We were seniors in high school, but our parents should have known better than to let Mike and me go camping on our own. Camping involves knowing how to survive, which involves knowing how to build a fire—and given that we'd burned down a Hooters restaurant the summer before, it didn't make sense that my parents would be okay with it.

But they were. And in order to go camping, I needed supplies. Both Mike and my father were outdoorsy types; Mike was an Eagle Scout, and my father loved hunting and killing and the smell of pine and whatever. But me? The closest I'd ever come to being outdoorsy was playing that horrid E.T. Atari game and getting him lost in the woods, and the only hunting I'd ever done was on Duck Hunt.

The weekend before we were to head off into the woods and live off the land, Mike and Dad and I hopped into my parents' Volkswagen Vanagon and headed up to the scout hut to pick up some gear for me to use on this trip. During the drive up, I could feel myself getting weaker from withdrawal from my Super Nintendo. When we arrived, Mike and Dad bounded out of the van with the giddiness only outdoors lovers could have for objects made of canvas and steel that smelled of DEET.

The scout hut was a camper's heaven. A cache of tents, cots, cooking stoves, lamps, fold-up chairs: All the things any outdoorsy person could ever want or need were located in this scout hut. I couldn't possibly have cared any less. I just knew I didn't want to be laying on dirt and sticks when my girlfriend, Michele, met up with me and I ditched Mike and made the trip worth going on as we sneaked off to, like, not camp. So I just agreed to whatever Mike and Dad suggested I needed and helped carry it all back to the van.

On the ride back home, I was rifling through one of the backpacks they'd picked up. In one of the pockets was a package of matches and a can with the word "Sterno" written on the side.

"What's a Sterno?" I asked Mike and Dad.

"It's not ‘a' Sterno, it's just ‘Sterno,' " my father noted from the front seat.

"It's fuel for the stove," Mike said.

"What, so it's, like, flammable?" I asked.

My father snorted. "It wouldn't be much good in a stove if it weren't, now, would it?"

Mike laughed and shook his head. I suppose it must have felt good for him, being knowledgeable about something I wasn't. It was a rare case—since we'd met, we'd always been the same level of smart on the same stuff. It must have felt great for his ego to get one up on me with this whole camping gambit, that fucker.

It was with all due haste that I opened the lid on the can of Sterno and dumped almost half of the contents in Mike's lap. He immediately freaked and slapped the can from my hand, causing it to spill all over the floor.

"What the fuck?" he yelped.

I grabbed the matchbox from the backpack, picked a match from the box, and placed it against the striking strip. "Laugh at me, will you?" I said with a manic smile.

"Oh, shit, no!" he shouted.

"Makes you feel like a big guy, knowing what Sterno is, huh?"

"Dude, don't do it!" he begged.

I wasn't going to. I just wanted him to think I would. And I carried out that illusion to the best of my ability. "You laughed at the wrong city boy, tough guy!" I said with a smirk.

"I didn't mean it," he said, attempting to wipe the Sterno off his corduroys. "Don't do it."

"What the hell?" my dad shouted from the front seat. "What is that smell? Is that the— Did you open that Sterno?"

"Yeah," I replied.

"He dumped it all over my pants!" Mike barked.

"What?" my dad said, turning back to look. He saw me holding the match to the box and Mike frantically trying to wipe his pants off with his bare hands. "What the HELL are you doing?"

"Teaching this dickhead a lesson!" I said. I thought maybe my father would understand the situation and realize that I was goofing around, given that my entire life had been spent goofing around. But when I look back on it now, I realize that my entire life had been spent attempting to goof around while actually causing reckless mayhem and strife. Usually involving fire and always by accident. Which is why I don't blame my dad for immediately reaching back to snatch the match from my hand.

But in doing so, he pulled his entire body across the steering wheel, which he held with one hand. This caused the Vanagon to swerve into the lane next to ours, which caused the driver of the car he almost creamed to lay on his horn and, presumably, scream vulgarities out the window of his vehicle. This of course caused my dad to compensate and swing the van's steering wheel the opposite direction, which pulled the vehicle left and back into our lane, but caused those of us inside to lurch hard to the right.

This knocked Mike into my left arm, which held the box of matches, which caused the box to rake across the head of the match I held in my right hand. Simultaneously, I lost my grip on both the matchbox and the matches, and they fell right into Mike's lap.

Immediately, my best friend's pants caught on fire.

"Wha . . . Augh! OH FUCK! I'm on fire!" Mike said as calmly as he could.

"What the HELL!" my father yelled. "Did you . . . Is he on fire?"

I didn't reply, as I was frantically trying to slap my best friend's crotch to put out the flames.

"Ow! Shit . . . Don't . . . You're racking me!" Mike yelled.

"Sorry!" I said, continuing to slap him on the lap.

Mike dropped to the floor in front of the bench seat. Lying face-down, he began rolling on the floor of the Vanagon. Given the shitty quality of the nearly plastic fabric on the floorboard of your late-seventies model orange Volkswagen Vanagon, and given that said shitty fabric was coated in the Sterno that Mike had just knocked from my hands, it wasn't a pretty sight.

My father had just pulled the van to the side of the road when Mike performed his "stop, drop, and roll into even more fire" routine, so I leaped up and opened the van door. I dragged Mike out and plopped him on the ground, where he began unbuckling his pants. My dad joined us just as we put out the fire in Mike's pants, and he was pretty damn angry. But then he realized there was a bigger, much worse fire burning in the Volkswagen, and all he could do was watch. There was no way to put out the flames besides grabbing me and using my body to smother the fire—which, I swear to God, he was considering as he stared me down.

Poor Mike stood there in his underwear with a slightly blistered crotch. The police and firefighters arrived in time to keep the entire van from being a total loss. The seats were melted, and the upholstery was almost entirely turned into carbon (and soaking wet). But the van still ran, and after a few visits to a few junkyards, the van was suitable for travel once again (even though it stank like hell).

My parents forbade us go camping for as long as I lived under their roof, so the great "Weekend of My Birthday During Our Senior Year" camping trip was off. But considering that my first attempt at being an outdoorsman had resulted in my shooting the truck in the engine, and my second had just reduced our van to a charred hulk, nearly everyone associated with me—including myself—gave up on the idea of my ever being the outdoors type.