It started when I was a kid. I stole matches from the kitchen junk drawer. Birthday candles. Anything with a fuse. I gathered bundles of dry twigs from the yard and kept them in a locked toy chest under my bed. I stood on my tippy toes to take the kitchen lighter from its place in the world. Just to hold it in my hands for a minute. My parents told me cut it out, quit it, and I did for a while. I used to hate getting in trouble. But you can adapt to anything. Every fire is made from three elements. One: fuel. Things you can burn. Scrap wood, dry leaves, a three story bungalow in the suburbs. Anything and everything you’d ever want to remove from this earth forever. Two: oxygen. Air to feed the flames. Fire is a living thing, like you and me. It needs to breathe. Nothing catches in a vacuum. And three: combustion. The spark to light it up. If you build the fire right, you never need much. Just a tiny nip of heat in the right place and you can burn the biggest building in the world down to a thin black sheen of ash that drifts away to nowhere in the first slight wind. Everything good I’ve ever done in this life has been the product of these three things, combined in the right amounts in the proper order. Here is the trifecta my entire world rests upon. Fuel, Oxygen, Combustion. Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Adam Eleanor lives at 1337 Pinnacle Park Lane. It’s a three story bungalow made of wood, and drywall, and three other types of insulation. The wood of the house is very dry. It will catch quickly. If I had to guess, the whole thing could be engulfed in ten minutes, start to finish. I don’t know how I know this, but I do. It’s a warm night in late May and the breeze across town is strong. Adam Eleanor is throwing the last party of high school tonight. Everyone’s invited to the last party of high school. Even me. Unfortunately I can’t make it to the party. I have plans. In the first grade, I’d get home from school, dash up to my room, and set fire to my homework. I’d tear it up into tiny jagged triangles and light them off one by one with the matches I’d stolen at breakfast, while Mom wasn’t looking. The next day, I’d tell my teachers the dog ate it. But we didn’t have pets. One afternoon I accidentally set off the overhead smoke alarm and my parents rushed in to find me in the act. I still remember their faces. How they froze in place in the doorway when they saw me there with that burning teepee of multiplication tables and charred matches between my legs. The moment they registered once and for all this was going to be a whole thing. The cold recognition of what was now the capital P Problem they’d have to deal with for years to come. I remember before there was anger, scolding, punishment, before I feigned shame and contrition and endured the long time-out and first visit to a clinical specialist, before all of that, there was something else in my parents’ eyes. Something no Mommy or Daddy should ever feel toward their firstborn son. When they looked down at me in my room that day… for no longer than a fleeting moment… They were afraid of me. On the walk to Adam Eleanor’s house I already know This Is A Very Bad Idea. I know this because I’m saying to myself again and again, This Is A Bad Idea, This Is A Bad Idea. But whenever I say to myself This Is A Bad Idea, I always end up doing it. It’s like a fundamental law of the universe. I’m dressed all in black and have my hood up. No one would ever think to stop me. I’m in the suburbs. I think about if maybe I can still stop myself from doing what I’m about to do, but the little click’s taken place in my mind. The switch has been flipped. You can always feel when the decision’s made. I was nine years old and it was February and I turned the gas stove on and held my left hand over the fire for eleven seconds without moving. I could feel my skin melt and curl in on itself like a marshmallow you leave to die on the stick. I was tall enough now I didn’t have to stand on my tippy toes. I could just reach right over the electric blue flame. Most human beings have a built-in animal instinct to pull away from the heat. But I guess I’ve always been a little different. I have a patchy tattoo of mottled pink flesh right here to prove it. It’s not that I didn’t feel the pain. Those were real tears in my eyes. I just didn’t pull away from it. I could stay inside of it. Transmute it, kind of. It didn’t get me off though. I had to get my kicks from lighting other stuff on fire. Everyone’s got their thing. Most kids do things like: go to soccer practice or choir or chess club. I did things like: set off homemade fireworks in lidless public trash receptacles after dark. Sneak out way past my bedtime with my pockets full of lint from the dryer machine. Collect trash from the streets of my town and burn it all down to ash. Burn anything I could get my hands on. Even my own clothes if that’s what it took. Tell myself each and every time I lit up that this was the very last time I would ever light up. Shame, guilt, self loathing, these gifts came early. They come with the territory. I’d tell myself, This has to stop. This is very bad. This is not a good habit I’m developing here. But then again, nobody got hurt. Not yet, at least. These were the early days. There’s a narrow window of time where Adam and his goons are out buying surplus liquor for the party and the house is empty. I have fifteen minutes to get inside the house through the back door, prepare the building for its dramatic conclusion, and bounce. I don’t have to worry about cameras on the door or anywhere else because Adam’s already taken care of that. The windows are draped and there’s no visibility from the front. I slip around the side, unlatch the gate to the backyard, and stroll through to the sliding door. Yes, it is always this easy to break and enter a home in the suburbs. Except can you really call it “breaking” when everything’s unlocked? Valentine’s Day of third grade is when I really knew I had a problem. Picture it. All the kids milling about depositing b******t Hallmark offerings into brown paper bags. Stickers, lollipops, little candy hearts made of colored chalk. You remember. There’s not much sentimental value to the ritual when you keep in mind every child is required to give one to everyone. No discrimination. Everyone gets a trophy. We’re 10 minutes into the festivities when Emily McBride yells out to the whole room, Who left a match in my bag? And everyone stops what they’re doing. God forbid someone exercise a little originality. Teacher looks inside Emily’s bag and frowns. Then she checks Arthur Dennison’s bag. Her forehead creases cut deeper into her face. She checks the next bag. The next. The downward slant of Teacher’s eyebrows becomes parabolic. She marches up to the front of the class and says Alright, who wants to speak up? Who put all these matches and fuses and homemade pocket explosives in everyone’s paper bags? No one says anything. So Teacher pulls the age old, Come forward now and you won’t be punished. Which, for the record: that promise has been kept exactly zero times in the history of elementary school. No one? she says. Alright then. She instructs the class to empty their bags. The perp will obviously be the only one who hasn’t deposited a match/fuse/pocket explosive into their own stash. Surely. Everyone groans and empties their bags. And sure enough, it’s in my brown paper bag they find something unexpected. Two things, actually. First, no one in the class has left me even one chalky pink heart or Hallmark card or offering of cheap candy. What happened to “No one gets left out on Valentine’s Day?” What they do find is: a small translucent bag of, what is that, gunpowder?, a juice box full of pure grain ethanol, two individual sets of flint and steel, and a tangled mess of unidentified multi-colored wires. Both my parents pick me up from the office. They say things like: Haven’t we talked about this, and We thought you were feeling better, and We’re not angry, honey, we’re just disappointed. There’s nothing I can say to get out of this one. I have to face the music. I have to go back to the listening experts that very afternoon. Later that night I hear my father break down into tears from the other side of the wall. Him and Mom are in their bedroom. I hear him collapse into these low, racking sobs, muffled by Mom’s arms wrapped around him. I can tell he’s been holding it in. No matter how well he hides it, my father’s cries have a way of echoing through the thin capillaries of our house. I grit my teeth and force myself to hear it all. I deserve this. There is something very, very wrong with me. This is the night I hold my arm over the stove. The first time. I’m dousing the floors, walls, and ceiling of the Eleanor estate in odorless combustible fluid. It’s a kerosene base with a number of other compounds mixed in to hide the scent. I’m not going to walk you through the whole process right now. I have a fifteen minute window, remember. But if you really want to hear about it, I prepare it at home in my room in small batch micro brews. It’s fast drying so I can cover every corner of the house and the kids won’t notice they’re standing and breathing in potent flammable aerosol spray until it’s ignited. I’m dousing the family photos hanging in the hallway. The marble countertops. Even though marble doesn’t burn. I don’t care. Douse it all. My nose drips a single tear of blood. I sniff it back up into my face. By the time I was 10, I’d learned how to keep my habit under wraps. How to lie to therapists, psychiatrists. Listening professionals. The trick is: you can’t ever be cheerful. When they ask you how you’re doing, how you’re feeling, you can never tell them just ‘good.’ They won’t buy it. You have to be a little unhappy. N
