City on Fire (39 page)

What was in these envelopes? Subpoenas? Payments to a secret mistress? To an illegitimate child? He knew better than to ask. Amory maintained a far-flung network of contacts, not only in the intelligence circles he’d moved in as a young man, but also with the tremendous data machine that was taking over finance; he saw information as his business. Not Keith Lamplighter. He just stooped and pushed the envelopes through. The arrangement was a little uncomfortable, sure. Grandees of old New York had once lived in these brownstones, but now it was territory openly hostile to his social class. And what if someone he knew should see him down here? But of course, not even the natives saw him. People were too busy getting high, or too scared to come out on the streets. The closest he would come to human contact was the bark of a dog or the muffled noise of a stereo.

Then, after the fourth or fifth time, he was walking back over to the safer blocks to find a cab when a sick feeling overtook him. He balanced his briefcase on the rounded top of a postal box and flicked open the clasps, and there inside lay the long, unmarked envelope he’d been supposed to deliver. This might not have troubled him so much except that its fraternal twin, a sealed stock warrant awaiting the signature of an important client, was missing. He tried to recall the moment when he’d slid the envelope through the mailslot, but couldn’t. His mind had been already back uptown, already home. He returned to the townhouse. The noise coming through the walls of the basement and the battered steel door with its giant hieroglyphic graffito now had the deep, amphibious thud of live music, but it couldn’t quite be called music. It was more as if someone was shooting up a music store. He knocked until his hands hurt and waited for some lull in the noise, but there was none. August of 1976, with the air thick, the sun beating down.

At some point since he’d last noticed it, the buzzer had been ripped out like an eye from its socket; a single, twisted ganglion of wire corkscrewed from the doorframe. He squatted and lifted the squeaky flap of the mailslot, to see if he could see his envelope lying on the floor inside. Sweat trickled from hairline to eye. He could feel watchful presences behind drawn curtains across the way. Did people ever call the cops down here? And if they did, did the cops dare to come? Maybe if he fashioned the buzzer-wire into some sort of hook.… He was about to shout through the slot, to ask if someone could let him in, when a shadow fell over him. He looked up. There, suspended against the humid sky, were two very long legs in denim. The young woman they belonged to was cradling a stack of records against her hip. Her black tee-shirt was cropped short to reveal a pale strip of belly. Her brown hair went gold where the sun hit it. She squinted down at him fiercely, but her voice, when it came, was curious, rich, throaty—almost amused, he might have said, long after he’d forgotten the exact words she spoke.

Which were, for the record: “Hey—is there something you’re looking for?”

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The Runaway

In My Father’s House, There Are Many Mansions

What a Kingdom It Was

monkeys invade the heavenly palace and chase out the dragon

Year of the Snake

No One Goes There Anymore

The Fireworkers

THE HOUSE WAS A WHITE, ALUMINUM-SIDED RANCH SET BACK off a cul-de-sac amid the ramifying suburbs of Nassau County, Long Island. Save for its relative isolation there, it might have been any of ten thousand others. The plumbing was temperamental. The walls bled sound. But when Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., drove his young wife out from Queens to look at it in the spring of 1963, he saw that it would serve: out back was just enough flat land to fit a patio, a cottage-sized outbuilding, and a stand of pine and elm to screen the traffic on the Long Island Expressway, toward which the rest of the lawn ungently sloped. I was living in Manhattan then myself, and, in the years after the Cicciaros moved to Flower Hill, I must have passed the place a dozen times on summer treks out to Montauk without giving it a second look. Certainly, I never imagined that one of America’s greatest indigenous artists made his home there. Then again, until the Bicentennial summer of 1976 and the events that followed from it, I probably wouldn’t have thought to call what Cicciaro does for a living “art.”

What Cicciaro does for a living––or did, until very recently––is shoot off fireworks. To his colleagues, the show he put on over New York Harbor on July 4, 1971, remains the greatest achievement in his field in a generation. So neglected is this field in the outside world, however, that no one can even agree on a name for it. Its seminal texts are all hundreds of years old. Casimir Simienowicz’s Artis Magnae Artilleriae, from 1650, uses whatever is Latin for “firemaster,” while other period works refer, somewhat cryptically, to “Wild Men” or “Green Men.” More recent sources speak of “pyrotechnicians,” but I have found that the men themselves (and they are all men) prefer “fireworker.”

They are of Italian descent, largely––the Rozzis of Cleveland, the Zambellis of Pennsylvania, the Ruggieris of France––and they are clannish and recessive and tight–lipped and gruff. Indeed, when I first found my way to that house on the hill, Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., was reluctant to talk about himself at all. Asked about his accomplishments, he fell back on platitudes. “You don’t choose it so much as it chooses you,” he must have said three times in as many minutes, as we stood in the doorway of his workshop. When I pressed him to elaborate, he said only that firework was in the blood. Growing up, he’d watched his older brothers, Frankie and Julius, load shells onto the family barge. He’d watched his father pilot it out into New York Harbor. Later, he’d watched from the deck as the sky lit up and thousands of heads along the waterfront tilted back, mouths widened into “o”s. My suggestion that this was rather an extraordinary way to spend one’s youth yielded only a shrug and another truism: “No one goes into this job for the glory.”

As if to underscore the point, Cicciaro carried himself less like an American master than like a pirate exiled to the mainland. He had eight o’ clock shadow and a belly like a catcher’s pad and a checked wool shirt several sizes too big, as if his own big frame might disappear inside. His left hand was missing half its ring-finger (most fireworkers are missing some appendage or other), but he never made reference to this, or to the silver band he wore below the remaining knuckle, except to turn it around and around while I made my pitch for an interview. On a table in the workshop was a shotgun. He might have turned me away entirely, but when my military service in Korea came up, it seemed I had passed some test. We were soon seated on his back patio, drinking cans of Schlitz from a cooler.

Beer, I found, relaxed him. Provided the subject was remote enough, he could be positively digressive. When I told him my research into fireworks had gotten little further than a 16th-century Sienese named Vannoccio Biringuccio, he said, “You’ve just got to know where to look.” He must have spent hundreds of hours when he was a teenager digging around at the library. “Chinese history, technical manuals in chemistry and metallurgy, military history around the Hundred Years’ War … Did you run across Francois de Malthus? Back then, the guy firing your shows in peacetime would also be the one mixing your gunpowder in battle. I could probably come up with call numbers, but my memory’s not what it used to be.”

This was another feint, I thought. Cicciaro was only 48 years old; his memory was manifestly good. Moreover, he wanted to talk. That summer and fall, we would spend many hours on his patio, where I coaxed out of him the story of his profession, a Spenglerish tale of triumph and decline. We got comfortable enough with each other that he seemed not to care if I went inside to freshen the sodapop I switched to, rather than try to match him Schlitz for Schlitz. But when I confessed that I hadn’t expected him to allow me back after that initial meeting, he said I’d gotten lucky. His daughter could talk him into just about anything.

Her name was Samantha, she was 17, and she was the first truly personal subject he’d been willing to broach. This was back in August. In a month, when the dorms opened, she would enter NYU’s School of the Arts. Cicciaro didn’t seem to connect the word “arts” to his own work. “Music, movies, poems … she’s crazy about all of it,” he said, though he hoped, given what he was paying, that college would steer her toward something “more practical.” He lifted the beercan perched on his knee and gestured to me. “Maybe even journalism. She’s been making this whole magazine by herself, with pictures and everything. Not that she’d let me read it.”

Later, he would have reason to speak of Samantha and her secrets with anger and with sorrow. But that first time, his mouth contracted as if he’d snuck in a lemon drop. Then we sat in pleasant ignorance and talked some more and watched the wind-tossed trees at the end of the yard, whose leaves were going gold at the edges. It was three o’clock, and then three thirty, and the traffic was thickening on the L.I.E. and the sun was going down.

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT FIREWORKS, WE’RE ACTUALLY TALKING about three distinct things. Roughly half of the 653 members of the Confederated Pyrotechnics Guild work in military ordnance, and wouldn’t know a Roman candle from a hole in the ground. The rest are in “amusements,” which further subdivides into stationary “set pieces” and “aerials.” Any self-respecting fireworker knows how to fashion a set piece. At the holiday shows I saw growing up in Tulsa, a burning frame spelling out “God Bless America” was a ubiquitous coda. A scant few decades earlier, the grand finale itself would have been a life-sized palace or Catherine wheel spewing sparks onto earth or water. Improvements in technology, however, have left the aerial branch ascendant. The staple of a professional show today is the mortar-fired shell, which you’ll rarely hear referred to in the trade as anything other than a bomb.

The basic science behind both set pieces and bombs Cicciaro traced back to the nameless Chinese villages where gunpowder first appeared some 2,000 years ago. “Of course it wasn’t gunpowder then,” he told me, “because there weren’t any guns.” Still, to judge by their efforts at monopoly, the emperors of the Tang dynasty must have recognized the powder’s martial implications. By the seventh century, fireworks were a fixture of court occasions, and fireworker an official position, like magician or Lord High Executioner. Then, around 1300, Marco Polo succeeded in smuggling a few unfired shells back to Venice. “Or anyway, that’s the story.” But the alchemists working for the doges would prove no better than the Tang emperors at containing the supply; over several centuries, fireworks spread down the boot of Italy.

By the 1850s, when they reached the ancestral home of the Cicciaros, the village of Pozzallo in Sicily, the Italians had made modifications. One was to replace the closed spheres the Chinese favored with open-ended cylinders that tumbled in the air, spraying sparks even before they burst. Another was “polverone,” a black powder alloyed with various dampening agents to slow the burn. And in the early 19th century, fireworkers discovered dozens of other alloys that broadened their palette beyond the traditional off-white. There were strontiums for red, sodiums for yellow, bariums for green. As a general rule, Cicciaro said, colors become less and less stable as one moves up the visible spectrum. Blue is generally thought to be the most volatile, and the hardest to produce, but Pozzallan lore holds that while still in short pants, Cicciaro’s grandfather, Gian’ Battista, found a way to go beyond it, to a purple that verged on ultraviolet.

However true this was, Gian’ Battista Cicciaro would land around the turn of the century in the New World, where fireworks became one of the first mass entertainments. The American city of that time was primarily an economic unit, not a cultural one, and ethnic and class factionalism threatened to rip it apart. Yet the impromptu infernos Gian’ Battista mounted on holidays gave the restive Italians and Irish and Germans and Jews something in common––at least while they lasted. This was not lost on Tammany Hall. The firm of Cicciaro & Son Amusements was swiftly chartered and granted renewable ten-year contracts for Independence Day, New Year’s Eve, and the Feast of San Gennaro. In 1934, with a gang war diverting the Chinatown tongs, Gian’ Battista’s son and successor, Carmine Sr. added Chinese New Year to the list, consolidating the family’s control over what fireworkers call the “Big Four.”

Carmine Jr., who by this point had already witnessed dozens of shows, claims to remember none of them. What he remembers, he says, is lying awake afterward in the family apartment on Mott Street, waiting for his father’s feet to creak the front stairs. The smell was pungent, vaguely diabolical. “It stood out almost like a yellow or red in the dark,” he said. “And then next day there’d be a ring of black powder left in the bathtub for my mother to clean. You could write your name in it with a knuckle.” It was by scraping this residue into a Knickerbocker mint tin, drying it out on the rooftop, mixing in some illicit compounds, and inserting a match end for a fuse that Carmine Cicciaro, Jr., age seven, manufactured his first bomb.

I’D BEEN GOING OUT TO THE HOUSE FOR ABOUT TWO MONTHS when Cicciaro offered to “show me the shop.” I thought he meant the outbuilding below, his private workshop, whose noisy exhaust fans were why (I supposed) no houses had been built nearby. Instead, he drove me out to the compound his father had erected in Willets Point, Queens, near the end of the Depression.

Today, Willets Point is a zone of razor-wire and dog bark and wastewater in open ditches backed up against the IRT trainyards. Until a modern sewer system is built, no residential buildings are permitted, so its chief tenants are metalworking shops and salvage lots and unmarked warehouses toward which tankers and semi trucks rumble. It can be hard to believe you’re even in New York until you glimpse, past the nippled domes of the water treatment plant, the finials of Midtown. Just next door is the Cicciaro & Sons compound, 17 numbered Quonset huts on an acre or so of grassless land. A copper plate has been grounded to a pole beside each door; before entering, you touch the plate to discharge any static electricity you may have accumulated. (Watch a fireworker carefully, and you’ll see it becomes a habit: at the doorway of any kitchen or bathroom or gas station kiosk, a hand paws unconsciously at the jamb.) When a light is turned on in one of the huts, a red bulb outside lets everyone know it is occupied. And behind the last row of sheds is the back acre known as “The Lab”: a scrabbly emptiness sheltered on all sides by man-made dunes whose inner slopes, scorched an igneous black, are dotted at all hours with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of the local gulls. It’s the nitrate buildup in the dirt that draws them, Carmine told me. “Like you crave the iron in a steak. Some mineral imbalance in the blood.”