Allison Bly hasn’t blown herself up in five months, and she misses it. These days, for excitement, she goes bowling, or putts golf balls, or, if she’s lucky, the dog gets loose.
“Heidi!” she shouts, after tracking the dog down and dragging her back in the house. “Bad dog!”
Not really, though. It’s Coral Springs, the sort of place where people don’t let their pets run free — that would be against the rules — and they especially don’t let them chase ducks, which is exactly what Heidi did, nipped one right in the tail, and Allison is gleeful.
“Nearly got it,” she says. “She had it by a feather.”
Rules don’t scare Allison. Nothing did, for a long while, and though sometimes she still wonders what she’ll be when she grows up, at 37, she has, at least, discovered fear, just a bit and just enough.
After 15 years, she has retired “The Dynamite Lady.” She blew herself up 1,100 times, at minor-league baseball games, at motor speedways, at lumber store grand openings, at monster truck competitions, in Australia, in Japan, in every state from Hawaii to Maine.
Then her friends on the stunt circuit started getting killed. Todd died jumping an ATV off a slightly damp ramp. If Todd, who was always so fastidious about safety, could get careless, then how much more was she at risk? Doug died when his hang glider collapsed in midflight. Randy died in a head-on collision. Allison was the first one to get to the car, and the image of what she saw there still troubles her.
No one gets decapitated in the suburbs, she tells herself. Her husband loves her. Cooking dinner, vacuuming, an afternoon on the golf course, that takes up her time just fine. No fleabag motels, no greasy meals, no late nights. But no countdowns either. And that’s the hard part. She can still remember crouching down in the semi-darkness, holding the wires just inches apart, all eyes on her in her box, The Coffin of Death, and the voices … three … two … one …
It was all Jim Lawrence’s idea. He promoted a dozen or so novelty stunt acts, people shooting themselves out of cannons, riding motorcycles around a Globe of Death, ramming junk cars into each other. It was mostly men who did it.
He figured the right girl, one who would look fine, but not cheap, in a skimpy outfit, would be a big draw. He picked the blowing-yourself-up stunt because one of its first practitioners was a woman, Carol Floyd, who did the act in the 1940s.
He circulated a flier soliciting tryouts for the next “Dynamite Lady.” Mostly he got biker girls, all chains and tattoos. He tried out one college student, but her parents found out and that was the end of that. Allison, who was working in her mother’s health spa in Tampa, got the flier from a friend.
“Cool,” she thought. “I’ll be ‘The Dynamite Lady.'”
As a kid, she had made bombs with a neighborhood friend who emptied the black powder from his dad’s shotgun shells. He blew two fingers off. That didn’t deter her. In the Army Reserves, she got a job shooting grenades out of a launcher.
She didn’t know exactly what “The Dynamite Lady” did until she met Lawrence in an abandoned field and he explained that the wooden box off in the distance was rigged with dynamite on the outside. Her job was to get inside and blow it up. Like this, he said, touching the end of one wire to another.
The explosion, which shredded the paper inside the box and blew it 30 feet through the air, didn’t deter her any more than the bomb-making miscues of her girlhood friend. Nor did meeting the bomb maker, a former Dynamite Man. He was two fingers shy of 10, and one eye short of two. Don’t worry, he told her, the dynamite is angled to blow outward, for the most part.
After they had reassembled the box, which was designed to collapse on hinges, she climbed inside and took hold of the wires. She hesitated only a second, then came the bang that was louder than anything she had ever heard. She was hooked.
Just to make sure, Lawrence gave her a pop-psychology quiz that he got out of a newspaper. It asked if she liked spicy food and whether, at an amusement park, she headed straight for the roller coaster. She scored high, definitely a Type-T personality — T for thrill seeker.
Once she started performing, Allison found that there was nothing in the world like those 10 seconds before blastoff. She waited sometimes after the crowd got down to zero, savoring the power the wires in her hands gave her, the power to squeeze the breath out of 10,000 voices.
Or, if the crowd was sassy, with voices shouting, “No big deal!” and “Go ahead!” she would touch the wires in the middle of the countdown and then allow the smoke to clear around her motionless body. That always scared them good, and when she stood up and spread her arms, even the most skeptical elements of the crowd erupted with applause.
Except for that one time at some low-class stadium where she had to do the stunt in broad daylight and then had to pick up the box herself and drag it off the field. When the crowd saw it was a hinged box that didn’t actually blow up, they booed her.
She vowed that would never happen again and began experimenting. First she boosted the load to two sticks of dynamite. Then she tinkered with the box, making it out of Styrofoam, putting the dynamite on the inside, filling it with paper and blowing it up. She would examine the debris pattern to see if it seemed the blast that caused it was something she could survive.
She experimented for six months, and then she was inside the coffin again, with the dynamite 18 inches from where she crouched. She emerged from the smoke, her big curly hair intact, smiling her wholesome smile to the blare of a song written just for her act.
Dynamite Lady,
You’d think that that girl had enough.
Dynamite Lady,
You’d think that that girl’s pretty tough … Dynamite Lady …
This is the show, you don’t wanna miss,
She’ll blow herself up, then blow you a kiss.
She signed autographs and got fan letters. The other stuntmen respected her. But each time she blew herself up, her backside was black and blue for days. She broke one hand, then the other, then a foot.
In 1997 she married Bruce Gilligan, a pilot who had his own business and made plenty of money for both of them. He begged her to stop. She remained undeterred until the spate of deaths hit the circuit.
Captain Dynamite died, too, and while he died of natural causes, his long life disheartened Allison. He had been blowing himself up for decades, longer than anybody. He was what? Eightysomething, and so beat up they used to wheel him out in a wheelchair to do his act. Is that how she wanted to end up? Addicted to the coffin until she was in the grave?
She quit at the end of last year, and she’s been a homemaker ever since. She fills in the hours between the breakfast dishes and supper by working on a children’s book and reading a whole lot.
She still gets fan letters. Promoters all around the country still call her. She was a big draw by the end of her career, beloved in some parts of the country. In Arkansas, they used to yell, “Allison, don’t do it. You don’t have to do it. Just stand there.”
The promoters say they’ll double her fee to $4,000. They’ll fly her out and put her up at a nice place. Just one more time, they plead.
Allison tells them no when they call. No, no, no. But, sometimes, every now and then, she says maybe. Maybe in a few months. Maybe one more time in the coffin.
