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.