Raising Cubby (32 page)

“Dad,” he said with some exasperation, “it’s not my first time driving on roads. I’ve driven on roads a lot already.” Where? I asked. And when? I remembered times when I was sure my car had moved since the last time I parked it in the garage. I decided it might be best if I did not pry further. Instead, I focused on making sure my seat belt was tight and the doors were secure as Cubby pulled onto the road with a twist of the neck and a chirp of the tires.

We made it to the gas station just fine, but his success with my vehicle was short-lived. That was a shame, because I was very proud of that car and I liked it a lot. It was a brand-new Mini Cooper S, British racing green, with a sunroof and racing stripes on the hood. It even had British flags on the mirrors. It was exactly the sort of machine a geek like me would drive.

I’d had the car two whole weeks when I asked Cubby to move it out of the garage. He immediately said okay and bounced out the back door. He was always quick to do anything involving that car, especially if he got to drive it. The car had come with two keys, and he had taken to carrying one of them in his pocket all the time. That made me feel like I needed to chain the little Mini to the floor anytime I was away, just like a bicycle.

People in the city, living where everything is in walking distance, might not understand that need to retain access to a motor vehicle. For us, living five miles from town on a backcountry road, motorized transportation was essential. And I was not about to have my kid make off with my wheels.

I heard the car start, followed almost immediately by a squeal of tires as he got it moving. Cubby’s coordination never failed to impress me; that was one of the few observable benefits of his hours of video gaming. I knew he’d have one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearshift lever. His left foot was on the clutch and the right one was on the gas. All moved independently, but he missed a step. A solid thump rattled the house. Glasses and china clinked in the cupboards. Looking into the garage, I saw my son had backed the car out of the garage, just as I’d asked. He had even opened the garage door first, just as he should. However, he had failed to close the car door. When he launched the Mini in reverse, the driver’s door embedded itself in the back wall of the garage. He’d hit it with enough force that the garage wall was caved in and the door was pretty well torn off the car.

“Cubby,” I shouted. “You wrecked my new car!”

“Sorry,” he said, tail between his legs. He looked down at the floor as I walked out to assess the damage. It looked bad from a distance, but it was actually much worse up close. It was bad enough that a stricter dad might have had him shot, but I just called his mom.

When I reported what had happened, all she said was, “Is Jack all right?”

“Of course he’s all right. It’s the car that’s wrecked. If Cubby ran into the garage door, he’d get better all by himself. The car has to go to the body shop, and it will cost thousands of dollars!”

Little Bear was not sympathetic. “The kid is all right, and that’s what’s important.” Well, I thought, the kid was all right the whole time. It’s the car that got damaged. Clearly, she and I did not see things the same way.

Driving practice was delayed a few weeks, while the body shop reconstructed the mutilated Mini. While we were waiting, I took some time to read the requirements for getting a license in Massachusetts. It seemed they’d evolved a bit since I was a teenager. The
most obvious change was the driving school racket. In the past, hopeful drivers simply went to the Registry of Motor Vehicles with a permit and a car, and took a road test. If they could drive on the road, parallel park, and do a three-point turn without terrorizing the inspector too badly, they got a license.

Now kids had to attend driving school and get a certificate of completion before they were allowed to take the road test. Clearly, our state had a strong special-interest lobby—one that paid off bigtime for the Association of Massachusetts Driving Schools. The nearest such school was in downtown Holyoke, a place Cubby had not visited since he was two—the day some lowlife tried to steal his mother’s grocery cart from the parking lot with him in it. Luckily for us, he did not get stolen, but he hadn’t gone back there to try his luck again either. Until now.

Driving school was scheduled to start in two more weeks. Meanwhile, we had a vacation planned. Every August, we go to Lake George in the Adirondacks of upstate New York with my geek friends. We eat, lie on the beach, and ride around in boats. This year, Cubby had his own plans. “I could make some underwater fireworks, and we could toss them off the boat. It would be like in a movie!” I was proud of my son’s prowess with chemistry, but I was not sure how wise it would be for us to lay down strings of depth charges in Lake George, and I suggested that we table that idea until the following year.

I headed for the Adirondacks after work on Friday. Cubby said he’d come up later that evening with his friend Luke, who had a driver’s license and a car of his own. I thought that meant Luke would drive them up in his car. However, Cubby had a different understanding, as I discovered when they rolled into the motel parking lot driving my repaired and re-doored Mini. Kids in front, poodle in back.

“What are you doing driving?” I asked him. He just looked at me. “Luke isn’t eighteen. You can’t drive with him as a passenger. What if you got stopped?”

“They would have given me a ticket and Luke would have had to drive. Besides, I was extra careful, because I didn’t want to get stopped. See? I got here okay!”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I was secretly proud that he’d driven two hundred miles all by himself. He’d navigated country roads, busy interstates, and the heavy traffic around Albany, all without damage. Yet I could never admit that to him. He should have known better than to take a chance driving my car. I growled and snorted and wandered away.

But I didn’t wander alone. I took the dog. And the reason I took the dog was another of Cubby’s obsessions—he had decided that the poodle’s fur “felt funny” and could no longer bring himself to touch him. Somehow fur that was soft and woolly became weird and bristly. I could not discern any change in the poodle’s exterior texture, but Cubby was not budging. That left Martha and me to take care of the dog. Feeling Cubby had abandoned his pet, I suggested we give him to the Estonian family with the poodle acrobatic act in the circus, but Cubby objected strenuously. Clearly, he still liked Shenzi; he just didn’t want to handle him. Just as clearly, the dog’s fur hadn’t changed a bit since we’d gotten him years before. Cubby’s obsessions might have been harmless, but they sure could be annoying!

The next day I overheard the kids talking when they thought I wasn’t paying attention. “There was one point where Jack drove over a bump and the whole car went into the air,” Luke said excitedly. Clearly, Cubby had not learned sufficient restraint from the previous two mishaps. When the time came to go home, I drove the Mini and let him ride back with my friends. If there had been a bus, I’d have sent him on it.

Finally, it was time for driving school. It had been years since he was eager to go to any school, but he definitely wanted that license. Every day we took him there and picked him up when he was done. Then, armed with a certificate, he made an appointment
at the registry. He wanted to take the test in my Mini, but it didn’t meet the registry requirements, so his mom ended up taking him in her minivan.

He passed.

That left the matter of a car. Cubby helpfully offered his notion that a BMW Z4 would be great.

“They’re nice cars,” I said, “but I wonder when Kia started importing vehicles to the USA. I’ve heard the early models are really getting collectible. Hyundai has some nice compact cars too. You might even like a vintage Taurus or Escort.”

“Dad! Be serious! You would really like a BMW!”

And indeed I would like a BMW, but that wasn’t what he was proposing. He wanted me to buy one for him. However, there were more realistic options. He ended up with a ten-year-old Subaru wagon. Sensible yet slow, and not very sporty. It was a nice shade of blue.

Soon it was also a nice shade of dented. He rear-ended another car on an icy road, smashing in the whole front end. That event seemed to do the trick. From then on, Cubby drove with restraint and caution. At least when I was around.

I figured he’d drive his new car to school, since he hated the bus so much. That was one of the reasons we’d given it to him. But when summer ended, and Cubby’s friends went back to school for their senior year, he announced that he had other plans. “Look,” he said one evening. “They don’t have any more chemistry courses at the high school, and I’m failing anyway. I think I should take the GED and enroll at Holyoke Community College instead. They have a chemistry lab class I can sign up for now.”

I had really wanted my son to graduate from high school and go on to a four-year university. The idea of him dropping out sounded awful, and I once again reminded him how many opportunities I’d missed out on by making the same choice. He was stubborn, though, and I couldn’t change his mind. He dropped out of school,
took the GED, and aced it. Then he signed up for chemistry at Holyoke Community College. He was seventeen years old, young for a college student, but he already knew more than any of the other students in his class.

“UMass won’t admit me with a GED,” he told me, “but HCC will, and I can get an associate’s here and transfer to UMass with that, if I want.”

“I’ve made it to college quicker than my friends,” he said proudly, and I couldn’t dispute that.

Things finally came to a head with Cubby’s chemistry experiments in late 2007. He had turned seventeen that spring, and his interest in chemistry was looking like a real obsession. When you added the girlfriend, a driver’s license, and a teenager’s confidence in his own limitless wisdom, we were bound to collide. It would have happened sooner, if not for my own issues. My first book had just been published, and I was traveling all the time to promote it. When I was home, I was distracted by the demands of a budding writing career, which were piled on top of my existing responsibilities to my family and to Robison Service. With me away or preoccupied, and Martha’s quiet personality, there was nothing standing in the way of Cubby’s enthusiasm. He more or less seized the house and ramped up his experimentation in a major way.

Before, his experiments had been relegated to one corner of the garage. Now he took advantage of my absence to expand his operations into the house. Glassware, jars, and boxes with cryptic handwritten labels appeared all over the house, even in our refrigerator. Then there were the results. Friends who lived half a mile away would call and say, “Jack must be experimenting again. I heard him
last night.” Sometimes they were right, but not all the bangs were his. There were nights when I’d hear a loud bang from the landfill, yet Cubby was home in his room. I asked whether he knew who it was, but it was a mystery to him too. As far as I knew, none of Cubby’s friends were experimenting with chemistry, but his own interest was no secret, and others could have been inspired. It was, after all, a college town with lots of geek kids.

When I was a kid no one noticed stuff like that. We shot rifles at targets right in the backyard. Nowadays, if we want to shoot some skeet, we have to call the cops first so they know what to say when the inevitable calls come in. That’s what happens when rural areas get gentrified, I guess. We still have a right to shoot guns in the woods, but we have to be more careful if we want to keep the law at bay. Unfortunately, Cubby couldn’t do that quite as easily. In most places in the U.S., you can still call the cops and say, “I’m shooting my rifle out back,” but you can’t call them and say, “I just wanna let you know that I’m going to be testing some explosives in the meadow.”

I urged moderation, with only limited success. “You can’t aggravate the neighbors,” I told him. “If you get them mad, and they call the cops, you’ll be all done. You should follow the same rules hunters use. No blasts on Sunday, and nothing in the dark. Those are the times people get annoyed and call to complain.”

Noise was not the only concern. There was also the issue of space. Cubby had started out with a corner of the workbench in my garage. That fall, he expanded his territory to the whole bench, plus two portable refrigerators on the floor. He had salvaged them from the “free for the taking” junk pile in the Amherst recycling center. To my surprise and pleasure, he fixed both in short order. He was looking smarter and more useful all the time. If only he fixed things around the house …

Cubby scavenged parts from scrap appliances and reconfigured them to make a vacuum pump. Vacuum pumps were essential for
some of the more sophisticated experiments he wanted to perform. “My pump pulls almost as good a vacuum as the ones in lab-supply catalogs for seven hundred fifty dollars,” he boasted. I looked at the gauge readings, and he was right. He’d built a complex concoction of glassware, which had overspread the workbench and taken up a large area of floor. It looked like something out of
Back to the Future
, and it might well have had similar powers. But I had to be practical. Now there was no room for me to park an automobile inside the garage, and that would not do.