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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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The Life
and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Recollections Bill Bryson’s
memoir of growing up in There are many versions of
how the Thunderbolt Kid came to attain his fantastic powers—so many that I
am not entirely sure myself—but I believe the first hints that I was not of
Planet Earth, but rather from somewhere else (from, as I was later to learn,
the Planet Electro in the Galaxy Zizz), lay
embedded in the conversations that my parents had. I spent a lot of my
childhood listening in on— monitoring really—their chats. They would have
immensely long conversations that seemed always to be dancing about on the
edge of a curious happy derangement. I remember one day my father came in,
quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper. “What’s
this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.” “Shays lounge,” she said, pronouncing
it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue
in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that
had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you
brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion
had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at
night. “Look
again,” urged my father. “Shays lounge,” repeated my mother,
not to be bullied. “No,” he
said, “look at the second word. Look closely.” She
looked. “Oh,” she said, cottoning on. She tried it again. “Shays lawn-gway.” “Well,
it’s just ‘long,’” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr. “Shays lohhhnggg,”
he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at that word a
hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t lounge.” “Lawngg,” said my mother
marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.” “It’s French,”
my father explained. “Yes, I
expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.” “No idea.
Oh, look, there’s Bob coming home from work,” my father said, looking out
the window. “I’m going to try it out on him.” So he’d collar Bob in his
driveway and they’d have an amazed ten-minute conversation. For the next
hour, you would see my father striding up and down the alley, and sometimes
into neighboring streets, with his piece of paper, showing it to neighbors,
and they would all have an amazed conversation. Later, Bob would come and ask
if he could borrow the piece of paper to show his wife. It was
about this time I began to suspect that I didn’t come from this planet and
that these people weren’t—couldn’t be—my biological parents. Then one
day when I was not quite six years old I was in the basement, just poking
around, seeing if there was anything sharp or combustible that I hadn’t come
across before, and hanging behind the furnace I found a woolen jersey of rare
fineness. I slipped it on. It was many, many sizes too large for me—the
sleeves all but touched the floor if I didn’t repeatedly push them back—but
it was the handsomest article of attire I had ever seen. It was made of a
lustrous oiled wool, deep bottle green in color, and was extremely warm and
heavy, rather scratchy, and slightly moth-holed but still exceptionally splendid.
Across the chest, in a satin material, now much faded, was a golden
thunderbolt. Interestingly, no one knew where it came from. My father thought
that it might be an old college football or ice hockey jersey, dating from
sometime before the First World War. But how it got into our house he had no
idea. He guessed that the previous owners had hung it there and forgotten it
when they moved. But I knew
better. It was, obviously, the Sacred Jersey of Zap, left to me by King Volton, my late natural father, who had brought me to
Earth in a silver spaceship in Earth year 1951 (Electron year 21,000,047,002)
shortly before our austere but architecturally exuberant planet exploded
spectacularly in a billion pieces of pastel-colored debris. He had placed me
with this innocuous family in the middle of This
jersey then was the foundation garment of my superpowers. It transformed me.
It gave me colossal strength, rippling muscles, X-ray vision, the ability to
fly and to walk upside down across ceilings, invisibility on demand, cowboy
skills like lassoing and shooting guns out of people’s hands from a distance,
a good voice for singing around campfires, and curious bluish-black hair with
a teasing curl at the crown. It made me, in short, the kind of person that
men want to be and women want to be with. To the
jersey I added a range of useful accoutrements from my existing
stockpile—Zorro whip and sword, Sky King neckerchief and neckerchief ring
(with secret whistle), Robin of Sherwood bow and arrow with quiver, Roy
Rogers decorative cowboy vest and bejeweled boots with jingly tin spurs—which
added to my strength and dazzle. From my belt hung a rattling aluminum army
surplus canteen that made everything put into it taste curiously metallic; a
compass and official Boy Scout Vitt-L-Kit,
providing all the essential implements needed to prepare a square meal in the
wilderness and to fight off wildcats, grizzlies, and pedophile scoutmasters;
a Batman flashlight with signaling attachment (for bouncing messages off
clouds); and a rubber bowie knife. I also
sometimes carried an army surplus knapsack containing snack food and spare
ammo, but I tended not to use it much as it smelled oddly and permanently of
cat urine, and impeded the free flow of the red beach towel that I tied
around my neck for flight. For a brief while I wore some underpants over my
jeans in the manner of Superman (a sartorial quirk that one struggled to
fathom), but this caused such widespread mirth in the Kiddie
Corral that I soon gave up the practice. On my
head, according to season, I wore a green felt cowboy hat or a Davy Crockett
coonskin cap. For aerial work I donned a Johnny Unitas—approved
football helmet with sturdy plastic face guard. The whole kit, fully
assembled, weighed slightly over seventy pounds. I didn’t so much wear it as
drag it along with me. When fully dressed I was the Thunderbolt Kid (later
Captain Thunderbolt), a name that my father bestowed on me in a moment of
chuckling admiration as he unsnagged a caught sword
and lifted me up the five wooden steps of our back porch, saving me perhaps
ten minutes of heavy climb. Happily, I
didn’t need a lot of mobility, for my superpowers were not actually about
capturing bad people or doing good for the common man but primarily about
using my X-ray vision to peer beneath the clothes of attractive women and to
carbonize and eliminate people— teachers, babysitters, old ladies who wanted
a kiss—who were an impediment to my happiness. All heroes of the day had
particular specialties. Superman fought for truth, justice, and the American
way. Roy Rogers went almost exclusively for Communist agents who were
scheming to poison the water supply or otherwise disrupt and insult the
American way of life. Zorro tormented an oafish fellow named Sergeant Garcia
for obscure but apparently sound reasons. The Lone Ranger fought for law and
order in the early West. I killed morons. Still do. I used to
give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work.
I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would
also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood
vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of
bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could
somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t
be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by
unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly
constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen
bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It
wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVisionTM,
a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away
undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more
intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating
people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit. Unlike Superman I had no
one to explain to me the basis of my powers. I had to make my own way into
the superworld and find my own role models. This
wasn’t easy, for although the 1950s was a busy age for heroes, it was a
strange one. Nearly all the heroic figures of the day were odd and just a
touch unsettling. Most lived with another man, except Roy Rogers, the singing
cowboy, who lived with a woman, Dale Evans, who dressed like a man. Batman
and Robin looked unquestionably as if they were on their way to a gay Mardi
Gras, and Superman was not a huge amount better. Confusingly, there were
actually two Supermans.
There was the comic-book Superman who had bluish hair, never laughed, and
didn’t take any shit from anybody. And there was the television Superman,
who was much more genial and a little bit flabby around the tits, and who
actually got wimpier and softer as the years passed. In similar
fashion, the Lone Ranger, who was already not the kind of fellow you would
want to share a pup tent with, was made odder still by the fact that the part
was played on television by two different actors—by Clayton Moore from 1949
to 1951 and 1954 to 1957, and by John Hart during the years in between—but
the programs were rerun randomly on local TV giving the impression that the
Lone Ranger not only wore a tiny mask that fooled no one, but changed bodies
from time to time. He also had a catchphrase—”A fiery horse with the speed of
light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo,
Silver’: the Lone Ranger”—that made absolutely no sense. I used to spend half
of every show trying to figure out what the catchphrase meant. Roy
Rogers, my first true hero, was in many ways the most bewildering of all.
For one thing, he was strangely anachronistic. He lived in a western town, Except for
Zorro—who really knew how to make a sword fly—the fights were always brief
and bloodless, and never involved hospitalization, much less comas,
extensive scarring, or death. Mostly they consisted of somebody jumping off a
boulder onto somebody passing on a horse, followed by a good deal of
speeded-up wrestling. Then the two fighters would stand up and the good guy
would knock the bad guy down. Roy and Dale both carried guns—everybody
carried guns, including Magnolia, their comical black servant, and Pat Brady,
the cook—but never shot to kill. They just shot the pistols out of bad people’s
hands and then knocked them down with a punch. The other
memorable thing about Roy Rogers—which I particularly recall because my
father always remarked on it if he happened to be passing through the
room—was that Roy’s horse, Trigger, got higher billing than Dale Evans, his
wife. “But then
Trigger is more talented,” my
father would always say. “And better looking, too!” we would faithfully and
in unison rejoin. Goodness me, but we were happy people in those days. In some ways, only Bryson could pull
off a memoir like this one. The Life
and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid will appeal to Midwesterners, especially
Iowans, in a special way, but any reader will find a lot of pleasure on these
pages. Steve Hopkins,
December 18, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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