It was a day around the end of elementary school or the beginning of middle school (I forget which right now). We were in the lazy days of summer vacation, which one's life only affords him in the midst of his school days, and perhaps his retirement. We being in the former, had much energy and little money, so for entertainment we created our own or more generally watched television. Back in those days I was not as opposed to wasting time in that way, and found myself in front of the idiot box more often than I should like to recount, but television even then took a wear on me. To remedy this, I figured the most effective thing to do was to call my friend ... let's call him Dippy Dawg... and ask him to come over and hang out. Dippy, being equally bored agreed, and we made plans that he would stay the night at my place. This being established we hung out for a good deal of that day, most likely watching television together, or playing video games, or something of that nature. Then the night came, and these things again grew boring, so we thought the most entertaining thing to do together would need to involve destruction.
Naturally at the early years of being teenagers or preteens we were curious as the effects that fire had on hair-spray. So, we brought down some fuel and not just any fuel but some Paul Mitchell pump spray fuel, that I am sure was none too cheap, and started with the matches and seeing just how effective it was. Needless to say, it was very potent stuff, and the fumes flew out like an ignited dragon's breath. All this being said, we were very impressed and all the more intrigued about what it could do. We started off with lighting just the hair-spray itself on fire, and would repeatedly pump the spray so that the flames would shout off in spurts. This was fun for a while, but then we wanted to see how well other things would catch with the right combination of hair-spray to surface. We lit things on fire outside first, but eventually moved inside, and lit things like the interior of the candy bowl, which you may be happy to know was void of candy.
We lit such things as the screens on the windows, my outdoors trampoline (which fell apart resultantly some years later). Dippy thought it would be interesting to spray his hand and light that, and oddly enough his hand was left only a little warm but otherwise unscathed. Finally, and now for the stories title, we decided to do the same thing to my poor dog Rex. He sprayed his hair with the hair spray, and lit that, it was odd to see a blaze being emitted from his back, but the expression on his very face and the lack of concern he seemed to exhibit by only remaining there with a look of intrigue directed toward us, suggested to us, that Rex was unaware of his own affliction of conflagration on his backside. Oh I am sure it was a oddly warm to him, but that must have been it. Anyway, we quickly put that out. Eventually we tired of this or just naturally and fell asleep.
The next day however we were again curious as to what new power we could use the mysterious effects of fire upon. So, naturally, the logical choice is a mailbox. Now, I know what you are thinking, what is so unique about burning the outside of a mailbox, well it was not the outside we were interested in, but rather the interior. So, I thoroughly sprayed the inside of the mailbox, fairly well, and proceeded to spray a lit match's flame to ignite all the awaiting fuel that was already set there by me earlier. I have done a great series of stupid things in my time, but this was certainly up there with the stupidest. The box roughly in the shame of a short closed-end tube, did not have quite the effect that I had anticipated when set to flame. The fire spewed back at me so rapidly, and foolishly standing straight in front of it, the hand I held the match with became engulfed in that wildfire, and left me with some nasty blisters.
Looking back on it, I am lucky only this happened, and I was otherwise fine, but it sure taught me, what several stone age people among others learned very long ago... fire is a harsh mistress. Having no trace of a learning disability at that point, I was very quick to extinguish (bad pun I know) my pyrotechnic curiosity forever after that and never sought to play with fire again. In addition to this hard-learned lesson, I thought it best to dress my aching wound caused by my so recent teacher. So, I went inside and rested my hand in a bowl of cool water for a long time. During the time of addressing my wounds, I noticed that the window screens that we had so eagerly set ablaze the night before, had huge gaping holes in them that had not been there earlier. So, out of fear of being caught by my parents, I took all the money I had and asked my brother to drive us up to the local hardware store to help us replace these screens. In addition to this, Dippy had the idea that we could use a magic marker to cover up another screen which was also damaged. Surprisingly this worked very well, but since the marker colour was different than the screens, we had to fill in the whole screen to make in unapparent that it was in fact covered up.
Having covered up as much evidence as we could for our previous nights fiery festivities, Dippy returned home, leaving me to see if we fooled my parents into thinking that nothing unusual had occurred the night before. Unfortunately we overlooked one too many things and my parents immediately collected clues as to our doings of the previous night. They called me down, and pointed out each thing they noticed, and I was frightened out of my mind. Realising that there was little point to argue against them, I acknowledged the whole thing, and told them we were only curious. Being as understanding as they were about the mischievousness of boys, they were very lenient with me and the only punitive recourse they took against me was that of telling me not to do it again. This having been reinforced for me through my aching thumb, I agreed and went about my merry way, a little wiser, and with a funny story. Though it was not until now that it seemed worth my while to do this, for the learning sake, and that of a good anecdote.