by Bill Bryson
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 perform
ance, 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.
As the manager bent over to try to disentangle the kid’s arm and shirt from the door, two hundred hands reached past him and deftly emptied the machine of its contents.
“Hey!” said the manager when he realized what was happening. Furious and sputtering, he snatched a large box of Milk Duds from a small boy walking past.
“Hey! That’s mine!” protested the boy, grabbing back and holding on to the box with both hands. “It’s mine! I paid for it!” he shouted, feet flailing six inches off the floor. As they struggled, the box ripped apart and all the contents spilled out. At this, the boy covered his face with his hands and began weeping. Two hundred voices shrilly berated the manager, pointing out that the Food-O-Mat machine didn’t dispense Milk Duds. During this momentary distraction the kid with the long arms slid out of his shirt and fled topless back into the theater—an act of startling initiative that left everyone gaping in admiration.
The manager turned to his oafish assistant. “Go get that kid and bring him to my office.”
The assistant hesitated. “But I don’t know what he looks like,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t see his face.”
“He’s got no shirt on, you moron. He’s bare-chested.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t know what he looks like,” the assistant muttered, and stalked into the theater, flashlight darting.
The boy with the long arms was never seen again. Two hundred kids had free candy. Willoughby got to study the inside of the vending machine and work out how it functioned. It was a rare victory for the inhabitants of Kid World over the dark, repressive forces of Adult World. It was also the last time the Orpheum ever had a children’s matinee.
DOUG WILLOUGHBY WAS
THE SMARTEST PERSON I ever met, particularly with regard to anything mechanical or scientific. Afterward he showed me the sketch he’d made when the door was open. “It’s astoundingly simple,” he said. “I could hardly believe the lack of complexity. Do you know, it doesn’t have an internal baffle or backflow gate or anything. Can you believe that?”
I indicated that I was prepared to be as amazed as the next man.
“There’s nothing to stop reverse entry—nothing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, and slid the plans into his back pocket.
The following week there was no matinee but we went to see How the West Was Won. About half an hour into the movie, he took me to the Food-O-Mat machine, reached into his jacket, and pulled out two telescopic car aerials. Extending them, he inserted them into the machine, briefly manipulated them, and down came a box of Dots.
“What would you like?” he said.
“Could I have some Red Hots?” I asked. I loved Red Hots.
He wriggled again and a box of Red Hots came down. And with that Willoughby became my best friend.
Willoughby was amazingly brainy. He was the first person I knew who agreed with me about Bizarro World, the place where things went backward, though for rather more refined reasons than mine.
