The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [27]
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 ThunderVision™, 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