Money to Burn

The stocky boy in a Denver Broncos T-shirt wraps his arms around the boxed TNT Assortment--$14.99, a $17.98 value--while his mother pays for it, no one under 16 being allowed to buy fireworks.

“Now, these are those safe-and-sound fireworks,” points out Cal as he makes change from behind the mesh screen.

“Safe and sane,” corrects his friend Bob, for the third time that morning.

Sound, sane, whatever.

The hillsides are as dry and crunchy as fat-free potato chips. An unsettlingly large piece of Riverside County is on fire. Last Friday, on the very day legal fireworks stands opened for business across the state, a raid at a Gardena storage locker turned up 15 tons of illegal fireworks, enough to blow up the Marine barracks in Beirut and the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Happy Fourth of July, the son et lumiere, flash-bang, all-American holiday.

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Cal and Bob, Calvin Cross and Bob McGinnis, fought in the Big One, Bob in a bomber group in the Pacific, Cal in the Army in Italy. Fifty summers after VJ day, they sit in a metal shed in Temple City, selling fireworks.

Distinguishing their shed from the other 16 in Temple City--from the Knights of Columbus around the corner, the Temple City Flyers soccer team and the rest--is the American Legion Post 279 banner, front and center. In five days this shed makes more than anything else the post does all year, money to send to veterans’ hospitals, to send many kids to boys’ baseball and one kid to Boys’ State. Cal rings it up one Laser Dragon, one Super Screecher at a time, on the old McCaskey cash register hauled over from the bar in the Legion Hall.

Thirty-eight of the county’s 88 cities license charities to sell “safe and sane” fireworks, which has created a well-intentioned but absurd patchwork.

To stay within the law, an Angeleno who drives to Temple City to buy fireworks from Cal would have to keep them in Temple City and return to Temple City to fire them up, because even driving back home to L.A. bearing fireworks is illegal.

It is disingenuous to think that human nature has the patience for such niceties.

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Fireworks have given California the official fidgets for years.

The name of W. Patrick Moriarty, once the head of Red Devil Fireworks, burned like a brush fire across state politics a decade ago. He spun his influence like a flaming catherine wheel, heading an operation variously accused of laundering money, delivering bribes and kickbacks, securing hookers for the elected elite. Moriarty’s hand seemed to be everywhere for a time, as owner of that faux Assyrian tire plant on the Santa Ana freeway, in a failed S & L, sending soldier of fortune and political swashbuckler Bo Gritz on a mission to Asia.

These are new times, and there is something touching in the state’s labors to fight fireworks with the Internet, outfitting a website with teaching tips, virtual fireworks, and safety ideas for kids from a purplish Power Rangerish character named the Preventer.

The Killer Bees and Morning Glory and Piccolo Petes that Cal Cross sells have weighty competition from the bigger firepower fireworks of Mexico, Colorado and Montana, and most proximately from Nevada, a state free and easy with so many things, among them automatic weapons and powerful fireworks, both of which can be felonious here.

And the Preventer and www.fireworks-safety.com are competing with our own lesser natures, the primal stuff that makes an 8-year-old boy without a toy gun turn a Barbie doll into an Uzi, the Promethean power of taking five bucks’ worth of pyrotechnics and making the neighborhood sound like a free-fire zone.

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Each first or second of July, in the Ohio town where I grew up, Sheriff Cecil Bailey came around for a little talk. Cecil had one good eye; his predecessor had one good arm. Sometimes I wondered how we came by these lawmen manque.

He would point to the eye patch and glower with his good eye (the boys said that sometimes he actually lifted the patch and showed them the scarry mess beneath, but I never saw it).

“See that?” he growled. “Fireworks done that.”

Some of us were chastened into behaving. Others were not. It is too tantalizing, the power of a single pyrotechnic toy, even a legal one, that can make your mother drop a dish, set a shake roof ablaze, propel a small, terrified dog through a plate-glass window.

The state’s standards are as neat and catchy as a Miranda warning: If it goes up in the air, darts across the ground or explodes, it’s dangerous and illegal. That criminalizes Roman candles, bottle rockets and cherry bombs, to the saving of countless toilets and numberless shake roofs.

The “safe and sane” standard is not idiot-proof, nor malice-proof. All it guarantees is, used in a sane manner, the Tequila Sunrise and Fire Krackle will be safe. And in this time and this place, what kind of guarantee is that?