Mike Teavee and the Chocolate Factory

Tags

charlie and the chocolate factory, children's fiction, roald dahl, television

Have you ever read a book that profoundly shaped your life?

I have. The book was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When I read it for the first time in the second grade, I promised myself that I would never, ever behave like those awful, beastly children that accompanied Charlie on the tour of Willy Wonka’s factory. I would not be spoiled like the little peanut heiress Veruca Salt. I would not be sassy like the gum-chewing Violet Bureaugarde. I would not be gluttonous like the greedy Augustus Gloop. Finally, I would not watch television all the time like the vacuous Mike Teavee.

As a new reader and an eight-year-old, I loved the subversively dark humor of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which was turned down for being in poor taste by several publishers in the 1960s, even though Roald Dahl was already a successful author at the time. But I also understood the book to be a cautionary moral tale. When children behave badly, bad things happen, was the lesson I took from it. I was determined not to become one of those bad kids. For most of my childhood, I think I succeeded.

A few months ago, I read the book to my six-year-old son over the course of several bed times. I thought he would enjoy the book, as I did. Perhaps he’d also appreciate that the hero of the book was the humble, good-hearted, impoverished Charlie, not the loud-mouthed brats who won the other four Golden Tickets to the factory.

My son did enjoy the book, especially the songs that the Oompa-Loompas sang each time a child met some grisly fate. The moral component seemed to be lost on him, though.

“What do you think this book was trying to say?” I asked him after we finished the last chapter.

“Always follow the rules,” my son said after some thought.

“Who was your favorite character?”

“Mike Teavee!” he said without hesitation.

“Why Mike Teavee?”

“He loves television and I love television. And I love my iPad,” my son said, leaping off of his bed and reaching for his digital device. “I want to be known as Mike iPad.”

I could barely hide my disappointment.

A few days later, when I was signing him up for a summer reading program at our library, the librarian asked what password we wanted to use on our summer reading online account (because God forbid we actually tabulate the hours on a simple sheet of paper).

“What password do you want to use?” I asked my six-year-old, who was busy trying to balance a Magic Marker between his upper lip and nose at the time.

“I want my password to be ‘TV!’” he said.

“You are killing me, man,” I replied.

So my son’s password for his online summer reading log is “TV,” and his literary hero is Mike Teavee. Somewhere, out there, Roald Dahl is shaking his head. Or maybe he’s laughing wickedly.

Blue Light Special

Tags

1980s, georgia, growing up, lagrange, midnight oil, u2

Kids who grow up in the city don’t know how good they have it.

Provided you have transportation and a little disposable income, you can choose a different activity for every single day of the year if you live in a large metropolitan area. In the city, there are museums, aquariums, zoos, amusement parks, professional sports, shopping centers and even dinosaur-themed restaurants from which to choose. In the city, there is no excuse to ever be bored, even though my son might sometimes disagree with me.

For kids who live in smaller towns, it’s different. Sometimes you have to make your own fun. Sometimes, that fun may be ill-advised.

I was luckier than most. I grew up in a mid-sized town called LaGrange that had a four-year college, a large recreational lake, golf courses, tennis courts and about 10 months of good weather each year. When I was in high school in the late 1980s, they opened up a six-screen cinema in my town, which was a social and cultural game-changer for me and my peers. I saw my first R-rated movie in that theater (Fatal Attraction with Michael Douglas and Glenn Close), even though my friends and I were under-aged. The new Cineplex brought a little bit of big-city daring and decadence to the town of LaGrange, Georgia.

Still, it could get boring at times. We had to make our own fun. My friend Jason and I swore off drinking for our high school careers, and we didn’t quite have enough nerve to swing though the school parking, where a lot of our classmates hung out on Friday and Saturday nights. Some evenings, we just drove around town in Jason’s Volkswagen Jetta, blasting U2 on the tape deck and somehow hoping that Bono’s words would inspire us to drive into the high school parking lot and talk to the cool kids.

One night, just to try something different, we grabbed a flashlight, a roll of duct tape, and a large, blue plastic cup from Jason’s house. Our hope was that, by taping the cup over the flashlight, and turning the light off and on rapidly, we could simulate the kind of pulsing blue light that police officers mounted on the dashboards of their patrol cars. To test our experiment, I stood on the side of the street and watched Jason whiz by in the Jetta a few times, his right arm holding the flashlight over the dash and turning it on and off just as fast as he could. Sure enough, it looked a lot like a police light.

When you are a pair of bored 18-year-olds who suddenly have invented your own police light, your next move is obvious. We hit the road on a warm Saturday night, patrolling the unlit rural routes that wound around and across West Point Lake. At about 10 o’clock that night, we pulled behind a red Chevrolet pick-up that was going about 10 miles above the speed limit. Jason turned the volume down on the Midnight Oil album we’d been listening to. Riding shotgun, I turned on the blue light and held it to the windshield, my thumb doing double-time over the switch to create the perfect effect. I might have even been whistling siren noises at the time.

After a quarter mile or so, the truck slowed and stopped on the gravel shoulder. Jason and I stared at each other in amazement. Did we just pull this guy over? What do we do now?

Jason gave it half a second of thought, then stomped the accelerator. The red pick-up was a blur as we sped by. Jason did not slow down until we entered the city limits. Along the way, I looked nervously in the side-view mirror, expecting to see the Chevy’s headlights cresting the hill behind us, its driver furious at being snookered by a pair of skinny, wanna-be cops in a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta.

Fortunately, we got away. Jason and I took the blue light out on the road a couple more times that summer, but we made only half-hearted attempts at enforcing the county’s traffic code. My friend and I were just a few weeks away from going to college in different parts of the country. Neither of us wanted any trouble when we were so close to our first tastes of freedom.

I sometimes think about that summer and how we might have been charged with a felony if we’d been caught using a flashlight and a plastic cup to transform Jason’s Jetta into a Georgia patrol car. If that happened today, of course, we’d be on the six o’clock news, and all over social media. Our lives would be ruined, at least for a while.

That’s why I feel for the kids growing up in the smaller towns, and maybe even the kids in the cities, too. The tolerance level for teen-aged mistakes is a lot lower these days, and the amount of public shaming is at an all-time high. One act of stupidity, and a kid could be in serious trouble. And who hasn’t done something stupid when they’re young and bored and aching for a little bit of adventure, like pretending to be a patrol officer for a night?

Memories of a Young Prince

Tags

darling nikki, georgia, lennox mall, let's go crazy, music, prince, purple rain, Stephen Roth, turtle records

I bought my first LP with my own money in August 1984 at the Turtle Records in Atlanta’s Lenox Square Mall. The record I bought was Purple Rain. It came with a full-sized poster that showed Prince and his band, The Revolution, wearing pouting expressions. Two Revolution members, Wendy and Lisa, stood tightly together in a way that, back then, suggested scandalous female intimacy.

Over the past two days, countless TV and social media tributes have paid respects to a man who transformed popular music over the span of more than 35 years. The news of Prince’s death was shocking not only because he was only 57 years old, but because so many people my age vividly recall when Prince epitomized everything that was forbidden and dangerous and exciting and new about music. We think of Prince as a restless prodigy in his early 20s, not the guy who released Hit n Run Phase One late last year.

Back in 1984, Prince was not only the most popular recording artist of the day, he was Middle America’s Worst Nightmare, oozing sexuality with a decadent blend of 1970s funk and 1980s rock. He wore eyeliner and lacy outfits, and spent a portion of his concerts thrusting himself on a massive brass bed. It was rumored that Prince sometimes had sex with one of his female cohorts onstage, though nobody in my eighth grade class had any proof during this pre-YouTube dinosaur age.

In 1980s Georgia, where there was no such thing as sex education in public schools and the closest thing to pornography for most boys was the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, you could learn an awful lot by playing “Darling Nikki” over and over on the turntable, which is exactly what we did one night at a friend’s dance party. This was the Purple Rain song that described Nikki “in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine,” easily the most shocking thing any of us had ever heard on vinyl. We were careful to turn the volume down low as we played the song again and again in my friend’s garage, junior high boys and girls nodding to the beat and grinning shyly while our parents drank cocktails and talked about who-knows-what inside the house.

When I bought my first record in 1984, it was more out of a wish to keep up with my peers than because I was a huge Prince fan. I listened to the record many times, captivated by some tracks (“Purple Rain,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” “Take Me With U”) bored by one (“When  Doves Cry”), and confused by others (What did it mean when Lisa asked Wendy if the water was warm? Were they going swimming?).

Years later, I gained a much greater appreciation for Prince’s musical artistry and lyrical prowess (is there any better description of anxious, teenage lust than “The place where your horses run free?”). I don’t have a lot of his music, I’m a casual fan at best, but the news of his death—whatever the cause—is still sad and shocking. For me and other people my age, we not only lost a another great artist to the After World, we got a reminder that Purple Rain was a mighty long time ago.

The Crayon Box

Tags

blog, friendship, michael schwartz, mizzou, san francisco, the crayon box, university of missouri

I met Michael Schwartz during my first semester at the University of Missouri in 1989. We shared an English class with about 10 other easily startled freshmen. Our instructor was a slightly mad fellow by the name of Aristotle Baklava, who did everything in his power to turn English 101 into a left-leaning political science course. Each week, he had us write term papers on different chapters from a book called Courage of Their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court. We wrote about gay rights, freedom of religion, freedom of expression and the uniquely American right to burn the country’s flag at the Republican National Convention. I have to admit I learned a lot about writing in that class. Once my terms papers started taking on a decidedly liberal slant, my grade average magically rose from a low “C” to a solid “A.”

I digress. When you’re in a class that is being led by a crazy man, it is natural to bond with the other inmates, um, students. Michael and I got to know each other because he decided to hit on one of our female classmates. One Friday afternoon, shortly after we were dismissed, he approached Jen, a bubbly girl with long, dishwater blonde hair, and asked if she would like to go with him to a movie that night.

“That sounds great, Mike,” she enthusiastically replied.

Then Jen turned toward me.

“Hey Steve,” she said, “would you like to go to the movies with me and Mike?”

“Sure,” I immediately said, oblivious to Mike’s withering glare. I was an out-of-state student with no friends at school, so the idea of taking in a movie with other people was positively irresistible.

We went to the movies. We saw Sex, Lies and Videotape. I must say, if Mike intended to take Jen on a first date, he could not have selected a more awkward film to watch.

After the movie, the three of us wandered the streets of Columbia, Missouri, talking about our respective upbringings. It turned out that Mike and I had a lot in common. We both came from the South with dreams of hitting it big in journalism. We liked history and politics. We shared an appreciation for dry, sarcastic humor. All in all, Mike and I had a really nice date.

I am not sure what became of Jen. I think she left Mizzou after fall semester to study botany at North Dakota State. Mike, however, is still one of my best friends. Our friendship has survived several moves around the country, careers in newspaper reporting and broadcast news, and get-togethers in Las Vegas, Birmingham, Colorado Springs and Memphis.

Today, Mike has a video production business in San Francisco. He loves the Bay Area, but his time there has come with some challenges. Mike has been blind in one eye since he was a teenager, and his sight in the other eye has continued to deteriorate. He now faces the prospect of losing his vision altogether.

Mike, being the most positive and resilient person I know, has taken a will-do approach to this setback. He recently started an outstanding blog that outlines his next project: to see different parts of the world that he has always wanted to visit. The plan is to experience these places while he can see them for himself. Though his writings on the blog, Mike will take us along on his adventure.

When you have a moment, I strongly recommend you check out Mike’s blog, which is called The Crayon Box. You can also find his twitter feed here.

My college buddy is an excellent writer, and the way he frames up his next challenge is truly inspiring.

Herbie Goes Bananas

Tags

1980, boys, childhood, golf, growing up, herbie goes bananas, parenting, Stephen Roth

My best friend in third grade was a ginger-haired, freckley kid named Rob Fairchild.

Even at nine years old, Rob had a swagger of someone who expected success. He won at every sport he played, and was one of the best golfers for his age in the state. He was a straight-A student who finished his homework each afternoon before getting off the school bus, and whose diorama book report on Charlotte’s Web was something the teachers raved about for years after the fact.

He was a good-looking kid, a kind of a 1970s, bowl-cut version of Ronnie Howard, whom you could easily imagine yelling “Hey Kool-Aid!” in those ads than ran between our after-school cartoons.

The teachers loved Rob. The parents admired him. The girls wanted to do the Hokey Pokey with him at the Skate Inn every Saturday afternoon. The boys liked Rob as much as you could possibly like someone who towered over you in every measurable way.

“Sure,” they’d say, eyes twitching around the schoolyard to see where he might be lurking. “Rob’s pretty cool.”

We didn’t have a term for it back in third grade, but Rob was an Alpha Male. Years later, he applied all that charisma and confidence toward becoming a successful entrepreneur. He patented a bath towel with a Velcro strip that make it easier to wrap around your waist. He called the invention The Belly Hugger. Rob sold millions of Belly Huggers on late-night television and became a minor celebrity in the process. I understand he now has his own island now somewhere near the Caymans.

Rob and I had little in common in third grade. I was a “B” student whose mind wandered into a world of talking cars and space adventures at the first mention of multiplication tables. I played soccer, which in those days was the sport of choice for kids not coordinated enough to throw and catch. I also took piano lessons, which was not real high on the coolness meter back in elementary school.

We were best friends mostly because our dads had management jobs for the same company, and we were the only two kids our age in the still-developing neighborhood between the local golf course and the lake. Nevertheless, Rob and I shared a bond. We used leftover lumber from the home construction sites to build a network of little forts in the woods that surrounded our houses. We stockpiled pine cones to hurl at Rob’s sister on the rare occasions she tried to play with us. We fished, we swam, we rode our bikes and we built rock dams in the creek beds. We often played until sundown and then got yelled at by our moms for tracking red clay into the house. It was a Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn kind of life, and it didn’t seem to matter that Rob could already drive a golf ball 120 yards while I was lucky to get mine past the ladies’ tees.

Things were different between us at school. Rob was aloof and standoff-ish around me. During recess, he was more interested in playing sports than Kick The Can or tag with me and all the motor skill-challenged kids. Then he got mean, heckling me when it was my turn at the plate in kickball, teasing me when a teacher caught me not paying attention in class. Of course, he managed to do all this in a disarming, Opie Taylor sort of way that made the teachers want to do little more than squeeze his freckley little cheeks.

I didn’t get it. Rob and I were best friends back in the neighborhood. We were “blood brothers,” like Bo and Luke Duke. Why would he turn on me in front of the other kids? Many times I wrote the friendship off, certain that Rob Fairchild wanted nothing to do with me, and I with him.

Every afternoon after school, however, my phone would ring. Even before picking up, I knew it was Rob.

“Whatcha doing?” he would ask.

“Nothing,” I’d say, still miffed about the latest schoolyard indignity.

“Come up to the house,” he’d say. “I just found my dad’s Playboy.”

Or something to that effect. I usually went because there wasn’t much else to do but watch a re-run of “Happy Days” or play with my Star Wars figures. And each time I went to Rob’s house, it was good times again: exploring the woods, jumping our bikes off rickety ramps, snagging lumber from a construction site to build our latest fort. Rob and I, to borrow a phrase from America’s most beloved simpleton, were like peas and carrots again.

But the school days were bad, and I tired of my friend’s split personality. The sensible thing would be to ask him to stop being such a jerk. But you just didn’t do that in the Boy World. It was much better, I felt, to conspire against him and plan his eventual demise.

The summer of 1980 was a troubling time. There were hostages in Iran. The oil crisis was looming. Dudley Moore and Burt Reynolds were considered major box-office attractions.

It was also the summer I declared war on Rob Fairchild. It started with a phone call.

“Watcha doing?” Rob asked.

“Nothing.”

“Come up to the house. I got a new tetherball set.”

“No.”

A pause. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘no.’”

“Why ‘no?’”

I took in a deep breath.

“Because,” I said. “I don’t want to.”

He let out a little gasp, as if this were the first time anyone dared defy him. Then he hung up.

Oh, it was on after that. Rob and I recruited foot soldiers from around the neighborhood for the inevitable showdown. I got Marcus McLaughlin, a soon-to-be-second-grader whose chief skill was screaming at an intolerably high pitch. Curt got Aoki, whose family just moved in from Japan and who spoke about three words of English.
Marcus and I struck first, trashing a fort in the woods behind Rob’s house. Then Rob and Aoki ambushed us with a brutal pine cone attack. Then we had a wrestling match near the creek bed, which ended with Rob hurling a large rock at me and Marcus as our moms called us home.

It was a high point in the campaign, to be sure. But to claim total victory, I wanted to beat my enemy at something he held dear. Rob played 18 holes of golf almost every day that summer, usually with boys much older than him. He was becoming something of a local legend, and he almost won his age group in a statewide tournament that year. If I was to bring Rob down, it would have to be on the links.

I was under no illusion that I could do that myself, of course. But I had a friend, a ringer, whom I knew Rob despised and couldn’t resist playing. I set up a four-hole tournament between Rob and Jason Payne, with the prize being a packet of orange Titleist balls. My ace-in-the-hole was a little rule that, for every cuss word one of the players uttered during the event, a shot would be added to their score. Rob’s cussing addiction was well-known by then, even by the adults. I was confident he couldn’t play four holes without swearing.

I was right, sort of. He said, “God-dangit,” after teeing off on the third hole, which cost him a stroke and the match. There was a hot argument at the final green over whether or not this qualified as a true cuss word before Rob pinned my friend to the ground, grabbed the tournament prize and ran home.

Furious, I marched over to the Fairchild residence to retrieve my golf balls.

“You know, Rob won the tournament fair and square,” Mrs. Fairchild said when she answered the door.

“Yes ma’am,” I replied.

“He’s upstairs crying right now. He’s very upset.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“I’m giving you your balls back because I don’t want any more trouble between you boys. You used to be such good friends.”

“Yes ma’am. I know.”

I felt bad about the tournament. If I could have articulated it in my soon-to-be fourth grade mind, I would have said the whole thing made me feel petty and foolish. I had taken things too far, and I thought that maybe it was time to make peace with Rob Fairchild. Beside, another school year was looming around the corner, and I soon would be in the same room with him seven hours a day.

A week or so after the tournament, I bumped into Rob at the swimming pool, waiting his turn to go off the high dive. He sat on a concrete bench, making little white marks on the armrest with a spare golf tee.

“That’s pretty neat,” I remarked. “I didn’t know you could draw with a golf tee.”

“That’s because you’re stupid,” he said. Then he climbed the diving board and made the coolest back flip anybody had ever seen.

A few hours later, I was at home, watching an old episode of “F-Troop,” when the phone rang.

“Watcha doing?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Wanna go see a movie?”

I paused before answering. “What’s playing?”

“Herbie Goes Bananas.”

In those pre-cable, pre-Internet, pre-everything days, you didn’t turn down an invitation to a movie, even from your nemesis. It just wasn’t done. Besides, I had always liked ol’ Herbie and had seen multiple advertisements about the new movie on TV. For a night, anyway, Rob and I could be friends.

“Okay,” I said.

Sitting in the front row of a theater watching a movie about the Love Bug breaking up a counterfeiting ring in Mexico might not seem like quality entertainment to you, but to a nine-year-old boy in 1980 it was about the most exotic thing imaginable. Rob and I ate our Sweet Tarts and chewed our Lemonheads, and there was no mention of our three-month war as we took in the talents of Cloris Leachman and Harvey Korman. Afterward, Rob and I sneaked into The Blues Brothers and got to watch the scene where the National Guard and about 50,000 Chicago police chase down Jake and Elwood. The car crashes, we both agreed, were top-notch.

“Whatcha doing tomorrow?” Rob asked before his mom dropped me off at my house.

“I dunno,” I said. “Watching TV, I guess.”

“Come over to my place. I got a new Sea Monkeys set.”

I pause for a moment, suspecting that we were falling back into a familiar routine.

“Okay,” I finally said, “that sounds cool.”

The Dean and the Sociopath

Tags

failure, grades, greenville, high school, lying, parenting, report cards

People who know me in my adult life often act surprised when I tell them I was a screw-up in high school. I guess it is a good thing that most of them find that surprising. They didn’t know me my freshman and sophomore years, which I was, at best, a “C” student and, at worst, an “F” student.

I once got a zero on a biology test when my teacher caught me looking at my notes. Another time, in freshman English, I got a zero on a test because I somehow forgot to read A Raisin in the Sun. I was so panic-stricken during that test that I pretended to “forget” to turn it in at the end of class. Instead, I rushed into the school library, desperately searching for a paperback copy of A Raisin in the Sun so I could scribble down a few answers. Sadly, I never found the book and have not read it to this day.

During sophomore year, I found chemistry to be completely out of my realm of understanding. I somehow mustered a 70 average in chemistry for the year. Yes, I just barely escaped having to repeat my sophomore year.

The lousy grades were not a big deal with my parents because, for the most part, they didn’t know about them. For half of my freshman year and all of sophomore year, I went to a private school Greenville, South Carolina. We were new to town and my parents didn’t know any of my teachers or the other kids’ parents. It was easy for me to hide the fact that I was regularly racking up failing grades in Latin, chemistry and geometry. I covered it up in a way that would make Richard Nixon smile. Every eight weeks, when it was time to bring home another report card, I went to the school computer lab and invented my own report card, awarding myself A’s and B’s where there should have been C’s and D’s. I forged my parent’s signatures on the real report card, and they unquestioningly signed the version I gave them. They had no reason to doubt its authenticity because they had never actually seen a real report card from my school.

I felt horrible about this. I wanted to tell my parents the truth but, like Watergate, I guess things kind of spiraled out of control. I was not a complete monster. however. My dad and I had a deal in those days that, if all my grades were 85 or higher, he would help me get my own used car. I made sure that at least one of my doctored grades fell just shy of an 85 because getting a car based on a pack of lies was an ethical bridge that even I was unwilling to cross.

No cover-up lasts forever. Mine ended on a spring day in 1987, which I got a 1050 on my Pre-SAT. My mother was so elated by the score that she wanted to talk with the school dean about my future college prospects. The dean of our school was a lanky, bespectacled man named Dean Dingledine (pronounced: “Dingle-DEAN”). Because he was the dean, his full title was actually “Dean Dean Dingledine.”

“You know,” my mom said over dinner one summer night. “I really do need to set up a time to talk with Dean Dingledine about your SAT score, and what kinds of colleges you should apply to.”

I took a little extra time chewing my pizza. I knew the dean would find this conversation ridiculous, based on the grades I had been making. He might hand my mother a couple of brochures to a community college or a vo-tech school and suggest that we start there.

“Mom,” I finally said after a long swig from my glass of milk. “I need to tell you something about my grades.”

I told her everything. Well, most of everything. Mom kept the appointment with Dean Dean Dingledine anyway. The dean was incredulous when she handed him one of my forged documents.

“This doesn’t look anything like our report cards!” he said.

“Well, I’ve never seen your report cards,” Mom replied. “What does one look like?”

Even though it was summer, the dean and my mother agreed that the school should administer some form of punishment. So for one week in July, I reported each morning to the dean’s office for a chat, then spent the rest of the day pulling weeds and picking up rocks on the school softball fields. My first conversation with the dean was uncomfortable. This was the summer of Ollie North and the Iran-Contra hearings.

“Lying gets you nowhere,” Dean Dingledine explained. “Just look what happened with Watergate. And now we have Iran-Contra and it’s like, ‘Here we go again.'”

I nodded, not knowing what to say.

Later that month, my parents sent me to a therapist. She had me do a series of personality tests. One test suggested I might have a future in teaching. Another test wasn’t quite so positive. The therapist told my parents there was a strong likelihood that I was a sociopath. My parents laughed, thanked her for the analysis, and we never saw her again.

Later that summer we returned to my hometown of LaGrange, where my parents knew many of the teachers and most of the other parents. I decided to stop lying and misleading my parents or anyone else. I managed to turn my grades around and eventually attended the University of Missouri.

I don’t know what became of Dean Dingledine, but I have to thank him and my parents for the roles they played in turning my life around. Otherwise, who knows what I would be doing today?

What a Game

Tags

1980, hockey, lake placid, miracle on ice, olympics, president carter, russia, team u.s.a., u.s.s.r., winter olympics

My first vivid sports memory came while riding in the back of my friend’s Oldsmobile station wagon on the way to the Skate Inn on a Saturday morning.

“Did you see that game last night?” my friend asked.

“What game?” I replied.

“The hockey game, dummy,” he said. “We beat the Russians.”

“It was incredible,” his mom chimed in from the front seat. “It was the most amazing game I’ve ever seen.”

“Everyone was screaming, ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’”

“Really?” I said, feeling misinformed. Hockey wasn’t something people talked much about in LaGrange, Georgia. “The Russians, huh?”

I had a vague notion that the Olympics were going on because my dad had taken over our television set, demanding the channel be switched to ABC all week long during primetime hours. One night, we watched some guy in a skin-tight yellow suit named Eric Heiden skate around in circles, and it was pretty boring. I remember being very disappointed about having to miss The Dukes of Hazzard on Friday night, and I probably ended up retreating to my Star Wars figures and army soldiers in the playroom. Somehow, I missed the news that we beat the Russians.

Circling the rink of the Skate Inn while the speakers played Blondie and Michael Jackson, I thought about the Russians and what beating them meant. I was in 3rd grade, so my only understanding of Russia was this big, wide expanse of pink across Europe and Asia that was called the “Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.” The Russians, my teacher told us, were not our friends. Their people were very poor, and had to wait in long lines for basic things like toilet paper. Yet their military was very powerful. They had just taken over some place called Afghanistan, and the President had gone on television and was very upset about it. The President went on TV a lot in those days, usually to talk about how we needed to save more energy. It was horrible because he was on all the channels, and you just had to wait him out—like waiting for a storm to pass before you could go outside to play—until he was done speaking and Happy Days could come back on.

It would take a while for me to realize the gravity of beating the Russians at that particular time in history with an amateur U.S. hockey team that was not expected to win anything. They would make the cover of the Sports Illustrated magazine that my dad read every week, then there was an awards-show television special about the team that my babysitter gushed over, and then there was the inevitable made-for-TV movie. It was such a momentous culmination of sports, politics and a fairy tale ending that I could almost convince myself, years later, that I had actually seen the game (or the replay of the game, since the original broadcast was tape-delayed for a primetime audience).

I didn’t see it, though. If it had taken place two years later, when I was into sports big-time, I would have been all over it. In 2010, the U.S. hockey team took Team Canada to overtime before losing the Gold Medal. That was an exciting game. Even if the Americans had won, however, it couldn’t have compared with The Miracle On Ice, the one I missed.

“Did you watch the game last night?” another friend asked me over Cokes at the Skate Inn. “My dad jumped so high, he almost put a hole in the ceiling!”

“Yeah,” I said, looking down at my skates. “What a game.”

Friday, First Date

Tags

1980s, billy joel, binanca, dating, fiction, high school, Stephen Roth, teenagers

Caroline Clooney was not the prettiest girl in the 10th grade class at Calvary Presbyterian School. She didn’t talk much, either. But she was blond and popular, and she had clear, tan skin. She embarrassed easily and had a laugh that made up for not having much to say.

Pete had been thinking about Caroline for most of the school year, and he even talked to her a couple of times. One Friday after school, she knocked on the door of his house selling magazines for the Spirit Squad. They exchanged nervous laughs and Pete bought a subscription to Popular Mechanics. He thought about that encounter all weekend, rehearsing it over and over in his mind like a favorite skit from Saturday Night Live. Pete decided that when he got his driver’s license, the first thing he would do was take Caroline Clooney out on a date.

Pretty soon, that fateful day arrived. Pete sat beside his phone for 30 minutes, school directory spread out in his lap. He picked up the receiver, dialed the first four digits of her number, then hung up. This went on for another 30 minutes before Pete reached that seventh digit, and Caroline Clooney answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Caroline?” Pete said. Then he paused because he didn’t know what else to say. He never expected to make it this far.

“Yes.”

“This is Pete.” Another pause. “Pete Miller from sixth period biology.”

“Oh,” she said, laughing in that adorably embarrassed way. “Hi, Pete.”

“I was just wondering,” he said, then he paused again. How to say it? How to encapsulate what he wanted to do in just a few words? There were so many ways to go about it. Dammit, Miller, he said to himself. You’re losing her. Just spit it out.

“Hello?” she said again.

“I was just wondering what you were doing Friday night, because if you aren’t doing anything Friday night, I wanted to see if you might like to go out to dinner with me and maybe go to a movie, too?”

“Oh,” she said.

“Well,” she added.

And what she said next was very telling, though Pete would not catch on until years later.

“Well, Pete, that sounds fun. I’d love to do that, but I’ve got this thing…this thing I’m doing… You know, my sister’s on the swim team and she’s got a… Actually, my mom and dad have this, uhm…and they wouldn’t really like it if I, uhm…”

Pete heard a long sigh, like someone was very slowly letting air out of a balloon.

“Oh, what the hell? I’ll go out with you. What time?”

Pete told her the time, then got off the phone as quickly as he could. He ran across the family room and did a David Lee Roth jump-kick into the oversized sofa.

Friday rolled around, and Pete spent much of that afternoon preparing for his date. He took a shower, slapped two splashes of Drakkar aftershave on his face, and reveled in the burn. He put on a buttoned-down shirt and khakis, and set his Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits tape at just the right romantic songs to play in the car. Finally, he unsheathed a tube of Binanca he’d gotten in his Christmas stocking, sampled its mint-fresh taste, and put the little bottle of breath freshener in his back pocket for later. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

He picked up Caroline in his mother’s burgundy Buick Park Avenue. “Where do you want to eat?” he asked.

“Somewhere where no one can see us together,” she said. “I mean, where we can be alone.”

“Great,” Pete said. Mr. Joel did most of the talking after that, crooning about how she’ll take what you give her as long as it’s free.

Pete drove to the only Mexican restaurant in town, a place called La Fiesta. Which was an appropriate name, Pete thought, as he and Caroline strolled through an entryway adorned with piñatas, Corona labels, and red, white and green streamers. The atmosphere was definitely celebratory.

The place was crowded. It was La Fiesta on a Friday night, after all. After what seemed like an eternity, the hostess led Pete and Caroline to a table near the bar. As Pete sat in his chair, he felt the tube of Binanca split open and explode in the seat of his pants. A light mist rose over the table. “Shit,” Pete said.

“What’s wrong?” Caroline asked.

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Once safely in a room labeled, “Senors,” Pete disposed of the ruined breath freshener and surveyed the damage. Sure enough, there was a big, wet area on the right butt cheek of his khakis where the Binanca resided.

“Shit,” he said. No amount of paper towels would fix this mess.

After a few minutes, he returned to the table. They ordered cheese dip and two Cokes. They actually talked, mostly about what Caroline was up to – Spirit Squad and National Honor Society and some other things. Pete didn’t even bring up the idea of driving to the secluded cul-de-sac at Cantering Downs, the new neighborhood in town. He settled instead on Beverly Hills Cop II – two hours of blissful movie watching when he didn’t have to say or do anything.

“Thanks,” Caroline Clooney said when he dropped her off in the circle drive in front of her house. “I had a good time.”

“Me, too,” he said, secure in the knowledge that, if he chose to, he would never, ever have to do something like this again.