What Goes Up

Trigger warning: this bit is about what happened when a few dumbass boys mixed reactive chemical elements in a long galvanized steel tube. Individuals with a history of abnormal sensitivity to that sort of thing should probably bail out now. (This trigger warning is not intend diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease, real or imaginary.)

~~~ INTRODUCTION ~~~

 OK. I hate to start this off on a “get off my lawn” note, but–kids these days!

My daughter just came into the shipwreck I call an office and told me that she was bored. I ran through the short list of available entertainments. I suggested playing video games because it seemed like she was in the mood for something a little more passive–more active than watching reruns of Twilight Zone on NetFlix, but less than something physical like, say, thumb wrestling.

She wasn’t having any of it. I could tell she had made up her mind to be bored. When that happens it’s best to just give up and embrace it. 

Since it was obvious that she was going to be immutably bored anyway, I started talking about the chemistry involved with something I’m currently working on, and since I have a tendency to drift, I wound up telling her about an accidental rocket launch that my friends and I had initiated at a school playground many years ago.

On reflection, I probably should have given more consideration to the ramifications of telling her about this; she has more than just a chip off the old block in her. I saw “that look” in her eyes as I was finishing up the narrative, so I gave her the same serious injunction that I’ll give you:

Do not try this at home, a school playground, a specially constructed blast containment facility, or anywhere. Ever. (My God, we could have been killed.)

~~~ TIM~~~

If you will indulge me in a little personal philosophy, I believe that, congenitally speaking, the male of the species Homo sapiens sapiens is the single greatest threat civilization has ever known and he is at his most dangerous just prior to the onset of adolescence. Later, he will be capable of destruction on a much larger scale, but that will require training, experience, and equipment designed for the purpose–and it will probably be motivated by political or religious motives. By contrast, the innate potential for calamity present in the average ten year old boy is unmatched in the entirety of the animal kingdom. Adult males with Peter Pan syndrome not withstanding, the only other possible exception is a ten year old girl, and even then, the swath of destruction in her wake is usually brought about by subterfuge and agency.

Case in point: one young master Tim Picket. Tim was one of the primary engineers involved in what I'll call “The Incident at Southlawn.” The first time I met Tim, I was standing in the corner of the teachers parking lot at Southlawn Elementary School in Amarillo, Texas, not a hundred yards from where the incident would take place in a just few months.

I was just sort of standing there pondering which meandering route home might offer the best selection of abandoned electronic junk I might add to my already impressive collection. In the meantime, Tim Picket had walked up behind me unnoticed. I remember the encounter something like this:

TIM: (Much louder than necessary) WHERE YOU GOIN’?

ME: Oh, Hi. Uh, I don’t know yet. Where… uh… What’s your name?

TIM: TIM. TIM PICKET. TIM PICKET JUNIOR. MY DAD’S NAME IS TIM PICKET SENIOR.  WHAT’S YOUR NAME?

ME: Andy

TIM: WHAT’S YOUR DAD’S NAME?

ME: (fighting fire with fire) Ed. His name is Edward, but he goes by Ed. Actually, that’s his middle name. His first name is Bert. Bert Edward Day. That makes his initials BED. He’s an accountant for Santa Fe, but he was a Marine drill instructor, so he’s a real hard case. He’s not my real dad. He’s my step-dad. Is your dad your real dad or did your mom marry her brother?

TIM: WHAT’S YOUR REAL DAD’S NAME?

ME: Neil.

TIM: OH. NEIL. (pause) HEY , WANNA’ FEEL SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD?

ME: No. 

At this point Tim stabbed me in the ass with an enormous tapestry needle. 

While I had been prattling on about my paternal situation I had turned my back on him and had resumed plotting my course home. When he stabbed me, I reacted by turning around and grabbing two fistfuls of Tim’s fluffy red Ronald McDonald clown hair and bum-rushing him to the nearest curb into which I began to beat his fat head . 

I conducted an emergency evaluation inspired by the Gestalt school of psychology which seeks to help individuals like Tim acquire meaningful perceptions and assemble them into accurate and cohesive interpretations of the world around them.

In rythym with the pounding I asked, "WHAT-THE-HELL-IS-WRONG-WITH-YOU? DID-YOU-NOT-HEAR-ME? I-SAID-NO!"

If I needed any more proof that Tim was insane, this was it; instead of wincing in pain or screaming, Tim laughed harder every time I smacked his head into the curb. When I let him up, he apologized, and said, “SORRY.  HA!  I THOUGHT IT WAS ‘NO MEANS YES’ DAY.”

Of course, we became fast friends and discovered a mutual interest in building “robots” out of old TVs and other junk that the average South-side-of-Amarillo resident was frequently kind enough to leave in the ally for us. 

 ~~~ THE FORMULA~~~

Our alpha project began with the development of “The formula.” Tim had already stumbled upon the primary agents but The Formula was developed in Tim’s back yard after school one day just a few weeks after we met. We ran into Daniel Bittingsworth (launch technician #3) on the way to Tim’s place. Daniel and I were amazed when we saw that Tim’s house had an actual in-the-ground swimming pool. It didn’t matter that it was full of leaves steeping in dark brown water. He had a swimming pool! This made Tim the luckiest kid we had ever met. To our knowledge, people in Amarillo just didn’t have such swimming pools.

Tim took us to a huge tool shed next to the pool and asked if we wanted to see something weird. 

Before I could warn him, Daniel blurted out that he did, but then I realized it was just a rhetorical question anyway. Tim took down a coffee can of bolts and dumped it into another coffee can of bolts. Then, he put a chlorine puck in the empty one, poured in a cup of Pine-sol, put on the lid, flipped the whole thing over, and backed away grinning. A few minutes later the coffee can just vanished and we found ourselves painted with the same robin’s-egg colored stuff I realized was probably responsible for the cool Hiroshima blast-patterns I had noticed on the shed walls when we came in.

We choked and choked and our eyes were burning.  Tim was yelling something that may or may not have, but probably didn't matter---but we couldn't tell because our ears were ringing so loud.

We were overjoyed. 

It dawned on me that Tim was probably supposed to be using the chlorine pucks to clean the pool, but he had discovered a much more entertaining use for them that more than justified the fetid pool. He had a natural talent for such discoveries---like some sort of idiot savant---just, with a lot more idiot than savant.

We spent a long time doing this over and over again because it took a long time for the novelty to wear off. When it did, it was time for me to make my contribution to the formula–a wad of steel wool. I don’t know what I expected, but it resulted in a spectacular addition of flash and fire. As much fun as this was, it didn’t get really interesting until Bittingsworth added a handful of the “secret ingredient.”

We had to take this outside because Danny boy's secret ingredient, which turned out to be a handful of cleated iron lawn food from a bag in the shed, completely ruled out the possibility of continuing experimentation in a confined space. 

Chlorine, Pine-Sol, Steel wool and Iron dust: this was the final recipe.  In it's ultimate composition "The Formula" gave off toxic clouds of dense brown vapor just before detonation. We no longer put on the lid and flipped the can. We just put in all the stuff and threw in the chlorine tab last. Two or three rings of pretty bay-colored smoke would puff out of the can just before a twenty foot cloud of fire and joy erupted into the clear blue and otherwise non-toxic Texas sky above Tim Picket’s back yard.

This went on for a few minutes which were probably more like hours---and at some point, Tim Picket Senior came out and told us to clean up the mess and go away.

~~~ YET MORE JOY ~~~

The next day was a Saturday, so we were back at Tim’s by the crack of dawn. Tim put all of the ingredients for The Formula into a wheel barrow, and we went to what would soon come to be known as “The Launch Site”---a combination hopscotch, four-square, tether-ball court on a square patch of blacktop excreted in the middle of the Southlawn Elementary School playground.

The next breakthrough came about in the same improvisational manner as the previous ones had. Undeterred by having forgotten to bring a coffee can, we decided to put "The Formula" in the tether-ball pole. This was just a galvanized steel pole sticking out of the blacktop. The ball and cord were dutifully attached and detached by a division of the school color guard each day, so this being Saturday, there was no tether or tether-ball – just the pole ; up which, master Bittingsworth shimmied and put in the stuff as we handed it to him.

The smoke and fire were doubled when we started using the tether-ball pole, but the really remarkable addition that the tether-ball pole contributed to the overall experience was a piercing howitzer-like report which made our ears ring. I can't really express how the biting peal and thunderous fury of the sound affected us, but suffice it to say we were transported into a level of delight that I believe is rarely, if ever, experienced by the prepubescent.

Looking back, one of the many inexplicable things about this whole affair; one was that, other than Tim Sr. making us clean up the back yard and paint the shed, nobody ever confronted us---or even seemed to notice for that matter. I guess since we were at the trailing end of the baby-boom people had grown accustomed to roaming bands of feral children – still, our little pack was repeatedly reproducing all the shock and awe of a military-grade artillery piece right out in the big open middle of an elementary school playground! You'd think somebody would have said something.

I mean, especially considering it would be hard to look more suspicious. Daniel always wore something that looked like, but obviously wasn’t, a prep-school blazer with a Yankee’s ball cap (which is why we called him "Bittingsworth" instead of Daniel or whatever his real family name was.)  Tim’s casual attire consisted entirely of bib-overalls and optional flip-flops, and I had avoided haircuts so long I had grown a bushy head of hair a little wilder than Hermione Granger's.  Oh, and for some reason that I’m sure made sense at the time, I had taken to wearing duck-boots, a grimy white lab-coat---and welding goggles. 

These days you'd be arrested on site just for dressing like that, but the Amarillo cops just smiled and waved at us as they drove by. Also remarkable---at no point did we ever consider we ourselves were doing anything even remotely wrong (until it was too late of course.) The prospect of “getting caught” never entered our deliberations, so maybe it was the total nonchalance of our demeanor.

Nobody ever even said, "boo."

No. Those were the days.

~~~ MORE IS ALWAYS BETTER~~~

Anyway, the next Saturday, I brought a step ladder so we could reach the top of the pole easier, and Tim brought a broom and sandwiches. I remember being impressed that Tim had brought the broom to sweep up the mess, but I was much more impressed when he used the broom to add the final component that would eventually culminate in what we would come to be known as "The Launch." Just after Daniel added all of the formula to the tether-ball pole, Tim climbed up the ladder, stuffed in a ball of aluminum foil, and rammed it down hard with the broomstick.

So---Yeah.

My knowledge of chemistry is limited to what I would later learn in the titular High-school class. I’ve since asked a few experts about this. None of them could account for what happened next based on the chemicals involved, but it was like nothing that had occurred in previous experiments. For one thing, it took much longer to happen – so long that, the first time, we were already blaming Tim for screwing it up when a solid straight column of bright blue lightning shot out of the pole and pierced the heavens. 

If we had been older, this might have been enough, but we were not, and no---it wasn’t enough. Maybe it was close, but the feedback loop between our temporay satisfaction and our return to thrill-seeking was so tight that the interval was nigh imperceptible. In the absence of anything like impulse control, the only alternative available to us was escalation. (All of this is what makes me say that ten-year-old boys should be confined to a blast proof facility until age 21.)

We increased the payload.

Yes. That’s right. We used the extended delay to pack in even more aluminum foil. We did it three or four more times, adding more foil, dirt, rocks, cans---and other stuff.

As the sun started to set we noticed that the base of the pole was so hot it was starting to glow red. We discussed this development briefly, but our unanimous analysis of this detail was that it was pretty cool looking.

A few minutes after the final time we charged the pole we noticed yet another new and even more exciting aspect. The ground actually rumbled under our feet! This gave us all god-like feeling and a serious case of monkey-face, but the rumbling died away and nothing happened.

For a long time.

We started thinking that this was the first dud, but nothing (and I mean nothing) could have been more non-dud than what happened just a few seconds after we stopped expecting anything at all.

The best I can figure is that the foil and other stuff we had packed into the tether-ball pole created a blockage greater than the pressure of whatever was holding the pole in the blacktop which was---at that very point---actually on fire. It was so hot that the pole started to lean as the asphalt melted and it was at about this time that we realized actual property damage was occurring and it might be a good time to abort.

We quickly gave up on using dirt to put out the burning asphalt and Tim started putting things in the wheel barrow.  We were in the middle of making plans to skedaddle when the pole shuddered wildly, launched out of its moorings, and described a bright blue arc along a path that appeared to have taken it into orbit.

The “blast off” was painfully concussive. It knocked the wind out of me and the noise was literally deafening. I was yelling “WHAT? WHAT?” when I realized by lip-reading that Daniel was telling me to run. I looked around for Tim, but he seemed to have vanished in the same stage-magic fashion as the coffee can had that first time he showed us his "something weird" back in the shed.. When I finally spotted him, he was already crossing Parker Street about a block away. He was pushing his dad’s wheel barrow down SW 43rd faster than anyone could have ever guessed Tim could run---even without a wheel barrow. 

I think the flight response must have kicked in for me too because the last thing I remember is a pitiful and resigned Bittingsworth shaking his head and flailing his arms while crying and saying "Run! Just---Just run." in a way that seemed to say, "It's too late for me. Go. Save yourself."

Then, I remember not remembering how I got home, and just being very very glad to suddenly somehow be there.

My ears were still ringing during morning exercises at school the following Monday when Principal Harrington announced that the tether-ball pole had been stolen, and that it would be replaced if it could not be found. I really wanted to tell him to go ahead with the replacement plan because I was pretty sure the pole would never be found; however, I didn’t want to risk implying that I might know anything about what happened to it. Besides, I was never a big fan of tether-ball.

~~~ AFTERWARDS~~~

The following Saturday, Daniel stole some pot from his older brother and we got lost in the drainage system under the Osage public swimming pool while trying to smoke it. Daniel knew the basics of joint rolling, but couldn’t put them together long enough to produce a functional prototype, so our fist drug experience was indefinitely postponed. We crawled through what seemed like an infinite length of drainage tunnels until we fetched up in one of those little storm drain boxes under curbs that most people only ever see from the outside. Daniel panicked and started yelling for help, but Tim just pushed the top off a nearby manhole cover and we climbed out unscathed.

After that, every time we saw each other we would talk about “The Launch” and make plans for new adventures, but fortunately for the human race we never did anything like that again, and our alliance was disintegrated with the onset of puberty. Daniel became infatuated with the same girl I was infatuated with, and Tim was infatuated with Daniel who did not reciprocate his affection, so we parted company even faster than we had made it. 

I understand that Daniel went on to start a successful crime-scene cleanup service in Dallas.

I don’t know what happened to Tim, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it required Daniels services at some point.

~~~ end ~~~


 ~~~

~~~RETURN~~~

My daughter was only entertained for the few minutes it took me to tell this story. She immediately renewed her devout commitment to boredom, but I remember the bone crushing pain of childhood boredom, and I like to think that my tail provided her with at least some small degree of relief. Seeing as how she has much more common sense than I did at her age, I’m pretty sure I don't have to worry about her blowing up stuff---much.

Pretty sure.