Raising Cubby (26 page)

People my age who work in special effects, or mining, or demolition
have a lifetime of blowing things up, but my connection to fireworks faded as I got older and stopped producing music. And Cubby’s only exposure to fireworks was watching them on the Fourth of July. He liked the displays, but they hadn’t yet affected him in the visceral way KISS pyrotechnics got to me, many years before. In retrospect, I see that’s probably because I didn’t let him close enough to really feel the magic. It wasn’t for lack of his trying. Cubby asked me to buy him bottle rockets, sparklers, and bangers, but I was wary and kept them at a safe distance. Some dads hand their kids M-80s as soon as they learn to walk. Not me. I’d seen my share of accidents and injuries, and there was no way I’d let my tyke get burned or get a finger blown off.

My agricultural grandparents had raised me with a real fear of losing body parts. Farmers know that risk all too well. Hooking implements to the tractor, if you weren’t careful, could cost you a finger. And pyro was even more dangerous. With fireworks, if you made a mistake, you lost a whole arm, or more.

“Yep,” they’d say, “Billy Joe ain’t with us no more. Blew hisself up with dynamite while digging a fish pond.” The old men always told me stories like that, whenever I went to the hardware store to get supplies for my grandpa. They kept the dynamite in back, stacked up in cases by the Moxie and Dr Pepper soda.

Now I was older, and times have changed. You need a federal license to buy dynamite, and stores have to keep it separate from the soft drinks. Lesser explosives like fireworks are actually illegal in Massachusetts. Not that that mattered much to an outlaw like me, but it was one more reason to tell Cubby no when he wanted his own rockets after seeing a July 4 celebration.

Cubby finally managed to circumvent my caution when he turned ten and his mom once again took him to Mexico. She was finishing her doctorate in modern-day Mayan culture, and she and Cubby spent most of that summer in the mountains of Chiapas. Chiapas is no fancy tourist resort. It’s beautiful and wild high country,
full of drugs, lawlessness, Zapatista rebels, and the Mexican army. You are on the border of Central America, but the country is so high that you need a sweater at night. A hundred miles away, on the coast, people bask in hundred-degree heat, but the mornings up there are fifty degrees and foggy. The countryside is broken up into little plots of land that are cultivated by innumerable subsistence farmers. Some of the fields are on slopes so steep you struggle to walk them, yet they produce crops. The roads are interrupted by vicious speed bumps they call
topes
. If you race over them, they’ll break your suspension, but if you stop and crawl over them, you may get robbed by predators lurking in the bushes. Every Sunday, the villagers get drunk and pass out like corpses, right in the middle of the highway. The native people—most of the population—are descendants of the Maya, who worship the old gods in mountaintop temples accessible only on foot or by mule.

The villa Cubby’s mom rented was in San Cristóbal, a town where American academics had formed a sort of expatriate community. Little Bear got acquainted with the other adults and Cubby made friends with their kids. His favorites were two brothers, Ben and Jordan. Ben was three years older than Cubby. Jordan was his same age. The kids hit it off immediately. They quickly discovered a shared love of video games, toy guns, and explosives—even pretend ones—and all those things were readily available in Mexico.

Cubby’s mom gave him a ten-dollar allowance every week. Ben had some money, too. One afternoon, when Cubby’s mom and Jordan’s dad were distracted, the two kids went shopping. The market in San Cristóbal was unlike anything Cubby had ever seen. Vendors sold counterfeit sneakers, fake Gucci handbags, the latest movies, and all the hot video games. And in the back … fireworks, smoke bombs, and rockets. Best of all were the prices. Ten bucks got them a whopping sackful. The kids embarked on an orgy of fireworks buying.

Meanwhile, I was back in Massachusetts, Cubby’s mom was studying, and Ben and Jordan’s dad was engrossed in his own research. With no one to keep a close eye on them, the kids ran wild. They loved it.

They began experimenting right away. They launched objects into the sky and attacked targets on the ground. They did what any boys would do, given explosives, summer days, and minimal adult supervision. It was a formula for disaster, but they were all basically gentle kids, with no desire to hurt people or animals, or to blow the doors off houses. And they were not desperate enough for money to try blowing up safes or a bank vault. They just wanted to make some noise and have some fun.

Some kids would have become bored after a few days, or run out of things to detonate, but Cubby and Ben were clever and resourceful. They never ran out of new things to blast. Ben had a new dog, and his dad expected him to clean up after it. Thanks to their newfound arsenal, Ben was able to vaporize the dog poop rather than pick it up, to the delight of all the children except those unfortunate enough to get splattered by high-velocity feces.

The kids had definitely gotten the pyrotechnics bug. Once they mastered the basics of usage, they moved on to the next step: research and development. Even as a ten-year-old, Cubby was certain of his ability to improve things, especially those that caught his fancy. So Ben and Cubby took their fireworks apart and reconstituted them in different and more aggressive forms. They even staged an exhibition, to show the adults their mastery of the craft. It was clear that they were learning, and I hoped they were safe when I heard the news on the phone. They were certainly exuberant.

Unfortunately, their exuberance and noise attracted the attention of a pack of unfriendly indigenous children. The urchins began shelling them with rotten fruit and calling them names. Cubby and Ben’s position in the street quickly became untenable.
Realizing that, they scampered to safety behind the walls of their house (most houses in San Cristóbal sit behind high walls). Unfortunately, their attackers continued the assault by climbing trees on the adjacent property and tossing epithets and projectiles over the wall.

The kids were at a loss for a minute, but then they had an inspiration. Seizing a handful of smoke bombs, they began lobbing them at the rock-throwing urchins. They could not see over the wall, but the noises suggested their smoke was having the desired effect. Sensing they had the upper hand, Cubby, Ben, and Jordan then opened the door to the sidewalk and emerged with a handful of bottle rockets and a lighter. Grinning demonically, the three boys launched a fusillade of rockets at the bullies. With missiles whizzing everywhere, the attackers ran for the hills, the wind in their faces and their asses on fire. Technology and pyrotechnics carried the day. Cubby and Jordan were very proud of themselves.

There was only one problem. A stray rocket flew into the neighbor’s garage and lodged in a car, and its owner complained to Ben and Jordan’s father. In the United States things might have escalated into a lawsuit, and in the Sierra Madre someone might have been shot, but in San Cristóbal, Chiapas, everyone ultimately concluded that boys will be boys, and the matter ended with a chuckle and a drink.

That night, Cubby’s mom reminded him about my interest in pyrotechnics and told him stories of the stuff she and I had made for KISS and other bands. Cubby was impressed, and determined to outdo us with his own achievements. He was nothing if not competitive.

Cubby came home from Mexico with a new interest that elbowed aside Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards once and for all. I was proud of what he’d learned, but Massachusetts just isn’t a very fireworks-friendly place. By then, though, Cubby had discovered the Internet, and he’d learned that fireworks were legal only forty
miles north, in New Hampshire. As soon as he found that out, the requests began: “Can we go get some, please?” He was very persistent, and he was just getting started. July 4 was coming, and there was no way he was going to let it go by without fireworks. The bigger, the better.

The rockets of summer came and went with the Fourth of July. When fall came, Cubby was headed for the ninth grade. He’d be a high school student. The idea was hard to imagine, but there it was. My little boy was growing up. One way I knew that was that he discovered Eminem, the rapper. I had never even heard of the guy, but now his music filled our house: loud, punchy, and belligerent. All of a sudden, I understood what a generation gap sounded like. It was Cubby’s first expression of musical taste—a sure sign of a developing mind. Houseplants and dogs, after all, do not choose the stations on the radio, though chimpanzees sometimes do.

Soon the
Star Wars
posters came off his walls, to be replaced by crude, brutish images of thugs in gold chains. Gangsta. If only it had stopped there.

I had become accustomed to delivering Cubby to his mom’s on Tuesday and getting him back on Saturday in essentially the same condition as when I’d handed him over. Eminem changed all that. One day when I arrived to pick him up, his hair had turned yellow-white and was twisted into points. “Wow,” I said. “What happened to you?”

He had become a little Eminem, just like the poster in his room. “My mom helped dye it,” he said proudly. I didn’t know what to say. Clearly, my parental influence was waning. I had never had white spiky hair, nor had I ever recommended such a thing for him. The closest I had come was suggesting that we point his ears Vulcan style, like Mr. Spock on
Star Trek
, and he declined that. As we drove home, he began reciting the lyrics to the latest rap, which he had proudly deciphered and was now bound and determined to share with anyone who would listen. His mom was probably relieved that I was taking him away.

Meanwhile, another decision point regarding Cubby’s schooling had arrived. He’d outgrown Montessori and ended up at South Hadley Middle School, which he hated. With his time there at an end, we had an opportunity to put him in a high school he might like a little better, or at least hate a little less. However, bad as South Hadley was, we still weren’t sure we should try our luck elsewhere. Maybe the new school would be worse. Other people might have embraced change, and jumped into a new educational program with both feet, but we were not that way. Neither, it seemed, was Cubby. If anything, he was more a creature of routine and habit than either of us.

We had both seen how he thrived in the Montessori environment, but there was no Montessori high school within driving distance. So Little Bear visited almost every private school in the area in hopes of finding a place Cubby could be successful. They had names like Hartsbrook School, The Common School, or Deerfield Academy, and every one followed a different teaching philosophy. At least that’s what they claimed. When you read about them, each school had a slick set of arguments for why their method was best. I’d never have guessed there were so many ways to run a school. Like many dads, I had taken school for granted. You put your kid in as an ignorant toddler, and he emerges twelve years later doing reading, writing, and arithmetic like a champ. If only it were that simple.

With all the educational variety we looked at, none followed the Montessori method, and we had no idea how Cubby would do in them. I looked at the school materials briefly too, but seeing pictures of smiling kids in school sales packages just made me mad, as I thought about my own failures years before. So I mostly left school selection to Cubby’s mom.

She jumped into the task with both feet, but she ran into some fundamental problems right away. We had been thinking so hard about what school we would choose that it took a while to dawn on us that the school had to choose us back. To my dismay, I learned that Cubby had to apply, and that he might be rejected. Still worse, we found out that we were long past the application deadline.
How full can they be?
I wondered. They charged the price of a nice car for a season’s tuition. At those rates, I figured they’d take anyone who came along, if the parents were willing to pay. To my shock, half the places we looked at were full.

In the case of the ones that still had room, we now faced the ugly prospect of Kid Assessment.
Was he good enough?
I had known all along that Cubby would have to compete if he wanted to get into a good college. Every sixth grader knows that Harvard and MIT only admit a few of the kids who apply. But competing to get into high school? The mere suggestion sounded crazy to me, and when I met some of the parents who drove their kids to go to those places, I decided they were not for us.

Not that there was anything wrong with those moms and dads, but they exhibited a strong surplus of what I’d charitably call “competitive spirit” on behalf of their kids, and with that sentiment totally lacking in me, I did not see a possible fit. I had as much desire as anyone to see my kid succeed, but the idea of calling my son’s history teacher and bullying her because she only gave Cubby an A-minus was alien to me. Actually, Cubby getting A-minus grades was alien too, and that made the whole thing moot.

I wanted him to do well and go to college, but my desire only took us so far.