The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (4 page)

You never got more than one shot because if the bomb missed the target and hit the table—as it nearly always did—it would explode spectacularly in a thousand candy-coated shards, wonderfully startling to the diners, but a call to arms to Mrs. Musgrove, who would come flying up the stairs at about the speed that the M&M had gone down, giving you less than five seconds to scramble out a window and onto a fire escape and away to freedom.

Des Moines’ greatest commercial institution was Younker Brothers, the principal department store downtown. Younkers was enormous. It occupied two buildings, separated at ground level by a public alley, making it the only department store I’ve ever known, possibly the only one in existence, where you could be run over while going from menswear to cosmetics. Younkers had an additional outpost across the street, known as the Store for Homes, which housed its furniture departments and which could be reached by means of an underground passageway beneath Eighth Street, via the white goods department. I’ve no idea why, but it was immensely satisfying to enter Younkers from the east side of Eighth and emerge a short while later, shopping completed, on the west side. People from out in the state used to come in specially to walk the passageway and to come out across the street and say, “Hey. Whoa. Golly.”

Younkers was the most elegant, up-to-the-minute, briskly efficient, satisfyingly urbane place in Iowa. It employed twelve hundred people. It had the state’s first escalators—“electric stairways” they were called in the early days—and first air-conditioning. Everything about it—its silkily swift revolving doors, its gliding stairs, its whispering elevators, each with its own white-gloved operator—seemed designed to pull you in and keep you happily, contentedly consuming. Younkers was so vast and wonderfully rambling that you seldom met anyone who really knew it all. The book department inhabited a shadowy, secretive balcony area, reached by a pokey set of stairs, that made it cozy and clublike—a place known only to aficionados. It was an outstanding book department, but you can meet people who grew up in Des Moines in the 1950s who had no idea that Younkers
had
a book department.

But its
sanctum sanctorum
was the Tea Room, a place where doting mothers took their daughters for a touch of elegance while shopping. Nothing about the Tea Room remotely interested me until I learned of a ritual that my sister mentioned in passing. It appeared that young visitors were invited to reach into a wooden box containing small gifts, each beautifully wrapped in white tissue and tied with ribbon, and select one to take away as a permanent memento of the occasion. Once my sister passed on to me a present she had acquired and didn’t much care for—a die-cast coach and horses. It was only two and a half inches long, but exquisite in its detailing. The doors opened. The wheels turned. A tiny driver held thin metal reins. The whole thing had obviously been hand-painted by some devoted, underpaid person from the defeated side of the Pacific Ocean. I had never seen, much less owned, such a fine thing before.

From time to time after that for years I besought them to take me with them when they went to the Tea Room, but they always responded vaguely that they didn’t like the Tea Room so much anymore or that they had too much shopping to do to stop for lunch. (Only years later did I discover that in fact they went every week; it was one of those secret womanly things moms and daughters did together, like having periods and being fitted for bras.) But finally there came a day when I was perhaps eight or nine that I was shopping downtown with my mom, with my sister not there, and my mother said to me, “Shall we go to the Tea Room?”

I don’t believe I have ever been so eager to accept an invitation. We ascended in an elevator to a floor I didn’t even know Younkers had. The Tea Room was the most elegant place I had ever been—like a stateroom from Buckingham Palace magically transported to the Middle West of America. Everything about it was starched and classy and calm. There was light music of a refined nature and the tink of cutlery on china and of ice water carefully poured. I cared nothing for the food, of course. I was waiting only for the moment when I was invited to step up to the toy box and make a selection.

When that moment came, it took me forever to decide. Every little package looked so perfect and white, so ready to be enjoyed. Eventually, I chose an item of middling size and weight, which I dared to shake lightly. Something inside rattled and sounded as if it might be die cast. I took it to my seat and carefully unwrapped it. It was a miniature doll—an Indian baby in a papoose, beautifully made but patently for a girl. I returned with it and its disturbed packaging to the slightly backward-looking fellow who was in charge of the toy box.

“I seem to have got a
doll
,” I said, with something approaching an ironic chuckle.

He looked at it carefully. “That’s surely a shame because you only git one try at the gift box.”

“Yes, but it’s a
doll
,” I said. “For a girl.”

“Then you’ll just have to git you a little girlfriend to give it to, won’tcha?” he answered and gave me a toothy grin and an unfortunate wink.

Sadly, those were the last words the poor man ever spoke. A moment later he was just a small muffled shriek and a smoldering spot on the carpet.

Too late he had learned an important lesson. You really should never fuck with the Thunderbolt Kid.

Chapter 2

WELCOME TO KID WORLD

DETROIT, MICH. (AP)
—Great news for boys! A prominent doctor has defended a boy’s right to be dirty. Dr. Harvey Flack, director of the magazine
Family Doctor,
said in the September issue: “Boys seem to know instinctively a profound dermatological truth—that an important element of skin health is the skin’s own protective layer of grease. This should not be disturbed too frequently by washing.”

—
The Des Moines Register
, August 28, 1958

SO THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT NOT VERY MUCH:
about being small and getting larger slowly. One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World—five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable—it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.

The slowest place of all in my corner of the youthful firmament was the large cracked-leather dental chair of Dr. D. K. Brewster, our spooky, cadaverous dentist, while waiting for him to assemble his instruments and get down to business. There time didn’t move forward at all. It just hung.

Dr. Brewster was the most unnerving dentist in America. He was, for one thing, about 108 years old and had more than a hint of Parkinsonism in his wobbly hands. Nothing about him inspired confidence. He was perennially surprised by the power of his own equipment.
“Whoa!”
he’d say as he briefly enlivened some screaming device or other. “You could do some damage with
that
, I bet!”

Worse still, he didn’t believe in novocaine. He thought it dangerous and unproven. When Dr. Brewster, humming mindlessly, drilled through rocky molar and found the pulpy mass of tender nerve within, it could make your toes burst out the front of your shoes.

We appeared to be his only patients. I used to wonder why my father put us through this seasonal nightmare, and then I heard Dr. Brewster congratulating him one day on his courageous frugality and I understood at once, for my father was the twentieth century’s cheapest man. “There’s no point in putting yourself to the danger and expense of novocaine for anything less than the whole or partial removal of a jaw,” Dr. Brewster was saying.

“Absolutely,” my father agreed. Actually he said something more like “Abmmffffmmfff,” as he had just stepped from Dr. Brewster’s chair and wouldn’t be able to speak intelligibly for at least three days, but he nodded with feeling.

“I wish more people felt like you, Mr. Bryson,” Dr. Brewster added. “That will be three dollars, please.”

SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS
were the longest days in Kid World. Sunday mornings alone could last for up to three months depending on the season. In central Iowa for much of the 1950s there was no television at all on Sunday mornings, so generally you just sat with a bowl of soggy Cheerios watching a test pattern until WOI-TV sputtered to life sometime between about 11:25 and noon—they were fairly relaxed about Sunday starts at WOI—with an episode of
Sky King
, starring the neatly kerchiefed Kirby Grant, “America’s favorite flying cowboy” (also its only flying cowboy; also the only one with reversible names). Sky was a rancher by trade, but spent most of his time cruising the Arizona skies in his beloved Cessna,
The Songbird
, spotting cattle rustlers and other earthbound miscreants. He was assisted in these endeavors by his dimple-cheeked, pertly buttocked niece Penny, who provided many of us with our first tingly inkling that we were indeed on the road to robust heterosexuality.

Even at six years old, and even in an age as intellectually undemanding as the 1950s, you didn’t have to be hugely astute to see that a flying cowboy was a fairly flimsy premise for an action series. Sky could only capture villains who lingered at the edge of grassy landing strips and to whom it didn’t occur to run for it until Sky had landed, taxied to a safe halt, climbed down from the cockpit, assumed an authoritative stance, and shouted: “Okay, boys, freeze!”—a process that took a minute or two, for Kirby Grant was not, it must be said, in the first flush of youth. Altogether seventy-two episodes of
Sky King
were made, all practically identical. These WOI tirelessly (and, one presumes, economically) repeated for the first dozen years of my life and probably a good deal beyond. Almost the only thing that could be positively said in their favor was that they were more diverting than a test pattern.

The illimitable nature of weekends was both a good and a necessary thing because you always had such a lot to do in those days. A whole morning could be spent just getting the laces on your sneakers right since all sneakers in the 1950s had more than seven dozen lace holes and the laces were fourteen feet long. Each morning you would jump out of bed to find that the laces had somehow become four feet longer on one side of the shoe than the other. Quite how sneakers did this just by being left on the floor overnight was a question that could not be answered—it was one of those things, like nuns and bad weather, that life threw at you from time to time—but it took endless reserves of patience and scientific judgment to get them right, for no matter how painstakingly you shunted the laces around the holes, they always came out at unequal lengths. In fact, the more carefully you shunted, the more unequal they generally became. When by some miracle you finally got them exactly right, the second lace would always snap, leaving you to sigh and start again.

The makers of sneakers also thoughtfully pocked the soles with numberless crevices, craters, chevrons, mazes, crop circles, and other rubbery hieroglyphs, so that when you stepped in a moist pile of dog shit, as you most assuredly did within three bounds of leaving the house, they provided additional absorbing hours of pastime while you cleaned them out with a stick, gagging quietly but oddly content.

Hours more of weekend time needed to be devoted to picking burrs off socks, taking corks out of bottle caps, peeling frozen wrappers off Popsicles, prising apart Oreo cookies without breaking either chocolate disk half or disturbing the integrity of the filling, and carefully picking labels off jars and bottles for absolutely no reason.

In such a world, injuries and other physical setbacks were actually welcomed. If you got a splinter you could pass an afternoon, and attract a small devoted audience, seeing how far you could insert a needle under your skin—how close you could get to actual surgery. If you got sunburned you looked forward to the moment when you could peel off a sheet of translucent epidermis that was essentially the size of your body. Scabs in Kid World were cultivated the way older people cultivate orchids. I had knee scabs that I kept for up to four years, that were an inch and three-quarters thick and into which you could press thumbtacks without rousing my attention. Nosebleeds were much admired, needless to say, and anyone with a nosebleed was treated like a celebrity for as long as it ran.

Because days were so long and so little occurred, you were prepared to invest long periods in just sitting and watching things on the off chance that something diverting might happen. For years, whenever my father announced that he was off to the lumberyard I dropped everything to accompany him in order to sit quietly on a stool in the wood-cutting room in the hope that Moe, the man who trimmed wood to order on a big buzz saw, would send one of his few remaining digits flying. He had already lost most of six or seven fingers, so the chances of a lively accident always seemed good.

Buses in Des Moines in those days were electrically powered, and drew their energy from a complicated cat’s cradle of overhead wires, to which each was attached by means of a metal arm. Especially in damp weather, the wires would spark like fireworks at a Mexican fiesta as the arm rubbed along them, vividly underscoring the murderous potency of electricity. From time to time, the bus-arm would come free of the wires and the driver would have to get out with a long pole and push it back into place—an event that I always watched with the keenest interest because my sister assured me that there was every chance he would be electrocuted.

Other long periods of the day were devoted to just seeing what would happen—what would happen if you pinched a match head while it was still hot or made a vile drink and took a sip of it or focused a white-hot beam of sunlight with a magnifying glass on your Uncle Dick’s bald spot while he was napping. (What happened was that you burned an amazingly swift, deep hole that would leave Dick and a team of specialists at Iowa Lutheran Hospital puzzled for weeks.)

Thanks to such investigations and the abundance of time that made them possible, I knew more things in the first ten years of my life than I believe I have known at any time since. I knew everything there was to know about our house for a start. I knew what was written on the undersides of tables and what the view was like from the tops of bookcases and wardrobes. I knew what was to be found at the back of every closet, which beds had the most dust balls beneath them, which ceilings the most interesting stains, where exactly the patterns in wallpaper repeated. I knew how to cross every room in the house without touching the floor, where my father kept his spare change and how much you could safely take without his noticing (one-seventh of the quarters, one-fifth of the nickels and dimes, as many of the pennies as you could carry). I knew how to relax in an armchair in more than one hundred positions and on the floor in approximately seventy-five more. I knew what the world looked like when viewed through a Jell-O lens. I knew how things tasted—damp washcloths, pencil ferrules, coins and buttons, almost anything made of plastic that was smaller than, say, a clock radio, mucus of every variety of course—in a way that I have more or less forgotten now. I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy chubbos in
Masterpieces of World Painting
to a cartoon by Peter Arno in the latest issue of
The New Yorker
to my father’s small private library of girlie magazines in a secret place known only to him, me, and 111 of my closest friends in his bedroom.

I knew how to get between any two properties in the neighborhood, however tall the fence or impenetrable the hedge that separated them. I knew the cool feel of linoleum on bare skin and what everything smelled like at floor level. I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting—the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush. I knew how to appreciate a really good fart, whether mine or someone else’s.

The someone else was nearly always Buddy Doberman, who lived across the alley, a secretive lane that ran in a neighborly fashion behind our houses. Buddy was my best friend for the first portion of my life. We were extremely close. He was the only human being whose anus I have ever looked at closely, or indeed at all, just to see what one looks like (reddish, tight, and very slightly puckered, as I recall with a rather worrying clarity), and he was good-tempered and had wonderful toys to play with, as his parents were both generous and well-to-do.

He was sweetly stupid, too, which was a bonus. When he and I were four his grandfather gave us a pair of wooden pirate swords that he had made in his workshop and we went with them more or less straight to Mrs. Van Pelt’s prized flower border, which ran for about thirty yards along the alley. In a whirl of frenzied motion that anticipated by several years the lively destructive actions of a Weedwhacker, we decapitated and eviscerated every one of her beloved zinnias in a matter of seconds. Then, realizing the enormity of what we had just done—Mrs. Van Pelt showed these flowers at the state fair; she talked to them; they were her children—I told Buddy that this was not a good time for me to be in trouble on account of my father had a fatal disease that no one knew about, so would he mind taking all the blame? And he did. So while he was sent to his room at three o’clock in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day as a weepy face at a high window, I was on our back porch with my feet up on the rail, gorging on fresh watermelon and listening to selected cool disks on my sister’s portable phonograph. From this I learned an important lesson: lying is always an option worth trying. I spent the next six years blaming Buddy for everything bad that happened in my life. I believe he eventually even took the rap for burning the hole in my Uncle Dick’s head even though he had never met my Uncle Dick.

THEN, AS NOW,
Des Moines was a safe, wholesome city. The streets were long, straight, leafy, and clean and had solid middle-American names: Woodland, University, Pleasant, Grand. (There was a local joke, much retold, about a woman who was goosed on Grand and thought it was Pleasant.) It was a nice city—a comfortable city. Most businesses were close to the road and generally had lawns out front instead of parking lots. Public buildings—post offices, schools, hospitals—were always stately and imposing. Gas stations often looked like little cottages. Diners (or roadhouses) brought to mind the type of cabins you might find on a fishing trip. Nothing was designed to be particularly helpful or beneficial to cars. It was a greener, quieter, less intrusive world.