Sting-Ray Afternoons

Cincinnati is another foreign land with its own brand of everything (Hudepohl beer, King Kwik convenience stores, Mom’s beloved Graeter’s ice cream) and a bewildering tapestry of indigenous customs (putting chili on spaghetti, calling ketchup “catsup,” diving into third base rather than sliding feetfirst). So this is what it’s like for Dad to travel overseas. Cincinnati and Chicago are my Rome and my Rio, distant lands with enviable natives whose lives crackle with an energy and glamour unimaginable in South Brook. The roller coaster at Kings Island in Cincinnati is called the Racer and it’s actually two roller coasters on parallel tracks that race each other. The Racer cost a million dollars to build. I first saw it on The Brady Bunch, when Mr. Brady’s boss, Mr. Phillips, invited the architect to take the whole family on a business trip to Cincinnati, where he delivered some blueprints to the Kings Island board.

Mom grew up in a trim white house on Julmar Drive with a neat lawn and a bedroom window above the garage that her brother—my uncle Pat—could sneak in and out of after hours. A few doors down is Mom’s grade school and next to it the church that she and Dad were married in at age twenty-two. Both school and church are named for Saint Antoninus, who was—to judge strictly by the surroundings—the patron saint of shade trees and birdsong.

When we passed Fort Wayne on our drive from Chicago to Cincinnati we didn’t stop or even slow down. There was not so much as a drive-by of Dad’s old stomping grounds. But rolling down Julmar Drive in the Country Squire, it’s easy to see how Dad might have promised Mom something as safe and sylvan as this, someplace called The Meadows or South Brook, a Blooming-this or Rolling-that. On this street he vowed he would—to borrow from The Brady Bunch theme song—somehow form a family.

While here, we stay at my aunt Ann’s house, but the Bradys—in that episode called “Cincinnati Kids”—stayed at the Yogi Bear–themed Kings Island Inn, where a Ford Country Squire trimmed in blue pulled up to its motor court in the opening scene, leading me to believe that the Bradys and the Rushins travel in the same style. (This time, at least. When the Bradys went to Hawaii, they flew on a United 747.) It confers a Southern California cool on the way back of our LTD as we pull into the parking lot at Kings Island, a place curiously devoid of a possessive apostrophe but otherwise containing everything else I could want.

Our cousins can ride the Racer whenever they please and sit in the same carriage as Bobby Brady. The Cincinnati Reds are the world-renowned Big Red Machine, defending World Series champions, playing in the modern Astroturfed citadel of Riverfront Stadium. Johnny Bench is on The Tonight Show. Pete Rose pitches Aqua Velva. The souvenir Slushie cups at King Kwik bear the baseball-headed likeness of the team’s mustachioed mascot, Mr. Redlegs. If there is a place on earth with greater cultural cachet right now than Cincinnati, Ohio, I cannot imagine it, at least not while I’m at Kings Island, spinning on a mechanical and many-tentacled octopus called the Monster.

But of course there’s a place. On the eleven-hour drive home from Cincinnati to Bloomington, stopping only to tinkle and get gas and eat sandwiches at some pigeon-shat picnic table on the interstate, while squeezing the wheel to the strains of “Are we there yet?” and “Tom’s on my side of the seat!” and “Can we please stop at McDonald’s?!” after Mom announces she’s fresh out of Tootsie Pops to plug into our mouths to shut us up, with the Country Squire making ominous knocking noises and steam beginning to seethe from its hood, and nothing but the bleak expanse of central Wisconsin to occupy our minds for the next several hours, Dad turns off the radio in the middle of Lou Rawls singing “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine” for the fourteenth time today. There is only silence and the smell of boiling DuraWeave.

“Next summer,” Dad says, “we’re going to California.”

There’s an explosion inside the car (of joy) and outside the car (of the carburetor, perhaps). When the buzz fades, he says, “And we’re flying there.” More cheers. I can see his eyes in the rearview mirror, gauging our reactions. He has spent part of the drive composing a new acronym for LTD: “Let’s Take Delta.”

In the way back of the Country Squire, I imagine the trip. Mom will buy us Adidas and Levi’s. She’ll not bring hillbillies to Beverly Hills. We’ll walk the Boyle Heights streets of Chico and the Man. Sit under the zigzagging roof of the left-field pavilion at Dodger Stadium, familiar from so many Saturday afternoons watching NBC’s Game of the Week or This Week in Baseball. California. The cutest girls in the world. Swimming pools and movie stars. Like Led Zeppelin, we’re Going to California and we’ll fly there on a 747: “Took my chances on a big jet plane. Never let ’em tell you that they’re all the same.”



In the yearlong buildup to the trip, Mom encourages me to read about our developing itinerary. The rest of The Boys have library cards but have allowed them to expire, like transplanted organs that failed to take. If anyone is going to bore his siblings with arcane facts as we tour San Francisco, I am the last hope. At the Penn Lake Library, bike shackled to the rack outside, I deplete the children’s section of every book on the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906; Walt Disney and the making of Disneyland; the San Simeon castle of William Randolph Hearst (whose daughter Patty has replaced Nixon as the national story without end that grown-ups talk about at parties); the devout and miraculous cliff swallows that fly back to the mission at San Juan Capistrano every March 19 on Saint Joseph’s Day from their winter home in Argentina; and the world-famous San Diego Zoo, whose Joan Embery brings animals onto The Tonight Show and where I might actually see—in person, through the bars of a cage—the marmoset that once urinated on Johnny Carson’s head.

But really, all I can think of on my bike rides home from the library are earthquakes. The Great Quake of ’06 lasted less than a minute, but the fires that followed burned for three days, killing three thousand people and reducing five hundred blocks of San Francisco to smoldering rubble, in which half the city’s population roamed without shelter, foraging for food among looters and violent mobs. What if something similar happens at the Holiday Inn Fisherman’s Wharf?

And Southern California will offer even less comfort. The San Andreas Fault—as the encyclopedia informs me on my next visit to the library—trumps the Bermuda Triangle and killer bees in my nightly inventory of natural terrors. California is bracing for the Big One and it may well coincide with our trip. A prominent geophysicist has predicted that another big quake will happen in the next year. Some Californians are hoarding water and contemplating the purchase of motorcycle helmets to wear at home. Dr. Steven Howard, “director of a child guidance clinic” in the San Fernando Valley, says that these imprecise predictions of a coming catastrophe are especially damaging to children, whose greater imaginations result in vivid fantasies of apocalypse. Only five years ago the Sylmar earthquake in the San Fernando Valley killed two dozen people while “shaking most of Southern California like an angry parent shakes a screaming child,” as I hear one TV newsman put it, combining the two most frightening forces I can conjure: natural and parental fury.

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