Getting Fired from My Father's Explosives Plant

If you were 15 years old, and your dad hired you and your best friend to work the graveyard shift at his explosives plant, all alone, on a Saturday night, what would you do? It was 1972. I was a long-haired bell-bottomed burboid boy. My dad was an immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island with nothing and made his American dream come true by working his way up from bottle-washer to owner/manager of his very own explosives plant: the Zeus Powder Company, smack dab in the middle of a huge cow field between Dallas and Fort Worth, just outside a little shit-kicking dot-on-the-map called Euless, Texas. Useless, we called it.

As me and my best friend pondered our Saturday night graveyard shift, it quickly became clear that there was only one logical thing to do: work our asses off like madmen, fill our quota by 1 a.m., then throw open the gates of the explosives plant to our menagerie of exotic party animal friends for the blowout of the century, as Zeus fills the heavens with lightning bolts.

So, 10 p.m. Saturday night, it was high ho high ho, off to work we go. We toiled like men-children possessed, busting our buns to the bone, shrink-wrapping case after case of explosives. At midnight it looked like there was no way we'd be done, but somehow we kicked into maxi-mondo-overdrive, sweat pouring off our fevered brows, fingers flying, muscles aching. Perhaps it was the exuberance of our youth. Maybe we just wanted it bad enough. But I like to think that Zeus himself had a hand in the miraculous completion of our mammoth work load. Whatever, suddenly it was 10 till 1, and we were done, Hallelujah, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition! Sure enough, as we strolled triumphantly into the parking lot of the explosives plant and breathed in the sultry Texas night, we could see the first headlights of our fabulous furry freak brothers and sisters arriving, and with great glee we greeted our sweet revelers as they rolled in, ready to make merry till the cows came home.