4th of July was arguably Mario’s favorite holiday. It was not his favorite due to any sort of patriotic leanings. It was his favorite because it was a giant party.
Years before we lived in an apartment together in Orange County, CA, we would get together with other friends and go to whatever giant rave was happening in or around the Los Angeles area.
Once we did move in together, we started hosting a party in our 1 bedroom apartment. There were years we probably had over 20 people, maybe even more. My memory does get a little fuzzy around these. When you are having a party at your own place, you’re not worried about drinking and driving after all. We would have food, sometimes barbecue, and of course plenty of booze. We also do DJ sets on the turntables.
The first year we lived in this apartment complex, we discovered that the street behind the complex went absolutely wild on the 4th of July. While fireworks were illegal in Los Angeles County, Orange County allowed the purchase of “safe and sane” fireworks (ones that stay on the ground and shoot sparks, basically). Let me just put this out there that there was really nothing “safe” nor “sane” with what everyone did with those fireworks. Besides that, people would go down to Mexico and buy the illegal sort (the kind that go up in the air, like you’d see at a professional fireworks display, but in the hands of mostly inebriated people making poor decisions left and right).
So the party would start at our apartment in the early afternoon. Mario would start drinking wine for breakfast. By 1pm he was already “three sheets to the wind”, as they say. People we knew would breeze through on their way to even bigger parties, but there was a core group who would stay well into the night. Once it started getting dusk, we would all start to walk over to the back street along with everyone else in the area who knew about it.
The first year, we were really unprepared for how crazy it got. We had our couple bags of the legal fireworks. Someone we knew brought Roman candles (not legal). The rest of the street was a mixture of legal and not. As far as I could tell, the police just kind of cordoned off the street at both ends and basically just watched everyone be stupid. They did step in when someone further down the street dropped a small bucket of gasoline off a ladder and lit it on fire though.
Anyway, as the sun set, the chaos ensued. The smoke (and the smell) of burning fireworks was intense. The noise was even more intense. You felt like you were walking around a war zone. I always hoped there were no actual war veterans or dogs that lived on that side of the street (the other side bordered the fairgrounds) as I could only imagine how traumatic it all would have been.
Somehow, everyone had enough fireworks to last a solid couple hours before people began to disperse. Miraculously, neither ourselves nor anyone we knew ever sustained any injuries. We’d all stumble back to our apartment and everyone would continue partying and usually playing records on the turntables until neighbors complained, then switching to playing video games. People who were too drunk to drive crashed out on the floor.
Mario loved it because it was the perfect excuse to basically be drunk the entire day and night and no one would say anything because most everyone else was doing the same thing.
Once we moved up to Oregon, it was just us, so no big parties. We’d get a small amount of legal fireworks once the big fireworks tents started popping up in the last days of June and then usually light them off in our driveway. Of course Mario still had his wine, but this was well past the point of making excuses for being drunk as it was, unfortunately, an everyday thing.
The year he died, I bought a single firework–a big fountain that shot colorful sparks into the air for about a minute–and lit it off in his honor. Since then, there have been no fireworks. It’s just not the same and all it does is remind me of the past.
