Rocket Boys.

When The Slug and I were growing up, we had a fascination with models of all sorts. Cars, trucks, tanks, planes, monsters, dinosaurs, you name it. Sometimes we'd set up a table in my parent's basement and work on them together.

The Slug was a perfectionist, and his attention to detail was insane. At one point, he told me he wanted to work as a model maker professionally, creating realistic miniature sets for the movies. He probably could have -- he was that good. You couldn't see the seams on any of his models -- he would sand and fill and prime and spray the thing like it was a real car. His engines had spark plug wires and oil stains. His tires had white letters. His dashboards had readable gauges.

No matter what type of model he was currently into, eventually they all came down to the same point -- he would get bored with them and start customizing. He'd swap engines, he'd cut holes in car hoods and add scoops, he'd tub wheel wells and shorten rear ends to add slicks. It was like an episode of "Pimp My Ride" but in 1:24 scale. When he was done, you couldn't tell that it wasn't supposed to be that way.

In the meantime, I would be across the table trying to not glue the left half of a Chevy big block to the side of my face.

Soon, however, the static models lost their appeal. Even though they were still cool to look at and work on, the Slug wanted something that moved. We would look wistfully through the catalog of radio controlled cars and airplanes that he found somewhere, knowing that we'd never have enough money to own one. We were especially enamored of the Corsairs, since we were both huge fans of a new TV show called Baa Baa Black Sheep.

One day he called and asked me if I could come over because he wanted to show me something. My mom dropped me off, and when I walked into his room he was in the final stages of applying fins to a sleek black rocket that stood about 2 feet high. When I found out that the rocket would actually launch and come down on a parachute, I went out and bought my own rocket kit the next day. I made him promise that he wouldn't launch his until I finished mine. He didn't have a problem with that, since he still needed fit up the nose cone and clear-coat his rocket again.

While it wasn't the neatest job, I had the entire rocket built in about 3 hours. I painted it gloss white, because that was the paint I had. I didn't bother with the U.S.A. stickers or anything else. It looked like a vibrator with fins. I didn't care. It was done and ready to fly.

The following weekend, we took them out to the cow field and set up the launch pad. We evaluated the wind-speed and direction, and angled the launch pad so that it would head slightly into the wind, the theory being that when the parachute deployed the rocket would drift back to us. He launched his first. Neither of us knew what to expect, since we had never launched a rocket before. We stuck the igniter into the back of the rocket, played out the wire and had a countdown from ten. We got to one, then we yelled "IGNITION!" and he hit the button.

Nothing happened.

He hit the button again.

Still nothing.

"Let me check it," I said and took three steps toward the rocket. I was just about to reach down to pick it up when all hell broke loose. The engine ignited, the rocket took off screaming into the sky and I jumped away as a cloud of dense white smoke billowed around me. The Slug let out a whoop behind me.

I looked up and saw that the nose cone had ejected and the chute had popped. I couldn't believe how high it was. It drifted back to us like we planned, then over our heads and past us and into the cow pasture. The Slug was laughing at me.

"You hit the dirt like you were under attack," he said.

We ran out and got his rocket, and then came back to the launch site. Every time he would look at me, he would start laughing again.

"I figured out that you have to hold the button in," he said. "You can't just push it and let it go. Sorry about that."

I could tell by his continuing fits of laughter that he really wasn't.

"Jerk," I said.

When we launched mine, we knew what to expect. We set it up the same way, only this time we started from 3. When I got to the end of the countdown, I pushed the button and held it in. There was a loud WHOOOOOOSH! and the rocket disappeared into the sky. And I mean that literally -- It disappeared. No chute, no nose cone ejection, no nothing. Just a smoke trail and the ringing in our ears. It was gone forever and we knew it.

"If you start laughing again, you're dead meat," I said.

After that, I did build more rockets and have many successful launches and -- more importantly -- recoveries. But as always, The Slug grew bored with it. There was something about vertical flight that just didn't do it for him. He wanted horizontal flight. That meant planes.

And obviously, given our current stock of spare parts, that meant Rocket Planes.

In the mid 1970's, the military came out with a new fighter jet called the F-15 Eagle that the Slug liked, and someone had given him a model of it for his birthday.

He hadn't built it yet, because he was mostly out of the "static model" phase, but sometimes kids move from one thing to another faster than their grandparents can keep track, and the gifts they receive can tend to lag a hobby or two behind.

He got the idea in his head to modify this model to take a pair of rocket engines, and I watched as he cut and sanded and melted and managed to make this model plane look like it was meant to be powered by rockets. He measured the jets and figured out that with just a little bit of modification, each one would hold a D-12 Estes engine. He lined the body of the jet with tinfoil before he put it together and modified the cockpit and nose cone to pop off, so the chute could be deployed. He put so much time into this rocket plane that I don't think either of us really wanted to test it. Just looking at it and imagining that it might actually fly was almost more fun than launching it and having it be a complete failure.

Eventually, we decided it had to be done. The main sticking point was how to get both engines to fire simultaneously. There was no way we could get two igniters to go at the exact second when they were wired together, so we decided our best bet was to set up two launch buttons, one for me and one for him. We'd count down, then push the buttons simultaneously. Using fresh batteries, we figured that would be as close to exact as we could get. We waited for a day with almost no wind, and then set everything up.

We wanted to launch almost horizontally, but knew there was no way it could actually take off on its own, so we opted for about a 15 degree launch angle. We pointed it out into the cow pasture, just in case anything went wrong. (What could go wrong, right?)

We had a piece of sheet metal set up as a back stop, and we used a straightened coat hanger as a launch guide. Once we had everything set, we checked the nose cone one more time, made sure the igniters were placed correctly and we played out the wire in preparation for the countdown.

We counted down. When we got to zero, we yelled "Now!" and slammed down on our buttons.

I'm not sure exactly what went wrong. I only know that the thrust and burn time of a pair of D-12 engines is not something to take lightly. The plane came off the launch guide and immediately started spinning like a pinwheel. It went about 6 feet in the air, then came directly at us. We both dove out of the way, and the plane crashed into the ground right where we had been standing. It was well-made however, because it didn't fall apart on impact.

No, that would have been too easy.

Instead, it began cartwheeling madly around the field, bouncing end over end, starting a fire every time it touched down.

We were screaming at each other and running around in a 50 foot radius stomping out fires that seemed to be sprouting miraculously one after another. The plane finally came to rest, and a few seconds later when the ejection charge fired, the nose cone didn't pop free. This, of course, meant that the entire plane started burning furiously. When we were finally done putting out all the fires, we walked toward the ruined plane. It was burning with a greasy yellow flame and copious amounts of smelly black smoke. It was a molten mess.

We were looking around for something to put it out with -- since neither one of us wanted to step on it -- when the second engine ignited with a roar. We had completely forgotten about that one, and we both almost shit our pants right there. The engine case had burned through and the flame hit the solid fuel. The engine didn't have much more than melted plastic holding it in place at this point, so it took off like a bullet, spraying melted plastic and spinning and bouncing around the field. Luckily the grass was shorter there, so other than a few scorched trails, a huge cloud of white smoke, and a pile of melted slag that used to be an F-15, there wasn't much damage.

We talked about that F-15 for years. Even though we both outgrew rockets and models shortly after that, it was a good couple of summers. The funny thing is, every time we'd get talking and that story would come up, he'd get this look in his eyes. Like even after all these years, he was still trying to figure out a way to make it work.

I'd bet anyone reading this a hundred bucks that right up until the day he died, if I had suggested to him that we try it again, he would have been building that F-15 model the next day.

Whoosh.