Free The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) by Bill Bryson Page A

of achievement.
    Goodness knows what I crawled through in order to accomplish this small feat, but then I
was
enormously stupid. I mean really quite enormously. I remember when I was about six passing almost a whole movie picking some interesting sweet-smelling stuff off the underside of my seat, thinking that it was something to do with the actual manufactured composition of the seat before realizing that it was gum that had been left there by previous users.
    I was sick for about two years over what a grotesque and unhygienic activity I had been engaged in and the thought that I had then eaten greasy buttered popcorn and a large packet of Chuckles with the same fingers that had dabbled in other people’s abandoned chewings. I had even—oh, yuk! yuk!—licked those fingers, eagerly transferring bucketloads of syphilitic dribblings and uncategorizable swill from their snapped-out Wrigley’s and Juicy Fruit to my wholesome mouth and sleek digestive tract. It was only a matter of time—hours at most—before I would sink into a mumbling delirium and in slow, fevered anguish die.
    After the movies we always stopped for pie at the Toddle House—a tiny, steamy diner of dancing grease fires, ill-tempered staff, and cozy perfection on Grand Avenue. The Toddle House was little more than a brick hut consisting of a single counter with a few twirly stools, but never has a confined area produced more divine foods or offered a more delicious warmth on a cold night. The pies—flaky of crust, creamy of filling, and always generously cut—were heaven on a plate. Normally this was the high point of the evening, but on this night I was distracted and inconsolable. I felt dirty and doomed. I would never have dreamed that worse still could possibly come my way, but in fact it was just about to. As I sat at the counter idly pronging my banana cream pie, feeling sorry for myself and my doomed intestinal tract, I drank from my glass of water and then realized that the old man sitting beside me was drinking from it, too. He was over two hundred years old and had a sort of gray drool at each corner of his mouth. When he put the glass down there were little white masticated bits adrift in the water.
    “Akk, akk, akk,” I croaked in quiet horror as I took this in and clutched my throat with both hands. My fork fell noisily to the floor.
    “Say, have I bin drinkin’ yer water?” he said cheerfully.
    “Yes!” I gasped in disbelief, and stared at his plate. “And you were eating…
poached eggs
.”
    Poached eggs were the second most obvious food-never-to-share-with-an-underwashed-old-man, exceeded only by cottage cheese—and only barely. As a sort of dribbly by-product of eating the two were virtually indistinguishable. “Oh, akk, akk,” I cried and made noises over my plate like a cat struggling to bring up a hair ball.
    “Well, I sure hope you ain’t got no cooties!” he said and slapped me jovially on the back as he got up to pay his bill.
    I stared at him dumbfounded. He settled his account, laid a toothpick on his tongue, and sauntered bowlegged out to his pickup truck.
    He never made it. As he reached out to open the door, bolts of electricity flew from my wildly dilated eyes and played over his body. He shimmered for an instant, contorted in a brief, silent rictus of agony, and was gone.
    It was the birth of ThunderVision. The world had just become a dangerous place for morons.
                      
    THERE ARE MANY VERSIONS of how the Thunderbolt Kid came to attain his fantastic powers—so many that I am not entirely sure myself—but I believe the first hints that I was not of Planet Earth, but rather from somewhere else (from, as I was later to learn, the Planet Electro in the Galaxy Zizz), lay embedded in the conversations that my parents had. I spent a lot of my childhood listening in on—monitoring really—their chats. They would have immensely long conversations that seemed always to be dancing about