The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [12]
I don’t believe I have ever been so eager to accept an invitation. We ascended in an elevator to a floor I didn’t even know Younkers had. The Tea Room was the most elegant place I had ever been—like a stateroom from Buckingham Palace magically transported to the Middle West of America. Everything about it was starched and classy and calm. There was light music of a refined nature and the tink of cutlery on china and of ice water carefully poured. I cared nothing for the food, of course. I was waiting only for the moment when I was invited to step up to the toy box and make a selection.
When that moment came, it took me forever to decide. Every little package looked so perfect and white, so ready to be enjoyed. Eventually, I chose an item of middling size and weight, which I dared to shake lightly. Something inside rattled and sounded as if it might be die cast. I took it to my seat and carefully unwrapped it. It was a miniature doll—an Indian baby in a papoose, beautifully made but patently for a girl. I returned with it and its disturbed packaging to the slightly backward-looking fellow who was in charge of the toy box.
“I seem to have got a doll,” I said, with something approaching an ironic chuckle.
He looked at it carefully. “That’s surely a shame because you only git one try at the gift box.”
“Yes, but it’s a doll,” I said. “For a girl.”
“Then you’ll just have to git you a little girlfriend to give it to, won’tcha?” he answered and gave me a toothy grin and an unfortunate wink.
Sadly, those were the last words the poor man ever spoke. A moment later he was just a small muffled shriek and a smoldering spot on the carpet.
Too late he had learned an important lesson. You really should never fuck with the Thunderbolt Kid.
Chapter 2
WELCOME TO KID WORLD
DETROIT, MICH. (AP)—Great news for boys! A prominent doctor has defended a boy’s right to be dirty. Dr. Harvey Flack, director of the magazine Family Doctor, said in the September issue: “Boys seem to know instinctively a profound dermatological truth—that an important element of skin health is the skin’s own protective layer of grease. This should not be disturbed too frequently by washing.”
—The Des Moines Register, August 28, 1958
SO THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT NOT VERY MUCH: about being small and getting larger slowly. One of the great myths of life is that childhood passes quickly. In fact, because time moves more slowly in Kid World—five times more slowly in a classroom on a hot afternoon, eight times more slowly on any car journey of more than five miles (rising to eighty-six times more slowly when driving across Nebraska or Pennsylvania lengthwise), and so slowly during the last week before birthdays, Christmases, and summer vacations as to be functionally immeasurable—it goes on for decades when measured in adult terms. It is adult life that is over in a twinkling.
The slowest place of all in my corner of the youthful firmament was the large cracked-leather dental chair of Dr. D. K. Brewster, our spooky, cadaverous dentist, while waiting for him to assemble his instruments and get down to business. There time didn’t move forward at all. It just hung.
Dr. Brewster was the most unnerving dentist in America. He was, for one thing, about 108 years old and had more than a hint of Parkinsonism in his wobbly hands. Nothing about him inspired confidence. He was perennially surprised by the power of his own equipment. “Whoa!” he’d say as he briefly enlivened some screaming device or other. “You could do some damage with that, I bet!”
Worse still, he didn’t believe in novocaine. He thought it dangerous and unproven. When Dr. Brewster, humming mindlessly, drilled through rocky molar and found the pulpy mass of tender nerve within, it could make your toes burst out the front of your shoes.
We appeared to be his only patients. I used to wonder why my father put us through this seasonal nightmare, and then I heard Dr. Brewster congratulating