Cray was the leader of our little gang. Cray was two years older than all of us and was already wearing glasses. And he was our friend. We hung out at the nearby playground after school and skated and pooled our money to buy chocolate ice cream floats from the diner. We held up twigs in our mouth and cupped a hand over it pretending we were smoking cigarettes. Once, a concerned mother marched up and shouted at us for being delinquents. Cray stood up and threw the branch in his hand away. He looked the angry woman in the eye and scrunched up his face.

‘FUCK!’ he said.

Spittle flew from his lips and a small gob landed on her dress with a tiny plop. It blossomed there like a flower. We held our breath. Cray stood there purple in the face, heaving like a bull. The woman opened her mouth, snapped it shut and walked away.

We didn’t know what ‘fuck’ meant. We asked Cray later on, and he told us that ‘fuck’ was a short form for ‘fucking’, who was a grown up who did something with his bellybutton and wee-wee, to make children. When you parents want a kid, they talk to this guy and he does the thing with his bellybutton and wee wee and makes a kid for them. But he urged us not to ask our parents about it because it was supposed to be a secret. ‘Fucking hell’ therefore, was when you spent eternity with this man.

Gross.

After that incident, Cray became the stuff of legend. No one had ever stood up to a grown up. He was a hero among the kids. In class, they whispered and pointed at us and told each other of the amazing bravery of Cray’s Gang. We let them talk, occasionally fuelling it when the furor seemed to be dying down, adding little details when it suited us. The woman punched Timmy in the head but he got right up and punched her back. She pulled an evil sword from behind her waist and it cried with the gabazillion souls it had consumed. She swung it and it howled and it would have taken Greg’s head off had he not ducked. We fought the mighty witch from noon to night with sticks and stones but we were fast tiring. But she was defeated when little Johnnie picked up the last rock and threw it and it hit her right in the eye. She screamed and turned into a bat but Cray shouted a spell and she flew away. Johnnie still has the rock. He carries it with him in case she comes back. Witch’s Bane, he calls it. If you’re nice and you ask politely maybe he’ll show it to you.
After that, none of the bullies dared to touch us. Some even declared us their friends. We smiled and said nothing (I guess little kids know discretion) and swaggered around like we owned the neighborhood. To a ten year old, this was amazing street cred.

The problem with Cray wasn’t his energy or his attention span. It was his intelligence. He always had these Super Duper ideas that he’d think of after watching something on the TV.

‘Hey, let’s build a hang glider!’

‘Fellas, I saw this guy put rockets on his bicycle. Wanna try it?’

‘If I put the hang glider on the rocket bike, do you think I can fly?’

Cray was magnanimous.

He had the grand ideas, but we were his Super Duper friends, and he’d let us be part of it. Cray’s Super Duper Team. He would paint beautiful dreams for us and we would nod our heads, high-five and say yes. After Timmy broke his arm and fractured his leg while trying to fly the rocket bike off his parent’s roof, we were a bit more apprehensive though. but there was nothing Cray couldn’t do. When he couldn’t cajole us into helping, he would sulk and make us feel sorry. And when that didn’t work, he would bribe us with money or candy bars. Money could be saved to buy ice cream floats. Candy bars were heaven, and that way, he had us. We built robots from soup cans, and spent hours scratching the heads off matchsticks and pounding them into fine powder with a stone. We used the match powder to make a huge firecracker that didn’t work when we lit the fuse, but worked when Johnnie walked over to check it, burning off both of his eyebrows.

Then one day, he said, ‘Hey, wanna build an electromagnet? I saw it on the Discovery channel.’

That didn’t sound too bad.

But Cray didn’t want to make a magnet to pick up metal filings or needles. He wanted to build an electromagnet to move cars. He wanted to turn on his magnet and WHAM, a plane would come tumbling out of the sky and clang resoundingly on his magnet. People would come out and say ‘Oh wow, how did he build that? Oh my god, and he’s only a kid!’

‘Nobody has ever built a magnet that powerful before. How did he do it? This boy is a genius!'

And Cray would just stand there and smile, and let them take photos with him. The Next Einstein, they would call him, and he would get the Nobel Prize and marry the pretty girl in class and have many dogs. No babies. Babies were icky.

Super Cray’s Super Duper Magnet. How awesome was that? Ka-pow!

We all trooped down to his house with dreams of selling our invention to the army and crushing tanks and fighter jets and whatnot and jumped on his bed and played with Bellman, his cat as he scrounged around for the necessary parts to his Super Duper Magnet. When he returned, he dragged along an old iron, a pair of kitchen scissors, a penknife and a nail he had found in his father’s toolbox. We sat down and he told us that we could magnetize the nail by stroking it with a magnet, but that would be too weak to bring down airplanes. He saw on the telly that the way to make a more powerful electromagnet was to wrap the nail in wire and connect both ends of the wire to a battery. Cray’s plan was grander though. We used the scissors to cut the cable and the plug off the iron and carefully stripped a large length of the wires bare. Greg was the neatest of us all and so he was chosen to be the one to wrap the wire around the nail. When he was done, Cray, grinning, took the weird mating of nail, wire and plug and plugged it in. The rest of us ran outside to watch out for the falling airplanes and cars.

Well, we didn’t get any Super Duper Car Moving but there was a Super Duper Explosion.