My friends and I were where we weren't supposed to be. Hiding in my uncle's room, a converted garage of my grandfather's cozy suburban home, watching a video on "StupidVideos.com" in which a guy hollows out a melon, fills it full of gasoline, lights it on fire, and hits it with a baseball bat.

This goes exactly as you'd imagine from an internet video.

The subsequent fireball completely envelops him, and as he limps away trying to put himself out, he leaves behind one sandal burning merrily.

We simply had to try it.

But we didn't have the resources (thank God), so we improvised.
We went to grandpa's orange tree, hollowed one out, filled it with two-stroke gasoline, lit it on fire, and hit it with a Wiffle ball bat.

This went about as well as you might expect.

The rind soaked up the gas, the Wiffle bat whiffed, and the orange sunk into the freshly tilled yard.
After a few tries, I threw it at one friend instead.

Dodgeball was a favorite of ours, and it turns out a fireball is something you want to dodge.

It was all fun and games at Grampa's suburb until my elder goodie two-shoes brother and his church friend came outside with a:

"It would be so cool if you took that old table, covered it in gasoline, threw a fireball at it and whoosh!"

To this day I do not know where the table in question came from, but it had been sitting in our backyard for a few years, its finish stripped by the sun, and oils evaporated, essentially leaving a giant circular sponge. We dragged it into the middle of the tilled yard (got to be fire safe), putting it right under the hanging branches of our neighbor's cherry plum tree, before pouring a little gas on it. The gas disappeared into the wood, so obviously it needed a little more of Grampa's pilfered two-stroke.

It.was.beautiful.
Fire arced from my fingers with a satisfying Whoosh. Then WHOOSH!
That's when my young mind absorbed an education.
That day, I learned that tree branches burn.
That eight feet up isn't high enough to protect them from young boys.
That gasoline can't be easily doused by hose water.

But in the end, we managed to put out the fire and bury all the evidence.

With dirt.
Using shovels.

The water kept the tree from burning too much, and we became much closer with no real damage done.

The moral of this story is not to trust your brother's church friends.
(He tattled).