The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [104]
Often Katz and Willoughby and I skipped school and spent long days trying to get into Willoughby’s older brother Ronald’s chest of drawers. Ronald had an enormous collection of men’s magazines, which he kept securely locked in a large chest in his bedroom. Ronald was the oldest, smartest, and by far best behaved of the Willoughby boys—he was an altar boy, Explorer Scout, member of the student council, hall monitor, permanent asshole—and more cunning than his three brothers put together. Not only was every drawer in the chest locked with ingenuity, but each drawer when opened had been given an impenetrable lid that seemed to offer no way in at all. On top of all this, much of the room, from the doorknob to certain of the floorboards, was lethally booby-trapped. Depending on what the intruder touched or tampered with, he might receive a bracing electric shock or come under multiple attacks from flying missiles, falling weights, swinging hammers, lunging mousetraps, or generous effusions of homemade pepper spray.
I particularly remember a moment of brief-lived delight when Willoughby, after hours of forensic examination, finally figured out how to open the second drawer of the chest—it had something to do with rotating a piece of carved filigree on the chest molding—and in the same instant there came a whistling sound, and a slender homemade dart, about six inches long and beautifully made, embedded itself with a resonant thwoing in the chest not two inches to the left of Willoughby’s fortuitously inclined head. Attached to the shaft of the dart was a slip of paper on which was neatly written: WARNING: I SHOOT TO KILL.
“He’s fucking crazy,” we agreed in unison.
After that Willoughby shrouded himself in every defensive item of apparel he could think of—welder’s goggles, hockey mitts, heavy overcoat, catcher’s chest protector, motorcycle helmet, and whatever else came to hand—while Katz and I hovered in the hallway urging him on and asking for updates on progress.
There was a particular urgency to the task because Playboy had lately taken to showing pubic hair. It is hard to believe that until the 1960s such an important erogenous zone remained undiscovered, but it is so. Prior to this, women in men’s magazines had no reproductive apparatus at all—at least none that they were prepared to show to strangers. They seemed to suffer from an odd reflex medical condition—vaginis timiditus, Willoughby called it—that for some reason compelled them, whenever a camera was produced, to wrench their hips and fling one leg over another as if trying to get their lower half to face backward. For years I thought that was the position women naturally adopted when they were naked and at ease. When Playboy first showed pubic hair, for at least seventy-two hours it featured in every male conversation in America. (“Check your oil for you, mister? Seen the new Playboy yet?”) Woolworth’s sold out its entire stock of magnifying glasses in twenty-four hours.
We longed with all our hearts to enter that privileged inner circle, as it were. But in over two years of trying, Willoughby never did get into his brother’s private stock, until one day in frustration he broke open the bottom drawer with a fireman’s ax, and a cornucopia of men’s magazines—my goodness, but his brother was a collector—came sliding out. I have seldom passed a more agreeable or instructive afternoon. Willoughby was grounded for two months for that, but we all agreed it was a noble sacrifice, and he did have the satisfaction of getting his brother in trouble, too, for some of these magazines were frankly quite disturbing.
As always, my timing