The Most Boring Summer Ever (or, How To Set Your Arm On Fire In 5 Easy Steps)
I wish there were still a bold line separating summer and the rest of the year. School used to go on seemingly without end until one day it just stopped and an extended months-long playtime began. Now summers camouflage into the rest of the year in one large blob of work and responsibility where, in the middle, my inner thighs get sweatier than usual.
No obligations and hardly any adult supervision laid the groundwork for a period devoid of the downers that taint adulthood. Even then, I knew how rare those days of bliss were. Those months satisfied the need for adventure and fun that the school year forced me to suppress. We rode bikes beyond the streets our parents told us we couldn’t cross. We swam during thunderstorms after they told us we’d get struck by lightning if we kept it up, which only made us do it more. We explored the spooky burnt down house at the end of the block. The dread of the looming school year crept as the calendar marched on to the final week of August when classes started up again. Those summers were about discovery, of myself and the world. I never wanted them to end.
They ended the summer I set my arm on fire. All that freedom shit I was romanticizing can, if you’re not careful, lead to being consumed by flames that were kindled by a mix of boredom and stupidity so toxic it requires a HAZMAT suit to approach.
Looking back on it, I don’t just see the moment I set my arm on fire as a single scene. I see the sequence of events that unfolded over months that led to it.
When I Decided Not To Attend Summer Camp
Boredom is a powerful tool that can lead to creative breakthroughs maybe 2% of the time. The other 98% is guys laughing as they punch each other’s dicks after having exhausted all other entertainment resources. If not for camps, my summers would have been slogs I’d use to later become either a creative genius or a supervillain with a volcano base.
Unlike in movies where kids returned to the same camp every summer, the camps I attended changed every year depending on what my friends and I were into. I begged my mom to pull me out of a Boy Scout camp halfway through. I’m not a fan of Mother Nature’s severe lack of TVs, especially when this camp’s idea of wilderness was a park with 10 trees in the middle of a residential neighborhood across the street from a Best Buy and a Taco Bell. I was in a roller hockey camp where every day I and fellow campers donned all of our pads in the sweltering heat of summer to play a game of chicken against heat-induced delirium. It was like if child abuse was fun for the child. I was in another where we went on field trips every day. Mondays we went to a spring water pool in a beautiful local coral quarry. We bowled on Tuesday, went to an arcade on Wednesdays, and so on. It explains why, for a small stretch in my life, I thought we were rich. The illusion of wealth was shattered the day my mom couldn’t afford the camp fees anymore, which I found out minutes before I hopped on the bus for our weekly laser tag game. I was shuttled off to hang out with the rest of the kids who couldn’t afford the Premium Platinum Plus Executive Level summer camp experience. I got into a 4-on-1 fight within the first hour. Those kids were animals.
By the time I hit middle school, I felt I’d outgrown camps. I was fast approaching adulthood. I should be getting a head start on being a listless loser with no future who sits around all day while his friends are actually doing something with their lives. Rather than spend another summer socializing in the sun, I figured I’d take the first steps into maturity by spending this summer the same way I use any brief instance of free time I manage to scrounge up as an adult – doing as little as humanly possible and basking in every glorious second of it.
When My Family Thought It Wise To Have A Candy Bowl of Lighters In Our Home
My home was a smoker’s paradise. Not a school year went by where at least one teacher or classmate who caught a whiff of me as I walked by didn’t ask if I had been running an illegal gambling ring out of a basement. In fourth grade, a classmate asked if I smoked cigarettes after catching an intense smoky whiff of my Sesame Street book bag. What a dumb question. How did he not notice me enjoying a couple smokes under the monkey bars every day during playtime?
My mom smoked one cigarette a day, just one to unwind after work. My aunt would pop in and out to snatch a smoke at odd intervals like she was an audience favorite sitcom character who’d have to wait for the applause to die down before she delivered her first line. My grandfather knew he was impervious to the Grim Reaper’s touch, so he’d chain smoke to rub Death’s futility in his bony face. To accommodate the smokers, there was always a candy dish filled with lighters and matchboxes somewhere around the house.
I wandered the apartment that summer struggling to find the reason I left the camp life behind. The desire to spend your free time relaxing at home rarely takes into account how little there is to do at home, especially on a weekday. Daytime TV was all soap operas and judge shows. I still can’t watch them without feeling like I’m in a waiting room about to get my braces tightened. I couldn’t rely on my Sega Genesis since the only games I had were Sonic Spinball, where the fusion of Sonic the Hedgehog and pinball into a punny title was the game’s only redeeming quality, and Math Blasters, a game I will never forgive for trying to trick me into liking math. The excitement the technological toys lacked I found in the primitive destructive powers of fire, which could be created with any number of the lighters and matchbooks lying around.
I improvised little fire-based games, like “Melt Plastic Sandwich Bags” where you won by melting clear plastic sandwich bags while trying to not boil my flesh or pass out from the fumes. Another fun one was “Let’s Burn Wooden Kebob Skewers For No Reason.” I was undefeated. Both of these eventually gave birth to a third game called “Try To Hide Signs of My Pyromania From Mom,” which I never won. The lighters were just sitting there, begging me to figure out how to use them to kill time and possibly myself and everyone in the building.
When I Shoplifted A Knock-Off Zippo Lighter From Spencer Gifts
When the boredom became too much to bear, which happened after I ran out of things to set on fire, I’d walk a few blocks to a local mall. I’d make routine stops at Electronics Boutique to gawk at all the non-Math Blasters games I couldn’t afford and then at Sharper Image to sit and groan with sensual pleasure in the massage chair until I was asked to leave. I’d circle the food court collecting free samples of chicken slathered in the traditional sugary chicken sauces of mysterious far-off lands.
No trip was complete without a visit to the Spencer Gifts hidden in the dark corridor at the ass end of the mall. All malls are required by federal law to have at least one Spencer Gifts or be heavily fined. It’s a loadbearing store. Spencer Gifts is where people with bad taste make a pilgrimage to stock up on fake dog poop, edible underwear, and novelty shot glasses emblazoned with fun slogans celebrating alcoholism. Today, it’s mostly filled with people deciding if they should buy a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles snapback flatbrim hat or pay their bills. The placement of this particular Spencer Gifts suggested it was this mall’s greatest shame. In my memory, it looks like the kind of place you suspect launders money for a local crime syndicate. Part of the proceeds of every glow-in-the-dark Jimi Hendrix poster went to buying off a couple cops and a City Councilman.
It was there that I saw it, the object that would save my summer: a knock-off Zippo lighter with a picture of a woman’s ass with a black thong running up the crack. Since anything that could be even vaguely described as porn was hard to come by for at least another year until I finally had internet, anything that showed off a woman’s body was a holy relic worth sacrificing my life to obtain and protect. One day between classes in middle school, some classmates and I came across an issue of Hustler lying on the grass out in the open. There was a woman showing off her vagina right there. How did no one else see this? Were we dehydrated wanderers being deceived by a mirage? We pounced on it at the same time and tried wrestling it from each other’s grasp, titties and pubes flying everywhere. We had to fight for our porn then. There’s only so much scrambled cable TV porn that looks like people are fucking in a Dali painting that a pubescent boy can take. One clear picture of a naughty part is all we asked for, and this knock-off Zippo with a thonged ass delivered that and fire. I was a budding pyromaniac in the throes of puberty and I kind of wanted to have sex with this lighter. But I had no money. The only way to make this truly terrible lighter mine was to steal it.
I cased the joint in the days leading up to the big heist. Their security system was no more than the bored guy in his early 20s working the cash register and hoping he’s not this store’s manager by the time he’s in his early 30s. There wasn’t a camera in sight. No scanners at the entrance. This wasn’t the Ocean’s 11 Bellagio heist. I grabbed it and headed over to the rear corner of the store, as far away from the register as I could get with plenty of aisles and novelty piggy banks shaped like boobs between me and the sole employee. I ripped open the packaging and slid it into my pocket. I probably could’ve told the cashier I was taking it and that he wouldn’t have broken his thousand-yard stare into the void of boredom enough to stop me. But in the moment my heart was racing, my temples were sweating, and my veins were pumping with enough adrenaline to lift an excavator off a baby if need be.
I walked home with the butt lighter in my pocket, terrified, thinking a squadron of waddling mall cops would be hot on my tail. I relaxed when I stepped into my apartment, and more so when I entered my bedroom. I had made it. The knock-off Zippo with a woman’s thonged butt was mine. My boring summer was about to become legendary.
All of this was the beginning of my brief but prolific career as a petty shoplifter. My youthful dabbling in criminality would come to an abrupt and fitting end a few years later when I got caught stealing Sonic Adventure for the Sega Dreamcast from a Target a block from home. When I die, the Grim Reaper will visit me in the form of Sonic the Hedgehog and together we will loop-to-loop over spike pits into the Great Beyond.
When I Ignored My Own Really Good Advice
I’d spent all summer searching for meaning in the boredom. I almost found it in the bowls filled with lighters, and again in the melted sandwich bags, but I wound up having to steal it from a Spencer Gifts. The lighter was the reason I left summer camps behind. It was the discovery of self at the end of a spirit quest. More than anything, it let me set things on fire with a butt.
When I wasn’t fiddling with it, it was never more than an arm’s length away. I’d spark it again and again, so often that I’d go through a bottle of lighter fluid every couple weeks. The cheap plastic gas station lighters in the candy bowls were functionally identical to the butt lighter, except the butt lighter had meaning. I earned the butt lighter. Each flame burned as hot as my desperation to not be so fucking bored because I made the horrible mistake of not going to summer camp. The flame, with its mysterious alluring powers to ruin and purify, became my Savior, and because of it I now totally understand how religion got started in the first place.
One day, I sparked the flint and it wasn’t followed by a flame. Out of fluid. No worries, though – I had some hidden away in my bedroom desk. Zippo-style lighters don’t have an enclosed inner chamber like cheap plastic gas station lighters. They’re filled with cotton stuffing that keeps the wick moist with absorbed lighter fluid. I slid the fluid tank from its casing and flipped it upside down to expose the cotton over the kitchen sink. The stuffing is so absorbent it can be hard to tell when it’s filled. The time between when the fluid peaks over the top of the cotton and when it’s dribbling down your forearm is roughly the same as a single flap of hummingbird’s wings or the length of my attention span. I got lost in thought and the fluid overflowed. It ran down my left forearm, streaming down my elbow. I knew the muscle memory wanted me to give the flint a flick after sliding the tank back in its casing, so I over-prepared by repeating a single mantra to prevent a worst-case scenario:
“DON’T SPARK THE LIGHTER!”
It echoed in my brain. It was my only thought.
“DON’T SPARK THE LIGHTER!”
“DON’T SPARK THE LIGHTER!”
“DON’T SPARK THE LIGHTER!”
When I Sparked The Lighter
As I watched the flames race up my left pinky to my elbow in an instant while making that dramatic “WOO-UUF!” sound fire makes in movies (which I can assure you is the sound it actually makes), I remember thinking, “Well, see, now this is pretty rad.” A second later I went into the customary “I’m on fire” panic, but not before I took a second to appreciate how, despite the horror, being on fire makes you feel pretty fucking metal. I wouldn’t suggest it to spice up a dull evening at home or an uneventful cocktail party, but it is a nice change of pace that can liven things up a little.
Stop, Drop, and Roll is an easy to remember tip that could save your life if you’re ever on fire, assuming you remember it. But being on fire really screws with your priorities. So I did not Stop, Drop, and Roll. Instead, I just went with the flow and did whatever my spirit told me to. My spirit was telling me to wave my arm around and scream. It wasn’t really helpful, but it felt right. That’s what really matters when you’re on fire.
The screaming wasn’t from the pain. It was from the shock of being engulfed by flame. I don’t remember the pain. Being on fire is a spectacle just uncommon enough in real life that it only makes sense in a movie, where the hero barbecues a henchman with a flamethrower who flails around screaming before leaping out of a window to splat on the street to end the pain. Something heroic like that. You don’t imagine setting yourself on fire in your kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon. I may have felt pain in the moment, but I was too distracted by being on fire to feel it, if that makes sense.
Something I’ve always marveled at is how, in a moment of desperation, the ghostly spirit of instinct will possess your body to guide it to safety. While my eyes and most sections of my brain were busy trying to comprehend how part of me was on fire, instinct launched my right hand over to the knob on the sink. I twisted the faucet open with a swift spin. In one fluid swipe, my left arm cut through the stream. The momentum swung water spotted with the black ashes of my arm hair across the counter to my right.
The little wisps of burnt hair smoke I inhaled trying to catch my breath made me want to vomit. There was a defining line of forearm hair that had been scorched away. Hair, hair, ha—BALD. The few hairs that remained had singed tips that smeared into dust. I caught my breath then wiped down the counter. I lit an incense to mask the unmistakable funk of burning me. I pieced the lighter back together and sparked it again.
The hinge on the lighter top snapped off a couple months later. I never used it again. I kept it in my desk for a few years longer as a memento of that time a woman’s ass set me on fire. I didn’t go back to camp the following summer, or ever again. My instinct was right. I had outgrown summer camp. I had chosen the worst way to end that chapter of my life. I hung out with friends and generally tried to spend more time away from places I could accidentally self-immolate in a fit of boredom.
Summer came to a well-earned end a couple weeks later. The hair on my arm had mostly grown back by the time I stepped foot into homeroom for the first time. I didn’t let the lingering summer heat stop me from wearing long-sleeved shirts to hide my arm stubble.
Most school years began with dread. Not this one. For the first and only time in my life, I couldn’t wait to go back. I hated school like it murdered my family and only kept attending so I could destroy it from the inside, but at least it wasn’t so boring that I had to set myself on fire to make it interesting.
