Grits....and fireworks

I used to have this friend that I met while working on the party boats in Hampton named Brian. After moving up here from Mississippi he just started going fishing one day and became a regular customer after that. He got stuck with the nickname "Grits" one day after he tried to sneak, and then bribe me with, a drink cooler full of white russians. When I brought the cooler up to the pilothouse for safe keeping my captain asked where I had procured the hooch. I replied "From the fat, grits-eating motherfucker out back". So, the name stuck.

Grits ended up being a pretty good dude. He moved in right down the road from me so we hung out quite a bit. We got along real well even though he didn't drink much (like me) and I didn't smoke weed (his passion). There is actually a pretty good story that involves a bottle of rum for me, his ever present bag, my Bronco and ice-fishing with them in various shapes and forms. Maybe another time.

One morning Grits excitedly came lumbering up to me sweaty and out of breath (the norm for him) and told me that he had a friend that worked in a fireworks plant that manufactured commercial grade fireworks. Just like the kind you see at the beach/town/city firework displays. He said that we could buy some for $100 a pop and asked if I would be interested. Now, knowing the type of explosion that I could create with that same $100 going towards blackpowder (covered in an earlier post), I thought that they wouldn't be nearly as impressive so I passed.

Luckily, I was working with this stupid kid from Seabrook named Phil.

Phil had started working with me earlier in the year. After the first day while we were having our 8th round of after-trip drinks he informs me that he is on probation and couldn't be drinking. Of course he was drunk when he told me. Needless to say, he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.

So, Phil ponies up $300 and tells Grits to get 3. I believe it was "Ike jesus, gits me some of dem-der fire-crackies". Maybe not, but thats what I hear every time any Seabrooker talks.

Anyways, Grits returns the next morning with two boxes that were about 3' X 3' and weighed around 50lbs. Impressive enough, but he also had one of those pinwheels that you nail to a post and they spin around making all kinds of cool sparks and noises. Except that this one was as big as a hula-hoop. No shit.

We immediately made plans to fire off one of these badboys that night.

Fast forward to around midnight or 1am....

One of my buddies was staying at this shitty little hotel down by the pier so we all met up there. Most importantly it is right across the street from a wide open state park and then Hampton Beach. The perfect place to light some massive fireworks off without killing anyone else besides ourselves. Afterall, the town lights off fireworks every week there in the summer so it must be a good place to do it...right? Anyone?

After quenching some thirst (I'm noticing a pattern here....beer+explosives=blog entry) we ambled over to the park, tripped over the sand dunes and made it onto the beach. After a quick recon of the area to make sure that there weren't any people that we were either going to A) scare the shit out of, or B) light on fire, we found a nice place to set up shop down by the water line. Of course, after professing my "expertise" in explosives I was nominated to light the fuse. After lighting the fuse I boogied up the beach to the sand dunes about 100 yards away. Everything was going just fine....then it went off.

None of us had ever been that close to giant fireworks before so the first shot caught us off guard, to say the least, with its sheer size and deafening noise. I am not joking one bit when I say it lit up a quarter-to-half a mile of beach just like it was daytime. Well, if the sun was bright green and exploding like a nuclear-fucking-bomb, it would look like daytime. After looking at it slackjawed in awe for a split second and dropping my beer I regained my senses enough to look around. Lo and behold about 100 yards down the beach were two cops on horseback that seemed to be just as surprised as we were, if not more. They too were staring up at the sky with a weird look that almost seemed to say "The sky isn't supposed to exploding tonight, is it?" We looked at each other simultaneously and it was at that moment that I decided that it would be quite beneficial to my health if I were to immediately hightail it the fuck out of there. The rest of the fireworks display, as seen by me, consisted of multiple colored shadows and loud noises on the sprint back to the apartment.

After settling down there and buoyed by our unmitigated success (and more beer), we decided that the pinwheel should be next. This time I let someone else light it off while I sat safely on the front porch. Of course Ed, the resident giant-psycho (doesn't everyone have one?), decided quite forcefully that it should be he and absolutely no one else to nail it to one of the posts on the dock. It didn't work out so well.

They lit the pinwheel right after Ed finished pounding the life out of that poor nail. It started to spin slowly and after a quarter of a turn it stopped while continuing to send 8 foot long swaths of sparks onto the post. Just our luck, the post had recently been coated with a fresh layer of tar to keep bugs out of it, or some fucking thing, so it caught on fire quite easily and very spectacularly. It looked like a scene from Mississippi Burning. After some frantic scrambling that involved Ed-the-drunken-giant-psycho swinging a hammer at the pinwheel like Babe Ruth to hit it into the water but instead launching the hammer about 50 feet into the harbor and someone else grabbing a hose, getting tangled up in it and splitting their chin open, we got it put out.

When the cops arrived all that was left was a smoking piling and 8 grinning, drunken boobs sitting sitting on the only porch within a mile saying "Wuddint me ossiffir."

I learned a couple of things that night...

You would think that horses would be able to climb sand dunes fairly well, but they can't.

Tar is REALLY hard to put out when it is on fire.

and most importantly....

No matter how old you are don't piss off the cops when your father is currently the captain of the department and they all know your name.