Even though the jump took place the Sunday after Labor Day, Evel wore white. White shoes, white helmet, white jumpsuit. Mom would not approve, though Mom isn’t watching. Dad is, his eyes Kilroyed above the newspaper just enough for me to see them rolling. There’s something about Knievel he isn’t quite buying. Or everything—the starred-and-striped Elvis jumpsuit, the giant EK belt buckle, the Chuckles candy patch on his sleeve, the drama-queen sheriffs with their shotguns, the security in cowboy hats, the thirty thousand kids partying in the crowd, the solemnity of the announcers…Dad seems to think the whole thing is a joke. He regards the television as he did whenever Watergate news was on, with a suspicion of all things star-spangled and helicopter-borne, with a buyer-beware cocked eyebrow at anything labeled “Tricky” or “Evel.”
“Here we are with the great man,” says an English broadcaster, David Frost, who we’ll see again in a couple of years, interviewing Nixon. “Are you afraid at this moment?”
“Yes,” I say to the screen, for both of us.
“I think that a man was put on this earth to live,” Evel says. “Not to exist.” I nod along to this profundity.
While a crane lifts Evel into the cockpit of his steam-powered Skycycle X-2 rocket, he is left to dangle in the wind on a trapeze swing. A clock is superimposed on the screen, counting down the final minutes. His final minutes, perhaps. Dad snorts, but just getting into the Skycycle is a feat of derring-do. The launch angle is almost straight up. Even knowing it all happened a week ago, and that Evel is still alive, makes it no less tense.
By the time the clock is at five-four-three-two-one, I am ready to explode. Evel is shot like a bottle rocket into the sky, trailing pink smoke. Up and up he goes and then—even before he’s cleared the launch pad—the whole phallic enterprise wilts with the premature release of its white parachute. “Oh, come on!” someone on the telecast says. The rocket begins its descent, never having reached the airspace above the river, and goes spiraling down, disappearing behind the rim of the Snake River Canyon. “Snake Oil Canyon” is all Dad says from behind his paper, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
7.
Every Day’s the Fourth of July
Tom turns ten on January 4, 1975, and when he opens his card at the breakfast table, two tickets fall into his lap for tonight’s North Stars game against the Boston Bruins. Dad’s taking him to Met Center to see Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito and the great Bs netminder Zheel Zheel-bair. All these faces Scotch-taped to our basement wall will come to life. Tom will be ushered into the foulmouthed, beer-swilling, urinal-using world of manhood. I’ll stay home with Mom and watch The Carol Burnett Show.
For the whole of Saturday morning, I seek solace in the five-hour block of TV, but even the interstitial pleasures of Schoolhouse Rock! and In the News can’t distract me from my envy, which is inflamed with every appearance of Peter Puck. The cartoon slab of eyeballed rubber promotes NBC’s coverage of the NHL—and this weekend’s Blues–Sabres Game of the Week—to North America’s schoolchildren, for whom five hours of cartoon violence is a gateway drug to professional hockey.
It is otherwise the worst sports week of the year. Dad dozes all afternoon through the Hula Bowl. But this is the calm before the storm. In eight days, the Vikings will play the Steelers in Super Bowl IX. The Vikes are already the first team to lose two Super Bowls, and losing a third does not seem possible, even if the game is in New Orleans, where the Vikings hold no advantage. Last week in Bloomington, in Howard Cosell’s Icebox of Met-ruh-pol-i-tan Stadium, the Vikes had beaten the Rams before the game even started. The Rams were dead meat the moment all those tanned and blond giants stepped off the plane from Los Angeles and saw their own breath escape their bodies like ghosts from a cartoon corpse.
The Vikings are proof that Minnesota is superior to Los Angeles in at least one very important way—as a football superpower—even as L.A. dominates every other aspect of American culture.
At eight o’clock tonight, after Tom and Dad have made the fifteen-minute drive across town to Met Center, the Mary Tyler Moore title sequence appears on CBS with Mary washing her car in her Fran Tarkenton jersey. But the show itself, I’m now old enough to realize, is really L.A. masquerading as Minneapolis. At eight thirty, The Bob Newhart Show, beyond the title sequence of Bob walking down Michigan Avenue, is L.A. pretending to be Chicago. Here are my two hometowns reflected back at me from soundstages in Los Angeles, their title sequences the only scenes ever shot on location. By the time Carol Burnett takes the stage at nine, however, Los Angeles has stopped pandering to me, stopped pretending to be someplace it isn’t, someplace less glamorous and more Midwestern. It is now unapologetically itself. “From Television City in Hollywood,” cries an announcer, “it’s The Carol Burnett Show!”
I imagine an actual city called Television City, where all our programming comes from. Television City is under constant siege by murderers, junkies, rapists, and madmen, which is why it is the most heavily policed municipality in the history of man, its streets kept clean by Joe Mannix and Theo Kojak; Frank Cannon and Jim Rockford; Barnaby Jones and Barney Miller and Tony Baretta; by Michael Stone and Steve Keller on The Streets of San Francisco; by San Diego private detective Harry O and LAPD partners Pete Malloy and Jim Reed of squad car Adam-12; by a whole S.W.A.T. team and Emergency! crew…
With the exception of a few sitcoms and variety shows, prime-time television is devoted almost exclusively to private eyes and policemen and one policewoman—Police Woman Pepper Anderson—pursuing dirtbags down California freeways and South Central ghettos and through the beachfront homes of wealthy racketeers in an endlessly perilous and endlessly fascinating place called Television City.
“From Television City in Hollywood, it’s The Carol Burnett Show!” I love the way the cartoon Carol Burnett pulls each letter of CBS like a window shade to reveal the title: C(arol) B(urnett) S(how).
Carol’s “special guest” tonight is Vincent Price, star of a thousand terrifying features on Mel’s Matinee Movie, and the old man who holds The Brady Bunch boys captive in a cave in Hawaii. I also know Price as a villainous voice in Scooby-Doo, which that Brady Bunch episode totally ripped off. (At the end, Price all but tells Greg and Peter and Bobby, “I’d have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”)
They do a sketch called “The Walnuts,” a parody of The Waltons, the most boring show on TV, in which “John-Girl” writes in her journal about the “ecstasy of drudgery” and “memories of whittlin’ and throwin’ rocks” on Walnut Mound. Is that what Bloomington is, I wonder, as I trudge off to bed: a place where things—North Stars games, for instance—only happen to other people? John-Girl says, “Don’t you get the idea that I’m a sissy just because I wear glasses and write.”