(Listen up. This is a submitted article from a reader, so none of the events herein can be verified by anyone. It may be a lie, but I doubt it. Carry on.)
Our story begins with my friend Steve. Steve is what I would graciously call a weird kid, I assume no more detail is necessary. Hes a rather large kid, 62 260 something pounds, but this comes into play later. Steves parents were gone on this particular day, so we decided to have a little get-together at his house.
The parties in attendance were: Steve, Skinner, Jimmy, a handful of our mutual friends, and myself. We started off the night with some mediocre bottle rockets, the ones you get packaged 50 together for $2.00. Instead of lighting them off individually, we took the sticks off of them and bound them together with scotch tape, one of Steves brilliant ideas. Steve and Skinner were hit by stray bottle rockets a couple of times, so we stopped that.
Steve then told us he had some good stuff, so we told him to go fetch it. Well, Steve comes back in about a minute with a bag full of mortars and a tube to launch them. To us, this was big we live in Florida and good fireworks are hard to come by legally. Steve picked them up on a road trip or something, but we really didnt care. Now we were going to have some real fun lighting these bitches up.
Steve comes up with another Einstein-caliber plan; we should light them from his roof! Skinner grabs a ladder from Steves garage and Jimmy, Skinner, Steve, and myself climb up. The others opted to stay on the ground and watch from there, which was a pretty good choice. Steves roof has no horizontal parts to it; its all slanted. This immediately shouldve told me this was going to be trouble.
I ignored it, and Steve set up the tube and loaded a mortar. After a few botched lights from Steve, the wick finally sparks up and we prepare for lift off. *BOOOOOM* The mortar bursts out of the tube at an exponential rate and climbs for the stars. Then the mortar arcs and *BOOOOOM* it explodes into a dazzling array of color. God damn that was cool, light up another one Steve! I yelled to him from across his roof. So Steve lights up a few more and we start to attract quite a crowd of his neighbors with our bitchin pyrotechnics.
This is when Steve gets careless. He lights another one and turns around to say something to Skinner, while I am watching in stark horror as the tube containing the lit mortar falls over and points its payload of doom straight toward Steves pathetic array of scraggly bushes in his front yard. By the time I yelled out, OH SHIT!, the mortar screams out of the tube heading directly at the bushes. When the mortar came into contact with the ground it exploded into multitude of blinding flashes of color that set my eyes alight with pain. I turned away from the blast to avoid any prolonged exposure and just like that, it stopped. I jerked my head around to survey the situation and I find myself gazing into a twisting helix of amber-colored death. The mortar had sparked off a rather sizeable brush fire in Steves front lawn.
I was dumb struck for a moment, then I burst out into one of the longest and glee-filled tangents of laughter I have ever experienced. Here I am, on my friends roof witnessing a quickly growing brush fire that could very well set the whole house ablaze and all I could do at the moment was laugh my fool head off. When Steve and Skinner saw the flash of lights and heard the explosion they immediately knew what happened. Steve sprang into action, running across his rooftop with the speed borne of a man in a life or death situation. He performs a superhero leap off of his roof that would make even Batman proud. When he lands, he takes off around the house looking for the water hose.
Meanwhile, Skinner dashes off toward the ladder and attempts to scale down it in a timely manner. This doesnt work, his foot slips and he falls to the ground with a large hole in his pants where a seam used to hold them together.
Guess where I am? Still on the roof, still laughing my ass off while the fire continues to grow, consuming much of Steves bushes and small plants in an attempt to reach the house and feed on the ample supply of wood and wonderful items contained therein.
Skinner picks himself up off the ground and grabs an old door that was hanging out on the other side of Steves house; Steves parents were remodeling parts of the house, hence the door. While Steve is still looking for the hose, Skinner runs out from the other side of the house with the door over his head and determination in his eyes. He ran up in front of the fire and tired to smother it with his dull white door of desperation. One, two, three. Skinner slams the door down on the fire. The fire starts to wane, its loosing oxygen and fading fast. Skinner slams the door down a fourth time and leaves it on the ground with the fire hopelessly trying to escape its demise. He then starts to jump on the door; one, two..and on the third try all 63 and 300 pounds of Skinner slips and falls right onto the door. *Whoosh* The fire dies an awful death at the hands, or should I say, from the cheeks of Skinners ass. Steve runs up with the hose and soaks Skinner and the area with water just to make sure the fire was out. I almost fell off of the roof from laughing so hard.
This whole fiasco has taught me but one thing, never let Steve think, period. I hope you enjoyed my recount of our New Years Day 2000 mishap. This is Scrantoine, signing off.