Raising Cubby (33 page)

The problem was that any suggestion that the glassware be moved started a fight. And I was wary of moving things myself, because I did not know which liquids might explode and which might eat holes in my foot or the concrete floor. That’s the problem with chemists—when you have one loose in the house you lose all confidence in the stability of liquids and even solids. A beaker of clear liquid could turn into white powder, or a ball of fire, just by lifting and shaking. The best course was to treat them all with caution.

Before Cubby became a chemist, the chemicals around me, at work and at home, behaved in a very predictable fashion. I had never worried that the chemicals stored in the garage would turn into something else or blow up. Cubby assured me that I didn’t have to worry about spontaneous explosions. “Besides, all the chemicals in the garage change all the time,” he said. “Paint catalyzes and hardens in the can. Spray solvents evaporate into the air. Everything changes. You just don’t notice.” I knew he was right. He didn’t really introduce chemical instability into my life; he simply made me aware of the natural instability that surrounds us all. Very little truly stays the same. Even if it doesn’t blow up or change visibly, everything changes at a microscopic rate, all the time. Geologists say even the land is in constant motion until it finds the level of repose—a state where everything has worn to gentle rolling terrain. Chemicals do that too, reacting until the energy is dissipated.
Even then, change can continue. Insects eat things. Rodents dig tunnels. Men drive bulldozers.

Thanks to Cubby, I see the whole world differently. In that way, I became a little like him, which is how it should be. Kids are our future; we parents can strive to be like them, but we should not try to make them like us. They are the next step, and we can’t know what they will do until it happens.

Still, I missed that illusion of stability. It was troubling, always wondering if the shelf beside me would spontaneously combust. But of course that never happened, and when I admitted as much to my son he said, “See? You’re irrational.” At the same time, Cubby had gotten himself into a pattern of behavior that troubled me. His special interest in chemistry had turned into a total obsession. It would not have been so bad if he pursued it out in the open, but he did all his studying (or whatever he was doing) behind a locked door in his room. When he wasn’t in there he was working in his garage lab. I hardly spoke to him at all, because he’d stopped eating meals with us and he wasn’t awake when I got up in the morning. He was sleeping till noon and staying up all night. I was so frustrated that I began thinking Cubby might need to get an apartment of his own.

When I complained to a friend about Cubby’s behavior, he told me kids were programmed to act that way. “When they’re teenagers they turn into total jerks, so you don’t miss them too much when you throw them out,” he said. “He’ll be better once he turns twenty-five.”

Meanwhile, Cubby continued to be very active online. He was talking chemistry and explosives with people all over the country and possibly all over the world. Cubby was only interested in explosives for the science, but I wasn’t so sure about the others. Of course, when I challenged Cubby, he dismissed my concerns.

“My videos don’t show anything getting destroyed,” he said. “All they show is explosives detonating on the ground. What’s wrong
with that?” He contrasted his videos with others on YouTube that showed old cars being destroyed and even houses being wrecked.

When I suggested that the FBI or the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) might still have a problem with his explosions, he disagreed. He kept insisting that there were far worse videos out there than his, and if the lawmen wanted to target people on YouTube, he’d be at the bottom of the list. It was very hard to counter his arguments.

“What law do you think people break, blowing up junk cars?” Hearing him, I had to agree. If it was your junk car, you had every right to destroy it. My son wasn’t even doing that. He just set off explosives on the ground. Yet there were other laws.

“What about possessing the explosives? You already told me that’s illegal.”

Cubby’s justification for that sounded quite a bit shakier. “I don’t keep explosives around,” he insisted. “All these chemicals I keep are just the ingredients. None of them are illegal at all. I mix them into a batch of explosive, carry it into the woods, and set it off. I don’t have a stockpile of explosives.” He was very rational, very insistent, and probably correct. However, it was increasingly clear that his notions would not protect us from a raid.

“Cubby,” I pleaded, “how could someone from the ATF know any of what you are saying? If they see those videos of yours, how could they know you don’t have a whole trunkful and you’re waiting to go on a rampage? Just calling attention to yourself might be enough to get the doors kicked in by feds. Can’t you see that?”

“Huuunh,” he said. Sometimes it was striking how closely he imitated my noises. This time I wasn’t amused.

I knew his interest was purely scientific, and I knew how it felt to be driven to experiment and refine something to make it better and better. That very trait had been the key to my success. However, I also knew he’d ventured into dangerous territory. The distinctive crack of fast-detonating high explosive is quite recognizable, even
in an online video. If I could see it, it would surely be just as unmistakable to an expert, like the ones in law enforcement.

“Don’t you think the ATF is watching you? How would they know you don’t have a hundred pounds of homemade dynamite, ready to blow up the post office or your old school?” When I said that, Cubby just looked at me like I was nuts. He was so certain of the purity of his own scientific curiosity. The idea that he would blow up the post office was total nonsense to him, and he could not even conceive of the possibility that someone else might think he could do such a thing.

Instinct told me he was headed for disaster. But he didn’t agree, and he argued his case with the greatest of eloquence. My attempts to change his mind went nowhere, and I could not decide on a course of action.

“Why put the videos online at all?” I asked him. That was the obvious question. By this time, he’d uploaded twenty-some videos to his own channel on YouTube. Cubby said he had worked hard to accomplish what he had, and he wanted to share the results with other chemists who might want to do something similar.

“What you don’t understand, Dad, is that there is a lot of bad science online. There are lots of how-to videos that show procedures that would kill you if you tried them at home. I want to show people safe science.” I wondered what would have happened if he’d followed hints in any of those “bad science” videos he talked about. Did his intelligence protect him, or was it just luck? Plus, “safe science” in the context of home-brew explosives sounded like an oxymoron to me, but he assured me it was not. “People make explosives for all kinds of reasons,” he said. “Look at mining companies. They mix their own charges all the time.”

Cubby’s experiments and his videos put me in a very difficult spot. I wanted to encourage him in his passions, but I did not want to awake one morning to find my home surrounded by federal agents with tanks and helicopters. I also did not want to get a phone
call one day, telling me that Cubby had blown his arm off. I knew he was smart and careful, but there was no margin for error in what he was doing. He did stick to small charges most of the time, but when he showed me a video of one particular test in the swamp behind the house, I was frightened almost as much as I was impressed. The blast tossed water twenty feet into the air, and I knew it would have injured him badly if it had gone off when he was placing it. Yet he dismissed my concerns once again.

“We’re talking about water, Dad! I can throw a big rock in the swamp and blast water just as far, and no one gets worried. I’m not blowing buildings into the air!” Once again, I had to concede he was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

When I challenged the risks of handling his explosives, I got a lecture on how stable the various chemicals were and how the explosives couldn’t detonate without an initiating charge. And I did know that dynamite wasn’t very sensitive, and that it was perfectly safe to handle under normal conditions. Blasting caps were safe too, until you connected the electrical wires to trigger them. They didn’t go off spontaneously. You had to make a mistake to get hurt.

But those were commercial explosives. Cubby was making his own explosive compounds, and if he made any mistakes formulating them, they might well be unstable in ways none of us could predict. That is the nature of experimentation. So what was the risk?

I tried to put what Cubby did in perspective. Other kids did skateboarding tricks, and the risks they took may well have been greater. Kids joined ski clubs and hit trees. High schoolers got concussions playing football. Cubby was thoughtful, careful, and performed all his experiments well away from people or houses. Logic told me he was less likely to sustain damage than many of his peers, but I still worried.

My biggest fear was the speed with which he was racing forward in his research and experimentation. He had started out imitating the work of others—mixing chemicals to make mildly explosive
compounds like flash powder. From there, he had moved on to blending simple rocket fuels. Then he took a big leap: He went from mixing to actually reacting. He mixed chemicals, extracted a product of the reaction, and mixed that with other chemicals. Those multistep processes were what yielded the sophisticated high explosive he was so proud of.

And he didn’t stop there. He read extensively and learned how compounds like PETN or RDX were made. Then he came up with ideas to improve them and to synthesize them more easily. In the space of a few months, he had progressed from doing reactions he read about to inventing his own.

I was proud of his technical brilliance. In addition, I knew his ideas could be very valuable. He might well have patentable inventions, at age seventeen! At the same time I worried about the legal ramifications. He said he didn’t keep explosive material around, but I suspected the sophisticated stuff he was learning to make was seriously illegal. Keeping black powder and flash powder was not much different from having a bag of firecrackers. But having PETN or C4 in the fridge was more like having a stick or two of dynamite, and the Feds had outlawed home stocks of dynamite a long time ago.

Something had to be done. Cubby was supposedly attending classes at Holyoke Community College, but as far as I could tell he wasn’t making it to class on time, and he wasn’t doing his work. He avoided showing me his grades, so I suspected he was failing. The Educated Cubby Who Does Better Than Dad plan was going seriously awry.

I tried to tell myself that I’d been the same when I was Cubby’s age. I lived with a bunch of guys in a band, and I often played music till one in the morning, ate breakfast in the middle of the night, and slept until noon. The difference was, no one was going to put me in jail for music and electronics. At least, that’s what I told my kid. He, of course, turned that right around.

“You told me you got arrested for drugs when you were with a band,” he said. He was right. They weren’t my drugs, and I did get acquitted, but I spent Easter 1976 in jail in Montserrat.

“You told me the ATF was looking at your special effects, too.” That too was correct. The ATF never raided any of the bands I was with, but they certainly looked askance at some of our more spectacular effects. My first effects were unique, and they must have escaped notice. The longer we did it, though, the closer people looked. By the time I quit the business, the ATF had come to see a rocket-launching guitar as about the same as a rocket-launching tank destroyer. That’s why you don’t see effects like the ones we did in the seventies on stages much anymore.

Whenever I thought about that, I got even more worried about Cubby. As sound as my son’s arguments about science and research and mixing the chemicals before the experiment were, I feared the government would see things differently. The risks were just too great.

A few days after Christmas, I finally had had enough. I told Cubby that everything had to go, that he could not keep his lab in my house. “Cubby, you need to be doing your experiments in a university lab, with a professor and grad students to help you. I’m terribly afraid you are going to get hurt. I am scared you are going to get raided. I can’t handle those worries anymore. I’ll get you a storage unit, and you can keep your lab stuff in there until you have a place of your own. I am really scared you are ruining your life, and I can’t let you drag me down too.”

Then I called his mom and told her what I had said. “Whatever you do,” I cautioned her, “do not let him set his lab up in your house. He is headed for disaster. I just know it.” She listened to what I said, and I thought she took it to heart. But ever since he’d moved in with us, she’d lived alone, and she was lonely. And, just as I feared, she told him he could bring his glassware to her house. Once he got it there, she didn’t stop him from setting it up in her basement.

I called her again and urged her not to let him experiment in her basement, but I didn’t get anywhere. She was always stubborn, and my suggestions were just more unwanted advice from an ex-spouse. If anything, my words probably made her more determined to stay her course with Cubby.

I didn’t talk to either of them for a little while. In some way, I was relieved. I know Martha was relieved. But I was also deeply saddened. The house was calm and quiet, but I’d lost my Cubby. He was gone a month, through the coldest part of winter.

February 15, 2008, dawned like any other day for me. It was a raw winter morning in New England, with gray skies and temperatures just above freezing. Fridays are always busy for me, as we bill out the week’s work on the projects in our shop.

At two o’clock I got the call.

“Dad, there are three ATF agents here at school,” Cubby said. “They want to search my mom’s house.” He spoke slowly and cautiously, as if people were listening. He sounded scared but firm.