Although I have many good qualities--my long, silky legs being chief among
them--thinking ahead has never been my strong suit. When I was twelve I
deliberately threw a snowball at a moving police car from my own yard,
figuring the driver wouldn't react any differently than the school bus
drivers did. Years later I went out of my way to surround myself with a
wife and three children, only to discover I enjoy their company most when
they're all asleep. And true to my nature, I spent tens of thousands of
my parents' dollars getting a mechanical engineering degree and never
worked single a day as an M.E.

Real mechanical engineers are disciplined, professional, enjoy working
with partial differential equations, and are responsible for most
of the technological marvels of the last century. They are one notch
below rocket scientists, whereas I am one notch below a vertebrate. I
like tinkering with machines, taking them apart and deciding much later
whether to reassemble them, but ask me to calculate the shear stresses
at the midpoint of a rotating jet turbine blade and I'll give you my
stock answer: sometimes planes crash and there's nothing we can do about
it. I'm not the guy you want working for NASCAR, let alone NASA.

But Reel Efx, a special effects company at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles,
was where I belonged in 1988. There was no higher math, no time cards,
just a huge honkin' metal shop with enough tools and materials to give
the IAEA pause. We made animatronic cows, blew up buildings, launched
catapults, flew people on wires, and operated puppets, all during our
off hours. The rest of the time they paid us to blow wind on Madonna,
rain on Janet Jackson, levitate Linda Blair, and impale Jason Voorhees. We
were single men who liked our work, so basically we never left except
to deposit our paychecks.

I made two very close friends at Reel Efx: Jim, an energetic
thirty-something nerd who co-owned the company and was the main force
behind it, and Beny, a nineteen-year-old kid whose voice had yet to
change and was such fun to be around that I often forgot what a genius
he was. This teenager had already done more in terms of invention and
entrepreneurship than most people ever do. He had bought the chassis
from an old VW Beetle, built his own dune buggy out of it, and would
race it competitively at Pismo Beach whenever he wasn't flying one
of his many home-made RC airplanes. Before Reel Efx he financed these
and many other hobbies through his three small businesses, installing
garage door systems, creating custom retractable swimming-pool covers,
and renting out the professional-grade paint sprayer he'd bought to turn
his low-rider Nissan truck from black to bright sparkly red.

The paternal half of Beny's extended family was Mexican and his mother's
side was native Californian, so Beny could toggle back and forth
effortlessly between American English and Mexican Spanish, complete with
flawless accents in both cases. For someone like me, whose brain had
burned ten million calories over four years trying to learn the most
rudimentary French, hanging around Beny in Los Angeles was like having
a friend with super powers. L.A. is a city with one foot in Reagan's
America and the other in Mexico, so in public spaces a lot of your time
is spent listening to unintelligible conversations. But when I was on
a bus or in a restaurant with Beny the Babelfish, all was revealed to me.

"That guy's son is in jail for trying to rob El Pollo Loco," he would
whisper. "And see that couple over there? They're having a fight over
something he said about her sister."

"What's up with those two," I'd ask, discreetly pointing to two young
Hispanic women giggling at a nearby table. "Do they like me? They keep
glancing over here."

Without turning his head Beny would adjust his x-ray hearing and sit
silently for a minute.

"No, your pants have exploded," he'd say.

This is something that actually happened to me. One morning I carried
two heavy car batteries from one end of the studio lot to another.
They didn't have handles, so as I tried to adjust and hang on to them
I must have tilted them this way and that. I got battery acid all over
my jeans but was too distracted to notice at the time. Something else I
didn't know was the effect battery acid has on denim, but I found out a
few hours later as I was showing a group of tourists around a sound stage
near our shop. I crouched down to pick up a nail gun and the acid-weakened
fabric gave way so unexpectedly and in so many places that it felt like
my pants had literally been repelled from my loins.

I believe it capped off a tour they'll never forget.

John Lengyel lives in Cohasset. He's not kidding about the pants, but
for the record his legs are nothing to write home about.