The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  But when the road was being laid out sometime in the second half of the 1800s there was a heavy rain in the night and apparently the surveyors’ sticks moved—at least that was what we were always told—and the road deviated from the correct line, leaving the capitol oddly off center, so that it looks as if it has been caught in the act of trying to escape. It is a peculiarity that some people treasure and others would rather not talk about. I for one never tired of striding into the downtown from the west and being confronted with a view so gloriously not right, so cherishably out of kilter, and pondering the fact that whole teams of men could build an important road without once evidently looking up to see where they were going.

  For its first couple of blocks, downtown Des Moines had a slight but agreeably seedy air. Here there were dark bars, small hotels of doubtful repute, dingy offices, and shops that sold odd things like rubber stamps and trusses. I liked this area very much. There was always a chance of hearing a bitter argument through an upstairs window and the hope that this would lead to gunfire and someone falling out of the window onto an awning, as in the better Hollywood movies, or at least staggering out a door, hand on bloodied chest, and collapsing in the street.

  Then fairly quickly downtown became more respectable and literally upstanding, more like a real downtown. This throbbing heart of the metropolis was of a fairly modest scale—only three or four blocks wide and four or five long—but it had a density of tallish brick buildings and it was full of people and life. The air was slightly dirty and blue. People walked with quicker steps and longer strides. It felt like a proper city.

  Upon arriving downtown I had an unvarying routine. I would call first at Pinky’s, a joke and novelty store in the Bankers Trust Building, which contained a large stock of dusty gag items—plastic ice cubes with a fly inside, chattering teeth, rubber turds for every occasion—that no one ever bought. Pinky’s existed purely to give sailors, migrant workers, and small boys a place to go when they were at a loose end downtown. I have no idea how it managed to stay in business. I can only assume that somehow in the 1950s you didn’t have to sell much to remain solvent. *4

  When I had looked at everything there, I would do a circuit or two of the mezzanine at Frankel’s, then check out any new Hardy Boys arrivals in the book department at Younkers. Generally I would call in at the long soda fountain at Woolworth’s for one of their celebrated Green Rivers, a refreshing concoction of syrupy green fizz that was the schoolboy aperitif of the 1950s, and finally head over to the R&T (for Register and Tribune), at Eighth and Locust. There I would always take a minute to look through the large plate-glass windows that ran along the building at street level and gave views of the capacious press room—a potentially excellent place to see a mangling, I always supposed—then proceed through the snappy revolving doors into the Register’s lobby, where I would devote a few respectful minutes to a large, slowly revolving globe which was housed behind glass (always interestingly warm to the touch) in a side room.

  The Register was proud of this globe. It was, as I recall, one of the largest globes in the world: big globes aren’t easy to make apparently. This one was at least twice my size and beautifully manufactured and painted. It was tilted on its axis at a scientifically precise angle and spun at the same speed as Earth itself, completing one revolution in every twenty-four hours. It was, in short, a thing of wonder and grandeur—the finest technological marvel in Des Moines aside from the atomic toilets at Bishop’s cafeteria, which obviously were in a league of their own. Because it was so large and stately and real, it felt very much as if you were looking at the actual Earth, and I would walk around it imagining myself as God. Even now when I think of the nations of the Earth, I see them as they were on that big ball—as Tanganyika, Rhodesia, East and West Germany, the Friendly Islands. The globe may have had other fans besides me, but I never saw any passerby give it so much as a glance.

  At 5:30 precisely, I would proceed in an elevator up to the newsroom on the fourth floor—a place so quintessentially like a newsroom that it even had a swing gate through which you entered with a jaunty air, like Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday—and passed through the Sports Department with a familiar “Hey” to all the fellows there (they were my father’s colleagues after all), past the chattering wire machines, and presented myself at my mother’s desk in the Women’s Department just beyond. I can see her perfectly now sitting at a gray metal desk, hair slightly askew, hammering away on her typewriter, a venerable Smith Corona upright. I’d give anything—really almost anything at all—to pass just once more through that gate and see the guys in the Sports Department and beyond them my dear old mom at her desk typing away.

  My arrival would always please and surprise her equally. “Why, Billy, hello! My goodness, is it Friday?” she would say as if we hadn’t met for weeks.

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Well, what do you say we go to Bishop’s and a movie?”

  “That would be great.”

  So we would dine quietly and contentedly at Bishop’s and afterward stroll to a movie at one of the three great and ancient downtown movie palaces—the Paramount, the Des Moines, and the RKO-Orpheum—each a vast, spookily lit crypt done up in an elaborate style that recalled the heyday of ancient Egypt. The Paramount and the Des Moines both held sixteen hundred people, the Orpheum slightly fewer, though by the late 1950s there were seldom more than thirty or forty at a showing. There has never been, will never again be, a better place to pass a Friday evening, sitting with a tub of buttered popcorn in a cubic acre of darkness facing a screen so enormous you could read the titles of books on bookcases, the dates on calendars, the license plates of passing cars. It really was a kind of magic.

  Movies of the fifties were of unparalleled excellence. The Blob, The Man from Planet X, Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, Zombies of the Stratosphere, The Amazing Colossal Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Incredible Shrinking Man were just some of the inspired inventions of that endlessly imaginative decade. My mother and I never went to these, however. We saw melodramas instead, generally starring people from the lower-middle tiers of the star system—Richard Conte, Lizabeth Scott, Lana Turner, Dan Duryea, Jeff Chandler. I could never understand the appeal of these movies myself. It was all just talk, talk, talk in that gloomy, earnest, accusatory way that people in movies in the fifties had. The characters nearly always turned away when speaking, so that they appeared inexplicably to be addressing a bookcase or floor lamp rather than the person standing behind them. At some point the music would swell and one of the characters would tell the other (by way of the curtains) that they couldn’t take any more of this and were leaving.

  “Me, too!” I would quip amiably to my mother and amble off to the men’s room for a change of scene. The men’s rooms in the downtown theaters were huge, and soothingly lit, and quite splendidly classy. They had good full-length mirrors, so you could practice gunslinger draws, and there were several machines—comb machines, condom machines—you could almost get your arm up. There was a long line of toilet cubicles and they all had those dividers that allowed you to see the feet of people in flanking cubicles, which I never understood and indeed still don’t. (It’s hard to think of a single circumstance in which seeing the feet of the person next door would be to anyone’s advantage.) As a kind of signature gesture, I would go into the far left-hand stall and lock the door, then crawl under the divider into the next stall and lock it, and so on down the line until I had locked them all. It always gave me a strange sense of achievement.

  Goodness knows what I crawled through in order to accomplish this small feat, but then I was enormously stupid. I mean really quite enormously. I remember when I was about six passing almost a whole movie picking some interesting sweet-smelling stuff off the underside of my seat, thinking that it was something to do with the actual manufactured composition of the seat before realizing that it was gum that had been left there by previous users.

  I was sick for about two years ove
r what a grotesque and unhygienic activity I had been engaged in and the thought that I had then eaten greasy buttered popcorn and a large packet of Chuckles with the same fingers that had dabbled in other people’s abandoned chewings. I had even—oh, yuk! yuk!—licked those fingers, eagerly transferring bucketloads of syphilitic dribblings and uncategorizable swill from their snapped-out Wrigley’s and Juicy Fruit to my wholesome mouth and sleek digestive tract. It was only a matter of time—hours at most—before I would sink into a mumbling delirium and in slow, fevered anguish die.

  After the movies we always stopped for pie at the Toddle House—a tiny, steamy diner of dancing grease fires, ill-tempered staff, and cozy perfection on Grand Avenue. The Toddle House was little more than a brick hut consisting of a single counter with a few twirly stools, but never has a confined area produced more divine foods or offered a more delicious warmth on a cold night. The pies—flaky of crust, creamy of filling, and always generously cut—were heaven on a plate. Normally this was the high point of the evening, but on this night I was distracted and inconsolable. I felt dirty and doomed. I would never have dreamed that worse still could possibly come my way, but in fact it was just about to. As I sat at the counter idly pronging my banana cream pie, feeling sorry for myself and my doomed intestinal tract, I drank from my glass of water and then realized that the old man sitting beside me was drinking from it, too. He was over two hundred years old and had a sort of gray drool at each corner of his mouth. When he put the glass down there were little white masticated bits adrift in the water.

  “Akk, akk, akk,” I croaked in quiet horror as I took this in and clutched my throat with both hands. My fork fell noisily to the floor.

  “Say, have I bin drinkin’ yer water?” he said cheerfully.

  “Yes!” I gasped in disbelief, and stared at his plate. “And you were eating…poached eggs.”

  Poached eggs were the second most obvious food-never-to-share-with-an-underwashed-old-man, exceeded only by cottage cheese—and only barely. As a sort of dribbly by-product of eating the two were virtually indistinguishable. “Oh, akk, akk,” I cried and made noises over my plate like a cat struggling to bring up a hair ball.

  “Well, I sure hope you ain’t got no cooties!” he said and slapped me jovially on the back as he got up to pay his bill.

  I stared at him dumbfounded. He settled his account, laid a toothpick on his tongue, and sauntered bowlegged out to his pickup truck.

  He never made it. As he reached out to open the door, bolts of electricity flew from my wildly dilated eyes and played over his body. He shimmered for an instant, contorted in a brief, silent rictus of agony, and was gone.

  It was the birth of ThunderVision. The world had just become a dangerous place for morons.

  THERE ARE MANY VERSIONS of how the Thunderbolt Kid came to attain his fantastic powers—so many that I am not entirely sure myself—but I believe the first hints that I was not of Planet Earth, but rather from somewhere else (from, as I was later to learn, the Planet Electro in the Galaxy Zizz), lay embedded in the conversations that my parents had. I spent a lot of my childhood listening in on—monitoring really—their chats. They would have immensely long conversations that seemed always to be dancing about on the edge of a curious happy derangement. I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.

  “What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”

  “Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.

  “Look again,” urged my father.

  “Shays lounge,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.

  “No,” he said, “look at the second word. Look closely.”

  She looked. “Oh,” she said, cottoning on. She tried it again. “Shays lawn-gway.”

  “Well, it’s just ‘long,’ ” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr. “Shays lohhhnggg,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at that word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.”

  “Lawngg,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

  “It’s French,” my father explained.

  “Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”

  “No idea. Oh, look, there’s Bob coming home from work,” my father said, looking out the window. “I’m going to try it out on him.” So he’d collar Bob in his driveway and they’d have an amazed ten-minute conversation. For the next hour, you would see my father striding up and down the alley, and sometimes into neighboring streets, with his piece of paper, showing it to neighbors, and they would all have an amazed conversation. Later, Bob would come and ask if he could borrow the piece of paper to show his wife.

  It was about this time I began to suspect that I didn’t come from this planet and that these people weren’t—couldn’t be—my biological parents.

  Then one day when I was not quite six years old I was in the basement, just poking around, seeing if there was anything sharp or combustible that I hadn’t come across before, and hanging behind the furnace I found a woolen jersey of rare fineness. I slipped it on. It was many, many sizes too large for me—the sleeves all but touched the floor if I didn’t repeatedly push them back—but it was the handsomest article of attire I had ever seen. It was made of a lustrous oiled wool, deep bottle green in color, and was extremely warm and heavy, rather scratchy, and slightly moth-holed but still exceptionally splendid. Across the chest, in a satin material, now much faded, was a golden thunderbolt. Interestingly, no one knew where it came from. My father thought that it might be an old college football or ice hockey jersey, dating from sometime before the First World War. But how it got into our house he had no idea. He guessed that the previous owners had hung it there and forgotten it when they moved.

  But I knew better. It was, obviously, the Sacred Jersey of Zap, left to me by King Volton, my late natural father, who had brought me to Earth in a silver spaceship in Earth year 1951 (Electron year 21,000,047,002) shortly before our austere but architecturally exuberant planet exploded spectacularly in a billion pieces of pastel-colored debris. He had placed me with this innocuous family in the middle of America and hypnotized them into believing that I was a normal boy, so that I could perpetuate the Electron powers and creed.

  This jersey then was the foundation garment of my superpowers. It transformed me. It gave me colossal strength, rippling muscles, X-ray vision, the ability to fly and to walk upside down across ceilings, invisibility on demand, cowboy skills like lassoing and shooting guns out of people’s hands from a distance, a good voice for singing around campfires, and curious bluish-black hair with a teasing curl at the crown. It made me, in short, the kind of person that men want to be and women want to be with.

  To the jersey I added a range of useful accoutrements from my existing stockpile—Zorro whip and sword, Sky King neckerchief and neckerchief ring (with secret whistle), Robin of Sherwood bow and arrow with quiver, Roy Rogers decorative cowboy vest and bejeweled boots with jingly tin spurs—which added to my strength and dazzle. From my belt hung a rattling aluminum army surplus canteen that made everything put into it taste curiously metallic; a compass and official Boy Scout Vitt-L-Kit, providing all the essential implements needed to prepare a square meal in the wilderness and to fight off wildcats, grizzlies, and pedophile scoutmasters; a Batman flashlight with signaling attachment (for bouncing messages off clouds); and a rubber bowie knife.

  I also sometimes carried an army surplus knapsack containing snack food and spare ammo, but I tended not to use it much as it smelled oddly and permanently of cat urine, and imped
ed the free flow of the red beach towel that I tied around my neck for flight. For a brief while I wore some underpants over my jeans in the manner of Superman (a sartorial quirk that one struggled to fathom), but this caused such widespread mirth in the Kiddie Corral that I soon gave up the practice.

  On my head, according to season, I wore a green felt cowboy hat or a Davy Crockett coonskin cap. For aerial work I donned a Johnny Unitas–approved football helmet with sturdy plastic face guard. The whole kit, fully assembled, weighed slightly over seventy pounds. I didn’t so much wear it as drag it along with me. When fully dressed I was the Thunderbolt Kid (later Captain Thunderbolt), a name that my father bestowed on me in a moment of chuckling admiration as he unsnagged a caught sword and lifted me up the five wooden steps of our back porch, saving me perhaps ten minutes of heavy climb.

  Happily, I didn’t need a lot of mobility, for my superpowers were not actually about capturing bad people or doing good for the common man but primarily about using my X-ray vision to peer beneath the clothes of attractive women and to carbonize and eliminate people—teachers, babysitters, old ladies who wanted a kiss—who were an impediment to my happiness. All heroes of the day had particular specialties. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the American way. Roy Rogers went almost exclusively for Communist agents who were scheming to poison the water supply or otherwise disrupt and insult the American way of life. Zorro tormented an oafish fellow named Sergeant Garcia for obscure but apparently sound reasons. The Lone Ranger fought for law and order in the early West. I killed morons. Still do.

  I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.