The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [89]
The strippers’ tent had the brightest lights and most pulsating music. From time to time the barker would bring out some of the girls, chastely robed, and parade them around a little open-air stage while suggesting—and looking each of us straight in the eye—that these girls could conceive of no greater satisfaction in life than to share their natural bounties with an audience of appreciative, red-blooded young men. They all seemed to be amazingly good-looking—but then I was running a temperature of over 113 degrees just from the thought of being on the same planet as young women of such miraculously obliging virtue, so I might have been a touch delirious.
The trouble was that we were twelve years old when we became seriously interested in the strippers’ tent and you had to be thirteen to go in. A dangling sign on the ticket booth made that explicitly clear. Doug Willoughby’s older brother, Joe, who was thirteen, went in and came out walking on air. He wouldn’t say much other than that it was the best 35 cents he had ever spent. He was so taken that he went in three more times in succession and pronounced it better on each occasion.
Naturally we circumnavigated the strippers’ tent repeatedly looking for a breach of any kind, but it was the Fort Knox of canvas. Every millimeter of hem was staked to the ground, every metal eyelet sealed solid. You could hear music, you could hear voices, you could even see the shadowy outlines of the audience, but you couldn’t discern the tiniest hint of a female form. Even Doug Willoughby, the most ingenious person I knew, was completely flummoxed. It was a torment to know that there was nothing but this rippling wall of canvas between us and living, breathing, unadorned female epidermis, but if Willoughby couldn’t find a way through there wasn’t a way through.
The following year I assembled every piece of ID I could find—school reports, birth certificate, library card, faded membership card from the Sky King Fan Club, anything that indicated my age even vaguely—and went directly to the tent with Buddy Doberman. It was newly painted with life-sized images of curvy pinups in the style of Alberto Vargas, and looked very promising.
“Two for the front row, please,” I said.
“Scram,” said the grizzled man who was selling tickets. “No kids allowed.”
“Ah, but I’m thirteen,” I said, and began to extract affidavits from my folders.
“Not old enough,” said the man. “You gotta be fourteen.” He hit the dangling sign. The “13” on it had been covered over with a square of card saying “14.”
“Since when?”
“Since this year.”
“But why?”
“New rules.”
“But that’s not fair.”
“Kid, if you got a gripe, write to your congressman. I just take the money.”
“Yes, but—”
“You’re holding up the line.”
“Yes, but—”
“Scram!”
So Buddy and I sloped off while a line of young men leered at us. “Come back when you’ve all growed up,” yukked a young man from a place called, I would guess, Moronville, then vanished under a withering glance of ThunderGaze.
Getting into the strippers’ tent would become the principal preoccupation of my pubescent years.
MOST OF THE YEAR we didn’t have Riverview or the state fair to divert us, so we went downtown and just fooled around. We were extremely good at just fooling around. Saturday mornings were primarily devoted to attaining an elevated position—the roofs of office buildings, the windows at the ends of long corridors in the big hotels—and dropping soft or wet things on shoppers below. We spent many happy hours, too, roaming through the behind-the-scenes parts of department stores and office buildings, looking in broom closets and stationery cabinets, experimenting with steamy valves in boiler rooms, poking through boxes in storerooms.
The trick was never to behave furtively, but to act as if you didn’t realize you were in the wrong place. If you encountered an adult, you could escape arrest or detention by immediately asking a dumb question: “Excuse me, mister, is this the way to Dr.