Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  “Okay,” I reply.

  “Marquette,” Dad says, as if I didn’t quite hear him, “is a Jesuit school with a journalism department. It’s close to home but not too close.”

  “How close?”

  “Three hundred miles.”

  “That’s close?”

  Journalism would help me transition from stealing books to writing them. Mom and Dad would love to see me back in Catholic school, where the stealing was always done by public school kids who used my desk for CCD on Sundays, helping themselves to BIC pens and Pink Pearl erasers. So I apply to Marquette and am accepted and resolve to attend school there for the next four years, despite never having visited the campus or even Milwaukee or any other colleges.

  But I do go to the Penn Lake Library, warm and snug on a winter’s day, snow drifting at the window, to research my future home. Milwaukee has the second most bars per capita of any city in the United States, after New Orleans, and is the birthplace of Miller and all the beers that sound like blunt-force blows in a Batman comic. Pabst! Blatz! Schlitz!

  Schlitz is “The beer that made Milwaukee famous,” not to be confused with Schlitz’s secondary brand, Old Milwaukee, the beer that “tastes as great as its name.” I know these beer slogans like I know the back of my baseball cards, for I have been steeped in beer without ever having drunk one thanks to TV and radio.

  Minnesota’s own Hamm’s commercials had an Indian tom-tom drumbeat backing their jingle: “From the land of sky-blue waters (wa-a-ters), from the land of pines, lofty balsams, comes the beer refreshing, Hamm’s the beer refreshing, Haaaammm’s.”

  These songs are every bit as ubiquitous as the Top 40 hits on Casey Kasem’s countdown, and occupy the same permanent place in my memory. “When you say BUD-weis-er! You’ve said it all.”

  There was no inoculating even the nine-year-old me against Budweiser’s insidious jingles. Like marketing a power company, Budweiser’s advertising seems unnecessary, promoting a product that is all but compulsory in American homes. “Here comes the king, here comes the big number one. Budweiser beer the king is second to none…” is locked in a clinch for my affection with “The king is coming, let’s hear the call. When you say Bud, you’ve said it all…”

  Budweiser is a behemoth. Its label is full of filigrees and fancy script and even a kind of Anheuser-Busch coat of arms. Schlitz has a globe on its can, connoting a kind of alcoholic megalomania. Pabst has its famous blue ribbon for being—as it says right there on the can—“Selected as America’s Best in 1893.” This is a sad boast, as when nearby towns leave up faded signs at the city limits: WELCOME TO DRIVELTON, CLASS A SOFTBALL CHAMPIONS, 1967.

  I can’t think of Marquette without thinking of Milwaukee, and I can’t think of Milwaukee without thinking of beer, a key component of a happy existence. “Life’s too short to settle for less,” Schlitz says. “Go for the gusto or don’t go at all.”

  Miller Lite has a stable of ex-jocks and showbiz personalities, among them Bob Uecker and Dick Butkus, who are always having a good time in a bar.

  Miller’s non-Lite beer has the best commercials, invariably about manly themes, narrated in a manly baritone. “Thirty years ago on a hot summer’s day your father taught you how to dig for clams,” goes one. “Now that it’s a job, the sun seems hotter and the day seems longer. But the clams taste just as sweet. And now comes Miller time.” The men in these commercials are always deep-sea fishing or chopping down trees or engaged in violent logrolling contests or manning oil rigs or steadfastly refusing to be thrown from a bucking bull. The Miller bottle is clear, see-through, its golden contents visible behind a label that calls it “The Champagne of Beers.” The mellow-gold, soft-rock jingle at the end of every ad goes: “If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer—Miller beer.”

  Miller is more or less what I know about Milwaukee. Detroit means cars, San Francisco means Rice-A-Roni, and Milwaukee means Miller. I don’t know what my future holds, but I know that it lies abroad, in Milwaukee, across an ocean of beer.

  Mom and Dad know I’m inert. Six months after my sixteenth birthday, Mom asked me, “Don’t you want to get a driver’s license?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? I can’t chauffeur you for the rest of your life.”

  When the Driver’s Ed instructor picked me up in a car for my first lesson, he asked me how many times I’d driven before. “A rough estimate,” he said. “A round number. Ballpark it for me.”

  I told him I had never driven in my life. Tom, by contrast, had logged at least a hundred illicit miles before he was sixteen. At fourteen, his buddy Dwight would take his father’s station wagon—the Chuckwagon—and mow down garbage cans. Their steel lids would crash like cymbals. Tom and Dwight knew the garbage pickup days in various neighborhoods like other kids knew their baseball statistics. When John is fourteen, Mom and Dad will go to the movies one night while their youngest child plows over a neighbor’s mailbox after taking Dad’s car for a spin in a snowstorm. But not me. I reminded the instructor that driving without a license is illegal and would likely go down on my Permanent Record.

  He looked me in the face to see if I was serious, then gripped his clipboard with both hands and gently slapped it against his forehead in our driveway.

  And so began my six required hours of behind-the-wheel instruction, driving fifteen miles an hour below the speed limit, popping the trunk when trying to activate the windshield wipers, activating the windshield wipers when trying to signal a turn, and signaling every turn a quarter of a mile in advance.

  My teacher didn’t care for the way I ignored his instructions to merge onto I-35W while building slowly to fifty-five miles an hour, choosing instead to lock up the brakes at the end of the on-ramp, in a panicky homage to Mom, who often does the same, necessitating a zero-to-sixty-five merge ahead of an onrushing semi. My death grip on the ten-and-two positions of the steering wheel was often supplemented by the instructor’s hands on the same wheel, so that we made our way around Bloomington wrestling for control in the ten-and-two and nine-and-one positions.

  After 360 harrowing minutes parceled out over many weeks, I was awarded my diploma from the Esse School of Driving. After more weeks watching Mom or Dad pump invisible brakes in the shotgun seat of the Honda while I squired them about town with my paper learner’s permit, I took my road test on a closed course and got an early insight into DMV inefficiency. Despite failing to parallel park (“If those cones were real cars, you’d have two separate insurance claims”) and blowing one stop sign (“That’s what is known as a ‘rolling stop’”), I was awarded a Minnesota driver’s license. It becomes the third thing—along with my Hennepin County library card and a YMCA membership card that identifies me as Hernando Gomez—to go in my blue nylon wallet with the Velcro seal. (“Velcro, wonder fabric of the eighties,” declares David Letterman, who devotes an entire show to the hook-and-loop sensation.)

  A month after I received my license, Mom and Dad flew to Monte Carlo on a sales-incentive trip for 3M and, on returning, asked me to pick them up at the airport. But when I approached the curb outside arrivals, where Mom and Dad stood tanned and smiling, suitcases at their sides, I also saw a traffic cop instructing the idling cars to move along. In preemptive obedience to the law, I passed Mom and Dad by and made another ten-minute loop of the Lindbergh Terminal. When I approached a second time, I saw the same cop, and the same parents. This time Mom and Dad weren’t smiling. Dad was gesturing wildly for me to pull over, but I powered past him in a panic, beginning another ten-minute circumnavigation of the airport. The third time I approached, Dad was standing in traffic with both suitcases, defying me to run him over. “What in the hell is the matter with you?” he said by way of greeting.

  It was a rhetorical question, but I answered honestly. “I don’t know.”

  The driver’s license is one more object on a scavenger hunt. Contact lenses, braces, deodorant, confirmation certificate, eighth-grade diploma, driver’s license…the
prize at the end of all this is adulthood. In eight months I’ll turn eighteen and by law go to the post office to register for Selective Service, in case the army reinstates the draft, which is Dad’s dream. “Uncle Sam straightened me out,” he says. “Taught me discipline, the importance of a made bed, how to shine my shoes…” Six weeks after my eighteenth birthday, I’ll vote in the presidential election. Reagan will win every state but my own, further proof of Minnesota exceptionalism.

  Shaving is another rite of passage. In eighth grade, Jim said to me: “Nice ’stache. You gonna shave or let the cat lick it off?”

  One Saturday morning Dad turned on the hot tap in the upstairs bathroom, showed me how to cup my hands like a supplicant, fill them with hot water, and dip my face into my raised palms as if bobbing for apples. He dispensed a dollop of Foamy on my fingertips, I swiped it across my upper lip, and—after seven downward scrapes with a single-blade disposable Schick—I had shaved. At Dad’s instruction, I applied bits of toilet paper to staunch the bleeding where I’d cut myself. A stinging splash of Skin Bracer numbed my upper lip. It felt rubberized. I could still feel the burn at the bus stop. Like the Party spokesman on the two-way telescreen in 1984, I now had “skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of winter.”

  There’s enough hair on the back of my hands that my friend Dan Olson greets me the way Paul Lynde once greeted Herman Munster. Instead of shaking my hand, he pets it and says, “Oh, you brought your doggie.” We have a hundred similar inside rituals, my friends and I—many of them dating to kindergarten—but this one is literally a secret handshake. Every time I see Oly, I extend my hand for petting. Likewise, we retract our hands into our sleeves before shaking hands with Danny Keane, universally known as Gator. At lunch, Oly will put his right hand in a ziplock sandwich bag before offering his hand for shaking. In eighth grade, at Nativity, we removed a ski glove from a coat pocket at the handshake of peace during Mass. Gator’s skin is no longer excessively dry, if it ever was, but our nicknames are built from the smallest physical traits and tics. Some are an obvious corruption of the person’s name. There’s a kid in our grade named Bill Folz whom we inevitably call The Wallet. But most of our nicknames are subtler. I have difficulty remembering names and call most people “man” as a stand-in.

  “Hey, Rush.”

  “Hey, man.”

  As a result, my grade school handle of “Rush” has given way to my high school nickname of “Man.” Even Dad has picked up on my propensity for the word and will sometimes use it against me in a kind of parental jujitsu: “Hey, man,” he’ll say, in a beatnik voice twenty-five years out of date. “Get your shoes off the ottoman, man, and bring me the Schedule, man, because I’m not watching this guy play guitar in a leotard. Man.”

  In their effort to get me eventually to move out, my parents do not have an ally in cable TV, which is urging me to stay in. By 1984, cable is in 40.5 percent of the 83.8 million “U.S. television households.” It only seems we’re the last to get it. In fact we’re right on time. TV Week magazine—the Sunday newspaper supplement known in our house as the Schedule (as in Dad’s exhaled question to himself: “Where in the hell is the Schedule?”)—has just been redesigned to accommodate the new universe of channels. Readers of the Star and Tribune, accustomed to their seven-channel world, open the paper to find a full-page grid crosshatched with obscure networks (ARTS) and even more obscure programs. The Saturday lineup for SPN includes Crafts ’n’ Things, Sewing with Nancy, and Personal Computer, which is odd, as SPN—a truncation of ESPN—is billed as an all-sports network.

  All of this is confusing to a great many readers of the Star and Tribune. In weeks to come, the paper’s Letters to the Editor will make for hilarious out-loud reading by Dad, declaiming from his Archie Bunker chair.

  “Here’s a good one,” he says. “Henry A. Carson of Excelsior writes, ‘After two weeks trying to decipher the new TV Week, I have decided to return to Princeton to pursue my master’s degree.’”

  Dad finds these rubes hilarious. We picture them gazing in openmouthed wonder at the new TV schedule.

  We’ve just gotten our first-ever channel changer and suddenly it is obsolete. The “flipper,” we call it, though others insist it is a “clicker.” A single silver button on top of a black barrel activates a steel bolt that somehow, miraculously, makes the dial turn on the television from across the room. And now, with the arrival of a cable box that requires the manual pushing of buttons, the clicker is useless.

  I walk across the room, turn on MTV, and there it is, in all its crimson glory: Diamond Dave’s Marble Bag.

  More happily, in the back of TV Week is an alphabetical listing of every movie on cable for the next seven days. It’s a treasure map directing me to “adult situations,” florid profanity, and “nudity.”

  The Beach Girls / Freewheeling girls cruise and carouse at Malibu Beach. Debra Blee, Val Kline. 1983. Adult situations, nudity. 91 m. TMC / Thu. 3:30 p.m.

  Black Emanuelle / Photographer neglects her job to explore other areas. Laura Gemser, Karin Schubert, Angelo Infanti. 1975. Adult situations, nudity. 91 m. MAX / Wed. 1:15 a.m.

  American Desire / Lovers search elsewhere for fulfillment. Veronica Hart, Robert Kerman. 1981. Adult situations, language, nudity. 79 m. SPC / Mon. 10:00 p.m.

  Retreating to the basement—for there is a new cable box down there as well—I switch between two unsubscribed-to channels at lightning speed. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Doing so reveals, for a split second, a wavy image in the static “snow.” It is a bare breast, possibly—though it could well be an elbow. Checking the Schedule, I realize what’s playing is Herbie, the Love Bug, and what I thought might be a breast is in fact a sentient cream-colored Volkswagen Beetle. Only one thing is verifiably indecent, and that is the hour. It’s 4:30 in the afternoon.

  As I flip between premium channels, the snow briefly clears and a squiggly image emerges for a beat, possibly of two Swedes in a hayloft, more likely of pay-per-view professional boxing. And then the channel reverts to its scrambled state of snow and squiggles, so that sex, in my mind, becomes something that happens sporadically in a snowstorm, while reflected in a fun-house mirror. In a January blizzard, perhaps, on the barren State Fairgrounds. In Minnesota, on a night-dark January afternoon in my basement, the scenario is not entirely out of the question.

  Indeed, the actresses all seem to be Scandinavian. A costar of She’s 19 and Ready is Gina Janssen. The costars of The Silence (“A free-loving young woman and her lesbian sister try to go their separate ways”) are Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom. The credits for all these movies read like the Minneapolis White Pages. Even Prince’s last name is Nelson.

  Within five minutes, I stop the futile button punching and just read the TV Week movie listings. They are soft-core erotic literature—very short stories serialized every Sunday in the Star and Tribune. The plot descriptions are so vague as to be titillating: “Visitors are entertained by an estate owner and her nieces” or “Two young people stranded in the desert discover secrets about each other.”

  Television’s new wonders do not stop here. As an executive at 3M—Mickey Mouse Mining, as it’s known at our dinner table—Dad is charged with selling as much audio and video recording tape as he possibly can. In that role, he receives a letter from a Los Angeles inventor who has a secret product that he promises will revolutionize home entertainment, turning every home into a home theater. Enormous profits could accrue to Mickey Mining, makers of blank VHS cassettes for home VCRs, should 3M acquire this wondrous new technology. Dad is dispatched to Los Angeles for an exclusive first look at this modern-day Edison in his laboratory.

  When he returns from L.A., Dad tells Mom that his map of Los Angeles—he has a hundred other maps in the basement, for New York, Vienna, Tokyo, Buenos Aires—led him from the Hertz lot at LAX straight to a little bungalow beneath a freeway flyover. A little man answered the door, and his little wife bade Dad to sit in an overstuffe
d armchair with a floral print. It was the seat of honor in their house. As Dad removed a pillow from his lumbar, the lady disappeared to the kitchen and returned through the swinging door with a glass of milk. The little man asked Dad to sign a multipage nondisclosure agreement in triplicate, after which curtains were drawn, lights extinguished, TV tuned to an afternoon soap. The man asked if Dad was ready to experience the twenty-first century. Dad assured him, with growing impatience, that he was. At which time the man withdrew from a drawer…

  “A pair of glasses,” Dad says, sighing heavily. “Eyeglasses. With a big magnifying glass bolted onto the front.”

  The man solemnly placed the glasses on Dad’s face and made minute adjustments to the fit. For a few moments, the three of them—inventor, wife, and Mickey Mining executive—sat in reverential silence, watching the soap. After a respectable interval, during which he drained his glass of milk, Dad complimented the inventor on his remarkable achievement, assured him that the 3M Company would soon be in touch, politely excused himself, got into his rental car at the curb, and waved goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Magoo, who waved gratefully back from their doorstep.

  If Dad couldn’t see the future of home entertainment through those glasses, at least the phrase “home entertainment” is no longer an oxymoron. My friend Kevin got Pong when it came out nearly ten years ago, but already that black-and-white pioneer has been consigned to the curbside trash barrel of history. Every other kid in South Brook now has Atari or Intellivision, eight bits of spellbinding joy in primary colors and with synthesized sound effects. Intellivision was the family present last Christmas. Like Atari—and the cable box and the TV itself—Intellivision’s inner workings are concealed in a box veneered in simulated wood paneling. We no longer have to pump quarters into machines in the lobby of the Southtown Theatre, or the smoke-shrouded cavern of Beanie’s Arcade. Our short stack of Intellivision game cartridges—Pitfall, Dig Dug, Donkey Kong—beckons me to stay in the basement under self-imposed house arrest.