Spare Parts

by Joshua Davis

  “But what if we just do the last thing,” he said. “What if we build a robot that does the pull-up and nothing else.”

  The idea had some merit. While other competitors were racing to grab balls, the Carl Hayden team could have a clear shot at the pull-up bar. A robot that hoisted itself up earned fifty points, the equivalent of gathering ten of the small balls. Plus, they would block other competitors from getting to the bar.

  Fredi and Allan thought it was a clever approach. It would be hard to build an offensive robot on the same level as that of the teams who had participated in the FIRST program for years. But they were pretty sure the Carl Hayden kids could build a robot that could do a single pull-up. After all, Oscar did dozens of them every day. He could serve as the model.

  They constructed a fiberglass frame and affixed four wheels to it. There was no need for it to be complicated; it had to travel just a little over twenty feet to the pull-up bar. They attached a clip to the top of a broom handle and connected it to a small motor that jerked the handle ten feet into the air. The clip was tied to a rope. When the pole extended up and clipped on to something, they activated a winch that dragged the robot up the rope and into the air.

  They arrived at the Arizona regionals in Veterans Memorial Coliseum on March 11, 2004. Many of the thirty-five other teams boasted the kind of technical capabilities that Cristian dreamed of. They could hurl balls through the air and could even operate autonomously. In comparison, the Carl Hayden robot was a broom handle on wheels.

  They had problems from the start. In the opening round, the robot’s chain slipped off and fell onto the arena floor. While other robots zipped about, their machine sat motionless on the floor. When the round ended, they hustled the bot back to their “pit,” an area behind the playing field where they’d set up their tools. The whole team was intensely focused—they only had forty-eight minutes until their next round and didn’t have time to take the whole robot apart. They decided to try to repair the chain surgically, with seven team members detaching and lifting various parts. Cristian felt a thrill as everybody got their hands inside the machine. It was like a game of perfectly choreographed Twister.

  It worked. They got the chain repositioned and rolled back to the court. When their next round began, their robot rolled straight for the pull-up bar while other robots scampered after the balls. Lorenzo flipped the switch that activated the broom motor. The handle shot up and snapped the clip into place. In a moment, the bot was dangling off the ground. It didn’t guarantee them a win—other teams could score more points getting balls—but they ended up winning three out of nine rounds. They also tied two. It was good enough for twenty-first place out of thirty-six teams. Their enthusiasm—if not their technical sophistication—impressed the judges, who awarded them the Engineering Inspiration Award. It recognized their “success in advancing respect and appreciation for engineering with a team’s school and community.” Most important, they didn’t finish last.

  When they got back to their seats in the amphitheater, Fredi and Allan had good news. “Guess what?” Allan said, buzzing with excitement. “That award qualifies you for the national championship. You’re going to Atlanta!”

  Cristian and Lorenzo were momentarily flummoxed, not because they weren’t excited—they were—but because they didn’t know where Atlanta was. When Fredi told them they’d have to fly there, they felt a mix of excitement and nervousness. Neither of them had been on a plane before.

  When Cristian got home, he told his mother the good news. Leticia was not thrilled. She didn’t want her son traveling after what had happened to the Wilson High kids at Niagara Falls. It was an unnecessary risk, and she told him he couldn’t go.

  Cristian was furious. No way was he going to let a robot he helped build travel to the national championship without him. He asked Fredi to do something, so Fredi called the Arcega home. Fredi explained that he used to coach track and had been traveling with kids for years. He’d never had any problems and intended to keep it that way. He also mentioned that Cristian was becoming an important member of the team. They needed him.

  Leticia wasn’t swayed, so Fredi tried another tack. He pointed out that if Cristian wanted to find a job in engineering, this was a great way to lay the groundwork. Engineers were in demand and made good money. Competing at a national robotics championship was a valuable experience that would lead to new opportunities. That resonated, and Leticia reluctantly gave her approval.

  Five weeks after the regional event, the teens were strapped into an eastbound flight. As the plane taxied onto the runway, it rattled. Annalisa Regaldo, a sophomore sitting next to Lorenzo, told him that the sound was a bad sign: “I think we’re gonna crash.”

  Lorenzo started to panic. “For real?” He looked around for a way out, and Annalisa broke into laughter. She was just kidding.

  Lorenzo didn’t appreciate the joke. He was pretty sure he didn’t understand girls, and this only reinforced that belief. He decided to stick closer to Cristian, Oscar, and Luis.

  Oscar, however, was a natural gentleman. On their first night in Atlanta, the teenagers snuck down to the hotel pool, and a game of tag erupted. A girl slipped on the slick surface, conked her head on the edge of the pool, and fell in. While the other kids watched her sink to the bottom, Oscar dove in and pulled her out. He helped her back to her room and sat with her until it was clear she was okay.

  When the competition began at the hulkingly large Georgia Dome, the Carl Hayden team’s robot seemed as dazed to be there as they were. In an early match, it froze in the middle of the playing field. Visualizing all the potential problems, Cristian calculated that most likely the battery was not sitting right in the robot.

  Cristian asked another team for help. “Will you ram us?” he shouted.

  “What?” the other robot’s driver said.

  “Just hit us as hard as you can.”

  The driver complied, smashing into the Carl Hayden robot. Surprisingly, it worked. The battery slotted into its connectors and the robot started rolling toward the pull-up bar.

  Lorenzo hooted and slapped Cristian on the back. “That was frictastic.”

  “What does that even mean?” Cristian said.

  Lorenzo smiled. “It means frickin’ fantastic.”

  He was weird, Cristian thought, but sometimes Lorenzo was pretty funny too.

  At the end of every day, Fredi and Allan convened a team meeting in their hotel room. They analyzed everything—from the way Luis unloaded the robot from the crate to the match itself—and asked the kids what had gone well and what needed to be done better. The teachers deliberately stretched the meetings on for hours. They wanted the students to learn as much as possible from the experience, but they also wanted them exhausted. The goal: make the kids so tired, they’d go straight to sleep and not cause problems horsing around all night. The meeting was, in essence, a bedtime story. Fredi would drone on about minutiae until he saw eyes drooping. Then the teachers hustled everybody off to bed.

  Though the team ended up placing in the middle of their division—thirty-ninth out of seventy-three teams—the result wasn’t bad for a newbie team and far from last place. More important, they had fun. After the closing ceremonies, Fredi and Allan took the kids for a walk around downtown Atlanta. It was hot and muggy, but they felt great. They posed for pictures flexing their muscles, and Oscar organized the group into a three-tier human pyramid in the middle of a public square. Lorenzo clambered onto the second tier, a huge smile on his face. He felt as if he were part of a group of superheroes. Oscar had done this type of group-building exercise in ROTC. Now he was building a new team.

  AFTER ATLANTA, the kids had about ten weeks until the ROV championship. Their experience building a ground-based robot proved critical as they set about assembling their underwater vehicle. They were comfortable with the FIRST controller so they decided to use it as the brains of their ROV. Since they now knew how to solder, they could connect the propellers and cameras to t
he controller. They had also traveled and competed together and employed a shorthand in their conversation. Diagonal cutting pliers were dykes, electrical connectors were Andersons, and PVC pipe became elbows and T-fittings.

  For Lorenzo, it was like a new kind of gang slang. The group also offered some of the same benefits of being in a gang. Now that he hung out with Luis on campus, Lorenzo found that other students were less likely to make fun of him. Few people wanted to antagonize someone as big as Luis, so the ridicule decreased. It gave Lorenzo some space to figure out whom he wanted to be instead of acting in response to insults.

  One of the things he enjoyed most outside of robotics was watching his mother cook. Lorenzo loved the pungent smells of pan-fried ancho and sliced onions and the bubbling steam coming off her boiling beans. She didn’t buy chili powder from the store; she ground peppers in a mortar and pestle and used the red flakes to make a spicy salsa. It was somehow reassuring, one of the few things in his life that seemed dependable and comforting, and it made Lorenzo want to learn more about cooking. The robotics team was showing him that there was a lot more to the world than he knew. The same must be true of food.

  Unfortunately, Carl Hayden had a single, lackluster cooking class. Among other things, instructors taught students how to use a microwave to make a cake from a box. Lorenzo wasn’t impressed. Metro-Tech High, another school in West Phoenix, offered a more robust program. They had a real kitchen and ran a restaurant out of the school. Lorenzo told Fredi that he was thinking about transferring. He loved robotics, but he was also drawn to cooking. It was a hard choice.

  “Why does it have to be a choice?” Fredi asked. Lorenzo was just starting to build a new life for himself. Fredi worried that if he left robotics, that foundation would crumble. “Why don’t you go to cooking school over the summer?”

  “Because that costs money.”

  “How much?”

  “Like a lot,” Lorenzo said. “Like four hundred dollars.”

  “Let me see what I can do.”

  About a week later, Fredi told Lorenzo not to worry about the cost of the class. He and Allan would cover it.

  “Take the summer class and stay here,” Fredi said. Though neither teacher was rolling in cash—the average teacher's salary in the district was thirty-five thousand dollars—they didn’t want to see Lorenzo go.

  Lorenzo was amazed. He still counted the Big Mac that Fredi had bought him in his freshman year as one of the most generous things anybody had ever done for him. But this was an entirely new level of generosity.

  “Are you sure?” Lorenzo asked.

  “Yeah,” Fredi said. “Where would we be without your crazy ideas?”

  “WE’RE GOING TO practice until we can do this without thinking,” Oscar said.

  It was time to put the robot together, and once the PVC pipes were glued in place, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make changes. They would have one chance to glue it all together, and it had to be right. Oscar wanted the process to move like a finely tuned military operation. For him, the pyramid in Atlanta was just the beginning. Over his four years in high school, he had drilled his ROTC team incessantly: push-ups in unison, running in lockstep, jumping jacks together. Now he brought that training to bear on Lorenzo, Cristian, and Luis. They might not have been gung ho Special Forces candidates, but Oscar had internalized the “Be all you can be” Army motto.

  Under Oscar’s supervision, the team assembled the robot without glue, dry-fitting pieces together. “Let’s do it again,” Oscar said. “The glue dries quickly so we need to move fast.”

  They disassembled and rebuilt the robot repeatedly. Each time, they finished at the top, leaving enough room for the black briefcase. Initially it took about an hour, but as they practiced they got faster, until they were able to do it in twenty minutes without mistakes.

  It was a bittersweet exercise. The school year was coming to an end and both Oscar and Luis would be graduating just before the competition in Santa Barbara. They knew that when they glued the robot together and completed the competition, their high school years would be over. They were getting older and needed to figure out what they would do with their lives. Luis had a green card. He could keep working as a short-order cook, but he’d been doing that for years already. He felt like his diploma should mean something.

  Oscar struggled with a similar but more pronounced problem. He didn’t have residency and couldn’t get a normal, legal job. The best he could hope for was to parlay a day laborer job into something steadier. It was hard to imagine building a life on such a shaky foundation.

  Still, just graduating was an accomplishment that meant a lot to both families. Neither Oscar’s nor Luis’s parents had received high school diplomas, so it was an important moment in their histories. Both teens dressed in caps and gowns and promenaded up onto the stage to accept their degrees. They posed for photos and smiled happily. Oscar’s sister baked a cake. Luis’s mom made birria, a spicy beef-and-pork stew. That was all they could afford, but everyone was pleased. The day was a sign that the boys could achieve things the previous generation had not.

  * * *

  With graduation behind them and the contest only a few weeks away, it was time to glue the robot together. Lorenzo arrived straight from cooking class bearing snacks. He felt obligated to bring his creations to the robotics closet, since Fredi and Allan had paid for the class, but nobody was prepared for the smell of the bloated brownish-red Polish sausage.

  “What is it?” Oscar asked.

  “Kielbasa,” Lorenzo said proudly. “And sauerkraut.”

  “Cook Mexican food so we can actually eat something,” Cristian said.

  This time, the trash talk was friendly and Lorenzo laughed with the others. It wasn’t mean-spirited. Lorenzo felt like he had a real group of friends for the first time in his life. “I’m expanding your taste buds,” he told them.

  Oscar took a cautious bite, and soon the sausage was gone. “It was pretty good,” Oscar allowed. “But let’s get going.”

  They had practiced assembling the plastic pipes for weeks under Oscar’s supervision. Now that practice would be put to use. They laid the pieces out on a table in the robotics closet and opened a metal container of Christy’s Red Hot Blue Glue. The glue didn’t actually need to be heated. Oscar just dipped an applicator into the container and coated it with a blob of the unnaturally blue paste.

  “Whoa,” Lorenzo said, getting a whiff of the stuff. It smelled like heavy-duty paint thinner and almost immediately filled the little robotics closet with an invisible cloud of intoxicating fumes. “We’re gonna get high.”

  They decided not to place a fan near the door. They thought it would make the glue dry faster, and they didn’t want it to harden while they were in the midst of placing a pipe. As a result, the vapors in the closest got denser. The guys gathered outside in the hallway. It was hard enough to remember where each of the sixty-odd pieces fit—now they were going to have to do it stoned.

  “Let’s take turns,” Oscar said. “Take a deep breath, glue as many pieces as you can, and then run out.”

  They broke into teams: Oscar and Luis went first. While Luis held the first two pieces of PVC together, Oscar swabbed on some of the blue glue. Oscar was holding his breath, but the fumes stung his eyes. Even the smallest inhalation made him dizzy. He got a few pieces set in place and then rushed out.

  Luis just smiled. “I’m okay. Send Cristian in.”

  Cristian sprinted in with his shirt pulled up over his nose and glued more pieces, while Luis continued to hold everything together with an increasingly large grin. People generally seemed small to him. Now Cristian looked like a manic elf, scurrying around the room with glowing white pipes. Luis started chuckling as the world went blurry.

  Oscar suddenly appeared and grabbed him. “Hey, you’ve got to get out of here.” Oscar pulled him from the room. Luis couldn’t stop smiling.

  “Are you okay?” Oscar asked.

  “Yes”
was all Luis would say.

  Lorenzo zipped into the room and quickly assembled a series of pieces with Cristian. The glue dried almost immediately when two pieces of pipe were pressed together, so they had to focus. One misglued portion could compromise the entire structure. It was like doing a large jigsaw puzzle with pieces that froze in place and a lack of oxygen. After sixty seconds, Cristian started to black out. He noticed his vision tunneling and had to stumble out, gasping for air.

  “Damn, that’s stinky,” Lorenzo wheezed, trailing behind Cristian.

  It took almost two hours to put the whole thing together amid the overpowering stench. At the end, all four teens had to work together to fit the four legs into position. Oscar felt a wave of nausea but tried to ignore it. They lowered the black briefcase into position. It was the crowning touch, the moment when the robot was complete, but there was a problem. The three pipes leading into the case didn’t line up. They angled up, as if the briefcase were much bigger, creating gaps that would flood with water, shorting the entire system and sinking the robot. It was a serious problem.

  “I thought you said this would work,” Cristian said to Oscar.

  They had practiced everything but the briefcase placement. Oscar was upset with himself. He should have tried to fit the briefcase when they were doing the dry runs. It was a critical oversight.

  “We have to start over,” Cristian said.

  The excitement they’d felt about building the robot disappeared. The process now felt like a defeat. They had limited options. It would be impossible to salvage the pipe they had used. If they were going to start over, they’d have to buy more pipe and try again. That was a lot of added time, energy, and expense.

  “We could cut out one section,” Oscar offered.

  While Oscar and Cristian debated the feasibility of a surgical demolition, Lorenzo held his breath and examined the pipes around the briefcase. They weren’t off by much. Maybe a little heat could solve the problem.