November 11, 2003

Several years ago I temped for a summer at a mortgage company in New Jersey. My job was to make copies of mortgage files. If you've ever gone through the process, you know that a mortgage application and its related paperwork are a chaotic mélange of legal-size paper, standard-size paper, checks, check-stubs, receipts, and oddly sized forms, all stapled and paper-clipped together in an unwieldy mass that can be several inches thick. Copying these brown-foldered monstrosities was a real pleasure, as you might imagine. I performed this task during a sudden rate-plunge, much like the one we've been seeing recently. While I was at the company, there were so many refinances and new mortgage applications that mortgage folders were piled two feet high on top of all the file cabinets that hulked along all the walls. Two employees left on disability due to mental stress. And I tried to blow up a vending machine in the office kitchen with a bomb.

I'm still unclear about the exact chain of thought that led me to conclude that yes, it is meet that I blow up this vending machine. I know it didn't have anything to do with the stress that sent two mortgage processors home gibbering and drooling--all I did was copy the applications. This lack of clarity may have something to do with a certain red plastic bubbling smoking device that I had inherited from my good long-haired friend Johnny A., and was using frequently at that stage of my life.

The vending machine in question was an older sort that isn't very common these days. It had a revolving, lazy-Susan style circular column, made up of several round trays, and divided into compartments. A row of clear plastic doors fronted the thing, and you got your item by pushing a button that rotated the circular column. When your item was lined up with one of the little plastic doors, you put in your money, slid the door aside, and got your plastic-wrapped stale-bread and questionable tuna sandwich, or your package of Ritz mini pseudo-cheese cracker things, or your Grandma's Homestyle Molasses N' Monosodium Glutamate cookies. All very Automat.

One day, I pushed the button, spun the column, lined up my food item with the plastic door, and put in my money. But something went wrong. Either the door didn't open, or the item compartment was misaligned, or some other terrible thing. I can't recall. Again, this may be the result of flowery smoky indulgence, or it may be the result of the trauma of a snack denied. But I decided that I'd had enough. The machine had taken my money, and therefore I would destroy it. I would build a bomb. I'd feed the machine a dollar. I'd empty one of the compartments of a snack--the snack which the machine had so smugly denied me--and place the bomb in the compartment. I'd light the device, close the little door, and spin the column around so that it came to rest deep within the machine. Then I'd leave the kitchen, and look as surprised as everyone else when the damn thing exploded. I formed this plan right there, as I stood looking through the clear plastic door at whatever it was that I couldn't get at.

So, I looked up a gun shop in the local phone book, one that offered supplies for loading your own shot, which meant they carried black powder. I left the office and drove 45 minutes to that gun shop. I bought a pound of black powder in a heavy black plastic jar, paying cash. In the hovel-style room that I was stealing from a friend of mine, I had a few loops of stiff green model rocketry fuse. I was going scrounge up a suitable container, fill it with the powder, stick the fuse into it, seal it up a bit with some putty, and drive back to the mortgage company. The deed would be done by three PM.

I made it all the way back to the house, with that pound of black powder on the passenger seat the whole way. I went into my room, sucked down a bong hit or two, then left the powder in my room and headed back to the office. No one noticed that I had taken an extra-long lunch. And no one, certainly, knew how close the kitchen had come to being covered with the shattered remains of vending machine, old tuna, cookies and mushy apples.

For a good hour and a half, I was going to do it. I left work and drove at a high rate of speed to obtain what I needed. I planned how long the fuse would be, where I'd be in the office when the bomb went off. I knew to wipe everything down, to remove incriminating prints. I was ready.

Remembering it now, it's quite clear that I was out of my mind, just a bit. I don't recall, exactly, what else was going on in my life at that time. But whatever my situation, there came a point where destroying a vending machine with a homebuilt explosive device to exact revenge for a snack denied came to seem like a Good Plan That Needs To Be Carried Out Right Away. I'm not sure that my current tension-reduction strategies are any better, although they tend not to involve blowing things up which is, I suppose, progress.

Sometimes, I think that I'm just a very odd fellow, and always will be.

The black powder later appeared as a series of pyrotechnic special effects in a short film, in which I played a much-abused freaky longhair who is given a big fat Book O'Magics by a playground elf and uses his new mastery of the Black Arts to turn his enemies into little girls.