September 1, 2011
Fuck, I had plans to do something tonight and for once it was slow at work, so I thought I’d leave a little early for once. But then a funny thing happened about a half an hour before I was ready to leave. Work started flying in. One job, two jobs, three jobs and then a pain in the ass job that’s due to be installed first thing in the morning. Now it’s after midnight, I’ve got a ringing, stinging headache and just feel like going home, which is exactly what I’m going to do. I think I’ll fish around for an old story to put up. In fact I know which one I’m going to use. It’s called “Blowing Up The Gin Room” and was first published in NY Press and later in my book, “The Boy Who Would Be A Fire Truck.”
Okay, almost home. What a fucking night.
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Blowing Up the Gin Room
In the summer of 1977, I was nineteen years old. I moved out of my parents’ house and into a dump of a three-bedroom house in a somewhat dicey neighborhood in Peoria, Illinois. My two roommates were Chris and Moon, and the main thing we had in common was a powerful thirst for all things alcoholic. Our drinks of choice were Blatz beer and shots of cheap gin.
To fortify ourselves in the midst of so much alcohol consumption, we bought more than a thousand hits of speed and kept them in a large candy dish on a crumbling secondhand wooden coffee table in the front room. Whenever we felt weary from the constant drink-a-thon we called life, we’d pop a couple hits of speed and–boom–back to the liquor store.
Our dilapidated house had a basement that was divided into two rooms. One had a door, but it also had a window on the outer wall. Since the basement was musty and came furnished with a variety of insects and rodentia, we didn’t spend a lot of time down there. We did, however, turn the sealed room into something we called the Gin Room. We dubbed it that because we would take our empty gin bottles and smash them on the cracked cement floor.
After a couple of months, the broken glass was nearing ankle height. It was really quite something to see. Smashing the bottles was a great release when you were about to jump out of your skin from too much amphetamines and alcohol.
Being constantly drunk and raging on speed leads to some weird behavior. Once, Chris and I turned everything in the house upside down and watched the sunrise while debating whether or not it would be a good idea to hang meat from the ceiling. Chris thought roasts would be the best choice, but I thought a variety of pork chops, steaks and hot dogs would be little more eye-catching and fun.
The greatest day in the house happened sometime in August when Moon came home clutching a large shopping bag.
"You’re not going to believe what I’ve got in here," he announced to me and Chris, a curious grin creeping across his face.
"Girl Scouts?" I wondered aloud.
"Fuck you,” he shot back. “I've got enough fireworks here to blow up a tank."
Then he overturned the bag, and the goods spilled out onto the floor.
A friend owed Moon a hundred bucks, and when Moon threatened to break the headlights on his car if he didn’t pay up, the guy offered him the fireworks and the deal was done. There on the floor were M-80s, firecrackers, Roman candles, cherry bombs and things with fuses on them I didn’t recognize.
We huddled around the explosive pile, and it became painfully obvious what was to be done.
“Let’s blow up the Gin Room,” I said in quite a noble fashion. Of course Chris and Moon were in total agreement, and we moved the artillery downstairs and set it up on a pile of newspapers that would act as a mass fuse.
But first, celebratory drinks upstairs. And a handful of speed all around.
When the beaners had kicked in, we moved back down to the basement and argued over who would light the newspaper. (Moon won, as they were his fireworks, so it was only fair.) The fire set, we quickly exited and watched the action from the outer window. Soon, an orgasm of colorful explosions, smoke, fire and ear-shattering bangs and booms belched out of the room. After a minute, the glass on the window cracked and fell out. After four minutes, it was over.
Four minutes. Of pure joy. Pure joy unfettered by the everyday worries magnified ten times by the booze and speed. Worries about money, a busted-up car, a dead-end job at a downtown discount store, running out of cigarettes, the question of what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and the greatest worry of all: would we make it to the liquor store before closing time. Nothing mattered for those four minutes but the colorful explosion in the gin room. It was quite a liberating experience. It was a wonderful life-lesson that had no meaning. I think that’s why it’s meant so much to me as the years have moved on.
It took two minutes to put the fire out on the left wall. The whole room was covered in black soot. In fact, the whole house had a smoky gunpowder scent that we would never be able to totally eliminate. A month later, we were thrown out. We didn’t recover our security deposit needless to say,.
Moon went on to become a financial director for a loan company. Chris went back to college and became a lawyer. I moved to New York and went to work at a shitty night job while trying to peddle my writing.
I still like to blow things up.
Further reading: Wikipedia, Passages Malibu and Urban Dictionary.
You Might Also Like: Cheez Whiz, Gee Whiz and Gene Whiz.
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