Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  The next night, the eve of Thanksgiving, is the busiest bar night of the year, according to a story I read in the paper. Oly and Roy are leaving O’Gara’s in Saint Paul when they see a guy in short sleeves standing outside, having a smoke. “You should put a coat on,” Roy says to him, and a moment later—halfway to their car, while walking through an alley—he and Oly are jumped by five guys, including the Short-Sleeved Smoker. In the cartoon melee that ensues—a rolling ball of fists and feet and ampersands of profanity—Oly’s glasses are broken and his face is bloodied. He doesn’t want to meet Mike and Ope and me at Whitey’s because he doesn’t want to stand in line bleeding and battered in broken glasses.

  “Are you kidding?” I tell Mike when he relays the news. “Oly would be, like, one of eight guys in line who look like that.”

  Indeed, in the Castle, nothing has changed. At a table near the counter, an old man festooned with sailor’s tattoos is wearing a fancy admiral’s hat from another country’s navy, or possibly from a military surplus store on Neptune, or more likely from Ragstock on Penn Avenue.

  At another table, another party of one wears a professional bowler’s brace on his arm, or perhaps—on closer inspection—it’s a falconer’s arm protector. He has come from either Lyn-Del Lanes next door or the bar at Fong’s across the street, or he is patiently awaiting the return of his peregrine. It’s possible that all three of these circumstances are true, for White Castle is in that category of places—bus stations, DMV lines, ER waiting rooms—where an admiral and a falconer don’t turn a single head. I want to pair them up for dinner, or possibly cast them in a televised cop drama, but instead I order a sack of ten sliders with vinyl, a box of nails, and a fifty-five-gallon drum of Coke and take a table by the window with Mike and Ope, as we’ve done so many times before, except now we’re living in the Future we used to talk about as a concept, as a mythological location.

  Like the kid gazing down at the traffic on the Illinois toll road from his perch at the window in the Lake Forest Oasis—then finding himself in that traffic, on a Trailways bus to somewhere else, as another kid gazes down on him—I have been fast-forwarded, to borrow a phrase from Dad’s magnetic-tape empire. I’m suddenly on my way somewhere, or so it seems, in my belted raincoat.

  Even now, the only occupations I can conceive of ever holding down are the ones depicted in Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, whose vaguely Bavarian municipality called Busytown has a detective (the private eye wears a deerstalker and holds a magnifying glass), a shoemaker (the cobbler hammers away at boot heels inside his shoe-shaped shop), a barber (a white-coated pig sits beneath his candy-striped pole), an automobile dealer (the car salesman is literally collaring a passerby and pulling him into the showroom), and an eye doctor (an anthropomorphic owl, fitting another owl for glasses).

  Above all, Busytown champions the arts, and writing in particular, for in its quaint downtown are a newsstand offering several daily papers, the office of The News (whose editor is in the window, puffing away on a cigar), and—next door to ABC Book Publishers—the Remarkable Book Shop, whose proprietress, “E. Kramer,” stands in the doorway, showing off a book to a passing child, who stares at its pages in rapt fascination. A newspaper reporter runs through the streets with a notebook in one hand, his fedora in mid-flight from his head, while a poet—quill at the ready—stares out the window of an artist’s garret. There are two other garrets atop the same building: in one, a painter in a beret sits at his easel; in the other, bent over a typewriter, a smiling raccoon composes his masterpiece. He is, according to the caption, “a story writer.” In Richard Scarry’s illustrations, in that book buried somewhere in Amy’s bedroom now—all of us long since having outgrown it—the banker and the mayor and the janitor and the story writer are all of equal prestige and importance and, as far as I know, earn equal pay. Mike wants to be a basketball coach, whistle around his neck. Ope wants to be an accountant, poring over a ledger, presumably in a green eyeshade. And I want to be a writer, flailing away at an olive-green Selectric.

  We eat our sliders, Mike and Ope and I and the admiral and the falconer and some high school kids talking too loudly. The steamed bun has fused with the burger, creating a gummy stratum where they meet. God, it’s good. In its own way, this is Thanksgiving dinner, an act of gratitude, surrounded by loved ones and a few crazy uncles, some of whom will be passing out shortly after their meal.

  Or during their meal, as it happens, when the admiral rests his cheek on the cool surface of the stainless-steel table and succumbs to the loudmouth teens, the onions sizzling on their stainless-steel grill, the grill itself irrigated with water from a squeeze bottle, the ice dispenser paying out like a slot machine over at the pop machine, and the kids peeling out of the parking lot in their muscle cars—a symphony of sounds that feels like home, the full White Castle lullaby.

  Thanksgiving dinner is the opposite of last night’s repast at White Castle. For starters, we eat in the formal “dining room,” something we’ll also do on Christmas and not again until the following Thanksgiving. If it’s odd that 200 square feet of our 2,800-square-foot house is reserved exclusively for two meals a year, nobody says so. This is part of what makes Thanksgiving dinner special, along with the various table leaves, the white tablecloth ironed for the occasion, the heirloom china that emerges once a year from its hiding place, like that Pennsylvania groundhog on the Today show.

  Part of the annual rite is sitting in the dining room, this otherwise forbidden space, staring at ourselves in the mirrored wall opposite the table. I’m drinking white wine in front of Mom and Dad. I’ve only ever sipped wine in Mass, but that’s the blood of Christ, which is why the priests would often glug down the remainders from the various chalices. My graduating to wine at Thanksgiving is a milestone, same as when I matriculated six or seven years ago from the Kids’ Table at various large get-togethers.

  There is another matriculation the day after Thanksgiving. Among all the other graduations of recent years—bicyclist to motorist, high school to college, teetotaler to inebriate—this is perhaps the greatest: I’m allowed to eat in the family room in front of the TV while watching football, as Dad has done for years.

  This is a ritual he usually reserved for Saturday afternoons, a plate on his lap—turkey, swiss, iceberg lettuce, and deli mustard on rye, garnished with Old Dutch potato chips—and a glass of ice water on the end table. Only now I’m invited to enjoy my sandwich in this sanctum sanctorum—this football salon of the front room—with Dad. Like him, I set down my drinking glass gently on a coaster. Since childhood, Mom’s admonition—“That will leave a permanent ring”—has left a permanent ringing in my ears whenever I have a beverage in hand.

  Dad has allowed me into his exclusive fraternity of armchair eaters. And it is a fraternity. Mom doesn’t do it. Amy doesn’t do it. I doubt they have ever wanted to. But sitting on the maroon love seat, eating a bologna sandwich while Boston College and Miami are locked in mortal combat on CBS, is everything I imagined it to be: decadent, manly, and fun. I settle in with my sandwich in front of the hundred-pound Zenith, as solid and permanent as Dad himself.

  The football is almost an afterthought to the sandwich, but the game is compelling. Boston College’s quarterback, five-foot-nine Doug Flutie, is an unsinkable runt in a mesh half shirt that exposes his midriff, one of those great journalism words that always makes me wonder if there is an upper or lower riff as well.

  The game is in Miami and everything looks sun-kissed. This is one of the great vicarious joys of watching football on TV in Minnesota with winter approaching. The field is bright green, reflecting the blinding South Florida sunlight I recognize from our visits to Grandma Boyle’s condo in Hollywood, north of Miami. We were there last over the Christmas holiday in 1980, a few weeks after John Lennon was shot, when Tom and I—then fifteen and fourteen—sat inside the fifteenth-floor apartment doodling mustaches and missing teeth onto magazine covers while cranking up Grandma’s AM/FM clock ra
dio, which played Lennon’s new songs, “Watching the Wheels” and “Woman,” seemingly on a loop, until Mom came up from the pool and ordered us outside, into that punishing Florida sun, but not before she expressed her grave disappointment at our vandalism of Grandma’s copies of Redbook and Reader’s Digest.

  BC and Miami are scoring at will. The twelfth-ranked Hurricanes are defending champions, but the Eagles are the number ten team in the nation. Still, Miami is at home, with a six-foot-five All-American quarterback, Bernie Kosar. In September, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s college football preview issue, and for good reason: Kosar has thrown for a ridiculous 447 yards in this game, giving the Canes a 45–41 lead as Boston College gets the ball back at their own 20 yard line with twenty-eight seconds remaining.

  Dad is not literally on the edge of his seat. He is deeply ensconced in his Archie Bunker chair, probing his incisors with a toothpick. But he has issued enough involuntary hoots and whoops to acknowledge that this game has been worthy of his respect. Dad played college football at Purdue before transferring to play at Tennessee and looks down on many of today’s players on television as “pansies,” “hot dogs,” and “candy-asses,” but he has made no such assertions today.

  After three quick passes, Flutie has moved BC out to their own 48 yard line. But there are only six seconds left, time for one last desperate fling. He has already thrown forty-five times, for 420 yards, and is further encumbered by his ridiculously large shoulder pads, which make him appear nearly as wide as he is tall. On CBS, Brent Musburger and Ara Parseghian go silent for a moment. I sit forward on the love seat. Dad stills his toothpick. The ball is snapped.

  “Flutie flushed!” says Musburger as this tiny dynamo flees the pocket, races back to his own 37 yard line, and heaves a ball—like some sacrifice to the gods—into the sky, where a thirty-mile-an-hour wind offers one more redundant obstacle. “Throws it down!” cries Musburger. It will be several minutes before he utters another sentence that isn’t punctuated by an exclamation mark. It appears that every player on both teams besides number 22 for the Eagles—Flutie—is racing to the end zone. As the ball comes down, nearly all of them fall like bowling pins.

  “CAUGHT BY BOSTON COLLEGE!” screams Musburger. “I DON’T BELIEVE IT! IT’S A TOUCHDOWN! THE EAGLES WIN IT!”

  We’re only rooting for Boston College because it’s a Catholic school, and yet the family room is now a storm of iceberg lettuce, Old Dutch potato chips, and sandwich crumbs raining down on the raked carpet, Dad and I both having leapt out of our seats with our lunches on our laps.

  A writhing pile of football players in Miami is transmitting unfettered joy to Bloomington via the CBS television network, thanks to Doug Flutie and his receiver, Gerard Phelan. “Phelan is at the bottom of that pile!” Brent is shouting. “Here comes the Boston College team!” They are pouring onto the field from the bench, a flash flood of humanity.

  In the next day’s Boston Globe, in a column I won’t see for several days, after returning to Marquette, to which some New England student has returned from his own Thanksgiving break, bearing his hometown paper, sports columnist Leigh Montville recorded the dialogue of two Boston College offensive linemen. One, Mark MacDonald, said in the postgame locker room: “That wasn’t Gerard Phelan who caught that ball. God caught that ball.” As a Catholic boy at a Catholic university, I eat this up with a spoon. But it’s the next line that gives me goose bumps. “No,” big Jim Ostrowski said softly. “God threw it.”

  The following Wednesday, when Sports Illustrated is published, I will do what I do every Wednesday at school (and every Thursday in Bloomington, for the magazine arrives there a day later): I’ll go to the mailbox to see whom the magazine’s editors honored with the cover. THE MAGIC FLUTIE reads the headline, over a picture of the dynamo heaving the ball heavenward. “Boston College’s Sensational Doug Flutie Stuns Miami.”

  On another Friday after Thanksgiving, a few years from now, I’ll be sitting inside, watching football with my brothers, when we’ll hear tires squealing outside the window, and look out to see a late-model sedan receding down West 96th Street and six rolls of toilet paper hanging from the birch tree in the front yard. They’re strangely beautiful, the two-ply tendrils dripping like Spanish moss, turning our house into a small New Orleans of Quilted Northern bathroom tissue, to judge by the plastic wrapper these dipshits have allowed to escape the car window. Tom picks up the bag and crumples it in his fist. He squints into the distance like a TV detective. Tom has TP’d more than a few houses in his time and recognizes this as an amateur job. Who buys quilted two-ply to TP a house? Tom also knows what the rest of us don’t: they’ll be back. In the same way that arsonists often return to a smoldering ash heap, these perpetrators will make another pass in their mom’s or dad’s car to properly admire their handiwork. “And when they do,” Tom says, parting a curtain of toilet paper on his way back into the garage, “we’ll be waiting.”

  It takes five minutes to circumnavigate South Brook by car, during which time Jim, Tom, John, and I wait in silence in the dark garage. We hear it before we see it—the sweet song of a Buick Skylark growing louder, until it heaves into view on West 96th. As it crosses over Washburn Avenue and passes Mr. Cole’s house next door, we make our move: the Boys run into the street. We form a human barricade. The stunned driver slows the Skylark. She’s a girl, as are her three passengers, presumably the same girls who call at 3 a.m. and ask, “Is Johnny there?” Or are they? We have no real way of knowing, for the car slowly swerves around us, horn sounding. If it’s possible to read a horn’s honk, this one—to my ear—is more terrified than taunting. Our hands slap the hood as the Skylark slaloms past, and the car disappears at speed around the bend, where 96th turns into Xerxes.

  Retreating to the backyard, feeling semi-defeated, Tom brandishes something long and thin and metallic. It glints in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “I snapped off their antenna,” he says, and we all take a turn holding it, swinging it about like a swashbuckler’s sword, happy to have a trophy.

  In three months away from home, by far the longest absence of my life, I’ve missed my siblings, a notion that had never really occurred to me, but I take comfort in the fact that being one of the Boys, as Mom has always called us, is like being a member of the Mafia. It’s a lifetime commitment, an irrevocable status, and it’s—perhaps more important—a kind of muscle memory. The way we are and have always been around each other, since childhood, will reflexively kick in whenever we’re together, time and distance immaterial.

  What I’ll remember most about this Thanksgiving, though, isn’t the Doug Flutie play, or the BC–Miami game itself, but the shared experience of sitting with Dad in front of the tube, admiring these athletes in silence, eating our sandwiches. From now on, the day after Thanksgiving will be special to me, long after retailers have turned it into a door-busting start to the Christmas shopping season.

  Before a bus returns me to Marquette, I make one last batch of “nachos,” of the sort Tom and I used to eat by the pound in our summertime, middle-of-the-night movie marathons in the basement. These nachos are home on a plate—an edible Bloomington, a microwaveable Minnesota, that begins with a blanket of Kraft singles or thinly sliced Velveeta pulled over a pile of tortilla chips like a sheet over a corpse. The chips are always Tostitos, introduced to a grateful America in 1980 with a TV commercial featuring a “restaurant owner” named “Fernando Escandon” saying, “My favorite Mexican snack doesn’t come from Mexico.” Tostitos (in Traditional Flavor and Nacho Cheese) come from someplace more authentic: Frito-Lay.

  I nuke the pile of Tostitos and Velveeta in the microwave until the cheese forms a thin fluorescent yellow membrane, like skin blistered by the sun. Then I spoon on Chi-Chi’s brand salsa—for it was Chi-Chi’s that brought Mexican food to the 494 Strip before spreading its refried gospel to dozens of other cities around the country.

  Chi-Chi’s is the love child of the Strip’s two greatest
ghosts: flight attendants and footballers. It was opened in 1975 by a Minnesotan named Marno McDermott and his business partner, former Green Bay Packers wide receiver Max McGee, who is best known for picking up an American Airlines stewardess in Los Angeles and partying all night on the eve of the first Super Bowl. The oldest player on either team, McGee wasn’t expecting to play that Sunday but was promptly summoned into the game with a crippling hangover. The Packers beat the Chiefs, McGee was the game’s star, and with the relative riches he accrued—and in the spirit of the times—he opened a restaurant on the Strip called the Left Guard. Time magazine called the Left Guard “the nation’s ultimate singles bar.” The nation’s ultimate singles bar! In the 1970s! And it was ours! Ours, even if my friends and I, at seven years old, could neither comprehend nor take advantage of it.

  As the popular culture changed around the Left Guard, McGee and McDermott converted it into a wicker-and-fern disco called Maximillian’s. “It’s a place where a girl can get picked up respectably,” an employee told the Tribune. “She knows [he’s] not going to be a low roller.”

  Tommy Kramer—himself no low roller, springing for three tins of Copenhagen at a time at Tom Thumb—used to hang out at Maximillian’s, which charged an annual membership fee of $100, ensuring that only millionaires (or anyone with a hundred bucks) could apply. I’m sure some of the parents in South Brook went there to do the Hustle, in shirts unbuttoned to their navels, but Don and Jane Rushin were not among them, though they have brought us to Chi-Chi’s, a favorite of Mom’s when she has lunch with other moms. Nine years after the original Chi-Chi’s opened on the north side of the Strip in 1975, there are now seventy-four of them across North America. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Minnesota’s own Marno McDermott brought Mexican food to Mexico from Minnesota?