by Steve Rushin
But the real electronic marvel that holds me in its spell these days is the Canon Typestar, a sleek black half digital, half analog minotaur. It has a computer keyboard whose every key is responsive to the slightest touch, so that I don’t have to strike them as if I’m Schroeder playing Beethoven on a baby grand. Above the top row of keys is an electronic “screen,” four inches wide and two inches tall: every sentence I type passes through that window, never displaying more than two words at a time, each letter of every word composed of a series of dots, like the letters on the state-of-the-art electronic scoreboards at major-league stadiums. If I write “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs,” I can review that sentence as it passes by, in two-word pairs, as if the sentence is boarding Noah’s Ark: “The quick” gives way to “brown fox” gives way to “jumped over” and so forth, until I’ve forgotten what the start of the sentence was. But that hardly matters, for I can now edit on the screen before striking the carriage return and seeing those words transfer onto paper. The Typestar—its name evokes the retro-futuristic Telstar satellite of the early 1960s—still requires a sheet of paper scrolled onto a platen, as on Mom’s manual Royal or my own electric Brother at home.
But I use it every day. My journalism teachers have made it clear that we can write about anything, find glory in the mundane, God in the everyday, literature wherever we happen to be. When I’m late for my journalism classes, I use the elevator override button in Tower, holding the L down as I bypass each floor on my descent from sixteen. The shouted obscenities and idle threats that issue as the elevator car passes each unrequited group on the other side of the unyielding doors gives me an idea.
For the first time in my life, I’m riding an elevator every day. One night I sit in my room in Tower and write an essay about the etiquette of elevator riding—avoiding eye contact, pressing buttons that have already been pressed, the suppression of flatulence, the repeated jabbing of the CALL button in the vain hope that the elevator will arrive sooner. I rip the thermal paper out of the Typestar, tri-fold it, stick it in an envelope, and mail it to 435 North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Ill., 60611.
This missive to the Chicago Tribune is the second letter I’ve ever submitted to a publication, after the letter to Sports Illustrated about the SHIT. Beyond those, the only unsolicited essays I’ve ever mailed to anyone were thank-you notes, which Mom required us to write within forty-eight hours of Christmas. The unspoken obligation to fill out the entire blank space of the card—expressing my undying gratitude for that Billy Squier tape or the empty Rubik’s Cube box—was my first exercise in creative writing. It was the literary equivalent of inventing sins to confess to Father Gilbert at reconciliation so that we had something to talk about in the confessional.
I buy the Chicago Tribune out of the coin-operated newspaper rack on Wisconsin Avenue every day. In Chicago, I’ve walked past the paper’s neo-Gothic headquarters on Michigan Avenue, gazed up at its thirty-four stories—never has the word “stories” seemed more appropriate—and looked for Chicago psychologist Bob Hartley, who first appears to us, in belted trench coat, near here in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show. After Cubs games, I have gone underground, across the street from Tribune Tower, to the subterranean Billy Goat Tavern, haunt of Mike Royko and inspiration for John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd’s “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger” sketch on Saturday Night Live. I’ve walked along the Chicago River, past the squat box of the Sun-Times building and the majestic Marina City, twin towers, each one sixty-two stories, each story shaped like a sixteen-petaled flower whose architect—near as I can tell—was George Jetson. I imagine myself walking from work at the Trib or Sun-Times, in a trench coat like Bob Newhart’s, to my condo in Marina City.
The centerpiece of this so-called Magnificent Mile is the turreted white Water Tower, fabled as the only building standing after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, though I’m more interested in it as the alleged inspiration for the White Castle hamburger chain.
The Tribune costs a quarter in Chicago but thirty-five cents in Milwaukee. Every day I put my quarter and dime into the same metal box and pull out the paper with its U.S. flag on a blue masthead and fold it neatly and carry it in my armpit to class. On Saturdays, I put my coins in and pull out the paper and absentmindedly leaf through it in my room, which is where—on February 22, three and a half weeks after the Challenger explosion—I turn to the editorial page and see, beneath an editorial on loans to farmers, the title “Regimenting the Ups and Downs.” The following thirteen paragraphs were written by me, in this very room, on my Canon Typestar, and now they’re on newsstands on Michigan Avenue, being flung from Schwinns into box hedges in Bolingbrook, discarded on L trains, and carried onto airplanes. At the bottom of the story, my name in italics: Steve Rushin, leaning to the right, as if in forward motion.
Saturday is the least-read paper of the week and there is no Royko column and some of my immortal prose has been edited with less precision than I might have liked, but it hardly matters. I return to the coin-operated Tribune box. The box snaps shut with an echoing bang after you remove a newspaper. I put another thirty-five cents into the coin slot and this time remove five papers. The box snaps shut. It’s a spring-loaded steel trap, this newspaper box, capable of snapping your arm off, or at least holding you fast, powerless to escape its clutches.
I’m fairly certain it has caught me.
The end of sophomore year rings the curtain down on two years that a biographer might call—were I a famous painter—my Bunk Bed Period. Never again will I climb a ladder to go to bed, or watch the bedsprings groan above me, for the only civilian adults I can think of who sleep in bunk beds—bunked hammocks, to be fair—are Gilligan and the Skipper. I am moving to an ungoverned combat zone called Off Campus, with two roommates, to an apartment where I’ll have my own bed and bedroom. And thus begins a new era of my life: the Apartment Epoch.
Hodes and I and our mutual friend Todd furnish our third-floor walk-up at Canterbury Court with castoffs from our parents’ houses. We put a TV cart in the corner, where the four divots in the carpet indicate the previous tenants’ TV was. The avocado carpet, installed in a previous decade—which decade is unclear—tells us where the furniture fits. The four legs of the couch go here, the circular base of the floor lamp goes there. It’s like an Arthur Murray dance chart, but instead of your foot you put your futon here.
Hodes secures for us a stereo and turntable housed in a walnut console the size and weight and finish of an upright piano. It’s burnished to a sheen with lemon-scented Pledge.
Carrying it up to the third floor, I felt like Hercules. There are floral-print armchairs and a U-shaped rug that fits around the base of the toilet and a fuzzy blue cap for the lid—things I wouldn’t know how to buy, refugees from various homes, a diaspora of misfit appliances and silverware and other aspirational kitchen implements: spatulas and wooden spoons and ladles, when all we’ll ever need is a bottle opener and a couple of cereal spoons.
And still the kitchen sink is piled with dishes, a permanent art installation that sits for a month. The sink is “stainless steel,” a phrase we’ve taken as a challenge while successfully staining it with petrified Ragú.
Inventors seem to have misplaced their priorities. The oven, never used, is self-cleaning. The shower and toilet, in constant use, are not.
Soon after we move into Canterbury Court I’m carrying a brown paper sack containing a six-pack of Miller Lite and a feed bag of Lay’s Sour Cream & Onion potato chips across a vacant lot to our apartment building when three young men approach, presumably to ask me the time, and when I consult my watch to tell them it is 10 p.m., the oldest (or at least the largest) of the three says, “How much money you got?”
They’ve seen too many movies and TV shows. I have too. We’re all improvising a stickup. They’ve arranged themselves in classic gangster-movie pose: the leader flanked by his two lieutenants, who stand a deferential step behind him. Together they form a gre
ater-than sign pointing at me, which is appropriate. Three is greater than one.
“I just spent my money on groceries,” I say.
“All of it?”
“Everything.”
Unsatisfied with this answer, they flex their jaw muscles and rotate their heads by way of stretching their necks. The truth is, if they were to remove my wallet from the back pocket of my khakis and un-Velcro it they would find two dollars, which would yield each of them—I’m doing the math in my head—sixty-six cents. Giving them sixty-six cents apiece would almost certainly be worse than nothing at all.
“You’re welcome to the groceries,” I say, and then have a momentary panic that one of them is underage, and should the police happen upon this exchange, I’ll be the one committing a crime by providing beer to a minor.
The boss peers into the brown bag, examines its contents, then looks back at me, assessing my veracity. His two stooges—I’ve come to think of them as Sour Cream and Onion—take all their cues from him.
“Come on,” says the boss. “He ain’t got shit.”
Sour Cream looks disappointed. Onion still wants the chips. Me, I’m not sure what just happened. In the six years between 1985 and 1991, five students will be murdered or perish in fires in what the New York Times calls “the declining neighborhood that surrounds the campus here.” I wasn’t even mugged. These guys live here; I’m an interloper. Milwaukee is on its way to shattering its record for most murders in a year—set five years ago—and this neighborhood is among its least salubrious, though it hints at a glorious past.
A block and a half from Canterbury Court is Mashuda Hall, a Marquette dorm that was, in a previous lifetime, the downtown Milwaukee Holiday Inn. The Beatles stayed here in 1964, in the Governor’s Suite on the seventh floor. I walk past it every day, secretly wishing I was housed there, wondering if the building is still redolent of tiny hand soaps and industrial towel detergent and plush carpet dampened by air-conditioning. But there is no sign of what it once was—literally no green-and-yellow sign, blinking outside, that made pulling up to a Holiday Inn in Arlington or Anaheim or Kissimmee (or Bloomington) such a thrill that I longed to live in one. This Holiday Inn has gone. I try but cannot conjure its ghosts—happy families disgorged from station wagons, John Lennon stepping from a limousine.
There are two oases on this western fringe of campus. The Glocca Mora will instill in me a lifelong love of dive Irish bars, and the Marquette rec center is a hotbed of pickup action. Pickup basketball, that is, though I’m sure others are picking up women there as well. My buddies signed me up for coed intramural basketball, but the only thing I can bring myself to say to my female teammates is “Switch!” or “Watch the screen!” or “Roll to the basket!” “Shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to,” I heard Morrissey sing on WMUR, the student radio station, narrowcasting to a three-block radius around campus.
Otherwise my neighborhood is a half century past its prime. Down the street is a nineteen-table poolroom called Romine’s High Pockets. Around the corner is the ScrubaDub car wash. Across from it is the Ambassador Hotel, a run-down relic from an art-deco heyday. A block from that is the Eagles Club, a 25,000-square-foot ballroom and boxing arena opened in 1926. It now stands as a Mediterranean revival reminder of the college culture that I’m not attuned to, for here play college radio acts like Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Replacements (from Minneapolis) and even—unbelievably—Limited Warranty, opening now for Eddie Money.
Limited Warranty are five guys from Bloomington who won Ed McMahon’s Star Search talent show and got signed to Atlantic Records. Not since Kent Hrbek of Kennedy High School became the Twins’ first baseman in 1981 has a Bloomingtonian been so exalted. They have big teased-up Flock of Seagulls hair and wear blazers with pushed-up sleeves over T-shirts. Teenage girls in Bloomington can still look them up in the phone book and call them even though they’re opening for Eddie Money, whose “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Baby Hold On” and this year’s “Take Me Home Tonight” you can hear on the radio. The lesson is, you can come from my hometown and make it in the arts, at least the arts that were most esteemed in Bloomington in my childhood there: sports and rock and roll.
Dreaming of artistic glory, I schlep forty minutes by city bus to the Northridge shopping mall in Milwaukee to watch an old man do trick shots on a pool table in front of Sears for the momentary diversion of a couple hundred people walking from Foot Locker to Frederick’s of Hollywood. A few more gaze down to pass the time while ascending the escalator, and a handful of others have brought books or magazines to be signed by the man who was the world champion of pocket billiards fifteen times between 1941 and 1957. I alone have brought a reporter’s notebook and two pens, scribbling Willie Mosconi’s every utterance for posterity.
This is Everymall, with a Spencer Gifts and a Cineplex showing Lethal Weapon, Platoon, and Crocodile Dundee. As a child, I saw Mosconi shoot pool in a tuxedo against Minnesota Fats on ABC’s Wide World of Sports, and like anybody I have ever seen on TV, he retains both a gravitas and a kind of unreality, such is the power of the medium. I’m here to “profile” him for my Magazine Writing class. In my notebook is a list of questions. Only after I arrive and see this resplendent white-haired seventy-four-year-old pool shark—who appears with a statuesque blonde on his arm in George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone” video, which still appears occasionally on MTV—does it hit me: I can’t approach this man and introduce myself and ask him invasive personal questions.
As with girls, or North Stars fans who wanted popcorn vended to them at their seats, I decide to stand there in silence and hope that he will approach me.
That doesn’t happen, of course, but I write down everything Mosconi says to the audience—“Nothin’ to this game”—and eavesdrop in the autograph line, and on the bus back to campus I write in my notebook: “The old man with the custom cue knocks the balls off the table as if he were a schoolboy with a slingshot and the stripes and solids were so many crows perched on a telephone wire.” It becomes the first sentence of the story that I compose on my Typestar and turn in to Professor Arnold, who has come to embody the career in journalism I’ve decided I want.
He wears aviator glasses, a wardrobe of shirts and ties evidently acquired on the newsroom set of All the President’s Men, and speaks in a pebble-dashed baritone that suggests a lifetime of coffee consumed from Styrofoam cups. If journalism issued its own currency, his would be the face on the one-dollar bill. Under the byline “James Arnold,” he writes film criticism for Catholic publications, often defending movies like Klute, or the comedies of Woody Allen, against charges of immorality and licentiousness. As such, he has published a book called “Seen Any Good Dirty Movies Lately?” A Christian Critic Looks at Contemporary Films. He makes kind comments in red ink about various phrases in my Mosconi story and scribbles on the cover: “Don’t let it go to waste.” One day he announces in class that David Halberstam, the great author and Pulitzer Prize–winning war correspondent for the New York Times, used to get so nervous before calling an army general or other high-ranking mucky-muck in Vietnam that he’d have to pour himself a stiff drink before dialing the phone. I have no idea if this is true, but the mere possibility that a successful writer shares my phobia takes residence in my brain, throws open the shuttered windows in a dark room, and lets the air and sunlight inside.
At the same time, I’ve sent a copy of my Mosconi story to Alex Wolff. The Back-In-Your-Face Guide to Pickup Basketball has been published, with my name in the acknowledgments. Alex passes my piece along to one of his editors at Sports Illustrated named Bob Brown, who writes me a letter—on that creamy stationery, with the magical letterhead—thanking me for my submission, regretting that the magazine is unable to use it, and suggesting one idea that might improve my piece on Willie Mosconi: “Interview Willie Mosconi.”
So I walk to the Milwaukee Public Library downtown, to their vast collection of U.S. phone books, select the Phil
adelphia White Pages, riffle to the Ms and find, to my surprise, a listing for Mosconi in Haddon Heights, New Jersey. I write down the number, take it back to the bedroom in my apartment, sit on the edge of the bed, shotgun a Miller Lite in the absence of whatever a Vietnam correspondent would drink to steel his nerves, and then dial ten of the eleven numbers necessary to reach Mosconi before hanging up. I sit for five full minutes on the edge of my bed, then dial all eleven numbers. After half a ring, a gruff voice answers.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is Willie Mosconi there, please?”
“Who wants to know?”
I stammer through my rehearsed introduction, that I’m Steve Rushin from [cough] Marquette University trying to write a story for [cough] Sports Illustrated, somehow hoping he doesn’t notice those eight qualifying words between coughs and only hears “Steve Rushin…from Sports Illustrated.”
He says, “Whaddya want?”
“When did you first learn to play—”
“I learned to play pool in dancing school,” he says. “Summer of 1919.” His uncle had a dance academy in South Philadelphia where Willie’s cousins Charlie and Louie practiced when they weren’t performing with the Ziegfeld Follies. “My uncle had a pool table in the corner of the studio,” Mosconi tells me. “You know how kids are. I said, ‘I can do that.’ First I just picked up the balls and threw them around, but by the end of the summer I was running the whole table.”
Unbidden, he recalls poking potatoes across the kitchen floor with a broomstick, his own father’s five-table poolroom in Philly, how six-year-old Willie started performing for his cousins’ show-business friends at the Friars Club in New York, about his barnstorming years, about the time in the ’40s when he found himself at the Strand Theatre near Times Square waiting to begin an 8 p.m. straight-pool match with thirteen-time world champion Ralph Greenleaf. “I had tickets to Abie’s Irish Rose that night, with an 8:30 curtain time. Greenleaf broke the balls, then I got up and ran off 125 points and did ten trick shots in seventeen minutes.” He was in his seat browsing the Playbill when the curtain rose on Rose.
