Invincible 2: What Made Me Tick

This is part two in a seven-part serial that will run every Tuesday and Thursday for the remainder of March. This piece was included in full in our recent collection of spiritual writing, Spiritus Oppidum, Vol. 1. Past and future online installments can be found here.

My name is Maurice McBride. I am – or was, anyway – a chemical engineer. I spent my entire career working for a big pharmaceutical company, a company whose products are on shelves and in cabinets all over the world…maybe even yours. During the years I worked for them, I was responsible for a handful of very successful “products”. That’s how we were taught and encouraged to refer to them, but to take the silk hat off the pig for a moment, they were drugs. I was a drug-maker, and my employer was a drug dealer. We got away with it, though, by Christ; the world’s prisons are full of people who didn’t.

I’ve decided not to use any names but my own, but I guess it won’t protect much. Any Wikipedia entry or Google search of my name will mention the parents I was born to, the schools I attended and graduated from, the year I began working for my employer, the fact I never married. Even if they glossed over those things, you can bet your watch and chain they won’t fail to mention what I’m best known for, my “biggest contribution”. The one that made me wealthy, the one that was touted as a “breakthrough” that “helped” so many millions of people.

The one I’d give anything to uninvent.

A six-year old with internet access can find that information, but all the research in the world will never tell you what drove me, what made me tick. Nor will you find anything about the simple lesson a young boy learned from his father many years ago that kept him going, even when the tables turned on him. Both of these I’ll get to, but we should start at the beginning. Right?

 I was the oldest child in a lower middle-class family. My sister was a full decade younger than I, and my brother two years younger than her (I was the “oops”, not them). Our parents were typical early twentieth-century immigrants – thrifty and industrious. Mother stitched our clothes. We planted, tended, and harvested our own vegetables, and traded with our nearest neighbor, a dairy farmer two miles away, for milk, beef, and cheese. Father worked for the railroad, and six days a week he left the home place with a tune on his lips and his lunch bucket banging against his thigh, keeping time. On payday he would splurge and come home with a small piece of black licorice which he would ceremoniously divide up amongst us. Mother would bitch at him because sweets weren’t a necessity, but he would tell her that children are only children once. Christ knows he was right about that. In 1958, thanks to a promotion my father was given, we were able to get a television. We were happy, even though Milton Berle’s jokes left something to be desired even back then.

One of my clearest memories is of standing on a chair, dressed in my usual short pants and Popeye-esque striped shirts, watching my mother bake cookies. The average child would likely have been there attempting to abscond with the mixing spoon in the event it was left unattended; I was there because I was fascinated by the way the flour, sugar, butter – all that stuff – combined to form a useful end product, in this case cookie dough. Witnessing this once, I made sure I was there to watch each subsequent miracle. I became a fixture at her side whenever she baked.

Later came another event, one my analyst would no doubt refer to as “formative”. You’ve heard of kids getting scolded for getting into the bleach under the sink? Well, in my case, it involved bleach, but I wasn’t eating it. I had poured it into our cat’s milk bowl. Hurting Morty was certainly not my intention. Having seen the skull and crossbones on the back of the container, I wanted to see if it would bubble or hiss or turn green or anything else of interest. Mother disposed of the tainted milk quickly (Morty was in no danger anyway, having been outside at the time), and reddened my backside with a large wooden spoon she kept on the mantel for that purpose. So no harm done, and certainly no malice involved. Just a kid being a kid…right?

Mom and Dad weren’t rich, but they weren’t fools, either. They saw the direction my interests were headed, and for my tenth birthday, I was given part of our small garage to “make my experiments in”. Father even rigged up water and a hose and got me a fire extinguisher, a nod to safety that, while de rigeur nowadays, was pretty neat at a time when cholesterol was just a word, Ike was president, and all human lives mattered. I spent most of the second half of my childhood in that garage (little more than a shed), from the ages of about nine to sixteen. My projects and experiments were many, and my memories of them fond. I was permitted to participate in the high school science fair two years before I was old enough to enroll there. As a sophomore and a junior, I competed in larger regional fairs. I won. Rather than chase girls and drink in high school – and with my siblings being so much younger than I was – my time was spent usually in the library, the drive-in, or playing chess  with my grandfather, who by that time had begun to fail and had to move in with us. There was no shortage of substances available on the streets back in those days, but the only experimenting I ever did was in my makeshift lab, which by then had expanded so as to consume the entire shed.

Soon thereafter, I had my hopes firmly set on a specific college. My folks had made it clear they would do what they could for me financially, but we all knew what the score was: no way would it happen without the help of a scholarship. So I worked my half-Jewish, half-Irish ass off. In time, scholarships were indeed offered. With their help, my scant savings, and the small but heartfelt contribution my parents bestowed on me, I paid my way through the school I had my eyes on. Yes, it was Ivy League, and in fact had actual ivy covering most of the wall. I’ll never forget the first time I set eyes on the plant. It looked like thin, skeletal hands breaking free of the earth and grasping hungrily for the slate of the roof. If I told you the name of the school, you would recognize it, possibly even be impressed. You can Google it if you want, nowadays, right?

Those were tough years. There was little if anything left over after schooling was paid for. I didn’t come from old money, and the Dean was most definitely not my father’s golfing buddy. Thus, while some of my classmates may have thought my Salvation Army wardrobe, scuffed and sprung loafers, brown-bag lunches, and penchant for riding the bus silly and transparent attempts at eccentricity, the majority knew the truth: if it wasn’t for the scholarship, I wouldn’t be among them. I got there and made it through thanks to nothing more than what our folks taught us: keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, your head down, and your nose to the grindstone.

These things, yes; although a lesson my father taught me one day during Christmas vacation of my senior year wound up being just as valuable.