When I was done throwing up on the sidewalk, I called 411 and asked to be connected to Poison Control.
When I was done throwing up on the sidewalk, I called 411 and asked to be connected to Poison Control. The operator, in a calm, trained tone, asked how she could be of assistance to me.
“How bad is it if you ingest fire extinguisher?” I asked.
“Well, it’s sodium bicarbonate. You’ll be fine. You might throw up.”
“We did.”
“And you’ll cough.”
“We are, a lot. And gagging.”
“You’ll want to wash out your eyes.”
“We will. Could we die?”
“No, I doubt it. May I have your zip code, please?” she asked.
“What about cancer?”
“Not that I know of. May I have your zip code?”
I was suddenly afraid we had committed a crime. I imagined policemen being dispatched. I imagined disappointed firemen shaking their heads in disgust at the sight of these wasted, potential life-saving tools. Was it a felony to use a fire extinguisher in a non-emergency situation? I didn’t need a felony.
Mike, with two empty fire extinguishers in his hands, opened the door and made his way to the sidewalk where we had been throwing up and trying to clear our lungs.
“Hello, sir? Your zip code, please.”
“My zip code is…90210.”
I hung up the phone, scared that my call was being traced, and announced we had to leave right then.
The building’s seventy old, leaky, moldy, crumbling rooms served as individual practice spaces for musicians and as living spaces for transient drug users. We had gone to our space that night with good intentions of writing and recording music while celebrating Nigel’s birthday at the same time. But as we found out, when you mix a bottle of warm, $300 Cristal and cans of PBR, guitars are harder to play, drum beats become more complicated, and every vocal melody sounds like an out of tune Santana song. So we put our instruments down and we began double-fisting Solo cups of champagne and cans of beer.
I’d never sprayed a fire extinguisher, and when I saw it hanging from the wall, near the elevator, I decided that I would try it. I took the mysterious, red can, pulled the clip and puffed it once into an empty room. Mike saw what I had done and asked if he could try it. When I handed it over, he disappeared, running down the hallway.
When he returned, he’d found another one. He stood in the doorway, with one in each hand, pointed at us.
“Mike! Don’t do it!” one of us said.
He laughed and squeezed both handles. We were trapped.
“Mike!”
He sprayed right into our faces, all over everything. We were covered in white dust. We looked like ghosts. It was in our noses, in the corners of our eyes, in our mouths, throats, and lungs. It turned our hair white. We couldn’t even see the door. We tripped on cords and knocked things on their sides. Mike’s laughter echoed from the hallway, as he continued spraying.
He continued to the elevator and the stairway and the bathrooms and to all of those same places on the two lower levels as well. When he emptied the contents of one can, he found another.
While Mike was busy on the other floors, the rest of us finally made it down the stairs to the ground floor, crawling, swiping at what was in front of us because we couldn’t see anything but a thick, white fog. Once we were outside, we threw up the chalky mixture of champagne, beer and sodium bicarbonate onto the sidewalk. Mike eventually came out too. He too was coughing, gagging and vomiting. Once we had all finished, we got into a car and drove, determined not to be caught.
We waited three weeks before going back to the building. We were scared. There were security cameras in the hallways, but you could see that the wires were coiled up and weren’t attached to anything. They probably weren’t even real cameras. But, as we walked up the stairs, I irrationally expected the building’s owner to have been waiting there for us, waiting day and night for the previous three weeks straight.
The dust was still on the floors and the walls, but the owner was nowhere to be seen. The five emptied extinguishers had been rounded up and placed on the floor next to a garbage can at the end of the hall amid a pile of empty cans and one empty champagne bottle. There were new extinguishers on the walls, now behind glass cases and there was a note on the glass that read, “Fire extinguishers are only to be used in the event of an actual fire. Any other usage is punishable by law.”
Todd Miller is a writer and musician. He is a frequent contributor to the music section of Newcity Chicago. He attended and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago. His band, A Lull, recently released its debut effort - an EP, Ice Cream Bones, on Lujo Records. The band is currently at work on an upcoming full-length record, Confetti, to be released in the fall. He currently resides in Chicago.
Check out A Lull at: alull.com
