With an ex-footballer father who can provide all the blank recording tape the company store can stock, Bloomington—with its Vikings games and Zeppelin concerts—is (or might well be) the center of the universe.
Led Zeppelin plays Bloomington on April 12, 1970. “The Zeppelin, a British four-man group that specializes in hard, cerebral rock, made a din that made a North Stars crowd in full cry sound like a mewling baby,” Dad reads to Mom from the next day’s Minneapolis Star. “The rock concert was set back an hour and a half to accommodate the play-off activities of the local icemen…As the lights dimmed and the musty, sweet aroma of burning ‘grass’ lifted from all parts of the crowd, much of the throng swept out of the aisles closer to the loudspeakers that were set up on the ice sheet.”
Peering over the paper for reaction, Dad arches his eyebrows in silent ridicule. Yes, Dad calls on record labels, recording studios, and television networks to sell them Mickey Mining’s audio and video recording tapes, but he hasn’t the slightest interest in almost any of the popular musicians or actors who are recorded for posterity on those tapes. As far as he’s concerned, Scotch brand recording tape reaches its peak of perfection when it rolls off the factory floor, before being vandalized by the likes of Led Zeppelin. The canvas is the masterpiece; the paint is graffiti. (He later says that even the set of the beloved Tonight Show, which he will visit when calling on NBC in Burbank, looks much shabbier in person than on TV.)
The newspaper he is reading, the Star, is the afternoon paper—the one we get, the one Mary Tyler Moore clutches to her breast in the opening credits of her show. The Minneapolis Tribune is for readers who prefer to face their news head-on first thing in the morning. News is not a fluid construct, but a product delivered to our doorstep once a day and consumed in a single sitting—in my father’s case, after dinner, when he can digest both his meatloaf and the world’s events simultaneously, toothpick in mouth, from the comfort of his Archie Bunker chair as the network news plays on TV. He likes to get the headlines over quickly, a bad-news Band-Aid ripped at once from his skin.
The anchorman looks gravely into the camera and says, “Federal agents tonight are searching for…”
From behind the Star, Dad finishes the sentence in the anchorman’s voice: “…the guy who gave me this haircut.”
Anchorman: “A Texas jury has sentenced to death…”
Dad: “…the man who sold me this tie.”
He is undercutting for my benefit the gravity of whatever grim news is to follow.
The TV is on a four-wheeled cart—in the event of a house fire, we can wheel it straight through the front doors with a bang, like a hospital stretcher at an ER—and I lie prone before it, chin on palms, in the deep-pile carpet that serves as elephant grass for our army men. The plastic soldiers, their bayonets bent like scythes, hack through the thick brush of the green shag as John Chancellor announces the day’s developments in “Viet Nam,” or possibly in “Vietnam”: in TV graphics and newspapers, I will come to notice, the war is seldom spelled the same way twice, as if the very name of the country has been contentiously split in two and is being reunited by force. I certainly don’t understand the war, but in those alternate spellings, I manage to infer some sense of what it’s all about. Such is the power of words, of letters, even the absence of letters—“Viet Nam,” divided at the seventeenth parallel of a single keystroke of white space.
My earliest “memories” are memories of home movies. Christmas morning in the split-level house on Dover Drive in Lisle, Illinois. Crawling over a rubber tugboat to get to a book: 1,001 Riddles. The images are intercut with footage from Dad’s business trips abroad. Double-decker buses at Trafalgar Square in London. A Danish street protest of the war in Vietnam: USA UD AF INDO-KINA. And before Dad can throw himself onto the projector as if it were a live grenade, the camera pans a Copenhagen sex-shop exterior: MAGAZINES—LESBIAN—HOMO—ANIMALS—BIZARRE.
We gather to watch these home movies in the basement in Bloomington: Dad aiming the Super 8 projector at a bedsheet on the wall, threading the film, dousing the lights, the twitching hair in the lens dominating the frame, the laughter at seeing ourselves as babies, the projector bulb abruptly burning up a frame, our family going up in flames, the basement lights suddenly flooding the room again and returning us—with a great sigh of disappointment—prematurely to the present.
Science says permanent memory kicks in at age three, and for me it arrives exactly on time, on my third birthday, in our lemon-yellow, avocado-green, harvest-gold kitchen in Bloomington. I blow out the candles on my cake, and while they’re still smoldering, Jim and Tom each grab one and pretend to smoke it like a cigarette, so I do the same, the three of us chain-smoking as Dad films. But then anything will stand in for a cigarette: pencils, Tootsie Pop sticks, Cheetos, BIC pens. We hold any of them between our index and middle fingers and pretend to puff away.
After cake, presents. My trembling hands unwrap the first one, from Jane Selander, our nearest neighbor and my first playmate. Mom stands by, already elated for me. But even before the box inside has been entirely denuded of its wrapping paper, I burst into tears. And then I scream, “Just what I didn’t want!”
Jane’s mother is the first friend Mom has made in Minnesota. Mom looks at Mrs. Selander, stammers apologies, then chases me down the hall, the yardstick from Lattof Chevrolet raised behind me like a riding crop. I spend the remainder of the afternoon in my bedroom, crying into my Sears rib cord bedspread and listening to my own party through the door.
The offending present is a pair of Romper Stompers, two inverted yellow cups, each attached to a green loop of plastic cord, that children “ages 2? to 6” can walk on. I have seen a girl enjoying these on Romper Room, and while they look like great fun, I am left with the impression that Romper Stompers are exclusively a girls’ toy, a suspicion confirmed by the pigtailed blond on the box.