by Steve Rushin
More change arrived on our doorstep. Where once there were two newspapers—the morning Tribune and the afternoon Star—Minneapolis now has just one: the Star and Tribune, conjoined by a conjunction in a marriage of economic convenience, pregnant with ad pages and thumped on our stoop every day by 7 a.m.
In it this morning is an ad for Sound of Music (slogan: “The Best Buy Company”). Once the place to buy your turntable, tape deck, and speakers, Sound of Music now offers touch-tone phones for fourteen bucks. These new phones are lightweight, plastic, push-button beauties with squared-off ear- and mouthpieces. Space-age. Our banana-yellow wall-mounted rotary-dial phone in the kitchen, with its round ear- and mouthpieces, is, by contrast, a reminder to Mom that her kitchen is outdated. Sound of Music still sells rotary-dial phones from ITT and Western Electric, but they are used, cut-rate, and “refurbished.”
Mom has plans to refurbish the kitchen, change its harvest-gold palette to all white. White tile will show every speck of dirt, but Mom considers this a benefit, the better to root out the filth. I’ve seen it said, in the journalism books I’ve begun to hoard, that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” But Mom knows better. When she has finished her daily ministrations—a chemical cocktail of Pine-Sol, Formula 409, and Wisk—those white tiles will gleam like the teeth of TV’s Wink Martindale.
The journalism book I most recently read is The News Business, by John Chancellor and Walter R. Mears, bought with my own money at B. Dalton Bookseller in the Southdale mall. B. Dalton is another Minnesota invention, and this is its flagship store, its first ever, founded by Bruce Dayton, whose Dayton’s department store anchors Southdale. B. Dayton changed one letter of his own name when christening B. Dalton, which now has more than seven hundred branches nationwide.
In the weeks to come, I will notice Sound of Music’s name becoming less prominent in their ubiquitous display ads in the newspaper, while the store’s slogan—“The Best Buy Company”—is printed in an ever-larger font. Soon the name Sound of Music will disappear entirely, leaving only the slogan as the chain’s new name: The Best Buy Company, operating out of Sound of Music’s modest outlets, but also from a Burnsville “superstore.”
The superstore will come to be known as a “big box.” Like the Voyager minivan, or the cable box, or the VCR, or Mattel’s miraculous Intellivision, a big box can hold everything a seventeen-year-old boy could want and fear. Like Winston Smith, I am stricken with an overwhelming desire to possess it. “It” being everything: books, cars, games, the company of girls, life itself. American Desire indeed.
Even better than Staying In is Going Out, which usually means Friday night, after a basketball game, freshly showered, feet still sore, cruising triumphantly in my navy-blue Kennedy letter jacket with the terry-cloth “84” limned in gold on the leather sleeve. I wear a terry-cloth shirt under the jacket as we aimlessly cruise the Strip.
There are strips marginally more famous than ours. But the Vegas Strip, the Sunset Strip, even the Gaza Strip—whose name is frequently uttered on WCCO radio, the AM news giant and only station that plays in Dad’s car—all confirm what we already suspect: that the 494 Strip in Bloomington is a place of endless excitement and bottomless interest to the outside world. Bloomington, like Hollywood, is strip-worthy. My best friend, Mike McCollow, and I cruise this wide river of asphalt in Dr. Terry McCollow’s Bonneville Brougham, charting a course for No Place in Particular, occasionally stopping for gas, which Mike charges to his dad’s Mobil credit card, to which we also bill tins of smokeless tobacco and cans of pop.
“Won’t Terry be pissed?” I ask Mike, referring to his dad by his first name. We all do this now, even with our own parents, though never within their earshot. “He can’t be happy that six tins of Copenhagen and a twelve-pack of Mountain Dew are billed to him.” But Terry McCollow, DDS, has to be tired by now—Mike is the youngest of four—and never says anything about the charges.
I-494 is the southern section of the freeway that encircles the Twin Cities. But it’s the ten-mile stretch running east and west through Bloomington—the 494 Strip—that is world famous to Minnesotans. On its banks are the bars and restaurants and hotels and nightclubs patronized by our local athletes and anchormen, to say nothing of the B-list entertainers who croon or crack wise at the Carlton Celebrity Room dinner theater, which has brought “Vegas-style entertainment” to the prairie.
Tomorrow morning, we’ll pile into the Bonnie again—Mike and I and Gator and our buddy Martin—and hit another hotspot on the Strip: Wally McCarthy’s Lindahl Olds, the world’s largest Oldsmobile dealership, with its yellow-and-white-striped circus tent, red pennant flags aflutter, and an annual advertising budget that must exceed Coca-Cola’s. Every Saturday morning, WCCO radio broadcasts live from Wally’s, offering free hot dogs, popcorn, and pop to anyone who walks in, which is what we do most weekends, pretending to be any group of kids in the market for an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. We sword-swallow several hot dogs and self-consciously kick a few tires, then leave with popcorn and persuade ourselves that once again we’ve made fools of gullible grown-ups.
But the Strip, like us, is most alive at night, when the lighted signs reflect off the windows of passing cars and rinse my cheeks in neon pastels. The Rusty Scupper is known to us as the Crusty Supper, a multilevel bar and restaurant whose nautical theme demands ropes and fishing nets and stenciled life rings. None of us has ever set foot in the place, but we have a vague idea that its sunken bar is a thriving pickup joint, where men who wear hats like Captain Stubing from The Love Boat buy Harvey Wallbangers for women who resemble Heather Locklear.
Vikings quarterback Tommy Kramer—renowned as Two-Minute Tommy for his last-second heroics on the football field—is the unofficial mayor of the Strip, where his late nights have earned him a supplementary nickname: Too-Many Tommy.
From the shotgun seat of the Bonnie the bars and restaurants go by in a blur: Mother Tucker’s, Chi-Chi’s, the Ground Round, all these places our parents go when they Go Out, their names on the matchbooks Mom keeps in an ashtray above the range in our kitchen. Eddie Webster’s, Steak and Ale, the Decathlon Club—the places they smelled of when they came home to dismiss the babysitter.
The Bonneville’s seats are upholstered in a synthetic crushed velvet. And so am I, practically, in my plush terry-cloth V-neck. (I’ve come to think of it as Terry Cloth, named for Dr. Terry McCollow and his Bonneville Brougham.) We are rolling in deep velour, and the tape deck is playing its equivalent—the soft textures, the sonic velour, of George Benson, Al Jarreau, Grover Washington Jr., and the Crusaders.
Near the eastern terminus of the Strip, past Airport Bowl but before the airport itself, is the Airport Inn. The building is forlorn, and at seventeen, I am already nostalgic for what it once was. The Airport Inn is the former Airport Holiday Inn, where, as an eight-year-old, I procured my Vikings hero Alan Page’s autograph, and so many other souvenirs, which I know from Madame Wicklund’s French class means “memories.”
The Holiday Inn was two stories and L-shaped, each room overlooking either the parking lot or the outdoor swimming pool. The hotel sold pool memberships to locals in the summer, and the McCollows always had one. Mike often brought me as his guest to what we called Airport Beach, directly under the flight path of MSP. But in 1981, during the final season of nearby Metropolitan Stadium—now a Roman ruin, a cyclone-fenced rubble heap and testament to a happier time, before the Twins and Vikings moved to the Metrodome in downtown Minneapolis—the Holiday Inn was rebranded as the sad-sack Airport Inn. Down came its iconic green-and-gold Holiday Inn sign, its pathway of lights leading to an arrow, the whole gorgeous structure topped by a star like the star of Bethlehem. And at the bottom was a marquee that hinted at its buzzing and fizzing interior life: CONGRATULATIONS BARRY AND LUANNE or WELCOME AMERICAN FEDERATION OF QUILTERS.
“Check out Airport Beach.” Mike sighs as we speed by, surveying the faded majesty of its courtyard: the swimming pool, whirlpool, shuffleboard court,
and rectangle of grass where we threw a football on childhood’s hottest summer days. Those days were once innumerable, but now—college and my eighteenth birthday looming in September—they are scarcely more than a couple of hundred.
There follows a litany of memories: getting out of the pool and lying on towels on the baking shuffleboard deck, which was always 20 degrees warmer than the pool; ordering malts from the lobby coffee shop, delivered poolside in a 30-ounce cup that preserved our fingerprints in the frost on its stainless-steel surface. You might see anything on any given day: Vikings backup quarterback Bob Lee—The General—throwing a Nerf football pass to Mike, who tried to catch it while jumping into the pool; a group of girls from Saint Paul wearing what appeared to be homemade, crocheted bikinis that gave each of them a crosshatched tan, covering them in grid marks like one of Mom’s string-bagged pork roasts from Red Owl.
And once, for one brief shining moment, a flock—a gaggle? a flight?—of Swedish stewardesses sunning themselves topless on the pool deck. (It sounds now like the description of a movie in TV Week: “Air Strip / Stockholm stews have fun on the 494 Strip. Adult content, mature themes, very brief nudity.”) On that day, in less than a minute, the Holiday Inn’s “innkeeper,” Mr. Chaika—father of our friend and classmate Troy Chaika—sprinted from the lobby with a floral bedspread and threw it across the stewardesses as if putting out a fire. Which is exactly what he had done, as far as Mike and I were concerned.
The Strip was built on stewardesses and professional athletes, in endless supply on an artery flanked by the airport and the arena.
The Rolling Stones even stayed at Airport Beach in 1964, when they played at Danceland in Excelsior, and Brian Jones threw a chair into the pool from the second-floor balcony, as if marshaling his strength for the heavier ordnance—TVs and Rolls-Royces—to be heaved poolward in future visits to future, more luxurious hotels.
It’s all now just a memory, preserved by one of the postcards filched from a spinning rack in the glory days of the gift shop. On the card, the “Holiday Inn Minneapolis Airport” is forever in its golden age, a Boeing 747 sharking in just feet above the rooftop.
We cruise the Strip, past Airport Beach, and follow one of 494’s off-ramp tributaries—Lyndale Avenue—south to the White Castle, its unspeakable lighting visible from the many passing planes.
A block north of the Castle, we pass the brand-new McDonald’s, with its tantalizing novelty menu item the Chicken McNugget. But we resist its siren song and continue on to the Castle.
Viewed from outside, from its barf-and-bottle-riddled parking lot, the White Castle is a Hopper painting. The light fluoresces the pavement and everyone on it, a glare intended to sober up the customers in line. It’s the kind of light that prepares those patrons for an interrogation lamp, or possibly for a surgical theater. As in prison or an operating room, the tables are stainless steel and bolted to the floor. The very décor warns that jail or open-heart surgery is in our future.
“On a typical Friday night,” wrote columnist Jim Klobuchar in the Star and Tribune, of his most recent experience at White Castle, “the customers included a runty old man with a scowl who claimed to be Adolf Hitler and two women who ordered two cheeseburgers apiece and tried to pay with Monopoly money. Neither gave a destination but all three appeared to have originated in the bar across the street.”
Every White Castle, a.k.a. Whitey’s, a.k.a. the Castle, is alike. Almost from the chain’s beginning, in Wichita in 1921, every Castle has been built identically, interchangeably—the white porcelain exterior hinting at the lavatorial exertions to come, the whole place designed to be hosed down at the end of the day, except that there is no end of the day, for the Castle is open twenty-four hours.
The one in Bloomington looks like the one in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where Tony, Joey, Double J, Bobby C, and Stephanie go in Saturday Night Fever. The workers there wear the same V-neck smocks the color of the light-blue Bonneville, identical to those Jim and Fluff wore to Shultzy’s costume party five years ago. The ketchup and mustard are combined in a single squeeze bottle in every Castle. In Saturday Night Fever, as in our own Friday night visits, Bobby C stands on a table barking like a dog and no other customers take much notice at all.
When it’s our turn to order, Mike tells the middle-aged manager in a paper hat, “Ten disgustings and a box of nails.”
“Ten what?” says the manager, who knows perfectly well what Mike wants but is in no mood for this shit tonight.
“Disgustings,” Mike says, as casual as can be. “And a box of nails.”
In grade school, when the playground at recess became a bazaar of baseball cards and marbles and other items that were contraband in class, no object was more esteemed than Wacky Packages stickers. And among the Wacky Packages parodies I remember most vividly is “Fright Castle,” in that famous Gothic type. “Greaseburgers. Horrific Taste. 6 Culinary Monstrosities.” A fly has alighted on the burger on the box as various creatures of the night—Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman—chow down on sliders, gut bombs, and greaseburgers, reinforcing the Castle’s image as a nocturnal haven for freaks who disparage the very product they’re about to ingest.
Even among White Castle management there are any number of acceptable euphemisms for White Castle hamburgers—sliders, gut bombs, Castles, Whiteys—and the crinkle-cut french fries are almost universally referred to as nails. A cheeseburger is always a “slider with vinyl.” The turkey sandwich with cheese—a favorite of Tom’s—is a “gobbler with glue.” High schoolers working the counter will accept any synonym, no matter how unflattering. Ask for “ten pieces of shit,” as we once heard another customer in line demand, and they’ll respond: “With vinyl?” But the manager on this night will not countenance our favored euphemism. He will not make ten disgustings unless Mike calls the burger by one of its proper names. There is a brief standoff until Mike finally downgrades his order to ten sliders. I want to intervene, to defuse the tension and explain to the manager, “If we’re paying for something that we think is repulsive, then perhaps the joke is on us.”
But something about his expression, sweat condensing on his mustache, his eyeglasses fogging from the burger steam, tells me that his dignity has not been compromised by a group of seventeen-year-olds, that perhaps the reverse is happening.
My unease is compounded by the knowledge that he isn’t the only adult we talk to this way. Or not we, exactly, for I don’t lip off to adults. But I do smirk along with my friends when they’re being smart-asses. It’s no different from the way I move my lips without singing in Mass. Our mockery is all an act. Mock mockery, like our mock bravado around girls, though I’m incapable even of faking that. I’m still struck dumb around “chicks,” hoping my silence will be mistaken for mystery. This hasn’t happened yet, but college, like the federal witness protection program, will offer a new life in a new setting with all new people oblivious to my high school identity.
Come fall, everyone seated at this table—many of us friends since kindergarten—will scatter. We’ll still see each other on occasion, but never in the same way, despite our adamant yearbook inscriptions to remain best buds forever. (I recognize in the word “adamant” the name of “Goody Two Shoes” singer Adam Ant.)
An individual slider costs 28 cents, $2.80 for ten, but a coupon in TV Week usually cuts that price in half. Each of us always orders ten or more sliders at a single feeding. I am blessed with the appetite of a Tasmanian devil and the metabolism of a hummingbird and have every reason to believe that that will never change. In my hands, a “family size” bag of Doritos is abruptly reduced to a cloud of orange dust. Two Hostess apple pies are often bought and ingested on impulse at the checkout counter of a SuperAmerica gas station. Life has become a Coneheads sketch. “Consume mass quantities.” My driver’s license says I’m six foot four inches and weigh 169 pounds.
Gluttony is not without consequence. Our labors in the lavatory often eclipse the competitive eating spectacles that precede t
hem. Junior year, our friend Ronnie was at a house party, using the bathroom, a line of girls accruing in the hallway, when he discovered to his horror that his turd was too large to flush. After several failed attempts, and the water threatening to breach the bowl, he removed it by hand and placed it in the bathtub, discreetly drawing the shower curtain before vacating first the bathroom and then the premises.
These stories are solemnly related over sliders the way some dads talk about fish they’ve caught. Z from our basketball team was so proud of one epic bowel movement in the locker room at Normandale golf course that he summoned Oly from the first tee box to verify it for posterity. “A python,” Oly now confirms at the Castle. “Three coils.”
Outside, Barney the rent-a-cop stands watch over the White Castle parking lot. He has a Yorkshire terrier named Jet that he strokes while often reciting long extracts of poetry, lovely stuff that none of us recognizes. He has a pickup truck with a camper top, where we assume he sleeps in the daytime, after a long night shift spent taking abuse from high school kids and whoever crawls off the bloodred barstools of David Fong’s at closing time. It’s said that the Plantation Punch at Fong’s should be registered as a lethal weapon at City Hall.
I look at Barney, in his white uniform shirt with the vague badge, standing sentry in the parking lot. My friends and I are reflected in the window as a faint overlay, so that I can almost literally see myself in him. Already I have shared some of his uniformed indignities, with many more to come—as convenience store clerk, dishwasher at Bennigan’s, and maintenance boy at the New Orleans Court apartment complex, where I will sit in the toolshed and read baseball books by Roger Angell and Roger Kahn and dream of being a New Yorker named Roger so that I too can write about baseball. I’m in that limbo state, not quite a kid, not yet an adult. Childhood dreams, in which anything can still happen, are running up against the foreclosed possibilities of having to choose. Choose a college, choose a major, choosy mothers choose Jif.
