Independance Day

You would think that a neighborhood living under the crushing weight of poverty would not spare any money for fireworks, wouldn't you? That might be so for other areas, but my neighborhood was full of Hoosiers, (see glossary) so our 4th of July would start in mid-June.

Most kinds of pyrotechnics were illegal in the city of St. Louis, so getting ahold of some meant a daring run out to Molly Brown's Fireworks, and a stealthily circuitous route back into the city. You couldn't ride a bus with a bag full of explosives, even back in the 80's, therefore a car was your only option. Molly Brown's sat right outside of St. Louis County, and the cops would sit up on a hill watching people pull out of the lot, just waiting for someone to be stupid enough to cross the county line. They would pull you over, confiscate your entire stash, and generally laugh at you to boot. It sucked. My neighbors would try to time their runs to periods when the cops would be busy elsewhere. They would drive out there every week and buy a small assortment, then dash back. The hope was that the cops would let you keep your stuff if it was a small enough collection. They usually did let you keep it, if what you had bought seemed reasonable.

Trust me, there was nothing reasonable about the quantity of fireworks set off in my neighborhood.

The all-time favorites were bottle rockets and m80's (which you can't buy anymore). Bottle rockets were cheap, so you could buy hundreds for a pittance and keep yourself occupied all night long. My neighbors didn't buy bottle rockets by the hundreds, they bought them by the thousands. Every weekend for a month, the sky would be lit with crappy little bursts of sparks, and every morning afterward the street would look like Barbie's war zone. Countless blackened beer bottles would be lying in the gutter, and little cardboard tubes on little red sticks were all over the place. How attractive.

As the 4th drew nearer, people would become more and more careless with their hoards of things that go bang in the night. By the time the first weekend in July rolled around, you could actually sleep through the noise. Then the hoosiers would break out their guns. I tell you there's nothing like hearing drunken fools firing rounds into the air, and wondering if any of those little balls of lead would finally punch through your already leaky roof and hit something. It always struck me as terribly wasteful. Ammunition is meant for killing things. It doesn't even make sparks. It just goes way up, then comes back down again. Stupid.
Of course, smart people understand the theory of gravity. Perhaps those idiots think their bullets are, even now, orbiting the planet.

Believe it or not, trying to murder clouds was not the most idiotic thing they'd do around Independance Day. Remember those M80's I mentioned earlier? Those would be placed under holey coffee cans, dropped into the sewers, stuffed into newspapers, flung at passing vehicles or flung at your friends.
Bottle rockets had endless uses also. You could shoot them at your pals and have "bottle rocket wars". You could break off the stick and toss them in the air, just to see which way they'd go. And, best of all, you could twist a bunch of the fuses together, then light them. Wow! Flaming projectiles going every which way but up. This would go on for a month. Mom was afraid to send us to the store after dark. She had a genuine fear of us being maimed by fireworks. All we were allowed to buy were those stupid black snakes and sparklers.

I'm amazed my friends still had all their digits. Guys could prove their toughness by holding a firecracker in their fingers and setting it off, the bigger the better. These are the same guys who spent a summer raiding their dad's stash of rimfire .22 rounds and setting them off with a hammer, so you know they put very little value on safety.

When we finally moved out of our neighborhood, it was over the 4th of July weekend. We would pick up a load of boxes with all the windows rolled up on the car, then drive them to our nice peaceful new neighborhood. It was so quiet there, we wouldn't want to go back. We would go back, of course, rolling up the windows again as we entered "the danger zone" (as we started calling it). The last load was packed at 1 in the morning, and small children were still out in the street setting off fireworks. I was 19 when we moved off of California Avenue, and it made me sick when I saw those children who were still stuck there in a place I had come to think of as Hell on Earth. They were blissfully unaware of the horrors lurking around them as they played with their explosives. Just as I had been when I was their age.

Innocence is more beautiful than a sunset, and it lasts longer. ;)