Even my new friends in high school have discovered my timidity. One night, at the McDonald’s on Nicollet Avenue, everyone gets their order but me. Instead of returning to the counter and demanding the Quarter Pounder with cheese I paid for, I simply sit at the table, watching the others eat and repeatedly asking in a small voice, “Where’s my burger?” Since then, in moments requiring bravery or recklessness, my friends have provoked me with that catchphrase: “Where’s my burger?”
But it’s not a fear of staining my permanent record that keeps my hands off the fire extinguisher. It’s the unmistakable knowledge, slouched down in the back of a Plymouth Duster, that our targets are the kind citizens of Bloomington, every one of them ostensibly offering us assistance. These are the people who took me in when my front teeth were knocked out, who offered their phone as I bled on their linoleum, who called my mother as I stood in their foyer after shitting my snow pants. They repaid cruel nicknames by buffing the gym floor to a Comet-commercial gleam and then sang “Silent Night” to our moms and dads. They coached me, cleaned my teeth, overpaid me to shovel their driveways, bought all the fund-raiser candy bars I could flog, applauded my every groundout, insisted I take that second sucker from the little basket on the liquor-store counter. They could have been the Nativity teachers and priests who were unfailingly decent and generous people.
Given Mom’s separate fears of freeway merging and splashing water, this drive-by dousing would be the worst thing I could do to her. There is a terrible irony at play. I spent nine years at Nativity worried about getting into heaven, and now a fire extinguisher, of all things, has consigned me to an eternity of flames.
Of the five kids in this car, I’m the only one going to Kennedy High School next year. Many of my friends will be “redistricted” to Jefferson, including the best friend I’ve made at Lincoln, another basketball-obsessed white boy named Keith Opatz. When The Empire Strikes Back comes out, Ope and I pretend to play Frogger in the lobby of the Southtown Theatre for ten minutes, then ask a ticket taker if we can use the men’s room beyond the velvet ropes. When he obliges, we hide in adjacent stalls for half an hour until the movie starts, then casually walk into the auditorium. And thus begins a fruitful collaboration sneaking into movies and the YMCA.
Separately, McCollow, Opatz, and I tell the front-desk attendant at the Y that we’ve lost our membership cards. From beneath the desk she pulls a basket that is full of lost cards and invites us to have a rummage. We each choose one with a distant expiration date and insinuate ourselves into the regular noontime “runs” at the Y—the pickup basketball games contested by middle-aged men on their lunch breaks and now us: three strutting teenagers wearing “Curtis Js.” These are sweatpants jaggedly cut off at the knees, as worn by Curtis Jackson on The White Shadow. Ope wears as many as five pairs of socks at any given time, so he can’t even lace his shell-toed Adidas. Mike takes pull-up jumpers from forty feet and shouts—in the face of his forty-five-year-old defender, as the ball rips through the net—“Three!” It’s all the more infuriating to the lunchtime lawyers and accountants that Mike is playing in a knit watch cap. As fugitives on fake IDs, the three of us are careful to call each other by the names on our membership cards—Milt, Chaz, Farouk. For all this, in our pickup games against responsible adults at the Southdale branch of the YMCA, it is we who find them ridiculous, with their beer guts and bald spots and black-framed Rec Specs (as well as their paychecks and wives and new cars).
The imminent closing of Lincoln High School will rearrange the three-way friendship among Mike and Ope and me. Ope will go from Lincoln to Jefferson. Mike will go from Jefferson to Kennedy. And while I will also go to Kennedy, my own brother will go to Jefferson, joining the citizens of prestigious west Bloomington without moving out of our house. As a senior-to-be, Tom is allowed to choose which school he attends. As a junior-to-be, I’ll go where I’m told, and South Brook, in the center of Bloomington, will be placed in the Kennedy catch basin. Indeed, some kids at Jefferson will be forced to attend Kennedy. Mike McCollow, from whom I was separated after graduation from the Buh-vum, is one of them. It is difficult to fathom Tom or me attending Lincoln’s archrivals, forsaking the Bears to become Jaguars and Eagles, respectively. Dropping the green-and-gold color scheme of the Swingin’ Oakland A’s for the powder-blue of Jefferson or the navy of Kennedy. As the fire extinguisher proves, fifteen is an age before empathy.
But our bus of Lincoln refugees will discover that other students—kids who grew up in the Jefferson and Kennedy districts, and get to remain in them—are no more excited to see us than we are to see them. A large dead fish will be rotting on the front walk into JFK when we disembark the school bus for our very first day there. Written in fish blood on the concrete: NEWCOMERS DIE.
As with the greetings in the Met Stadium commissaries—MAIN IS HELL, and that shriveled hot dog wishing us GOOD LUCK—we’re left to wonder how this bloody message has remained, how no grown-up has ordered it cleaned up.
But of course no teacher has seen it yet, and when the first one does—within the hour—the message in fish blood is hosed away, and I’m left to wonder if it was ever there in the first place. Nothing remains but the faint smell of fish.
Childhood disappears down a storm drain. It flows, then trickles, then vanishes, leaving some olfactory memory—of new tennis balls, Sunday-morning bacon, a chemical cloud of Glade—to prove it ever existed. It seldom ends on a sixteenth birthday or an eighteenth birthday or some other calendar date, and rarer still is it stamped with a time of death.
But sometimes it is.
The snow-covered parking lot at the Met is the usual tailgating tableau on Sunday, December 20, 1981. Weber grills and Winnebagos. Snowmobile suits and horned H?gar the Horrible helmets. It’s ten degrees. A man has set up his living room in the lot: a sofa, easy chair, and coffee table anchored by an orange rug. His TV is hooked to a generator to watch the Vikings final home game of the season, against the Kansas City Chiefs, on the NBC television network.
But this isn’t an ordinary Sunday. It’s the last game ever at the Met, and Bloomington’s final day in the sun for some time, at least until the nation’s largest shopping mall—planned for this frozen plot of land—opens in another eleven years. Fans file in with signs—BLOW UP THE DOME, THE MET’S OUR HOME, U BET WE WON’T 4-GET THE MET, and this one, spray-painted on a bedsheet, a Krylon-on-Orlon epitaph: DEATH OF A TAILGATER, 12-20-81.