by Steve Rushin
“If you don’t go to your prom,” she says, “you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.” She still has matchbooks, supper-club menus, and carnations from her own prom in Cincinnati pressed into a scrapbook in her bedroom closet.
We both know that I will forever regret not going to the prom. We also both know that I won’t be going.
On the night of the winter formal dance, Mike, Ope, and I are seeing Kool & the Gang at the Carlton Celebrity Room. We’ve purchased tickets this time, though previously we’ve only ever snuck into the Carlton, a Las Vegas–style dinner theater in East Bloomington, which means grown-ups in blazers and dresses dining at tables with cutlery and china while watching Tom Jones sing “Delilah.”
Sneaking in isn’t hard. Half the people we know work at the Carlton, including Oly and Gator.
The trouble is, once our friends have spirited us in through the kitchen—Oly is a busboy—we spend the night walking to or from our nonexistent table to the men’s room, never reaching either destination. I’m often content to hang out near the can, in the carpeted lobby outside the doors to the auditorium, where all I really get is the bass line and the cocktail-buzzed patrons leaving or entering the men’s room.
Occasionally, though, one of us finds a dropped ticket stub on the lobby floor and will pass it back and forth like the letters of transit in Casablanca, allowing us—one at a time—to occupy a folding seat and thus hear a snippet of a set from the Commodores or the Little River Band. Behind the booths and tables are theater seats occupied by the majority of the 2,200 patrons who fill the pie-shaped theater to hear synth-pop gods Spandau Ballet play “True.”
The singer Mel Tillis, whose stutter evaporates in song, headlined the Carlton Celebrity Room when it opened five years ago, in 1979. Putting the word “Celebrity” in its name was an effort to speak something into existence: call it a “Celebrity” room, the celebrities will come. And they did. I’d seen Tillis on The Tonight Show—and there has followed a parade of men and women onto the Carlton stage who previously appeared on that show: Charo, Wayne Newton, and the insuperable Engelbert Humperdinck.
Rodney Dangerfield once killed in a three-minute stand-up set on Carson, then moved over to the couch to plug his upcoming gigs. “I’m gonna be in a place I’ve never been before in my life,” he told Johnny. “Minnesota.”
An audience member whooped.
“Minnesota?” Johnny said.
“Minnesota,” said Rodney. “Bloomington, Minnesota.”
I nearly fell off the love seat.
“Land of a thousand lakes,” Johnny said.
“That’s right,” Rodney said. “There’ll be a lotta lakes over there.”
“A thousand!” Johnny said.
“That’s right,” Rodney replied, rolling his eyes. “A thousand lakes’ll be there. And I’ll be at the Carlton Celebrity Club.”
“The Carlton Celebrity Club,” Johnny echoed.
“In Bloomington, Minnesota,” Rodney repeated.
“Bloomington, Minnesota,” Johnny said, to titters from the audience.
“This place is so far out in the woods,” Rodney said, “my act’ll be reviewed by Field & Stream.”
It was unbelievable to witness. Rodney Dangerfield from the Miller Lite commercials and Johnny Carson himself, the king of late-night TV, were talking about my hometown on the set of The Tonight Show. And it almost didn’t matter that they called the Carlton Celebrity Room the Carlton Celebrity Club or that Johnny said “a thousand lakes” when “10,000 Lakes” is the phrase on our license plates. The point was Johnny Carson had seen our license plates. He spoke the words “Bloomington, Minnesota.”
Mike and Ope and I also snuck in to hear David Brenner, another comic who appeared on Carson. But for Kool & the Gang, we’ve not only purchased the best seats in the house—a red-leather banquette front and center—we’re properly dressed for the occasion.
Mike picks me up in the Bonneville. He’s wearing a pair of Stacy Adams shoes that I can only surmise he has gently removed from an unconscious pimp. Mike’s also wearing a white tuxedo shirt and a red clip-on bow tie purchased at the Valley West Marshalls. He’s gone deep into his well of Dippity-Do, gelling his hair into a style that we’ve called—on other people—a Dippity-Don’t.
I’m wearing a blue blazer with gold buttons embossed with anchors, and a maroon argyle V-neck sweater over a blue button-down oxford shirt. My khakis break just above my cordovan penny loafers as I duck into Dr. Terry McCollow’s sky-blue land yacht. Ope is wearing his dad’s sport coat over a puffy pirate shirt from Marshalls. We roll into the Carlton parking lot, pass the entrance to its Backstage disco, moor the Bonnie in a space, and walk three abreast into the Carlton Celebrity Room with the bravado of Frank, Dean, and Sammy strolling into the Sands Hotel and Casino.
At the edge of the stage, we brandish our tickets at the skeptical ushers, who show us to our sumptuous booth, where we order three Cokes. “On the rocks.”
In the next booth is a Jefferson hockey player Mike knows, and he’s brought a date. By the time the house lights go down and Kool & the Gang materialize onstage in matching white marching-band pants and silver lamé shirts, our mouths are too busy chewing prime rib to sing along to “Get Down on It.” As the show carries on, the Jefferson hockey player, whose name I now know is Kyle, slides into our booth with his date, and the five of us bask in the warm glow of the footlights, our cavity fillings gently vibrating to Robert “Kool” Bell’s bass.
I’m too self-conscious to dance, but I’m already throwing caution to the wind tonight, rolling the dice in this mini Las Vegas, by exposing myself to the stage’s strobe lighting, which Mom often reminds me could trigger a recurrence of the grand mal seizure I had as a three-year-old.
The music critic for the Star and Tribune, Jon Bream, has called the Carlton “mediocrity for Middle America,” but you wouldn’t know it on this night, when the Backstage disco seems to have moved into the main room. A small crowd of Minnesotans—generally loath to show emotion in public—have turned the narrow moat between our booth and the stage into a dance floor.
Mike and Ope are up dancing solo, both of them displaying symptoms of White Man’s Overbite, while the other three of us—Kyle, his date, and I—listen to the slow jam of “Too Hot” and gaze up at the stage, where James “J.T.” Taylor is purring, “At seventeen we fell in love, high school sweethearts, love was so brand new…”
And yet I somehow feel less awkward here, as the third wheel at my own table, than I would at the winter formal. Prom theme this spring will be “Dancing in Heaven,” named for last year’s smash by the British one-hit wonders Q-Feel. “Dancing in Heaven” is about getting down in outer space. If the future prophesied in books, songs, and movies is even remotely punctual—Orwell’s 1984, Prince’s 1999, Kubrick’s 2001—we’ll be among the celestial bodies by the time we’re thirty, consigned there by rocket ship, or reduced to carbon by nuclear oblivion. On this night, I can’t yet imagine turning eighteen, never mind thirty, not as Kool & the Gang kick into their finale and every repressed Minnesotan in the Celebrity Room dances in the aisles. In the darkness of the booth, I bite down on my lower lip and gyrate in my seat, making a motion like I have to pee. Across town, other kids are attending the winter formal: the boys in suits, banding their dates with wrist corsages like the banded ducks tracked by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Like all of them, I’m dancing. Not in heaven, but close enough—in Bloomington, shining the seat of my red banquette with my pleated khakis.
A familiar pang of longing descends as we leave the Carlton and gaze next door at the abandoned rust-hulk of Metropolitan Stadium—former home of the Twins and Vikings—whose magnetic pull I still feel, three years after it closed. The Met is derelict. Bereft but not yet bulldozed. The field on which Rodney Cline Carew won seven batting titles in the 1970s, where the Purple People Eaters ruled the National Football Conference in the same decade, is often infiltrated by kids my age leaving be
hind beer cans. Bloomington still feels done wrong by the teams that abandoned us for a dome in downtown Minneapolis, so we trespass upon those who trespassed against us.
The decaying molar of the Met recedes in the rearview. Mike and Ope and I are still high from the concert and six Coca-Colas. It’s not “Celebrate” that we’re singing in the Bonneville on the way to White Castle, where we appear to be regular winter formal attendees who released their banded dates back into the wild. As Ope’s Hush Puppies hit the white-tiled floor, and our pupils contract in the Hopper light of the “dining room,” and Barney the rent-a-cop fails to recognize us in our dress-up clothes, my two best friends and I are still singing our favorite Kool & the Gang song. All together, and without irony: “Oh yes, it’s Ladies’ Night, oh what a night…”
Every night ends at the Castle. After Tom’s friend Nelly got ejected from the Saint Paul Civic Center for hocking a loogie at Jerry Blackwell as the beer-gutted villain made his bombastic entry into the ring at all-star wrestling, Tom and Nelly went to the Castle. After prom, after keggers, even after gorging oneself at a different fast-food franchise, the night ends at the Castle.
In high school, Tom and his friend Digger teamed up in a competitive eating contest against two other friends, Timmy C and Shootsy, who earned his nickname for saying “shoot” instead of “shit.” Shootsy arrived at Pizza Hut having fasted, armed with a powerful appetite and a grim determination to vanquish Tom and Digger. The pizza-eating contest that followed would live in legend as The Sow-Down.
Pizza Hut is cheap. Somewhere, in what I imagine is the chain’s hut-shaped headquarters, their bean counters have calculated how much even the most ravenous person is likely to choke down at an all-you-can-eat buffet and set their price accordingly. Tom, Digger, Timmy C, and Shootsy are not those average people. They’re fueled by petty rivalries that date back to grade school, the kind of grudges—over marbles, Little League, musical tastes, hairstyles, and cruel nicknames—that only good friends can nurture.
As each new steaming pie was delivered to the Pizza Hut buffet, Tom, Digger, Timmy C, or Shootsy was there to collect it. They kept a strict accounting of how many slices each participant devoured, and as that number crept, per capita, into the double digits, the four of them eyed each other above the tops of their bottomless pop glasses and wondered whose gastrointestinal tract would blink first.
One by one they cried uncle, first Timmy C and then Digger, until it was just Tom vs. Shootsy for the Pyrrhic victory. As Tom continued to eat like Pac-Man—with a relentless, almost robotic joy—Shootsy retreated to the bathroom, via the buffet. When Tom and Digger followed soon after, to make sure nothing fishy was going on—“Trust, but verify” as President Reagan put it—they found Shootsy in a stall, on the toilet, with his pants around his ankles and a whole pizza on his lap.
He was trying to eat it while trying to make room for it. Exposed in this way, Shootsy knew it was over. He summoned what remained of his dignity and waved the white paper napkin of surrender.
And even then, having just won The Sow-Down, Tom insisted they all go to the Castle. This was partly to prove he could eat more—a few sliders with vinyl, a few gobblers with glue—but also as a kind of valedictory, the victory cigar after a fine evening. Every night ends at the Castle.
Turning up there after Kool & the Gang, we see the usual suspects: freaks, jocks, dirts, dorks, lops, fries, and gearheads—the entire taxonomy of Bloomington’s high schools.
Any kid who smokes, wears an Iron Maiden shirt, has a leather wallet chained to a belt loop, or clomps around in Frye boots is a “freak” or a “dirt.” “Dirt” is short for “dirtball.” Frye brand motorcycle and hiking boots are also known as shitkickers, freak boots, and wafflestompers. So ubiquitous are the Frye boots that the freaks are also called “fries,” partly for the footwear, partly because their brains are presumed to have been fried by the many controlled substances they presumably ingest.
It will be another three years before the Partnership for a Drug-Free America airs its public-service announcement with an egg popping and hissing in a cast-iron skillet: “This is your brain on drugs.” But fries and Fryes and frying metaphors are already coupled with drugs in Bloomington high schools.
At Jefferson, the fries smoke in the Pit, and the jocks hang out on the sundeck directly outside Jock Hall, where passing girls are rated. Or so I’ve heard from Jefferson exiles. The boys hastily scrawl a number—anything from 1 through 10—in BIC pen on a sheet of notebook paper and hold it up as if they’re Olympic judges watching the figure skating at Sarajevo.
I never talk about girls. I don’t tell anyone that I’m secretly enamored of Mallory from Family Ties, Bailey from WKRP in Cincinnati, Jo from The Facts of Life, Jayne Kennedy from The NFL Today, the brunette from Bananarama, Sadé, Fawn Liebowitz’s roommate in Animal House, Phoebe Cates, Valerie Bertinelli, Daphne from Scooby-Doo, Rachel Ward in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Mrs. Kotter, Jennifer Beals, Julie the cruise director on The Love Boat, Daphne Zuniga from The Sure Thing, and—with an ardor undimmed since elementary school—Clarice, the doe-eyed caribou love interest of the title character in the stop-motion animated Rankin/Bass production that airs once a year in December, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
In a bit of architecture that John Hughes might have dreamed up, the sundeck at Jefferson, purview of jocks, overlooks the Pit, purview of fries. Inevitably, the jocks once poured a pot of ink from Art class onto the fries below, touching off a free-for-all, the news of which made its way to Kennedy, where we hate the Jefferson jocks because they’re our basketball (and hockey, football, and wrestling) archrivals—the Jefferson Jaguars, a.k.a. Jag-offs.
“Dickie Turner had a sweet pair of wafflestompers at Olson,” says Oly, who attended Olson Junior High. “But then he set a girl’s hair on fire in Music class and got sent to juvie.”
Dirts, freaks, and fries go to juvie. Some of us who went to Lincoln High School before it closed still call fries “gumbies.” We could fill a dictionary with our slang. Farting is “creasing.” Money is “skins,” “jing,” or “bones.” Our classmates resort to “kiping” or “gripping”—petty theft—when they have no jing, or merely for laughs. Laughing is “rolling.” Fun is “yuks.” Some kids—jocks and fries alike—get their yuks at the expense of nerds, who are known variously as lops, doofs, dinks, dorks, and spazzes. If jocks, fries, and dorks are the three circles of a Venn diagram, many of us fall into at least two of the overlaps. There are smoking jocks, dorky fries, and—if I’m being honest, under the baleful gaze of the ARE YOU A NERD? poster—at least one jockish dork who collects coins, simulates baseball games with pencil and dice, and writes stories about those games in his bedroom on his mom’s typewriter. The only thing that marks him out as a jock are his hoop shoes.
As it was at Nativity, when we wore a school uniform, our sneakers are the only things that set us apart. Shoes contain multitudes. They’re the one article of clothing I care about, and therefore the only real variable in my wardrobe. There’s a line from “Moving in Stereo” by the Cars, the song Phoebe Cates gets out of the pool to in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: “Life’s the same, except for my shoes.”
The closest thing a non-fry has to Frye boots are Hush Puppies, which we also call “desert highs” or “wallabees.” They’re high-topped, lace-up, brushed-suede, crepe-soled, sand-colored “desert shoes” that make no sound. Like the cornmeal balls of the same name—once fed to hounds to keep them quiet—Hush Puppies stop your dogs from barking. Hoop shoes announce themselves with a squeak on the polished corridors of Kennedy High. Hush Puppies, like nursing shoes, are silent—something a meek assassin might wear with his cardigan sweater. I have a cardigan sweater, kelly green, with the alligator on the breast, love child of Mister Rogers and Jack Nicklaus, but I’ll never wear Hush Puppies.
“Hoop shoes and sandals are all I’ll ever need,” Mike says, dreaming of a life shuttling between the basketball court and the shuffleboard court at so
me Airport Beach of the future. “They’ll call my biography High-Tops and Flip-Flops.”
Our high-tops are Converse Dr. Js or Adidas Top Tens or Adidas Pro Models, the high-top version of the shell-toed Superstars worn by rap group Run-DMC on the back of their self-titled album that just came out. We also like Nike Blazers and Bruins, Pro-Keds, Ponys, Batas, and Chuck Taylors. With his Chucks, Ope often wears four or five pairs of socks, in homage to Pistol Pete Maravich; I prefer a single pair of three-striped tube socks with a pair of baseball “sanitary socks” worn over them, preferably gold, to offset the blue-and-gold uniforms we wear as members of the Kennedy Eagles basketball team.
There’s a growing appetite in Bloomington for Doc Martens, army boots, and other signifiers of the punk aesthetic. A secondhand clothing store has opened in Bloomington and attracts high school students like flies. Or rather: in addition to flies. Ragstock specializes in army jackets with someone else’s surname stamped on the breast; gas-station-attendant shirts with someone else’s first name stitched in cursive inside an oval patch (“Buster”); and bowling shirts with a jaunty team name emblazoned on the back (“Pin Pricks”).
I come home one day in the spring wearing a wool navy pea coat purchased for nine dollars at Ragstock. Mom has complicated feelings about it, torn between her love of a bargain and her fear of anything that reeks of “hillbilly.” And this coat literally reeks of hillbilly.
“Pea coat?” Tom says, on a rare weekend home from Iowa State. “You mean a smells-like-pee coat.”
Tom looks slightly different. His Brillo-pad hair can never be teased into the full Flock of Seagulls, so he’s settled for something more staidly new wave, a tonsorial tribute to Echo, perhaps, or one of the Bunnymen. He wears boxers now, like Dad, and laughs at my tighty-whities. The wire arms of his John Lennon glasses loop around his ears, but it’s the ears themselves that have been most radically transformed. His eardrums were punctured in a cataclysmic explosion and are just now mending.
