The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (22 page)

On Saturdays there were also matinees to go to, usually involving a double feature of all the movies that my mother didn’t take me to—
The Man from Planet X
,
The Return of Godzilla
,
Zombies of the Stratosphere
, something with the slogan “Half-man, half-beast, but ALL MONSTER”—plus a handful of cartoons and a couple of Three Stooges shorts just to make sure we were maximally fired up. Generally the main features involved some fractious, jerkily animated dinosaurs, a swarm of giant mutated insects, and several thousand severely worried Japanese people racing through city streets just ahead of a large wave or a trampling foot.

These movies were nearly always cheaply made, badly acted, and largely incoherent, but that didn’t matter because Saturday matinees weren’t about watching movies. They were about racing around wildly, making noise, having pitched battles involving thrown candy, and generally making sure that every horizontal surface was buried at least three inches deep in spilled popcorn and empty containers. Essentially matinees were an invitation to four thousand children to riot for four hours in a large darkened space.

Before every performance, the manager—who was nearly always a bad-tempered bald guy with a bow tie and a very red face—would take to the stage to announce in a threatening manner that if
any
child, any child at all, was caught throwing candy, or seemed to be about to throw candy, he would be seized by the collar and frog-marched into the waiting arms of the police. “I’m watching you all, and I know where you live,” the manager would say and fix us with a final threatening scowl. Then the lights would dim and up to twenty thousand pieces of flying candy would rain down on him and the stage around him.

Sometimes the movies would be so popular or the manager so un-seasoned and naïve that the balcony would be opened, giving a thousand or so kids the joyous privilege of being able to tip wet and sticky substances onto the helpless swarms below. The running of the Paramount Theatre was once entrusted to a tragically pleasant young man who had never dealt with children in a professional capacity before. He introduced an intermission in which children with birthdays who had filled out a card were called up onstage and allowed to reach into a big box from which they could extract a toy, box of candy, or gift certificate. By the second week eleven thousand children had filled out birthday cards. Many were making seven or eight extra trips to the stage under lightly assumed identities. Both the manager and the free gifts were gone by the third week.

But even when properly run, matinees made no economic sense. Every kid spent 35 cents to get in and another 35 cents on pop and candy, but left behind $4.25 in costs for repairs, cleaning, and gum removal. In consequence matinees tended to move around from theater to theater—from the Varsity to the Orpheum to the Holiday to the Hiland—as managers abandoned the practice, had nervous breakdowns, or left town.

Very occasionally the film studios or a sponsor would give out door prizes. These were nearly always ill-advised. For the premiere of
The Birds
, the Orpheum handed out one-pound bags of birdseed to the first five hundred customers. Can you imagine giving birdseed to five hundred unsupervised children who are about to go into a darkened auditorium? A little-known fact about birdseed is that when soaked in Coca-Cola and expelled through a straw it can travel up to two hundred feet at speeds approaching Mach 1 and will stick like glue to anything—walls, ceilings, cinema screens, soft fabrics, screaming usherettes, the back of the manager’s suit and head, anything.

Because the movies were so bad, and the real action was out in the lobbies, nobody ever sat still for long. Once every half hour or so, or sooner if nobody on the screen was staggering around with a stake through the eye or an ax in the back of his head, you would get up and go off to see if there was anything worth investigating in the theater’s public areas. In addition to the concession stands in the lobby, most theaters also had vending machines in dark, unsupervised corners, and these were always worth a look. There was a general conviction that just above where the cups dropped down or the candy bars slid out—slightly out of reach but tantalizingly close by—were various small levers and switches that would, if activated, dispense all the candy at once or possibly excite the change release mechanism into setting loose a cascade of silvery coins. Doug Willoughby once brought a small flashlight and one of those angled mirrors that dentists use, and had a good look around the insides of a vending machine at the Orpheum, and became convinced that if he found someone with sufficiently long arms he could make the machine his servant.

So you may imagine the delight on his face on the day that someone brought him a kid who was about seven feet tall and weighed forty pounds. He had arms like garden hoses. Best of all he was dim and pliant. Encouraged by a clutch of onlookers that quickly grew to a crowd of about two hundred, the kid dutifully knelt down and stuck his arm up the machine, probing around as Willoughby directed. “Now go left a little,” Willoughby would say, “past the capacitor, under the solenoid and see if you can’t find a hinged lid. That’ll be the change box. Do you feel it?”

“No,” the kid responded, so Willoughby fed in a little more arm.

“Do you feel it now?” Willoughby asked.

“No, but—ow!” the kid said suddenly. “I just got a big shock.”

“That’ll be the earthing clamp,” said Willoughby. “Don’t touch that again. I mean, really, don’t touch that again. Try going around it.” He fed in a little more arm. “Now do you feel it?”

“I can’t feel anything, my arm’s asleep,” said the kid after a time, and then added: “I’m stuck. I think my sleeve’s caught on something.” He grimaced and maneuvered his arm, but it wouldn’t come free. “No, I’m really stuck,” he announced at last.

Somebody went and got the manager. He came bustling up a minute or so later accompanied by one of his oafish assistants.

“What the hell?” he growled, forcing his way through the crowd. “Move aside, move aside. Goddamn it all. What the hell. What the hell’s going on? Goddamn kids.
Move
, boy! Goddamn it to hell. Goddamn. Goddamn. What the hell.” He reached the front of the crowd and saw, to his astonishment and disgust, a boy obscenely violating the innards of one of his vending machines. “The hell you
doing
, buster? Get your arm out of there.”

“I can’t. I’m stuck.”

The manager yanked on the kid’s arm. The kid wailed in pain.

“Who put you up to this?”

“They all did.”

“Are you aware that it is a federal offense to tamper with the insides of a Food-O-Mat machine?” the manager said as he yanked more and the kid wailed. “You are in a
world
of trouble, young man. I am going to personally escort you to the police station. I don’t even want to
think
about how long you’ll be in reform school—but you’ll be shaving by the time of
your
next matinee, buster.”

The kid’s arm would not come free, though it was now several inches longer than it had been earlier. Clucking, the manager produced an enormous ring of keys—the kind of ring that, once seen, made a man like him decide to drop all other plans and go into movie-theater management—unlocked the machine, and hauled open the door, dragging the kid protesting along with it. For the first time in history the inside of a vending machine was exposed to children’s view. Willoughby whipped out a pencil and notebook and began sketching. It was an entrancing sight—two hundred candy bars stacked in columns, each inhabiting a little tilted slot.

As the manager bent over to try to disentangle the kid’s arm and shirt from the door, two hundred hands reached past him and deftly emptied the machine of its contents.

“Hey!” said the manager when he realized what was happening. Furious and sputtering, he snatched a large box of Milk Duds from a small boy walking past.

“Hey! That’s mine!” protested the boy, grabbing back and holding on to the box with both hands. “It’s mine! I paid for it!” he shouted, feet flailing six inches off the floor. As they struggled, the box ripped apart and all the contents spilled out. At this, the boy covered his face with his hands and began weeping. Two hundred voices shrilly berated the manager, pointing out that the Food-O-Mat machine didn’t dispense Milk Duds. During this momentary distraction the kid with the long arms slid out of his shirt and fled topless back into the theater—an act of startling initiative that left everyone gaping in admiration.

The manager turned to his oafish assistant. “Go get that kid and bring him to my office.”

The assistant hesitated. “But I don’t know what he looks like,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I didn’t see his face.”

“He’s got no shirt on, you moron. He’s bare-chested.”

“Yeah, but I still don’t know what he looks like,” the assistant muttered, and stalked into the theater, flashlight darting.

The boy with the long arms was never seen again. Two hundred kids had free candy. Willoughby got to study the inside of the vending machine and work out how it functioned. It was a rare victory for the inhabitants of Kid World over the dark, repressive forces of Adult World. It was also the last time the Orpheum ever had a children’s matinee.

DOUG WILLOUGHBY WAS THE SMARTEST PERSON
I ever met, particularly with regard to anything mechanical or scientific. Afterward he showed me the sketch he’d made when the door was open. “It’s astoundingly simple,” he said. “I could hardly believe the lack of complexity. Do you know, it doesn’t have an internal baffle or backflow gate or anything. Can you believe that?”

I indicated that I was prepared to be as amazed as the next man.

“There’s nothing to stop reverse entry—nothing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, and slid the plans into his back pocket.

The following week there was no matinee but we went to see
How the West Was Won
. About half an hour into the movie, he took me to the Food-O-Mat machine, reached into his jacket, and pulled out two telescopic car aerials. Extending them, he inserted them into the machine, briefly manipulated them, and down came a box of Dots.

“What would you like?” he said.

“Could I have some Red Hots?” I asked. I loved Red Hots.

He wriggled again and a box of Red Hots came down. And with that Willoughby became my best friend.

Willoughby was amazingly brainy. He was the first person I knew who agreed with me about Bizarro World, the place where things went backward, though for rather more refined reasons than mine.

“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.