The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [49]
The only other option was to spy on people. A boy named Rocky Koppell, whose family had been transferred to Des Moines from Columbus, lived for a time in an apartment in the basement of the Commodore Hotel and discovered a hole in the wall at the back of his bedroom closet through which he could watch the maid next door dressing and occasionally taking part in an earnest exchange of fluids with one of the janitors. Koppell charged 25 cents to peep through the hole, but lost most of his business when word got around that the maid looked like Adlai Stevenson, but with less hair.
The one place you knew you were never going to see naked female flesh was at the movies. Women undressed in the movies from time to time, of course, but they always stepped behind a screen to do so, or wandered into another room after taking off their earrings and absentmindedly undoing the top button of their blouse. Even if the camera stayed with the woman, it always shyly dropped its gaze at the critical moment, so that all you saw was a bathrobe falling around the ankles and a foot stepping into the bath. It can’t even be described as disappointing because you had no expectations to disappoint. Nudity was just never going to happen.
Those of us who had older brothers knew about a movie called Mau Mau that was released in 1955. In its initial manifestation it was a respectable documentary about the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, soberly narrated by the television newscaster Chet Huntley. But the distributor, a man named Dan Sonney, decided the film wasn’t commercial enough. So he hired a local crew of actors and technicians and filmed additional scenes in an orange grove in Southern California. These showed topless “native” women fleeing before men with machetes. These extra scenes he spliced more or less randomly into the existing footage to give the film a little extra pep. The result was a commercial sensation, particularly among boys aged twelve to fifteen. Unfortunately, I was only four in 1955, and so missed out on the only naked celluloid jiggling of the decade.
One year when I was about nine we built a tree house in the woods—quite a good tree house, using some first-rate materials appropriated from a construction site on River Oaks Drive—and immediately, and more or less automatically, used it as a place to strip off in front of each other. This was not terribly exciting as the group consisted of about twenty-four little boys and just one girl, Patty Hefferman, who already at the age of seven weighed more than a large piece of earth-moving equipment (she would eventually become known as All-Beef Patty), and was not, with the best will in the world, anyone’s idea of Madame Eros. Still, for a couple of Oreo cookies she was willing to be examined from any angle for as long as anyone cared to, which gave her a certain anthropological value.
The only girl in the neighborhood anybody really wanted to see naked was Mary O’Leary. She was the prettiest child within a million million galaxies, but she wouldn’t take her clothes off. She would play in the tree house happily with us when it was wholesome fun, but the moment things got fruity she would depart by way of the ladder and stand below and tell us with a clenched fury that was nearly tearful that we were gross and loathsome. This made me admire her very much, very much indeed, and often I would depart, too (for in truth there was only so much of Patty Hefferman you could take and still eat my mom’s cooking), and accompany her to her house, praising her effusively for her virtue and modesty.
“Those guys really are disgusting,” I would say,