Nights in White Castle
Page 26
One night in 2018, Dad said to me on the phone, “It seems hard to believe that everything I sold—eight-track tapes, audiocassettes, videocassettes, the whole business I was in for thirty-eight years—just disappeared.”
“Dad,” I replied. “I’m a magazine writer. I understand.”
Sports Illustrated moved out of the Time & Life Building in 2015, to smaller offices near the former site of the World Trade Center. The Time & Life Building is perhaps now best known as the fictional offices of Sterling Cooper & Partners, the ad agency employing Don Draper in the television series Mad Men.
Happily, the White Castle still stands on Lyndale Avenue in Bloomington, though it is no longer bookended by Beanie’s Arcade and Lyn-Del Lanes. The Chinese restaurant and bar is still thriving across the street, however, its great red neon sign spelling out DAVID FONG’S in a font familiar from a hundred strip-mall kung fu studio windows.
As for the rest of our former haunts, most are long gone, as are many of the joints that made the Strip so alluring to a teenager. Even now I can’t drive down 494 without hearing the Talking Heads song “(Nothing but) Flowers,” released in 1988, the year of the Golden Handshake, when David Byrne sang unhappily about a world—post-cataclysmic?—that has reverted to the so-called beauty of nature: “I miss the honky tonks, Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens.”
One honky-tonk that remains, albeit in New York, is an ancient bar called the Dublin House. Its great neon harp is a pink-and-green beacon on West 79th Street. The British writer and restaurant critic A. A. Gill extolled the virtues of the Dublin House in his memoir Pour Me. “It was everything I wanted from a pub: dark, old photos, red leather, cigarette smoke, purposeful, utilitarian, fit for its calling—a room to drink in,” Gill wrote. “A long room, filled with generations of solitary thoughts. There was an old jukebox, and I’d sit at one end of the bar and drink glasses of dark Beck’s with Wild Turkey chasers and smoke Lucky Strikes, a combination that has never been bettered in all drunkenness. I’d read the New York Times and the Post and the New York Review of Books. The barman, a third-generation Irish New Yorker who still nursed a discernible Dublin Northside brogue, was friendly but taciturn…That was probably the best—just there, that time.”
I thought it was the best too. It was in the Dublin House on a May night in 2001 that I was introduced by chance to a woman at the end of the bar. She recognized my name and asked, “Didn’t you write a column in Sports Illustrated making fun of women’s basketball?”
Indeed, I had. My armpits ignited, because this woman, as I knew, was herself a famous basketball player. When she asked me how many women’s basketball games I’d ever attended, I told her none. So Rebecca Lobo invited me to watch her play for the New York Liberty against the Los Angeles Sparks at Madison Square Garden. Silence—my default strategy in popcorn vending, and interviewing, and most other aspects of life—had once again paid off. With scarcely a spoken word, I had met my future wife.
We have four children now, and fly with them every summer to Minnesota, where I’m afforded an aerial view of Bloomington before landing. That vista always reminds me of the postcard Mom sent, just ahead of my books, of that bird’s-eye view of the Strip. “Thought you would like to keep this on your desk,” she wrote, all those years ago. And through every move, on every desk, the card has remained within arm’s reach: “a reminder,” as Mom wrote, “of this garden spot.”
Photos
Muscle cars replaced muscle bikes as our Sting-Ray afternoons yielded to nights in White Castle. (Car Culture / Getty Images)
At the dawn of the 1980s, one redhead and four shitheads gather in their South Brook driveway. Left to right: Tom, John, Jim, Amy, and the author, in khakis.
Stewardesses sun themselves beneath a jumbo jet at Airport Beach on the Strip, as Bloomington boys look on, filled with wonder and milkshakes.
John celebrates Christmas 1982 in front of the TV and its state-of-the-art VCR, whirring with Scotch brand videotape.
Santa delivers Amy an argyle sweater to go with her plaid skirt and monogrammed wardrobe straight from The Official Preppy Handbook.
I will spend many high school afternoons marooned on this maroon love seat, waiting—in khakis—for cable TV.
Leaning jauntily on a typewriter (just out of frame), I’m photographed by Mom for the dust jacket of a future book. Say cheese, indeed.
Eddie Money performs in a North Stars jersey at Met Center, where I vend popcorn at concerts and hockey games—two tickets to paradise in Bloomington, Minnesota. (Jim Steinfeldt / Getty Images)
The 1979 disco hit “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” is our basketball anthem, played on the JFK team bus en route to State.
In pants inspired by Uncle Sam, I attempt to dunk at the Saint Paul Civic Center, where Bruce Springsteen will soon pull Courteney Cox onstage for his “Dancing in the Dark” video.
The IBM Selectric II hums to life when I turn it on, and that turns me on. Twenty of them going off like guns in typing class makes writing an act of violence. (Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields / Getty Images)
On high school graduation day, Dad gives me a Silver Handshake, partially absolving himself of financial responsibility for me. The Golden Handshake is still four years away.
Jim receives a second, superfluous Golden Handshake after earning his MBA from Notre Dame.
As a Marquette freshman, in signature khakis, I fuel up on McDonald’s before joining the tank-topped, tube-topped rabble in the Wrigley Field bleachers, September 1984.
Mom, in new white hair and new white coat, dreams of a new white kitchen in which every surface is spotless.
Flip Saunders shoots over Mike McCollow at the Saunders Hoop Invitational Tournament, aka the SHIT. (Courtesy of Mike McCollow)
Resplendent in jean shorts, the young baseball writer for Sports Illustrated—or is it Jorts Illustrated?—enjoys a spectator’s view at an Angels game in Anaheim, 1992. (V. J. Lovero / Getty Images)
The author (left) with pen-pal-turned-colleague Alex Wolff at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.
The lion in winter: Dad, near the end of his Mickey Mining career, enjoys Milwaukee’s most famous export on a December getaway in Palm Desert, California.
Beyond the great blinking neon harp of the Dublin House on West 79th Street in Manhattan, I meet my future wife. Daddy don’t live in that New York City no more.
Acknowledgments
When I wrote about a Minnesota boy who moved to New York and immersed himself in words, that proposal found its way to Phil Marino, a Minnesota boy who moved to New York and immersed himself in words. What luck. He edited the manuscript with grace and humor (and perhaps a touch of homesickness: he asked me to add more snow).
Many others at Little, Brown helped to make this book, including Karen Landry and Dianna Stirpe, who worked on its predecessor, Sting-Ray Afternoons. I am grateful again to Michael Pietsch and Reagan Arthur, as well as Elizabeth Gassman, Jessica Chun, and Juliana Horbachevsky. John Parsley, who edited Sting-Ray, now stands back, like a father, and watches that bicycle wobble on its further journeys.
Esther Newberg’s enthusiasm for this idea and all the other ones I’ve ever had persuaded me that I could complete it. Esther said what every author wants to hear from his or her agent when writing against a deadline: “I’m sure they’ll give you another month.”
The Rushin family of South Brook—Jim Rushin, Tom Rushin, Dr. Amy Kolar, John Rushin, and our parents, Don and Jane Rushin—provided me with source material and permission to write about it. The residents of South Brook and the people of Bloomington have been exceptionally kind. My Minnesota friends, particularly Mike McCollow, Keith Opatz, and Dan Olson, shared their recollections.
I’m indebted for life to the teachers and faculty of Nativity of Mary, Bloomington Lincoln High School, Bloomington Kennedy High School, and Marquette University. Ring out ahoya to Mike Hodan, Mike Villafana, and Todd Larson. Dan DeWeerdt bears partial responsibility for the Smiths
appearing in the preceding pages.
In addition to those mentioned in the book, I wish to thank colleagues past and present at Sports Illustrated, including Steve Cannella, Chris Stone, Greg Kelly, and Michael Jaffe.
My wife, Rebecca, and our children—Siobhan, Maeve, Thomas, and Rose—provide, among everything else in my life, a daily invitation to procrastinate. Without these five, my writing would be twice as fast and half as fun. I have told them that whatever my next book is about, the title should be Enough About Me.
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About the Author
Steve Rushin is the author of Sting-Ray Afternoons, which was named one of the Best Books of 2017 by Amazon. As a writer for Sports Illustrated, he is a four-time finalist for the National Magazine Award. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Magazine Writing collections. His essays have appeared in Time magazine and the New York Times. He lives in Connecticut.
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Also by Steve Rushin
Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir
The 34-Ton Bat
The Pint Man
The Caddie Was a Reindeer
Road Swing