The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [61]
My best period was the late evening. I liked to watch the ten o’clock news with Russ Van Dyke, the world’s best television newsman (better even than Walter Cronkite), and then Sea Hunt starring Lloyd Bridges (some genius at KRNT-TV decided 10:30 at night was a good time to run a show enjoyed by children, which was correct) before settling down with a largish stack of comic books. I was seldom asleep much before midnight, so when my mother called me in the morning, I usually found it inconvenient to rise. So I didn’t go to school if I could help it.
I probably wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been for mimeograph paper. Of all the tragic losses since the 1950s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating. Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system’s willing slave for up to seven hours. Go to any crack house and ask the people where their dependency problems started and they will tell you, I’m certain, that it was with mimeograph paper in second grade. I used to bound out of bed on a Monday morning because that was the day that fresh mimeographed worksheets were handed out. I draped them over my face and drifted off to a private place where fields were green, everyone went barefoot, and the soft trill of panpipes floated on the air. But most of the rest of the week I either straggled in around mid-morning, or didn’t come in at all. I’m afraid the teachers took this personally.
They were never going to like me anyway. There was something about me—my dreaminess and hopeless forgetfulness, my lack of button-cuteness, my permanent default expression of pained dubiousness—that rubbed them the wrong way. They disliked all children, of course, particularly little boys, but of the children they didn’t like I believe they especially favored me. I always did everything wrong. I forgot to bring official forms back on time. I forgot to bring cookies for class parties, and Christmas cards and valentines on the appropriate festive days. I always turned up empty-handed for show-and-tell. I remember once in kindergarten, in a kind of desperation, I just showed my fingers.
If we were going on a school trip, I never remembered to bring a permission note from home, even after being reminded daily for weeks. So on the day of the trip everybody would have to sit moodily on the bus for an interminable period while the principal’s secretary (the one nice person in the school) tried to track my mother down to get her consent over the phone. But my mother was always out to coffee. The whole fucking Women’s Department was always out to coffee. If they weren’t out to coffee, they were out to lunch. It’s a miracle they ever produced a section, frankly. The secretary would eventually look at me with a sad smile and we would have to face the fact together that I wasn’t going to go.
So the bus would depart without me and I would spend the day in the school library, which I actually didn’t mind at all. It’s not as if I were missing a trip to the Grand Canyon or Cape Canaveral. This was Des Moines. There were only two places schools went on trips in Des Moines—to the Wonder Bread factory on Second Avenue and University, where you could watch freshly made bread products traveling around an enormous room on conveyor belts under the very light supervision of listless drones in paper hats (and you could be excused for thinking that the purpose of school visits was to give the drones something to stare at), and the museum of the Iowa State Historical