by Steve Rushin
I don’t know how the Gopher got on the roof, except to say that he—like almost all the players here—is of a higher physical order, capable of feats I can’t fathom. He might have just leapt onto the roof, Six Million Dollar Man style, or vaulted up there off the picnic table. Whatever the case, he is unambiguously on the roof, brooding. Halfhearted efforts are made to coax him down. But they are for naught. The Gopher remains up there, marooned on a suburban roof like a Frisbee, as the sun sets on West 98½ Street, and I ride my ten-speed home, to the comforting drudgery of ordinary life.
Every Thursday I go to the mailbox in a fever of anticipation to retrieve my copy of Sports Illustrated. I have a fixed idea of who should be on that week’s cover, and the instant I drag my copy into the sunlight of South Brook I know if I was right. But this Thursday is the Fourth of July. There is no mail. So I wait an eighth day, plus an extra minute—until the mail truck is two doors down, so I don’t look like one of those elderly residents whose entire day is arranged around the arrival of the mail. (There’s a kid on Xerxes who every day watches his live-in grandfather shuffle to the curb for the mail, then races out to snatch it from the box just before Grandpa can get to it.)
The cover of SI on this Friday is Dodgers left-hander Fernando Valenzuela next to the headline MAKING HIS WAY IN THE U.S.A. The magazine is fat with advertisements, some of them rigid cardboard and scented with cologne. Three subscription cards fall out on my way from the mailbox to the front door. Leafing through this high-gloss leviathan, while walking barefoot up the scalding driveway, my eyes fall on page 62, on a story titled “The Only Game in Town.” “On one spirited weekend each summer,” reads the subhead, “tiny Lowell, Mich., turns into Mackerville, its streets, sidewalks, and front lawns given over to a three-on-three basketball bacchanal.” I can scarcely believe it. Sports Illustrated has devoted eight pages to a makeshift, semi-ironic, quasi-suburban three-on-three basketball tournament in a Midwestern town and it reads like literature, thanks to the deft touch of its author, Alexander Wolff, whose name I recognize as the co-author of The In-Your-Face Basketball Book, which I ordered through B. Dalton Bookseller at Southdale in eighth grade and read almost in its entirety as Mom drove me home.
Upstairs, on the Brother typewriter in my bedroom, beneath Jim’s handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, I compose a letter to the editor of Sports Illustrated. “Sir,” it begins, in the style of all letters published in the magazine. “Lowell, Michigan, may have the Gus Macker, but Bloomington, Minnesota, has a better three-on-three basketball extravaganza: the Saunders Hoop Invitational Tournament, whose acronym is no reflection on the caliber of play…” It is a single paragraph, because letters published in the magazine are seldom longer than that, and I want to see this letter published in SI, see my name and town italicized at the end: Steve Rushin, Bloomington, Minn.
The Brother is forever warm this summer. It gives my desk the factory hum of enterprise. The Twins are hosting baseball’s all-star game next week, and while I don’t have a ticket, I do visit the Dome the day before, when it’s open to the public for the official all-star workout. Though I have been in the Metrodome a hundred times, I’m now here to sketch its portrait, noting the quilted pattern of its Teflon roof, the white panels pushing through the grid like marshmallows through a tennis racket. The place is devoid of charm and atmosphere—if not for the organ music, it would be a sensory deprivation chamber—and I can’t help but note the people here for the free workout will not likely be here tomorrow night for the game itself, when the stands and luxury boxes will be filled with (writes the righteous journalism student in his reporter’s notebook) “fat businessmen” and “civic fat cats.” I don’t know why I think of white-collar workers as overweight. I’m not sure I know the difference between “corporate” and “corpulent.”
The only thing I know is these imagined obese executives will be at the all-star game tomorrow night in place of me—a self-described “loyal box-score reader”—who will be forced to watch it at home, with “the armchair-and-six-pack crowd” (as I type in my eight-page single-spaced dispatch from in front of the basement TV, which I deliver in the historical past tense, writing for posterity):
I got my consolation, though. The game was a terrible bore, a lifeless 6–1 National League victory, complete with zero home runs, no American League extra base hits, and LaMarr Hoyt as the game’s MVP.
Actually, my true consolation came the day before the all-star game, at the all-star workout, when members of both teams took batting practice at the Dome. A home-run hitting contest was held, and all the while that group known as The Media hounded anyone on the field wearing polyester double-knits (many of whom weren’t ballplayers in uniform but members of The Media themselves).
That day I sat in the front row behind the National League’s dugout, offering me a good view of Eddie Murray’s high liner off the suspended speaker in right field, 175 feet off the ground and 350 feet out. I saw Ryne Sandberg send one over the wall in center, only to have a local high school kid who was fielding for the workout haul back a home run.
I also got to see Joe Garagiola and Vin Scully, Brent Musburger and a score of local writers whom I recognized. I was on a cloud. I pictured myself on the field, as did everyone else at the workout. But not only did I picture myself taking a Dwight Gooden fastball to the corner for a triple, I also saw myself with a luggage tag hanging from my belt and a notebook in my hand, following the neglected all-star batboys in search of a story.
But how, exactly, will that happen? How will I move from a seat in front of my television to a place in the dugout, clubhouse, and press box, that “luggage tag” of a press credential dangling from my belt loop? Where is the wardrobe door leading to this Narnia? My plan, such as it is, involves magical thinking. The key, I’ve decided—for reasons I cannot articulate even to myself—is to get my letter published in Sports Illustrated.
And so every Thursday I stand at the curb—the mailbox door still hanging open like a dog’s tongue—and I flip to the back page, to the letters page, called 19th Hole, to see if the editor has chosen my letter. I don’t know if the letters-to-the-editor editor—identified on the page as “Gay Flood”—is a man or a woman. I only know that he or she hasn’t published my letter.
Every seven days, centuries go by. Entire geological ages transpire from Thursday to Thursday. How I wish I had access to “electronic mail,” a phenomenon that now appears to be no different from four-course meals in pill form or flying cars. And so I wait another seven days for the next issue of SI, turning first to the back page, the letters page, reading the magazine from back to front like a Japanese comic book. My letter is never there. It is now dawning on me that it won’t be published. The letters here refer to stories published weeks after the story on the Macker. The magazine has moved on. There is no magic wardrobe through which I can enter the world of Sports Illustrated, or New York City, or journalism in general. “You like to read, you like to write,” Mom tells me, looking out for my best interests. “You might consider becoming a lawyer.”
There’s breaking news on the evening of Friday, August 2. Shortly after dinner—a reheated repast I eat alone at the kitchen table, having returned late from the New Orleans Court apartment complex, whose enormous grounds I am perpetually mowing this summer—the networks gravely report that Delta flight 191 from Fort Lauderdale has crash-landed in heavy rain and burst into flames on approach to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport. The pictures are horrific. Scores are dead. Some passengers, miraculously, are said to have survived.
It is thirty minutes after I get home and eat, then, that Mom absentmindedly mentions there’s a letter for me on her desk in the kitchen. My name and address have been typed by a manual typewriter on the front of the envelope. There is no return address, but the postmark reads JUL 30 ’85 NEW YORK, N.Y. I turn it over, and there’s a return address on the back flap.
Sports Illustrated
Time & Life Building
New Yor
k, NY 10020
Typed above the Sports Illustrated letterhead is the name of my correspondent and what appears to be his office number in the Time & Life Building, kitty-corner to 30 Rock, where David Letterman broadcasts his show: A. Wolff 1931.
With trembling hands, I open the letter carefully, using a butter knife because a surgeon’s scalpel isn’t readily available. The stationery is creamy, on a stock of paper with which I am not familiar. At the top of the sheet is the same Sports Illustrated logo as on the envelope, just above the magazine’s phone number, which doesn’t appear to have changed in the previous quarter century. It is 212 JU 6-1212. I recognize these ancient telephone exchanges from bits of pop-culture flotsam. There’s an old song called “PEnnsylvania 6-5000.” The Ricardos’ phone number on I Love Lucy reruns is MUrray Hill 5-9975. I’ve seen a novel at Penn Lake Library called BUtterfield 8. With this missive from JUdson 6-1212, I’ve taken one step into my television set, into a black-and-white ’40s movie or a Signet Classic paperback.
I open the letter itself.
Dear Steve:
The SI Letters Dept. recently forwarded to me your kind and informative letter responding to our story on Mackerville. My co-author, Chuck Wielgus, of The In-Your-Face Basketball Book, will likely call you soon to find out more about S.H.I.T., to help us research our sequel, The Back-In-Your-Face Basketball Book.
Thanks again for writing. Any help you could provide Chuck and me in our research would be greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Alex Wolff
Staff Writer
I turn the envelope upside down and shake it, and a business card falls out. The card has raised letters, as if my goose bumps are contagious and have transferred to this inanimate object.
The business card has that Rockefeller Center address and a home phone number scrawled across the back in blue ink. (Like the office number, it has that magical 212 area code.) On the front, next to Wolff’s name, is the title “staff writer.” How do you get to be that?
I put the business card on my desk. It looks like something that would arrive on a silver tray, proffered by a white-gloved butler, an engraved invitation to something in another, higher world. New York. Rockefeller Center. Time & Life Building. Sports Illustrated.
The card and letter sit on my desk for two weeks. I look at them every day, occasionally taking them to the couch downstairs, lying down and looking up at the letter as if into a lover’s eyes. Soon I receive another missive, this one from Chuck Wielgus, “co-author” with “Alex” of The In-Your-Face Basketball Book. Could I send Chuck thumbnail sketches of the best pickup basketball hot spots in the Twin Cities—playgrounds, backyards, YMCAs—for possible inclusion in the book’s forthcoming sequel? My electric typewriter hums. When I send “Chuck” several paragraphs on each playground—he has asked only for a few lines—he inquires, by mail, if I’d be willing to write similar sketches for other municipalities. By the end of the summer, I’m phoning parks-and-rec departments throughout Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, asking whoever answers the phone to tell me where the good people of Bismarck or Yankton or Dubuque hone their spin moves and tomahawk dunks.
And then one day before returning to school I can’t find the letter from Alex. I have misplaced it, as I misplace everything else in my life. Or perhaps Mom pitched it. Either way, I’ve lost this artifact—this Golden Ticket—and with it, Alexander Wolff’s phone number and address, and any evidence that my correspondence with him was anything more than a fever dream. My pen pal is now Chuck, his co-author, who is himself a parks-and-rec director—in South Carolina—and not a staff writer for Sports Illustrated.
At the end of August, as she has done for the previous fourteen years, Mom buys me back-to-school clothes. The ritual hasn’t varied in a decade. I try them on in my bedroom, I confirm they fit in the bathroom mirror, then I fish the scissors out of Mom’s sewing kit to cut all the tags off.
Returning the scissors to the kit, I see it through the clear Tupperware of my memory box: the envelope from Sports Illustrated and, inside it, the letter and business card from Alex, tucked away by Mom for safekeeping. She’ll never mention law school again.
10.
Money for Nothing
Every morning at eight the next-door neighbors in my high-rise dorm crank “Money for Nothing,” whose introductory guitar riff I come to think of as the theme song that runs over the opening credits of the sitcom that is my daily life. Over and over, background vocalist Sting sings a haunting refrain of “Money for nothin’” and “Chicks for free” before delivering the decade’s most diabolical earwig: “I want my, I want my, I want my MTV.” By embedding MTV’s jingle within their song, Dire Straits has ensured endless rotation on MTV itself, which now has twenty-six million subscribers, all of us in the words of the Associated Press “peach-fuzzy viewers, notorious for their bite-size attention spans.”
I’ve been hearing this since I was little. “Studies have shown that many children have short attention spans and suffer fidgets as the result of watching TV with its constant interruptions,” the Detroit Free Press reported when I was eight. “Teachers fight the battle constantly. On Sesame Street, much of the show’s educational material is done in a TV commercial style: short spurts to fit a child’s short attention span.” Of course, it’s possible that children have always had short attention spans and adults have always lamented that fact and television provided a convenient scapegoat. This much is certain: when the video for “Addicted to Love” airs on MTV, as it seems to have done every hour on the half hour for weeks, I am powerless to look away for the full glorious duration of its three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Five sullen models identically done up in black dresses, bloodred lipstick, and slicked-back hair pretend to play instruments while towering over Robert Palmer, unintentionally dressed as a high-end waiter in black slacks, white shirt, and black tie. The whole tableau is enchanting. Even late at night, with the TV on mute, the syncopated gyrations of the pantomime musician-models render sound unnecessary. The song plays in my head. Likewise, when the song comes on the radio, the models are conjured from thin air. If any of this is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
“Money for Nothing” is off Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album. I know my neighbors are playing a vinyl LP because there’s a brief interval of popping and hissing after “Money for Nothing” ends and before “Walk of Life” begins. This is the first album in chart history to sell more copies on compact disc than on long-playing record, and the first to sell a million CDs. The format is two years old and an unstoppable force. Digital has arrived, impatiently tapping its watch, waiting to usher analog off the stage.
CDs haven’t replaced tapes and records. The downtown Milwaukee record store Radio Doctors looks and smells as if it’s been here forever. And it has. The place opened as a radio repair shop in 1931 and still restores old Philcos and Zeniths to life. But most of its 22,000 square feet is devoted to a musical Tower of Babel, where pop, rock, funk, punk, comedy, country, classical, and jazz albums all call at once from their alphabetized bins. Bach and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Coltrane and Cocteau Twins, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Echo and the Bunnymen—they’re all here, as are their fans: hippies and yuppies in Frye boots and business suits, smelling of professorial tweed and undergraduate weed. Radio Doctors will always be here, in the aptly named Century Building, a shop both ancient and eternal. Here I discover the Smiths, whose songs about “spending warm summer days indoors writing frightening verse” somehow resonate.
Today, I buy a double album—Canadian classical pianist Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations—because I heard a professor extol it in passing. Gould will be shelved between the Gap Band and Grandmaster Flash in my alphabetized record collection.
A few blocks away is Renaissance Books, another Milwaukee institution that I’m certain will outlive me. Its five stories seem to totter precariously, like a pile of books. Inside, I have to wade through volumes st
acked higgledy-piggledy to explore its heaving floors and buckling shelves. I feel like an EMT entering a hoarder’s apartment in search of a body to carry out. The cracked spines and yellow pages and overpowering smell of age—old books, old customers—give the store the appearance of a skid-row hotel for the elderly. Indeed, the sign that hangs perpendicular to the front of the building, unmissable by any foot or automotive traffic passing by, are five enormous letters hung vertically:
B
O
O
K
S
Every time I pass by—or rather, every time I see it, finding it impossible to pass by—I read those five bloodred letters as:
H
O
T
E
L
Indeed, I buy a used paperback there called The Hotel New Hampshire because Professor Bovée praised it in a journalism class, and thus John Irving joins Julius Erving in the pantheon on my bookshelves. I make no critical distinction between Irving’s The World According to Garp and the Erving-inspired Dr. J: The Story of Julius Erving, a 1975 Scholastic paperback by sportswriter Joe Gergen, except to say that I enjoyed them both equally, in different ways.
Much as moisture has found its way through the cracked grout in my shower at Tower (as my new dorm is called), so the occasional literary novel and classical or jazz or “college radio” recording has penetrated my collections, with a stealthy influence that I don’t detect until it has become too late and pervasive.
If I’m to believe the news, I won’t be buying records much longer. The news stories I read all the time now insist “it’s only a matter of a few years” before digital kills analog, as video killed the radio star. I have faith, however, that my generation will continue to make mix tapes, if only to keep Dad, who is now fifty-one, employed for another dozen years, before he and Mom can retire to a condo on the Gulf Coast of Florida, following the migratory pattern of Minnesota snowbirds.
