The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [70]
Every night about eleven o’clock or a little after I would hear my father going downstairs to the kitchen to make a snack. My father’s snacks were legendary. They took at least thirty minutes to prepare and required the most particular and methodical laying out of components—Ritz crackers, a large jar of mustard, wheat germ, radishes, ten Hydrox cookies, an enormous bowl of chocolate ice cream, several slices of luncheon meat, freshly washed lettuce, Cheez Whiz, peanut butter, peanut brittle, a hard-boiled egg or two, a small bowl of nuts, watermelon in season, possibly a banana—all neatly peeled, trimmed, sliced, cubed, stacked, or layered as appropriate, and attractively arrayed on a large brown tray and taken away to be consumed over a period of hours. None of these snacks could have contained less than twelve thousand calories, at least 80 percent of it in the form of cholesterol and saturated fats, and yet my father never gained an ounce of weight.
There was one other notable thing about my father’s making of snacks that must be mentioned. He was bare-assed when he made them. It wasn’t, let me quickly add, that he thought being bare-assed somehow made for a better snack; it was just that he was bare-assed already. One of his small quirks was sleeping naked from the waist down. He believed that it was more comfortable, and healthful, to leave the bottom half of the body unencumbered at night, and so when in bed wore only a sleeveless T-shirt. And when he went downstairs late at night to concoct a snack he always went so attired (or unattired). Goodness knows what Mr. and Mrs. Bukowski next door must have thought as they drew their drapes and saw across the way (as surely they must) my father, bare-assed, padding about his kitchen, reaching into high cupboards and assembling the raw materials for his nightly feast.
Whatever dismay it may have caused next door, none of this was of any consequence in our house as everyone was in bed fast asleep (or in my case lying in the dark watching TV very quietly). But it happened that one night in about 1963, my father descended on a Friday night when my sister, unbeknownst to him, was entertaining. Specifically, she and her good friends Nancy Ricotta and Wendy Spurgin were encamped in the living room with their boyfriends, watching television in the dark and swabbing each other’s airways with their tongues (or so I have always imagined), when they were startled by a light coming on in the hallway above and the sound of my father descending the stairs.
As in most American homes, the living room in our house communicated with the rooms beyond by way of a doorless opening, in this case an arch about six feet wide, which meant that it offered virtually no privacy, so the sound of an approaching adult footfall was taken seriously. Instantly assuming positions of propriety, the six young people looked toward the entranceway just in time to see my father’s lightly wobbling cheeks, faintly illumined by the ghostly flicker of television, passing the open doorway and proceeding onward to the kitchen.
For twenty-five minutes they sat in silence, too mortified to speak, knowing that my father must return by the same route and that this time the encounter would be frontal.
Fortunately (insofar as such a word can apply here) my father must have peripherally noted them as he passed or heard voices or gasps or something, for when he returned with his tray he was snugly attired in my mother’s beige raincoat, creating the impression that he was not only oddly depraved but a nocturnal cross-dresser as well. As he passed he mouthed a shy but pleasant good evening to the assembled party and disappeared back up the stairs.
It was about six months, I believe, before my sister spoke to him again.
INTERESTINGLY, at just about the time I acquired my television I realized that I didn’t really like TV very much—or, to put it more accurately,