The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [92]
“Hey!” said the manager when he realized what was happening. Furious and sputtering, he snatched a large box of Milk Duds from a small boy walking past.
“Hey! That’s mine!” protested the boy, grabbing back and holding on to the box with both hands. “It’s mine! I paid for it!” he shouted, feet flailing six inches off the floor. As they struggled, the box ripped apart and all the contents spilled out. At this, the boy covered his face with his hands and began weeping. Two hundred voices shrilly berated the manager, pointing out that the Food-O-Mat machine didn’t dispense Milk Duds. During this momentary distraction the kid with the long arms slid out of his shirt and fled topless back into the theater—an act of startling initiative that left everyone gaping in admiration.
The manager turned to his oafish assistant. “Go get that kid and bring him to my office.”
The assistant hesitated. “But I don’t know what he looks like,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t see his face.”
“He’s got no shirt on, you moron. He’s bare-chested.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t know what he looks like,” the assistant muttered, and stalked into the theater, flashlight darting.
The boy with the long arms was never seen again. Two hundred kids had free candy. Willoughby got to study the inside of the vending machine and work out how it functioned. It was a rare victory for the inhabitants of Kid World over the dark, repressive forces of Adult World. It was also the last time the Orpheum ever had a children’s matinee.
DOUG WILLOUGHBY WAS THE SMARTEST PERSON I ever met, particularly with regard to anything mechanical or scientific. Afterward he showed me the sketch he’d made when the door was open. “It’s astoundingly simple,” he said. “I could hardly believe the lack of complexity. Do you know, it doesn’t have an internal baffle or backflow gate or anything. Can you believe that?”
I indicated that I was prepared to be as amazed as the next man.
“There’s nothing to stop reverse entry—nothing,” he said, shaking his head in wonder, and slid the plans into his back pocket.
The following week there was no matinee but we went to see How the West Was Won. About half an hour into the movie, he took me to the Food-O-Mat machine, reached into his jacket, and pulled out two telescopic car aerials. Extending them, he inserted them into the machine, briefly manipulated them, and down came a box of Dots.
“What would you like?” he said.
“Could I have some Red Hots?” I asked. I loved Red Hots.
He wriggled again and a box of Red Hots came down. And with that Willoughby became my best friend.
Willoughby was amazingly brainy. He was the first person I knew who agreed with me about Bizarro World, the place where things went backward, though for rather more refined reasons than mine.
“It’s preposterous,” he would agree. “Think what it would do to mathematics. You couldn’t have prime numbers anymore.”
I’d nod cautiously. “And when they got sick they’d have to suck puke back into their mouths,” I’d add, trying to get the conversation back to more comfortable territory.
“Geometry would be right out the window,” Willoughby would go on, and begin listing all the theorems that would fall apart in a world running in reverse.
We often had conversations like that, where we were both talking about the same thing, but from perspectives miles apart. Still it was better than trying to discuss Bizarro World with Buddy Doberman, who was surprised to learn it wasn’t a real place.
Willoughby had an absolute genius for figuring out how to get fun out of unpromising circumstances. Once his dad came to give us a ride home from the movies, but told us that he had to stop at city hall to pay his property taxes or something, so we were left sitting in the car at a meter outside an office building on Cherry Street for twenty minutes. Now normally this would be about as unpromising a circumstance as one could find oneself in, but as soon as his dad was