Kids of Fire

My fascination with fire began at a decently young age, about seven or eight.  It started and ended with matches, the booklet kind.  Any kid could snatch a pack or more at the hostess counter of a local diner, or from a friend’s garage, a back patio, or a glove box.  It was no big deal.  It was a time when most middle-class homes had at least one heavy smoker; when free people were allowed to blacken their lungs and do as they pleased.  With matches in hand, Ross and I went down to Vista Park and into the woods. 

At first, I lit the matches according to directions – pull single match from booklet and strike down firmly.  I suppose I was a bit tentative.  It quickly subsided. 

Soon Ross and I were launching little flaming sticks at each other by the tip of our fingers.  It was a harmless game of dodgeflame and it was blast. Most of the tiny torched arrows missed, but a few found their target; a chest, a leg, the hair.  Ross caught one in the lip and it blistered nicely.  Another stuck to my finger when I flung it and it nearly blackened.  It was then that we stopped and moved on to better things. 

The leaves were just turning then and many had already, prematurely, fallen.  They were crisp and even had a heavy wooden feel.  Some were larger than our heads, and the pile we made quickly grew into a miniature teepee.  Pocahontas would’ve probably wanted to fuck us it was so good.  Of course, I’d have taken first dibs.

We placed the pile of leaves in a barren spot next to an old stump of a half-fallen tree—it had been like that for the few years we had been coming there, and it looked as though it had been brought down by someone older, someone young, someone we probably didn’t want to run in to—and knelt down with our flame.  The leaves caught quickly and Ross and I turned to grab larger things to burn. 

 

We were eight blocks away when we heard the fire trucks.  When we read about it later we learned 70 percent of the trees in the park had been turned to ash, three houses were destroyed, and a mother and her fourteen-month old baby never made it out of one.  For years neighbors were suspicious but the cops never pin-pointed anyone.  Investigators concluded that a dead tree had been set aflame and that wind, the dry summer, and a number of other perfectly aligned variables were the reason the park burned so well, so large. 

 

Ross and I never really spoke about the fire or of really anything after that.  We sort of distanced ourselves from that point on.  It was the summer before fourth grade and we had already ruined people’s lives and ended two.  My wife knows about the situation now and perhaps so does Ross’s – that is, if he’s married and still alive.  As far as I’m aware there are only three people in the world who really know, but it still haunts me.  Every so often I think about Ross.  I think about the situation in which I’d see him again.

Sometimes I imagine him on my front-porch.  He’s just rung my doorbell and I get up to answer it only to realize that all my nightmares have landed in one spot in front of me.  I open the door to meet him.  He’s visibly shaken and seems to have been for a long while.  I ask if he’d like to sit down and if he needs a drink, but he declines.  Sometimes I imagine that he has three police officers behind him and when I step out the door they ask – “Mr. Tursey?  Mr. Geryd Tursey?”  It’s the only question they need to ask if they have all the evidence stacked on their side.  Then come the handcuffs and the Miranda Rights.

I’ve also imagined him with a gun.  It’s the same scenario; he rings the doorbell, I nearly shit myself, and then go out to meet him.  Drink? Sit? No, no, okay.  He’s visibly shaken again but this time it’s because he’s about to pull a gun and shoot me in the chest.

Another setting I have is him at my door in a suit and smile.  “Ger!  How the hell are ya?” he asks.  “It’s me, Ross.”  When I step outside he hugs me and looks into my eyes and smiles again.  It’s a warm feeling and I can see he is obviously doing better than me – better in every way.  He gives me brief summaries of school, his job, his wife and kids, but never once mentions the fire.  During a certain part of the conversation I finally realize he won’t mention it, he’s passed it, it’s not part of him anymore.  And it kills me.  But that scenario, I believe, is far from my own good-fit reality. 

I suppose it makes more sense to me for Ross and me to meet up again after all these years and have the same uncomfortable tension between us as when we parted.  I step onto the porch.  We shake hands and look at each other only briefly. 

“How you been, Ross?”

“Oh, pretty good.”

“How you?”

“Well, you know how it is.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

 “You liven’ around here now?”

“No…no.  I don’t really live anywhere, I suppose.”

“I suppose.”

When You Just Can’t Hold It…

I went home for Christmas this year.  I don’t like going home much.  I think I finally realize that my parent’s house always feels just a bit lukewarm to me.  It’s not the warm feeling I’d like it to be.  It’s a take it or leave it feeling.  I didn’t know how to put a finger on it before.  But I do now. 

There aren’t exactly bad memories I have growing up there – just not fond ones.  I was the youngest of two, just my brother and me, and for some reason I felt like the stupidest one in the family.  Maybe I was. 

My mom wore the pants in the family, but she was a bit out of control.  She had bad approach with people.  She didn’t know how to talk to them sometimes, or at least didn’t recognize how her approach came off.  She didn’t have the sense to view herself from third person, a birds-eye view, a fly on the wall.  I don’t think she was able to reflect back on events from a different perspective.  She believed she was always right.  Perhaps she had to believe that; she had to think that way.  I wouldn’t have wanted to raise my brother and me. 

There are some interesting things kids do when they don’t have proper direction and healthy outlets of exploration.  I journeyed down those paths more than my brother Mike did.  The only thing he did wrong was shoot his pellet gun at cars. 

It was a nice summer day and he came walking up the porch steps.  A big blond-haired guy in sunglasses followed him gripping his shirt collar.  Mike looked sickly and pale. 

“Derek,” he said, “is mom and dad here?”  

I opened the screen door and let them both in.  Mom walked in from the kitchen.  She had a what-in-god’s-name-is-this-shit look about her.

“Mom, I got in trouble,” Mike said.  He was scared shitless, faint-like, and I think I was scared for him.  Though, I look back on it with a bit of fondness now.

“Ma’am, your son was shooting at cars with his b-b gun,” the man said.

“What the fuck – Jesus Christ,” she scowled.

“And he shot out the rear window of my car,” he continued.

“He did what – you did what?  WHY?”

Mike started crying.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t really mean to.”

“What do you mean, ‘you didn’t mean to?’  What did you think would happen, God damn you?” 

There was no reason to dig in on him and watch any more.  I had the story, I knew enough.  Perhaps out of respect, I got up and went to the kitchen.  My fuckups and misadventures were in the grooming process, getting ready for sweet perfection.  I had no room to rub salt in any of his wounds.

 

One of my first really nice fuckups happened when I was about six.  My mom found a sock, wet with piss, stuck in a toy ambulance I had in my room.  She didn’t know what it was at first, but it was a couple days old.  When she brought it to her nose she nearly puked.  She wanted to kick my ass pretty bad when she found that. 

We only had one bathroom in the house and sometimes, as a young boy, a bad piss came on as quick as a sneeze.  All a sudden it was just there and sometimes someone was in the bathroom, usually my dad. 

I didn’t like disrupting my dad when he was in the bathroom.  If I had to go I knocked.  And when I knocked there was a sound of such irritation from the other side.  I knew this because I had done it many times before.  I didn’t like disrupting him in there.  I wasn’t sure why, but somehow I understood how important the shitter was to him. 

“Dad?” I’d say softly.

“Yeahhh?” he’d say back, annoyed.

“I gotta go to the bathroom.” 

I’d then hear a big sigh, “Jesus Christ,” a long pause until finally, Okay, give me a minute.

It seemed as though he didn’t believe me.  As if I waited, peeking around the corner, daily planner and stopwatch in hand, for him to make his routine jaunt into this private realm.

But the problem was that I tried not to knock.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt and truly believed that he would finish before I could hold my piss no longer.  I waited and waited, and hoped and prayed.  It was my mission for me and my dad, and I did not want to fail.  But sometimes I did.

“Oh, God.  Please, please hurry up,” I’d whisper while marching around my small, square bedroom.  “Oh, God. Oh, God.”  I felt the urine come to its last stop.  The time of walking around, shaking my legs, putting it between them, kneading it like dough had all passed.  The flicking, the tapping, the slapping in hopes of inducing pain were gone. ALL ABOARD!  Last stop!

“Dad?”

“Yeahhh?”

“I gotta go.”

“Jesus Christ.”

I thought of my options.  The kitchen sink, no my mom was down there.  She’d slap the shit out of me.  She’d see me throw my pants down and hop up to use her sink as a new toilet.

“What the fuck – Jesus Christ!” she’d have said, rushing at me.

No. We weren’t going that route.

Outside was another option.  But it was cold and there was no time left.  I couldn’t think to find my shoes let alone run downstairs and unlock the door.  I was simply a piss procrastinator.  I was using my last resort, I was panicking, I was pinching my hole closed.  A long tube sock had to do the trick.  They made those things knee high back then and I was fairly certain it would soak up everything I had to give it.

So I pulled the sock overtop of myself and released my stream.  The sock soaked the piss for a while, but five seconds later it proved useless, just streaming down to the carpet.  The stream was loud, as loud as pissing directly onto the floor.  I had to figure something else and I soon found that pissing against a wall is nearly silent. 

I finished off against my white bedroom wall and put the dripping sock into the back of the ambulance.  To the hospital, stat!  This sock has jaundice!  No one would look there, I thought.

I waited for my dad to flush and exit the bathroom.  It was always a horrible experience to use the bathroom after him, especially if I was just using it as cover.  But I was smart enough to know that I would arouse suspicion by not entering the bathroom immediately after his exit. 

“I thought you had to go?”

“Not anymore.  It just disappeared.  I don’t know what happened.”

Yeah, that wouldn’t have gone over so well.

There were no scented lotions or soaps or candles in our bathroom.  Just the remnants of someone’s bowels usually. 

So I’d drop my pants and sit down.  A warm seat, a couple last dribbles, long enough to really play out the act, time enough to really find out what my dad was all about.  Umm – pot roast and green beans, French style.

I was a slow learner and learned by experience mostly, I suppose.  I happened upon a few more “fire drills” and the dowsing of my walls before my bedroom caught fire.  You see, I understood that I could no longer piss in the same spot so I moved the location across the room, behind a metal bookcase.  It was more like a metal framed piece of shit, but it was functional.  It didn’t have a back or sides.  It was just a cheap piece of shit.  I stored Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders and Mousetrap on it, and it was located in front of an outlet.

It didn’t know back then how well a conduit piss makes for electricity, but it didn’t take long to figure out.  I learned mostly through experience.

The 120 volts that traveled through my piss and into my body was quite an interesting experience, to say the least.  I suppose it was a fairly warm feeling.  Looking back, I remember feeling a zap in my asshole and bellybutton before feeling the overall shock.  I think I was lucky.  As young boys aren’t usually the straightest of pissers, I thank youth for saving my life and eliminating a next day’s headline – Boy Dies Doing Darndest Thing.

The shock twanged me so hard that I stopped pissing.  And what was left on wall rolled quickly down into the outlet.

Pop – Pop!  Sparks shot from it.  I stood back.  

Pop – Pop!  More sparks.  Then suddenly, Whuff. 

Flames began to crawl up the wall.  They grabbed my board games.  I tucked my little pecker away before dad ran in.

“What the hell!” he screamed.  He grabbed the games and ran with them to the tub. 

I don’t think my parents ever put the two together – my piss and the fire – but I remember it and feel a bit guilty.  And for years I was reminded of it by the charred blackness on the wall that always came through the fresh coats of paint.