In God we trust_ all others pay cash - Jean Shepherd [49]
And nowhere was this particular pleasure more honored and indulged than in the mill towns of Northern Indiana. Even today there are countless veterans of those fireworks barrages—hearing partially gone, a high, thin, singing sound in the cranium, sporting stunted, stubbly eyebrows, vaguely jumpy from borderline shellshock—who search in vain for the Fireworks Stand to assuage their deep hunger for the celebrating concussion, the better to honor our glorious American past.
The Fireworks Stand. Even setting the words down stark and simple on the page causes my hand to tremble and my brow to dampen in delicious fear, the sort of fear that only a kid who has lit a Five Incher under a Carnation milk can and has hurled himself prone upon the earth awaiting The End can know. Even the look of classical fireworks was magnificent! The Five Incher—hard, cool, rock-like cylinder of sinister jade green, its vicious red fuse aggressive and yet quiet cradled in the palm of the hand—is an experience once known never forgotten.
The Cherry Bomb. Ah, what pristine geometric tensile beauty; a perfect orb, brilliant carmine red, packed chockablock with latent tenor and destruction. The Torpedo, an instrument malevolent and yet subtly complex, designed for hand-to-hand celebration. Many a grown man today carries in his shins a peppering of tiny round pebbles buried deep in the flesh from too close familiarity with the roaring Torpedo—a shrapnel victim of the Glorious Fourth. For the uninitiated I at this point must explain that the Torpedo was perhaps an inch high, a half-inch in circumference, symbolically striped in the colors of our country, made to be hurled against a brick wall or a passing Hupmobile, a contact weapon of singular violence that sent its ignitors, tiny rock fragments, showering over an area of fifty yards or more.
The Pinwheel—an expensive device largely used for flamboyant show and yet responsible for some of the major conflagrations of the past. Whole blocks, and indeed in some cases entire towns, disappearing under the roaring flames to the applause of the multitude. I speak with more than average authority on these matters since my father, a genuinely dedicated fireworks maniac, owned and operated a Fireworks Stand every year during my larval stages.
The Depression lay over the land like a great numbing blanket of restlessness and frustration, but on the Fourth the sky would be filled with skyrockets, booming aerial bombs, and hand grenades, because nobody had anything else to do in those days. They could scratch, and make beer, and just stand around. Once in a while they’d go down to the Roundhouse and see if they could pick up an extra day somewhere, but mostly they’d just sit on the porch and chew tobacco and spit. That’s what the Depression was. One of the good things about the Depression, and why a lot of people look back on it with a nutty kind of nostalgia, is because nobody made it in the Depression. So nobody had a sense of guilt. Goofing off was just a natural thing to do. In the Depression nobody did anything. It was a license to fool around, and they fooled around in big ways.
I remember guys sitting on their front porch, tossing dynamite—I mean blasting dynamite!—out on the streets, just for kicks. Northern Indiana is full of primeval types who’ve drifted up from the restless hills of Kentucky and the gulches of Tennessee, bringing with them suitcases filled with dynamite saved over from the time Grandpaw blew up the stumps in the Back Forty. And they brought it to the city with them, because you never can tell, and since they never had any money for fireworks there was only one thing to do.