A year earlier, another South Brook dad was killed in a transformer explosion while working for Northern States Power, an accident so improbable that I persuaded myself that nothing comparable could happen to Dad. But now Mr. McCarthy has died, and Mike McCollow’s dad will soon survive a massive heart attack of his own on the golf course. And so I intensify my unconscious explorations of the house after midnight, peeing in hampers and wastebaskets. But now I am also racing up and down the hallway in a panic, my nocturnal journeys fueled by night terrors. This makes sleepovers almost unbearably stressful. At the house of a boy named Sean Burke, it’s a relief to stay up all night in his basement, playing Monopoly. Sleeping over at the McCarthys’, on the other hand, I wet their new fabric sofa in a kind of waking dream.
It isn’t just this sudden revelation of mortality that powers my dreams. When I run from room to room, looking in on my snoring siblings, I am sleepwalking in a kind of hypnotized state, but I’m also actively engaged in a vivid plotline. Often, a storm of mathematical equations has been whipped up around me—a whirlwind of 7s and x’s and greater-than signs—and I am attempting to outrun it. Sometimes it’s a hailstorm of letters, an alphabet cannonade. One vivid nightmare is a cold-war fantasy of nuclear near-annihilation. That night, I run into Mom and Dad’s room, throw on the light switch at 3 a.m., and shout, “They’re gonna blow up the world!”
Another night I sleepwalk downstairs in my summer pajamas, sit down on the love seat, and watch Saturday Night Live with the lights on. I am vaguely aware that Jim is home for the summer and sitting in Mom’s chair, and that his high school friends are also in the room, drinking beer. It’s nearly midnight. Jim’s buddies are laughing at me. But Jim just says, “You’re sleepwalking. Go to bed.” I do what I’ve always done when I’m told it’s bedtime: I stand, walk over to Mom’s chair, and give its occupant a good-night kiss. Except it’s Jim’s cheek that I kiss, to howls of laughter from his friends. Even in my half sleep, I brace to get speed-bagged. But Jim doesn’t hit me or even mock me. He just helps his little brother, on the brink of attending high school, back up the stairs and into bed.
An introverted child who spent much of the 1970s reading his parents’ newspaper would have expected 1980 to be the dawn of a wondrous age. President Nixon had expected all of America’s energy needs to be met by America come 1980. Dr. James T. Grace Jr., the eminent cancer researcher, predicted cancer would be cured by this year. Bell plans to put a picture phone in every home in the new decade, and that isn’t even the most exciting technological promise. Once South Brook gets cable television, we’ll have fifty channels instead of five. And we won’t have to stay home to watch The Dukes of Hazzard because every house will have a videocassette recorder, releasing us from the shackles of time, so I can record That’s Incredible! and play it back at my leisure.
Those VCRs will require Scotch brand videocassettes, ensuring the prosperity of our household for another ten years. Dad is a hermit crab, at regular intervals outgrowing one magnetic-tape format for a bigger and better one. He abandoned eight-tracks for audiocassettes and audiocassettes for VHS tapes. Except that he’s still selling audiotapes too, and so he doesn’t immediately dismiss my claims when I ask for a Panasonic RX-5085 boom box that weighs thirteen pounds.
This is the one thing—more than a Sting-Ray, more than Adidas, more than flying a 747 to Television City—that will make me happy for the rest of my life. I would never want anything again if I only had a Platinum Power boom box with six-and-a-half-inch woofers and one-and-a-quarter-inch tweeters and “the miracle of Ambience Sound,” as Earth, Wind, and Fire sings in the TV commercials. “Stereo, AM/FM, cassette! Platinum is the power to get!”
“Two hundred and forty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents!” Mom says. “You don’t have that kind of money.”
I promise I’ll buy the RX-5085 with the proceeds from my first job, the $3.35 hourly wage earned in the commissary at Met Stadium. “You have to save for college,” Mom says. “You don’t want to work at the Met for the rest of your life.”
But that’s exactly what I want to do! And I think Mom knows it, which is why she said it. The trouble is, I can’t work at the Met forever because the ballpark has been condemned, “slated to close”—as the newspapers put it—after the 1981 season. Likewise, Lincoln High School is “slated to close” after the 1981–82 school year, when I’m a sophomore, at which time everyone at Lincoln will be forced to attend one of our two archrivals: Jefferson or Kennedy. Bloomington’s youth population is shrinking. Not every family, it turns out, has five or six or seven kids. Only the families I know.
The Twins and Vikings are moving into a new domed stadium in downtown Minneapolis, which will rob Bloomington of its dateline status. We’ll no longer appear in papers around the world or issue from the mouth of Johnny Carson or Howard Cosell. We’re getting demoted from an allcaps dateline—BLOOMINGTON—to a lowercase burg that people soon enough will confuse with the Bloomingtons in Illinois and Indiana.
Pity, because it’s a dream working at the Met, preparing the food that the vendors hawk in the stands. This is the fantasy I’d choose on Fantasy Island, without the bit where everything goes wrong in the end. Breezing past the employee entrance while I flash my Minnesota Twins pass, Jim (back from college, working his old job again), Tom, and I punch in at the Main Commissary, a windowless expanse in the bowels of the Met. It’s hotter than the engine room of a burning tugboat down here. The metal doors to Main are graced with permanent graffiti: MAIN IS HELL. Hung above the entrance to the center-field commissary is an ancient hot dog, shriveled and black with age, and frequently likened to the unfortunate appendage of a frostbite victim on Everest. Attached to it is a sign: GOOD LUCK FROM EDDIE AND THE BOYS.
Why Twins “executives” never ordered the petrified hot dog taken down and the signs scrubbed away—and, on the contrary, seem to enjoy the message as a welcome-to-the-big-leagues kind of hazing—says from the moment of arrival everything I needed to know about this place.
Drinking as much soda as possible from the company’s endless stores of CO2 canisters is encouraged, as long as you bring your own cup. (The wax cups emblazoned with the Coca-Cola logo are meticulously inventoried.) For the same reason, infinite hot dogs may be eaten so long as I never consume a single bun. My coworkers often smuggle in a twelve-pack of buns from Red Owl because the buns are inventoried but the dogs are not. “You do the math,” my coworker and South Brook colleague Jim Clancy says. “Seventy-five cents times twelve hot dogs equals nine bucks. The pack of buns cost eighty-nine cents.” Clancy clears $8.11 on the black market in a single day but feels so guilty afterward that he puts his entire profits into the collection basket during Mass at Nativity the following Sunday.