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’d sit on weekends when my father was away, enjoying breakfast in solitude. One morning, after finishing a bowl of Frosted Flakes, I looked over at the pack of Winstons I’d 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, Kevin noticed me and yelled, “Whoa, Atticus is smoking!” The kids stopped to confirm it was legit. Not fully grasping the concept of inhaling, I blew air through the filter, sending a puff of smoke drifting out. They lost interest as fast as they’d found it and went back to riding around. Donny had built a ramp out of plywood and bricks that looked like a lot more fun than fake-smoking, so I decided on one more bowl of Frosted Flakes and then I’d head out. I set the cigarette down on the bed with the pack and lighter and started eating.
Minutes later, I caught a flicker from the corner of my eye – my bed was on fire.
Panicking, I grabbed the cereal box and tried to beat out the flames. The fire caught the box, scorched my hand, and I dropped it mid-swing. The flaming box hit the bed, bounced off, and landed beside the curtains. FOOM. I watched in horror as the flames slowly climbed the curtains and began to blacken 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. Getting the toys out meant navigating a narrow path between my burning bed and the flaming floor. By the third trip, few made it – I watched in horror as my G.I. Joe helicopter bounced off the sill, hit the floor, and began to bubble and melt.
My 3-year-old brother appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, as the sheetrock in the ceiling began to bow and orange waves of flame rolled across it like a tide coming in. I screeched at him to go get Mom. He turned and calmly walked down the hall.
My mother later told me 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.”
At that age, he’d walk up and say things like, “There’s a witch in the closet.” She had no idea – not until I came sprinting down the hall screaming, “MOM, I’M SORRY – I’M SORRY!”
She called the fire department, and they arrived fast and managed to contain the fire to my room. I still remember the acrid smell that soaked the entire house – burnt fabric, 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 gonna beat ya until me feckin arm is tired!”
And he did. The beating was 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 by a contractor, and the church donated some clothes. 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 neighborhood kids were playing Cowboys and Indians. Larry, my brother, and I decided to send smoke signals like the Native Americans in the old Western movies. We snuck a lighter, piled up dead grass, and lit it.
Then the wind picked up.
In the blink of an eye, the grass caught and spread fast. The fire reached the barn in seconds, and within moments it was ablaze. Inside was my father’s shell loader, canisters of gunpowder, several buckets of live ammo he’d loaded himself, buckets of empty shells, his motorcycle, and dozens of paint cans he’d bought to eventually redo the barn – along with stacks of fresh lumber he planned to use when he “sobered up enough to get around to it.”
I told my brother to go get Mom. He walked slowly to the house.
He walked into the kitchen, nodding his head, and said, “There’s a fire in the barn.”
This time she didn’t hesitate. She called the fire department immediately.
Meanwhile – back at the barn – the wall and roof had collapsed onto the paint cans and, worse, onto the shell loader and gunpowder canisters. Gunpowder only explodes when compressed, and thank God neither canister was sealed, so it didn’t detonate – it flashed off instead, spreading the fire to the ammo buckets. This is the part where shit turns to heck.
With the paint cans ignited and the gunpowder flashed, the bullets started cooking off. When a round cooks off outside a gun’s chamber, there’s nothing to propel the bullet – instead, the casing behaves like shrapnel from a hand grenade. It was a war zone. Casings were popping and whizzing everywhere. We sprinted to the garage but couldn’t help peeking around the corner, watching as thousands of rounds went off in waves. The fire department arrived and could do nothing but crouch behind their truck while the brass flew.
When it was over, there was spent brass scattered across our yard and the neighbor’s. The barn was gone. The motorcycle was gone. Everything inside was gone.
Ping pong paddle time.
This one was thorough. My father made sure to hit the backs of my legs as well as my ass so the bruises wouldn’t show as much. But at the end of it all, he collected a fat insurance check – and I’m sure he claimed more in losses than what was actually in that barn. So it worked out well for him. I didn’t even get a “thank you.”
Pffffffff.
Donny Did It
A few weeks later, the neighborhood kids were playing War in the big field across the street. Donny had brought a canteen, hotdogs, marshmallows, and a lighter, so we built a fire and roasted the hotdogs – then got to the best part. Marshmallows.
As everyone knows, when you roast marshmallows, you want them to catch fire for a moment – you want it a little black. The move is to shake the stick, kill the flame, and eat it while the outside’s crunchy and the inside is all soft and melted. But when Donny shook his, the marshmallow flew off the stick and landed in the dry grass.
The field went up fast. The fire spread and cut us off from home. We ran parallel to the flames until we found a way out, then made it back safe. This time there was no need for my brother’s calm report – the smoke was visible for miles, and the whole town could see it. The fire department showed up again. I’m sure they were starting to recognize me.
This one wasn’t my fault, and I refused to take the blame. I told my father it was Donny – that my brother and I had just happened to be walking by. My brother backed me up without missing a beat. Donny told his own father it was us. Nobody got in trouble. It was a perfect outcome.
A couple of weeks later, my brother and I were poking around the charred field, playing War in the burned-out wasteland. We wanted to dig a foxhole, so we grabbed a shovel from the garage and got to work. We hit something hard – maybe a big rock. Moved over a few feet. Tink again. We set down the shovel and started clearing with our hands, brushing away dirt until we uncovered something large, smooth, and pale.
A bone. A big one.
Only one thing could have bones that big – a dinosaur. We were electric. We talked about how famous we were going to be as we kept digging until our mother whistled for dinner. Our father pulled up just as we were dragging the shovel back and asked what we’d been doing in the field. We told him: dinosaur bones. He walked over, took a look, and called the police. The police called somebody else. That somebody called somebody else, and the next day a team of archaeologists arrived, pitched a tent over the site, and began a full excavation.
It turned out to be a woolly mammoth.
We were ecstatic – right up until my mother read us the newspaper article, and our names weren’t in it. I was furious. I found the lead archaeologist and told him directly that he was a cheater and had stolen our thunder – we were the ones who found it.
He looked like he actually felt a little bad about it. He said, “Wait right here,” went to his van, and came back with a fossil – a bird, normal-sized, pressed into mudstone. You could see the feathers preserved in the rock, little hooks on the wings like a bat, and small sharp teeth lining the beak. He said, “Here. This is for you two.”
We were thrilled.
One escaped marshmallow. A burned field. A woolly mammoth. We found it because of a fire we didn’t even start.
The Mishka Files 