Flight of Passage: A True Story (10 page)

The changes were evident in the man kangarooing toward us down the drive. He turned fifty that year, a big milestone for a man of his youthful outlook, and as if deliberately anticipating the aging process he had mellowed a lot over the winter. He wasn’t rakish any more, just dapper. He dressed the part of a distinguished magazine executive in New York who was emerging in middle age as a writer and social activist. He wore a Dublin-tailored sports jacket, immaculately pressed wool slacks, and he had a cane, a briar pipe, and a tweed cap.

My father’s eyes opened wide and danced brightly as he stood lopsided beside the Cub.

“My, my, my, Kernahan,” he said, looking at Kern. “This is really sharp. A clean, clean Cub. I’m proud of you. I am just so proud of you.”

I was rushed with my old fondness for the man. I could see what the sight of a superbly restored plane was doing for him and it reminded me of the winters we had spent together rebuilding other planes. My father breathed in hard a few times. He was refreshed to be within olfactory range of new zinc paint, hydraulic oil, and rubber bungees.

I loved my father that morning, too, because he was saying just the right thing for Kern. In the past, they had argued a lot over our planes. Kern was fastidious about every repair and my father was an old barnstormer type, impatient and slapdash as a mechanic—”fly ’em and fix ’em again” was his motto—and he and Kern had conducted monumental battles in the barn over how long a project should take. This only made Kern more apprehensive about 71-Hotel; he was terribly dependent on my father’s opinion of his work. My father seemed to understand this and he knew what his job was that day. This was Kern’s plane, Kern’s rebuild. He would lavish praise on his son.

We got some Yoo-Hoo sodas from the refrigerator in the tack room and sat there by the plane doing a post-op on the winter. My father wanted to hear every detail. The control cables, the throttle couplings, the new magnetos.

Sitting in his rocker, my father ran his hands down over the zinc-chromated tubes and ponged the new baggage compartment. Several times he let out a long, low whistle. It was obvious that the workmanship on 71-Hotel was flawless.

“Jeez Kern,” he said. “You really went overboard. New bungees.”

He reminded Kern that he still owed us $500 for parts. How could we afford to buy all this stuff?

When Kern told him that we still had $400 left over from snow-plowing, and that included paying cash-on-delivery for the fabric and buckets of dope stacked in the corner of the barn, my father was incredulous.

“Well, can’t I do something?”

“Just hang on Dad,” Kern said. “When we get to planning the routes, you can help us with the maps.”

“All right,” my father said. “You boys are really something. I guess I’m just ground crew now.”

My father’s eyes were misty when he said that, but not because he was sad to have reached an age when he was just “ground crew.” He was immensely gratified by that mint-condition Piper Cub. It must have been the same kind of melancholy that overtakes parents at graduations and weddings, the feeling of time immutably passing and children moving on. Kern and I didn’t need him any more to work on a plane.

My father stood up to leave. He ran his hands down over the airframe once more and ponged the new baggage compartment with his index finger.

“Ah, Dad,” Kern said. “Rinker. Rinker did a lot of work on this plane. Fifty percent. Even more than fifty percent.”

My father was very glib, recovering from a lapse like that.

“Well, Kern, exactly,” he said. “That’s what I said, 'You boys.’ You did this together. As brothers. Do you know how happy that makes me feel?”

I wished Kern hadn’t said that. I stood there red-faced, my heart racing, unable to say anything.

I was inching toward an understanding of my father and I completely sympathized with him at that moment. He was a man engulfed by distractions and the changes of middle age. (And later on, sitting in a lawyer’s office in Manhattan, poring over his medical records so my mother could collect his life insurance, I understood a lot more about this period in his life. A great deal of the time, he was so doped up on Demerol and other painkillers it was a miracle he could function at all.) He could only concentrate on one thing at a time, and what he was concentrating on that morning was Kern, Kern’s masterful supervision of the Cub rebuild. It was a moment of pleasure for him, a time to get past his preoccupation and worry about his oldest son. Compared to that, I simply didn’t rate. I wasn’t a factor at all. This was supposed to be Kern’s moment.

Besides, I didn’t want attention and compliments from my father. It was a lot easier to be ignored, which made it that much easier for me to ignore him, a strategy that was working for both of us right now. My father and I needed a vacation from each other and we both knew it. I couldn’t explain this to Kern. He would never understand how, for me, loving my father meant creating as much distance from him as possible. Now Kern had embarrassed me, taking what should have been a carefree, pleasant moment and making it awkward.

My father was chastened by that, and now he seemed intent on addressing us as a pair. Halfway up the drive, he spun on his good leg and leaned on his cane.

“It’s a damn fine airplane boys. I’m proud as the blazes of you two.”

Whistling some more, he turned and went up the drive, limping with that peculiar gait of his, swinging the cane in his hand like Charlie Chaplin.

In early April, just as we were beginning the laborious, dizzying job of spraying butyrate dope onto the Cub fabric, my sister Macky poked her head through the barn door one night.

“Hi Kern! Hi Rinky! Can I help?”

It was an epic event in our family. A sister had not only ventured into our plane shop, she had offered to help. After adolescence, we had lived completely separate lives from our sisters, a family practice so ordained and seemingly natural that we never thought to question it. The boys and the girls lived in separate wings of the house, attended different high schools, and on weekends my father, Kern, and I religiously disappeared for the airport. I couldn’t tell you what my sisters were doing with their lives during those years because I practically never saw them. This was just the way families lived, I thought.

Kern and I were too obsessed about finishing the plane to dwell very long on my sister’s reasons for being there. Macky was a lot of fun, a demon for work herself, and she saved the spring for us. Pitching right in on the plane, she worked with us nearly every night until we finished recovering in May.

Macky was sixteen that year, wedged directly between Kern and me in the family lineup. In a lot of ways she was the most unique child in the family. She had my father’s Black-Irish complexion, with olive-tone skin that tanned almost black in the summer, dark brown eyes and a luxuriant mane of unruly brown hair that bounced like surf whenever she said something or laughed. Inquisitive and bright, bubbling over all the time with whatever idea entered her head, she reminded me of a character in
Alice in Wonderland.
The simplest things made her profoundly happy. She was always sampling new people and new experiences, and diving right into a plane recovering project was the sort of thing she would pursue, just for the novelty of it.

Years later, Macky would tell me that she was bitterly disappointed that Kern and I had not invited her to fly to California too. Everyone just assumed that the boys, especially Kern and I, would enjoy all the adventures in the family. She was confused about that, but the family bias toward boys was too rooted for her to even think about speaking up or even to see her situation very clearly. So, she accepted the next best thing. She could be close to us out in the barn, helping us with the plane.

By the time Macky got to the shop Kern and I had already finished the hardest part of recovering, cutting and stitching the Grade A Irish linen into sleeves that fit onto the fuselage and wings. These were pasted onto the plane with a milky, sticky airplane glue called nitrate dope. We applied the nitrate with natural-bristle paint brushes, dipping them into coffee cans filled with nitrate. Nitrate is awesome, head-banging stuff, as powerful as angel-dust. When we rebuilt our first three planes, our shop was located in another barn, directly above the horse stable. When we got into the nitrate, all of the horses got sick and keeled over in their stalls. About the only good thing to be said for nitrate is that it expands the sinuses and loosens up the muscles for the milder, sweet-smelling butyrate dope, which is slowly sprayed onto the linen with an air-compressor to tighten and stiffen the fabric.

Butyrate-doping is not a difficult business, just a lot of drudgery. Every time Kern sprayed on a fresh coat of silver primer dope, or later clear finish coats, the entire wing surface and fuselage had to be wet-sanded with fine emory paper and water. The sanding smoothed the surface and removed excess dope that had not penetrated the fabric. Then another coat of dope was sprayed on, dried overnight, and got wet-sanded again. Both sides of each wing and the entire fuselage would get almost twenty sandings. Macky and I assumed complete responsibility for sanding, and this allowed Kern to slip into a more managerial role. Every evening he mixed the dope for the night’s work, consulted his records on how many coats he had sprayed on each section, and then told Macky and me which surface to prepare for spraying with the Sears compressor and gun.

Kern was determined to really “cherry out” 71-Hotel with a smooth recovering and paint job. Every surface Macky and I sanded had to be “baby-butt” smooth, or he’d make us do it over. The chief mechanic out at Basking Ridge, Lee Weber, had showed Kern how to “push” the dope with extra thinner, so the butyrate seeped into the fabric more evenly and deeply and became perfectly recessed.

The more thinner you use, of course, the better the high. Thinner carries quite a punch itself, and thinned dope aspirates into the air in finer particles that go down more easily into the lungs.

All of this was a revelation for Macky. It had never occurred to her that, while doping a plane, you get high on the dope. Sanding was boring, back-breaking work. The dust curling up from the fabric coated our noses and throats and our arms and shoulders ached after an hour. But fortified with butyrate, we could hardly tell we were working. Besides, the warm weather had arrived, Macky and I had ferocious cases of spring fever, and we just wanted to goof off out there and get high. As soon as we got into the shop every night we were clamoring for Kern to start up the compressor and give us our first dose.

“Hey Kern!” I called out. “Give us a hit.”

“Ah c’mon Rink,” Kern said. “This is an aircraft recovering project. You don’t
try
to get high. It’s supposed to just happen by mistake.”

“Screw that, Kern,” I said. “Give us a hit or we don’t sand.”

Disgusted, Kern kicked on the compressor, reached for the spray gun and gracefully swept the supply hoses behind his back with his free hand. Then he raised the spray-nozzle high over our heads and anointed Macky and me with a long, pungent burst of butyrate.

The nimbus of dope slowly descended from the ceiling and matted onto our shoulders and hair. It was cool and moist, like ocean spray at a beach. We breathed in hard and felt better right away. Butyrate was wonderful stuff.

“Wow Rinky,” Macky said. “This is
really
fun. I can feel myself getting high. Kern, hit me again.”

After twenty minutes or so we didn’t have to beg Kern for a fix. He had started his long, rhythmic sweeps down the fuselage and wings with his spray gun.

Sand and dope, sand and dope, go, go, go. The barn filled with dope fumes. Even on a hot night, we never opened the windows. We had the old Texan radio on loud all the time, and there were some great sanding and doping tunes on WABC then. “Good Vibrations” and “Wooly Bully,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” and “Hanky Panky.” Macky and I laughed all night and forgot what we said to each other and sanded the same wing twice, shaking our asses in unison through a wing section and a song.

Every couple of hours, Macky and I took a break from our dope den. We lay outside on the grass, taking in the scent of lilacs and honeysuckle mixing with the butyrate cloud hanging over the barn. It was a good time for Macky and me. Even though we were only eighteen months apart in age, we’d hardly spoken in years, and under the influence of the airplane dope we found it easier to talk. Macky was precociously intuitive about people and closer in age to Kern than I was, and she had a way of analyzing our problems together which relieved me of the guilt I usually felt about Kern. His jealousy of my success and popularity in school was “Kern’s hang-up,” Macky thought. I shouldn’t worry about it because I was never going to change that. Still, I had an obligation to defuse the issue. I only had six more months until he left for college, Macky said, and until then I should humor Kern. This was more or less what my father was telling me, but of course I wouldn’t listen to him. But I did listen to Macky.