July 5th

July 5th, 1989

There must be some male urge to blow things up, to watch something that is whole separate in thousands of smaller pieces in a flash of thunder. I think all young boys have a bit of a pyromaniac in them. Whether it is burning ants with a magnifying glass or building campfires with your dad. We all grow up with this fear and fascination of it. In adulthood, I think the pyromaniac comes out in all of us on the four of July.
Fireworks are illegal, but the police officer that lived across the street gave us them for free. My family was not close when I was growing up and I really enjoyed sharing this petty crime with them.
Fourth of July meant many things to me as a kid. It was the pinnacle of summer, it meant barbeque, laughs, friends, staying up late, humidity, and the maddening buzz of cicadas. On the night of July 4th, we waited until past 11 p.m. Shooting off fireworks in the street in front of your house was a common thing to do on suburban Long Island. By that time there were plenty of other people in the neighborhood shooting of fireworks and the police would not have an easy time of pinpointing where the whistling and explosions were actually coming from.
I was to told sit close to the house and far from the street and watch in awe as my parents and older brother lit fuses for the bottle rockets, helicopters and jumping jacks. One fourth, a police car snuck up on them. There were no lights, no sirens, just the blue, white and orange of the Nassau County police cruiser coasting silently through the smoke of the fireworks we just shot off. My mother handed my grandmother the brown grocery bag of fireworks and walked directly towards to the police car. In a commanding voice of suburban matriarchal right she told that we had just come from a barbecue in Brooklyn and while pulling in the driveway witnessed several young men shoot off some fireworks and run in between the houses across the street. And they bought it. My eleven-year old mind was astounded at my mother’s guile.
Our show was over, but we stayed out to watch the fireworks shot off by our neighbors explode and sparkle in the night’s sky above the old soaring trees in the neighborhood.
We were eleven and relished summer. We were old enough to venture out on our own, fearless, and could navigate the streets and ride our bikes further away then ever before and then find our way back home. They day after the fourth, all over the neighborhood, there were hundreds of fireworks left behind being run over by the morning traffic. My friends and I would finally be able to get our hands on that which was denied us.
I rode my bike the next block over and called to my friend Brian from the end of it.
“Brian!! Lets go!”
“WHAT!!”
I beckoned him with my arm, “Fireworks! C’mon!” Brian was quiet and clever. He had very light colored blonde hair, incredibly pale blue eyes and thin light pink lips. He was the quiet one people warned about. “I’m coming!” he yelled and ran back into his slender yellow house to get his bike. Together we rode to Ricky’s house on the corner of the next block.
Ricky was like neither of us. He was good hearted. If we were both caught doing something wrong, he would take the fall. He was the athletic one of us. At 11, Brian and I were both short and still had a little baby fat. We looked like children. Ricky was tall and muscular with darker skin and a Romanesque nose. He resembled a young man.
“Hey guys, if you eat over tonight, my mom will let us drink wine coolers with dinner, ” Ricky said. He was always saying this, but our mothers spoke often I was too terrified to ever accept the offer.
The streets were littered with fireworks, and I could see them on my way to their homes, but I refused to search until I could share it with them. We investigated our first pile of charred remnants about a block from Ricky’s house. It was in the middle of the street and we felt safe laying our bikes down right there and kneeling to inspect it. Family orientation ruled and drivers expected kids to be in the middle of the street.
I remember kneeling there with Brian and Ricky, each of us sifting our hands through the ashes that smelled of gun powder, when this odd looking man quietly snuck up on us.
“Hey boys,” he said, startling me. Brian and Ricky stood up. I stayed down and started pocketing the small green and yellow jumping jacks that we had just found. The man did not introduce himself. He just smiled. He had long firey orange looking hair, a thick mustache and freckled shoulders
“Hey man, how are you?”, Ricky said shaking the stranger’s hand.
“What are you guys doin?” he asked.
Brian told him we were going to find some unused fireworks and set them off in the field behind Mepham High School. I was surprised that he would so boldly tell a complete stranger our plans. The stranger, fortunately, did not try to sway us from having our good fun. He simply showed us his forearm.
He said, “I did that about a year ago with the gun powder I shaved out of a model rocket engine.” The inside of his forearms was had a bad burn scar on it. He had had a tattoo on that arm beforehand that now looked like a crayola drawing being looked at through pebbled glass.
“How?” Brian asked.
“I wanted to make like a big blockbuster. I just shaved the gunpowder off and lit it with my lighter. It was this incredibly bright flash and then my arm was cooked.”
I looked at Brian and could see something stir in those pale blue eyes. We bid the strange flame haired man goodbye and followed Brian back to his house. Apparently, Brian thought the stranger had a fantastic idea. We walked into the garage and I pointed out to Ricky the cases of beer from which we sometimes stole. My mother and Brian’s never spoke.
Brian held his pasty little hand over the boxes as though it guided him in is search. “My dad and I build model rockets,” he said, “we have a whole package of engines here somewhere.” He found the box, took one out and showed it to me. It was just a cardboard cylinder, about three inches long and three quarters of an inch in diameter. I looked at Brian looking at the cylinder in his hand. His eyes were intense, and looked almost translucent. He went to the wall and took his father’s razor blade knife off it. We went back to our bikes.
On the way, we passed the stranger just standing on the side of the road talking to no one. He gave a small wave. Brian and Ricky smiled big and said “Hey.” The next left was a blind curve going down a small hill. We let go of our handlebars and coasted freely into the parking lot of Mepham High School. We peddled through the empty lot past the tennis courts and the soccer field to the left hand corner of the field where there was a dilapidated baseball diamond.
We liked this spot. There was never anyone playing baseball and there was easy access to a fenced off creek. The fencing was overgrown with green ivy and dried brush. We went there when we did not want to be seen or heard. I thought that was our destination but Brian and Ricky went right for the pitchers mound. I did not want my arm to end up like the stranger’s, so I sat at the bottom of the run down bleachers and watched. They were both kneeling as Brian cut the cylinder in half and quickly began to scrape the powder onto the ground.
“Hey, if you go so quickly you could create a spark and wind up just like that guy,” I said. He scraped slower. I just sat there on the bleachers daydreaming and moving my hand over the dry overgrown reeds that were coming up between the cracked green boards.
I was still daydreaming when they lit. What I saw was something like a camera flash. When I turned, all there was was a small mushroom cloud.
“Holy Fuck!” Brian yelled after lighting it.
Smiling, Ricky said in breathless awe, “That was awesome.”
“Why didn’t you fuckin’ guys tell me you were gonna light it? I wasn’t looking,“ I said.
Ricky shrugged, “I guess we just thought you were.” Brian was furiously shaking his hand in the air and intermittently twiddling his fingers. It wasn’t a bad burn but it was red. He just stood there intermittently shaking his hand and blowing on it.
I went back to lay down on the splintered green bleachers. It was a beautiful day, incredibly hot, but with an occasional breeze that cooled us as it moved along the dry unkempt grass around me. Brian and Ricky went back to just lighting some bottle rockets and jumping jacks we had found on the street. Every few minutes I would look up to see if there was anyone paying attention to us. There was not. It was a good place to do it without starting a fire. There were not many trees around. When we shot them off at night in our neighborhood, we would often shoot them down the block, parallel to the ground, to avoid them getting stuck in the tree canopy that covered our streets.
After about ten minutes, I noticed that Brian had wandered near me and was lighting small patches of dried grass on fire with the punk and then watching them burn out. Realizing that I was laying above a large patch of dried grass, I immediately moved away.
“Dude, what are you doing?” I said.
“Nothing, don’t worry,” he replied.
“Lets go get something to eat,” I told him.
“Sounds good,” he said.
“Hey, Ricky we’re leavin’!” And as I said that. I saw Brian throw a match with its glowing ember underneath the bleachers.
“Dude, what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he replied, “Don’t worry, it’ll just burn out.” At which point a small flame erupted from beneath the bleachers. “Oh,” was Brian’s reaction. We just stood there fascinated, as the flames got larger. Ricky giggled and said, “Fuck”. Transfixed for only a moment longer, Ricky and I turned and ran. While running, I turned to see the smoke beginning to swirl skyward and Brian disappearing through the fence into the creek bed. All I could see was his clothing. His pale skin and light blonde hair blended with the dried brush and tall reeds growing out of the fence.
“We should tell someone,” I said. Ricky agreed and we ran towards the high school. The side door to the school was open. We immediately saw an old janitor with a small hunch in a blue jumper. We blurted out something about fireworks, teenagers and the bleachers being on fire. He nodded and turned away. A little perplexed by how calm he was, Ricky and I just ran back outside to see how much bigger the flames had gotten. They were enormous. “Do you think we should tell someone else,” I asked. We ran back past the tennis courts and soccer field.
Behind the bleachers, on the other side of the fence was an elderly man with his wife spraying his garden hose into the flames, trying to beat them back from his yard. I’m not sure if he even saw me but I imagined that his intense glare into the flames was an accusing look at me. “Maybe we should get someone else,” I reiterated. Completely forgetting about our bikes again, we turned to run and saw the old janitor turning the corner of the school with a small fire extinguisher. He looked up, froze in his tracks and ran the other way.
Moments later two fire trucks turned into the parking lot at the other end of the field. I could only assume it was old man with the garden hose that had called them. As the fire trucks came charging down the field right for us, Ricky and I stood in almost paralyzed astonishment at what we were a part of. The trucks blew their horns and we moved out of the way. I don’t even remember them pulling out hoses or how the flames were finally extinguished. I do remember us mumbling something to a firefighter about teenagers, fireworks, we were just watching, and they went that way. Then we left.
I didn’t think we could get away with our involvement in it and I told Ricky.
“Get away with what? We didn’t do anything.”
“Well what about our parents?”
“Just don’t say anything. They won’t know.”
We went to the corner, ate pizza, played some pinball and then went home. I walked into my house carefully. The house seemed empty and I waited to hear my name bellowed out from the emptiness. There was nothing. I walked into the kitchen and found my mother and grandmother sitting at the table staring at me with a large plate of meatballs in front of them.
“Hi,” I said.
“Nana and I were just sitting here talking about your grandfather,” my mother said.
“Oh yeah.”
“We made you some meatballs with pinoles.”
“Thank you.” I sat down at the table and put a few on a plate. My grandmother and mother resumed talking about my grandfather as I sat, ate and waited for the police to arrive. No one ever came to the door to reveal what I was a part of. Later in the conversation, I admitted to my mother that my friends and I had seen a fire at Mepham High School and reported it to a janitor, who promptly called the fire department. She congratulated me for being so kind. The day went on and so did the summer.
I spent the rest of the it at the beach. I saw Brian once more that summer about a week later. His hand had swollen from the burn and there was an oblong puss pocket on the side of it. He had stolen some needles from his mother, who was a nurse, and showed me how he was draining the puss out with them. It was disgusting. Between his fleeing the scene of the crime and draining his puss pockets with stolen needles, I decided not to hang out with him again. I only saw Brian one more time after that. It was two years later and we were in eighth grade. He just appeared one day out from between two houses while I was playing baseball in the street. His parents decided to send him to catholic school. He told me about all the drugs he was doing in the bathrooms there. “Catholic school is a great place to get drugs,” he told me. At thirteen, I didn’t know how to react to a statement like that. It was awkward and we didn’t have much to say to each other about anything. Ricky and I stayed friends until I moved in ninth grade. The last time I heard anything about him was when I visited my old high school during senior year. Someone pointed towards a beat up black Ford Bronco and said he was in there with his girlfriend. I heard that today he is a New York City fire fighter.