[lookout123]

my other one also involves a cousin, but this one was a bit younger than me. he had just gotten in trouble for setting a neighbor's antique chair on fire in their basement. i couldn't figure out how he could do something so stupid. we hung out all day and at various times i would ask how he'd done it, why he'd done it, etc. his answer was always - "i don't know".

in the afternoon we were over at my house and my parents were at work. we are watching movies and eating pizza. i get up to go to the bathroom and when i come back he is just standing there with a stupid grin on his face and he asks me if i "really want to know" how he set a chair on fire. i said yes, because i just couldn't understand how anyone could be so stupid.

he explains to me that bug spray - namely OFF! is flamable. i said "uh huh". he then says that they were spraying it and igniting the spray. i said "that was stupid to do it in the house". he says, "uh huh". i thought that was the end of it, so i went into the kitchen to get a drink of water. as i come back i hear him say that he figured out that the trick is to not spray it, because it is hard to control the spray. as he says this i see him (in slow motion) pull a lighter from his pocket and move his hand toward a glass A&W Root Beer glass sitting on my dad's end table. I yell "NO!" he says, in a container it's easier to control and lights the glassful of OFF!.

apparently it isn't easier to control because as soon as a column of flame shot from the glass he panicked and tried to pick up the glass to take it to the sink. yeaaaah, right. glass. flames. he burns his hand and jerks is away from the glass which of course lands on my dad's pride and joy. his lazy boy. when he came home from another 10 hour shift dad collapsed in that chair with a huge glass of Lipton Ice Tea - every single day. but not this day, because that chair went up in flames.

i put it out quickly with my shirt. the light brown nap of that chair was black. the smoke alarms were going off, and the house reaked of a chemical fire. i spent about two hours frantically cleaning the chair and was able to get the black off until it was no longer visibly damaged. the problem was that it was crispy to the touch. my cousin looks at me and says "he probably won't even notice". that was the first time i ever hit a person. i broke his nose, gave him a black eye, and knocked out one tooth.

and then i got grounded for a month. it wasn't until i was in my late 20's that for some reason we were all talking about it and i found out that my cousin had gone straight home to his mom and told her that i beat him up so that he wouldn't tell my dad that i had almost burned the house down. my aunt called my dad at work and apparently he was just so tuned up when he got home that he never even heard my side of the story. when his veins started bulging and he announced my grounding i assumed it was because i broke my cousin's nose. dad had thought for all those years that i set the fire.

that cousin just got stationed in korea. serves him right.