Raising Cubby (25 page)

“That’s a slug of water about the size of our car,” I explained to Cubby. “So if it was cars getting dumped into the river, at one every second, the junkyard would fill up pretty fast. But it’s not cars, it’s water, so it just flows downstream toward the Connecticut River at Deerfield.” Sometimes Cubby accepted my explanations. Other times he seemed annoyed by my analogies. It’s hard teaching engineering principles to a kid, so I just took whatever success I got.

Over the years, thanks to the access our stock ownership provided,
we saw most of the great engineering works of New England. Cubby didn’t say much about the places we went, but I knew the nuclear power plants, navy ships, rail yards, and dams made an impression. You could tell just by watching him on our tours. The little cogs were almost visible, revolving in his head.

I always hoped our adventures made Cubby a little smarter. Some people said intelligence was innate and you couldn’t change it, but I knew a foundation of experience would have a powerfully beneficial effect on whatever reasoning ability he was born with. Experience was what made common sense possible, and as my grandfather always said, common sense isn’t common at all.

I also hoped he’d see something that caught his interest. The only way I found electronics and cars—my two great loves—was when grown-ups showed them to me and helped me to unravel their secrets. Right from the beginning, I resolved to do that for Cubby.

I knew he’d have a great advantage in life if he found his interests early. The trajectory of my own life had shown me the value of acquiring skills in my teen years. Those years were fast approaching for Cubby. If I could help him find things he wanted to pursue and encourage him to study and go to college, I knew he’d be on a good path, with excellent odds of success.

I learned the value of college the hard way—by not going. Instead, I left home at sixteen and made my own way, without any legitimate credentials. Sure, I’m educated today, but I had to do it myself, a difficult and arduous process. Growing up was a rough ride, with times when I had nowhere to live and and foraged in Dumpsters, and I wanted to protect my son from that same fate. The best way I knew to do that was to teach him as much as I could, thereby giving him a head start on a real education—one that would make people want to hire him when he grew up. People complimented me for making my own way, as if it were admirable. If only they knew how much I’d rather have taken the easy and normal road!

For Cubby to take that gentler road, though, he had to find an interest and chase it. I could not make him want something just because I thought it was neat; he was manifestly different from me. The realization that he was not simply a newer version of me came to me over and over, and it was a surprise every time. His interest in trains waned, yet he never acquired my love of electronics and music. I was worried and troubled.
Was it possible that he simply wasn’t smart enough to fully appreciate the things I’d loved when I was his age?
He didn’t show a passion for civil engineering or electronics. He rode in cars but didn’t show an urge to take them apart. He used computers but didn’t try to modify them or make them better. For a dad who loved machines, it was surprising and unsettling.

There was, however, one thing he loved: a card game called Yu-Gi-Oh! Cubby became a walking encyclopedia and statistical index to that game. He went to tournaments at the local mall, where he challenged freakish pimply twenty-five-year-olds and even stranger eight-year-olds. More often than not, he won.

The question was, what did those victories mean? I had played cards too as a kid, but I played poker with ordinary playing cards. Poker is a game of chance and skill, where a good player can calculate the odds and gain an advantage over less skilled opponents. The deck itself is always the same, not a tool manipulated by the other player.

The trading card games Cubby played were quite different. There was no such thing as a standard deck. People assembled their own decks, and some cards were better than others. Those cards cost more, and they had to be purchased or won. So you had a situation where a sharp player could work with anything, but he might get beaten by a little kid with rich parents who bought him an unbeatable deck.

At first I was disgusted, but then I realized real life was exactly the same. The deck of life is stacked in favor of rich, entitled people;
kids who played Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon were just experiencing that early.

When I won at poker, I took my money and bought dinner in town. That gave winning a purpose outside of the game. When Cubby won, he expected me to buy him rare and exotic trading game cards that would make him a more powerful player next time. His reward came from my pocket! There was always a better card to buy. Yu-Gi-Oh! was what I called a closed loop. One played it in order to play more. Some people would call that addiction, and I wouldn’t disagree. The degree to which Cubby and the other kids immersed themselves in the game was almost scary.

I began to wonder if Yu-Gi-Oh! was a game of skill or a game of resources. If it was the latter, what did Cubby’s winning mean? I could not tell if he was a smart player, or if he was simply good at talking me into buying expensive winning cards. I spent some time learning about the game, but my question remained unanswered. One thing became clear: Whoever invented Yu-Gi-Oh! had created a real cash machine. In that game, the inventor was the genius, and all the rest of us were just marks, like suckers at a county fair. But when I expressed that opinion to Cubby, he got mad. I realized he could not even conceive of a simple game of skill or chance, like blackjack or poker. All he knew was trading card games, where acquiring (usually buying) rare cards was the key strategy, as opposed to skill.

Naturally, he disagreed with me on the topic of ability. He claimed his success with the games was due to his cleverness and his skill; according to him, I just bought him the basic equipment that allowed him to deploy those skills. He even went so far as to suggest that the games of my childhood were simplistic compared to what he did. With a start I realized I’d been worrying whether he was as smart as me, yet all the while Cubby had assumed the opposite. He figured he was Robison 2.0 and I was little more than a dumb brute from the cave compared to him. I wasn’t convinced, but his chutzpah was admirable.

I did have to concede that he applied a lot of brainpower to the game. Other players saw that too. That was obvious by the way he was greeted when I took him to the tournaments. He got a remarkable amount of respect for a kid who wasn’t as old as many of the cars in the parking lot. However, I still wished he’d apply himself to something with potential commercial value.

I watched and waited, and finally I was rewarded when he discovered chemistry. Even though I had taken him on countless explorations of technology, it was his mother who introduced him to chemistry through her interest in rockets. She had been a rocketeer as long as I’d known her. When we were twenty-two, she assembled Estes rocket kits on the kitchen table and flew them on weekends. She even fitted one of her rockets with a camera and shot pictures of us gazing up as the thing took off. In fact, one of her friends made her a wedding rocket, and we launched it when we got married. By the time Cubby came along, the wedding rocket was long lost, but she kept making more rockets and launched them with him.

I should have known that would turn out to be his passion. From the moment he was born, I don’t think he missed a single launch. When Cubby saw her getting ready, he latched on and didn’t let go until they recovered the pieces from some downrange field. He even brought the idea to school. He got together with an adventurous teacher and three other kids, and they founded a rocket club. The objective: put a rock into orbit by the time he turned sixteen.

Finally, Cubby became so interested in rocketeering that he put his trading cards aside. The change was remarkable to watch. I first thought his interest was similar to my own fascination with model car kits, where the challenge lay in gluing the rocket together in the manner of a skilled artisan. However, I quickly realized that I was just projecting myself into my Cubby-view, and that was wrong. He was interested in the physics of the thing and the chemical reactions. That was far more sophisticated than simple model making.

The rocket fascination had an interesting side effect. It sucked
up so much of Cubby’s attention that he didn’t have time for his “little compulsions,” none of which he was even aware of. I’d been watching, and I noticed that the more he got wrapped up in rockets, the less he brushed, washed, and obsessed.

As I thought about it, I realized my dad had been the same way, in reverse. When I was younger I can’t remember him having any compulsive behaviors, but he was busy then. Now that he was older, and mostly retired, he had to check the house five times before he could leave. He checked the stove twice after turning it off once. He washed his hands a lot, too. Sometimes he and Cubby did it together. It was funny to watch, until I put it together. Then I wondered,
What are my obsessive behaviors? Am I blind to them, or are they hidden because I’m busy? Or did obsessiveness skip a generation?
I never talked to Cubby about those things, but I wondered a lot.

Meanwhile, the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards sat in his room, abandoned. I wondered if I could recover some of my investment by selling them on eBay. He must have divined my intentions, because he growled like a guard dog whenever I went near them and began closing the door to his room. I didn’t complain, though, because I saw chemistry as a special interest with a future, and I was delighted to see him studying. The cards could be gotten out and sold later, when he was launching a rocket or off at school.

He got a periodic table and the
Handbook of Chemistry
. He started reading, and telling me what rocket engines were made of and how they worked. He even asked about my experience with rockets, fireworks, and explosives. The changes had started, and Robison 2.0 was in beta!

Rockets, rocket fuel, and explosives make some kids dream of being astronauts. Not Cubby. He dreamed of becoming an organic chemist.

I wasn’t surprised that Cubby found explosives fascinating. Ever since my dad first showed me how to make rockets from baking soda, vinegar, and a pop-top bottle, I’ve felt the same way. It’s possible we are unusual, but I suspect every boy loves fireworks, deep down.

That’s especially true of boys who love chemistry. There are many uses for chemists in the adult world, but every teen chemist I have ever met thinks about one of two things: explosives or drugs. Given that choice, as a dad, I preferred the former.

There’s something irresistible about rockets powerful enough to light the sky and shake the ground. The bigger the blast, the more you feel it. I loved watching fireworks displays as a kid, so when I worked rock and roll as a young adult, I jumped at the chance to use them in our shows. That was where I discovered the real power of thunder. I already thought metaphorical thunder was cool. I loved it when the drummer rolled the heavy tom-toms or a timpani
to make a point in a musical performance. Inspired by that, I created amplifiers that could deliver rock-and-roll thunder without self-destructing and punch the audience smack in the chest. I was proud of what I’d accomplished, and I thought I knew the state of the art, until the first time I saw KISS play a big civic center.

I knew KISS used a lot of pyro (pyro stands for pyrotechnics, another word for fireworks), but I had yet to see the band in action. Their show started like many others, as I stood at the control area with the crew. There were five of us on a little fenced island among a sea of fans. The producer hollered commands into the intercom as guitarist Paul Stanley leaned forward over the front of the stage to scream out his intro. “Do you people want a little bit of rock and roll? Shout it out loud!” With that, he lit into his guitar and the meters on the sound system swung all the way into the red. The band was playing the only way they knew: full throttle. That was the moment that pyro master Hank Schmel pushed the button, off to stage right, and the first of his bombs went off.

Before that moment I might have described the roll of the big drums as thunderous, but after, I knew the truth: Real thunder comes from the sky or out of the barrel of a cannon. That’s what Hank had, sunk into the stage on both sides. Four-inchers, stubby versions of the guns on old navy destroyers. When they fired, it was as if time stopped. The flash lit the room, and the power of it rocked us back on our feet

That’s how KISS started every show. It left me with a profound appreciation of the power of explosives, and a good sense of comfort using them. When I returned home, I brought knowledge of flash powder, rockets, smoke bombs, and all sorts of other loud, bright, and powerful special effects. My KISS experiences helped me to transform the shows of many other bands and even a few discos. They also helped me liven up several Halloweens.

There’s nothing like a sack of explosives to brighten up your day.