Waiting for the Last Gasp – Adam Overland

When I was 16 my head caught on fire. It was around the 4th of July and my parents had left town on a family vacation that I’d usually take part in, but that year I was old enough to stay home alone and I’d also recently discovered booze. A friend came over and we took small drinks of my dad’s various liquors, then replaced what we’d taken with the equivalent amount of water. At some point I got the idea that since I had last year’s unused fireworks in a grocery bag as well as the keys to my dad’s truck, we should go out onto a gravel road in the country and light the fireworks up. All at once. By pouring gasoline on the bag. 

This was, perhaps, my independence day, and the British won. 

I’ve always loved fire. My siblings and I grew up with a wood-burning fireplace in the living room, and it was a source of physical and familial comfort, gathering around it in the wintertime. And since most of our vacations involved camping, I loved campfires as well. Fire keeps you warm and gives you something to focus your attention on, a little light show full of shadows and mystery, the closest thing to TV that our ancient ancestors had. It also has incredible destructive powers, something which very much appealed to a mixed-up boy full of anxiety about his place in the world.

In action movies, you always see people do something like burn down a house, or set a car on fire, pouring gasoline everywhere, standing in the midst of it, then casually tossing the match. The fire then spreads relatively slowly from floor to wall to ceiling. That is not what gas does. 

The thing with gas is that it’s the fumes that get you. When you dump about a cupful of the stuff onto a bag of fireworks and strike a match on a windless night on a country road, everything within a significant perimeter of that bag will go up in a fireball, which is what happened when I stood a couple feet away and lit a match. As soon as I struck it, everything became blindingly bright. My first thought was confusion; I realized that I had been too close to the fire and began to run. Except when I ran I didn’t escape the fire. 

It didn’t really ever dawn on me, in my panic, that I was the fire. Stop, drop, and roll never once crossed my mind, and had my friend not come sprinting from his safer location to tackle me into a ditch and put me out, I’d likely be a much different person today. A few more seconds and I’d be noticeably disfigured. I’m eternally grateful to that friend for acting quickly.

After rushing to the ER, my friend driving while I went into shock in the passenger seat, I spent an incredibly painful week on the burn unit of the hospital, where a team of nurses would place me daily into a seated shower with dozens of water jets and scrub the dead skin away from my open wounds while my nerve endings screamed and I wept and swore, nearly passed out, and even once called them bitches, something I regret but which I’m sure they’d heard before. 

But those treatments, and all the bandages and creams and ointments that came after, worked. Today I have only a small scar the size of a quarter on my chest that is noticeable to anyone but me. And there’s a tiny bump on my left wrist where a very large morphine IV was inserted. But every time the sun shines, the skin on the left side of my neck and face feels its heat more intensely. 

So the 4th of July always means something a little different to me. After all, there’s really no forgetting the memory of your head and torso being on fire. It’s still painful to think about that experience, of what I could have been thinking, and of the emotional pain it caused that won’t quite disappear entirely, lingering still, just under the skin. But good and bad, traumatic and otherwise, experiences make us who we are, for better and for worse. I lost that battle, and while you never really win those kinds of wars, I’ve made peace with it.