The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

by Bill Bryson

  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.”

&
nbsp; 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.