The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  At the box-office window, when the ticket lady hesitated, my sister told her that we had a cousin in California who had a role in the movie and that we had promised our mother, a busy woman of some importance (“She’s a columnist for the Register, you know”), that we would watch the film on her behalf and provide a full report afterward. As stories go, it was not perhaps the most convincing, but my sister had the face of an angel, a keen manner, and that fluffy, innocent hat; it was a combination that was impossible to disbelieve. So the ticket seller, after a moment’s fluttery uncertainty, let us in. I was very proud of my sister for this, too.

  After such an adventure, the movie itself was a bit of an anticlimax, especially when my sister told me that we didn’t actually have a cousin in the film, or indeed in California. No one got naked and there were no fingers in ears or toes in hatboxes or anything. It was just lots of unhappy people talking to lampshades and curtains. I went off and locked the stalls in the men’s room, though as there were only two of them at the Ingersoll even that was a bit disappointing.

  By chance, soon afterward I had an additional experience that shed a little more light on the matter of sex. Coming in from play one Saturday and finding my mother missing from her usual haunts, I decided impulsively to call on my father. He had just returned that day from a long trip—and so we had a lot of catching up to do. I rushed into his bedroom, expecting to find him unpacking. To my surprise, the shades were drawn and my parents were in bed wrestling under the sheets. More astonishing still, my mother was winning. My father was obviously in some distress. He was making a noise like a small trapped animal.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Ah, Billy, your mother is just checking my teeth,” my father replied quickly if not altogether convincingly.

  We were all quiet a moment.

  “Are you bare under there?” I asked.

  “Why, yes we are.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” my father said as if that was a story that would take some telling, “we got a bit warm. It’s warm work, teeth and gums and so on. Look, Billy, we’re nearly finished here. Why don’t you go downstairs and we’ll be down shortly.”

  I believe you are supposed to be traumatized by these things. I can’t remember being troubled at all, though it was some years before I let my mother look in my mouth again.

  It came as a surprise, when I eventually cottoned on, to realize that my parents had sex—sex between one’s parents always seems slightly unbelievable, of course—but also something of a comfort because having sex wasn’t easy in the 1950s. Within marriage, with the man on top and woman gritting her teeth, it was just about legal, but almost anything else was forbidden in America in those days. Nearly every state had laws prohibiting any form of sex that was deemed remotely deviant: oral and anal sex of course; homosexuality obviously; even normal, polite sex between consenting but unmarried couples. In Indiana you could be sent to prison for fourteen years for aiding or instigating any person under twenty-one years of age to “commit masturbation.” The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indiana declared at about the same time that sex outside marriage was not only sinful, messy, and reproductively chancy, but also promoted Communism. Quite how a shag in the haymow helped the relentless march of Marxism was never specified, but it hardly mattered. The point was that once an action was deemed to promote Communism, you knew you were never going to get anywhere near it.

  Because lawmakers could not bring themselves to discuss these matters openly, it was often not possible to tell what exactly was being banned. Kansas had (and for all I know still has) a statute vowing to punish, and severely, anyone “convicted of the detestable and abominable crime against nature committed with mankind or with beast,” without indicating even vaguely what a detestable and abominable crime against nature might be. Bulldozing a rain forest? Whipping your mule? There was simply no telling.

  Nearly as bad as having sex was thinking about sex. When Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy was pregnant for nearly the whole of the 1952–53 season, the show was not allowed to use the word “pregnant,” lest it provoke susceptible viewers to engage in sofa isometrics in the manner of our neighbor Mr. Kiessler on St. John’s Road. Instead, Lucy was described as “expecting”—a less emotive word apparently. Closer to home, in Des Moines in 1953 police raided Ruthie’s Lounge at 1311 Locust Street, and charged the owner, Ruthie Lucille Fontanini, with engaging in an obscene act. It was an act so disturbing that two vice officers and a police captain, Louis Volz, made a special trip to see it—as indeed did most of the men in Des Moines at one time or another, or so it would appear. The act, it turned out, was that Ruthie, with sufficient coaxing from a roomful of happy topers, would balance two glasses on her tightly sweatered chest, fill them with beer, and convey them without a spill to an appreciative waiting table.

  Ruthie in her prime was a bit of a handful, it would seem. “She was married sixteen times to nine men,” according to former Des Moines Register reporter George Mills in a wonderful book of memoirs, Looking in Windows. One of Ruthie’s marriages, Mills reported, ended after just sixteen hours when Ruthie woke up to find her new husband going through her purse looking for her safe-deposit key. Her custom of using her bosom as a tray would seem a minor talent in an age in which mail was delivered by rocket, but it made her nationally famous. A pair of mountains in Korea were named “the Ruthies” in her honor and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille visited Ruthie’s Lounge twice to watch her in action.

  The story has a happy ending. Judge Harry Grund threw the obscenity charges out of court and Ruthie eventually married a nice man named Frank Bisignano and settled down to a quiet life as a housewife. At last report they had been happily married for more than thirty years. I’d like to imagine her bringing him ketchup, mustard, and other condiments on her chest every evening, but of course I am only guessing. *9

  For those of us who had an interest in seeing naked women, there were pictures of course in Playboy and other manly periodicals of lesser repute, but these were nearly impossible to acquire legally, even if you cycled over to one of the more desperate-looking grocery shacks on the near-east side, lowered your voice two octaves, and swore to God to the impassive clerk that you were born in 1939.

  Sometimes in the drugstore if your dad was busy with the pharmacist (and this was the one time I gave sincere thanks for the complex mechanics of isometrics) you could have a rapid shuffle through the pages, but it was a nerve-racking operation as the magazine stand was exposed to view from many distant corners of the store. Moreover, it was right by the entrance and visible from the street through a large plate-glass window, so you were vulnerable on all fronts. One of your mom’s friends could walk past and see you and raise the alarm—there was a police call box on a telephone pole right out front, possibly put there for that purpose—or a pimply stock boy could clamp you on the shoulder from behind and denounce you in a loud voice, or your dad himself could fetch up unexpectedly while you were frantically distracted with trying to locate the pages in which Kim Novak was to be seen relaxing on a fleecy rug, airing her comely epidermis, so there was practically no pleasure and very little illumination in the exercise. This was an age, don’t forget, in which you could be arrested for carrying beer on your bosom or committing an unspecified crime against nature, so what the consequences would be to be caught holding photographs of naked women in a family drugstore were almost inconceivable, but you could be certain they would involve popping flashbulbs, the WHO-TV mobile crime scene unit, banner headlines in the paper, and many thousands of hours of community service.

  On the whole therefore you had to make do with underwear spreads in mail order catalogs or ads in glossy magazines, which was desperate to be sure, but at least safely within the law. Maidenform, a maker of brassieres, ran a well-known series of print ads in the 1950s in which women imagined themselves half dressed in public places. “I dreamed I was in a jewelry store in my Maidenform bra” ran the caption in one, acco
mpanied by a photo showing a woman wearing a hat, skirt, shoes, jewelry, and a Maidenform bra—everything, in short, but a blouse—standing at a glass case in Tiffany’s or some place like it. There was something deeply—and I expect unhealthily—erotic in these pictures. Unfortunately, Maidenform had an unerring instinct for choosing models of slightly advanced years who were not terribly attractive to begin with and in any case the bras of that period were more like surgical appliances than enticements to fantasy. One despaired at the waste of such a promising erogenous concept.

  Despite its shortcomings, the approach was widely copied. Sarong, a manufacturer of girdles so heavy-duty that they looked bulletproof, took a similar line with a series of ads showing women caught by unexpected wind gusts, revealing their girdles in situ, to their own horrified dismay but to the leering delight of all males within fifty yards. I have before me an ad from 1956 showing a woman who has just alighted from a Northwest Airlines flight whose fur coat has inopportunely gusted open (as a result of an extremely localized sirocco occurring somewhere just below and between her legs) to reveal her wearing a Model 124 embroidered nylon marquisette Sarong-brand girdle (available at fine girdlers everywhere for $13.95). But—and here’s the thing that has been troubling me since 1956—the woman is clearly not wearing a skirt or anything else between girdle and coat, raising urgent questions as to how she was dressed when she boarded the plane. Did she fly skirtless the whole way from (let’s say for the sake of argument) Tulsa to Minneapolis or did she remove the skirt en route—and why?

  Sarong ads had a certain following in my circle—my friend Doug Willoughby was a great admirer—but I always found them strange, illogical, and slightly pervy. “The woman can’t have traveled halfway across the country without a skirt on, surely,” I would observe repeatedly, even a little heatedly. Willoughby conceded the point without demur, but insisted that that was precisely what made Sarong ads so engaging. Anyway, it’s a sad age, you’ll agree, when the most titillating thing you can find is a shot of a horrified woman in a half-glimpsed girdle in your mother’s magazines.

  By chance, we did have the most erotic statue in the nation in Des Moines. It was part of the state’s large Civil War monument on the capitol grounds. Called Iowa, it depicts a seated woman, who is holding her bare breasts in her hands, cupped from beneath in a startlingly provocative manner. The pose, we are told, was intended to represent a symbolic offering of nourishment, but really she is inviting every man who goes by to think hard about clambering up and clamping on. We used to sometimes ride our bikes there on Saturdays to stare at it from below. “Erected in 1890” said a plaque on the statue. “And causing them ever since,” we used to quip. But it was a long way to cycle just to see some copper tits.

  The only other option was to spy on people. A boy named Rocky Koppell, whose family had been transferred to Des Moines from Columbus, lived for a time in an apartment in the basement of the Commodore Hotel and discovered a hole in the wall at the back of his bedroom closet through which he could watch the maid next door dressing and occasionally taking part in an earnest exchange of fluids with one of the janitors. Koppell charged 25 cents to peep through the hole, but lost most of his business when word got around that the maid looked like Adlai Stevenson, but with less hair.

  The one place you knew you were never going to see naked female flesh was at the movies. Women undressed in the movies from time to time, of course, but they always stepped behind a screen to do so, or wandered into another room after taking off their earrings and absentmindedly undoing the top button of their blouse. Even if the camera stayed with the woman, it always shyly dropped its gaze at the critical moment, so that all you saw was a bathrobe falling around the ankles and a foot stepping into the bath. It can’t even be described as disappointing because you had no expectations to disappoint. Nudity was just never going to happen.

  Those of us who had older brothers knew about a movie called Mau Mau that was released in 1955. In its initial manifestation it was a respectable documentary about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, soberly narrated by the television newscaster Chet Huntley. But the distributor, a man named Dan Sonney, decided the film wasn’t commercial enough. So he hired a local crew of actors and technicians and filmed additional scenes in an orange grove in Southern California. These showed topless “native” women fleeing before men with machetes. These extra scenes he spliced more or less randomly into the existing footage to give the film a little extra pep. The result was a commercial sensation, particularly among boys aged twelve to fifteen. Unfortunately, I was only four in 1955, and so missed out on the only naked celluloid jiggling of the decade.

  One year when I was about nine we built a tree house in the woods—quite a good tree house, using some first-rate materials appropriated from a construction site on River Oaks Drive—and immediately, and more or less automatically, used it as a place to strip off in front of each other. This was not terribly exciting as the group consisted of about twenty-four little boys and just one girl, Patty Hefferman, who already at the age of seven weighed more than a large piece of earth-moving equipment (she would eventually become known as All-Beef Patty), and was not, with the best will in the world, anyone’s idea of Madame Eros. Still, for a couple of Oreo cookies she was willing to be examined from any angle for as long as anyone cared to, which gave her a certain anthropological value.

  The only girl in the neighborhood anybody really wanted to see naked was Mary O’Leary. She was the prettiest child within a million million galaxies, but she wouldn’t take her clothes off. She would play in the tree house happily with us when it was wholesome fun, but the moment things got fruity she would depart by way of the ladder and stand below and tell us with a clenched fury that was nearly tearful that we were gross and loathsome. This made me admire her very much, very much indeed, and often I would depart, too (for in truth there was only so much of Patty Hefferman you could take and still eat my mom’s cooking), and accompany her to her house, praising her effusively for her virtue and modesty.

  “Those guys really are disgusting,” I would say, conveniently overlooking that generally I was one of those guys myself.

  Her refusal to take part was in an odd way the most titillating thing about the whole experience. I adored and worshipped Mary O’Leary. I used to sit beside her on her sofa when she watched TV and secretly stare at her face. It was the most perfect thing I had ever seen—so soft, so clean, so ready to smile, so full of rosy light. And there was nothing more perfect and joyous in nature than that face in the micro-instant before she laughed.

  In July of that summer, my family went to my grandparents’ house for the Fourth of July, where I had the usual dispiriting experience of watching Uncle Dee turning wholesome food into flying stucco. Worse still, my grandparents’ television was out of commission and waiting for a new part—the cheerfully moronic local television repairman was unable to see the logic of keeping a supply of spare vacuum tubes in stock, an oversight that earned him a carbonizing dose of ThunderVision needless to say—and so I had to spend the long weekend reading from my grandparents’ modest library, which consisted mostly of Reader’s Digest condensed books, some novels by Warwick Deeping, and a large cardboard box filled with Ladies’ Home Journals going back to 1942. It was a trying weekend.

  When I returned, Buddy Doberman and Arthur Bergen were waiting by my house. They barely acknowledged my parents, so eager were they to get me around the corner to have a private word. There they breathlessly told me that in my absence Mary O’Leary had come into the tree house and taken her clothes off—every last stitch. She had done so freely, indeed with a kind of dreamy abandon.

  “It was like she was in a trance,” said Arthur fondly.

  “A happy trance,” added Buddy.

  “It was really nice,” said Arthur, his stock of fond remembrance nowhere near exhausted.

  Naturally I refused to believe a word of this. They had to swear to God a dozen times and hope for their mothers’ death
s on a stack of Bibles and much else in a grave vein before I was prepared to suspend my natural disbelief even slightly. Above all, they had to describe every moment of the occasion, something that Arthur was able to do with remarkable clarity. (He had, as he would boast in later years, a pornographic memory.)

  “Well,” I said, keen as you would expect, “let’s get her and do it again.”

  “Oh, no,” Buddy responded. “She said she wasn’t going to do it any more. We had to swear we’d never ask her again. That was the deal.”

  “But,” I said, sputtering and appalled, “that’s not fair.”

  “The funny thing is,” Arthur went on, “she said she’s been thinking about doing it for a long time, but waited until you weren’t there because she didn’t want to upset you.”

  “Upset me? Upset me? Are you kidding? Upset me? Are you kidding? Are you kidding?”

  You can still see the dent in the sidewalk where I beat my head against it for the next fourteen hours. True to her word, Mary O’Leary never came near the tree house again.

  Shortly afterward, in an inspired moment, I took all the drawers out of my father’s closet chest to see what, if anything, they hid. I used to strip down his bedroom twice a year, in spring and autumn, when he went to spring training and the World Series, looking for lost cigarettes, stray money, and evidence that I was indeed from the Planet Electro—perhaps a letter from King Volton or the Electro Congress promising some munificent reward for raising me safely and making sure that my slightest whims were met.

  On this occasion, because I had more time than usual on my hands, I took the drawers all the way out to see if anything was behind or beneath them, and so found his modest girlie stash, comprising two thin magazines, one called Dude, the other Nugget. They were extremely cheesy. The women in them looked like Pat Nixon or Mamie Eisenhower—the sort of women you would pay not to see naked. I was appalled and astonished, not because my father had men’s magazines—this was an entirely welcome development, of course; one to be encouraged by any means possible—but because he had chosen so poorly. It seemed tragically typical of my father that his crippling cheapness extended even to his choice of men’s magazines.