Boom Baby
By Vasya Volkov
By Vasya Volkov
We were wandering the night streets of Pattaya, Thailand, the number one sex tourism destination in the world, making it an amazing city if you're a middle aged, overweight, Russian man. And the worst if you're not. It was a few days before New Year's, which we were going to spend on Ko Chang, one of Thailand's biggest islands, with a large group of friends. Andrew mentioned that we should buy fireworks before the celebration, but I was too mesmerized by the hookers and creepy old men on the streets to even think about fireworks.
Suddenly he made us stop in front of a tiny toy store cluttered with bootleg Barbies and stuffed animals. There were absolutely no signs for explosives. Still, Andrew said, "I have a good feeling about this place," and walked inside. He began asking the sales lady if she sold any fireworks. She understood absolutely no English, so he resorted to making extravagant hand gestures of mortars blowing up in the air. Her eyes light up. Without any hesitation, she started digging through a six-foot tall pile of toys. Dolls, toy cars, legos, every toy you could ever imagine, she pulled out of this pile until finally she found what looked like a clay cannon ball, maybe eight inches in diameter with a flat base and a taped up hole on its top. She handed it to Andrew, who immediately started shaking it around. The lady's face instantly transformed into the most petrified expression I had ever seen, as if she thought all of us and her entire toy store was about to explode. She quickly grabbed his hands to make him stop shaking it. This mystery bomb caused such an intense reaction from the shopkeeper that Andrew knew this was exactly the treasure he had been looking for and immediately bought two.
As we rode the bus to the island the next day, we wondered about the fireworks. What could they be? Do they shoot mortars? Are they just fountains? Will they even work? Will they explode? Why was the shop keeper so afraid? When we showed them to the rest of our friends they were all intrigued, but some people felt that buying home made explosives in Thailand was not a good idea and started proposing safety regulations to make sure our New Year's celebration does not turn into a catastrophe. We agreed that we would bury the firework in the sand to prevent any shrapnel from flying at us and so it doesn't start shooting balls of fire in an undesired direction, everyone would stand really far away and we would do it at a desolate beach where nothing could catch on fire.
Finally New Year's Eve arrived. We were at a huge beach party with hundreds of tourists and locals celebrating together. There was a huge ring of fire. Music was blasting and fireworks were exploding above us. It was the perfect time to set off our own stash. But the days worth of anticipation and fear had us worried that this crowded beach was not the best location. What if the bomb explodes and shrapnel hits the crowd? What if we accidentally set the hotel right next to is on fire? What if out little clay cannon ball ruins the celebration for all of these happy people? As we played out the many potentially horrible scenarios, a tiny Thai lady walked by us carrying a firework that looked just like ours, only three times larger. She set it down twenty feet from our group, lit it, and slowly walked away from it. Within a few seconds a huge fountain of sparks flew into the Southeast Asian sky. Even though the sparks landed all over us, we didn't care. We were pretty drunk, a little high and totally mesmerized by the millions of lights coming out of this magical clay ball. All of the paranoia that we had built up about Thai firework engineering vanished and I felt very bad that we ever distrusted the Thai people or the things they would sell to a group of American tourists. We lit our fountain cannon soon after and couldn't wait to get home to enjoy the second one on a more private beach. That never, however, happened because we had to battle British Hercules on the taxi ride back to the hotel. But that's a whole different story. |