by Steve Rushin
Minneapolis Star
Summer 1978
Leveraged state-of-the-art technology, including Schwinn Varsity ten-speed and canvas shoulder satchel, to deliver late-breaking news to seventy-five driveways and box hedges in suburban Minneapolis.
Should my résumé prove insufficient on its own to send editors into a bidding war for my services, Marquette has established a job fair for those of us graduating in the spring. Sadly, Sports Illustrated is not among the employers seeking Lanche lizards for entry-level positions. The only posted job whose description I even understand—and therefore consider interviewing for—is Ricoh copier salesman. But when I fill out a card listing my qualifications—“Years of experience Xeroxing things”—the lone verb in my five-word sentence fragment disqualifies me from further consideration.
Keying into my mailbox one late winter afternoon, I find an envelope embossed in blue with the Sports Illustrated logo. Opening it with my index finger in the Canterbury Court vestibule, with its Chinese takeout menus and tear-off-tabbed flyers (for movers and lost dogs and guitar lessons), I find a note inside from editor Bob Brown, acknowledging receipt, several months ago, of my revised Willie Mosconi story, which he appears to have returned in the same envelope. When I unfold the enclosure, confirming his polite rejection of my manuscript, I see that it isn’t my story at all. It’s a contract to purchase my story for $750.
When I rode a city bus to the Northridge Mall last spring to see Willie Mosconi shoot pool at Sears, I didn’t imagine this, but in my head now I’m hearing Dickey Betts sing “Ramblin’ Man,” the bit about being born in the back seat of a Greyhound bus rolling down Highway 41. Maybe I was born that day on the Milwaukee County Transit System, rolling up 76th Street.
At the suggestion of Alex Wolff, I’ve sent my résumé and writing samples to SI c/o Jane Wulf, whose title is chief of reporters, so that I picture her in the kind of feathered headdress we used to buy, along with rubber tomahawks and fringed moccasins, inside roadside attractions shaped like teepees on long trips in the wood-paneled Country Squire.
As Alex told me, Jane Wulf is married to SI writer Steve Wulf and manages a reporter named Cathy Wolf and all these lupine Wolffs and Wulfs and Wolfs contribute to my fear that the “Bullpen” (as the fact-checking department is known at the magazine) is a den of feral predation. Even after Jane Wulf calls me at Canterbury Court and introduces herself as “Bambi,” a more benign woodland creature, I feel like my résumé is an alibi and she’s a prosecutor poking holes in it. “Next time you find yourself in New York,” she says after five minutes, “swing by the office and we can meet.”
Even before I’ve returned the handset to its cradle, I know this will never happen. I’m not the kind of person who “finds myself” in New York as if I’ve woken from a deep sleep in a first-class seat to discover I’m in—ah, yes, now I remember—New York City. Nor am I likely to “swing by” Rockefeller Center on my way to someplace more important. When I confess this to Dad in our Sunday night phone call, he says: “Tell her.”
“Tell her? I can’t just—”
“You have to call her back and tell her that you have no plans or any reason to be in New York.”
So I do. As with Willie Mosconi, I dial ten digits and hang up three separate times before finally dialing the eleventh digit and letting the phone ring. I tell Bambi Wulf I have no immediate or future plans to be in New York, as I don’t really know anyone east of Cincinnati.
After a long silence and an audible sigh, Bambi says: “I’ll tell you what. We’ll take you on here for three months. We’ll see how it goes. You’ll start on June 23. Come to my office on the eighteenth floor at ten and we’ll take it from there.”
I stifle a scream, thank her as casually as I can, and hope the ancient carpet in my Canterbury Court bedroom muffles the sound of my feet as I sprint in place.
“How is Steve going to survive in New York?” Mom asks Dad on the extension when I call home that night. “He can barely put his shoes on in the morning.” And it’s a fair point. Mom still buys my clothes, shoes, and underpants—tighty-whities with two racing stripes around the elastic waistband. It’s the same style I’ve worn since grade school, when Tom would hoist me by that jaunty waistband until it separated from the body of the briefs, at which time he would wear it as a headband, the way fur trappers wore the pelts of their prey.
More worrisome for me: I’ve never rented a car, booked a hotel room, or worked any job that did not require somebody, at shift’s end, to mop up. In four years at Marquette, my social circle has shrunken. It’s a social triangle, really. At most a square.
But I do own a suit, for which I was fitted over Christmas break, at Joseph A. Bank at the Galleria, in the presence of Dad, who insisted I get charcoal. “It can do the work of a black or gray suit,” he tells me, while I secretly hope it can also do the work of a magazine fact-checker. The tailor wears a tape measure around his neck like a python. He takes a knee, holds the tape measure to my inseam, and says, “And you’ll be dressing on…”
“The twenty-second,” I say. “Of May. It’s my graduation.”
“Yes, but you’ll be dressing on which side,” says the tailor, looking up at Dad, who sighs and says, “On which side of your fly do you hang your—you know—genitalia.”
Dad says this in the most discreet manner possible, placing the preposition at the start of the sentence, so it doesn’t dangle, unlike my—you know—genitalia.
“Right,” I whisper.
“He dresses on the right,” Dad says.
As the tailor continues his ministrations with tape and chalk and safety pins, I become, in the trifold mirror, a single-vented, single-breasted, two-button, worsted-wool, flap-pocketed suit jacket kind of guy who prefers his pants cuffed and flat-fronted with a long rise and a crease sharp enough to slice ham.
And now it hangs in my closet in Milwaukee, awaiting graduation day beside a crisp white dress shirt, dry-cleaned for the occasion and hanging in its one-hour Martinizing bag because I prefer hangers to boxes, and light starch to heavy. Or so Dad informs me. I think of the summer Tom worked at T.G.I. Friday’s as an “expediter,” putting the final sprig of parsley on a plate as it hit the pass, and that’s what Dad is doing now, garnishing his son before sending him into the world.
Before I leave school forever, I knock on George Reedy’s open door in Johnston Hall. He bellows for me to enter. I’m holding a new edition of his 1970 book The Twilight of the Presidency, reissued in the dying light of the Reagan administration. It was a Christmas present from Mom and Dad, who insisted I have it signed. I can’t help but notice that Professor Reedy’s black-and-white author photo on the dust jacket bears some resemblance to my own, except that his head is bowed as he hammers away at his portable typewriter, a bronze bust of LBJ on his desk. At his Texas ranch, while still president, LBJ gave Reedy his Lincoln Continental to persuade him not to quit. As White House gifts go, it’s better to be presented with Johnson’s Lincoln than Lincoln’s Johnson. It’s a thought I keep to myself as Reedy produces a ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket—he has three clipped there, in real life and on his dust jacket—and signs in a shaky hand.
Out on the sidewalk, I read the inscription: “To Steve, With all good wishes for all good things in life.”
Whatever those things are, they all seem possible on graduation day, sitting in my single-vented suit in Mom and Dad’s room at the Holiday Inn downtown, which doesn’t resemble in any way the Holiday Inns that captivated me ten or fifteen years ago, with their thrumming pop machines and their Holidome pools redolent of chlorine and industrial towel detergent. Where is the paper ribbon around the toilet seat certifying that it has been Sanitized for Your Protection? There are no crinkly bags around the drinking glasses, hermetically sealing them against airborne viruses. When I search in vain for a thrumming pop machine stocked with Tahitian Treats and RC Colas and other exotic beverages of the 1970s, Dad tells me to take his room key, which isn’t a key
at all. It’s a card that slides into a slot in the door, not a brass key lashed to a green plastic diamond embossed in white with the hotel’s address and the phrases “Drop in any mailbox. We guarantee postage.”
The Holiday Inn no longer provides each room with a “guest bag”—“waterproof and dustproof”—to be used (per directions printed on the bag) “for wet bathing suits, soiled laundry, shoes, sweaters, toilet articles, as a shower cap or ice bag and for many other personal items.” Most guests used the bag to steal Holiday Inn hand soaps, green-striped Holiday Inn bath towels, Holiday Inn pens, Holiday Inn stationery, Holiday Inn ashtrays, Holiday Inn shoehorns, Holiday Inn matchbooks, Holiday Inn sewing kits, and “Holiday Inn sanitary napkin disposal bags for personal hygiene and cleanliness,” filling the waxen Holiday Inn ice bucket with any overspill.
None of these items are evident in the room, and not because they were stolen by the previous guest. Once upon a time, the sheer quantity and variety of items in every room at every Holiday Inn that we visited in our Country Squire wagon could—and did—fill a carry-on suitcase. My favorite was always the Holiday Inn flyswatter, representing as it did the expectation that there would be flies in the room.
Now the Holiday Inn looks like every other hotel. The great green-and-yellow sign outside has been replaced by a discreet logo above the lobby exterior. No longer does an electric star light the night sky—like the star of Bethlehem only better, because this one signified that there was room at the inn. No lighted arrow points cars to a parking lot or a porte cochere, as it did when Holiday Inn truly was the Nation’s Innkeeper, “Your host from coast to coast.”
There is no outdoor pool, nor any stewardesses sunbathing beside it, nor any ten-year-olds drinking milkshakes from frosted steel mixing cups while sunning themselves on a shuffleboard court. There are no NFL linemen signing autographs in the lobby. The Holiday Inn that I knew in the warm cocoon of childhood no longer exists, and neither will that cocoon in another hour. After receiving my diploma, by the tradition he’s established with Jim and Tom before me, Dad will give me the Golden Handshake, and my legal taxpayer status will change from Dependent to Single, probably forever, though Mom holds out hope that someday I’ll be Married, Filing Jointly.
What is comforting in this final hour in the Holiday Inn is that the Celtics are on TV, and I’m watching them with Mom and Dad just as I once watched them with Mike and Ope on the Richie the C TV in the McCollows’ basement. Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Hawks, live from Boston Garden. Larry Bird and Dominique Wilkins are locked in an epic game of one-on-one, both scoring at will in the fourth quarter. “It’s a duel!” says Tommy Heinsohn on CBS, in his Fred Flintstone voice. “Who’s going to blink first?”
The answer is: Mom and Dad. They won’t let me watch the game play out, won’t let me see how many points Larry and ’Nique will score in the fourth quarter alone (20 and 14 respectively) or if the Celtics will advance to the finals (yes), or witness what will instantly be called the greatest playoff game in NBA history, a status that won’t be challenged in the coming quarter century.
Instead, halfway through this historic fourth quarter, Mom insists we get down to MECCA—the Milwaukee Exposition Convention Center and Arena—where I’ve watched Larry play against the Bucks on that fabled court designed by pop artist Robert Indiana. I graduated from high school on the home ice of the Minnesota North Stars and will graduate from college on the home court of the Milwaukee Bucks.
“Let’s go,” Dad says, switching the TV off and lifting me from the chair by my lightly starched collar. “This diploma cost us a lot of money, and you’re going to pick it up.”
Which is why I’m sitting in cap and gown on the hallowed floor where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson once dazzled crowds, listening to the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court say that life is “a great shopping mall.” If so, I hope to spend my days as I once did at Southdale, when Mom would drop me at B. Dalton Bookseller while she went shopping, sometimes buying me a treat after. I’d be happy with that life—immersed in words, with an Orange Julius on the way out. But the chief justice has something else in mind. Time is currency, he says. We may use it to purchase “worldly success, love of music, enjoyment of painting, a six-handicap golf game.”
Of these, only music interests me, but I see his point. “It is impossible,” William Rehnquist says, “for anyone to be so rich in time that he can enjoy every single one of the things that time might buy. So there is a choice to be made.”
My mind wanders. Time is money. TYME is money—Take Your Money Everywhere. It’s the ATM card I got with Mom and Dad at the M & I Bank the day they dropped me here four years ago. As the sixty-three-year-old Rehnquist describes his journey from suburban Shorewood to Washington and various points in between, I think of a title for his memoir: Have Gavel, Will Travel.
My train of thought is a hundred cars long, coupled behind the locomotive of this commencement address, with a single epiphany at the caboose: I’m five minutes from becoming a writer, or at least an entry-level journalist, instead of (as Mom once gently suggested) going to law school, as the judge at the podium did. But if I do become a writer, the chief justice and I will have something in common. We’ll both spend the better part of our days in a robe.
When it’s over, and I have my degree, and Marquette has officially become my alma mater (“nourishing mother,” as a Latin-fluent Jesuit informs me), I walk back to the Holiday Inn with Mom and Dad to receive, at the corner of 19th and Wisconsin in front of the Holiday Inn, the Golden Handshake.
Mom solemnly takes the Instamatic from Dad, who straightens his tie and tugs his sport coat into place and shakes my hand, pumping it for a good ten seconds as if trying to get water from a well, giving Mom time to snap off ten frames, increasing the odds she has a good one. They will add this Golden Handshake portrait to the ones previously taken with Jim and Tom, preserved under cellophane in a photo album in the upstairs hall closet in South Brook.
“The Golden Handshake,” Dad says, gripping and grinning. “On this twenty-second day of May, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-eight, I, Donald Rushin, hereby absolve myself of any future financial responsibility for you, Steven Rushin, from this day forward, in perpetuity…”
What I don’t know—and Dad doesn’t want me to know—is that this declaration is non-binding. He has no intention of enforcing it. The Golden Handshake is a motivational tool designed to keep me employed. For the same reason, he’ll advise me someday to have a mortgage and to make car payments. “You need the incentive to keep working,” he says, knowing the effort required to get me to mow the lawn. More than the worsted-wool suit, this is his graduation gift to prepare me for real life: the gift of no-more-gifts.
When Amy and John have been given Golden Handshakes of their own, Dad will frame color photocopies of all our diplomas and display them beneath the Sears studio portraits each of us had taken as children that still hang, staggered up the staircase, at 2809 West 96th Street.
That’s the house we drive home to now, through Wisconsin Dells, where I slept through the Apollo 11 moon landing as a two-year-old moving from Chicago to Bloomington nineteen summers ago. Amy is eighteen, already accepted at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. John is fifteen, fielding late-night phone calls from the ladies on the basement phone, on which he has written—on the plastic-covered slip of paper meant for emergency phone numbers—“Fresh J Hotline.”
I have two weeks at home before moving to New York, barely enough time to prepare. I have to buy “dress socks” and close my passbook savings account and convert all of my meager assets into traveler’s checks. Mike and Ope and I meet at White Castle, less for ironic laughs than for the cheap sustenance of late-night sliders. The Castle has performed many services over the years—hangout, feed bag, freak show—and will have something to offer us at any age, to judge by the old men seated at single tables nursing hot coffees and staring into t
he middle distance beyond Lyndale Avenue.
“It’s like the Giving Tree,” I say.
“It really is,” Mike says.
Above all it’s been the theater of dreams, a place to imagine our future selves. On Thursday, June 2, 1988, eleven days after graduating from Marquette and a week before I leave for New York for three months or more, I walk to the mailbox to see who’s on the cover of SI. Several recently dismissed coaches, it turns out, beneath the blunt cover slug YOU’RE FIRED! Walking up the driveway, my head bowed to the hymnal of the magazine, giving it the customary cursory riffle, I’m drawn to a headline: “In Pool, the Shark Still Leaves a Wide Wake.” And beneath the title is my byline, so that my surname has made the miraculous quarter-inch journey from the mailing label (“The Rushins”) to an inside page. On that page is a photograph of Mosconi bowed over the emerald baize of a pool table. I burst through the screen door and run to the kitchen to show Mom, who wipes the Crisco off her hands with a dish towel and holds the magazine up with both hands, as if she’s Patton studying a map.
“This is wonderful!” she says, kissing my cheek and wrapping her arms around me. The woman who quit teaching to raise five kids—who brought me to the Penn Lake Library every week, abandoned me for hours at B. Dalton Bookseller, was my English substitute in seventh grade, fished stories out of my bedroom wastebasket for the perusal of her bridge-club cronies, and took an author photo for the dust jacket of a book I haven’t written—doesn’t release me from her hug for five full seconds. When she does, there are tears in her eyes.
“I can’t believe it,” I say.
“I can,” she replies.
Reclaiming the magazine, I retreat to my room for the weekly ritual of reading it, as I’ve done since I was twelve. And there, on page 85, near the end of a story on Red Sox “ace” Roger Clemens, is an ad for a bicycle manufacturer. Next to a small black-and-white snapshot of two kids idling on their muscle bikes in the 1970s is the line, “Remember your first Schwinn?” They’re contemporaries of mine, these frozen-in-amber eight-year-olds, poised to pop wheelies on some suburban street, on some long-ago Sting-Ray afternoon. Below them is a color photograph of the same two kids, now young adults, on modern-day Schwinn ten-speeds. And the advertising copy says: “So much has changed!”
