4th of July (a good day for arson)

They blamed bottle rockets, but someone set fire to the building across the street. A big old factory - five floors of pigeon, rat and junkie droppings and the piled debris of years of disuse went up with a rush and the flames were so high you could see it blaze from blocks away. It burned so hot that we couldn’t stand on our roof - the heat reddened our faces and the smoke scorched our lungs, and the bricks of our building got too hot to touch. We were engulfed by the heat, afraid we’d burn down too, standing under cascades of sparks and blasts of superheated air.
And then the burning building collapsed, setting the firemen running and the neighbors yelling as bricks tumbled and burning beams flew about. A whole wall fell sideways, crushing all the cars parked in the lot next door and also the unlucky chickens cooped there. They were probably cooked already by the heat. By morning Third Street felt apocalyptic - a smoking, ruined landscape populated by fat rats, skinny cats and the local mob of skeletal stray dogs. For a week they pulled out the twisted metal of flattened cars and lined them up to be carted away - compacted scrap. The smell lingered - burnt neighborhood.
Another year on the Fourth, gangbangers lit up a bag of fireworks they had stuffed under the seat of a stripped car outside our front door. A smothered hissing detonation, then smoldering stinking black smoke until the car burst into flames. It burned so hard the fire licked our front door and second floor fire escape and the choking greasy smoke poured through our crooked old windows. We didn’t want to let the firemen in (safety violations always a good way to evict) but there was too much fire and they were too busy to mess with us. Let us in or we’ll cut the door down. My skin and everything in my apartment was covered with greasy black soot.
As our neighborhood was to drugs, Chinatown was to fireworks -
an open-air bazaar of shells and mortars, M-80s, blazing fountains and
roman candles. They sold openly on street corners and out of car trunks. Which meant that every year our building would shake rattle and roll with weeks of massive detonations in the streets. Smoke hung low on hot nights as the Lower East Side sky flashed colors and smelled of gunpowder. Dangerous and beautiful sparks, like us. We’d watch the shrieking rockets shoot up at buildings and whistle down the street at cars. Kids would shoot them at each other. For fireproofing we’d close our windows in the stifling summer heat and pray nothing landed on our roof.