Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  I’ll return home via the Castle with secondhand smoke deeply embedded in my letter jacket, and the scent of bowling-shoe disinfectant lingering in my nostrils.

  Some nights we go to Lyn-Del Lanes, on Lyndale Avenue next to White Castle, which is flanked on the south side by Beanie’s Arcade, making it a mini Strip for Kennedy students who can play Punch-Out!! or Galaxian for two hours, cleanse their palate with a sack of sliders, then roll the rock to the thunderous clatter of bowling pins and Journey.

  We bowl in teams, for money. It’s always Mike and Oly against Z and me. Z and I are the starting forwards on the basketball team. We’re the same height, but he outweighs me by twenty-five pounds of muscle, intensity, and bottled anger. Z is cocaptain of the basketball team and captain of the football team, in which he plays middle linebacker in a neck roll and comically large shoulder pads, though he’s terrifying enough without them. In basketball practice the other day, Mike threw a pass when Z wasn’t looking. The ball hit Z in the face and knocked out a false tooth that none of us knew he had. There was a long interval of silence when everyone—coaches included—paused to see if Z would rip Mike’s head off.

  A student manager retrieved the tooth and, with a bow of deference, handed it back to Z. Enraged and embarrassed, Z reared back and threw the tooth like a skipping stone across the gym floor. It skittered under the accordion bleachers, never to be found.

  And then, with a single bleat of Coach Strommen’s whistle, practice resumed as if nothing had happened.

  One day after an evening of rolling the rock, Z overhears me talking to one of the juniors before practice about Strat-O-Matic basketball. Like Strat-O baseball, it’s a cards-and-dice game. It simulates real NBA games between real NBA teams of real NBA players, with one significant difference. If the NBA is jazz—improvisation within a group dynamic—Strat-O is double-entry bookkeeping. Every move of every play requires rolling dice, reading charts, cross-consulting with other charts, ordering double-teams, calling time-outs, addressing player injuries, and—best of all—keeping a detailed and elaborate score sheet replete with arcane statistics. I love it. As with writing, Strat-O-Matic is a game played on paper, where I can bend it to my will. The NBA is aerial; Strat-O-Matic is actuarial.

  “What are you talking about?”

  It’s Z, who I fear knows exactly what I’m talking about, this nerd game in which I pretend to be Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson.

  “Nothing.”

  “You were talking about…Strat-O-Matic?”

  “Yeah, but only because—”

  “I love Strat-O-Matic,” Z says. “We should play sometime.”

  And so begin my visits to Z’s house after practices to play Strat-O-Matic in his basement. Our Strat-O games are intensely contested—I’m the Celtics, Z’s the Sixers—but the tension of them is undercut by the pure joy of our temporary return to prelapsarian boyhood. Sitting in the basement, playing a board game after school, we could be nine again, if not for Z’s tin of Copenhagen, the complicated nature of the game itself, and the knowledge that he can, if required, bench-press Mom’s Honda Accord.

  His own mom supplies us with chips and pop, a service moms still provide, regardless of our age. Our moms are sacrosanct. We’ve grown taller than them but remain afraid of them. As a species, dads are less universally revered. Some dads are absent, some dads are dicks, some dads let their kids drink beer in the house, some dads drink beer in the house themselves at noon on Wednesday. If some moms do these things as well, I’ve never heard of it. On the contrary, moms are the ones supplying us with pretzels and lemonade, laundry service, livery service, a maddeningly cheerful reveille every morning at 6:30, the aggravating discipline of household chores, and the domestic bedrock of rigorously balanced meals and checkbooks. My own mom keeps a household budget in a spiral notebook, every single expenditure—every postage stamp and bottle of Prell—logged with ballpoint pen in the impeccable script of an eyeshaded scrivener out of Dickens.

  A year ago, when reminded that I had promised to mow the lawn for three consecutive days, I told Mom to get off my back, and then yelled, “Damn it!” while storming down the hall. Swearing in front of my parents was a novelty. I was trying it on, seeing how it looked, like I used to do in the three-way mirror at Dayton’s when Mom would take me back-to-school shopping.

  In ordering me back to the kitchen to apologize, Dad addressed me as “buster,” a poker tell that he was livid. I returned to the kitchen with the confidence of the morally righteous and declined to apologize, adding, in front of Mom, “I’m not kissing her ass.” The words hung in the air, as visible as in a cartoon balloon. They had a physical weight. We all stood around for a second and regarded them from various angles. I wanted to snatch them from the air and stuff them back into my mouth like Lucy Ricardo on the haywire assembly line, stuffing the chocolates into her cheeks.

  My shame was instant. In not sending me through the kitchen wall, Dad summoned every subatomic particle of his patience. I stormed upstairs to my room and paced it like a caged animal, trying and failing to justify my actions. I didn’t face Mom again until morning, when she declined to acknowledge me at breakfast. After an hour of a blanketing silence, as thick as fog, I found the strength to issue a wildly inarticulate apology, an unintentional homage to Fonzie, who couldn’t say the words “sorry” or “wrong” and instead always apologized with “I’m suh-suh-suh…” and “I was wruh-wruh-wruh…” Mom returned me to her good graces after an overnight defrosting.

  This twenty-four-hour thaw is customary. With Jim and Tom out of the house, I’m the next man up: big brother, protector, and counselor, charged with handing down the secrets, customs, and knowledge that they passed along to me. There’s a spot in his sock drawer, for instance, where Dad keeps a drum-shaped box filled with dimes. He’ll never miss three or four of them when you need spare change for candy at Pik-Quik. Likewise, any contraband you keep in your bedroom—ancient Halloween candy, racier Mad magazines, typewritten essays aping the newspaper columns of Mike Royko or Art Buchwald or Erma Bombeck that would cause you to die if anyone read them—all of that is best hidden in plain sight inside your shoeboxes of baseball cards. As long as those boxes are stacked neatly in your closet, Mom will never look inside them.

  All of this I tell John, but not Amy, whose skepticism of her brothers is well earned.

  Amy is finishing eighth grade, its own rite of passage: confirmation and graduation and her first slow dance, to “Time After Time.”

  She’s taller than the boys in her class. Jim and Tom have told her that her feet are big. “Look at these boats,” they say, picking up one of her Tretorns. Her butt, they’ve told her, is enormous.

  And yet, to the evident horror of her brothers, Amy is becoming—in Dad’s words—a “young lady,” a phrase Mom usually employs as an admonishing form of address: “Don’t talk to me that way, young lady.”

  She has shed her braces, has traded her glasses for contact lenses, and was recently granted permission to grow her hair longer—out of the Dorothy Hamill haircut that all moms, including ours, still love eight years after Dorothy Hamill became America’s sweetheart at the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Many of those moms still wear oversized Dorothy Hamill glasses, their last connection to the figure skater, now that their daughters have achieved tonsorial autonomy.

  No longer will Amy sustain tinfoil burns in the backyard while Mom and Mrs. O’Brien give her a perm. Mom still won’t let her wear ripped jeans, but Mom has also instituted a new Secret Santa program to promote sibling bonhomie. We draw one another’s names from a hat and buy that brother or sister a Christmas present. Last year Jim drew Amy and got her a pair of Calvin Klein jeans with white stitching and a velour V-neck sweater. It’s her favorite ensemble, but like Twins pitcher Frank Viola, it is only allowed to appear every five days or so.

  John already has his own pair of designer jeans, whose red triangle has replaced the red tag of Levi’s as the hood ornament
of choice among Bloomington eleven-year-olds. “Check out my Guess jeans,” he says. “Sweet.” My friends will impersonate this line for years, replete with John’s slur, for which he gets speech therapy: Guessh jeansh. Shweet.

  It only occurs to me now, several weeks after the fact, that Mom rigged the Christmas lottery so that Jim, the only one with money, drew Amy, the only one of us cruelly bereft of designer jeans. (I don’t have them because I don’t want them.) The notion of Jim shopping for Amy’s clothes—holding up the V-neck on its hanger, checking the jeans tag for Amy’s waist size—is suddenly absurd. Mom bought Amy the jeans she’d forbidden her to wear, using Jim for plausible deniability.

  Jim and Tom and I now openly laugh at some of the good-faith presents we get from well-meaning relatives, specifically our Uncle Pat and Aunt Sandy in Reno. This past Christmas, they sent five Rubik’s Cube key chains, each in individual boxes. Two of the boxes were empty.

  Mom laughed so hard she was in tears. We still don’t know why two of the boxes arrived empty, but it was clear from Pat and Sandy’s enclosed note that it wasn’t a practical joke.

  “When you write the thank-you card,” Mom said, “don’t say that your box was empty.”

  “I’ll send them an envelope with no card inside,” I suggested.

  Like most American families, ours was already in possession of a roughly used Rubik’s Cube, the white-hot pop-culture artifact of 1981. Thirty million had been sold by 1982, at which time ours had been frequently thrown against walls or trod upon in the dark by Dad in his stocking feet, eliciting a burst of stifled profanity.

  The colors of the Cube itself—decals in red, white, blue, orange, yellow, and green—are all turned up at the corners, after being peeled off and rearranged countless times as a shortcut solution. We also became adept at popping off the corners of the Cube and replacing them to our advantage, often to win a bet. “I bet I can solve this in three minutes,” Tom might boast, before disappearing and returning with a solved Cube. Erno Rubik taught the Rushins nothing about algebraic principles—his original purpose for inventing the Cube as a teacher in Budapest—but he inadvertently taught us quite a bit about grifting and cutting corners.

  Two Christmases ago, Pat and Sandy sent us audiocassettes. I got Billy Squier’s Don’t Say No, containing the hit single “The Stroke,” whose chorus was an endlessly repeated two-word phrase. “Stroke me, stroke me…”

  “Perfect for you,” Tom said.

  “Isn’t your sister pretty?” Dad often says to the Boys. “Pretty ugly,” we reply. Why Dad keeps offering up this straight line is anybody’s guess, but she is unquestionably Dad’s favorite. We know because he says so. If John and I are laying waste to the refrigerator at noon on a Sunday, devouring great stacks of lunch meat and drinking orange juice straight from its Tupperware decanter, Dad will walk through the kitchen and sing, “All the monkeys aren’t in the zoo, every day you meet quite a few.”

  Mom doesn’t coddle Amy the way Dad does. “Why don’t you fix a sandwich for your brothers,” Mom tells her as we play hockey in the basement. When John is old enough to drive and has cause to run an errand with Amy, Mom will ask, “Why don’t you let your big brother drive,” even though Amy is three years older than her “big brother.” Dad tells Amy she’s going to be a doctor, but Mom suggests she aim higher and become a nurse.

  Jim has told Amy she should only play a sport whose uniform is a skirt. Golf, perhaps, or field hockey. She chooses tennis, but all the matches are right after school, so Dad never gets to see her compete. She nurses a persecution complex, often expressed with righteous indignation. I’ll think of Amy this summer when I hear a line on the radio that goes “It’s obvious you hate me though I’ve done nothing wrong…” The song is by Depeche Mode, in keeping with the current vogue for pretentious and ridiculous band names. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Kajagoogoo. Echo and the Bunnymen. Haircut One Hundred. Fun Boy Three. Psychedelic Furs. There are three Thompson Twins and none of them is named Thompson.

  I’ve grown up on bands named for great flying beasts—Eagles, Zeppelin, Wings—and the familiar places they soar to and over: Boston, Chicago, Kansas…America. New wave’s great flying beast is A Flock of Seagulls. Its one band named for a city is Berlin. I can’t metabolize the music or even the haircuts. The new music I listen to is almost exclusively by black artists. I turn to the R&B chart first whenever Dad purges his briefcase of his unread Billboard magazines, complimentary copies of which pile up on his desk, for he is a titan of magnetic tape, the lifeblood of the recording industry.

  So I listen to Cameo, the Gap Band, the Whispers, the S.O.S. Band, and the Jonzun Crew. In a couple of months, Prince is going to release his “long-anticipated” album and “major motion picture” of the same name, its title borrowed from “Ventura Highway,” by America. That song always puts me in mind of the previous decade and our family trip down the California coast in a rented wood-paneled station wagon during the glorious summer of ’77: “Sorry, boy, but I’ve been hit by purple rain…”

  Before I leave for college, those last two words will forever belong to Prince, who has already mined Orwell in a similar way. On New Year’s Day of 1984, while eating my Cheerios and reading the Star and Tribune, I paused over this line in an op-ed column by Anthony Burgess: “Orwell, writing his novel in 1948, set its events in 1984 because that year seemed remote enough to be mythical.” With 1999, Prince set the apocalypse for 2000, still safely sixteen years in the distance, no matter what The Day After would have me believe.

  4.

  Dancing with Myself

  In the backyard of a house on West 98½ Street, there’s a basketball half-court in a spot where most people have their patios. I gaze at this concrete square through the window of the school bus every morning. It’s roughly equidistant between my house and Mike’s and right next door to our friend Tony’s, whose dad we call the Fly, because that’s what the Fly calls all of us: “Tony, who are these flies you brought into the house?”

  One afternoon, Tony walks into his family room to tell the Fly that we’re all going to grab a Quarter Pounder with Cheese at the new McDonald’s on Lyndale. “Dad,” Tony says, “we’re going to Mac and Don’s.”

  The Fly never breaks eye contact with the TV as he replies: “Who’s Mac, who’s Don, and you ain’t goin’.”

  The Fly has a genius for inserting swear words into already existing words to create something greater than the sum of its parts, the way Mom likes to stuff rice into hollowed-out red peppers. “Unbe-fucking-lievable,” he might say as Ron Davis gives up another bomb in the bottom of the ninth for the Twins. Sometimes the Fly will double down on the profanity and declare something “Bull-fucking-shit,” and I like the way he’s cracked open one swear word and inserted another inside it, the way some baseball players wrap Bazooka around a chaw of Red Man to get the double rush of sugar and tobacco.

  From Tony’s house, the train tracks run all the way out to Prestigious West Bloomington. Tony and his best friend, Flynn, have become adept at hopping on a boxcar while holding on to their bikes and riding the train out to the Valley West mall before riding their bikes back home.

  So Mike and I go to Tony’s to listen to the Fly, and to see Tony hop a train, or to drag him to the softball field behind John Deere and take turns hitting towering home runs with a tennis ball. But in the course of visiting Tony’s house we hear a rumor: the guy next door with the half basketball court in the backyard is Flip Saunders, former captain of the University of Minnesota basketball team that sent three of its other starters—Ray Williams, Mychal Thompson, and Kevin McHale—to stardom in the NBA. Only Flip’s size—he’s five foot ten—prevented him from making the Celtics. He’s now an assistant coach with the Golden Gophers after four seasons as head coach at Golden Valley Lutheran College, where his team went 56–0 at home behind a captivating forward with a supreme Minnesota name: Nelson Johnson.

  Mike and I start to mill around outside that house, in the st
reet, hoping to see Flip go in or out. After many days of fruitless loitering, Mike has an idea. He opens that mailbox on West 98½ Street and examines the contents while I stand a hundred feet away, knowing that tampering with the United States mail is a felony. With a suppressed shriek, Mike stuffs the mail back into the box, but not before briefly brandishing a smoking gun—the homeowner’s Minnegasco bill, in whose cellophane window appears the name Philip D. Saunders.

  As I stand at the foot of the driveway, Mike walks up to the door and knocks. A twenty-five-year-old blond former Gophers cheerleader answers.

  “Yes?” she says, looking for the candy bars Mike is almost certainly selling for his Little League fund-raiser.

  “Is this Flip Saunders’s house?”

  “Yes,” she replies. “I’m his wife, Debbie. Can I help you?”

  “Can he, uh…”

  “Can he what?”

  “Come out to play?”

  There is a moment of stifled laughter as Debbie says something into the void behind her. Then she turns back to Mike.

  The answer, to our everlasting astonishment, is yes. Yes, Flip can come out to play. Or rather, we can come in, to the backyard, and shoot hoops on his half-court. He has a coach’s easy banter with younger people. Flip suggests minute adjustments to our jump shots and expresses his admiration for our wooden attempts to impress him with spin moves and finger rolls. Then he disappears into the house to let two strangers play one-on-one in his backyard. If he and Debbie saw us rifling their mail through a gap in the blinds, they are kind enough not to say so. The balls on Mike, to open up their mailbox, knock on their door, and talk to the grown woman who answers, when I can’t talk to a girl much less ask one to the prom, despite Mom’s frequent suggestions that I do so.