The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) (12 page)

As the Thunderbolt Kid, I read comic books the way doctors read
The New England Journal of Medicine
—to stay abreast of developments in the field. But I was a devoted follower anyway and would have devoured them even without the professional need to keep my supernatural skills honed and productive.

But just as we were getting into comic books, a crisis came. Sales began to falter, pinched between rising production costs and the competition of television. Quite a number of kids now felt that if you could watch Superman and Zorro on TV, why tax yourself with reading words on a page? We in the Kiddie Corral were happy to see such fickle supporters go, frankly, but it was a near-mortal blow for the industry. In two years, the number of comic-book titles fell from 650 to just 250.

The producers of comic books took some desperate steps to try to rekindle interest. Heroines suddenly became unashamedly sexy. I remember feeling an unexpected but entirely agreeable hormonal warming at the first sight of Asbestos Lady, whose cannonball breasts and powerful loins were barely contained within the wisps of satin fabric with which some artistic genius portrayed her.

There was no space for sentiment in this new age. Captain America’s teenage companion, Bucky, was dispatched to the hospital with a gunshot wound in one issue and that was the last we ever heard of him. Whether he died or recovered weakly, passing his remaining years in a wheelchair, we didn’t know and frankly didn’t care. Instead thereafter Captain America was helped by a leggy sylph named Golden Girl, soon augmented by Sun Girl, Lady Lotus, the raven-haired Phantom Lady, and other femmes of sleek allure.

Nothing so good could last. Dr. Fredric Wertham, a German-born psychiatrist in New York, began an outspoken campaign to rid the world of the baleful influence of comics. In an extremely popular, dismayingly influential book called
Seduction of the Innocent
, he argued that comics promoted violence, torture, criminality, drug-taking, and rampant masturbation, though not presumably all at once. Grimly he noted how one boy he interviewed confessed that after reading comic books he “wanted to be a sex maniac,” overlooking that for most boys “sex,” “mania,” and “want” were words that went together very comfortably with or without comic books.

Wertham saw sex literally in every shadow. He pointed out how in one frame of an action comic the shading on a man’s shoulder, when turned at an angle and viewed with an imaginative squint, looked exactly like a woman’s pudenda. (In fact it did. There was no arguing the point.) Wertham also announced what most of us knew in our hearts but were reluctant to concede—that many of the superheroes were not fully men in the red-blooded, girl-kissing sense of the term. Batman and Robin in particular he singled out as “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” It was an unanswerable charge. You had only to look at their tights.

Wertham consolidated his fame and influence when he testified before a Senate committee that was looking into the scourge of juvenile delinquency. Just that year Robert Linder, a Baltimore psychologist, had suggested that modern teenagers were suffering from “a form of collective mental illness” because of rock ’n’ roll. Now here was Wertham blaming comics for their sad, zitty failings.

“By 1955,” according to James T. Patterson in the book
Grand Ex
pectations
, “thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books.” Alarmed and fearing further regulatory crackdown, the comic-book industry abandoned its infatuations with curvy babes, bloody carnage, squint-worthy shadows, and everything else that was thrilling. It was a savage blow.

To the dismay of purists, the Kiddie Corral began to fill with anodyne comic books featuring Archie and Jughead or Disney characters like Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who wore shirts and hats, but nothing at all below the waist, which didn’t seem quite right or terribly healthy either. The Kiddie Corral began to attract little girls, who sat chattering away over the latest issues of Little Lulu and Casper the Friendly Ghost as if they were at a tea party. Some perfect fool even put Classic Comic Books in there—the ones that recast famous works of literature in comic-book form. These were thrown straight out again, of course.

I vaporized Wertham, needless to say, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Pleasure was going to be harder to get than ever, and the kind we needed most was the hardest of all to get. I refer of course to lust. But that is another story and another chapter.

Chapter 6

SEX AND OTHER DISTRACTIONS

LONDON, ENGLAND (AP)
—A high court jury awarded entertainer Liberace 8,000 pounds ($22,400) damages Wednesday in a libel suit against the
London Daily Mirror.
The jurors decided after 3½ hours of deliberation that a story in 1956 by
Mirror
journalist William N. Connor implied that the pianist was a homosexual. Among the phrases Liberace cited in his suit was Connor’s description of him as “everything he, she or it can want.” He also described the entertainer as “fruit-flavored.”

—
The Des Moines Register
, June 18, 1959

IN
1957
, THE MOVIE
PEYTON PLACE
,
the steamiest motion picture in years, or so the trailers candidly invited us to suppose, was released to a waiting nation and my sister decided that she and I were going to go. Why I was deemed a necessary part of the enterprise I have no idea. Perhaps I provided some sort of alibi. Perhaps the only time she could slip away from the house unnoticed was when she was babysitting me. All I know is that I was told that we were going to walk to the Ingersoll Theatre after lunch on Saturday and that I was to tell no one. It was very exciting.

On the way there my sister told me that many of the characters in the movie—probably most of them—would be having sex. My sister at this time was the world’s foremost authority on sexual matters, at least as far as I was concerned. Her particular speciality was spotting celebrity homosexuals. Sal Mineo, Anthony Perkins, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Batman and Robin, Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, a man in the third row of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra who looked quite normal to me—all were unmasked by her penetrating gaze. She told me Rock Hudson was gay in 1959, long before anyone would have guessed it. She knew that Richard Chamberlain was gay before he did, I believe. She was uncanny.

“Do you know what sex is?” she asked me once we were in the privacy of the Woods, walking in single file along the narrow path through the trees. It was a wintry day and I clearly remember that she had on a smart new red woolen coat and a fluffy white hat that tied under her chin. She looked very smart and grown-up to me.

“No, I don’t believe I do,” I said or words to that effect.

So she told me, in a grave tone and with the kind of careful phrasing that made it clear that this was privileged information, all there was to know about sex, though as she was only eleven at this time her knowledge was perhaps slightly less encyclopedic than it seemed to me. Anyway, the essence of the business, as I understood it, was that the man put his thing inside her thing, left it there for a bit, and then they had a baby. I remember wondering vaguely what these unspecified things were—his finger in her ear? his hat in her hatbox? Who could say? Anyway, they did this private thing, naked, and the next thing you knew they were parents.

I didn’t really care how babies were made, to tell you the truth. I was far more excited that we were on a secret adventure that our parents didn’t know about and that we were walking through the Woods—the more or less boundless Schwarzwald that lay between Elmwood Drive and Grand Avenue. At six, one ventured into the Woods very slightly from time to time, played army a bit within sight of the street, and then came out again (usually after Bobby Stimson got poison ivy and burst into tears) with a sense of gladness—of relief, frankly—to be stepping into clear air and sunshine. The Woods were unnerving. The air was thicker in there, more stifling, the noises different. You could go into the Woods and not come out again. One certainly never considered using them as a thoroughfare. They were far too vast for that. So to be conducted through them by a confident, smart-stepping person, while being given privy information, even if largely meaningless to me, was almost too thrilling for words. I spent most of the long hike admiring the Woods’ dark majesty and keeping half an eye peeled for gingerbread cottages and wolves.

As if that weren’t excitement enough, when we reached Grand Avenue my sister took me down a secret path between two apartment buildings and past the back of Bauder’s Drugstore on Ingersoll—it had never occurred to me that Bauder’s Drugstore
had
a back—from which we emerged almost opposite the theater. This was so impossibly nifty I could hardly stand it. Because Ingersoll was a busy road my sister took my hand and guided us expertly to the other side—another seemingly impossible task. I don’t believe I have ever been so proud to be associated with another human being.

At the box-office window, when the ticket lady hesitated, my sister told her that we had a cousin in California who had a role in the movie and that we had promised our mother, a busy woman of some importance (“She’s a columnist for the
Register
, you know”), that we would watch the film on her behalf and provide a full report afterward. As stories go, it was not perhaps the most convincing, but my sister had the face of an angel, a keen manner, and that fluffy, innocent hat; it was a combination that was impossible to disbelieve. So the ticket seller, after a moment’s fluttery uncertainty, let us in. I was very proud of my sister for this, too.

After such an adventure, the movie itself was a bit of an anticlimax, especially when my sister told me that we didn’t actually have a cousin in the film, or indeed in California. No one got naked and there were no fingers in ears or toes in hatboxes or anything. It was just lots of unhappy people talking to lampshades and curtains. I went off and locked the stalls in the men’s room, though as there were only two of them at the Ingersoll even that was a bit disappointing.

By chance, soon afterward I had an additional experience that shed a little more light on the matter of sex. Coming in from play one Saturday and finding my mother missing from her usual haunts, I decided impulsively to call on my father. He had just returned that day from a long trip—and so we had a lot of catching up to do. I rushed into his bedroom, expecting to find him unpacking. To my surprise, the shades were drawn and my parents were in bed wrestling under the sheets. More astonishing still, my mother was winning. My father was obviously in some distress. He was making a noise like a small trapped animal.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Ah, Billy, your mother is just checking my teeth,” my father replied quickly if not altogether convincingly.

We were all quiet a moment.

“Are you bare under there?” I asked.

“Why, yes we are.”

“Why?”

“
Well
,” my father said as if that was a story that would take some telling, “we got a bit warm. It’s warm work, teeth and gums and so on. Look, Billy, we’re nearly finished here. Why don’t you go downstairs and we’ll be down shortly.”

I believe you are supposed to be traumatized by these things. I can’t remember being troubled at all, though it was some years before I let my mother look in my mouth again.

It came as a surprise, when I eventually cottoned on, to realize that my parents had sex—sex between one’s parents always seems slightly unbelievable, of course—but also something of a comfort because having sex wasn’t easy in the 1950s. Within marriage, with the man on top and woman gritting her teeth, it was just about legal, but almost anything else was forbidden in America in those days. Nearly every state had laws prohibiting any form of sex that was deemed remotely deviant: oral and anal sex of course; homosexuality obviously; even normal, polite sex between consenting but unmarried couples. In Indiana you could be sent to prison for fourteen years for aiding or instigating any person under twenty-one years of age to “commit masturbation.” The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Indiana declared at about the same time that sex outside marriage was not only sinful, messy, and reproductively chancy, but also promoted Communism. Quite how a shag in the haymow helped the relentless march of Marxism was never specified, but it hardly mattered. The point was that once an action was deemed to promote Communism, you knew you were never going to get anywhere near it.

Because lawmakers could not bring themselves to discuss these matters openly, it was often not possible to tell what exactly was being banned. Kansas had (and for all I know still has) a statute vowing to punish, and severely, anyone “convicted of the detestable and abominable crime against nature committed with mankind or with beast,” without indicating even vaguely what a detestable and abominable crime against nature might be. Bulldozing a rain forest? Whipping your mule? There was simply no telling.

Nearly as bad as having sex was thinking about sex. When Lucille Ball on
I Love Lucy
was pregnant for nearly the whole of the 1952–53 season, the show was not allowed to use the word “pregnant,” lest it provoke susceptible viewers to engage in sofa isometrics in the manner of our neighbor Mr. Kiessler on St. John’s Road. Instead, Lucy was described as “expecting”—a less emotive word apparently. Closer to home, in Des Moines in 1953 police raided Ruthie’s Lounge at 1311 Locust Street, and charged the owner, Ruthie Lucille Fontanini, with engaging in an obscene act. It was an act so disturbing that two vice officers and a police captain, Louis Volz, made a special trip to see it—as indeed did most of the men in Des Moines at one time or another, or so it would appear. The act, it turned out, was that Ruthie, with sufficient coaxing from a roomful of happy topers, would balance two glasses on her tightly sweatered chest, fill them with beer, and convey them without a spill to an appreciative waiting table.

Ruthie in her prime was a bit of a handful, it would seem. “She was married sixteen times to nine men,” according to former
Des Moines Register
reporter George Mills in a wonderful book of memoirs,
Looking in Windows
. One of Ruthie’s marriages, Mills reported, ended after just sixteen hours when Ruthie woke up to find her new husband going through her purse looking for her safe-deposit key. Her custom of using her bosom as a tray would seem a minor talent in an age in which mail was delivered by rocket, but it made her nationally famous. A pair of mountains in Korea were named “the Ruthies” in her honor and Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille visited Ruthie’s Lounge twice to watch her in action.

The story has a happy ending. Judge Harry Grund threw the obscenity charges out of court and Ruthie eventually married a nice man named Frank Bisignano and settled down to a quiet life as a housewife. At last report they had been happily married for more than thirty years. I’d like to imagine her bringing him ketchup, mustard, and other condiments on her chest every evening, but of course I am only guessing.
^*9

For those of us who had an interest in seeing naked women, there were pictures of course in
Playboy
and other manly periodicals of lesser repute, but these were nearly impossible to acquire legally, even if you cycled over to one of the more desperate-looking grocery shacks on the near-east side, lowered your voice two octaves, and swore to God to the impassive clerk that you were born in 1939.

Sometimes in the drugstore if your dad was busy with the pharmacist (and this was the one time I gave sincere thanks for the complex mechanics of isometrics) you could have a rapid shuffle through the pages, but it was a nerve-racking operation as the magazine stand was exposed to view from many distant corners of the store. Moreover, it was right by the entrance and visible from the street through a large plate-glass window, so you were vulnerable on all fronts. One of your mom’s friends could walk past and see you and raise the alarm—there was a police call box on a telephone pole right out front, possibly put there for that purpose—or a pimply stock boy could clamp you on the shoulder from behind and denounce you in a loud voice, or your dad himself could fetch up unexpectedly while you were frantically distracted with trying to locate the pages in which Kim Novak was to be seen relaxing on a fleecy rug, airing her comely epidermis, so there was practically no pleasure and very little illumination in the exercise. This was an age, don’t forget, in which you could be arrested for carrying beer on your bosom or committing an unspecified crime against nature, so what the consequences would be to be caught holding photographs of naked women in a family drugstore were almost inconceivable, but you could be certain they would involve popping flashbulbs, the WHO-TV mobile crime scene unit, banner headlines in the paper, and many thousands of hours of community service.

On the whole therefore you had to make do with underwear spreads in mail order catalogs or ads in glossy magazines, which was desperate to be sure, but at least safely within the law. Maidenform, a maker of brassieres, ran a well-known series of print ads in the 1950s in which women imagined themselves half dressed in public places. “I dreamed I was in a jewelry store in my Maidenform bra” ran the caption in one, accompanied by a photo showing a woman wearing a hat, skirt, shoes, jewelry, and a Maidenform bra—everything, in short, but a blouse—standing at a glass case in Tiffany’s or some place like it. There was something deeply—and I expect unhealthily—erotic in these pictures. Unfortunately, Maidenform had an unerring instinct for choosing models of slightly advanced years who were not terribly attractive to begin with and in any case the bras of that period were more like surgical appliances than enticements to fantasy. One despaired at the waste of such a promising erogenous concept.