The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [105]
“Happens every time,” they said.
“I’m sorry, did you just say ‘her chest’—‘pressed on her chest’?” I said.
Kathy Wilcox was a young woman with a chest worth pressing. The mere mention of her name was enough to make every corpuscle of blood in my body rush to the pelvic region and swell up in huge pointless readiness. They nodded happily. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me again.
“Kathy Wilcox’s chest? You were pressing on Kathy Wilcox’s chest? With your hands?”
“Repeatedly,” said Willoughby, beaming.
Katz confirmed it with many happy nods.
My despair cannot be described. I had missed out on the only genuinely erotic, hands-on experience that there would ever be involving boys aged fourteen and instead had passed forty-eight hours watching a man turn assorted foods into flying whey.
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