When I grow up...

When I grow up...

I wanted to fly jets when I grew up. Laying in my bed I stared at the ceiling and dreamt of adventures as a jet fighter pilot.

Over the closet, in my childhood bedroom, was a line of nails. Each nail held a plastic jet model I built. Each aircraft took months to build. Working with enamel paints, each coat had to dry, and progress was often slow, but measurable.

My room had two desks. I did homework on one and the other served as a workbench. It was neatly organized with model building tools. A pencil holder sat on the corner, bristling with pointed white paint brushes. A pallet of Testor’s model paints lined the back edge of the desk like a little white picket fence. Razor knives and tweezers covered a blue washcloth, like a little surgical set. The far end of the desk had a retrofitted propane tank my dad manufactured for me. We had an air-compressor in the garage and for my twelfth birthday, I got an airbrush that was powered by compressed air. When I was painting a lot, I had to run up and down the stairs from my room to the garage to get more air. It was a good Saturday when I had to refill three times.

When I was painting, I opened the window and faced a box fan outside and turned it on. It was a surprisingly well ventilated workspace. But then again, I can’t smell, so who knows how often I fumigated myself?

My dad helped me build the first model, an F-15. We painted it blue, using leftover paint from when we painted my room the year before. It camouflaged the jet well against the wall. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned that fighter jets had specific color schemes of greys. They were not, in fact, bedroom blue.

I built in the 1/48 scale. One inch on the model equaled 48 inches in real life. Most of my jets were a foot or two long. Before I moved out I had around 15 models, with increasing complexity and realism. I hung two planes from the ceiling, a B-1 bomber being shot down by a Soviet Su-27. I used a cigarette lighter to melt and distort one of the bombers engines and I used wire and pillow stuffing spray-painted black to give a smoking affect. It was a beautiful piece of 3-D art.

Staring at the bomber from my bed, as a young teenager, I realized I wouldn’t just be flying jets. I would be firing missiles at another boy who had models hanging in his room where he dreamed of flying. Staring into the white popcorn texture of the ceiling, past the smoke of an exploding fuselage, I felt my innocence leave me.