The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [45]
I vaporized Wertham, needless to say, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Pleasure was going to be harder to get than ever, and the kind we needed most was the hardest of all to get. I refer of course to lust. But that is another story and another chapter.
Chapter 6
SEX AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS
LONDON, ENGLAND (AP)—A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the London Daily Mirror. The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by Mirror journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”
—The Des Moines Register, June 18, 1959
IN 1957, THE MOVIE PEYTON PLACE, the steamiest motion picture in years, or so the trailers candidly invited us to suppose, was released to a waiting nation and my sister decided that she and I were going to go. Why I was deemed a necessary part of the enterprise I have no idea. Perhaps I provided some sort of alibi. Perhaps the only time she could slip away from the house unnoticed was when she was babysitting me. All I know is that I was told that we were going to walk to the Ingersoll Theatre after lunch on Saturday and that I was to tell no one. It was very exciting.
On the way there my sister told me that many of the characters in the movie—probably most of them—would be having sex. My sister at this time was the world’s foremost authority on sexual matters, at least as far as I was concerned. Her particular speciality was spotting celebrity homosexuals. Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Batman and Robin, Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, a man in the third row of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra who looked quite normal to me—all were unmasked by her penetrating gaze. She told me Rock Hudson was gay in 1959, long before anyone would have guessed it. She knew that Richard Chamberlain was gay before he did, I believe. She was uncanny.
“Do you know what sex is?” she asked me once we were in the privacy of the Woods, walking in single file along the narrow path through the trees. It was a wintry day and I clearly remember that she had on a smart new red woolen coat and a fluffy white hat that tied under her chin. She looked very smart and grown-up to me.
“No, I don’t believe I do,” I said or words to that effect.
So she told me, in a grave tone and with the kind of careful phrasing that made it clear that this was privileged information, all there was to know about sex, though as she was only eleven at this time her knowledge was perhaps slightly less encyclopedic than it seemed to me. Anyway, the essence of the business, as I understood it, was that the man put his thing inside her thing, left it there for a bit, and then they had a baby. I remember wondering vaguely what these unspecified things were—his finger in her ear? his hat in her hatbox? Who could say? Anyway, they did this private thing, naked, and the next thing you knew they were parents.
I didn’t really care how babies were made, to tell you the truth. I was far more excited that we were on a secret adventure that our parents didn’t know about and that we were walking through the Woods—the more or less boundless Schwarzwald that lay between Elmwood Drive and Grand Avenue. At six, one ventured into the Woods very slightly from time to time, played army a bit within sight of the street, and then came out again (usually after Bobby Stimson got poison ivy and