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April 29, 2005
It Must Be A Guy Thing
y name is Mark Alexander, and I've blown up things. Reading Acidman's confession that he blew up things as a 12-year-old, reminded me of things I did in 6th grade as well. There's something about that age, I guess.
I was born in Nebraska and raised in Kansas until I was 11 years old. We had real fireworks in those days. Remember helicopters? A rubber band tying a single propeller to a cylinder full of explosives that you would light next to a flat cornfield and watch ignite and spin faster than a clothes washer on spin cycle and then SHOOT straight up into the sky and out of sight within a split second?
Remember the real Roman candles that came in rainbow-colored 8-ball shots and 10-ball shots?
We'd divide up into teams with several of the 10-ball shot Roman candles in our overalls, stake out our kingdoms at the ends of a large dirt-clod field ringed by a few mulberry trees, and about 30 minutes after sunset on a warm June night, we'd take up our defensive positions using as our shields steel garbage can lids with the handle welded to the center, then in a coordinated attack begin lighting Roman candles that would SPIT a 3-inch ball of colored fire every 3 or 4 seconds about 100 feet, slow enough to give the enemy plenty of time to deflect the shot as they returned fire and we'd deflect theirs. Our eyes would light up with the colorful splatters of fire. Nobody ever got hurt. Of course you learn fast to hold the candle out so that the rear of the cylinder does not spit back at you.
One summer night my dad was an actor in community theater in The Rainmaker when some kids drove by and tossed a Cherry Bomb over the fence of the theater and it landed on the bench right between my dad's legs and someone yelled just in time so that he stood up when it blew, causing 1st and 2nd degree burns on his inner thighs and butt.
When we moved to California in the summer of 1966, the third 6th-grade school I went to was in Salinas, home of John Steinbeck. I met a rich kid whose father was a doctor. Neither of his parents seemed ever to be home after school, but his dad would allow this 12-year-old to play with Potassium Chlorate. Hell, doctor dad wrote the prescription to acquire it for him.
In those days you could look in the back of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and see ads for 75 feet of Cherry Bomb fuse for $1. And ads for barrel bomb components minus the gunpowder. Well hell, we had Potassium Chlorate. Anyone could pick up the Sulfur and Charcoal to finish the mix, and we did.
We made barrel bombs by filling the little grey tube with powder, gluing the end caps with Elmer's Glue, sticking in Cherry Bomb fuse right in the middle of the barrel, and burying the little bombs in the back yard. KABLOOIEEE!!!
We found little miniature liquor bottles from his parents European trips and filled them and KABLOOIEEED those as well.
When we ran out of Potassium Chlorate, we would still have yards of Cherry Bomb fuse, so we would play Mission Impossible and light the sucker, after winding it through his sister's dolls and trains and balsa wood airplanes. That gave us the idea to blow up more fun stuff, because hell, his daddy could rewite the prescription.
Ahhh, the days before every damn social reformer campaigned to protect us from ourselves.
*** Somehow I reached excess without ever noticing when I was passing though satisfaction. Ashleigh Brilliant
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Posted by witnit at April 29, 2005 8:55 AM
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