The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (10 page)

And here is what people in Iowa read:

The most hallowed piece of property in Pittsburgh baseball history left Forbes Field late Thursday afternoon under a dirty gray sports jacket and with a police escort. That, of course, was home plate, where Bill Mazeroski completed his electrifying home run while Umpire Bill Jackowski, broad back braced and arms spread, held off the mob long enough for Bill to make it legal.

Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the ninth inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-covered brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10–9, for the title.

Bear in mind that the story was written not at leisure but amid the din and distraction of a crowded press box in the immediate whooping aftermath of the game. Nor could a single thought or neat phrase (like “broad back braced and arms spread”) have been prepared in advance and casually dropped into the text. Since Mazeroski’s home run rudely upended a nation’s confident expectations of a victory by “the lordly Yankees,” every sportswriter present had to discard whatever he’d had in mind to say, even one batter earlier, and start afresh. Search as you will, you won’t find a better World Series game report on file anywhere, unless it was another of my dad’s.
^*8

But I had no idea of this at the time. All I knew was that my father returned home from the series in unusually high spirits, and revealed his startling plans to take us away on a trip over Christmas to some mysterious locale.

“You wait. You’ll like it. You’ll see,” was all he would say, to whoever asked. The whole idea of it was unspeakably exciting—we weren’t the type of people to do something so rash, so sudden, so
un-seasonal
—but unnerving, too, for exactly the same reasons. So on the afternoon of December 16, when Greenwood, my elementary school, dispatched its happy hordes into the snowy streets to begin three glorious weeks of yuletide relaxation (and school holidays in those days, let me say, were of a proper and generous duration), the family Rambler was waiting out front, steaming extravagantly, keenly even, and ready to cut a trail across the snowy prairies. We headed west, as usual, crossed the mighty Missouri River at Council Bluffs and made our way past Omaha. Then we just kept on going. We drove for what seemed like (in fact was) days across the endless, stubbly, snow-blown plains.

We passed one enticing diversion after another—Pony Express stations, buffalo licks, a pretty big rock—without so much as a sideways glance from my father. My mother began to look faintly worried.

On the third morning, we caught our first sight of the Rockies—the first time in my life I had seen something on the horizon other than a horizon. And still we kept going, up and through the ragged mountains and out the other side. We emerged in California, into warmth and sunshine, and spent a week experiencing its wonders—its mighty groves of redwoods, the lush Imperial Valley, Big Sur, Los Angeles—and the delicious, odd feel of warm sunlight on your face and bare arms in December: a winter without winter.

I had seldom—what am I saying? I had never—seen my father so generous and carefree. At a lunch counter in San Luis Obispo he invited me,
urged
me, to have a large hot fudge sundae, and when I said, “Dad, are you
sure
?” he said, “Go on, you only live once”—a sentiment that had never passed his teeth before, certainly not in a commercial setting.

We spent Christmas day walking on a beach in Santa Monica, and on the day after Christmas we got in the car and drove south on a snaking freeway through the hazy, warm, endless nowhereness of Los Angeles. At length we parked in an enormous parking lot that was almost comically empty—we were one of only half a dozen cars, all from out of state—and strode a few paces to a grand entrance, where we stood with hands in pockets looking up at a fabulous display of wrought iron.

“Well, Billy, do you know where this is?” my father asked, unnecessarily. There wasn’t a child in the world that didn’t know these fabled gates.

“It’s Disneyland,” I said.

“It certainly is,” he agreed and stared appreciatively at the gates as if they were something he had privately commissioned.

For a minute I wondered if this is all we had come for—to admire the gates—and that in a moment we would get back in the car and drive on to somewhere else. But instead he told us to wait there, and strode purposefully to a ticket booth where he conducted a brief but remarkably cheerful transaction. It was the only time in my life that I saw two twenty-dollar bills leave my father’s wallet simultaneously. As he waited at the window, he gave us a bored smile and a little wave.

“Have I got leukemia or something?” I asked my mother.

“No, honey,” she replied.

“Has Dad got leukemia?”

“No, honey, everybody’s fine. Your father’s just got the Christmas spirit.”

At no point in all my life before or since have I been more astounded, more gratified, more happy than I was for the whole of that day. We had the park practically to ourselves. We did it all—spun gaily in people-size teacups, climbed aboard flying Dumbos, marveled at the exciting conveniences in the Monsanto All-Plastic House of the Future in Tomorrowland, enjoyed a submarine ride and riverboat safari, took a rocket to the moon. (The seats actually trembled. “Whoa!” we all said in delighted alarm.) Disneyland in those days was a considerably less slick and manicured wonder than it would later become, but it was still the finest thing I had ever seen—possibly the finest thing that existed in America at the time. My father was positively enchanted with the place, with its tidiness and wholesomeness and imaginative picture-set charm, and kept asking rhetorically why all the world couldn’t be like this. “But cheaper, of course,” he added, comfortingly returning to character and steering us deftly past a souvenir stand.

The next morning we got in the car and began the thousand-mile trip across desert, mountain, and prairie to Des Moines. It was a long drive, but everyone was very happy. At Omaha, we didn’t stop—didn’t even slow down—but just kept on going. And if there is a better way to conclude a vacation than by not stopping in Omaha, then I don’t know it.

Chapter 5

THE PURSUIT OF PLEASURE

In Detroit, Mrs. Dorothy Van Dorn, suing for divorce, complained that her husband 1) put all their food in a freezer, 2) kept the freezer locked, 3) made her pay for any food she ate, and 4) charged her the 3% Michigan sales tax.

—
Time
magazine, December 10, 1951

FUN WAS A DIFFERENT KIND OF THING IN THE
1950
S,
mostly because there wasn’t so much of it. That is not, let me say, a bad thing. Not a great thing perhaps, but not a bad one either. You learned to wait for your pleasures, and to appreciate them when they came.

My most pleasurable experience of these years occurred on a hot day in August 1959 shortly after my mother informed me that she had accepted an invitation on my behalf to go to Lake Ahquabi for the day with Milton Milton and his family. This rash acceptance most assuredly was
not
part of my happiness, believe me, for Milton Milton was the most annoying, the most repellent, the
moistest
drip the world had yet produced, and his parents and sister were even worse. They were noisy, moronically argumentative, told stupid jokes, and ate with their mouths so wide open you could see all the way to their uvulas and some distance beyond. Mr. Milton had an Adam’s apple the size of a champagne cork and bore as uncanny a resemblance to the Disney character Goofy as was possible without actually being a cartoon dog. His wife was just like him but hairier.

Their idea of a treat was to pass around a plate of Fig Newtons, the only truly dreadful cookie ever made. They actually yukked when they laughed—an event that gave them a chance to show you just what a well-masticated Fig Newton looks like in its final moments before oblivion (black, sticky, horrible). An hour with the Miltons was like a visit to the second circle of hell. Needless to say, I torched them repeatedly with ThunderVision, but they were strangely ineradicable.

On the one previous occasion on which I had experienced their hospitality, a slumber party at which it turned out I was the only guest, or possibly the only invitee who showed up, Mrs. Milton had made me—I’ll just repeat that: made me—eat chipped beef on toast, a dish closely modeled on vomit, and then sent us to bed at 8:30 after Milton passed out halfway through
I’ve Got a Secret
, exhausted after sixteen hours of pretending to be a steam shovel.

So when my mother informed me that she had, in her amiable dementia, committed me to yet another period in their company, my dismay was practically boundless.

“Tell me this isn’t happening,” I said and began walking in small, disturbed circles around the carpet. “Tell me this is just a bad, bad dream.”

“I thought you liked Milton,” said my mother. “You went to his house for a slumber party.”

“Mom, it was the worst night of my
life
. Don’t you remember? Mrs. Milton made me eat baked throw up. Then she made me share Milton’s toothbrush because you forgot to pack one for me.”

“Did I?” said my mother.

I nodded with a kind of strained stoicism. She had packed my sister’s toilet bag by mistake. It contained two paper-wrapped tampons and a shower cap, but not my toothbrush or the secret midnight feast that I had been faithfully promised. I spent the rest of the evening playing drums with the tampons on Milton’s comatose head.

“I’ve never been so bored in my life. I
told
you all this before.”

“Did you? I honestly don’t recall.”

“Mom, I had to share a toothbrush with Milton Milton after he’d been eating Fig Newtons.”

She received this with a compassionate wince.

“Please don’t make me go to Lake Ahquabi with them.”

She considered briefly. “Well, all right,” she said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us to visit Sister Gonzaga then.”

Sister Gonzaga was a great-aunt of formidable mien and yet another of the family’s many nuns from my mother’s side. She was six feet tall and very scary. There was a long-running suspicion in the family that she was actually a man. You always felt that underneath all that starch there was a lot of chest hair. In the summer of 1959, Sister Gonzaga was dying in a local hospital, though not nearly fast enough if you asked me. Spending an afternoon in Sister Gonzaga’s room at the Home for Dying Nuns (I’m not sure that that was its actual name) was possibly the only thing worse than a day out with the Miltons.

So I went to Lake Ahquabi, in a mood of gloomy submission, crammed into the Miltons’ ancient, dinky Nash, a car with the comfort and stylish zip of a chest freezer, expecting the worst and receiving it. We got heatedly lost for an hour in the immediate vicinity of the state capitol building—something that was almost impossible for any normal family to do in Des Moines—and when we finally reached Ahquabi spent ninety minutes more, with much additional disputation, unloading the car and setting up a base camp on the shady lawn beside the small artificial beach. Mrs. Milton distributed sandwiches, which were made of some kind of pink paste that looked like, and for all I know was, the stuff my grandmother used to secure her dentures to her gums. I went for a little walk with my sandwich and left it with a dog that would have nothing to do with it. Even a procession of ants, I noticed later, had detoured three feet to avoid it.

Having eaten, we had to sit quietly for forty-five minutes before swimming lest we get cramps and die horribly in six inches of water, which was about as far in as young males ever ventured on account of perennial rumors that the coffee-colored depths of Ahquabi harbored vicious snapping turtles that mistook small boys’ pizzles for tasty food. Mrs. Milton timed this quiet period with an egg timer, and encouraged us to close our eyes and have a little sleep until it was time to swim.

Far out in the lake there was moored a large wooden platform on which stood an improbably high diving board—a kind of wooden Eiffel Tower. It was, I’m sure, the tallest wooden structure in Iowa, if not the Midwest. The platform was so far out from shore that hardly anyone ever visited it. Just occasionally some teenaged daredevils would swim out to have a look around. Sometimes they would climb the many ladders to the high board, and even cautiously creep out onto it, but they always retreated when they saw just how suicidally far the water was below them. No human being had ever been known to jump from it.

So it was quite a surprise when, as the egg timer dinged our liberation, Mr. Milton jumped up and began doing neck rolls and arm stretches and announced that he intended to have a dive off the high board. Mr. Milton had been a bit of a diving star at Lincoln High School, as he never failed to inform anyone who spent more than three minutes in his company, but that was on a ten-foot board at an indoor pool. Ahquabi was of another order of magnitude altogether. Clearly, he was out of his mind, but Mrs. Milton was remarkably untroubled. “Okay, hon,” she replied lazily from beneath a preposterous hat. “I’ll have a Fig Newton for you when you get back.”

Word of the insane intention of the man who looked like Goofy was already spreading along the beach when Mr. Milton jogged into the water and swam with even strokes out to the platform. He was just a tiny, distant stick figure when he got there but even from such a distance the high board seemed to loom hundreds of feet above him—indeed, seemed almost to scrape the clouds. It took him at least twenty minutes to make his way up the zigzag of ladders to the top. Once at the summit, he strode up and down the board, which was enormously long—it had to be to extend beyond the edge of the platform far below—bounced on it experimentally two or three times, then took some deep breaths and finally assumed a position at the fixed end of the board with his arms at his sides. It was clear from his posture and poised manner that he was going to go for it.

By now all the people on the beach and in the water—several hundred altogether—had stopped whatever they were doing and were silently watching. Mr. Milton stood for quite a long time, then with a nice touch of theatricality he raised his arms, ran like hell down the long board—imagine an Olympic gymnast sprinting at full tilt toward a distant springboard and you’ve got something of the spirit of it—took one enormous bounce and launched himself high and outward in a perfect swan dive. It was a beautiful thing to behold, I must say. He fell with flawless grace for what seemed whole minutes. Such was the beauty of the moment, and the breathless silence of the watching multitudes, that the only sound to be heard across the lake was the faint whistle of his body tearing through the air toward the water far, far below. It may only be my imagination, but he seemed after a time to start to glow red, like an incoming meteor. He was
really
moving.

I don’t know what happened—whether he lost his nerve or realized that he was approaching the water at a murderous velocity or what—but about three-quarters of the way down he seemed to have second thoughts about the whole business and began suddenly to flail, like someone entangled in bedding in a bad dream, or whose chute hasn’t opened. When he was perhaps thirty feet above the water, he gave up on flailing and tried a new tack. He spread his arms and legs wide, in the shape of an X, evidently hoping that exposing a maximum amount of surface area would somehow slow his fall.

It didn’t.

He hit the water—
impacted
really is the word for it—at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away. At such a speed water effectively becomes a solid. I don’t believe Mr. Milton penetrated it at all, but just bounced off it about fifteen feet, limbs suddenly very loose, and then lay on top of it, still, like an autumn leaf, spinning gently. He was towed to shore by two passing fishermen in a rowboat, and carried to a grassy area by half a dozen onlookers who carefully set him down on an old blanket. There he spent the rest of the afternoon on his back, arms and legs bent slightly and elevated. Every bit of frontal surface area, from his thinning hairline to his toenails, had a raw, abraded look, as if he had suffered some unimaginable misfortune involving an industrial sander. Occasionally he accepted small sips of water, but otherwise was too traumatized to speak.

Later that same afternoon Milton Junior cut himself with a hatchet that he had been told on no account to touch, so that he ended up bleeding, in pain, and in trouble all at the same time. It was the best day of my life.

OF COURSE,
that isn’t saying a huge amount when you consider that the previous best day in my life at this point was when Mr. Sipkowicz, a teacher we didn’t like much, licked a Lincoln Log.

Lincoln Logs were toy wooden logs with which you could build forts, ranch houses, stockades, bunkhouses, corrals, and many other structures of interest and utility to cowboys, according to the imaginative illustrations on the cylindrical box, though in fact the supplied materials were actually just barely enough to make one small rectangular cabin with one door and one window.

What Buddy Doberman and I discovered was that if you peed on Lincoln Logs you bleached them white. As a result we created, over a period of weeks, the world’s first albino Lincoln Log cabin, which we took to school as part of a project on Abraham Lincoln’s early years. Naturally we declined to say how we had made the logs white, prompting pupils and teachers alike to examine them keenly for clues.

“I bet you did it with lemon juice,” said Mr. Sipkowicz, who was youthful, brash, and odious, and had an unfortunate taste for flashy ties, and who for a single semester had the distinction of being Greenwood’s only male teacher. Before we could stop him (not that we had any intention or desire to, of course) he shot out a long, reptilian tongue and ran it delicately and experimentally—lingeringly, eye-flutteringly—over the longest log in the back wall, which by chance we had prepared only that morning, so that it was still very slightly moist.

“I can taste lemon, can’t I?” he said with a pleased, knowing look.

“Not exactly!!!” we cried and he tried again.

“No, it’s lemon,” he insisted. “I can taste the tartness.” He gave another lick, savoring the flavor with such a deep, concentrated, twitchy intensity that for a moment we thought he had gone into shock and was about to topple over, but it was just his way of relishing the moment. “Definitely lemon,” he said, brightening, and handed it back to us with great satisfaction all round.

Mr. Sipkowicz’s unbidden licking gave pleasure, of course, but the real joy of the experience was in knowing that we were the first boys in history to get genuine entertainment out of Lincoln Logs, for Lincoln Logs were inescapably pointless and dull—a characteristic they shared with nearly all other toys of the day.

It would be difficult to say which was the most stupid or disappointing toy of the 1950s since most of them were one or the other, except for those that were both. The one that always leaps to mind for me as most incontestably unsatisfactory was Silly Putty, an oily pink plastic material that did nothing but bounce erratically a dozen or so times before disappearing down a storm drain. (That was actually the best thing about it.) Others, however, might opt for the majestically unamusing Mr. Potato Head, a box of plastic parts that allowed children to confirm the fundamental truth that even with ears, limbs, and a goofy smile a lifeless tuber is a lifeless tuber.