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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