The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (13 page)

Despite its shortcomings, the approach was widely copied. Sarong, a manufacturer of girdles so heavy-duty that they looked bulletproof, took a similar line with a series of ads showing women caught by unexpected wind gusts, revealing their girdles
in situ
, to their own horrified dismay but to the leering delight of all males within fifty yards. I have before me an ad from 1956 showing a woman who has just alighted from a Northwest Airlines flight whose fur coat has inopportunely gusted open (as a result of an extremely localized sirocco occurring somewhere just below and between her legs) to reveal her wearing a Model 124 embroidered nylon marquisette Sarong-brand girdle (available at fine girdlers everywhere for $13.95). But—and here’s the thing that has been troubling me since 1956—the woman is clearly not wearing a skirt or anything else between girdle and coat, raising urgent questions as to how she was dressed when she boarded the plane. Did she fly skirtless the whole way from (let’s say for the sake of argument) Tulsa to Minneapolis or did she remove the skirt en route—and why?

Sarong ads had a certain following in my circle—my friend Doug Willoughby was a great admirer—but I always found them strange, illogical, and slightly pervy. “The woman can’t have traveled halfway across the country without a skirt on, surely,” I would observe repeatedly, even a little heatedly. Willoughby conceded the point without demur, but insisted that that was precisely what made Sarong ads so engaging. Anyway, it’s a sad age, you’ll agree, when the most titillating thing you can find is a shot of a horrified woman in a half-glimpsed girdle in your mother’s magazines.

By chance, we did have the most erotic statue in the nation in Des Moines. It was part of the state’s large Civil War monument on the capitol grounds. Called
Iowa
, it depicts a seated woman, who is holding her bare breasts in her hands, cupped from beneath in a startlingly provocative manner. The pose, we are told, was intended to represent a symbolic offering of nourishment, but really she is inviting every man who goes by to think hard about clambering up and clamping on. We used to sometimes ride our bikes there on Saturdays to stare at it from below. “Erected in 1890” said a plaque on the statue. “And causing them ever since,” we used to quip. But it was a long way to cycle just to see some copper tits.

The only other option was to spy on people. A boy named Rocky Koppell, whose family had been transferred to Des Moines from Columbus, lived for a time in an apartment in the basement of the Commodore Hotel and discovered a hole in the wall at the back of his bedroom closet through which he could watch the maid next door dressing and occasionally taking part in an earnest exchange of fluids with one of the janitors. Koppell charged 25 cents to peep through the hole, but lost most of his business when word got around that the maid looked like Adlai Stevenson, but with less hair.

The one place you knew you were never going to see naked female flesh was at the movies. Women undressed in the movies from time to time, of course, but they always stepped behind a screen to do so, or wandered into another room after taking off their earrings and absentmindedly undoing the top button of their blouse. Even if the camera stayed with the woman, it always shyly dropped its gaze at the critical moment, so that all you saw was a bathrobe falling around the ankles and a foot stepping into the bath. It can’t even be described as disappointing because you had no expectations to disappoint. Nudity was just never going to happen.

Those of us who had older brothers knew about a movie called
Mau Mau
that was released in 1955. In its initial manifestation it was a respectable documentary about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, soberly narrated by the television newscaster Chet Huntley. But the distributor, a man named Dan Sonney, decided the film wasn’t commercial enough. So he hired a local crew of actors and technicians and filmed additional scenes in an orange grove in Southern California. These showed topless “native” women fleeing before men with machetes. These extra scenes he spliced more or less randomly into the existing footage to give the film a little extra pep. The result was a commercial sensation, particularly among boys aged twelve to fifteen. Unfortunately, I was only four in 1955, and so missed out on the only naked celluloid jiggling of the decade.

One year when I was about nine we built a tree house in the woods—quite a good tree house, using some first-rate materials appropriated from a construction site on River Oaks Drive—and immediately, and more or less automatically, used it as a place to strip off in front of each other. This was not terribly exciting as the group consisted of about twenty-four little boys and just one girl, Patty Hefferman, who already at the age of seven weighed more than a large piece of earth-moving equipment (she would eventually become known as All-Beef Patty), and was not, with the best will in the world, anyone’s idea of Madame Eros. Still, for a couple of Oreo cookies she was willing to be examined from any angle for as long as anyone cared to, which gave her a certain anthropological value.

The only girl in the neighborhood anybody really wanted to see naked was Mary O’Leary. She was the prettiest child within a million million galaxies, but she wouldn’t take her clothes off. She would play in the tree house happily with us when it was wholesome fun, but the moment things got fruity she would depart by way of the ladder and stand below and tell us with a clenched fury that was nearly tearful that we were gross and loathsome. This made me admire her very much, very much indeed, and often I would depart, too (for in truth there was only so much of Patty Hefferman you could take and still eat my mom’s cooking), and accompany her to her house, praising her effusively for her virtue and modesty.

“Those guys really are disgusting,” I would say, conveniently overlooking that generally I was one of those guys myself.

Her refusal to take part was in an odd way the most titillating thing about the whole experience. I adored and worshipped Mary O’Leary. I used to sit beside her on her sofa when she watched TV and secretly stare at her face. It was the most perfect thing I had ever seen—so soft, so clean, so ready to smile, so full of rosy light. And there was nothing more perfect and joyous in nature than that face in the micro-instant before she laughed.

In July of that summer, my family went to my grandparents’ house for the Fourth of July, where I had the usual dispiriting experience of watching Uncle Dee turning wholesome food into flying stucco. Worse still, my grandparents’ television was out of commission and waiting for a new part—the cheerfully moronic local television repairman was unable to see the logic of keeping a supply of spare vacuum tubes in stock, an oversight that earned him a carbonizing dose of ThunderVision needless to say—and so I had to spend the long weekend reading from my grandparents’ modest library, which consisted mostly of Reader’s Digest condensed books, some novels by Warwick Deeping, and a large cardboard box filled with
Ladies’ Home Journal
s going back to 1942. It was a trying weekend.

When I returned, Buddy Doberman and Arthur Bergen were waiting by my house. They barely acknowledged my parents, so eager were they to get me around the corner to have a private word. There they breathlessly told me that in my absence Mary O’Leary had come into the tree house and taken her clothes off—every last stitch. She had done so freely, indeed with a kind of dreamy abandon.

“It was like she was in a trance,” said Arthur fondly.

“A
happy
trance,” added Buddy.

“It was really nice,” said Arthur, his stock of fond remembrance nowhere near exhausted.

Naturally I refused to believe a word of this. They had to swear to God a dozen times and hope for their mothers’ deaths on a stack of Bibles and much else in a grave vein before I was prepared to suspend my natural disbelief even slightly. Above all, they had to describe every moment of the occasion, something that Arthur was able to do with remarkable clarity. (He had, as he would boast in later years, a pornographic memory.)

“Well,” I said, keen as you would expect, “let’s get her and do it again.”

“Oh, no,” Buddy responded. “She said she wasn’t going to do it any more. We had to swear we’d never ask her again. That was the deal.”

“But,” I said, sputtering and appalled, “that’s not fair.”

“The funny thing is,” Arthur went on, “she said she’s been thinking about doing it for a long time, but waited until you weren’t there because she didn’t want to upset you.”

“Upset me? Upset me? Are you kidding? Upset me? Are you kidding? Are you kidding?”

You can still see the dent in the sidewalk where I beat my head against it for the next fourteen hours. True to her word, Mary O’Leary never came near the tree house again.

Shortly afterward, in an inspired moment, I took all the drawers out of my father’s closet chest to see what, if anything, they hid. I used to strip down his bedroom twice a year, in spring and autumn, when he went to spring training and the World Series, looking for lost cigarettes, stray money, and evidence that I was indeed from the Planet Electro—perhaps a letter from King Volton or the Electro Congress promising some munificent reward for raising me safely and making sure that my slightest whims were met.

On this occasion, because I had more time than usual on my hands, I took the drawers all the way out to see if anything was behind or beneath them, and so found his modest girlie stash, comprising two thin magazines, one called
Dude
, the other
Nugget
. They were extremely cheesy. The women in them looked like Pat Nixon or Mamie Eisenhower—the sort of women you would pay
not
to see naked. I was appalled and astonished, not because my father had men’s magazines—this was an entirely welcome development, of course; one to be encouraged by any means possible—but because he had chosen so poorly. It seemed tragically typical of my father that his crippling cheapness extended even to his choice of men’s magazines.

Still, they were better than nothing and they did feature unclad women. I took them to the tree house where they were much prized in the absence of Mary O’Leary. When I returned them to their place ten days or so later, just before he came home from spring training, they were conspicuously well thumbed. Indeed, it was hard not to notice that they had been enjoyed by a wider audience. One was missing its cover and nearly all the pictorials now bore marginal comments and balloon captions, many of a candid nature, in a variety of young hands. Often in the years that followed I wondered what my father made of these spirited emendations, but somehow the moment never seemed right to ask.

Chapter 7

BOOM!

MOBILE, ALA.
—The Alabama Supreme Court yesterday upheld a death sentence imposed on a Negro handyman, Jimmy Wilson, 55, for robbing Mrs. Esteele Barker of $1.95 at her home last year. Mrs. Barker is white.

Although robbery is a capital offense in Alabama, no one has been executed in the state before for a theft of less than $5. A court official suggested that the jury had been influenced by the fact that Mrs. Barker told the jury that Wilson had spoken to her in a disrespectful tone.

A spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called the death sentence “a sad blot on the nation,” but said the organization is unable to aid the condemned man because it is barred in Alabama.

—
The Des Moines Register
, August 23, 1958

AT
7:15
IN THE MORNING
local time on November 1, 1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb in the Eniwetok (or Enewetak or many other variants) atoll in the Marshall Islands of the South Pacific, though it wasn’t really a bomb as it wasn’t in any sense portable. Unless an enemy would considerately stand by while we built an eighty-ton refrigeration unit to cool large volumes of liquid deuterium and tritium, ran in several miles of cabling, and attached scores of electric detonators, we didn’t have any way of blowing anyone up with it. Eleven thousand soldiers and civilians were needed to get the device to go off at Eniwetok, so this was hardly the sort of thing you could set up in Red Square without arousing suspicions. Properly, it was a “thermonuclear device.” Still, it was enormously potent.

Since nothing like this had ever been tried before, nobody knew how big a bang it would make. Even the most conservative estimates, for a blast of five megatons, represented more destructive might than the total firepower used by all sides in World War II, and some nuclear physicists thought the explosion might go as high as one hundred megatons—a blast so off the scale that scientists could only guess the chain of consequences. One possibility was that it might ignite all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Still, nothing ventured, nothing annihilated, as the Pentagon might have put it, and on the morning of November 1 somebody lit the fuse and, as I like to picture it, ran like hell.

The blast came in at a little over ten megatons, comparatively manageable but still enough to wipe out a city a thousand times the size of Hiroshima, though of course Earth has no cities that big. A fireball five miles high and four miles across rose above Eniwetok within seconds, billowing into a mushroom cloud that hit the stratospheric ceiling thirty miles above the Earth and spread outward for more than a thousand miles in every direction, disgorging a darkening snowfall of dusty ash as it went, before slowly dissipating. It was the biggest thing of any type ever created by humans. Nine months later the Soviets surprised the Western powers by exploding a thermonuclear device of their own. The race to obliterate life was on—and how. Now we truly were become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

So it is perhaps not surprising that as this happened I sat in Des Moines, Iowa, quietly shitting myself. I had little choice. I was ten months old.

What was scary about the growth of the bomb wasn’t so much the growth of the bomb as the people in charge of the growth of the bomb. Within weeks of the Eniwetok test the big hats at the Pentagon were actively thinking of ways to put this baby to use. One idea, seriously considered, was to build a device somewhere near the front lines in Korea, induce large numbers of North Korean and Chinese troops to wander over to have a look, and then set it off.

Representative James E. Van Zandt of Pennsylvania, a leading proponent of devastation, promised that soon we would have a device of at least a hundred megatons—the one that might consume all our breathable air. At the same time, Edward Teller, the semi-crazed Hungarian-born physicist who was one of the presiding geniuses behind the development of the H-bomb, was dreaming up exciting peacetime uses for nuclear devices. Teller and his acolytes at the Atomic Energy Commission envisioned using H-bombs to enable massive civil engineering projects on a scale never before conceived—to create huge open-pit mines where mountains had once stood, to alter the courses of rivers in our favor (ensuring that the Danube, for instance, served only capitalist countries), to blow away irksome impediments to commerce and shipping like the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Excitedly they reported that just twenty-six bombs placed in a chain across the Isthmus of Panama would excavate a bigger, better Panama Canal more or less at once, and provide a lovely show into the bargain. They even suggested that nuclear devices could be used to alter the Earth’s weather by adjusting the amount of dust in the atmosphere, forever banishing winters from the northern United States and sending them permanently to the Soviet Union instead. Almost in passing, Teller proposed that we might use the Moon as a giant target for testing warheads. The blasts would be visible through binoculars from Earth and would provide wholesome entertainment for millions. In short, the creators of the hydrogen bomb wished to wrap the world in unpredictable levels of radiation, obliterate whole ecosystems, despoil the face of the planet, and provoke and antagonize our enemies at every opportunity—and these were their
peacetime
dreams.

But of course the real ambition was to make a gigantically ferocious transportable bomb that we could drop on the heads of Russians and other like-minded irritants whenever it pleased us to do so. That dream became enchanting reality on March 1, 1954, when America detonated fifteen megatons of experimental bang over the Bikini atoll (a place so delightful that we named a lady’s swimsuit after it) in the Marshall Islands. The blast exceeded all hopes by a considerable margin. The flash was seen in Okinawa, twenty-six hundred miles away. It threw visible fallout over an area of some seven thousand square miles—all of it drifting in exactly the opposite direction than forecast. We were getting good not only at making really huge explosions but at creating consequences that were beyond our capabilities to deal with.

One soldier, based on the island of Kwajalein, described in a letter home how he thought the blast would blow his barracks away. “All of a sudden the sky lighted up a bright orange and remained that way for what seemed like a couple of minutes…We heard very loud rumblings that sounded like thunder. Then the whole barracks began shaking, as if there had been an earthquake. This was followed by a very high wind,” which caused everyone present to grab on to something solid and hold tight. And this was at a place nearly two hundred miles from the blast site, so goodness knows what the experience was like for those who were even closer—and there were many, among them the unassuming native residents of the nearby island of Rongelap, who had been told to expect a bright flash and a loud bang just before 7 a.m., but had been given no other warnings, no hint that the bang itself might knock down their houses and leave them permanently deafened, and no instructions about dealing with the aftereffects. As radioactive ash rained down on them, the puzzled islanders tasted it to see what it was made of—salt, apparently—and brushed it out of their hair.

Within minutes they weren’t feeling terribly well. No one exposed to the fallout had any appetite for breakfast that morning. Within hours many were severely nauseated and blistering prolifically wherever ash had touched bare skin. Over the next few days, their hair came out in clumps and some started hemorrhaging internally.

Also caught in the fallout were twenty-three puzzled fishermen on a Japanese boat called, with a touch of irony that escaped no one, the
Lucky Dragon
. By the time they got back to Japan most of the crewmen were deeply unwell. The haul from their trip was unloaded by other hands and sent to market, where it vanished among the thousands of other catches landed in Japanese ports that day. Unable to tell which fish was contaminated and which was not, Japanese consumers shunned fish altogether for weeks, nearly wrecking the industry.

As a nation, the Japanese were none too happy about any of this. In less than ten years they had achieved the unwelcome distinction of being the first victims of both the atom and hydrogen bombs, and naturally they were a touch upset and sought an apology. We declined to oblige. Instead Lewis Strauss, a former shoe salesman who had risen to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (it was that kind of age), responded by suggesting that the Japanese fishermen were in fact Soviet agents.

Increasingly, the United States moved its tests to Nevada, where, as we have seen, people were a good deal more appreciative, though it wasn’t just the Marshall Islands and Nevada where we tested. We also set off nuclear bombs on Christmas Island and the Johnston atoll in the Pacific, above and below water in the South Atlantic Ocean, and in New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Alaska, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi (of all places), in the early years of testing. Altogether between 1946 and 1962, the United States detonated just over a thousand nuclear warheads, including some three hundred in the open air, hurling numberless tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The USSR, China, Britain, and France detonated scores more.

It turned out that children, with their trim little bodies and love of milk, were particularly adept at absorbing and holding on to strontium 90—the chief radioactive product of fallout. Such was our affinity for strontium that in 1958 the average child—which is to say me and thirty million other small people—was carrying ten times more strontium than he had only the year before. We were positively aglow with the stuff.

So the tests were moved underground, but that didn’t always work terribly well either. In the summer of 1962, defense officials detonated a hydrogen bomb buried deep beneath the desert of Frenchman Flat, Nevada. The blast was so robust that the land around it rose by some three hundred feet and burst open like a very bad boil, leaving a crater eight hundred feet across. Blast debris went everywhere. “By four in the afternoon,” the historian Peter Goodchild has written, “the radioactive dust cloud was so thick in Ely, Nevada, two hundred miles from Ground Zero, that the street lights had to be turned on.” Visible fallout drifted down on six western states and two Canadian provinces—though no one officially acknowledged the fiasco and no public warnings were issued advising people not to touch fresh ash or let their children roll around in it. Indeed, all details of the incident remained secret for two decades until a curious journalist filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to find out what had happened that day.
^*10

While we waited for the politicians and military to give us an actual World War III, the comic books were pleased to provide an imaginary one. Monthly offerings with titles like
Atomic War!
and
Atom-Age Combat
began to appear and were avidly sought out by connoisseurs in the Kiddie Corral. Ingeniously, the visionary minds behind these comics took atomic weapons away from the generals and other top brass and put them in the hands of ordinary foot soldiers, allowing them to blow away inexhaustible hordes of advancing Chinese and Russian troops with atomic rockets, atomic cannons, atomic grenades, and even atomic rifles loaded with atomic bullets.

Atomic bullets! What a concept! The carnage was thrilling. Until Asbestos Lady stole into my life, capturing my young heart and twitchy loins, atomic-war comics were the most satisfying form of distraction there was.

Anyway, people had many other far worse things to worry about in the 1950s than nuclear annihilation. They had to worry about polio. They had to worry about keeping up with the Joneses. They had to worry that Negroes might move into the neighborhood. They had to worry about UFOs. Above all, they had to worry about teenagers. That’s right. Teenagers became the number-one fear of American citizens in the 1950s.

There had of course been obnoxious, partly grown human beings with bad complexions since time immemorial, but as a social phenomenon teenagehood was a brand-new thing. (The word
teenager
had only been coined in 1941.) So when teens began to appear visibly on the scene, rather like mutant creatures in one of the decade’s many outstanding science-fiction movies, grown-ups grew uneasy. Teenagers smoked and talked back and petted in the backs of cars. They used disrespectful terms to their elders like “pops” and “daddy-o.” They smirked. They drove in endless circuits around any convenient business district. They spent up to fourteen hours a day combing their hair. They listened to rock ’n’ roll, a type of charged music clearly designed to get youngsters in the mood to fornicate and smoke hemp. “We know that many platter-spinners are hop-heads,” wrote the authors of the popular book
USA Confidential
, showing a proud grasp of street patois. “Many others are Reds, left-wingers or hecklers of social convention.”

Movies like
The Wild One
,
Rebel Without a Cause
,
Blackboard Jungle
,
High School Confidential!
,
Teen-Age Crime Wave
,
Reform School Girl
, and (if I may be allowed a personal favorite)
Teenagers from Outer Space
made it seem that the youth of the nation was everywhere on some kind of dark, disturbed rampage.
The Saturday Evening Post
called juvenile crime “the Shame of America.”
Time
and
Newsweek
both ran cover stories on the country’s new young hoodlums. Under Estes Kefauver the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency launched a series of emotive hearings on the rise of street gangs and associated misbehavior.