by Buck, Rinker
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.
After a while Kern was overcome by the dope fumes too and came out and joined us. When he got high, Kern was as funny and relaxed as the next kid and we liked having him out there. We were making great progress on the plane and enjoying our spring together.
My mother didn’t have any idea about what was going on out there. To her a plane rebuild was just a plane rebuild. My father had always been deliberately vague about our weekend activities together and he pawned off a lot of platitudes to my mother that she seemed to accept. For example, despite all evidence to the contrary, he told her that he was “a very safe pilot,” and that he was teaching us to fly the same way. So, he never told her about the airplane dope. Working on an airplane all winter, he told her, “built character in boys,” and Kern and I were getting along so much better that year she figured this must be true.
One night in early May my mother looked out through the kitchen window and saw three of her four oldest children prone on the grass beside the barn. We were completely plastered on dope, but she couldn’t tell that from a distance. Working that hard on a plane, building all that character, must have been tiring, she thought. Maybe we needed something to eat.
So, she loaded up her wicker tray with cookies and milk and came out across the lawn, quiet as a cat. Suddenly she was there, and I was looking up at her pretty, pert face through the little holes in a wicker tray.
“Oh, hi Mom.”
“Are you children all right?”
“Oh we’re fine,” Kern said. “Just taking a rest from the plane.”
“Why are you all lying on the grass?”
“Oh, it’s a nice night out I guess.”
“Well, maybe you should come in.”
“Mommy,” Macky said. “You know what?”
“No dear, what?”
“Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.”
Karl was a kid who lived in our town and we went to grammar school with him. I’d never heard about his Davy Crockett underpants before, but it sounded like Karl.
“Excuse me Macky?” my mother said, “What did you just say?”
“I said, 'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.’”
“Macky. Don’t say that again. I heard you the first time.”
“Mom. You said, 'What did you just say?’ And I said, 'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.’”
“Don’t say that!”
“What?”
“That!”
“'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants?’ What’s wrong with that?”
“Don’t say it!”
Kern and I were just as high as Macky and we didn’t see anything wrong with what she was saying. In fact, it made perfect sense. Karl’s Davy Crockett underpants was the kind of image that naturally rises to the surface and just pops out while you’re doping a plane, and we were grateful for the information, now that it was out.
But my mother was flustered and started looking around for a place to set her tray down.
“Mom,” Macky said, “I don’t know why you’re being so sensitive. All I said was, 'Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants.’”
“Oh dear,” my mother said. “Macky, you really should come inside now.”
“Mom,” Kern said. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh, not that!” Macky laughed. She had this uproarious, high-octane laugh. “Karl Kincherf wears Davy Crockett underpants. I saw them in Mrs. Kincherf’s washing machine when Karl was five.”
“Macky, are you sure you’re all right?”
“Mom. It’s not important, okay? Let’s drop it. I just wanted you to know.”
My mother left the tray of cookies and milk on the grass and decamped for the house.
We never did hear about Karl and his Davy Crockett underwear again. I knew that my mother was confused and suspicious about the conversation, but she didn’t want to discuss it. That spring when we doped the plane was one of the times I was grateful about being raised a Catholic. At a certain point the doctrine of silence always took over and protected us from having to say anything about our behavior.
Kern was jubilant. We finished recovering the Cub by the end of May, which gave us the three-day Memorial Day weekend for the painstaking job of sectioning off the fuselage and wings with masking tape and newspaper for his paint scheme. There would be plenty of time during the week for spraying on the paint.
He decided to paint the Cub red and white, using the paint design for a 1956 Super Cub, his favorite look among all Cubs. When we got to the wings, Kern masked off large, triangular shapes to paint bright red “sunbursts” on the top surface, like all the stunt pilots had on their planes.
“Sunbursts, Kern?” I said. “Why sunbursts?”
“Ah c’mon Rink. Think. Think.”
“Kern I’m thinking. But I don’t know.”
“Look, if we go down in the deserts or the mountains, they’ll send search planes out.”
“Right. The sunbursts will make it easier to find us from the air.”
“Exactly. Rink, this paint job could save our lives.”
CHAPTER 5
The stories my father told us when we were young were full of enchanting accounts about him camping beside his plane at night, falling asleep as the stars lit some distant prairie sky. Kern and I wanted to “rough it” too, sleeping under the wings of the Cub every night, an idea that appealed to us both romantically and financially. By now, the last of our snow-plowing money from the winter had been spent on paint for the plane. One evening we sat down and calculated our expenses for the coast-to-coast flight—fuel, meals, motel rooms on rainy nights—and arrived at a total budget of $300. As soon as school let out in early June we found summer jobs to raise the money, and we went about this in our usual way.
I found a cushy job as an exercise boy at a standard-bred trotter farm across the fields from our house. I was assigned the farm’s breeding stock, a couple of stallions and a half-dozen brood mares, each of whom had to be hitched up to an exercise sulky and loped around a large cinder track every couple of days. After the long winter sequestered with the plane, I enjoyed being outside in fresh air and working with horses. I was getting a great tan, and Kern rigged up a holder so I could attach my transistor radio to the sulky and listen to Cousin Brucie on WABC as I circuited the track. The horses could only be run when it was cool, early and late in the day. The rest of the time I took long naps on the tack-room couch.
Kern was miserable at his job. He found work as a cashier at the Acme Supermarket in Bernardsville. The Acme was presided over by a swarthy, pockmarked store manager who strutted the aisles barking out orders and criticizing his employees. Everybody called him Mussolini. Kern and Mussolini took an instant dislike to each other, and practically every shift Kern worked at the Acme was a tragicomedy of labor relations.
Kern was a sensitive, generous kid to begin with, and he naturally sympathized with the female shopper. He had seen what my mother went through several times a week, shopping for all those children. As far as he was concerned, the Acme should treat every customer like “Queen for a Day.” That was his philosophy, his “point of view,” as he put it. Whenever an old lady or a mother with bawling children appeared at his cash register, Kern would hold up his entire checkout lane to help them stack their groceries in boxes. Then he disappeared for the parking lot to load their car. The line of shoppers in his lane backed all the way up into baked goods.
Mussolini went apeshit every time it happened. Storming out of his manager’s booth, he was constantly reprimanding Kern for “not being efficient.” But Kern wouldn’t give in. It was this obdurate mind-block with him. The customer came first, period. As soon as he thought Mussolini wasn’t looking again, he’d help another old lady out to the parking lot. But Mussolini had infallible radar for supermarket gridlock and he’d come racing back out to lambaste Kern.
The whole thing was a farce. My brother was the only teenager in America who could give a shit about Acme customers. But I admired his tenacity and loved hearing about his battles with Mussolini. Finally my older brother was developing into the kind of combative protagonist I had always wanted him to be. But Kern was demoralized about his job. He hated being criticized by the boss every day. When he came in from work, tired and disgusted, he wanted to talk.
“Rink, I’m not giving in to this guy,” Kern vowed. “The Acme should be run for the benefit of the customers, not the store manager.”
“Right,” I said. “It’s the principle that counts.”
“Yeah. You know what else I don’t like about the guy?”
“No, what?”
“Acne. He’s got acne. I mean, Mussolini must be at least thirty-five years old. Adult acne is the pits. No way! I’m not kissing his ass.”
Mussolini retaliated by assigning Kern to the late shift. This was supposed to be onerous punishment, because most of the teenagers who worked at the Acme didn’t like working nights. But Kern didn’t mind. Mussolini wasn’t there at night and now Kern could run the most lethargic checkout lane in the supermarket business. Besides, Kern liked having his days free to work on the Cub.
Kern spent the rest of June contentedly putting the finishing touches on 71-Hotel all day before he went into work. He also went flying quite a bit, to work the winter rust off his arm before we took off for the coast. A friend of ours out at the airport, Jack Sylvester,
let Kern use his 65-horse Aeronca Champ.
One morning while I was working at the horsefarm, running the big stallion around the track and singing along with my transistor radio to “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” on WABC, I heard a sudden roar and then an airplane tire went by my face. It was Kern, pulling a buzz job in Sylvester’s Champ. I didn’t hear him coming because Kern had snuck up quite low and from behind the trees, with the wind on his nose.
Kern kept the ugly yellow Champ on the deck all the way across the farm. His prop blew a rooster-tail of track cinders into my face, and he mowed over a big swath of cattails and bamboo grass when he blasted past the swamp. My heart raced. I loved it when Kern flew like that. His depth-perception and timing were precise and he was just so good already, nimble and hot and cocksure, as good as my father or the great Eddie Mahler.
At the tree-line, Kern pulled the Champ up hard and banked left.
It was a hot, muggy morning. On a day like that, the elevated temperature and humidity cause the air molecules to expand, providing less lift for a wing. And the Champ was a loser, a notorious loser. The fuselage was shaped like a bathtub, and the wings were stubby and fat, about as aerodynamic as an Italian villa. Even on a good day, Champs couldn’t climb for shit.
Ah c’mon Kern, I said to myself. Put the nose down and level those wings. You’re going to spin the airplane.
At the top of the turn, that’s exactly what he did. The nose suddenly pitched up, the high wing stalled and fell to the right, and the plane violently corkscrewed around into a spin.
Spins are aggravated stalls, something that happens when a plane is slowed beyond the point at which it will fly any longer and the wings are banked over or the rudder pushed out. In a standard stall, with the wings level, most planes will recover straight ahead in a few hundred feet. In a spin, the plane cranks over in the direction of the turn and falls into uncontrolled flight. Rotating like a top, the plane plummets with the nose pointed straight at the ground, screaming in the slipstream as it falls wing-over-wing. The increased forces of gravity pull the pilot down into the seat, and the earth gyrating around through the windshield is disorienting and terrifying. Generally a thousand feet or more is lost before the plane builds up enough speed to recover. But most pilots don’t recover. Because spins were considered too dangerous, the FAA had phased spin-training out of its curriculum, and most flight schools merely taught pilots how to avoid them. But my father insisted that Kern and I learn to fly the old-fashioned way and gave us spin-training himself.