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Fire And Underoos
Posted On Wednesday April 25, 2007 By Carl MillerWhen I was eleven years old I used to have this little bedroom where I’d often sequester myself with only my little bed and my little toys to keep me company. It was not that I had so much to hide from. I was only eleven. But even then I had a natural tendency to recharge my energies through solitude and an eleven-year-old boy has only one place to do that with any consistency; that’s in his bedroom.
One particular night I woke up and all I could see was this odd sort of grey, wispy ceiling that seemed to have replaced the regular off-white ceiling that normally, in association with the walls and the closed door, secured me in my little room.
Then my door was flung open and my mom was there and she was saying all these words in a rush and I understood that something serious was going on. I sat up and I looked at her for a second. I understood on some level that she was telling me that the house was on fire and that we had to get out, but on another level my brain was having a hard time processing this information. It was like part of me was thinking, “Holy Fuck! I gotta get out of here,” but another part of me was rooted in place as if, perhaps, this whole concept of “fire” needed further explaining. And in what way did “fire” relate to the syntax of “the house is on”?
And then my mom was gone to get my little sister. Gloomily I got out of bed and realized suddenly that I couldn’t see anything and that it was more than just the normal state of being in the dark. It was hard to breath. I don’t recall what happened next. Maybe my dad bodily dragged me out of there, maybe I went running out of the house, I don’t know. But there I was outside in the winter wearing only a pair of underwear. Not a slightly dignified pair of boxers either. In the humiliation that is retrospect boxers would have been acceptable if slightly unrealistic. What eleven-year-old boy wears boxers? Pajamas. Christ. Why didn’t I wear pajamas? Anyway, I was out in the cold, in front of a gathering crowd of neighbors and passers by, and all I was wearing was the bottom half of a goddamned Superman Underoos ensemble.
Eventually a neighbor brought over a blanket to cover my unsightly underwear-ed body (and to keep me from freezing to death). There’d been talk of me going over to someone’s house, but I preferred to stand there with the rest of my family and watch our house burn down. I noticed rather bitterly that my sister was wearing her Strawberry Shortcake pajamas and a coat.
To this day I am never far from a pair of clothes just in case I need to flee my house because of some emergency. Also, I wear boxers. And I’ve always hated Strawberry Shortcake.
Tags: fire, underoos