Sandwich of Ruin!

Busting A Cap

From the age of five onward, my parents gave me a weekly allowance. It wasn't much to start out because, honestly, if you give a five-year old boy too much money, chances are good he'll buy something dangerous. So it was, my first allowance, if memory serves correctly, consisted of 50 cents a week.

Being the resourceful child I was, however, I was still able to find dangerous stuff to buy with that 50 cents a week. My purchase of choice were caps, as in the kind of caps you would put into a cap gun. They came in a very patriotic-looking red-white-and-blue little box, and inside that box was a little red cigar-like roll of caps. The roll was divided into four separate sections, which could be broken off so they could be rolled into a cap gun.

Now, I owned many cap guns during my childhood, and I was always disappointed with them. They were, quite frankly, a pain in the ass to load and, once loaded, the pathetic pipping pops they made were pretty sad. Also, only about one out of every four caps actually made much of a sound, which didn't seem like much of a return on my investment.

Then, one day, my brother taught me a little trick. By taking an ordinary nail, and scraping it across the surface of a cap, he showed me that caps can do fun, firey things other than go "pop." The drawback, however, was that one out of every three scraped caps would burn my finger. That was unfortunate, but it was still way better than boring old cap guns.

I'm not sure when it was that the hammer was introduced. I think I probably observed a neighbor boy up the street doing it, and I felt compelled to copy the behavior. It worked like this: I took a segment off the cigar roll of caps, placed it on the sidewalk, and mashed it with a standard-issue claw hammer.

You'd never guess it by looking at an innocent roll of caps, particularly when you consider the piddly pops that issue forth from a cap gun but, believe me when I tell you that an entire roll, mashed with a hammer, makes a considerable ka-boom, especially when heard from the shallow distance of a five-year-old's arm length. Hammer came down, caps went blooey, ears started ringing.

For some reason, I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

Eventually, I got to thinking. I figured that "if one roll is that cool, then an entire box certainly must be four times as cool!"

So, I took a brand new, unopened box of caps, propped it up on its end, and swung my hammer like the mighty Thor.

Now, at that tender age, I didn't have that much experience with extremely, ridiculously, outrageously loud explosions. But that day, with that swing of the hammer, I had my first lesson. It wasn't even a direct hit, and a substantial number of caps didn't go off, but all that didn't really matter much, because that detonation reverberated around inside my skull so forcefully, I very nearly threw up.

Instead, I thought the moment, at the very least, warranted a good, soul-cleansing cry. I sat there on the sidewalk, in front of my parents house, hammer still in hand, and I bawled. I bawled and I bawled and I bawled. And, gradually, as the ringing pain subsided, the bawling trailed off to some angry sniffles.

Then, after some serious thought, I hit the remaning caps with the hammer.

No one said I was a bright five-year-old.

Posted by Ryan at August 4, 2004 05:00 PM