Sting-Ray Afternoons

Tom and his buddy Steve Raich compose a song that goes in part “The Sea Hags across the street, meanest things on two feet. They like to call the heat, on me…”

The 1968 survey map of South Brook is on file at city hall. It bears the stamped logo of the surveying company, Harry S. Johnson Associates, and oh—if he only knew—how Jim and his friends would enjoy that name. Harry Johnson! It fits perfectly among the names on the baseball cards—Dick Pole, Pete LaCock—that ballplayers have in the 1970s, cards I will keep meticulously filed away in Velveeta cheese boxes. They are the perfect repositories, as if custom-built for baseball cards, whose glorious subjects stare back at me, each one sporting a mustache and a Windbreaker worn under the V-necked pullover of their double-knit jersey and a crazy name screaming grade school innuendo.

The names of athletes in the 1970s—men born and christened in a more innocent age after World War II—are all the better for being real. There is the White Sox outfielder Rusty Kuntz and the Bengals running back Boobie Clark, grown men whose names will make us giggle after the middle of this decade, when calculators will become ubiquitous. The moment the first pocket calculator appears at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, children will punch in 5318008 and turn it upside down to reveal BOOBIES. For a time, I will be so fascinated by this trick that I begin to fear—in case of emergency—I’ll give my phone number as 5318008 instead of 888-2872.

Jim and Tom are already privy to this kind of information, these secrets that aren’t divulged on Romper Room or Sesame Street or even The Electric Company. A Sudsy (or a Swirly) is when a student’s head is jammed into a flushing toilet. My brothers swear it is a routine occurrence in the boys’ bathroom at Nativity and that a Swirly almost certainly awaits me next week when I start kindergarten in the middle of the year, as the newest and youngest kid in the school.

I have spent a couple of months at Saint Stephen’s preschool, but whenever Mrs. Bakke-Hockey reads to the class and turns the book around to show us the illustrations, I silently mouth the words on the facing page. I read the construction-paper letters right off the wall, see them in my dreams like a spilled bowl of Alpha-Bits, and it’s probably best for everyone—Mom and Mrs. Walkie-Talkie agree—if I finish the school year in kindergarten at Nativity, where I’m expected to do a nine-year stretch, enduring Sudsies and Snuggies, overseen by the two remaining nuns: Sister Roseanne and Sister Mariella, whom some call Sister Carl Eller, after the Vikings’ fearsome defensive end.

It’s like a mid-season call-up to the big leagues. And the red rash that spontaneously breaks out on my body? It’s called pityriasis rosea, according to Dr. Larsen, our pediatrician, whom we all like for his gentle manner and startling resemblance to our favorite channel 5 meteorologist, Barry ZeVan the Weather Man. “Probably just anxiety induced,” Dr. Larsen says. And then, though it barely needs saying, “In anticipation of school.”





4.





Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,

Teacher Hit Me with a Ruler




Consistent with the themes of early education, my school-lunch sandwich is a pile of shapes: a square of Wonder Bread, a circle of Oscar Mayer bologna, and a sharp-cornered square of Kraft American cheese, shiny like vinyl. Its violent orange is vivid against the stark white of the Wonder. We ask Mom to cut these sandwiches diagonally, to make two triangles, but she cuts them horizontally, because she believes strongly that sandwiches should consist of two rectangles. She has strong convictions on what is right and what is wrong. Thank-you notes should be sent within three days of receiving a gift, we should always say hello when adult “company” comes over, and we should never—under any circumstances—use the word “fart” in front of her. “It’s ‘passing gas.’”

So the sandwiches are two rectangles, mortared together with Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise and placed in a metal lunch box embossed with the Peanuts gang, which I snap shut with exactly the same flourish—and with the same sense of mission—Dad displays when snapping shut his briefcase.

Mom saves the Wonder Bread bags. I wear them over my socks. They make it easy to slip what we call snowmobile boots on and off, and to keep my socks dry while I’m planted in a snowbank at the end of our street, waiting for the school bus. That bus is also a violent shade of orange, vivid against the stark white of the snow. It slows to a stop, the air brakes decompressing with a long sigh, and its doors fold outward, like the arms of a malevolent stranger.

Mom digs a wad of Kleenex from her purse, licks it, and wipes my face. I scratch at my pityriasis rosea and let the bus swallow me whole, and think of Jonah being eaten by the whale in my children’s Bible.

As she recedes from view, Mom waves the Kleenex as if it were a hanky and the bus is the Queen Mary, pulling out of port on a nine-year voyage around the world.

And so life begins—and begins to pick up speed. Mom wakes me every morning by pulling up the shades and singing in falsetto the theme song from The Boone and Erickson Show, the morning-drive juggernaut on WCCO radio: “Good morning, good morrr-ning. It’s great to be on hand. Good morning, good morning, to yoooou!” Her predawn cheeriness is something I admire and resent in equal measure.

Supine on my blue bedspread, I stick my legs in the air and bicycle into my underpants. Pulling on a single tube sock, I remain on the bed, lost in thought. Mom sings, “Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John, one sock off and one sock on.”

Dad has already left the house under cover of darkness after his solitary bowl of Post Raisin Bran. (“There’re two scoops of raisins in Kellogg’s Raisin Bran,” I tell him, but he doesn’t care.) He’s taught me to check my gig line every morning when getting dressed. I make sure my shirt buttons, my belt buckle, and the fly seam of my navy-blue pants are ramrod straight, as Dad learned to do in the army, giving us both the illusion that the world—and, by extension, the day ahead—can be ordered, straightened out, or bent to our will.

He wears a suit to work every day, navy-blue or charcoal. They’re racked up in the closet in their dry-cleaning bags emblazoned with ONE-HOUR MARTINIZING. Mom launders and irons his white shirts. When Mickey Mining dispatches Dad to Guam, to sell Scotch brand recording tape to the U.S. Army base exchange stores of the Pacific Rim, Dad meets the local 3M rep for breakfast at his hotel. It is 100 degrees at 7:30 in the morning. “What are you wearing?” asks the guy, dressed in a guayabera shirt, regarding Dad, in his navy-blue suit and tie knotted to the neck.

“I’m dressed for business,” Dad replies. “What are you wearing?”

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