The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

— The Des Moines Register, June 18, 1959

IN 1957, THE MOVIE PEYTON PLACE , the steamiest motion picture in years, or so the trailers candidly invited us to suppose, was released to a waiting nation and my sister decided that she and I were going to go. Why I was deemed a necessary part of the enterprise I have no idea. Perhaps I provided some sort of alibi. Perhaps the only time she could slip away from the house unnoticed was when she was babysitting me. All I know is that I was told that we were going to walk to the Ingersoll Theatre after lunch on Saturday and that I was to tell no one. It was very exciting.

On the way there my sister told me that many of the characters in the movie—probably most of them—would be having sex. My sister at this time was the world’s foremost authority on sexual matters, at least as far as I was concerned. Her particular speciality was spotting celebrity homosexuals. Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Batman and Robin, Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, a man in the third row of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra who looked quite normal to me—all were unmasked by her penetrating gaze. She told me Rock Hudson was gay in 1959, long before anyone would have guessed it. She knew that Richard Chamberlain was gay before he did, I believe. She was uncanny.

“Do you know what sex is?” she asked me once we were in the privacy of the Woods, walking in single file along the narrow path through the trees. It was a wintry day and I clearly remember that she had on a smart new red woolen coat and a fluffy white hat that tied under her chin. She looked very smart and grown-up to me.

“No, I don’t believe I do,” I said or words to that effect.

So she told me, in a grave tone and with the kind of careful phrasing that made it clear that this was privileged information, all there was to know about sex, though as she was only eleven at this time her knowledge was perhaps slightly less encyclopedic than it seemed to me. Anyway, the essence of the business, as I understood it, was that the man put his thing inside her thing, left it there for a bit, and then they had a baby. I remember wondering vaguely what these unspecified things were—his finger in her ear? his hat in her hatbox? Who could say? Anyway, they did this private thing, naked, and the next thing you knew they were parents.

I didn’t really care how babies were made, to tell you the truth. I was far more excited that we were on a secret adventure that our parents didn’t know about and that we were walking through the Woods—the more or less boundless Schwarzwald that lay between Elmwood Drive and Grand Avenue. At six, one ventured into the Woods very slightly from time to time, played army a bit within sight of the street, and then came out again (usually after Bobby Stimson got poison ivy and burst into tears) with a sense of gladness—of relief, frankly—to be stepping into clear air and sunshine. The Woods were unnerving. The air was thicker in there, more stifling, the noises different. You could go into the Woods and not come out again. One certainly never considered using them as a thoroughfare. They were far too vast for that. So to be conducted through them by a confident, smart-stepping person, while being given privy information, even if largely meaningless to me, was almost too thrilling for words. I spent most of the long hike admiring the Woods’ dark majesty and keeping half an eye peeled for gingerbread cottages and wolves.

As if that weren’t excitement enough, when we reached Grand Avenue my sister took me down a secret path between two apartment buildings and past the back of Bauder’s Drugstore on Ingersoll—it had never occurred to me that Bauder’s Drugstore had a back—from which we emerged almost opposite the theater. This was so impossibly nifty I could hardly stand it. Because Ingersoll was a busy road my sister took my hand and guided us expertly to the other side—another seemingly impossible task. I don’t believe I have ever been so proud to be associated with another human being.

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, accompanied 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 Journal s 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’ deaths 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.

Still, they were better than nothing and they did feature unclad women. I took them to the tree house where they were much prized in the absence of Mary O’Leary. When I returned them to their place ten days or so later, just before he came home from spring training, they were conspicuously well thumbed. Indeed, it was hard not to notice that they had been enjoyed by a wider audience. One was missing its cover and nearly all the pictorials now bore marginal comments and balloon captions, many of a candid nature, in a variety of young hands. Often in the years that followed I wondered what my father made of these spirited emendations, but somehow the moment never seemed right to ask.

Chapter 7

BOOM!

MOBILE, ALA.—The Alabama Supreme Court yesterday upheld a death sentence imposed on a Negro handyman, Jimmy Wilson, 55, for robbing Mrs.

Esteele Barker of $1.95 at her home last year. Mrs. Barker is white.

Although robbery is a capital offense in Alabama, no one has been executed in the state before for a theft of less than $5. A court official suggested that the jury had been influenced by the fact that Mrs. Barker told the jury that Wilson had spoken to her in a disrespectful tone.

A spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called the death sentence “a sad blot on the nation,” but said the organization is unable to aid the condemned man because it is barred in Alabama.

— The Des Moines Register, August 23, 1958

AT 7:15 IN THE MORNING local time on November 1, 1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb in the Eniwetok (or Enewetak or many other variants) atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific, though it wasn’t really a bomb as it wasn’t in any sense portable. Unless an enemy would considerately stand by while we built an eighty-ton refrigeration unit to cool large volumes of liquid deuterium and tritium, ran in several miles of cabling, and attached scores of electric detonators, we didn’t have any way of blowing anyone up with it. Eleven thousand soldiers and civilians were needed to get the device to go off at Eniwetok, so this was hardly the sort of thing you could set up in Red Square without arousing suspicions. Properly, it was a

“thermonuclear device.” Still, it was enormously potent.

Since nothing like this had ever been tried before, nobody knew how big a bang it would make. Even the most conservative estimates, for a blast of five megatons, represented more destructive might than the total firepower used by all sides in World War II, and some nuclear physicists thought the explosion might go as high as one hundred megatons—a blast so off the scale that scientists could only guess the chain of consequences. One possibility was that it might ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing annihilated, as the Pentagon might have put it, and on the morning of November 1 somebody lit the fuse and, as I like to picture it, ran like hell.

The blast came in at a little over ten megatons, comparatively manageable but still enough to wipe out a city a thousand times the size of Hiroshima, though of course Earth has no cities that big. A fireball five miles high and four miles across rose above Eniwetok within seconds, billowing into a mushroom cloud that hit the stratospheric ceiling thirty miles above the Earth and spread outward for more than a thousand miles in every direction, disgorging a darkening snowfall of dusty ash as it went, before slowly dissipating. It was the biggest thing of any type ever created by humans. Nine months later the Soviets surprised the Western powers by exploding a thermonuclear device of their own. The race to obliterate life was on—and how. Now we truly were become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

So it is perhaps not surprising that as this happened I sat in Des Moines, Iowa, quietly shitting myself. I had little choice. I was ten months old.

What was scary about the growth of the bomb wasn’t so much the growth of the bomb as the people in charge of the growth of the bomb. Within weeks of the Eniwetok test the big hats at the Pentagon were actively thinking of ways to put this baby to use. One idea, seriously considered, was to build a device somewhere near the front lines in Korea, induce large numbers of North Korean and Chinese troops to wander over to have a look, and then set it off.

Representative James E. Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, a leading proponent of devastation, promised that soon we would have a device of at least a hundred megatons—

the one that might consume all our breathable air. At the same time, Edward Teller, the semi-crazed Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the presiding geniuses behind the development of the H-bomb, was dreaming up exciting peacetime uses for nuclear devices. Teller and his acolytes at the Atomic Energy Commission envisioned using H-bombs to enable massive civil engineering projects on a scale never before conceived—to create huge open-pit mines where mountains had once stood, to alter the courses of rivers in our favor (ensuring that the Danube, for instance, served only capitalist countries), to blow away irksome impediments to commerce and shipping like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Excitedly they reported that just twenty-six bombs placed in a chain across the Isthmus of Panama would excavate a bigger, better Panama Canal more or less at once, and provide a lovely show into the bargain. They even suggested that nuclear devices could be used to alter the Earth’s weather by adjusting the amount of dust in the atmosphere, forever banishing winters from the northern United States and sending them permanently to the Soviet Union instead. Almost in passing, Teller proposed that we might use the Moon as a giant target for testing warheads. The blasts would be visible through binoculars from Earth and would provide wholesome entertainment for millions.

In short, the creators of the hydrogen bomb wished to wrap the world in unpredictable levels of radiation, obliterate whole ecosystems, despoil the face of the planet, and provoke and antagonize our enemies at every opportunity—and these were their peacetime dreams.

But of course the real ambition was to make a gigantically ferocious transportable bomb that we could drop on the heads of Russians and other like-minded irritants whenever it pleased us to do so. That dream became enchanting reality on March 1, 1954, when America detonated fifteen megatons of experimental bang over the Bikini atoll (a place so delightful that we named a lady’s swimsuit after it) in the Marshall Islands. The blast exceeded all hopes by a considerable margin. The flash was seen in Okinawa, twenty-six hundred miles away. It threw visible fallout over an area of some seven thousand square miles—all of it drifting in exactly the opposite direction than forecast.

We were getting good not only at making really huge explosions but at creating consequences that were beyond our capabilities to deal with.

One soldier, based on the island of Kwajalein, described in a letter home how he thought the blast would blow his barracks away. “All of a sudden the sky lighted up a bright orange and remained that way for what seemed like a couple of minutes…We heard very loud rumblings that sounded like thunder. Then the whole barracks began shaking, as if there had been an earthquake. This was followed by a very high wind,”

which caused everyone present to grab on to something solid and hold tight. And this was at a place nearly two hundred miles from the blast site, so goodness knows what the experience was like for those who were even closer—and there were many, among them the unassuming native residents of the nearby island of Rongelap, who had been told to expect a bright flash and a loud bang just before 7 a.m., but had been given no other warnings, no hint that the bang itself might knock down their houses and leave them permanently deafened, and no instructions about dealing with the aftereffects. As radioactive ash rained down on them, the puzzled islanders tasted it to see what it was made of—salt, apparently—and brushed it out of their hair.

Within minutes they weren’t feeling terribly well. No one exposed to the fallout had any appetite for breakfast that morning. Within hours many were severely nauseated and blistering prolifically wherever ash had touched bare skin. Over the next few days, their hair came out in clumps and some started hemorrhaging internally.

Also caught in the fallout were twenty-three puzzled fishermen on a Japanese boat called, with a touch of irony that escaped no one, the Lucky Dragon. By the time they got back to Japan most of the crewmen were deeply unwell. The haul from their trip was unloaded by other hands and sent to market, where it vanished among the thousands of other catches landed in Japanese ports that day. Unable to tell which fish was contaminated and which was not, Japanese consumers shunned fish altogether for weeks, nearly wrecking the industry.

As a nation, the Japanese were none too happy about any of this. In less than ten years they had achieved the unwelcome distinction of being the first victims of both the atom and hydrogen bombs, and naturally they were a touch upset and sought an apology. We declined to oblige. Instead Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman who had risen to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (it was that kind of age), responded by suggesting that the Japanese fishermen were in fact Soviet agents.

Increasingly, the United States moved its tests to Nevada, where, as we have seen, people were a good deal more appreciative, though it wasn’t just the Marshall Islands and Nevada where we tested. We also set off nuclear bombs on Christmas Island and the Johnston atoll in the Pacific, above and below water in the South Atlantic Ocean, and in New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Alaska, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi (of all places), in the early years of testing. Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

It turned out that children, with their trim little bodies and love of milk, were particularly adept at absorbing and holding on to strontium 90—the chief radioactive product of fallout. Such was our affinity for strontium that in 1958 the average child—

which is to say me and thirty million other small people—was carrying ten times more strontium than he had only the year before. We were positively aglow with the stuff.

So the tests were moved underground, but that didn’t always work terribly well either.

In the summer of 1962, defense officials detonated a hydrogen bomb buried deep beneath the desert of Frenchman Flat, Nevada. The blast was so robust that the land around it rose by some three hundred feet and burst open like a very bad boil, leaving a crater eight hundred feet across. Blast debris went everywhere. “By four in the afternoon,” the historian Peter Goodchild has written, “the radioactive dust cloud was so thick in Ely, Nevada, two hundred miles from Ground Zero, that the street lights had to be turned on.”

Visible fallout drifted down on six western states and two Canadian provinces—though no one officially acknowledged the fiasco and no public warnings were issued advising people not to touch fresh ash or let their children roll around in it. Indeed, all details of the incident remained secret for two decades until a curious journalist filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what had happened that day. *10

While we waited for the politicians and military to give us an actual World War III, the comic books were pleased to provide an imaginary one. Monthly offerings with titles like Atomic War! and Atom-Age Combat began to appear and were avidly sought out by connoisseurs in the Kiddie Corral. Ingeniously, the visionary minds behind these comics took atomic weapons away from the generals and other top brass and put them in the hands of ordinary foot soldiers, allowing them to blow away inexhaustible hordes of advancing Chinese and Russian troops with atomic rockets, atomic cannons, atomic grenades, and even atomic rifles loaded with atomic bullets.

Atomic bullets! What a concept! The carnage was thrilling. Until Asbestos Lady stole into my life, capturing my young heart and twitchy loins, atomic-war comics were the most satisfying form of distraction there was.

Anyway, people had many other far worse things to worry about in the 1950s than nuclear annihilation. They had to worry about polio. They had to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. They had to worry that Negroes might move into the neighborhood.

They had to worry about UFOs. Above all, they had to worry about teenagers. That’s right. Teenagers became the number-one fear of American citizens in the 1950s.

There had of course been obnoxious, partly grown human beings with bad complexions since time immemorial, but as a social phenomenon teenagehood was a brand-new thing. (The word teenager had only been coined in 1941.) So when teens began to appear visibly on the scene, rather like mutant creatures in one of the decade’s many outstanding science-fiction movies, grown-ups grew uneasy. Teenagers smoked and talked back and petted in the backs of cars. They used disrespectful terms to their elders like “pops” and “daddy-o.” They smirked. They drove in endless circuits around any convenient business district. They spent up to fourteen hours a day combing their hair. They listened to rock ’n’ roll, a type of charged music clearly designed to get youngsters in the mood to fornicate and smoke hemp. “We know that many platter-spinners are hop-heads,” wrote the authors of the popular book USA Confidential, showing a proud grasp of street patois. “Many others are Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention.”

Movies like The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, High School Confidential! , Teen-Age Crime Wave, Reform School Girl, and (if I may be allowed a personal favorite) Teenagers from Outer Space made it seem that the youth of the nation was everywhere on some kind of dark, disturbed rampage. The Saturday Evening Post called juvenile crime “the Shame of America.” Time and Newsweek both ran cover stories on the country’s new young hoodlums. Under Estes Kefauver the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency launched a series of emotive hearings on the rise of street gangs and associated misbehavior.

In point of fact, young people had never been so good or so devotedly conservative.

More than half of them, according to J. Ronald Oakley in God’s Country: America in the Fifties, were shown by surveys to believe that masturbation was sinful, that women should stay at home, and that the theory of evolution was not to be trusted—views that many of their elders would have warmly applauded. Teenagers also worked hard, and contributed significantly to the nation’s well-being with weekend and after-school jobs.

By 1955, the typical American teenager had as much disposable income as the average family of four had enjoyed fifteen years earlier. Collectively they were worth $10 billion a year to the national balance sheet. So teenagers weren’t bad by any measure. Still it’s true, when you look at them now, there’s no question that they should have been put down.

ONLY ONE THING CAME CLOSE to matching the fear of teenagers in the 1950s and that was of course Communism. Worrying about Communism was an exhaustingly demanding business in the 1950s. Red danger lurked everywhere—in books and magazines, in government departments, in the teachings of schools, at every place of work. The film industry was especially suspect.

“Large numbers of moving pictures that come out of Hollywood carry the Communist line,” Congressman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, gravely intoned to approving nods in 1947, though on reflection no one could actually think of any Hollywood movie that seemed even slightly sympathetic to Marxist thought. Parnell never did specify which movies he had in mind, but then he didn’t have much chance to for soon afterward he was convicted of embezzling large sums from the government in the form of salaries for imaginary employees. He was sentenced to eighteen months in a prison in Connecticut where he had the unexpected pleasure of serving alongside two of the people, Lester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr., whom his committee had put away for refusing to testify.

Not to be outdone, Walt Disney claimed in testimony to HUAC that the cartoonists’

guild in Hollywood—run by committed Reds and their fellow travelers, he reported—

tried to take over his studio during a strike in 1941 with the intention of making Mickey Mouse a Communist. He never produced any evidence either, though he did identify one of his former employees as a Communist because he didn’t go to church and had once studied art in Moscow.

It was an especially wonderful time to be a noisy moron. Billy James Hargis, a chubby, kick-ass evangelist from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, warned the nation in weekly sweat-spattered sermons that Communists had insinuated themselves into, and effectively taken over, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Education, the National Council of Churches, and nearly every other organization of national standing one could name. His pronouncements were carried on five hundred radio stations and two hundred and fifty television stations and attracted a huge following, as did his many books, which had titles like Communism: The Total Lie and Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?

Although he had no qualifications (he had flunked out of Ozark Bible College—a rare distinction, one would suppose), Hargis founded several educational establishments, including the Christian Crusade Anti-Communist Youth University. (I would love to have heard the school song.) When asked what was taught at his schools, he replied “anti-Communism, anti-Socialism, anti–welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights.” Hargis eventually came undone when it was revealed that he had had sex with several of his students, male and female alike, during moments of lordly fervor. One couple, according to The Economist, made the discovery when they blushingly confessed the misdeed to each other on their wedding night.

At the peak of the Red Scare, thirty-two of the forty-eight states had loyalty oaths of one kind or another. In New York, Oakley notes, it was necessary to swear a loyalty oath to gain a fishing permit. In Indiana loyalty oaths were administered to professional wrestlers. The Communist Control Act of 1954 made it a federal offense to communicate any Communist thoughts by any means, including by semaphore. In Connecticut it became illegal to criticize the government, or to speak ill of the army or the American flag. In Texas you could be sent to prison for twenty years for being a Communist. In Birmingham, Alabama, it was illegal merely to be seen conversing with a Communist.

HUAC issued millions of leaflets entitled “One Hundred Things You Should Know About Communism,” detailing what to look out for in the behavior of neighbors, friends, and family. Billy Graham, the esteemed evangelist, declared that more than one thousand decent-sounding American organizations were in fact fronts for Communist enterprises.

Rudolf Flesch, author of the best-selling Why Johnny Can’t Read, insisted that a failure to teach phonics in schools was undermining democracy and paving the way for Communism. Westbrook Pegler, a syndicated columnist, suggested that anyone found to have been a Communist at any time in his life should simply be put to death. Such was the sensitivity, according to David Halberstam, that when General Motors hired a Russian automotive designer named Zora Arkus-Duntov, it described him in press releases, wholly fictitiously, as being “of Belgian extraction.”

No one exploited the fear to better effect than Joseph R. McCarthy, Republican senator from Wisconsin. In 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to have in his pocket a list of 205 Communists working in the State Department. The next day he claimed to have another list with fifty-seven names on it. Over the next four years McCarthy waved many lists, each claiming to show a different number of Communist operatives. In the course of his spirited ramblings he helped to ruin many lives without ever producing a single promised list. Not producing evidence was becoming something of a trend.

Others brought additional prejudices into play. John Rankin, a senior congressman from Mississippi, sagely observed: “Remember, Communism is Yiddish. I understand that every member of the Politburo around Stalin is either Yiddish or married to one, and that includes Stalin himself.” Against such men, McCarthy looked almost moderate and fairly sane.

Such was the hysteria that it wasn’t actually necessary to have done anything wrong to get in trouble. In 1950, three former FBI agents published a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, accusing 151 celebrities—

among them Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Burgess Meredith, Orson Welles, Edward G. Robinson, and the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee—of various seditious acts. Among the shocking misdeeds of which the performers stood accused were speaking out against religious intolerance, opposing fascism, and supporting world peace and the United Nations. None had any connection with the Communist Party or had ever shown any Communist sympathies. Even so, many of them couldn’t find work for years afterward unless (like Edward G. Robinson) they agreed to appear before HUAC as a friendly witness and name names.

Doing anything at all to help Communists became essentially illegal. In 1951, Dr.

Ernest Chain, a naturalized Briton who had been awarded a Nobel Prize six years earlier for helping to develop penicillin, was barred from entering the United States because he had recently traveled to Czechoslovakia, under the auspices of the World Health Organization, to help start a penicillin plant there. Humanitarian aid was only permissible, it seems, so long as those being saved believed in free markets. Americans likewise found themselves barred from travel. Linus Pauling, who would eventually receive two Nobel Prizes, was stopped at Idlewild Airport in New York while boarding a plane to Britain, where he was to be honored by the Royal Society, and had his passport confiscated on the grounds that he had once or twice publicly expressed a liberal thought.

It was even harder for those who were not American by birth. After learning that a Finnish-born citizen named William Heikkilin had in his youth briefly belonged to the Communist Party, Immigration Service employees tracked him down in San Francisco, arrested him on his way home from work, and bundled him onto an airplane bound for Europe, with nothing but about a dollar in change and the clothes he was wearing. Not until his plane touched down the following day did officials inform his frantic wife that her husband had been deported. They refused to tell her where he had been sent.

In perhaps the most surreal moment of all, Arthur Miller, the playwright, while facing congressional rebuke and the possibility of prison for refusing to betray friends and theatrical associates, was told that the charges against him would be dropped if he would allow the chairman of HUAC, Francis E. Walter, to be photographed with Miller’s famous and dishy wife, Marilyn Monroe. Miller declined.

In 1954, McCarthy finally undid himself. He accused General George Marshall, the man behind the Marshall Plan and a person of unquestioned rectitude, of treason, a charge quickly shown to be preposterous. Then he took on the whole of the United States Army, threatening to expose scores of subversive senior staff that he claimed the army knowingly shielded within its ranks. In a series of televised hearings lasting thirty-six days in the spring of 1954 and known as the Army-McCarthy hearings, he showed himself to be a bullying, blustering buffoon of the first rank without a shred of evidence against anyone—though in fact he had always shown that. It just took this long for most of the nation to realize it.

Later that year McCarthy was severely censured by the Senate—a signal humiliation.

He died three years later in disgrace. But the fact is that had he been just a tiny bit smarter or more likable, he might well have become president. In any case, McCarthy’s downfall didn’t slow the assault on Communism. As late as 1959, the New York office of the FBI still had four hundred agents working full time on rooting out Communists in American life, according to Kenneth O’Reilly in Hoover and the Un-Americans.

Thanks to our overweening preoccupation with Communism at home and abroad America became the first nation in modern history to build a war economy in peacetime.

Defense spending in the fifties ranged between $40 billion and $53 billion a year—or more than total government spending on everything at the dawn of the decade. Altogether the United States would lay out $350 billion on defense during the eight years of the Eisenhower presidency. More than this, 90 percent of our foreign aid was for military expenditures. We didn’t just want to arm ourselves; we wanted to make sure that everybody else was armed, too.

Often, all that was necessary to earn America’s enmity, and land yourself in a lot of trouble, was to get in the way of our economic interests. In 1950, Guatemala elected a reformist government—“the most democratic Guatemala ever had,” according to the historian Howard Zinn—under Jacobo Arbenz, an educated landowner of good intentions. Arbenz’s election was a blow for the American company United Fruit, which had run Guatemala as a private fiefdom since the nineteenth century. The company owned nearly everything of importance in the country—the ports, the railroads, the communications networks, banks, stores, and some 550,000 acres of farmland—paid little taxes, and could count confidently on the support of a string of repressive dictators.

Some 85 percent of United Fruit’s land was left more or less permanently idle. This kept fruit prices high, but Guatemalans poor. Arbenz, who was the son of Swiss immigrants and something of an idealist, thought this was unfair and decided to remake the country along more democratic lines. He established free elections, ended racial discrimination, encouraged a free press, introduced a forty-hour work week, legalized unions, and ended government corruption.

Needless to say, most people loved him. In an attempt to reduce poverty, he devised a plan to nationalize, at a fair price, much of the idle farmland—including 1,700 acres of his own—and redistribute it in the form of small farms to a hundred thousand landless peasants. To that end Arbenz’s government expropriated 400,000 acres of land from United Fruit, and offered as compensation the sum that the company had claimed the land was worth for tax purposes—$1,185,000.

United Fruit now decided the land was worth $16 million actually—a sum the Guatemalan government couldn’t afford to pay. When Arbenz turned down United Fruit’s demand for the higher level of compensation, the company complained to the United States government, which responded by underwriting a coup.

Arbenz fled his homeland in 1954 and a new, more compliant leader named Carlos Castillo Armas was installed. To help him on his way, the CIA gave him a list of seventy thousand “questionable individuals”—teachers, doctors, government employees, union organizers, priests—who had supported the reforms in the belief that democracy in Guatemala was a good thing. Thousands of them were never seen again.

And on that sobering note, let us return to Kid World, where the denizens may be small and often immensely stupid, but are at least comparatively civilized.

Chapter 8

SCHOOL DAYS

In Pasadena, California, student Edward Mulrooney was arrested after he tossed a bomb at his psychology teacher’s house and left a note that said: “If you don’t want your home bombed or your windows shot out, then grade fairly and put your assignments on the board—or is this asking too much?”

Time magazine, April 16, 1956

GREENWOOD, MY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, was a wonderful old building, enormous to a small child, like a castle made of brick. Built in 1901, it stood off Grand Avenue at the far end of a street of outstandingly vast and elegant homes. The whole neighborhood smelled lushly of old money.

Stepping into Greenwood for the first time was both the scariest and most exciting event of the first five years of my life. The front doors appeared to be about twenty times taller than normal doors, and everything inside was built to a similar imposing scale, including the teachers. Everything about it was intimidating and thrilling at once.

It was, I believe, the handsomest elementary school I have ever seen. Nearly everything in it—the cool ceramic water fountains, the polished corridors, the cloakrooms with their neatly spaced ancient coat hooks, the giant clanking radiators with their intricate embossed patterns like iron veins, the glass-fronted cupboards, everything—had an agreeable creak of solid, classy, utilitarian venerability. This was a building made by craftsmen at a time when quality counted, and generations of devoted childhood learning suffused the air. If I hadn’t had to spend so much of my time vaporizing teachers I would have adored the place.

Still, I was very fond of the building. One of the glories of life in that ancient lost world of the mid-twentieth century was that facilities designed for kids often were just smaller versions of things in the adult world. You can’t imagine how much more splendid this made them. Our Little League baseball field, for instance, was a proper ballpark, with a grandstand, concession stand and press box, and real dugouts that were, as the name demands, partly subterranean (and never mind that they filled with puddles after every rain and that the shorter players couldn’t see over the edge and so tended to cheer at the wrong moments). When you ran up those three sagging steps and out onto the field you could seriously imagine that you were in Yankee Stadium. Superior infrastructure makes for richer fantasies, believe me. Greenwood contained all that in spades.

It had, for one thing, an auditorium that was just like a real theater, with a stage with curtains and spotlights and dressing rooms behind. So however bad your school productions were—and ours were always extremely bad, partly because we had no talent and partly because Mrs. De Voto, the music teacher, was a bit ancient and often nodded off at the piano—it felt like you were part of a well-ordered professional undertaking (even when you were standing there holding a long note waiting for Mrs. De Voto’s chin to touch the keyboard, an event that always jerked her back into action with rousing gusto at exactly the spot where she had left off a minute or two before).

Greenwood also had the world’s finest gymnasium. It was upstairs at the back of the school, which gave it a nicely unexpected air. When you opened the door, you expected to find an ordinary classroom and instead you had—hey! whoa!—a gigantic cubic vault of polished wood. It was a space to savor: it had cathedral-sized windows, a ceiling that no ball could ever reach, acres of varnished wood that had been mellowed into a honeyed glow by decades of squeaky sneakers and gentle drops of childish perspiration, and smartly echoing acoustics that made every bouncing ball sound deftly handled and seriously athletic. When the weather was good and we were sent outdoors to play, the route to the playground took us onto a rickety metal fire escape that was unnervingly but grandly lofty. The view from the summit took in miles of rooftops and sunny countryside reaching practically to Missouri, or so it seemed.

Mostly we played indoors, however, because it was nearly always winter outside. Of course winters in those days, as with all winters of childhood, were much longer, snowier, and more frigid than now. We used to get up to eleven feet of snow at a time—

we seldom got less, in fact—and weeks of arctic weather so bitter you could pee icicles.

In consequence, they used to keep the school heated to roughly the temperature of the inside of a pottery kiln, so pupils and teachers alike existed in a state of permanent, helpless drowsiness. But at the same time the close warmth made everything deliciously cheery and cozy. Even Lumpy Kowalski’s daily plop in his pants smelled oven-baked and kind of strangely lovely. (For six months of the year, his pants actually steamed.) On the other hand, the radiators were so hot that if you carelessly leaned an elbow on them you could leave flesh behind. The most infamous radiator-based activity was of course to pee on a radiator in one of the boys’ bathrooms. This created an enormous sour stink that permeated whole wings of the school for days on end and could not be got rid of through any amount of scrubbing or airing. For this reason, anyone caught peeing on a radiator was summarily executed.

The school day was largely taken up with putting on or taking off clothing. It was an exhaustingly tedious process. It took most of the morning to take off your outdoor wear and most of the afternoon to get it back on, assuming you could find any of it among the jumbled, shifting heap of garments that carpeted the cloakroom floor to a depth of about three feet. Changing time was always like a scene at a refugee camp, with at least three kids wandering around weeping copiously because they had only one boot or no mittens.

Teachers were never to be seen at such moments.

Boots in those days had strange, uncooperative clasps that managed to pinch and lacerate at the same time, producing some really interesting injuries, especially when your hands were numb with cold. The manufacturers really might just as well have fashioned the clasps out of razor blades. Because they were so lethal, you ended up leaving the clasps undone, which was more macho but also let in large volumes of snow, so that you spent much of the day in sopping wet socks, which then became three times longer than your feet. In consequence of being constantly damp and hyperthermic, all children had running noses from October to April, which most of them treated as a kind of drip feeder.

Greenwood had no cafeteria, so everybody had to go home for lunch, which meant that we had to dress and undress four times in every school day—six if the teacher was foolish enough to include an outdoor recess at some point. My dear, dim friend Buddy Doberman spent so much of his life changing that he often lost track and would have to ask me whether we were putting hats on or off now. He was always most grateful for guidance.

Among the many thousands of things moms never quite understand—the manliness implicit in grass stains, the satisfaction of a really good burp or other gaseous eructation, the need from time to time to blow into straws as well as suck out of them—winter dressing has always been perhaps the most tragically conspicuous. All moms in the fifties lived in dread of cold fronts slipping in from Canada, and therefore insisted that their children wear enormous quantities of insulating clothes for at least seven months of the year. This came mostly in the form of underwear—cotton underwear, flannel underwear, long underwear, thermal underwear, quilted underwear, ribbed underwear, underwear with padded shoulders, and possibly more; there was a lot of underwear in America in the 1950s—so that you couldn’t possibly perish during any of the ten minutes you spent outdoors each day.

What they failed to take into account was that you were so mummified by extra clothing that you had no limb flexion whatever, and if you fell over you would never get up again unless someone helped you, which was not a thing you could count on. Layered underwear also made going to the bathroom an unnerving challenge. The manufacturers did put an angled vent in every item, but these never quite matched up, and anyway if your penis is only the size of a newly budded acorn it’s asking a lot to thread it through seven or eight layers of underwear and still maintain a competent handhold. In any visit to the restroom, you would hear at least one cry of anguish from someone who had lost purchase in mid-flow and was now delving frantically for the missing appendage.

Mothers also failed to realize that certain clothes at certain periods of your life would get you beaten up. If, for instance, you wore snow pants beyond the age of six, you got beaten up for it. If you wore a hat with earflaps or, worse, a chin strap, it was a certain beating, or at the very least a couple of scoops of snow down your back. The wimpiest, most foolish thing of all was to wear galoshes. Galoshes were unstylish and ineffective and even the name just sounded stupid and inescapably humiliating. If your mom made you wear galoshes at any point in the year, it was a death sentence. I knew kids who couldn’t get prom dates in high school because every girl they asked remembered that they had worn galoshes in third grade.

I WAS NOT A POPULAR PUPIL with the teachers. Only Mrs. De Voto liked me, and she liked all the children, largely because she didn’t know who any of them were. She wrote “Billy sings with enthusiasm” on all my report cards, except once or twice when she wrote “Bobby sings with enthusiasm.” But I excused her for that because she was kind and well meaning and smelled nice.

The other teachers—all women, all spinsters—were large, lumpy, suspicious, frustrated, dictatorial, and unkind. They smelled peculiar, too—a mixture of camphor and mentholated mints, and had the curious belief (which may well have contributed to their spinsterhood) that a generous dusting of powder was as good as a bath. Some of these women had been powdering up for years and, believe me, it didn’t work.

They insisted on knowing strange things, which I found bewildering. If you asked to go to the restroom, they wanted to know whether you intended to do Number 1 or Number 2, a curiosity that didn’t strike me as entirely healthy. Besides, these were not terms used in our house. In our house, you either went toity or had a BM (for bowel movement), but mostly you just “went to the bathroom” and made no public declarations with regard to intent. So I hadn’t the faintest idea, the first time I requested permission to go, what the teacher meant when she asked me if I was going to do number one or number two.

“Well, I don’t know,” I replied frankly and in a clear voice. “I need to do a big BM. It could be as much as a three or a four.”

I got sent to the cloakroom for that. I got sent to the cloakroom a lot, often for reasons that I didn’t entirely understand, but I never really minded. It was a curious punishment, after all, to be put in a place where you were alone with all your classmates’ snack foods and personal effects and no one could see what you were getting into, and where you could mug for the other pupils if you positioned yourself out of the teacher’s line of sight.

It was also a very good time to get some private reading done.

As a scholar, I made little impact. My very first report card, for the first semester of first grade, had just one comment from the teacher: “Billy talks in a low tone.” That was it. Nothing about my character or deportment, my sure touch with phonics, my winning smile or can-do attitude, just a terse and enigmatic “Billy talks in a low tone.” It wasn’t even possible to tell whether it was a complaint or mere observation. After the second semester, the report said: “Billy still talks in a low tone.” All my other report cards—

every last one, apart from Mrs. De Voto’s faithful recording of my enthusiastic melodic noise-making—had blanks in the comment section. It was as if I wasn’t there. In fact, often I wasn’t.

Kindergarten, my debut experience at Greenwood, ran for just half a day. You attended either the morning session or the afternoon session. I was assigned to the afternoon group, which was a lucky thing because I didn’t get up much before noon in those days.

(We were night owls in our house.) One of my very first experiences of kindergarten was arriving for the afternoon, keen to get cracking with the fingerpaints, and being instructed to lie down on a little rug for a nap. Resting was something we had to do a lot of in the fifties; I presume that it was somehow attached to the belief that it would thwart polio.

But as I had only just risen to come to school, it seemed a little eccentric to be lying down again. The next year was even worse because we were expected to turn up at 8:45 in the morning, which was not a time I chose to be active.

My best period was the late evening. I liked to watch the ten o’clock news with Russ Van Dyke, the world’s best television newsman (better even than Walter Cronkite), and then Sea Hunt starring Lloyd Bridges (some genius at KRNT-TV decided 10:30 at night was a good time to run a show enjoyed by children, which was correct) before settling down with a largish stack of comic books. I was seldom asleep much before midnight, so when my mother called me in the morning, I usually found it inconvenient to rise. So I didn’t go to school if I could help it.

I probably wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been for mimeograph paper. Of all the tragic losses since the 1950s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating.

Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system’s willing slave for up to seven hours. Go to any crack house and ask the people where their dependency problems started and they will tell you, I’m certain, that it was with mimeograph paper in second grade. I used to bound out of bed on a Monday morning because that was the day that fresh mimeographed worksheets were handed out.

I draped them over my face and drifted off to a private place where fields were green, everyone went barefoot, and the soft trill of panpipes floated on the air. But most of the rest of the week I either straggled in around mid-morning, or didn’t come in at all. I’m afraid the teachers took this personally.

They were never going to like me anyway. There was something about me—my dreaminess and hopeless forgetfulness, my lack of button-cuteness, my permanent default expression of pained dubiousness—that rubbed them the wrong way. They disliked all children, of course, particularly little boys, but of the children they didn’t like I believe they especially favored me. I always did everything wrong. I forgot to bring official forms back on time. I forgot to bring cookies for class parties, and Christmas cards and valentines on the appropriate festive days. I always turned up empty-handed for show-and-tell. I remember once in kindergarten, in a kind of desperation, I just showed my fingers.

If we were going on a school trip, I never remembered to bring a permission note from home, even after being reminded daily for weeks. So on the day of the trip everybody would have to sit moodily on the bus for an interminable period while the principal’s secretary (the one nice person in the school) tried to track my mother down to get her consent over the phone. But my mother was always out to coffee. The whole fucking Women’s Department was always out to coffee. If they weren’t out to coffee, they were out to lunch. It’s a miracle they ever produced a section, frankly. The secretary would eventually look at me with a sad smile and we would have to face the fact together that I wasn’t going to go.

So the bus would depart without me and I would spend the day in the school library, which I actually didn’t mind at all. It’s not as if I were missing a trip to the Grand Canyon or Cape Canaveral. This was Des Moines. There were only two places schools went on trips in Des Moines—to the Wonder Bread factory on Second Avenue and University, where you could watch freshly made bread products traveling around an enormous room on conveyor belts under the very light supervision of listless drones in paper hats (and you could be excused for thinking that the purpose of school visits was to give the drones something to stare at), and the museum of the Iowa State Historical Society, the world’s quietest and most uneventful building, where you discovered that not a great deal had ever happened in Iowa; nothing at all if you excluded ice ages.

A more regular humiliation was forgetting to bring money for savings stamps. Savings stamps were like savings bonds, but bought a little at a time. You gave the teacher 20 or 30 cents (two dollars if your dad was a lawyer, surgeon, or orthodontist) and she gave you a commensurate number of patriotic-looking stamps—one for each dime spent—

which you then licked and placed over stamp-sized squares in a savings stamp book.

When you had filled a book, you had ten dollars’ worth of savings and America was that much closer to licking Communism. I can still see the stamps now: they were a pinkish red with a picture of a minuteman with a three-cornered hat, a musket, and a look of resolve. It was a sacred patriotic duty to buy savings stamps.

One day each week—I couldn’t tell you which one now; I couldn’t tell you which one then—Miss Grumpy or Miss Lesbos or Miss Squat Little Fat Thing would announce that it was time to collect money for U.S. Saving Stamps and every child in the classroom but me would immediately reach into their desk or schoolbag and extract a white envelope containing money and join a line at the teacher’s desk. It was a weekly miracle to me that all these other pupils knew on which day they were supposed to bring money and then actually remembered to do so. That was at least one step of sharpness too many for a Bryson.

One year I had four stamps in my book (two of them pasted in upside down); in all the other years I had zero. My mother and I between us had not remembered once. The Butter boys all had more stamps than I did. Each year the teacher held up my pathetically barren book as an example for the other pupils of how not to support your country and they would all laugh—that peculiar braying laugh that exists only when children are invited by adults to enjoy themselves at the expense of another child. It is the cruelest laugh in the world.

DESPITE THESE SELF-INFLICTED HARDSHIPS, I quite enjoyed school, especially reading. We were taught to read from Dick and Jane books, solid hardbacks bound in a heavy-duty red or blue fabric. They had short sentences in large type and lots of handsome watercolor illustrations featuring a happy, prosperous, good-looking, law-abiding, but interestingly strange family. In the Dick and Jane books, Father is always called Father, never Dad or Daddy, and always wears a suit, even for Sunday lunch—

even, indeed, to drive to Grandfather and Grandmother’s farm for a weekend visit.

Mother is always Mother. She is always on top of things, always nicely groomed in a clean frilly apron. The family has no last name. They live in a pretty house with a picket fence on a pleasant street, but they have no radio or TV and their bathroom has no toilet (so no problems deciding between Number 1 and Number 2 in their household). The children—Dick, Jane, and little Sally—have only the simplest and most timeless of toys: a ball, a wagon, a kite, a wooden sailboat.

No one ever shouts or bleeds or weeps helplessly. No meals ever burn, no drinks ever spill (or intoxicate). No dust accumulates. The sun always shines. The dog never shits on the lawn. There are no atomic bombs, no Butter boys, no cicada killers. Everyone is at all times clean, healthy, strong, reliable, hardworking, American, and white.

Every Dick and Jane story provided some simple but important lesson—respect your parents, share your possessions, be polite, be honest, be helpful, and above all work hard.

Work, according to Growing Up with Dick and Jane, was the eighteenth new word we learned. I’m amazed it took them that long. Work was what you did in our world.

I was captivated by the Dick and Jane family. They were so wonderfully, fascinatingly different from my own family. I particularly recall one illustration in which all the members of the Dick and Jane family, for entertainment, stand on one leg, hold the other out straight, and try to grab a toe on the extended foot without losing balance and falling over. They are having the most delightful time doing this. I stared and stared at that picture and realized that there were no circumstances, including at gunpoint, in which you could get all the members of my family to try to do that together.

Because our Dick and Jane books at Greenwood were ten or fifteen years old, they depicted a world that was already gone. The cars were old-fashioned; the buses, too. The shops the family frequented were of a type that no longer existed—pet shops with puppies in the window, toy stores with wooden toys, grocers where items were fetched for you by a cheerful man in a white apron. I found everything about this enchanting.

There was no dirt or pain in their world. They could even go into Grandfather’s henhouse to collect eggs and not gag from the stink or become frantically attached to a blob of chicken shit. It was a wonderful world, a perfect world, friendly, hygienic, safe, better than real. There was just one very odd thing about the Dick and Jane books. Whenever any of the characters spoke, they didn’t sound like humans.

“Here we are at the farm,” says Father in a typical passage as he bounds from the car (dressed, not incidentally, in a brown suit), then adds a touch robotically: “Hello, Grandmother. Here we are at the farm.”

“Hello,” responds Grandmother. “See who is here. It is my family. Look, look! Here is my family.”

“Oh, look! Here we are at the farm,” adds Dick, equally amazed to find himself in a rural setting inhabited by loved ones. He, too, seems to have a kind of mental stuck needle. “Here we are at the farm,” he goes on. “Here is Grandfather, too! Here we are at the farm.”

It was like this on every page. Every character talked exactly like people whose brains had been taken away. This troubled me for a long while. One of the great influences of my life in this period was the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I found so convincingly scary that I took it as more or less real, and for about three years I watched my parents extremely closely for telltale signs that they had been taken over by alien life forms themselves, before eventually realizing that it would be impossible to tell if they had been; that indeed the first clue that they were turning into pod people would be their becoming more normal—and I wondered for a long time if the Dick and Jane family (or actually, for I wasn’t completely stupid, the creators of the Dick and Jane family) had been snatched and were now trying to soften us up for a podding of our own. It made sense to me.

I loved the Dick and Jane books so much that I took them home and kept them. (There were stacks of spares in the cloakroom.) I still have them and still look at them from time to time. And I am still looking for a family that would all try to touch their toes together.

Once I had the Dick and Jane books at home and could read them at my leisure, over a bowl of ice cream or while keeping half an eye on the television, I didn’t see much need to go to school. So I didn’t much go. By second grade I was pretty routinely declining my mother’s daily entreaties to rise. It exasperated her to the point of two heavy sighs and some speechless clucking—as close to furious as she ever got—but I realized quite early on that if I just went completely limp and unresponsive and assumed a posture of sacklike uncooperativeness, stirring only very slightly from time to time to mumble that I was really seriously unwell and needed rest, she would eventually give up, and go away saying, “Your dad would be furious if he was here now.”

But the thing was he wasn’t there. He was in Iowa City or Columbus or San Francisco or Sarasota. He was always somewhere. As a consequence he only learned of these matters twice a year when he was given my report card to review and sign. These always became occasions in which my mother was in as much trouble as I was.

“How can he have 26¼ absences in one semester?” he would say in pained dismay.

“And how, come to that, do you get a quarter of an absence?” He would look at my mother in further pained dismay. “Do you just send part of him to school sometimes? Do you keep his legs at home?”

My mother would make small fretful noises that didn’t really amount to speech.

“I just don’t get it,” my father would go on, staring at the report card as if it were a bill for damages unfairly rendered. “It’s gotten beyond a joke. I really think the only solution is a military academy.”

My father had a strange, deep attraction to military academies. The idea of permanent, systematized punishment appealed to a certain dark side of his character. Large numbers of these institutions advertised at the back of National Geographic—why there I don’t know—and I would often find those pages bookmarked by him. The ads always showed a worried-looking boy in gray military dress, a rifle many times too big for him at his shoulder, above a message saying something like:

Camp Hardship Military Academy

TEACHING BOYS TO KILL SINCE 1867

We specialize in building character and

eliminating pansy traits.

Write for details at P.O. Box 1,

Chicken Gizzard, Tenn.

It never came to anything. He would write off for a leaflet—my father was a fiend for leaflets of all types, and catalogs too if they were free—and find out that the fees were as much as for an Austin Healy sports car or a trip to Europe, and drop the whole notion, as one might drop a very hot platter. Anyway, I wasn’t convinced that military academies were such a bad thing. The idea of being at a place where rifles, bayonets, and explosives were at the core of the curriculum had a certain distinct appeal.

ONCE A MONTH we had a civil defense drill at school. A siren would sound—a special urgent siren that denoted that this was not a fire drill or storm alert but a nuclear attack by agents of Communism—and everyone would scramble out of their seats and get under their desks with hands folded over heads in the nuclear attack brace position. I must have missed a few of these, for the first time one occurred in my presence I had no idea what was going on and sat fascinated as everyone around me dropped to the floor and parked themselves like little cars under their desks.

“What is this?” I asked Buddy Doberman’s butt, for that was the only part of him still visible.

“Atomic bomb attack,” came his voice, slightly muffled. “But it’s okay. It’s only a practice, I think.”

I remember being profoundly amazed that anyone would suppose that a little wooden desk would provide a safe haven in the event of an atomic bomb being dropped on Des Moines. But evidently they all took the matter seriously, for even the teacher, Miss Squat Little Fat Thing, was inserted under her desk, too—or at least as much of her as she could get under, which was perhaps 40 percent. Once I realized that no one was watching, I elected not to take part. I already knew how to get under a desk and was confident that this was not a skill that would ever need refreshing. Anyway what were the chances that the Soviets would bomb Des Moines? I mean, come on.

Some weeks later I aired this point conversationally to my father while we were dining together in the Jefferson Hotel in Iowa City on one of our occasional weekends away, and he responded with a strange chuckle that Omaha, just a hundred or so miles to the west of Des Moines, was the headquarters of Strategic Air Command, from which all American operations would be directed in the event of war. SAC would be hit by everything the Soviets could throw at it, which of course was a great deal. We in Des Moines would be up to our keisters in fallout within ninety minutes if the wind was blowing to the east, my father told me. “You’d be dead before bedtime,” he added brightly. “We all would.”

I don’t know which I found more disturbing, that I was at grave risk in a way that I hadn’t known about or that my father found the prospect of our annihilation so amusing, but either way it confirmed me in the conviction that nuclear drills were pointless. Life was too short and we’d all be dead anyway. The time would be better spent apologetically but insistently touching Mary O’Leary’s budding chest. In any case, I ceased to take part in the drills.

So it was perhaps a little unfortunate that on the morning of my third or fourth drill, Mrs. Unnaturally Enormous Bosom, the principal, accompanied by a man in a military uniform from the Iowa Air National Guard, made an inspection tour of the school and espied me sitting alone at my desk reading a comic adventure featuring the Human Torch and that shapely minx Asbestos Lady, surrounded by a roomful of abandoned desks, each sprouting a pair of backward-facing feet and a child’s ass.

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? Some thing 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 with 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 some place 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 any one, 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. Dewey 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.

I took my dinner on a tray in my room each evening and scarcely ever saw my parents after that except on special occasions like birthdays and Thanksgiving. We bumped into one another in the hallway from time to time, of course, and occasionally on hot summer evenings I joined them on the screened porch for a glass of iced tea, but mostly we went our separate ways. So from that point our house was much more like a boardinghouse—a nice boardinghouse where the people got along well but respected and valued one another’s privacy—than a family home.

All this seemed perfectly normal to me. We were never a terribly close family when I think back on it. At least we weren’t terribly close in the conventional sense. My parents were always friendly, even affectionate, but in a slightly vague and distracted way. My mother was forever busy attacking collar stains or scraping potatoes off the oven walls—

she was always attacking something—and my father was either away covering a sporting event for the paper or in his room reading. Very occasionally they went to a movie at the Varsity Theatre—it showed Peter Sellers comedies from time to time, on which they quietly doted—or to the library, but mostly they stayed at home happily occupying different rooms.

Every night about eleven o’clock or a little after I would hear my father going downstairs to the kitchen to make a snack. My father’s snacks were legendary. They took at least thirty minutes to prepare and required the most particular and methodical laying out of components—Ritz crackers, a large jar of mustard, wheat germ, radishes, ten Hydrox cookies, an enormous bowl of chocolate ice cream, several slices of luncheon meat, freshly washed lettuce, Cheez Whiz, peanut butter, peanut brittle, a hard-boiled egg or two, a small bowl of nuts, watermelon in season, possibly a banana—all neatly peeled, trimmed, sliced, cubed, stacked, or layered as appropriate, and attractively arrayed on a large brown tray and taken away to be consumed over a period of hours. None of these snacks could have contained less than twelve thousand calories, at least 80 percent of it in the form of cholesterol and saturated fats, and yet my father never gained an ounce of weight.

There was one other notable thing about my father’s making of snacks that must be mentioned. He was bare-assed when he made them. It wasn’t, let me quickly add, that he thought being bare-assed somehow made for a better snack; it was just that he was bare-assed already. One of his small quirks was sleeping naked from the waist down. He believed that it was more comfortable, and healthful, to leave the bottom half of the body unencumbered at night, and so when in bed wore only a sleeveless T-shirt. And when he went downstairs late at night to concoct a snack he always went so attired (or unattired).

Goodness knows what Mr. and Mrs. Bukowski next door must have thought as they drew their drapes and saw across the way (as surely they must) my father, bare-assed, padding about his kitchen, reaching into high cupboards and assembling the raw materials for his nightly feast.

Whatever dismay it may have caused next door, none of this was of any consequence in our house as everyone was in bed fast asleep (or in my case lying in the dark watching TV very quietly). But it happened that one night in about 1963, my father descended on a Friday night when my sister, unbeknownst to him, was entertaining. Specifically, she and her good friends Nancy Ricotta and Wendy Spurgin were encamped in the living room with their boyfriends, watching television in the dark and swabbing each other’s airways with their tongues (or so I have always imagined), when they were startled by a light coming on in the hallway above and the sound of my father descending the stairs.

As in most American homes, the living room in our house communicated with the rooms beyond by way of a doorless opening, in this case an arch about six feet wide, which meant that it offered virtually no privacy, so the sound of an approaching adult footfall was taken seriously. Instantly assuming positions of propriety, the six young people looked toward the entranceway just in time to see my father’s lightly wobbling cheeks, faintly illumined by the ghostly flicker of television, passing the open doorway and proceeding onward to the kitchen.

For twenty-five minutes they sat in silence, too mortified to speak, knowing that my father must return by the same route and that this time the encounter would be frontal.

Fortunately (insofar as such a word can apply here) my father must have peripherally noted them as he passed or heard voices or gasps or something, for when he returned with his tray he was snugly attired in my mother’s beige raincoat, creating the impression that he was not only oddly depraved but a nocturnal cross-dresser as well. As he passed he mouthed a shy but pleasant good evening to the assembled party and disappeared back up the stairs.

It was about six months, I believe, before my sister spoke to him again.

INTERESTINGLY, at just about the time I acquired my television I realized that I didn’t really like TV very much—or, to put it more accurately, didn’t much like what was on TV, though I did like having the TV on. I liked the chatter and mindless laugh tracks. So mostly I left it babbling in the corner like a demented relative and read. I was at an age now where I read a lot, all the time. Once or twice a week I would descend to the living room, where there were two enormous (or so it seemed to me) built-in bookcases flanking the back window. These were filled with my parents’ books, mostly hardback, mostly from the Book-of-the-Month Club, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, and I would select three or four and take them up to my room.

I was happily indiscriminate in my selections because I had little idea which of the books were critically esteemed and which were popular tosh. I read, among much else, Trader Horn, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, Manhattan Transfer, You Know Me, Al, The Constant Nymph, Lost Horizon, the short stories of Saki, several jokey anthologies from Bennett Cerf, a thrilling account of life on Devil’s Island called Dry Guillotine, and more or less the complete oeuvres of P. G. Wodehouse, S. S.

Van Dine, and Philo Vance. I had a particular soft spot for—and I believe may have been the last human being to read— The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen, with its wonderfully peerless names: Lady Pynte, Venice Pollen, Hugh Cypress, Colonel Victor Duck, and the unsurpassable Trehawke Tush.

On one of these collecting trips, I came across, on a lower shelf, a Drake University Yearbook for 1936. Flipping through it, I discovered to my astonishment—complete and utter—that my mother had been homecoming queen that year. There was a picture of her on a float, radiant, beaming, slender, youthful, wearing a glittery tiara. I went with the book to the kitchen, where I found my father making coffee. “Did you know Mom was homecoming queen at Drake?” I said.

“Of course.”

“How did that happen?”

“She was elected by her peers, of course. Your mom was quite a looker, you know.”

“Really?” It had never occurred to me that my mother looked anything except motherly.

“Still is, of course,” he added chivalrously.

I found it astounding, perhaps even a little out of order, that other people might find my mother attractive or desirable. Then I quite warmed to the idea. My mother had been a beauty. Imagine.

I put the book back. On the same section of shelf were eight or nine books entitled Best Sports Stories of 1950 and so on for nearly every year of the decade, each consisting of thirty or forty of the best sports articles of that year as chosen by somebody well-known like Red Barber. Each of these volumes contained a piece of work—in some cases two pieces—by my dad. Often he was the only provincial journalist included. I sat down on the window seat between the bookcases and read several of them right there. They were wonderful. They really were. It was just one bright line after another. One I recall recorded how University of Iowa football coach Jerry Burns ranged up and down the sidelines in dismay as his defensive team haplessly allowed Ohio State to score touchdowns at will. “It was a case of the defense fiddling while Burns roamed,” he wrote, and I was amazed to realize that the bare-assed old fool was capable of such flights of verbal scintillation.

In light of these heartening discoveries, I amended the Thunderbolt Kid story at once. I was their biological offspring after all—and pleased to be so. Their genetic material was my genetic material and no mistake. I decided, on further consideration, that it must have been my father, not I, who had been dispatched to Earth from Planet Electro to preserve and propagate the interests of King Volton and his doomed race. That made vastly more sense when I thought about it. What better-sounding place, after all, for a superhero to grow up in than Winfield, Iowa? That, surely, was where the Thunderbolt Kid was intended to come from.

Unfortunately, I realized now, my father’s space capsule had suffered a hard landing, and my father had received a concussive bump, which had wiped his memory clean and left him with one or two slightly strange habits—a crippling cheapness and a disinclination to wear underpants after dark being the principal ones—and spent his whole life tragically unaware that he had the innate capacity to summon up superpowers.

Instead, it was left to his youngest son to make that discovery. That was why I needed special clothes to assume my Electron powers. I was an Earthling by birth, so I didn’t come by these super-gifts naturally. I required the Sacred Jersey of Zap for that.

Of course. It all made sense now. This story just got better and better, in my view.

Chapter 10

DOWN ON THE FARM

MASON CITY, IOWA—A pretty blonde bride’s playful tickling of her husband to get him out of bed to milk the cows led swiftly to tragedy early Tuesday. Mrs. Jennie Becker Brunner, 22, said through her tears in a Cerro Gordo County jail cell here late in the day that she shot and killed her husband, Sam Brunner, 26, with his .45 caliber U.S. Army Colt pistol. Mrs. Brunner said she and her husband quarreled after she tickled him under the arm to get him out of bed.

— The Des Moines Register, November 19, 1953

GIVE OR TAKE the occasional ticklish murder, Iowa has always been a peaceful and refreshingly unassertive place. In the 160 years or so that it has been a state, only one shot has been officially fired in anger on Iowa soil, and even that wasn’t very angry.

During the Civil War, a group of Union soldiers, for reasons that I believe are now pretty well forgotten, discharged a cannonball across the state line into Missouri. It landed in a field on the other side and dribbled harmlessly to a halt. I shouldn’t be surprised if the Missourians put it on a wagon and brought it back. In any case, nobody was hurt. This was not simply the high point in Iowa’s military history, it was the only point in it.

Iowa has always been proudly middling in all its affairs. It stands in the middle of the continent, between the two mighty central rivers, the Missouri and Mississippi, and throughout my childhood always ranked bang in the middle of everything—size, population, voting preferences, order of entry into the Union. We were slightly wealthier, a whole lot more law-abiding, and more literate and better educated than the national average, and ate more Jell-O (a lot more—in fact, to be completely honest, we ate all of it), but otherwise have never been too showy at all. While other states of the Midwest churned out a more or less continuous stream of world-class worthies—Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Lindbergh—Iowa gave the world Donna Reed, Wyatt Earp, Herbert Hoover, and the guy who played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy.

Iowa’s main preoccupations have always been farming and being friendly, both of which we do better than almost anyone else, if I say so myself. It is the quintessential farm state. Everything about it is perfect for growing things. It occupies just 1.6 percent of the country’s land area, but contains 25 percent of its Grade A topsoil. That topsoil is three feet deep in most places, which is apparently pretty deep. Stride across an Iowa farm field and you feel as if you could sink in up to your waist. You will certainly sink in up to your ankles. It is like walking around on a very large pan of brownies. The climate is ideal, too, if you don’t mind shoveling tons of snow in the winter and dodging tornadoes all summer. By the standards of the rest of the world, droughts are essentially unknown and rainfall is distributed with an almost uncanny beneficence—heavy enough to give a healthful soaking when needed but not so much as to pummel seedlings or wash away nutrients. Summers are long and agreeably sunny, but seldom scorching. Plants love to grow in Iowa.

It is in consequence one of the most maximally farmed landscapes on earth. Someone once calculated that if Iowa contained nothing but farms, each of 160 acres (presumably the optimal size for a farm), there would be room for 225,000 of them. In 1930, the peak year for farm numbers, there were 215,361 farms in the state—not far off the absolute maximum. The number is very much smaller these days because of the relentless push of amalgamation, but 95 percent of Iowa’s landscape is still farmed. The remaining small fraction is taken up by highways, woods, a scattering of lakes and rivers, loads of little towns and a few smallish cities, and about twelve million Wal-Mart parking lots.

I remember reading once at the state fair that Iowa’s farms produced more in value each year than all the diamond mines in the world put together—a fact that fills me with pride still. It remains number one in the nation for the production of corn, eggs, hogs, and soybeans, and is second in the nation in total agricultural wealth, exceeded only by California, which is three times the size. Iowa produces one-tenth of all America’s food and one-tenth of all the world’s corn. Hooray.

And when I was growing up all this was as good as it has ever been. The 1950s has often been called the last golden age of the family farm in America, and no place was more golden than Iowa, and no spot had a lovelier glint than Winfield, the trim and cheerful little town in the southeast corner of the state, not far from the Mississippi River, where my father had grown up and my grandparents lived.

I loved everything about Winfield—its handsome Main Street, its imperturbable tranquillity, its lapping cornfields, the healthful smell of farming all around. Even the name was solid and right. Lots of towns in Iowa have names that sound slightly remote and lonesome and perhaps just a little in-bred—Mingo, Pisgah, Tingley, Diagonal, Elwood, Coon Rapids, Ricketts—but in this green and golden corner of the state the town names were dependably worthy and good: Winfield, Mount Union, Columbus Junction, Olds, Mount Pleasant, the unbeatably radiant Morning Sun.

My grandfather was a rural route mailman by trade, but he owned a small farm on the edge of town. He rented out the land to other farmers, except for three or four acres that he kept for orchards and vegetables. The property included a big red barn and what seemed to me like huge lawns on all sides. The back of the house was dominated by an immense oak tree with a white bench encircling it. It seemed always to have a private breeze running through its upper branches. It was the coolest spot in a hundred miles.

This was where you sat to shuck peas or trim green beans or turn a handle to make ice cream at the tranquil, suppertime end of the day.

My grandparents’ house was very neat and small—it had just two bedrooms, one upstairs and one down—but was exceedingly comfortable and always seemed spacious to me. Years later I went back to Winfield and was astounded at how tiny it actually was.

From a safe distance, the barn looked like the most fun place in the world to play. It hadn’t been used for years except to store old furniture and odds and ends that would never be used again. It was full of doors you could swing on and secret storerooms and ladders leading up to dark haymows. But it was actually awful because it was filthy and dark and lethal and every inch of it smelled. You couldn’t spend five minutes in my grandfather’s barn without banging your shins on some piece of unyielding machinery, cutting your arm on an old blade, coming into contact with at least three different types of ancient animal shit (all years old but still soft in the middle), banging your head on a nail-studded beam and recoiling into a mass of sticky cobwebs, getting snagged from the nape of your neck to the top of your buttocks on a strand of barbed wire, quilling yourself all over with splinters the size of toothpicks. The barn was like a whole-body workout for your immune system.

The worst fear of all was that one of the heavy doors would swing shut behind you and you would be trapped forever in a foul smelly darkness, too far from the house for your plaintive cries to be heard. I used to imagine my family sitting around the dinner table saying, “Well, I wonder whatever became of old Billy. How long has it been now? Five weeks? Six? He’d sure love this pie, wouldn’t he? I’ll certainly have another piece if I may.”

Even scarier were the fields of corn that pressed in on all sides. Corn doesn’t grow as tall as it used to because it’s been hybridized into a more compact perfection, but it shot up like bamboo when I was young, reaching heights of eight feet or more and filling 56,290 square miles of Iowa countryside with a spooky, threatening rustle by the dryish late end of summer. There is no more anonymous, mazelike, unsettling environment, especially to a dim, smallish human, than a field of infinitely identical rows of tall corn, each—including the diagonals—presenting a prospect of endless vegetative hostility. Just standing on the edge and peering in, you knew that if you ventured more than a few feet into a cornfield you would never come out. If a ball you were playing with dropped into a cornfield, you just left it, wrote it off, and went inside to watch TV.

So I didn’t play alone much at Winfield. Instead I spent a lot of time following my grandfather around. He seemed to like the company. We got along very well. My grandfather was a quiet man, but always happy to explain what he was doing and glad to have someone who could pass him an oil can or a screwdriver. His name was Pitt Foss Bryson, which I thought was the best name ever. He was the nicest man in the world after Ernie Banks.

He was always rebuilding something—a lawn mower or washing machine; something with fan belts and blades and lots of swiftly whirring parts—and always cutting himself fairly spectacularly. At some point, he would fire the thing up, reach in to make an adjustment, and almost immediately go, “Dang!” and pull out a bloody, slightly shredded hand. He would hold it up before him for some time, wiggling the fingers, as if he didn’t quite recognize it.

“I can’t see without my glasses,” he would say to me at length. “How many fingers have I got here?”

“Five, Grandpa.”

“Well, that’s good,” he’d say. “Thought I might have lost one.” Then he’d go off to find a bandage or piece of rag.

At some point in the afternoon, my grandmother would put her head out the back door and say, “Dad, I need you to go uptown and get me some rutabaga.” She always called him Dad, even though he had a wonderful name and he wasn’t her father. I could never understand that. She always needed him to get rutabaga. I never understood that either since I don’t remember any of us ever being served it. Maybe it was a code word for prophylactics or something.

Going uptown was a treat. It was only a quarter of a mile or so, but we always drove, sitting on the high bench seat of my grandfather’s Chevy, which made you feel slightly regal. Uptown in Winfield meant Main Street, a two-block stretch of retail tranquillity sporting a post office, two banks, a couple of filling stations, a tavern, a newspaper office, two small grocers, a pool hall, and a variety store.

The last stop on every shopping trip was a corner grocer’s called Benteco’s, where they had a screen door that kerboinged and bammed in a deeply satisfying manner, and made every entrance a kind of occasion. At Benteco’s I was always allowed to select two bottles of Nehi brand pop—one for dinner, one for afterward when we were playing cards or watching Bilko *12 or Jack Benny on TV. Nehi was the pop of small towns—I don’t know why—and it had the intensest flavor and most vivid colors of any products yet cleared by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. It came in six select flavors—grape, strawberry, orange, cherry, lime-lemon (never “lemon-lime”), and root beer—but each was so potently flavorful that it made your eyes water like an untended sprinkler, and so sharply carbonated that it was like swallowing a thousand tiny razor blades. It was wonderful.

The Nehi at Benteco’s was kept in a large, blue, very chilly cooler, like a chest freezer, in which the bottles hung by their necks in rows. To get to a particular bottle usually required a great deal of complicated maneuvering, transferring bottles out of one row and into another in order to get the last bottle of grape, say. (Grape was the one flavor that could actually make you hallucinate; I once saw to the edge of the universe while drinking grape Nehi.) The process was great fun if it was you that was doing the selecting (especially on a hot day when you could bask in the cooler’s moist chilled air) and a torment if you had to wait on some other kid.

The other thing I did a lot in Winfield was watch TV. My grandparents had the best chair for watching television—a beige leatherette recliner that was part fairground ride, part captain’s seat from a space ship, and all comfort. It was a thing of supreme beauty and utility. When you pulled the lever you were thrust—flung—into a deep recline mode.

It was nearly impossible to get up again, but it didn’t matter because you were so sublimely comfortable that you didn’t want to move. You just lay there and watched the TV through splayed feet.

My grandparents could get seven stations on their set—we could only get three in Des Moines—but only by turning the roof aerial, which was manipulated by means of a crank on the outside back wall of the house. So if you wanted to watch, say, KTVO from Ottumwa, my grandfather had to go out and turn the crank slightly one way, and if you wanted WOC from the Quad Cities he turned it another, and KWWI in Waterloo another way still, in each case responding to instructions shouted through a window. If it was windy or there was a lot of solar activity, he sometimes had to go out eight or nine times during a program. If it was one of my grandmother’s treasured shows, like As the World Turns or Queen for a Day, he generally just stayed out there in case an airplane flew over and made everything lapse into distressing waviness at a critical moment. He was the most patient man who ever lived.

I watched a lot of television in those days. We all did. By 1955, the average American child had watched five thousand hours of television, up from zero hours five years earlier.

My favorite programs were, in no particular order, Zorro, Bilko, Jack Benny, Dobie Gillis, Love That Bob, Sea Hunt, I Led Three Lives, Circus Boy, Sugarfoot, M Squad, Dragnet, Father Knows Best, The Millionaire, Gunsmoke, Robin Hood, The Untouchables, What’s My Line? , I’ve Got a Secret, Route 66, Topper, and 77 Sunset Strip, but really I would watch anything.

My favorite of all was The Burns and Allen Show starring George Burns and Gracie Allen. I was completely enchanted with it because I loved the characters and their names—Blanche Morton, Harry Von Zell—and because George Burns and Gracie Allen were, in my view, the funniest double act ever. George had a deadpan manner and Gracie always got the wrong end of every stick. George had a television in his den on which he could watch what his neighbors were up to without their knowing it, which I thought was just a brilliant notion and one that fed many a private fantasy, and he often stepped out of the production to talk directly to the audience about what was going on. The whole thing was years ahead of its time. I’ve never met another human being who even remembers it, much less doted on it.

NEARLY EVERY SUMMER EVENING just before six o’clock we would walk uptown (all movement toward the center was known as going uptown) to some shady church lawn and take part in a vast potluck supper, presided over by armies of immense, chuckling women who had arms and necks that sagged in an impossible manner, like really wet clothes. They were all named Mabel and they all suffered greatly from the heat, though they never complained and never stopped chuckling and being happy. They spent their lives shooing flies from food with spatulas (setting their old arms a-wobbling in a hypnotizing manner), blowing wisps of stray hair out of their faces, and making sure that no human being within fifty yards failed to have a heaped paper plate of hearty but deeply odd food—and dinners in the 1950s, let me say, were odd indeed. The main courses at these potluck events nearly always consisted of a range of meat loafs, each about the size of a V-8 engine, all of them glazed and studded with a breathtaking array of improbable ingredients from which they drew their names—Peanut Brittle ’n’ Cheez Whiz Upside-Down Spam Loaf and that sort of thing. Nearly all of them had at least one

“ ’n’ ” and an “upside down” in their names somewhere. There would be perhaps twenty of these. The driving notion seemed to be that no dish could be too sweet or too strange and that all foods automatically became superior when upended.

“Hey, Dwayne, come over here and try some of this Spiced Liver ’n’ Candy Corn Upside-Down Casserole,” one of the Mabels would say. “Mabel made it. It’s delicious.”

“Upside down?” Dwayne would remark with a dry look that indicated a quip was coming. “What happened—she drop it?”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe she did,” Mabel would reply, chuckling. “You want chocolate gravy with that or biscuit gravy or peanut butter ’n’ niblets gravy?”

“Hey, how about a little of all three?”

“You got it!”

The main dishes were complemented by a table of brightly colored Jell-Os, the state fruit, each containing further imaginative components—marshmallows, pretzels, fruit chunks, Rice Krispies, Fritos corn chips, whatever would maintain its integrity in suspension—and you had to take some of each of these, too, though of course you wanted to because it all looked so tasty. Then came at least two big tables carrying tubs and platters of buttery mashed potatoes, baked beans and bacon, creamed vegetables, deviled eggs, corn breads, muffins, heavy-duty biscuits, and a dozen types of coleslaw.

By the time all these were loaded onto your paper plate, it weighed twelve pounds and looked, as my father once described it, distinctly postoperative. But there was no resisting the insistent blandishments of the many Mabels.

Everyone for miles came to the suppers. It didn’t matter what the denomination of the church was. Everybody came. Everyone in town was practically Methodist anyway, even the Catholics. (My grandparents, for the record, were Lutherans.) It wasn’t about religion; it was about sociable eating in bulk.

“Now don’t forget to leave room for dessert,” one of the Mabels would say as you staggered off with your plate, but you didn’t have to be reminded of that for the desserts were fabulous and celebrated, the best part of all. They were essentially the same dishes, but with the meat removed.

On the few nights when we weren’t at a church social, we had enormous meals at my grandparents’ house, often on a table carried out to the lawn. (It seemed important to people in those days to share dinner with as many insects as possible.) Uncle Dee would be there, of course, burping away, and Uncle Jack from Wapello, who was notable for never managing to finish a sentence.

“I tell you what they ought to do,” Uncle Jack would say in the midst of a lively discussion, and someone else more assertive would interject a comment and nobody would ever hear what Jack thought. “Well, if you ask me,” he’d say, but nobody ever did.

Mostly they sat around talking about surgical removals and medical conditions—goiters and gallstones, lumbago, sciatica, water on the knee—that don’t seem to exist much anymore. They always seemed so old to me, and slow, so glad to sit down.

But they sure were good-natured. If we had a guest from beyond the usual family circle somebody would always bring out the dribble glass and offer the guest a drink. The dribble glass was the funniest thing I had ever seen. It was a fancy-looking, many-faceted drinking glass—exactly the sort of glass that you would give to an honored guest—that appeared to be perfectly normal, and indeed was perfectly normal, so long as you didn’t tilt it. But cut into the facets were tiny, undetectable slits, ingeniously angled so that each time the glass was inclined to the mouth a good portion of the contents dribbled out in a steady run onto the victim’s chest.

There was something indescribably joyous about watching an innocent, unaware person repeatedly staining him- or herself with cranberry juice or cherry Kool-Aid (it was always something vividly colored) while twelve people looked on with soberly composed expressions. Eventually, feeling the seepage, the victim would look down and cry, “Oh, my golly!” and everyone would burst out laughing.

I never knew a single victim to get angry or dismayed when they discovered the prank.

Their best white shirt would be ruined, they would look as if they had been knifed in the chest, and they would laugh till their eyes streamed. God, but Iowans were happy souls.

WINFIELD ALWAYS HAD more interesting weather than elsewhere. It was hotter, colder, windier, noisier, sultrier, more punishing and emphatic than weather elsewhere.

Even when the weather wasn’t actually doing anything, when it was just muggy and limp and still on an August afternoon, it was more muggy and limp than anywhere else you have ever been, and so still that you could hear a clock ticking in a house across the street.

Because Iowa is flat and my grandparents lived on the very edge of town, you could see everything meteorological long before it got there. Storms of towering majesty often lit the western skies for two or three hours before the first drops of rain fell in Winfield.

They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.

The greatest fury in Iowa—in the Midwest—is tornadoes. Tornadoes are not often seen because they tend to be fleeting and localized and often they come at night, so you lie in bed listening to a wild frenzy outside knowing that a tornado’s tail could dip down at any moment and blow you and your cozy tranquillity to pieces. Once my grandparents were in bed when they heard a great roaring, like a billion hornets as my grandfather described it, going right past their house. My grandfather got up and peered out the bedroom window but couldn’t see a thing and went back to bed. Almost at once the noise receded.

In the morning, he stepped outside to fetch in the newspaper and was surprised to find his car standing in the open air. He was sure he had put it away as usual the night before.

Then he realized he had put the car away, but the garage was gone. The car was standing on its concrete floor. It didn’t have a scratch on it. Nothing of the garage was ever seen again. Looking closer, he discovered a track of destruction running along one side of the house. A bed of shrubs that had stood against the house, in front of the bedroom window, had been obliterated utterly, and he realized that the blackness he had peered into the night before was a wall of tornado passing on the other side of the glass an inch or two beyond his nose.

Just once I saw a tornado when I was growing up. It was moving across the distant horizon from right to left, like a killer apostrophe. It was about ten miles off and therefore comparatively safe. Even so it was unimaginably powerful. The sky everywhere was wildly, unnaturally dark and heavy and low, and every wisp of cloud in it, from every point in the compass, was being sucked into the central vortex as if being pulled into a black hole. It was like being present at the end of the world. The wind, steady and intense, felt oddly as if it was not pushing from behind, but pulling from the front, like the insistent draw of a magnet. You had to fight not to be pulled forward. All that energy was being focused on a single finger of whirring destruction. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was killing people as it went.

For a minute or two the tornado paused in its progress and seemed to stand on one spot.

“That could mean it’s coming toward us,” my father remarked to my grandfather.

I took this to mean that we would all now get in our cars and drive like hell in a contrary direction. That was the option I planned to vote for if anyone asked for a show of hands.

But my grandfather merely said, “Yup. Could be,” and looked completely undisturbed.

“Ever seen a tornado up close, Billy?” my father said to me, smiling weirdly.

I stared at him in amazement. Of course not and I didn’t want to. This business of not ever being frightened of anything was easily the most frightening thing about adults in the fifties.

“What do we do if it’s coming this way?” I asked in a pained manner, knowing I was not going to enjoy the answer.

“Well, that’s a good question, Billy, because it’s very easy to flee from one tornado and drive straight into another. Do you know, more people die trying to get out of the way of tornadoes than from any other cause?” He turned to my grandfather. “Do you remember Bud and Mabel Weidermeyer?”

My grandfather nodded with a touch of vigor, as if to say, Who could forget it? “They should have known better than to try to outrun a tornado on foot,” my grandfather said.

“Especially with Bud’s wooden leg.”

“Did they ever find that leg?”

“Nope. Never found Mabel either. You know, I think it’s moving again.”

He indicated the tornado and we all watched closely. After a few moments it became apparent that it had indeed resumed its stately march to the east. It wasn’t coming toward us after all. Very soon after that, it lifted from the ground and returned into the black clouds above it, as if being withdrawn. Almost at once the wind dropped. My father and grandfather went back in the house looking slightly disappointed.

The next day we drove over and had a look at where it had gone and there was devastation everywhere—trees and power lines down, barns blown to splinters, houses half vanished. Six people died in the neighboring county. I expect none of them were worried about the tornado either.

WHAT I PARTICULARLY REMEMBER of Winfield is the coldness of the winters. My grandparents were very frugal with the heat in their house and tended to turn it all but off at night, so that the house never warmed up except in the kitchen when a big meal was being cooked, like at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when it took on a wonderful steamy warmth. But otherwise it was like living in an Arctic hut. The upstairs of their house was a single long room, which could be divided into two by a pull-across curtain. It had no heating at all and the coldest linoleum floor in history. But there was one place even colder: the sleeping porch. The sleeping porch was a slightly rickety, loosely enclosed porch on the back of the house that was only notionally separate from the outside world.

It contained an ancient sagging bed that my grandfather slept in in the summer when the house was uncomfortably warm. But sometimes in the winter when the house was full of guests it was pressed into service, too.

The only heat the sleeping porch contained was that of any human being who happened to be out there. It couldn’t have been more than one or two degrees warmer than the world outside—and outside was perishing. So to sleep on the sleeping porch required preparation. First, you put on long underwear, pajamas, jeans, a sweatshirt, your grandfather’s old cardigan and bathrobe, two pairs of woolen socks on your feet and another on your hands, and a hat with earflaps tied beneath the chin. Then you climbed into bed and were immediately covered with a dozen bed blankets, three horse blankets, all the household overcoats, a canvas tarpaulin, and a piece of old carpet. I’m not sure that they didn’t lay an old wardrobe on top of that, just to hold everything down. It was like sleeping under a dead horse. For the first minute or so it was unimaginably cold, shockingly cold, but gradually your body heat seeped in and you became warm and happy in a way you would not have believed possible only a minute or two before. It was bliss.

Or at least it was until you moved a muscle. The warmth, you discovered, extended only to the edge of your skin and not a micron farther. There wasn’t any possibility of shifting positions. If you so much as flexed a finger or bent a knee, it was like plunging them into liquid nitrogen. You had no choice but to stay totally immobilized. It was a strange and oddly wonderful experience—to be poised so delicately between rapture and torment.

It was the serenest, most peaceful place on earth. The view from the sleeping porch through the big broad window at the foot of the bed was across empty dark fields to a town called Swedesburg, named for the nationality of its founders, and known more informally as Snooseville from the pinches of tobacco that the locals used to pack into their mouths as they went about their business. Snoose was a homemade mixture of tobacco and salt which was kept embedded between cheek and gum where the nicotine could be slowly and steadily absorbed. It was topped up hourly and kept in permanently.

Some people, my father told me, even put in a fresh wad at bedtime.

I had never been to Swedesburg. There was no reason to go—it was just a small collection of houses—but at night in winter with its distant lights it was like a ship far out at sea. I found it peaceful and somehow comforting to see their lights, to think that all the citizens of Snooseville were snug in their homes and perhaps looking over at us in Winfield and deriving comfort in turn. My father told me that when he was a boy the people of Snooseville still spoke Swedish at home. Some of them could barely speak English at all. I loved that, too—the idea that it was a little outpost of Sweden over there, that they were all sitting around eating herring and black bread and saying, “Oh, ja!” and just being happily Swedish in the middle of the American continent. When my dad was young if you drove across Iowa you would regularly come upon towns or villages where all the inhabitants spoke German or Dutch or Czech or Danish or almost any other tongue from northern and central Europe.

But those days had long since passed. In 1916, as the shadow of the Great War made English-speaking people suspicious of loyalties, a governor of Iowa named William L.

Harding decreed that henceforth it would be a crime to speak any foreign language in schools, at church, or even over the telephone in the great state of Iowa. There were howls that people would have to give up church services in their own languages, but Harding was not to be moved. “There is no use in anyone wasting his time praying in other languages than English,” he responded. “God is listening only to the English tongue.”

One by one the little linguistic outposts faded away. By the 1950s they were pretty much gone altogether. No one would have guessed it at the time, but the small towns and family farms were soon to become likewise imperiled.

In 1950, America had nearly six million farms. In half a century almost two-thirds of them vanished. More than half the American landscape was farmed when I was a boy; today, thanks to the spread of concrete, only 40 percent is—a severe decline in a single lifetime.

I was born into a state that had two hundred thousand farms. Today the number is much less than half that and falling. Of the 750,000 people who lived on farms in the state in my boyhood, half a million—two in every three—have gone. The process has been relentless. Iowa’s farm population fell by 25 percent in the 1970s and by 35 percent more in the 1980s. Another hundred thousand people were skimmed away in the 1990s.

And the people left behind are old. In 1988, Iowa had more people who were seventy-five or older than five or younger. Thirty-seven counties out of ninety-nine—getting on for half—recorded more deaths than births.

It’s an inevitable consequence of greater efficiency and continuous amalgamation.

Increasingly the old farms clump together into superfarms of three thousand acres or more. By the middle of the present century, it is thought, the number of farms in Iowa could drop to as low as ten thousand.

Without a critical mass of farmers, most small towns in Iowa have pretty well died.

Drive anywhere in the state these days and what you see are empty towns, empty roads, collapsing barns, boarded farmhouses. Everywhere you go it looks as if you have just missed a terrible contagion, which in a sense I suppose you have. It’s the same story in Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri, and even worse in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Wherever there were once small towns, there are now empty main streets.

Winfield is barely alive. All the businesses on Main Street—the dime store, the pool hall, the newspaper office, the banks, the grocery stores—long ago disappeared. There is nowhere to buy Nehi pop. You can’t purchase a single item of food within the town limits. My grandparents’ house is still there—at least it was the last time I passed—but its barn is gone as is its porch swing and the shade tree out back and the orchard and everything else that made it what it was.

The best I can say is that I saw the last of something really special. It’s something I seem to say a lot these days.

Chapter 11

WHAT, ME WORRY?

LIES IN MORGUE

17 HOURS—ALIVE

ATLANTA, GA. (UP)—An elderly woman taken to a funeral home for embalming opened her eyes 17 hours after arriving and announced: “I’m not dead.”

W. L. Murdaugh of Murdaugh Brothers funeral home here said two of his employees were made almost speechless.

The woman, listed as Julia Stallings, 70, seemed dazed after her long coma ended Sunday night, but otherwise appeared in good condition, Murdaugh said.

— Des Moines Tribune, May 11, 1953

THE ONLY TIME I have ever broken a bone was also the first time I noticed that adults are not entirely to be counted on. I was four years old and playing on Arthur Bergen’s jungle gym when I fell off and broke my leg.

Arthur lived up the street, but was at the dentist or something when I called, so I decided to have a twirl on his new jungle gym before heading back home.

I don’t remember anything at all about the fall, but I do remember very clearly lying on damp earth, the jungle gym now above and around me and seeming awfully large and menacing all of a sudden, and not being able to move my right leg. I remember also lifting my head and looking down my body to my leg which was bent at an unusual—

indeed, an entirely novel—angle. I began to call steadily for help, in a variety of tones, but no one heard. Eventually I gave up and dozed a little.

At some point I opened my eyes and a man with a uniform and a peaked cap was looking down at me. The sun was directly behind him so I couldn’t see his face; it was just a hatted darkness inside a halo of intense light.

“You all right, kid?” he said.

“I’ve hurt my leg.”

He considered this for a minute. “You wanna get your mom to put some ice on it. Do you know some people named…”—he consulted a clipboard—“…Maholovich?”

“No.”

He glanced at the clipboard again. “A. J. Maholovich, 3725 Elmwood Drive.”

“No.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell at all?”

“No.”

“This is Elmwood Drive?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, kid, thanks.”

“It really hurts,” I said. But he was gone.

I slept a little more. After a while Mrs. Bergen pulled into their driveway and came up the back steps with bags of groceries.

“You’ll catch a chill down there,” she said brightly as she skipped past.

“I’ve hurt my leg.”

She stopped and considered for a moment. “Better get up and walk around on it. That’s the best thing. Oh, there’s the phone.” She hurried into the house.

I waited for her to come back but she didn’t. “Hello,” I croaked weakly now. “Help.”

Bergen’s little sister, who was small and therefore stupid and unreliable, came and had a critical look at me.

“Go and get your mom,” I said. “I’m hurt.”

She looked at my leg with comprehension if not compassion. “Owie,” she said.

“Yes, owie. It really hurts.”

She wandered off, saying, “Owie, owie,” but evidently took my case no further.

Mrs. Bergen came out after some time with a load of washing to hang.

“You must really like it down there,” she chuckled.

“Mrs. Bergen, I think I’ve really hurt my leg.”

“On that little jungle gym?” she said, with good-natured skepticism, but came closer to look at me. “I don’t think so, honey.” And then abruptly: “Christamighty! Your leg! It’s backward!”

“It hurts.”

“I bet it does, I bet it does. You wait right there.”

She went off.

Eventually, after quite some time, Mr. Bergen and my parents pulled up in their respective cars at more or less the same moment. Mr. Bergen was a lawyer. I could hear him talking to my parents about liability as they came up the steps. Mr. Bergen was the first to reach me.

“Now you do understand, Billy, that technically you were trespassing…”

They took me to a young Cuban doctor on Woodland Avenue and he was in a panic.

He started making exactly the kind of noises Desi Arnaz made in I Love Lucy when Lucy did something really boneheaded—only he was doing this over my leg. “I don’ thin’ I can do this,” he said, and looked at them beseechingly. “It’s a really bad break. I mean look at it. Wow.”

I expect he was afraid he would be sent back to Cuba. Eventually he was prevailed upon to set the break. For the next six weeks my leg remained more or less backward.

The moment they cut off the cast, the leg spun back into position and everyone was pleasantly surprised. The doctor beamed. “Tha’s a bit of luck!” he said happily.

Then I stood up and fell over.

“Oh,” the doctor said and looked troubled again. “Tha’s not good, is it?”

He thought for a minute and told my parents to take me home and to keep me off the leg for the rest of the day and overnight and see how it was in the morning.

“Do you think it will be all right then?” asked my father.

“I’ve no idea,” said the doctor.

The next morning I got up and stepped gingerly onto my wounded leg. It felt okay. It felt good. I walked around. It was fine. I walked a little more. Yes, it was definitely fine.

I went downstairs to report this good news and found my mother in the laundry room bent over sorting through clothes.

“Hey, Mom, my leg’s fine,” I announced. “I can walk.”

“Oh, that’s good, honey,” she said, head in the dryer. “Now where’s that other sock?”

IT WASN’T THAT MY MOTHER AND FATHER were indifferent to their children’s physical well-being by any means. It was just that they seemed to believe that everything would be fine in the end and they were always right. No one ever got lastingly hurt in our family. No one died. Nothing ever went seriously wrong—and not much went wrong in our town or state either, come to that. Danger was something that happened far away in places like Matsu and Quemoy and the Belgian Congo, places so distant that nobody was really quite sure where they were.

It’s hard for people now to remember just how enormous the world was back then for everybody, and how far away even fairly nearby places were. When we called my grandparents long distance on the telephone in Winfield, something we hardly ever did, it sounded as if they were speaking to us from a distant star. We had to shout to be heard and plug a finger in an ear to catch their faint, tinny voices in return. They were only about a hundred miles away, but that was a pretty considerable distance even well into the 1950s. Anything farther—beyond Chicago or Kansas City, say—quickly became almost foreign. It wasn’t just that Iowa was far from everywhere. Everywhere was far from everywhere.

America was especially blessed in this regard. We had big buffering oceans to left and right and no neighbors to worry us above or below, so there wasn’t any need to be fearful about anything ever. Even world wars barely affected our home lives. During World War II, when the film mogul Jack Warner realized that from the air his Hollywood studio was indistinguishable from a nearby aircraft factory, he had a giant arrow painted on the roof above the legend “Lock-heed That-Away!” to steer Japanese bombers safely away from some of the valuable stars who didn’t go to war (and that included, just for the record, Gary Cooper, Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, Frank Sinatra, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, Alan Ladd, Danny Kaye, Cary Grant, Bing Crosby, Van Johnson, Dana Andrews, Ronald Reagan, and John Wayne, among many other valiant heroes who helped America to act its way to victory) and toward the correct target.

No one ever knew whether Warner was in earnest with his sign or not, but it didn’t really matter because no one seriously expected (at least not after the first jittery days of the war) that the Japanese would attack the U.S. mainland. At the same time, on the other side of the country, when a congressman grew concerned for the welfare of rooftop sentries at the Capitol Building who didn’t ever seem to stir from their positions or enjoy a moment’s relief, he was quietly informed that they were in fact dummies and that their antiaircraft guns were wooden models. There was no point in wasting men and munitions on a target that was never going to be hit, even if it was the headquarters of the United States government.

FOR THE RECORD there was one manned attack on the American mainland. In 1942, a pilot named Nobuo Fujita took to the air from coastal waters off Oregon in a specially modified seaplane that was brought there aboard a submarine. Fujita’s devious goal was to drop incendiary bombs on Oregon’s forests, starting large-scale fires that would, if all went to plan, rage out of control and engulf much of the West Coast, killing hundreds and leaving Americans weeping and demoralized at the thought of all that damage caused by one little squinty-eyed man in a plane. In the event, the bombs either puttered out or caused only localized fires of no consequence.

The Japanese also, over a period of months, launched into the prevailing winds across the Pacific some nine thousand large paper balloons, each bearing a thirty-pound bomb timed to go off forty hours after launch—the length of time calculated that it would take to cross the Pacific to America. These managed to blow up a small number of curious souls whose last earthly utterance was something along the lines of “Now what the heck do you suppose this is?” but otherwise did almost no damage, though one made it as far as Maryland.

IN THE COLD WAR YEARS all this comfortable security abruptly vanished as the Soviet Union developed long-range ballistic missiles to match our own. Suddenly we were in a world where something horribly destructive could drop on us at any moment without warning wherever we were. This was a startling and unsettling notion, and we responded in a quintessentially 1950s way. We got excited about it.

For a number of years you could hardly open a magazine without learning of some new destructive marvel that could wipe us all out in a twinkle. An artist named Chesley Bonestell specialized in producing sumptuously lifelike illustrations of man-made carnage, showing warhead-laden rockets streaking gorgeously (excitingly!) across American skies or taking off from giant space stations on a beautifully lit, wondrously imagined Moon en route to an explosive attack on planet Earth.

The thing about Bonestell’s paintings was that they seemed so real, so informed, so photographically exact. It was like looking at something as it happened, rather than imagining it as it one day might be. I can remember studying with boundless fascination, and more than a touch of misplaced longing, a Bonestell illustration in Life magazine showing New York City at the moment of nuclear detonation, a giant mushroom cloud rising from the familiar landscape of central Manhattan, a second cloud spreading itself across the outlying sprawl of Queens. These illustrations were meant to frighten, but really they excited. *13

I’m not suggesting that we actually wanted New York to be blown up—at least not exactly. I’m just saying that if it did ever happen you could see a plus side to it. We would all die, sure, but our last utterance would be a sincere and appreciative “Wow.”

Then in the late 1950s the Soviets briefly developed a clear lead in the space race and the excitement took on a real edge. The fear became that they would install giant space platforms in geostationary orbit directly above us, far beyond the reach of our gnatlike planes and weakly puffing guns, and that from this comfortable perch they would drop bombs on us whenever we peeved them.

In fact, that was never going to happen. Because of Earth’s spin, you can’t just drop bombs from space like water balloons. For one thing, they wouldn’t drop; they would go into orbit. So you would have to fire them in some fashion, which required a level of delivery control the 1950s simply didn’t command. And anyway because the Earth is spinning at a thousand kilometers an hour (give or take), you would have to master extremely precise trajectories to hit a given target. Any bomb fired from space was in fact far more likely to fall in a Kansas wheat field, or almost anywhere else on Earth, than through the roof of the White House. If bombarding each other from space had ever been a realistic option, we would have space stations up there in the hundreds now, believe me.

However, the only people who knew this in the 1950s were space scientists, and they weren’t going to tell anybody because then we wouldn’t give them money to develop their ambitious programs. So magazines and Sunday supplements ran these breathless accounts of peril from above, because their reporters didn’t know any better, or didn’t wish to know any better, and because they had all these fantastic drawings by Chesley Bonestell that were such a pleasure to look at and just had to be seen.

So earthly devastation became both a constant threat and a happy preoccupation of that curiously bifurcated decade. Public service films showed us how private fallout shelters could not only be protective but fun, with Mom and Dad and Chip and Skip bunking down together underground, possibly for years on end. And why not? They had lots of dehydrated food and a whole stack of board games. “And Mom and Dad need never worry about the lights running low with this handy pedal generator and two strong young volunteers to provide plenty of muscle power!” And no school! This was a lifestyle worth thinking about.

For those who didn’t care to retreat underground, the Portland Cement Association offered a range of heavy-duty “Houses for the Atomic Age!”—special “all-concrete blast-resistant houses” designed to let the owners survive “blast pressures expected at distances as close as 3,600 feet from ground zero of a bomb with an explosive force equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT.” So the Russians could drop a bomb right in your own neighborhood and you could sit in comfort at home reading the evening newspaper and hardly know there was a war on. Can you imagine erecting such a house and not wanting to see how well it withstood a nuclear challenge? Of course not. Let those suckers drop!

We’re ready!

And it wasn’t just nuclear devastation that enthralled and excited us. The film world reminded us that we might equally be attacked by flying saucers or stiff-limbed aliens with metallic voices and deathly ray guns, and introduced us to the stimulating possibilities for mayhem inherent in giant mutated insects, blundering mega-crabs, bestirred dinosaurs, monsters from the deep, and one seriously pissed-off fifty-foot woman. I don’t imagine that many people, even those who now faithfully vote Republican, believed that any of that would actually happen, but certain parts of it—the UFOs, for instance—were far more plausible then than now. This was an age, don’t forget, in which it was still widely believed that there might be civilizations on Mars or Venus. Almost anything was possible.

And even the more serious magazines like Life and Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Newsweek found ample space for articles on interesting ways the world might end. There was almost no limit to what might go wrong, according to various theories.

The Sun could blow up or abruptly wink out. We might be bathed in murderous radiation as Earth passed through the twinkly glitter of a comet’s tail. We might have a new ice age. Or Earth might somehow become detached from its faithful orbit and drift out of the solar system, like a lost balloon, moving ever deeper into some cold, lightless corner of the universe. Much of the notion behind space travel was to get away from these irremediable risks and start up new lives with more interestingly padded shoulders inside some distant galactic dome.

Were people seriously worried about any of this? Who knows? Who knows what anyone in the 1950s was thinking about anything, or even if they were thinking at all. All I know is that any perusal of popular publications from the period produces a curious blend of undiluted optimism and a kind of eager despair. More than 40 percent of people in 1955 thought there would be a global disaster, probably in the form of world war, within five years and half of those were certain it would be the end of humanity. Yet the very people who claimed to expect death at any moment were at the same time busily buying new homes, digging swimming pools, investing in stocks and bonds and pension plans, and generally behaving like people who expect to live a long time. It was an impossible age to figure.

But even by the strange, elastic standards of the time, my parents were singularly unfathomable when it came to worry. As far as I can tell, they didn’t fear a thing, even the perils that other people really did worry about. Take polio. Polio had been a periodic feature of American life since the late 1800s (why it suddenly appeared then is a question that appears to have no answer) but it became particularly virulent in the early 1940s and remained at epidemic proportions well into the following decade, with between thirty thousand and forty thousand cases reported nationally every year. In Iowa, the worst year was 1952, which happened to be the first full year of my life, when there were more than 3,500 cases—roughly 10 percent of the national total, or nearly three times Iowa’s normal allotment—and 163 deaths. A famous picture of the time from The Des Moines Register shows assorted families, including one man on a tall ladder, standing outside Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines shouting greetings and encouragement to their quarantined children through the windows. Even after half a century it is a haunting picture, particularly for those who can remember just how unnerving polio was.

Several things made it so. First, nobody knew where it came from or how it spread.

Epidemics mostly happened in the summer, so people associated polio with summer activities like picnics and swimming. That was why you weren’t supposed to sit around in wet clothes or swallow pool water. (Polio was in fact spread through contaminated food and water, but swimming-pool water, being chlorinated, was actually one of the safer environments.) Second, it disproportionately affected young people, with symptoms that were vague and variable and always a worry to interpret. The best doctor in the world couldn’t tell in the initial stages whether a child had polio or just the flu or a summer cold. For those who did get polio, the outcome was frighteningly unpredictable.

Two-thirds of victims recovered fully after three or four days with no permanent ill effects at all. But others were partly or wholly paralyzed. Some couldn’t even breathe unaided. In the United States roughly 3 percent of victims died; in outbreaks elsewhere it was as high as 30 percent. Most of those poor parents calling through the windows at Blank hospital didn’t know which group their children would end up in. There wasn’t a thing about it that wasn’t a source of deepest anxiety.

Not surprisingly, a kind of panic came over communities when polio was reported.

According to Growing Up with Dick and Jane, a history of the fifties, at the first sign of a new outbreak, “Children were kept away from crowded swimming pools, pulled out of movie theaters and whisked home from summer camps in the middle of the night. In newspapers and newsreels, images of children doomed to death, paralysis or years in an iron lung haunted the fearful nation. Children were terrified at the sight of flies and mosquitoes thought to carry the virus. Parents dreaded fevers and complaints of sore throats or stiff necks.”

Well, that’s all news to me. I was completely unaware of any anxiety about polio. I knew that it existed—we had to line up from time to time after the mid-fifties to get vaccinated against it—but I didn’t know that we were supposed to be frightened. I didn’t know about any dangers of any type anywhere. It was quite a wonderful position to be in really. I grew up in possibly the scariest period in American history and had no idea of it.

WHEN I WAS SEVEN and my sister was twelve, my dad bought a blue Rambler station wagon, a car so cruddy and styleless that even Edsel owners would slow down to laugh at you, and decided to break it in with a drive to New York. The car had no air-conditioning, but my sister and I got the idea that if we lay the tailgate flat, stood on it, and held on to the roof rack, we could essentially get out of the car and catch a nice cooling breeze. In fact, it was like standing in the face of a typhoon. It couldn’t have been more dangerous. If we relaxed our grip for an instant—to sneeze or satisfy an itch—we risked being whipped off our little platform and lofted into the face of a following Mack truck.

Conversely, if my father braked suddenly for any reason—and at least three or four times a day he provided us with sudden hold-on-to-your-hat swerves and a kind of bronco-effect braking when he dropped a lighted cigarette onto the seat between his legs and he and my mother jointly engaged in a frantic and generally entertaining search to find it—there was a very good chance that we would be tossed sideways into a neighboring field or launched—fired really—in a forward direction into the path of another mighty Mack.

It was, in short, insanely risky—a thought that evidently occurred to a highway patrolman near Ashtabula, Ohio, who set his red light spinning and pulled my dad over and chewed him out ferociously for twenty minutes for being so monumentally boneheaded with respect to his children’s safety. My father took all this meekly. When the patrolman at last departed, my father told us in a quiet voice that we would have to stop riding like that until we crossed the state line into Pennsylvania in another half hour or so.

It wasn’t a terribly good trip for my dad. He had booked a hotel in New York from a classified ad in the Saturday Review because it was such a good deal, and then discovered that it was in Harlem. On the first night there, while my parents lay on the bed, exhausted from the ordeal of finding their way from Iowa to 1,252nd Street in upper Manhattan—a route not highlighted in any American Automobile Association guide—my sister and I decided to get something to eat. We strolled around the district for a while and found a corner diner about two blocks away. While we were sitting enjoying our hamburgers and chocolate sodas, and chatting amiably with several black people, a police car slid by, paused, backed up, and pulled over. Two officers came in, looked around suspiciously, then came over to us. One of them asked us where we had come from.

“Des Moines, Iowa,” my sister replied.

“Des Moines, Iowa! ” said the policeman, astounded. “How did you get here from Des Moines, Iowa?”

“My parents drove us.”

“Your parents drove you here from Des Moines?”

My sister nodded.

“Why? ”

“My dad thought it would be educational.”

“To come to Harlem?” The policemen looked at each other. “Where are your parents now, honey?”

My sister told them that they were in the Hotel W. E. B. DuBois or Château Cotton Club or whatever it was.

“Your parents are staying there?”

My sister nodded.

“You really are from Iowa, aren’tcha, honey?”

The policemen took us back to the hotel and escorted us to our room. They banged on the door and my father answered. The policemen didn’t know whether to be firm with my dad or gentle, to arrest him or give him some money or what. In the end they just strongly urged him to check out of the hotel first thing in the morning and to find a more appropriate hotel in a safer neighborhood much lower down in Manhattan.

My father wasn’t in a strong position to argue. For one thing, he was naked from the waist down. He was standing half behind the door so the police were unaware of his awkward position, but for those of us sitting on the bed the view was a memorably surreal one of my father, bare-buttocked, talking respectfully and in a grave tone of voice to two large New York policemen. It was a sight that I won’t forget in a hurry.

My father was quite pale when the policemen left, and talked to my mother at length about what we were going to do. They decided to sleep on it. In the end, we stayed. Well, it was such a good rate, you see.

THE SECOND TIME I noticed that adults are not entirely to be trusted was also the first time I was genuinely made fearful by events in the wider world. It was in the autumn of 1962, just before my eleventh birthday, when I was home alone watching television and the program was interrupted for a special announcement from the White House. President Kennedy came on looking grave and tired and indicated that things were not going terribly well with regard to the Cuban missile crisis—something about which at that point I knew practically nothing.

The background, if you need it, is that America had discovered that the Russians were preparing (or so we thought) to install nuclear weapons in Cuba, just ninety miles from American soil. Never mind that we had plenty of missiles aimed at Russia from similar distances in Europe. We were not used to being threatened in our own hemisphere and weren’t going to stand for it now. Kennedy ordered Khrushchev to cease building launchpads in Cuba or else.

The presidential address I saw was telling us that we were now at the “or else” part of the scenario. I remember this as clearly as anything, largely because Kennedy looked worried and gray, not a look you wish to see in a president when you are ten years old.

We had installed a naval blockade around Cuba to express our displeasure and Kennedy announced now that a Soviet ship was on its way to challenge it. He said that he had given the order that if the Soviet ship tried to pass through the blockade, American destroyers were to fire in front of its bow as a warning. If it still proceeded, they were to sink it. Such an act would, of course, be the start of World War III. Even I could see that.

This was the first time that my blood ever ran cold.

It was evident from Kennedy’s tone that all this was pretty imminent. So I went and ate the last piece of a Toddle House chocolate pie that had been promised to my sister, then hung around on the back porch, wishing to be the first to tell my parents the news that we were all about to die. When they arrived home they told me not to worry, that everything would be all right, and they were right of course as always. We didn’t die—though I came closer than anybody when my sister discovered that I had eaten her piece of pie.

In fact, we all came closer to dying than we realized. According to the memoirs of Robert McNamara, the then secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time suggested—indeed, eagerly urged—that we drop a couple of nuclear bombs on Cuba to show our earnest and to let the Soviets know that they had better not even think about putting nuclear weapons in our backyard. President Kennedy, according to McNamara, came very close to authorizing such a strike.

Twenty-nine years later, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, we learned that the CIA’s evidence about Cuba was completely wrong (now there’s a surprise) and that the Soviets in fact already had about 170 nuclear missiles positioned on Cuban soil, all trained on us of course, and all of which would have been launched in immediate retaliation for an American attack. Imagine an America with 170 of its largest cities—

which, just for the record, would include Des Moines—wiped out. And of course it wouldn’t have stopped there. That’s how close we all came to dying.

I haven’t trusted grown-ups for a single moment since.

Chapter 12

OUT AND ABOUT

JACKSON, MICH. (AP)—A teenaged girl and her 12-year-old brother were accused by police Saturday of trying to kill their parents by pouring gasoline on their bed and setting it alight while they were sleeping. The children told police their parents were “too strict and were always nagging.” Mr. and Mrs. Sterling Baker were burned over 50 percent of their bodies and were listed in fair condition in a hospital.

— Des Moines Tribune, June 13, 1959

EVERY SUMMER, when school had been out for a while and your parents had had about as much of you as they cared to take in one season, there came a widely dreaded moment when they sent you to Riverview, a small, peeling amusement park in a dreary commercial district on the north side of town, with two dollars in your pocket and instructions to enjoy yourself for at least eight hours, more if possible.

Riverview was an unnerving institution. The roller coaster, a Himalayan massif of aging wood, was the most rickety, confidencesapping construction ever. The wagons were flocked inside and out with thirty-five years of spilled popcorn and hysterical vomit.

It had been built in 1920, and you could feel its age in every groaning joint and cracked cross brace. It was enormous—about four miles long, I believe, and some twelve thousand feet high. It was easily the scariest ride ever built. People didn’t even scream on it; they were much too petrified to emit any kind of noise. As it passed, the ground would tremble with increasing intensity and it would shake loose a shower—actually a kind of avalanche—of dust and ancient bird shit from its filthy rafters. A moment later, there would be a passing rain shower of vomit.

The guys in charge of the rides were all closely modeled on Richard Speck, the Chicago murderer. They spent their working lives massaging zits and talking to groups of bouncy young women in bobby socks who unfathomably flocked to them.

The rides weren’t on timers of any kind, so if the attendants went off into their little booths to have sex, or fled over the fence and across the large expanse of open ground beyond at the appearance of two men with a warrant, the riders could be left on for indefinite periods—days if the employee had bolted with a vital key or crank. I knew a kid named Gus Mahoney who was kept on the Mad Mouse so long, and endured so many g-forces, that for three months afterward he couldn’t comb his hair forward and his ears almost touched at the back of his head.

Even the bumper cars were insanely lively. From a distance the bumper-car palace looked like a welder’s yard because of all the sparks raining down from the ceiling, which always threatened to fall in the car with you, enlivening the ride further. The bumper-car attendants didn’t just permit head-on crashes, they actively encouraged them.

The cars were so souped up that the instant you touched the accelerator, however lightly or tentatively, it would shoot off at such a speed that your head would become a howling sphere on the end of a whiplike stalk. There was no controlling the cars once they were set in motion. They just flew around wildly, barely in contact with the floor, until they slammed into something solid, giving you the sudden opportunity to examine the steering wheel very closely with your face.

The worst outcome was to be caught in a car that turned out to be temperamental and sluggish or broke down altogether because forty other drivers, many of them small children who had never before had an opportunity to exact revenge on anything larger than a nervous toad, would fly into you with unbridled joy from every possible angle. I once saw a boy in a disabled car bale out while the ride was still running—this was the one thing you knew you were never supposed to do—and stagger dazedly through the heavy traffic for the periphery. As he set foot on the metal floor, more than two thousand crackling bluish strands of electricity leaped onto him from every direction, lighting him up like a paper lantern and turning him into a kind of living X-ray. You could see every bone in his body and most of his larger organs. Miraculously he managed to sidestep every car that came hurtling at him—and that was all of them, of course—and collapsed on the stubbly grass outside, where he lay smoking lightly from the top of his head and asked for someone to get word to his mom that he loved her. But apart from a permanent ringing in his ears, he suffered no major damage, though the hands on his Zorro watch were forever frozen at ten after two.

There wasn’t anything at Riverview that wasn’t horrible. Even the Tunnel of Love was an ordeal. There was always a joker in the leading boat who would dredge up a viscous ball of phlegm and with a mighty phwop shoot it onto the low ceiling—an action that was known as hanging a louie. There it would dangle, a saliva stalactite, before draping itself over the face of a following boater. The trick of successful louie-hanging—and I speak here with some authority—had nothing to do with spit, but with how fast you could run when the boat stopped.

Riverview was where you also discovered that kids from the other side of town wanted you dead and were prepared to seize any opportunity in any dark corner to get you that way. Kids from the Riverview district went to a high school so forlorn and characterless that it didn’t have a proper name, but just a geographical designation: North High. They detested kids from Theodore Roosevelt High School, the outpost of privilege, comfort, and quality footwear for which we were destined. Wherever you went at Riverview, but particularly if you strayed from your group (or in the case of Milton Milton had no group), there was always a good chance that you would be pulled into the shadows and briskly drubbed and relieved of wallet, shoes, tickets, and pants. There was always some kid—actually it was always Milton Milton now that I think of it—wandering in dismay in sagging undershorts or standing at the foot of the roller coaster wailing helplessly at his jeans, now dangling limply from a rafter four hundred feet above the ground.

I knew kids who begged their parents not to leave them at Riverview, whose fingers had to be prised off car door handles and torn from any passing pair of adult legs, who left six-inch-deep grooves in the dust with their heels from where they were dragged from the car to the entrance gate and pushed through the turnstile, and told to have fun. It was like being put in a lion’s cage.

THE ONE AMUSEMENT OF THE YEAR that everyone did get genuinely excited about was the Iowa State Fair, which was held at enormous fairgrounds way out on the eastern edge of town late every August. It was one of the biggest fairs in the nation; the 1945

movie State Fair was filmed at and based on the Iowa State Fair, a fact that filled us all with a curious pride, even though no one to our knowledge had ever seen the movie or knew a thing about it.

The state fair happened during the muggiest, steamiest period of the year. You spent all your time there soaked in perspiration and eating sickly foods—snow cones, cotton candy, ice-cream bars, ice-cream sandwiches, foot-long hot dogs swimming in gooey relish, bucketloads of the world’s most sugary lemonade—until you had become essentially an ambulatory sheet of flypaper and were covered from head to toe with vivid stains and stuck, half-dead insects.

The state fair was mostly a celebration of the farming way of life. It had vast halls filled with quilts and jams and tasseled ears of corn and tables spread with dome-roofed pies the size of automobile tires. Everything that could be grown, cooked, canned, or sewn was carefully conveyed to Des Moines from every corner of the state and ardently competed over. There were also displays of shiny new tractors and other commercial manufactures in a hall of wonders known as the Varied Industries Building and every year there was something called the Butter Cow, which was a life-sized cow carved from an enormous (well, cow-sized) block of butter. It was considered one of the wonders of Iowa, and some way beyond, and always had an appreciative crowd around it.

Beyond the display buildings were ranks of enormous stinking pavilions, each several acres in size, filled with animal pens, mostly inhabited by hogs, and the amazing sight of hundreds of keen young men buffing, shampooing, and grooming their beloved porkers in the hope of winning a colored satin ribbon and bringing glory home to Grundy Center or Pisgah. It seemed an odd way to court fame.

For most people the real attraction of the fair was the midway with its noisy rides and games of chance and enticing sideshows. But there was one place that all boys dreamed of visiting above all others: the strippers’ tent.

The strippers’ tent had the brightest lights and most pulsating music. From time to time the barker would bring out some of the girls, chastely robed, and parade them around a little open-air stage while suggesting—and looking each of us straight in the eye—that these girls could conceive of no greater satisfaction in life than to share their natural bounties with an audience of appreciative, red-blooded young men. They all seemed to be amazingly good-looking—but then I was running a temperature of over 113 degrees just from the thought of being on the same planet as young women of such miraculously obliging virtue, so I might have been a touch delirious.

The trouble was that we were twelve years old when we became seriously interested in the strippers’ tent and you had to be thirteen to go in. A dangling sign on the ticket booth made that explicitly clear. Doug Willoughby’s older brother, Joe, who was thirteen, went in and came out walking on air. He wouldn’t say much other than that it was the best 35

cents he had ever spent. He was so taken that he went in three more times in succession and pronounced it better on each occasion.

Naturally we circumnavigated the strippers’ tent repeatedly looking for a breach of any kind, but it was the Fort Knox of canvas. Every millimeter of hem was staked to the ground, every metal eyelet sealed solid. You could hear music, you could hear voices, you could even see the shadowy outlines of the audience, but you couldn’t discern the tiniest hint of a female form. Even Doug Willoughby, the most ingenious person I knew, was completely flummoxed. It was a torment to know that there was nothing but this rippling wall of canvas between us and living, breathing, unadorned female epidermis, but if Willoughby couldn’t find a way through there wasn’t a way through.

The following year I assembled every piece of ID I could find—school reports, birth certificate, library card, faded membership card from the Sky King Fan Club, anything that indicated my age even vaguely—and went directly to the tent with Buddy Doberman.

It was newly painted with life-sized images of curvy pinups in the style of Alberto Vargas, and looked very promising.

“Two for the front row, please,” I said.

“Scram,” said the grizzled man who was selling tickets. “No kids allowed.”

“Ah, but I’m thirteen,” I said, and began to extract affidavits from my folders.

“Not old enough,” said the man. “You gotta be fourteen.” He hit the dangling sign. The

“13” on it had been covered over with a square of card saying “14.”

“Since when?”

“Since this year.”

“But why?”

“New rules.”

“But that’s not fair.”

“Kid, if you got a gripe, write to your congressman. I just take the money.”

“Yes, but—”

“You’re holding up the line.”

“Yes, but—”

“Scram!”

So Buddy and I sloped off while a line of young men leered at us. “Come back when you’ve all growed up,” yukked a young man from a place called, I would guess, Moronville, then vanished under a withering glance of ThunderGaze.

Getting into the strippers’ tent would become the principal preoccupation of my pubescent years.

MOST OF THE YEAR we didn’t have Riverview or the state fair to divert us, so we went downtown and just fooled around. We were extremely good at just fooling around.

Saturday mornings were primarily devoted to attaining an elevated position—the roofs of office buildings, the windows at the ends of long corridors in the big hotels—and dropping soft or wet things on shoppers below. We spent many happy hours, too, roaming through the behind-the-scenes parts of department stores and office buildings, looking in broom closets and stationery cabinets, experimenting with steamy valves in boiler rooms, poking through boxes in storerooms.

The trick was never to behave furtively, but to act as if you didn’t realize you were in the wrong place. If you encountered an adult, you could escape arrest or detention by immediately asking a dumb question: “Excuse me, mister, is this the way to Dr.

Mackenzie’s office?” or “Can you tell me where the men’s room is, please?” This approach never failed. With a happy chuckle the apprehending custodian would guide us back to daylight and set us on our way with a pat on the head, unaware that under our jackets were thirteen rolls of duct tape, two small fire extinguishers, an adding machine, one semipornographic calendar from his office wall, and a really lethal staple gun.

On Saturdays there were also matinees to go to, usually involving a double feature of all the movies that my mother didn’t take me to— The Man from Planet X, The Return of Godzilla, Zombies of the Stratosphere, something with the slogan “Half-man, half-beast, but ALL MONSTER”—plus a handful of cartoons and a couple of Three Stooges shorts just to make sure we were maximally fired up. Generally the main features involved some fractious, jerkily animated dinosaurs, a swarm of giant mutated insects, and several thousand severely worried Japanese people racing through city streets just ahead of a large wave or a trampling foot.

These movies were nearly always cheaply made, badly acted, and largely incoherent, but that didn’t matter because Saturday matinees weren’t about watching movies. They were about racing around wildly, making noise, having pitched battles involving thrown candy, and generally making sure that every horizontal surface was buried at least three inches deep in spilled popcorn and empty containers. Essentially matinees were an invitation to four thousand children to riot for four hours in a large darkened space.

Before every performance, the manager—who was nearly always a bad-tempered bald guy with a bow tie and a very red face—would take to the stage to announce in a threatening manner that if any child, any child at all, was caught throwing candy, or seemed to be about to throw candy, he would be seized by the collar and frog-marched into the waiting arms of the police. “I’m watching you all, and I know where you live,”

the manager would say and fix us with a final threatening scowl. Then the lights would dim and up to twenty thousand pieces of flying candy would rain down on him and the stage around him.

Sometimes the movies would be so popular or the manager so un-seasoned and naïve that the balcony would be opened, giving a thousand or so kids the joyous privilege of being able to tip wet and sticky substances onto the helpless swarms below. The running of the Paramount Theatre was once entrusted to a tragically pleasant young man who had never dealt with children in a professional capacity before. He introduced an intermission in which children with birthdays who had filled out a card were called up onstage and allowed to reach into a big box from which they could extract a toy, box of candy, or gift certificate. By the second week eleven thousand children had filled out birthday cards.

Many were making seven or eight extra trips to the stage under lightly assumed identities.

Both the manager and the free gifts were gone by the third week.

But even when properly run, matinees made no economic sense. Every kid spent 35

cents to get in and another 35 cents on pop and candy, but left behind $4.25 in costs for repairs, cleaning, and gum removal. In consequence matinees tended to move around from theater to theater—from the Varsity to the Orpheum to the Holiday to the Hiland—

as managers abandoned the practice, had nervous breakdowns, or left town.

Very occasionally the film studios or a sponsor would give out door prizes. These were nearly always ill-advised. For the premiere of The Birds, the Orpheum handed out one-pound bags of birdseed to the first five hundred customers. Can you imagine giving birdseed to five hundred unsupervised children who are about to go into a darkened auditorium? A little-known fact about birdseed is that when soaked in Coca-Cola and expelled through a straw it can travel up to two hundred feet at speeds approaching Mach 1 and will stick like glue to anything—walls, ceilings, cinema screens, soft fabrics, screaming usherettes, the back of the manager’s suit and head, anything.

Because the movies were so bad, and the real action was out in the lobbies, nobody ever sat still for long. Once every half hour or so, or sooner if nobody on the screen was staggering around with a stake through the eye or an ax in the back of his head, you would get up and go off to see if there was anything worth investigating in the theater’s public areas. In addition to the concession stands in the lobby, most theaters also had vending machines in dark, unsupervised corners, and these were always worth a look.

There was a general conviction that just above where the cups dropped down or the candy bars slid out—slightly out of reach but tantalizingly close by—were various small levers and switches that would, if activated, dispense all the candy at once or possibly excite the change release mechanism into setting loose a cascade of silvery coins. Doug Willoughby once brought a small flashlight and one of those angled mirrors that dentists use, and had a good look around the insides of a vending machine at the Orpheum, and became convinced that if he found someone with sufficiently long arms he could make the machine his servant.

So you may imagine the delight on his face on the day that someone brought him a kid who was about seven feet tall and weighed forty pounds. He had arms like garden hoses.

Best of all he was dim and pliant. Encouraged by a clutch of onlookers that quickly grew to a crowd of about two hundred, the kid dutifully knelt down and stuck his arm up the machine, probing around as Willoughby directed. “Now go left a little,” Willoughby would say, “past the capacitor, under the solenoid and see if you can’t find a hinged lid.

That’ll be the change box. Do you feel it?”

“No,” the kid responded, so Willoughby fed in a little more arm.

“Do you feel it now?” Willoughby asked.

“No, but—ow!” the kid said suddenly. “I just got a big shock.”

“That’ll be the earthing clamp,” said Willoughby. “Don’t touch that again. I mean, really, don’t touch that again. Try going around it.” He fed in a little more arm. “Now do you feel it?”

“I can’t feel anything, my arm’s asleep,” said the kid after a time, and then added: “I’m stuck. I think my sleeve’s caught on something.” He grimaced and maneuvered his arm, but it wouldn’t come free. “No, I’m really stuck,” he announced at last.

Somebody went and got the manager. He came bustling up a minute or so later accompanied by one of his oafish assistants.

“What the hell?” he growled, forcing his way through the crowd. “Move aside, move aside. Goddamn it all. What the hell. What the hell’s going on? Goddamn kids. Move, boy! Goddamn it to hell. Goddamn. Goddamn. What the hell.” He reached the front of the crowd and saw, to his astonishment and disgust, a boy obscenely violating the innards of one of his vending machines. “The hell you doing, buster? Get your arm out of there.”

“I can’t. I’m stuck.”

The manager yanked on the kid’s arm. The kid wailed in pain.

“Who put you up to this?”

“They all did.”

“Are you aware that it is a federal offense to tamper with the insides of a Food-O-Mat machine?” the manager said as he yanked more and the kid wailed. “You are in a world of trouble, young man. I am going to personally escort you to the police station. I don’t even want to think about how long you’ll be in reform school—but you’ll be shaving by the time of your next matinee, buster.”

The kid’s arm would not come free, though it was now several inches longer than it had been earlier. Clucking, the manager produced an enormous ring of keys—the kind of ring that, once seen, made a man like him decide to drop all other plans and go into movie-theater management—unlocked the machine, and hauled open the door, dragging the kid protesting along with it. For the first time in history the inside of a vending machine was exposed to children’s view. Willoughby whipped out a pencil and notebook and began sketching. It was an entrancing sight—two hundred candy bars stacked in columns, each inhabiting a little tilted slot.