Buster rose to my defense during our sophomore year of high school. It was my brother’s senior year. We only had one tuxedo in the family. 

The prom committee had invited me to the Junior-Senior prom. This was a huge honor for me, because my brother always treated me with such disrespect. 

Our one tuxedo posed a problem: who would get to wear the suit? My brother or me? 

I knew he had become the rightful inheritor, as the eldest. But I really wanted to make my appearance at the prom special debut.

Seeing him take the tuxedo frustrated me. 

I made the mistake of telling Buster about my misfortune.

He rose to the occasion with his famous, “You know…

“I learned something interesting in chemistry class last week,” Buster told me.

That phrase should have been my cue to run in the opposite direction. But I was always intrigued by the way his mind worked. 

Turns out that a solution of nitrous acid, when combined with urea and ammonia (abundant in human sweat) will make a potent solvent.

However, an evil-genius mind like Buster’s would not just commit this fact to memory. He wanted to figure out how to apply this chemistry. 

He decided that the nitrous acid could lie innocently in the seams of a suit. There, it would wait for a catalyst and then turn into a caustic agent that would hurt and burn.

Three days before the prom, my brother carefully brushed and cleaned the tux. Then he hung it inside his closet. 

When Buster came to the house, we laid the suit on the bed. Buster swabbed the inside seams with the nitrous acid.

Then we hung it on the back of the closet door. It had days to dry and there is little odor with nitrous acid, especially when a suit has been stored in moth balls. 

The night of the prom, I arrived early and started completing the jobs assigned by the bossy Seniors in charge of the prom.  Arriving fashionably late, not until just before the band began playing, my imposing brother arrived in the now infamous tux.  He looked wonderful in the black suit and had a great shine on his shoes.  I stood in my passed-down brown suit harboring thoughts of his early death.

It was the beginning of June and the weather had turned unseasonably warm, making the room hotter than usual.  It took only minutes before the faces of the dancers began showing the perspiration – my brother Bill’s included.  As he reached up to wave to a friend I could see a split around the elbow of suit.  The music became louder and faster and my brother, having always been a great dancer, increased his rhythmic movements. 

The suit separated up the back of the coat exposing the rear of his pants which also were pulling apart.  Soon the pants separated along the inside seams and turned into a long flowing gown for him.  When his left coat sleeve separated from the shoulder and fell to the dance floor, he stopped, appeared in shock, and began to take inventory of himself.  With each movement he continued falling apart in front of the entire school body. 

Wrapping his arms around himself, he ducked out the back-service entrance and headed toward dad’s car.

Students stopped dancing, amid uproarious laughter, watching him run across the dance floor.  Nobody had a clue for why this deterioration of the tuxedo was happening...no one, that is, except for a knowing frown on the face of Mr. Jennings, the chemistry teacher. 

The following day, my brother’s accusations were met with a display of innocence from me. I was so convincing that our father thought my brother was delusional. 

I had to be careful not to be alone with him for the next month until he left for the Navy.