The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [96]
Jed could talk his way into anything. We used often to go and look in the windows of rich people’s houses. Occasionally he would ring the front doorbell.
“Excuse me for intruding,” he would say when the lady of the house arrived, “but I was just admiring your living-room curtains and I simply have to ask, where did you find that velour? It’s won-derful.”
The next thing you knew we’d be in the house, getting a full tour, with Jed cooing in admiration at the owner’s inspired improvements and suggesting modest additional touches that might make it better still. By such means we became welcome in all the finest houses. Jed struck up a particular friendship with an aged philanthropist named A. H. Blank, founder of Blank Children’s Hospital, who lived with his tottering, blue-haired wife in a penthouse apartment in the ritziest and most fashionable new address in Iowa, a building called the Towers, on Grand Avenue. Mr. and Mrs. Blank owned the whole of the tenth floor. It was the highest apartment between Chicago and Denver, or at the very least Grinnell and Council Bluffs, they told us. On Friday nights we would often stop by for cocoa and coffee cake and a view of the city—indeed of most of the Midwest, it seemed—from the Blanks’ extensive balconies. It was in every sense the high point of all our weeks. I waited years for Mr. Blank to die in the hope that he would leave me something, but it all went to charity.
One Saturday after going to the movies (Midnight Lace starring Doris Day, which we immediately agreed was okay but by no means one of her best), we were walking home along High Street—an unusual route; a route for people of an adventurous disposition—when we passed a small brick office building with a plaque that said MID-AMERICA FILM DISTRIBUTION or something like that, and Jed suggested we go in.
Inside, a small, elderly man in a lively suit was sitting at a desk doing nothing.
“Hello,” said Jed, “I hope I’m not intruding, but do you have any old film posters you don’t require any longer?”
“You like movies?” said the man.
“Like them? Sir, no, I love them.”
“No kidding,” said the man, pleased as anything. “That’s great, that’s great. Tell me, son, what’s your favorite movie?”
“I think that would have to be All About Eve.”
“You like that?” said the man. “I’ve got that here somewhere. Hold on.” He took us into a storeroom that was packed from floor to ceiling with rolled posters and began searching through them. “It’s here somewhere. What else you like?”
“Oh, gosh,” said Jed, “Sunset Boulevard, Rebecca, An Affair to Remember, Lost Horizon, Blithe Spirit, Adam’s Rib, Mrs. Miniver, Mildred Pierce, The Philadelphia Story, The Man Who Came to Dinner, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Storm Warning, The Pajama Game, This Property Is Condemned, The Asphalt Jungle, The Seven Year Itch, From This Day Forward, How Green Was My Valley, and Now, Voyager, but not necessarily in that order.”
“I got those!” said the man excitedly. “I got all those.” He started passing posters to Jed in a manic fashion. He turned to me. “What about you?” he said politely.
“The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” I answered hopefully.
He grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t handle B stuff,” he said.
“Zombies on Broadway?”
He shook his head.
“Island of the Undead?”
He gave up on me and turned back to Jed. “You like Lana