Tales from the Hood

If I were to ever be asked if I had shot someone, I would probably blurt out "Yes" with only a slight hesitation...as a teen I had a fascination with all things explosive and my marble cannon was my prize piece of field artillery...when word got around that I had made this marble cannon, on wheels no less, I went from being a non-com to a field-commissioned officer in my neighborhood...the cannon very effective, perhaps some might say too effective and I only took it up because I was frustrated how my home-made solid rocket fuel kept blowing up at the wrong time...prep work for rocket fuel was a nuisance too, because I had to board a downtown bus, walk to the chemical supply house and wait while they measured out my warhead materiel, placed it in paper bags and thanked me for my continued business...with the marble cannon, however, I could get everything close by, at the hardware store and from my cache of cherry bombs or M-80s, for they were the propellant and boy did they work...we had a sizable backyard with a fence separating us from other houses, a fence that was capable of keeping just about everything but fired marbles out...and so, one fine Fourth of July, I set up the marble cannon so my friends could see it shooting marbles right to their targets...first test fire perfect, but on the second one, for some unknown reason (to this day) the damn cannon jumped sideways and instead of shooting the marble at the neighbor's chicken coop next door, it flew toward a house directly behind our house, about three hundred feet away...I, and my friends, watched as the marble flew toward the wooden sided two-story home where as luck would have it, the woman of the house was out tending to her flower garden along the back edge of said house...my god, the marble hit the house about six feet directly above her head and then headed downward where the woman was, bent over in a flowery sun dress, the kind that had a lot of her skin showing on her back...the marble, heated during the cherry-bomb propelled flight landed squarely on her upper torso and then proceeded to disappear into her sun dress...my friends had already hopped on their bikes and squealed outta there but I clearly saw her rise into the air, arms stretched toward the heavens and yell at the top of her lungs...Jesus, I mean Jesus, what is a kid to do? However, it wasn't too long before her husband was out the back door and directing me in a very intimidating voice to show myself...I stood terrified, expecting someone from my own home to show up shortly, but I guess they were so used to bellowing in the neighborhood that they stayed put...the husband finally calmed down and assured me his wife was very much alive, but if I ever fired that damn cannon again, he would have me jailed...normally this would be the end but there was another neighbor who got wind of all this and thought it was hilarious and apparently thought I musta had some set of balls...well, anyway, I get a call across the yard a few weeks later and it's the other neighbor telling me to come right over...okay, I like the guy, he had spent a lot of time teaching me about photography and secondly, he longed to have a son and had failed in his attempt to turn his one child, a daughter, into a tomboy...the guy handed me a medium-sized paper bag and when I looked inside it was full of cherry bombs...one of two bags holding cherry bombs, as he was holding one too...he told me he was going to stand some distance away and that we would take turns chucking the c-bombs at one another until we got tired of dodging them and that would conclude our fun...man, this was incredible, throwing those things, lit of course, close but no too close to each other...I must tell you that this guy was one tough character, because according to my parents, he had lopped off his large toe mowing his lawn barefoot and told the hospital to simply stitch it back on, which they apparently did, and I say apparently because he never mowed barefoot again...things were going quite well, the bombs were lighting up and we were playing it safe when all of a sudden the guy slipped, straddled one of the cherry bombs which of course exploded and took most of his pant leg with it and I was thinking, I hope not his balls...this concluded our afternoon, apparently no one was bothered long-term by my shooting them with marbles or the inevitability of my blowing off their pant legs...