We have a growing appetite for these pranks. Anything we find funny is “good yuks.” Tom and his friend Rye enjoy crank-calling phone-in radio shows and insulting the hosts. I record the exchanges on a handheld cassette recorder and we play them back for good yuks. Tom and his buddies attend pro-wrestling matches at the Saint Paul Civic Center. When the house lights go down, they throw Mom’s potatoes into the ring. The taped matches air on All-Star Wrestling every Sunday morning before Mass on channel 9. Tom tunes in to see one of his own potatoes suddenly materialize from the dark and strike a klieg-lit Iron Shiek on the shoulder.
When Dad reads about other teens doing idiotic things, he’ll sometimes say, “If I ever hear you’ve pulled a stunt like that…” “Stunt” is a word he uses when he’s mad. Dad has other angry poker tells, like addressing one of us as “buster” or using the phrase “God dammit” or reflexively raising a backhand. “Only two things work,” I’ve heard him say, of trying to persuade The Boys to do anything. “Bribery and intimidation.”
Whenever I protest that I didn’t try to break Mom’s vase or leave the fridge open all afternoon, he plays the rhetorical trump card: “You didn’t try not to.”
After All-Star Wrestling and Mass one Sunday morning, Dad threatens us all with what-for if we don’t stop fighting on the drive home. But we don’t stop fighting. Which is how it happens that ten minutes after leaving Nativity, Dad parks the car in the garage and sprints around the back to catch up with Tom, who picks up a hockey stick to block the backhand he knows is coming. Dad’s hand hits the Sher-Wood and instantly swells up like a foam fan hand at the Met. Without breaking stride, Dad gets back into the car—shotgun seat this time—and Mom drives him to the hospital. When he comes home with his hand bandaged, again in the shotgun seat, Dad doesn’t say a word. It’s the only time I have seen Mom drive when Dad is in the car. It’s the absence of the steering wheel, not the presence of the bandages, that makes him look injured.
(Dad will be Mom’s passenger one more time, in my senior year of high school. On the morning after his fiftieth birthday party, aggressively celebrated on our screened porch, Dad has to catch a flight to Tokyo. Mom drives. When she pulls up to the departures terminal at MSP, Dad opens the shotgun door and stands there for a moment, hands pressed to his temples, nursing his crippling hangover. Tires squealing on her new car—she has given Jim her station wagon and downsized to a Honda Accord—Mom leaves Dad there to contemplate the error of his ways and the two lonely weeks ahead, eating ribs as a party of one at the Tony Roma’s in Shinjuku.)
But if seeing Dad reduced to riding shotgun is a first, the summer of ’81 is mostly filled with lasts. Things are all coming to an end. The last year of Lincoln High School looms, and the Met is already reduced to a handful of Twins and Vikings games when yet another ending comes. On May 29, the Twins join their colleagues in the rest of Major League Baseball in voting to go on strike. They won’t return until August 10. On reflection, theirs is the greatest job in the world, not mine. I am utterly at a loss to understand how Butch Wynegar can be paid $460,000 to play catcher for the Minnesota Twins in front of nearly eight thousand people and be anything less than deliriously happy. And because he evidently isn’t, I will be deprived of my $3.35 an hour for most of the summer. I’ll be denied the fruits of my labor, that Panasonic boom box with the miracle of Ambience Sound.
Thanks to annual increases in the federal minimum wage, my hourly pay has risen, like an aging pitcher’s earned run average, from $2.90 in 1979 to $3.10 in 1980 to $3.35 this year. And still it’s taking me forever to save $249.95. I make a modest side income delivering the PennySaver circular throughout South Brook every Wednesday. The job becomes less onerous when a former delivery boy tells me that he—and all my predecessors on the PennySaver route—just ditched the bundles in the Dumpster at Hillcrest Elementary School. No homeowners are expecting them or will ever know they’re missing. By delivering the PennySavers I’m doing a disservice to Dumpster-using delivery boys in adjacent neighborhoods. So I stop.
Dad knows that even if the striking Twins return to the Met and give me a dozen or so five-hour work dates at minimum wage minus FICA, tax, and union dues; and even if I continue to deliver (as far as he knows) the PennySaver in perpetuity; and even accounting for the shoeshine money he gives me once a week, I can never save enough in a single summer to buy what even he has come to call “this boom box.” And so he tells me that he’ll pay for half of it as an early birthday present.
Beyond that box camera he saw in a shop window in Chicago in seventh grade, Dad has never wanted anything, as far as I know. He still coos over the tennis balls and Old Spice we give him every birthday, Father’s Day, and Christmas. And yet he understands the symbolic power that an earned object holds. It helps that for once my interest—requiring, as it does, regular feedings of Scotch brand magnetic tape—align with his. But mostly, I think, he recognizes that a shiny metallic object adorned with countless knobs and buttons can spur a man to work. The longer it remains out of reach, the better.
For me, it’s the boom box. For Dad, it’s the Cadillac he promised his skeptical mother-in-law when he married Mom, now twenty-five years ago.
As a surprise gift for Mom and Dad’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Jim arranges for Mr. Cole, our next-door neighbor—a photographer known to us as Old King Cole—to take a portrait of the five Rushin children. The day before our sitting, in Mr. Cole’s basement, Tom and I have a fistfight. With one punch, Tom tears a strip of skin off my right cheek. Jim is furious and threatens to give Tom one for symmetry. When Mom and Dad return from their anniversary trip to San Francisco, Jim presents them with a sepia-toned portrait of their five children, ranging in age from twenty to nine. The middle child’s prominent scab from a bare-knuckle fight the night before is preserved for posterity inside a golden frame. Captured in amber, as it were.
Mom sighs. She could have said “Just what I didn’t want.” Instead, she says, “Perfect.”