by Steve Rushin
Chi-Chi’s (named for the founder’s wife, Chi Chi McDermott) has its salsa on grocery shelves, the only salsa I’ll spoon on my nachos, and now McDermott is the CEO of an upscale hamburger restaurant on the Strip called Fuddruckers, kitty-corner to Mother Tucker’s, a pair of joints evidently christened in the hope that our parents will accidentally utter a four-syllable swear word.
Even so, there is a sense—now that I’m eighteen—that I’ve missed the Strip of my parents’ heyday. Perhaps my affinity for soul and R&B and disco is what has me pining to go to ’70s-vintage Ichabod’s South, colossus of the Strip, with its thirty-thousand-dollar sound system and stainless-steel dance floor, or Eddie Webster’s, with its sunken dance floor and house band—Five Easy Pieces—and all the glorious hotel bars that lead to and from Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport like a string of runway lights: the Exchange at the Marriott, the Captain’s Table at the Ramada Inn, the Pow Wow Lounge at the Thunderbird Motel, the Grand Portage Saloon at the Registry Hotel, the Lounge at the Rodeway Inn, Mr. C’s at the Radisson, or Le Bar at L’Hotel Sofitel, where Billy Martin punched out a marshmallow salesman, costing him—Billy, not the marshmallow salesman—his job as the manager of the New York Yankees.
If my friends and I have been deprived of Daddy’s—another ’70s Strip fixture, with its singing waitstaff and crab-legs specialty—well, so has my own daddy, who married Mom when they were both twenty-two, at which time the newlyweds were stationed in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, “courtesy of Uncle Sam’s Army.” The notion that I could be married or in the army (or both) four years from now is ludicrous. Even after I’ve returned to Marquette, I find myself blinking back the punishing light of the Castle. There, off-Strip—Off-Off-Strip, to use the Broadway analogy—is our slightly less glamorous version of Henrici’s or the Decathlon Club or the Arthurian-themed, lavishly turreted Camelot, another faux castle in Bloomington. But that faux castle is not our faux castle. At White Castle, at what Dad sometimes calls Le Chateau Blanc, there are no high rollers picking up women, respectably or otherwise. In fact, I’ve never seen a woman getting picked up at the Castle, unless—as occasionally happens—she was being picked up off the floor by a put-upon worker in a paper hat, trying to mop the tiles around her. But for now it’s a kind of heaven.
9.
Spending Warm Summer
Days Indoors
Twenty of us sit side by side in four neat rows at olive-green IBM Selectrics whose collective racket sounds like a thousand sets of novelty wind-up teeth chattering across a factory floor. Bashing out our timed deadline exercises in a News Writing class in Johnston Hall, we’re disproving the notion that five hundred monkeys bent over five hundred typewriters will eventually compose the collected works of Shakespeare.
And we are monkeys, college freshmen not fully evolved. When we return from our three-week Christmas break, one of my friends named Steve—Stever, as he’s known—opens his dorm-room door and is confronted with a profound stink. Tugging his T-shirt over his nose and mouth, Steve makes a brief investigation of the tiny room but turns up no rotting eggs, no lunch meat that has fallen onto the radiator. Feeling ridiculous but wanting to be thorough, he disassembles the handset of the room’s wall-mounted rotary-dial telephone. Unscrewing the ear- and mouthpieces, he makes a grisly discovery. Someone has concealed within both of them a dollop of shit. Steve suspects it was more than one person—two people with whom he had fought outside a bar. As he puts it to me an hour later, still incandescent with indignation but summoning all the dignity the phrase will allow: “They shat in my phone.”
I’ve grown up with three brothers whose atrocities are always imaginative. Tom is a Marquis de Sade of scatological torments. He once invited me to sniff an empty aspirin bottle into which, unbeknownst to me, he had quite recently farted. Something about the tiny plastic receptacle, and the bed of cotton at the bottom, acted as the ideal vessel for his scheme. When I took a deep draw, the smell nearly rendered me unconscious—and was so strong it could have also revived me if indeed I had passed out. It was both knockout punch and smelling salts.
McCormick Hall is a tower full of Toms. Every floor has at least one visionary joker, a Walt Disney of depravity. My next-door neighbor is a quiet six-foot-six Milwaukeean with a cheerful disposition and a striking poster above his desk of a beautiful woman in a peach toga and pearls, with her name—Whitney Houston—across the top. In the evenings, B.Q.—as everyone knows him—enjoys decanting a six-pack of beer into a pitcher liberated from O’Paget’s and using it as his personal mug. He sits on his desk chair with the door open. Like a prison toilet, it’s the only place to sit that isn’t the bed.
But here is B.Q.’s brilliance, the divine spark that reminds me of Tom. Whenever a floor mate’s parents arrive for a visit—or parents of a prospective student tour the dorm—B.Q. is tipped off to their presence by one of his informants. And because the floor is circular—since the building is a cylinder—those parents usually make a full circumnavigation of the floor while looking for their son’s room. As a result, B.Q. has just enough time to divest himself of his clothes, sit at his desk with his legs casually crossed, and give a jaunty wave while quaffing 60 ounces of beer from a pitcher at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning.
In this atmosphere of anti-domesticity, the mere presence on our floor of any mom puts all of us but B.Q. on our best behavior. I want these visiting moms to tuck me into my upper bunk or hand me a bologna sandwich. My diet is abysmal. At least three times a week I order two chimichangas from Amigo’s across the street and ask for extra sour cream and salsa. I dip the chimi into the little plastic receptacles on every bite. One night, ravenous, I return from Amigo’s in a downpour and the bottom of the paper takeout sack—already translucent with grease—falls open. My two chimichangas drop into a puddle in the McCormick parking lot. I look at them for a moment with regret, this tortilla flotilla, and make a decision: with both hands, I reach into the murky depths of the puddle and pull out both chimichangas. I am tempted to hold them up to the sky in triumph. They feel good in my hands, like an Olympic sprinter’s baton. Back in my room, I put the chimies on the radiator. When they have dried, I eat them.
In fact, every menial task is a minefield. Clean clothes, I’ve discovered, require a descent into the coin-operated underworld of the dormitory laundry room, or the neighborhood Laundromat, both places teeming with other people’s underwear, the cotton-candy remnants of the lint traps, sheets of Bounce fabric softener stirring on the floor like autumn leaves whenever the door opens, bringing in new strangers with their bras and bedsheets and pajamas on full display. If there is value in the proscription against airing one’s dirty laundry in public, none of us can afford to care.
Someone else’s wet clothes have evidently been abandoned in a washing machine whose cycle has long since ended, and I’m left to bundle their twisted jeans and pink pillowcases in my arms and solemnly place them on a plastic folding table. (The table itself folds but is also used for folding clothes. Imagine a coffee table that also makes coffee.) I’m careful not to touch the sodden panties or to gaze directly at the off-white bra while silently praying that their owner doesn’t walk in just as I’m transferring her frilly unmentionables across the black-and-white-tiled floor. And then I sit and watch my own underthings do somersaults in the foam-lashed porthole of an industrial Maytag.
I write Mom a letter to tell her what I can’t in our Sunday night telephone conversations: that I now appreciate how difficult it is to do on my own all the things she has previously done for me. Even this requires me to buy envelopes and find the post office and procure a single twenty-cent stamp. The stamp they sell me was just issued. It bears the likeness of the great Roberto Clemente in a white Pittsburgh Pirates cap. How can the United States Postal Service depict one of the most famous players in the history of the game wearing a white cap when he and his teammates famously wore black or mustard caps? I want to write the Postmaster General and express my outrage, but the
n I remember who the stamp is for: Mom. I address the envelope to “Jane Rushin, 2809 West 96th Street, Bloomington, Minn. 55431.” In the upper left corner of the envelope, I write “The Zoo, 1530 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, Wis. 53233.” Then I take one last look at Clemente in his white hat and—turning the stamp over with a sigh—I lick it and stick it and send it on its 343-mile journey. Mom will be reading my letter in two or three days.
Among the visions I have of the distant future, fed by TV and newspapers and popular music, are those thin TVs that hang like paintings in the living room carrying as many as fifty channels into my den. On one of the cassettes Tom and I listen to on the boom box between our beds during summer and holiday breaks, Donald Fagen, late of Steely Dan, sings of a streamlined world of spandex jackets, ninety minutes from New York to Paris, undersea by rail. That song, “I.G.Y.,” is about a kid in 1957 thinking about the impossibly distant world of 1976. Here I am, in 1984, contemplating a similar far-off Valhalla, as described in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, which claims that someday—when I’m thirty-five, maybe, and on the brink of decrepitude—I won’t be licking stamps and mailing letters. In fact, the paper tells me, that day has already arrived for some.
“Today,” this story claims, “information that might otherwise require costly long-distance calls or delays for postal delivery can be exchanged across town or around the world virtually in an instant via ‘electronic mail’—a computer-to-computer communications system regarded as the most revolutionary since the telegraph and telephone replaced horseback couriers more than a century ago.”
“Electronic” mail. “Cellular” telephones. “Cable” TV. All these magical modifiers. Surely flying cars cannot be far off. They certainly can’t arrive fast enough for my liking. In March, four months after taking a Trailways to South Bend, I go there again. It snowed the previous night, the “lake-effect snow” in which cold air sucks up the warm water from Lake Michigan and drops it heavy and wet on Milwaukee. This is heart-attack snow for middle-aged shovelers. It leaves an icy coat on Interstate 94. My friend Vill is driving us to Notre Dame to watch the Irish host Marquette in basketball. Ten minutes south of downtown, we hit a patch of ice on I-94. As the Chrysler LeBaron starts to spin at sixty-five miles an hour, the revolving landscape seems to slow down, as if passing by on a merry-go-round.
While I remain stationary in the shotgun seat, the world leisurely turns around me. Or so it feels. The other cars, the highway signs, the churches and houses fringing the freeway, all go by slowly, a lazy Susan landscape, while I wonder if this is how it all ends—on Saturday morning, March 2, 1985, with the radio playing “I Want to Know What Love Is” by Foreigner.
When the spinning stops, the LeBaron is facing the oncoming freeway traffic. After a short moment of bewilderment, Vill harnesses years of watching The Rockford Files and executes a perfect Rockford Turn, reversing at speed, jamming on the brakes, throwing the car into drive, and continuing southbound on I-94. No words pass between us, and we drive to South Bend without further incident, as if nothing happened, as if that perfect J shape of burnt rubber was left by somebody else.
But our morning spinout confirms what I—and I can only assume Vill—have suspected all along. That we are immortal. Indestructible. Eighteen.
The downside of this immunity to Death: we’ll have to earn a living forever. And so, on our safe return to Milwaukee from South Bend, I write an account of the Irish victory over the Warriors. The game story is for my eyes only. I will never show it to anyone. I can’t wait to get home for the summer, when school breaks, and return to Flip Saunders’s backyard, and write more game stories about our three-on-three contests that I won’t show to anyone. Is it possible to make a living this way, writing stories for myself that pile up in one Mead folder after another in the back of my closet, like the crated Ark of the Covenant warehoused among a million other identical crates at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, never again to see sunlight?
God, I hope so, because that’s my plan.
In my weekly Sunday evening call home from the prison phone in my dorm room, before he hands the receiver to Mom, Dad tells me, “That was a nice letter you wrote to your mother. I can tell you’ve really matured.” I’m wearing a bathrobe at 8 p.m., eating nachos from a paper sack, and watching Knight Rider, a show about a sentient, self-aware 1982 Pontiac Firebird that talks back to its driver.
“Thanks,” I say, as my fellow freshmen do lap after lap around our circular hallway on wheeled office chairs in an impromptu Indianapolis 500. “I guess I am growing up.”
Summer arrives faster than I expected. Within days of my returning to Bloomington, a letter arrives from the dean of the College of Journalism, which Mom puts into my Tupperware memory box, a see-through sarcophagus memorializing all of my worldly achievements: Kool & the Gang ticket stub, state tournament basketball programs, letter-jacket letter—they lie in repose like Vladimir Lenin in his bulletproof tomb in Moscow, transparent testament to past glory.
“Dear Steven,” wrote the dean, whose first paragraph is the only bit that isn’t part of a form letter. “Congratulations on a successful freshman year at Marquette! I note especially your ‘A’ in J004 and encourage you to continue strong in writing.”
The letter goes back into its envelope, and the envelope goes into my aforementioned Tupperware box, and the Tupperware box goes into the upstairs hall closet, with its bifolding doors that open to reveal the laundry hamper into which I frequently urinated during my sleepwalking rounds in junior high and high school. To the right of the hamper, just below my memory box, is Mom’s sewing kit, with its fake-wicker exterior.
Every so often I open it up to inhale its mystical aroma, gaze into its fathomless depths. The sewing kit is Mom’s memory box. It is tiered like a tackle box, displaying the various implements—scissors of various sizes, needles of differing circumferences, a solid bulb on which she darns socks, a measuring tape for reasons I can’t discern, safety pins and thimbles and buttons of every description, and (at the center of it all) sufficient thread of every color to sew a Technicolor dreamcoat.
My memory box has my name in Mom’s handwriting, block letters in permanent Magic Marker. There are four other boxes surrounding mine, for Mom is dutifully embalming each of our childhoods, preserving them in amber, socking away the very knickknacks that she ordinarily disdains as clutter.
Her favorite rhetorical question—“Can I pitch that?”—has always served as a death sentence for whatever object (stuffed animal, stray Shrinky Dink, ancient copy of Sports Illustrated) is in her crosshairs. Somehow this is the same mom who has saved every progress report, every newspaper clipping that mentioned any of us, every matchbook cover—CAMELOT: ADVENTURE IN DINING—that once cluttered one of our dressers as a reminder of that time we celebrated a special occasion at a fancy restaurant. She hasn’t just socked away my birthday cards and graduation tassels and unsewn sleeve patches from long-forgotten tournaments (Tartan Basketball Classic 1981). She’s done it for Jim and Tom and Amy and John as well. There’s a box for every one of us. This closet is a Smithsonian Museum of the Rushin Children, their towering achievements preserved in airtight Tupperware for maximum freshness, to be snacked on whenever Mom gets hungry.
In June we contest the second annual SHIT in Flip’s backyard, with the boom box blasting Whitney Houston, whom I’d never heard of when I first saw her on the poster above B.Q.’s desk. Now she’s world famous. The boom box is the size of a Samsonite suitcase. The speakers pulsate like a cartoon thumb struck with a hammer. The wheels of the cassette tape turn slowly, inexorably. They are the wheels of a motorcycle, transporting me somewhere else: someplace grown-up, urban, racially diverse, and linguistically rich.
The slap, slap of high-end high-tops on the concrete court, the insults and warnings, the imprecations to “get that weak shit outta here,” and—new to me—the elaborate slanders against one another’s mothers. A player who pump-fakes three times—ball in both hands, elbows sp
read wide, pump-faking against a defender who isn’t biting—is said to be “jacking off an elephant.” Nobody does it again.
There’s a real live NBA player here. Jim Petersen of Saint Louis Park and the University of Minnesota has just completed his rookie season with the Rockets. In Houston, he plays with Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson. In Bloomington, he plays with Steve Rushin and Mike McCollow and Keith Opatz. The resulting cognitive dissonance makes the SHIT slightly hallucinogenic. Arriving by Schwinn ten-speed at Flip’s backyard court, “you’re traveling through another dimension,” as Rod Serling says. “A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.”
In this dream state, Flip says his friend and former Gophers teammate Kevin McHale might come play in the SHIT, even though McHale and the Celtics have just played the Lakers in the NBA Finals. McHale doesn’t show, but Flip’s optimism, his can-do enthusiasm for basketball, and this backyard three-on-three tournament make me believe that an NBA all-star at any moment might walk through that sliding door from the kitchen and into the Saunderses’ backyard, where McHale will clothesline me just like he clotheslined Kurt Rambis in last year’s finals. And it would be a thrill, a privilege.
While the three-on-three games are going on, and the boom box throbs, and the traffic thrums past, I look up from the court to see a member of the Minnesota Golden Gophers basketball team staring pensively into the distance while sitting on the peaked roof of Flip’s house. He is evidently upset, perhaps about the result of his three-on-three game, or possibly over a call (or non-call) in these self-policed games. “No blood, no foul” is the law here, though the truth is everyone acts unfazed even when their own blood is shed. Especially when their own blood is shed.
