Disclaimer: All these stories are real. It is unfortunate that I am unable to consult with any of the individuals in them to confirm certain details of my memories of these events. I have refrained from writing the full names of those involved, but those who know me personally know who I'm talking about. None of the first names were changed. No one involved was innocent.
Part 3: Almost Arson
I used to run away from home pretty often in Middle School. I'd usually just go on super long bike rides. It wasn't really to run away. I never stayed out overnight. I never left town. It was to avoid my parents and punishments like grounding. I don't think there was a week when I was 12-13 that I wasn't grounded. I was a little shit, as I've said before. Sometimes when I'd run away, I'd go meet up with Crazy fuckin Eddie. This was the only way we could hang out, eventually, because neither one of our parents wanted us hanging out together, with very good reason.
One day, when I had been a particularly bad little asshole, I had to "run away" without my bike. Being the loyal friend that he was, Ed locked his ride up and walked with me. As usual, the mission was to raise hell. We went to one store and stole a bunch of trading cards, candy and lighters. Then we went to this discount pharmacy where we'd learned from a fellow delinquent, you could steal cigarettes, which we did. This was back before all the stores wised-up and put them behind the counter. It was also before the retail security camera. We broke out, got some 25 cent soda cans, and hid in an unused alley. There, we smoked cigarettes, talked about tits, vaginas, and ate our ill-gotten candy.
One store after another kicked us out, and one manager after another was cussed out by Eddie. His brutal verbal lashing of the poor fat lady at the Hallmark store made me kind of uncomfortable. Ed just had no filter at all. "FUCK YOOOU! YOU FUCKIN FAT WHORE! YOU FAT BITCH!!" Punctuating the word "bitch", he toppled a display on the way out. I remember thinking to myself: "This shit is getting really crazy here." We watched the cops arrive, hidden in some bushes outside a bank that was closed near the Hallmark store. We had to hide there a while. I remember staring at that cop car. I was imagining myself in back of it because of Ed's rage. My brain told me then and there: "This guy's out of fucking control." But still, I didn't go home. I suppose it was for the same reasons that people watched Ultimate Warrior's monologues, rather than switch over to NOVA.
The sun was sinking as we left the grocery store with some freshly pilfered snacks (I was partial to tubes of raw cookie dough and handfuls of candy from the candy bins.) I knew we were both going to have to go home soon. Tomorrow was a school day, and I didn't start skipping school until a year or so later. We climbed on the roof of a nearby shopping center, and smoked more cigarettes while we hucked little white roof pebbles onto cars in the purple border of night. (This was before all parking lots were all aglow with halogen lamps at sundown.) A lot of them would brake suddenly, causing us to jiggle with silent laughter above. Horrible. Dangerous. Stupid. Fun.
Another cop (or possibly the same one from earlier) started circling around, but left after a cigarette or 2. We climbed down, and walked to another, larger shopping center a few blocks away. Although this mini mall was larger, most of it was shut down. That's because on the ass of this particular shopping center was a restaurant and a nightclub that had both closed down a few years earlier. There were tons of dead brown vines that crept up alongside the boarded up restaurant. For aesthetic, it had shitty, old, wood panelling along the side, all the way to the roof. A goddamn tinderbox. I was lighting dead leaves and letting them burn in my hand until they touched my fingers, at which point I dropped them on the pavement to burn out. Ed started doing it too. Then, things began to escalate.
The leaves from the vines were so dry they went up almost like flash paper. They'd burn slower towards the stems. We pulled several vines off the side. Some of the wood panels fell off as we did so because they were so dry and rotten. Wood degrades quickly in Florida. We dropped this mess into a huge empty (save for some mulch) planter. The planter itself was also a wooden barrel style one. Then, intellects we were, we lit the pot's contents on fire. They flared up instantly. This was when we both got scared, I thought.
In no time the flame was 8 feet high. Ed started running away. "Fuck it! Let's get the fuck out of here!" he screeched at me. My mind went over all the things we'd done that evening. The people we'd pissed off. The cops being called, twice. Our faces would be remembered, and once those vines caught, it would be the end of that building. There was nothing to consider. "NO WAY!" I said. The sun had set. My heart felt like it would beat out of my chest as I frantically stomped the shit out of the planter, breaking it. Ed laughed, and tried to pull me off it. "Fuck this shit. Let it burn." I stopped.
There was no panic on his face. He wasn't scared at all. "C'mon!" He wanted the building to burn down. It was then that I knew this guy was really fucking bat shit. It took a few moments, but I darkened every tiny orange spark with dirt that had come out of the broken planter, and my sneakers. I had to be sure that not one ember remained. Crazy Eddie laughed at me the whole time, calling me a pussy.
The buildings spared that night were later demolished, professionally. The mind of Crazy Eddie, however, would not be spared. Eddie saw to that.
-2013 Wielgorecki
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