The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (17 page)

I particularly dreaded Sunday mornings when it was dark because Dewey was black and invisible, apart from his teeth, and it was just him and me in a sleeping world. Dewey slept wherever unconsciousness overtook him—sometimes on the front porch, sometimes on the back porch, sometimes in an old doghouse by the garage, sometimes on the path, but always outside—so he was always there, and always no more than a millimeter away from wakefulness and attack. It took me ages to creep, breath held, up the Haldemans’ front walk and the five wide wooden creak-ready steps of their front porch and very, very gently set the paper down on the mat, knowing that at the moment of contact I would hear from someplace close by but unseen a low, dark, threatening growl that would continue until I had withdrawn with respectful backward bows. Occasionally—just often enough to leave me permanently unnerved—Dewey would lunge, barking viciously, and I had to fly across the yard whimpering, hands held protectively over my butt, leap on my bike and pedal wildly away, crashing into fire hydrants and lampposts and generally sustaining far worse injuries than if I had just let Dewey hold me down and gnaw on me a bit.

The whole business was terrible beyond words. The only aspect worse than suffering an attack was waiting for the next one. The lone redeeming feature of life with Dewey was the rush of relief when it was all over, of knowing that I wouldn’t have to encounter Dewey again for twenty-four hours. Airmen returning home from dangerous bombing runs will recognize the feeling.

It was in such a state of exultation one crisp and twinkly March morning that I was delivering a paper to a house half a block farther on when Dewey—suddenly twice his normal size and with truly unwarranted ferocity—came for me at speed from around the side of the McManuses’ house. I remember thinking, in the microsecond for reflection that was available to me, that this was very unfair. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. This was my time of bliss.

Before I could meaningfully react, Dewey bit me hard on the leg just below the left buttock, knocking me to the ground. He then dragged me around for a bit—I remember my fingers scraping through grass—and then abruptly he released me and gave a confused, playful, woofy bark and bounded back into the border shrubbery whence he had come. Irate and comprehensively disheveled, I waddled to the road to the nearest streetlight and took down my pants to see the damage. My jeans were torn, and on the fleshy part of my thigh there was a small puncture and a very little blood. It didn’t actually hurt very much, but it came up the next day in a wonderful purply bruise, which I showed off in the boys’ bathroom at school to many appreciative viewers, including Mr. Groober, the strange, mute school janitor who was almost certainly an escapee from
some
place with high walls and who had never appeared quite this ecstatic about anything before, and I had to go to the doctor after school and get a tetanus shot, which I didn’t appreciate a whole lot, as you can imagine.

Despite the evidence of my wound, the Haldemans refused to believe that their dog had gone for me. “
Dewey?
” they laughed. “Dewey wouldn’t harm
any
one, honey. He wouldn’t leave the property after dark. Why, he’s afraid of his own shadow.” And then they laughed again. The dog that attacked me, they assured me, was some
other
dog.

Just over a week later, Dewey attacked Mrs. Haldeman’s mother, who was visiting from California. It had her down on the ground and was about to strip her face from her skull, which would have helped my case no end frankly. Fortunately for her, Mrs. Haldeman came out just in time to save her mother and realize the shocking truth about her beloved pet. Dewey was taken away in a van and never seen again. I don’t think anything has ever given me more satisfaction. I never did get an apology. However, I used to stick a secret booger in their paper every day.

At least rich people didn’t move without telling you. My friend Doug Willoughby had a newspaper route at the more déclassé end of Grand Avenue, made up mostly of funny-smelling apartment buildings filled with deadbeats, shut-ins, and people talking to each other through walls, not always pleasantly. All his buildings were gloomy and uncarpeted and all his corridors were so long and underlit that you couldn’t see to the end of them, and so didn’t know what was down there. It took resolution and nerve just to go in them. Routinely Willoughby would discover that a customer had moved away (or been led off in handcuffs) without paying him, and Willoughby would have to make up the difference, for that’s the way it worked. The
Register
never ended up out of pocket; only the paperboy did. Willoughby told me once that in his best week as a newspaper boy he made four dollars, and that included Christmas tips.

I, on the other hand, was steadily prospering, particularly when my bonus fines were factored in. Shortly before my twelfth birthday I was able to pay $102.12 in cash—a literally enormous sum; it took whole minutes to count it out at the cash register, as it was mostly in small change—for a portable black-and-white RCA television with foldaway antenna. It was a new slimline model in whitish gray plastic, with the control knobs on top—an exciting innovation—and so extremely stylish. I carried it up to my room, plugged it in, switched it on, and was seldom seen again around the house.

I took my dinner on a tray in my room each evening and scarcely ever saw my parents after that except on special occasions like birthdays and Thanksgiving. We bumped into one another in the hallway from time to time, of course, and occasionally on hot summer evenings I joined them on the screened porch for a glass of iced tea, but mostly we went our separate ways. So from that point our house was much more like a boardinghouse—a nice boardinghouse where the people got along well but respected and valued one another’s privacy—than a family home.

All this seemed perfectly normal to me. We were never a terribly close family when I think back on it. At least we weren’t terribly close in the conventional sense. My parents were always friendly, even affectionate, but in a slightly vague and distracted way. My mother was forever busy attacking collar stains or scraping potatoes off the oven walls—she was always attacking something—and my father was either away covering a sporting event for the paper or in his room reading. Very occasionally they went to a movie at the Varsity Theatre—it showed Peter Sellers comedies from time to time, on which they quietly doted—or to the library, but mostly they stayed at home happily occupying different rooms.

Every night about eleven o’clock or a little after I would hear my father going downstairs to the kitchen to make a snack. My father’s snacks were legendary. They took at least thirty minutes to prepare and required the most particular and methodical laying out of components—Ritz crackers, a large jar of mustard, wheat germ, radishes, ten Hydrox cookies, an enormous bowl of chocolate ice cream, several slices of luncheon meat, freshly washed lettuce, Cheez Whiz, peanut butter, peanut brittle, a hard-boiled egg or two, a small bowl of nuts, watermelon in season, possibly a banana—all neatly peeled, trimmed, sliced, cubed, stacked, or layered as appropriate, and attractively arrayed on a large brown tray and taken away to be consumed over a period of hours. None of these snacks could have contained less than twelve thousand calories, at least 80 percent of it in the form of cholesterol and saturated fats, and yet my father never gained an ounce of weight.

There was one other notable thing about my father’s making of snacks that must be mentioned. He was bare-assed when he made them. It wasn’t, let me quickly add, that he thought being bare-assed somehow made for a better snack; it was just that he was bare-assed already. One of his small quirks was sleeping naked from the waist down. He believed that it was more comfortable, and healthful, to leave the bottom half of the body unencumbered at night, and so when in bed wore only a sleeveless T-shirt. And when he went downstairs late at night to concoct a snack he always went so attired (or unattired). Goodness knows what Mr. and Mrs. Bukowski next door must have thought as they drew their drapes and saw across the way (as surely they must) my father, bare-assed, padding about his kitchen, reaching into high cupboards and assembling the raw materials for his nightly feast.

Whatever dismay it may have caused next door, none of this was of any consequence in our house as everyone was in bed fast asleep (or in my case lying in the dark watching TV very quietly). But it happened that one night in about 1963, my father descended on a Friday night when my sister, unbeknownst to him, was entertaining. Specifically, she and her good friends Nancy Ricotta and Wendy Spurgin were encamped in the living room with their boyfriends, watching television in the dark and swabbing each other’s airways with their tongues (or so I have always imagined), when they were startled by a light coming on in the hallway above and the sound of my father descending the stairs.

As in most American homes, the living room in our house communicated with the rooms beyond by way of a doorless opening, in this case an arch about six feet wide, which meant that it offered virtually no privacy, so the sound of an approaching adult footfall was taken seriously. Instantly assuming positions of propriety, the six young people looked toward the entranceway just in time to see my father’s lightly wobbling cheeks, faintly illumined by the ghostly flicker of television, passing the open doorway and proceeding onward to the kitchen.

For twenty-five minutes they sat in silence, too mortified to speak, knowing that my father must return by the same route and that this time the encounter would be frontal.

Fortunately (insofar as such a word can apply here) my father must have peripherally noted them as he passed or heard voices or gasps or something, for when he returned with his tray he was snugly attired in my mother’s beige raincoat, creating the impression that he was not only oddly depraved but a nocturnal cross-dresser as well. As he passed he mouthed a shy but pleasant good evening to the assembled party and disappeared back up the stairs.

It was about six months, I believe, before my sister spoke to him again.

INTERESTINGLY,
at just about the time I acquired my television I realized that I didn’t really like TV very much—or, to put it more accurately, didn’t much like what was
on
TV, though I did like having the TV on. I liked the chatter and mindless laugh tracks. So mostly I left it babbling in the corner like a demented relative and read. I was at an age now where I read a lot, all the time. Once or twice a week I would descend to the living room, where there were two enormous (or so it seemed to me) built-in bookcases flanking the back window. These were filled with my parents’ books, mostly hardback, mostly from the Book-of-the-Month Club, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s, and I would select three or four and take them up to my room.

I was happily indiscriminate in my selections because I had little idea which of the books were critically esteemed and which were popular tosh. I read, among much else,
Trader Horn
,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
,
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
,
Manhattan Transfer
,
You Know Me, Al
,
The Constant Nymph
,
Lost Horizon
, the short stories of Saki, several jokey anthologies from Bennett Cerf, a thrilling account of life on Devil’s Island called
Dry Guillotine
, and more or less the complete oeuvres of P. G. Wodehouse, S. S. Van Dine, and Philo Vance. I had a particular soft spot for—and I believe may have been the last human being to read—
The Green Hat
, by Michael Arlen, with its wonderfully peerless names: Lady Pynte, Venice Pollen, Hugh Cypress, Colonel Victor Duck, and the unsurpassable Trehawke Tush.

On one of these collecting trips, I came across, on a lower shelf, a Drake University Yearbook for 1936. Flipping through it, I discovered to my astonishment—complete and utter—that my mother had been homecoming queen that year. There was a picture of her on a float, radiant, beaming, slender, youthful, wearing a glittery tiara. I went with the book to the kitchen, where I found my father making coffee. “Did you know Mom was homecoming queen at Drake?” I said.

“Of course.”

“How did
that
happen?”

“She was elected by her peers, of course. Your mom was quite a looker, you know.”

“Really?” It had never occurred to me that my mother looked anything except motherly.

“Still is, of course,” he added chivalrously.

I found it astounding, perhaps even a little out of order, that other people might find my mother attractive or desirable. Then I quite warmed to the idea. My mother had been a beauty. Imagine.

I put the book back. On the same section of shelf were eight or nine books entitled
Best Sports Stories of 1950
and so on for nearly every year of the decade, each consisting of thirty or forty of the best sports articles of that year as chosen by somebody well-known like Red Barber. Each of these volumes contained a piece of work—in some cases two pieces—by my dad. Often he was the only provincial journalist included. I sat down on the window seat between the bookcases and read several of them right there. They were wonderful. They really were. It was just one bright line after another. One I recall recorded how University of Iowa football coach Jerry Burns ranged up and down the sidelines in dismay as his defensive team haplessly allowed Ohio State to score touchdowns at will. “It was a case of the defense fiddling while Burns roamed,” he wrote, and I was amazed to realize that the bare-assed old fool was capable of such flights of verbal scintillation.

In light of these heartening discoveries, I amended the Thunderbolt Kid story at once. I
was
their biological offspring after all—and pleased to be so. Their genetic material was my genetic material and no mistake. I decided, on further consideration, that it must have been my father, not I, who had been dispatched to Earth from Planet Electro to preserve and propagate the interests of King Volton and his doomed race. That made vastly more sense when I thought about it. What better-sounding place, after all, for a superhero to grow up in than Winfield, Iowa?
That
, surely, was where the Thunderbolt Kid was intended to come from.