Nights in White Castle

by Steve Rushin

  Part III

  Stompin’ on the Avenue

  by Radio City

  14.

  Into the Great Wide Open

  The second time I arrive in New York, I stride purposefully past the gypsy cabdrivers trying to seize my luggage, maintain a death grip on the soft-sided suitcase that was my high school graduation gift—meant to take me around the world, or at least away from home—and join an infinite snake line at the taxi stand. I’m not standing in line, as I would in Minnesota. I’m standing on line, as we say in New York.

  The city is stewing. The cabdriver’s T-shirt is translucent with sweat. Every four minutes, every hour, around the clock, 1010 WINS tells us that it’s 91 degrees in Central Park.

  “Forty-Eighth between Second and Third,” I say. “Take Crescent to the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge.”

  “Triborough faster,” the cabbie says.

  “Fine.”

  The city shimmies in a heat haze. Alex Wolff has left me the use of his rent-controlled apartment while he’s on various overseas assignments for the summer, along with a guide to the neighborhood he composed and dot-matrix-printed for me on three continuous fan-folded sheets of sprocket-feed paper, the kind with longitudinal holes on either side that tear off at the perforations. This is a great leap forward from the copy paper made of newsprint that I used in classes at Marquette. This is what professional writing looks like before it’s published. I feel like an East Berliner seeing West Berlin for the first time.

  The apartment itself is “book-lined,” as they say in newspaper profiles of famous authors. Its former tenant was Alex’s grandmother, a book editor, who had her own imprint at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, one of those publishing partnership names that has always intrigued me on book spines, like “Houghton Mifflin” or “Harper & Row” or the insuperable “Funk & Wagnalls,” a phrase Ed McMahon invokes when introducing Carnac the Magnificent: “These envelopes are hermetically sealed. They’ve been kept in a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnalls’ porch since noon today…”

  Alex’s grandmother—she was the subject of a long profile in The New Yorker, which he has left for me on the coffee table—brought Doctor Zhivago to American readers and also published Günter Grass and Amos Oz and other writers I’ve heard of but never read, including Umberto Eco, whose Name of the Rose Dad famously picked out of a twirly rack at the Minneapolis airport before a long business trip and forced himself to complete, despite hating it—finally sending it windmilling across the bedroom in triumph one night after reading the 592nd and final page. This apartment has that book and hundreds of others, along with stacks of Spy magazine, a satirical monthly that ridicules the rich and famous of New York, especially the city’s most famous real estate mogul, who is described in every issue as “short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump.”

  All these books and magazines are an invitation to stay in. But the city beckons me out, or at least the immediate neighborhood does. According to Alex’s guide, it’s called Turtle Bay, despite the absence of turtles, or bays. The three-story townhouse next door, Alex writes, is the home of novelist Kurt Vonnegut. I might see him on the sidewalk. Vonnegut was hired at Sports Illustrated in its inaugural year of 1954. Given a photograph from a steeplechase competition, and told to write a caption for it, he shut himself in an office for hours. After he left—never to return—an editor found a single sentence on the sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter: “The fucking horse jumped over the fucking fence.”

  Vonnegut’s wife, Alex writes, is a photographer named Jill Krementz, who specializes in black-and-white author photos for dust jackets. This sounds perfectly natural to me. When you’re young, your mom takes your author photo; when you’re older, your wife does. But the Vonneguts are not my only well-known neighbors.

  From high above Second Avenue, in the condo tower around the corner, Mets captain Keith Hernandez presides over the East Side like a bachelor monarch. One block north, I might literally run into Katharine Hepburn, whom I last saw in tenth grade, in On Golden Pond, with Mom and Dad, at the Southtown Theatre.

  And in this very building, with its maroon canopy and doorman, lives the eminent sportswriter and NBC Sports personality Pete Axthelm, author of The City Game, a classic book about New York City basketball that I took from Tim McCollow’s basement bedroom in Bloomington and never returned during my brief but torrid biblio-kleptomania days.

  It isn’t long before I see Keith Hernandez buying eggs at Gristedes, the grocery store on Second Avenue. Soon I’ll see O. J. Simpson and his blond wife walking arm in arm on Lexington Avenue. I’ll fall in behind Muhammad Ali strolling along 50th between Fifth and Sixth, surrounded by strangers calling “Champ!” It’s like being backstage at America.

  The Sports Illustrated workweek is Thursday to Monday, with Saturdays off, though Sundays often require an all-nighter in the office. The workday starts at 10 a.m., three hours later than Dad arrives at Mickey Mining. Which is why I arrive outside the Time & Life Building for the first day of the rest of my life on a Thursday, at 9:30 a.m., suited, in shined shoes, dressing on the right. I walk around the building for half an hour until I’ve worked up a full sweat, glazed like a Christmas ham.

  The city is on fire. In the absence of a single friend or acquaintance, my principal pursuit is the act of being hot. It was 97 on the 21st and 98 the next day, yesterday, the hottest June 22 on record and the most Con Edison megawatts used in the city’s history. The main story on the front page of the Times tomorrow will not be the Yankees’ firing of manager Billy Martin. (The team has fired Martin on four previous occasions—not just the time he punched out a marshmallow salesman in the bar of L’Hotel Sofitel on the Strip in Bloomington—so that story is below the fold.) Nor will the top story be “The Crack Plague.” That one, halfway down the front page, will declare that “the city’s police have all but conceded the fight to abolish trafficking in the drug, saying the growth has overwhelmed traditional law enforcement tactics.”

  Rather, the top story in the Times tomorrow will be about the infernal heat on the day I arrived in journalism wearing several yards of worsted wool. Beneath the headline GLOBAL WARMING HAS BEGUN, EXPERT TELLS SENATE, the paper will note that the first five months of 1988 have been hotter than any comparable period in the 130 years that records have been kept. James E. Hansen of NASA “was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.”

  “It is time to stop waffling,” Hansen told a Senate energy committee.

  “If Dr. Hansen and other scientists are correct,” the Times writer will add, “then humans, by burning of fossil fuels and other activities, have altered the global climate in a manner that will affect life on earth for centuries to come.”

  There will be thirty-two days this summer in New York with temperatures 90 or higher, a record, and the front page of the paper will accurately convey the New York I am already coming to know: a heat-crazed, crack-addled, baseball-frenzied cauldron.

  The eighteenth floor of the Time & Life Building looks nothing like the Sports Illustrated offices of my fevered imagination. I had expected to see senior writer Frank Deford in a smoking jacket at the Xerox machine, George Plimpton in an ascot at the water cooler, Cheryl Tiegs in a fishnet one-piece being photographed against a false backdrop of palm trees for next February’s swimsuit issue.

  The place looks like Community State Bank, with softly cooing phones and carpeted hallways that muffle my footsteps. There is no newsroom, much less a clatter of typewriters, but as I near the Bullpen, the fact-checkers’ bank of offices in the northeast corner of the eighteenth floor, the people in the hallway are getting younger. Bambi’s office overlooks the Radio City Music Hall marquee, kitty-corner to 30 Rock, where Letterman’s cue-card guy is no doubt, at this very moment, Magic-Markering onto poster board the line: “It was so hot in Central Park today I saw a squirrel fanning his nuts.”

  I’m
given a shared office and a list of staff home phone numbers in the event that an editor—God forbid—needs to be reached out of office hours. I get a quiver of sharpened red pencils and a stack of creamy stationery embossed with the SI logo on which I’ll write to everybody I can think of. In the event this job lasts only three months, I shall hoard a lifetime of letterhead.

  The Bullpen and its immediate environs is populated by med school dropouts, law school castaways, stand-up comics, screenwriters, novelists, filmmakers, musicians, and various other moonlighters, the overqualified and the underslept, with first names—Merrell, Morin, Duncan—I have never encountered in Bloomington.

  Morin Bishop is a sesquipedalian editor-in-training who can deliver an extemporaneous monologue on any topic. Speaking in perfectly composed paragraphs, he extols the virtues of knockwurst and admires Frank Sinatra’s frequent insertion of the word “cuckoo” in his live performances: “The cuckoo warm September of my years,” “Baubles, bangles, and them cuckoo beads.” In his verbal dexterity, wit, and baldness—to say nothing of his suit selection, from the “House of Cromwell,” deep in the Garment District—Morin is almost Churchillian. His first-day invitation to lunch with other Bullpen stalwarts feels like a lifeline.

  Merrell Noden was a track star at Princeton, ran the mile in 4:11.2, and eats cake for lunch dessert every day. “He’s the world’s fattest thin man,” says another reporter, Sally Guard, by way of introduction. “Or the world’s thinnest fat man.” Merrell invites me to play in his Monday night pickup basketball games at 112th and Broadway, and afterward to lay waste to the neighborhood bars. There are even more Irish bars in New York than there were at Marquette, and I visit them with the other writers and comics who play basketball, including Merrell’s best friend, Joe Bolster, who has appeared on Carson and Letterman. In the bar at a comedy club called Catch a Rising Star—Manhattan’s answer to the Carlton Celebrity Room—Joe will introduce me to another comic I recognize from The Tonight Show: Jerry Seinfeld is drinking water and wearing a leather jacket. I shake the hands that shook the hands of Johnny Carson and Letterman. Already, I’m passing through the looking glass, the gray-green glass of our family-room Zenith in South Brook.

  In the Bullpen, many of my new colleagues do devastating impersonations of the editors they hope to write for or replace. Because we see every story pass through the computer system—from the writer’s draft through three layers of editing—a favorite parlor game is to imagine how famous first lines of literature would survive this editorial spanking machine.

  “Call me Ishmael,” in this exercise, becomes “Call me Ishmael—a six-foot-four-inch, 267-pound left tackle for the Buffalo Bills.”

  “It was the best of times—and, paradoxically—it was the worst of times.”

  Fact-checking queries are appended to Orwell: “It was a bright cold day in April [ed: specific date?], and the clocks were striking thirteen [ed: not possible; please fix].

  Alex Wolff will see James Brown sitting courtside at a college basketball game and describe the legend thusly: “He felt good. You knew that he would.” The line will be changed to: “He felt good. You knew he would.” Only in the Time & Life Building would an Ivy League editor copy-edit the Godfather of Soul.

  So we spend time copy-editing classic songs. “I can’t get no satisfaction” becomes “I can’t get any satisfaction.” “Ain’t no woman like the one I got” becomes “No woman is similar to the one I have.” And thus passes a paid hour in the office. The mordant humor and ear for language and voluminous knowledge of song lyrics and TV shows and advertising jingles make me feel instantly at home, despite fundamental differences over what my predominantly East Coast–raised coworkers call our childhood snack cakes. My Ding Dongs are their Ring Dings, my Ho Hos are their Yodels, my Cupcakes are their Yankee Doodles. Our primary fault line is not so much Midwest vs. Northeast but Hostess vs. Drake’s.

  And yet the stresses of the job are always in evidence. Slats, my new colleague across the hall, is on the phone with a sports publicist at the University of Kentucky, fact-checking a minor item in the magazine. The Kentucky official is taking Slats to task for an alleged error that appeared in SI sometime in the distant past. And even though he was not responsible for this minor oversight, which may not have been an error at all, Slats apologizes abjectly on behalf of the magazine, assures the man he will take this complaint straight to his bosses, and expresses his general admiration for the good people of the Bluegrass State, and for the University of Kentucky in particular.

  After hanging up, Slats keeps the phone to his mouth and shouts down the line every profane thing he had wanted to say to Mr. Kentucky, before repeatedly banging the handset of the phone onto his desktop. Every hammer blow is punctuated by an f-bomb. When he has calmed down, Slats bungs the whole phone into the metal trash can next to his desk, turns to his open door, and says, “Well, that was fun.”

  Sundays are more stressful still. That’s when most of the stories come in and the staff labors late into the night. On Sunday mornings, en route to the office, I attend Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to see if I can store some tranquility to draw upon later, like water in a camel’s hump. In the marble vastness of Saint Patrick’s, echoing with organ music, the horns and sirens of Fifth Avenue feel far away. The altar does too. There are three hundred pews seating nearly three thousand people. Our family’s unwritten rule of attending Mass at Nativity—“Arrive early to get the good seats in back”—is made moot here. I can sit midway up the aisle and still be a mile from the priest. To behold from the sidewalk the rock-candy spires of Saint Patrick’s rising toward the heavens, before walking a block to another kind of cathedral, the Time & Life Building, is to be certain that these two institutions—Mass and mass-circulation magazines, the Catholic Church and the printed word—are utterly, eternally invulnerable.

  In the office, every so often, a writer files a story that has the letters “TK” in it. “TK” I’m told is a placeholder for information that is “to come.” For instance: “The Seattle Mariners have lost TK night games in the Kingdome this season.” It is the fact-checker’s job to find this information. An editor named Sandy Padwe one night, reviewing a story littered with TKs, turns to me and says, “Rushin, if you ever become a writer at this magazine, put in the fucking TKs!”

  We fact-checkers set about to do so. A story on Penn State coach Joe Paterno mentions his modest car, but not the model, or the color. By the time the piece is being edited, at 2 a.m. on a Monday morning, when the Bullpen is expected to be awake and at the ready, the only way to fill in this fucking TK is to call Paterno’s home number, wake him up, and ask him the color of his car. This absurd task falls to the intern, Rog, and we gather around his office to watch. Predictably, Paterno assumes the call is a prank, possibly from a drunken fan at Ohio State, and hangs up. Beyond the journalism clichés I learned from Lou Grant and All the President’s Men—make that extra call, details bring writing to life, the news doesn’t punch a clock—the lesson is clear to me: journalists can, with impunity, wake a famous man in the middle of the night to ask him the color of his car.

  For other facts, we have a warehouse of knowledge just down the hall. Sports Illustrated maintains the world’s largest sports library, with shelves of red folders alphabetized by subject containing newspaper clippings from A (Aaron, Hank) to Z (Zalapski, Zarley). It reminds me of our old Encyclopedia Americana in the basement, thirty volumes covering every facet of human knowledge from aardvarks to zymotic disease. This library is a walk-in encyclopedia. In these folders and books and press guides and magazines are all the known facts ever recorded about sports, all accessible in a single room, almost always after a short search (and a long session at the photocopier). I spend my Sports Illustrated weekends—my Tuesdays and Wednesdays—in the library in a T-shirt, jorts, and Adidas Samba indoor soccer shoes. I can’t imagine a more convenient portal to human knowledge, everything I ever wanted to know at my fingertips.

  The mo
st eager reporters among us triple-check the facts. A legendary summer intern, I’m told, once called the Boston Red Sox PR man to confirm that the left-field wall at Fenway Park was indeed renowned as the Green Monster. The same intern later rang up Barbara Nicklaus to verify that her husband, Jack, really was nicknamed The Golden Bear.

  On my first Sunday night, as I sit around developing an ulcer, wondering if I might have to wake someone at midnight, Sally Guard mentions that she’s going out to get sandwiches for the Bullpen at A & K, the twenty-four-hour deli at 50th and Seventh. Sally’s father, Dave Guard, was a founding member of the Kingston Trio, whose “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” was in heavy rotation on Mom’s kitchen tape deck.

  “Can I get you anything?” Sally says.

  “Bologna and American on white?” I say. “With mayo?”

  She laughs. Everyone in earshot does. I’m not sure why. Perhaps they know it’s the sandwich I’ve had most days since the first grade.

  And yet Sally brings me the bologna and American on white. The people in the Bullpen are kind to me and to each other and devastating to everyone else: the editors whose queries we answer, the writers we’d like to supplant, the athletes and coaches we’re covering.

  Like an alpinist with acrophobia, I bring a fear of talking on the telephone to a job that requires cold-calling people on the telephone. While fact-checking a story on Doug Moe, I’m told to find out what the Denver Nuggets coach majored in as a college undergraduate. I ask the Nuggets PR intern, who calls back an hour later and says, “Coach Moe told me to tell you ‘nuclear physics.’”