Mike

Ball

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July 7, 2008

The Commanding Performance of a Fireworks Icon

As we all know, the Chinese invented gunpowder. Being deeply philosophical thinkers, it did not take them too long before they saw how useful the stuff could be for transforming entire enemy armies into big holes in the ground.

As a point of reference, this was at about the time in European history when chucking a spear at someone you didn’t much care for was the pinnacle of modern military technology.

After a while the Chinese decided that even if you didn’t have any bad guys around that you wanted to blow into bad-guy hash, you should still be able have fun with your gunpowder, and so they invented fireworks.

The original cultural idea the Chinese had for fireworks was that they could be used to terrify evil spirits and cocker spaniels, and for this they apparently still work very well. You almost never hear of an all-out assault by fire demons on a suburban American town during the Fourth of July weekend.

I love fireworks, but I’m also a little bit frightened of them. I probably owe some of my fear to Scamp, the dog I had when I was little. At the first festive explosion anywhere in the neighborhood, Scamp would retire to my mother’s closet and ride out the crisis in a shelter she would prepare for herself out of shoes and shredded sundresses.

As for myself, a child of the 1950s thoroughly trained in the advanced federal “Duck and Cover” technique of survival against nuclear attack, I could see the obvious folly of that dog’s simplistic approach. Anticipating by many years our current Department of Homeland Security’s breakthrough “Duct Tape and Visqueen” method of safeguarding the American public, I would make myself an impenetrable fortress out of a bedspread and some folding chairs.

Then a few years later, when I was about seven, I saw my first public fireworks display, an exhibition put on by a teenager named Toby.

Toby was tall and skinny, with an occasionally squeaky voice. He kept his hair slicked back with Brylcreem to showcase the acne on his forehead. He wore tight blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up above his white socks, and a white t-shirt with a pack of Pall Malls rolled up in the sleeve.

In other words, Toby was a living god. He stood in the parking lot of the IGA, leaning rebelliously against the fender of his almost-new 1957 Chevy, with a cigarette dangling from his sneering lips and a mysterious brown paper bag on the hood of the car. He caught my eye, then reached into the bag and pulled out:

A Black Cat Firecracker!

I knew all about Black Cats. My neighbor Chris, who was going into the third grade, had told me about this guy his older sister knew whose cousin’s friend blew all his fingers off with a Black Cat.

And here I was, standing not 10 feet from one. Too paralyzed with fear to run or improvise any sort of bedspread fort, I watched as Toby coolly took the cigarette from his lips, flicked the ashes on the ground, then used it to light the fuse.

He held the sizzling Black Cat in his fingers for what seemed like an eternity, then casually flicked it toward an empty parking space.

The explosion was deafening. I jumped about three feet straight up in the air and landed in perfect sprinter’s starting position, ready for a dash to safety. But Toby’s voice stopped me in my tracks.

“Hey kid,” he screeched, “if you thought that was cool, just watch this.”

I stood, transfixed by the idea that a living god who owned a Chevy would speak to one such as me, and watched him fish six or seven more Black Cats out of the bag. He held them in a bundle, twisted the fuses together, then lit them with his cigarette. After another interminable wait he tossed them after the first one.

They separated and seemed to explode in the air, in a staccato rapid fire concussion that washed over me like a wave. I stood, gasping for breath, looking from the shards of smoking black paper on the pavement, to Toby’s laughing face, then back again. And then I found myself applauding helplessly.

I don’t know how long it lasted. Toby entertained me with every combination of exploding Black Cats he could think of, while I watched in slack-jawed awe. I would cheer and clap after each death-defying stunt, then watch in breathless anticipation while he prepared the next one. Finally he paused, hefted his brown bag to estimate how much ordinance he had left for his other entertainment obligations, then pretended to look at an imaginary wrist watch. “Well kid, I gotta go now. See you around.”

I was too overwhelmed to speak, even to say “thank you,” so I simply gave him one more round of applause while he bowed, jumped into his Chevy, and laid a double patch of rubber down on the pavement as he peeled out of the parking lot and headed up the street toward Valhalla.

To this day, every time I see a fireworks display, I like to watch the staging barge. I feel like if I squint real hard, I can see the silhouette of a skinny guy with a Pall Mall dangling from his lips, walking from charge to charge to make sure that each one will be even more entertaining than the one before.

And I always clap.

Copyright © 2008, Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.