The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (26 page)

SMOKING WAS THE BIG DISCOVERY
of the age. Boy, did I love smoking and boy did it love me. For a dozen or so years I did little in life but sit at desks hunched over books French inhaling (which is to say drawing ropes of smoke up into the nostrils from the mouth, which gives a double hit of nicotine with every heady inhalation) or lounge back with hands behind head blowing languorous smoke rings, at which I grew so proficient that I could bounce them off pictures on distant walls or fire one smoke ring through another—skills that marked me out as a Grand Master of smoking before I was quite fifteen.

We used to smoke in Willoughby’s bedroom, sitting beside a window fan that was set up to blow outward, so that all the smoke was pulled into the whirring blades and dispatched into the open air beyond. There was a prevailing theory in those days (of which my father was a devoted, and eventually solitary, advocate) that if the fan blew outward it drew the hot air from the room and pulled cool air in through any other open window. It was somehow supposed to be much more economical, which is where the appeal lay for my father. In fact, it didn’t work at all, of course—all it did was make the outside a little cooler—and pretty soon everyone abandoned it, except my father who continued to cool the air outside his window till his dying day.

Anyway, the one benefit of having a fan blow outward was that it allowed you to finish each smoke with a flourish: you flicked the butt into the humming blades, which diced them into a shower of outward-flying sparks that was rather pleasing to behold and neatly obliterated the cigarette in the process, leaving no visible evidence below. It all worked very well until one August evening when Willoughby and I had a smoke, then went out for air, unaware that a solitary wayward ember had been flung back into the room and lodged in a fold of curtain, where it smoldered for an hour or so and then burst into a low but cheerful flame. When we returned to Willoughby’s house, there were three fire trucks out front; fire hoses were snaked across the lawn, through the front door, and up the stairs; Willoughby’s bedroom curtains and several pieces of furniture were on the front lawn soaked through and still smoking lightly; and Mr. Willoughby was on the front porch in a state of high emotion waiting to interview his son.

Mr. Willoughby’s troubles did not end there, however. The following spring, to celebrate the last day of the school year, Willoughby and his brother decided to make a bomb that they would pack in confetti and bury the night before in the center of the Callanan lawn, a handsome sward of never-walked-upon grass enclosed by a formal semi-circular driveway. At 3:01 p.m., just as a thousand chattering students were pouring from the school’s four exits, the bomb, activated by an alarm-clock timer, would go off with an enormous bang that would fill the air with dirt and drifting smoke and a pleasing shower of twirling colored paper.

The Willoughby brothers spent weeks mixing up dangerous batches of gunpowder in their bedroom and testing various concoctions, each more robust than the previous one, in the woods down by the railroad tracks near Waterworks Park. The last one left a smoking crater almost four feet across, threw strips of confetti twenty-five feet into the air, and made such a reverberating, citywide bang that squad cars hastened to the scene from eight different directions and cruised slowly around the area in a suspicious, squinty-eyed manner for almost forty minutes (making it the longest spell that Des Moines cops had ever been known to go without doughnuts and coffee).

It promised to be a fantastic show—the most memorable letting-out day in the history of Des Moines schools. The plan was that Willoughby and his brother would rise at four, walk to the school grounds under cover of darkness, plant the bomb, and withdraw to await the end of the school day. To that end they assembled the necessary materials—spade, dark clothes, ski masks—and carefully prepared the bomb, which they left ticking away on the bedroom desk. Why they set the timer is a question that would be asked many times in the coming days. Each brother would vigorously blame the other. What is certain is that they retired to bed without its occurring to either of them that 3:01
a.m.
comes before 3:01
p.m.

So it was at that dark hour, fifty-nine minutes before their own alarm went off, that the peaceful night was rent by an enormous explosion in Doug and Joseph Willoughby’s bedroom. No one in Des Moines was out at that hour, of course, but anyone passing who chanced to glance up at the Willoughbys’ house at the moment of detonation would have seen first an intense yellow light upstairs, followed an instant later by the sight of two bedroom windows blowing spectacularly outward, followed a second after that by a large puff of smoke and a cheery flutter of confetti.

But of course the truly memorable feature of the event was the bang, which was almost unimaginably robust and startling. It knocked people out of bed up to fourteen blocks away. Automatic alarms sounded all over the city, and the ceiling sprinklers came on in at least two office buildings. A community air-raid siren was briefly activated, though whether by accident or as a precaution was never established. Within moments two hundred thousand groggy, bed-flung people were peering out their bedroom windows in the direction of one extremely well-lit, smoke-filled house on the west side of town through which Mr. Willoughby, confused, wild of hair, at the end of an extremely stretched tether, was stumbling, shouting: “What the fuck? What the fuck?”

Doug and his brother, though comically soot-blackened and unable to hear anything not shouted directly into their ears for the next forty-eight hours, were miraculously unharmed. The only casualty was a small laboratory rat that lived in a cage on the desktop and was now just a lot of disassociated fur. The blast knocked the Willoughby home a half an inch off its foundations and generated tens of thousands of dollars in repair bills. The police, fire department, sheriff’s office, and FBI all took a keen interest in prosecuting the family, though no one could ever quite agree on what charges to bring. Mr. Willoughby became involved in protracted litigation with his insurers and embarked on a long program of psychotherapy. In the end, the whole family was let off with a warning. Doug Willoughby and his brother were not allowed off the property except to go to school or attend confession for the next six months. Technically, they are still grounded.

And so we proceeded to high school.

Drinking became the preoccupation of these tall and festively pimpled years. All drinking was led by Katz, for whom alcohol was not so much a pastime as a kind of oxygen. It was a golden age for misbehavior. You could buy a six-pack of Old Milwaukee beer for 59 cents (69 cents if chilled) and a pack of cigarettes (Old Gold was the brand of choice for students of my high school, Roosevelt, for no logical or historic reason that I am aware of ) for 35 cents, and so have a full evening of pleasure for less than a dollar, even after taking into account sales tax. Unfortunately it was impossible to buy beer, and nearly as difficult to buy cigarettes, if you were a minor.

Katz solved this problem by becoming Des Moines’s most accomplished beer thief. His career of crime began in seventh grade when he hit on a scheme that was simplicity itself. Dahl’s, as part of its endless innovative efficiency, had coolers that opened from the back as well as the front so that they could be stocked from behind from the storeroom. Also inside the storeroom was a wooden pen filled with empty cardboard boxes waiting to be flattened and taken away for disposal. Katz’s trick was to approach a member of the staff by the stockroom door and say, “Excuse me, mister. My sister’s moving to a new apartment. Can I take some empty boxes?”

“Sure, kid,” the person would always say. “Help yourself.”

So Katz would go into the stockroom, select a big box, load it quickly with delicious frosty beer from the neighboring beer cooler, put a couple of other boxes on top as cover, and stroll out with a case of free beer. Often the same employee would hold the door open for him. The hardest part, Katz once told me, was acting as if the boxes were empty and didn’t weigh anything at all.

Of course you could ask for boxes on only so many occasions without raising suspicion, but fortunately there were Dahl’s stores all over Des Moines with the same help-yourself coolers, so it was just a matter of moving around from store to store. Katz got away with it for over two years and would be getting away with it still, I daresay, except that the bottom gave way on a box once at the Dahl’s in Beaver-dale as he was egressing the building, and sixteen quart bottles of Falstaff smashed onto the floor in a foamy mess. Katz was not built for running, and so he just stood grinning until a member of the staff strolled over and took him unresisting to the manager’s office. He spent two weeks at Meyer Hall, the local juvenile detention center, for that.

I had nothing to do with store thefts. I was far too cowardly and prudent to so conspicuously break the law. My contribution was to make, by hand, forged driver’s licenses. These were, if I say it myself, small masterpieces—albeit bearing in mind that state driver’s licenses were not terribly sophisticated in those days. They were really just pieces of heavy blue paper, the size of a credit card, with a kind of wavy watermark. My stroke of brilliance was to realize that the back of my father’s checks had almost exactly the same wavy pattern. If you cut one of his checks to the right size, turned it over, and, with the aid of a T square, covered the blank side with appropriate-sized boxes for the bearer’s name and address and so on, then carefully inked the words “Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles” across the top with a fine pen and a straight edge, and produced a few other small flourishes, you had a pretty serviceable fake driver’s license.

If you then put the thing through an upright office typewriter such as my father’s, entering false details in the little boxes, and in particular giving the bearer a suitably early date of birth, you had a product that could be taken to any small grocery store in town and used to acquire limitless quantities of beer.

What I didn’t think of until much too late was that the obverse side of these homemade licenses sometimes bore selected details of my father’s account—bank name, account number, telltale computer coding, and so on—depending on which part of the check I had cut to size with scissors.

The first time this occurred to me was about 9:30 on a weekday morning when I was summoned to the office of the Roosevelt principal. I had never visited the principal’s office before. Katz was there already, in the outer waiting room. He was often there.

“What’s up?” I said.

But before he could speak I was called into the inner sanctum. The principal was sitting with a plainclothes detective who introduced himself as Sergeant Rotisserie or something like that. He had the last flattop in America.

“We’ve uncovered a ring of counterfeit driver’s licenses,” the sergeant told me gravely and held up one of my creations.

“A
ring
?” I said and tried not to beam. My very first foray into crime and already I was, single-handedly, a “ring.” I couldn’t have been more proud. On the other hand, I didn’t particularly want to be sent to the state reform school at Clarinda and spend the next three years having involuntary soapy sex in the showers with guys named Billy Bob and Cletus Leroy.

He passed the license to me to examine. It was one I had done for Katz (or “Mr. B. Bopp,” as he had rather rakishly restyled himself). He had been picked up while having a beer-induced nap on the grassy median of Polk Boulevard the night before and a search of his personal effects at the station house had turned up the artificial license, which I examined with polite interest now. On the back it said “Bankers Trust” and beneath that was my father’s name and address—something of a giveaway to be sure.

“That’s your father, isn’t it?” said the detective.

“Why, yes it is,” I answered and gave what I hoped was a very nice frown of mystification.

“Like to tell me how that happened?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said, looking earnest, and then added: “Oh, wait. I bet I know. I had some friends over last week to listen to records, you know, and some fellows we’d never seen before crashed in on us, even though it wasn’t even a party.” I lowered my voice slightly. “They’d been drinking.”

The detective nodded grimly, knowledgeably. He’d been to this slippery slope before.

“We asked them to leave, of course, and eventually they did when they realized we didn’t have any beer or other intoxicants, but I just bet you while we weren’t looking one of them went through my dad’s desk and stole some checks.”

“Any idea who they were?”

“I’m pretty sure they were from North High. One of them looked like Richard Speck.”

The detective nodded. “It starts to make sense, doesn’t it? Do you have any witnesses?”

“Oom,” I said, a touch noncommittally, but nodded as if it might be many.

“Was Stephen Katz present?”

“I think so. Yes, I believe he was.”

“Would you go out and wait in the outer room and tell Mr. Katz to come in?”

I went out and Katz was sitting there. I leaned over to him and said quickly: “North High. Crashed party. Stole checks. Richard Speck.”

He nodded, instantly understanding. This is one of the reasons why I say Stephen Katz is the finest human being in the world. Ten minutes later I was called back in.

“Mr. Katz here has corroborated your story. It appears these boys from North High stole the checks and ran them through a printing press. Mr. Katz here was one of their customers.”

He looked at Katz without much sympathy.

“Great! Case solved!” I said brightly. “So, can we go?”

“You can go,” said the sergeant. “I’m afraid Mr. Katz will be coming downtown with me.”

So Katz took the rap, allowing me to keep a clean sheet, God bless him and keep him. He spent a month in juvenile detention.

THE THING ABOUT KATZ
was that he didn’t do bad things with alcohol because he wanted to, he did them because he needed to. Casting around for a new source of supply, he set his sights higher. Des Moines had four beer distribution companies, all in brick depots in a quiet quarter at the edge of downtown where the railroad tracks ran through. Katz watched these depots closely for a couple of weeks and realized that they had practically no security and never worked on Saturdays or Sundays. He also noticed that railroad boxcars often stood on sidings beside the depots, particularly at weekends.