*** This is one man's account of actual events that transpired on the evening of January 13th, 2000. For another man's recollection, please take a dip in the Language Pool ***
///////
It was the middle of winter; the time of year which on occasion leaves you thinking you’re late for bed before the 6 o’clock news is even into their sports coverage. It was the time of year when the sun goes to bed early and this particular evening it happily obliged, pulling a blanket of high clouds after itself as it plunged the Western hemisphere into night leaving only occasional peeks of the lunar physiognomy to provide light. The preternatural gloom that followed, obscuring almost completely the memory of lavish summer evenings spent outdoors until late, had fallen long before I got the call; when I heard James’ voice on the phone, however, a light was kindled against the darkness. It was the moment we had been waiting for since the previous evening at Bible Study; or had it been our entire lives? We were 18, and we were going to purchase dynamite.
James had joined me in the ranks of adulthood just recently, and the Knudson brothers were the ones who first floated the idea. “Yeah, lotto tickets and smokes. Turning 18 just isn’t as exciting as I thought it’d be,” I said while Al Nunez desperately tried to redirect the group’s attention back to Galatians Chapter 2. “Welcome to the club anyhow, James.”
“You can buy dynamite,” Peter interjected. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Totally,” added his brother Nathan. “You’re adults now.”
There were some guffaws and ‘nu-uh’s’ followed by more ‘uh-huh’s’ before Al’s persistently patient redirections were effective in returning us to the text at hand, but the damage had been done; James and I were hooked. Dynamite was available for the purchasing and there was no way we wouldn’t be buying some.
After the study was over, James and I took council together. “What are we gonna use it on, though, James?” I said. Always the Bert to his Ernie, I’m thinking practically. “Heck, where are we gonna use it?”
“Can’t we use your house?” James asks, dead pan. A forgone conclusion.
“We’re not that far out in the country, James. And plus, I’m pretty sure my dad doesn’t want us blowing stuff up in the back yard with dynamite.”
“Well, we can probably find somewhere up in the foothills or around camp to do it, then,” he countered, undeterred.
“And the target?”
“Who cares? Even just a hole in the ground would be cool.”
“I wonder how much dynamite costs? For that matter, where do we even buy it? I don’t remember seeing it at Wal Mart or Target or anything, ya know?” I was excited about the project, but I couldn’t get myself past a few logistical hiccups. Like price per unit, and felony destruction of property charges.
“I betcha OSH has it,” responded James. “If anybody has it, I bet they do.”
“Yeah, I guess they’ll be our best bet. OSH it is. If they don’t have it there we could probably try Home Depot or something, too.” There was nothing left to do now but play it out, so when James called the next night I knew what he wanted. He swung by my house in his battered Geo Metro and we sped off into the gathering night to meet our destiny.
The ride over was uneventful, James expertly spiriting his nimble automobile through, around and over traffic. “This is gonna be awesome,” he had said while down shifting and accelerating past an old Dodge Ram, screaming through an orange light. Caedman’s Call blared over the small tinny speakers in the car.
“Totally,” I had agreed, looking up at the patchwork of high clouds and the penumbral moon high above, face half smashed against the cool window.
We skittered into a parking stall under a guttering light near the front of Orchard Supply Hardware, the closest corporate equivalent to Mom & Pop’s Hardware N’ Things. If the parking lot was any indication, they didn’t get a lot of customers after six on a Thursday night. Piling out of the Metro and casting furtive grins at each other, we strolled through the automatic doors as they whooshed aside and we stepped into the mausoleum. The fluorescent lighting above hummed in subdued tones, harmonizing with Kenny Loggins who was politely crooning over the store’s speakers. The tang of galvanized metal and fertilizer was thick in the air and employees conspicuously thin on the ground as we began combing the store for our prized purchase.
“What aisle do you think they keep the dynamite in?” I asked James as we made our way past the impulse-buy stands, coiled garden hoses and E-Z Up shelters.
“Well, you can make explosives out of fertilizer, right? Maybe they’re with that?”
“Yeah, I dunno. I figure we can probably just go down every aisle and check it out,” I guessed. We still hadn’t seen any employees.
Fasteners? Not there. Drivers? Nor there. Lighting? Plumbing? Sealants? Paint? Nope x 4. We had worked our way through roughly ¾ of the store from left to right, muttering to each other about the odds of finding our target down this aisle or that aisle and ogling power tools when we found our first employee re-stocking the snail bait shelf in the pest control section. The boy looked to be about 16 with floppy hair and a slightly hunched posture, dutifully putting box after box of Ortho Slug & Snail Bait next to its kindred. His nametag informed us his name was Travis.
“Here we go,” James breathed to me and quickly approached the kid. I followed along in tow slightly slack-jawed and still very much wondering how the immanent exchange would go down.
“Hey,” James began, stopping at just the right distance from the employee. Not too close, not too far away. “I was wondering; do you guys sell dynamite?”
Travis’ hand, which had been methodically conveying box after box from his cart to the shelf, ground to a halt in mid air. It set cautiously down the box it had been carrying, and instead of retrieving another brushed his floppy hair back out of his face as he looked from the shelf to the cart and back again, conspicuously avoiding looking at James except for a quick glance between oscillations. “Oh – ah – uhmmmmm, yeah. Wow. Dynamite? No. Gosh, no. Wow, yeah. Dynamite? Yeah, we don’t sell that, I don’t think. I’m pretty sure, yeah, we don’t sell that, what do you need it for?” Travis was obviously flustered.
‘Shit!’ I thought to myself. ‘This is what I was worried about. Travers thinks we’re terrorists.’ I started looking for escape routes. Luckily James had no such compunction, and responded cool as a cucumber.
“Rodents,” he stated matter-of-factly, his face inscrutable.
“Oh, wow. Yeah. Gosh,” floundered the kid. “What kind?”
My stomach fell down my pant leg. ‘I wonder if they’ll give us cells near each other?’ I despaired. This wasn’t going as well as I had hoped. I thought I might have heard police sirens swiftly approaching outside, and every creak and groan of the store around us was the stamping of booted ATF agents. Still apparently unperturbed, however, James soldiered on.
Furrowing his brow just slightly and leaning towards Travis for emphasis, he replied “Big,” nodding slightly.
“Gophers . . . actually,” I found myself saying. “Big gophers. Making a real mess out of the place, you know?” I was trying to sell an Eskimo a refrigerator.
“Wow. Yeah, gophers. Gosh, ummm, yeah, must be pretty big. I guess they really can make a mess out of things,” Travis weakly agreed. I could taste his apprehensive skepticism. “What have you tried to get rid of em?”
“Just, you know, poison. Uh, flooding.” My mind raced through a conversation between my friend’s dad and another guy I had overheard about a gopher problem he was having. “The, uh. Um, well, the usual. Nothing’s really worked and my dad just wants ‘em gone.”
“Have you – uh -- tried, um, gopher gassers?” Travis asked. “I, um, I think they’re one aisle over. They usually, uh, they usually work pretty good.”
“Oh yeah?” At that moment I couldn’t have been paid any sum of money to stay in the store one minute longer. “No, we haven’t tried those yet but we will, one aisle over? Thanks, have a good night, see ya around.”
James and I turned on our heels and pushed the envelope for conspicuous walking speed, flashing wan smiles at a bored elderly lady slumped at the customer service desk as we strained towards the automatic sentries to freedom. Three steps from the door we both broke into a run and the Metro had started rolling before I had managed to fully shut my door. It wasn’t until we’d made it a block and a half with no lights in the mirror that we nearly died laughing ourselves to death.
It’s been a long time since James and I made Travis fill out an incident report on Orchard Supply letterhead; there are a million and three stories, jokes, and sorrows between then and now, and we still never have managed to procure ourselves any dynamite. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been appropriate (metaphorically, not legally), but that’s never something you can know at the time. My relationship with James has never been centred around destruction, explosion or demolition. Instead, it has been a nearly 10 year history of encouragement, exploration, trust, intimacy (in a masculine way, of course) and growth which I count among my most treasured of gifts. I’m just glad I never had to shank him with a filed down toothbrush in the Big House for a carton of smokes and some lotto tickets during our 16 year stint for Conspiracy and Terrorist Threats.
