Confessions of a Nerd

I have in the past confessed to being a nerd when I was growing up. Nerdiness has become more stylish since then and somehow these people are in charge?

I will present my credentials by saying that I would meet with my friends Warren and Walter and Terry for our science fiction book club while playing chess and watching Star Trek. I know… morbidly nerdish.

As a result I took all the AP (Advanced Placement) classes I could in high school. Statistics, Calculus, AP Chemistry, Organic Chemistry. A Boy Scout Explorer post learning computer programming in Fortran IV and punched cards. Hopefully you are still with me…

Chemistry at my high school was taught by John Friend. He was a great teacher (alas no longer with us). Knowledgeable and enthusiastic, sarcastic and humourous. I had read a brief note in the textbook (yes I know reading is frowned upon by the younger folk these days) about nitrogen triiodide and it potentially being an explosive. (Explosions being the primary purpose of chemistry of course.)

I asked Mr Friend how to make it and he smiled and said ‘Wouldn’t you like me to tell you.’ and said nothing more on the subject. This was many years before the internet and so this was a time where young people had little choice but to think for themselves.

Being in AP Chem we had free access to the chemicals cupboard. I thought a good starting point would be some iodine crystals and concentrated ammonia. So I set about acquiring them from the lab stores.

I took these home on the bus and went to my bedroom to begin experimenting. A few crystals mixed with some ammonia. Let it dry and at the slightest touch ‘POP!’. Wow cool! Call my friend Terry over and show him. We play with it some more and pretty soon the carpet in my room crackles when we walk on it with the leftovers of our increasingly larger detonations.

The next morning before school I prepared a big batch to show my friends at school. Understanding it was more stable when kept moist I wrapped it in a wet paper towel and slipped it into a small matchbox.

The fashion I adhered to at the time was outdoors. Big hiking boots, denim jeans, a heavy canvas shirt. The matchbox went into the shirt pocket along with a $1 bill, my lunch money (burrito and a coke from the lunch wagon).

Flagstaff has a very dry climate, my bus ride was about an hour to school. Since I always arrived at school early I cooled my heels in the library reading magazines. Usually Popular Electronics (yes I know it was almost a terminal condition.).

So I was sitting at the table and the librarian was across the way. It was deathly silent as I read and flicked through the pages when BANG!. My ears were ringing, I didn’t know what was happening, confusion, the librarian is walking towards me, I am coughing while enveloped in a purple cloud, there is a metallic medicinal smell to the air, small pieces of dollar bill are filtering down out of the air in front of me.

My hearing recovers enough to hear the librarian ask if I am all right. I acknowledge her and recover my senses enough to realize what has happened.

I was taken to the nurse’s office where my heavy shirt was examined to reveal a gaping tattered hole in the front and rear of the pocket. A matchbox-sized abrasion on my chest. A bandage was prepared and about that time Mr Friend stormed into the nurse’s office and demanded what I had stolen. I said ‘nothing’, I had picked up and old firecracker on the way to school and was reminded now why we were always told not to do that.

Mr Friend did not believe me but he had no evidence. Also I was one of the best scholars in the school so that made me kind of bulletproof in one sense if not actually bomb proof.

The wound healed. I wore the torn shirt with pride for many years until it practically rotted off of me. It gave me a kind of hero nerd reputation.