Chapter 8: Ninth Grade

Fall 1969

By the time school started, I had grown one more inch, so now I was 5’1” tall. The ninth grade had seen a huge growth spurt for me, and I was really looking forward to it. From the time school started until the time school ended, I grew nine inches in nine months. I shot up like a beanpole. I was 5’10” tall at junior high graduation. Mom was beside herself the entire year, trying to keep me in clothing; I would outgrow everything I owned every month or two! It was ridiculous! After school ended, I would only grow another inch and end up being my final 5’11” height.

One major difference now was that I was exercising and had already put on about five pounds of muscle. Before, I had looked anorexic, now I just looked slender. Even after I stopped growing, I was so skinny I had needed all my suits tailored for me. Maybe this time I could buy off-the-rack and have them fit.

It started within a few weeks of school starting. Two weeks into the fall semester I was walking through the kitchen when Mom stopped me. We had a measuring spot on the door frame between the kitchen and dining room, with lines drawn in different colors for each of us kids. “Come here, get against the door frame,” she said. I grinned and got into position. We normally did this on our birthdays, so this was a couple of months early for me. She put the ruler on top of my head, and I scooted out from underneath it. “Well, I know what you’re getting for your birthday - new clothes!” Mom, if you only knew! As it was, she had to buy me a couple of pairs of blue jeans anyway, because they were too short.

Ninth grade was similar to eighth grade but was more focused for the college prep kids. We no longer took general science, but now took Biology. Everyone else would get that in high school. Likewise, the college prep kids took a second year of algebra and a foreign language. My deal with Mrs. Bakkley had her tutoring me in Plane Geometry and required me to make a weekly visit to Towson High to see Mrs. Rogers and turn in assignments and receive new ones. Mom or Dad would usually take me over after school.

Spanish II was livened up this year. We had a new girl in school, a transfer, Rebecca Rinaldi. Becky was a State Department brat and had lived in a bunch of different Latin American countries, moving every few years when her father transferred to a different embassy. She was perfectly fluent in Spanish and delighted in teaching the class all the words you didn’t find in El Camino Real. Cussing in Spanish became the new sport! We also knew enough Spanish now to get into trouble. If you didn’t know what the word was, you could always fake it by adding an ‘o’ to the end of the English word. You’d usually get a laugh and be told what the word was. This time it backfired on Tammy Roberts, who had to say she was embarrassed, so she said ‘Yo soy embarrassado.’ The teacher broke down in laughter before explaining it to us. ‘Embarrassado’ means pregnant! Tammy was the butt of jokes for a month after that.

I was now in the 9^th grade chorus. Back on my first go-around, I had played trumpet all through elementary and junior high schools. I have no known musical talent. When I got recycled (for want of a better word) I hadn’t held a trumpet in my hands for over fifty years! I didn’t even know how to blow into it anymore, let alone how to key the notes. One of the biggest blowups we had last year was when I announced I wanted to stop playing the trumpet and sing in the chorus. Chorus was for those kids who couldn’t afford an instrument or were too stupid to play one. My utter lack of ability was not grounds for change. Thank God my voice had changed by then, because I finally settled the argument by breaking into ’The Impossible Dream’ from Man of La Mancha. While the movie wouldn’t come out for several years, my parents had a copy of the soundtrack from the Broadway play. It is a tremendous song for a baritone, and they were simply stunned. To look at me you wouldn’t think I could pull it off, but I once sung baritone in the church choir.

By the time my birthday rolled around, I was already well on the way to my final height. I had grown another couple of inches since Mom had measured me, and I was on the way to outgrowing the clothes she had bought me at the start of the year. She fretted over this, and I just laughed and told her I was going to be taller than her by my next birthday. She just rolled her eyes and muttered a lot. I told her to save everything that I grew out of, since Hamilton was going to do the same thing in another two or three years. He ended up three inches taller than me!

School became vastly more interesting in mid-November. The Science Fair was announced. Students could enter a project in the annual Science Fair, to be judged in the spring; it was expected of all the college prep crew to participate (read required) and optional for other students. It was open for individual students, or as teams of two.

Back when I did this the first time, I did it by myself, and took second place, with a project showing the effects of different radiation levels on the growth of barley plants from irradiated seeds. The first-place winner was Mike Misner, who was a buddy in the college prep group. His project involved growing a bunch of fertilized chicken eggs in an incubator. Every day he would harvest an egg and place it in a jar in formaldehyde, showing fetal growth. The leftover eggs at the end of the project he hatched, so we had peeping chickens at the fair. Timing was everything. I had the better science, but let’s face it, peeping chickens make for great theater. Mike continued this field of endeavor, ending up as a pediatrician down in Annapolis.

I decided on better theater myself, but growing chickens in the house was out of the question. I had already decided to do a project on the tar in cigarettes. Randy Bronson did this the last time, using a vacuum pump to ‘smoke’ cigarettes and collecting the tar they generated. That was all he did, though, collect the tar. Adequate theater but lousy science. I figured I could dress it up and do better science and I might beat the chickens. I put in a proposal the first day of the announcement, before Randy had a chance.

The interesting part was when Shelley Talbot came up to me that week in the hallway. I was very curious about this, because up until now, Shelley had looked at me like something to be scraped off the bottom of her shoe. She was one of the popular girls, very pretty, and the rumor mill had it down as gospel that chastity was not one of her cardinal virtues. Supposedly, she put out, but I had serious doubts about a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl doing that back in the Sixties. Then again, I did have a feeling she was more advanced than her classmates. She was the only girl in the school who I knew for a fact dyed her hair. In the eighth grade she had been a blonde. This year she was a brunette.

She came up to me between classes at my locker. “Carl, can I talk to you for a bit?”

I smiled and said, “What’s up?” For the first time in my life, I was tall enough to look a girl in the eye!

“Well, you know, we have to do a project for the science fair. What are you doing?”

I gave a brief explanation of my plan. “What were you doing?” I asked. I was curious. Technically the Science Fair was optional, but participation would be good for your grade. In practical terms, it was required for college prep, and Shelley was not college prep.

She groaned, “I can’t think of anything!”

“You need some ideas? I suppose I can help with that.”

“Uh...” She gave me a slightly coquettish look. “Well, I was wondering. You know, we can do this in teams of two, and I was wondering, uh, maybe...”

I stared at her. This was totally out of the blue! This was a girl who wouldn’t give me the time of day before. What was going on? “You want to team with me? Why?”

“Oh, God, Carl! Like, you’re so smart! Everybody knows you take classes over at Towson and all. You’re straight A, for Christ’s sake! You’re going to blow this away!”

I gave her a thoughtful look. “Yeah? So, what’s in it for me?”

“What do you mean?” The idea that somebody wouldn’t be dying to have her in their team was an alien concept.

“I mean, if this is a team effort, what do you bring to the team?” I replied.

Her face scrunched up at this. An original thought would kill this girl, and right now she was experiencing death-like symptoms. “Uhhhh...”

I let her off the hook. “Listen, let me give it some thought. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Alright?”

“Thanks, Carl, you’re tremendous!” she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek! She was off and down the hallway after that, while I stood there in shock, rubbing my cheek until the class bell rang. I was late to English 9.

I was lost in thought the rest of the day. Developing a project outline for a scientific experiment was a piece of cake. I had spent fifty years working with math and the hard sciences before, even at the construction company. I jotted down notes quickly. No, what had me wondering was Shelley. The way she had looked at me, and that kiss ... well, that kiss really made me wonder! It had been a long time since that had happened to me, and I liked it. Was she trying to buy my support via some form of sexual gratification? A Buckman can’t be bought - but we can be rented! I looked forward to negotiations.

By the next morning I had developed two plans of attack, one for me doing the project alone and the other for working as a team. We had a week to develop our planned projects, for review by the science teachers, but I wanted to get my project approved before Randy submitted his plan. I saw Shelley in the hallway before class and asked her to meet with me at lunch. Normally she would never have been seen with a geek like me, but she readily agreed. She must be desperate, I thought.

She was. She admitted she needed a good grade on this project to pass Science, and everyone knew I was going to win. She was also a lousy negotiator, revealing the weakness of her position like this. I brought out the two-person plan and explained it. “Okay, here’s the plan. We’re going to smoke a whole lot of cigarettes and collect all the tar, and then measure it.”

“We’re going to what? I don’t smoke and I don’t plan to start!” she protested.

I grinned at her. “Good for you. Neither do I. No, we’re going to build a machine and let it do the smoking for us.” I pulled a sketch I had worked on out of my binder and laid it down. “See, here’s how it works. First, we get a vacuum pump, and then we simply make a few filters and attach them to the pump. Finally, at the other end, we make a mouthpiece and stick in a cigarette. We turn on the pump and light the cigarette. The pump draws the air in, and the smoke goes into the filter. Afterwards we measure what was in the filter.” I traced the parts of the system with my finger, and Shelley followed along.

She slowly nodded but looked up at me. “We do all that for only one cigarette?”

I shook my head. “No, never work that way. There’s not that much tar in a cigarette. We’ll have to smoke a lot of cigarettes, a whole lot.”

“Like, how many? Besides, where do we get the cigarettes? We can’t buy them. We’re not old enough to buy them.”

That was questionable, since I knew several guys who already smoked, however no way was I going to buy them from a vending machine. I had given it some thought though. “I’m not completely sure, but probably several cartons.” She looked at me confused. “Do either of your parents smoke?” I asked.

She nodded. “Both of them do.”

“Okay. There’s twenty cigarettes in a pack, and ten packs in a carton. That makes two hundred cigarettes per carton. Five cartons is a thousand cigarettes.”

“That’s a lot of cigarettes.”

“Yeah, but we need that many. I don’t know how much tar is in a cigarette, but it’s on the order of milligrams. A milligram is a thousandth of a gram,” I explained.

“So, a thousand cigarettes is...” She looked stumped.

“A thousand milligrams is one gram. Now we’ll never be able to detect a milligram, but a gram we can measure. If it’s more than a milligram per cigarette, it becomes easier.” I showed her how the filters would work. “We can take the filters apart after we weigh them and then collect the tar chemically.”

“You can do that?” she asked.

“WE can do that,” I replied. Her eyes opened at this. “If we are doing this as a team, it won’t just be me. You’ll have to help out, too. Otherwise, I can do it on my own.”

She nodded slowly. “Uh, okay, but what can I do? I’m not all smart like you. I don’t even know what grams and stuff are. How am I going to help?” I figured Shelley was planning on smiling and flirting and getting that silly nerd, Carling Parker Buckman, to go along with her, for the sheer enjoyment of her company. Five minutes after the A was handed out, Shelley would be history.

I reached across the table and laid a hand on top of hers. “Don’t worry. I’ve thought of that as well. You’re going to be a lot of help.” I squeezed her hand and then pulled my arm back. No use frightening the prey away. The hunter had to leave a little more bait out first.

“Oh? How so?” she asked suspiciously.

Time to calm the prey down, show her that the trap wasn’t really there, but just part of the landscape. “Well, we need a place to set this up. We’re going to need someplace which can be secured, without a lot of people wandering through and messing it up.”

“Here, after school?”

“Take too long to smoke all those cigarettes,” I answered.

She shrugged. “Home?”

“There’s five other people at home, several of whom would take the thing apart or turn it off or something, and I don’t have a basement to lock it in.”

“Well, I do. I mean, we have a basement. We could set it up there,” she said.

I nodded. “Any kid brothers who’d wreck it?”

“I’m the baby of the family. The only person other than my parents is the cat, and we can keep her out of trouble.”

“See, you’re already helping. We set the lab up in your basement. We can smoke cigarettes down there after school. You help with that and get your parents to buy the cigarettes. I’ll do the science. Do you know how to type?”

“Better than you, Carl. I’ve seen your typing!” She smiled at this. We shared the same typing and home economics classes.

“Then you can type up our final report. It’s a natural partnership. Even at the actual fair itself. I’ll stand there and look like a nerd, and you can dress up and look pretty. We can’t lose!”

“I can do more than just look pretty!”

I laid my hand on hers again, just for a moment, and squeezed it again. “I know that, and this will be your chance to prove it. Besides, you end up better off than I do.”

“How so?” She never removed my hand.

I pulled back and smiled. “Because you’ll always be pretty, and now you’ll show how smart you are. As for me, I’ll still be smart, but I’ll never be pretty!”

She giggled loudly at this and agreed to my terms. I turned in our project outline that afternoon, beating Randy by three days. The first few weeks would all be research anyway, and I would have to do that on my own. My compliments to Shelley notwithstanding, the brain portion of the project was all mine. She was a gorgeous airhead.

I got home late from school that night, missing the school bus, and had to walk. It was only about a mile and a half or so, and my new and improved shape wasn’t even a light workout. I came in the door to find Mom standing there. “Detention? Wait until your father hears about this!” The school must have called her.

I gave her a sheepish shrug and went downstairs, dumping my stuff off in the bedroom. I avoided Mom and any questions until later. Mom must have told Dad when he got home, but I stayed in my room studying Geometry until we all went up to dinner.

Now that we had six people in the house, Suzie had to share her side of the dining room table with Nana. She was in charge of making sure Nana didn’t put salt on her plate before we sat down. She was on a low sodium high blood pressure diet, and she salted everything, driving my mother nuts. I never narced on her, figuring the old bat would just make a ruckus if we caught her. Usually, Suzie caught her about once a week and ratted her out, causing Nana to start crying. Tonight, I noticed Nana got away with it. I debated winking at her, but Mom would probably catch me and figure it out.

Dad was the one who started in on me. After we said grace, he picked up the serving plate of the pot roast and speared a piece. “So, you want to explain how you got a detention in Home Economics?”

Hamilton started laughing. He began singing, “Carl got detention, Carl got detention!”

“Hey, Dad, really?” I hooked my thumb at my brother, and Dad ordered him to shut up, or else. Hamilton had never given them the no-hitting ultimatum like I had and could still get walloped.

“So?” he pressed.

I thought about it, and I must have looked very sheepish doing so. “I couldn’t help it. I swear, I just couldn’t help it. It just sort of burst out,” I admitted.

“What just burst out?” asked Mom coldly.

“Well, Mrs. Wakerman was talking about tropical foods and fruits and nuts and stuff, and she started talking about coconut milk, and she asked if anybody knew what you could use coconut milk for. So, I just said that mommy coconuts fed it to the baby coconuts, so they could grow up to be big and strong, and that’s when she gave me detention.”

Mom stared at me for a second, and then just buried her face in her hands and started laughing. Dad leaned so far back while he laughed that his chair fell backwards and dumped him on the floor. Even Nana started laughing. Only Suzie and Hamilton didn’t laugh; Suzie because she didn’t understand, and Hamilton because he could see I wasn’t getting in trouble.

He still tried to push it, though. After our parents calmed down, he started smirking and snarkily said, “You still got detention. You’re still going to get punished.”

I just shook my head at him. “Hamilton, you want to know why people like me more than you? I was named after a delicious and refreshing adult beverage, and you were named after a watch.” That set my parents to laughing all over again.

The next day at school I got the approval for the project from our Biology teacher, Mr. Hailey. I told Shelley and she squealed with delight and kissed my cheek again. This time I gave her a hug, which surprised her, but she didn’t protest. My seduction strategy was a slow one but would probably prove successful. A few discreet inquiries gave indications that Shelley had a much better understanding of the birds and the bees than would be expected in a ninth grader. How much was completely true, I couldn’t say - yet - but I considered this as worthy of scientific investigation as cigarette tar.

“Now, for the next week we need to do preparation. I need to get over to Towson State and use the library there and you...”

“You’re going over to Towson State College?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“Uh, sure. I need to do the preliminary research.”

“Wow!”

I don’t know why this surprised her, but I chalked it up to the fact that she figured only college students could go over there. The truth was that Towson State was only about a half mile from Towson High, and the college prep kids there routinely went over to the library for research. All you needed was your student ID card and they’d let you in. I didn’t see why there would be an issue.

Getting over there would be simple, too. It was just a couple of miles further south on York Road, almost in the center of Towson. I could ride my bike there easily. Further, what with my wacky schedule and a lot of independent study time, I had an unlimited hall pass. As long as I let my teachers know what I was up to, I could take a day and go over there without worrying about skipping class.

I shrugged. “It’s no big deal. Like I said, I’ll go over there either tomorrow or the next day and figure a few things out. You need to sweet talk Mr. Hailey into letting us use a vacuum pump. I know they have one here, but we’ll need to take it home.”

She nodded in understanding. “I’ll ask him at lunch. If he says yes, I can call Daddy and he can drive over, and we can carry it out to the car. We can carry it down to the basement. How big a space do we need?”

Again, I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like we’re building anything all that big.” I used my hands to measure out an area of about three feet by three feet. “I bet we could put it all together in a space like that. I mean, if you have an old table or something like that, I’m sure it can fit on that.”

“We have an old dining room table in the corner.”

“Sounds perfect. We can pull it away from the wall so we can move around it. We’ll build our own lab in the basement, just like Doctor Frankenstein did!”