Z-Brick

They called it Z-Brick. We called it a miracle. It could transform a house or any building of your choice from a simple structure to one with a fancy pseudo-brick facade that looked just wonderful. It was rough but elegant. It looked like a million white chocolate Zero bars stacked on top of one another.

The most popular color in our town was white with grey mortar lines, even though real brick wasn't even that color. It doesn't matter. Nobody ever questioned why artificial Christmas trees were silver. This was fantasy, not reality, anyway.

White was the color our neighbors, the Longenhagens, chose. We went to see it. It was kind of a house warming, but only on the outside... to view the new Z-Brick. We didn't go indoors; there was too much going on outside. The grown-ups stood on the front porch discussing the ins and outs of the material, How was it applied? How long did it take to accomplish? Was it guaranteed? Was it patented? Why Z-Brick? And the big question: how much did it cost? Just in general terms, of course, because it was considered rude and obnoxious to ask someone how much they exactly paid for something. They circled around that question, hungry for details.

Annie Gillespie, Tips's mom, treaded closest to asking the dreaded question of Z-Brick pricing. She said she would go to town and get some Z-Brick for her own house. She always prefaced her announcements with the phrase "go to town" or some variant thereof, as in, "I'm going to go to town and clean the house". I think she invented the phrase, just like she popularized the word "machine" when referring to her car. Actually, she might have been the only person to call an automobile "the machine". She was right on the money in her evaluation of the Z-Brick, I could tell, as she cast her fashion-conscious eye on the facade. And as it turned out, a couple of years later, when the Longenhagens moved out, she moved in, and the Z-Brick house became her own. She was no longer eaten up with envy.

The adults continued their searching inquiries about the pseudo-brick substance just put on the house. The house looked new, I had to admit, but nobody wanted to hear the assessment of a five year old. My dad, being in the building trade himself, moonlighting after work as a carpenter, took keen interest in the transformation. He cast his deft eye upon the structure and deemed it was good. The house, in actuality, might not be recognizable to the casual passerby, a definite drawback, as I saw it. Someone might wonder, wasn't that house made of cinder block? (Some called it Hollywood block, but I didn't see how it had anything to do with Hollywood. Z-Brick though really was Hollywood through and through, not that other junk that was underneath it.) It might confuse company when they dropped by. Company was always dropping by, especially on Sundays.

We'd seen Z-Brick before, in the city, I think. It's not like we just got off the boat, you know. (Just got off the boat. We said that frequently.) But Z-Brick was new, it was sassy, it said to the world "We're happening". There wasn't much of it in Catasauqua at that point in time, but my prediction that everybody was going to want this on their home really did come true in the coming years. In time, every other house, it seemed, had a Z-Brick facelift. It got to the point when even real brick was held suspect, and it was, despite its authenticity, looked upon unfavorably next to Z-Brick, its big time cousin. People said real brick paled in comparison. They pointed to its dinginess, that it somehow wasn't bright enough, that it just didn't stack up to the new space age material. Z-Brick, on the other hand, was everything real brick was not. It was brighter alright, and it was a lot thinner too. The Longenhagens had gotten in on the ground floor, at least in our town, and they were proud as Marines.

Mr. Longenhagen was irresponsible. He left his hammer and screwdrivers outside, and they got all rusty surviving many rainstorms. Tips and I were getting awfully bored listening to all the laudatory comments about the plaster-ish stuff with glitter embedded in it. What did they know about Z-Brick? We'd get to the bottom of it with some real hands-on experience. We went around to the back of the house, and that's where we found the hammer and screwdrivers next to a shed.

The guys who invented popcorn ceilings must have ripped out a couple of pages from the Z-Brick manual. It was just that amazing, like constellations of glitter. I thought that Elvis might have Z-Brick stuff in his stage outfits. We were going to investigate further to see what was inside the Z-Brick to make it so wondrous. We had to do a biopsy.

The essence of Z-Brick was locked in mystery like the Coke formula or MacDonald's sauce. I wondered about the twelve different ways Wonderbread would strengthen my bones. I was a pawn in the marketing game that was all around me. But here, right here, was a chance to get to the bottom of one of those great mysteries. Our experiment on the back side of Longenhagen's house was going to change things around here.

Hand me the hammer, Tips. And a screwdriver. We'll need to chip away some of this, very delicately now, so as not to disturb the surrounding area but still enough to give us a good core sample. It wasn't every day that you could get a unique opportunity to study a building material such as this, and I was furthering my construction skills at the same time. We would just remove a layer one brick wide, maybe two... or three. I worked feverishly with Tips at my side. There was no better sidekick than Tips, who was up for any kind of adventure, and he had just the right amount of curiosity to make this work. He joined in, chipping away.

It got to be fun, so we continued on into the night until we had a pretty wide swath chipped away, exposing the underlying blocks in an unseemly way. I hoped it would be worth all the trouble it took to examine this more closely as I'd already skinned my knuckles on it and almost hit my thumb with the hammer. I actually hit my brother's thumb with a hammer once accidentally, and boy, did he yowl, so I did not want that to happen to me. Especially not now in the middle of our research.

I am forced to admit that what we found might be considered dull and mundane to some. The glitter was just on the surface. So much for integrity, you might say. But it really was just a surface thing, this Z-Brick. You could pick at it all day long, how it was just a half-inch thick, how it was fake. But this was one of those rare cases when fake, for lack of a better word, was good. Besides, those thousands of households who had Z-Brick couldn't all be wrong. And there were thousands more who wished they had it. I rest my case.

Just as we were finishing up, me and Tips, the grown-ups came around the corner to the back of the house and began yelling at us. They didn't get the gravity of our quest. We wanted to understand Z-Brick in a way no other kids had done. We caught hell anyway. They tore the tools from our hands, they grounded us, called us names. I think Tips got hit also. We feared for our lives. We were made to vow that we would never do this again. Why would we? We'd gotten all we could out of this, and now it was time to move on to the next big thing.

The Z-Brick chipping was fun afterall, and it was certainly something for my mental scrapbook, which wasn't too full yet at this stage of my life. The Z-Brick caper, as I began to call it, had emboldened me to visit our other neighbor in the alley to check out the iron balls he had embedded into the concrete of his driveway to strengthen it. In the spirit of Z-Brick, whenever I got the chance, I would go out there and dislodge a few. The iron balls were the size of marbles, and in time I amassed quite a collection of them. I'd upgraded my tool set, adding a cold chisel to my arsenal. I'd work under the cover of darkness. I'd tell no one of my exploits. But in the end, this eventually got me into a peck of trouble too, just like my first love, chiseling Z-Brick.