Junior High

Chapter 1: The Worst Day in my Life

Tuesday, November 5, 1968

“Carl, it’s time to wake up!”

I was having the damnedest dream. I could hear my mother calling for me to wake up, but she had been dead for six years. I dozed on and a few minutes later she called for me again. I rolled over and tried to burrow back into the covers, but the bed was oddly sized and didn’t seem right.

“CARLING PARKER BUCKMAN, IT’S TIME TO GET OUT OF BED!”

I groaned and sat up, my eyes still shut, and ran my hands over my face. That didn’t feel right, either.

“Man, she used all three names. You’re in trouble now!” said my brother.

But that wasn’t right. I hadn’t seen my brother since we had buried our mother six years ago. He hadn’t even come to Marilyn’s or Alison’s funerals. And as I ran my hands over my face, I realized I was clean shaven, no morning stubble. I continued moving my hands around my head and discovered hair up on top. I lost my hair a long, long time ago.

I opened my eyes and looked around. My kid brother, Hamilton, was sitting on the end of his bed smirking at me. “You better get up or Mom’s going to be angry!” But he wasn’t my brother. My brother is two years younger than me, so he is 65. This Hamilton was younger, a lot younger, pre-teen younger, a little kid. And what were we doing in our old bedroom, in our house in Lutherville? I haven’t lived there in fifty years. I moved out when I was seventeen. I looked around in confusion. It was our old bedroom, our first bedroom, upstairs across the hall from our parents, before we moved to the garage when it was remodeled.

“Carl, are you up yet!” sounded from down the hall.

“I’m up, I’m up!” I replied.

Hamilton kept smirking as he started getting dressed. He normally was the slow one. I got out of bed and opened my side of the closet — yeah, there was my robe hanging on the hook on the left side. I put my robe on and stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom. Suzie’s bedroom door was closed but I could hear her getting up. I slipped into the hall bathroom before anybody saw me.

Hamilton and I didn’t have any mirrors in our room. The bathroom mirror showed the face of me in my early teens, and I had a strange haunted look to my eyes. What was going on? The last thing I remembered was being in a Middle Eastern antique shop at the mall and thinking I was having a heart attack. Had I died? Was this heaven or hell? I remembered the store owner’s name was Selim al A-Din al-Kassim, and I was holding a lamp. Al A-Din’s lamp? Aladdin’s Lamp? I had wished to be a teen again. Was that possible?

“Mom, Carl’s hogging the bathroom!” yelled Suzie from the other side of the door.

I muttered under my breath. “Give me a minute!” I replied.

“Mom!” I ignored her and pissed and brushed my teeth. When I was growing up you took a shower before going to bed, not in the morning. I opened the door and she brushed past me, pushing at me from behind to move me along. I ignored this, too. When I was growing up, I thought Suzie was a major league pain in the ass, but it wasn’t until I had daughters of my own that I realized that all female offspring fall into that category. Male offspring, too, for that matter.

Shaking the cobwebs from my head, I went back to the bedroom I shared with my brother and dressed. Briefs and undershirt, jeans, flannel shirt, socks, and sneakers. I went down the stairs and found everyone already in the dining room. Well, my father had already left for work, so it was just Mom, Hamilton, and Suzie.

Hamilton and Suzie had already dug into their cereal. Mom looked over at me and smiled. “Morning, sleepyhead. How’s it feel to be a teenager?”

“Huh?”

“Happy birthday! You’re a teenager today, remember?”

“Uh, yeah, thirteen,” I said stupidly. Suzie ignored me and Hamilton just rolled his eyes. He was still ten and wouldn’t become eleven for another couple of months. So I was thirteen. That made today the fifth of November, 1968. Jesus H. Christ, it was the Sixties? What was going on?

My thoughts were interrupted by a nudge at my knees. I looked down and saw Daisy pushing against me. I didn’t think twice, but reached down and scratched her head. She gave a happy bark and lay down under the table at my feet. Maybe the Sixties wouldn’t be so bad. My favorite dog was alive and well!

Mom had to remind me to eat. I used my toes to rub Daisy’s stomach, which she enjoyed. Daisy was about two at the time, a curious result of an afternoon’s dalliance between a golden retriever and a beagle, the end result of which was the size and shape of a beagle, but with the coloring and beautiful coat of a golden retriever. She was one of the best dogs I’ve ever owned, with a happy disposition, little barking, and never biting. She didn’t need a leash when we went outside and never left the property without one of us with her. The only flaw anybody could figure out with her was that she wouldn’t chase the rabbits away from Mom’s garden. Daisy could care less. Dad used to say they could come up and play pinochle on her snout and she wouldn’t do anything. This bothered my mother, since the rabbits loved to eat her petunias. The rest of us thought this was hilarious.

It’s funny, though, how a dog picks its master. Daisy was the family pet, but she had immediately picked me as the master. After I went to college, her new boss became Suzie, completely skipping past Hamilton. She would live another 12 or 13 years, dying of natural causes after Suzie went off to college. She was a good dog and lived a good long life.

I had finished my cereal and Mom had to remind me to get up. “Carl, what is with you this morning? You’re going to be late for school!”

Oh, shit! School! At thirteen I would have been attending Towsontown Junior High, off York Road. I was in the eighth grade and took the school bus. Hamilton and Suzie walked up the hill about a third of a mile to Hampton Elementary. He was in the sixth grade and she was in second grade. Supposedly he watched out for her, but the reality was that he could care less and she simply followed him there and back. I always suspected that if a van pulled up alongside them and masked men jumped out and abducted Suzie, Hamilton not only wouldn’t do anything, he wouldn’t tell anybody until somebody asked him what happened to her.

I took my dishes to the kitchen and went to the living room closet and pulled out my pea jacket. I was headed out the door when Mom stopped me. “Your books?” She was pointing at my knapsack of books and I grabbed it. Daisy was waiting at the door and followed me out. Mom was muttering in the background, “If his head wasn’t screwed on, he’d leave that behind, too.”

The bus stop was just on the other side of the road. We lived on the corner of Ridgefield Road and Felton Circle. I had plenty of time to get to the bus stop. Daisy and I crossed the road and Daisy sat down at my feet. Katie Lowenthal came up to us and bent down, holding her hand out to Daisy. “Hello, Daisy!” Daisy woofed and raised her paw, shaking hands, which caused Katie to giggle. Most of the other kids greeted Daisy this way, too. Daisy didn’t know many tricks, but she liked this one and she was a good spirited dog. Everybody knew and liked Daisy.

I glanced up the street to see a big yellow school bus heading our way slowly. “Okay, Daisy, time to go home.” I pointed at our house and she took off, to bark at the front door. Mom let her back in with a wave to me. A few minutes later the bus lumbered up and I climbed on board.

There was a seriously restricted seating arrangement on the school bus. Seventh graders sat near the front, where they were near the driver and the big kids couldn’t pick on them. The big kids, mainly the ninth graders, with a smattering of large and ‘cool’ eighth graders sat in the rear, where they lorded over the lesser beings in front of them. The eight graders were stuck in the middle to fend for themselves. I usually sat inboard next to Katie Lowenthal and across from Ray Shorn and Betty Lewis. I looked around, remembering classmates from days long gone and trying to figure out where my classes were. Or had been. This was too fucking weird.

I was so wrapped up in trying to figure out my past that I failed to notice when the bus stopped at the next stop. There was the usual fussing as the alpha males got on first. At this stop, simply by happenstance, it was mostly ninth graders and jocks. It was a mouthy crew that got on board.

The first three down the aisle were Jerry Strutter and his twin brother Tim, and their buddy Bob Tewkes, a trio of bullies who liked to boss around the younger kids. I remember how all three got the shit kicked out of them when they graduated to Towson High and got to meet some older kids who were nowhere near as impressed as any of us. Jerry smiled as he saw me and said, “Where’s our money?”

What the hell was he talking about? I glanced over at Ray and Betty in confusion, but they just had scared looks on their faces. I turned back in time to hear Jerry laugh. “No money?” The next thing I knew his right fist was rushing at my face.

I jerked my head back, but not in time to completely avoid getting smacked in the face. By the time I shook it off, Jerry had stepped past me, and his brother was moving forward, laughing, and saying, “My turn!”

What the fuck? The hell with this shit! I jumped up from my seat and pushed Tim hard, in the chest, knocking him into Bob, and the pair of them fell backwards, setting off a chain reaction of dominoes. I then turned around, and before Jerry could react, I tackled him from behind. No way was I putting up with this crap again. With him yelling, I rode him down to the floor of the bus.

“GET THE FUCK OFF ME, YOU LITTLE FAGGOT!” Jerry was roaring and cussing up a storm, but he couldn’t do much else. He had already started to peel off his jacket and it was now tying him up like a straight jacket. I tried a rabbit punch in the kidneys but he was too padded there and all I got was some more yelling and struggling. I decided I would have better luck smacking his head. I reached up and tried to shove his head at the floor, but the angle was all wrong, and he was struggling to get loose.

Down at my feet, towards the front of the bus, Tim and Bob were getting untangled. Tim started towards me with murder in his eyes, but as soon as he got closer, I lashed out and kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. He and Bob collapsed backwards again, and it was like dominoes all over again. By now the screaming of the little kids and the calls of “Fight! Fight!” were deafening.

Jerry and I had shifted slightly on the grimy floor of the school bus. Now I tried slamming his face forward, and connected with one of the supports for a bus seat. There was a satisfying crunch and Jerry let out a scream of pain, followed by more demands to let him up. “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL YOU!”

Fuck that shit! I started slamming his face into the support again, and the results were most gratifying. Jerry began screaming more and threatening less, and after three or four more slams, was just crying and bleeding. Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and pulled up and away. The bus driver had finally managed to work his way through the scrum of bodies and grabbed me from behind. My final look at Jerry showed blood and teeth on the floor of the bus, and he was crying.

“Out! Get out!” ordered the driver. Half the bus had already gotten off and were milling around outside the bus, on somebody’s lawn, and everybody was staring at me with sick faces. Very few of them had ever seen much violence before. At 67, I had seen my share already, even if I was only 13 now.

It wasn’t over yet. Waiting outside were Tim and Bob, working themselves up to avenge Jerry. They waited a minute until I was off, screwing up their courage, I suppose, and then came for me. It was Tim who came in first. “You faggot, I’m going to kill you!” Unfortunately for Tim, he had never learned how to fight, and being big isn’t enough. He simply rushed at me and tried to grab me, a loser’s game for me if I let him. At the last moment, I sidestepped his rush and then pushed him from behind into the bus. He slammed into the bus and sagged against it.

I had a brief moment, while he was shook up and Bob was startled, to even the odds. Bob had been running up behind Tim, so I stepped closer and slightly sideways. I kicked out as hard as I could at the side of his knees. My timing was off slightly, and I missed the outside of his left knee but kicked him hard on the inside of his right knee. You could hear the cartilage tearing and bone snapping. Three hundred pound professional football players end up retiring from injuries like that, so it was no surprise when Bob collapsed screaming to the ground.

Tim decided on a final try for me, but he was still slow and stupid. After another mad rush towards me, I slammed him into the bus, and then pulled him back and slammed his head into the bus another couple of times. When I pulled him back the last time, his eyes were fluttering and I threw him backwards to fall to the ground.

I was suddenly exhausted, as the adrenaline began flushing out of my system. I sagged back against the bus, breathing heavily. I remembered this day from my first go around. My thirteenth birthday had been the worst day of my life.

You see, the thing to know about me was that I was a little guy, very little, one of the smallest in the school. I was certainly the smallest guy in the eighth grade, and last year, in the seventh grade, was the smallest kid in the entire school, even smaller than all the seventh grade girls. Being small in junior high school simply made you a target. Even after I hit my growth spurt in the ninth grade, I was still beanpole skinny and a target. It wasn’t until I got out of high school that I was mentally mature enough that I was no longer a target. So for the rest of my junior and senior high school time, I was a victim, a target, and school was a prison more than anything else for me. I’ve heard it said that you don’t graduate high school, you survive it. Certainly it was that way for me.

The first time around, all three boys had punched my face as they passed me in the bus. I just sat there and took it, and cried. Later, after I got to school, some of the girls on the bus complained to the vice-principal, so I got called down to the office for that. The bus driver reported that he hadn’t seen anything happen, so that was the end of that. My parents were notified, and they just gave me a ration of shit about ‘standing up for myself’ and ‘being a man’ but of course fighting was not allowed.

I just leaned against the side of the bus, my mind going a million miles an hour in every direction. Tim was sleeping on the ground, Bob was still screaming and clasping his ruined knee, and Jerry was still bleeding on the bus. Then it got even more interesting. A police car showed up followed closely by an ambulance. I remembered that school buses at the time carried some kind of CB radio. The driver must have called it in. Now he came off the bus and pointed the cops to me. I guess he never saw the fight outside the bus, although how he missed hearing me slam Tim’s head into the bus was beyond me.

The police came up to me and one of them was already reaching for his handcuffs. I stepped away from the side of the bus and held my hands out to them. I was cuffed in front of my body and loaded into the back of the patrol car. A few minutes later, after calling in another unit and another couple of ambulances, we pulled out. I leaned back against the side of the car to get some rest. This was going to be a very long day.

Chapter 2: Hard Time in the House of Many Doors

It was only about a ten minute ride to the police station. Lutherville is on York Road north of the Beltway, Towson is on York Road south of the Beltway, and Towson is the county seat and headquarters of the Baltimore County Police. I was quickly brought inside to a fairly clean central area with a big counter and pushed onto a bench against the wall. I was sitting next to another guy, early twenties, kind of scruffy looking, but hey, we were in a jail, also sitting there with his hands cuffed. I nodded at him but otherwise kept my mouth shut.

He nodded back. “They run out of the FBI Top 10 and had to bring you in?”

I laughed at this. I looked like exactly what I was, a slightly rumpled school kid from a rich, white neighborhood. “Yeah, they found out I’m the one who actually shot JFK. What’s your story?”

“I got picked up for boosting a liquor store, but I didn’t do it. They got the wrong guy,” he asserted. I just nodded in understanding. “You?”

“Some kids on the school bus decided they wanted my lunch money.”

He stared at me for a moment. “You’re shitting me. So why are you here and not them?”

“They’re in the hospital.”

He gave me a look of respect, which made me wonder about my standards in my new life. I was getting approval from criminals. I just gave an embarrassed shrug. Any further discussion was ended when a uniformed cop came up and took my new friend by the arm and took him away. After another couple of minutes a different cop came for me. I was led down a series of hallways towards what looked like an interrogation room of some sorts. I glanced in and then asked if I could use the bathroom first. The police officer led me to a bathroom and followed me in. Thank God the cuffs were in the front. I was able to fumble my zipper down and use the urinal. I don’t pee easily when being watched, but I ran the Fibonacci Series in my head until I relaxed and did my business. I zipped up and was led out. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I had a nice shiner starting. A minute later I was in the interrogation room.

“Who do you want me to call?” he asked, pulling out a small notebook and a pen.

“What, you mean my parents?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I gave a wry shrug at this. “Well, they’re both at work right now.” I gave it a thought. “Listen, I don’t know the number, but my father works here in town at Harry T. Campbell’s. He’s an engineer. His name is Charles Buckman. I don’t know the number but they must be in the phone book. When you get him, you’d better tell him to bring a lawyer. I have a funny feeling this is going to be a hairball.”

The police officer gave me a funny look at this. “And your mom?”

“Why don’t you ask me that if you can’t reach my father. I think you’ll find him more… rational, let’s say.”

He just grunted at that and left the room. I had a chance to look around the room. Very stark and utilitarian, lowest bidder government work. A metal table, bolted to the floor. Four metal chairs, bolted to the floor. A mirror along the side, probably one way glass. No carpet. Plain sheetrock walls, painted institutional gray. Single door, steel, small window with the heavy glass and metal mesh, locked.

I sat down on one of the chairs and considered my predicament. In a lot of ways, despite my surroundings, I wasn’t doing badly. Yes, I was cuffed in a jail, but I hadn’t been booked, fingerprinted, photographed, or otherwise processed through the system, and the reality of it was that I probably wouldn’t be. Unlike my new friend out in the lobby, I had been involved in a schoolboy fight on a school bus. Okay, yes, I had put all three of them into the hospital, but the bottom line was that this was a fight on a school bus.

I reflected a moment on the fight itself. How had I beaten up three older bullies so badly, when at the time, the original time around, I would have been so much dead meat? It was purely a matter of surprise and circumstance. They had figured that the three of them could cower a little kid, but I wasn’t thinking like a little kid, but like a fully grown man who wasn’t going to put up with their shit. When I fought back it was like the mouse spitting back at the cat. They were stunned. The last time I was actually in a fight had been when I was 17 and working at Pot Springs Pizza, and a punk kid wanted to prove he was a tough guy. He shoved me from behind and I swung around and backhanded him across the face. He was so stunned that somebody fought back it was easy for me to hustle him out of the shop.

Mind you, it usually still works out badly for the mouse. The only reason I managed to win was that I managed to fight in a restricted space, where I could handle them one at a time. The bus aisle was the first place, with two boys tied up and falling all over everybody while I concentrated on Jerry. Later, outside, I had my back to the bus, eliminating 180 degrees of vulnerability, and still managed to get the two boys to attack me individually. If we had all been outside, on a field, with no place to hide, and all three had attacked me at the same time, I would have been the one in the hospital.

So what was going to happen now? They hadn’t started processing me through the system, so it was much more likely they were going to send me home with my parents. The cops and the courts are not how you want to handle schoolboy fights. But was that actually what I wanted? It is certainly what I would have wanted back the first time around. I would have been terrified; hell, I would have shit my pants being on a bench next to an armed robber! Now, at 67, I was nowhere near as impressed as they wanted me to be, even if I was 13 on the outside.

There were several tactics the police could use to get me out of their hair. They could threaten me and/or my parents. They could knock me around and show me how tough they were. Never mind the nonsense about how that was illegal. It was 1968. The Escobedo decision was only four years old and the Miranda ruling was only two years old and I was underage in any case. The cops could do any damn thing they wanted to a criminal and realistically get away with it.

Still, that wasn’t going to happen. After the war, when the highway system was being developed and it became possible to move out of the cities, Baltimore developed a large network of suburbs just like every other city in America. This was where the rich white people moved to get away from the niggers. Don’t blame me if you don’t like the language. This was 1968, not 2022, and this was south of the Mason-Dixon line and that was how people talked. So my parents moved to the new suburbs, and the richest and whitest suburb in the state was Towson. There was no way I was going to end up in the basement getting the rubber hose treatment.

I was in the interrogation room for over an hour and a half when the door was opened and two large men stepped in. The first man in was a big man, tall and stocky, dressed in a suit, and his hair was gray and his face was red. The second man was similar, only a bit shorter, and his face was a normal color.

I stood up and turned towards the red faced man. “Hi, Dad.”

“WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE NOW?!” he roared.

“Well, so much for ‘innocent until proven guilty’,” I commented. I turned towards the other man as my father fumed and seemed to get redder. “Hi, I’m Carl Buckman. Who are you?” I held out my right hand to shake his, but of course the left came with it since they were cuffed together.

The other man quickly came around to stand between me and my father. He stared at the cuffs for a moment before shaking my hand awkwardly. “I’m John Steiner. I’m a lawyer.”

“I asked what the hell you have done!” yelled my father again.

“Why don’t we sit down so I can tell you?” I answered calmly.

The lawyer pushed my father towards a chair opposite mine. “Charlie, sit down so we can figure this out.”

“I want to know…”

“Charlie, sit down and shut up,” replied Steiner.

My father sat down with no small amount if ill grace and stared at me. In a low and dangerous voice, he said, “This had better be good.”

“I will tell you everything in just a moment, Dad. Just believe me when I tell you that I am not the bad guy here. Please, just believe me. First I need to ask Mister Steiner a question.”

Dad looked like he was about to explode, but the lawyer grabbed his arm and kept him under control. He sat down next to my father and looked at me. “Yes?”

“Mister Steiner, I presume you are my father’s attorney.”

“Yes, I have been for several years. Why?”

“The question is, are you now my attorney or are you his?”

Steiner sat back in his chair and eyed me curiously. Dad just looked confused and was on the verge of some more yelling when Steiner leaned forward and held his hand up. “Hold it, Charlie, this is good.” He turned back to me. “I will be your attorney.”

“Even though he is paying you?” I pressed.

He glanced at my father and then turned back to me. “Even though.”

“And if his wishes were different than mine?”

My father was staring at the pair of us like we were speaking in Martian. “What in the world are you two…”

Steiner simply held his hand up to silence my father. “I know where this is going.” He turned back to me. “If there was that much of a difference of opinion I would arrange for a new lawyer for you. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir, thank you very much.” I stood and reached across the table and offered my hand again. “Like I said earlier, my name is Carl Buckman.”

He shook my hand much more firmly. “I’m John Steiner and I’m your lawyer. You want to tell us what you’re doing here?”

“Yes, sir, I would very much like to do that.”

The sense of rationality in the room had grown by several orders of magnitude. Even my father seemed calmer now. In a much more reasonable tone, he repeated himself. “This still had better be good.”

“That all depends on your definition of good.” I told them everything, about how the three boys had decided to begin ganging up on the kids on the bus, taking lunch money, and how they had told me they were going to charge me five bucks a week. This had been announced on the bus yesterday afternoon on the ride back from school. Then I described the fight. Dad’s a pretty tough guy himself, but it’s mostly his size and looks. He might look like a stevedore, but he’s actually a design engineer. Dad actually blanched when I described what I thought were the final results. “Jerry has got to have a busted nose, some busted teeth, and probably a broken jaw. Tim was just knocked out, a concussion, I guess, and Bob’s knee is totally shattered. I would bet all three are staying in the hospital for a few days.”

“Jesus Christ!” Dad said. He was finally looking at me with a mixture of horror and respect, the lawyer, too.

Steiner asked, “Have you told this to the police?”

“They never asked. I’ve been sitting here for the last couple of hours waiting for you. Besides, I’m not talking to them without a lawyer. Miranda v. Arizona comes to mind.”

Both men stared at me for a second, and then Steiner stood up and pounded on the locked door. It opened a few seconds later and he spoke quietly to whoever was on the other side. He then came back and sat down at the table. “Okay, a detective will be in shortly. I want you to tell him everything you just told us. We’ll get out of here afterwards. I can’t imagine they’ll charge you with much more than a misdemeanor. Fighting on a bus or something.”

“Mister Steiner, I have no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort. I’m the victim here, not them. They attacked me, not the other way around,” I replied.

This sort of disagreement was what my father used to call ‘back talk’, ‘lip’, or ‘sass’, and you could see his face clouding up again. At home he’d start swinging at me by now. Mr. Steiner just nodded in understanding and motioned for Dad to keep calm. “Let’s talk to the detective first. I won’t agree to anything without discussing it with you first.”

After another minute the door opened up and another man in a suit, smaller and thinner, with a noticeable bald spot even though he was still in his thirties, came in. He was carrying a legal pad and a pen and a manila folder. He looked at us and tossed his things to the table. “Hello. My name’s Robert Ritchie and I’m a detective.” He waggled a finger at the two men, pointing in turn at them. “Mister Buckman?”

“This is Charles Buckman, and I’m John Steiner, Mister Buckman’s attorney,” answered Mr. Steiner.

Detective Ritchie shook their hands before turning to face me. “And you must be Carl. Can I call you Carl?” he asked, a big friendly smile on his face. Yeah, we were all buddies. He was my friend. He would remove my cuffs and send me home to my loving parents. I would leave the horrible police station. And to do this, I only needed to make a little confession. Kidnapping the Lindbergh baby came to mind as the little confession.

“Sure thing, Bob, you bet,” I answered happily.

Ritchie started at this and stared at me. Smiling to himself, he shook his head. “Okay, I deserved that, I suppose. Let’s sit down and get this over with.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, much more politely.

“Can we do something about the handcuffs?” asked Steiner.

“I suppose, but these are some pretty serious charges,” replied Ritchie. It was like watching poker players raise and fold on their hands.

“There’s three of us. I think we can take him if we need to.” was the dry response.

Ritchie shrugged and removed my cuffs. I guess this gave him some form of card for later in the game. He put the cuffs and keys in his pocket and picked up his pad and pen. He turned to me and said, “So, tell me your side of it.”

I glanced over at Steiner, who nodded silently, and told my story again, just like I had before. He made several notes, most specifically when I mentioned names. At the end he commented, “That’s not precisely the story I got.”

It was important that I stay in control as much as possible. Before my lawyer could respond, I said, “I imagine not, but who would you have heard differently from? The other three are all in the emergency room. No way have you talked to them yet. Who’s left? The bus driver?”

Ritchie gave me a very sharp look at this. “According to the driver, you attacked all three boys on the bus, and then attacked the two he rescued when you got outside.”

I snorted in derision. “He rescued them? That’s rich. Let me guess, he stated he saw the whole thing, right?”

“Yes, he did.”

My father was keeping quiet, which was good. He simply couldn’t understand what had happened to his nerdy little asshole son. More importantly, the lawyer was keeping silent. He could always step in and claim I was being coerced or stupid if something came up that was bad, but in the meantime, if I was asking questions, the detective might just screw up himself. I was taking control of the interview session.

“You may consider that report as fine a work of fiction as anything Hemingway or Faulkner ever wrote. It has just about as much relation to the truth. The driver was sitting in his seat, facing out the windshield when this all started. The only place he could have seen anything from was standing in the aisle, but that is where all the kids getting on the bus were, so he wasn’t there. He was sitting, face forward. When he heard the fight start, he would have turned around, but there were at least a dozen kids between us and him. He never saw anything.”

“Uh, huh.” Ritchie wasn’t letting me know what he was thinking. He would have been a good poker player.

“Then later, after he threw my last two attackers off the bus — the phrase he used was ‘get the fuck out of here’ — he was kneeling on the floor trying to see to Jerry. He was three feet below any windows on the bus, which are six feet off the ground in any case, so how did he see me attack the other two? He didn’t know anything about what happened until after the police and ambulance arrived and he came down off the bus.” I continued.

“So why did he say different?” he asked.

“Well, what was he going to say? That he had no idea what was happening and couldn’t keep control of the kids on his bus? How long would he stay employed after that? I would bet that he’s not actually a school employee and protected by a union, but a part time employee of the contracting company that operates the busses.” On the first go around, the same driver had reported that nothing at all had occurred, despite what some of the passengers had said.

“Interesting thought.” He was very noncommittal to my statement.

“Have you interviewed any of the other witnesses? Any of the other students on the bus?”

“Who should I interview?”

“I saw you writing their names down.” I read off the list that he had written. “They would have been right beside me on the bus. They saw the attack this morning and they heard the threats and extortion yesterday afternoon.”

“That’s an awful lot of time to take these statements. Why should I do anything with this other than let you go on a misdemeanor disturbing-the-peace complaint?” I looked at him curiously and he continued. “Let’s be realistic here. This is never going to trial. You four boys got into a beef and the bus driver decided to cover his butt. You are going to take the misdemeanor and go home.”

“Because I want those three arrested on at least four felony counts.” I answered calmly.

The room exploded, with all three men exclaiming the ridiculousness of this. I just sat there with a calm look until they quieted down, and then held my hand up for silence. The detective simply shook his head at me. “Felonies? Never going to happen. This is never going anywhere near a court.”

“You’re right, this is never going to go to court, but I have a problem now because of this, and the only way my problem gets solved is with your help.”

“You have a problem?”

I nodded. “A big one. As it stands, I have been arrested and hauled away in handcuffs, and the bus driver has formally accused me of attacking three kids on the school bus. At the bare minimum, I’m barred from riding the bus, and much more likely, I’m expelled from school. Right now, as we speak, Towsontown Junior High is getting ready to burn me at the stake.”

It was obvious that the adults in the room had never thought of this. My father, in particular had a worried look on his face. “I know this isn’t going to court. However, if the three boys are formally arrested and charged with felonies, the school will have to allow me to stay in school, especially since no charges have been formally filed against me yet. A detective trumps a bus driver any day of the week.” Maybe I could play to his vanity a touch. “I don’t care if they plead it down to attempted jaywalking. It will keep me on the bus and going to school, with no record.”

“Interesting. You’ve given this some thought.” Unspoken was ‘A lot more thought than a 13 year old kid should be having!’ “What felonies did you have in mind?”

He wouldn’t have asked me this if he wasn’t thinking of going along. “Just the obvious ones. Assault. Conspiracy to commit assault. Attempted extortion. Conspiracy to commit extortion. I bet there’re a few others you can think up. Maybe something gang related.” We didn’t have any criminal gangs in Towson that I had ever heard of, but I was being ambitious.

He shook his head with a certain degree of incredulity. “I’ve got to tell you, this is the craziest stuff I have run across in a long time.”

“But certainly it is the right thing to do,” interjected Steiner. He had been following along closely and was nodding and making other motions to push the detective along.

“And I do this how?”

“Everybody is at school now, probably at lunch. You go over there, right now, and get those three kids to come to the office. Ask them what happened. Ask them if they heard the threats yesterday. They have no reason to lie to you. If they back me up, you tell the principal. If they don’t back me up, you throw my sorry butt in jail. I’ll be safer there than at home with him.” I pointed at my father as I said this.

“Like you would not believe,” Dad said dryly.

“Just do it right now. It will be the most fun those guys have had this year! I’ll hang around here until you get back. You can do it in an hour,” I pushed.

He gave an exasperated look at me, but then he stood up. “My captain will never believe me when I tell him about this. I’ll be back.” He left the room.

Once he had left, Dad looked at me. “Where do you get off talking to the police like that?”

“Charlie, it’s okay, he did okay,” said Steiner.

“Dad, I was neither rude nor loud nor coarse. If anything, I was the voice of reason.”

“Carl, I don’t know what you plan on doing someday, but if you ever get a law degree, look me up.” Steiner gave me a very approving look.

I smiled at him and nodded my thanks. “Thank you. Now we come to part two. I couldn’t say this in front of the detective, so we have to plan this out.”

“Plan what out? What’s part two?”

“That would be the lawsuit we bring against the three of them and their parents.”

“What?!” My father had jumped out of his chair and was staring at me.

Steiner was calmer. “A lawsuit? On what basis?”

“A civil suit based on the assault and extortion, my severe emotional disability, the slanders they have been speaking — I don’t know and I don’t care. You’re the lawyer. You can figure it out.”

Steiner just shook his head. “This will never go to trial. It’s ridiculous. You destroyed those boys.”

“Yes, I did. They are all going to be hospitalized, and the bills are going to be horrendous. If we don’t sue them, they will sue us.” My father got very worried looking at this. He really hadn’t thought this through.

“They can sue us regardless.”

“I know, but it won’t matter. They get charged with felonies, they plead them down to something minor and do no time in jail, but the plea is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. The standard of proof in civil court is lower than in criminal court. I don’t need anything more. Meanwhile, I will have no criminal arrest record and they will have been expelled from school. We win so fast your head will spin.”

“We win in ten years. They will drag this out forever.”

I smiled. “Stop thinking like a lawyer for a second and think like a parent. They don’t want to drag this out. They want it to go away! Sue them for a quarter million apiece.”

“A quarter of a million dollars? Are you crazy?”

“Too low? Half a million?” Steiner sputtered and I just grinned. “I don’t care if you ask for their first born male children. You offer to settle for ten grand each. They’ll cave in a heartbeat. You take a third. It will be the easiest and quickest ten grand you will ever earn.”

Dad was beside himself, sputtering indignantly. “This is the craziest thing I have ever heard of. Nobody is suing anybody!”

Steiner, on the other hand, slowly smiled and nodded. He grinned at my father and said, “No, this makes perfect sense. It’s brilliant.”

“This is crazy.”

“Crazy like a fox, maybe. Look at it. It keeps him in school, it keeps them from suing you for damages, and it maybe nets us all some cash. What kind of a cut do you want?” he asked.

“Jack, I’ll punch you instead of him.”

Steiner laughed. “You do that. I’m hiring him as my attorney.” He pointed at me. “We won’t be able to sue until after they have been arrested and charged and agree to the plea. They might have an attorney who can figure this out as well.”

“Fine by me. We’ll know in a week’s time or so. Even if they do figure it out and try to fight it in criminal court, their lawyer will bankrupt them trying to fight something the district attorney will be begging with them to plead out on. They will have to settle. My immediate worry is getting back to school. Dollars to doughnuts, by the time we get home, they will have called Mom and told her.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” commented Dad.

“Sorry about that, Dad.” I just gave him a sympathetic look. There was a reason I had told the cops to call him rather than Mom. She could be a bit extreme at times. His look back at me was not a happy one.

It was closer to an hour and a half before Detective Ritchie returned, time in which Steiner and I spent plotting strategy. Ritchie’s return was almost anticlimactic. “You are free to go,” he announced, coming in the door.

“The charges?” asked Steiner.

“No charges.”

“And the school? What did the witnesses say?” I asked.

“The witnesses back you up a hundred percent. The school is your problem. I told the principal but I don’t think he cares. You’ve been expelled.”

I looked over at Steiner. “Let me handle this. You’ll be back before the end of the week. Let’s go,” he said confidently.

We all trooped out, though I made sure I shook the detective’s hand. “Thank you very much, Mister Ritchie. I know you went out of your way and I appreciate it quite a lot. You didn’t have to help me, and it means a lot to me. Thank you.”

Most cops don’t get thanked by the guys they interrogated. He gave me a shocked look and mumbled out a ‘thank you’ before sending us away.

I followed my father out of the station to his car and climbed into the passenger seat after he unlocked the door. He was quiet the entire walk, and stayed quiet as he started the car, but then he turned the key off again and twisted to look at me. “What is with you? You backtalk to a police officer? You make deals with a lawyer? You fight on the bus? It’s like I don’t know you anymore.”

I just looked out the windshield. “I’m the same guy, Dad. Maybe this is what happens when you treat me like a grownup and not like a kid.”

“What, you’re thirteen now and don’t think you need to do what you’re told anymore?”

I turned to face him and took a deep breath. “No, Dad, I’m thirteen now and decided I wasn’t going to be pushed around by bullies anymore. If people want to deal with me, they can deal with me like an adult. Life is too short otherwise.”

“An adult? This is how you act like an adult?”

“Yes, father, it is. Tell me, how have I not been acting like an adult? If a gang of three men decided to punch you in the face, would you have just sat there and let them? Or would you have fought back? Come on, Dad, you were in the Navy during the war, what would you have done?” Before he could make a response, I pressed on. “Go ask Mr. Steiner if I was acting like a kid or an adult today? I was respectful and asked intelligent questions and we worked together to make an effective plan to keep me in school and protect you and Mom from lawsuits. Are those the actions of a child or an adult?”

Dad continued to stare at me. “The only time I was anything less than courteous with the detective was when he condescendingly treated me like a child at the start. Once I called him on that, we got along fine. Even better, he came into the room planning on offering me an out as long as I pled guilty to something minor. I managed to get out of there with no charges and no guilty plea. Is that childlike? Or did you really want me to break down and cry and piss my pants? Hell, Dad, the only one in that room who was treating me like a kid was you!” I was immediately sorry I said this since up until now I hadn’t cursed once.

My father just stared at me for a moment and then shook his head in disbelief. My use of the word ‘hell’ was ignored. “Huh. Now what?”

I grinned. “Now we go home. I missed lunch today. Maybe I can grab a cookie or two.”

He glanced at his watch. “Your mother is probably home by now. This is not going to be fun.”

“She’s probably already heard from the school,” I agreed.

We were both right. Mom’s car was in the driveway when we got home. Ham and Suzie weren’t home yet, but I saw my knapsack with my books on the couch. Somebody on the bus must have brought it home, so now Mom knew everything. “Carl? Is that you? I want you up here now!” She was calling me from their bedroom, across the hall from my bedroom. There was no way to avoid her. I followed Dad up the stairs to the bedroom.

Mom looked furious. Normally she’s a very attractive woman — Dad snagged a real looker — but not this afternoon. She started right in on me. “What did you do!? Katie Lowenthal brought your bookbag home and told me you had beat up three boys on the bus and the police had arrested you, and then the school called. You’ve been expelled! What have you done now!?” She was at full volume during all of this, and her face looked pinched and ugly.

I turned my head to my father. “You know, you guys really have to work on this ‘presumption of innocence’ thing.”

I turned my head back towards Mom just in time to see her hand come swinging at my face. She clocked me a good one, staggering me back a step. “Don’t you dare give me any lip!”

I stepped back forward to my original place and rubbed my jaw. “Good one, Mom. We’ll get to that in a bit. Why don’t we all sit down?”

Mom moved to slap me again, but Dad simply said, “Shirley, no.” and she stopped.

My parents have managed to cram in a regular size bed, a desk and office chair, and a recliner into their bedroom. I plopped down into the recliner and Dad sat at his desk. Mom had no choice but to sit on the bed. “Okay, here goes,” I said.

I gave her the full story, including what happened at the jail. I did leave out my meeting the armed robber. That would have been just one story too much for her. By the end of the tale she was somewhat mollified, but still angry with me. “You shouldn’t have fought those boys. You know better than to fight.”

She was starting to piss me off, but I tried to keep it out of my voice. “What, Mom? What should I have done? Tell someone? Who? The bus driver? The bus driver lied to the cops just to keep his job. You think he was going to do anything? Who am I going to tell at the school? The principal? You think he’s going to assign somebody to walk me to class every day and protect me?”

From the look on her face, this is precisely what I should have done. Still I pushed her. “Maybe I should have told you and Dad? Oh, that’s right, I did that already, last year. You told me to be a man and stand up for myself. Guess what, I did just that and now you’re unhappy with me. Make up your mind, Mom.”

“How dare you speak to me like that!?” She looked over at my father, expecting him to start beating the crap out of me, which is what he would have done any day prior to this. Instead he just sat there and looked at her. “Are you going to let your son backtalk to me like that?”

“Shirley, stop it.”

“Mom, define backtalk. Is it saying anything under the sun that you and Dad don’t agree with? You might as well just shoot me now, because there are lots of things in the world we don’t agree on,” I replied, which was probably not a good thing to do.

Dad turned his head to me. “Don’t push your luck.”

“Yeah.” I rubbed my face wearily. It had been a long day, and the time with my parents was the worst of it. “Is there anything else?”

Mom stared at the both of us. She had no idea what was happening, but it was definitely not going according to her righteously indignant plan. “That’s it? You’re not punishing him for this?”

“Punishing him for what? For defending himself? For getting out of jail? For protecting us from a lawsuit? What’s he done?” Dad asked. Score one for Dad. If they began arguing between themselves, I could escape.

I stood up and moved over to the door. “Two last things I have to say.” They stopped their bickering and looked over at me. “First, don’t ever hit me again.” They stared at me like I was speaking in tongues. “I just got in a fight and went to jail because three kids decided to hit me. I won’t stand for that ever again. If you want to punish me for something, fine. Ground me, take away the car keys, take away my possessions, throw me out of the house — I don’t care, I just don’t care, but never hit me again.”

They didn’t say anything to this. I guess they were too stunned. “Second, I just want you to think about something. If I ever have children, and I ever find out they’ve been arrested, I pray to God that the first thing I would say to them is ‘Are you all right?’ and not ‘What have you done now?’ I just want you to think about that.” I left the room and went across the hall to my room.

Chapter 3: Making Plans

I went over to my room and crawled onto my bed, rearranging the pillow to sit upright against the wall. I was no longer hungry, just tired. It had been a long day, and dealing with my parents simply made it more tiring. Ham and Suzie came home a few minutes later. Ham came upstairs and dropped his shit off and then left without paying any attention to me. I mean every word of it when I say that he is self-centered to the point of near psychopathic proportions.

I was forced to give my parents a lot of thought, and reflect on what they had been before and what they were now. It was a very complicated subject. Charles and Shirley Buckman are good people. They are the rock solid upper middle class foundation of this country. They work hard, go to church, pay their taxes, vote, and give to charities. By any stretch of the imagination, they are people you would want living next door.

However — they are lousy parents. Don’t get me wrong on this. It’s not like we were chained in the basement, eating gruel and being whipped. We weren’t. By most standards we were raised well. By any objective standard we all turned out okay, with three white collar jobs, college educations (mostly), grandchildren, and nobody ever getting into trouble (until this morning.) Further, kids don’t come with an instruction book, and they never really got lessons.

But it was not enjoyable growing up in that house the first time and I was seriously wondering if I could do it again. My father could be very abusive. His view of child rearing involved using a carrot and stick approach, but the carrot was a few tiny slivers of orange shaving and the stick was a half inch thick oak pledge paddle from his college days. If anything, and I do mean anything, was not perfect, Ham and I would get hit with it. Further, since we were supposed to always exhibit proper behavior, whatever that was, and since you do not reward correct actions, only above average actions, if we behaved properly, there was no notice taken. If we behaved, nobody would ever say how good we were, but if we were bad, we would get beaten with a stick.

In some ways, my mother was worse. She didn’t hit as much, preferring to wait until Dad got home, but she could be very cold. She fully bought into the idea that good behavior was expected, and therefore not to be rewarded, and that bad behavior should be punished severely. Further, her job was to mold us, especially me, as the oldest, into a proper adult. Being loving did not enter the equation, but teaching and training us did.

Once, when I was five or so, I made a birthday card for her birthday. On the front side it said “I love you!” Then, when you opened it, it said, “I love you too!” “I love you two!” and “I love you to!” I thought I was being clever, and proudly gave this to her. The average mother would probably hug and kiss her child for this. My mother used this as a chance to correct my spelling and teach me proper word usage. I never made a mistake in using those words again, but I never made her another card, either.

As the oldest child, I got the brunt of this. Hamilton, two years younger, got some, but he wasn’t the first born male child and wasn’t as important and they didn’t hide this fact, which must have done wonders for his self esteem. Suzie, on the other hand, was a girl and the youngest child, and they made no bones about the fact that she was the favorite. You would think that I would have been jealous about that, but actually not. Suzie was a good kid, and even though she knew she had her father wrapped around her little finger, she didn’t rub it in our faces. She was also six years younger than me, so we didn’t have all that much in common. We never went to school together, for instance. Later on, whenever she managed to get something really outrageous (an all expenses paid trip to New Orleans, for example) I simply smiled and considered her a really sharp operator.

By the time I was a teenager, it was very obvious that my future position in life was to be Charlie Buckman’s clone, only better. Like my father I would go to a good school and become a scientist or engineer. This is about the only part of the plan that actually happened. The rest was a disaster. I was to go to an Ivy League school like Dad, but four years and not the two that he did. I would get a graduate degree, which he never did, and be a professional (letters after the name), which he never did. I would marry properly, another WASP, also a college trained professional, and we would have 2.3 children. We would live in the suburbs, only a nicer and more expensive one, have a bigger house than theirs, and I would work for a large conglomerate. We would be good Republicans and pass on these values to future generations of Republican Ivy League WASPs.

Inasmuch as almost none of this was to occur, my parents made no attempt to hide their disappointment in me. Even though by almost any rational standard I led a good and happy and well-off life, until the day they died they made no bones about the fact that I had let them down. There was a very good reason that I went to school three hundred miles away and never moved back and rarely visited.

Part of today’s discussion with them was an effort to put them on notice that my life was to be lived on my terms, not theirs. I was not naïve enough to think that today would make that much of an impression. I knew that before too long Dad, and especially Mom, would begin molding me back to the path of righteousness. The first time around I had usually acquiesced unhappily for a time until something would go wrong and cause me to explode in juvenile anger. This time I would have to be different, and they would have to be taught that if I was to be a part of their lives after I was seventeen, it would be their expectations which would change, not mine.

One of the curious events that had transpired today was when I told them never to hit me again. You might not believe that would happen, but on the first go-around, it actually happened when I was only a year older. My mother had decided I needed to be slapped, probably for backtalk or some damn thing, and I had instinctively brought my arm up to block her. She was so startled she had stared at me for a second, and then swung at me again. By then I was already in too deep, so I blocked her again. She put her arm down and promised to tell my father, at which point I had told her to do what she thought best, but they couldn’t hit me anymore. They didn’t hit me anymore, either.

I don’t mean to say that when my parents were home we were cowering in the basement hiding from them. It really wasn’t like that. The best comparison I can make is with other families. I’ve seen normal families. Mom or Dad get home from work or the store or wherever, and the kids show up to say hello and see what they brought back or whatever. We didn’t. We avoided them lest they figure out what we’d done wrong that day and hit us. It was over quickly, but it was never a good thing to be called up to see them. There was never any praise, only punishment. No carrot, only stick.

I skipped dinner that night, which was very unusual. Generally speaking, you ate what Mom put on the table, when she put it on the table. There were no substitutions and no delays. If you didn’t like it, which could happen, you ate it anyway, since the other choice was a beating with the oak paddle. If the meal was toxic radioactive sludge, you ate it. If you didn’t eat it and survived the beating and still wouldn’t eat it, you didn’t get fed until the next day. Surprisingly, my parents let me skip out, even after I told them I would eat something later.

I stayed in my room, thinking about what I was doing and how I would survive the next few years, until Hamilton came upstairs to bed. We had a small room but had managed to cram in two twin size beds and a dresser. By then my stomach was growling and I went downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone else had gone to bed, so I scrounged up a can of soup and opened it and poured it into a pan and set it on the stove.

Mom must have heard me stirring about, because she came downstairs. She found me stirring the soup over the flame and surprised me further by taking a bowl out of the overhead cabinet. “Thank you,” I said.

She looked at me without speaking as I finished stirring my soup. I poured it into the bowl and sat down at the kitchen table to eat. Finally, as she realized I wasn’t going to be the one to speak, she said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you this afternoon about the fighting. I know it wasn’t your fault.”

“Thank you.” Better to keep my words brief and to the point. Obviously she was the one who wanted to speak.

She gave me a strange look. “You’re different somehow. You’re acting… different.”

I set my spoon down and looked at her. “You always tell me to grow up and act my age, but now that I do, you don’t like it. You need to make up your mind, mother.”

Her face clouded up at this. Before this afternoon, I am sure I would have been smacked. Now she controlled herself. “You can’t speak that way to your mother.”

“Mom, I am speaking to you like an adult. You want me to act like an adult. You have said this more than once. If you want me to act like a little kid, just let me know. I have to tell you, it’s awfully confusing.” She just sat there, flummoxed, not knowing what to say to me. My words were making perfect sense, but just weren’t registering. I pushed a little harder. “Mom, I’ll make you a deal. You want me to act like an adult? Fine, I’ll do just that. You just have to treat me like an adult.”

“But you’re not an adult, you’re only a child!” she protested, probably louder than she wanted.

I simply shrugged. “Okay, it’s up to you. I am the one acting like an adult at the moment. I’ll keep acting like a grown up, but don’t be surprised when I let you know I think you’re letting me down.”

She just stared at me and then stood up and went back upstairs. I might as well have been speaking in Chinese for her understanding. I cleaned up and put the dishes in the dishwasher, and then headed upstairs and went to bed.

The next morning I woke up at my normal time, even though I wasn’t going to school. I went down to breakfast, which is basically cereal and juice, and got some Frosted Flakes and OJ. Hamilton ignored me as always, but Suzie noticed my eye. “What happened to you?”

“I got a black eye?”

“How?”

“I got punched in the eye.” I grinned at her and jumped up from the kitchen table. I balled my hands up into fists and waved them around wildly. “How would you like to be a Black Eyed Suzie!?”

In case you don’t know, the Maryland state flower is the Black Eyed Susan, which sounds a lot more exotic than it really is. It’s actually just a daisy with a brown center instead of the normal yellow. It’s a common wildflower all over Maryland. Ever since she’s been old enough to understand, the entire family has been teasing Suzie about giving her black eyes and making her the state flower.

Suzie giggled and squealed and ran back up the stairs. “Mom! Carl’s going to make me a black eyed Suzie!”

I laughed and sat back down to finish my breakfast. A minute later Suzie reappeared and stuck her tongue out at me. I stuck mine out at her, and this was how Mom found us when she came in, sticking our tongues out and making funny faces at each other.

“This is acting like an adult?” she asked me.

I smirked and then made a pointing gesture at Mom to Suzie. She giggled and nodded, and we both turned our faces to Mom and stuck out our tongues. It was too ridiculous. Mom just laughed and then stuck her tongue out back at us, before telling us to finish breakfast. Suzie and Hamilton got bundled out the door to school. Mom went back upstairs to get dressed for work. She worked part time in ladies lingerie at Hutzlers, a Baltimore department store. She had started part time once Suzie started school, and as we got older, she began working more hours, and eventually becoming full time and moving into management. By the time I got out of college, she had become the head of telecommunications for the company, which was an amazing thing, considering she only had a high school diploma. She stayed with them until retiring, just before the company folded and was sold.

I stayed downstairs and found my bookbag in the living room. Mom went off to work and I pulled everything out of the knapsack and spread it around. Wow! I didn’t remember being this sloppy!

El Camino Real, the Spanish book. Five years of Spanish and all I ever learned was ‘Mas cervezas, por favor!’ An algebra book. General science. Nothing on English or Social Studies, so I must have left that in my locker. A three ring binder with all sorts of handouts and crap falling out of it. Thank God I found a copy of my schedule, because after fifty years, I didn’t have a clue where I was supposed to be or who the teachers were.

I lived in a rich suburb in a rich county, and the public school system reflected this. It was your typical big suburban school system. When I got to Towson High it was about 2,200 kids in the top three grades. My graduating class was about 650. You could study almost anything. It was really first rate. It was a massive change when Marilyn and I lived north of the Catskills and raised children. When Alison and Parker graduated together, their class was 29 kids.

Because the school was so big, every seventh grader at Towsontown took a standardized test, a sort of junior SAT test. On the basis of this single test, the remainder of your academic life was laid out in precision detail. The next five years were organized, and attempting to vary your destiny was considered both futile and somewhat subversive.

The top ten percent of all students were the elite, the college prep group. These would become the future masters of the universe. They were destined to go to four year colleges, private colleges, becoming doctors and lawyers and scientists and engineers. They would become the future leaders of America. They were in accelerated classes. While others were taking 8^th grade math, they were taking algebra. They were at least one year ahead of the others in taking biology, chemistry, and physics. They took AP advanced classes for college credit. Ten percent of 650 students worked out to roughly two classes of about 30+ students each, and for five years we moved in lockstep together, marching towards the future. I, of course, was a member of this exalted group, on the basis of my phenomenal ability at taking standardized tests, and in no way on the basis of my horrendously average grades.

Along the way, we were encouraged to mate and breed with other members of the top ten percent, to produce the next generation of elites. If necessary, because of the excess of teenage hormones, it was deemed acceptable to mate with members of a lower class, but breeding was certainly to be avoided, lest we waste our precious seed and eggs with subhumans. The overall theory was to allow the elites to sow their wild seeds with the lesser breeds, but to make sure they married within their class.

The next lower class was the normal kids, who made up about eighty percent of the school. These children had been tested and found wanting in the lottery of life. They would generally go to college, but it would be a public school, or even a community college. These unfortunates were often graced by the elites with being allowed to date and mate, but it was well known that these could only be temporary and physical affairs. After all, we, the elites, were all going to very expensive colleges on scholarships, and the lesser types would not be able to follow.

At the lowest level was the bottom ten percent, those assigned to Vo-Tech, or vocational technical training. They were considered almost a different species, and only spent a few hours every day at school before being shipped off campus to some form of job training. Such shipments were rumored to be made in off duty County Police transport buses, which was considered a good idea, since it would acclimate these knuckle-draggers to a frequent mode of future transportation after graduation. If they didn’t end up going to jail and not passing Go, most would end up in the Army. This group invariably smoked, sported tattoos, grew mustaches (women, too!), and rode motorcycles. They would have frightened Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Nobody had anything to do with these examples of pond scum unless they needed drugs. Since there was a lot of drug activity in the Sixties and Seventies, a lot of people actually knew these guys.

On the basis of my amazing standardized test scores, I was assigned to the college prep crew, and my mother never let me forget it. As I mentioned, her duty was to make sure I fulfilled my academic destiny and my grades were never good enough. She was the sort who could complain ‘Carling, you only got straight A’s. You have the potential for so much more!’ and mean every word. If I had graduated as valedictorian, it would probably not have been sufficient. My rebellion was to not give two shits, and I was a B- student at best. B- among the college prep kids, at least. This would have still been considered an A student among the normal kids. Worse, I often dated the normal kids, and even had friends among the dregs of humanity, the Vo-Tech crowd. I was smart enough, at least, to hide the last fact from my parents.

I picked up my algebra book and glanced at my homework sheet to see where in the book we were. I found my place easily enough and reviewed the chapter, but decided I needed to catch up, so I started at the beginning of the book. After a couple of hours, I had finished the book. This brought up a new dilemma. I had already gone through this shit the first time around — would I be able to survive doing it a second time without going batty? I glanced through the rest of my books and confirmed my fears.

I stood up and stretched and went to the kitchen and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich. I was hemmed in by the fact that in the here and now, I needed to graduate high school, graduate college, and get at least one graduate degree to make something of myself. It didn’t matter that I had already gotten an associates, two bachelors, and a masters degree the first time around. That didn’t count.

When I got out of high school in ’73 I had gone to Rensselaer, RPI, for a bachelors in chemistry. Immediately after graduating in ’77, I had gone to night school and gotten an MBA. Then, ten years later, in a new job, I had gone back to school for an associates and then a bachelors in computer science. If I was to repeat the sequence, I would go nuts.

But I could make some changes. As I thought about it, I started to get a wacky kind of idea. Way back when, in ’78 the first time around, I had toyed with the idea of switching majors to become a chemical engineer. I have always been comfortable in an industrial setting and working in engineering related fields, probably thanks to my dad being an engineer. When I mentioned this to him, he just nodded and had a chemical engineer he knew talk to me. We all had a very pleasant dinner and discussion, and at the end I realized that I was actually a much better chemist than I was an engineer. I stayed a chemist and compensated by specializing in industrial chemistry. Any chemist can make drugs in the lab — I could make them by the ton in a factory! I spent the better part of ten years doing this.

But it was only after several years that I realized that I was actually a much better mathematician than I was a chemist! By the time I got through with my degrees I had certainly had enough math classes. Quantum mechanics is nothing but another semester of calculus. I picked up operations research and linear algebra getting the MBA, and so forth. By the time I got the degrees in computer science, I had the equivalent of at least a bachelors or a masters.

There used to be a television show called Numbers, about a math professor who had a brother who was an FBI agent. Every week he would come up with some strange aspect of set theory or number theory or information science to figure out who the killers were. In a hundred people, I would have been the only one who could not only understand what he was talking about, but could also figure out the shortcuts and discrepancies the show had to take.

My first foray into this had been at RPI. Everybody in the school had to take three semesters of calculus (the place is nerd heaven) plus either a semester of differential equations or a semester of computer programming. I had suffered enough with calculus so I took computer programming. Even though I was stoned and drunk about ninety percent of the semester, I still managed a solid B in the class. I even considered getting into programming, but no, I was a chemist; I put that silly thought out of my mind. The funniest part was that when I was a senior and needed an elective, I actually took differential equations on a lark and got another solid B, again half-baked the entire semester. A math degree, especially considering that I remembered most of my math, would be a breeze. I was going to have to give this some serious thought.

I reviewed the rest of my books. English 8 was simplistic bullshit. It didn’t get interesting until senior high. The same was true of Social Studies, which didn’t break down into history until then. You would get a year of American History and then a year of World History, and then a year of whatever subjects were trendy. In the eighth grade we took General Science, not taking anything specialized until Biology in the ninth grade, a year before the rest of the kids in the school. This wasn’t all that bad, however. Our Science teacher was Mr. Rodriguez. A generation later he would be considered Hispanic or Latino; in 1968 he was known as the ‘little spic.’ I didn’t much care. That ‘little spic’ was the reason I became a chemist. He was a damn good teacher!

I was still reviewing things when Mom got home from Hutzlers. She gave me a curious look when she saw me studying, but her only comment was that I damn well better be right about getting back into school. I just smiled and nodded. When Suzie and Ham got home, he just ignored me. Suzie teased me about my black eye and I offered to give her one. She just giggled and ran off to Mom. Ten seconds later I heard a loud “Carling! Will you knock it off!?”

I just yelled back, “Yes, Mom.” I didn’t mean it. There had to be some way to have some more fun with this.

Dad got home about half past five. He just told me that he had a phone call from Steiner. We had an appointment at school at nine the next morning, and supposedly everything was worked out. Dad was doubtful; he had a hearty mistrust of all lawyers. I remember dating a girl in high school who had gone on to become a lawyer. Years later Mom asked if I remembered her. When I said I did, she mentioned that she had become a lawyer, and had married another lawyer, and that they now had two kids. Dad promptly quipped, “Oh my God, now they’re breeding!”

Dinner would be in half an hour. I found Suzie watching TV in the family room. I sat down on the ratty old couch we had down there. “Want to play a joke on Mom?” I asked.

Suzie giggled and nodded. In many ways she was the most normal of us. She grew up to become a nurse, married a divorced cop with two boys, and had another two boys with him. They did very well together. Her biggest problem when she was growing up was her teenage years. She was a real pain in the tail, to the point I nicknamed her the Ice Queen Bitch From Hell. My parents used to say that she had ‘growing pains.’ I took this to mean the normal adolescent issues, which seemed to me to be wholly inadequate to describe her, but this actually was their clever little euphemism for actual pains. She had terrible PMS and menstrual cramping, which made her miserable for almost two weeks of every month. It was so bad that her gynecologist put her on the Pill to control her cycle, which worked wonders for her, though it totally freaked out our father.

“Do you have a water color paint set?” I thought I had seen her painting with it the other day. She nodded and I told her to go bring it down to the laundry room. She scampered off.

She was back a couple of minutes later, acting all sneaky and surreptitious. “Okay, what are we going to do?”

I opened up the kit and grinned. “We’re going to give you a black eye!”

“Cool!”

I took a brush and wet it at the laundry room sink, and then used it to wet the black water color pigment. I then had her stand still and close her eyes. I only did her right eye, to match mine, even though she wanted both done. We got finished just as Mom called us to supper.

“Okay. You need to wait here. Wait until I get upstairs to the table, and then you come in last. And don’t touch it. Don’t scratch your eye or get your eye wet or the paint will run.”

“Maybe I can go to school like this tomorrow!” she said excitedly.

I had to smile at that. “Yeah, I bet Mom would love that idea. You should make sure to ask her. Now wait until Mom calls you.”

I headed upstairs to find the other three already seated. I immediately sat down in my normal seat to the right of Dad and next to Hamilton. Dad sat at the head of the table and Mom at the other end. Suzie’s normal place was opposite Ham and me.

“Suzie! We’re waiting for you!” called out Mom.

I endeavored mightily to keep a straight face. Suzie bounded up the stairs and into the dining room. “Sorry I’m late.” She had an enormous grin on her face as she sat down at the table.

Mom stared at her with a mixture of awe and horror. “Oh my God!” Dad took the opposite tack, simply breaking down into raucous laughter. I had to hide my face behind my hands and bite my napkin to keep from joining him.

“Carling made me a Black Eyed Suzie after all!” she announced, which totally set my father off. He was laughing so hard he was crying, and even Mom was smiling through her disapproving looks.

“Hey, you should have taken me seriously this morning,” I said, breaking down and laughing. Even Hamilton had started to laugh by now, not so much at Suzie as at my parents’ reactions.

“I wanted him to do both eyes,” said Suzie.

“You’d look like a raccoon then,” I replied.

“Cool! Mom, can I go to school tomorrow like this?”

Dad laughed some more, and Mom simply repeated, “Oh my God!” She began wagging a finger at me and smiling. “I’ll get you back for this one! I assume it comes off, or I really will get you back.”

“It was water color. It will come off in the bathtub tonight.” I grinned. “I debated making camouflage paint like they use in the army, but I figured I didn’t have the time.”

“You can’t do that,” said Ham scornfully.

“Of course I can. Do you have any idea what that stuff even is? It’s nothing but lipstick with brown and green instead of the red. Stick it in a green plastic container and it’s no longer Sunset Kiss but Macho Manly. I figured I could grind up a charcoal briquette and mix it with a little Vaseline and do it. Kind of greasy, though, and I didn’t have time to experiment.” He looked disdainful but I ignored him.

Dad settled down enough to start serving dinner, although every time he looked at my sister he would chuckle. I was sentenced to cleaning up after dinner, while Mom took Suzie to the bathroom to wash up. There were to be no black eyes at school the next day, or at least none that didn’t belong to me.

Chapter 4: Back To School

I set the alarm clock for an hour early the next morning, which made it my normal time to get up as an adult. Back when I was a kid the first time, I was a very late riser, but after forty years working I tended to get up by seven or earlier, even on my days off.

When the alarm went off the next morning, Hamilton grumbled and bitched he was going to tell Mom. I ignored him and pulled on some gym shorts and a tee shirt and sneakers. I also grabbed a sweatshirt. It was November after all. I quietly went down the stairs and out the back door.

This was going to be a major change in my overall life plan. It was one thing to accelerate my schooling. I was a nerd before and would be a nerd again. Previously, however, I was a couch potato, and it showed. I was skinny and weak for many years, but as I grew older, I started putting on a couple of pounds a year like clockwork. For many years I was simply filling out to a normal size. Then I started getting fuller, becoming plump, chubby, a few pounds overweight, fluffy — fat. By the time I was in my late fifties I was a good fifty pounds too heavy. Clothing wouldn’t fit, my health went downhill, and it exacerbated the normal problems you get with aging.

I didn’t plan on being a jock, but I did plan to get in better shape and stay there. I also planned to learn some self defense techniques. Nobody knew better than me that the fight on the school bus was a real anomaly. I won by surprise and aggression, not by skill. One thing I damn sure wouldn’t do again was smoke. I had spent half my life smoking cigars and cigarettes, and it’s just not good for you. As much as I liked it, and don’t ever think smokers don’t enjoy it, it’s terrible for your health. After I quit I put on 30 pounds immediately, and was still healthier being fat than I was when I smoked.

I had no hopes of becoming a jock. I was always going to be too slim and wiry for that. I could, however, build up my stamina and some muscle. It was going to have to be a long term commitment. I knew enough about human nature to know that if I got in the habit now, it would be a lot easier to continue into the future. It’s incredibly easier to keep the weight off in the beginning than to try to lose it later on.

Life was simple. I decided to run around the block. I alternated jogging and walking for a half hour. I didn’t do much, maybe a mile and a half or two miles total, which isn’t much more than an average walking speed. I made a couple of laps around the block, which was big, and on the second I added another block in as well. I was sweating by the time I got back to the house and let myself in.

“What in the world are you doing?” asked my father. Normally he would have been off to work, but today he was reading the paper and drinking coffee.

“Getting in shape.”

“What, so you can get in fights again?”

I grinned. “No, so I can run away!” He just snorted at that and I went upstairs and took a shower. I made it quick, since it’s the only bathroom the three of us kids can use. Hamilton was waiting outside the door when I got out, a towel wrapped around my waist.

Hamilton brushed past me into the bathroom. Suzie opened the door to her bedroom and looked out into the hall, to see me standing there with a towel around my waist. “Gross!” she shrieked and slammed the door shut. I laughed and went to my bedroom to dress. I had grossed out my baby sister and it wasn’t even breakfast time. My day was complete! Everything else was going to be like ice cream on top of the pie!

At 8:30 Dad and I drove over to the school. Steiner wanted us to meet him in the parking lot. We found a space in the visitor’s lot. Since none of the kids had cars, none of the spaces were filled by student cars. We got out and waited for the lawyer to show up, which he did about five minutes later. He got out carrying a brief case. His only instructions were for me to keep my mouth shut at all times, and for Dad not to lose his temper. I smiled at this, but Dad glared at me and I promptly found it a good time to look at something else — anything else!

We went inside and I led them down the hallway to the offices. In the future schools would be locked fortresses, with guards and check in procedures, but not back in the Sixties. You just walked in. In the office, we announced ourselves and were sat on the cheesy modernistic couch they had picked up somewhere. A couple of minutes later we were summoned into the Holy of Holies, Mr. Butterfield’s office. He was the Principal, and he and Mr. Warner, the Vice-Principal were waiting for us. Neither was smiling. They really weren’t smiling when my father introduced Steiner as our lawyer.

They got right to the point. I was expelled for attacking children on the school bus. They weren’t at all sure why I wasn’t serving time in the Maryland State Penitentiary already, but they didn’t care. No matter what that cop said the other day, I was history.

Dad’s face got red, but he kept his mouth shut. I just sat there like a bump on a log. When Mr. Butterfield and Mr. Warner ran out of steam, Mr. Steiner spoke up. “Okay, gentlemen, it’s my turn now. Let me make a few things clear.” He opened up his brief case and pulled out several thick documents wrapped in heavy blue paper. Everyone’s eyes went to them immediately. “First, my client is not under arrest and has never been under arrest. He was taken to the police station for questioning and sent home the same day. If you were to say or do anything which implies otherwise, I formally warn you that we will be suing for slander and/or libel.”

They looked at him, stunned. How dare anybody come into the Inner Sanctum to tell them what to do? He ignored their sensibilities. “Next, the three students which my client allegedly attacked have all been arrested. They have been formally charged and arraigned on multiple counts of extortion, conspiracy, assault, and battery. More may be coming. Don’t just take my word for it, either. Maybe you missed it, but it made this morning’s edition of the Baltimore Sun.” He slapped down a copy of the newspaper, with a circle drawn around a small article. No names were mentioned, since everybody was a minor, but the fact that three boys had attacked another on a Towsontown Junior High school bus and had been arrested was noted. “All three boys are currently handcuffed to their beds at GBMC, in the prison ward. A judge actually went out there and arraigned them in the hospital.”

GBMC, the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, was a big hospital in Baltimore County. It was the local trauma center, a good place to go when you got the shit kicked out of you. On a side note, it was also a place you could generally find a cop to make an arrest. Steiner made it sound a lot more dramatic than it really was. At the arraignment, to which the judge brought a public defender, he immediately turned the kids over to their parents and the public defender washed his hands of the whole thing and told the parents they should get their own lawyers.

“So, gentlemen, your premise is incorrect. It is not my client who did the attacking, but your three innocent children. So, here’s how we are going to handle that.” He slapped down one of the blue documents. “That is a court order, a judicial restraining order, prohibiting you from punishing my client without first taking it up with the judge in Family Court. If you do so and lose, which you will, the school district will be responsible for court costs. Additionally, you will open yourselves up, both through the district and in your own persons, to a countersuit. Gentlemen, I will take you to the cleaners.”

He then slapped down a second blue sheaf. “That is another restraining order, ordering you to keep those three boys out of this school and no closer than 500 feet while my client is in school. Copies have also been served this morning on each of those boys and their parents. Gentlemen, you expelled the wrong students. We have corrected your error. Again, failure to obey these restraining orders without judicial approval will result in civil penalties against both the school district and you personally. Is that understood?”

Neither man could do more than stare at the blue documents and sputter incoherently. Steiner continued on. “I think I am going to require something more concrete, gentlemen. I have officially served you with legal orders. Now, I assume you will have counsel for the school district review these, but I assure you, they are quite legal. Now, I expect my client to be able to return to class, today, and ride the school bus home. Is that clearly understood? Please answer.”

Warner was stupefied. Butterfield simply looked at us and said, “Yes.”

Steiner stood up. “Then we are done here. My card, gentlemen, in case you or your attorneys, both the district’s and your own, wish to contact me.” He dropped a few business cards on the desk, and then we all stood up and went out of the office. He led us back to the front door. He stopped there.

“Carl, you stay here. Go to your regular class. If there is any trouble from the teachers or the administration, let your Dad know and he will call me. Don’t do one damn thing that will get you in trouble, okay?”

“Uh, yeah, sure,” I agreed.

“Is this for real?” asked my Dad.

“What the orders? Sure. I play golf with the judge. He’d have to recuse himself, but it will never get that far. Those two are so buffaloed it’s not funny. It’s like Carl said yesterday, a detective beats a bus driver any day of the week. The arrest just nailed them to the cross.” He smiled at me. “Are you in the Boy Scouts, by any chance?”

Where the fuck did that come from? “Uh, yes sir, Troop 896.”

“St. Paul’s? Good for you? First Class yet?”

“Second, but almost to First. Why?”

“I’m the Adviser to an Explorer Post in Timonium. You can transfer when you turn fourteen. I want you to think about it.”

Holy shit! Now I knew where I remembered him from! I had joined that Explorer Post anyway. All I remembered of the leadership was that the Adviser was a rich lawyer and his son was the Post President. Nobody cared, though, since he had a monstrously large SUV that could haul the trailer with all our gear. They specialized in white water rafting, which I thought was infinitely cool!

“What’s the specialty?”

“White water canoeing and rafting. We even have our own canoes and rafts,” he replied.

“Cool! I promise, I’ll give it some thought!”

“Good. We can use a guy like you.” He shook our hands and headed out, followed closely by my father. His words were somewhat more succinct, telling me to stay out of trouble, ‘or else!’

It was about half past when I finished with Dad and Mr. Steiner, already fifteen minutes into the second period. According to the schedule in my binder, I was supposed to be in English class in Room 214 with Mrs. Turnbull. I couldn’t remember where 214 was and barely remembered her. First I had to find my locker and dump my crap off. I rooted out my binder and found my locker and combination taped to the front inside cover. High security, you bet!

I wandered around the halls getting familiarized to an extent and found my locker. Boy, that was like looking into a time capsule! I would need to sort through that at some point. I tossed my bag and jacket in there and went off in search of 214. Finding it, I looked through the window in the door and saw Mrs. Turnbull standing near a blackboard at one end of the room. I moved on to the other door and slid in through the back.

There was no hope of doing this secretively. Mrs. Turnbull stopped and stared at me as everyone in the room turned in their chairs and looked at me, goggle eyed and slack jawed. A memory came back and I realized that the empty chair in the fourth row on the right was mine. I made my way over and slid into it.

“Welcome back, Mr. Buckman. I had heard you were no longer with us,” said Mrs. Turnbull. She was a nondescript but witty and sharp woman in her forties.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” I replied.

She smiled. “So I gather, Mr. Twain, so I gather. Might I assume you will continue to grace us with your presence in the foreseeable future?”

“And a most gracious presence it will be!” Mrs. Turnbull had enjoyed witty repartee back in the day. She didn’t mind a student arguing or disagreeing with her, just so long as they used good English, proper phrasing, and refused to swear or insult.

She nodded at me. “We’ll see about that.” She went back towards the board and resumed her lecture.

As soon as Turnbull’s back was turned, when she began to write something on the blackboard, Katie Lowenthal, who sat next to me turned and whispered, “What happened! I saw you go to jail!”

Without turning, Mrs. Turnbull loudly said, “Miss Lowenthal, questions such as that are best answered after school. Would you like a detention later on to allow you time to make a list?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then spare the discussion until after class.”

Katie gave me a dirty look, but I just shrugged my shoulders. Katie was one of my best friends in school, and she was a girl, but she was never a girlfriend. We had known each other since our days at Hampton Elementary. She was another college prep kid, scary smart, and we could talk about anything. She was rather roly-poly throughout our time in school. We totally lost track of each other after graduation, when I moved hundreds of miles away and stayed away, but ran across each other at our twenty year reunion. She had become a doctor, was doing research in oncology, and was living in Southern California. She had slimmed down, gotten an amazing tan, and looked very foxy. I got the impression she might have been interested in a little reunion get-together on our own later, but I was with Marilyn and just smiled away the tentative approach.

Anyway, that was all years in the future, or the past, or something. We muddled through the remainder of the class, and I could feel the occasional stares as people wondered what I was doing here. The fight on the bus, the expulsion, and the three boys in the hospital would have been amazing in themselves, but add that I was arrested and hauled off in handcuffs and you just knew that I was the talk of the last couple of days. Now I show back up like nothing has happened.

As soon as I got out of the class to the hallway Katie was in my face, with some other friends around us. “What are you doing here!? You’re supposed to be in jail!”

“Yeah, you escape or something?” asked somebody behind her.

I just gave a laugh. “It’s nothing like that. I was never arrested. It was all a misunderstanding.”

“No it wasn’t! I saw the police put the cuffs on you!” she protested.

I just leaned against a wall of lockers. “Yeah, but that was because the bus driver screwed up. That’s why the police were here later that morning. Did they talk to you then?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, me and Betty and Ray. They wanted to know what happened. It was kind of cool. Ray said he asked if you were going to jail but the police officer wouldn’t say. Mr. Warner stayed with us the entire time and the police officer kept telling him to let us talk. He kept trying to tell what happened, like he was there or something.”

“Figures. Anyway, as soon as they knew what really happened I went home. It’s no big deal.”

“It is too a big deal! They had you in handcuffs like on TV. Did they fingerprint you? Take your picture?” Ray Shorn had come up next to Katie and was hitting me with all sorts of questions. He was one of the normal kids, but was a good guy anyway. He lived three houses up and across the street, and when we were little we had made a tree fort in the woods behind his house.

“Nope. None of that. They just asked me some questions and sent me home.”

“What about the Strutters and Tewkesie? What happened to them?” asked Katie.

“Don’t know. Haven’t seen them? They haven’t been to school?” I asked innocently.

She stared at me. “They all went off in a couple of ambulances. There was so much blood that Marcie fainted and little Billy Smith puked up breakfast all over his brother.”

Ray laughed. “Yeah, it was so cool!”

So much for being innocent. That was pretty funny, in a black comedy sort of way. I had to smile at that and shrug. “Hey, they started it, not me.”

“Where did you learn to fight like that?” asked Tommy Toner, another guy from the college prep crew. “What, you some kind of karate guy or something?” It was years before Kung Fu ever made it to television, so at least I didn’t have to put up with that.

“I just got lucky, I guess.”

The bell rang and we had to split up and move along. Next class was Algebra 1. I wondered just how bad it was going to be. It turned out to be just about as bad as I thought it would. It had been pretty easy and straightforward the first time around, and it sure hadn’t gotten any harder since then. I was going to have to do something about this. I decided to think some more about it and speak to the teacher tomorrow.

The rest of the day was pretty much the same. I was a celebrity, in a dark and creepy sort of way, and I spent the day rehashing the entire event between classes, and the time in class rehashing ancient lessons. It got funny, though, when it was time to go home. I followed Katie out to the buses, not trusting my memory as to where in the lineup it would be. The driver refused to let me on. That led to an argument between him and Mr. Warner, who oversaw us getting on the buses, which got very interesting. It ended when Warner threatened to have the driver yanked off the bus and have Joe Jenkins, the head maintenance guy, drive us home. I was allowed on the bus, but ordered to sit in the first row with the little kids, so he could keep an eye on me. I just smiled and sat where he pointed. When one of the little kids asked why I was being punished, I just answered, “I guess he likes me!” which got me an order to shut up or he was throwing me off.

The ride home was quiet, since none of the seventh graders I was riding with knew who I was, other than ‘the guy in the back who got in the fight and went to jail.’ My buddies, who would all have been bugging me, and any friends of the three ex-students were all behind us. The bus driver told me he was going to see about having me removed, no matter what Warner said, but I just shrugged and ignored him.

The next morning I went running again, same route as before, same crick in my side as before. It would have to get better sooner or later. Daisy ran with me the first lap, but then I let her into the house and continued on. I suspected she was smarter than I was. The bus driver was different however, a woman this time. Katie asked her what happened to our old driver and she said that he was on a different route. She didn’t say anything about any assigned seating to me, so I just moved on down to my normal seat. One of the ninth graders, a buddy of Tewkesie, gave me a dirty look, but I just looked him straight in the eye and he continued on down the aisle. After he passed, I slowly turned and saw him sitting down. He looked at me again, silently daring me to do something, but I just stared him down and after about ten seconds he looked away.

Ray reached across the aisle and punched my arm. I lowered my head to his. “Are you trying to start trouble?” he whispered.

“Trying to stop trouble. I’m a peaceful kind of guy. Trust me.”

“Yeah? Well remind me before you get all peaceful on my ass. I don’t need too much of that kind of peaceful!”

“I’m a lover, not a fighter!” I protested.

“You’re full of shit, is what you are.”

Classes were back to normal for me. Algebra was a total waste. I went up to Mrs. Bakkley after class and asked, “Mrs. Bakkley, when would I be able to speak to you about the class?”

“What’s on your mind, Carl?”

“I want to know how I go about testing out of the class.”

She looked at me curiously. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Is there some kind of test you can give me that I can take, that if I pass it, I get credit for Algebra 1?”

Her eyes popped wide at that. “You want to drop Algebra?”

“No, I want to do both years now, this year. Can I do it?”

She stared at me. Some of the kids from the next class were drifting in, but we ignored them. “What did you have in mind?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure, but I was wondering, I finish this class by Christmas, and then catch up and finish Algebra 2 by next summer. Do they use a different book? Could I do it?”

“No, it’s the same book. We only do about half this year, and finish it off next year. Why do you want to do this? What do you plan on doing next year?”

“Geometry.”

“We don’t even teach that here!”

“No, but I bet I can take it over at Towson High somehow.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “You need to get to class. Let me ask around about this. I don’t even know if you would be allowed to do this.”

I grinned. “Do us both a favor. Don’t mention my name. I don’t think Mr. Butterfield is in the mood to be generous when my name comes up.”

She laughed at this. “I think you’re right. Now get out of here and let me talk to some people.”

I didn’t say anything to my folks that night. My parents would be upset because it messed up their intricately crafted plans for my future, even though it was advancing them. Mom, especially, liked being in control. Dad was somewhat easier going, but not by much. I had always avoided them in any serious discussion of classes and grades, because it was always a painful subject, painful in the sense that the oak pledge paddle invariably would be involved. I dreaded nights when the PTA had their meetings and my parents went to school to see the teachers. Since I was never ‘living up to my potential’, a beating was held as soon as they got home. It would be better to ask forgiveness than permission. If the school allowed me to do it, I would bring them into it then. If the school balked, I would have to get my parents to somehow force them, and this had a possibility to backfire on me. No, it was better to wait for Mrs. Bakkley to talk to me next week.

As for my siblings, Suzie was in the second grade and could care less. Hamilton would care because he was a snoopy asshole and couldn’t mind his own business. He would spend the weekend telling me why I couldn’t be allowed to do it, and then telling the entire neighborhood what I was trying to do. It would be infinitely better if my plans were presented as a done deal.

I continued my running over the weekend. Saturday was pretty straightforward, getting up with the alarm clock, running a lap with Daisy, and then running a bigger lap without her. I still had the crick in my side, but it seemed to come later in the run, and didn’t seem as bad. I also shaved a minute off the run. Mom gave me a funny look when I came in, but I just repeated the old line about ‘he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.’ Later that afternoon I rooted around in the garage looking for something I could use as weights. The only things I could find were a couple of bricks I could do some arm curls with. I also tried doing pushups, but the calisthenics seemed to be too much. I was going to have to work up to that.

Sunday morning sucked. We were Lutheran, on both sides of the family, and while we didn’t have to go to church every week like the Catholics did, I did have to go to Sunday School. Worst of all was the fact that by the time I got to college I had lost my faith. I had already seen and learned too much about the wickedness of man to believe what a church, any church, had to say about anything. My folks, however, were members in good standing of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran, and I was going to Sunday School and then confirmation class and communion or else Dad was going to tie me to a stake and Mom was going to light a match.

To be fair about it, St. Paul’s was a pretty nice place. We had a fairly new pastor, Pastor Joe Needham, who had an excellent way with young people. He was married and had adopted a couple of nice little ones and lived in Timonium. There was an active teen program and Pastor Joe was an avid camper and canoer, often leading church group camping and canoeing trips. He and I got along just fine. I often would stop by his house to gab even after moving away, for many years, just to see an old friend and shoot the shit. We often talked about my problems with my family, but we always showed each other pictures of our kids.

Now, however, going to Sunday School was like an hour in a communist reeducation camp. Years later I would joke to Marilyn that I used to be a real Bible thumper when I was a kid, but then I figured out the Devil made chocolate chip cookies, and I was a lost cause. She was a hard core Catholic, and this irked her to all get out. It was a Communion Sunday as well. Unlike the Catholics, we only did Communion once a month. On those days it was like a double dose — Sunday School followed by an hour plus of church. As we left, Pastor Joe asked if I wanted to become an altar boy, but I replied, “Only if I get put in charge of the wine.” Pastor Joe and my father both laughed at this, but Mom gave me a huffy complaint and smacked the back of my head. I guess the agreement not to hit me anymore was null and void while standing in the House of God.

Monday at school, Mrs. Bakkley asked me to stay after class. She briefly said that we needed to talk, and asked if I could meet her in the classroom at lunchtime. She even gave me a hall pass. It sounded positive to me. If the answer was no, she would have just said that.

I swung by the cafeteria at lunchtime, but simply bought a couple of apples and stuck one in my pocket. I ate the other on the way back to Mrs. Bakkley’s class. She was sitting at her desk grading some tests when I knocked on the open door and came in. She put down the test she was working on and looked up at me. “Grab a seat and bring it over here.” She pointed at the side of the desk.

“Yes, ma’am.” I pulled one out of the front row and sat down facing her.

She eyed me curiously for a second. “Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You want to go through both Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 this year, and then somehow take a high school level course next year. Is that correct?” I just nodded, and she continued, “Why? What brought this on? I have to tell you, your grades so far are average at best. What makes you think you can even do this?”

“I just decided to quit fooling around and do something with my life. I decided to stop goofing off so much.”

“This isn’t just stopping the goofing off. Taking two math classes in a single year is a lot more than that. And next year? Are you planning on actually attending class at Towson High? Are you planning on skipping a grade?”

“Not really. I figure that if I go over there and say that I managed to pull this off, they would have no reason not to let me do some kind of independent study. My understanding is that they have students already moving ahead in some cases, even taking some classes over at Towson State for dual credit. I want to do that,” I announced.

“Well!” She sat back and eyed me for a moment. “What brought this on?! Did your parents tell you to ask about this?”

I stared at her. That seemed totally out of left field. “My parents? They don’t even know about this!”

“You haven’t talked to them about doubling up in math?”

“God no! It will make life a lot simpler if I simply present this as a done deal, a fait accompli if you will. I will admit, though, my mom will be all in favor of it. I’ll finally be living up to my potential. Why?”

She rolled her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen Little Johnny get an A on a test and the next day his parents come in thinking he’s Sir Isaac Newton brought back to life.” She waved it aside. “So, seriously, what brought this on? Does this have something to do with the fight on the bus the other day?” My eyes opened wide at that. “Yeah, I heard all about it. Do you think you can get out of here a year early and escape the bullies? Towson High will be even worse!”

I just shrugged. “It’s a yes and no answer. It’s more like I just turned thirteen and decided to do something, make something of myself. I want to take control of my life. Up until now everybody and their brother has been telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it. No more! I want to be in control. Nobody’s going to bully me anymore and I want to have some say in what classes I take. I think I can do this. Will you help me? Or not?”

“Hunh.” She sat there stumped for a moment. “Well, I might, although if you think you can take control of your life, you are sorely mistaken. I don’t think any of us are really in control of anything. Here’s the deal. If we were to compress all of this year into half the year, this would be about the midpoint of the semester. Tomorrow, after school, I will give you a midterm test. It will cover not only what we have studied so far, but the topics I will be teaching up through Christmas. You take the test and I grade it. You do well and I will figure out how to do this. You fail, and you stay like now. This is it. One test, make or break. That’s the deal. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am!” I said eagerly. “What chapters will the test cover?”

An eye raised at this, as if I was calling her bluff. She gave me the chapters to be covered. Then she said, “This is a one time shot. You will get one hour, no curve on the grade. I don’t care how you finagle staying after class or how you plan to get home. This is your shot at glory. If you don’t show up for any reason, it’s all over. Are we in agreement?”

I stuck out my hand. “Yes, ma’am! Do we need to spit on our palms to make it official?”

She snorted in laughter at this. She simply took my hand and shook it. “I think we can avoid that.”

I got up and left, pulling out my second apple and eating it on the way to my next class. I said nothing to any of my classmates, or to my parents that evening. It would be a lot simpler to keep them out of it until I had it locked up. I will admit that I studied those chapters awfully hard that night, reading the first half of the book twice and doing a bunch of problems at the end of each chapter, but it was still a snap. I spent more time writing the answers down than in figuring them out. The next day, I lingered after class and confirmed the time I was to show up in the classroom. I told my parents I was staying late to study in the library, and that I would walk home. It was only about a mile and a half from the school to home, so it wasn’t a big deal.

The test was fifty problems, seemingly split evenly among each chapter of the book. I was done in about forty-five minutes, even though I had to ask for help twice, simply to make sure I understood what the problem was asking for. I handed Mrs. Bakkley my test and sat back down in my seat.

“Okay, you want the good news or the bad news now, huh?” she asked. I nodded. Suddenly my mouth was as dry as dust. “Alright, let’s see.” She pulled her answer key out of her briefcase and graded my test as I waited. She was using a red pen, and I felt an annoying sense of dread as she would make cryptic marks on the paper. It sure seemed like she was making a lot more marks on the test paper than could possibly be warranted. Finally she put down her pen and sat back, to look at me curiously. “Huh!” She wordlessly handed me the page.

My nerves were shot as I turned it to face me. 97! I stared at it, and then glanced up at her. It wasn’t perfect. Was it good enough?

“I wrote that test harder than I would have for a normal class, and you just aced it!” she exclaimed.

“Is it good enough?” I asked, barely able to speak.

“Good enough and beyond. If you want to do this, I’ll help.”

I felt like buckets of sweat washed through me. I suddenly felt lightheaded and ran out of the room to the bathroom across the hall. I just made it to a toilet stall in time to lose my lunch. My guts heaved and I puked up about three years of meals. After a minute or so, I got to my feet weakly and saw Mrs. Bakkley staring at me from the doorway, horrified. “Carl! Are you alright?”

I moved to a sink and ran cold water over my face and through my hair. I spit out the aftertaste of my vomit and breathed deeply, then looked at myself in the mirror. I was grinning. I washed up again and grabbed a few paper towels. I turned to face my math teacher. “I am now!”

Chapter 5: Planning For The Future

Taking control of my life meant that I was going to be in charge of the timetable, and this was a major step along the way. Mrs. Bakkley told me to go home and she would make some arrangements. I would need to discuss this with my parents and meet with her and the administration for permission. She was also going to speak to one of the math teachers over at Towson High. She would tell me when the meeting was.

On Thursday she told me everything was all set, and that she had made an appointment with Mr. Butterfield for after school on Monday. I would need to get at least one of my parents there at four.

At dinner that night I asked them if either of them could come. The results were predictable. Dad wanted to know what I had done now, and Mom wanted to know if I was being punished or given detention. “Your faith in me is overwhelming!” I responded, which brought outraged cries about ‘lip’ and ‘backtalk’ but no hitting. Suzie just stared, not understanding. She liked school and didn’t understand why staying after was bad. Hamilton was much more along the line that I was being punished for something, a feeling for which he had an inordinate amount of glee. It was bad enough that I had to mention to Dad that Ham was really starting to get on my nerves and I was starting to work up the energy to give him a good thumping. This got Dad to give me a stern warning to leave my little brother alone, but it also got him to chew Ham’s ass ragged. He left me alone after that.

Mom pushed for an explanation of the meeting, and I simply told her, truthfully, that it involved getting permission to take an advanced class. I left it at that, and when they pushed, I simply stated that it would make more sense on Monday. Mom would ask Mrs. Bonner across the street to keep an eye on Suzie and Hamilton after school.

Larry and Lenore Bonner were our parents’ best friends. He was an executive at Black & Decker and she worked part-time at the County offices in Towson. They were a few years older than my folks, and their children were several years older than us. Their youngest daughter Shelley, a senior over at Towson High, was a frequent babysitter, but Mrs. Bonner often sat for us.

I continued running every morning, always taking Daisy for a quick run first, and was now doing three laps around the neighborhood. One day I had Dad drive the route with me and we used his odometer to check the distance. Our best guess was that two laps, one small with Daisy, and then one large by myself, worked out to about a mile and a half. By now the cramp in my side was history, and I was able to speed up enough to add in another small lap. Dad noticed this, and he also noticed me lifting the bricks down in the garage, and asked if I wanted a set of real weights for Christmas. I decided some barbells would be a better choice and told him so. He just nodded and said he would think about it.

Hamilton was getting to be quite annoying. He was bitching constantly about everything I did. When I got up early to run, he would complain I was waking him up. I started taking my clothes to the bathroom to dress and he complained about my opening the drawers. I started laying out my clothes at night before I went to bed and he complained about where I left them. He started turning off my alarm clock, so I had to double check it each night, and placed it on the far side of the bed where he couldn’t get at it without going over me. He had a major case of schadenfreude going on; it wasn’t enough to feel good, others had to feel bad.

It really came to a head at dinner on the Saturday night before our meeting with Mrs. Bakkley. Right there at the dinner table, he decided to tattle on me, that I wasn’t sleeping in my pajamas, but in my underwear.

In my humble opinion, pajamas are one of the stupidest inventions ever invented. Really, clothing to sleep in? Mind you, I certainly don’t mind the look when a woman is wearing a pajama top and nothing else, but on guys it just looks dumb. My mother, however, insisted on them. The day I went off to college I started sleeping in my briefs and an undershirt, like normal men do. I’ve never worn pajamas since then, and had no intention of restarting now.

He sat there looking smugly at me as Mom stared at me, horrified. I just looked at him and disgustedly asked, “Why in the world could you possibly care for what I sleep in?”

He smugly replied, “It’s the rules! I bet you get punished now!”

“Christ on a crutch!” I muttered under my breath.

“Carling!” protested Mom. “I heard that.”

“Sorry.”

Hamilton started to laugh, saying I had been cussing but I think Dad had enough out of him. He was told to shut up, or else. Ham looked daggers at me, which I just ignored.

Mom, however, was all worked up about my improper sleeping attire. “Carling, why aren’t you wearing your pajamas to bed at nights?!” she demanded.

“Because I don’t want to wear them.” Simple answer.

“But you are supposed to sleep in pajamas.”

I smiled at that, blandly. “Oh? Do you wear pajamas?” I asked. I already knew the answer to that was a resounding NO! Mom preferred to wear very small and skimpy sleepshirts, although I also suspected Dad preferred her to wear them as well. At 5’10" tall, Mom was slim and very leggy, and a real looker. She was fairly slender, an A cup, but was within five pounds of the day she had married, and that after three children. She was an elegant and good looking woman, and she was very fortunate that my father was 6’1" tall, so she could wear high heels and not be taller than him. In the future she would be considered a MILF or a cougar, but back then she was just a hot mom.

Mom had the decency to blush as she stumbled out, “Uhhhh…”

“Really? I think I know what that means.” I hooked my thumb over at Dad, who was now grinning. “How about Dad? Does he wear pajamas?” I knew the answer to that as well. He wore briefs and an undershirt, too, or at least until Mom got into bed with him. For all of her coldness with Hamilton and me, Mom was decidedly not cold with Dad. The romance was alive and well across the hall.

Mom blushed again.

I looked over at Suzie and grinned. “I hope the pajama police don’t find me! You want some extra pajamas?” They’d look like they were made by Omar the Tentmaker on her.

“Yuck! You’ve worn them!”

“Yeah, they probably have my cooties,” I said, which got a laugh from Dad.

She stuck her tongue out at me, which I returned, and Mom began protesting that as well. It was a lost cause for her. Hamilton tried to protest but Dad shut him down again. I really began to wonder about him. He had some mental health issues on our first go-around; this time looked to be the same, and I wasn’t sure how much I was going to tolerate this time.

That Monday I hung around the library after school until my parents were scheduled to show up. It was always open late for students who needed to do homework. At four I met them in the lobby and we went into the office. Mrs. Bakkley was waiting there with Mr. Butterfield, and another woman I wasn’t sure I knew.

Butterfield pointed at me and asked Mrs. Bakkley, “This is the student you are talking about? Him?” I definitely got a warm and fuzzy feeling.

“Why don’t we all sit down,” she replied. She led the way into a teacher’s conference room. We all took seats around the table.

“This is your meeting,” he replied. “I think it’s a mistake, myself,” he added nastily.

My parents were thoroughly confused now, but getting angry. Mrs. Bakkley took on the lead role. Turning to me, she asked, “Did you explain your plan to your parents?”

“No, I just said the meeting was about taking some advanced classes. Nothing else.”

She nodded and turned to my folks. “Let me start off with an explanation. Last week Carl came to me with the suggestion that he take both Algebra 1 and 2 this year, to, in effect, squeeze two years of math in. When I asked why, his response was that it would allow him to take Geometry next year, which is normally a high school course. That’s why I brought Mrs. Rogers over from Towson High. She is a math teacher there.” Mrs. Rogers said hello.

This was all very confusing to my parents. They tried to ask me what was going on and what I was up to, but they were interrupting each other. Finally Mrs. Bakkley stopped them. “Let me finish. My first reaction was like yours, that this was a crazy idea, but I talked to Carl about it and he seemed sincere. So I made him a bet. I would give him a midterm test for Algebra 1, a test I wouldn’t normally give for another two months. It was a one time deal, take it or leave it. He passes the test and I see what I can do for him. He flunks and he forgets the whole thing.”

She took a deep breath as my parents stared at us. “He got a 97. Half the material on the test I haven’t even covered in class. I think I could have given him the final from the end of the year and he would have passed that as well. I suspect he is a mathematical prodigy of some sort.”

Finally my mother looked at me with something akin to pride. It made me a little disgusted, to be fair about it, that she would only be satisfied if I was some sort of genius. Like I said, great person, crappy parent.

My father eyed me curiously. “So what is your idea here? You want to skip a grade or something? Start high school next year?”

I had anticipated this. I shook my head. “No, not really. If you think I’ve had problems with bullies this year, wait until I’m still thirteen and the smallest kid in the entire high school. No, my thought is to skip some time on the math classes. If I can do geometry next year, I can take some of the other classes early when I get to Towson High.” I named a few of the advanced classes available.

“So what happens when you finish those? Do you plan to graduate early?”

I just shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know yet. That’s a possibility.”

The others all looked at me. My parents stared at me like I had grown a second head, Mrs. Bakkley like I was a new toy to play with, and Mrs. Rogers like a potential science experiment. Mr. Butterfield was the worst. He looked at me in contemptuous disdain. “What could possibly make you think you can do any of that?” he asked.

I returned his haughty look. “Because unlike you, I understand the meaning of the phrase ‘99.9^th percentile’. I know what my IQ is, and I suspect it is considerably higher than yours.” As soon as I said it, I knew I had overstepped the bounds. “I apologize, that was rude of me.”

“How dare you! I absolutely forbid this! This meeting is over!” he yelled. “Get out!”

I stayed seated. “On what grounds? An inability to perform the course work? That is something which can be tested for, and failure to allow me to do this will only result in a legal challenge to the school board which you will most certainly lose. I have my lawyer’s card in my wallet. Should I call him?”

The reminder of my lawyer caused him to sputter incoherently. He turned to Mrs. Rogers and said, “This boy is nothing but a troublemaker! You should have nothing to do with him!”

She eyed me closely. She asked me, “In his day, the physics establishment considered Einstein a troublemaker, also. Are you a good troublemaker or a bad one?”

“Probably both, but I don’t presume to think of myself as an Einstein. That would be presumptuous even for me,” I said with a smile.

“Your teacher told me about your difficulties last week. I would be willing to work with you despite that.”

“Towson High will go along?”

She nodded. “It wouldn’t be the first time. We usually have a few students who have moved forward, and a few who end up taking classes their senior year over at Towson State. You have to mean it, though. The school will want you to do your best, but more importantly, so will I. I need a personal commitment from you, not your parents.”

“Done!” I held out my hand to her.

“Agreed, then.” She shook my hand. “I will be talking to you near the end of the year, to figure out our arrangements. Until then, Mrs. Bakkley will give you both years of Algebra, and monitor you in Geometry next year.”

She stood up. “My part in this is over. Carl, if you don’t give us one hundred percent, we’ll know it and the cooperation will end. If you do give us that one hundred percent, I promise we will, too.” She shook hands with my stunned parents and left.

Mr. Butterfield sputtered some more, but in the end agreed. Mentioning the lawyer had broken his spirit. Mrs. Bakkley told us she would develop a lesson plan to speed me along, and we left. Just like that I was on the road to a doctorate in mathematics.

It was a quiet ride home, but I could almost hear the wheels grinding in my parent’s heads. Once inside, they dragged me into their bedroom. “So, is that what you want to do? Become a mathematician?” asked my father.

“I think so,” I agreed. “I’ve been thinking about it since the beginning of the school year, actually. I guess I just got bored.”

“Well, what would you do? What do math people do? Do you want to become a school teacher?” asked Mom.

Dad and I just stared at her for a moment. Mom’s actually fairly bright, but she’s never been to college and she met Dad a couple of years after he got out. She simply doesn’t know what college is like. “Well, Mom, I might be able to get a job at the University of Pennsylvania teaching mechanical engineers how to do calculus,” I said blandly. That got a laughing snort out of my father, since that was his degree and college.

“Very funny, smarty-pants. I’m serious!”

I shrugged. “Lots of things, Mom. Even leaving aside teaching at the college level, maybe computers. That’s all math.”

“Isn’t that electrical engineering?” asked Dad.

“Well, maybe back in the dawn of time, you know, the Forties. It was run by dinosaurs, I heard.” The first electronic computer, ENIAC, had been built at the University of Pennsylvania back when Dad had been going there.

He made a rude gesture to me, eliciting a sharp rebuke of “Charlie!” from Mom. To me she said, “Don’t encourage him. What about what they asked? Do you want to graduate early?”

“Mom, I just don’t know yet. Maybe, but maybe not. If I go to school my senior year over at Towson State, who picks up the bill? I bet Towson High pays! I bet I can get a free year or more of college out of them.”

That got them both thinking. College wasn’t cheap, and at their income level, was going to result in a hefty chunk of change, even figuring in scholarships or loans. Dad asked the next question. “What did you mean by you knew what the 99.9^th percentile was. What do you think it means?”

I looked him straight in the eye. “Low genius.”

“How do you know that?” he asked quietly. This was all supposed to be hush-hush, top secret. Children weren’t supposed to know the results of IQ tests; it would warp them or something.

“Dad, you’d be amazed what you can find out in the library,” was my only answer. Yes, the library and the Internet (when that was invented) and a couple of later standardized tests. Most tests pegged me at about 140, just at the bottom end of the genius rating. It didn’t warp me all that much knowing about it. Hamilton tested out even higher — I mean, have you ever actually met somebody who scored a perfect 1600 on their SAT? I lived with the little bastard! — but he was living proof that IQ doesn’t make you smart.

The final discussion was my insulting Mr. Butterfield. Despite the fact I had apologized, I was chewed out for pushing his buttons, and television was denied for the rest of the week. Well, it beat a beating, and I deserved it. Oh well.

Chapter 6: Financial Planning

Thursday, December 19, 1968

Surprisingly, not much was said about my testing out of Algebra 1. Those who noticed me skipping out on the classes basically assumed I was dropping out of the class, not burning ahead. It would probably be more noticeable in January, when I began sitting in on some of the Algebra 2 classes. Mrs. Bakkley’s plan was for me to skip out for about a month, studying on my own to catch up, and then to audit the class towards the end of the spring semester.

Otherwise things went along quietly. Eighth grade English and Social Studies were abysmally boring, as always. They had been before. We didn’t move ahead of the norms until we got to high school in those subjects. General Science was much like before, and Mr. Rodriguez was just as interesting. I still found chemistry to be interesting — after all, I had made it a career once before — but now had no burning desire to do so again.

Gym proved curious. Before, I had suffered from the same body anxiety and nervousness as any other little boy. I often tried to skip out on showers after gym, and my locker smelled unbearably atrocious. Now, I just didn’t care if anybody saw my scrawny little ass, and if anybody commented on the size of my pecker, I’d just ask them why they were looking. I also cleaned my shit out of the locker and took it home to be washed. The EPA would have approved, if there was an EPA at the time; it wouldn’t be invented until after Nixon took office.

My physical training program had begun paying some marginal dividends. I could run almost three miles now, and if I wasn’t the world’s fastest runner, I could do so without embarrassing myself or tossing my cookies all over the place. I decided it was time to learn self-defense.

Monday, at dinner, after dessert, I brought it up. Suzie had already been excused along with Hamilton, but I stayed at the table. “I want to learn self-defense.” I announced.

Mom looked startled at that, and Dad said, “I thought your new plan was to run away?”

“Well, what if they catch me?” I replied, earning a snort from him and a frown from my mother.

“Did you have something specific in mind?” he asked.

I nodded. “I don’t know if you remember him or not, but Lance Miyagi was at Hampton with me, and his father teaches karate or something up on York Road in Timonium. I figured I could see about that.”

Hamilton had been spying on us from the kitchen. Laughing, he came through the doorway. “You’re going to learn karate?” He kept laughing and started waving his arms around in giant fake karate chops.

“I may use it on him,” I muttered.

“Hey Suzie, Carl wants to learn karate!” Suzie came running up the stairs and the pair of them jumped ludicrously around the living room chopping and kicking at each other. Mom and Dad yelled at them to knock it off, which only ended when my idiot brother actually connected and hit her arm. Suzie started crying and Hamilton got smacked by my father and both got sent to their rooms.

“Well, that doesn’t seem like a very good idea, now, does it?” asked my mother in her most disapproving voice.

“Mom, it’s not my fault he’s a jerk. Why did you even have him? I mean, you got it right the first time!”

Dad laughed at this and Mom pursed her lips. This was a recurrent joke around the house. I would say that they got it right the first time and how can you improve on perfection. Suzie would say it took them three tries to get it right, and they were able to stop after she came along. Only Hamilton couldn’t say anything, stuck in the middle like he was.

“I don’t like the idea of you fighting. It’s not right.”

“Mom, it’s not fighting, it’s learning how not to fight.” that made no sense, but Mom wasn’t big on logic to begin with. Reasonably smart lady, but couldn’t pass a logic course if her life depended on it.

Dad agreed to take me up to the Miyagi school after the holidays, at least to look around. Unsaid but implied was that I was going to have to figure out how to pay for any lessons. He certainly wasn’t going to cough up any cash. This evening, however, the answer to that problem had come through. Dad came home early, and Mr. Steiner followed him. Ham and Suzie were sent to their rooms, and my parents and I sat down in the living room with him. It was a very brief meeting.

The lawsuits we had brought against the other students on the bus had been settled, much like I had predicted, but even faster than I thought. He had been barraging them and their lawyer with letters, but that was about it. His only real time and trouble was the day he filed the lawsuit and had them all served with papers. He opened his briefcase and brought out a pile of papers that he had my parents and me sign, and then handed me a check for $20,000.

This was some serious coin for the day. Dad never said anything to me, but it could well have been more than his annual paycheck, and he was a fairly senior engineer at the company. It could certainly have paid for four years at most colleges for me, and that was the plan immediately announced. Mom decided to put it in their savings account.

“I think I’d rather put it in my savings account,” I announced.

“Don’t be silly. We certainly aren’t going to let you have it. It’s for the future,” she replied.

Steiner raised an eyebrow at that, but I just calmly answered, “According to the check, it’s my name on there and not yours. I have no problem with putting it in a savings account to start with, but it will be in my name.”

“Well, I never!” She looked at my father irately. “Are you going to just sit there? He can’t keep this money, he’ll just spend it!”

Dad didn’t agree with her automatically. Instead he looked at me and asked, “What did you have in mind?” This caused my mother to issue an outraged cry.

I ignored her and answered, “Well, a savings account would be adequate to start with, but I know I can get a much better rate of return at a brokerage. The equity markets in general have been averaging somewhere around nine to ten percent for most of the last decade, which is quite a bit higher than a savings account. If I am saving this money for the future, I should make it work for me.”

Mom continued to fulminate as Dad and Mr. Steiner sat back and appraised me. Finally Dad said, “Shirley, settle down. He’s making sense.”

Mom quieted down, not too graciously, and Dad then asked, “Anything particular in mind?”

I did have some thoughts, but simply said, “Not initially. Probably a general stock fund, perhaps something that mimics the Dow, or a money market account. Eventually, though, I see considerable opportunity in commodities.”

That stumped him. Steiner broke in and asked, “Commodities? Like wheat or orange juice?”

“I was thinking more like oil.”

“Oil!”

“You’re crazy!” remarked Dad.

I grinned. “Crazy like a fox. You wanted to know what a mathematician can do? Here’s an example of probability theory as applied to financial analysis.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” asked my perplexed father.

The lawyer, however, said, “This I want to hear. He was right about the law suits, after all. Go on, Carl.”

I smiled. “Okay, consider the following — the Arabs hate the Jews, right?”

“The Arabs and the Jews? What in God’s name are you talking about?” thundered Dad.

I just held up my hand. “Bear with me. The Arabs hate the Israelis. That’s a given. In the last twenty years they have fought three separate wars. The first was in 1948, the second was in 1956, the last one was last year.”

“During which, the Israelis handed the Arabs their heads on a platter,” remarked Steiner.

“Indeed they did, but does anybody here think they have made up and are friends? Or do you agree that everybody hates each other’s guts?”

“Agreed.”

I continued. “Okay, so let’s apply probability theory. From 1948 to 1956 is 8 years. From 1956 to 1967 is 11 years. The average separation between wars is 9.5 years. With me so far?” My father and Mr. Steiner nodded their heads. Mom was totally lost and stared at me in disbelief. “So, for simplicity sake, let’s say they average 10 years apart. That would mean the odds of having a war in any given year are 10 percent. Once you have the likelihood of the war determined, it is possible to apply probability theory to subsequent actions.”

“Keep going,” said the lawyer.

“If we assume a 10 % chance of a war in any given year, then you have a 90 % chance of avoiding a war in any given year. So, now, one year later, there was a 90 % chance of not having a war in the Middle East.”

“Which we didn’t have,” said Dad.

“Right. So what are the odds of not having a war next year?”

“Like you said, 90 %.”

“And the year after that?” I pressed.

“90 %, like you said. Why? You disagree?”

“Quite. The odds of avoiding war for two years in a row are 90 % time 90 %, or only 81 %. The odds of avoiding war for three years in a row are.9 times.9 times.9, or roughly 73 %. Four years works out to 64 %, five years is under 60 %, and at six years we are barely at a fifty-fifty chance of not having another war between Israel and its neighbors.”

“So you’re saying that by 1973 there is a fifty-fifty chance of a war starting between now and then,” asked Dad.

“Precisely.”

“Okay, but so what? They hate each other. We already knew that!”

“Leaving aside other considerations, the Arabs are probably going to lose again, just like in every war they’ve had before. And, like in every other war, they will blame everybody but themselves — specifically the United States and Western Europe. The last time they had a war, they seized the Suez Canal, but now what can they do? What is the one thing that the Arabs have that everybody else wants and that they can take away from us?”

Suddenly a light went off in both Dad’s and Mr. Steiner’s heads! Almost as one, they both whispered, “Oil!”

“Precisely. What is going to happen the next time the Arabs get frisky and decide to take on Israel? We already know it is going to be sometime in the next five to ten years, and we already know the Israelis will clean their clocks. The one single thing the Arabs can do is shut the spigots off. The price of oil will go through the roof.”

“So, we’ll just pump more from here. There’s still plenty of oil in Texas and Oklahoma,” countered Steiner.

“It doesn’t work like that. Oil wells aren’t like faucets you can turn on and off. Dad, you’re an engineer, you know it’s not that simple.”

Dad looked at us thoughtfully and answered slowly. “Uh, this really isn’t my specialty, but he’s right. Besides, the reason we went to Arabia is because it’s cheaper than drilling here. If we start drilling here again, the price is going to rise anyway.”

“So, we stop burning oil in power plants and burn coal or something,” countered Steiner.

“You can’t burn coal in an oil fired power plant. You’d have to spend a fortune and six months just refitting them. That much I do know,” replied Dad.

“And you can’t burn coal in your car engine. What happens when gasoline that now costs 28¢ a gallon costs a buck or more?” I added.

“The government would never let that happen!”

“I don’t know,” commented Dad. “This actually makes a lot of sense, in a crazy sort of way.”

“All I’m saying is that if I put the money in the stock market rather than just a bank, I’ll have a way to do better than whatever they pay on a passbook account. There are any number of events that can happen, any one of which can affect prices on stocks or bonds or commodities, but you can’t do anything unless you are willing to play the game.”

Dad eyed me. “Is that what you want to do? Become a stockbroker?”

I just laughed at that. What an impossibly boring job!

Mom decided to put her foot down. “You aren’t actually going to allow this insane plan, are you? You want to gamble on wars and killing? Charlie, I absolutely forbid this!”

“Shirley, settle down.” Dad faced me. “All right, I can see the idea of investing in the market, but you’re only thirteen. You’re too young to do that.”

“So we put your name on the account. Not Mom’s, she’s obviously against the entire idea.” Mom started squawking again when I said that, causing the three of us to wince. “I’ll make the decisions. Is it my money or not?” Mom’s squawking got even louder.

“Shirley, for the love of God, shut up!” Dad rarely, if ever, yelled at Mom, and the sheer shock of it made her speechless. “He’s right. It’s his money. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

I stuck my hand out. “Deal.”

“Deal. But you better be right, or I’m going to have to bunk with you down at the poorhouse.”

Mr. Steiner laughed at that and took his leave. “You really are amazing, Carl. Don’t forget I want you in our Explorer Post next year.”

“Yes, sir, I remember,” I replied, grinning.

Christmas was on a Wednesday this year, as was New Year’s Day. School was shut down for a full two weeks, and I wondered about seeing a stockbroker during the off time, but Dad said no. It was the holiday season and a lot of people would be using up vacation days. Instead, the Monday I started back to school, he took off work early and picked me up after school. We drove directly over to his broker’s office in Towson.

“What’s your broker’s name?” I asked.

“Bill Hardesty, but you call him Mr. Hardesty,” he answered.

“I’m about to hand him a check for $15,000. Maybe he’ll let me call him Bill.”

Dad snorted and said, “Don’t push your luck.”

I had taken the check to the bank the day after I received it. I had had a passbook account since I was about eleven or so at Clifton Trust, a small community bank with a few branches. The closest was less than a mile away, and easy to get to on my bike. I had only a couple of hundred dollars squeezed out of allowances and money from mowing lawns. The deal I made with Dad was that I would keep five grand in the savings account, and the other fifteen would go to the brokerage. A few simple interest rate calculations showed him that by the time I got to college, I could make up that five grand easily.

In the lobby of the brokerage were pictures of all the brokers — white, middle-aged, graying temples, perfect smiles and perfect hair, looking like they all had just stepped out of a thirty-year-old-Scotch ad. All except one, a young girl, who looked barely in her twenties. It was the late Sixties, so I assumed she was the token woman, hired as much for her looks as any brains, and probably having to fight off a bunch of overaged Lotharios who should know better. Curious, I noted her name, and then glanced over at a Broker Of The Month plaque on the wall. Hardesty’s name seemed the most prominent, but Melissa Talmadge was listed more than her share of the time. Interesting.

The receptionist answered her phone and then set it down, Standing, she asked us to follow her and she led us down a hallway lined with offices. As we went down, I noticed Melissa Talmadge’s office a few feet beyond Hardesty’s.

I enjoyed following that receptionist. She was a good looking lady, and wore a short skirt and high heels. This was one of the finest aspects to reliving the Sixties. This was the period of time when they invented the miniskirt! Even further, in many situations, women were prohibited from wearing pants, as a violation of the dress code. Back on my first go-around, I remember when two ninth grade girls dared to come to school in blue jeans; they were stopped at the front door, marched to the principal’s office, and their parents were called to take them home. Meanwhile, skirts so short that a generation later would be considered suitable club attire were perfectly acceptable. It was a hell of a time to be young and male!

Hardesty rose when we got to his door. “Thanks, honey, I appreciate it,” he told the receptionist. Forty years later he’d have been slapped, but not then. He ushered us in, looking curiously at me. Dad was placed in an armchair next to his desk. I was put in a smaller chair at the back of the room. “It’s good to see you, Charlie. I got the message you were coming over, but not what it was about. How can I help you?”

“It’s about my son, actually. This is my oldest boy, Carling. He’d like to open an account.”

For the first time, Hardesty looked me over, deciding to stop ignoring me. He put a big smile on his face and reached over the desk, thrusting out his hand. “Well I think that’s tremendous, Carling! Give you a chance to see how business is done, hey?” He immediately turned back to my father and began talking to him again. “Are we figuring a weekly deposit, ten or twenty dollars? Or a small lump sum? We’ve got some great funds we can place you in?”

I cleared my throat, and Dad smiled and said, “Ask him. It’s his money.”

Hardesty looked over at me curiously. “Really? What did you have in mind, son?”

“How many shares of ITT common will $15,000 buy? I’m not looking for any odd block purchase fees, so some will end up in a money market account, preferably an equity growth account,” I replied.

Hardesty looked at me and blinked, and then turned right back to Dad. “I’ll have to look that up, Charlie. I really don’t think that’s the way you want to go, though. I think you’ll do much better with one of the mixed equity funds we’ve had you with for the last several years.”

“It’s not my money, it’s his.” Dad just pointed a finger over at me.

Hardesty looked back at me like I was growing a second head. “You want ITT common? You shouldn’t be doing that son; you should be buying some money market mutual funds. Here, let me show you this brochure and tell you how they work.” He couldn’t have been more condescending and patronizing if he had tried.

“I’ll be looking to actively trade equities, at least as a start, but I would expect that as opportunities arise, to also move into commodities. Additionally, I’ll probably be doing some trades in options, both calls and puts, maybe some short sales,” I replied. “Is that going to be an issue?”

Hardesty looked back at my father. “Charlie, what is going on? Is this some kind of joke?”

Even Dad was getting a little pissed. “Bill, I already told you, it’s his money. He has a check in his pocket, already made out in the name of the brokerage, for $15,000.”

“Mr. Hardesty?” He looked over at me and I pulled a folded up check out of my pocket and unfolded it, although I kept it out of his reach. “I plan on being an active trader. Will you execute the trades I call in, or not?”

“Well, I suppose so, although I’ll need to confirm them with your father…”

I stood up. “Come on, Dad. This isn’t going to work.” I tucked the check back in my pocket and walked back out into the hallway. Behind me I could hear Hardesty spluttering and asking my father what he thought he was doing.

I wandered down the hallway to see the cute young Miss Talmadge working at her desk. It was a much smaller office than Hardesty’s. She was hanging up her phone when she saw me standing in her doorway. “Got a moment?” I asked.

She looked at me curiously, and motioned me forward. “How can I help you?”

I sat down at the armchair next to her desk. “I saw on the Broker of the Month plaque that you’re number two around here. Is that true?”

She smiled at me. “Yes it is. Why?”

I placed the check down on her desk. “Is it true that number two tries harder?” This was the slogan of Avis Rent-A-Car at the time.

She eyed the check and then me again. “Yes, that is exactly what it means. Who are you and what are you up to?”

“I apologize for not introducing myself. My name is Carl Buckman and I’m looking to start an account.”

“Really? You? You’re a little young for that, don’t you think?”

I gave her a soft smile. “I’ll bet you’ve heard that said too.”

She gave a quick barking laugh. “Okay, I earned that. You’re serious?”

“Absolutely. Are you?”

“Yes and no,” she replied. “You’re too young to open an account by yourself. Until you’re eighteen, an adult has to be on the account as well.”

“I have that already covered.” Out in the hallway we could hear Hardesty and my father arguing, and looking for me as well. I raised my voice slightly, and said, “In here, Dad.”

My father stuck his head around the corner. “Here you are. I thought we were leaving.”

I pointed at Miss Talmadge. “She’s number two, she’ll try harder. Dad, this is Miss Talmadge. Miss Talmadge, my father, Charles Buckman.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said.

Hardesty stormed in. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Missy. You can’t just steal my clients out from underneath me!”

I stood up and got between them. “Mr. Hardesty, I have never been your client, so she hasn’t stolen me from you. I have no intention of being your client. And furthermore, this is not the behavior of a gentleman.”

“How dare you speak to me like that, you little…” At that moment he noticed my father standing in the corner, and he stopped. He looked at Miss Talmadge, and yelled, “We’ll see about this!” and then stormed out.

Missy Talmadge blinked and said, “Well, that was fun. Are you two serious about this?” I sat back down and outlined my investment plans. She just nodded and agreed with them. At one point she looked over at my father and asked if he was in agreement. He said he was, so she just shrugged and pulled some paperwork out of her desk. Fifteen minutes later she had the check and I had a brokerage account.

She led us out, but on the way, we were waylaid by an older gentleman, who called the three of us into a very large and rich corner office. He introduced himself as the branch manager and asked, politely, what had happened. I took the lead in explaining the situation. I finished by stating, “Here’s the bottom line. I’m not doing business with Mr. Hardesty. If I do business with your firm at all, it will be with Miss Talmadge. If that breaks some sort of rule, then give me my check back and you can just shred these papers. I am sure that Merrill Lynch would be more than happy to talk to me. I think they’re a couple of floors up, aren’t they?”

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Buckman,” he replied, and for the first time, a man at this outfit was using that title with me, and not my father. It was a curious feeling.

On the drive home, Dad smiled and asked, “Think you were a little rough on Bill Hardesty back there?”

I smiled back. “What I think is that you can do better. He has you into mutual funds his company runs, right?”

“Yes.”

“And occasionally you find him trading in something you hadn’t authorized, but afterwards he tells you it was a great deal, right?”

“Yes. So?”

“Dad, he’s churning your account and putting you into high cost proprietary funds. I can guarantee he makes more from your account than you ever will.”

Dad stared at me for a second, but didn’t reply.

The money I got from the lawsuits was going to be seed money. How many times have you ever thought, boy, if I’d only known about this company or that company, way back when, I’d have bought it and be rich? Wouldn’t you have liked to have bought Microsoft or Xerox or Apple or Wal-Mart back when they were tiny and nobody had ever heard of them? Well, obviously I had heard of them.

There was more, however. As part of my MBA classes I had to take a finance class, and the professor had discussed the accounting practices and stock market analysis of the conglomerate craze of the Sixties, and how it had risen and fallen in the Seventies. I had even worked for several years at an ITT subsidiary, so I knew what most of the conglomerates would do in the next few years. This was the last gasp of the conglomerates. Within three years, their stocks would tank. You can make just as much money betting a stock will drop as you do that it will rise.

That was why I discussed options. This can give you incredible leverage betting on the rise or fall of a company, although you have the possibility of losing everything if you bet the wrong way. There were other ways to make money, too. The scenario I outlined of the rise of oil prices following another Arab-Israeli war would be duplicated in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis won the war, but the price of oil quadrupled. This happened again in 1979. For real money, the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market in ’79 and silver prices quintupled in a matter of months, and then collapsed in 1980. Ride the wave up, and then ride it back down. By the time I got to college, I could have a million dollars. By the time I graduated, many times that.

This wasn’t what I wanted in life. I have never really understood the burning desire some people have for inordinate wealth. A nice house, fine. Maybe a vacation place. But three, or four, or five places? Some people buy homes that they never actually even visit or live in! Want a boat? Okay, not my cup of tea (a boat is a hole in the water you try and fill with money) but I’ve had a lot of friends who liked them. How many do you need, though, and what’s the fun of having a boat that you can’t even steer, but have to hire a crew and captain to run? How many planes can I fly at once? How much is too much?

I wanted enough to have a nice home, maybe a vacation place. Hell, just be able to take a vacation when I wanted to! Fly first class, or even better, be able to charter a plane! Put my kids through college and pay for my daughters’ weddings. And no debt, no credit cards! The worst arguments Marilyn and I ever had were not about the kids, but about money! Or about our lack of money! Everything else was a piece of cake.

I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.

Chapter 7: Growing Up

A few days after starting my brokerage account, Dad drove me up to the Miyagi Dojo up on York Road. Mom still wasn’t all that happy with either one of us for not giving her the money to put in the bank. It’s not that she was going to steal it, but if I gave her twenty grand to invest, all I would ever see was the twenty grand, spent on college. If college were to cost less, she would hold onto the money until I needed it later. It would be used to pay their portion of any wedding expenses. Forget about earning interest on the money!

She was just starting to get over her mad when Dad took me to Miyagi’s. That just got her started on why I needed to learn to fight. I would just get in trouble and go to jail again, and this time she wouldn’t let me come home. Or Dad either. Later I told him that jail might be quieter. He just grinned and swatted the back of my head.

Lance had been in my grade going through Hampton Elementary. Almost all, about 95 %, of the students there ended up going to Towsontown Junior High. Not all, however; the school boundaries between elementary schools and between junior high schools were not exactly identical. There were always a few kids each year who got caught in the overlap. Lance had ended up at Ridgely, which was to the north of us.

I hadn’t seen Lance in a couple of years. He was the only kid in the entire school who hadn’t been Caucasian. He was Japanese-American, though none of us knew how many generations ago they had come here. Mind you, this was during the Sixties, when the northern Baltimore County suburbs were about as white as chalk. If you went there now, they’d be just as rich, but as integrated as any other suburb. Nowadays right next door to St. Paul’s is a Korean Catholic church, and they are at least as large. In 1969, being a Jap in Timonium was pretty damn unusual.

I didn’t care. He was a nice guy. I always figured he would have more problems being gay than being Asian. This was a major no-no back then, and could actually get you arrested and jailed. He kept it quiet, but when I was around him, my ‘gay-dar’ would start pinging like crazy. I know that most women don’t believe in gay-dar, but most guys do. We can tell. It’s not 100 % certain, maybe more like 90 %, but we can tell. I have known only a few guys in my life who I have known were gay who I couldn’t tell, a fellow teacher at MVCC for one, and one of my cousins, who I was never completely sure about anyway, for another.

It’s not like I care. I am totally able to distinguish between the act and the person. I don’t care if you fuck donkeys, as long as they’re consenting adult donkeys. I have never understood the bit about how the gays are going to lead the youth of the world astray. Sure, sounds like fun — be ridiculed and beaten up by yokels, have family members shun you, be jailed and lose jobs! I bet you can get lots of people to sign up with a membership package like that! And I have also never understood how this might be tempting to a young person who is still ‘learning about his sexuality.’ If you have to learn, you’re already gay. Ever since I was old enough to figure out that I could use my gizmo for more than just writing my name in the snow, I’ve known I was totally straight.

So, although Lance wasn’t a flamer, it was obvious that he was ‘as queer as a three dollar bill’, that being one of the catchier descriptions of the day. He was also already a black belt, so it wouldn’t do to make a smart comment about it.

The Miyagi Dojo didn’t teach karate, but taught aikido. When I heard that I thought it was pretty cool. Dad had never heard of it but at the time nobody had ever heard of Steven Seagal. He became a movie star much later. I remember seeing him in a bunch of movies, and he was a for real 7^th degree black belt in aikido. He didn’t chop you or kick you, but he could toss you all over the place. That looked infinitely cooler, so I signed up. It wasn’t terribly expensive, but it would all come out of my pocket, and I would need to ride my bike there after school. The only way I would get my parents to take me was if it was raining or snowing.

Aikido is not one of the more glamorous martial arts, in that nobody is breaking any boards or concrete blocks. Those are all ‘hitting’ arts, like karate or kick boxing. Aikido is a ‘grappling’ art, like judo. In a perfect match, your opponent tries to attack you, and then you avoid the attack, and use his momentum to make him do something he doesn’t want to do. So, for instance, if he punches you, you can duck inside and then throw him over your shoulder, or maybe duck him from the outside and grab his arm, to twist it and flip him on his ass.

You also need to learn how to avoid this sort of thing happening to you. Bouts can be quite physical and quick. A premium is placed on speed and agility, not so much on strength and power. You have to be in good shape, and have some stamina as well. If I hadn’t been running and working out with bricks and (after Christmas) barbells, it would have been very painful. As it was, although Mr. Miyagi considered me hopelessly slow, I learned and advanced.

School in the spring semester went about as I figured. I had finished the semester at Christmas with straight As, which mollified my mother somewhat. Mind you, I still wasn’t living up to my potential, whatever the fuck she thought that was, but it was a lot better that the B-/C+ which had been my previous grades. In addition to Algebra 2, I signed up for typing class, which got me a serious ration of shit from just about everyone on the planet.

If you ever saw the television show Mad Men, then you know that in that day and age, secretaries were women and only women. Only secretaries used typewriters. If a boss needed to write a letter, either he hand wrote it and handed it to a secretary to type, or he gave it to her by dictation, personally or by tape recorder. Guys didn’t type — end of story! This was one of the reasons Missy Talmadge was such a standout at the brokerage. She wasn’t a secretary, but a broker, which was for men only.

Curiously, my father had actually sent me to summer school on my original run, between my eighth and ninth grade years, to learn typing. I was the only guy in the class. I have no idea why he wanted me to learn, and it may well have been as a punishment for some now long forgotten misdeed, but it was one damn useful skill. From then on I typed all my reports; considering my handwriting, this was a vast improvement.

Maybe Dad liked secretaries. When he met Mom, she was his boss’ secretary. He went fishing in the secretarial pool!

Anyway, I signed up for typing class, and was rejected immediately by the teacher. I wasn’t a girl. I was supposed to take shop class, which was for boys. Shop class was actually three classes in one. You started out in the fall with drafting, moved into wood shop over the winter, and finished with metal shop in the spring. We did this for two years, and then when we got to high school were required to specialize, so some guys took all drafting and some took all wood shop. Girls took secretarial classes and home economics. There was to be no mixing of the species, since no good would ever come of such a thing. It was sort of like miscegenation, which was also considered unnatural.

By the time I got to high school, the rules began to break down. My junior year, the last I had to take shop, I took a second full year of drafting, and we actually had two girls in the class. The teacher, an old style geezer, simply couldn’t deal with them. He was simply stunned when they showed up. He compensated by ignoring them the entire year. He graded their projects and tests, but nothing else. He wouldn’t even talk to them.

Drafting had always proved useful to me. I had worked in several jobs where the ability to read blueprints and do design work proved quite helpful. I learned enough in wood shop to make a crappy wooden stool and know which end of the hammer was which. Metal shop was a disaster, since everything we used was either blistering hot or razor sharp, or both, and the only projects we made were totally useless. Of course, a lot of the guys ended up making high school versions of prison shivs, which for some of them would prove good training for the future.

When the typing teacher refused to let me in, I simply went down to the office and saw Mr. Butterfield. He also refused to let me in, with the same argument. I very calmly asked what the legal reason was. As soon as he heard the word ‘legal’ his ears pricked up and he stared at me.

“It’s the rules!” he sputtered.

I set the paper back down on his desk and marked a big X where he was supposed to sign. “Mr. Butterfield, please, just sign here.”

He turned bright red and spluttered some more, than grabbed a pen and scrawled his name angrily. I left quickly, not wanting to push my luck. I marched right back to the typing class and handed Mrs. Wakerman the paper. She stared at it and wordlessly pointed me towards an empty desk to the side. The typewriter was a decrepit and ancient manual Royal model, but it worked, mostly. I managed to get some time on some of the IBM electrics as well during the course.

This class was a little tougher. Typing on a keyboard is a snap compared to using a typewriter. Make a mistake and you have to go over it with a correcting ribbon. There’s only one font. No spell checker or grammar checker. No automatic centering. No automatic line return. And you have to do it all blind, because your eyes aren’t on the screen, but to the side, reading what you are trying to type. They call this touch typing, probably because afterwards you’re touched in the head.

Still, I got a decent enough grade the first time, and while Mrs. Wakerman wasn’t happy, she was fair. I got a decent grade this time, too. Even better, I got to hang out with a bunch of pretty girls, and didn’t have to make prison shivs with a bunch of ugly guys. I promised Mrs. Wakerman I would sign up for Home Economics next year, which made her apoplectic and the girls giggly.

I didn’t have much grief from my male classmates, though. For one thing, after the fight on the bus, I got a wide berth from anybody interested in bullying me. For another thing, well, like I said, I got to hang out with some awfully pretty girls in class, which was a pretty big deal at 13 or 14. I wasn’t anywhere near as nervous about girls this time around. If the girls weren’t interested in me, and let’s face it, they weren’t, they often told me which guy they were interested in, and I could drop subtle hints (’Asshole, I am telling you, she’d like to go to the dance with you! Get with the program!’) in the proper direction. I had a rather subtle power over my compatriots.

Okay, I had my fair share of hormones rampaging as well, but as a midget 13 year old, I couldn’t buy a handjob from a hooker, let alone a dance invitation with a girl. The first time, I didn’t get anywhere until I was 14, next year. This time looked to be the same. I jerked off in the bathroom at home occasionally. Oh well.

I managed to make it to First Class in Boy Scouts as well. I liked Scouting, and was involved from Cub Scouts, up through Boy Scouts, and then transferred over to the Explorers. Later, when Parker was old enough, I registered him as a Cub Scout and I became a Scout Leader. He actually made Eagle, and I had just about every rank in the book, ending as an Assistant Scoutmaster.

At the time, however, I only cared about the camping. I cared nothing about ranks or merit badges, even though I learned enough to qualify for a shitload of them. I never made it above First Class, and the Explorers simply don’t have ranks. They have job titles, and they consider themselves elite anyway.

Hamilton couldn’t hack it and dropped out after a year. He hated the hazing all first year scouts get. The final straw for Ham had been when he was diagnosed with the dread disease ‘ear lobes’, which required the bottom half of his ears to be painted with mercurochrome. I actually enjoyed it, and then dished it out when I was older. In later years Scouting became all politically correct, and hazing wasn’t considered nurturing and progressive. I remember one camporee where a buddy of mine and I spent two hours being sent from one campsite to another in search of a left-handed monkey wrench. I don’t recall it leaving me feeling un-nurtured. Nobody ever died from searching for smoke shifters (keeps the smoke out of your eyes at campfires), skyhooks (to hold your tent up if the pole breaks), tent-stretchers (obviously to stretch your tent), or a hundred feet of shoreline. Likewise, sending a bunch of 10 and 11 year old boys into the woods with a stick and a bag to catch snipes (they actually exist, but not in the woods) is an excellent means to burn off their energy. Snipe-hunting was a time honored tradition in the Boy Scouts of the Sixties and Seventies.

I loved it. Between Boy Scouts and the church youth group Pastor Joe took camping, I could count on a camping trip every month, rain or shine, no matter what the season. I liked it and I was good at it. I had all the gear, and when I moved to the Explorers it just got better. Explorer posts specialize in something. Many specialize as police or EMT or firefighter auxiliaries, but the one I joined specialized in canoeing and camping. By the time I went to college, I was an expert, and could confidently tackle Class V whitewater rivers. I even had a waterproof World War II surplus UDT diver’s backpack for keeping my stuff dry in rough water. It was a seriously cool Post.

The major change that happened in the summer of 1969 involved a major remodeling of the house. Nana, my mother’s mother, was moving in. This was somewhat of a mixed blessing the first time around, and I suspected it would be this time also.

Pop-pop, Mom’s father, had died when I was twelve, almost two years ago. He and Nana lived in Baltimore, in the Highlandtown area, which is where Mom grew up. They were a real pair of characters. He was at least ten years older than Nana, was from London, and around the turn of the century had run away from home and gone to sea on a whaling ship. For the rest of his life he earned a living from the sea. One winter he got snowed in at Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. During World War II he had been a civilian deep sea diver for the Navy, moving mines around ports. After the war he had his own deep sea salvage yard. I remember his deep sea diving suit and helmet down in the basement of the house. He kept a double-decker pigeon coop in the backyard for racing pigeons.

Nana was a crusty old battleaxe, born around the turn of the century. Her parents were German, and came here during the massive immigration of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Her parents must have found a way to get busy on the boat, because she was born about 8½ months after they arrived. She used to make beer in the bathtub during Prohibition.

Anyway, Pop-pop was sailing a different sea these days, and Nana still had the place in Highlandtown. Last year, during the riots in Baltimore after Martin Luther King was killed, Dad had me get dressed in case he and I had to go into the city to rescue her. It didn’t have to be done, but it got my mother very nervous. She was going to come out to live with us. If ever I wondered whether my father loved my mother, this was the ultimate proof he did; the old bat could be cantankerous as hell! Every week she would buy the National Enquirer, the worst of the tabloids, and she believed every word, because ‘it’s a newspaper!’ Because of that, we didn’t need to spend all that money sending men to the moon, because the aliens were actually landing somewhere in New Mexico. Besides which, all those rocket launches interrupted the soap operas she set her life by.

She really hated the moon launches. Not only did we not need to spend the money on space, we should keep the money here, where it could help all the poor people. It could be used to increase Social Security! Dad went nuts when she got on that kick. She was living under his roof and eating his food and not paying one red cent, and he would be damned if his taxes went to raise her Social Security payments when she didn’t spend penny one!

On the other hand, she was an easy touch for us kids, and was always slipping the three of us a buck or two. What really cost her money was that twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, she played Bingo over at the VFW in Perry Hall. On Tuesdays Mom would go with her and sit with her, but Thursdays I got the task. For at least a couple of years, no matter what the season, even during school sessions, I ended up playing Bingo on Thursday night. She must have been the unluckiest Bingo player on the planet, because I don’t recall her ever winning, not even once.

The house we lived in was like every other house in the development, a split-level. They were like an upscale Levittown, built in the mid-Fifties. You could get the house right-handed or left-handed, in-line or tee-shaped, and in brick or clapboard. A total of 8 styles, and they must have built about five thousand of them! Miles and miles of these things! I could go into any friend’s house in a five mile radius and know where everything was.

No way could we fit Nana into the house. First, a contracting crew built a big utility shed on the end of the house. Then, after it was finished, Dad and Hamilton and I moved everything out of the garage and moved it into the shed. Once the garage was empty, the contractor ripped out the garage door and converted the garage into a giant bedroom for Ham and me. This was the blessing end of the deal. Our bedroom actually became the largest room in the house. Our old bedroom would become Nana’s.

My first thought was that Suzie was getting the short end of the stick, but she didn’t mind. Her bedroom was the smallest in the house, sort of an upholstered closet. Still, she got along great with her grandmother, and Nana bought a beautiful cherry bedroom set for her new bedroom, with the understanding that when she passed away, Suzie was to get it. Suzie cared for Nana from the day she moved in, which was a hell of a job to ask of an eight year old. Suzie never complained once, and when Suzie became a nurse everybody, including Suzie herself, acknowledged that she became a nurse because of taking care of Nana.

I got my first lessons in both practical and theoretical construction that summer. If anybody was ever to tell me I would eventually spend over thirty years at a construction company, I’d have said they were nuts. I was going to be a scientist! It’s funny where life takes you.

Chapter 8: Ninth Grade

Fall 1969

By the time school started, I had grown one more inch, so now I was 5’1" tall. The ninth grade had seen a huge growth spurt for me, and I was really looking forward to it. From the time school started until the time school ended, I grew nine inches in nine months. I shot up like a beanpole. I was 5’10" tall at junior high graduation. Mom was beside herself the entire year, trying to keep me in clothing; I would outgrow everything I owned every month or two! It was ridiculous! After school ended I would only grow another inch and end up being my final 5’11" height.

One major difference now was that I was exercising and had already put on about five pounds of muscle. Before, I had looked anorexic, now I just looked slender. Even after I stopped growing, I was so skinny I had needed all my suits tailored for me. Maybe this time I could buy off-the-rack and have them fit.

It started within a few weeks of school starting. Two weeks into the fall semester I was walking through the kitchen when Mom stopped me. We had a measuring spot on the door frame between the kitchen and dining room, with lines drawn in different colors for each of us kids. “Come here, get against the door frame,” she said. I grinned and got into position. We normally did this on our birthdays, so this was a couple of months early for me. She put the ruler on top of my head and I scooted out from underneath it. “Well, I know what you’re getting for your birthday — new clothes!” Mom, if you only knew! As it was, she had to buy me a couple of pairs of blue jeans anyway, because they were too short.

Ninth grade was similar to eighth grade, but was more focused for the college prep kids. We no longer took general science, but now took Biology. Everyone else would get that in high school. Likewise, the college prep kids took a second year of algebra and a foreign language. My deal with Mrs. Bakkley had her tutoring me in Plane Geometry, and required me to make a weekly visit to Towson High to see Mrs. Rogers and turn in assignments and receive new ones. Mom or Dad would usually take me over after school.

Spanish II was livened up this year. We had a new girl in school, a transfer, Rebecca Rinaldi. Becky was a State Department brat, and had lived in a bunch of different Latin American countries, moving every few years when her father was transferred to a different embassy. She was perfectly fluent in Spanish, and delighted in teaching the class all the words you didn’t find in El Camino Real. Cussing in Spanish became the new sport! We also knew enough Spanish now to get into trouble. If you didn’t know what the word was, you could always fake it by adding an ‘o’ to the end of the English word. You’d usually get a laugh and be told what the word was. This time it backfired on Tammy Roberts, who had to say she was embarrassed, so she said ‘Yo soy embarrassado.’ The teacher broke down in laughter before explaining it to us. ‘Embarrassado’ means pregnant! Tammy was the butt of jokes for a month after that.

I was now in the 9^th grade chorus. Back on my first go-around, I had played trumpet all through elementary and junior high schools. I have no known musical talent. When I got recycled (for want of a better word) I hadn’t held a trumpet in my hands for over fifty years! I didn’t even know how to blow into it anymore, let alone how to key the notes. One of the biggest blowups we had last year was when I announced I wanted to stop playing the trumpet and sing in the chorus. Chorus was for those kids who couldn’t afford an instrument or were too stupid to play one. My utter lack of ability was not considered grounds for change. Thank God my voice had changed by then, because I finally settled the argument by breaking into ‘The Impossible Dream’ from Man of La Mancha. While the movie wouldn’t come out for several years, my parents had a copy of the sound track from the Broadway play. It is a tremendous song for a baritone, and they were simply stunned. To look at me you wouldn’t think I could pull it off, but I had once sung baritone in the church choir.

By the time my birthday rolled around, I was already well on the way to my final height. I had grown another couple of inches since Mom had measured me, and I was on the way to outgrowing the clothes she had bought me at the start of the year. She fretted over this, and I just laughed and told her I was going to be taller than her by my next birthday. She just rolled her eyes and muttered a lot. I told her to save everything that I grew out of, since Hamilton was probably going to do the same thing in another two or three years. He ended up three inches taller than me!

School became vastly more interesting in mid-November. The Science Fair was announced. Students could enter a project in the annual Science Fair, to be judged in the spring; it was expected of all the college prep crew to participate (read required) and optional for other students. It was open for individual students, or as teams of two.

Back when I did this the first time, I did it by myself, and took second place, with a project showing the effects of different radiation levels on the growth of barley plants from irradiated seeds. The first place winner was Mike Misner, who was a buddy in the college prep group. His project involved growing a bunch of fertilized chicken eggs in an incubator. Every day he would harvest an egg and place it in a jar in formaldehyde, showing fetal growth. The leftover eggs at the end of the project he hatched, so we had peeping chickens at the fair. Timing was everything. I had the better science, but let’s face it, peeping chickens make for great theater. Mike continued this field of endeavor, ending up as a pediatrician down in Annapolis.

I decided on better theater myself, but growing chickens in the house was out of the question. I had already decided to do a project on the tar in cigarettes. Randy Bronson did this the last time, using a vacuum pump to ‘smoke’ cigarettes and collecting the tar they generated. That was all he did, though, collect the tar. Adequate theater but lousy science. I figured I could dress it up and do better science and I might beat the chickens. I put in a proposal the first day of the announcement, before Randy had a chance.

The interesting part was when Shelley Talbot came up to me that week in the hallway. I was very curious about this, because up until now, Shelley had looked at me like something to be scraped off the bottom of her shoe. She was one of the popular girls, very pretty, and the rumor mill had it down as gospel that chastity was not one of her cardinal virtues. Supposedly she put out, but I had serious doubts about a fourteen or fifteen year old girl doing that back in the Sixties. Then again, I did have a feeling she was more advanced than her classmates. She was the only girl in the school who I knew for a fact dyed her hair. In the eighth grade she had been a blonde. This year she was a brunette.

She came up to me between classes at my locker. “Carl, can I talk to you for a bit?”

I smiled and said, “What’s up?” For the first time in my life I was actually tall enough to look a girl in the eye!

“Well, you know, we have to do a project for the science fair. What are you doing?”

I gave a brief explanation of my plan. “What were you doing?” I asked. I was curious. Technically the Science Fair was optional, but participation would be good for your grade. In practical terms, it was required for college prep, and Shelley was not college prep.

She groaned, “I can’t think of anything!”

“You need some ideas? I suppose I can help with that.”

“Uh…” She gave me a slightly coquettish look. “Well, I was wondering. You know, we can do this in teams of two, and I was wondering, uh, maybe…”

I stared at her. This was totally out of the blue! This was a girl who wouldn’t give me the time of day before. What was going on?! “You want to team with me? Why?”

“Oh, God, Carl! Like, you’re so smart! Everybody knows you take classes over at Towson and all. You’re straight A, for Christ’s sake! You’re going to blow this away!”

I gave her a thoughtful look. “Yeah? So, what’s in it for me?”

“What do you mean?” The idea that somebody wouldn’t be dying to have her in their team was an alien concept.

“I mean, if this is a team effort, what do you bring to the team?” I replied.

Her face kind of scrunched up at this. An original thought would kill this girl, and right now she was experiencing death-like symptoms. “Uhhhh…”

I let her off the hook. “Listen, let me give it some thought. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Alright?”

“Thanks, Carl, you’re tremendous!” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek! She was off and down the hallway after that, while I stood there in shock, rubbing my cheek until the class bell rang. I was late to English 9.

I was lost in thought the rest of the day. Developing a project outline for a scientific experiment was a piece of cake. I had spent fifty years working with math and the hard sciences before, even at the construction company. I jotted down notes quickly. No, what had me wondering was Shelley. The way she had looked at me, and that kiss… well, that kiss really made me wonder! It had been a long time since that had happened to me, and I liked it. Was she trying to buy my support via some form of sexual gratification. A Buckman can’t be bought — but we can be rented! I looked forward to negotiations.

By the next morning I had developed two plans of attack, one for me doing the project alone and the other for working as a team. We had a week to develop our planned projects, for review by the science teachers, but I wanted to get my project approved before Randy submitted his plan. I saw Shelley in the hallway before class and asked her to meet with me at lunch. Normally she would never have been seen with a geek like me, but she readily agreed. She must be desperate, I thought.

She was. She admitted she needed a good grade on this project in order to pass Science, and everyone knew I was going to win. She was also a lousy negotiator, revealing the weakness of her position like this. I brought out the two person plan and explained it. “Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to smoke a whole lot of cigarettes and collect all the tar, and then measure it.”

“We’re going to what?! I don’t smoke and I don’t plan to start!” she protested.

I grinned at her. “Good for you. Neither do I. No, we’re going to build a machine and let it do the smoking for us.” I pulled a sketch I had worked on out of my binder and laid it down. “See, here’s how it works. First we get a vacuum pump, and then we simply make a few filters and attach them to the pump. Finally, at the other end, we make a mouthpiece and stick in a cigarette. We turn on the pump and light the cigarette. The pump draws the air in and the smoke goes into the filter. Afterwards we measure what was in the filter.” I traced the parts of the system with my finger, and Shelley followed along.

She slowly nodded, but looked up at me. “We do all that for only one cigarette?”

I shook my head. “No, never work that way. There’s not that much tar in a cigarette. We’ll have to smoke a lot of cigarettes, a whole lot.”

“Like how many? Besides, where do we get the cigarettes? We can’t buy them. We’re not old enough to buy them.”

That was questionable, since I knew several guys who already smoked, however no way was I going to buy them from a vending machine. I had given it some thought though. “I’m not completely sure, but probably several cartons.” She looked at me confused. “Do either of your parents smoke?” I asked.

She nodded. “Both of them do.”

“Okay. There’s twenty cigarettes in a pack, and ten packs in a carton. That makes two hundred cigarettes per carton. Five cartons is a thousand cigarettes.”

“That’s a lot of cigarettes.”

“Yeah, but we need that many. I don’t know how much tar is in a cigarette, but it’s on the order of milligrams. A milligram is a thousandth of a gram,” I explained.

“So a thousand cigarettes is…” She looked stumped.

“A thousand milligrams is one gram. Now we’ll never be able to detect a milligram, but a gram we can measure. If it’s more than a milligram per cigarette, it becomes easier.” I showed her how the filters would work. “We can take the filters apart after we weigh them and then collect the tar chemically.”

“You can do that?” she asked.

“WE can do that,” I replied. Her eyes opened at this. “If we are doing this as a team, it won’t just be me. You’ll have to help out, too. Otherwise I can do it on my own.”

She nodded slowly. “Uh, okay, but what can I do? I’m not all smart like you. I don’t even know what grams and stuff are. How am I going to help?” I figured Shelley was planning on smiling and flirting and getting that silly nerd, Carling Parker Buckman, to go along with her, for the sheer enjoyment of her company. Five minutes after the A was handed out, Shelley would be history.

I reached across the table and laid a hand on top of hers. “Don’t worry. I’ve thought of that as well. You’re going to be a lot of help.” I squeezed her hand and then pulled my arm back. No use frightening the prey away. The hunter had to leave a little more bait out first.

“Oh? How so?” she asked suspiciously.

Time to calm the prey down, show her that the trap wasn’t really there, but just part of the landscape. “Well, we need a place to set this up. We’re going to need someplace which can be secured, without a lot of people wandering through and messing it up.”

“Here, after school?”

“Take too long to smoke all those cigarettes,” I answered.

She shrugged. “Home?”

“There’s five other people at home, several of whom would take the thing apart or turn it off or something, and I don’t have a basement to lock it in.”

“Well, I do. I mean, we have a basement. We could set it up there,” she said.

I nodded. “Any kid brothers who’d wreck it?”

“I’m the baby of the family. The only person other than my parents is the cat, and we can keep her out of trouble.”

“See, you’re already helping. We set the lab up in your basement. We can smoke cigarettes down there after school. You help with that, and get your parents to buy the cigarettes. I’ll do the science. Do you know how to type?”

“Better than you, Carl. I’ve seen your typing!” She smiled at this. We shared the same typing and home economics classes.

“Then you can type up our final report. It’s a natural partnership. Even at the actual fair itself. I’ll stand there and look like a nerd, and you can dress up and look pretty. We can’t lose!”

“I can do more than just look pretty!”

I laid my hand on hers again, just for a moment, and squeezed it again. “I know that, and this will be your chance to prove it. Besides, you end up better off than I do.”

“How so?” She never removed my hand.

I pulled back and smiled. “Because you’ll always be pretty, and now you’ll show how smart you are. As for me, I’ll still be smart, but I’ll never be pretty!”

She giggled loudly at this and agreed to my terms. I turned in our project outline that afternoon, beating Randy by three days. The first few weeks would all be research anyway, and I would have to do that on my own. My compliments to Shelley notwithstanding, the brain portion of the project was all mine. She was a gorgeous airhead.

I got home late from school that night, missing the school bus, and had to walk. It was only about a mile and a half or so, and my new and improved shape wasn’t even a light workout. I came in the door to find Mom standing there. “Detention? Wait until your father hears about this!” The school must have called her.

I gave her a sheepish shrug and went downstairs, dumping my stuff off in the bedroom. I avoided Mom and any questions until later. Mom must have told Dad when he got home, but I stayed in my room studying Geometry until we all went up to dinner.

Now that we had six people in the house, Suzie had to share her side of the dining room table with Nana. She was in charge of making sure Nana didn’t put salt on her plate before we sat down. She was on a low sodium high blood pressure diet, and she salted everything, driving my mother nuts. I never narced on her, figuring the old bat would just make a ruckus if we caught her. Usually Suzie caught her about once a week and ratted her out, causing Nana to start crying. Tonight I noticed Nana got away with it. I debated winking at her, but Mom would probably catch me and figure it out.

Dad was the one who started in on me. After we said grace, he picked up the serving plate of the pot roast and speared a piece. “So, you want to explain how you got a detention in Home Economics?”

Hamilton started laughing. He began singing, “Carl got detention, Carl got detention!”

“Hey, Dad, really?” I hooked my thumb at my brother, and Dad ordered him to shut up, or else. Hamilton had never given them the no-hitting ultimatum like I had, and could still get walloped.

“So?” he pressed.

I thought about it, and I must have looked very sheepish doing so. “I couldn’t help it. I swear, I just couldn’t help it. It just sort of burst out,” I admitted.

“What just burst out?” asked Mom coldly.

“Well, Mrs. Wakerman was talking about tropical foods and fruits and nuts and stuff, and she started talking about coconut milk, and she asked if anybody knew what you could use coconut milk for. So I just said that mommy coconuts fed it to the baby coconuts, so they could grow up to be big and strong, and that’s when she gave me detention.”

Mom stared at me for a second, and then just buried her face in her hands and started laughing. Dad leaned so far back while he laughed that his chair fell backwards and dumped him on the floor. Even Nana started laughing. Only Suzie and Hamilton didn’t laugh; Suzie because she didn’t understand, and Hamilton because he could see I wasn’t getting in trouble.

He still tried to push it, though. After our parents calmed down, he started smirking and snarkily said, “You still got detention. You’re still going to get punished.”

I just shook my head at him. “Hamilton, you want to know why people like me more than you? I was named after a delicious and refreshing adult beverage, and you were named after a watch.” That set my parents to laughing all over again.

The next day at school I got the approval for the project from our Biology teacher, Mr. Hailey. I told Shelley and she squealed with delight, and kissed my cheek again. This time I gave her a hug, which surprised her, but she didn’t protest. My seduction strategy was a slow one, but would probably prove successful. A few discreet inquiries gave indications that Shelley had a much better understanding of the birds and the bees than would be expected in a ninth grader. How much was completely true, I couldn’t say — yet — but I considered this as worthy of scientific investigation as cigarette tar.

“Now, for the next week we need to do preparation. I need to get over to Towson State and use the library there and you…”

“You’re going over to Towson State College?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“Uh, sure. I need to do the preliminary research.”

“Wow!”

I don’t know why this surprised her, but I chalked it up to the fact that she figured only college students could go over there. The truth was that Towson State was only about a half mile from Towson High, and the college prep kids there routinely went over to the library for research. All you needed was your student ID card and they’d let you in. I didn’t see why there would be an issue.

Getting over there would be simple, too. It was basically just a couple of miles further south on York Road, almost in the center of Towson. I could ride my bike there easily. Further, what with my wacky schedule and a lot of independent study time, I pretty much had an unlimited hall pass. As long as I let my teachers know what I was up to, I could take a day and go over there without worrying about skipping class.

I shrugged. “It’s no big deal. Like I said, I’ll go over there either tomorrow or the next day and figure a few things out. You need to sweet talk Mr. Hailey into letting us use a vacuum pump. I know they have one here, but we’ll need to take it home.”

She nodded in understanding. “I’ll ask him at lunch. If he says yes, I can call Daddy and he can drive over and we can carry it out to the car. We can carry it down to the basement. How big a space do we need?”

Again, I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like we’re building anything all that big.” I used my hands to measure out an area of about three feet by three feet. “I bet we could put it all together in a space like that. I mean, if you have an old table or something like that, I’m sure it can fit on that.”

“We have an old dining room table in the corner.”

“Sounds perfect. We can pull it away from the wall so we can move around it. We’ll build our own lab in the basement, just like Doctor Frankenstein did!”

She laughed at that. I put an arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick hug, and she giggled at that. Then she put an arm around my waist and hugged me back, and then pulled away. She smiled shyly and we split up, and she gave me a hip bump as she moved away. This project looked to be very educational, indeed!

The next morning I rode my bike to school. After lunch, I checked out and rode down to Towson State. At the time it was known as Towson State College. It had originally been a small teacher’s college, but over the years the size of the school and the quality of education there had grown substantially. By the time I graduated from college, it had transformed into Towson State University, and a few years later became simply Towson University, the second largest university in the state. The odds that I would be able to find relevant information were quite high.

They were even better than I thought. I quickly found an article on cigarette tar that had been co-authored by a professor there at Towson State. Figuring nothing ventured, nothing gained, I rode over to the chemistry building and locked my bike into the rack there. Once inside I found the professor was at class, but would be back in another half hour. Despite a number of curious stares from much older students, I sat down on the floor in the hallway to wait for him.

About half an hour later a middle-aged man came walking down the hallway towards me. He glanced at me curiously, and then opened the door to his office. He stopped and looked down at me as I climbed to my feet. “Can I help you?”

“Are you Professor Milhaus?” I asked.

“Yes. Are you waiting for me, Mister…?”

“Buckman, sir. Carl Buckman. Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”

“Sure.” He opened his office door and stepped inside, holding it open for me as well. “How can I help you, Mr. Booker?”

“That’s Buckman, sir.” I pulled out my wallet and handed him a business card. He stared at it in surprise, not expecting a teenager to have a card.

It had been as much a joke as anything else. Some of the guys at school had been talking about their fathers having business cards, and they seemed to think it was cool. I had commented that it was no big deal; they should get some of their own if they wanted them. That immediately started an argument about whether kids could do it, about how to get them, and about what they would say. I just said to give me a couple of weeks and I bet I could get some made for me. One loud mouth even bet me five bucks I was full of shit.

That afternoon, after school, I found a printer in Towson in the Yellow Pages. I called and asked if they did business cards and how much they were, and got the directions. The next day I rode my bike to school, and after school rode into Towson. The guy at the front desk thought I was full of shit until I laid a twenty down on the counter, at which point he blinked hard and began to help. It was a simple card really, no artwork or logos, just printed on a pebble finish heavy white stock, with

Carling Parker Buckman, II

(I’m named after my grandfather) across the center in a heavy font, and under that

Scholar Adventurer Soldier of Fortune

in a smaller serif font, and then down in the lower right hand corner, my home phone number, discreetly done in a sans serif font, all done in a glossy black. It actually looked rather classy.

I won the fiver from my friend along with some brownie points at school, but it all proved to be a bit of a mixed bag, at least at home. Hamilton got seriously bent out of shape about my business cards. First he decided to complain about them at the dinner table, and about how I was breaking the law doing this. My parents were kind of curious about why I would bother, and when they refused to have me destroy the cards and otherwise punish me, he ran down to our room and started scribbling on them with a Magic Marker. I caught him at this and called mom down to our bedroom to show her. He stood there with ink on his fingers and denied everything. That got him walloped by Dad with the oak pledge paddle. When I asked about getting paid for the cards he had ruined, Dad tossed me my brother’s wallet, and I lifted out a five. This caused Ham to start fighting and screaming, and got him spanked a second time. I took the remaining cards and locked them in a foot locker I had.

Professor Milhaus looked at my card. “Mister Buckman. Sorry about that. How can I help you?”

“Professor, I’m a student over at Towsontown Junior High and my partner and I are working on a science fair project related to tar in cigarettes. I know you’ve done at least one paper on that and I was hoping for at least a little education.”

His eyes lit up at that. “Yes, I can certainly help you. What did you have in mind?”

I quickly outlined my plans and asked for any advice he had to offer. Considering he understood what I planned, it went a lot faster than with Shelley. He followed along easily.

“Well, it’s an ambitious plan, but nothing too unusual. Ambitious at least for high school. You go to Towson High?” he asked.

“Uh, no sir, Towsontown Junior High. We’re in the ninth grade.”

“Good lord! How old are you?”

“I just turned 14 a few weeks ago.”

He stared at me for a second. “You’re only 14? I’ve had worse explanations and plans from grad students! What do you plan to study after you graduate?”

“I want to get a degree in math or computers.”

“Can I interest you in chemistry?” he asked with a smile.

Oh, Professor Milhaus, if you only knew. “Sorry, I think it’ll be math,” I said, smiling back.

“What about your partner? What are they doing?”

I must have given a wry smile at that, because he raised an eyebrow at me. “Shelley is more the facilities and logistics end of the partnership, while I handle the science portion.”

“Facilities and logistics?”

“It’s in her basement,” I said with a shrug.

He looked askance at me. “Her basement, huh. Just for the sake of idle curiosity, is Shelley pretty?”

“Scientists are human, too, Professor.” That got a good laugh from him.

We then got down to brass tacks. He made several suggestions for improving the project. He also gave me a small stack of scientific papers on cigarette tar. I asked about bringing a sample of the tar over and having it analyzed. They had a new gas chromatograph which would be useful on this, but it would end up using most of the first sample we created. Shelley and I would also list his name as an academic adviser. It was a fair request — he would get some credit for a community service type project for the college, and we could get some time from him.

I bundled up my paperwork and went back outside. I rode home through a cold wind and decided that the next time I needed to go over to the college, I would call and make an appointment and get somebody to drive me.

The next day at lunch I told Shelley about meeting Professor Milhaus over at Towson State, and how he had offered to give us some help. She was amazed at what I had achieved. So far she had simply managed to get her father to come and take the vacuum pump home. It was now sitting on the old table in her basement. We decided I would ride the bus home with her and I could see what the lab looked like. As soon as lunch broke, I found the pay phone at the school and called Dad to let him know I was changing my schedule, and that I would call when I needed a lift from Shelley’s; he would let Mom know in turn.

The ride to Shelley’s was interesting. She lived in our development, but on the other side of Charmuth Road, so she was on a different bus. We got a lot of questions when I got on with her, and then sat next to her, and she proudly proclaimed she was my partner in the Science Fair. For some reason this seemed to give her an improvement in status, which I couldn’t fathom. She was already in the ‘popular’ clique; why worry about being smart? I don’t claim to understand women.

I was already the King of the Nerds, and fully graced with all the rights and privileges of said kingdom. It was a rather dubious honor. The rights and privileges seemed few and far between.

Shelley lived about a half block from where we got off the bus, and as we walked to her house she tucked an arm in mine. This was the first physical touch that she had initiated, and I liked it. Maybe the King of the Nerds had some hidden rights. Droit du seigneur seemed a bit of a stretch, but I’d be willing to go along. We walked to her house, bumping hips and laughing. She let us in, telling me that her parents were both at work for another couple of hours. Interesting!

Before anything else could happen, I needed to see the lab area. The basement was well enough lit, if a bit dusty. The table was in the corner, with an old vacuum pump sitting on it. I looked around but couldn’t find an electric outlet, so Shelley looked and found one on the other side of the room. I picked up the pump and moved it off the table, and then we both picked up the table and carried it across the room. Then I grabbed the pump and set it up again. “You got any rags and Windex or something?” I asked. Everything was fairly dusty.

“Upstairs.”

“Can you go up and grab a bunch, please? We need to do some cleaning first.”

She scampered up the stairs and came back down a few minutes later with an armload of old rags and a bottle of Windex. I grinned when I saw her. “Professor Milhaus asked what you were doing, and I said you were Facilities and Logistics. I was right!” This didn’t get the response I expected, since Shelley didn’t know what either facilities or logistics meant. Oh, dear. Well, she was very ornamental.

We cleaned up the table and the vacuum pump, which was old and a little dirty and greasy. We still needed a power cord to connect up the pump, which made an ungodly racket when running, but it looked like it would work. I found a wrench and took off the suction end of the pump and stuck it in my backpack. I would need to go by the hardware store and come up with a filtration cavity. I told Shelley I would get my father to take me to the hardware store on Saturday and try and figure out something we could use, probably from plumbing supplies. With any luck we could have a working model next week.

“Wow! That seems awfully fast! I thought we didn’t have to do this until the spring?” she commented.

I looked around the room. At the other end of the basement was some old furniture. I led her over there and sat down on a ratty old couch. She sat down next to me. I leaned back into the corner and said, “You’d be surprised how quickly the time will go. Listen, you want an A on this, right?”

“I need an A on this,” she replied ruefully.

I didn’t react to that, but I admitted, “And I want to win this, not just get an A, so we have to do more than you’d think. First, we’re probably going to have to suck down about a thousand cigarettes to get a batch of tar to take over to Towson State. I don’t know how long it will take to smoke a cigarette, but even if we do one a minute, that’s three packs an hour. It might take us a couple of weeks to smoke fifty packs.”

Shelley blinked at that. “Wow!”

“It gets worse. That first batch of tar will go to Towson State, but they’ll be using it all. We won’t get anything back, which means we’ll need to make another batch for the demonstration of the project. Maybe even two batches.” Even so, I was privately worried we still wouldn’t win. We could win the Nobel Prize with the science, but Mike Misner could still beat us with even a half-assed project. You just can’t beat an incubator full of baby chicks for cuteness.

Shelley saw my worried look and smiled at me. “Hey, we’re going to win, I just know it! You’re too smart to do anything else!” Then she leaned over and kissed me again, only this time not on my cheek but on my lips. “I’m telling you, we’re going to win!”

I smiled and licked my lips. I hadn’t been kissed by a girl since Marilyn died on my first trip through eternity. I liked it, and the hormones going through me were not all that much under control. “Wow, is that how you plan to keep my morale high?”

She waved her arm at the room. “I’m not just good for facilities and logics, but I can also handle morale.”

I grinned. I could have explained the difference between logics and logistics, but I didn’t think that would be all that productive. On the other hand… “You know, I still think there’s an awful lot of work to do. I’m just feeling really depressed about it.” I moaned theatrically.

Shelley waggled her eyebrows at me. She shifted on the couch and crawled over me, and this time the kiss lasted a good deal longer. Then she sat back down on her heels. “Feeling better?”

“Some, but you know, it kind of comes and goes. I think I need another treatment.” I reached out and tugged her towards me. She crawled back on top of me and I stretched out. We began kissing again, and this time I slipped her a little tongue. Shelley instantly responded, and our tongues began dueling. We necked for another hour or so, until we heard a door open upstairs and the floor creaking. We separated, grinning, and got ourselves back in order.

I stood up and tucked my shirttails back in. “I hate to say it, but I think we’re going to have to work on my mental depression some more.”

Shelley licked her lips lewdly. “I know cures you wouldn’t believe!” She checked her own shirttails, and then grabbed my hand. “Come on, we need to go upstairs. I think my mom is home.” I allowed myself to be dragged upstairs to meet first her mother, and then her father when he came home.

Shelley’s parents were both heavy smokers. Nobody had ever heard of second hand smoke in those days, but you could probably get lung cancer just by walking through the house. Both her parents smoked two packs of Marlboros a day, and the house reeked of tobacco. Shelley didn’t smoke, and when I got done with this project, she’d never want to. Mr. Talbot drove me home, since he hadn’t even taken off his coat. The way he and Mrs. Talbot coughed, I hoped Shelley wouldn’t be an orphan before she graduated.

I suspected my father would end up quitting by the time I got through with this project, also. He smoked two packs a day of L&Ms, and had done so since he was in the Navy. He ended up quitting when I was in high school, and then took up cigars for another ten years, before quitting that, too. The curious thing was that for all that the anti-smoking zealots complain about the dangers, and God knows, it’s a deadly habit, not everybody who smokes gets cancer. Dad lived until he was 75 and never had a problem with his lungs. I smoked 26 years and when I had to quit I had a lung test and found I had the lungs of a teenager. Marilyn was seriously peeved with me about that. She wanted me to have something dreadful, but curable, so she could sit there and tell me, ‘I told you so!’ It might eventually kill 95 % of the people who smoked, but Dad and I were in that other 5 %. Then again, I seemed to have been recycled due to a heart attack, but was that because of smoking or the lamp?

That Saturday Dad and I drove up to a local hardware store and went through the plumbing section. This was all long before the days of Home Depot or Lowes. Hardware stores were much smaller. There was an ample supply of pipes and fittings, and while I would have preferred stainless steel, it just wasn’t available. I settled on galvanized. I bought enough parts for three different filters.

Monday afternoon I rode the bus home with Shelley again, and we headed down to the basement. I had the bag of pipe fittings in my backpack, along with a big package of surgical cotton balls. I laid everything out on the table. “I tried this all at home over the weekend, but we need to try it here and see if it actually will work. We need to hook it up to the pump and see if it can work.”

“Okay, but what exactly do we have?”

“This is the body of the filter,” I said, holding up a piece of 1" galvanized steel pipe, six inches long and threaded at both ends. I then grabbed an adapter, which converted the 1" pipe to ¼" pipe, and threaded that onto one end. “So that end goes onto the pump. Now, we drop in this piece of wire mesh.” I held up a small round piece of wire mesh.

“Where did you get that?”

I shrugged. “I think it’s supposed to be a sort of garden fence wire. It’s bigger than screen for windows but smaller than chicken coop screen.” I dropped it down the pipe and jiggled it, then glanced inside to see if it lay flat. “All it does is hold the actual filter in place.”

“The cotton balls, right?” she said pointing at the bag.

“Exactly.” I reached over and grabbed the bag, and then ripped one end open.

“If we just drop the balls in there, won’t the smoke go around them?”

I eyed her curiously. Actually, that was a very good question. Shelley might not be as dumb as she let out. “That’s actually something we should think about. Maybe we should pull some of the balls apart before stuffing them into the tube.” Shelley nodded and we each took a handful and pulled the balls apart into a mass of cotton. I held the tube upright while she pushed it down inside.

I really wasn’t sure how much we wanted to fill it. Too much would make the draw too hard for the vacuum pump. Too little meant we wouldn’t capture enough tar. We would also have to keep an eye out on how the pump functioned after tar started accumulating and clogging the filter. I was just guessing when I stopped Shelley and put the other end cap on.

“Now we attach the filter to the pump.” I twisted the adapter onto the business end of the vacuum pump.

“And the cigarette goes on the other end. How does that work?”

I just looked at her. “That part I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe when your parents get home we can ask them.”

“It’s funny. For once there’s something you don’t know!”

“Oh, Shelley, if you only knew! There’s lots of things I don’t know!” I said with a laugh.

She grinned. “Maybe I can teach you some.”

“I’d like that.”

“Anyway, let’s figure that you figure out how to put a cigarette on that end and we smoke a bunch of cigarettes. How do we get the tar out of the cotton?”

“The way I see it, we open it up, take out the cotton balls, and mix the cotton balls in a solvent. The tar goes out of the cotton into the solvent, and then we boil off the solvent,” I replied.

“We do that down here?” she asked, looked very warily at the idea.

“God no, not unless we want the house to blow up! I think we had better do that over at school in the chem lab.” She looked rather relieved at that.

We took a break at that point, and settled back onto the couch, where Shelley tried to teach me a few things. She was an excellent teacher. I got a bit bolder and began moving my hands around her back (she had on a small bra under her very thin sweater) and then around to the sides and her front. She had medium sized breasts. She didn’t complain, but simply moaned louder when I began touching her through her sweater. Her face was very flushed when we had to stop because her parents started coming in.

Okay, it wasn’t just her. I was breathing pretty hard as well. It had been a long time since I had made out with a teenage girl like that, and Shelley seemed very responsive. We both got off the couch and turned our backs on each other, and tucked in our shirttails and tried to clean up and look innocent. Almost as one we turned around to face each other and gave sheepish grins.

I smiled and said, “You know, I plan to become a mathematician, but chemistry seems pretty enjoyable, too.”

Shelley laughed at that. “I’m starting to like it, too.” Then she smiled and got a little more serious. She sat down on the arm of the couch and said, “You’re not at all what I expected.”

“Oh?”

“I figured you to be a super serious nerd and a total loser, and you’re not.” I raised an eyebrow at this. “Oh, I mean, you’re just a genius and all, but you’re, like, normal, too.” She licked her lips and smiled. “You sure don’t kiss like a genius.”

I had to laugh at that. “And just how do geniuses kiss?” I asked.

She laughed with me. “I don’t know, but not like that!”

“I’ll have to give you a list of geniuses and how many kids they’ve had. They aren’t a bunch of monks.” I got a little more serious, as well. “Does this mean you won’t be embarrassed to be around me in school? I won’t be a secret?”

“That’s not fair Carl, I haven’t been treating you like that,” she answered me.

I rubbed my face. “No, no you haven’t. I apologize for that. I get treated so differently at times, it’s hard to remember not to be sensitive about things. I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “We’ll talk about that sometime.” She looked at the project. “Let’s get some help on this.” She walked over to the basement stairs and yelled up the stairwell, “Daddy, can you come down and give us a hand?”

Chapter 9: The Science Fair

Shelley showed her father what we had concocted and asked about something to hold a cigarette in. He scratched his head for a moment, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros, out of his pocket. He lit it up and took a drag on it, and then put the filter end into the end of our filter. “Turn it on,” he ordered.

I reached across the table and flipped the switch on the pump. It started chugging away, and the cigarette was pulled firmly into the small pipe on the end of the adapter we were using as a filter cap. The coal glowed brightly and began to quickly march down the length of the cigarette, to ultimately go out when it hit the filter. I turned off the pump. We all looked at each other, and Mr. Talbot said, “That cockamamie gizmo actually works. Nice going, kids.”

I stared at it again. “Yeah, I guess it does.” Holy shit, this thing actually worked!

Mr. Talbot lit up another Marlboro and put it in place and I flipped the switch again, and we watched it smoke another cigarette. “Well, now what? What exactly are you planning on doing?” He asked it of his daughter, and lit up another cigarette. This one he started smoking himself.

Shelley stumbled a little explaining it, but I refrained from taking over. This was her moment and I didn’t want to ruin it. At the end she turned to me and asked, “Did I say that right?”

I smiled. “Pretty much. By the end of this, we’re going to have to pretty it all up, but you got it right. We’re going to smoke a bunch of cigarettes through it, collect the tar, and measure it all.”

“Going to prove I shouldn’t be smoking these things, huh?” he said with a grunt.

“Daddy, it’s not like that!”

“Yeah, it is, honey. That’s exactly what it is. Don’t worry about it. If somebody had done this forty years ago, maybe they wouldn’t be killing me now,” he replied.

“Daddy?” she asked, suddenly fearful.

He coughed and smiled. “Not just yet, baby, but one of these days. I’ve still got a few years left. Just don’t you grow up as stupid as your mother and me. You, neither, young man,” he said to me.

“No thanks, sir. My father smokes L&Ms and I have no interest in it either,” I responded.

He just nodded at that. “Just how many cigarettes are we talking about, anyway?”

I looked a little sheepish at that. It was a big number. “Uh, I figure we’re going to need about five cartons per batch, and probably two or three batches.”

He stared at me and gave a quiet ‘oof’ sound. “That’s a lot of cigarettes. You got any preferences on brands?”

I shrugged. “More a matter of what they aren’t. We don’t want menthols, because they add a chemical to the tobacco which will just complicate things. And they shouldn’t be filter tips, just tobacco.”

“Why not?” he asked curiously.

“Well, we just built a filter. We don’t want any of the tar stopping at the cigarette, but only in the big filter.”

“Makes sense. Camel has a non-filter brand. You could try that, I suppose.”

“Uh, would you be able to buy some for us? I mean, we’ll pay, but no way is anybody going to sell us five cartons of cigarettes. We’re only fourteen!” I said.

He looked at me for a minute, and then lit up another Marlboro. “You already bought all these parts yourself, didn’t you?” He waved a finger towards the various filter parts.

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

He nodded in understanding. “Tell you what, I’ll take care of the smokes. You and your parents can take care of the rest of the expenses. Agreed?”

“Yes, sir, that would be fine.” I stuck out my hand. What that meant was that I would pay my half of the bills. My folks would happily donate their time, but wouldn’t cough up one red cent.

We shook hands and went upstairs. He offered to drive me over to my house, and today Shelley decided to come with us. She got into the back seat, so I did too, and she sat close to me. It was a move that caught her father’s eye, and while he didn’t say anything, he looked at us curiously when I got out. I refrained from kissing her good-bye, the better part of valor being discretion, and all that sort of thing.

I couldn’t get back over to Shelley’s to work on the project until the following Tuesday. She had to go out of town for the weekend and I had plenty to do to keep busy. Over the summer I had increased my training sessions at the dojo to three a week, but once school started, I was back down to two. I still needed to work out and run in the morning. Unfortunately, now that I was growing, my reactions and timing were totally screwed up. Exercises and katas and workout routines that should have been quick and easy were now the work of a drunken spastic. Mr. Miyagi said that this was normal in students of my age, and as I stabilized at a new height and weight, I would quickly get back to normal. I had already moved up one belt color, or kyu, to yellow, and was now working towards orange. Curiously, in official Japanese based aikido, everyone is white, until the graduate from kyu status to dan status, where everyone is black belt. The multicolored belt system is an American innovation.

I also got Dad to trade in our family’s Royal manual for a used IBM Selectric, and amazingly got him to cough up half the difference in price. Typing homework became much faster. Hamilton didn’t like that I could use a typewriter, but he had pushed his luck too far lately and he was afraid of fucking with it, on fear of Dad’s anger.

Tuesday afternoon I rode on the bus over to Shelley’s house, and she held my hand on the bus, which generated more than a few stares from some of the other kids. We walked hand in hand up to her house. Once inside, I held up our hands and said, “Thanks, I think.”

She gave me an exasperated look and took back her hand. “Carl, I don’t know what it is you think of me, but I’m not as shallow or as stupid as you seem to think I am.”

I gave her a bleak look. “Yeah, I mean, no, you’re not.” I shook my head at the import of what I was saying as she gave me a disgusted look. “That didn’t come out right.”

“Carl, what is your problem with me?”

I sat down on the living room couch and rubbed my face. “I don’t know, Shelley. Maybe the problem is with me, not you.”

She sat down next to me. “Huh?”

“I don’t know Shelley, maybe I’m just being a jerk. I mean, a year ago, or even just last spring, you wouldn’t have given me the time of day. Then this year, out of the blue, you ask to partner with me and we’re suddenly boyfriend-girlfriend. What happens the day after the Science Fair is over? I get kicked to the curb again?”

“That’s a pretty ugly picture of me, Carl, you know?” She did not look happy.

“I know.” I looked at her and shrugged. “Or am I just the most cynical and pessimistic bastard you’ve ever met?”

She smiled at that. “Maybe it’s a little of both,” she replied. I eyed her curiously. “Listen, before this year, you weren’t anything to write home about. Don’t get me wrong, Carl, but I at least would like a guy to be as big as I am!”

I laughed at that. “God knows that’s the truth.”

“And this year,”, she continued, “Well, maybe I did start out just looking for your help on the project, but I also got to know you. You’re nowhere near as scary as I thought you would be.”

I had to stare at her. “Scary?! What in the world are you talking about?” The very concept that anybody could be impressed by me was ludicrous on its face. Scary?

“Well, Jeez, Carl, everybody knows you. Come on, you’re only the smartest guy in the entire school. You kicked the shit out of three guys twice your size last year. You got arrested and then sweet talked your way out of it, and then you got the three guys arrested and thrown out of school! Everybody sees you out running and working out every morning, and everyone knows you’re, like, a black belt in karate or something. You take classes at Towson High and know professors at Towson State — I mean, half the school wants to know why you aren’t going to college!”

I stared at her in disbelief. “Are you shitting me?” I just shook my head.

“No, I’m not!”

“Jesus!” I looked over at her and smiled. “Listen, I ain’t nobody special. I’m just trying to get by, like everyone else. I’m the same asshole I’ve always been. All that stuff is just stuff. I don’t go looking for trouble.”

“Oh, yeah? So, let me ask you, seriously, how come you’re still at Towsontown then, and not in high school or college? You’re the smartest guy I’ve ever heard of, like our very own Einstein or something.”

I had a good laugh at that. I may well have been the smartest guy in the school, but I know the difference between that and Einstein. “Here’s the question for you. Maybe I could get into college. Maybe I am that smart. Why would I want to?”

“Huh? Why wouldn’t you?” she asked, her forehead wrinkling. “So you can get out of school, silly.” For the average student, graduation meant escape.

I just shook my head. “Think about that for a second. I’m 14 years old. All the kids over at Towson State are 18 or 19 or whatever. If you think I stand out now, how about then? How many college girls are going to be interested in me? Think any of them are going to hold my hand like you did? How do I get to school? I can’t drive. I can’t wait to see Mommy and Daddy taking me to school over there.”

Her eyes opened at that. “I never thought about that.”

“I just want what everybody else wants. I’m so normal I’m boring, even to myself.”

Shelley rolled her eyes at that. “You aren’t boring! I mean, what about all the karate and working out and all?”

“Lots of guys work out. What’s the difference between me and the guys who stay after school for sports?”

“But that’s just it; you’re not going out for sports! You do it on your own.”

“Who’d pick me for sports? I’d still be the smallest guy on the team, and besides, I’m not a black belt in karate. That’s just silly.”

She pointed a finger at me. “I know you go up to the Miyagi place. I saw Lance two weeks ago and we were talking.”

“That’s aikido, which is different, and I’m not a black belt.”

“Listen, say what you want, but you’re different, special-like. I’m just glad you let me be your partner and not one of the other girls.”

My eyes widened at that. “What other girls?”

She rolled her eyes again. “Oh my God! Give me a break! There were a bunch of them — and no, I’m not giving you their names! — and I just asked you first. Besides, now that you’ve outgrown the midget stage, you’re kind of cute.”

I just stared for another minute or so. “I think each and every one of you have lost your fucking minds!”

Shelley laughed loudly at that and stood up. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. “Come on, we need to work on this project!”

She dragged me down to the basement and it was obvious that somebody had been working. I won’t say it was spotless, but it was a whole lot cleaner. The room had been swept and dusted, and while the couch was still dilapidated, it was clean, and an old Afghan had been draped over it. “Wow, somebody has been working.”

Shelley laughed. “Daddy made me do it. He said it was pretty disgusting when he saw what we had been working in. I got Mom to help.” On the table along with the pump was a shopping bag with a half dozen cartons of Camel nonfilters.

I pulled a carton out of the bag and opened it up, and then pulled out a pack. “Let’s give it a shot. Got any matches?”

She looked startled. “This is it? We’re starting?”

“Sort of. We need to test the machine and see how it works first. I figure we should smoke a couple of packs and time it and see how it goes.”

She nodded and ran upstairs, coming down with a small box of kitchen matches. I turned on the pump and stuck a Camel in the end, and then struck a match. In just a bit over half a minute the Camel was sucked down in its entirety, not even leaving a butt. Shelley stuck in another cigarette and I lit another match. Over the next fifteen minutes we smoked an entire pack of Camels.

I turned off the pump and laid my hand on the filter. It was uncomfortably warm. Well, we were sucking burning material through it. We smoked another pack of cigarettes and the filter was becoming too hot. I shut off the pump. “We need to figure a way to cool this thing down,” I said.

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that if we keep sucking hot smoke through the filter, it’s going to get too hot and start baking the tar it’s already trapped. We need to cool it down somehow.” This was a problem. I was trying to envision wrapping some sort of hose around the filter and running cooling water through it, or building a double layered filter. That could get very complicated, very fast!

“You just need the filter cooled? Can we use ice?”

I looked at her curiously. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Shelley scampered back upstairs. I turned on the pump and drew some air through it, hoping to use air cooling to bring the temperature down. That worked, but it would slow things down immensely if we had to spend half our time just sucking in cooling air.

Shelley returned with a tray of ice and a couple of different size Baggies. She also had an old candle. She broke up the ice and put some in a Baggie and sealed it, and then draped it over the filter. She didn’t like how it looked, so she repeated it with the next larger size and added another couple of ice cubes. “Try it now.” I shrugged and opened another pack of cigarettes and then picked up the box of matches. “Here, wait.” She set the candle between us and lit it with a match. “Use that and save on the matches.”

“That’s a good idea,” I commented. I smoked another pack of Camels. Inside the Baggie the ice began melting and the temperature of the steel filter stayed at a decent level.

I shut off the pump. “You know, that actually works.”

“Really?”

“It’s ugly, but it works. Next time, we mix a little water in with the ice, and crush some of the ice cubes first. We start off cool and stay that way.”

“Why?”

I explained heat transfer and surface area and heat capacity, but after a few minutes her eyes were glazing over. “Hey, it doesn’t matter why. This will work. You saved us a lot of grief.”

“Wow! I did?”

“Yep!” I grabbed the filter and twisted it off the pump. “Let’s see what it’s like.”

“I thought we had to smoke all these first,” she said, pointing at the rest of the Camels.

“No, this week we are in test and preparation mode. We need to make sure it all works first.” I twisted the filter apart. The suction end was noticeably brownish-yellow, showing tar accumulating, but there were also a number of bits of unburned paper and tobacco. Over five cartons of cigarettes, that would be a problem. I pointed it to her. “We need something to keep out this junk.”

Shelley picked up some spare screen. “Can we use this?”

I shook my head. “Too coarse. We need something finer.”

She went over to a workbench and pulled out a piece of metal window screening. “How about this?”

“We’ll try it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Why not now?”

“Because we don’t need to. We’ll have to suck down another pack or two of Camels and we don’t have the time. The schedule allows us plenty of time to get this right.”

“What schedule? You haven’t said anything about a schedule,” she said accusingly.

I thought about it for a moment. “You know, you’re right, I haven’t. Sorry about that. Listen, I will type up a schedule at home tonight and bring it over tomorrow. Anyway, on the schedule, this week I have us doing initial design and testing. Next week we can start for real.”

Shelley nodded with that. Her eyes perked up when I asked what she was doing after school on Thursday. “Why?”

“We need to take the filter over to Towson State to be weighed. My mother will pick me up after class and take me over. Want to go with me?”

“Sure! That would be pretty cool. Why are we weighing the filter, and why over there?”

I explained that we needed to accurately weigh the filter assembly before and then after the experiment, to try and measure how much tar we had collected. The only balances the school had was a bunch of old triple beam balances. We needed something much more accurate. I don’t think it really sank in, but Shelley went along. I figured to weigh the filter now, weigh it again after loading it with the tar, then remove the cotton and collect the tar, and weigh that as well. The science would be impressive. Whether it would beat baby chicks was questionable.

Lab work for the day was ended, and the sounds of the front door opening and a parent arriving indicated there wouldn’t be much in the way of non-lab experimentation going on. Shelley glanced at the stairs with an unhappy look. “I wanted to spend the time down here differently,” she said.

I smiled. “Me too. Well, tomorrow, if your design changes work out, maybe there’ll be time for testing our personal chemistry.”

“I’d like that!” She tossed her arms around my neck and pulled me closer, and we kissed for several minutes, with an awful lot of tongue swapping, before we broke free and went upstairs. I ended up walking home tonight, but it wasn’t that big a deal.

Chapter 10: Chemistry, the Experimental Science

The next afternoon, Wednesday, I went over to Shelley’s and we quickly smoked a pack of Camels. This time our Baggie held crushed ice and a little water and kept the filter temperature nicely under control. The screen caught any paper and tobacco, and the filter cotton was becoming decidedly browner. We pronounced the design a success. Shelley then grinned and blew out the candle.

I sat down on the couch and stretched out, making myself comfortable. Earlier, Shelley had changed out of her skirt into a pair of tight jeans, which looked really good on her. As soon as I was stretched out, she sat down on the couch and crawled over me. She kissed me and said, “Mmmm, I think we have at least an hour before anybody comes home. Whatever will we do until then?”

I smiled and ran my hands up her back. Shelley was wearing a green print cotton blouse, with a bra underneath it. I could feel the catch behind her. “Well, we could always talk, or watch TV, or read books. Did you have something else in mind?” I asked innocently.

“I was thinking about a different experiment.” She leaned in and kissed me much more deliberately.

After a minute, I pulled back and smiled. “I love science. I think I’ll let you be the project leader.” I put a hand behind her head and pulled her closer.

We French kissed for several minutes, and I could tell Shelley was becoming very aroused. She was a vocal lover, and reminded me of an ancient joke: Two guys were talking and the first said that it was his birthday, and his friends had gotten him a sweater. The second guy said that was very nice of them, at which point the first guy replied, ‘Yeah, but last year they got me a moaner!’ Shelley was a moaner!

Shelley lay on top of me, moaning as we kissed. Her eyes were closed and she squirmed around, rubbing herself across me. Well, I might not understand women (God knows I didn’t on the first time around, and so far the second trip wasn’t looking all that favorable) but even I knew enough to move forward. I began rubbing her back, slowly running my hands down her back to her jeans and then back upwards. I could feel the muscles in her back moving in response. I lingered briefly at her bra, letting her know that I knew it was there, but otherwise handled it slowly. Shelley moaned even louder, and she began squirming around feverishly, even beginning to hump my leg.

After another minute or two of frantic kissing, I brought my hands up and along her sides, and then brought my right hand around to her front. I simply held it against her left breast. Shelley shivered and kissed me harder, and then pulled away slightly. “Oh, God, oh God…” She opened her eyes and looked at me. I just smiled and shifted on the couch, so that now we were lying more or less on our sides.

I moved my lips away from hers, and began licking and nibbling first her lips, and then her cheeks, and then began moving down her neck, all of which elicited tiny little shrieks of pleasure from her. She was furiously humping her pelvis at me. When I got down to her neckline I spent a fair bit of time working at the side of her neck before moving my lips around to her throat. As I did, I reached between us and popped the top button on her blouse. Shelley didn’t complain, so I kissed lower, and undid another button.

Inside of five minutes I had Shelley’s blouse unbuttoned, and I was kissing and licking the tops of her breasts above the cups of her small bra. Shelley wasn’t the bustiest girl in the school, but what she had was nice and soft and warm, and looked very perky. I pulled away and reached around her, inside her blouse, and smiled at her as I undid the catch on her bra. She sighed and said, “We can’t go any further today.”

I pulled my hand back. “Do I need to stop and leave?”

She smiled and took my hand and held it to her breast. “I didn’t say that, just that we can’t go any further. It’s not a good time.”

The confusion must have been evident on my face, and then I simply said, “Ohhhh.” It had been a long time since Marilyn and I had been held up by menstruation.

“Yeah. In the meantime, don’t stop, no matter what!” She tugged my head back down to her chest. I maneuvered her bra out of the way. She had large and puffy nipples on those two perfect little cones, and I split my time on them, licking and sucking them, first one and then the other. After several minutes, Shelley’s moans became even louder and she began to shiver and shake. Then, she stiffened in my arms with a tiny little shriek, and gasped out, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” She was coming, and I led her through it and then let her down. She collapsed in my arms, breathing heavily.

Well, hell, so was I, and it didn’t look like I was going to get any relief until later that night in the bathroom. Meanwhile, my cock was stuck halfway down one of my pant legs and I was starting to suffer the mother of all blue balls. I moved away slightly and tried to adjust my position. Shelley noticed and grinned. “Things a little hard for you?” she teased.

“Uh, yeah!”

“Maybe you’d like a little help with that?”

“Well, now that you mention it…”

Shelley smiled a very adult smile at me. She sat up, not bothering to cover up or adjust her blouse and bra, and very expertly undid my belt and the zipper on my blue jeans. “Lift up,” she ordered. I obeyed and she tugged my jeans and my tighty-whiteys down. Little Carl popped into view, hard and red and proudly waving in the wind. “Oh, Carl, that’s very nice!” she said, a coo in her voice.

Well, I wasn’t the biggest guy in the gym on my first trip through, but I wasn’t the smallest either. If the average was between 5½" and 6½" long, I was between 6½" and 7", depending on how you did the measuring. It was pretty obvious to me that this wasn’t the first cock Shelley had seen, although exactly how many I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Shelley climbed off the couch and knelt on the carpet at my waist. She reached out and delicately began to stroke and pump me, smiling at me and looking into my eyes seductively. “Does that feel good?” she asked in a whisper.

“Oh, God!” I moaned. She gave me a slightly more vigorous stroke, with a bit of a twist involved, and I lost control. Jism spurted up and into the air, and then came down and landed all over my crotch and her hand. She gave me several more pumps until I drained out.

“I think it felt good,” she commented, laughing. Then she completely surprised me. She peeled off her blouse and bra, leaving her kneeling next to me topless. Then she used her bra cups to wipe the come off my cock and balls and her hand. Just the sight of her doing this, and the feel of the silky bra running over my groin, drove me nuts, and my cock immediately stiffened again.

I had forgotten one of the great things about my teenage years, the ability to rejuvenate practically at will! I was a pretty normal guy. In my teen years I could go again after about ten minutes or less, and screw three or four times in a row, no problem. In my twenties, it was two or three times a night; my thirties and forties, once a night. By the time I was mid-fifties, Viagra became a useful helper, and by my sixties, a requirement.

Now — now I could go again as quickly as I needed to, and right now, it looked like I needed to! Shelley pumped my dick until it was sufficiently hard, and then leaned in, opening her mouth. She only sucked on my cockhead, all the while pumping and twisting my shaft. It was my turn to moan happily. I laid a hand on her back and another on her head, not pushing her lower but simply running my fingers through her hair and keeping her in place. “Oh, that’s it, don’t stop… don’t stop… just like that… don’t stop… yes, yes…” As she took me closer to the edge, biology took over, and I began pumping my midsection upwards, trying to fuck my cock into her mouth. Shelley stayed firmly in control.

Just before I cut lose, I had enough semblance of thought to weakly cry out, “I’m going to come, I’m going to come, keep going, keep going.” If she didn’t want it in her mouth, and some girls don’t, at least I gave her warning. She could probably tell anyway by the taste of my pre-come. Shelley didn’t care. She kept sucking and pumping until I exploded again, and she swallowed every drop.

I collapsed into the couch and gazed at her. She sat back on her heels and grinned, using a finger to wipe the corners of her mouth. “Wow!” I said.

“That was fun. We’re going to have to do that again.”

“Any time you want.” I theatrically looked at my watch. “Give me a few minutes…”

Shelley laughed and stood up, grabbing her top and bra. “Not now. My folks will be home in ten minutes. I need to get dressed!” She scampered up the stairs.

I waited another minute to catch my breath, and then stood up and pulled my briefs and pants back up. By the time Shelley returned, I had the basement in a semblance of dignity. We packaged up the parts of the filter we were taking to the college and tossed them in my backpack and headed upstairs.

“Not to be too personal, but any idea when, you know, we’ll be able to, you know?” I stammered out. I figured this was better than asking the real question — when can we fuck like minks in heat?!

She grinned. “Sometime next week.”

“Should I be getting some protection?” I asked.

She gave me a surprised look. “Thank you for asking, but no, I’m on the Pill.” She then said, “Most guys don’t ask.”

“You should know by now, I’m not most guys.”

She ran her hands across her breasts, shivering, and said breathily, “I figured that out already. I thought I was going to be teaching you, but boy did I have that wrong! Who taught you?”

“A friend.”

“Who was she? I didn’t know you had been dating anyone.”

I just shook my head. “I don’t kiss and tell, or do anything and tell. I have had friends.”

“Friends? Multiple friends?”

“I’m a friendly guy.”

She looked at me and then reached out to try and tickle me. “I bet I can force you to tell me.”

I didn’t tell her, but the only places on my entire body that are ticklish are the soles of my feet. I let her try to tickle me, but just held out, stalwart to the end. “Us tough guys can’t be broken!”

“Then I’m going to start asking around school!”

I shrugged. “Ask away, but you’ll never hear it from me.”

“And if one of your friends asks about us?”

“We’re just friends. Good friends. Unquote. Like I said, I don’t tell.” Then I grinned. “But don’t let me stop you. You ask your friends in school, and the next time we’re together, you can try tickling me again, too, but don’t be surprised if I tickle back.” I goosed her side and she squealed and jumped away. “Payback’s a bitch, baby!”

Her mother walked in just then, to find her daughter trying to tickle me, and me valiantly resisting. I was polite enough to look embarrassed, and then I grabbed my coat and took off. As I left the house, I could hear Shelley saying, “Mom! Nothing happened!” I grinned like a fool the entire walk home.

That evening, after demolishing what little homework I was behind in, I gave a lot of thought to my newfound sexual liberation. In many ways, the Sixties and Seventies were the golden age of the sexual revolution. With the introduction of the Pill in the late Fifties/early Sixties pregnancy was effectively eliminated as a reason for abstinence. Even if a girl got pregnant, it was no longer the end of the world. By 1973 Roe v. Wade legalized abortion throughout the country. By the Seventies the social stigma of abortion was at the lowest it would be for a generation or two.

The other major problem with promiscuous sexual freedom was disease, but AIDS didn’t exist until the early Eighties. In the Sixties and Seventies the worst you could get was gonorrhea or syphilis, both of which were susceptible to standard antibiotics. (Okay, herpes was around too, but that was never that big a deal.) Once, in the mid Seventies when I was in college, I got an abscessed tooth, and needed to be treated with penicillin. My frat brothers immediately suspected I had the clap and my reputation soared!

So I was in the midst of a sexual smorgasbord that on the first go-around I had been both oblivious to (at first) and then unable to do much with. Sexual liberation was something that really wasn’t seen until college. While statistics on the subject have always been notoriously unreliable, the average age when virginity was lost was 18 or 19. It would continue to drop as time went on, but when I graduated high school in 1973, well over half my class, despite the bragging and brave talk, were virgins, myself included. I also have to be fair about it, when I say that in 1969, it was very unusual for a junior high student to be sexually active. There were always rumors and stories, but were generally just rank bullshit.

I saw no need to repeat that history! If two-thirds of my graduating class were virgins, then one-third wasn’t, and it was my duty to find the females in this group. It looked to me like I already had found my first serious girlfriend, and I intended for us to become very serious.

Certainly nothing was going to happen on Thursday. Mom picked me and Shelley up after school and drove us the five minutes into Towson to the college. It took us longer to park the car and walk across campus than it did to drive there. Once inside the chemistry building, I led the way to Professor Mihaus’ office. He was waiting there for us and I introduced everyone. Before we went into the lab, however, I asked, “Professor, do you have a blank lab notebook? I completely forgot to pick one up.”

He shook his head and wagged a finger at me. “You need to remember the importance of proper observations.” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out two notebooks. “Now, record today’s work in one of them. How many days have you been working on this?”

“About a week or so.”

“Why, Professor?” asked Shelley. She had gotten over her initial awe and was curious.

“I messed up,” I replied. “I forgot to record our daily work and progress each day. You need accurate observations and recordings to document your lab work.”

Professor Milhaus nodded in agreement. “Quite correct. Still, it’s early on and no harm, no foul. I want you to take the second notebook and start on page one and record the work you’ve done to this point. When you get to today’s work, copy from the one notebook into the other, and then only use the second from that point.”

I nodded my understanding. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t. While proud of me (and barely acknowledging Shelley) she felt this was an awful lot of work for a little junior high project, and she told him so. “Is all that really needed, Doctor?”

“Oh, very much so. I would never accept less from one of my students,” he replied. She looked quite skeptical, and he noticed. “Mrs. Buckman, I think you are working under a misapprehension about this project. You are thinking this is just a school project. This is a most ambitious undertaking. I would normally accept this caliber of work at the undergraduate level. I plan on using the sample that these two provide me as a basis of lab work for a senior and graduate organic chemistry course. Proper documentation is essential!”

“I apologize, Professor, it won’t happen again,” I assured him.

“I know it won’t,” he said with a smile. To my mother, he said, “Talk to your son. He would have a future in chemistry.”

From there we went into the lab. Today’s work was simple. We weighed the filter without the cotton, then Shelley and I fluffed up some cotton and put that in place, and then reweighed the loaded filter. After we had smoked a bunch of cigarettes through it, in a couple of week’s time we would reweigh things. The filter system should be demonstrably heavier. Afterwards we would isolate the tar and measure that. Throughout the experiment, we could calculate the amounts of tar we could obtain and the overall efficiency of our system.

Shelley followed along well enough, once it was explained. Mom was totally lost, but ridiculously proud. Mom drove us back over to Shelley’s house, and Shelley took the filter inside. Mom also noticed that on the ride over to Towson State, and the ride back, I rode in the back with Shelley, and that when I walked Shelley to her door, Shelley gave me a very enjoyable kiss before going inside.

I got back into the car, although in the front seat this time. Mom immediately asked, “So is Shelley your girlfriend, too?”

“Yes, I think we could say that,” I admitted.

“Why haven’t you told us anything about her?”

I just stared at her briefly and started laughing. Mom wasn’t amused but she bit her tongue. “Carl, I’m serious.”

“Okay, Mom, I’ll tell you about all my current girlfriends the same day you tell me about all your current boyfriends.” I started laughing some more.

“Carl! How dare you?! I don’t have any boyfriends!”

“Well, I’m sure Dad will be relieved!” I continued laughing until we got home and managed to avoid answering any questions.

To be fair about it, once I started dating, my mother never gave me any real grief, back in the first time around. I was a fairly good kid and not one that fathers would start chasing around with a shotgun. The only time she ever stuck her nose in was a brief period between girls when she suggested I ask Denise Maitland out. ‘She’s such a nice girl.’ I almost rolled on the floor laughing, telling her that Denise Maitland was the Queen Bitch of the entire high school, and if she ever held my hand, I’d cut it off at the wrist. She never bothered with me again on the subject of girls.

Mom got very upset with me that night. First she told everyone at the table that I had a girlfriend, which was amusing, not upsetting. That came later. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Ham started in on me. “Carling’s got a girlfriend! Carling’s got a girlfriend!” started spewing out in an annoying sing-song rendition.

I looked over at my father, rolling my eyes and pointing with my head at my brother. “Dad? Really?”

He gave my brother a disgusted look and yelled, “Hamilton, knock it off!”

Hamilton started sulking. “What did I do?”

“Just shut up and eat your dinner.”

Mom then said, “But Carling won’t tell me anything about her.”

“Mom, it’s like I told you. I’ll tell you all about my girlfriends as soon as you tell me about all your boyfriends.”

Suzie and Hamilton giggled at that, Nana snorted, and my father just eyed Mom curiously. Mom protested, “Carling!” and then looked over at Dad. “Don’t you start, mister.”

“I don’t know, Shirley. Sounds reasonable to me.”

“Yeah, Dad, you can tell us about your girlfriends, too,” I remarked.

“Old girlfriends or new girlfriends?” he asked, causing even more giggling.

“You two think you’re just so smart!”

I looked over at my father and we shrugged our shoulders. I turned back to Mom and said, “Well, we are smart. You want us to be dumb?”

Mom started wagging a finger at both of us, which only got her other children and her mother laughing, before she stopped and primly announced she wasn’t going to go any further. Then she caused real problems, when she announced at the dinner table how she had taken Shelley and me over to Towson State and how I was going to become a chemist.

Dad looked at me curiously, since he knew I was interested in math. I just stared at Mom in disbelief. “No, Mom, I never said any such thing. I have no interest in becoming a chemist.” Again.

“Well, that’s just silly. That professor said you would be a brilliant chemist. You like chemistry. He said that this Science Fair project was good enough for college.” Mom heard what she wanted to hear. She had selective hearing disorder as bad as any four-year-old.

“Uh, huh. You told me I did a nice job scrubbing the floor last Saturday, but that doesn’t mean I want to become a janitor,” I answered.

“Don’t give me any lip. You do very well at this sort of thing. You’ll be an excellent engineer some day, maybe a chemical engineer.”

I just stared in disbelief. There it was, her master plan for my life. I was to be Mini-Me for Dad. “No, Mom, I will not.”

“Carling, stop it. I have to say, your behavior now is very disappointing!”

I glanced over at Dad, who was silently watching us. I suspected she had been planning this since I was born, and had suitably informed him at many steps along the way. I could also tell by the look on his face he was not at all convinced this was such a good idea. Despite the ease with which he punished my brother and me for the most trivial of offenses, he actually had a pretty tight grip on reality.

I took a deep breath and looked back at Mom. “You should get used to that feeling, Mom. It’s going to be a lot more frequent than you can imagine.”

“Watch your mouth, Carl,” my father told me.

“Sorry, Dad.”

“How dare you! Charles, are you going to allow this insubordination?”

“Let him talk, Shirley.”

She looked over at me as if about to launch into a tirade and I just held up a hand to stop her. “Mother, I love you, but you seem to have my life planned out in advance. Well, it’s my life, not yours. Let’s be very clear on this. I would happily die for you, but I will never live for you. I will go to the colleges I want to go to, choose the professions I want to choose, and take the jobs I want to take. Along the way, I will date the girls I want to date and marry whoever I want to marry. We will live where we want to live, in the house we want to live in. I have a terrible feeling that very little of what I do will match up with your plans for me.”

She stared at me. “Charlie, are you going to sit there and allow your son to talk to me that way?!”

“Shirley, let him be. If he doesn’t want to be a chemist or an engineer, fine. That’s his business, not ours.” Mom started crying, and then got up and ran from the room. I looked over at Dad, who simply heaved a great sigh and said, “Just shut up, Carling. You’ve had your say, but don’t push it.” I just nodded.

Later, Hamilton started in on me about making Mom cry and how I was in big trouble. I throttled my desire to beat him to a bloody but silent pulp, and took the book I was reading up to the living room. He didn’t dare follow me somewhere our parents might hear him.

Friday I gave Shelley a typed schedule for the experimentation. I had budgeted two weeks to smoke the first five cartons of smokes for Professor Milhaus, and then a third week to isolate the tar for him. We would then repeat this three week exercise to generate a sample to be shown during the Science Fair. Finally, we would use another couple of weeks to generate a filter sample without the chemical isolation, also for the Science Fair. At that point we would have a couple of weeks left to prepare our exhibit and type up a report.

Shelley looked it over. “You know, it doesn’t seem so bad when you put it down like this.”

I nodded. “No, it’s not. It’s just a huge pile of piddling little things that will drive us nuts, but it’s really straightforward. We follow the plan and we get it done in plenty of time.”

“You figured this all out by yourself?”

I shrugged. “It’s not all that much to figure out. You were there when we smoked the Camels the other day. You know how much time that took. Multiply it out to smoke 50 packs and we’ll be within this time frame. Some time will be spent going over to the college, but we can cover that in the time we have. You just have to work backwards in an organized fashion.”

“I don’t know…”

I placed a hand on hers and smiled. “You’re overthinking things. You think I’m so smart. Okay, honestly, I am smart, but even more importantly, I’m organized. I manage my time. I get my shit done on time. That’s my secret!”

This was also the God’s honest truth. God knows I screwed off on my first time through, just like every other kid on the planet. I spent my entire time in high school farting around, and wasn’t much better in college. I did, however, manage to get through college finally knowing how to learn and how to study and with the desire to actually do so. I went from a 2.61 in college to a 3.61 on my next degree, and then 3.98 on my next two degrees, and by then I was already married with children. I just had to stop screwing around.

Shelley didn’t look convinced, but I just laughed and told her that if we followed the plan, not only would we get the project finished, we’d win it and ace our science classes. She calmed down and gave me a very hot kiss before bouncing off to class. Several people noticed and looked at me curiously, but I just smiled. When pressed by the guys, I just did what I told her I was going to do, and said we were just friends.

One of the mouthier assholes in the class, Jerry Bruce, then started asking all sorts of personal questions about what Shelley had done with me, and what her tits and pussy were like. He was pretty graphic and disgusting, which made a few of the guys nervous, as if he was daring me to fight. I just looked at him and asked if he talked about Amanda Burns, his supposed girlfriend, that way. “Oh, yeah, she’s got great tits, and really sucks my cock so good!”

“Really? Congratulations! You won’t mind then if I ask Shelley to talk to her about that, and ask Amanda for tips. Do you think Amanda will be able to tell her, especially when Shelley lets everybody else in class know how good Amanda is?” I asked.

Jerry’s eyes bulged out and he started sputtering, “No, you can’t do that!”

“Jerry, maybe you ought to watch what you say about other guys’ girlfriends, hmmm?”

“Fuck you, Buckman!” He stomped off.

His romance with Amanda didn’t last much more than another 24 hours. She heard all about this from somebody else (not me!) and slugged him in the cafeteria the next day. So much for true love.

Chapter 11: Working at Shelley’s

I went over to Shelley’s on Saturday and we started smoking cigarettes, sucking down almost an entire carton. Her parents were home all day long, and had the disconcerting habit of wandering down to the basement at odd moments to ‘look for something’, in other words, to check on what we were up to. This kind of kept any of our own romance limited, although we did get in some pleasant French kissing. Likewise, we smoked another couple of cartons on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (total, not each day), and since Shelley was on a self-imposed lockdown, we didn’t get much else done, although she gave me a sizzling blowjob each day.

Thursday was completely out. It was Thanksgiving, and both her family was coming to her house, and the entire Buckman clan was coming to ours. This was a major deal, and nobody was smoking cigarettes that day. I don’t know how crazy it got at Shelley’s, but the Thanksgiving feast was a major production at our house, the biggest of the year. Of the three Buckman offspring, Dad was the only male, the most centrally located, the only college educated, and the richest with the largest house. It was his duty to host the affair, and do it in grand style, an idea which suited my hilariously snobbish mother to a tee. (Where she got her snobbishness was a totally different question, one which us kids often debated, since Mom was just a middle class girl from Highlandtown, not Nob Hill.)

Mom had a 12 place setting (six pieces each) formal china service from Pfaltzgraff which was kept in the hutch in specially padded containers. We would drink from matching Steuben crystal stemware (three pieces each) and eat with Oneida flatware (nine pieces per setting). Needless to say, all the serving bowls and utensils matched. We would wipe our fingers on Irish linen napkins, initially held together by silk ribbons, and the table cloth would be matching Irish linen. Thanksgiving dinner was held by candlelight from a silver candelabra.

That was the grown up table. The kids’ tables were a whole lot less formal, mostly whatever Corelleware was available. One of the great delights of growing up was being the oldest and occasionally getting to dine at the grownup table. By the time I was actually old enough and married and could expect this treatment, Mom went to a buffet format. There is simply no justice in the world.

This year we were expecting our family (six including Nana), Aunt Nan’s family (five), and Aunt Peg’s family (four including Grandpa — Dad’s father). That made it 15. By the early Nineties, Nana and Grandpa would be gone, but both my sister and I would have families, as would a couple of my cousins. The number peaked in the low to mid-20s at that point and the formal meal became a true zoo!

Hamilton and I were used as slave labor during the preparations for the feast, which consisted of turkey, both regular stuffing and oyster stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, two types of cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, sauerkraut, green beans, and rolls. After dinner we had at least three types of pies, as well as sundry other things both before and after. You could feed third world nations with what we had at that table. It was the most marvelously gluttonous affair imaginable, and my mother hosted it every year from the time she got married until the time my father’s Alzheimer’s became unmanageable, almost fifty years.

Friday, however, was an entirely free day. The women of the family, my mother and my two aunts, would go on an all day shopping frenzy on Black Friday. Suzie, at only eight years old, was still in the amateur ranks; she wouldn’t be able to go with the pros until she was a teenager. My father took the day off and could watch the kids, but Shelley’s parents both had to work! We would have her entire house to ourselves, and Shelley had told me in no uncertain terms to get there early.

I left the house at nine, just after Mom and the ladies left wearing their finest holiday hobnailed boots and brass knuckles, the better to fight off the maddening hordes. I rode my bike up to Shelley’s and parked it around back, and then knocked on her back door.

I wasn’t quite sure what Shelley had in mind. I didn’t really expect her to open the door wearing a lace teddy and high heels, and she didn’t. She did, however, have on a blouse and a short denim skirt, and was barefoot. She opened the door and I slipped inside. “Brrrr, it’s freezing out there!” she commented.

I thought it was just a normal November day, but I had spent damn near fifty years in upstate New York, where it snowed six months of the year. Maryland is a tropical paradise compared to that! As soon as I got inside, Shelley unzipped my coat and slipped her arms inside and around me. I quickly noticed she was missing a bra. “Maybe I can warm you up,” I replied.

“I sure hope so!” She tilted her head up so I could kiss it. Just in the time we had been working on the project I had grown another inch, and I was now taller than her.

I kissed her back, taking my time about it and being thorough. After a few minutes she pulled away and took my hand, and led me into the living room. She had already laid out a comforter on the floor in front of the fireplace, although no fire was laid. I took off my coat and kicked off my shoes, and followed her to the comforter.

She was already seated on one side of the comforter, her legs drawn up beneath her, and was grinning. I sank down next to her and lay back, tucking a couple of throw pillows under my head. “I have to admit, this is a lot nicer than the couch downstairs,” I said.

Shelley giggled. “No kidding. That thing is awful!”

“And your parents won’t be back until…?”

She grinned. “Not until after five. They both work in Baltimore and never come home for lunch or anything. They’re gone all day. Why? Did you want to go downstairs and smoke some more cigarettes?” She stretched out next to me and threw a leg over mine.

“Uh, not right away.” I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her on top of me. “Maybe later.”

“Maybe a lot later!” She lowered her lips to mine and gave me a scorching hot kiss with her tongue thrusting halfway down my throat. I began to run my hands up and down her back, and she began moaning loudly. We had played this game before, but this time, when I slipped my hands down to cup her butt through her skirt, she didn’t warn me off with a statement that she couldn’t. No, instead she began moaning, “Uh huh, uh huh…” and humping herself at me.

I was in no hurry, and wanted to treat her like I was sure no other guy had ever done before. I very slowly reached down to the hem of her skirt and began tugging it northward. Shelley went into overdrive, rubbing herself on me and trying to pull it higher. Meanwhile she had reached between us to start undoing the buttons on my shirt. Eventually I had her skirt around her waist. She had worn bikini panties, and I slipped one hand down from the top and the other up through a leg opening, and cupped her bottom.

Suddenly she stopped and sat upright. I was worried I had done something wrong, but she just began to feverishly work at the buttons on her blouse. “Oh, God, hurry up!” she demanded, quickly peeling off her blouse and pushing her skirt and panties down off her legs so that she was naked on the comforter. She was a natural brunette, which I had suspected when she changed from being a blonde at the start of the year.

I smiled. “There’s no hurry,” I said.

“You are driving me crazy!”

I just grinned. “Now, lay back. By the time I get done with you, you will be ruined for any other man. No matter who he is, you’ll always be able to tell him, ‘You’re no Carl Buckman!’”

“Oh, just hurry!”

I didn’t hurry. I rolled over so that I was laying at her side, facing her, and began kissing and licking my way from her lips down her throat and on to her perky little tits. Shelley lay there and sighed happily, but she wasn’t expecting what was next. Moving lower, I licked and nibbled my way down to her belly button, lingered there a few minutes, and then shifted down even further. “What… what are you… oh God! Oh GOD!.. Oh Jesus…” Shelley wailed loudly as I began to lick her pussy. To be fair, I didn’t use any great technique, but simply used my fingers to spread apart her pussy lips and concentrated on her clit. Shelley was orgasming nonstop from this, bouncing her cute little ass up off the floor, and her hands were in my hair trying to pull me even further in.

I licked her through three very quick comes, and then reversed course, licking my way back to her navel and then her tits, as I crawled over her. It was my turn. During my dining, I had managed to slip a hand free and had undone my belt and zipper, and had worked my jeans and briefs low enough that Little Carl was available. As soon as Shelley realized what was about to happen, she spread her legs wide and reached between us to guide me in.

Shelley wasn’t a virgin, but she was awfully tight. Thank God I had licked her ahead of time, so that she was well lubed. I slipped inside slowly, and she gasped and moaned as I sank down and bottomed out. “Oh, Carl, that was… that was…”

“I told you we shouldn’t hurry.” I began to slowly thrust in and out, and Shelley’s butt was bouncing off the comforter beneath us. “We have all day.”

“I don’t know where you learned to do that, but you should give lessons.” Shelley wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and I began to pick up speed. The sensations of her hot little pussy around my cock were amazing. She was so wet you could hear it slurping. It was only another five or ten minutes before I lost any semblance of control. Pounding her down into the comforter, I collapsed on top, my hips churning as my cock spasmed out a heavy load. I could feel her pussy twitching around me as it accepted my jism.

It took her a couple of minutes to respond. I tried to lift up and relieve my weight, but she held me tightly. “Oh, my God, that was amazing! I never knew it could be like that.”

“Was that the first time you ever had your pussy licked?” I asked.

She blushed and nodded. “I asked once, but he refused.”

“That’s not very gentlemanly.” I rolled over and off of her, and she curled up next to me, a leg thrown over me and her wet pussy pressed against me. “Well, that was only the first lesson. I think I can do better the next time.”

Shelley sighed happily and hugged herself against me. “I don’t think you can do better than that.”

“Ummm, a challenge. I like that.” I rolled over on the comforter to face her, and put my lips against hers. I assume she could taste her dried pussy juice on my lips, because her eyes widened at the touch, but then they closed again as she moaned happily. This time I concentrated my lips on her neck and tits and nipples, and one hand on her clit. As soon as she began crying out for me to fuck her, I moved a leg over hers and held her down and in place, while my free hand gently held her on her back. I continued this torment through another pair of quick orgasms before getting back into position on top and screwing her until we both came again. Much as before, she had her arms and legs wrapped tightly around me.

I was breathing pretty hard after this, and I figured I needed a bit of a rest, so I rolled over on my back, with Shelley rolling along with me, so that she was half draped over me still. If either parent came home early, we would both die before we could even sit up, but I really didn’t care at the moment. Shelley was murmuring incoherently in my ear. She was really turned on, and slipped a hand down to my groin, where my soft and sticky cock lay, slumped to the side. Well, I was young, so I hoped I would rise to the challenge quickly. It was only mid-morning, so I should be able to tear off another piece at some point.

Miracle of miracles, Shelley’s warm hand began coaxing my cock back to life. “I need you so bad!” she whispered in my ear. That’s always nice to hear. “I want you. I want you to fuck me.” I just smiled as she manipulated me, although I did lift my hand up to tease her nipples. She had maybe a B cup, but her nipples were much darker, and stuck out like tiny pencil erasers. I flicked them with my finger tips, and she rolled onto her back and tugged me to follow.

I had a slightly different idea, though. I snuggled up next to her and pushed her over onto her side, facing away from me. She quickly turned her head to look at me. “Carl, what are you doing?”

“Trust me, you’ll like it.” I slipped a leg between hers and lifted her leg up slightly, then squirmed around until my cock was between her legs.

“Carl?” she asked nervously.

I suddenly realized she thought that I was going to try anal. It occurred to me that although Shelley wasn’t a virgin, she was still very inexperienced. Her previous lovers didn’t have very much experience, and her bag of tricks was rather limited. She gave a great blowjob, and knew about the missionary position, but that was pretty much it. It was time for a few more lessons.

“Trust me, it’s not what you think.” I squirmed around slightly more, and she could feel my cock head butting up against her pussy lips from behind. “Now, reach down and help me inside.” She gave me a nervous look, but slipped a hand between her legs and spread open her pussy, and I slipped inside. I kept pushing until I was fully seated.

“Oh, my God! I’ve never done it like this before!” she admitted. “You feel even bigger!”

I began pumping in and out, her perfectly round little butt cheeks jiggling to the motion. “It gets better. Reach down and touch yourself.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.” I reached around and touched her arm, and gently slid my had down to hers. I maneuvered it back down between her legs. “Now, touch yourself.”

“Carl!?”

“Just like at night, when you go to bed, and you think about me, and what we’re going to do together. You touch yourself then, don’t you?” I picked my pace up while holding her hand in place.

Her fingers began probing her pussy slit, touching her clit along with the underside of my cock as it slowly sawed back and forth. “Yes…” she admitted.

I let go of her wrist and she kept her hand in place, so I ran my hand up her body to tease her nipples. Shelley shuddered and came. I pumped some more, and then pushed in deeply, and rolled her further, so that she was face down on the comforter while I was laying on top of her from behind. I lifted up slightly and straddled her legs, and began pumping into her from behind more forcefully. God she felt so tight and wet and hot!

Shelley was definitely enjoying the ride. Both hands were buried beneath her, rubbing her clit and pussy, and she was almost babbling, “Fuck me! Fuck me!”

“Oh God!” I exclaimed, and one of her pussy spasms sent me over the edge. Another load shot out of me into her overheated snatch, and I collapsed down on top of her back, as my hips weakly churned and finished pumping. I just lay there on top of her, sweaty and disgusting.

After I rolled off her, Shelley just lay there face down on the comforter. “That was… amazing! Where did you learn…?”

I smiled. “Like I told you before, I never kiss and tell. I take it you liked that little trick?”

“When can we do it again?”

“Maybe later. Suddenly, I’m very hungry.” Just as suddenly, Shelley’s stomach growled, and she blushed fiercely. I just laughed, and sat up. “Any chance we can make lunch?” I asked.

She groaned and rolled over, looking for her clothing and blushing. “I need to clean up first. I’m starting to feel kind of yucky.” She turned her face away from me.

“That just means we’re doing it right!” I laughed. I reached out with my fingertips and tilted her face back to mine, and then kissed her lips gently. “You are an amazing and beautiful lady.”

She kissed me fiercely and might have wanted more, but her stomach growled again, and she pulled away, turning bright red. “I need to clean up. I’ll be back down in a minute or two.”

I lightly held her wrist. “Soup and sandwiches?” She nodded agreement. “Okay, don’t hurry back. Why don’t you take a quick shower and get dressed again. By the time you come back down, I’ll have some things ready. Okay?”

“Okay.” We stood up, grabbing our clothing.

I had another thought as I saw her pick up her blouse and skirt. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and whispered in her ear, “Do you have a pair of high heels?”

She turned and looked at me curiously. “I have a pair of high heeled sandals. Why?”

“I want you to put on your shortest skirt, and your tiniest top, and your high heels, and come back down. Will you do that for me?”

Shelley giggled. “Give me a few minutes.”

“Take your time. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Shelley scampered up the stairs and I walked into the kitchen, still naked. I dropped my clothing on the table and went over to the kitchen sink, where I used a clean dishcloth to wash up. I scrubbed off all over. Back in the day, this was known as a whore’s bath, but I didn’t think I wanted to tell that one to Shelley. Hell, it would probably just gross her out if she knew her mom was going to wash the dishes that night with a dishcloth I had wiped my cock clean with. It would gross me out, too!

I pulled my jeans on commando fashion, along with my shirt, which I left unbuttoned. Her house wasn’t much different than mine, although ours didn’t have a basement. I found the pantry and pulled out a can of chicken noodle soup and found a clean pot and made soup. I put that on the burner, on low, and dug bread and cold cuts out of the fridge, along with mayo and mustard. I set it out, along with a couple of plates, and waited for Shelley’s return.

It was worth the wait. I turned when I heard the sound of high heels coming down the stairs. She was a little clumsy on them, but I couldn’t care less. “Is this all right?” she asked nervously.

“Oh, yeah!” I replied, nodding. The heels were a classy set with at least a two inch height. I suspected the skirt and top were from last year, and she had outgrown them. The skirt was extremely short, white cotton, and very light and flirty. The top was a tank top that looked sprayed on, and short enough that a band of skin showed at the waist. “You look great! You should wear that to school someday.”

She laughed at that. “In your dreams!”

“You look good enough to eat! In fact, that gives me an idea!”

Just then her stomach growled. “Good idea, bad timing. Let’s have lunch first.” She came into the kitchen.

“Well, at least I know what I’m having for dessert,” I replied. She grinned at this.

I poured the soup into bowls while she made us both a ham and cheese sandwich, on white, with mustard. I set Shelley’s bowl on the side of the table, instead of across from me, so that I could watch her better. “You look tremendous!” I told her. A quick glance at her lap showed the skirt had ridden up enough so that I knew she had skipped on the panties.

“Thank you!” she said with a blush. “You don’t think I look cheap, do you?”

“No, I think you look smoking hot!” She grinned at that. “Besides, it’s just you and me. It’s not like I’m going to say anything to anybody! It doesn’t matter if you look cheap, as long as it turns me on, right?”

She smiled coyly. “And does it?”

“I’ll let you know after dessert.” That earned another blush and a grin.

Lunch was a hurried affair; dessert was of greater interest to both of us. When we were finished with lunch, Shelley took our plates over to the kitchen sink, and then came back to take my hand and go back to the comforter. I had a slightly different idea. I held onto her hand and pulled her back to the table. “I like to eat my dessert at the table,” I announced.

“Carl?”

I leaned down and quickly kissed her on the lips and then stepped back. Placing my hands on her waist, I lifted her up and sat her on the dining room table. Finally, a use for my new muscles other than just defending myself!

Shelley looked shocked, as she sat there at the end of the table. “Carl!?”

I pulled out the chair and sat down directly in front of her, spreading her legs apart and sliding forward. This chair, like the one at the other end, had armrests built in, while the ones on the side of the table didn’t, so I suspected this was either her mother’s or father’s chair. I grinned up at her. I tugged her forward so that her pretty little pussy was at the edge of the table, and said, “Now this is what I call dessert!”

Shelley shrieked happily as I ate my dessert. After her first orgasm, I pulled back and looked up at her. “I bet you’ll be thinking about this at dinner tonight!” I then ate her out some more. Afterwards, I stood up, dropped my trousers, and fucked her right there on the table. Thank God it was sturdy!

By mid-afternoon, we were both running out of steam. I taught Shelley about the cowgirl position (save a horse, ride a cowboy!) and then we decided we needed to clean things up. She let me shower first, so I didn’t smell like a whorehouse on Sunday morning, and then she took another shower. The comforter went into the washing machine, and the windows were opened to air out the house. We even went down to the basement and smoked about half a carton through the filter before one of her parents came home. It had been a productive day, in more ways than one.

That night and Saturday we had turkey and leftovers at the Buckman house. This wasn’t a bad deal, since I can eat turkey, oyster dressing, and gravy until it runs out. If you’re not from Maryland, you won’t know what oyster dressing is, but it’s great! Sunday I was dining over at Shelley’s. I don’t know whether they were suspicious of me, or of her, but I got the third degree that night. Politely, of course, and I just smiled and answered their questions. I will say that at one point during dinner I complimented them on their lovely dining room set, and Shelley almost died of a coughing spell. We also smoked another half carton of Camels. I figured we could smoke the last of the cartons this week, and either do the tar extraction late in the week or early next week.

The tar extraction was fairly simple. First we would weigh the filter assembly accurately over at Towson State. Then, back at Towsontown Junior High, we would open the filter, extract the cotton, and dunk it in a flask of acetone. Acetone has a very low boiling point. We would let the cotton soak overnight, and then filter off the acetone the next day. Washing the filter material with some more acetone would clean it up, and then we would carefully heat the mix in a fume hood, allowing the acetone to vaporize, leaving behind the tar. This would be collected in a pre-weighed test tube, and then be given to Professor Milhaus. Then it was back to work for us, collecting another sample for show-and-tell during the Science Fair.

In all honesty, it was very difficult to stay on track with the schedule from this point on. While we didn’t have any more all day sex marathons like Black Friday, Shelley was very agreeable to screwing down in the basement. We could usually manage to sneak in one or two very enjoyable sessions after smoking some Camels, and the cigarette smell covered up any sex smell.

I definitely learned that Shelley’s previous lovers hadn’t taught her anything other than blowjobs and plain missionary position. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, and thankfully, for her sake, Shelley was easily aroused and highly orgasmic, so she certainly enjoyed herself. However, that was so limiting, and once Shelley learned there were more possibilities, she was extremely enthusiastic about learning them all. Now, I won’t claim that I taught her the entire Kama Sutra, but we sure got well through the Beginner and Intermediate sections! It turned out that she really liked the control she had when she was on top, so we often did some sixty-nine, or she would climb on my lap and bounce on my cock. I really couldn’t complain.

In December I took Shelley as my date to the Christmas dance at school. Yes, it was my first formal date since I got recycled, but no, it’s not much of a date when your parents drive you. We couldn’t get all that hot and bothered, but Shelley definitely liked being taken to the dance, and not meeting me there. I was still growing, so I was now a couple of inches taller than her, and she could wear a pair of heels and not be taller than me. She was very hot!

For Christmas, I bought Shelley a charm bracelet with a couple of charms, one with a heart, and the other with a cigarette. The first got me a very passionate kiss, the second a very long laugh. A charm bracelet seemed a nice compromise present — not too expensive, not too personal, and something she could wear after we broke up.

By February I was beginning to suspect this would happen in the near future. Aside from the Science Fair and our mutual love of screwing our brains out, we had about zilch in common. I mean, for Christmas I got a copy of Gibbons’ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (both the first time around and now) and she got a subscription to Teen magazine. Forget about intellectual discussions. Shelley was not precisely sure of the name of the President; she did, however, know volumes about the breakup of The Monkees and the effect this would have on western civilization. We did manage to stage several all day sex-athons over the Christmas holidays that left me gasping for relief. Every time I started thinking we weren’t all that great together, and that maybe I should start breaking up with her, she would use her body to convince me otherwise. What can I say? I am a guy. I am not a hero. I have no known moral fiber.

The breakup pretty much occurred the night of the Science Fair itself. That was a pretty fair success. It went about as I had expected it to, and I mentioned it to Shelley. Mike Misner had done the fertilized chick project, with a few dozen fertilized eggs, and cracking one open every day for three weeks and dropping the contents into a formaldehyde filled jar. He had the sealed jars on display, along with a box full of baby chicks. Since chicken eggs hatch in 21 days, he had started 22 days ago and so he had 1 day old chicks. He had about zero science involved, but you could hear the heart strings being tugged all the way across the gym everything was set up in. People love baby chicks.

Our project was science, pure and simple, but we did have just enough sizzle to sell the steak. Dad had gotten a 2’ by 4’ Formica countertop for me, and I had gone over to Mr. Bonner’s across the street. Working for Black & Decker, he could buy any of their tools at wholesale price. Dad always got mowers and power tools from him, and Mr. Bonner actually had a garage full of drill presses and saw tables. I used the drill press to put holes in the countertop and mounted everything on it, including our freshly cleaned and painted pump, filter assemblies in use and disassembled, and even one I had managed to cut in half. The print shop that I got my business cards through had a nice deal on some professional looking displays for behind us, and we borrowed a tiny booth from them.

The science part was impeccable. We had a sign showing that our adviser was a chemistry professor over at Towson State, top-notch lab workbooks showing our work, and an analysis of the tar we collected, along with estimates showing the efficiency of our collection method.

What really impressed the judges was when Professor Milhaus showed up with a couple of college students, just as the judges came through. I introduced the professor to the judges, and then the professor introduced his students. One was a college student and the other a grad student, and they had used the sample I had provided for their own work. The grad student analyzed the sample as part of his thesis, while the undergrad used his work to design an upper-class experiment for the organic chemistry classes. Then the professor blew us all away. He asked if I would contribute my work to the project and be part of a paper to be written for the Journal of Chemical Education. Holy shit! Of course I would!

One of the important parts of being a college professor is publishing scholarly works. As the saying goes, ‘publish or perish.’ Most of the work done at a research college is actually done by various students, but for every one of their publications, more than one person can be listed as an author. In almost all cases, the head of the lab will get his name on the paper, whether he had anything to do with it or not. It’s sort of a game, and everybody knows the rules. The undergrad student would write his paper, and the grad student and the professor would get their names on it. The grad student would write a paper, and the professor’s name would show up as well. And then the professor would write his own paper. Three publications for the work of one.

Now, I would have my first publication, at the age of fourteen, and while still in junior high. This was practically unheard of, and my parents were suitably impressed. I had been published before, and in the same journal, but not until I was in college. This was quite a jump start. (Eventually I would be listed on the grad student’s paper as well. Two publications!)

“Does this mean my name goes on this paper thingie, too?” asked Shelley. She didn’t really understand how publishing worked, but she did understand being snubbed, and she could sense being snubbed big time.

The undergrad who had come with Professor Milhaus just gave us a blank look, but the grad student gave the Professor a look that equated Shelley with something to be scrubbed off and washed down a drain. One school kid was bad enough, but two was unthinkable. I also noticed that Professor Milhaus saw this all. He would pay attention to the grad student more than he would heed the undergrad, and way more than he would listen to Shelley or me.

Well, as hopeless as I knew it to be, I had to ask, for Shelley’s sake. I was pretty sure what the answer would be. “Professor, can both of us be listed?”

He eyed me, and then Shelley before answering. “I don’t wish to be rude, but we can really only put one name on the paper, and my feeling is that you, Carl, did more of the work that could be published, as opposed to other work on the project.” He didn’t elaborate on what that other work might be.

I turned towards Shelley. At least I had tried. Shelley didn’t seem to care, and she became noticeably cooler. Later that evening, when we packed up and took the project home, she turned her face away when I tried to kiss her good-night. The first great romance of my revival was going down in flames!

The winners weren’t announced until the next day at school, when it was announced in the morning over the intercom. Third place was some kid in the eighth grade with some idiot description of the Solar System. Second place was Mike Misner and his chickens (What did he do with them, anyway? Raise them and then eat them? I never did find out.) The winners were me and Shelley. The announcement came during Spanish class, and the room erupted in cheers when my name was spoken. The last time this happened, I took second place, and it felt pretty good; this felt much better.

Shelley was happy, at least with the project, if not with me. She had an A on the project, which brought her Science grade up to a B. She had gotten what she was looking for. To be fair, so did I, in every conceivable meaning. She dumped me that day at lunch, when I saw her holding hands with a member of the basketball team. He looked at me nervously, and she simply gave me a haughty look and turned away. This was noticed by others as well, and earned me a mixed bag of comments. A few of my friends commiserated with me, and a few others made jokes about it. It certainly wasn’t worth breaking a sweat over, to my way of thinking at least.

It wasn’t the end of the world. The following Monday, Tammy Braxton came up to me in the hallway at my locker as I took my coat off in the morning. Tammy was a short and very curvy little brunette, and very cute, a ninth grader like myself. She leaned back against the locker next to me, her arms across her chest pushing her cleavage up on display in her vee neck sweater. “Carl, I hear you and Shelley aren’t seeing each other anymore,” she stated.

I stopped at this and looked over at her in surprise. “Uh, I guess not.”

“What happened?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess we just sort of drifted apart, I suppose.” ‘She’s a fucking moron and used sex to earn a B in Science.’ No, I didn’t say that! Where was this going?

She smiled coquettishly at me, and sifted slightly so that I could see more of her cleavage. Very nice, too, probably twice what Shelley had. “That’s too bad. I heard that you and she studied together after school a lot.”

I raised an eyebrow at that. “Well, we did work on the Science Fair together.”

“I heard you worked on other things, too,” she said teasingly.

I just shrugged. “Hey, we’re just friends.”

“That’s not what she said.”

I smiled. “Well, I would never talk about a friend, no matter what or when. She was a friend and we were friendly.” I glanced at that very inviting cleavage, and then looked her in the eye. “I’m a very friendly guy.”

Tammy smiled back, and looked down at my pants, and then back at my face. She licked her lips, and asked, “Interested in making another friend?”

I simply smiled. I closed my locker and put my arm around her shoulder, and began walking her to class. “I don’t think anybody can ever have enough friends!”