That Saturday Dad and I drove up to a local hardware store and went through the plumbing section. This was all long before the days of Home Depot or Lowes. Hardware stores were much smaller. There was an ample supply of pipes and fittings, and while I would have preferred stainless steel, it just wasn’t available. I settled on galvanized. I bought enough parts for three different filters.
Monday afternoon I rode the bus home with Shelley again, and we headed down to the basement. I had the bag of pipe fittings in my backpack, along with a big package of surgical cotton balls. I laid everything out on the table. “I tried this all at home over the weekend, but we need to try it here and see if it actually will work. We need to hook it up to the pump and see if it can work.”
“Okay, but what exactly do we have?”
“This is the body of the filter,” I said, holding up a piece of 1" galvanized steel pipe, six inches long and threaded at both ends. I then grabbed an adapter, which converted the 1" pipe to ¼" pipe, and threaded that onto one end. “So that end goes onto the pump. Now, we drop in this piece of wire mesh.” I held up a small round piece of wire mesh.
“Where did you get that?”
I shrugged. “I think it’s supposed to be a sort of garden fence wire. It’s bigger than screen for windows but smaller than chicken coop screen.” I dropped it down the pipe and jiggled it, then glanced inside to see if it lay flat. “All it does is hold the actual filter in place.”
“The cotton balls, right?” she said pointing at the bag.
“Exactly.” I reached over and grabbed the bag, and then ripped one end open.
“If we just drop the balls in there, won’t the smoke go around them?”
I eyed her curiously. Actually, that was a very good question. Shelley might not be as dumb as she let out. “That’s actually something we should think about. Maybe we should pull some of the balls apart before stuffing them into the tube.” Shelley nodded and we each took a handful and pulled the balls apart into a mass of cotton. I held the tube upright while she pushed it down inside.
I really wasn’t sure how much we wanted to fill it. Too much would make the draw too hard for the vacuum pump. Too little meant we wouldn’t capture enough tar. We would also have to keep an eye out on how the pump functioned after tar started accumulating and clogging the filter. I was just guessing when I stopped Shelley and put the other end cap on.
“Now we attach the filter to the pump.” I twisted the adapter onto the business end of the vacuum pump.
“And the cigarette goes on the other end. How does that work?”
I just looked at her. “That part I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe when your parents get home we can ask them.”
“It’s funny. For once there’s something you don’t know!”
“Oh, Shelley, if you only knew! There’s lots of things I don’t know!” I said with a laugh.
She grinned. “Maybe I can teach you some.”
“I’d like that.”
“Anyway, let’s figure that you figure out how to put a cigarette on that end and we smoke a bunch of cigarettes. How do we get the tar out of the cotton?”
“The way I see it, we open it up, take out the cotton balls, and mix the cotton balls in a solvent. The tar goes out of the cotton into the solvent, and then we boil off the solvent,” I replied.
“We do that down here?” she asked, looked very warily at the idea.
“God no, not unless we want the house to blow up! I think we had better do that over at school in the chem lab.” She looked rather relieved at that.
We took a break at that point, and settled back onto the couch, where Shelley tried to teach me a few things. She was an excellent teacher. I got a bit bolder and began moving my hands around her back (she had on a small bra under her very thin sweater) and then around to the sides and her front. She had medium sized breasts. She didn’t complain, but simply moaned louder when I began touching her through her sweater. Her face was very flushed when we had to stop because her parents started coming in.
Okay, it wasn’t just her. I was breathing pretty hard as well. It had been a long time since I had made out with a teenage girl like that, and Shelley seemed very responsive. We both got off the couch and turned our backs on each other, and tucked in our shirttails and tried to clean up and look innocent. Almost as one we turned around to face each other and gave sheepish grins.
I smiled and said, “You know, I plan to become a mathematician, but chemistry seems pretty enjoyable, too.”
Shelley laughed at that. “I’m starting to like it, too.” Then she smiled and got a little more serious. She sat down on the arm of the couch and said, “You’re not at all what I expected.”
“Oh?”
“I figured you to be a super serious nerd and a total loser, and you’re not.” I raised an eyebrow at this. “Oh, I mean, you’re just a genius and all, but you’re, like, normal, too.” She licked her lips and smiled. “You sure don’t kiss like a genius.”
I had to laugh at that. “And just how do geniuses kiss?” I asked.
She laughed with me. “I don’t know, but not like that!”
“I’ll have to give you a list of geniuses and how many kids they’ve had. They aren’t a bunch of monks.” I got a little more serious, as well. “Does this mean you won’t be embarrassed to be around me in school? I won’t be a secret?”
“That’s not fair Carl, I haven’t been treating you like that,” she answered me.
I rubbed my face. “No, no you haven’t. I apologize for that. I get treated so differently at times, it’s hard to remember not to be sensitive about things. I’m sorry.”
She nodded. “We’ll talk about that sometime.” She looked at the project. “Let’s get some help on this.” She walked over to the basement stairs and yelled up the stairwell, “Daddy, can you come down and give us a hand?”
Chapter 9: The Science Fair
Shelley showed her father what we had concocted and asked about something to hold a cigarette in. He scratched his head for a moment, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros, out of his pocket. He lit it up and took a drag on it, and then put the filter end into the end of our filter. “Turn it on,” he ordered.
I reached across the table and flipped the switch on the pump. It started chugging away, and the cigarette was pulled firmly into the small pipe on the end of the adapter we were using as a filter cap. The coal glowed brightly and began to quickly march down the length of the cigarette, to ultimately go out when it hit the filter. I turned off the pump. We all looked at each other, and Mr. Talbot said, “That cockamamie gizmo actually works. Nice going, kids.”
I stared at it again. “Yeah, I guess it does.” Holy shit, this thing actually worked!
Mr. Talbot lit up another Marlboro and put it in place and I flipped the switch again, and we watched it smoke another cigarette. “Well, now what? What exactly are you planning on doing?” He asked it of his daughter, and lit up another cigarette. This one he started smoking himself.
Shelley stumbled a little explaining it, but I refrained from taking over. This was her moment and I didn’t want to ruin it. At the end she turned to me and asked, “Did I say that right?”