In God We Trust (16 page)

“Yep. I always was wiry,” I said.

“Oh yeah? I remember the time Paswinski chased you up on the garage and you stayed there all Saturday,” Flick sneered, stroking old fires.

“I liked it up there! What do you mean, I used to always go up on the garage—I liked it up there.”

“Oh sure. Especially when Paswinski was throwing rocks at you.”

“Well, I notice
he
never did anything about Grover Dill!”

We both watched silently as across the street a solitary drunk struggled from doorway to doorway. For some reason he carried his hat in his hand, waving it frantically at each passing car. Flick, an old connoisseur of drunks, watched his technique critically as he ricocheted from storefront to storefront.

“They don’t make ’em like old Lud Kissel any more.” Flick had the sound of a man describing a recognized all-time great.

“Funny thing, Flick. I thought of Lud Kissel in New York, this past Fourth.”

“Fourth of what?”

“The Fourth of
July.”

“The Fourth of July? Reminded you of Ludlow Kissel? Old Lud Kissel, the drunk?”

It was my turn to play it expansive. I leaned forward over the bar, sipping my beer meaningfully, milking the moment.

“Flick, do you mean to tell me you don’t remember Lud Kissel’s Dago bomb?”

“Dago bomb?”

We stared at each other for a long moment and again he lit up like a 60-watt Mazda.

“You mean that big Dago bomb that blew out the …?”

“Yes indeed, Flick, that is the very one I am referring to.”

XVI
LUDLOW KISSEL AND THE DAGO BOMB THAT STRUCK BACK

I threaded my way through the midtown, midday sidewalk traffic that eddied and surged over and around the clutter of Construction paraphernalia. It was desperately hot. My wash-and-wear suit clung to me like some rancid, scratchy extension of my clammy skin. All around me New York was busily, roaringly, endlessly rebuilding itself, like some giant Phoenix arising from still red-hot ashes of its dead self. New York’s infamous Edifice Complex blooms mightily in Midsummer.

I scuttled feverishly through shimmering waves of asphalt-scented heat toward the paradise of dark, expensive decadence of my favorite French restaurant,
Les Misérables des Frites
, little realizing that in another split second I was about to enjoy one of the truly secret subterranean pleasures of the human soul. Frantically taking my place in a hunched line of prickly-heated City dwellers doggedly plodding single file over a long, planked gangway, tightly jammed between an enormous excavation and a line of throbbing bright orange engines of construction. Ahead of me a short, stout lady wearing a damp flowered dress, clutching a Bonwit Teller shopping bag in both hands, ducked her head low as she ran interference for me and for those behind me through the wall of ringing sound and sensual heat.

My mind, as is so often the case these days, was totally blank. Sweat trickled in a long, thin, cool line down the knobbles of my backbone and spread out damply along the waistband of my twisted jockey shorts, which were threatening to emasculate me at any moment. My feet moved steadily to the rhythm of a colossal Diesel engine pounding insanely off my port bow. All around us, reaching high into the copper heavens, the stainless steel and aluminum green-glassed cliffs of partly completed and already eroding towers acted as colossal baffles, amplifying the subterranean reverberations of construction almost beyond endurance. New York’s Summer Festival was in full swing, and I was a celebrant.

I had reached perhaps the midpoint of the plank ladder, breathing shallowly of the rising clouds of pulverized cement dust and carbon monoxide fumes, a subtle mixture that forms one of the more insidious anesthetics yet devised, dulling the senses and clouding the soul, when it happened. It was more felt, at first, than heard—a long, low gurgling sensation pushing up suddenly from the gut and exploding in the brain like some great comber of some ancient sea, on a lost, forgotten beach:

KAARRROOOMMMMPPHHHHH
!

For a split second the great sound hung in mid-air and then, unthinkingly, my ancient GI reflexes working magically and smoothly, I hurled myself to the clapboards, digging in as I landed. The bombardment had begun!

I clung to the earth, waiting for the second round of the bracket, which should come, I hastily calculated, off to my right. Suddenly I became aware of an insistent rapping on the back of my neck as an elderly crane-like citizen behind me croaked:

“Get up, you bum. If you’re going to sleep on the sidewalk, at least find a doorway, you soak!”

He stepped over me and sheepishly I regained my feet. Up and down the line I saw other ex-GIs brushing themselves off and once again moving forward in the unending stream of Twentieth Century Man, bound for God knows where. My mind raced as I peered down through the haze of the great
canyon of excavation that lay just beyond the barricades. And then I could smell it, an acrid, faint, delicious, familiar, naggingly pleasing scent—Dynamite! The real thing!

Minutes later I sat pensively at a tiny corner table of
Misérables
, waiting for my luncheon date to arrive and vaguely conscious of a difficult-to-define sense of nostalgic pleasure and euphoria. Could it be the Bloody Charlie I was drinking? No, I had barely touched it. As I idly and comfortingly fingered the smooth, sleek surface of my Diners’ Club card—my protection against the world—the way a gunfighter of old must have absently fondled his Smith & Wesson Thirty-Eight, I tried to analyze my sudden sense of warmth and well-being. It had started immediately after the blasting operation at the construction site. Could there be a connection? No man wants to admit that he is a secret Atom Bomb fan, so I hastily rejected this transient thought. Yet somehow I could not deny that the tiny whiff of blue smoke had awakened some ancient memory, some long-dormant pleasure. I absently munched one of the new No-Cal composition cashew nuts which are featured at the
boîte
as I raked my memory for a clue. The pleasant sound of diners’ voices mingled with the Muzak and the popping of corks. The sizzling of the grill and the hum of air-conditioning lulled me as the Bloody Charlie began its soothing work. Out of the din, voices and sounds of the past emerged, dripping ooze and slime like some ancient creatures unearthed from long-sealed caverns. Dynamite!

Let’s admit it. There are few sounds more soul-satisfying, more frightening, more exciting than an explosion. Explosions of one kind or another have always been part of great Folk celebrations from weddings to Wars. I sipped my drink and mused on the first time I had heard that primal roar of exploding black powder. And then it hit me. My God! Tomorrow was the Fourth of July!

The Fourth of July! It had crept up on tiny cats’ feet on the scale of the calendar, unnoticed, unsung, unbombarded. It was then that I knew where those pleasant tinglings of mingled regret and exhilaration that we call Nostalgia had come from.
Yes, in just a few hours it would be the Glorious Fourth. And here I was without so much as a sparkler to my name. I ordered another drink and settled down comfortably into my soft eiderdown bed of remembrances of things past. There are times when you just have to let it go.

As I idly mulled the twin olives in my classical Charlie, the Northern Indiana landscape of the late Depression era began to take form, shadowy and persistent, amid the green and gold bottles behind the mirrored bar directly ahead of me. The blackened stumps, snaggle-toothed and primal, of the steel mills and the oil refineries lay etched against the hazy gray-green horizon of the July skies of the Great Lakes. Somewhere off in the distance the construction crew set off another dull, thumping blast that jiggled the silverware on my table, and it all began to come back.

Dynamite, heat, and excitement were all intermingled in that Fourth of July ritual that has long since departed. What is there about a solid, molar-rattling explosion that sets the blood a-tingling and brings the roses to the cheeks? There are muddle-headed souls who will tell you over and over that Man is basically a peaceful and quiet creature, destined ultimately to while away his golden days strumming lutes, penning odes, and watching birds. I have never yet witnessed a turtle preparing to ignite the portentous fuse of a Cherry Bomb. No, it remained for Man to concoct black powder from the innocent elements of the earth and ultimately to split the atom, all in pursuit of that healing balm—the thundering report.

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. And they did it. They would sit on their porch on a quiet, hot, Fourth of July, rocking back and forth in the swing, breaking dynamite sticks, which come about six inches long, into sizes approximating a green Two Incher, like busting off a chunk of a Baby Ruth candy bar. Old Dad, his cigar clamped in his teeth, would Scotch-tape a little fuse on the end, raise it with suitable flourishes to his cigar-butt end—
bbzzzzzzzzz—
hold it aloft for a split second, flip it back by the garage, and dive for the floor.

KKKAAAABBBOOOOOOMM!
!

Rufe is celebrating his ancient heritage. Crockery would crash for blocks around, old ladies would be hurled into the snowball bushes, but no one seemed to care. After all, the Fourth is the Fourth. There would be a slight delay as Rufe fused another nuclear bomb, and:

BAAARRROOOOOOOM
!

Tin cups would rattle for miles around, windows shatter and smash.

Dynamite was the milk of life to the average hillbilly of the day. He celebrated with it, feuded with it, and fished with it. The Sporting instinct runs strong in the hills. When the fishing season would open, the river would literally be aboil with TNT.