In class, Mike sketches basketball warm-up suits bedazzled with stars and stripes and zigzagged bell-bottoms and tries to choreograph a pregame routine for the Buh-vum that involves rhythmic handclaps and complicated handshakes and a mixtape for the layup line worthy of Foster Park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. The fact that we’re Buh-vum and not Bed-Stuy doesn’t register.
And so I have separation anxiety from my rubber Spalding basketball when we fly to Washington, DC, on our last family vacation in the summer of ’79, passing a happy interval at Virginia Beach and an unhappy one at Colonial Williamsburg, where the butter-churning tedium in the dog’s-breath heat of a mid-Atlantic August makes all of us pine loudly for the Holidome pool at the Holiday Inn. We race from our rental car to our rooms and from our rooms to the pool, shouting an ancient childhood mantra: “Last one in is a rotten egg.”
But it’s the three days in DC that enchant, and not just because I see a newly acquired object at the Smithsonian, the real Archie Bunker chair, after all these years of getting evicted from Dad’s various Archie Bunker chairs. What’s fascinating to me a month before I turn thirteen aren’t the museums and monuments but all the black teenagers wearing PRO-Keds and shell-toed Adidas Superstars with colored laces and intricate lacing patterns and white tube socks pulled to their kneecaps, all of which I’ll endeavor to replicate with my own shoes and socks when I get back to the Holiday Inn in Arlington, Virginia, for our end-of-day swim and Dad’s evening libations.
We’ve strayed far from the National Mall when Dad leads all seven of us into a tiny liquor store late on a Thursday afternoon to buy enough booze to drown a horse. “If I don’t see you before then,” the guy behind the counter says, “have a nice weekend.” Dad finds this hilarious, and as he leads us out of the store with a heavy paper sack under one arm, I ask him to explain.
Dad says, “For a lot of his customers, a bottle of scotch and a twelve-pack of beer is apparently a one-night supply.”
I don’t answer, but having begun to imagine myself as a poor city kid, I feel protective of this threadbare neighborhood and its liquor-store clientele, even if I’m protecting it from an actual poor city kid who has spent his life putting distance between himself and poverty.
At the Holiday Inn in Arlington, Dad puts the beer on ice in the bathroom sink. In the adjoining room, I reflexively turn on the TV and crank up the volume, to hear it above the hum of the overworked air conditioner.
The voice is David Brinkley’s, on NBC, familiar from a thousand similar evenings at home. What he says as I lie on the bed makes me jackknife forward to attention.
“New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson was killed today in a crash of a small airplane at the Akron–Canton Airport in Ohio.”
I shudder. The sudden chill has nothing to do with the arctic AC blowing on my sweat-soaked T-shirt.
The news is unbelievable. I literally can’t believe it. Major League Baseball players are invincible, and New York Yankees are immortal, the principal players in America’s favorite soap opera. This summer’s biggest book is The Bronx Zoo, by the former Yankees relief pitcher Sparky Lyle, and while I cannot spend $8.95 for a hardcover in B. Dalton Bookseller at Southdale, I check it out of the grown-up section at Penn Lake Library and read about Lyle’s clubhouse affinity for sitting naked on birthday cakes.
Munson was the captain of these Yankees, the first person I know, or feel I know, who has died. I’ve committed to memory his baseball cards and their B sides. Bats: Right. Throws: Right. Born: Akron. Lives: Canton. And this unforgettable fun fact: “Thurman’s nickname is Squatty.”
That Munson died in a plane crash, three days before we have to fly home, adds another fear to all the usual ones (death, vampire bats, Ouija boards) while joining a burgeoning category of new ones (girls, mockery, loneliness).
Munson was thirty-two, thirteen years younger than Mom and Dad, fourteen years older than Jim, in that generational gap occupied by professional athletes and rock stars and most of the people on TV. Any of them could vanish like that, will vanish like that. Just days after we get home, Jim himself is leaving for college, having finally accepted a hockey scholarship—“a full ride” is the congratulatory phrase he hears often these days—to a hockey power on the East Coast, which might as well be Narnia.
Five minutes before Jim leaves for the airport, bound for Providence College, he comes up to my bedroom to give me a valedictory 99 Bump, a few sternum welts to remember him by. Supine on the floor next to my bed, biceps pinned to the carpet, I scream and spit and tell Jim I hate him, that I’m happy he’s going, that I hope I never see him again. He tells me I’ve made one last grievous error and loses count on his way to ninety-nine, forcing him to start over, hammering my chest with a single knuckle as if he’s drilling for oil.
Mom and Dad wait downstairs, station wagon idling in the driveway, listening to the fight as if it’s a favorite song on the radio they might never hear again.
And I kind of understand. They want to preserve this time in a locket, freeze us as we are now and will never be again.
John is about to turn seven, slurring his way through his killer Steve Martin impression at dinner parties (“Gotta condo made-uh shtone-uh, King Tut”).
Amy is nine, with a Shaun Cassidy poster taped to the door that keeps The Boys out of her bedroom. (“Do you love him more than you love me?” Dad asks Amy, standing before the poster, the teen idol’s satin baseball jacket unbuttoned to his navel. Amy thinks for a minute and says, “The same.”)
Tom is fourteen, a freshman at Lincoln, strong enough now to punch a hole in the wall of our bedroom when I score on him in our handheld game of Mattel football. (He steals a piece of drywall from a construction project outside the Bloomington Ice Garden, patches the hole, and puts one of Jim’s football recruiting posters over the white spot on the blue wall, where MONTANA STATE WELCOMES JIM RUSHIN will stay until Mom decides—as she does every five years or so—to paint the room another color.
Jim, of course, is eighteen. “Flying the coop,” as Dad says, off to college this very minute while I stay upstairs, snuffling back snot and tears on the bedroom carpet.
Tom is out. He has more friends than I have acquaintances. Amy and John have gone with Mom and Dad to see Jim off at the airport. So I’m alone with Christ above the credenza, the house silent save for clock ticks and bird chirps and the distant buzz of a push mower. It’s an hour that seems like forever.
Dad tells a story when they get back. Just before he boarded the plane for Providence, Jim shook hands with John. “Well,” John said, chin quivering. “You’ve been a great brother.”