As a kid, the side of my family’s garage was home to what could affectionately be called a pile of crap. The pile would expand and contract, but it never completely disappeared. If you looked closely, you’d see that some of the foundational elements were wood scraps from past home renovations, garden tools that were supposed to be hung up in the garage, odds and ends that were too big to put in the garbage can but not big enough to merit a trip to the landfill, and a bike with two flat tires that no one remembered to buy new tubes for.
When you’re 13 years old, a pile like that is relatively invisible. That is, of course, until the very moment in which its contents could save you from a serious disease that plagues too many of our youth—death by boredom.
A moment such as that came one summer afternoon when Mom was being a total buzzkill. I guess the constant background noise of mid-day television programming had become too much. She declared that I had to turn off the TV and find something to do outside.
As I made my way outside—annoyed and desperate for something to alleviate the fresh pain of boredom—the quiet call of the pile, which had always been drowned out by the sound of the TV, was suddenly the only sound I could hear. There it was: a Mecca of mischief. A pile of innumerable possibilities.
I kicked a few stray two-by-fours and watched how the collection absorbed the movement. The boards moved the teeth of a rake, which scraped the side of the garage, causing small pieces of stucco to fall off into a puddle of water. If you could have seen inside my head at that moment, it would have looked exactly like the scene in the 1995 Hollywood hit, Apollo 13, when the team at mission control lays out all the contents of the spaceship and has to figure out how to fix the problem using only those items. I carefully inventoried everything in front of me, mentally running through various scenarios to see which of the items would produce the most enjoyment for my effort.
It didn’t take long to decide that the gas can for the lawnmower was going to be a key piece of the puzzle—literally providing the biggest “bang” for my buck. Seeing the gas can, I was reminded of the fifth-grade science fair. My submission was a volcano made out of clay that used baking soda and vinegar to create an eruption.
But that was then. I was older now. And being the age at which the world agreed I was mature enough for movies with drug use, violence (though not extreme or persistent), and a single use of one of the harsher sexually derived words (though only as an expletive), I decided I was old enough to create a volcano with real fire instead of the ingredients for cookies and BBQ sauce.
I retrieved a cup and some matches from inside the garage—still avoiding Mom inside the house. I set the cup firmly on the concrete, filled it with gasoline, lit a match, and dropped it in.
Now, when you introduce fire to more than a minor amount of combustible liquid, there is only one thing that can happen. And if you have ever seen the episode of Parks and Recreation where Ron Swanson lights the eternal flame at Lil’ Sebastian’s memorial, you know that that one thing is a giant fireball consuming the face of the person introducing the flame.
Luckily, the skin on my face wasn’t burned, but I immediately reached for the top of my head. It was much less hairy than normal. I hesitantly went inside to look in the mirror. What was previously a beautiful head of early teen hair had been reduced to charred stubble. My light blonde hairs were barely visible on my scalp, which made me look more bald than anything.
After the initial shock, I eventually came to see my head as a badge of honor, and I enjoyed telling the story to everyone (except my parents, who, as you can guess, did not worship me for my “cool” experiment).
And that’s the story many of my friends at the time believe to this day.
Now, you can choose to believe that story, or you can choose to consider an alternate story.
You can choose to believe that my mother, who, bless her heart, had taught herself to cut her children’s hair to save money, had forgotten to grab a clipper guard when she was cutting my hair. Before she realized her mistake, it was too late. She had run the bare clippers through my bangs and halfway to the back of my head. Since a fully buzzed head looks better than a head with a single buzzed line down the center, she finished off the rest of my head to match.
I was devastated.
But not long after the last tear dried from my cheek, I decided I had two options: I could succumb to another of the serious teenage diseases—death by embarrassment in the court of middle-school opinion—or, I could come up with a lie (a pile of crap, if you will), that would make me seem so cool that no one could possibly make fun of me.
Now, no matter which story you choose to believe, the hero and the antagonist are the same. The hero, a pile of crap, saved me from death by boredom and death by embarrassment. And the antagonist, the one who put me into those situations, was none other than every kid’s antagonist: Mom. Though, I will say, she did extend an olive branch by lending me some mascara to darken my hair. Coincidentally, mascara in buzzed blonde hair gives it a believable just-got-singed look.
There is more junk in this picture than ever existed on the side of our garage :-)