Yiro's Hairspray Flamethrower

I used to start fires. It started small. Burning paper in the woodstove at home. Then, with the discovery that hairspray is flammable, homemade mini-flamethrowers. I would leave my house with a lighter in my pocket, and a can of Aqua-Net in a backpack. I had a friend, Yiro, who would do whatever I did, and so, he started fires. He usually supplied the materials, and when required, the safe house. His mother didn't care.

Like I said, it started small.

Let me step back for a moment, to when it actually began. I have always been a fan of destruction, as far back as I can remember. Equally so with creation, I suppose, which gives me what? A god complex? Sure. Anyway, I always liked to destroy things. Sandcastles, school projects (mine, or other kids), toys, tree houses, whatever. I wasn’t a bad kid. Don’t get that impression. I just occasionally enjoyed dabbling in annihilation. So, it is safe to say, I carry a streak (that would present itself in a wide variety of ways throughout the remainder of my life). My father triggered the fires though.

I had always enjoyed watching flames. Their dance. Their life. The crackle. It excited me, turned me on, on some primal level. Whenever we were camping, or at a bonfire, or heating the house with a woodstove, or cooking on a gas stove, I watched. I saw.

My father left the family for good (after years of false starts), when I was twelve years old. Until this current reflection, I never made the connection. I began to spend a lot more time in our living room, the one with the wood stove. My mother always liked to keep the door closed, so the fire burned slower, but I liked to watch. Whenever she wasn’t around, I would open the door and stare. It was calming, much like noise music and a beautiful woman’s body are to me today. It centered me. I would build the fire. Add to it. Blow on it and watch the flames rise and swell. Watch them eat the wood and the paper, things that were, were no more, once the fire. Soon though, wood and paper began to bore me. I began feeding the stove my old toys. Pretending they would scream as their plastic faces bubbled, melted, and stank. And when it was over, when the excitement faded, I felt like less. I had had my moment of fire and control, but after, I was just short a few old toys.

I was hanging out with Yiro a lot back then. My mother thought he was a bad influence, but I think that we were equally bad for each other, which made for some great times. We would vandalize everything. Signs, walls, summer camps, it didn't matter. We smoked cigarettes and pot. We drank, we became teenagers together. The shitty kids in band t-shirts with dirty hair and bleak futures. That was us. He is a well known, well established body piercer now. I am an unknown, unpublished writer. Fucker.

Anyway, it was Yiro who showed me the hairspray trick. He came over to my house one morning during a school vacation in the winter, all excited.

“You have to check this out.” he said.

He opened my wood stove, and from his hoodie took out an aerosol can of hairspray.

“You have a lighter?” he asked.

I did, and handed it over.

He lit a flame, pointed the hairspray at it, and pressed the button. A flame shot into my fireplace. He held his finger down and the flame kept right on living. It was an angry flame, and had a force to it that stationary pit fires had not. This was a new type of fire for me. This, in my blossoming adolescence, was just one more doorway for me to walk through, much in the same vein as punk rock, my sexual identity, and parental independence.

That morning, amid the snow and ice, we walked down to our neighborhood beach, and with our miniature flame thrower, torched everything from the ice, to some frozen driftwood, to a dead fish we uncovered with a stick. It smelled awful.

Eventually, we got cold, and went back to his house. We listened to CD's, watched MTV (when it was still worth watching), ate, and basically just wasted the day. The vacation ended, and we went back to school. Winter ended, and grass began to show again. By then, we were becoming fairly psychotic with fire. We had begun to “practice” Stop, Drop, and Roll. We would pour hairspray (and rubbing alcohol, which we had discovered burned immensely better) on our clothes, light it, and try to put it out before we would burn. Sometimes, it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

A year went by. We discovered other things. We did other things. Our lives weren’t completely about fire, but it popped up occasionally. Eventually, in the spring of 1998, we met another group of kids, who for whatever reason, were interested in being like us, as fucking stupid as that sounds. So, being the “super cool” kids we were, we took the others out into the woods, and began to show them how to play with fire. Some of the kids pussied out, went home and told their parents. We weren’t allowed to hang out with them after that. One of them though, was all about it.

His name was Cornell.

Yiro and I had a falling out. A stupid disagreement (one we would repeat a few more times before permanently parting ways a few years later) over a girl. I began to hang out more with Cornell. In a way, hanging out with him was better, because I already saw myself as the boss. He wanted to learn from me, and I wanted a bitch.

Summer was approaching, and you could tell all of the kids in school were getting restless. Virginities were lost, fights were rampant. Cornell and I, we set fires.

At first, we just started bon fires at the edge of a small pond near his house. Huge fuckers that would burn for hours while we smoked pot and watched the trees sway. It satisfied both of us for a few weeks. In retrospect, it may be one of the most relaxed periods in my entire life.

We were walking home from one, one Friday. If I remember correctly, we were going to go to the town Bowling Alley to loiter that evening and sing drunken karaoke, but in the woods on the way back from the pond, we saw a couch. Not the sort of couch you would expect to find a half mile in the woods, but a new couch. Some of the pillows and cushions were still wrapped in plastic.

I set it on fire.

I have no idea why it was there, or what it was made of, but that fucking couch went up like it was fucking gasoline coated bible paper. Cornell was damn near squealing with glee, hitting it with a stick over and over, running around it like a fucking madman. I could only step back a little and watch. I was entranced by it. The sound of that fucking idiot, the flames. I made this mad scene. I created it.

One of the plastic wrapped pillows began to expand. I watched it, wondering when the plastic would melt around it. Cornell saw it too, and jammed his stick into it. It still didn’t pop, and he tried to pull his stick back out, but the pillow came with it. He shook it back and forth, and it shot off the end of the stick and flew at my fucking head. I ducked and stuck my arm up to block it, and that is the moment the plastic bubble chose to pop. I was showered with hot melting plastic.

I screamed, and dropped to the ground. Cornell stopped yelping and started panicking. Equally fucking useless. All of the Stop, Drop, and Roll practice came in handy. I rolled around, and most of the plastic came off relatively quickly. There were no flames on me, so far as I know, but I was burnt. My arms, legs and neck mostly.

I was hurt. I stood up, and Cornell was shook.

“What do we do?” he asked.

“We need to go back to the pond.”

We walked back to the pond, and I dove in. I sat in the water for a while, then got dressed and went home, to get ready to go to the bowling alley.

That was almost the last time I set something on fire.

About a week later, Cornell and I were near the pond again. Bored, and out of pot, we decided to explore more of the woods, starting with a long perimeter walk around the pond. His girlfriend had broken up with him recently, but he had been fucking her on an old mattress behind the bowling alley for a little while, and found it hysterical. I heard the story repeatedly.

We got almost halfway around the pond when we found what looked like someone’s old tree house. It was pretty run down, and I would have been surprised if anyone had even looked at it in the past fifteen years or so. It seemed as though sheer luck was holding it together.

We climbed inside.

There was an indistinguishable animal carcass on the floor, and moss, mold and god knows what else all over the walls. There was no roof, but there looked like there was once. We hung out inside for a while. From the tree house, we could see the pond, only thirty or so feet away. Eventually, I climbed down.

I sat on the ground beneath it, and lit a cigarette. Cornell came down and asked me for one. He sat down, I gave him mine, and lit a new one.

Quietly, peacefully, we sat there, smoking, watching the water, and unknowingly feeling the last moments of relatively innocent childhood.

I was still reeling from my father leaving a year and a half earlier. I missed and was angry at Yiro. I thought my heart was broken over some girl. I was failing school, and my apathy toward it worried me. I lit the leaves in front of me on fire, and laid back, onto the ground.

“Do you want me to tell you if it gets close to you?” Cornell asked.

“No.” I said.

“Okay.”

The wind was blowing down my body, toward the pond. The sound of it, and the crackle of the fire, I remember almost falling asleep. Until Cornell said “Um, shit.”

“What?” I asked.

“What do we do now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Sit up.”

I sat up and looked down. The short hill below me was on fire. The wind had spread the fire, and it had reached the pond, and spread wide, nipping at trees, and burning a large black circle in the ground.

“Shit!” I said.

I jumped up and began to try to stomp it out, but somehow, I was only making it worse. Cornell was up, and doing the same, and then he ran down to the pond, yanked off his shirt and dunked it in the water. He tried using it like a bowl and dumping water on the fire, but it just wasn’t working. We worked for a good twenty minutes, but the fire kept spreading.

Somehow, I burned the palms of my hands during the mess, but I don’t remember how. Cornell lost a perfectly good shirt. Eventually, we just left. The fire had won, and I had lost control of it.

The news that evening told tale of a forest fire near our pond. I couldn’t even take the credit for it.

-A.