The Burning Car Prank

Last fall, I wrote a song about growing up and Halloween. For a bit, I was trying to decide what to call it---I toyed with some titles that weren't traditional("This One's For Unicef!", "On Halloween", and "Anyone But Me") but most people realized it should just be called, "Halloween". James suggested that it be called, "Halloween, 1987" just to place it in time and I liked that. It stuck. But people are destined to just refer to it as "Halloween" much as you would be hard pressed to get people to call "Missing Mississippi Mister" anything longer than just "Mississippi".

It's a pain to spell for one thing.

Anyways, in New Jersey(see the patterns emerging?)they have a thing they called "Mischief Night". It takes place the night before Halloween. I'm not really sure why they don't just do it on Halloween. But they do.

When I moved to Woodside, Brian cautioned me about going out on Halloween or "Mischief Night". Apparently, the New York kids don't play around. Eggs are out in force! And he was right. Luckily, I escaped them but as I was walking back home after staying at my then girlfriend's apartment, I stepped over the shells of many broken eggs. Fallen in the line of duty.

It's a funny word that people use to describe all of this, "pranks". Some of the pranks are definitely funny. For instance, the time honored "burning bag of shit". I mean, that's a brilliant prank. You know, where you put it on the person's doorstep and then they have to stamp it out and get crap all over them.

And then there's "forking"---where you put plastic forks all over their lawn but you break the handles off so it's a pain when they try to get them out.

But there are other pranks. For instance...

Even though the song takes place in 1987, I'd like to fast forward to 1988, or it might have been 1989. It was near Halloween, or it might have been "Mischief Night". I woke up in my bedroom. It was hot. I walked to the hallway and there were orange lights dancing on the wallpaper. Confused, I ran downstairs after I heard my brother and sister yelling. I went to the front door(to see what was the matter) and the door was HOT.

I think about it now, and I ignored what they always teach you---if the handle's hot, you're not supposed to open it. But I did that night. And the door opened to a picture of a giant blaze. There, engulfed in flames, was our trusty crap brown Subaru.

Apparently, there was a group of kids that were going around our block and lighting cars on fire. The most interesting part of this story to me is that at first, they weren't very good at doing this.

The first thing they did, was try lighting a match and dropping it in the gas tank. Seems pretty stupid right? I guess the match goes out before it gets to the tank. So the police said. You would think the vapors would just be enough to light on fire but not that night.

Their next idea was to pile leaves into the back seats and light those on fire. They left the windows closed which thwarted the enterprise because the lack of oxygen burned the fires out.

But they had all this schooling behind them by the time they reached the Shelkey house. They rolled down the windows and that car ended up burning. And the whole neigborhood came out to watch our car burn up. The fire department came and thankfully put it out---supposedly before the gas tank blew.

I don't know if that's true or we just like to believe it was scarier than it really was. We used to keep the charred and gunked up piece of metal that used to be the license plate too.

Mostly, I think Brent and I were angry because that crappy car was to be the car we shared in high school. And instead we had to share another car with our sister.

Halloween. 1989.