The Home Depot guy was on a ladder in the plumbing department when I found him on that September afternoon in 2004. He was busy, but not helping any other customers. I had some questions.
"Hey, let me ask you... is it possible to bend PVC pipe?"
"What do you mean 'bend it'?"
"I mean... like, can you heat it up and curve it into specific shapes?"
"God, no! You're not just ALLOWED to melt PVC. What are you trying to do?"
"I'm making a Doctor Octopus costume."
"Oh. Well then, yeah. Bend the pipes."
I think my son was probably joking when he said he wanted to be Doctor Octopus for Halloween. The topic of Halloween costumes had come up during a mundane grocery shopping trip as we caught our very first glimpse of fall decorations and candy corn. It was the first week of September, so I had plenty of time and, seemingly out of nowhere, lots of ideas. This was going to be awesome, but in the strictest sense, it would be less than honest to say I was building this for my son.
Earlier that year, we'd had a harsh experience at the pinewood derby, a near disqualification due to never having been given a copy of the specific rules for this specific tournament.
A last minute inspection of the car revealed to the judges that the wheels had appeared altered. "What'd you do? Sand these?"
To which I'd responded "AWW yeah! Not only did we sand them, but we Dremeled out some of the interior mass to reduce the standing inertia at the starting line. We altered the hell out of them!"
To which they'd responded, "You can't do that," handing me a photocopied page of rules I was now seeing for the first time, and sending me speeding to my house to pick up a set of unaltered wheels which I hurriedly crammed onto the car without precision, alignment or graphite lubrication. We placed poorly.
My son and I, united in abject bitterness, openly fantasized about entering a protest car the following year -- something that conformed to the regulations of the race but would express our deep resentment. I suggested a car which would have all the appearances of being an unworked block of wood but which would light up in fiber optic letters some malicious message. My son suggested the phrase "BITE ME."
He got past it in a week or so. I never really did.
I'm not particularly inventive or gifted with tools, so I don't go around looking for projects to tackle. But the immediacy and clarity with which the Doc Ock costume design presented itself was, in my experience, unprecedented. I immediately imagined an "X" of PVC piping that would cross at the center of the wearer's back with grips at the bottom that would allow my son to control their movement. The upper right and lower left mechanical arms would be controlled with the left hand, and the opposite arms controlled with the right, and I hoped that would give the illusion of each of the four arms moving independently. The overcoat, which would be worn over the mechanics of the apparatus, would also be outfitted with fake arms, bent slightly at the elbows and misdirecting from the fact that the wearer was controlling the mechanical arms with anything other than his central nervous system.
I spent six weeks working tirelessly on this -- stopping at hardware stores to look at and evaluate materials. My initial plan was to sheath the piping with electrical conduit, which would have given exactly the segmented metallic look I was shooting for. It would have also added fifteen or so pounds to an apparatus which was proving to be, as early test fittings revealed, a bit much for a fifth grader. It's not good form for a father to ask his son to bear the weight of his own personal ambitions in a figurative way. But literally? Less so.
I covered it with dryer ducting. Which made it look like the entire thing was made out of aluminum foil. The effect was, and this was evident on the faces of everyone who saw it, underwhelming.
But... it had functional claws. I fashioned the handles into levers and ran some extra coax cable I had lying around through the tubing and connected it to the claws, which were hinged to a flared PVC fitting at the end of each arm. The grip was tight at first, but upon full assembly, they just sort of wiggled a little.
My wife suggested a wig. Since my son's hair is the color of an Irish haystack fire, she thought a dark wig would really sell the whole Doc Ock effect. My son hastily agreed, which, upon reflection, probably said less about his commitment to the character and more about his reluctance to be recognized in public. We got a novelty mullet wig. My wife took a pair of kitchen shears and cancelled the party in the rear.
And then, one day, it was done. My son, his knees buckling under the weight, his center of gravity badly out of whack, his face twisted in pain as the contraption punched and twisted his sinless flesh -- extracting a price that he alone would pay for his father's selfish contempt for the world, limped around our livingroom grunting and wincing like some hideously transformed thing. I thought to myself, "This is how it happens. This is how evil is born -- from a prideful father's blind thirst for petty vengeance. This will ruin my boy. I've blackened his heart and extinguished every ember of his kindness. This may be the day that I've actually created a super villian."
"By God, THAT would show those Scout Dads a thing or two."
The hospital in our town holds an annual Halloween trail, which winds through some woods and gives local merchants a chance to fill the trick or treat bags of neighborhood kids with brochures about maintenance-free downspouts and coupons for discount furnace inspections. It's beyond me why kids even want to go, but it's possible that I've forgotten that the sensory experience of crunching through the fall leaves in a costume is more enjoyable than eating a fun-sized Milky Way.
An eleven-year-old girl wearing a French maid costume (and really, why are there child-sized French maid costumes?) flicked her head in the direction of my son, whose treat bag was dangling from tentacle #3 and being filled with promotional tongue depressors. She asked me with what sounded like open disdain, "What's HE supposed to be?"
And I answered, "Doctor Octopus."
And she responded, "I don't know what that is."
And I asked, "Spider Man 2?"
And she said nothing.
"Biggest movie of this past summer?"
She shook her head.
"$120,000,000 million domestic box office gross?"
She looked him over contemptuously and sneered, "I've never heard of any of this." My son looked over and waggled a claw dismissively in her direction. She clicked her tongue and walked down the trail to rejoin her parents.
We troubled on, collecting unsharpened pencils and pamphlets from sewer line inspectors and wall anchoring services until we got to a table sponsored by some community center. We tricked n treated and got a small packet of off-brand Post-Its from a very nice older woman, who got a look at my son and absolutely melted. She was spellbound.
"That's just wonderful."
I was a little surprised. She, even less than the snotty maid, didn't strike me as a Spider-Man fan.
"I've never seen anything like it. This is really, really inventive."
I nearly cried. This was all I'd hoped for. This was the validation that I had secretly and shamefully craved since the pinewood derby incident. As I beamed, and my son wiggled his little mechanical arms, this lovely woman called her co-workers around to look at him.
As they surrounded us, their hands clasped together near their chests in adoration, they all agreed that this was an ingenious and absolutely perfect depiction of Edward Scissorhands.
"Hey, let me ask you... is it possible to bend PVC pipe?"
"What do you mean 'bend it'?"
"I mean... like, can you heat it up and curve it into specific shapes?"
"God, no! You're not just ALLOWED to melt PVC. What are you trying to do?"
"I'm making a Doctor Octopus costume."
"Oh. Well then, yeah. Bend the pipes."
I think my son was probably joking when he said he wanted to be Doctor Octopus for Halloween. The topic of Halloween costumes had come up during a mundane grocery shopping trip as we caught our very first glimpse of fall decorations and candy corn. It was the first week of September, so I had plenty of time and, seemingly out of nowhere, lots of ideas. This was going to be awesome, but in the strictest sense, it would be less than honest to say I was building this for my son.
Earlier that year, we'd had a harsh experience at the pinewood derby, a near disqualification due to never having been given a copy of the specific rules for this specific tournament.
A last minute inspection of the car revealed to the judges that the wheels had appeared altered. "What'd you do? Sand these?"
To which I'd responded "AWW yeah! Not only did we sand them, but we Dremeled out some of the interior mass to reduce the standing inertia at the starting line. We altered the hell out of them!"
To which they'd responded, "You can't do that," handing me a photocopied page of rules I was now seeing for the first time, and sending me speeding to my house to pick up a set of unaltered wheels which I hurriedly crammed onto the car without precision, alignment or graphite lubrication. We placed poorly.
My son and I, united in abject bitterness, openly fantasized about entering a protest car the following year -- something that conformed to the regulations of the race but would express our deep resentment. I suggested a car which would have all the appearances of being an unworked block of wood but which would light up in fiber optic letters some malicious message. My son suggested the phrase "BITE ME."
He got past it in a week or so. I never really did.
I'm not particularly inventive or gifted with tools, so I don't go around looking for projects to tackle. But the immediacy and clarity with which the Doc Ock costume design presented itself was, in my experience, unprecedented. I immediately imagined an "X" of PVC piping that would cross at the center of the wearer's back with grips at the bottom that would allow my son to control their movement. The upper right and lower left mechanical arms would be controlled with the left hand, and the opposite arms controlled with the right, and I hoped that would give the illusion of each of the four arms moving independently. The overcoat, which would be worn over the mechanics of the apparatus, would also be outfitted with fake arms, bent slightly at the elbows and misdirecting from the fact that the wearer was controlling the mechanical arms with anything other than his central nervous system.
I spent six weeks working tirelessly on this -- stopping at hardware stores to look at and evaluate materials. My initial plan was to sheath the piping with electrical conduit, which would have given exactly the segmented metallic look I was shooting for. It would have also added fifteen or so pounds to an apparatus which was proving to be, as early test fittings revealed, a bit much for a fifth grader. It's not good form for a father to ask his son to bear the weight of his own personal ambitions in a figurative way. But literally? Less so.
I covered it with dryer ducting. Which made it look like the entire thing was made out of aluminum foil. The effect was, and this was evident on the faces of everyone who saw it, underwhelming.
But... it had functional claws. I fashioned the handles into levers and ran some extra coax cable I had lying around through the tubing and connected it to the claws, which were hinged to a flared PVC fitting at the end of each arm. The grip was tight at first, but upon full assembly, they just sort of wiggled a little.
My wife suggested a wig. Since my son's hair is the color of an Irish haystack fire, she thought a dark wig would really sell the whole Doc Ock effect. My son hastily agreed, which, upon reflection, probably said less about his commitment to the character and more about his reluctance to be recognized in public. We got a novelty mullet wig. My wife took a pair of kitchen shears and cancelled the party in the rear.
And then, one day, it was done. My son, his knees buckling under the weight, his center of gravity badly out of whack, his face twisted in pain as the contraption punched and twisted his sinless flesh -- extracting a price that he alone would pay for his father's selfish contempt for the world, limped around our livingroom grunting and wincing like some hideously transformed thing. I thought to myself, "This is how it happens. This is how evil is born -- from a prideful father's blind thirst for petty vengeance. This will ruin my boy. I've blackened his heart and extinguished every ember of his kindness. This may be the day that I've actually created a super villian."
"By God, THAT would show those Scout Dads a thing or two."
The hospital in our town holds an annual Halloween trail, which winds through some woods and gives local merchants a chance to fill the trick or treat bags of neighborhood kids with brochures about maintenance-free downspouts and coupons for discount furnace inspections. It's beyond me why kids even want to go, but it's possible that I've forgotten that the sensory experience of crunching through the fall leaves in a costume is more enjoyable than eating a fun-sized Milky Way.
An eleven-year-old girl wearing a French maid costume (and really, why are there child-sized French maid costumes?) flicked her head in the direction of my son, whose treat bag was dangling from tentacle #3 and being filled with promotional tongue depressors. She asked me with what sounded like open disdain, "What's HE supposed to be?"
And I answered, "Doctor Octopus."
And she responded, "I don't know what that is."
And I asked, "Spider Man 2?"
And she said nothing.
"Biggest movie of this past summer?"
She shook her head.
"$120,000,000 million domestic box office gross?"
She looked him over contemptuously and sneered, "I've never heard of any of this." My son looked over and waggled a claw dismissively in her direction. She clicked her tongue and walked down the trail to rejoin her parents.
We troubled on, collecting unsharpened pencils and pamphlets from sewer line inspectors and wall anchoring services until we got to a table sponsored by some community center. We tricked n treated and got a small packet of off-brand Post-Its from a very nice older woman, who got a look at my son and absolutely melted. She was spellbound.
"That's just wonderful."
I was a little surprised. She, even less than the snotty maid, didn't strike me as a Spider-Man fan.
"I've never seen anything like it. This is really, really inventive."
I nearly cried. This was all I'd hoped for. This was the validation that I had secretly and shamefully craved since the pinewood derby incident. As I beamed, and my son wiggled his little mechanical arms, this lovely woman called her co-workers around to look at him.
As they surrounded us, their hands clasped together near their chests in adoration, they all agreed that this was an ingenious and absolutely perfect depiction of Edward Scissorhands.
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