the Life and Times Of the Thunderbolt Kid (2007) by Bill Bryson

Author:Bill Bryson [Bryson, Bill]
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-19T00:39:38.250000+00:00

Chapter 9

MAN AT WORK

In Washington, D. C., gunman John A. Kendrick testified that he was offered $2,500 to murder Michael Lee, but declined the job because when I got done paying taxes out of that, what would I have left?

Time magazine, January 7, 1953

ONCE YOU STRIP OUT ALL THOSE JOBS where people have to look at, touch, or otherwise deal with feces and vomit sewage workers and hospital bedpan cleaners and so on being an afternoon newspaper boy in the 1950s and 1960s was possibly the worst job in history. For a start, you had to deliver the afternoon papers six days a week, from Monday through Saturday, and then get up on Sundays before dawn and deliver the Sunday papers, too. This was so the regular morning paperboys could enjoy a day off each week. Why they deserved a day of rest and we didn't was a question that appears never to have occurred to anyone except evening newspaper boys.

Anyway, being a seven-day-a-week serf meant that you couldn't go away for an overnight trip or anything fun like that without finding somebody to do the route for you, and that was always infinitely more trouble than it was worth because the stand-in invariably delivered to the wrong houses or forgot to show up or just lost interest halfway through and stuffed the last thirty papers in the big U. S. Mail box at the corner of Thirty-seventh Street and St. John's Road, so that you ended up in trouble with the customers, the Register and Tribune's circulation manager, and the United States postal authorities and all so that you could have your first day off in 160 days. It really wasn't fair at all.

I started as a paperboy when I was eleven. You weren't supposed to be allowed a route until you had passed your twelfth birthday, but my father, keen to see me making my own way in the world and herniated before puberty, pulled some strings at the paper and got me a route early. The route covered the richest neighborhood in town, around Greenwood School, a district studded with mansions of rambling grandeur. *11 This sounded like a plum posting, and so it was presented to me by the route manager, Mr. McTivity, a man of low ethics and high body odor, but of course mansions have the longest driveways and widest lawns, so it took whole minutes in some cases, many, many whole minutes to deliver each paper. And evening papers weighed a ton back then.

Plus I was absentminded. In those days my hold on the real world was always slight at best, but the combination of long walks, fresh air, and lack of distraction left me helplessly vulnerable to any stray wisp of fantasy or conjecture that chose to carry me off. Generally for a start I would spend a little while thinking about Bizarro World. Bizarro World was a planet that featured in some issues of Superman comics. The inhabitants of Bizarro World

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.