The Dalí clock radio isn’t a boom box. On the contrary. It never strays from the shelf next to my bed. It’s tethered to the wall socket by six feet of electrical cord but also tethered to the broadcast towers of WLOL and KDWB, playing “Baby Come Back” or “Kiss You All Over” in such heavy rotation (and even while I sleep) that it’s impossible to imagine a day when their lyrics can’t be summoned in my head at a second’s notice. I will never grow so old as to forget a single word to “Whenever I Call You Friend.”
But I also discover at night, after dark, if I position the Dalí clock radio just right and spin the dial to the far left, I can conjure the low-watt signal of 88.5 KBEM or 89.9 KMOJ out of north Minneapolis and hear through the crackling static R&B artists that I’d never heard of much less heard on record. The names alone are musical: Con Funk Shun, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, L.T.D., Funkadelic, Fatback Band. Their music reaches the southern suburbs like the smoke from a distant fire, to use a phrase in frequent rotation on the pop stations that come in loud and clear.
It’s the R&B that’s suddenly captivating, and certain phrases and words and inflections find their way into my vocabulary, and Mike McCollow’s. We say “thang” instead of “thing.” I’m still afraid to say “shit” but have no qualms saying “shee-yit.” I persuade myself, with a linguistic sleight of hand, that South Brook is the South Bronx, two gritty urban streetscapes I come to think of collectively as SoBro.
Before or after basketball practice, Mike and I start running a couple of blocks from Nativity to Harpo’s Records ’n Stuff, where we head straight for the “Records,” uninterested in all the “Stuff”—incense, roach clips, rolling papers—kept in a glass display case at the counter. It reminds me of the candy case at the Southtown Theatre, if Zig-Zag Super Quality Slow-Burning Gummed Cigarette Papers had replaced the Mike and Ike Tender, Chewy Assorted Fruit Flavored Candies.
Alone, watched only by the Styx and Foreigner posters, we nonchalantly race-walk to the O bin, where the Ohio Players album covers reliably feature a naked or near-naked woman brandishing a honey pot or a fire hose, objects that somehow remain single entendres to us.
Cassettes are what we really want—tapes to feed the boom boxes we don’t yet have. Dad could supply me with all the blank tape in the world, miles of it, courtesy of the Mickey Mining company store, and I could tape albums or songs off the radio and use paper-route money to buy my own D batteries, which the “boxes” eat like Pop Rocks. I see myself dangling a pulsating boom box from the ram’s-horn handlebars of my Schwinn Varsity. It’s a grown man’s bike, emblematic of my incipient maturity and an acknowledgment that Sting-Rays are over, already displaced by dirt bikes among the little kids of South Brook, a designation that no longer applies to me.
These transitions—from young to less young, from innocence to experience, from pop to funk, from white to black—are evident in our last two summer vacations of the 1970s, our post-California road trips. In the summer of ’78, we made our every-other-summer road trip to Chicago and Cincinnati, where my older cousin Johnny Burns held us all rapt in his basement bedroom playing “Life’s Been Good” and “Smoke on the Water” on his electric guitar. We walked to King Kwik for Slushies in a commemorative Reds cup that Mom let me take home in my suitcase, and Johnny produced a telescopic golf-ball retriever to scoop cigarette butts out of Winton Woods Harbor. Johnny called the device a “wub fisherman,” “wub” being Cincinnati high school slang for what we in Bloomington call freaks, burnouts, dirtballs, or gumbies—Dad still calls them “hippies.” They’re a subset of youth that my friends and I ridicule, following the lead of our older brothers. Secretly, though, I also fear the freaks, with their cigarettes and Kawasakis and boots called shitkickers.
The photographic negative of freaks are jocks. As Lincoln’s standout jock, Jim is the anti-freak, a football linebacker, baseball pitcher, and the dominant hockey center in a hockey town in the state of hockey. He wears number 16 in homage to center Jude Drouin of the North Stars, whose colors—green, gold, and white—Lincoln shares. Except that Jim is bigger and more fearsome than Drouin. He is not afraid, in his description, to “speed-bag” any opponent. “Speed-bag” is a verb. It means to punch a person in the head repeatedly in the rhythmic manner of a boxer working a speed bag.
He is a talented, hardworking team player of growing renown. The Minneapolis Tribune, which I now deliver throughout South Brook on Sunday mornings, has the same postage-stamp-sized photograph on page one of each section every day. It’s a familiar icon that helps the reader find the way to his or her favorite subject. And so the IDS skyscraper is the logo for the Metro section, a dollar bill anchors the Business section, an open book orients to the Arts section. And even an illiterate buyer of the Minneapolis Tribune will know he or she has stumbled on the Sports section by seeing, at the top of the front page—every day of the week for a couple of years—an action photo of my big brother. In it, Jim Rushin of the Bloomington Lincoln High School Bears is shoveling another shot past some helpless sieve of a goalie who made a grievous error by skating out to cut off the angle on my big brother. Clancy the Great. Look at him skate.
In the summer and fall Jim still works at Met Stadium, managing a commissary and watching all the Twins and Vikings and Kicks soccer games he wants, not to mention concerts, so that he finds himself on the evening of August 1, 1978, standing beneath the second-deck overhang in a driving rainstorm as the Eagles, the Steve Miller Band, and Pablo Cruise perform on the Hotel California tour before sixty-five thousand Minnesota kids high on pot and Grain Belt Premium. Jim alone is dry, sober, and high on life. Jim alone is there to hear Pablo Cruise.
Like other Minnesota-made mascots—the Pillsbury Doughboy, the Jolly Green Giant, the Lucky Charms leprechaun—Jim is an icon, fielding scholarship offers in every sport and dating a cheerleader whose name is Peggy Golden. (Could it possibly be otherwise?) Girls want to be with him, and twelve-year-old boys want to be him. Strangely, I am no exception.
Except that now I’m basketball obsessed, thanks in part to another Jim—Jamaal Tahoma, our pasty, freckled, floppy-haired emissary from Harvard on the Hill who wears three pairs of socks like Pistol Pete Maravich, prompting McCollow and me to do the same. Jamaal Tahoma plays “The Groove Line” by Heatwave or “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire before practice and I’ve never been happier, shooting jumpers—“Js” in our new vernacular—while singing “Never was a cloudy day, yow.”