My brother and I fought a lot as kids. The big problem was, he was an oafish jerk and I was an innocent, hard-working boy just trying to help others. That’s how I recall it, at least.
We fought about many things. The rules of Monopoly. The best player in Green Bay Packers history. Whether mustard is better on a hot dog or ketchup. Pretty much the same stuff we fight about now. But the wars were usually verbal and psychological, not physical. Very few actual blows were ever exchanged; very little actual blood was ever shed. Then came the rocket bank incident.
I was about eight or nine, so Dan must have been about ten. Grandpa Wormley gave us both the same Christmas present that year: a rocket that was also a bank.
It was made out of some heavy metal, like lead or steel or something, and it was painted gold. It stood upright on a big round metal base, with the tip of the rocket pointing skyward.
The “bank” part of it was the coolest thing ever. How it worked was, you’d load a coin into this little metal spring-loaded pouch thing on the outside of the rocket, and you’d push it down to the base, then you’d tap a button and your coin would be launched upward into a coin slot. Then it would fall to the bottom, inside the bank. Whoa! It was great.
My brother and I were playing with our rocket banks together, up in Spazz’s room. I don’t why we were in Spazz’s room, we just were. And we were blasting every coin we could find into our banks, one by one. We created elaborate count-down rituals. We pretended we were Walter Cronkite, describing each launch in deep, serious voices for vast TV audiences. We would make an especially huge production over the launch of the more precious coins, such as dimes or quarters.
After a while, however, our stockpiles of coins were completely used up. Our pleas to the Geezers for more solid-rocket-booster fuel fell on deaf ears, so we were forced to improvise. I tried buttons, but they were too thick. Dan tried cutting fake coins out of cardboard, but they were too light. I tried a chewable vitamin tablet. It disintegrated on launch. I was trying to clean the vitamin crumbs out, and suddenly my launcher snapped right off.
Dan stared at me for a moment, then laughed. “Good one, Ace,” he said.
“Shut up,” I said, “It’s not funny.” I was still holding the broken launcher and staring at my rocket bank, not sure what to do. I’m not good at fixing things, as you may know.
“What’s a matter, why don’t you fix it” asked Dan. “Oh that’s right, you can’t fix anything.”
“Can too,” I said. I went to get my model airplane glue.
“That’s not gonna work,” he said as I pressed the launcher part into a glob of glue.
“It just has to dry,” I said confidently. But I suspected he might be right.
“Get it as dry as you want, it’s just gonna bust back off,” he said.
Sure enough, ten minutes later it busted back off.
“Are you gonna cry now?” said Dan.
That made my blood boil. At nine years old, there’s no bigger insult than being called a crybaby.
“Oh, look at you, you are going to cry!” he said.
“Just shut up!!” I shrieked.
“Here, just give it to me,” he said. “I’ll fix it.”
That did it. “Just get out of here!” I yelled. I could feel that my face was hot.
“Sheesh!” he said, backing away. “Fine, I’ll leave you to have a good cry.” He turned and took two steps toward the door.
WHAM!! My rocket bank smashed into the door a few inches from his head, splintering into pieces and leaving a huge crater in the door. I had hurled it as hard as I possibly could. He stared at me, incredulous.
“You’re dead,” he said. But he quickly left.
I calmly picked up the pieces and threw the whole thing away, coins and all. I never wanted to see that stupid rocket again. The strangest thing was, the whole incident was never mentioned again. Unlike other conflicts, where the key points are brought up again and again just to provoke new skirmishes, like someone picking a scab, this one simply disappeared. It was like it never happened.
