The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  Boy, was I in trouble. In fact, it was worse than just being straightforwardly in trouble. For one thing, Miss Squat Little Fat Thing was also in trouble for having failed in her supervisory responsibilities and so became deeply, irremediably pissed off at me, and would forever remain so.

  My own disgrace was practically incalculable. I had embarrassed the school. I had embarrassed the principal. I had shamed myself. I had insulted my nation. To be cavalier about nuclear preparedness was only half a step away from treason. I was beyond hope really. Not only did I talk in a low tone, miss lots of school, fail to buy savings stamps, and occasionally turn up wearing girlie Capri pants, but clearly I came from a Bolshevik household. I spent more or less the rest of my elementary-school career in the cloakroom.

  Chapter 9

  MAN AT WORK

  In Washington, D.C., gunman John A. Kendrick testified that he was offered $2,500 to murder Michael Lee, but declined the job because “when I got done paying taxes out of that, what would I have left?”

  —Time magazine, January 7, 1953

  ONCE YOU STRIP OUT ALL THOSE JOBS where people have to look at, touch, or otherwise deal with feces and vomit—sewage workers and hospital bedpan cleaners and so on—being an afternoon newspaper boy in the 1950s and 1960s was possibly the worst job in history. For a start, you had to deliver the afternoon papers six days a week, from Monday through Saturday, and then get up on Sundays before dawn and deliver the Sunday papers, too. This was so the regular morning paperboys could enjoy a day off each week. Why they deserved a day of rest and we didn’t was a question that appears never to have occurred to anyone except evening newspaper boys.

  Anyway, being a seven-day-a-week serf meant that you couldn’t go away for an overnight trip or anything fun like that without finding somebody to do the route for you, and that was always infinitely more trouble than it was worth because the stand-in invariably delivered to the wrong houses or forgot to show up or just lost interest halfway through and stuffed the last thirty papers in the big U.S. Mail box at the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and St. John’s Road, so that you ended up in trouble with the customers, the Register and Tribune’s circulation manager, and the United States postal authorities—and all so that you could have your first day off in 160 days. It really wasn’t fair at all.

  I started as a paperboy when I was eleven. You weren’t supposed to be allowed a route until you had passed your twelfth birthday, but my father, keen to see me making my own way in the world and herniated before puberty, pulled some strings at the paper and got me a route early. The route covered the richest neighborhood in town, around Greenwood School, a district studded with mansions of rambling grandeur. *11 This sounded like a plum posting, and so it was presented to me by the route manager, Mr. McTivity, a man of low ethics and high body odor, but of course mansions have the longest driveways and widest lawns, so it took whole minutes—in some cases, many, many whole minutes—to deliver each paper. And evening papers weighed a ton back then.

  Plus I was absentminded. In those days my hold on the real world was always slight at best, but the combination of long walks, fresh air, and lack of distraction left me helplessly vulnerable to any stray wisp of fantasy or conjecture that chose to carry me off. Generally for a start I would spend a little while thinking about Bizarro World. Bizarro World was a planet that featured in some issues of Superman comics. The inhabitants of Bizarro World did everything in reverse—walked backward, drove backward, switched televisions off when they wanted to watch and on when they didn’t, drove through red lights but stopped at green ones, and so on. Bizarro World bothered me enormously because it was so impossibly inconsistent. The people didn’t actually speak backward, but just talked in a kind of primitive caveman “me no like him” type of English, which was not the same thing at all. Anyway, living backward simply couldn’t be made to work. At the gas station they would have to take fuel out of their cars rather than put it in, so how would they make their cars go? Eating would mean sucking poo up through their anus, sending it through the body and ejecting it in mouth-sized lumps onto forks and spoons. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all.

  When I had exhausted that topic, I might devote a good stretch of time to “what if” questions—what I would do if I could make myself invisible (go to Mary O’Leary’s house about bath time), or if time stopped and I was the only thing on earth left moving (take a lot of money from a bank and then go to Mary O’Leary’s house), or if I could hypnotize everyone in the world (ditto), or found a magic lamp and was granted two wishes (ditto), or anything at all really. All fantasies led ultimately to Mary O’Leary.

  Then I might move on to imponderables. How could we be sure that we all saw the same colors? Maybe what I see as green you see as blue. Who could actually say? And when scientists say that dogs and cats are color-blind (or not—I could never remember which it was), how do they know? What dog is going to tell them? And how do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone? And when you see two ants going in opposite directions pause to check each other out, what information exactly are they exchanging?—“Hey, nice feelers!” “Don’t panic, but that kid that’s watching us has got matches and lighter fluid”—and how do they know to do whatever they are doing? Something is telling them to go off and bring home a leaf or a granule of sand—but who and how?

  And then suddenly I would realize that I couldn’t remember, hadn’t actually consciously experienced, any of the last forty-seven properties I had visited, and didn’t know if I had left a paper or just walked up to the door, stood for a moment like an underfunctioning automaton, and turned around and walked away again.

  It is not easy to describe the sense of self-disappointment that comes with reaching the end of your route and finding that there are sixteen undelivered papers in your bag and you don’t have the least idea—not the least idea—to whom they should have gone. I spent much of my prepubescent years first walking an enormous newspaper route, then revisiting large parts of it. Sometimes twice.

  As if delivering papers seven days a week weren’t enough, you also had to collect the subscription money. So at least three evenings a week, when you might instead have had your feet up and be watching Combat! or The Outer Limits, you had to turn out again and try to coax some money out of your ungrateful customers. That was easily the worst part. And the worst part of the worst part was collecting from Mrs. Vandermeister.

  Mrs. Vandermeister was seven hundred years old, possibly eight hundred, and permanently attached to an aluminum walker. She was stooped, very small, forgetful, glacially slow, interestingly malodorous, practically deaf. She emerged from her house once a day to drive to the supermarket, in a car about the size of an aircraft carrier. It took her two hours to get out of her house and into the car and then another two hours to get the car out of the driveway and up the alley. Partly this was because Mrs. Vandermeister could never find a gear she liked and partly because when shunting she never moved forward or backward more than a quarter of an inch at a time, and seemed only barely in touch with the necessity of turning the wheel from time to time. Everyone on the alley knew not to try to go anywhere between 10 a.m. and noon because Mrs. Vandermeister would be getting her car out.

  Once on the open road, Mrs. Vandermeister was famous over a much wider area. Though her trip to Dahl’s was only about three-quarters of a mile, her progress created scenes reminiscent of the streets of Pamplona when the bulls are running. Motorists and pedestrians alike fled in terror before her. And it was, it must be said, an unnerving sight when Mrs. Vandermeister’s car came toward you down the street. For a start, it looked as if it was driverless, such was her exceeding diminutiveness, and indeed it drove as if driverless, for it was seldom entirely on the road, particularly when bumping around corners. Generally there were sparks coming off the undercarriage from some substantial object—a motorcycle, a garbage can, her own walking frame—that she had collected en route and was now taking wi
th her wherever she went.

  Getting money from Mrs. Vandermeister was a perennial nightmare. Her front door had a small window in it that provided a clear view down her hallway to her living room. If you rang the doorbell at fifteen-second intervals for an hour and ten minutes, you knew that eventually she would realize that someone was at the door—“Now who the heck is that!” she would shout to herself—and begin the evening-long process of getting from her chair to the front door, twenty-five feet away, bumping and shoving her walker before her. After about twenty minutes, she would reach the hallway and start coming toward the door at about the speed that ice melts. Sometimes she would forget where she was going and start to detour into the kitchen or bathroom, and you would have to ring the doorbell like fury to get her back on course. When eventually she came to the door, you would have an extra half hour of convincing her that you were not a murderer.

  “I’m the paperboy, Mrs. Vandermeister!” you would shout at her through the little glass pane.

  “Billy Bryson’s my paperboy!” she would shout back at the doorknob.

  “I am Billy Bryson! Look at me through the window, Mrs. Vandermeister! Look up here! You can see me if you look up here, Mrs. Vandermeister!”

  “Billy Bryson lives three doors down!” Mrs. Vandermeister would shout. “You’ve come to the wrong house! I don’t know why you’ve come here!”

  “Mrs. Vandermeister, I’m collecting for the paper! You owe me three dollars and sixty cents!”

  When finally you persuaded her to haul open the door, she was always surprised to find you there—“Oh, Billy, you gave me a start!” she’d say, treating you to a simultaneous bobble-head demonstration—and then there would be another small eternity while she went off, shuffling and wobbling and humming the Alzheimer theme tune, to find her purse, a half hour more while she came back to ask how much again, another forgetful detour to toilet or kitchen, and finally the announcement that she didn’t have that much cash and I’d have to call again on a future occasion.

  “You shouldn’t leave it so long,” she’d shout. “It’s only supposed to be a dollar twenty every two weeks. You tell Billy when you see him.”

  At least Mrs. Vandermeister had the excuse of being ancient and demented. What really maddened was being sent away by normal people, usually because they couldn’t be bothered to get their purses out. The richer the people were the more likely they were to send you away—always with a fey can-you-ever-forgive-me smile and an apology.

  “No, it’s all right, lady. I’m very happy to hike a mile and a quarter here through three feet of snow on the coldest night of the year and leave empty-handed because you’ve got some muffins in the fucking oven and your nails are drying. No problem!”

  Of course I never said anything like that, but I did start levying fines. I would add fifty or sixty cents to rich people’s bills and tell them that it was because the month started on a Wednesday so there was an extra half week to account for. You could show them on their kitchen calendar how there were an extra few days at the beginning or end of the month. This always worked, especially with men if they’d had a cocktail or two, and they always had. “Son of a gun,” they’d say, shaking their head in wonder, while you pocketed their extra money.

  “You know, maybe your boss isn’t paying you the right amount each month,” I would sometimes pleasantly add.

  “Yeah—hey, yeah,” they’d say and look really unsettled.

  The other danger of rich people was their dogs. Poor people in my experience have mean dogs and know it. Rich people have mean dogs and refuse to believe it. There were thousands of dogs in those days, too, inhabiting every property—big dogs, grumpy dogs, stupid dogs, tiny nippy irritating little dogs that you positively ached to turn into a kind of living Hacky Sack, dogs that wanted to smell you, dogs that wanted to sit on you, dogs that barked at everything that moved. And then there was Dewey. Dewey was a black Labrador, owned by a family on Terrace Drive called the Haldemans. Dewey was about the size of a black bear and hated me. With any other human being he was just a big slobbery bundle of softness. But Dewey wanted me dead for reasons he declined to make clear and I don’t believe actually knew himself. He just took against me. The Haldemans laughingly dismissed the idea that Dewey had a mean streak and serenely ignored any suggestions that he ought to be kept tied up, as the law actually demanded. They were Republicans—Nixon Republicans—and so didn’t subscribe to the notion that laws are supposed to apply to all people equally.

  I particularly dreaded Sunday mornings when it was dark because Dewey was black and invisible, apart from his teeth, and it was just him and me in a sleeping world. Dewey slept wherever unconsciousness overtook him—sometimes on the front porch, sometimes on the back porch, sometimes in an old doghouse by the garage, sometimes on the path, but always outside—so he was always there, and always no more than a millimeter away from wakefulness and attack. It took me ages to creep, breath held, up the Haldemans’ front walk and the five wide wooden creak-ready steps of their front porch and very, very gently set the paper down on the mat, knowing that at the moment of contact I would hear from someplace close by but unseen a low, dark, threatening growl that would continue until I had withdrawn with respectful backward bows. Occasionally—just often enough to leave me permanently unnerved—Dewey would lunge, barking viciously, and I had to fly across the yard whimpering, hands held protectively over my butt, leap on my bike and pedal wildly away, crashing into fire hydrants and lampposts and generally sustaining far worse injuries than if I had just let Dewey hold me down and gnaw on me a bit.

  The whole business was terrible beyond words. The only aspect worse than suffering an attack was waiting for the next one. The lone redeeming feature of life with Dewey was the rush of relief when it was all over, of knowing that I wouldn’t have to encounter Dewey again for twenty-four hours. Airmen returning home from dangerous bombing runs will recognize the feeling.

  It was in such a state of exultation one crisp and twinkly March morning that I was delivering a paper to a house half a block farther on when Dewey—suddenly twice his normal size and with truly unwarranted ferocity—came for me at speed from around the side of the McManuses’ house. I remember thinking, in the microsecond for reflection that was available to me, that this was very unfair. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. This was my time of bliss.

  Before I could meaningfully react, Dewey bit me hard on the leg just below the left buttock, knocking me to the ground. He then dragged me around for a bit—I remember my fingers scraping through grass—and then abruptly he released me and gave a confused, playful, woofy bark and bounded back into the border shrubbery whence he had come. Irate and comprehensively disheveled, I waddled to the road to the nearest streetlight and took down my pants to see the damage. My jeans were torn, and on the fleshy part of my thigh there was a small puncture and a very little blood. It didn’t actually hurt very much, but it came up the next day in a wonderful purply bruise, which I showed off in the boys’ bathroom at school to many appreciative viewers, including Mr. Groober, the strange, mute school janitor who was almost certainly an escapee from someplace with high walls and who had never appeared quite this ecstatic about anything before, and I had to go to the doctor after school and get a tetanus shot, which I didn’t appreciate a whole lot, as you can imagine.

  Despite the evidence of my wound, the Haldemans refused to believe that their dog had gone for me. “Dewey?” they laughed. “Dewey wouldn’t harm anyone, honey. He wouldn’t leave the property after dark. Why, he’s afraid of his own shadow.” And then they laughed again. The dog that attacked me, they assured me, was some other dog.

  Just over a week later, Dewey attacked Mrs. Haldeman’s mother, who was visiting from California. It had her down on the ground and was about to strip her face from her skull, which would have helped my case no end frankly. Fortunately for her, Mrs. Haldeman came out just in time to save her mother and realize the shocking truth about her beloved pet. D
ewey was taken away in a van and never seen again. I don’t think anything has ever given me more satisfaction. I never did get an apology. However, I used to stick a secret booger in their paper every day.

  At least rich people didn’t move without telling you. My friend Doug Willoughby had a newspaper route at the more déclassé end of Grand Avenue, made up mostly of funny-smelling apartment buildings filled with deadbeats, shut-ins, and people talking to each other through walls, not always pleasantly. All his buildings were gloomy and uncarpeted and all his corridors were so long and underlit that you couldn’t see to the end of them, and so didn’t know what was down there. It took resolution and nerve just to go in them. Routinely Willoughby would discover that a customer had moved away (or been led off in handcuffs) without paying him, and Willoughby would have to make up the difference, for that’s the way it worked. The Register never ended up out of pocket; only the paperboy did. Willoughby told me once that in his best week as a newspaper boy he made four dollars, and that included Christmas tips.

  I, on the other hand, was steadily prospering, particularly when my bonus fines were factored in. Shortly before my twelfth birthday I was able to pay $102.12 in cash—a literally enormous sum; it took whole minutes to count it out at the cash register, as it was mostly in small change—for a portable black-and-white RCA television with foldaway antenna. It was a new slimline model in whitish gray plastic, with the control knobs on top—an exciting innovation—and so extremely stylish. I carried it up to my room, plugged it in, switched it on, and was seldom seen again around the house.