Come On Baby Light My Fire

365° …Burning Down The House

By age 5, I had a lot of pent-up anger from getting knocked around, and the whole Bad Boy persona started taking root. I used to steal my old man’s cigarettes and sneak off to light them up, pretending I was smoking. My room had a small card table where I would sit on weekends when my father was away, enjoying breakfast in solitude. One morning, as I finished a bowl of Frosted Flakes, I looked over at the pack of Winstons I had filched and knew that people liked to smoke after they ate, so I raised the window, perched on the sill, and clumsily lit one up, attempting to mimic the cool, nonchalant smokers I’d seen. Little Atti the Rebel, puffing away, trying to get my friends’ attention as they rode their bikes up and down the street.

Finally, Devin noticed me and yelled, “Whoa, Atticus is smoking!” The kids stopped to make sure it was legit. Not fully grasping the concept of actually inhaling, I blew air through the cigarette’s filter, causing a puff of smoke to drift out. They lost interest as quickly as it was gained and continued riding around. Dean had made a ramp out of some plywood and bricks, which looked funner than pretending to smoke. I decided on one more bowl of Frosted Flakes and head out there. Setting the cigarettes and lighter down on the bed, I started eating. Minutes later, I caught a flicker from the corner of my eye – my bed was on fire! In my naïveté, I had set the lit cigarette down with the pack and lighter. Panicking, I grabbed the cereal box and tried to beat out the flames, but the fire caught the box and scorched my hand, making me drop it mid-swing. The flaming box hit the bed, bounced over, and landed beside the curtains. FOOM! I watched in horror as the flames slowly danced up the curtains and began to grill the ceiling.

And my first thought was… “My toys!” I ran to the closet, grabbed an armful, and tossed them out the window. On my second trip, the curtains had collapsed, and the carpet in front of the window was burning. Throwing the toys out required navigating a narrow path between my burning bed and the flaming floor. By the third trip, few toys made it out, and I watched in horror as my G.I. Joe helicopter bounced off the window sill, landed on the floor, and began to bubble and melt. My 3-year-old brother appeared at the door, eyes wide with confusion as the sheetrock in ceiling began to bow, as the orange waves of flames rolled across it like an orange tide rolling in. I screeched at him to go get Mom, and he calmly walked down the hall. My mother later recounted that he walked into the kitchen, nodding his head, and said, “There’s a fire in Atti’s room.” She replied, “Well, you better tell him to put it out.” She said that at that age, he would often walk up and say things like, “There’s a witch in the closet…” She had no idea until I came sprinting down the hall, shouting, “MOM, I’M SORRY- I’M SORRY!”

She called the fire department, and they arrived in a flash and managed to contain the fire to my room. I can still remember the sour, acrid smell that permeated the entire house – a mix of burnt fabrics, plastic, and wood, utterly unmistakable. All my clothes and about a third of my toys were gone. When my father came home, something in him snapped. He grabbed a ping pong paddle and said, “I’m going to beat you until my arm is tired…”, and he did. The beating was severe, bad enough that my ass was purple, and I couldn’t go to school for two days because I couldn’t sit down. My room was quickly restored, thanks to a contractor, and the church donated some clothes. So, I didn’t try smoking again until I was a teenager.

The Roof, The Roof, The Roof Is On Fire...

A few months later, the kids in the neighborhood were playing Cowboys and Indians. A kid named Gary, me, and my brother decided to send smoke signals like Native Americans in the old Western movies. We snuck a lighter, gathered dead grass into a pile, and lit it. suddenly a group of Choctaw Indians pulled up in a pickup truck- joking…heh! But suddenly, the wind picked up, and in the blink of an eye, the grass caught fire, spreading rapidly. The fire reached the barn in a flash, and within moments, it was ablaze. Inside the barn was my father’s shell loader that he used to load ammunition, canisters of gun powder, and several buckets of live ammo he had loaded, along with other buckets of shells that were empty… not to mention his motorcycle and dozens of cans of paint that was going to be used to paint the barn, and stacks of fresh lumber that he was going to use to replace the rotting wood when he sobered up enough to “get around to it”. The barn wall went up in flames, quickly spreading to the roof. I told my brother to go get Mom, and he slowly walked to the house. And once again, my brother calmly informed my mother nodding his head, “There’s a fire in the barn.” But this time, she didn’t hesitate and called the fire department immediately.

Meanwhile…back at the barn, the wall and roof had collapsed and landed on top of the cabinet that was holding the cans of paint and, worse, on top of the shell loader and canisters of gunpowder. Now, gunpowder only explodes if it is compressed, and thank God neither of them were sealed, so it didn’t explode but flashed off and spread the fire over to the ammo buckets. Now…this is the part when shit turns to heck…

With the paint cans ignited and the gunpowder flashed, bullets started cooking off. When a bullet cooks off, it doesn’t shoot the bullet out like in the barrel of a firearm because there is nothing to push it through. But outside a gun’s chamber, the casing acts like the shrapnel of a hand grenade. It was like a war zone with bullet casings popping off and whizzing everywhere. We ran to the garage for safety but couldn’t help but peek around and watch as the thousands upon thousands of rounds exploded at different times. The fire department showed up but could only sit and watch behind their fire truck with all of the shrapnel flying around. There was brass all over our yard along with the next door neighbors’.

So, the barn burned to the ground, along with my dad’s motorcycle and everything else inside. And yes, it was ping pong paddle time again. This beating was thorough, and my father spread it around, making sure to hit the back of my legs as well as my butt so that the bruises wouldn’t show as much. But at the end of it all, my dad got a nice fat insurance check, which I’m sure he claimed more in losses than what was actually in the barn. So it worked out well for him, and I didn’t get so much as a “thank you” Pffffffff….

The Snuffleupagus Effect

As the months passed, I turned 6, and my brother turned 4. We lived on the edge of a small town, with a large field across the street where we’d often play. One day, we were playing War out in the field, killing Nazis, and our friend Dean had brought a cantine, hotdogs, marshmallows, and a lighter. So we made a fire and roasted the hotdogs, then moved on to the best part… the marshmallows. I don’t remember whose marshmallow it was, but one of them caught on fire – but that’s good; you want the outside to be a little black, right?… RIGHT! So normally, the marshmallow bursts into flames… and what do you do? You shake it, and the flames go out, and it’s time to eat it because the outside is crunchy, and the inside is all melted and soft. But when someone’s marshmallow caught fire, it flew off the stick when they shook it and landed in the dry grass, setting it ablaze. The fire quickly spread, cutting us off from home. We ran parallel to the flames, eventually making it out safely. This time, there was no need for my brother to calmly report the incident – the smoke was visible for miles, and the entire town could see it! The firemen showed up…again…I’m sure they were wondering what I had set ablaze this time, but this one wasn’t on me. It didn’t take long at all for the flames to be doused, as the field was mainly grass and very few trees other than Mesquite, which is more of a large bush.

Once again…ping pong paddle time. Naturally, I was the one who got blamed and was about to get beaten again, but I refused and said it was not me and blamed the whole thing on Dean- we just happened to be innocently strolling by… and my little brother backed me up on it. So we actually didn’t get in trouble. And the glory of it was that Dean told his father it was us, and he didn’t get in trouble either! So it all worked out in the end, and we all escaped unscathed.

So a couple of weeks later, my brother and I were exploring the charred wasteland that was once the battlefield where many an enemy was felled to our imagination. We decided to play War again and wanted to dig a foxhole, so we got a shovel from the garage and got to work. As we dug, “TINK!” we hit something hard, so we moved over a bit more, and “TINK!” again, we hit something. We began to use our hands and clear away the dirt and uncover something that was large, smooth, and light-colored. We continued scooping around it and discovered it was a bone, a big one! Only one thing could have bones that big… a dinosaur! We were so excited and talked about how we were going to be famous as we scooped and cleared out dirt until our mother whistled, signaling that it was time to eat. Our father drove up about that time and saw us dragging a shovel behind and asked what we were doing in the field, and we told him that we found giant dinosaur bones and were digging them up, so he walked over with us and saw our discovery. So he called the cops, who called someone else, who called this person and that, and by the next day, people showed up to view it and the next thing you know a team of archaeologists arrived and put a tent over it, and began unearthing what in time turned out to be a woolly mammoth! We were ecstatic, thinking we’d get some recognition. However, when my mother read the newspaper article to us, it didn’t even mention us. I was furious and confronted the lead archaeologist, calling him a cheater and accusing him of “stealing our thunder.” because we were the ones who found it! He kind of felt bad, you could tell, and he said, “Wait right here.” He went to his van and came back with a fossil of a bird that was normal-sized and had been embedded in the mud. You could see the feathers, and it had little hooks on its wings like a bat and sharp teeth. He said, “Here, this is for you two.” We were so excited! So the fire ended up having mammoth consequences, quite literally! Who knew that one escaped marshmallow would lead to such a significant discovery?