Thursday, August 16, 2012

Fire Head and the Nasty Girl

My sophomore year of college I lived with seven pals in a four bedroom house off-campus.  We were surrounded by fraternity boys, which was usually more of a curse than a blessing. We were also living in the community and many of our neighbors were families. As much as many of our female contemporaries envied out setting and set up, the people who really lived in the neighborhood must have despised us!

We meandered our way home from classes on the day of the first snow and gathered in our yard to play in it. Of course, a group of 19 year old girls laughing and frolicking in the snow is bound to attract some attention. Pretty soon, the boys next store joined us for an impromptu snowball fight.  Now, the boys next store were particular favorites of mine and absolutely characters in their own right.  One of them I even fell in love with, but that's a lot of tales that I'll pass on to you some other time. I was, in fact, in the courtship stage with the boy next door at this time. Sadly, that has no bearing on the story I'm imparting today.

While the college aged boys and girls from 15 and 13 Eben Street were making snow balls and chasing each other around the yard, a group of small children from the neighborhood decided to get in on the action.  Now, not all of us were involved in the action in the yard.  Zoid, our house president, remained inside. Of course, I am digressing once again, but feel that I should reflect on the  Zoid presidency. There was no election. I'm pretty sure she got and maintained her post by virtue of the microphone attached to her stereo. I can, to this day, picture her with her stereo blasting, microphone pressed to her flaming red lips, making announcements and pronouncements to her subjects.  On this day, however, she wound up running out of the house pointing the rifle from some old school shoot-em-up video game (cord trailing behind her and not quite making it out before the screen door shut) at the hooligans on "her" yard, shouting some nonsense and then running back inside from her perch on the porch before being pummeled with snow.  Considering that she was, in all likelihood, wearing sweatpants and spike heeled pumps in a brilliant hue, this was wise on her part.

As the attention was turned to Zoid,  a small red-headed boy snuck up on our Nasty Girl and walloped her with a big chunk of snow.  Now, you should know that Nasty Girl is an extremely tiny little woman. She's just about 5 feet tall and around this time felt the need to regularly remind us of the fact that she weighed some ridicuously little bit of weight, like 80 pounds. This 6 year old boy really wasn't all that much smaller than itsy bitsy NG, which may have had a lot to do with the boldness of his attack. In her anger and surprise she spun around, facing the tiny little boy and sputtered, "You.... You.... YOU FIRE HEAD!"  I can only assume that she was trying her best not to say any of the many curse words that were fighting to spring from her lips.

What immediately followed was one of those needle scratching against the record/ sounds from the ghosts of the crickets who perished in the first frost kind of moments as everyone paused in the silliness of the moment. And then the laughter started and, of course, the introductions between the "adults" and our elementary school aged neighbors and newly acquired friends were made.

Footnote:  Fire Head and his slightly older brother, Billy, became fixtures at the Eben Street house. They often stopped by after to school to hang out, or just see what was up.  We never bothered to learn Fire Head's real name.  He seemed to like the one he received, born in a time of snow war, from the Nasty Girl.

No comments:

Post a Comment