On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1981, after the Twins and I have returned to our respective jobs, which we both continue to perform poorly, and before my sophomore year begins, Dad tells me, “Get in the car.” We drive a few miles to a row of corrugated metal warehouses in an industrial park. He won’t say why. A steel garage door is rolled up on one warehouse that we pass. “That’s Mr. Costa’s,” Dad says. Mr. Costa is better known in South Brook as Champagne Tony. He has a son, Nicky, who is my age. Champagne Tony is in the amusements trade. His warehouse is filled with pinball machines and arcade games. The pinball machines are festooned with familiar faces and logos: Charlie’s Angels, Evel Knievel, Playboy, Kiss, and the pinball wizard himself, Elton John, who wears suspendered white bell-bottoms and blue platform boots on the Captain Fantastic machine by Bally. Even I am vaguely aware that the men on these machines and the machines themselves are icons of a vanishing age. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.
At the front of the warehouse are their boxy replacements, the games that have taken over the lobbies at the Southtown Theatre and Lyn-Del Lanes and Airport Bowl, and necessitated an entire stand-alone arcade called Beanie’s, next to the White Castle on Lyndale Avenue. These games—Space Invaders, Asteroids, Galaga, Centipede, Frogger, Donkey Kong—are the next big thing, but I’m still unaccountably attached to the pinball machines. I’m oblivious to the notion that all these endings (Lincoln, the Met, childhood, pinball, freedom from work or care or responsibility) also mean something else is beginning (a new high school, a new ballpark, Pac-Man, adulthood, a driver’s license, pocket money).
Even Champagne Tony’s van, parked outside the warehouse, is beginning to age. It has a metallic burgundy paint scheme, a tinted bubble window on one side, and a scene of the desert at night with a billion stars all around, so that I can never watch it go past our house without hearing the Eagles sing “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”
There’s a little ladder to the roof of the van—its purpose, I’ve concluded on my own, is for rooftop sunbathing—and its interior walls are covered in a plush carpet. The overall effect of the van—the carpet, the sunroof, the desert vignette—is of a water bed on wheels. It embodies everything that was cool about the 1970s, especially when parked outside a warehouse filled with coin-operated wonderments, machines devoted to the Harlem Globetrotters and Led Zeppelin.
“This door here,” Dad says.
We step into a carpeted showroom filled with brand-new electronics and cases of Scotch brand recording tape. Like the pinball machines next door, the boom boxes on display are all lights and knobs and shiny surfaces. The room pulsates with sound. The man working here recognizes Dad, seems to be expecting him, has the air of someone who owes him a favor. “This it?” Dad says, hefting the RX-5085 by the handle, doing a thirteen-pound wrist curl, a weight that will seem to double with the insertion of eight Rayovac D batteries. There is a muttered exchange between Dad and the sales guy, a brief exchange of paperwork, and then we’re suddenly outside, in the parking lot, and I’m walking past Champagne Tony Costa’s Peaceful Easy Feeling van with a Panasonic boom box on my right shoulder the way Dad might carry a case of beer.
The R&B stations out of north Minneapolis don’t reach South Brook in the daylight hours, so I’m left to listen at night, with a blank Scotch cassette, and press PLAY and RECORD at the same time when I hear something I like—“Burn Rubber on Me” by the Gap Band, “Fantastic Voyage” by Lakeside, “Double Dutch Bus” by Frankie Smith. Only when I’ve built up a solid forty-five-minute side of tape do I ride around on my burgundy Schwinn World Sport ten-speed playing “Let’s Groove” by Earth, Wind, and Fire on my brand-new South Brook blaster.
Quite what the neighbors think as the Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder” rings out on Xerxes Circle, I can’t say. All I know is I’m steering the ram’s-horn handlebars of my Schwinn with my knees, a rubber Spalding basketball (“my rock”) under one arm and the RX-5085 (“my box”) in the other, and all the while I’m singing along to the cassette: “Go dang-diddy-dang-dee-dang-dee-dang, diddy-diddy-dang-diddy-dang-dee-dang-dee-dang…”
The World Sport is my first brand-new Schwinn. My Sting-Ray dreams have gone wherever they go when a fifteen-year-old has followed the biblical prescription to put away childish things. Those dirt bikes that the little kids in the neighborhood are riding now are all knobby tires and padded handlebars. These kids today. Sometimes I ride the World Sport with a canvas sack of PennySavers slung over my shoulder. The custodian at Hillcrest Elementary complained to the distributor that his papers were being disposed of in the school Dumpster. Dad said, “Never pull that stunt again, buster,” and I never will.
But there are other stunts. When Lincoln High School closes forever after my sophomore year, it’s as if a government has fallen. Lincoln’s vast storehouses of treasure are looted. Sweatshirts and basketball uniforms and baseball Windbreakers are liberated from The Cage, where the sports equipment is stored. A classmate we call Rodney, after a streetwise character in Heaven Is a Playground, acquires a two-and-a-half-gallon stainless-steel fire extinguisher with LHS Magic-Markered down the side. One summer night I join Rodney and four other kids in joyriding around Bloomington with the fire extinguisher at our feet. “Excuse me,” a kid named Gary Dombrowski says, rolling up on a middle-aged man walking his dog. “Would you happen to have the time?”
“Why, yes,” the man says, rolling up his sleeve and checking his watch while walking over to the curb. “It’s…”
But before the man can tell us, Dumbo is strafing him with a high-pressure rope of Bloomington’s award-winning tap water, the fire-extinguisher foam having long since been depleted. Dumbo soaks the shirt of the Good Samaritan, who can only return a stream of profanity as we squeal away from the curb.
Another night, in the drive-through at the Valley West McDonald’s, we fire-hose the seventeen-year-old who passes the sack of Quarter Pounders through the window.
Ten minutes later, we ask a man for directions and strafe him. We roll up on a car at an intersection and shoot its passengers through the shotgun window.
And though I never pull the trigger—never even touch the canister for fear of leaving fingerprints on its silver surface—I’ve seen enough TV shows to know I’m an accessory, an aider and abettor, a possessor of stolen goods, a party to vehicular something or other, a so-and-so after the fact.