Stories from high school usually suck.  Then again, rarely do people try to pull off the shit I attempt.

Back in the day I was a band nerd.  Concert band, jazz band, marching band.  If it involved wrapping my lips around a mouthpiece and blowing, I was your man.  It should come then as no surprise that I was recruited to perform in the pit band for our high school musical my senior year.  For those of you who don’t know, the pit band sits in the eponymous pit, an appropriately named hole in the middle of the stage, as the action proceeds above-decks.  Putting twenty-five horny high school kids in a darkened pit with only one adult is never a good recipe for good behavior, especially when one of those kids was yours truly.

The musical selected for that year was “Pippin,” a hedonistic, overly lavish piece of shit from the 1970s that our chorus teacher (and director) had selected and watered down for consumption by our backwater North Carolina audience.  The only other thing you need to know about Pippin was that the trumpet part (aka my part) sucked.    Basically, I was sitting around with thirty or forty minutes between needing to play, which (suffice to say) made rehearsals duller than one of our special ed stage hands.

What do you do in a pit when bored?  I decided to start a business.  A few years before, for no particular reason, I had ordered (oh, this hurts to admit) something off of an infomercial called a Super Snacker 2000.  This was essentially the precursor to a George Foreman grill, only you could only make grilled sandwiches on it.  One day I had brought it in, along with some nonstick spray, a loaf of bread, and some ham and cheese.  I plugged the grill into the jack at my feet and was just going to make myself a sandwich (or maybe four- I was pretty fat in those days) when the smell hit my pit-mates.  They all “wanted them a sandwich” and were willing to pay.  Six sandwiches at three bucks apiece later, I was officially in business.

I adapted to the life of businessman pretty fast.  Soon I was selling to chorus members, extras, stage hands, and anyone else struck by the maddening odor of cooked meat wafting from the pit.  I devised a crude menu, took advance orders, and even had a sign up sheet for the busy times when I had to play AND cook.  I also learned how to avoid being shut down by the establishment: the first sandwich of the day went, free of charge, to the pit conductor (another portly fellow), who amazingly looked the other way once he was full of belly.

Rehearsals lasted for a couple of months.  By the time they were over, I had over a thousand dollars in my pocket after expenses, which later became a significant part of the down payment on my first house.  These were good times.

Were that it ended there. Like Icarus on wings of pastrami, I had chanced fate once too often and had flown too close to the sun.  As we began performances I decided not retire the grill in hopes of squeezing a few more dollars from my classmates.  On opening night we were midway through the first act when I finally got burned for my illicit operation.  I was preparing an hot italian panini on sourdough when I had to take my eyes away from the grill to play a passage.  When I looked down, I was shocked to see that the Super Snacker 2000 had caught fire directly between my feet.

Starting a fire in the middle of a performance is not good, and things were quickly going from bad to worse.  In the cramped space of the pit, the flames spread to the detritus accumulated by high school students pushed into a small space for too long.  In a moment, the bassoon player in front of me was going to catch fire.  I struggled to find a way to quietly extinguish the flames, to no avail.  Though this fact may be debatable, I was not a complete idiot.  I had a fire extinguisher handy.  With no choice, I pulled it out and discharged its contents onto the conflagration at my feet.

In the immediate sense, this maneuver was highly successful.  The flames were put out and all were placed out of harm’s way.  The fallout, on the other hand was substantial and rather disastrous.  Audience members heard a loud whoosh lasting ten or twelve seconds, followed by a great puff of white smoke rising from the middle of the stage.  Nothing was occurring onstage to lead anyone to believe this was a special effect.  Sadly, our musicians and actors were so amateurish that they ceased the performance to watch the cloud rise in amazement.  In effect, the entire performance ground to a bizarre halt before being coaxed back to life by our livid band director, who knew full well what had probably happened.

At intermission, a befuddled director asked me what the ruckus had been.  I told her there was a malfunction with the electrical system (technically true) that had led to a fire that I had extinguished.  The director praised me for my quick thinking and hustled off to attend to other business.  I crept back into the pit for the second act, sadly noting the charred remains of my first-ever entrepreneurial venture when I sense a presence above me.  Our band director, all six-foot-six of him, towered above me.  He suspected I was the culprit, and seeing me in the charred remains only confirmed his suspicions.  With nothing springing to my tongue in the way of excuses, I did the only thing I could imagine would placate him.  I held aloft the final charred sandwich of my career as a restauranteur, offering it to him gratis.