In our garage, placed in a drawer of a steel workbench, there was a brass gas-torch about as long as my forearm and about as round as a baseball bat, with a nice, sharpish, brass nozzle. It belonged to my grandfather (my mom’s dad), so I don’t really know what it was doing in our garage, but it was there nonetheless... and we weren’t supposed to touch it. Jeff and I knew that what this really meant was that we weren’t supposed to get caught playing with it, so whenever Mom and Dad were gone, we knew that this was tacit approval to try to kill ourselves with the small brass tank filled with volatile fuel.

I seem to recall that on one particular occasion my parents were going to be gone for quite awhile, either shopping or chicken poaching or something, but in any case they were going to be away for at least the whole afternoon, and that seemed like plenty of time to do what we had to do and get it repaired before they got back.

What we planned to do was build a cannon in the tradition of our Uncle Ben, the one who was also infamous for having sat on a large, empty (fume-filled), propane tank while welding it in a quonset hut (and getting bounced off of the ceiling and onto the floor). As legend had it, when he was a kid he had built a cannon out of some lead pipe with great success, meaning that it had caused an explosion without resulting in any injuries (which is understood to mean “any permanent injuries”).

I don’t want to give a step-by-step set of instructions on how to make this thing (just in case some kid gets hold of this story), but then again, we didn’t need a book to make our own bomb: we had been given detailed instructions repeatedly over the years by listening to how my uncle had made his. You can see how we felt that this was truly the right thing to do; after all, someone had to keep up the family tradition.

In case you’re wondering, we got the gunpowder out of some long, brass rifle cartridges that were in a yellow cardboard box labeled “Winchester.” I remember that there was a red bear rearing up on the lid. Again, this was my grandfather’s box, so I don’t know what it was doing in our workbench. In any case, when we plied the bullets out of their brass casings the powder was in the form of a bunch of little cylinders, like broken up pencil leads, and we ground them down in a rock polisher with some wooden bingo balls. Good thing we decided against using the ball bearings, I guess. The result was a nice, fine, shiny grey powder, beautiful to behold in a way, all soft and shiny and slippery looking when you poured it onto a white rag.

We packed the powder into the pipe with some cloth and then loaded our cannon with a solid metal cylinder that slipped into the pipe perfectly. Everything was going so well that we took it as a good omen, a sign from above. When you regularly accidentally almost but not quite kill yourself, it’s easy to become a mystic and read signs into everything. After all, something must be protecting you from yourself. More or less.

Then, at the last second, for no apparent natural reason, we decided to swap out the solid pipe for a wooden dowel, which probably helped to keep the pipe from becoming a bomb.

So we stuck the cannon in the backyard aiming straight up, and held it in position with some bricks. We couldn’t really bury the lower end because the fuse-hole was only about an inch up from the end of the pipe. Yes, we knew that missiles which were shot straight up came straight down, and that they landed just as fast as they were shot up. We had learned that playing the game called, “Dodging Plummeting Arrows.”

We used a sparkler as a fuse. I almost said that it was one that my brother had left over from the Fourth of July, but he always had so many fireworks around that you couldn’t really say when any given explosive rotated through his collection. He kept them hidden in the attic crawlspace, right over the fuse panel that melted and almost burned our house down when the fireworks were up there... but you’ll hear more about that later.

Normally, I would have wanted to light the fuse, but since it was such a treat, and since it was my brother’s fuse, he got to play with the torch. This torch had a chain hanging down from a lever on top that ended in a finger ring, so you could use one hand to both hold the torch and keep the valve open. (Talk about convenient.) He lit the torch with a match and then used the torch to light the sparkler. I know, it seems like a lot of trouble to light a sparkler with a torch when you could have just used the match itself, but don’t forget that this whole cannon scheme was just an excuse to use the torch to begin with, and there was no reason to think of the plan in any terms other than that. We simply had torch on the brain.

We ran behind the corner of the house so we could watch without getting blown up if something went wrong, which it invariably did, and sure enough, it was like someone was looking down from on-high saying, “So, up to your old tricks while your parents are gone? Well, here’s something you’ll never be able to fix before they get back, you little bastards.” And with that, the cannon fell over, aiming at the neighbor’s yard. Which was lucky, because they were the neighbors we didn’t like.

I would like to be able to say that at that point I was brave and that I madly and heroically dashed out there to pull out the fuse, or even say that my brother ran out there in a moment of glory, but the truth of the matter is that we were both standing at the corner of the house pushing each other, yelling, “YOU go get it!”, “No, YOU go get it!” when all of a sudden, as if by telepathic consensus, we decided to hit the dirt. Of course we were still watching, I mean, we weren’t going to maybe get blown up and not see the thing go off after all this trouble.

We were rewarded with a loud explosion and two long tongues of flame, a big one from the mouth of the cannon and a small one from the fuse-hole. I don’t know what happened to the sparkler. It’s probably still on the roof or it got stuck in some passing car or something. It’s nice that it didn’t get driven through either of our bodies. The dowel was nowhere to be found; it was not in our yard, and we didn’t see it when we looked into the neighbor’s yard through the dowel-sized hole in the fence.

We didn’t consider the fact that someone might have been killed. That sort of thing never happened (and didn’t happen this time either), so it never crossed our minds. Our thoughts were more along the lines that we were going to get caught now, no matter what, so we might as well set off the cannon again because it wasn’t like our parents were going to get home, sniff the barrel of the cannon, and say, “Hey, this has been fired... twice.”

So we loaded the cannon with a double handful of gravel, figuring it probably wouldn’t punch a hole through anything, ignoring what we had already learned about the kind of damage a shotgun does, and aimed the cannon straight up a second time, holding it in place with bricks stomped more firmly into the ground than before. We put in a new fuse, lit it, hid, and so forth, and sure enough, the cannon tipped over. The only difference was that whereas the last time it was at a pretty flat angle to the ground, this time it wasn’t tipped over all that much. We hit the dirt, it went off with another awe-inspiring set of flame lashes and: nothing.

We just sat there in silence for what seemed like a pretty long time, until, “tik... tik... CRASHHHHHHH” as the double handful of gravel came pounding down onto our aluminum porch awning, no doubt waking up every police officer or other random authority figure for miles around, and spreading heart attacks faster than rumors.

Fear then provided a visceral incentive to get everything cleaned up rather than setting it off repeatedly until we got caught, which might be why I don’t remember ever getting in trouble for this particular episode.

At least not until my folks read this story a few decades down the road.