Springle... The House

Clarence Clinton was my brother’s best friend. They had been friends since kindergarten. Clarence was being raised by his grandmother because his mother died of a drug overdose when he was an infant, and his father was a member of the famous musical group Parliament/Funkadelics and was on the road a lot. Clarence was a frequent visitor at our house and had become family. He was at our house today to help my brother barbeque for the 4th of July. He swore that his dad had taught him to build/start the perfect grill fire. My brother knew nothing about cooking or building a fire. I don’t think Stephen had an interest in doing anything that consisted of taking care of himself; including taking a bath or shower, doing his own laundry, or any sort of cleaning of his environment. He knew that if he didn’t do it I would have to take care of it. This also included cooking or preparing anything to eat for himself. Actually, by this time in our lives, he was content to eat nothing else but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and drink milk. He would also eat anything I cooked. If mom cooked it, he was back to eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sometimes he would eat the tv dinners that mom heated up in the oven. I think he liked the salty, greasy “fried” chicken and the weird dessert (anything sweet). Stephen was just at the barbeque as an unwilling participant, and because Clarence was there. I think Clarence was there because I was there. Most of Stephen’s friends had a crush on me. Ugh!

Stephen, Clarence, and I were in the back yard waiting for my mother to come and supervise the fire getting started. Her supervision consisted of standing in the kitchen and yelling out the back door occasionally. While we were waiting, Clarence got tired of waiting and decided he would start building the fire in the grill. It kind of seemed like mom had forgotten us any way. He started off by putting lots of balled up newspaper in the bottom of the grill; a reasonable beginning. Then he put in charcoal…ok. It was when he started putting in the lighter fluid that I got a little nervous. He was using waaaaay too much!!! When he picked up the match and lit it to throw in, everything seemed to switch to slow motion. I yelled and pushed Clarence away, grabbed the top of the grill and slammed it down just in time for fire to shoot out all around. Whew, disaster abated. What I did not realize was that I had not pushed Clarence soon enough to avoid his eyebrows from being singed off. He was dancing in a little circle screaming “I’m on fire, I’m on fire!!!!” He wasn’t but he was convinced he was. Stephen had gotten the hose and was soaking him down. My mother came running out of the house shouting “What is going on!?!” If she had been supervising, she would not have had to ask. As usual, I had to calm everybody down. I sent Stephen to get a towel for Clarence. I told mom we didn’t need to call the fire department. I got Clarence to sit in a lawn chair and breathe while I dried him off with the towel. He was sitting in the chair shaking, doing that breathing like a child does after he’s been punished with his bottom lip trembling, patting his face, whispering over and over “I’m on fire, I’m on fire. My eyebrows, my eyebrows. My mustache.” He never had a mustache but, I guess in his mind, he did. He had singed off his eyebrows, eyelashes and any peach fuzz on his face. After order was restored, we all (Clarence, my brother, and I) found humor in the fire-building adventure. My mother finally came outside to build the fire and cook the food. I was desperately hoping to find a way to avoid eating any of the food. I thought barbeque made me sick. Every time my mother grilled and made her horrible home-made sauce (bottled sauce doctored up), I always got sick after eating it. I later discovered it was from my mother squirting lighter fluid on the coals while the food was on the grill. This resulted in me having a headache, diarrhea, and nausea for at least a day and a half after. My girlfriend, Cheryl, saved me by inviting me over to her house to eat. Yay! Fourth of July salvaged!!