Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  A kid on the bus builds model cars. I quietly envy him, his head bent toward his father’s workbench, assembling a 1:25 scale replica of a 1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt beneath a clamp-on lamp that illuminates his collection of tools, laid out as for a surgeon in an operating theater: hobby knife, sanding sticks, tweezers, toothpicks, masking tape, modeling cement. Is the contact high from the glue or from having a diversion of one’s own—a world to withdraw into?

  Some kids at school play D&D. I see them in the hall, each holding a blue Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rulebook. They hold it close the way I clutch Sports Illustrated after its Thursday arrival in our mailbox. They talk of Regdar and Tordek the way I talk of Redfern and Hrbek, so that it’s difficult to tell which ones are characters in D&D and which ones are characters on the Minnesota Twins. Major-league baseball—MLB—is no less a fantasy role-playing game than D&D.

  One Christmas I received, unasked for, a stamp-collecting kit. Opening the vinyl-covered album, I fell into its pages as if into a canyon, lost myself in the cancelled stamps from West Germany and the Dutch Antilles and the Republic of Zaire. They came in a glassine envelope. I mounted them in the album on gummed hinges whose adhesive was activated by my own tongue: twice-licked stamps bearing, in their perforated frames, queens’ heads and raised fists and exotic animals.

  When the stamp album was complete, I returned to the hobby shop and bought a blue coin folder for Washington quarters, and pressed into its rows of round beds every quarter in my piggy bank—a slotted Twins batting helmet. The quarters fitted in with a satisfying snap, from the year of my birth in 1966 all the way up to 1983. I did the same for Lincoln pennies and Eisenhower dimes, using the little plastic magnifying glass that came with the stamp album to identify which U.S. mint issued each coin. They’re all empty now. I punched out the quarters to buy baseball cards. Even among my private obsessions, the world of baseball trumps all.

  I have my own dice-and-tabletop role-playing game called Strat-O-Matic baseball, which reduces every player in the big leagues to a coded index card. I select two teams and lay the cards on the table in the basement, where I’m a baseball Dungeon Master, playing out nine-inning baseball games with cards, dice, and fully annotated scorecards that I three-hole-punch and clip into a three-ring binder until there are 162 sheets in there, a full season of games. I’ve played the entire Kansas City Royals schedule, embellishing each score sheet with imaginary tales of life on the road, of autographs signed in big-league hotel lobbies, of raucous pranks played on flights to Anaheim. Every index card is a living, breathing ballplayer with an envelope full of per diem meal money. The completist zeal I once brought to philately I now channel into Strat-O, as the game is known to its devotees, none of whom I know. This is my private obsession.

  There’s a poster in the basement, another Christmas present unvetted by Mom or Dad, featuring a kid my age. The headline says ARE YOU A NERD? and lists the symptoms, including a “fascination with word problems,” “reads too much,” and prefers “Farah, Sta-Prest, Dads and Lads, or other fine brands” of slacks to blue jeans. I’ve had my balls busted at school for never wearing jeans, with the glorious exception, sophomore year, of bib overalls. I wear what Mom buys me: khakis that come with a striped fabric belt or—my favorite—Dickies gas-station-attendant pants in navy blue. Forbidden to wear jeans from kindergarten through eighth grade, most of my friends wear only jeans now. Not me. Like the Vietnam veterans who have returned to Bloomington but still sport their army jackets, I’ve continued wearing the navy-blue pants of the Catholic schoolboy.

  In dressing me, Mom relies on her style bible. The Official Preppy Handbook was published as a parodic celebration of an East Coast sailing set far removed from our lives in landlocked Bloomington, but I see that these people are distantly related to Mom through her love of the Kennedys. This is why my closet is full of Izod alligator shirts, wide-wale corduroys, oxford-cloth button-downs, and two kinds of “dress” shoes: penny loafers and Top-Siders, a.k.a. docksiders, a.k.a. boat or deck shoes.

  A year from now, as a freshman at the Academy of the Holy Angels, Amy will be photographed for the yearbook as the quintessential preppy in Weejuns, knee-high socks, a tartan skirt, and a white oxford worn under a green Izod sweater.

  “Is Amy Rushin the last of a dying trend of preppies?” the yearbook wonders. “Maybe at other schools, but at AHA, lurking behind new-wave skirts and punky haircuts are self-confident people clad in plaid Bermudas and argyle socks. If you knock these preppies, the alligators might bite you!”

  The very first sentence of the Preppy Handbook declares: “It is the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child to wear khaki.” In my khakis, playing Strat-O in the basement, with only the rattle of dice to keep me company, I contemplate the accusing poster. Am I a nerd? More telltale signs: “undue respect for authority” (check), “using big words” (check), “passivity” (check), and “sexual ignorance” (checkmate).

  One day after school, standing on the grass, holding a stray football I’ve idly picked up from the practice field, I see a group of girls huddle, confer, nod in agreement, and then chase me as a pack, shrieking and giggling. Instinctively, I run like Eric Dickerson, the football held the way Dad always told me to carry it: tucked snug against my rib cage as a safeguard against fumbling. “It’s not a loaf of bread,” he always said, so I protect the ball, elude the girls’ shoddy attempts at tackling, stiff-arm one of them, execute a spin move, and break free, sprinting up the sideline until I stand alone—chest heaving, lungs burning—in the end zone instead of lying at the bottom of a pile of girls. And only then does it occur to me that I might have missed the point of this whole exercise.

  To be in high school in the 1980s is to see yourself depicted in countless movies, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in Risky Business, Weird Science, Better Off Dead, Teen Wolf, Footloose, and the Porky’s trilogy, confirming your place at the center of the culture. To be seventeen is to be the subject of song. Stray Cats: “She’s sexy and seventeen.” Kool & the Gang: “At seventeen we fell in love.” The Cars: “She won’t give up ’cause she’s seventeen.” Tom listens to an English new-wave band called Heaven 17, which sounds like a multiplex in the afterlife. (Even the majestic Southtown Theatre has become a duplex. The vast screen on which I saw The Poseidon Adventure and Rocky and The Empire Strikes Back is now two smaller screens, divided by a wall, showing Return of the Jedi and Mr. Mom.)

  “We’re the kids in America, whoa-oh,” sings a woman from England, on the radio, and you can tell she’s not from here when she says, “New York to East California, there’s a new wave comin’, I warn ya.” And that nonexistent place—“East California”—annoys me the way Sadé will when she sings, “Coast to coast, L.A. to Chicago…” It occurs to me that the kids in America aren’t always being written about by the kids in America.

  In none of these songs—in no movies or TV shows—are any seventeen-year-olds listening to Grover Washington Jr., scavenging for books in dumpsters, living in fear of Kenny Rogers’s female fans, playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, or longing for not a black Trans Am but an olive-green IBM Selectric II, the kind I use in Mr. Cavanaugh’s typing class, where twenty of them are arrayed in a row, all of them going off like guns, a metal golf ball with eighty-eight characters on it punching letters onto a page. Writing as an act of violence. The Pavlovian ding at the end of a line, the RETURN button so responsive to touch, all that power in your right pinkie. The way the whole thirty-five-pound beast hums to life when I turn it on also turns me on. It might as well be a car. I have no interest in cars but would love to be behind the wheel of an IBM Selectric II for the rest of my days, pulling out pages of prose and handing them to a copyboy, who then races them to a chain-smoking editor in an office overlooking the newsroom, as in All the President’s Men.

  A weird commercial aired during the third quarter of this year’s Super Bowl. The game was alre
ady a blowout—the Raiders beat the Redskins 38–9—and the only thing I remembered the next day, apart from Barry Manilow singing the national anthem in a bomber jacket, was the Olivia Newton-John look-alike who jogged into a room full of gray totalitarian worker drones and threw a sledgehammer through a giant telescreen with the image of Big Brother on it. “On January 24th Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” the voice-over went. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.” I still don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but I do know that the Apple Macintosh, with its off-white keyboard hooked up to an off-white monitor, puts me in mind of hospital equipment, like something you’d see in a patient’s room on St. Elsewhere. The Selectric hums and dings—it is, in every sense of the phrase, a real humdinger—while the Macintosh is clinical, antiseptic, and silent. The commercial aired only once, but its meaning has been debated on the news and in the papers ever since. Apple was saying it would save the world from the future tyranny of staring slack-jawed at a screen all day, while offering a screen of its own at which to stare.

  Contrast that with the beautiful Selectric. It was designed for IBM in 1961 by architect Eliot Noyes. His son Eliot (Eli) Noyes Jr. is an animator who made a series of short films for Sesame Street called the Mad Painter, in which a bearded man in a Chaplinesque bowler and black Chuck Taylors paints numbers on other people’s property: a 4 on a woman’s umbrella (she is Stockard Channing, Rizzo from Grease); an 8 on a bald man’s scalp; a 10 on a barstool that a maintenance man in a boilersuit promptly sits on, transferring the number to his bottom. I loved these sixty-second silent movies as a little kid. Truth be told, I love them now. If I’m alone in the room and Sesame Street is on, I’ll happily watch it. The Mad Painter—actor Paul Benedict—has grown up to be Mr. Bentley, George and Weezy’s British next-door neighbor in that dee-luxe apartment in the sky on The Jeffersons, but I still think of him painting a 5 on a yellow bouncy ball inside the gorilla enclosure at the zoo. Like Stockard Channing and Paul Benedict, even the ape would go on to greater fame—as Paul the Gorilla on The Electric Company.

  But Eli Noyes also made for Sesame Street a memorable stop-motion series in which sand shaped itself into letters of the alphabet. With the Selectric and the Sand Alphabet animated shorts, respectively, Eliot Sr. and Eliot Jr. played with letters in a way that appealed to me, forming and re-forming them with sand or an electric typewriter.

  By contrast, many computers are now advertised in the paper as “word processors.” Like the “food processors” that serve as prizes on The Price Is Right, they reduce diverse ingredients of varied textures to a pabulum the color of the Macintosh itself.

  Three percent of American households have a telephone answering machine. I don’t know anybody who has one besides Jim Rockford. Ten percent of American homes have a videocassette recorder, and because Dad sells videocassettes, ours is among the lucky few. Twenty-one percent own video-game consoles, and ninety percent own color TVs. But only seven percent of American homes have a home computer. Commodore has sold the most, followed by Texas Instruments, Atari, Timex Sinclair, Radio Shack, and Apple. But I don’t want a Macintosh. I want a Selectric.

  Dad wants a Cadillac so he buys an Olds. I want an IBM so, at a garage sale in South Brook, I buy a Brother electric typewriter with brown keys and a yellow body, a color scheme inspired by the coffee-and-cigarette-stained teeth of every reporter I have ever seen in any movie that requires journalists. It’s louder than an idling bus and of course has no golf ball embossed with letters, but it has regular typewriter keys that rise up and occasionally entangle themselves when I’m typing too fast. I love everything about it.

  At my desk, at the kitchen table, on my own thighs on the bus to school, I put my fingers on imaginary keys in ready position—left fingers on A, S, D, F; right fingers on J, K, L, semicolon—and type out entire paragraphs, my right thumb striking an invisible space bar between every word, the way some kids air-drum Alex van Halen’s intro to “Hot for Teacher” on their thighs.

  I can properly type my first name using only my left hand. But I can also type longer words—“afterward,” “reverberated,” “desegregated”—using only my left hand. The guy two desks down finds he can type “unhook bra” this way—“unhook” right-handed, “bra” left-handed—and we are impressed. I type two other words with just my left hand—“Abracadabra, stewardesses”—and think of the magical appearance of Swedish air hostesses poolside at the Airport Holiday Inn.

  I’m afflicted by shyness and wordplay, both of them crippling, both of them battling each other in my Business Law class, taught by my typing teacher, Mr. Cavanaugh. When he asked us to read a passage in the textbook about disputed rights to a causeway, a classmate asked, “What’s a causeway?”

  Mr. Cavanaugh turned the question back on the class and said, “Anyone know the answer? Mr. Rushin, what’s a causeway?”

  “About eight pounds,” I said.

  There was a long silence before he said, “What’s…a cause…weigh?” Mr. C suppressed the tiniest smile and looked over his glasses and said, “Very funny, Mr. Rushin. Anyone else?”

  He didn’t get mad—or, worse, groan; he just explained it to the rest of the class without them knowing he was explaining it and then moved on. Likewise, my Contemporary Issues teacher, Roger House—whose name appears as “R. House” on class rolls and report cards—doesn’t mind, or possibly understand, when kids sing Madness within earshot: “R. House, in the middle of our street…”

  In this style of wordplay as comedy, we’re guided by Benny Hill, whose reruns air every night after the local news. “This is the dumbest show in the world,” Dad says, half rising from his Archie Bunker chair to go to bed. “Who watches this?” Thirty minutes later, still poised on the edge of his chair, as the closing credits roll, and Benny chases a woman around a field to “Yakety Sax,” Dad snaps off the TV, tears in his eyes: “Why am I still up? This show is for imbeciles…”

  “I fell in love with an opera singer named Maria,” Benny says wistfully one night. “Was that a woman.” He waits a beat before adding, “That’s what everyone kept asking—‘Was that a woman?’”

  The only show that can compete with Carson as an influence on our sense of humor is M*A*S*H, which reruns every night at 10:30 on channel 11, preceding Carson by half an hour. In delaying Johnny’s monologue, Trapper and Hawkeye get an extended afterlife following the show’s demise the previous year.

  “I loved a girl in San Francisco once,” Hawkeye says. “Or was it twice?”

  Last February, on the day the final new episode of M*A*S*H aired, Mike and I went to school dressed as Hawkeye and Trapper John. I wore Dad’s paisley bathrobe and carried a plastic martini glass and walked the halls of Kennedy High on a Monday morning doing dialogue from the show.

  Me as Frank Burns: “You disgust me!”

  Me as Hawkeye: “That’s right, Frank. I discussed you with everyone I know, and we all find you disgusting.”

  I watched the finale that night along with 122 million other Americans, 52 percent of the country, the most watched television program in history, though given the weeks-long buildup to the episode, the more startling figure is the 112 million U.S. citizens who somehow failed to watch it. And though the two-and-a-half-hour episode was melodramatic and disappointing, I took comfort in one last exchange of army humor written by men who had served in World War II and then used the Korean War as a vehicle to comment on Vietnam.

  “Just a minute, you handle our food and dig latrines?”

  “Don’t worry, sir. I always wash my hands before I dig the latrines.”

  In the year since M*A*S*H went off the air, I’ve found a new comedy hero on nights I can stay awake to watch him. David Letterman also wears khakis and polo shirts, and he broadcasts his show from Rockefeller Center, which is at the center of Manhattan, which is at the center of New York, which puts it at the center of the world. “Dave” is a smart-ass who loves Johnny Carson and has a gap between his front teeth
like the one I had closed by orthodontia, then blown wide open by a baseball. He occasionally does sketches from a bar downstairs called Hurley’s, and when I switch his show off at midnight and put on Steely Dan’s Katy Lied cassette, I fall asleep by the second track, “Bad Sneakers,” which contains the line “Stompin’ on the avenue by Radio City, baby.” By the time the fourth song on side one is playing, “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More,” I’ve incorporated the lyrics into my dreams: “He can’t get tight every night pass out on the barroom floor.” I think of Rockefeller Center, Radio City, Hurley’s bar, David Letterman, and Steely Dan, and though I’ve never been to New York City, I decide—in my sleep—that I’d very much like to go someday.

  Young Doctors in Love is showing at the Southdale multiplex, where we’ve duct-taped the fire-door latch to theater 4. Martin picks me up, with our friend Miles riding shotgun. Miles went to Nativity with us but now goes to Holy Angels. Ope is next to me in the back seat. On a sunny spring Saturday afternoon we’re cruising up France Avenue, three lanes running north and south divided by a landscaped median. There’s nothing French about France Avenue except that, like the Champs-Élysées, it’s broad and well trafficked and full of diversions.

  Principal among these diversions is the Mann France Avenue Drive-In theater, ringed by a solid corrugated metal fence twelve feet tall, so that the parking lot inside is like a prison yard in reverse. For eighteen years, since it opened in the summer of 1966—billed as “The world’s most beautiful and distinctive drive-in theater”—young men and women have been trying to break in, smuggled inside the trunks of cars, four kids popping out like spring snakes.