by Steve Rushin
On our last night together at the Castle in August, there is no sense of occasion, no acknowledgment that this may be the last time we ever gather here, that some of us may never live in Minnesota again, that our bodies might not always desire, much less be capable of digesting, a dozen sliders and a couple gobblers with glue at an hour when most grown-ups are in REM sleep.
Mike is telling the table about how we met, when I joined his kindergarten class at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, halfway through the school year, having been promoted out of Saint Stephen’s Nursery School because Sesame Street had already taught me how to read and spell.
“We faced each other in the finals of the spelling bee,” Mike says.
“Who has a spelling bee in kindergarten?” says Gator. He has returned to the Castle from his years in exile, Barney the rent-a-cop having either forgiven or forgotten the time Gator ripped a table from its moorings here.
“I was always a good speller,” I say. “In third grade, I’d listen to the Lincoln cheerleaders say, ‘R-O-W-D-I-E, that’s the way you spell “rowdie”! Rowdie! Let’s get rowdie!’ and I’d tell my mom, ‘That’s not the way you spell “rowdy.” It’s R-O-W-D-Y.’”
“Well, if you’re going to have a kindergarten spelling bee, at least give the kids a word like ‘dog’ or ‘cow’ or ‘hen,’” Mike says to me. “That’s what you got: some bullshit word like ‘cat.’”
I’ve heard this story fifteen times but enjoy its annual embroidery, like an afghan that your grandma keeps adding to, always available for warmth and security.
“Meanwhile,” Mike says, “I get ‘picnic.’ Picnic. I spelled it P-I-K-N-I-K. Because I passed Pik-Quik every day in the car. I didn’t know grown-ups misspelled things on purpose.”
“We used to buy Pixy Stix at Pik-Quik,” I say. “How did we ever learn to spell?”
“Pixy Stix were kindergarten cocaine.”
“We used to chop the grape powder into lines with a baseball card and snort them off our nap mats…”
And so it goes, long into the night, the banter moving on to other subjects, though I’m still thinking about kindergarten, how we were five years old then, with sixteen years of school ahead of us, and all but one of those is over, and now what? No matter how many times I press the SEEK button in Mom’s Honda Accord on the drive home, all the radio ever seems to land on is the number one song in America. “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
Before I return to Milwaukee for senior year, Mom takes a valedictory picture of me in my bedroom. Posters of Dr. J, Joe Morgan, Alan Page, and Fran Tarkenton that once adorned its walls are still evident in the orphaned pieces of Scotch tape that reveal themselves when the sun hits them just right. Wanton use of Scotch tape, a product of the 3M Company, has always been encouraged in our house.
On my dresser, introduced by Mom in my absence, are three potted plants, the first shots fired in a guerilla campaign to seize my room and slowly convert it to a “guest bedroom.” My friends have experienced this same phenomenon, arriving home from school to find a carpeted cat tower in the corner, or a sewing machine squatting on what was once their homework desk.
Of course this will always be my room. It’s a child’s greatest possession, his own room, and even though I shared this one, and it didn’t have a lock, and Mom could (and did) ransack its contents on a daily basis, turning it over like a DEA agent, it was still my room, for if I told Amy or John or even Jim, “Get out of my room,” they were required by unwritten fiat to comply. Likewise, whenever Mom or Dad yelled, “Go to your room!,” enshrined in that command was an explicit acknowledgment that it was mine, these fifteen square feet of cobalt carpeting, these four walls covered in Benjamin Moore Blue Bonnet.
Jim, Tom, Amy, John, and I have spent most of our lives defending a small swatch of territory against each other’s incursions, fighting over every inch of car seat or couch or church pew. As we scrambled to claim the best seat at a restaurant’s cobbled-together table for seven, Mom and Dad became Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta, assigning each of us our own chair at Mr. Steak. Our territorial natures manifest themselves in fantasies of owning real estate: building snow forts, buying hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place, gazing at the Pacific from the balcony of Barbie’s Malibu Dream House.
But the only place I could ever truly call my own was this room, or at least this half of this room that I shared with Tom, with the Maginot Line running between our beds, bisecting the nightstand we shared, cutting the Kleenex box and bedside lamp in half. This is where, at different ages, I couldn’t sleep the night before Christmas and couldn’t wake up the morning after New Year’s Eve. This is where my Pigs in Space poster on one wall and Tom’s Farrah Fawcett poster on another engaged in a years-long staring contest. This is where I’ve spent the vast majority of my nights and a good number of my days. But I’ll never again spend more than a week here, and when I do, I’ll be something closer to a hotel guest than what I am now: a sultan supine on his daybed.
So the picture Mom takes of me is black-and-white, giving the occasion its proper weight of history. Seated at my desk, books arrayed on the shelf behind me, a framed Sports Illustrated cover of Larry Bird screaming back at the camera, I look back grimly at Mom, the way authors do on the dust jackets behind me. I’m wearing a pale yellow oxford-cloth shirt with broad vertical stripes. My right elbow, just out of frame, rests jauntily on my typewriter, as if I’m a middle-aged journalist who lives in Connecticut and uses “summer” as a verb and wears a V-neck sweater tied around his neck like a cape.
“Smile,” Mom says, and eventually I comply.
“The author,” she says, snapping the shutter, and I think if I ever write a book I’ll dedicate it to her, the author of the author.
13.
Golden Handshake
Six weeks after my senior year starts, a miracle draws me home, back to the bedroom that is no longer quite mine, my baseball cards in the closet now getting crowded by tablecloths and photo albums and other oddments.
The miracle is this: the Minnesota Twins, who have been bad for as long as I can remember—and who weren’t even very good this season, getting outscored by their opponents 806–786 while winning only 29 of their 81 games on the road—have somehow been incapable of losing at the Metrodome, their fever blister of a football stadium, where just a few summers ago I sold Dome Dogs to the handful of paying customers who passed through the stadium’s revolving doors.
In winning 56 of 81 at home, the Twins have won the American League West and will face the Tigers in the AL playoffs. What’s more, Mike has somehow secured tickets for Games 1 and 2, and he and Ope and I sit in the bleachers and wave our Homer Hankies—white snot-rags emblazoned with a red baseball distributed for free by the Star Tribune, which has shed its conjunction. In the Metrodome, 55,000 people are waving hankies, and the national television audience doesn’t quite know what to make of it all. It seems perfectly natural to me. Am I the only one who got a set of handkerchiefs as a rite of passage before going off to college?
When the Twins beat the Tigers in Game 5 of that series, having won both games at the Metrodome and two out of three in Detroit, they are suddenly—impossibly—in the World Series. The St. Paul Pioneer Press publishes a special insert, a Fall Classic preview, and the cover illustrates the Twins’ fearsome home-field advantage. It’s a full-page crowd shot of fans in the left-field bleachers at the Metrodome waving their Homer Hankies. And there, in the center of that mob, waving our hankies like three damsels in distress, are Mike, Ope, and me.
I’m back at school by the time that edition of the Pioneer Press is published, so Mom mails a copy to Milwaukee. Did she remove five papers from a spring-loaded street-corner box, the way I did with the Chicago Tribune? Will she someday buy five copies and give them to her bridge-club friends if I ever have a story published in the Star Trib or the Pioneer Press? Or am I duty bound to “buy five copies for my mother,” as Dr. Hook will do if he ever appears on the
cover of Rolling Stone?
This is the 84th World Series and the second in Minnesota. The first one, in 1965, was played in Bloomington four years before the Rushins arrived there from Chicago. The Twins beat the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame pitchers Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax, the Lennon and McCartney of ’60s baseball glamour, in Games 1 and 2 at Metropolitan Stadium. The NBC television network carried Bloomington to every hamlet in America. Seven weeks earlier, the Beatles, featuring the Drysdale and Koufax of rock and roll, played a thirty-five-minute concert on the very same field at the Met, using the Twins clubhouse as their dressing room and escaping in a dry-cleaning truck for downtown Minneapolis, where their rooms at the Leamington Hotel were raided, police looking in vain for underage girls.
Bloomington and its immediate environs were, well and truly, the epicenter of the world.
For Minnesota, then, hosting the World Series is not just a novelty but a return to its natural place of pop-culture supremacy. I’m stuck in Milwaukee, taking exams, and have to watch Games 1 and 2 on CBS, like thirty-five million other Americans. Under a Teflon sky, the Twins win 10–1 on October 17 and 8–4 on October 18 before traveling to Saint Louis with a 2-game lead on the off day. That evening, I turn on the network news to make sure that the Twins are the nation’s top story. I don’t know why it’s so important to me that the rest of America pay tribute to my hometown. I only know that it is.
Tom Brokaw looks gravely into the camera. “A shattering six and a half hours on Wall Street,” he begins. “The Dow off more than five hundred points. Paper losses more than five hundred billion dollars.” I don’t know what that means, or why news anchors speak in these sentence fragments, shorn of subjects, but five hundred billion sounds like a lot of money. Regardless of what Prince and Orwell and The Day After have taught me, the world may not end with a thermonuclear bang or the whimper of Winston Smith, a boot stamping on his human face forever. Perhaps it ends as a boxing match does, with a closing bell.
It’s hard to say how frightened I should be, because the NBC Nightly News theme music is clearly designed, even on the sunniest of news days, to put the viewer on edge. I’ve taken to watching the NBC Nightly News, as Dad does, on the assumption that it’s a gateway drug leading to the harder stuff of adulthood, like carrying a key wallet or owning a shoeshine kit.
“October 19, 1987,” Brokaw continues, every syllable landing like a tombstone. “Wall Street’s Black Monday.”
There follows footage of ulcerated men frantically waving papers on a crowded trading floor. When NBC finally gets around to showing Twins fans waving Homer Hankies, I think of them as a happy analog to those waving Wall Street traders, Gallant to their Goofus, the comedy and tragedy masks of Black Monday. One is the real world, I suppose, and one is not. But I know which one worries me more.
Black Monday is followed by the more serious debacles of Black Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, as the Twins—true to form—lose all three games in Saint Louis, meaning Minnesota has to win Game 6 at the Metrodome on this Saturday night to force a Game 7. As I watch from my seat on the coffee table, a foot in front of the TV—Mom promised this proximity to the tube would leave me blind—I’m tempted to remove my thick glasses and theatrically clean them with a Homer Hankie. My brain can’t yet process what my eyes have just seen.
In the bottom of the sixth inning of Game 6 of the World Series, Twins first baseman Kent Hrbek of Bloomington comes to the plate with the bases loaded and a 1-run lead. In the Metrodome, the crowd is standing. In Milwaukee, so am I. My brother claims that in high school—when Jim pitched for Lincoln and Hrbek played for Kennedy—he “owned” the six-foot-four left-handed behemoth, a fact that Jim’s high school teammates have confirmed to me. Mercifully, Cardinals reliever Ken Dayley has no such mastery over Hrbek. Hrbie hits Dayley’s first pitch to deepest center field and over the 408-foot marking for a grand slam. As Hrbek airplanes around the bases with his arms and fists thrust out to either side, it appears he might actually lift off, along with the roof of the Metrodome, for the crowd is making a noise commensurate with a 747 taking flight. I can almost see the roar lifting the roof, like a waiter removing the silver lid off a room-service plate.
The announcers go silent as Hrbek runs the bases. He rehearsed this a hundred times growing up. “I wish I could have run around the bases twice,” he’ll say in the next day’s New York Times, which I’ll buy for posterity. “I can’t tell you how big a thrill it is with your family and friends in the stands.”
And that’s just it. Everyone here knows him and vice versa. In his yard a couple of miles from mine, Hrbek dreamed of doing this very thing. And now he has done it, and the Twins will play Game 7 of the World Series tomorrow night in a place where they are incapable of losing.
Hrbek has found a way to turn his backyard fantasy world into the real world. The same places where he dreamed, I did too: in the Met Stadium bleachers, on the Little League fields and in the municipal pool at Valley View Park, on the oiled lanes at Airport Bowl and in a window booth at White Castle, where anybody can drive by and see you on display, your grown-up self hatching in an incubator of dreams.
At 4:30 a.m. on Sunday, October 25, Hrbek receives a phone call from a buddy who says, “The ducks are flying.” Hrbek goes duck hunting on the morning of Game 7, because he’s from Bloomington, and this is what every Bloomington boy but me would do if his buddy called to say the ducks are flying.
Alexander Wolff of Sports Illustrated—I’m now invited to call him “Alex”—is in Milwaukee to write a story about the Bucks. When his work is done, he swings by my apartment to watch the end of Game 7. We are among the fifty-one million Americans who witness the Minnesota Twins win their first world championship, something the Vikings and North Stars have never done. I’ve now had goose bumps for seven straight days, like a happy version of the mumps, and Alex offers to drive me to the Lanche so that I might celebrate with my fellow Minnesotans.
On the short drive, Alex encourages me to apply for a job as a fact-checker at SI. The magazine can keep my résumé on file and if there’s an opening someday and my clips are good enough, who knows? The fact that he is delivering me to an establishment that offers Red White & Blues nearly free of charge as a beverage but also as a lubricant for naked beer slides does not seem to disqualify me from consideration for working at the magazine.
The bloodred sign—AVALANCHE LIQUOR BAR—buzzes as Alex drops me at the curb and recedes down Wells Street, en route to his hotel, the Hyatt Regency, with its revolving rooftop restaurant, twenty stories above Milwaukee, affording a panoramic view of every steeple and smokestack in the quad-county area. Though I’ve never set foot in one, the very concept of a revolving rooftop restaurant has always dazzled me. These, surely, are our greatest temples of gastronomy and elegance. Polaris, as the Hyatt’s restaurant is called, makes a full rotation every seventy minutes, so that every cosmopolitan diner ingesting duck à l’orange and Dom Pérignon is also on a very slow carnival ride. Not since third grade, when I scarfed cotton candy on the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Nativity school carnival—called Frontier Days—have I so desperately wanted to eat and spin at the same time. At thirty, Alex lives a life of almost unimaginable sophistication, chatting with NBA players before driving a Chevy Caprice to a revolving rooftop restaurant, a typical day in the life of a nationally known sportswriter.
I wrote about the basketball games in Flip Saunders’s backyard and Alex wrote me back and now here I am, waving goodbye to a staff writer for Sports Illustrated, whose cover next week—headlined CHAMPS!—will feature a hog pile of Minnesota Twins, among them Kent Hrbek, who has given me the dangerous notion that maybe you can dream up a life in a Bloomington backyard and somehow have it come true.
In my meager portfolio is one masterwork of creative writing: the first draft of my résumé. Its style borrows heavily from the NBC Nightly News, rat-a-tat sentence fragments shorn of subjects that paint me as a Churchillian man of action. I want to run off a couple hundre
d copies at Kinko’s, on the kind of paper ordinarily reserved for royal weddings, choosing a font whose name I can only guess at: Baloney Bold, perhaps, or Pig Lipstick.
Tom Thumb Convenience Store
Summer 1984
Fronted dairy case, tonged frankfurters and shelved adult magazines for elf-themed purveyor of cigarettes and sundries.
Bennigan’s
June 17–18, 1984
Operated Hobart machine with patented Opti-Rinse technology for leprechaun-themed purveyor of Broccoli Bites and Queso Fundido.
New Orleans Court
Summers 1985–86
Pushed antiquated two-stroke Toro, read Joseph Wambaugh police procedurals while concealed in maintenance shed of Crescent City–themed apartment complex.
These entries, of course, are mere appetizers to the main course, my varied experience at the highest levels of sports and journalism. I am counting on these entries to carry the day with any potential employer:
Minnesota Twins
1979–1981
Liaised with thirty-five-year-old ex-carnies to nourish patrons of condemned ballpark. Withstood extended confinement in walk-in meat freezer for entertainment of commissary manager. Learned patience and sympathy watching twenty-third-best baseball team in twenty-six-team league.
Metropolitan Sports Center
1983
Sold popped corn to raise sodium levels of hockey and popular-music enthusiasts. Optimized beer sales to create home-ice advantage for dentally challenged members of the National Hockey League.
