“What’s a bidet?”
But Dad is in no mood to explain. He waits two hours, until after dinner, to tell us what a bidet is, and what French people do with it, and how they’re common in European hotels and homes. I sit there agog, marveling at the infinite variety of human beings and silently thanking God that Mom never let Dad move us to Belgium, where kids have to sit bare bottomed on a fire hose.
“John thought it was a drinking fountain!” Tom says.
“Shtop it, shtupid!” John cries. He slurs his s’s. He’ll see a speech therapist for this. But until then, we call as much attention as we can to it, asking him all summer to say the name of the thoroughbred racehorse aspiring to the Triple Crown. And John will dutifully shout, “Sheattle Shlew in sheventy-sheven,” showering us with spit.
Tom is telling on him now. “John was trying to drink out of the…” The new French word eludes him, and Tom finally says, “John was trying to drink out of the butt washer!”
In the morning, we visit William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon. I’m wearing my giveaway Rod Carew jersey, dyed with so many orange Sunkist soda stains that even Mom’s many ministrations with Clorox couldn’t remove them. “Say ‘Sunkist soda stains,’” I tell John. He says, “Shunkisht shoda shtains,” spraying saliva.
“Say ‘spraying saliva,’” I say, but he says “Shut up, Shtevie” instead.
“Say it, don’t spray it,” I say.
I read all about Hearst Castle at the Penn Lake Library and so I lip-synch along with the tour guide’s spiel about “La Cuesta Encantada,” or “The Enchanted Hill,” where publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst set down 127 acres of swimming pools, guesthouses, his own twin-towered castle, and dozens of fountains, each one burbling like the bidet in our Best Western bathroom.
Standing next to the Neptune Pool, frozen in a waking dream like one of Hearst’s Roman statues, I think, This is the reward for a life in the newspaper business. Everything I know or will know about print journalism issued from California. In the fall, I’ll watch Lou Grant, about a gruff television editor from Minneapolis station WJM who moves to Los Angeles to run the L.A. Tribune. Tom Bradford on Eight Is Enough lives in a big white house bought with the salary earned from his Sacramento Register column. I know from careful viewing of The Odd Couple that while Oscar Madison is a sportswriter for the New York Herald and has a gigantic apartment at 1049 Park Avenue, the show is filmed on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles.
And William Randolph Hearst built this joint on the proceeds of his newspaper empire. I want my second home to be a 165-room estate overlooking the Pacific. So I tell Mom and Dad I want to be a writer.
I carry a notebook like Harriet the Spy, a sheaf of stationery from the Holiday Inn and the Best Western, and keep my eyes peeled for celebrities. We missed Michael Douglas and Karl Malden on the streets of San Francisco, but somewhere on the California coast is Bay City, home of Starsky and Hutch and the Bay City Rollers. I have no idea that the Bay City Rollers are Scottish and randomly named their band for Bay City, Michigan, but that hardly matters. When Dad unfolds his ten-square-foot map of California on the Best Western bedspread, plotting tomorrow’s movements like General Patton, he informs me that there is no Bay City. “It’s all fake,” he says, presumably so we don’t have to stop there. But what does he know? He says the same thing about pro wrestling.
“It’s all fake,” Dad says again, by way of reassurance, on the tram at Universal Studios, when the mechanical shark jumps out of the water and scares the bejabbers out of me. We pass the Psycho mansion, narrowly escape a mechanical rockslide, and gape at the facade of the Munsters’ house on 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Oddly, it’s on the same street as Beaver Cleaver’s house, and he lived at 211 Pine Street. “The magic of Hollywood,” Dad says, pointing out the beams and braces and brackets behind all the various false fronts, the bogus backdrops.
Many years ago, when Dad required U.S. government security clearance for a Mickey Mining project, the forms asked for his father’s legal name and date of birth. A marriage certificate coughed up the details. It identified my grandfather as Nathan “Jack” Rushin. His place of birth was listed as Kingston, Jamaica. His religion was listed as Jewish. But here, at Universal Studios, I don’t know any of this yet. I haven’t a clue what’s behind the facade—the Irish-Catholic kid I think I am—or if it matters that I’m really an Irish-Catholic Jamaican Jew. The truth is I feel like a Rushin, a Nativity-ite, a South Brooker, a Bloomingtonian, a Minnesotan, and an exiled Chicagoan, in that order.
It is here, in the Universal Studios live animal show, that we spot our first California celebrity. Fred the Cockatoo, Robert Blake’s wisecracking parrot sidekick on Baretta, is riding a tiny bicycle for our amusement. “The magic of Hollywood,” I say to Dad.
“No, that’s real,” he replies. But how can I know it’s the same bird from the show? They all look the same.
I’ve come to California, braved the San Andreas Fault, and the only thing that’s shaken so far is my faith in what’s real.
At the end of the tour we’re offered the chance to sit in “the live studio audience” for a new show. As I beg Dad to please let us watch it, he blithely declines the tickets to Carter Country, saying we don’t have time, though I fear he has spurned the show on political grounds, since he voted for Ronald Reagan, and doesn’t want to sit through a three-hour taping with a bunch of hillbilly characters from Plains, Georgia.
And yet a few hours later I feel like a hillbilly, a Midwestern rube, as we visit one of Dad’s Mickey Mining colleagues at his house in Anaheim Hills, near Disneyland. It’s a contemporary that looks like Mike Brady designed it and smells of something we don’t have in Minnesota: frangipani or eucalyptus. Perhaps this is “the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air” the Eagles are always going on about in “Hotel California.”
Dad’s friend has a fourteen-year-old son with long wavy hair and a surfboard in the garage. And though the boy never says anything to make us feel less than right at home, everything about him suggests that his Hollywood nights are better than our Sting-Ray afternoons. Tom and I vow, that very night, to pool our allowance when we get home and buy a skateboard like this kid’s, with polyurethane wheels, that we can use in drained swimming pools, should South Brook ever get any swimming pools, and those pools ever get drained.