You're missing it, screamed my neighbor, eccentric and awkward by nature yet holding onto a beer can. I could only imagine the contents of his night. I held my tongue and watched first, letting the sounds trail behind the flashing lights framed far off between the buildings of the Ann Arbor skyline.
At first I had perhaps by instinct assumed impending storms, thunder, lightning, the continuation of a rainy week, but after a few more loud cracks, passed up the notion for something more sinister, or synthetic rather. It sounded like bombs being dropped on Ypsilanti, but as my neighbor explained, he figured it was the rich folks who lived off that way having a private show just for fun.
It was not altogether different from a night a couple weeks prior. At the Eightball splitting a pitcher. Drunk. And the whole world closed in on me as I glanced at the flaming television. It was Vancouver but it could have been anywhere in North America. My mind jumped to conclusions and ultimately overestimated the degree of provocation necessary for a group of North Americans to start torching cars. Well, false alarm. Just fireworks. I postulated some other dastardly attack, thinking quite like some kid in Iraq, the evening his world lit up with embers in 2001. No holidays or special occasions for those little boys, just the complete and total upheaval of their worlds; worlds which were if not perfect, at least structured. My life was not perfect, but structured, and really there is no valid comparison between myself and such a boy, but anyway I leaned against the railing of the fire escape, pushing backwards towards the open air now littered with sound and glowing light.
And I was listening to my neighbor talk about history, old fourth of Julys in his childhood Detroit. "The sound used to just bounce around between the buildings and just get louder and louder and from all directions. It was just something, and I mean it was really something! I'm sure it had old war vets just crumbling, shit like this. Man, just crumbling!"
Vivien, the girl from #7 arrived on the stairs with questions. We told her about the booming in the sky. It was cold she said, and it was quite cold. I had earlier retreated to find a sweater which I let hang around me, unfitting of the time of year, but much appreciated. We stood assembled like that on the fire escape for half an hour at least, exchanging stories, I in silence most of the time, listening, watching the colors, thinking about July.
In Jackson, the fireworks went off and I mean, to borrow my neighbor's idiom, They really went off. It had my father crumbling I think. My memories of that July 2009 exist in silence, impenetrable even by fireworks. Dad was a strong man and the fourth was usually celebratory, but that year even I felt that war zone shock. Turn the lights off or the jerries will blow us to bits. And Imagine! The lights go off in the entire city and then you really can see the etchings made by the trailing embers, But you can't see the smoke. Only when another one goes off do you see the trails of ash in the sky. 2009 ruined Julys forever and a day. The noise echoed across dad's sickbed, made us all wish then that we could sleep, and notice that we hadn't for quite some time. He moaned, he made slight pained movements. He was not yet sixty. He was no longer strong.
I bit my lip, unnoticed. Vivien left. Too cold and she had seen fireworks before she said. So the two of us remained and I leaned and he staggered and oohed and ah-ed and I thought about Detroit, and Vancouver, and Fallujah, Beirut, Gaza, London, the horror of the blitzkrieg and the remarkable similarities of fireworks, missiles, and jellyfish. I thought about Jackson and my father's fourth of July stories I had never heard. There was so much I thought of then, leaning back against the air, testing the carpentry, wondering if I might just fall deep into something.
I sit and the fireworks end. My neighbor is praising the show ad nauseam. Some show, wowee! one hell of a display! And I say goodnight and he says goodnight and we all go inside. Some miles away some people applaud at the magnificent show and do party things. Have faces, lives, schedules, and drinks that I know nothing of. We both exist several miles away in the growing dark and I am content to let that be. Some soul smothered in wine and the darkness of the night staggers out in search of his grown children, screaming like the scene after the rodeo in The Misfits and I went to bed thinking about the coming fourth and more fireworks. In my dreams I was Clark Gable baring my drunken tonsils to the Nevada night only I am a child looking for his father; just a stumble drunk off the hood of a car.
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