Oh, it really did happen...
I hung out pacing between the neighbors houses waiting for the fire trucks to show up. The thing that really jacks with me when I think about it is that in my mad scramble to vacate the premise, I had turned the outside Christmas lights on.
So, you’ve got this house, it’s the pinnacle of festive cheer, every window and peak outlined with those fat, rainbow Christmas lights…and the inside is basically gutted from the bottom up. I’m fifteen and there’s some cop trying to question me with his little note book and black isontoner gloves, all the while there’s an endless clown car full of firefighters clomping up the stairs with their hoses and axes.
I just wanted to call my fucking parents. Eventually, some baby-faced paramedic swung in and intervened so I could keep frantically shuffling between Neighbor Rick’s car trailer and The Old Lady’s chain link fence.
I didn’t give much thought at first to the fricasseed carnage a house fire entails, I just kept reeling “What the Hell kind of guilt trip is God trying to lay on me with letting my house burn down on Christmas?”
The sucker didn’t burn down, really it burnt up. Up the vents, singing everything in our closets, collecting in the places where the ceiling meets the walls.
That night we collected ourselves in Uncle Tim’s house, abandoned for the holidays. Nobody was supposed sleep that night. Mama D ironed things she found in Uncle Tim’s linen closet, DumbBaby took off with one of her friends until things got a little less heavy, I watched an E! True Hollywood story on Divine, and in the grand style of The Dada, he turned in with “Well, ain’t nothing’s that gonna get done tonight. See you in the morning.”
The first person showed up at about 6:00 AM.
“Oh my GAWWWD! I heard all about what happened and all I could think of was ‘those girl’s don’t even have any panties! So here, here’s my new Christmas Panties. Figured you could use ‘em more than I could.”
What can you say to that?
Just “Thanks. We really don’t have panties this morning.”
Christmas just happened to show up on a Saturday which rendered us a flood of Churchies showed up around 11:00 asking us what we needed. We couldn’t go into the house, so we didn’t know.
“Thanks. We really do need help with something, we just don’t know what. Thanks just the same.”
They left a Sunday School’s worth of handmade sympathy cards, the jewel of the bunch being a snow man written in a child’s backward, washable marker scroll boldly reading:
“MY FIRNDS IM JOPESH! THANK YOU!”
The Queenbee Senior Girl called DumbBaby to say; “Uh hey, I have some old Silvers if you need some stuff.”
DumbBaby hung up to tell us “Guys, I want her Silvers but, like, I feel bad because we’re getting all new stuff anyway. There’s probably some poor people who don’t even have any Silvers.”
We met the fire marshall the afternoon of December 26, 1999. Everything in the house was either burnt or blemished with a layer of soot. Melted or ruptured in the heat.
The Dada ran around trying to wipe everything off.
“This’ll come clean! This is just a little warped! Ahhh we were going to get a new TV anyway.”
The fire marshall was a stoic, seasoned gritty old guy. Who walked in behind us and announcing “Criminy that’s some smoke damage.”
Dada still bouncing around trying to minimize popped in with a cheery:
“Yeahhhh but you’ve seen worse!”
The fire marshall took a seat on top of a noxious chair that had been our rolling vinyl dinette set. He very carefully set the scene by shimmying the chair in front of our wilted, plastic, blob of our tinseled Christmas tree and lit a cigarette.
“Nah. I ain’t ever seen worse. Everything that didn’t burn’s toxic now anyway. You’d best start all over, mister.”
I still run that moment over and over in my mind, trying to justify that maybe this was a scene from a Wes Anderson movie.
Nope. This was our life.
By the early evening, a barrage of friends from my parent’s party excursions, DumbBaby’s basketball camp buddies were over dragging all of our blackened worldly clutter on to the driveway. My (2) friend’s contribution had been whisking me away to a movie while everyone else toiled.
I came back to some Samaritan power washing my skateboard on the lawn while everyone else piled the back of trucks for dump runs.
DumbBaby was right, we made quick work of the situation we were handed and rented a new house right away and filled it with all brand new things. It happened so fast with our band of ragtag friends helping us wipe things down and bring us Christmas Panties, there wasn’t much time to sulk around bawling over a ruined collection of Babysitter’s Club books or scorched antique Fiesta ware.
It’s like it almost didn’t happen at all. Every once in a while we’ll uncover a warped and discolored family photo and think about how much Christmas sucked that year. The only concrete evidence of the whole nasty ordeal is a VHS tape someone camcordered to try to help us with an insurance claim.
The tape goes from room to devastated room, curtains ragged with burns, our teenaged bedrooms covered in blackness, even over our laundry piles on our floors. Christmas presents destroyed below the tree and the clean white outlines of foot prints through the ashes. Negative shapes from where pictures were hung on the walls.
You hear chatter from people moving all of these pieces of our collected materialisms out the front door, then Dada walking up behind the camera man to say:
“Thanks man, really, really thanks a lot. Come gimme a hand with this couch then we’ll go have a beer.”
1 year ago