Confessions Of A Pyromaniac

When I was just a lad of single digits, I had a strange fascination with fire.

More to the point, I liked to burn things.

I would burn anything that didn't move on its own.

I didn't have many toys. I burned them all.

Remember those little plastic soldiers that came like a hundred to the pack? I would take those and stick their heads in the gas heater in my room and melt them until I could feel the heat on my fingers.

Even some of my friends shared my penchant for pyromania.

One boy and I would save our pennies up and walk into town to the dime store and buy model airplanes or cars or ships and take them home and put them together.

And I'm not talking about just hastily slinging them together. We took our time, using the instructions in the package and constructing them with great care. We even painted them and applied the decals provided in detail.

Then, after admiring our artwork, we would take them outdoors, douse them with any flammable liquid we could get our grubby little hands on and set them on fire sometimes even adding a firecracker or M-80, if we had any, for effect.

Once another friend and I, armed with only a book of matches, set out on a dry, breezy day to a wheat field near our house and ignited it. It was not our intention to burn the field. We were just striking the matches and burning individual straws but, under said weather conditions, things got out of control and the next thing we knew we had a five-alarm blaze going.

Or so it seemed to boys our age.

It was large enough, however, for people who lived nearby to call the fire department and pretty soon the local volunteers were swarming the area to extinguish our craft.

We hid in some brush and watched until the area was full of folks and we came out and blended in with the onlookers.

No one ever suspected us. They attributed the inferno to a passerby flicking a cigarette out of his car on the worst possible day to do so.

Being raised in a southern Baptist home, I was taken to church every time the doors were open. Sunday school, morning worship, evening services and midweek prayer meeting.

Our pastor preached hell, fire and brimstone from the pulpit and made staunch believers in the Word to all who attended these meetings.

It was his God fearing messages that led me to believe that my mother's paperback copy of The Exorcist was pure evil and full of demons. I got it in my head that if I destroyed that book the demons would come out and, better yet, I would witness their exit.

So, you guessed it, I took that book, drenched it in gasoline and set it on fire. Now I didn't actually witness any demons through the smoke and fire but I was satisfied they had made their exodus and I had done a good thing.

My mother searched high and low for that book and never knew, until she reads this, what happened to it. She suspected my dad found it and disposed of it.

A railroad line runs behind our house and me and my friends used to wait on it from the back of our property as it made its way into town and when the caboose would appear at the end we would jump it and ride into town which was walking distance from my house.

One day we discovered some flares on that caboose. A virtual treasure trove to adolescent pyros such as ourselves. We, of course had to have some so we took some.

We took them to an old, abandoned building at the end of our street that once had been a dry cleaners to test out our new toys. The building was full of cobwebs and dust and paper and stuff that would burn very easily.

We ended up setting the whole building on fire.

This time there was no hiding as someone saw us run from the building as it burned and told the local police chief when he arrived on the scene shortly after the volunteer firemen.

He questioned us sternly and we began to cry giving ourselves away.

We were loaded into the back of his squad car and carried to the police booth in the middle of town where the chief grilled us some more before calling our parents to come get us.

Now I can tell you the fire my folks lit in my pants when we got home was ten times hotter than the one we had set in that building.