I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.
Unlike Superman I had no one to explain to me the basis of my powers. I had to make my own way into the superworld and find my own role models. This wasn’t easy, for although the 1950s was a busy age for heroes, it was a strange one. Nearly all the heroic figures of the day were odd and just a touch unsettling. Most lived with another man, except Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy, who lived with a woman, Dale Evans, who dressed like a man. Batman and Robin looked unquestionably as if they were on their way to a gay Mardi Gras, and Superman was not a huge amount better. Confusingly, there were actually two Supermans. There was the comic-book Superman who had bluish hair, never laughed, and didn’t take any shit from anybody. And there was the television Superman, who was much more genial and a little bit flabby around the tits, and who actually got wimpier and softer as the years passed.
In similar fashion, the Lone Ranger, who was already not the kind of fellow you would want to share a pup tent with, was made odder still by the fact that the part was played on television by two different actors—by Clayton Moore from 1949 to 1951 and 1954 to 1957, and by John Hart during the years in between—but the programs were rerun randomly on local TV, giving the impression that the Lone Ranger not only wore a tiny mask that fooled no one, but changed bodies from time to time. He also had a catchphrase—“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver’: the Lone Ranger”—that made absolutely no sense. I used to spend half of every show trying to figure out what the catchphrase meant.
Roy Rogers, my first true hero, was in many ways the most bewildering of all. For one thing, he was strangely anachronistic. He lived in a western town, Mineral City, that seemed comfortably bedded in the nineteenth century. It had wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, the houses used oil lamps, everyone rode horses and carried six-shooters, the marshal dressed like a cowboy and wore a badge—but when people ordered coffee in Dale’s café it was brought to them in a glass pot off an electric hob. From time to time modern policemen or FBI men would turn up in cars or even light airplanes looking for fugitive Communists, and when this happened I can clearly remember thinking, “What the fuck?” or whatever was the equivalent expression for a five-year-old.
Except for Zorro—who really knew how to make a sword fly—the fights were always brief and bloodless, and never involved hospitalization, much less comas, extensive scarring, or death. Mostly they consisted of somebody jumping off a boulder onto somebody passing on a horse, followed by a good deal of speeded-up wrestling. Then the two fighters would stand up and the good guy would knock the bad guy down. Roy and Dale both carried guns—everybody carried guns, including Magnolia, their comical black servant, and Pat Brady, the cook—but never shot to kill. They just shot the pistols out of bad people’s hands and then knocked them down with a punch.
The other memorable thing about Roy Rogers—which I particularly recall because my father always remarked on it if he happened to be passing through the room—was that Roy’s horse, Trigger, got higher billing than Dale Evans, his wife.
“But then Trigger is more talented,” my father would always say.
“And better looking, too!” we would faithfully and in unison rejoin.
Goodness me, but we were happy people in those days.
Chapter 4
THE AGE OF EXCITEMENT
PRE-DINNER DRINKS WON’T
HARM HEART, STUDY SHOWS
PHILADELPHIA, PENN. (AP)—A couple of cocktails before dinner, and maybe a third for good measure, won’t do your heart any harm. In fact, they may even do some good. A research team at Lankenau Hospital reached this conclusion after a study supported in part by the Heart Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
— The Des Moines Register, August 12, 1958
I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED IT, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner?
The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier, by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds, according to advertisements. “Just what the doctor ordered!” read ads for L&M cigarettes, some of them in The Journal of the American Medical Association where cigarette ads were gladly accepted right up to the 1960s. X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending penetrating rays up through the soles of your feet and right out the top of your head. There wasn’t a particle of tissue within you that wasn’t bathed in their magical glow. No wonder you felt energized and ready for a new pair of Keds when you stepped down.
Happily, we were indestructible. We didn’t need seat belts, air bags, smoke detectors, bottled water, or the Heimlich maneuver. We didn’t require child-safety caps on our medicines. We didn’t need helmets when we rode our bikes or pads for our knees and elbows when we went skating. We knew without a written reminder that bleach was not a refreshing drink and that gasoline when exposed to a match had a tendency to combust.
We didn’t have to worry about what we ate because nearly all foods were good for us: sugar gave us energy, red meat made us strong, ice cream gave us healthy bones, coffee kept us alert and purring productively.
Every week brought exciting news of things becoming better, swifter, more convenient. Nothing was too preposterous to try. MAIL IS DELIVERED BY GUIDED
MISSILE The Des Moines Register reported with a clear touch of excitement and pride on the morning of June 8, 1959, after the U.S. Postal Service launched a Regulus I rocket carrying three thousand first-class letters from a submarine in the Atlantic Ocean onto an airbase in Mayport, Florida, one hundred miles away. Soon, the article assured us, rockets loaded with mail would be streaking across the nation’s skies. Special delivery letters, one supposed, would be thudding nosecone-first into our backyards practically hourly.
“I believe we will see missile mail developed to a significant degree,” promised Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield at the happy celebrations that followed. In fact nothing more was ever heard of missile mail. Perhaps it occurred to someone that incoming rockets might have an unfortunate tendency to miss their targets and crash through the roofs of factories or hospitals, or that they might blow up in flight, or take out passing aircraft, or that every launch would cost tens of thousands of dollars to deliver a payload worth a maximum of $120 at prevailing postal rates.