The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  The next morning we got in the car and began the thousand-mile trip across desert, mountain, and prairie to Des Moines. It was a long drive, but everyone was very happy. At Omaha, we didn’t stop—didn’t even slow down—but just kept on going. And if there is a better way to conclude a vacation than by not stopping in Omaha, then I don’t know it.

  Chapter 5

  THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

  In Detroit, Mrs. Dorothy Van Dorn, suing for divorce, complained that her husband 1) put all their food in a freezer, 2) kept the freezer locked, 3) made her pay for any food she ate, and 4) charged her the 3% Michigan sales tax.

  —Time magazine, December 10, 1951

  FUN WAS A DIFFERENT KIND OF THING IN THE 1950S, mostly because there wasn’t so much of it. That is not, let me say, a bad thing. Not a great thing perhaps, but not a bad one either. You learned to wait for your pleasures, and to appreciate them when they came.

  My most pleasurable experience of these years occurred on a hot day in August 1959 shortly after my mother informed me that she had accepted an invitation on my behalf to go to Lake Ahquabi for the day with Milton Milton and his family. This rash acceptance most assuredly was not part of my happiness, believe me, for Milton Milton was the most annoying, the most repellent, the moistest drip the world had yet produced, and his parents and sister were even worse. They were noisy, moronically argumentative, told stupid jokes, and ate with their mouths so wide open you could see all the way to their uvulas and some distance beyond. Mr. Milton had an Adam’s apple the size of a champagne cork and bore as uncanny a resemblance to the Disney character Goofy as was possible without actually being a cartoon dog. His wife was just like him but hairier.

  Their idea of a treat was to pass around a plate of Fig Newtons, the only truly dreadful cookie ever made. They actually yukked when they laughed—an event that gave them a chance to show you just what a well-masticated Fig Newton looks like in its final moments before oblivion (black, sticky, horrible). An hour with the Miltons was like a visit to the second circle of hell. Needless to say, I torched them repeatedly with ThunderVision, but they were strangely ineradicable.

  On the one previous occasion on which I had experienced their hospitality, a slumber party at which it turned out I was the only guest, or possibly the only invitee who showed up, Mrs. Milton had made me—I’ll just repeat that: made me—eat chipped beef on toast, a dish closely modeled on vomit, and then sent us to bed at 8:30 after Milton passed out halfway through I’ve Got a Secret, exhausted after sixteen hours of pretending to be a steam shovel.

  So when my mother informed me that she had, in her amiable dementia, committed me to yet another period in their company, my dismay was practically boundless.

  “Tell me this isn’t happening,” I said and began walking in small, disturbed circles around the carpet. “Tell me this is just a bad, bad dream.”

  “I thought you liked Milton,” said my mother. “You went to his house for a slumber party.”

  “Mom, it was the worst night of my life. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Milton made me eat baked throw up. Then she made me share Milton’s toothbrush because you forgot to pack one for me.”

  “Did I?” said my mother.

  I nodded with a kind of strained stoicism. She had packed my sister’s toilet bag by mistake. It contained two paper-wrapped tampons and a shower cap, but not my toothbrush or the secret midnight feast that I had been faithfully promised. I spent the rest of the evening playing drums with the tampons on Milton’s comatose head.

  “I’ve never been so bored in my life. I told you all this before.”

  “Did you? I honestly don’t recall.”

  “Mom, I had to share a toothbrush with Milton Milton after he’d been eating Fig Newtons.”

  She received this with a compassionate wince.

  “Please don’t make me go to Lake Ahquabi with them.”

  She considered briefly. “Well, all right,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us to visit Sister Gonzaga then.”

  Sister Gonzaga was a great-aunt of formidable mien and yet another of the family’s many nuns from my mother’s side. She was six feet tall and very scary. There was a long-running suspicion in the family that she was actually a man. You always felt that underneath all that starch there was a lot of chest hair. In the summer of 1959, Sister Gonzaga was dying in a local hospital, though not nearly fast enough if you asked me. Spending an afternoon in Sister Gonzaga’s room at the Home for Dying Nuns (I’m not sure that that was its actual name) was possibly the only thing worse than a day out with the Miltons.

  So I went to Lake Ahquabi, in a mood of gloomy submission, crammed into the Miltons’ ancient, dinky Nash, a car with the comfort and stylish zip of a chest freezer, expecting the worst and receiving it. We got heatedly lost for an hour in the immediate vicinity of the state capitol building—something that was almost impossible for any normal family to do in Des Moines—and when we finally reached Ahquabi spent ninety minutes more, with much additional disputation, unloading the car and setting up a base camp on the shady lawn beside the small artificial beach. Mrs. Milton distributed sandwiches, which were made of some kind of pink paste that looked like, and for all I know was, the stuff my grandmother used to secure her dentures to her gums. I went for a little walk with my sandwich and left it with a dog that would have nothing to do with it. Even a procession of ants, I noticed later, had detoured three feet to avoid it.

  Having eaten, we had to sit quietly for forty-five minutes before swimming lest we get cramps and die horribly in six inches of water, which was about as far in as young males ever ventured on account of perennial rumors that the coffee-colored depths of Ahquabi harbored vicious snapping turtles that mistook small boys’ pizzles for tasty food. Mrs. Milton timed this quiet period with an egg timer, and encouraged us to close our eyes and have a little sleep until it was time to swim.

  Far out in the lake there was moored a large wooden platform on which stood an improbably high diving board—a kind of wooden Eiffel Tower. It was, I’m sure, the tallest wooden structure in Iowa, if not the Midwest. The platform was so far out from shore that hardly anyone ever visited it. Just occasionally some teenaged daredevils would swim out to have a look around. Sometimes they would climb the many ladders to the high board, and even cautiously creep out onto it, but they always retreated when they saw just how suicidally far the water was below them. No human being had ever been known to jump from it.

  So it was quite a surprise when, as the egg timer dinged our liberation, Mr. Milton jumped up and began doing neck rolls and arm stretches and announced that he intended to have a dive off the high board. Mr. Milton had been a bit of a diving star at Lincoln High School, as he never failed to inform anyone who spent more than three minutes in his company, but that was on a ten-foot board at an indoor pool. Ahquabi was of another order of magnitude altogether. Clearly, he was out of his mind, but Mrs. Milton was remarkably untroubled. “Okay, hon,” she replied lazily from beneath a preposterous hat. “I’ll have a Fig Newton for you when you get back.”

  Word of the insane intention of the man who looked like Goofy was already spreading along the beach when Mr. Milton jogged into the water and swam with even strokes out to the platform. He was just a tiny, distant stick figure when he got there but even from such a distance the high board seemed to loom hundreds of feet above him—indeed, seemed almost to scrape the clouds. It took him at least twenty minutes to make his way up the zigzag of ladders to the top. Once at the summit, he strode up and down the board, which was enormously long—it had to be to extend beyond the edge of the platform far below—bounced on it experimentally two or three times, then took some deep breaths and finally assumed a position at the fixed end of the board with his arms at his sides. It was clear from his posture and poised manner that he was going to go for it.

  By now all the people on the beach and in the water—several hundred altogether—had stopped whatever they were doing and were
silently watching. Mr. Milton stood for quite a long time, then with a nice touch of theatricality he raised his arms, ran like hell down the long board—imagine an Olympic gymnast sprinting at full tilt toward a distant springboard and you’ve got something of the spirit of it—took one enormous bounce and launched himself high and outward in a perfect swan dive. It was a beautiful thing to behold, I must say. He fell with flawless grace for what seemed whole minutes. Such was the beauty of the moment, and the breathless silence of the watching multitudes, that the only sound to be heard across the lake was the faint whistle of his body tearing through the air toward the water far, far below. It may only be my imagination, but he seemed after a time to start to glow red, like an incoming meteor. He was really moving.

  I don’t know what happened—whether he lost his nerve or realized that he was approaching the water at a murderous velocity or what—but about three-quarters of the way down he seemed to have second thoughts about the whole business and began suddenly to flail, like someone entangled in bedding in a bad dream, or whose chute hasn’t opened. When he was perhaps thirty feet above the water, he gave up on flailing and tried a new tack. He spread his arms and legs wide, in the shape of an X, evidently hoping that exposing a maximum amount of surface area would somehow slow his fall.

  It didn’t.

  He hit the water—impacted really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently. He was towed to shore by two passing fishermen in a rowboat, and carried to a grassy area by half a dozen onlookers who carefully set him down on an old blanket. There he spent the rest of the afternoon on his back, arms and legs bent slightly and elevated. Every bit of frontal surface area, from his thinning hairline to his toenails, had a raw, abraded look, as if he had suffered some unimaginable misfortune involving an industrial sander. Occasionally he accepted small sips of water, but otherwise was too traumatized to speak.

  Later that same afternoon Milton Junior cut himself with a hatchet that he had been told on no account to touch, so that he ended up bleeding, in pain, and in trouble all at the same time. It was the best day of my life.

  OF COURSE, that isn’t saying a huge amount when you consider that the previous best day in my life at this point was when Mr. Sipkowicz, a teacher we didn’t like much, licked a Lincoln Log.

  Lincoln Logs were toy wooden logs with which you could build forts, ranch houses, stockades, bunkhouses, corrals, and many other structures of interest and utility to cowboys, according to the imaginative illustrations on the cylindrical box, though in fact the supplied materials were actually just barely enough to make one small rectangular cabin with one door and one window.

  What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of weeks, the world’s first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln’s early years. Naturally we declined to say how we had made the logs white, prompting pupils and teachers alike to examine them keenly for clues.

  “I bet you did it with lemon juice,” said Mr. Sipkowicz, who was youthful, brash, and odious, and had an unfortunate taste for flashy ties, and who for a single semester had the distinction of being Greenwood’s only male teacher. Before we could stop him (not that we had any intention or desire to, of course) he shot out a long, reptilian tongue and ran it delicately and experimentally—lingeringly, eye-flutteringly—over the longest log in the back wall, which by chance we had prepared only that morning, so that it was still very slightly moist.

  “I can taste lemon, can’t I?” he said with a pleased, knowing look.

  “Not exactly!!!” we cried and he tried again.

  “No, it’s lemon,” he insisted. “I can taste the tartness.” He gave another lick, savoring the flavor with such a deep, concentrated, twitchy intensity that for a moment we thought he had gone into shock and was about to topple over, but it was just his way of relishing the moment. “Definitely lemon,” he said, brightening, and handed it back to us with great satisfaction all round.

  Mr. Sipkowicz’s unbidden licking gave pleasure, of course, but the real joy of the experience was in knowing that we were the first boys in history to get genuine entertainment out of Lincoln Logs, for Lincoln Logs were inescapably pointless and dull—a characteristic they shared with nearly all other toys of the day.

  It would be difficult to say which was the most stupid or disappointing toy of the 1950s since most of them were one or the other, except for those that were both. The one that always leaps to mind for me as most incontestably unsatisfactory was Silly Putty, an oily pink plastic material that did nothing but bounce erratically a dozen or so times before disappearing down a storm drain. (That was actually the best thing about it.) Others, however, might opt for the majestically unamusing Mr. Potato Head, a box of plastic parts that allowed children to confirm the fundamental truth that even with ears, limbs, and a goofy smile a lifeless tuber is a lifeless tuber.

  Also notable for negative ecstasy was Slinky, a coil of metal that could be made to go head over heels down a flight of steps but otherwise did nothing at all, though it did redeem itself slightly from the fact that if you got someone to hold one end—Lumpy Kowalski was always very good for this—and stretched the other end all the way across the street and halfway up a facing slope and then let go, it hit them like a cannonball. In much the same way, Hula-Hoops, those otherwise supremely pointless rings, took on a certain value when used as oversize quoits to ensnare and trip up passing toddlers.

  Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very like a small dose of cough syrup. You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification, then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours. Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course. But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better. And there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained, about eating a product that had neither flavor nor nutritive value.

  You could also get small artificial ice-cream cones made of some crumbly chalklike material, straws containing a gritty sugar so ferociously sour that your whole face would actually be sucked into your mouth like sand collapsing into a hole, root-beer barrels, red-hot cinnamon balls, licorice wheels and whips, greasy candy worms, rubbery dense gelatinlike candies that tasted of unfamiliar (and indeed unlikable) fruits but were a good value as it took more than three hours to eat each one (and three hours more to pick the gluey remnants out of your molars, sometimes with fillings attached), and jawbreakers the size and density of billiard balls, which were the best value of all as they would last for up to three months and had multiple strata that turned your tongue interesting new shades as you doggedly dissolved away one squamous layer after another.

  At Bishop’s, where they had a large and highly regarded assortment of penny candies by the cash register, you could also get a comparatively delicious licorice treat known, with exquisite sensitivity, as nigger babies—though no one actually used that term anymore except my grandmother. Occasionally, when visiting from her hometown of Winfield and dining with us at Bishop’s, she would slip me a quarter and tell me to go and get some candy for the two of us to share later.

  “And don’t forget to get some NIGGER BABIES!” she would shout, to my intense mortification, across half an acre of crowded dining room, causing a hundred or so diners to look up.

  Five minutes lat
er as I returned with the purchase, pressed furtively to outside walls in a vain attempt to escape detection, she would spy me and cry out: “Oh, there you are, Billy. Did you remember to get some NIGGER BABIES? Because I sure do love those…NIGGER BABIES!”

  “Grandma,” I would whisper fiercely, “you shouldn’t say that.”

  “Shouldn’t say what—NIGGER BABIES?”

  “Yes. They’re called ‘licorice babies.’ ”

  “ ‘Nigger baby’ is a bit offensive,” my mom would explain.

  “Oh, sorry,” my grandmother would say, marveling at the delicacy of city people. Then the next time we went to Bishop’s, she would say, “Billy, here’s a quarter. Go and get us some of those—whaddaya call ’em—LICORICE NIGGERS!”

  THE OTHER PLACE TO GET PENNY CANDIES was Grund’s, a small grocery store on Ingersoll Avenue. Grund’s was one of the last mom-and-pop grocers left in the city and certainly the last in our neighborhood. It was run by a doddering couple of adorable minuteness and incalculable antiquity named Mr. and Mrs. Grund. None of the stock had been renewed, or come to that sold, since about 1929. There were things in there that hadn’t been seen in the wider retail world since Gloria Swanson was attractive—Othine Skin Bleach, Fels-Naptha Soap, boxes of Wild Root Hair Tonic with a photograph of Joe E. Brown on the front. Everything was covered in a thick coating of dust, including Mrs. Grund. I believe she may have been dead for some years. Mr. Grund, however, was very much alive and delighted when the bell above his door tinklingly sounded the arrival of new customers, even though it was always children and even though they were there for a single nefarious purpose: to steal from his enormous aged stock of penny candies.