At an early age my parents realized i was a giant magnet for trouble when i was bored. I lacked discipline they always told me. Meaning if i didn’t have anything to do i would make shit up as i go, usually ending with something broken, something bleeding or quite possibly all the above.
When we moved to NJ, my parents immediately sought out after school activities for their kids. My ass landed in the Scouts. Theres a few photos floating around of me in my Cub Scout and Boy Scout uniform somewhere. not sure where, i’ll probably find it in two weeks and tweet it like i did with my pajama photo.
My best friend in NJ was also in the same Boys Scout troop as me, Lamont.
Lamont and i managed to get stuck together in the same.. is the right term Squad? i remember it was called Badger and that fit us pretty well because our squad was a bunch of mean fuckwits. i think they stuck us all together in the hopes we’d kill ourselves off and cull ourselves from the herd.
Anyway, on our third or fourth month in Badger Squad we got assigned morning cooking duties. This mean we were in charge of setting up our fire, doing all the cooking and clean up. Other members of our squad were in charge of dinner and lunch. Well Lamont and i being as competitive as we are decided we wanted to one up our squad mates and cook bacon as well as pancakes. (if you have ever been in the scouts, pancakes quickly becomes a staple of your wilderness diet.)
Lamont and i get the fire going and we’re cooking pancakes and Lamont decides to throw a bunch of bacon on to cook.
Here’s the thing about bacon, its full of grease. Grease is flammable. In about 2 minutes flat we had a major grease fire on our metal cooking plate. A big one.
now i don’t know how they do it now but it used to be they taught us ff you have a fire, use something non flammable like baking soda to put it out. We kept extra boxes of baking soda around just for this reason.
The one thing you don’t do is pour water on it.
So here i am standing over it smacking at it with my spatula trying to get the flaming bacon off the cooking plate and Lamont comes in with a cup of water and pours it all over the cooking pan.
it doesnt work.

The simple little grease fire explodes in my face, i violently leap back trip and land on my back smacking parts of my clothes that are now on fire. Flaming Grease, fire and cotton don’t mesh well together.
Everyone stops and turns to look at this disaster that has occurred over the space of about 10 seconds. *Everyone pauses for a moment to take this all in* Everyone then fly out of the chairs run over and begin stomping on me to put me out. At some point i take a boot to the face so my nose starts bleeding. So now i’m burned, bleeding and worst of all starved.

Finally when they realize i’m not on fire, they pick up my smoking carcass and sit me at the picnic table. My face hurts, my back hurts, frankly everything hurts.

Daniel one of the other members looks at me and starts laughing and pointing, everyone walks back to the table and starts laughing. i’m confused, in pain and starting to get really angry.

“Whats so fucking funny.”
“Dude….. dude…. you’re eyebrows.. you’re eyebrows are gone!” *note the ….. are from him laughing so hard he can’t breathe*.

Everyone immediately comes over to check this out and they all start laughing at me.

Someone finally hands me a mirror and i finally catch a glimpse of myself, busted nose, blood smeared all over my face, my face red with a 1st degree burn like a bad sunburn and no eyebrows.

I was pissed and scared. “How am i going to go home like this? My parents are gonna kill me.”

“Oh we’ll just draw them in, nobody will notice i promise.”

So my ‘friends’ in badger squad used a sharpie to draw fake eyebrows.
I got my revenge though a few months later and broke Lamont’s nose. We were best friends for years after that till i moved to New Mexico.