BOOKS: STING-RAY AFTERNOONS

DUCK...DUCK...DUCK...GOOSE...

Warning: Too much nostalgia can lead to dizziness and nausea

by Don Stradley

I grew up in a rather strange household by American  standards. Things like Little League baseball, Schwinn bikes, and television game shows were considered the obsessions of people who had nothing better to do, people with empty heads and empty lives. Me, I was taught how to cast bullets for a .45 automatic, and how to tuck a rifle deep into my shoulder so it wouldn't knock me down when I pulled the trigger. By age 10 I'd visited the Farmers' Museum in upstate New York, and could name every heavyweight boxing champion going backwards to Paddy Ryan, the "Troy Giant." I'd occasionally see kids in their locally sponsored baseball uniforms, and I'd think, "Those poor simpletons. They've been brainwashed." I was pretty sure I wasn't missing anything, though I was slightly envious that the neighborhood coaches would bring the teams to Dog & Suds, a highway stand that served nothing but root beer and hotdogs. Delicious! Fortunately, Steve Rushin's new book, Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir, is here to fill me in on what I missed. Perhaps I wasn't part of the standard U.S.A. family unit, but from what he describes, I didn't miss much.  

We know from the introduction what sort of book this will be. Rushin is going to start from the minute he was born, and he's going to tell us about every damned household item and brand name that came into the Rushin home in Bloomington, Minnesota. Not only does he fetishize such objects as BIC pens, but he will stop mid chapter and give us a mini-bio of Marcel Bich, the founder of the BIC company. This is mildly amusing at first, and Rushin's a good enough writer to keep the story puffing along, but a little of this would go a long way. One hundred pages in, after an ode to Pink Pearl erasers, I was exhausted and ready to cry uncle. I didn't give a damn what brand of soap this family used, or what they had for dinner on Tuesdays, or where Rushin and his shithead siblings shopped for their school clothes. Rushin, who has written for Sports Illustrated, fills a few pages with Minnesota hockey lore,  and I remember some of the players he mentions, like Jude Drouin, whose massive sideburns were like "two shag carpet samples that ripple in the breeze," but then it's back to the minutia. He writes as if he expects us to applaud every stinkin' cereal and toy he mentions. (Hey everybody! Remember Count Chocula? Yay!)

 The inspiration here is probably Jean Shepard, who wrote about his own childhood in a way that was funny and ridiculous. Shepard wrote short pieces - you have probably seen A Christmas Story, which was based on Shepard's writing -  because he knew nostalgia is flimsy stuff and  works best in a short blast. Shepard's characters were also larger than life, almost cartoonish, which made them entertaining. Rushin's characters are smaller than life. The closest he comes to a character we'd like to know more about is a mysterious grammar school janitor who showed up to a Christmas gathering to sing "Silent Night" and brought the house down. Everyone else in the book is a stick figure. Perhaps Rushin was too worn out from writing such purple prose as "TV is a security blanket, not altogether different from the Sears Orlon blanket on my bed - warm, fuzzy, narcotizing, vividly colored, and crackling with static electricity." 

Oh, fuck off.

 The problem with nostalgia is that it's cheap. No matter how much you loved that first pair of Adidas, they were still just a pair of shoes. Rushin also wants to rhapsodize about the fall of Bloomington as a major city, but in his hands the city of his childhood is reduced to stats and dates. (Do sports writers see the world only through statistics?) We're clobbered with such long stretches of brand name dropping - he even inserts an entire page from the old Sears Wish Book, which in truth is only slightly more monotonous than the rest of this toy store flashback - that  we hardly notice the shift when he tries to get serious. He potshots us in the last chapter with the death of his mother, a kindly woman, but after 300 pages of Topps baseball cards and wedgies, it feels like a late effort to give his book some heft. Of course, any one of the chapters in Sting-Ray Afternoons would make a nice piece in the Sunday supplement. Maybe the best way to read it is one chapter per month, spread out over several years. Otherwise, Rushin and his family of squares is hard to take in one gulp. I kept hoping Scut Farkus would run in from a Jean Shepard story and kick one of Rushin's brothers in the balls, anything to break up these reveries about The Brady Bunch and Marie Osmond and those damned BIC pens.