City on Fire (40 page)

He began coming out here to work after school in the early ’40s, when both his brothers shipped out for the war. His main duties were to tidy and secure the premises when the technicians had left for the day. Left alone among the combustibles, though, Cicciaro began to tinker. It quickly became clear that he had inherited his grandfather’s gift for color. He was able to see distinctions between shades that escaped others; to smell, via a mild form of synesthesia, the precise hues that would result from various admixtures of chemicals, and to sense just how far he could push them and still survive. One of his earliest triumphs was what the writer and fireworks enthusiast George Plimpton has called “one of the great, rare blues.” It burned both deep and bright, though Cicciaro’s secret formula was so potent that the shells couldn’t be packed more than a day or two ahead of their firing.

Then, in November of 1944, a U.S. bomber carrying Cicciaro’s brother Frankie went down over the Pacific. Julius Cicciaro was killed in Belgium not long after. There was a posthumous medal for valor. Their mother became one of those black-clad Catholic women who only leave the apartment for daily Mass. The father simply worked harder, as did the remaining son. Winter has long been when the fireworker is busiest, building bombs for the summer shows, and the shop in Willets Point stayed open Monday through Saturday. By the time he officially left school at 16, Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., was logging ten to twelve hours a day in the sheds. Then on Sunday, after church, he headed back to the big public library on 42nd Street and sank down into brittle-paged books.

Even as he immersed himself in history, though, Cicciaro had an eye toward the future. All around him, the world was standardizing. People no longer had to wait for an opera performance; they could buy a record album and listen to it over and over, the same way each time. Yet firework remained immune to even the most basic notion of composition. In the absence of his dead sons, with whom he’d had a sort of telepathy, Carmine Sr. had to rely on flash-blind technicians running around lighting fuses by hand, trying to read the waving of his arms in the dark.

One day, Carmine Jr., reached Willets Point to find these technicians gathered around the radio in his father’s office in Shed 8. The networks were reporting the detonation of Fat Man over Nagasaki. It was the largest man-made explosion ever devised, and the war would be over, with ample retribution for his brothers’ deaths. The men seemed mainly preoccupied with the bomb’s engineering. One explained that the key electrical problem had been getting the explosive material to ignite evenly around the core.… Seeing the bereaved kid nearby, he broke off. But Cicciaro himself was already puzzling out schematics. The A-bomb was almost the inverse of an aerial shell: a transformation of order into heat, where fireworks turned heat into order. Yet the need to control the ignition rate was much the same.

Within a month, Cicciaro was out among the dunes with a crude circuit board he’d built to sequence and fire multiple fuses. This device, later called a “Cicciaro board,” would permit the elaborate synchronization we have come to associate with fireworks shows. It therefore played a big role in readying those shows for television broadcast. As for a patent application, however, Cicciaro told me that it never occurred to him, any more than it had occurred to the fireworker who’d discovered that magnesium perchlorate burned a bright pink. Which is to say that, not for the last time, Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., had brought himself one step closer to obsolescence––to being consumed by the fire he was making.

A BOMB ESSENTIALLY CONSISTS OF A CASING, A FUSE, AND two charges. The first of these, the casing, is a corset of butcher paper several layers thick and up to 12 inches in diameter. Once the fireworker has removed the casing from its wooden form, he fastens a long match, or passafuoco, inside. This will ignite the lifting charge, even as the fire proceeds more slowly through the polverone and the fuse proper. At the center of the bomb goes the smaller metal tube called the cannula, which contains the most powerful powder: the bursting charge.

On the Sunday when we visited Willets Point, the compound was mostly empty, but inside Shed 15, a technician named Len Rizzo, recently divorced (another occupational hazard) was using empty San Marzano tomato cans to prepare some shells for a “First Night” celebration down the Jersey shore. I watched him pack the space between each can’s outer wall and the paper casing with finger-length noisemakers and chemical nuggets the size of bouillon cubes, known as “stars.” These latter were the bomb’s colors. Their volatility was why they got loaded in before either of the charges, Carmine told me––“Always build from the outside in”––though I can’t say this precaution made me any less tense when he invited me to try it myself.

With the color and the sound ready, the shell traveled to another shed, where the cannula received its bursting charge. This was sectioned off to give the shell several “breaks” in the air, like a multi-stage rocket. Into the bottom, in yet another shed, Cicciaro inserted the lifting charge and a paper “bochetta” of firing equipment and sealed off the ends. The final step was to wrap the finished shell in Italian twine, in a kind of cat’s-cradle pattern. This added to the shell’s integrity, I was told, but I wonder now if it wasn’t done simply for beauty’s sake, as a set-dresser might fill a desk drawer inside which the audience will never see. Pulling bakery twine from the dispenser that hung from the ceiling of Shed 7, Carmine’s scarred and mangled hands became almost delicate, and though I never got the hang of the wrapping myself, I could have stood there all day watching him.

The finished shells were stored in Sheds 1 through 3, cut off from the rest of the compound by a stagnant drainage ditch. I observed to Cicciaro that, in its discrete plotting, the compound was an outsized version of a bomb: each element in its own compartment. “Mixing them too early is what gets you killed,” he said. When one fireworks family in Omaha saw its shop go up in the spring of 1973, merchants ten miles away reported broken windows. “The son who died was a careful guy. But you never know. Well, the dogs knew. Neighbors said they were barking half an hour before the explosion.”

It was getting dark out, and I asked if we could shoot something off. Not here, he said. “The city only lets us fire Thursdays through Saturdays. But I guess I know a place we could go. You got anything special in mind?” I said I’d like to use one of the bombs we’d just made. For all his warnings about safety, he came back out of Shed 3 carrying one barehanded and handed it off like a football. “Just don’t drop it,” he said, so I sat with it on my lap in the pickup truck, jumping at every noise as we jolted past Dobermans and over potholes and onto the expressway.

We stopped at a secluded state park half an hour out onto Long Island. Cicciaro had some mortar pipes in his truckbed––that’s what I’d heard banging around back there––and he sank one straight into the graveled parking lot, angled toward an adjacent meadow. He dropped the bomb in. The leader fuse he draped over the mortar’s lip and lit as casually as if it were a cigarette. He walked the few dozen feet to where I was standing. The slowness of that fuse was almost painful. Then the flame went over the lip and disappeared inside.

Nothing happened at first, and I must have moved to investigate, because he grabbed my arm. Sure enough, there came a whooshy thud I could feel right through the sand and a scream like the rending of air and a blurt of light up in the moody night. He’d packed the bomb with multiple colors, one for each of its seven breaks. First came a burst of high-altitude blue, then a cautionary orange, somewhat lower. Then green drowned these out, with an even richer green at the center––like a shell inside a shell. Then amber, gold, and finally a deep incarnadine red as it fell toward earth. This last was bright enough to etch Cicciaro’s slack jaw, and it hit me that he looked like nothing so much as a kid in the grip of an obsession. He might have been standing here the year after his brothers’ deaths, alone in the apparently private language of his work.

CICCIARO WAS USUALLY IN HIS WORKSHOP WHEN I ARRIVED, but on my next trip to Nassau County, the Friday after Thanksgiving, I found the door triply padlocked, the pickup truck gone. I’d been counting on him for a ride back to the train and had already sent my taxi on its way. Walking would take an hour, in the rain. It was this as much as anything that led me, passing back around the front of the house, to ring the doorbell. For a time, no one answered. As I was about to go, though, the inner door receded, and there was Samantha, the daughter, watching through the storm glass. In the childhood photos taped to the fridge she was still roly-poly, but in person, the first thing you saw was how rangy she’d become. The second was that she didn’t know what to do with it. She had the slouchy diffidence you sometimes see in wading birds before they’re startled into flight. Her hair, chin-length and bottle-black, made her face look severe, but then her mouth relaxed, softening everything around it. I wondered if she’d been expecting someone else. “You’re the magazine guy, right? Dad’s not here.”

I gave her my most winning smile and said our wires must have gotten crossed. “I was wondering if I could use your phone to call another cab. And maybe bend your ear for a minute, since you’re home.”

Her eyes narrowed. Then they were huge, dark, pensive again, and the door was opening. She didn’t watch while I flipped through numbers in the kitchen, or even linger in the room. I should have gone to wait at the curb after hanging up the phone. Instead, I followed the house’s one hallway to the bedrooms. I found her sitting on an old canopy bed, looking down at her fingers on the frets of a green electric guitar. There was a record on the stereo; she was trying to teach herself to play along when my knock on the doorframe interrupted her. “I never got a chance to thank you,” I said.

“For what?” On the wall behind the bed were dozens of photographs of rock musicians.

For lobbying Carmine to keep talking to me, I said.

Her shrug was her father’s. “I figure someone gives you a shot at fame, you take it.”

“Fame’s a pretty exalted term for what I have to offer,” I said.

“Not if you’re in the business he’s in.” She idly strummed a chord.

She wasn’t tempted to go work for him, then? I asked.

“Is this what you wanted to bend my ear about? Because if so, it’s already pretty well bent.”

“This is what fathers do,” I said. “They worry.”

“Just because he’s talking to you now doesn’t make my life your business.” Again, her thumb summoned a chord, the wrong one, and well behind the beat. “Anyway, I hope you don’t take it all as gospel, because he’s a little unreliable these days.” The song was an old Van Morrison number. When she bent to play it, I noticed a child’s plastic bandage on her neck, a pattern of white animals covering what I assumed to be an injury. The strings made a dead, detached sound. I had a brief sense of her as in mourning about something. “Or paranoid,” she said. “He thinks people are trying to get him to fold his tents.”

“You mean people from the old neighborhood? The mob?”

“Please. I mean the competition. We’ve had the contracts for the city for like fifty years, and now these assholes, or their subsidiaries, come along and snatch them.” I had heard about these lost contracts before I’d ever met Cicciaro, but so far he’d mentioned them only in passing, like the failure of his marriage, and I knew better than to press him on matters touching his pride. But surely this was just business, nothing personal.

“I’ll admit I was curious as to why he keeps a gun back there.”

“It’s the Sicilian in him. Like we’re in some medieval village where property has to be protected by the sword. Though if anyone did cross him, I’m sure he could handle it. He’s a tough old guy, my dad.”

“Runs in the family, huh?” It was supposed to be a compliment, but came out too solicitous. Then a horn honked outside.

“There’s your ride.”

“E D A,” I said. I can still see her puzzled look. “The chords. E-e-e-D-A. Glo-o-o-ri-a.” And there, for a second, was her smile.

I WOULDN’T THINK OF THOSE CONTRACTS AGAIN UNTIL A FEW weeks later, when, to compensate for standing me up, Cicciaro finally made the offer I’d been waiting for: he wanted to know if I’d come help fire a show. “Don’t expect anything fancy,” he warned me. It was just that rinky-dink First Night he’d contracted for on the Jersey shore. “Fifteen minutes, a couple hundred shells, Happy New Year’s, that’s it.” Still, this looked to be the future of the independent fireworker, and if I wanted to see it, I might as well come along.

The show was to be fired from a refurbished garbage scow set adrift on a brackish inlet on the inland side of the town. Neither Cicciaro nor the other technicians who’d driven down to meet us seemed to notice the smell of souring trash, or the snow that had begun to slant through the parking lot’s lone streetlight. With the barest vocabulary of grunts and nods, we loaded up the scow. Some kids in parkas stood watching at a distance, ready to skitter off into the dark. For all they knew, notwithstanding my necktie and fedora, I was a fireworker, too.

Around eleven, we pushed out onto the water, Cicciaro himself at the wheel. We anchored in sight of the parking lot’s light and the black cattails on the shore, but far enough away, I noted, that should anything go wrong, the casualties would be limited to those of us on board. Then there was nothing to do but wait. The technicians kept to the end of the boat farthest from the mortar arrays, but the distance between them and their boss seemed less spatial than spiritual. He’d recently confessed to me that he’d had to undertake a round of cost-cutting back in the spring. Technology had made it difficult for an unaffiliated shop to compete on price. Big conglomerates could have the Taiwanese build shells for pennies a day, and hire a consultant to come in and program their Cicciaro board. Indeed, as New York dug out from the fiscal crisis that had pushed it into technical bankruptcy, Cicciaro was told that in order to win back city contracts, he would need to halve all his bids. He went to the shop one day and gathered his men together, most of them with families to support or alimony to pay, and announced that, for the first time in history, there would have to be layoffs. Then, once those jobs were gone, he was told that his outfit was too small to compete for the Bicentennial.