It blowed up, it blowed up reel good!

I’m a guy, or at least I am until I experience some sort of tragic accident or really piss off my wife, in which case all bets are off. And like most guys, I share the same predilection for acts that could be defined as stupid and/or juvenile, especially during our younger years. Though we get older, most guys never really get past their interest in engaging in those same stupid/juvenile acts; as we age these acts become like a favorite shirt that we outgrow—we hang onto it because we like it but it’s uncomfortable to wear.

In my younger days I had a fascination with fireworks. Fortunately for me a number of my friends also shared the same hobby as I. Indeed, that first summer after I graduated from high school I made plenty of trips to the Augusta area, where my friend Tim and I would drive across the border to Wacky Waynes fireworks emporium in South Carolina. It was the eighteen year old’s equivalent of being a kid in a candy store! Almost every type of gunpowder-crammed, finger-removing, eye-gouging miniature explosive device known to mankind could be found at Wacky Waynes. We would spend sizeable amounts of our limited income there and return to Georgia to engage in pyrotechnical acts of deviance. Rockets that were intended to go some two to three hundred feet in the air before detonating with a colorful display became “Interneighborhood Ballistic Missiles,” as we would launch them at an angle and watch as they would explode just over the tops of houses a block or two down the street. At night we would launch bottle rockets at cars traveling down the dirt road behind his house, laughing at the “thud” as the missiles bounded off the windshields. Though fun at the time, these acts would pale in comparison to the thirty person fireworks fight outside the front entrance to a Kroger one night many summers ago. The front of the store was filled with people too afraid to leave the store! But that’s another story for another time. Jeebus, I hope my daughter never reads this.

For the most part I’ve outgrown my interest in fireworks, but from time to time there’s some fun to be found in the “light fuse, get away, do not hold in hand” spectacle in watching things blow up. Writing my recent entry about working at a Burger King set my mind in motion, recalling all the people I worked with. I recall two people in particular and an event one night that almost put an end to my fireworks career before it got off the ground.

It was Halloween 1982, and my friend Gus and I had to work at the BK that night but were slated to get off work at eight that evening. Another friend and co-worker, Ben, was going to be coming by around that time and the plan was to head off and engage in some Halloween shenanigans. Ben shows up a little after eight, and the three of us head out in Ben’s Ford Pinto for a night out on the town. Once we’re in the car I notice Gus has a large brown bag on the front floorboard, and it contains about $60 worth of fireworks (adjust for 1982 dollars and that’s a lot of fireworks). We head to one of the richer neighborhoods in town, where Gus proceeds to launch bottle rockets and other fireworks at houses. Almost all of them miss their intended targets, exploding harmlessly in the yards. After a short time of doing that, we decided that we should look elsewhere for targets as the police had almost certainly been called by then and would be showing up soon. From there we made our way to an apartment complex not too far away and resume the launching of fireworks.

We hadn’t been there long when Karma decided on some payback, and this time payback really was a bitch. Gus had been firing “jumping jacks” at some of the brick buildings in the apartment complex. Once a jumping jack has been lit they fire off two fiery, colored orbs that bounce around the ground. On his fourth launch attempt in the complex, Gus set a jumping jack on his sling shot and lit the fuse—except this time he let the fuse burn a little too long. “Shoot it, Gus!” I yelled from the back seat. He did, and the sudden rush of air made what was left of the fuse burn that much faster. The jumping jacks had no sooner cleared the car window when they ignited. I remember seeing the red one head off towards a building. The blue one, however, came right back into the car.

“Oh SHIT!” Gus yelled, as the burning orb of Karma entered the car and landed squarely in the nearly full bag of fireworks at Gus’ feet. In about half a second the front seat of the car began glowing like a disco, red, green, and blue hues lighting the faces of Ben and Gus. Despite his best efforts to stomp out the fireworks, Gus simply couldn’t prevent the entire bag from going off almost at once. Within seconds the car was filled with the sights and sounds of brick after brick of firecrackers going off, a gross of bottle rockets whizzing around the interior, display cannons exploding. It was like New Year’s in Chinatown except in a space of twenty square feet.

Most of my recollections of the incident are the sounds, as I quickly hit the floor in the back and covered myself with my jacket. Then it hit me that the odds of dying in this car were pretty damned good. For one thing I was trying to protect myself by covering my head with a nylon windbreaker (nylon being well-known for its fire-resistant properties), not to mention that I was in the back seat of an unexploded Ford PINTO. Images from the news of Pintos bursting into flames after rear-end collisions filled my head. If the car wouldn’t survive being hit from the rear, what were the odds it would survive a small gunpowder factory going off in the front seat? How would my parents take the news that their son died in a fireworks explosion in a Pinto? Worse than dying was the prospect that we’d get nabbed by the police, and I’d have to explain to my parents what happened. Maybe dying wasn’t so bad after all.

After about twenty seconds of Ben and Gus being peppered by multiple, small yield explosions and rocket launches, the contents of the bag had all been detonated. Someone called “Abandon car!” and we all jumped out. We were all coughing from smoke inhalation, of which there was plenty of smoke to be found inside the car. My first impression as I watched the clouds roll out of the open doors was that it resembled something from a Cheech and Chong film. It was then that we realized that the car was still moving; Ben, in his haste, had forgotten to put the car in park. Gus and I tried to get in front to at least slow it down as it headed towards a line of parked cars, while Ben tried to throw the car in park. On par with the rest of the evening, the smoldering Pinto hit a parked car but didn’t do any damage. We all looked at each other with the same “Let’s get the hell out of here” look on our faces.

From there we headed off to a nearby car wash to try to clean out the car some. The entire interior was covered with bits of paper from all the fireworks that had gone off inside the vehicle. The windshield was so covered in soot that Ben had to drive with his head hanging out the window. We had just put some coins into one of the vacuums and found some towels to wipe off the windshield when a police car came cruising past. I thought for sure we were pinched, but he slowed, gave us a look, and left. I guess he saw nothing suspicious about three teenagers covered in soot, in a car covered in soot and firecracker paper, cleaning out a car after hours at a car wash. Praise Jeebus for underpaid cops.

For all intents and purposes the evening was over. Ben’s charred and shattered Pinto dropped me off at my house, and I headed inside in hopes that I could wash off the sight and smell of gunpowder and charred Pinto interior before my parents spotted me. The next day Gus and I checked out the interior of Ben’s car when he arrived at work. The entire carpeting on the passenger side floorboard was either burned or had melted away, leaving just the metal below exposed. It’s funny reflecting back on the experience now, but it wasn’t so funny at the time. And I made a mental note that the next time I go off with friends on a similar expedition, I’m riding shotgun and NOT in the back seat—and definitely NOT in a Ford Pinto!