Daily Excerpt: Tucker and Me (Harvey) - Playing with Fire
Excerpt from Tucker and Me (Andrew Harvey)
PLAYING WITH FIRE
My
father, George, had a rather odd love-hate relationship with fire. It reminds
me of an old joke about a famous monster, which stated that Frankenstein’s
primary form of problem solving was strangulation. Deadly effective, but not
the most subtle approach. George never strangled anyone as far as I know, but
he did use fire as a key solution for vexing problems around his property.
Fire
is one of those things that can be either good or bad; it all depends on the
context and care in which it’s put to use. George’s judgment was never his
strong suit, but he did have protocols he employed when using fire. Now you
might think this would involve things like safety equipment, universal
precautions, and the like. However, none of these cumbersome things were taken
into account. There really was only one rule. When you used fire to solve a
problem, you had to drink beer. A lot of it.
The
first problem that emerged was an extraordinary series of nests that yellow jacket
wasps had built in the front bushes at the house on Avis Lane in Tucker,
Georgia. George was not really an outdoors kind of guy, so there was no telling
how long their structures had remained in existence.
My friend Dale and
I were often outside, and I think you know that young boys and wasps are bound
to collide. This intersection of different types of life took the form of Dale
getting stung on the nose. One minute he looked like Dale and the next a young
W.C. Fields, the famous old-time actor known for his bulbous nose.
We
immediately went into the house to lodge our complaint with George, who was
hard at work in his home office as usual. I encouraged Dale to tell the story
firsthand, and with the emotions and tears of a young Marlon Brando, he did
just that as we were standing in the house with George listening and me
watching.
As Dale was about
halfway through his tale of woe, my father hauled off and slapped him in the
face. Although I was certainly stunned at this, the look on Dale’s face is one
I wish I could have preserved for posterity. If you were going to take a
picture that epitomized the term, “look of shock,” I think this would be the
picture you would use.
After
slapping Dale, presumably for either being stupid enough to get stung or not
telling the story quickly enough, my father went into what looked like some
sort of Indian rain dance, stomping on the carpet first with his right foot,
and then with his left as we stood by in amazement.
It was only when
he stopped that we began to realize what had happened. George had seen a yellow
jacket crawling onto Dale’s face from behind his ear and had taken swift,
affirmative action to knock it to the ground and eradicate it. Terminix®? We
don’t need no stinking Terminix®!
When
we recovered from our shock, we knew more action would need to be taken against
the attackers, but we didn’t know what. My father’s first move was to go into
the kitchen and get a beer, which would help grease the skids of his mind. We
all then went to the front yard for a reconnaissance mission, with my father in
the lead, closely followed by me, and Dale very slowly bringing up the rear. After
what seemed like a pretty short period of time, my father announced the
strategy that would be employed: “We’ll burn ‘em out!”
Now
you might think that such a strategy would take some time to carry out, but
this was not the case. The strategy was enacted immediately by another visit to
the refrigerator for a second beer, followed by a trip to the big shed under
the house that held various large devices such as a riding lawn mower.
As it turns out,
we had quite a bit of both gasoline and kerosene on hand. We never specifically
discussed it, but I believed George thought that if one was good, the
combination of the two would be better. Moreover, with regard to highly
incendiary material, the old saying, “the more, the merrier,” seemed to be the
order of the day.
After
staging all our materials in the front yard, there was only one thing to do—back
to the kitchen for a third beer, and now we were ready. George had the gasoline
and began pouring it generously into the front bushes. I was instructed to pour
the kerosene over the gasoline. What could be better than that for a nine-year
old boy? Dale watched cautiously from a distance, waiting for the kind of
justice that only fire can bring.
George
set fire to the bushes, and what happened next is one of those things that’s
difficult to describe to someone who wasn’t present, but I’ll do my best. If
you think of a charcoal barbeque being lit after the coals have been soaked in
lighter fluid, you’ll get an idea—times one thousand. Initially, it was really
more of an explosion than a fire, although there was definitely fire in the
aftermath. I can’t swear to it, but Tucker may have seen its first and only
mushroom cloud that day. The wasps were incinerated, as were the bushes and
anything within the area, and to this day, I’m shocked that the adjacent
windows were not blown out.
How
the house was not set on fire, I’ll never know, but I give George some credit. By
luck or choice, the house George chose to buy was brick, and those bricks stood
the test on that day. I’m sure you think that as soon as the fire did its job
with the wasps that we immediately put out the fire with water and fire
extinguishers, and we would have done just that if we had water and fire
extinguishers.
Unfortunately, with
what amounted to three nine-year old boys at work, we did not have the
foresight to have either present when we lit the fuse to the rocket. All’s well
that ends well and the fire burned itself out quickly after the initial blaze
of glory. I’ve never been one to confuse good luck with good tactics. That day
we had good luck.
George
was one to confuse those two concepts, and this led to our next adventure with
fire the following summer. For reasons that escape me, he had, over time,
collected a huge pile of garbage, brush, and tree limbs at the back of his
property. Now let’s see…what to do…what to do with such a thing? Oh, of course.
Burn it, but only after first being properly hydrated with many beers, knocked
back in a short period of time.
Dale
was missing-in-action for this one. This was just me and my dad. We trudged
down the hill of the back yard, crossed the creek, and eyed the work at hand. I
don’t know if the prior experience influenced him or not, or if it was just that
he didn’t have any kerosene on hand, but our only accelerant this time was a
gallon of gasoline.
Regrettably, our
prior experience had not resulted in ensuring the availability of water or fire
extinguishers. In fact, the pile was so far from the house there was not even a
hose line that would reach it. Such details would not deter George though, who
had a bit of a “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” mentality.
The plan, such as it was, was for him to soak
half of the pile, which formed the shape of a circle. He would then hand off
the gasoline can to me, and I would finish moving around the circle, soaking it
all with the gasoline until the can was empty. We would then light the bonfire,
and burn, baby, burn.
As
well-planned out as this all may seem, there ended up being a couple of
problems. First, this pile was so high, that if one person was standing on one
side, and another person was standing on the other side, you wouldn’t be able
to see each other. Thus, as I poured the gasoline on the pile and moved to
complete the circle, I lost sight of George.
I realized in
short order this was not a good thing, as he set fire to the pile on the other
side with me still pouring gasoline on my side. Why wait until the pouring of
the gasoline was complete? That’s crazy talk, right? As the fire took hold at
lightning speed around the circle, I was blasted back by the explosive power,
dropping the gasoline can onto the pile in the process. What little hair I had
on my legs and arms was singed off, thus ending my ability to look like Burt
Reynolds, the big (and hairy) movie star of the time.
Once
my father knew I had almost been killed by his negligent action, he rushed to
me and held me in his arms, apologizing with tears in his eyes and professing
his undying love for me. Oh wait, this is a non-fiction memoir, so disregard
that.
Although he did
rush all right, it was to try and get the gas can out of the fire with a rake. He
then chastised me for dropping the can into the fire, which gives pretty good
insight into my father’s capacity to properly assess culpability. Once again,
with good luck, the fire burned itself out, and we trekked back up the hill to
quaff a few beers, him Budweiser®, and me root.
Our
final fire story involved my father’s friend, Merlin, who was destined to
become part of neighborhood lore for being involved in this last incident. George
had already developed a reputation as a bit of an unconventional neighbor,
particularly in regard to his use of fire as a form of first response to
problems.
In the above
instances, through sheer good fortune, things hadn’t gotten out of hand. The
third time wasn’t the charm for my father, as this incident was destined to
involve the authorities, who would, no doubt, keep a closer eye on him in the
future.
There
was a nice creek running through the back of my father’s property, and as is
often the case, large brush tends to grow up on both sides of a creek. Most
people would just let it grow, or work to thin it out, or perhaps hire someone
to deal with it, but George was not most people. Like a lot of problems, in his
eyes, the logical solution involved fire, along with the requisite six-pack of
beer to be ingested beforehand.
Enlisting
Merlin to assist him in this endeavor was not overly helpful. Merlin was a very
nice man, but he wasn’t working in the rocket science department at NASA at
that time, and he tended to go along with my father’s suggestions. In this
case, the suggestion was to apply gasoline all up and down each side of the
creek and light it on fire. This would eliminate the pesky problem of overgrown
brush. However, like a lot of things involving fire and beer, there are often
unintended consequences.
George
worked one side of the creek, soaking it with gasoline, and Merlin did the same
on the other. You know what comes next—blast off! The neighbors on each side weren’t
enamored of the creek being set on fire, and they called the fire department. As
the trucks arrived, my father sent Merlin up the hill to talk with them as his
designated representative. George didn’t know what was said between the fire
captain and Merlin, but what he did know was that after the brief conversation,
Merlin pointed down at him excitedly. It appeared that waterboarding was not
going to be necessary to get Merlin to lay out the guilty party.
After
the fire personnel had ensured the whole neighborhood wasn’t going to go up,
the captain had a conversation with my father, which I was not privy to. Based
upon his body language, though, I would venture a guess that things like “jail,”
“prison,” “expensive fines,” and “locked up for good,” probably came up. At least
to my knowledge, George ended his fire-starting career that day. As a result,
Tucker became a much safer community to live in, albeit perhaps with fewer
funny stories to tell.
Hollywood Book Festival honorable mention
For more posts about Andrew and his book, click HERE.
For more posts about memoirs, click HERE.
For more boyhood posts, click HERE.
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