Riding Rockets

But I was wrong. My slam dunk was rejected. I couldn’t blow off Dr. McGuire with that rehearsed dribble. He looked at me with an all-knowing smirk and replied, “Mike, at the most fundamental level, we’re all motivated by things that occurred in our youth. Tell me about your childhood, your family.”

God, how I hated essay questions.

Chapter 2

Adventure

I was born a week after the end of World War II, September 10, 1945, in Wichita Falls, Texas. “He looks like a monkey” was my grandfather’s first impression. I had a mop of shaggy black hair and, just like a chimp, outward-deployed adult-size ears. Through my early childhood, my mom fought to correct this defect. At bedtime she would adhesive-tape the billboards to the sides of my head, hoping they would grow backward. But it was a lost cause. Somewhere in the night, nature would overcome adhesive and my ears would sprong outward like speed brakes on a fighter jet.

As I had told Psych One, I was the second child in a Catholic family that would ultimately include six children—five boys and a girl. When I was born my dad was serving as a flight engineer aboard B-17s in the Pacific, so it was left to my mom to name me. She picked Richard. I was only a few hours out of the womb and already burdened for life with wing-nut ears and the handle Dick. It was no wonder when my dad returned home he began to call me by my middle name, Mike.Christ, give the kid a break, I imagine him thinking.

Though the war had ended, my dad remained in the service. My earliest memories are of weekend visits to air-base flight lines and sitting in the cockpits of C-124s and C-97s and C-47s and other cargo planes, where Dad allowed me to grab the control yokes and “steer” the parked monsters. He also took me to base operations, where aircrews were arriving from all corners of the globe. They would give me silver wings right off their chests, brightly colored patches, and strange coins from faraway lands. In my eyes they were heroic beyond anything Hollywood could conjure.

My dad was a New Yorker, an Irishman born and raised in Manhattan. He was full of amazing, colorful, exaggerated, and frequently untrue stories. No doubt his blarney was a source of inspiration for me. He made flight out to be a thing of grand adventure, particularly his flying experiences in the Pacific theater of WWII.

He described being attacked by Washing Machine Charlie, a Japanese pilot who kept the Americans from getting any rest by flying over their Philippine base at night and dropping pop bottles from an antique bi-plane. The air whistling over the openings would produce the scream of a bomb, sending everybody out of their bunks and into shelters.

“Boys, we named him Washing Machine Charlie because that damn Jap [with my dad, Japs were always “damn”] had the worst-running engine we ever heard. I know he tuned the engine wrong just to make it sputter and backfire and keep us awake. It sounded like a dying washing machine.” Then Dad would put on a goofy Red Skelton–like face, purse his lips, and produce a litany of fart sounds to describe the offending machine. My brothers and I would laugh and laugh and beg him to “pretend to be Washing Machine Charlie.”

A boom of thunder would put us on another flight. “Boys, one time our damn navigator [like Japs, navigators were always “damn”] got us lost in a thunderstorm. Lightning hit our plane. I could feel it crawling all over my body. My hair exploded off my head, which is why I don’t have any today. It heated the fillings in my teeth and I burned my tongue when I touched it to the silver.”

On other occasions he would swoop through our room with arms outstretched describing how gooney birds (albatrosses) would perch on the wings of his B-17 and hitch a ride during takeoff. The birds would spread their own giant wings and use the rush of air to achieve flight.

I suspect my dad, flying late in the war, never really saw a Japanese fighter aircraft but you would have never known it from his stories. He told of being shot down and parachuting into an island jungle. He and his crew teamed up with native freedom fighters and fought their way to the coast, where an American submarine rescued them. I now know this never happened, but his colorful fiction planted a seed in my soul. I wanted to live this same adventure. I wanted to fly.