Oh Rodney

We had a Rodney. Every neighborhood did. Ours was Milwaukee, late 60s, early 70s, summer so bright the sidewalk looked bleached. Me, Mikey, Davey, Corey, Danny, Dougie, and Jimmy were the audience. Rodney was the show. He did not just make bad decisions. He auditioned them. He workshopped them. He took feedback notes and then doubled down.

Back then America still let kids learn how gravity, heat, and common sense worked. If you fell off the monkey bars, you got a lumpy cast, a nickname, and a story. No committee meeting. No sign that said “Use At Your Own Risk.” The risk was the point.

So one afternoon Rodney announces the plan. “I need a Ball jar and dry ice.” Not a request. A proclamation. We all look at each other like jurors who already know the verdict. He has the jar. Of course he has the jar. He probably stole it from his mother’s shelf between the peaches and the pickles. He wants the dry ice. Where does a kid get dry ice? From the ice cream man, obviously, because in that America, the ice cream man was also the bomb squad quartermaster.

We hear the bell two blocks away. Ding-ding, salvation on wheels. Rodney sprints, we stampede behind him, and the truck lurches to a stop. The ice cream man leans out with that look adults had back then: It is your life, kid, and I cannot stop you from living it loudly. Rodney goes, “Got any dry ice?” The man asks, “What are you going to do with it?” And Rodney, honest to a fault, says, “Put it in this jar, screw on the lid, and watch it explode.” The man nods, like he has heard worse. He fishes out a jagged white chunk wrapped in paper and says, “Be quick.”

This is comedy the way George Carlin talked about it. The joke writes itself, and the punchline is already sweating.

We form a semicircle on the curb. Rodney drops in the dry ice, vapors curl like a mad scientist kit, and he twists the lid until it squeals. Mikey whispers, “This is science.” Davey says, “This is Darwin.” Dougie starts humming taps. Jimmy prays to whoever handles neighborhood idiots. Rodney sets the jar in the middle of the street like it is an art installation. Then he sits. On the curb. Three feet away. Face level.

Time stretches. The jar hisses. Corey says, “Maybe it does nothing.” Danny says, “Maybe it launches to the moon.” I say, “Maybe we should step back.” Rodney says, “Maybe you should shut up, I am concentrating.”

We stand there, all of us, learning physics the way nature intended: with no safety officer and a front row seat. The lid vibrates. The glass sings. You can feel the pressure like a held breath. Then, the universe claps.

Boom.

The sound bounces off the whole block. A flash, a snap, and the jar turns into a swarm of angry bees. We all dive. Rodney does not. Rodney takes the lesson point-blank. When the steam clears, he blinks like a cartoon character after a dynamite stick misfires. There are tiny glittering dots in his forehead. Not sparkles. Shrapnel. He is smiling. Of course he is smiling. He has just proven that adults are not lying when they warn you about things.

We walk him home like a parade of idiots escorting their king. His mother sits him at the kitchen table with the good light. She has tweezers and a look that says she has blamed him for worse. She plucks glass out of his skin like she is harvesting a very dumb crop. We stand in the doorway, hats in hand, giving moral support by trying not to laugh out loud.

His father comes in from work with that end-of-shift sigh. He sees his boy, sees the tweezers, sees the milky little shards, and asks the question fathers have asked since fire met children. “How did that happen?” Rodney explains, very matter-of-fact, like he is delivering a book report on Consequences. “I put dry ice in a Ball jar and screwed on the lid.” His father pauses. You can hear the tiny gears of generational wisdom grind. “So you were just staring at it. Waiting for it to blow up in your face.” Rodney nods. “Yes.” His father looks at us, the Greek chorus of accomplices, and says, “What am I raising here, a row of morons?” We shrug. The evidence is not in our favor.

Here is the thing. Nobody sued Ball. Nobody banned dry ice. Nobody wrote a three-page memo about playground protocols. The lesson was simple: Do dumb things and it hurts. Do smart things and it still might hurt, but usually less. You learn. You adjust. You keep the monkey bars.

We walked out of Rodney’s house that evening with the sun sliding down and the street smelling like cut grass and summer. We were quiet for a block, thinking hard, which for us was unusual. Then Rodney, bandaged and proud, meets us on the sidewalk like a victorious astronaut. “Next time,” he says, “we use a bigger jar.” And we all nod, because this is America and this is childhood, and the only way out is through a better idea and a slightly safer distance.

That was our Rodney and the America we grew up in during the late 60s.