“In pictures children drew after the ’71 earthquake,” Dr. Howard says, “they had giant fists coming up from the earth and huge monsters shaking the sides of their homes.”
On the Fourth of July, we park the Country Squire in the Alligator lot at Southdale and celebrate the bicentennial as fireworks explode over Dayton’s department store. This was the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in America, built to serve our burgeoning population, and so vast is its parking lot that we can only remember where we park by identifying the animal on the sign that towers above every section: Alligator lot, Giraffe lot, Tiger lot. More than one Lincoln student has promised his prom date he would take her to Bloomington’s fine-dining restaurant, Camelot, only to drive her to the Camel lot at Southdale.
The fireworks pop. Cheers and mosquitoes. Beer and the radio. “My Love Is Alive” leaking from various car windows. The fireworks remind me of the ones bursting above Cinderella’s castle in the opening of The Wonderful World of Disney. Everything makes me think of California, and in turn, of earthquakes.
On summer days in South Brook, when the sky suddenly turns green and the tornado siren at Dwan Golf Course sounds and WCCO radio urges its listeners—all the mothers in Minnesota—to hurry to the southwest corners of their basements, I draw similar pictures in my head, terror fantasies fueled by The Wizard of Oz, until the tornado warning expires and Mom’s head stroking, whispered small talk, and tremulous humming of lullabies is no longer necessary and we emerge from our hole in the ground like rescued miners.
But I know nature will win in the end. The best I can hope for is an occasional fluke triumph—a bloop double, a seeing-eye single. With this in mind, a bunch of fathers and sons in South Brook hack down a corner of the swamp across from our house. (It’s surprising how many dads keep machetes in the garage.) Then we mow the stubble that remains until the marsh has a fan-shaped bald patch onto which we can lay a baseball diamond.
Base paths are dug up with gardening implements and overlaid with sandbox sand. A pitcher’s mound is made from the sod that was dug up to make the base paths, which are covered with potting soil. Foul lines are chalked out; bases are anchored in. Mr. Raich has a sign in his garage that says MINNOWS, and he nails it to a stake that he pounds into the ground and Minnows Field is born. The sign is quickly stolen and our ballpark is renamed Bicentennial Field, but a few boys with a Toro push mower cannot compete with nature’s fury, and in a matter of weeks it has reclaimed our little diamond, letting me know who’s boss.
It’s an unnecessary reminder. I still play BAA hockey outdoors in the winter, stuck in a snowbank between shifts, wishing I were in the warming house. My favorite part of skiing at Hyland Hills is sitting in the chalet, by the fire, eating a Hostess apple pie. I want to quit hockey this winter and try basketball but am afraid of what Dad will think. Mike McCollow plays basketball inside, in a heated gymnasium, in shorts. I’ve inherited my father’s love of the Great Indoors but none of his toughness. His disdain for nature manifested itself in a fistfight with the Creek Freak. Mine finds an outlet in the summertime cool of the basement, away from the burrs and wasps and things that slither beneath the mower as I cut the grass.
Not that it isn’t scary down there too. Jim has a new stereo in the basement—a turntable and tape deck and two tall speakers paneled in a wood laminate like the rest of our possessions. The first album he ever owns, bought at the tail end of 1976, is the Eagles’ Hotel California, which he plays on repeat. The Hotel California itself scares the wits out of me, with its satanic guests stabbing beasts with their steely knives and its unreasonably inflexible checkout policy. This is what every hotel in California must look like, a mission-style building with a Spanish-tile roof and palm trees swaying in a permanent twilight.
That’s the front of the album. On the back of the album, in the empty lobby of the Hotel California, is the hallmark of any Rushin vacation—a thrumming pop machine lit from within, its coin slot eager for my quarters. And it’s this push-pull of horror and fascination, of Beelzebub and Bubble Up, of earthquake and Disneyland, that is our looming trip to California.
Listening to the Eagles at night—the lighted bars of the graphic equalizer rising and falling like an EKG, their alien green glow the only illumination in the basement—pop music becomes a game of chicken, a hand held just above the flame. “Seasons in the Sun” (“Good-bye my friend, it’s hard to die…”). “Dream Weaver” (“I’ve just closed my eyes again…”). “Nights in White Satin” (“Cold-hearted orb that rules the night…”). “Alone Again (Naturally)” (“I remember I cried when my father died…”). “Lonely Boy” (“Well, he ran down the hall and he cried. Oh, how could his parents have lied?”). I lay awake at night, thinking of that ghostly girl in Nebraska, with the hoot owl outside her window, calling after the undead pony she called Wildfire.
Above the basement couch are two shelves mounted on brackets. They support the Rushin family home library. Most of its volumes were acquired during a brief but torrid membership in the Book of the Month Club, supplemented by fat paperbacks from the spinning racks of international airports. Mom is partial to eight-hundred-pagers with one-word titles like Shogun or Burr or Centennial or Roots. The books, like the music, are magnetizing in their horror. But I’m powerless to stop opening these doors. On page twenty-eight of The Godfather, Sonny Corleone and a bridesmaid named Lucy are a mystifying blur of “upper thighs” and “turgid flesh,” of “savage thrusts” preceding a “shattering climax.” The passage holds me rapt, which is not to suggest that I understand a word of it. For all the apparent penetration going on, the passage remains impenetrable to me.
If Mom and Dad had read any of these books they wouldn’t have left them in the basement. Or maybe they left The Godfather here in lieu of giving me The Talk. Jim and Tom and I will never get The Talk, left instead to squint at scrambled images of sex scenes on the premium cable channels to which we don’t subscribe. (Only John will be pulled into our parents’ bedroom one night, fifteen years from now, to find Dad poking a finger in his chest. “Remember,” Dad will say in a talk inspired by army training films and the Scared Straight! prison documentaries, “a hard dick is a head without a mind.” After these ten words—the entirety of The Talk—John will be bundled back into the upstairs hallway, left to compose himself in the unwavering gaze of Christ above the credenza.)