The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [85]
WHEN I WAS SEVEN and my sister was twelve, my dad bought a blue Rambler station wagon, a car so cruddy and styleless that even Edsel owners would slow down to laugh at you, and decided to break it in with a drive to New York. The car had no air-conditioning, but my sister and I got the idea that if we lay the tailgate flat, stood on it, and held on to the roof rack, we could essentially get out of the car and catch a nice cooling breeze. In fact, it was like standing in the face of a typhoon. It couldn’t have been more dangerous. If we relaxed our grip for an instant—to sneeze or satisfy an itch—we risked being whipped off our little platform and lofted into the face of a following Mack truck.
Conversely, if my father braked suddenly for any reason—and at least three or four times a day he provided us with sudden hold-on-to-your-hat swerves and a kind of bronco-effect braking when he dropped a lighted cigarette onto the seat between his legs and he and my mother jointly engaged in a frantic and generally entertaining search to find it—there was a very good chance that we would be tossed sideways into a neighboring field or launched—fired really—in a forward direction into the path of another mighty Mack.
It was, in short, insanely risky—a thought that evidently occurred to a highway patrolman near Ashtabula, Ohio, who set his red light spinning and pulled my dad over and chewed him out ferociously for twenty minutes for being so monumentally boneheaded with respect to his children’s safety. My father took all this meekly. When the patrolman at last departed, my father told us in a quiet voice that we would have to stop riding like that until we crossed the state line into Pennsylvania in another half hour or so.
It wasn’t a terribly good trip for my dad. He had booked a hotel in New York from a classified ad in the Saturday Review because it was such a good deal, and then discovered that it was in Harlem. On the first night there, while my parents lay on the bed, exhausted from the ordeal of finding their way from Iowa to 1,252nd Street in upper Manhattan—a route not highlighted in any American Automobile Association guide—my sister and I decided to get something to eat. We strolled around the district for a while and found a corner diner about two blocks away. While we were sitting enjoying our hamburgers and chocolate sodas, and chatting amiably with several black people, a police car slid by, paused, backed up, and pulled over. Two officers came in, looked around suspiciously, then came over to us. One of them asked us where we had come from.
“Des Moines, Iowa,” my sister replied.
“Des Moines, Iowa!” said the policeman, astounded. “How did you get here from Des Moines, Iowa?”
“My parents drove us.”
“Your parents drove you here from Des Moines?”
My sister nodded.
“Why?”
“My dad thought it would be educational.”
“To come to Harlem?” The policemen looked at each other. “Where are your parents now, honey?”
My sister told them that they were in the Hotel W. E. B. DuBois or Château Cotton Club or whatever it was.
“Your parents are staying there?”
My sister nodded.
“You really are from Iowa, aren’tcha, honey?”
The policemen took us back to the hotel and escorted us to our room. They banged on the door and my father answered. The policemen didn’t know whether to be firm with my dad or gentle, to arrest him or give him some money or what. In the end they just strongly urged him to check out of the hotel first thing in the morning and to find a more appropriate hotel in a safer neighborhood much lower down in Manhattan.
My father wasn’t in a strong position to argue. For one thing, he was naked from the waist down. He was standing half behind the door so the police were unaware of his awkward position, but for those of us sitting on the bed the view was a memorably surreal one of my father, bare-buttocked, talking respectfully and in a grave tone of voice to two large New York policemen. It was a sight that I won’t forget in a hurry.
My father was quite pale when the policemen left, and talked to