The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [97]
“Of course. Who doesn’t?”
“I’ve got ’em all—every one since Dancing Co-Ed. Here, I want you to have them.” And he began piling them onto Jed’s arms.
In the end, he gave us more or less everything he had—posters dating back to the late 1930s, all in mint condition. Goodness knows what they would be worth now. We took them in a cab back to Jed’s house and divided them up on his bedroom floor. Jed took all the ones for movies starring Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds. I got the ones with men running along in a crouch with guns blazing. We were both extremely happy.
Some years later, I went away to Europe for a summer and ended up staying two years. While I was away my parents cleared out my bedroom. The posters went on a bonfire.
THERE WERE CERTAIN THINGS I couldn’t comfortably share with Jed and the one that stuck out most was my lustful wish to see a naked woman. I don’t think an hour passed in the 364 days following my rejection at the state fairgrounds that I didn’t think at least twice about the strippers’ tent. It was the only possible place to see naked female flesh in the flesh, and my need was growing urgent.
By the March following my fourteenth birthday, I was crossing off on a calendar the number of days till the state fair. By late June I was frequently short of breath. On July 20 I laid out the clothes I was going to wear the following month. It took me three hours to choose. I considered taking opera glasses, but decided against it on the grounds that they would probably steam up.
August 20 was the official opening of the fair. Normally no sane person went to the state fair on its opening day because the crowds were so vast and suffocating, but Doug Willoughby and I went. We had to. We just had to. We met soon after dawn and took a bus all the way out to the east side. There we joined the cheerful throngs and waited three hours in line to be among the first in.
At ten a.m. the gates swung open and twenty thousand people went whooping across the landscape, like the attacking hordes in Braveheart. You may be surprised to hear that Willoughby and I didn’t go straight to the strippers’ tent but rather bided our time. It was our considered intention to savor the occasion, so we had a good look around the exhibition halls. Possibly this was the first time in history that anyone has treated quilts and a butter cow as a form of foreplay, but we knew what we were doing. We wanted to let the girls have a chance to limber up, get into their stride. We didn’t wish to attend an inferior show on our first visit.
At eleven a.m. we fortified ourselves with a popular ice-cream confection known as a Wonder Bar, then proceeded to the strippers’ tent and took our place in the line, pleased to be taking up one of the privileges of our seniority. But shortly before reaching the ticket booth, Willoughby nudged me in the ribs and indicated the dangling sign. It was new and it said: “Absolutely NO MINORS! You must be SIXTEEN and have GENUINE ID.”
I was speechless. At this rate, I would be getting a senior citizen discount by the time I saw my first naked woman.
At the window the man asked how old we were.
“Sixteen,” said Willoughby briskly, as if he would say anything else.
“You don’t look sixteen to me, kid,” said the man.
“Well, I have a slight hormone deficiency.”
“You got ID?”
“No, but my friend here will vouch for me.”
“Fuck off.”
“But we were rather counting on attending one of the shows, you see.”
“Fuck off.”
“We’ve been waiting for this day for a year. We’ve been here since six a.m.”
“Fuck off.”
And so we slunk away. It was the cruelest blow I had suffered in my life.
The following week I went to the fair with Jed. It was an interesting contrast since he spent hours in the farmwives’ section chatting to ladies in frilly-edged aprons about their jams and quilts. There wasn’t a thing in the world of domestic science that didn’t fascinate him and not a single obstacle or potential setback that didn’t awake his immediate compassion. At one point he had a dozen women, all looking like Aunt Bee