The fine people at the Madagascar Institute have every intention of giving me a weapon that shoots flames wherever I point it. You should be aware that, given the current circumstances, wherever I point it is still going to be Brooklyn.
George Carlin
Growing up in Missouri, my house had a lot of knives and guns in it. My step-father kept two fully stocked gun cabinets, one in the basement and the other in my parent’s bedroom closet. Mainly rifles and shotguns, just hunting weapons, but I was aware of at least two handguns in the house. One was a small revolver and the other was a semi-automatic. The revolver was light and felt flimsy, kind of cheap, when you held it. The barrel was narrow and the metal was thin and black. It really lacked the drama you look for in a pistol. The semi-automatic had a little more theater to it, but that had to do with the pearl handle more than size or perceived stopping power. One of the networks had done a made for TV movie starring Kenny Rogers, based on his song “The Gambler.” It was standard western fare and I don’t really recall the plot. I would assume it involved gambling.
My stepfather would be so proud that someone is walking the trail he blazed.
In the movie there is a confrontation and Kenny pulls out a pearl handled derringer. One of the seven thugs attacking him points out that there are only two bullets in a derringer and there are a bunch of them, to which Rogers replies, “Which two of you want them?” Ever since then, anything with a pearl handle had at least some cinematic cache so far as I was concerned.
But, by the time I was seventeen, I had developed a passing interest in the knives. There were all manner of knives in the house. Hunting knives, Bowie knives, boning knives, scaling knives, pocket knives, buck knives, and Swiss Army knock offs. Real Swiss army knives are expensive. I almost always received one of the knock offs for a birthday or Christmas from some relative who was not going to think too hard about gifts. This wasn’t unusual in Missouri. Weapons are handed out to redneck children like hannukah gelt to the kids of the first Orthodox Synagogue of Bushwick. That along with the knives that were in my step-father’s collection, those handed down from people who had aged out of their hunting and fishing days, and the random ones that just seemed to pop-up because people forgot them or traded them or just as a sort of meteorological effect, a kind of lethal condensation that has yet to be explained by science, all of it meant that in our house it was wise to watch where you sat.
Whatever interest I had in the knives had nothing to do with their practical purpose. It was an extension of my elaborate fantasy life, which a steady diet of comic books and pop culture had made as sprawling as the Dallas suburbs. My mind made associations that would have made my step-father cry out in utter defeat. The scaling knife reminded me of the claws on the X-Men character Wolverine. The boning knife was thin and curved like the ones the elves carried in the Tolkein books. There was one, out in the pile of blades in the garage, that reminded me of a Ninja’s short sword. I had no idea what its real use might have been and I didn’t much care. There was also a fascination with throwing the knives, as there was a comic character called Longshot and throwing knives while wearing a cool black outfit was pretty much the entire basis of his superpowers. He also sported a mullet which had its own bad effect on me, but that is a different story.
I am absolutely certain this was in our garage, behind a broken snow blower and under a can of rusty nails, next to a Steve Miller eight track.
I actually got pretty good at throwing the knives. There is a whole rhythm to it that you eventually figure out. In fact, I got a bit better than I thought. One day I was outside in the front lawn, I was maybe fifteen at this point, and my toy of choice was a butterfly knife. I’m whipping it around like a pudgy ninja one swordfight away from a very short career as an assassin, when I spy my mother’s garden hose lying in the sideyard, across the driveway. I only threw the knife at the garden hose because I was so sure that I would never be able to hit it. I hit it. The knife went right through the hose about three feet down from the nozzle. Now, I had no intention of actually hitting the hose and, since it was an accident, I had every intention of informing my mother about the damage I had done. Then, with the attention span of someone going through puberty, I forgot all about it and wandered off to the woods. I came back several hours later to find my mother standing in the front lawn with the hose in her hand, furious and soaked. I never saw the butterfly knife again.
Nope. I'm a DIY guy.
Now someone is going to give me a flamethrower. Actually, they are going to teach me how to build a flamethrower. Y’know, give a man a fish, blah, blah blah. Artstar: Shop Manager Leif Krinkle has decided it is a good idea to give homemade propane cannons to the kind of twitchy eyed geeks that would show up to learn to make a propane cannon and then loose them upon the streets of Brooklyn. And within walking distance of a strip of bars. This, apparently, is the goal and stated purpose of Flamethrower Theory and Practice. My favorite part of the event listing is – Age Suitability: None Specified. It actually is a rather abstract question to tackle. So, if something goes horribly wrong, folks, (and by horribly wrong I, of course, mean me being injured, anything else that might go wrong would just be funny) remember that I was pretty once and I had great hair. At least in the period between the mullet and the day I burned it all off.
