Wall of Paul

Yeah, yeah— America’s birthday is July 4th. I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy and all that, but even before George Bush and Dick Cheney turned the Bill of Rights into well-appointed toilet paper, I never got too worked up about the big day. In fact, the only thing that’s ever made the Fourth of July particularly special to me is the promise of deadly explosives that can be tossed with your bare hand. I mean, of course, firecrackers. Lots of them, and the bigger the better.

Actually, I probably haven’t handled a proper firecracker in over 25 years. But back when I was growing up in Alabama, the Fourth meant the sudden appearance of little wooden shacks by the side of the road featuring subtle, 5 foot-tall red-and-white signs stating FIREWORKS. Plain and simple— FIREWORKS. They were everywhere. All you had to do was extinguish any open flames, choose your deafening poison, and fork over the all-important MONEY. After that, rather unbelievably, you were on your own.

Since Alabamians are pretty much used to people shooting their brains across the room with a dropped firearm, they probably viewed the chance that kids might generate a few phalangeal projectiles as an improvement. You weren’t supposed to sell fireworks to anyone under a certain age anyway. But unless that age was five, the law wasn’t particularly effective. By June 25th each year, virtually every kid I knew was packing a Bic lighter and a brown paper bag loaded with firecrackers, bottle rockets, and anything else you could possibly want to light and run away from.

But come on, man. Who wants to do that?! That’s like hiring a prostitute and running away.

The whole point of a firecracker is to do something completely idiotic with it, something that wavers in the haze between tawdry and demented. Anyone who treated the things with the level of respect suggested on the wrapper was either lacking in courage or idiocy or both, and wasn’t worthy of your friendship. After all, you only get to be 10 years-old for a year.

So we blew stuff up. Anything we could think of. Tin cans were a mainstay, because they were easy to find, and you could gawk at the exit wound when you were done. And model cars were always great, but they were expensive, and took too long to build if you were just going to destroy them anyway. Besides it was better to shoot them with a BB gun, because that took longer and you had all afternoon to waste. Remember, this was a town of 6,300 people. When someone dared to open a hardware store, the headline on the front of the newspaper was just a little smaller than “Japs Surrender.”

So, again, we blew things up when we got the chance, and, for some reason, we convinced ourselves that Black Cat firecrackers were the crème de la crème of firecrackerdom. If you didn’t have Black Cat, you weren’t shit.

I’ll be damned if I know why. If you put Black Cats in an ant hill - because ants deserve it, you know - they blew a hole in it the size of your fist, just like any other firecracker. But from the distance of 30 or so years, I’ll take a wild guess and say that the label was the real draw. I mean, look at this: