Fire House

All the news about the wildfires in California and the blaze Jimmy Kimmel lit in a trashcan on stage during the Emmy’s got me thinking about my childhood experiences with fire. We didn’t have gender reveal pyrotechnics when I was a kid nor did we have large scale forest fires in New England, but our house did almost burn down twice.

We lived in a 1200 square foot ranch located in a working class neighborhood of a town that was historically founded on the principles of gerrymandering. In 1980 when I was in high school our town went bankrupt due to a combination of budgetary mismanagement and grassroots efforts to resist increases in property taxes. The school board had to make some tough decisions to save money so they offered to cut buses or the football team. The townsfolk rallied to save the football team. After the cheese wagons were nixed in favor of preserving the jock's glory days, I walked to school carrying my 20 year old physics book which predicted that “someday men would walk on the moon.”

Red Fire Alarm Box

Our house was located a block down the road from The Station, a nightclub that caught fire in 2003 during a set by the headlining band, Great White. Pyrotechnics set the place ablaze killing a hundred people and injuring many more. I recall that the tragic event was covered by all the national news outlets including CNN. My hometown is best known not as the birthplace of a famous scientist who postulated groundbreaking theories that changed the world, but for the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in the United States. Mediocrity was so inbred in my town that in a competition for avoidable catastrophes, we couldn’t even pull off a bronze.

Years earlier when I was in middle school, two fires occurred in my childhood house, both in the kitchen. Residential smoke alarms were not required by code back then, and we didn’t even own a fire extinguisher. No matter. There was a red fire alarm box affixed to the telephone pole at the head of our driveway. As kids we were told never to touch that box unless, of course, something was on fire.

The red metal box always intrigued me, thermostat level intrigue. The central emergency number, 9-1-1, wasn’t yet nationally adopted. No matter. Having a fire alarm right down our short driveway was like living next door to a firehouse. My friend, who I considered to be brought up wrong, sometimes pulled down the white cover to reveal the business end of the fire alarm, the mysterious metal lever. For me touching that thing was sacrilegious.

Once as I rode past the red box on my bike, I envisioned a meteor streaking across the sky then crashing into our neighbor's house. I imagined that I darted for the alarm, pulled down the white cover, then yanked on the elusive lever, summoning the emergency calvary. I was heralded as a hero for my quick thinking which saved my neighbor’s lives. Unfortunately, their house was a total loss.

“Bobby! Dinner,” my mother hollered from the side door that opened to the kitchen.

My mother always called everyone to the table before the meal was ready. She knew we all had to wait our turn to wash hands in the one bathroom of our house. She wanted us clean, relatively, and seated when she was ready to serve. So I wasn’t surprised that as I passed through the kitchen, the large pot of oil on the stove was just coming to a boil.

My oldest sister, the firstborn, was taking her sweet time in the loo as I queued up behind my sister, Jeannine. Jeannine is the middle child while I am the youngest. As the alpha vacated, she pushed past both of us with indifference, broken only momentarily to convey disgust. Jeannine went in next.

“Come on Bobby! I’m just washing my hands,” she called out.

Confident I wasn’t going to see my sister involved in bodily functions on the throne, I entered the bathroom.

“Mom’s making mushy chicken,” Jeannine announced as we washed.

My mother liked to fry chicken except she never left the chicken in the oil long enough to crisp up. The egg and bread formed a soft coating which although mildly tasty probably still contained live bacteria. Jeannine darted from the bathroom. As I entered the kitchen, something was wrong. My oldest sister was seated at the table, tending to her nails with an emery board. My mother was on the phone, her hand to her mouth as she looked out the kitchen window. My father, always last to sit, was in the living room reading the newspaper. Jeannine had stopped in her tracks and was staring at the pot on the stove.

“What’s she doing?” I thought, “Why’s she not sitting at the table?”

I watched Jeanine’s hand rise like the moon. She was pointing at the pot of boiling oil. As the frothy liquid popped and sputtered over the lip, it ignited into a spectacular orange flame. My mother dropped the phone as she screamed for my father. My dad burst into the kitchen still clutching his newspaper. In a move best described as superhuman, my father jettisoned the paper, reached through the flames and spun the knob on the stove. The thick orange glow of the metal burner faded, but this did little to dissuade the grease fire now raging in the pot. Someone brushed past me. It was the alpha receding to her room. As my family was locked in a life and death struggle to save our home, the firstborn's first thought was to return to the safety of her room as if the David Cassidy posters on the wall would save her.

While my father stepped backwards trying to think of his next best move, my mother filled a glass of water from the sink. She ventured to the cauldron on the stove with the glass held aloft. When she dumped the water into the flames, a fireball arose from the pot and spread out over the ceiling. Jeannine and I mentally came to the same conclusion,

"ABANDON SHIP! Every man for himself!"

She bolted for the door with me not too far behind. As I traversed the kitchen, a second fireball belched from the pot. My parents recoiled as I ducked my head. When I reached the threshold, I yelled to Jeannine who had made it to the driveway,

“Pull the fire alarm!”

“No don’t!” my mother shot back.

I turned to my mother in disbelief. The inside of our house looked like the launch pad for a Saturn V rocket at T plus 2 seconds, and she didn’t want to alert emergency services? Best I could come up with in the middle of the chaos was that she probably didn't want the firemen to track mud in her house. My father grabbed the closest thing in reach, my vinyl schoolbag. He beat back the flames which now covered the entire top of the stove. Knowing that my books, pencils and papers were now in peril, I yelled,

“Not my schoolbag!”

The smoldering remains of my education hit the floor with a thud. My dad snatched up the braided area rug which he piled onto the stovetop, adjusting it each time a flame snuck out from underneath. I called to Jeannine who was poised in front of the fire alarm,

“It’s out!”

My father periodically lifted the rug to check on the status of the rest of our lives in that house. Any hint of orange, and he would slam the rug back down. Once he was sure the crisis was over, he hauled my mother’s smoldering mess of a rug outside to the lawn where he hosed it down. As the commotion subsided, I recall hearing the muffled lyrics of a Partridge Family song emanating from my sister's room,

So what am I so afraid of?
I'm afraid that I'm not sure of
a love there is no cure for.

I think I love you.

I'll tell you what I was afraid of. Fried food! The second kitchen fire took place a year later. It wasn’t as ominous of an event as The Great Grease Fire of 1974, but since we never had a family debriefing after the first fire, we were equally unprepared for the second. It was the day after a holiday party. My mother was cleaning up the debris from the previous day's cheer and merriment, which included a large, yellow Tupperware bowl filled to the brim with Cheez doodles. (I have no idea why "doodles" is not capitalized). The large bowl full of orange baked puffs that sort of resemble insect larvae kept getting in my mother's way. Now when I say that this was a large bowl, I mean it was much more than merely big. It was a Fix N Mix Bowl #274 which according to the internet can hold 26 cups of your favorite shit. She kept moving it here and there as she cleaned so eventually she came up with the master class idea to stow the plastic container and all 26 cups of Cheez doodles in, wait for it...

the oven.

Hours later when my mother was preparing to reheat leftovers for dinner, she put the oven on "preheat." Momentarily, a foul oder permeated our tiny home. My father, the house whisperer, noted it first from the living room,

"What's that smell?" he asked aloud.

My dad sniffed in different directions then took two steps then sniffed again. He olfactorily dead reckoned right into the kitchen where he met me trying to retrieve a box of crackers from a high cabinet.

"Something stinks," I announced.

My mother's muffled voice emanated from the bathroom.

"The Cheez doodles!"

"Get your mother the Cheez doodles," my father ordered.

I looked about.

"Where are they?"

My father scanned the kitchen.

"They're in the goddamn stove!" my mother said frantically.

My father and I looked at each other puzzled.

"They're not in the stove," my dad exclaimed with a chuckle.

"You don't cook Cheese doodles," I offered.

"They must be around here someplace."

The door to the bathroom cracked open.

"They’re in the oven!" my encumbered mother screamed through the opening.

My father and I both looked to each other then to the oven. Through the dark, charred flin caked on the glass window in the oven door, I could just make out a faint yellow glow. My father reached for the handle. As he was getting ready to yank it open, he paused then released the handle. He pointed in succession to each of the many knobs and levers on the console above the burners, looking for the one that was set to "Go For the Moon." As my dad reacquired the handle, I stepped back. My father cautiously cracked open the door. A foul vapor poured out from the oven but no flames. Yellow goo was dripping from the grate and pooling at the bottom of the oven. My dad released the door.

"Not too bad," he ascertained.

Before he finished his assessment, the yellow glowing flicker, fanned by a backdraft, ignited. My father saw it right off.

"Oh shit!" my dad shouted.

He reached for the rug I was standing on and pulled it into the air. I fell backwards onto my fundament. Briefly, I thought that this just might be the chance I was waiting for. Maybe, just maybe, I might get to pull the fire alarm. My father swung open the door then proceeded to beat the flaming pile of Cheez doodles with the rug which sent fiery bits of doodle in every direction. They landed on the floor. Some even made it up to the counter. While my father's go-to method of fire suppression did, yet again, suppress the flames, embers were drifted about the kitchen. Although I wasn't going to have any snacks in my lunch this week, at least we weren't going to lose the family home.

Unbeknownst to my dad and I, my mother had exited the john. After seeing the mess my father was making, she armed her favorite cleaning implement, the canister vacuum cleaner. My father hated the sound of that thing, partly because it was loud and partly because my mother loved it so that when she vacuumed it was like a trip on the S.S. Minnow, a three hour tour. He retreated to his chair in the living room and resumed the word jumble in the newspaper as I picked myself up off the floor. Hours passed as my mother vacuumed with delight. She was on her hands and knees working on freeing up the burnt yellow, solidified plastic blob in the oven with a butter knife when I crossed through the kitchen. My mother momentarily stopped scraping.

"Look at the mess your father made!" she bellowed.

I was near the canister which, the best I could tell, was glowing.

"You better change the bag in that thing," I offered, believing that the motor was overheating after three hours of sucking up Cheez doodles.

My mother resumed scraping. I went into the living room to continue my self-study of The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Actually, I was going to try to tune in the UHF selector on the TV to Channel 56 to watch Speed Racer. After a few minutes of fiddling, I got it.

Go Speed Racer go!

I was just wondering how Trixie learned to fly a helicopter when my dad lowered his newspaper.

"What's that?" he asked while looking up in a seemingly random direction.

"What?"

As my dad rose, he dropped his paper onto his chair. He made his way down the short hallway to the kitchen. I looked through the passageway to see him staring at my mother as she scraped the stove. Returning to my cartoon, I thought,

"Where did she even get a helicopter?"

Picking up the vacuum wand, my father sniffed the end. Recoiling, my dad was satisfied that he had found the source of the miasma. As he inspected the vacuum cleaner, I confidently explained,

"I told her to change the bag. The motor is overheating." 

My father looked down the hallway as I rattled off my expert advice. As his attention shifted to the handle, he adjusted his grip while demonstrating excellent trigger discipline. With a flick of his thumb, the vacuum sprang to life. I looked towards the noise, unsure why my father was powering up a machine he loathed so completely. As I focussed on the canister, he shut it off. I thought I saw for just a moment a flame coming out of the exhaust port. To this day, I recall that it was blue. I half expected the canister to start rolling across the floor then after reaching take off speed, lift skyward. My father looked to the canister then tried the trigger once more.

"What the heck!" he shouted as he abruptly switched off the machine.

He quickly rolled the vacuum to the door then tossed it down the stairs. As it bounced off the concrete steps, the canister broke open revealing a core of smoldering dust, dander and doodles that had burned through the bag. Once it breeched the filter, the compressed air driven by the motor created a low thrust jet engine that fried the inside of the canister.

The opportunity to activate the red fire alarm box at the end of the driveway never presented itself to me again even though we were hardly an accident free family. Back in those days you went to the hospital if you couldn't stop bleeding from an artery. You passed on an emergency room visit for a concussion even if you blacked out. My family depended on a general practitioner who gave you a bottle of orange medicine for every malady with instructions to "finish the bottle." It didn’t work and stained your teeth, but it didn’t kill you either so down the hatch!

After I was on my own on a bright Sunday morning my father choked hard on some steak grizzle. Having worked so memorably well with the grease fire, my mother rolled out her glass of water trick. As my asphyxiating father drank the warm water, the steak lodged even deeper. Eventually, he had to choose either entering a white tunnel to the afterlife or performing the Heimlich maneuver on himself. When they told me the story, I asked my mother if she called 9-1-1. She hadn't.

My parents generation never felt that their emergency rose to a level which required intervention by trained professionals. They treated the fires which could've easily claimed our home or one or more of us as an embarrassment. I know this because my mother put us kids under an explicit gag order not to disclose the fires to our friends, especially the Cheez doodle Syndrome of 1975. She regarded that incident as her fault even though the first time around she poured a glass of water in a pot of boiling oil.

As an adult I sat them down and explained that emergency personnel want you to call them, but it never sunk in. When a ladder my father was on slipped down the house, and he broke his nose on a rung, my mother called a neighbor who rushed over to find my father holding a towel to his face as he bled profusely. The neighbor wisely called emergency services against my father's wishes. When the paramedics arrived he refused to go with them because as he put it,

"I have to take my wife to her hair appointment this afternoon."

He didn't tell me about his accident until I saw him a week later. I was shocked to see my dad so banged up. He said,

"I didn't mess up anything I need. I just broke my face."

Later when we talked, he wondered aloud what the paramedics must have thought of him. He asked,

"You think they thought I was nuts?"

After a long pause, I answered,

"Yes, definitely."

He confided in me that the whole experience alleviated his fear of hospitals. He recalled all the jokes he played on the staff during his brief visit including asking them if he would be able to play the tuba after they fix his nose. They reassured him that he would to which he said,

"Oh good! I never could before."

When I think of how as kids we were unrestrained in car seats for all those years, crossed active train bridges that spanned raging rivers, avoided the groovy drugged out hippies of the 1970's, roamed forests and rivers alone all day long, ventured at night into deep trenches being dug in the streets for sewer pipes, passed on going to the hospital for a concussion and survived our homes catching fire, I wonder if any of it built character or took some away. This is when writers usually proclaim that if they could do it all over again, they wouldn't change a thing. I, for one, would've taken a pass on The Great Grease Fire of 1974.

It still gives me nightmares to this day.

I Hate the 70s

My son, Aidan, and I were walking to a nearby field to fly a kite. As we hiked I carried a folded delta wing close to my body. Aidan picked up that my head was on a swivel.

"What's the matter Dad?" He asked.

I soon realized my unfounded paranoia was causing him some concern. The reason I was on the lookout was because back in my day when I was walking somewhere to fly a kite if I encounter a long haired hippy type there was a good chance he would grab the kite from my hands and break it for no reason.

I grew up in the 70s not as a teenage participating in the drug fueled free love psychedelic tune in and drop out counterculture. I was a ten years old dealing with the aftermath of a society where most teenagers and many adults were routinely taking illicit recreational drugs. Having an older rebellious sister who was fully immersed into the whole 70s scene meant that all the sordid things of that decade were inside my house as well as prowling the streets outside. My other sister, Jeannine, and I huddled together in our kid world playing with Lincoln Logs and Hot Wheels surrounded by drugs, alcohol and satanic verses.

Whenever the music from the 70s comes on the radio, I overtly cringe. People think the music of that time was so far out, but I think of the many groovy beatings my friends and I took from the fun loving hippies of the time. Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Frank Zappa were all the cultural icons of the day. Many of these guys were so artistically challenged that they incorporated carnival theatrics to take the focus away from their poor musicianship. All these bozos were succeeded by the band, Kiss.
 

Kiss

While I disliked the others, I hated Kiss. They were a band formed by four former high school teachers who at least where sober enough to realize that musically they stunk so badly that they had to come up with characters to be successful. Gene Simmons was a demon. Ace Frehley was a spaceman. Paul Stanley was the starchild. The drummer, Peter Criss, became a cat. I can just imagine what Simons must have said when this was being sorted out,

"Look Pete. I'm the demon. Ace is the alien. You have to pick something cool."

"Like a cat?" Criss asks.

"I don't think we're on the same page here. I said something cool. Why not be a ninja?" Simmons offers.

"I want to be a kitty."

Then Paul Stanely says, "I'm gonna be the starchild."

"Am I the only one who get's this? You can't be a starchild if Ace is gonna be a spaceman."

"Well, if Pete can be a kitty, I want to be a bunny," Stanely asserts.

"You're not gonna to be no fucking bunny!" Simmons decrees.



David Cassidy

The part I could never figure out was why so many kids from the 70s related to satanic themes. Ozzy Osborne was the lead singer for Black Sabbath. A British heavy metal band was called Judas Priest, and of course, Kiss was sometimes touted as an acronym for "Knights in Satan's Service," but I suspect it really meant "keep it simple stupid." They all had their demonic songs which my older sister played endlessly. She transitioned from David Cassidy and the Partridge Family to Alice Cooper and his sixth album, Billion Dollar Babies. I heard that record countless times. I still recall the lyrics,


Alice Cooper

If I'm too rough tell me

I'm so scared your little head will come off in my hands

Billion Dollar Baby

Back in the 70s, Alice Cooper said that he didn't want to live past thirty. My older sister thought that was way cool. My father used to say,

"Let's see if he says that when he's twenty-nine and a half."

Cooper, whose real name is Vincent Furnier, is pushing seventy-five and enjoys golf. My older sister used to put on eye makeup like Alice Cooper and wear a white tuxedo she sewed herself, including a white top hat she made out of paper mache. She wore this get up to school and insisted that everyone including her teachers call her "Alice" even though that wasn't her real name.

As a kid in the 70s our parents would let us roam the neighborhood which was great when we were up to mischief but not so great when the hippies were wandering about. They concentrated at the top of the street where the local drug dealer set up a small yellow trailer advertising flowers. He never had any actual plants in the trailer which was chained to a payphone. The dude just leaned against the rig and made drug sales all day. The hippies close to this area didn't have time to mess with us kids. Going in they had a wad of cash. Going out a stash of illegal narcotics. Either way they were usually strung out and on a mission. We learned quickly that the time to worry about hippies was when they were stoned and wandering around aimlessly. It was never near the drug dealer because he wouldn't tolerate that kind of attention close to his operation.

The presence of the sole drug dealer at the top of the street was great news for Alice. She began frequenting the plant stand. When I came home from school if she was sleeping on the couch my mother would say,

"Be quiet. Alice is sleeping."

Slumber meant she took downers. If she was buzzing about the house doing laundry or folding clothes, then she took uppers. Speed or something. Jeannine and I knew to always stay clear of Alice when she was awake and high.
 

Pot would make hippies anything from jovial to paranoid. Recognizing the signs was the difference between being beat up or escaping with your kite. If a hippy was smiling, it usually meant he smoked marijuana and was going to be generally friendly. If he was jittery and agitated, then he took some narcotic, and one of us was going to catch a beating. For some reason a beard usually meant a pot smoker and a cheesy mustache was likely a hard drug user. Both had long hair bell bottoms, a jean jacket and often a drug themed T-shirt or that stupid Rolling Stones lips and tongue logo.

Sometimes we would get detained by some drugged out bully. If we had our bikes there was a chance we could out run them. One time on Monterey Drive a druggy grabbed onto the sissy bar on my bike. I broke free and darted for Cowesett Avenue, a busy road to this day. The hippy chased me as I darted into the street. A driver in a car slammed on the brakes, just missing me. I made it to the other side, my "plat" as we used to called it. I owe my life to an attentive driver who stopped in time. The hippie turned and sauntered by the drug dealer who casually walked up to the dude then beat him senseless.

This guy violated the one unwritten rule, making a commotion around the plant stand. The hippie collapsed on the ground in the fetal position while the drug dealer kicked in his head. It was simultaneously horrible and satisfying. I'd like to think that the dope dealer had a sense that it was wrong to chase a kid on a bike into a busy street, but that wasn't the case. He just didn't want the disruption to his business which would've occurred if the cops had to scrape a body, however small, off the pavement.

One day I was walking to Kmart with my friend, Mark, when this hippy came up to us saying,

"I knew someday I would kick your ass Mark."

He proceeded to hit Mark in the head. I punched him in the kidney because that's all I could reach. I got mine next. Mark and I were resolved to start weightlifting so we would bulk up and protect ourselves from the long haired freaky hippy types. I lobbied for a 110 pound concrete filled vinyl weight set for my next birthday. I bought a bench with my paper route money. It was more puberty than exercise, but before long I was buying another weight set because one wasn't enough. One thing about taking a beating, you get used to being hit and that gives you an advantage. The next time we crossed path with a hippy bent on pushing us around things went a little different.

I wish I could tell you that my experiences made me a better person who stood up for the weakest in our community, that I led the fight against bullying long before it trended on social media, but that didn't happen. Victims of bulling often become the next bullies. While I doled out my share, all of which I deeply regret, I never did so with the same enthusiasm of my tormentors. I'm sure that is no consolation to the people I hurt so badly.

In middle school my son, Aidan, reported countless incidents of bullying both against him as well as others. The backlash was excessive and often physical. He's tall and has a good reach. I've taught him how to defend himself, but I warned him never to use it.

"Why do you teach me how to fight then tell me not to hit anyone?" he asks.

I've explained that striking another student, even in defense, makes it harder to make your case to school officials. Recently a friend of mine suggested that all this anti-bullying agendas might be "making kids incapable of handling conflict." I thought about this for days, and I've come to the conclusion that the bullies are the ones who can't deal with conflict, not my son, who certainly can defend himself but chooses not to.

We flew the kite that day. It soared across the sky. The sound of it's long plastic tail fluttering in the wind was familiar and comforting. We both wondered how far we could pay out the string, and if it was tied to the spindle. It was thankfully. On the way back Aidan asked,

"Dad, did you ever win a fight?"

I was reluctant to answer. Not because I lost many and wanted to come off as a tough guy to my son. I was trying to frame my experiences without reliving the abuse I experienced in my youth. Eventually I answered,

"You know, I used to make my own kites. Once I made a box kite. It took me a month."

"Did it fly good?" Aidan asked.

I never knew how well it would have flown because a drugged out hippy broke it on the way to the field. The late afternoon sun cast shadows across the empty meadow. The wind had dissipated leaving the sound of the frogs in a nearby pond.

"It flew beautifully," I said.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on April 18, 2017.