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

on the edge of a curious happy derangement. I remember one day my father came in, quite excitedly, with a word written down on a piece of paper.
    “What’s this word?” he said to my mother. The word was “chaise longue.”
    “
Shays lounge
,” she said, pronouncing it as all Iowans, perhaps all Americans, did. A chaise longue in those days exclusively signified a type of adjustable patio lounger that had lately become fashionable. They came with a padded cushion that you brought in every night if you thought someone might take them. Our cushion had a coach and four horses galloping across it. It didn’t need to come in at night.
    “Look again,” urged my father.
    “
Shays lounge
,” repeated my mother, not to be bullied.
    “No,” he said, “look at the second word. Look closely.”
    She looked. “Oh,” she said, cottoning on. She tried it again. “
Shays lawn-gway
.”
    “Well, it’s just ‘long,’ ” my father said gently, but gave it a Gallic purr. “
Shays lohhhnggg
,” he repeated. “Isn’t that something? I must have looked at that word a hundred times and I’ve never noticed that it wasn’t
lounge
.”
    “
Lawngg
,” said my mother marveling slightly. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”
    “It’s French,” my father explained.
    “Yes, I expect it is,” said my mother. “I wonder what it means.”
    “No idea. Oh, look, there’s Bob coming home from work,” my father said, looking out the window. “I’m going to try it out on him.” So he’d collar Bob in his driveway and they’d have an amazed ten-minute conversation. For the next hour, you would see my father striding up and down the alley, and sometimes into neighboring streets, with his piece of paper, showing it to neighbors, and they would all have an amazed conversation. Later, Bob would come and ask if he could borrow the piece of paper to show his wife.
    It was about this time I began to suspect that I didn’t come from this planet and that these people weren’t—couldn’t be—my biological parents.
    Then one day when I was not quite six years old I was in the basement, just poking around, seeing if there was anything sharp or combustible that I hadn’t come across before, and hanging behind the furnace I found a woolen jersey of rare fineness. I slipped it on. It was many, many sizes too large for me—the sleeves all but touched the floor if I didn’t repeatedly push them back—but it was the handsomest article of attire I had ever seen. It was made of a lustrous oiled wool, deep bottle green in color, and was extremely warm and heavy, rather scratchy, and slightly moth-holed but still exceptionally splendid. Across the chest, in a satin material, now much faded, was a golden thunderbolt. Interestingly, no one knew where it came from. My father thought that it might be an old college football or ice hockey jersey, dating from sometime before the First World War. But how it got into our house he had no idea. He guessed that the previous owners had hung it there and forgotten it when they moved.
    But I knew better. It was, obviously, the Sacred Jersey of Zap, left to me by King Volton, my late natural father, who had brought me to Earth in a silver spaceship in Earth year 1951 (Electron year 21,000,047,002) shortly before our austere but architecturally exuberant planet exploded spectacularly in a billion pieces of pastel-colored debris. He had placed me with this innocuous family in the middle of America and hypnotized them into believing that I was a normal boy, so that I could perpetuate the Electron powers and creed.
    This jersey then was the foundation garment of my superpowers. It transformed me. It gave me colossal strength, rippling muscles, X-ray vision, the ability to fly and to walk upside down across ceilings, invisibility on demand, cowboy skills like lassoing and shooting guns out of people’s hands from a distance, a good voice for singing around campfires, and curious bluish-black