More Eli

Since I wrote about the Memphis trip, other Rick and Eli stories have been coming back to mind, and with those two there has never been a dull moment. Eli is one of those people who are naturally inclined to chaos. If there is any possibility of getting hurt in any activity he engages in, then he will get hurt. Sometimes it’s because of sheer stupidity and carelessness, and at other times it’s just plain old bad luck. Like for instance, the night we played with the fireworks we bought in Arkansas. What a night! I never realized until then how much fun fireworks could be because we weren’t allowed any in our household growing up. (The reason for that I ended up discovering that night as well.)

The beginning of the fun started when I was squatting in the middle of their steep driveway about to light some bottle rockets. I hear a quick whistle go past my ear, and I turned around to look up at the porch. Eli had just lit four or five of them, and was aiming straight for me. I immediately scrunched down into the fetal position, and prayed I wasn’t going to get hurt, which luckily, I didn’t because I was able to chase him down and give him a good knock on the back of the head. (This also reminds me- and I can’t help mentioning- of a New Year’s party in which a friend threw a handful of bottle rockets into the bonfire, and we all ran away as fast as we could except for the paraplegic who was stuck down there in his wheelchair about five feet from the fire.)

We came up with many brilliant ideas while fooling around that night. One being to put the majority of the fireworks in a cigarette carton box, put it at the bottom of the driveway, and light the box on fire. It was pretty funny until the next day when his scary biker neighbor came up to us at the local bar and asked if we were trying to burn his house down. The highlight of the night came when Eli decided to light these heavy duty rockets he bought. The first one went off well, it was loud and got the expected reaction. He lights the second one, and in mid-throw, it explodes in his hand. It had a short fuse. His flesh was burnt to a crisp, literally black hard skin with pieces of his pink flesh peeking out here and there. The worst part of it all was that it smelled like roast beef. It was pretty knarley! He didn’t go to the hospital, and took care of it himself. It healed in a few weeks.

This sort of thing was a regular occurrence for Eli. I watched him hang upside down from a ceiling fan and fall on what looked like his neck, but was his shoulder which dislocated. He fell off the front stairs and broke his collar bone. The worst of them all was a serious bad luck case. He was doing a tree job for some rapper who lives somewhere around Lithonia. He got out of the truck and was heading for the house when the owner’s pit bull came running up to him and clamped down on his package- the whole thing. He punched the dog in the head and started running, and the dog chased him and took a chunk out of the back of his leg too. He had a canine-made prince albert piercing right through the head of his peter, plus other wounds in that area. He tried to get me to look at the pictures of it to show me how bad it really was. I was like “No thanks, Eli, I’ll take your word for it……No, really.” It turns out that the rapper’s friend let the dog out, and Eli walked up to the house at that time. He was supposed to get a settlement for it. I don’t know if he ever got it because he moved to Tennessee, and we’ve lost touch with each other. I haven’t seen him in a few years, I hope he’s doing okay. I’m sure he is, because he always bounces back from whatever life throws at him.