The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (11 page)

Also notable for negative ecstasy was Slinky, a coil of metal that could be made to go head over heels down a flight of steps but otherwise did nothing at all, though it did redeem itself slightly from the fact that if you got someone to hold one end—Lumpy Kowalski was always very good for this—and stretched the other end all the way across the street and halfway up a facing slope and then let go, it hit them like a cannonball. In much the same way, Hula-Hoops, those otherwise supremely pointless rings, took on a certain value when used as oversize quoits to ensnare and trip up passing toddlers.

Perhaps nothing says more about the modest range of pleasures of the age than that the most popular candies of my childhood were made of wax. You could choose among wax teeth, wax pop bottles, wax barrels, and wax skulls, each filled with a small amount of colored liquid that tasted very like a small dose of cough syrup. You swallowed this with interest if not exactly gratification, then chewed the wax for the next ten or eleven hours. Now you might think there is something wrong with your concept of pleasure when you find yourself paying real money to chew colorless wax, and you would be right of course. But we did it and enjoyed it because we knew no better. And there was, it must be said, something good, something healthily restrained, about eating a product that had neither flavor nor nutritive value.

You could also get small artificial ice-cream cones made of some crumbly chalklike material, straws containing a gritty sugar so ferociously sour that your whole face would actually be sucked into your mouth like sand collapsing into a hole, root-beer barrels, red-hot cinnamon balls, licorice wheels and whips, greasy candy worms, rubbery dense gelatinlike candies that tasted of unfamiliar (and indeed unlikable) fruits but were a good value as it took more than three hours to eat each one (and three hours more to pick the gluey remnants out of your molars, sometimes with fillings attached), and jawbreakers the size and density of billiard balls, which were the best value of all as they would last for up to three months and had multiple strata that turned your tongue interesting new shades as you doggedly dissolved away one squamous layer after another.

At Bishop’s, where they had a large and highly regarded assortment of penny candies by the cash register, you could also get a comparatively delicious licorice treat known, with exquisite sensitivity, as nigger babies—though no one actually used that term anymore except my grandmother. Occasionally, when visiting from her hometown of Winfield and dining with us at Bishop’s, she would slip me a quarter and tell me to go and get some candy for the two of us to share later.

“And don’t forget to get some
NIGGER BABIES
!” she would shout, to my intense mortification, across half an acre of crowded dining room, causing a hundred or so diners to look up.

Five minutes later as I returned with the purchase, pressed furtively to outside walls in a vain attempt to escape detection, she would spy me and cry out: “Oh, there you are, Billy. Did you remember to get some
NIGGER BABIES
? Because I sure do love those…
NIGGER BABIES
!”

“Grandma,” I would whisper fiercely, “you shouldn’t
say
that.”

“Shouldn’t say what—
NIGGER BABIES
?”

“Yes. They’re called ‘
licorice
babies.’ ”

“ ‘Nigger baby’ is a bit offensive,” my mom would explain.

“Oh, sorry,” my grandmother would say, marveling at the delicacy of city people. Then the next time we went to Bishop’s, she would say, “Billy, here’s a quarter. Go and get us some of those—whaddaya call ’em—
LICORICE NIGGERS
!”

THE OTHER PLACE TO GET PENNY CANDIES
was Grund’s, a small grocery store on Ingersoll Avenue. Grund’s was one of the last mom-and-pop grocers left in the city and certainly the last in our neighborhood. It was run by a doddering couple of adorable minuteness and incalculable antiquity named Mr. and Mrs. Grund. None of the stock had been renewed, or come to that sold, since about 1929. There were things in there that hadn’t been seen in the wider retail world since Gloria Swanson was attractive—Othine Skin Bleach, Fels-Naptha Soap, boxes of Wild Root Hair Tonic with a photograph of Joe E. Brown on the front. Everything was covered in a thick coating of dust, including Mrs. Grund. I believe she may have been dead for some years. Mr. Grund, however, was very much alive and delighted when the bell above his door tinklingly sounded the arrival of new customers, even though it was always children and even though they were there for a single nefarious purpose: to steal from his enormous aged stock of penny candies.

This is possibly the most shameful episode of my childhood, but it is one I share with over twelve thousand other former children. Everyone knew you could steal from the Grunds and never be caught. On Saturdays kids turned up from all over the Midwest, some of them arriving in charter buses if I recall correctly, to stock up for the weekend. Mr. Grund was serenely blind to misconduct. You could remove his glasses, undo his bow tie, gently ease him out of his trousers and he wouldn’t suspect a thing. Sometimes we made small purchases, but this was only to get him to turn around and engage his ancient cash register so that a hundred flying hands could dip into his outsized jars and help themselves to more. Some of the bigger kids just took the jars. Still, it has to be said we brightened his day, until we finally put him out of business.

At least candy gave actual pleasure. Most things that were supposed to be fun turned out not to be fun at all. Model making, for instance. Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable but it was really just a mysterious ordeal that you had to go through from time to time as part of the boyhood process. The model kits
looked
fun. The illustrations on the boxes portrayed beautifully detailed fighter planes belching red-and-yellow flames from their wing guns and engaged in lively dogfights. In the background there was always a stricken Messerschmitt spiraling to earth with a dismayed German in the cockpit, shouting bitter epithets through the windscreen. You couldn’t wait to re-create such lively scenes in three dimensions.

But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string.

Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.

The really interesting thing about playtime disappointment in the fifties was that you never saw any of the disappointments coming. This was because the ads were so brilliant. Advertisers have never been so cunning. They could make any little meretricious piece of crap sound fantastic. Never before or since have commercial blandishments been so silken of tone, so capable of insinuating orgasmic happiness from a few simple materials. Even now in my mind’s eye I can see a series of ads in
Boys’ Life
from the A. C. Gilbert Company of New Haven, Connecticut, promising the most wholesome joy from their ingenious chemistry sets, microscope kits, and world-famous Erector Sets. These last were bolt-together toys from which you could make all manner of engineering marvels—bridges, industrial hoists, fairground rides, motorized robots—from little steel girders and other manly components. These weren’t things that you built on tabletops and put in a drawer when you were finished playing. These were items that needed a solid foundation and
lots
of space. I am almost certain that one of the ads showed a boy on a twenty-foot ladder topping out a Ferris wheel on which his younger brother was already enjoying a test ride.

What the ads didn’t tell you was that only six people on the planet—A. C. Gilbert’s grandsons presumably—had sufficient wealth and roomy enough mansions to enjoy the illustrated sets. I remember my father took one look at the price tag of a giant erection on display in Younkers toy department one Christmas and cried, “Why, you could practically get a
Buick
for that!” Then he began randomly stopping other male passersby and soon had a little club of amazed men. So I knew pretty early on that I was never going to get an Erector Set.

Instead I lobbied for a chemistry set, which I had seen in a fetching two-color double-page spread in
Boys’ Life
. According to the ad, this nifty and scientifically advanced kit would allow me to do exciting atomic energy experiments, confound the adult world with invisible writing, become a master of FBI fingerprinting techniques, and make the most satisfyingly enormous stinks. (It didn’t actually promise the stinks, but that was implicit in every chemistry set ever sold.)

The set, when opened on Christmas morning, was only about the size of a cigar box—the one portrayed in the magazine had the approximate dimensions of a steamer trunk—but it was ingeniously packed, I must say, with promising stuff: test tubes and a nifty rack in which to set them, a funnel, tweezers, corks, twenty or so little glass pots of colorful chemicals, several of which were promisingly foul smelling, and a plump instruction booklet. Needless to say, I went straight for the atomic energy page, expecting to have a small, private mushroom cloud rising above my workbench by suppertime. In fact, what the instruction book told me, if I recall, was that all materials are made of atoms and that all atoms have energy, so therefore
everything
has atomic energy. Put any two things in a beaker together—any two things at all—give them a shake and, hey presto, you’ve got an atomic reaction.

All the experiments proved to be more or less like this. The only one that worked even slightly was one of my own devising, which involved mixing together all the chemicals in the set with Babbo cleaning powder, turpentine, some baking soda, two spoonfuls of white pepper, a dab of horseradish of a good age, and a generous splash of Lectric Shave shaving lotion. These when combined instantly expanded about a thousandfold in volume, and ran over the sides of the beaker and onto our brand-new kitchen counter, where they began at once to hiss and crinkle and smoke, leaving a pinkish red welt along the Formica join that would forever after be a matter of pain and mystification to my father. “I can’t understand it,” he would say, peering along the edge of the counter. “I must have mixed the adhesive wrong.”

However, the worst toy of the decade, possibly the worst toy ever built, was electric football. Electric football was a game that all boys were compelled to accept as a Christmas present at some point in the 1950s. It consisted of a box with the usual exciting and misleading illustrations containing a tinny metal board, about the size of a breakfast tray, painted to look like an American football field. This vibrated intensely when switched on, making twenty-two little men move around in a curiously stiff and frantic fashion. It took forever to set up each play because the men were so fiddly and kept falling over, and because you argued continuously with your opponent about what formations were legal and who got to position the final man, since clearly there was an advantage in waiting till the last possible instant and then abruptly moving your running back out to the sidelines where there were no defenders to trouble him. All this always ended in bitter arguments, punctuated by reaching across and knocking over your opponent’s favorite players, sometimes repeatedly, with a flicked finger.

It hardly mattered how they were set up because electric football players never went in the direction intended. In practice what happened was that half the players instantly fell over and lay twitching violently as if suffering from some extreme gastric disorder, while the others streamed off in as many different directions as there were upright players before eventually clumping together in a corner, where they pushed against the unyielding sides like victims of a nightclub fire at a locked exit. The one exception to this was the running back who just trembled in place for five or six minutes, then slowly turned and went on an unopposed glide toward the wrong end zone until knocked over with a finger on the two-yard line by his distressed manager, occasioning more bickering.

At this point you switched off the power, righted all the fallen men, and painstakingly repeated the setting-up process. After three plays like this, one of you would say, “Hey, do you wanna go and hit Lumpy Kowalski with a stretched Slinky?” and you would push the game out of the way under the bed where it would never be touched again.

The one place where there was real excitement was comic books. This really was the golden age of comics. Nearly one hundred million of them were being produced every month by the middle of the decade. It is almost impossible to imagine how central a place they played in the lives of the nation’s youth—and indeed more than a few beyond youth. A survey of that time revealed that no fewer than 12 percent of the nation’s teachers were devoted readers of comic books. (And that’s the ones who admitted it, of course.)