The Fire

It has been too long. I’ll bet you thought this blog was dead, huh? I’ve actually spent the past month losing my mind and participating in the incredibly insane, yet undoubtedly fulfilling NaNoWriMo event. The good news is that I’ve been writing like a madman. The bad news (depending on how you look at it, I guess) is that the project I’ve been working on will take a really long time to be released.

However, amidst a November full of novel-focused literary recklessness, I still had to come up with another short story for Backbeat Magazine (an awesome problem to have, by the way – no complaints here). The deadline for the second entry kind of snuck up on me because I’d been forcing my way through NaNoWriMo, but, after quickly writing and hating a couple of other short stories over a day or two, I came up with something that I think is pretty entertaining.

I’m looking forward to sharing more ideas with you in the coming months and, as always, I appreciate you reading. Also, I have to apologize for the inconsistency of the appearance of these blog posts. I've tried messing with the layout of these entries a dozen times, but the alignment constantly comes out weird when I copy and paste out of Word. Thanks for bearing with it.

Enjoy!

The Fire

I was seventeen years old when I burned my house down.

If you lived here at that time, I’m sure that you read all about it. Its true that we lost everything and, yes, I was severely punished, but I’ll never forget the moment of bizarre fascination and awe that I shared with over a hundred people on my front lawn that night. None of us said anything. We just stood there, mesmerized, as the wail of the fire truck sirens grew louder and louder. There was something strangely satisfying about watching my childhood home disintegrate before my very eyes – I can’t really explain it. By morning, it was all destroyed. The insurance adjuster later told my dad that it was what they call in the industry, “a total loss.” From my point of view, however, it was the perfect ending to an incredible night.

I was born and raised in that house. My forced piano lessons began taking place in the extra bedroom that was just off the kitchen when I was six years old. The asshole instructor that my Julliard alum father enlisted to teach me would show up twice a week expecting to hear perfect renditions of, “Moonlight Sonata,” and, “Clair de Lune.” She, per my father’s insistence, demanded technically precise and proficient performances every month.

All I wanted to do was play the guitar.

By the time I was twelve, I could burn through several Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven pieces blindfolded. In fact, I actually did that at a recital once to show my father that I was, as he liked to say, “taking advantage of the musical gift I had been given.” He complimented my technique, but couldn’t resist informing me that my performance was, “a little too showy.” Despite his mixed reviews, I figured adhering to his musical expectations would serve as leverage for me to get my first electric guitar. It worked. He told me that I could “play that thing” in my free time as long as my piano playing didn’t suffer.

I played it every day.

When I was fourteen, I joined a punk band. The first few songs we wrote were horrendous. We played power chords over and over through shitty amps, but we didn’t care. It was loud, it was raw, and I loved every minute of it. It felt good to abandon the rigid form of expression to which I had been forcefully accustomed. There was no sheet music or needle-nosed, musical know-it-all peering over my shoulder as I recklessly shredded.

We began playing around town and actually developed a following over the next couple of years. I constantly had to sneak out of the house to go play shows. My piano playing was beginning to slip, but my father’s career was starting to take off and, thankfully, he hadn’t noticed.

The day that he was invited to perform a concert with the New York Philharmonic, I was ecstatic. It meant that I could stay home and put on a “concert” of my own while he was miles away. He was hesitant to leave me home alone, but I assured him that I would spend my time studying and trying to master his old book of Bach preludes. He smiled and said that he expected to hear them when he got back the following week. I returned a sincere smile because I had mastered that book the year before and could easily play any of those pieces from memory.

He left on Thursday and said that he would be returning on Monday.

The turnout was unbelievable. Friends, friends of friends, and complete strangers were crammed into every inch of our ranch style home. I don’t know how that many people fit in my house, but they did. The crowd drank, chatted, and watched in anticipation as we began to set up in the living room.

Over the previous year, our band had become increasingly adventurous with our stage show. We were constantly breaking things, hurting ourselves as we thrashed around, and even getting into fights. We were young and embraced our youth by putting on the loudest and wildest show in town every time we played. The latest addition to the “Oh shit” moments of our performances was lighting our drummer’s cymbals on fire. During the set, I would spray lighter fluid in a circular motion on the top of the gold discs and ignite them with a cheap Bic. The desired result was a steady flame around the edges followed by a vertical fireball of at least three feet when the cymbals were struck. We made club owners nervous, but we knew what we were doing.

Or so we thought…

That night, during our best show to date, I was completely swept up in the frenzied energy of the crowd and accidentally went overboard with the lighter fluid. When the song demanded intense cymbal hits, the fireballs shot up, as usual, but a couple of smaller fireballs that leapt onto the floor near my amp went completely unnoticed. As we launched into the bridge of that closing song, coincidently titled, “Fire Fight,” my amplifier crackled, the drummer stopped playing, and the crowd began pushing and shoving - more out of panic than typical slamming. I turned around to see my amp, along with the floor-to-ceiling oak entertainment center behind it, completely engulfed in flames.

There are no words.

The growing fire was still small enough to allow everyone to get out safely, but just big enough to prevent us from putting it out. In a moment of collective consciousness, the crowd actually settled down and began to march out in a slow orderly fashion. It was as if they were quietly leaving a funeral while I, the dearly departed for whom they would surely be mourning upon my father’s return, unplugged my guitar and followed suit.

I thought about his piano as I walked outside and inspected my unscathed guitar. The thought of the disfigured ivory, snapping wires, and smoldering wood in that little room off the kitchen made me smile. It was surely cosmic justice for the years of my forced appreciation for that instrument – his instrument.

Despite the life changing repercussions that loomed on the horizon, I joyfully basked in the orange-yellow glow that radiated from the rubble that was once my house. When the firemen asked me what happened, I didn’t lie. I simply smiled and told them that I had burned the place down doing what I loved to do.

My father received rave reviews that weekend. I’m sure you read all about it. People still say that it was one of the most memorable concerts of his entire career. That piece in The Times makes me laugh to this day. The reporter decided to use a sports idiom to explain the incredible level on which my father played. She said that my dad “nailed every note of the perfect performance with poise, precision, and passion. To put it quite simply… he was on fire.”