by Bill Bryson
“It’s preposterous,” he would agree. “Think what it would do to mathematics. You couldn’t have prime numbers anymore.”
I’d nod cautiously. “And when they got sick they’d have to suck puke back into their mouths,” I’d add, trying to get the conversation back to more comfortable territory.
“Geometry would be right out the window,” Willoughby would go on, and begin listing all the theorems that would fall apart in a world running in reverse.
We often had conversations like that, where we were both talking about the same thing, but from perspectives miles apart. Still it was better than trying to discuss Bizarro World with Buddy Doberman, who was surprised to learn it wasn’t a real place.
Willoughby had an absolute genius for figuring out how to get fun out of unpromising circumstances. Once his dad came to give us a ride home from the movies, but told us that he had to stop at city hall to pay his property taxes or something, so we were left sitting in the car at a meter outside an office building on Cherry Street for twenty minutes. Now normally this would be about as unpromising a circumstance as one could find oneself in, but as soon as his dad was around the corner, Willoughby bobbed out of the car and rotated the windshield washer—I didn’t even know you could do such a thing—so that it pointed toward the sidewalk, then got into the driver’s seat and told me on no account to make eye contact with or seem to notice anyone passing by. Then each time someone walked past he would squirt them—and car windshield washers put out a lot of water, a surprising amount, believe me.
The victims would stop in dumbfounded puzzlement on the spot where they had been drenched and look suspiciously in our direction—but we had the windows up and seemed completely oblivious of them. So they would turn to study the building behind them, and Willoughby would drill them in the back with another soaking blast. It was wonderful, the most fun I had ever had. I would be there still if it were up to me. Who would ever think to investigate a car windshield washer for purposes of amusement?
LIKE ME, WILLOUGHBY WAS a devotee of Bishop’s, but he was a more daring and imaginative diner than I could ever be. He liked to turn on the table light and send the waitresses off on strange quests.
“Could I have some Angostura bitters, please?” he would say with a look of choirboy sweetness. Or: “Please could I have some fresh ice cubes; these are rather misshapen.” Or: “Would you by any chance have a spare ladle and some tongs?” And the waitresses would go clumping off to see what they could find for him. There was something about his cheery face that inspired an eagerness to please.
On another occasion he pulled from his pocket, with a certain theatrical flourish, a neatly folded white handkerchief from which he produced a perfectly preserved large, black, flat, ugly, pincered stag beetle—what was known in Iowa as a June bug—and set it adrift on his tomato soup. It floated beautifully. One might almost have supposed it had been designed for the purpose.
Then he put the table light on. An approaching waitress, spying the beetle, shrieked and dropped an empty tray, and got the manager, who came hastening over. The manager was one of those people who are so permanently and comprehensively stressed that even their hair and clothes appear to be at their wit’s end. He looked as if he had just stepped from a wind tunnel. Seeing the floating insect, he immediately embarked on a nervous breakdown.
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Oh my goodness, my goodness. I don’t know how this has happened. This has never happened before. Oh my goodness, I am so sorry.” He whisked the offending bowl off the table, holding it at arm’s length, as if it were actively infectious. To the waitress he said, “Mildred, get these young men whatever they want—whatever they want.” To us he said: “How about a couple of hot fudge sundaes? Would that help to fix matters for you?”
“Yes, please!” we replied.
He snapped his fingers and sent Mildred off to get us sundaes. “With plenty of nuts and extra cherries,” he called. “And don’t forget the whipped cream.” He turned to us more confidentially. “Now you won’t tell anyone about this, will you, boys?” he said.
We promised not to.
“What do your parents do?”
“My father’s a health inspector,” Willoughby said brightly.
“Oh my God,” said the manager, draining of blood, and rushed off to make sure our sundaes were the largest and most elaborate ever served at Bishop’s.
The following Saturday, Willoughby led me into Bishop’s again. This time he drank half his water, then pulled from his jacket a jar filled with pond water, which he used to top up his glass. When he held the glass up to the light there were about sixteen tadpoles swimming in it.
“Excuse me, should my water be like this?” he called to a passing waitress, who stared at the water with a transfixed look, then went off to get backup. Within half a minute we had half a dozen waitresses examining the water with consternation, but no shrieking. A moment later our friend the manager turned up.
He held the glass up. “Oh my goodness,” he said and went pale. “I am so sorry. I don’t know how this could have happened. Nothing like this has ever happened before.” He looked at Willoughby more closely. “Say, weren’t you here last week?”
Willoughby nodded apologetically.
I assumed we were about to be heaved out on our ears, but the manager said: “Well, I am so sorry again, son. I cannot apologize enough.” He turned to the waitresses. “This young man seems to be jinxed.” To us, he said, “I’ll get your sundaes,” and went off to the kitchen, pausing here and there en route to crouch down and look discreetly at the water of other diners.
The one thing Willoughby always lacked was a sense of proportion. I begged him not to push his luck, but the following week he insisted on going to Bishop’s again. I refused to sit with him, but took a table across the way and watched as he hummingly pulled from his pocket a brown paper bag and carefully tipped into his soup about two pounds of dead flies and moths that he had retrieved from the overhead light fitting in his bedroom. They formed a mound four inches high. It was a magnificent sight, but perhaps just a touch deficient in terms of plausibility.
By chance the manager was passing as Willoughby put on his light. The manager looked at the offending bowl in horror and utter dismay and then at Willoughby. I thought for a moment that he was going to faint or perhaps even die. “This is just not poss—” he said and then a giant lightbulb went on over his head as he realized that indeed it wasn’t possible for anyone to be served a bowl of soup with two pounds of dead insects in it.
With commendable restraint he escorted Willoughby to the street door, and asked him—not demanded, but just asked him quietly, politely, sincerely—never to return. It was a terrible banishment.
ALL THE WILLOUGHBYS—mother, father, four boys—were touched with brilliance. I used to think we had a lot of books in our house because of our two big bookcases in the living room. Then I went to the Willoughbys’ house. They had books and bookcases everywhere—in the hallways and stairwells, in the bathroom, the kitchen, around all the walls of the living room. Moreover, theirs were works of real weight—Russian novels, books of history and philosophy, books in French. I realized then that we were hopelessly outclassed.
And their books were read. I remember once Willoughby showed me a paragraph about farm-boy bestiality he had come across in a long article about something else altogether in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I don’t remember the details now—it’s not the sort of thing one retains for forty years—but the gist of the passage was that 32 percent of farm boys in Indiana (or something like that: I’m pretty sure it was Indiana; it was certainly a high number) at one time or another had enjoyed sexual congress with livestock.
This amazed me in every possible way. It had never occurred to me that any farm boy or other human being, in Indiana or elsewhere, would ever willingly have sex with an animal, and yet here was printed evidence in a respectable publication that a significant proportion of them had at least give
n it a try. (The article was a touch coy on how enduring these relationships were.) But even more amazing than the fact itself was the finding of it. The Encyclopaedia Britannica ran to twenty-three volumes spread over eighteen thousand pages—some fifty million words in all, I would estimate—and Willoughby had found the only riveting paragraph in the whole lot. How did he do it? Who reads the Encyclopaedia Britannica?
Willoughby and his brothers opened new worlds, unsuspected levels of possibility, for me. It was as if I had wasted every moment of existence up to then. In their house anything could be fascinating and entertaining. Willoughby shared a bedroom with his brother Joe, who was one year older and no less brilliant at science. Their room was more laboratory than bedroom. There was apparatus everywhere—beakers, vials, retorts, Bunsen burners, jars of chemicals of every description—and books on every subject imaginable, all well-thumbed: applied mechanics, wave mechanics, electrical engineering, mathematics, pathology, military history. The Willoughby boys were always doing something large-scale and ambitious. They made their own helium balloons. They made their own rockets. They made their own gunpowder. One day I arrived to find that they had built a rudimentary cannon—a test model—out of a piece of metal pipe into which they stuffed gunpowder, wadding, and a silver ball bearing about the size of a marble. This they lay on an old tree stump in their backyard, aimed at a sheet of plywood about fifteen feet away. Then they lit the fuse and we all retired to a safe position behind a picnic table turned on its side (in case the whole thing blew up). As we watched, the burning fuse somehow unbalanced the pipe and it began to roll slowly across the stump, taking up a new angle. Before we could react, it went off with a stupendous bang and blew out an upstairs bathroom window of a house three doors away. No one was hurt, but Willoughby was grounded for a month—he was commonly grounded—and had to pay $65 restitution.
The Willoughby boys really were able to make fun out of nothing at all. On my first visit, they introduced me to the exciting sport of match fighting. In this game, the competitors arm themselves with boxes of kitchen matches, retire to the basement, turn off all the lights and spend the rest of the evening throwing lighted matches at each other in the dark.
In those days kitchen matches were heavy-duty implements—more like signal flares than the weedy sticks we get today. You could strike them on any hard surface and fling them at least fifteen feet and they wouldn’t go out. Indeed, even when being beaten vigorously with two hands, as when lodged on the front of one’s sweater, they seemed positively determined not to fail. The idea, in any case, was to get matches to land on your opponents and create small, alarming bush fires on some part of their person; the hair was an especially favored target. The drawback was that each time you launched a lighted match you betrayed your own position to anyone skulking in the dark nearby, so that after an attack on others you were more or less certain to discover that your own shoulder was robustly ablaze or that the center of your head was a kind of beacon of flame fueled from a swiftly diminishing stock of hair.
We played for three hours one evening, then turned on the lights and discovered that we had all acquired several amusing bald patches. Then we walked in high spirits down to the Dairy Queen on Ingersoll Avenue for refreshment and a breath of air, and came back to discover two fire trucks out front and Mr. Willoughby in an extremely animated state. Apparently we had left a match burning in a laundry basket and it had erupted in flames, climbed up the back wall, and scorched a few rafters, filling much of the house above with smoke. To all of this a team of firemen had enthusiastically added a great deal of water, much of which was now running out the back door.
“What were you doing down there?” Mr. Willoughby asked in amazement and despair. “There must have been eight hundred spent matches on the floor. The fire marshal is threatening to arrest me for arson. In my own house. What were you doing?”
Willoughby was grounded for six weeks after that, and so we had to suspend our friendship temporarily. But that was okay because by chance I had also become friends at this time with another schoolmate named Jed Mattes, who offered a complete contrast with Willoughby. For one thing, Jed was gay, or at least soon would be.
Jed had charm and taste and impeccable manners, and thanks to him I was exposed to a more refined side of life—to travel, quality food, literary fiction, interior design. It was strangely refreshing. Jed’s grandmother lived in the Commodore Hotel on Grand Avenue, which was rather an exotic thing to do. She was more than a thousand years old and weighed thirty-seven pounds, which included sixteen pounds of makeup. She used to give us money to go to the movies, sometimes quite enormous sums, like forty or fifty dollars, which would buy you a very nice day out in the early 1960s. Jed never wanted to go to movies like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. He favored musicals like The Unsinkable Molly Brown or My Fair Lady. I can’t say these were my absolute first choices, but I went with him in a spirit of friendship and they did lend me a certain sheen of cosmopolitanism. Afterward, he would take us in a cab—a form of conveyance of impossible elegance and splendor to me—to Noah’s Ark, an esteemed Italian eatery on Ingersoll. There he introduced me to spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread, and other worldly dishes of a most sophisticated nature. It was the first time I had ever been presented with a linen napkin or been confronted with a menu that wasn’t laminated and slightly sticky and didn’t have photographs of the food in it.
Jed could talk his way into anything. We used often to go and look in the windows of rich people’s houses. Occasionally he would ring the front doorbell.
“Excuse me for intruding,” he would say when the lady of the house arrived, “but I was just admiring your living-room curtains and I simply have to ask, where did you find that velour? It’s won-derful.”
The next thing you knew we’d be in the house, getting a full tour, with Jed cooing in admiration at the owner’s inspired improvements and suggesting modest additional touches that might make it better still. By such means we became welcome in all the finest houses. Jed struck up a particular friendship with an aged philanthropist named A. H. Blank, founder of Blank Children’s Hospital, who lived with his tottering, blue-haired wife in a penthouse apartment in the ritziest and most fashionable new address in Iowa, a building called the Towers, on Grand Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Blank owned the whole of the tenth floor. It was the highest apartment between Chicago and Denver, or at the very least Grinnell and Council Bluffs, they told us. On Friday nights we would often stop by for cocoa and coffee cake and a view of the city—indeed of most of the Midwest, it seemed—from the Blanks’ extensive balconies. It was in every sense the high point of all our weeks. I waited years for Mr. Blank to die in the hope that he would leave me something, but it all went to charity.
One Saturday after going to the movies (Midnight Lace starring Doris Day, which we immediately agreed was okay but by no means one of her best), we were walking home along High Street—an unusual route; a route for people of an adventurous disposition—when we passed a small brick office building with a plaque that said MID-AMERICA FILM DISTRIBUTION or something like that, and Jed suggested we go in.
Inside, a small, elderly man in a lively suit was sitting at a desk doing nothing.
“Hello,” said Jed, “I hope I’m not intruding, but do you have any old film posters you don’t require any longer?”
“You like movies?” said the man.
“Like them? Sir, no, I love them.”
“No kidding,” said the man, pleased as anything. “That’s great, that’s great. Tell me, son, what’s your favorite movie?”
“I think that would have to be All About Eve.”
“You like that?” said the man. “I’ve got that here somewhere. Hold on.” He took us into a storeroom that was packed from floor to ceiling with rolled posters and began searching through them. “It’s here somewhere. What else you like?”
“Oh, gosh,” said Jed, “Sunset Boulevard, Rebecca, An Affair to Remember, Lost Horizon, Blithe Spirit, A
dam’s Rib, Mrs. Miniver, Mildred Pierce, The Philadelphia Story, The Man Who Came to Dinner, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Storm Warning, The Pajama Game, This Property Is Condemned, The Asphalt Jungle, The Seven Year Itch, From This Day Forward, How Green Was My Valley, and Now, Voyager, but not necessarily in that order.”
“I got those!” said the man excitedly. “I got all those.” He started passing posters to Jed in a manic fashion. He turned to me. “What about you?” he said politely.
“The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” I answered hopefully.
He grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t handle B stuff,” he said.
“Zombies on Broadway?”
He shook his head.
“Island of the Undead?”
He gave up on me and turned back to Jed. “You like Lana Turner movies?”
“Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“I’ve got ’em all—every one since Dancing Co-Ed. Here, I want you to have them.” And he began piling them onto Jed’s arms.
In the end, he gave us more or less everything he had—posters dating back to the late 1930s, all in mint condition. Goodness knows what they would be worth now. We took them in a cab back to Jed’s house and divided them up on his bedroom floor. Jed took all the ones for movies starring Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. I got the ones with men running along in a crouch with guns blazing. We were both extremely happy.
Some years later, I went away to Europe for a summer and ended up staying two years. While I was away my parents cleared out my bedroom. The posters went on a bonfire.
THERE WERE CERTAIN THINGS I couldn’t comfortably share with Jed and the one that stuck out most was my lustful wish to see a naked woman. I don’t think an hour passed in the 364 days following my rejection at the state fairgrounds that I didn’t think at least twice about the strippers’ tent. It was the only possible place to see naked female flesh in the flesh, and my need was growing urgent.
By the March following my fourteenth birthday, I was crossing off on a calendar the number of days till the state fair. By late June I was frequently short of breath. On July 20 I laid out the clothes I was going to wear the following month. It took me three hours to choose. I considered taking opera glasses, but decided against it on the grounds that they would probably steam up.
