It’s suddenly rare that I’m home after school instead of at basketball practice. When I worked up the nerve to tell Dad that I wanted to quit hockey for basketball, he said, “Great.” He didn’t enjoy standing in a snowbank any more than I did. And what a relief it is to be indoors, in shorts, in a heated gym, playing against opponents who aren’t brandishing sticks or wearing sharpened blades. The new seventh-grade coach at Nativity is a second-year student at Harvard on the Hill. He’s a short, white, nineteen-year-old man from Michigan who blasts Earth, Wind, and Fire on a portable cassette player the size of a suitcase, its eight D batteries turning the sprocketed wheels of a cassette tape. The audiocassette tape is the new paddle wheel of the Rushin family economy, displacing the eight-track tape, its success allowing us to make upgrades small (from Hydrox to Oreo) and large (from Ford Country Squire to Buick Regal). The maroon Regal, with its white landau roof, is the evolutionary missing link between the station wagons Dad has always driven and the Cadillac he long ago promised his mother-in-law he would one day drive.
One snowy morning Dad is driving his boss to Holman Field in Saint Paul, where the two of them will get on the Mickey Mining corporate jet to some far-flung locale bereft of magnetic tape. Dad is snaking his way down Shepard Road, high above the Minnesota River, when the car slides off the pavement, through the guardrail, and down the embankment leading to the icy river below.
This is the Valleyfair water flume ride in real life, the fiberglass log replaced by a burgundy Buick Regal with a landau roof. But instead of ending in a cascade of white water and Mom standing at a safe remove, patting her hair, the car is stopped, as in a Warner Brothers cartoon, by a lone tree on the river bluff.
Scrambling out of the car, up the hill, and back to the roadway, gig lines intact, Dad and his boss walk to the nearest pay phone and arrange to have the car towed to a body shop in Saint Paul and themselves delivered by taxi to Holman Field. They’d have done the same had the car gone into the river. If one of them had perished in the accident, the survivor would have made the flight. Such is the one-track mind of the eight-track salesman.
From the pay phone, Dad makes a second call, asking Mom to drive to the body shop and sort out the details of repair and payment, which she dutifully does, despite an hour round-trip in the snow to the kind of place she dreads and where she feels preyed upon—an auto-body shop.
Relieved but also exasperated, Mom expresses to Dad her mixed feelings about the presence of that tree. For now, Dad is the hero of the story, and Mom is the comic bit player. It will be years before I see that the opposite is true.
The restored Regal reminds my brothers and me of the cars driven by detective-show pimps and other police informants. Mike McCollow’s dad, a dentist, likewise now drives a baby-blue Bonneville Brougham with simulated crushed-velvet upholstery. Huggy Bear would look at home behind its burled-walnut steering wheel. Mike and I read the cues from our male authority figures and begin to believe—despite all evidence to the contrary—that we are black.
Mike checks a nonfiction book out of the Penn Lake Library called Heaven Is a Playground, about a group of black teenagers playing pickup basketball at Foster Park in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. I read it five times. The kids in Heaven have names like Fly and Pontiac and call the basketball a “rock.” We begin to lard our conversation with their slang and to take fashion cues from another library book: Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool, by the splendiferous New York Knicks guard Walt “Clyde” Frazier. He drives a Rolls-Royce with New York license plates WCF. I’d drive to school in a wide-brimmed fedora and a double-breasted suit with fur lapels set off by an ornate walking stick, if only Sister Roseanne Roseannadanna would relax the uniform code.
Our basketball coach is named Jim Thomas, but Mike and I privately call him “Jamaal Tahoma.” In addition to his studies, and coaching us, he works the graveyard shift at The Embers. He can hit shots from the corner of the court, where the sideline meets the baseline. On his boom box, we listen to Earth, Wind, and Fire and the Commodores and long for our own R&B delivery system—what Jamaal Tahoma calls his “box.” Our fantasies are fueled by a new television show that debuts when our basketball season does. The White Shadow on CBS is set at an urban school in Los Angeles called Carver High Scho_l. (The second o is missing from the sign on their crumbling building.) The basketball team there is mostly black, the coach is white but streetwise, and their opponents have a respectful fear of Carver. And so Mike and I come to believe that our opponents in the CYO league have a similar fear of Nativity’s seventh-grade team, coached by its own White Shadow. We wear BVM across our chests, and while it stands for Blessed Virgin Mary, we’ve decided that Bloomington is Bed-Stuy, and that BVM is a basketball power known far and wide as the “Buh-vum.” We imagine other seventh-graders in and around Minneapolis see the BVM on our chicken chests and say in a reverential whisper, “They got some bad fly muthas at the Buh-vum.”
Ever since my preschool screenings of Sesame Street I have wanted to live in a city and play a radio on the stoop and wave to the merchants and Muppets walking by on the sidewalk. When I mention this dream to my parents, they surprise me on my birthday with a radio. Not a boom box I can carry on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, not a Samsonite-sized South Brook blaster with speakers the size of dinner plates kicking out the bass line to “Brickhouse” and vibrating molars throughout the subdivision. Rather, they surprise me with an AM/FM clock radio I can put on the shelf next to my bed, its lighted digital numbers casting a green glow in the room at night, like the green light I’ve seen emanating from the underside of the escalators at Dayton’s. And to my own surprise, I love it, and spend an hour running my fingers over its many buttons, switches, dials, and speaker holes, until Mom has to drive me to football practice.
In my absence, Tom studies it with envy. He takes the gooseneck reading lamp off my desk and shines it on the radio, illuminating its snooze bar and dimmer switch. Beneath the 100-watt bulb of my reading lamp, he memorizes its functions in the instruction booklet, which remains next to the lamp that still burns with a white-hot intensity when I get home from football and run upstairs to my room.
Tom is long gone. As I approach the birthday present I unwrapped only three hours ago, my mouth is a rictus of disbelief. The lamp has melted the white plastic casing that houses the radio. It’s literally melting, like one of Salvador Dalí’s clocks.
And yet I still love it, truly love it, not for the way it looks on the outside—like an electronic stroke victim, its left half now cooled into a permanent sag—but for what it has on the inside. Music. Twins games from the West Coast that play until midnight, Herb Carneal on WCCO radio singing me to sleep with an anti-music of Twins names: Dave Goltz, Paul Thormodsgard, Craig “Mongo” Kusick.