The grill and the girl

My home for my last year in college was a garage apartment behind a small brick house that had been carved up into three tiny apartments. A friend of mine lived in one of them. One summer afternoon, while taking the shortcut through the alley, he found a discarded grill, which he helped himself to.

He hadn't had a date all summer, and he saw this grill as the break he'd been looking for. If he only had some charcoal, and something to put it in, he could set them under the grill. And if he had two steaks, he might be able to entice a girl to eat one of them. Which turned out to be true; a girl did agree to come for Sunday dinner.

My friend scraped up enough money to purchase a bag of charcoal and two steaks. He took another trip down the alley and borrowed a garbage can lid. He walked half a block to the Texaco station, which was closed on Sundays in those days, lowered the hose of the first pump, and drained a few drops of gasoline into a Mason jar. Doing the same with the other pumps, he filled the jar about one-third full.

What happened next, I was privileged to watch from my second-story porch. At first, everything seemed routine. My friend washed the garbage can lid, filled it with a thin layer of charcoal and balanced the grill on top. Then he picked up the Mason jar and poured the gasoline over the charcoal. I knew enough about gasoline to suspect that it wasn't soaking gently into the briquettes, but was probably pooling at the lowest part of the garbage can lid. So alarms went off in my head when my friend took out his cigarette lighter and leaned into the garbage can lid as if intending to blow on a glowing ember in hopes of coaxing a flame. I think I may have leaned back from the rail of my porch in the spirit of self preservation.

Two things happened. My friend's head disappeared in a huge ball of fire, and his hand threw the cigarette lighter straight up. The picture that is seared into my brain is of a body on all-fours, with fire where the head should be, and a Bic lighter flipping end over end about even with me on the second-story porch.

He survived. He cooked his steaks. His date showed up for dinner as promised. She ate quickly and then left, probably thinking she was pretty sure that my friend had eyebrows when she accepted his invitation.

It's amazing that he wasn't seriously injured. Not his time, I guess. That would come the following summer, when, crossing a parking lot on his way home, he walked into a bullet meant for someone else.

***

The point of all this goes back to the theme of being a master story-teller: you have to be ruthless about what you leave out. I really wanted to tell you why I was sitting on the porch in the first place, why I didn't shout a warning to my friend, where he was going the night he got shot, who shot him, and why there were other bullets waiting for him if that one hadn't found him. And maybe you're curious about that now. But at the time, we were trying to draw a straight line from the finding of a grill to a date with a girl, with a twist at the end. Anything that didn't help us get from Point A to Point B was left out. Mastery demanded it.