Our Life of Crime on Shady Avenue Ext:

Part 1 Come On Baby Light My Fire

Yesterday I looked up pyromania on Google and as usual got more information than I ever wanted to know. The word can be divided into two Greek root words; pyr meaning fire and mania meaning madness. This sums up the period of time when I, along with my two friends Arlene and Naomi, were obsessed with fire.

Wikipedia says that pyromania in children is a troubling porthole for horrendous things to come: morbid behaviors, cruelty to animals, aggression, violation of others' rights, and psychoses. I can tell all with certainty that I have never exhibited these symptoms nor have Arlene and Naomi. Arlene is now president of the sisterhood of an Orthodox synagogue, Naomi is a retired kindergarten teacher, and I have been a counselor, teacher of creative writing, and I now work with the elderly. So where did our pyromania come from? I read that it could be considered a precursor to puberty, and we were 10 years old at that time. But in looking back at how many cowboy television shows we watched, I think we were obsessed with fire because all the cowboys on those shows were always out on the range, building fires for cooking food and keeping warm. We wanted to be like them.

But added to the mix is curiosity. People have always been fascinated with fire. And when the families on our street went to Frick Park in cars loaded with hotdogs, Hershey bars, bags of marshmallows, and graham crackers (all of the children squeezed in together because it didn't matter whose car we traveled in--our parents were practically interchangeable) the first thing we did was run around gathering wood for a fire so we could roast our hotdogs and make smores. After we had eaten we sat around the fire in a circle, throwing twigs and leaves into it to prolong the moment, and we stared hypnotically into the heart of the fire, feeling dejected when the adults told us to quench the fire because it was time to go home.

There was an alley that ran behind the row of houses across the street from our own homes, and a lot of our fires were started there. Nobody came to the alley very much, certainly our mothers never did, and we didn't think they could smell the burning twigs. What remains vague in my memory is the way in which we got our matches. My parents didn't smoke and I think Arlene's mother did. All three homes, however, had matches in them and we must have stolen them to build our fires.

Burning a little pile of paper and wood way back in the alley seemed, to us, a mild way of getting into trouble. Thinking about it now scares me half to death. Many awful things could have happened; we kept no water nearby to use in case of an emergency. However, nothing did happen so we began to take more risks.

The end of our pyromania phase came suddenly. Both Arlene and Naomi's houses had two storage rooms in the basement. One day Arlene and I stole a menorah and some candelabras along with some Shabbos and Hanukkah candles, crept into one of the storage rooms, placed the candles and lit them. Mrs. Stein smelled smoke coming from the basement, ran downstairs, and saw us in the storage room with about fifteen candles burning at the same time. She screamed at us at the top of her lungs, doused the candles with water, and called my mother. Mrs. Stein kept screaming at us until my mother ran down the block, saw what had happened and began to scream at us too. My mother marched me back home and said the sentence she used only once and never again: Oh boy wait until your father gets home.

I was sent to my room where I sat quivering. My father was serious, austere, and quite strict; he would be furious when he found out about what I'd done. But--my parents were having some kind of party that night. It was what they called a "cocktail party" for some of their friends. My stomach tied in knots, I sat in my bedroom listening to the adults having cocktails and laughing. I fell asleep and in the morning life went on as usual. I still don't understand this. How could my parents let this terrible incident pass without my being punished? But none of us ever received punishment for starting fires. It was just a lucky break. But the horror of being discovered that day was enough to cure us of our pyromania. Naomi hadn't been there that day but the story had the same effect on her. We never set fire to anything again, except on those wonderful picnics and cookouts.