For most of this century the primary scourges of American life have been a) illegal immigration and b) terrorist activity. While the jury is still out on the issue of immigration A presidential finding made some years ago stated that such terrorists when captured either on the fields of battle or in airport lounges or your odd public crèche would be designated illegal enemy combatants and denied the protections of the Geneva Convention.
News of such reprisals one day got me reflecting on certain naïve, reckless activities of my youth that not only thrust me into a similar circumstance but nearly got me labeled with that most unwanted of tags – a terrorist. Here is my story condensed for the sake of brevity and kept factually inaccurate to protect those totally uninvolved.
When I was twelve I was in to blowing things up.
The origin is hard to determine although it coincided with the time I first heard the words Big Bang. Initially, my first ventures into space began with Estes mail order model rockets. At first they were un-animaled space shots. But I quickly graduated from that and then started sending up small fur bearing animals to altitudes alien to their evolutionary experience. Few, I found, like those in the Gemini program, had the right stuff. Most usually returned to terra firma with their compos mentis rocked.
But I didn’t give up and stuck, so to speak, to my rockets.
Soon a public outcry ensued. Neighbors renounced me as a pet assassin before the ASPCA and filed charges against me at the Hague in the Netherlands. Their main charge was that I had subjected innocent animals to the harrowing effects of terminal escape velocity. Unable at eleven years of age to afford a lawyer I pleaded my own case. During cross examination I stated that such a charge was absurd since not one of my space shots had ever attained such velocity for if it had had the integrity of the capsule would have been compromised and its passenger atomized. And, I added, that to the best of my knowledge not one had ever returned to Earth reduced to a handful of atoms easily pourable from a cup.
But on that day our local humane society - in a building that once housed a court of law where it was decided one hundred and fifty year before that ownership of another human being was perfectly fine - ruled against me. Even if my boyhood idol Werner von Braun had testified that day as an expert witness on space they still would have ruled against me. Don’t confuse someone with the facts when emotions are carrying the day.
Under a signed consent decree I was therefore ordered by the weight, majesty and dint of law to find another outlet for my passion
And find it I did.
While passions come in a myriad of forms mine had metamorphosed into the shape of dog shit, oddly. I had invented a game called toady-fly. Its name was derived from that of a toady whose job requirements were to assist medieval snake oil salesmen in their tout and when demanded eat a toad on the spot; ‘fly’ needs no explanation.
The rules were simple, really. First, huddle with ones pals in a tight scrum-like formation around a pile of dog feces; organically acquired with no harm to the dogs. Second, insert into harvested excrement a short wicked firecracker. Three, strike a match to the wick, and Four, run as if your life depended on it!
The game’s losers were determined by the breadth and length of the splatter signatures across their backsides.
I should have left well enough alone and let the game remain in its crude, original form. But I was its inventor and hell-bent on improving it. One approach involved stuffing the volatile mass with aluminum foil blast deflectors while another included the marrying of it to homemade gunpowder. It wasn’t long before such advancements outstripped the innate human capacity for avoidance not unlike what happened when the machine gun, tank and mustard gas were introduced on the battlefields of World War 1. No matter the strategy employed few in the neighborhood were safe anymore.
Yet still I soldiered on obsessed with finding that thing which dares not speak its name - the perfect kill ratio. I tried numerous technical approaches but found them all inadequate. Feeling dejected I was about to give up on my quixotic dream until that fateful day when I watched mom hard boil eggs. There was my answer in its white eggyness hovering above our kitchen’s faux Tuscan tiles. Something as simple as an egg’s shape inspired me to devise an ovoid shaped explosive blanket that was by an order of magnitude far more powerful than anything I had yet imagined.
In my version of Trinity Day I wanted to ape Oppenheimer and utter the words from the Bagavad Gita in Sanskrit. But a copy of it, even in English, was not to be found in my sleepy town. A neighborhood activist named Orville Umpfleet, founder of the local SDS chapter of which he was its lone member, loaned me a book of Hare Khrishna chants which I found if read out loud quickly sounded like a Pentecostal church revival in Sanskrit.
The effect of the blast that day surpassed even my crude calculations. I had mishandled the calculus nearly as badly as Schrödinger when he miscalculated the H function and blew his cat into a state of linear superposition where it found itself both alive and dead simultaneously. My bad math caused the fecal mass first to implode and then explode into a perfect flaming arch across the settling twilight. It was followed by a silvery mica ash that drifted down from the clouds which some thought resembled the fallout seen in 1950’s propaganda photos of Chinese cobalt atomic bomb tests. Whereas, no radiation poisons visited the town that day it wasn’t so lucky dodging the thrall of a salmonella outbreak.
Soon state health investigators descended on the town like biblical locusts and a health emergency declared. I was forced to go underground. Before doing so I hid my secrets cryptographically using the small comic strips found in Bazooka Joe bubblegum as the basis for my one time pads. Once encoded I repackaged them in other bubblegum pieces and safe-housed them in a cereal box of Count Chocula..
I laid low for a month but finally came out of hiding under the delusion of a false thermidor; a mistaken belief that the inspectors were decamping. One morning right after my breakfast cereal two grim faced men attired in matching trench coats and fedoras nailed me in front of my bedroom door. They announced sotto voce that they were from the Atomic Energy Commission.
“A spectrograph analysis of the bomb signature gives us reason to believe you were behind the blast,” spat out Philby, the tallest of the pair.
I played it cool. Not only was plausible deniability was on my side I was also underage.
The agent continued, “We did a collateral damage assessment and what we found wasn’t pretty,” he said, spitting out the words acidly. “Yeah,” added Burgess, the shorter of the pair, “what kind of human being would subject his own playmates to a game called toady-fly?”
“Toady-fly a.k.a. Poop Shoots!” barked Philby, “a sadistic monster, that’s who!”
They threatened to hold me incommunicado until I cracked. But a few moments later fortune smiled when mom called me downstairs for dinner. “Fellas, looks like this conversation must wait another day,” I said snapping back an illusory brim.
“You’re lucky they don’t have a juvenile court at The Hague or we would run you up on war crimes under the Geneva Convention,” Burgess hissed. He sidled in so close I could feel his five o’clock shadow and it wasn’t even ten in the morning. “You can’t find refuge behind the youth card forever kid because in matters of national security we have quite a big stick. And we’ll use it dinner or no dinner!”
“We shall return,” they said in unison, tipping their fedoras on the way out. And return they did much like MacArthur returned to the Philippines when the locus of the war had moved elsewhere.
They appeared in my school yard during the middle of a kick ball game. For once due to the rash of food poisonings I was picked to play. But the excitement was short lived when they pulled me off the field right in the middle of a game
“FBI lab tests at Quantico matched the fecal material produced by one of your assets.”
I raised an incredulous eyebrow.
“Your dog.”
“He’s a free agent, perhaps a rogue one at that,” I answered unsteadily, “I can’t vouch for him.”
“So, you disavow knowledge of your own dog?” demanded Philby.
“Just his behavior… who knows what he does when he’s not eating or sleeping,” I pleaded, glancing nervously toward the school house door. “Look, fellas… you’ve got me all wrong!”
“Don’t depend on anyone saving you this time, buddy boy,” sneered Burgess.
Philby moved in closer. “Before we leave… there’s just one more thing,” he said in a voice pregnant with conspiracy.
From inside a flap in his trench coat he pulled out a piece of Bazooka Joe bubblegum. He held it so close to my face I could smell its sugary promise. The G-Man slowly unwrapped it waxed paper swath by waxed paper swath seducing me with each bump and grind of bubble gum reveal. Tucked cleverly under the comic wound around the gum packed inside the wrapper was a small slip of paper similar in size to what Heisenberg passed to Bohr in Copenhagen in 1939. On it instead of Heisenberg’s crude drawing of an atomic pile was drawn the following:
[a picture of an egg followed by a complex formula]
They had me dead in the water!
But now, I wondered, what were they going to do with me? And more importantly was he going to share that gum?
Stuffing the evidence back in the pocket of his trench coat Philby grabbed my left elbow and guided me to a shaded cul de sac a block away where both men raised their verbal threats level. Words like trial, banishment, excommunication, auto-da-fé and even stoning were used as verbal truncheons to beat me around the head with until I yelled out in agonized desperation, “Are you going to try me or gum me to death?”
The question deflated their testosterone fueled rage momentarily.
The agents could least afford an open trial exposing as it might their sources and methods. And a secret trial was not in the cards since the legality of such would have to wait until the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Security Act some many years hence. And while there existed other unsavory black bag tactics they knew the country was in no mood for them and had not the energy with the Vietnam War winding down and Nixon on the verge of resignation to bear another scandal especially one centered on a teen-aged boy whose bomb miniaturizations were giving famed A-bomb designer Ted Taylor of Los Alamos apoplectic fits.
Exasperated Burgess cried out, “Why can’t you have normal problems like other boys your age… you know booze or drugs! This is America for Chrissakes!”
Pressed for time and pressured to bring the case to closure by superiors they offered me a Hobson’s choice. Give up my mad bomb schemes or else I’ll find myself enrolled against my wishes at the notorious Father Gibault’s School of Christian Brotherhood. Giboo as it was called was a precursor to our modern day Gitmo in Cuba. It was rumored that Giboo had received a secret dispensation from the Supreme Court allowing it to disregard the Bill of Rights and also given the right to mete out cruel and unusual punishment without reprisal. Teenagers under their care would no longer be considered teenagers legally and would be redefined into a new group called homo nullius.
“No way my parents would send me to Giboo.”
“Burgess here already talked to your old man about it,” he replied slyly. “On a Marine to Marine basis. Just like the draft an underage kid has no choice,” he added tauntingly.
“Last chance kid… so what’s it going be? You goin’ jettison force vectors and find a new hobby?”
“Like girls…” Burgess replied mockingly.
“Or face time at Gibault? Once incarcerated even your parents can’t get you out. I heard of one sad case where the parents changed their minds and sued but the case was handled ex parte.”
“Ex parte what…?”
“It means no right of habeas corpus. You rot in Giboo while the courts figure it out… very Lincolnsque.”
And with that in mind and my face seizing up into a rictus I rode home in the back of their black sedan apprehensively.
Throughout the night I held firm but caved to their demands the next morning when my usual bowl of Frosted Flakes went missing. Napoleon once said: “my men can suffer torture, their medals can be stripped away but dare not relieve them of their breakfast cereal!”
Late in the day I was hustled off by Burgess and Philby in their black sedan to the church rectory where Father Conti met us at the door encased in a mummy smoke suit of frankincense. He escorted us into the anteroom of the sacristy or what became more commonly known a decade later as ‘weenie heaven’ when it was first enunciated by cognoscenti in the Vatican speaking to the press ex cathedra and found sub rosa in numerous lawsuits filed against it.
“My son,” the Count said gravely, “I will say yet another novena for your soul.”
I signed a document witnessed by the Count thrust at an odd angle under my nose that bound me to absolute secrecy until either of two conditions were met: my rocketry knowledge reached technical obsolescence or thirty years passed. The agreement was so complex that only three people ever fully understood it. Now, of that three thirty years later, one is dead, the other has gone mad and as for me I’ve forgotten everything except this:
Bombs are easy, girls are hard!
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