The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [98]
“Well, wasn’t that just wonderful?” he said to me afterward and gave an enormous happy sigh. “Thank you so much for indulging me. Now let’s take you to the strippers’ tent.”
I had told him about my disappointment the previous week, and reminded him now that we were too young to gain admission.
“Age is but a technicality,” he said breezily.
At the tent, I held back while Jed went up to the ticket window. He talked to the man for some time. Occasionally they both looked at me, nodding gravely, as if in agreement about some notable deficiency on my part. Eventually Jed came back smiling and handed me a ticket.
“There you go,” he said cheerfully. “I hope you don’t mind if I don’t join you.”
I was quite unable to speak. I looked at him in wonder and with difficulty stammered: “But how?”
“I told him you had an inoperable brain tumor, which he didn’t quite buy, and then I gave him ten bucks,” Jed explained. “Enjoy!”
Well, what can I say other than that it was the highlight of my life? The stripper—there was only one per show, it turned out, something Willoughby’s brother had neglected to tell us—was majestically bored, sensationally bored, but there was something unexpectedly erotic in her pouty indifference and glazed stare, and she really wasn’t bad looking. She didn’t strip off completely. She retained a sequined blue G-string and had nipple caps and tassels on her breasts, but it was still a divine experience, and when, as a kind of climax—a term I use advisedly but with a certain scientific precision—she leaned out over the audience, not six feet from my adoring gaze, and gave a ten-second twirl of the tassels, propelling them briefly but expertly in op- posite directions—what a talent was this!—I thought I had died and that this was heaven.
I still firmly believe it will be much like that if I ever get there. And knowing that, there has scarcely been a moment in all the years since that I have not been extremely good.
Chapter 13
THE PUBIC YEARS
In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, after householders reported that a car was tearing around the neighborhood in reverse, Assistant Police Chief Robert Schmidt investigated and found behind the wheel a teen-age girl who explained: “My folks let me have the car, and I ran up too much mileage. I was just unwinding some of it.”
—Time magazine, July 9, 1956
ACCORDING TO THE GALLUP ORGANIZATION 1957 was the happiest year ever recorded in the United States of America. I don’t know that anyone has ever worked out why that largely uneventful year should have marked the giddy peak of American bliss, but I suspect it is more than coincidental that the very next year was the year that the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers dumped their hometown fans and decamped to California.
Goodness knows it was time for baseball to expand westward—it was ridiculous to have teams crammed into the old cities of the East and Midwest but not in any of the newer municipal colossi of the western states—but the owners of the Dodgers and Giants weren’t doing it for the good of baseball. They were doing it out of greed. We were entering a world where things were done because they offered a better return, not a better world.
People were wealthier than ever before, but life somehow didn’t seem as much fun. The economy had become an unstoppable machine: gross national product rose by 40 percent in the decade, from about $350 billion in 1950 to nearly $500 billion ten years later, then rose by another third to $658 billion in the next six years. But what had once been utterly delightful was now becoming very slightly, rather strangely unfulfilling. People were beginning to discover that joyous consumerism is a world of diminishing returns.
By the closing years of the 1950s most people—certainly most middle-class people—had pretty much everything they had ever dreamed of, so increasingly there was nothing much to do with their wealth but buy more and bigger versions of things they didn’t truly require: second cars,