials that aired when I was a kid. They began “Do you know me? On the golf course you might.” They ended with “The American Express card—don’t leave home without it.” I want to say, “I do know you, and I don’t leave home without it. I learned that one the hard way.”
As I make my cotton-mouthed introduction, Nicklaus talks to me amiably without breaking stride. He’s still talking when we approach the windowless door to the locker room. But when he steps inside, I stop at the threshold, assuming I’m not allowed in, even as a guest of the greatest golfer in history. As a result, when the door swings shut, Nicklaus is still talking to me—except that I’m no longer there. He’s talking to a ghost. Through the door, I hear him stop in midsentence, evidently wondering what became of me. But my fear of going where I’m not allowed—of getting in trouble, of accruing a police record, of trespassing—has frozen me to my spot. Nicklaus must think I’m an imbecile. But he doesn’t come back out.
Still, the story on the Senior PGA Championship gets filed, on deadline, and will appear three days later in mailboxes across North America, including the one at 2809 West 96th Street in South Brook. “Golf’s most junior senior,” I write, “was trying to win his most minor major.” Jaime Diaz of the New York Times sends the piece from his phone because I can’t get the rubber brassiere to connect with New York through the handset of the press tent pay phone.
Two weeks later I’m sent to Milwaukee to write a deadline story on the Brewers. Nothing has changed at County Stadium since I came here in college except I’m sitting in the Brewers’ dugout now instead of getting hammered in the bleachers. “I tell young player
s and young writers the same thing,” the Brewers’ batting coach tells me. “The travel isn’t easy. You’ll see.” He is Don Baylor, who played for the Twins in 1987, when Mike and Ope and I sat in the left-field seats at the Metrodome. “You better pace yourself,” Baylor says.
But I don’t. I’m assigned another baseball story the following week, in Chicago. White Sox catcher Carlton Fisk—whom I pretended to be in the backyard, waving foul balls into fair territory, as he did in Game 6 of the ’75 World Series—declines to speak to me because “I have a meeting today.”
“I’ll be here for the next four days,” I say.
“I have a meeting the next four days,” he replies.
Every week, Thursday to Monday, I’m on a road trip. “Trip” is the right word, for life is now an extended hallucination. Angels manager Doug Rader throws his pants at me in anger in the visiting manager’s office at Fenway Park. At the Oakland Airport Hilton, near the Coliseum where the A’s play, I sit at the bar with seven-foot-seven Golden State Warriors center Manute Bol, feeling as if I’m in the Star Wars cantina.
The job requires me every week to write two thousand words overnight in a hotel room, to be filed by 8 a.m. on Sunday morning, my panic rising with each sign that the dawn is drawing nearer: the complimentary copies of USA Today being dropped in the hall, the bill slipped under the door, birds chirping outside the window, the first light leaking through the blackout curtains.
And yet none of my siblings or friends wants to hear that this is work. In the visitors’ clubhouse at Wrigley Field, Pirates pitcher Jerry Reuss takes hold of the credential around my neck and says, “Working press? That’s an oxymoron.”