Vic Socotra

05 July 2009

M-80s

(M-80 Explosive Holiday Commemoration Device)

It is later than usual here this morning, or better said, the earth is spinning along just fine and I am trying to mount it at about three quarters-speed and not succeeding that well.

That is a function of the emerging social whirl here at Big Pink, which features new arrivals and old co-conspirators. I had not planned on being here to enjoy it, the explosions echoing off the flanks of the assisted living facility, nor to be snacking on Chad’s extraordinary garlic and butter miniature Colossal shrimp, or Leslie’s fine roasted chicken, or those succulent spareribs.

But like Gale’s new name, Diana Ross, bestowed on her after the stunning transformation of Michael Jackson’s wig into the very personification of MoTown’s supremist Supreme, that is another story, which due to the spinning of the earth, may (or may not) be able to get to.

The food was good, and providing it to Cuba the Polish Life Guard ensured that any minor infractions of the Big Pink Rules were suitably amended. It is always wise to co-opt the power structure. That turned out to be useful, as the explosions began just after dusk, and continued until nearly midnight.

There were even a series of staccato bursts powerful enough to be M-80s, and the echo of the reports were sharp off the flanks of the building.

The descent into fiasco began just as I pushed the cart full of junk out of Tunnel Eight and piled project materials up in the Bluesmobile late in the afternoon. I wanted to get started on some things down on the farm, and avoid the crush of merrymakers with high explosives in the capital.

I was west of Centreville when I realized I did not have the keys to the house, and pondered the predicament. With a carload of junk and two feral cats waiting, I decided to push on.

After all, there was plenty to do on the exterior of the place, weeds to pull and a dead tree to chop up in the pasture, and I could just turn around again and come back once I knew the share-cropping felines were all right, and their automatic feeder was loaded for the coming week.

You really need kids to completely enjoy explosives on the 4th of July. The celebration of the 4th was pretty sedate in southeastern Michigan. The State had pretty severe rules about even Class C pyrotechnics, and the stuff for sale in the makeshift seasonal road-side sheds was pretty tame even if the Hong Kong cardboard packages were colorful.

Mom and Dad could pile us in the Rambler station-wagon and drive down to the Detroit River for a real thrill, but that was as painful, logistically, as it is here to fight your way onto the National Mall.

Mostly they barbequed with the neighbors, and the little ones were permitted to run around with sparkers.

Wee.

As we got older, legends spread about the things that were available for sale outside the placid heartland. Sometimes an acquaintance would return from a long car trip to the south equipped with cherry bombs, a marvelous IED that was powerful enough to lift aluminum ash-cans in the air. They had waterproof fuses, and could blow porcelain fixtures off the wall of school lavatories if properly flushed.

Those paled in comparison with the legendary M-80, an ashcan-shaped miniature depth charge that had enough explosive power to blow off teen-aged fingers. Really exciting stuff.

A service buddy had more personal experience with them growing up in the river states, where high-explosives have a real mission in farming and other rural applications.

He belonged to the Methodist Youth Fellowship back in the day, and one of the more angelic-looking boys in the group was one Patrick Mulligan, a true hellion. He was much attached to the use of M-80s, which were perfectly legal there, culminating in a bombing campaign at his high school during the week before graduation.

Hazelfield High School was one of those big factory institutions that serves the educational needs of Hazelfield, Black Jack, and Spanish Lake; a large section of the city of Florissant; portions of the cities of Bridgeton, Bellefontaine Neighbors, and Ferguson; and several square miles of unincorporated St. Louis County.

It regularly matriculates five thousand students, and therefore rated a solid platoon of Assistant Principals to enforce discipline. These functionaries diligently tracked down Mr. Mulligan in the course of his bombing spree. They hauled him in and confronted him with a chart of his class schedule, correlated to the location of M-80 explosions.

Mulligan was about to confess when an M-80 went off just down the hall. He had a confederate, unknown to the Assistant Principals, who had maintained his freedom. Thus, he could smile, deny all, and wander off to consider the site of his next attack.

When last heard of, Mulligan had dropped out of college and was selling expensive bible sets to the recently-bereaved: "Your late husband told me he wanted to buy these..."

Never trust an innocent-faced, handsome boy.

You would think you would get over fascination with the forbidden, but in my experience that only stops at the tomb.

Case in point: I was driving the family in the Taurus station wagon on one of the periodic moves- NAS Jax to DC, I think, and we stopped at that bizarre complex that marks the northern border of South Carolina, near the city of Dillon, seat of Dillon County.

James L. Petigru observed, on the eve of the Palmetto State’s second secession from the Union that "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum." Accordingly, the rules for the control of high explosives are much more lax than it’s genteel northern neighbor.

“South of the Border” is a gas-station-restaurant-souvenir-amusement complex with bill-boards for hundreds of miles along I-95. SOB, as it's known to the traveling cognoscenti, is a unique amalgam of real Dixie and imaginary Old Mexico.

A visionary resident of Dillon named Alan Schafer was responsible for this extreme manifestation of the American roadside attraction. It was 1950 when he began work on a simple beer and explosives stand- those being the two pillars of southern life- but when the building supplies began arriving addressed to "Schafer Project: South Of The [North Carolina] Border," the neon light came on.

The spectacularly insensitive mascot of the place is Pedro, a grinning mustachioed caricature-Mexican topped with an outsized sombrero. Pedro straddles the SOB entrance, 97 neon feet tall, as "the largest freestanding sign east of the Mississippi."

You can drive your Taurus right between his legs. The kids were amazed.

Anyway, South Carolina laws being what they are, I took a moment to walk through Pedro’s Rocket City, the fireworks stand the had formed the core of SOB's original business case. The boys were delighted by the colorful packaging of the explosives. I took the opportunity to scoop up armloads of bottle rockets and general sparkling devices.

I liked the rockets, which were a marvelous all-purpose general flying pyrotechnic.

My eyes widened when I saw cases of the legendary M-80 explosive for sale.

I bought a case and took it on to Virginia with the rest of the crap in the back of the Taurus wagon. That 4th of July we shot off a bunch of bottle rockets, and I discovered that they performed perfectly well as hand-launched devices, at least until I hit my neighbor Gary with one of them in the chest.

Thankfully, the payload in a bottle rocket is quite small and there were no casualties, but it was in the course of cleaning up that I looked for the box of M-80s, thinking to explode some in the woods behind the house for the amusement of the young men in the family.

Looking at the packaging, I realized that the things were nothing more than 1/8 sticks of dynamite.

Jesus. I stripped the cardboard wrappers, soaked the powder in a bucket and got rid of the dark acrid residue in the woods. No doubt it was a HAZMAT violation, but one I was pleased to take.

I was afraid the Boys might find out how much fun they were, and the last thing I wanted them to do was discover alcohol and black powder at the same time.

You know the last words down South, right?

“Hey Ya’ll, watch this!”

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