Danger: number two

Of the things that kept me riveted with deer in the headlights like attention, the absolute number one on the list was fire. Everyone is captivated by fire, the way it dances, its colors, its ability to transform solid matter to gas, heat and ash in no time at all. It is an ancient fixation that is cross species, cross time and probably encoded on the very first DNA.

One image that struck me was on a world war two recap show that played on Saturday or Sunday morning called “The Big Picture”. This program had all sorts of newsreel footage of planes dropping bombs and sometimes crashing, ships shooting big guns and guys using these flamethrowers. Out of a benign tube came sinuous liquid flames like a long lizard tongue that licked its target and withdrew kissing its victims with absolute destruction. To me that was both the coolest looking thing and the scariest. They also used them on the giant ants in a movie called “Them” though I doubt I had seen that film yet. Of course none of it was real to me. People doing that to one another were the stuff of fantasy and entertainment. I had no inkling of what mortality meant

It is odd to me now that the war I watched as if it was ancient history, ended only ten or twelve years before. I had no way of understanding ten years because I was at most eight. I wanted so much to be a part of those exciting looking times. I had no idea what it was really. To me it was about winners and losers and we were winners. I wanted to win too. I used the word “we” in the smallest possible meaning here because the bigger more expansive meaning of “we” might very well be that we lost. That though is an essay for another time. In 1955-56, it all looked cool.

For my part, I would burn “nazi” ants with a magnifying glass or little fires. I burned Hitler’s and the other top nazi leader’s houses in fiery effigy. Oddly enough, though the newsreels portrayed the Japanese in the most demoniacal and racist of ways, I don’t remember having the same hatred for them that I had for the Germans who were all parsed into nazis. I suppose it is because I’m Jewish and would have known about the special status that we held for them and that they hold for us, even if I didn’t understand it very well.

While I was busy destroying all of the little nazi surrogates, I discovered gasoline. My father kept it in the garage for the lawnmower in a metal one or two gallon can. Hoo-wee did that stuff poof into flames. It melted all of the plastic soldiers and burned down the little forts I made to stand in for the nazi enemies. Since it was stored in the garage I thought it safe enough. Why would we have dangerous things in our possession? I thought.

I should probably step in here to say why my mother (or father) didn’t step in and prevent me from playing with this stuff. My father was an overworked commuter who went to the city every morning on the Long Island Railroad and returned late and tired. He had been fairly bohemian as had my mother not so many years before. They had been in the thick of creative life down in the village and now found themselves out in suburban Long Island with three children. It was so close to new York city, but as far away as outer Nebraska in many ways. They were fulfilling Thoreau’s description of “lives of quiet desperation…” My mother was, what would probably now be diagnosed as clinically depressed. In those days they didn’t pay much attention to women who couldn’t function well because they felt trapped and marginalized. Being stuck in suburbia with a downtown personality wasn’t deemed a problem, so there was nothing to be done. Now she would be given all kinds of antidepressants which may or may not have helped. She was trying her best to cope with her demons. In the meantime I was playing with gasoline.

It was the beginning of summer vacation from school and I was free from scheduled constraint. I would spread a patch of gas on the lawn and set it ablaze while watching whatever havoc it created on the miniature level. Like all thrills and drugs. i eventually got used to the dose and needed something a little bigger. For me it was a bigger spread of the conflagration that held magic. I spilled some out from a canning jar in the back yard and set lit the match. Poof! I had filled the jar with gas for easy handling and put it down far enough, or so I thought, from the fire so it would not go up. My eight year old skills at judging these things were sloppy or nonexistent and so the fire surrounded the jar. I was suddenly very scared because I thought that the jar of now flaming liquid was too close to the house. I didn’t want to be that kid who burnt down his family’s home.

I reacted by kicking the jar away from the house. This was another very stupid thing to do at the head of a long line of stupid things. I was very lucky that the only thing that happened was that a bit of flaming gasoline splashed on the cuff of my jeans. I started screaming like crazy and ran into the house where my mother frantically beat out the fire. The flames went up and burnt my right leg from ankle to knee with second and third degree burns.

It was hospital time again and I was in shock, so was my mother. No ambulance this time. I went in the family car which was an old Desoto. The trip to the hospital was like a bad, bad dream. I remember her being so upset, that I was upset that she stopped at a Carvel ice cream store to get me something to make me feel good. Perhaps that never happened but it is a clear memory. I did not feel any pain yet so I thought it wasn’t too bad. I thought what’s the fuss about? We didn’t really have to go to the hospital.

Shock is a funny thing and you can believe everything is just fine when the opposite is true. They admitted me very quickly and a doctor placed me on a table. With forceps he began lift large sheets of cooked skin from my leg. Then it started to hurt and I mean it hurt more than anything ever has. I understood to the depths of my being what a “burning sensation” meant. He cleaned it up as well as he could and began a conversation with my mother. I just wanted to go home and wake up from the dream or get saved in the “nick of time“. It was not to be. I was to spend the summer in the hospital meeting all sorts of kids my age, some with problems that they would readily trade for mine.

~ by joshua rose on August 5, 2009.