I'm sure you know what I mean; 'Dad, look how fast I can ride my bike', 'mom, see how high I can climb up this tree'.
You know what I mean?
Well yeah, it happened to me a lot.
It still does.
At my high school we had several art classrooms. One of them was equipped with a large gas fired kiln. It was used for firing and glazing ceramics. It wasn't part of the classroom as much as it was only accessible through the classroom.
This classroom had a set of double French doors that gave the students access to a small courtyard and within this courtyard, the far corner of it, was where the kiln was situated.
Our art teacher was one of those strangely abstract women who seemed to be stuck in a continuous daily cycle of reinventing herself. Don't get me wrong she was a fantastically warm woman and we loved her dearly - it was just that her randomness always had you wondering who she would be when next she stood in front of the class!
The thing I liked best about her was that she held strongly to the belief that everything everyone did was just simply a form of artistic expression struggling to be let free.. To this end she saw the fact that I smoked cigarettes to mean that I was struggling with some sort of artistic self destruction that really only needed to be harnessed.
Anyway, one of the reasons I loved her, more perhaps than most, was that she would let me smoke out by the kiln in the courtyard during our classes with her.
It was during one of these highly irregular 'smoko' breaks and accompanied by one of my friends who also had a propensity for tobacco that I discovered two newly refilled gas bottles that had been delivered earlier that day. It appeared that the two being used to power the kiln were nearing empty and the replacements were ordered before the old ones actually ran out.
These bottles were not unlike the one sitting below your BBQ at home only they stood about 5 or more foot high and didn't have that guard thingy around the valve on the top, so they looked more like gigantic dive cylinders - I'm pretty sure I've seen bottles like this around recently so it must just be the ones for home use that have the guard around the valve - who knows.
I had learnt from experiments I had conducted at home on the gas bottle attached to the front of my parents caravan, that a most spectacular and self sustaining flame could be generated by opening the valve on the top of these bottles and applying a lit match to the valve outlet. In fact the bottle at home when newly refilled had managed a flame a good 7 - 8 foot long and I could only imagine what length flame we could get out of these freshly delivered monster bottles sitting so temptingly available in the art class courtyard...
Having already dealt with gas before I was well aware of the need to strike the match first before opening the valve so after having told my friend to move to one side a little so I could show him something 'excellently awesome' I struck the match.
Now as I said these bottles were quite tall - or at least tall in comparison to us, so I actually had to reach up a little above my own eye level in order to put the match near the valve outlet and I couldn't really see what I was doing exactly.
Nonetheless I turned the valve on hard and waited for the stream of gas to ignite..
- nothing -
Hmmmm.
There was certainly the sound of much gas escaping, plenty of it.
Suddenly it struck me... idiot!
I was holding the match on the wrong side of the valve!
No worries, that side was clear of everything, we both shuffled a little to the left and I moved the match to the other side of the valve...
I still cant really remember the exact sound - it was more like a feeling really, much like the feeling you get from an excessively powerful sub woofer. I think that the ground might have actually shook.
There was a dull blue flash at the same time as the sub woofer feeling and then a very brief sensation of extremely intense heat on my face, neck, ears and hands.
When I opened my eyes I found myself looking at some strange brown fuzzy critter that was standing where my friend had been a couple of seconds ago, not only was this strange beast brown and fuzzy but most alarmingly it was smoking! Every part of it was smoking! The clothes were smoking, the socks were smoking the brown fuzzy head was smoking! There was even smoke coming off the eyebrows!
A little too late I suppose I turned off the gas valve.
Holy sheeeet!
"Man - that happened quick" was all I had.
"Fucking right!" was all my friend had.
His name was Malcombe Jones and he used to be shock blond - now it seemed there was only the shock left. Almost exactly half of his hair from the front to the middle of his head had gone a funny type of ginger and looked markedly shorter than that hair which remained his normal blond. His eyebrows and eye lashes were the same matching ginger brown. Being blond he had very light skin but this was quickly turning a majestic shade of puce. He looked for all the world like a cartoon character who had just had one of those little black round bombs go off in his face. In retrospect I suppose he had just had a bomb go off in and all around his face!
It took Malcombe a few minutes if that, before he started pointing at me and laughing. I suppose it was just the relief of knowing that we had just had a very near miss but we both started roaring with laughter.
As it turned out my hair, and not just half of it but most of it had changed color to rusty brown as well and I was sporting matching eyebrows and lashes all of which were smoking!
The worst of it was yet to come - when we rubbed our newly tinted eyebrows and hair it all fell off!
Inconveniently the wind had blown the smell of burning hair straight through the open French doors and filled the art classroom which, when combined with the explosive thump had brought our beloved art teacher and half the class haring outdoors and into the courtyard where Malcombe and I stood half bald, eyebrow less, scorched red and smoking.
Even more inconveniently another teacher of a less understanding nature had now appeared on the scene and after quickly appraising the situation sent both of our scorched asses off to see the headmaster. The headmaster upon listening to our tale proceeded to cane both of us and inform our parents of our indiscretion.
When I arrived home that afternoon I was treated to a rather sound tongue lashing from my mother and a bloody good hiding from my old man.
So to recap, we both now had hair that made us look like monks from an old fashioned Kung Fu movie, we had no eyebrows or eye lashes and our faces looked like we'd both fallen asleep in a sun bed. The headmaster had caned our bums till we couldn't sit properly and to add further insult to our injuries our dads had kicked our already highly tender and broken butts.
Could always have been worse I suppose but all in all, rather a grim outcome for a bit of "see how awesome I am" I thought.
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