Johnny Carson is interviewing Frank Sinatra on The Tonight Show in 1976 when Don Rickles suddenly walks onto the set. “I am a Jew and you’re an Italian,” he tells Frank. Looking at Johnny, he says, “And you are a…What?”
Is that what I am? Am I a What? Dad didn’t know his father, so he doesn’t know where the name Rushin comes from. But Mom is a Boyle, her father comes from a long line of James John Boyles out of Cork, and that makes me Irish, or more Irish than anything else. Irish like my friends Mike McCollow and Danny Collins and Dan Mullen and Tim Flynn and Frankie X. Connolly and half the rest of my class at Nativity. Irish like the Lucky Charms leprechaun and the lady on the Irish Spring soap commercial, who says, “Manly, yes, but I like it too!” Irish like Patrick Pig in Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy World, my favorite book as a preschooler, featuring “33 Exciting Adventures” in “Many Exotic Countries,” a book whose protagonists include Sven Svenson of Sweden, Hunky Dori and Suki Yahki of Tokyo, and Farmer Polka and Farmer Dotta of Poland.
Now I’m reading about the Hardy Boys and another child detective in another crime-infested hamlet, Encyclopedia Brown of Idaville. But the Hardy Boys can’t do anything that Nancy Drew doesn’t already do, and Encyclopedia Brown’s friend Sally is the one who stands up to the bully Bugs Meany. Amy would do that—stand up to a bully. She isn’t afraid of the copious bleeding in our house, doesn’t blink at broken teeth and boy-on-boy violence.
“Amy’s going to be our doctor,” Dad says when she watches our boxing matches with forensic curiosity. She can defend herself, mix it up with us. “Manly, yes, but I like it too.”
Mom watches the same thing Dad does and wonders if I might want to become a priest. Or a lawyer. “You like to read,” she says. “And lawyers get to read a lot.”
Mostly I read about California throughout fifth grade, through the school year of 1976–77, while staring at Sister Mariella’s nut cup, at Ned Zupke’s soiled rubbers, and counting the days until I can “get on board a westbound 747.”
If 1977 is going to be the Year of California, I still have to get through 1976, the Year of Everything Else. It’s the Bicentennial Year, an Election Year, an Olympic Year, and “The Year of the Cat,” according to a song on the radio by Al Stewart, whose other hit will be called “Song on the Radio.” But even in the Year of the Cat, my mind is on the Year of California.
On the Wednesday evening of September 22, 1976, ten years to the night after I entered the world to the Star Trek episode “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the ABC television network debuts another new show, this one called Charlie’s Angels, about “three little girls” who graduated from the Los Angeles Police Academy but were “taken away” from their menial duties and hired, as private eyes, by an anonymous millionaire named Charles Townsend. Television has given me a tenth birthday present. Charlie first appears to America lying on his stomach, while a young woman in a bikini massages his pelvic muscles, which he has somehow overexerted. “I think it will be just a matter of some deft manipulation,” he tells his Angels over a Western Electric speakerphone, “before I’m standing as erect as ever.”
Charlie exists almost exclusively as a disembodied voice speaking in double entendres that I don’t understand. He assigns the Angels their first case, to investigate the death of a woman driver at a dirt-track car race. Angel Jill Monroe infiltrates the infield, posing as a traveling evangelist.
“And what denomination are you, little lady?” a leering grease monkey asks her.
“Thirty-five, twenty-four, thirty-five,” Jill purrs.
At school, in science class, I’ve seen time-lapse film of seeds growing into fully bloomed flowers, ninety days of nature compressed into thirty torrid seconds. Charlie’s Angels acts as a similar accelerant for puberty, several years passing in the forty-four minutes of the fourth episode, called “Angels in Chains,” in which the ladies go undercover in a women’s prison in Louisiana. In the basement, as Mom and Dad chat obliviously upstairs, Tom and Jim and I watch in slack-jawed disbelief as a leering warden named Maxine says, “Okay, girls, strip down to your birthday suits.”
Our silence is an unspoken agreement never to speak of what we are witnessing, which is Jill Monroe being strip-searched, showered, and deloused.
“Are there dressing rooms?” Jill asks.
“Whaddya think this is, Saks Fifth Avenue?” barks the warden. “Now drop the towels and get to it!”
By November, Charlie’s Angels has forty million viewers a week. It is known to every boy in every grade at Nativity, rehashing the previous night’s plotlines during Thursday morning recess, as “Chuck’s Chicks.” Tom acquires a poster for our room of the actress who plays Jill Monroe, Farrah Fawcett-Majors, only the third female face to grace our walls (after the Virgin Mary and Miss Piggy, from the “Pigs in Space” poster I’ve taped to our door). Twelve million other kids have bought the Farrah poster for their bedrooms, nearly all of them—like Tom—spending their allowance at Spencer’s Gifts, purveyors of Farrah posters, Playboy lighters, patchouli oils, pet rocks, lava lamps, black lights, greeting cards featuring morbidly obese women in bikinis, mesh-backed caps with a coil of plastic turd on the top, and—in the “Adult” section at the back of the store—personal vibrating massagers that women, to judge by the packaging, use to rub on their cheeks.
Farrah Fawcett is married to Lee Majors, the Six Million Dollar Man, and this to me is the essence of California, a place where the Bionic Man and one of Charlie’s Angels are conjoined in connubial bliss. Every other husband and wife in the state seem to have their own network variety show: Sonny and Cher, Captain and Tennille, Shields and Yarnell, Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. If Tony Orlando and Dawn aren’t married, if Donny and Marie aren’t husband and wife, you could have fooled me.