It's always good to stay in touch with your friends from High School when you go off to college. Especially if your friends go to the same college! But what happens when you have to come home for the summer to live with your parents? Well, you hope that some of your friends will have to come back home as well, thus allowing you to party with them. The only problem is that you are living with your parents. But then you just wait for a set of parents to leave and you can party at their house. While my parents never went anywhere, luckily for me some of my friends' parents would leave their house in the capable hands of their responsible, college-aged children. This is a story of one of those times...
My friend Kat had a few of us over to her house when her parents weren't there for a weekend and we decided to have a couple of drinks. Now, when I say a few people, I actually mean that this time: there were only about 5 of us total at the house. The problem was that three of us were dumb, 20-something males who grew up in the middle of nowhere. So, when the words "fire pit" and "bonfire" were thrown around, we immediately decided to investigate this further. At this point, our bloodstreams were probably flammable due to consumption, so the last thing we needed to do was play with fire. Thank god we were all rational adults, so we all decided to sober up before we played with fire.
After that fantasy never happened, the three of us (myself, Jake, and Corbin) headed outside to get some serious flames going. Now, unfortunately, Kat was being a major buzzkill (read: more sober than us) and said we couldn't do that and she wasn't going to tell us the location of any fire-starting supplies. Luckily for us, Jake was dating Kat at the time, so he went outside and said, "I know where they keep the gas! And I've got matches!"
The three of us went to a shed near the house and went to find the gas Jake said he knew of. Not only did we find a gas container there, but we found 3 gas containers! We had stumbled straight out of reality and into a Darwin Award! Too bad for the human race, we weren't removed from the gene pool that night, but something pretty damn funny did happen...
All three of us decided to go out and put some wood on the fire pit and some gasoline on that wood. All was going just fine until we light it all on fire. Nothing exploded, but we did notice there was a bit of grass outside of the fire pit that had lit itself on fire. And by a bit, I mean something roughly the size of a football. I am not over-exaggerating anything this time, we were in no imminent danger. We were a good distance from the house, woods, cars, and other people. And that's why what followed is so stupid.
We all agreed in a well thought out, calm conversation ("Dude, the grass is on fire!" "Should put it out?" "Probably should" "I'm drunk as hell right now, stop harshing my buzz with talk about fire") that the grass should be extinguished. So, Jake and I (being slightly more sober than Corbin) looked around for something to put the fire out with. Corbin, being a man of action (drunk), decided to stomp the fire out. This is just fine most of the time, but I think I left out one important detail:
Corbin was barefoot.
Actually, I left out two important details:
Corbin was barefoot and his feet were soaked in gasoline.
It took Jake and I a minute to realize that our friends feet had CAUGHT ON FIRE and we should probably do something about that. You see, we managed to spill everywhere with our gas (probably because we were flinging gas at each other, but that's neither here nor there) so Jake manage to get Corbin to the ground and I patted his feet out. Luckily, Corbin was one of those genetic freaks that didn't really feel pain like normal people (seriously, they made Jackass-style videos of him getting tazed and things like that), so he was no worse for the wear. That and all the booze made him just fine. It was at that point we all realized the grass was still on fire and we still had to do something about it.
You ever have one of those moments where everything happens in slow motion, you know it's all going to end badly, but you still can't react fast enough? This was one of those moments. I am sure it had something to do with all the alcohol, but for whatever reason, I just sat back and watch what happened next. It was like seeing the unveiling of the PT Cruiser: you knew it was a bad idea and it could do a lot of damage, but you kinda wanted to see it go up in flames.
Corbin proceeded to notice the grass was still on fire and sprang into action again. That's right: after we had just stopped his feet from being on fire, he tried to stomp out more flames. This, unsurprisingly, lit his feet the fuck back up and we had to put him out once again. I then got up and stomped the fire out with my shoe-covered feet and everything was fine. Jake and I asked Corbin if he was okay and he seemed to be. After a strange conversation about bacon (probably brought on by the smell of burning flesh), we all decided to let the fire burn out and go back inside to drink more.
I wonder if they ever covered that scenario in D.A.R.E.?
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