So Monday I was in the city running some errands. As is my own little tradition when I cross the bridge , I dropped in on the Treasure Island Gang. Eisen, Bigguy, Sparky and The Brit.The guys that took over my lease when I left the Island after my place was robbed.
I pull up to the place and park my bike in the walkway in front of the door. A quick assessment of missing and present vehicles in the driveway give me an idea who’s home. I doff my gear and knock on the door, but I pick up a hint of electrical fire in the air that has me poring over my bike looking for some sort of melted indicator of doom.
Nothing visible and the smell is gone. So I knock at the door again. Bigguy opens the door with a little bleary in his eye. I guess my very authoritative second rap was enough to drag him from the from the cyber and into the harsh and real. He noticed the smell and I saw the smoke, behind him, inside the house.
We both ran around looking for the source. It was nonchalant at first. Thinking that a computer was thrashing about somewhere in it’s death throws, or a curling iron was bubbling a bathroom floor somewhere. Some mildly annoying thing that would make you want to kill your roommate’s cat. After we went upstairs and trespassed into the roommates rooms without finding the source. We came downstairs. The mood went from nonchalant to genuinely frightened when we saw the 2 foot deep layer of thick black smoke that clung to the ceiling in the kitchen. Bigguy is a full head taller than me and started hacking a cough that made me hurt. We searched frantically as the Acrid cloud encroached on our good air. Now stooping to keep our eyes and lungs from the painful menace that was bearing down I told Bigguy to grab the phone and get out of the house. I followed and on the way out saw the smoke pouring out from the top of the door to the laundry room. I was kneeling in the hallway frozen at the sight. Transfixed by the weird black bizarro world waterfall that was flowing up, instead of down, and splashing into a pool on the ceiling.
The sound of the running dryer behind the door snapped me out of it. I touched the knob, it was warm but not hot. All I could think about was the contents of the room. I relived the last time I was in there, taking a mental inventory of the aerosols, solvents, motorcycle fluids and the 35 gallon air compressor. I cracked the door and the whole room was black. I couldn’t see anything inside except the flicker of orange behind the dryer. I closed the door and got out of the house.
Once outside Bigguy had called the emergency services and all we could do was wait. Marking the unstoppable progression of the fire by noticing the smoke now coming from the upstairs windows. Now the fire licking out of the dryer vent exhaust. The exterior vinyl siding started to melt off. The paint on the doors was blistering.
Realizing the gravity of what was happening, we both caught some sort of urge to do something besides spectate. He started rousing the neighbors that shared the common wall, I ran to the breaker box to try to cut the power. Bigguy was successful. Me, not so much. The floating battery acid that is the salt air on the Island, not only corrodes motorcycle drive chains in record time, but it will weld the fasteners on an external breaker box into an impenetrable, tamper-proof barrier. (A fire fighter who was given the same task needed a fire axe to gain access to the breakers) I started working at moving what I could out from under the carport to save it from the fire and make room for the firefighters to do their jobs unhindered.
The 2 minutes that passed as we waited for the first responders to get on the scene, seemed like an eternity. When they got there, I gave them a quick brief on the location of the fire and the contents of the room. The first guy to kick open the door was greeted with a fireball the was belched into the carport. An invisible cloud of scalding gas filled the rafters in the carport with only the vinyl siding wilting, like a Styrofoam cup in a campfire, to mark it’s presence. The relief valve on the compressor went off like a gunshot followed by the popping of aerosol cans.
The Treasure Island Firemen, that now numbered about 25 or so, had the fire out in about 15 minutes.
Hard to believe that 20 minutes ago I was walking up to the door taking off my gloves and helmet, now there were 15 guys going about the business of doing what they do. Six guys on the roof with a gas-powered circular saw, cutting a vent hole. Two teams of two making entry through the upstairs windows, by breaking the glass and ripping the blinds out, and the rest downstairs scooping debris with shovels and squeegeeing the water out of the downstairs.
The other roommates arrived. The story was told over and over. I thought about this place. All I could think of was the bad. The calls about deaths in the family, the random drunken intruders, the robbery, and now the fire. Being an atheist I don’t believe in the unmeasurable. Ghosts, poltergeists, hauntings, and ill spirits all fall into the same category as god. Maybe someday scientists will create a bad-energy-ometer. This place. This physical location in space seems to be nothing but a Negative Nexus. Just as tectonic plates build up pressure and release it as earthquakes, this place will go some time with normal happy happenings, but when the negative hits, it’s the worst.
I’m glad I moved.
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