Sting-Ray Afternoons

“I know where it is,” says a South Brook kid named Eddie O’Phelan.

I don’t ask how he knows, or where it is, or even what it is, exactly. I just follow him into the marsh. The wetlands squish underfoot. We have to part the reeds or push them aside like stage curtains. The ground is trying to suck the shoes from our feet. There are no signposts in here, nothing to distinguish one direction from another. It’s like being lost in a cornfield, and after ten minutes I stop fearing that we won’t find the magazine and instead start fearing that we won’t be found. A helicopter will locate our bodies weeks from now, lying a few feet from a copy of Penthouse, like Robert Falcon Scott dying just miles shy of his Antarctica supply depot.

But Eddie plows forward, as if guided by some divine hand. After fifteen minutes he pauses, seems to sniff the air, takes three steps forward and three more to his left. Then he crouches. Clearing away a tarp of dead reeds, he reaches into a small pit from which he removes a wet magazine rolled up like a spyglass. If he had just removed a rabbit I would have been no more astonished—indeed, I would have been much less astonished, as there must be a million rabbits out here, but only one magazine.

Peeling it open reveals an enormous woman, a wall of flesh in black-and-white. She looks at us balefully, as if we’re not even the first young visitors from South Brook today and she only wants to be left alone beneath the reeds. The great wedding cake of her crenellated flesh is exposed once again to the world, and we stand there, in nylon shoes soaked through to sodden socks, staring in wonder and terror at the first real naked woman either of us has ever seen.

We never turn the page, just gaze at a wet magazine that for all we know is called Wet magazine.

After a few minutes of quietly confused contemplation, Eddie shrieks, “My dink’s growing! My dink’s growing!”

As is our sacred duty, we rebury the ancient artifact for future treasure hunters and set about trying to find our way out of the wilderness, our dinks leading the way like the tails of two English pointers.

Even before we’re out of the marsh, I know that I won’t relay this sin to Father Zheel-bair when our class next goes to confession. If God is watching, He already knows. Plus, I only ever enter the confessional with the same three sins. Like a soldier trained to give only his name, rank, and serial number, I only ever offer “I fought with my brothers and sister,” “I disobeyed my parents,” and “I lied.” Often, telling the priest that I lied is the only lie that I’ve told, but a good confession requires three sins, and I’m never going to cop to the real ones, like coveting my neighbor’s goods or thinking impure thoughts. If I have just committed adultery—and I’m pretty sure I have—I know from religion class that my eternal soul will be consigned to hell, forever poked and prodded like a hamburger on the Weber grill by some pointy-tailed, cloven-hoofed, trident-wielding demon. (Satan, to my understanding, looks like the logo on packages of Underwood deviled ham.) So I consign myself to warm places in preparation.



The warming houses of Bloomington are incubators. They hatch hockey players. Those hockey players become baseball players in the spring and football players in the fall. In the summer, we buy baseball cards at Pik-Quik and play box hockey, floor hockey, and air hockey in the stifling grade school gyms of the city’s Parks and Rec programs.

As a spur to do homework, Mom threatens us with summer school, the worst possible fate that can befall a child, but when we get to Parks and Rec, the Bloomington public schools are revealed to be empty in the summer, desks occupied only by the chairs inverted on top of them, the petrified boogers and Bubblicious stuck to the undersides now visible beneath the strip lighting. Our counselors are in high school and cannot contain our coursing adrenaline. It’s at Parks and Rec that Tom raises Mike Knapp’s Sting-Ray to the top of the Hillcrest flagpole and lets it free-fall, so that Knapper has to ride it home with a wonky wheel. It wobbles off unpredictably like a Red Owl grocery cart.

And so the counselors focus our energy on sports. We are the sun, the counselors are the magnifying glass, and sports are the ants we burn through. We play Ping-Pong and dodgeball and foosball, kickball and baseball and four square. With the possible exception of Dodgertown, the Dodgers’ spring-training redoubt in Vero Beach, Florida, no American city has ever been so singularly devoted to sports as Bloomington, Minnesota, is in the 1970s. And even then Dodgertown isn’t a real municipality, and it’s dedicated to only one sport and for only six weeks of the year.

The kinetic energy of Bloomington’s exploding youth population is transferred from our bodies into baseballs and tennis balls and hockey pucks and anything else that can be struck furiously with a stick or racquet. As at Dodgertown, our civic self-esteem is tied entirely to athletics. We love watching the Vikings and Twins and North Stars. Seeing BLOOMINGTON in all caps in a three-day-old copy of the Los Angeles Times or Dallas Morning News that Dad brings home from his travels is still a thrill—a reminder that BLOOMINGTON has a place with LONDON and MOSCOW and SAIGON at the dinner table of international datelines.

Even in South Brook, the giants of our televised dreams walk among us. Mr. Fischer lives on West 97th Street and is the football coach at Edina High School but is much more famous in our subdivision for working on the Vikings chain gang. He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated once, framed between Vikings linebacker Wally Hilgenberg and Cowboys running back Preston Pearson. Mr. Stange, the Twins pitching coach, lives on Upton. He used to pitch for the Boston Red Sox. My Nativity classmate Andy Crump is the son of the Twins equipment manager, and Troy Chaika’s dad is the innkeeper at the Airport Holiday Inn, where the Vikings stay the Saturday night before home games. No man is a hero to his valet, but these men are the valets of my heroes, and therefore heroic themselves.

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