Charlie Graham was one of those banty rooster types. The kind that grow up short, and spend the rest of their life compensating for it. Consequently, he was as tough as harness leather, had no pain threshold we ever witnessed, and was absolutely fearless. Now the Wild Bunch were all dedicated pyros, an apparent tradition with gun cranks as witnessed today at all CSA gatherings. So it became the norm for all of our experiments to nominate fearless, painless Charlie as the trigger man. Many a legendary tale begins with the words: "Hey Charlie! Light this.".

Not that Charlie was an altogether hapless victim. He once chased a trapdoor spider back down it's hole, and then dumped at least a quarter pound of black powder down the hole, bent on murder. All we did was watch. The resulting ka-boom blew an impressive crater, and removed all of Charlie's facial hair, along with an inch or so of his hairline. Charlie spent an amazing amount of time re-growing burnt off hair. No trace of the spider was found.

So the point of this tale was a gorgeous summer night on the front porch of yours truely. The little country line-shack that was such a beloved home to so many "shining times". Charlie and his new girlfriend, Myself and Patricia, Youngblood, his little brother "Blute", and a local name of John Bryan were all gathered on the porch. I don't recall all the details, but John and I wound up at the kitchen table constructing a bomb. It's just what creative people did as part of any gorgeous summer night. I'm almost certain that adult beverages played a role. We took a sheet of typing paper, cracked open dozens of firecrackers from the stash, and hand-rolled a stogie from hell. Wrapped tightly with layers of scotch tape, it was hard as a brick. But we had no fuse. In a fit of creative genius, we laid out a strip of masking tape on the table, sprinkled it with firecracker powder, and folded it over on itself. We figured about two feet was plenty, and stuffed our fuse into the end of the masterpiece.

Returning to the porch, John took the stogie out to the front yard. It was a pitch black night with no moon, so John had his flashlight. "Hey Charlie!" "Whut"..."Hey Charlie!" "Whaaatt@#$%!&*!!" "Come light this". Muttering additional profanities, Charlie roused himself from his reclined position on the porch cot, and ambled into the yard. Mutterings in the yard, and then John returned to the porch with his flashlight. From the porch, we couldn't see a thing.

In the pitch blackness we saw the flick of a Bic lighter, then another flick, and some muttered profanities. Then another flick, then... Do you remember the old cartoons, especially the Road Runner? The screen is black while Wil. E. Coyote lights something, and then the screen turns bright white with this silhouette of Coyote in the middle? I swear on my honor that this is what we saw. A horrendous ka-boom, and a brilliant flash of white, with this perfect black silhouette of Charlie, bent over to the ground with his Bic. As it turns out, two feet of home made masking tape fuse has a burn rate of less than a second. Oops...

Then there is this awful scream, but it ain't Charlie, it's his girlfriend. Now we are all collapsed in fits of totally uncontrollable laughter. That may have just been the funniest thing any of us have ever seen in our entire lives. The girlfriend glares at all of us in horror, snatches John's flashlight, and runs into the darkness of the front yard. Acrid sulfur smoke drifts across the porch. Up onto the porch she comes, dragging a mumbling, staggering Charlie, with a lopsided grin, and no hair. The sight is downright dangerous, because we haven't been able to breath from laughing for several minutes, and now for sure it's going to be several long minutes more. I think hysterical is the operative word here.

Girlfriend leads Charlie over to collapse on his cot. She is boiling mad, which of course, is funny. She plants her feet, and commences some serious butt-chewing, and now I just know that I'm going to die from asphyxiation. "You crazy %$#@%s, he could have been killed!"...bwahahahahaaaaa!!! She just gets madder, and we beg her to stop. She does, by grabbing a handy broom. Aw dang...now we have to move in this condition! With a few impressive roundhouse swings, she clears the porch, but only moves the guffawing to scattered locations out in the darkness of the yard. In a major huff, she hollers "Charlie!" "Whut?" "Get up, we're leaving!". "Whut did I do?" "Get up!" "Awww...^%$#@%! I was nice and comfortable". She half drags Charlie down to the driveway, and he turns and says "Daylight tomorrow you &%$@%. We got work to do!" "No lollygagging!" And into the darkness went a happy Charlie Graham.