When I was around 11 or 12 years old, my family moved from the big city to a much smaller town in northeastern Oklahoma. This was in the early 90s. The “big city” wasn’t and still isn’t very big, but it was basically Los Angeles compared to where we moved. We moved at that critical point where you’ve just started to make lifelong friends and starting developing the personality that’s going to carry you through your teenage years, and I had to start over, which meant most of the kids I met were delinquents who’d been passed over by the more popular kids. I found myself well-suited to delinquency.
I had one neighborhood friend who was always in trouble, and given that I hung around him a lot, I was usually in trouble as well. His mother worked second shift, his father was long gone, and so we spent a lot of time at his house figuring out new and creative ways to steal cigarettes from the Homeland grocery store down the street and listening to The Chronic, which he had to hide from his mother (she was very racist) and I had to hide from mine (it is flagrantly misogynist).
For reasons that escape me now, but not uncommon in teenage boys with too little to do and too much time to fill, we got obsessed with setting things on fire. At first, these were small things. Stumps, sticks, abandoned furniture in a parking lot. These small things didn’t didn’t stay small. Once, we came across a pile of tires which were illegally dumped on unincorporated land near our neighborhood, and while the fire never got out of hand, we could see smoke from our houses for hours that will certainly be on my ecological damage ledger to answer for when I die.
The Anarchist Cookbook was popular amongst some of the more aggressively delinquent older boys we knew. This was before most people had home internet, and before the OKC bombing, and it was before 9/11, but far enough from the 60s that we didn’t have watch lists, and, most importantly, it didn’t raise red flags with your parents. We didn’t have a copy, but my friend swore he’d read it, and had read how to make napalm. I didn’t even really know what napalm was, but it sounded cool as shit, and so we set out to mix gasoline and styrofoam and become characters in Apocalypse Now (a movie neither of us had seen but lied to each other about having seen).
To this day, I don’t know how to make napalm, but I can say that a 64oz soda cup from QuikTrip filled with gasoline, positioned precariously close to a fence does not napalm make. It does create a dangerously flammable mess that spreads faster than you would think on a hot and windy summer day in Oklahoma. Before you could say “rollin’ in my six four”, a section of the fence was on fire.
Then, the entire fence was on fire.
Then, the yard contained inside of the fence was on fire.
As the memes from the ancestors tell us, this escalated quickly. By the time the fire department arrived — which also happened quickly — we had destroyed the yard, the fence, singed the garage and very nearly burned his house down. A garden hose with a busted sprayer is no substitute for a fire truck.
The police arrived just as quickly as the fire department did, and we did what all boys of our age did when caught doing something wrong — we tried to lie our way out of it. We failed. It turns out that standing on the scene of a fire in progress when the police show up paints a pretty clear picture of what happened, especially if one of you lives at that address. It’s never been clear to me whether we were actually under arrest, and, somewhat uncharacteristically for me at that period in my life, I didn’t badger the cops for details on our precise legal status. We were both white, we were both minors, the arson did (more or less) minor damage, and no one was hurt.
Later, the court dropped the charges against us, we paid fines, we did community service, we rebuilt the fence, and I wasn’t allowed to hang out with my friend again (an order I ignored entirely). But it took a long, long time for people I met to stop asking me, “hey, didn’t you burn down that fence?”
That was the first time I got in real trouble. It wasn’t the last.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 