That summery afternoon, a gawker would have judged Pepper’s action at the gas pump mindlessly impulsive, as though the idea had been transmitted into his head from Mars.  Had there been a moment for reflecting, the young men riding with Pepper would have deemed it a transient spike in his fickle ambitions, an optimistic half-pluck at impressiveness.  They knew him.  His youth, like theirs, yet dimly glinted of the innocent immortality that gradually dissolves in hard experience.  More, he was known to confess from time to time extraordinary abilities restrained by modesty but available if warranted.  He alluded to vast and exotic mental powers, such as a talent for manipulating objects from afar by merely visualizing them, or his sometimes burdensome hypnotic gaze that ran ordinary eye-to-eye conversation right off its tracks.  These exceptionalities were complemented by an equally formidable spread of physical ones, which Pepper also thought fair to divulge now and then.  Whatever the exertion a fellow might undertake—pogo-jumping, for example—Pepper did not doubt his own capacity to eclipse, if only he wanted to.  Great was the debt owed his generosity, as it was not his bag to upstage his disadvantaged fellows at every turn.  Still, not so great a stretch was it from all the marvels of legend—strongmen towing boxcars with their hair or teeth, Air Jordan levitating to soar high above the giants, fire eaters swallowing blazes and blowing them back out from their mouths—that, flush in the spirit of some sublime moment, Pepper himself, slight of frame and fame, might uncork a miracle.

            Opportunity presented in the American way:  Pepper created his own.  Somehow, whether it was a wild oratorical gesture accompanying a burst of public oration there in the fueling island, or an impromptu Highlander-with-sword whirl as he finished pumping, Pepper serendipitously knocked the nozzle out of the old Pontiac’s fuel tube onto the concrete, splashing regular unleaded across the legs of his Levi’s. 

            We who will not comprehend his reaction have not walked the tracks in his ragged tennies or looked through the eyes of the Game Boy zombie standing there in the gas-stinking summer air in the middle of the whole dirty world.  Of all feasible encores, one promised Pepper what he needed after he hung up the nozzle and yanked open the car door.

            Immune to life’s embarrassments, he fished out his cigarette lighter and brought it up against his leg, musing to his buddies, “Wonder if I’ll catch on fire?”

            “Yeah right, dude.”  “Go ahead.”  “You ain’t got. . .”

            WHOOOFF!           

            A fireball announced that he did got.

            Instants ensued in which there was certain to have been an eruption of screams and curses as young men spewed out of the Pontiac in all directions like rats from a blazing KFC, but no mind can recall those instants.  A fellow at the next pump across fled into the highway and was swallowed up in traffic.  An evacuation circle swept outward from the flailing ignitee, stranding him on the island to hash out his burning issues solo.

            . . .Which he happened to do, the fire-flash having suffocated itself in hypervirulent depletion of the oxygen required to propagate—a supernatural phenomenon that can save lives.  As Pepper’s scattered homeboys rallied in the early aftershock, they could see him slapping his steaming Levi’s, hear the shrieked obscenities of a deeply cheated daredevil making on as if he weren’t half out of his freaking mind, the half that normally half-worked.  They gave it a bit to see if the place would blow, then circled in to assess and assist their smoldering bro.

            The old guy who ran the place was out squawking now, totally irrelevant and ignored.  Pepper was peeling up a tattered pants’ leg, cursing now in anticipation of finding roasted flesh curling off the bone.  He got a glimpse and straightened to face the posse.  Translated, perfumed and summarized, his message was “Get me to the drugstore.”

            One of the dudes without a driver’s license took the wheel and brought them all to a nearby Walgreens, where Pepper bought some salve recommended by the burn specialist working the cash register.  There was semi-privacy behind the store, a drive-through lot visible from the teeming highway eighty yards distant but not quickly reached by any cop who might spot his keister shining while he smeared balm.  He had not stopped cursing.  His legs were burned hairless but the damage otherwise was not what it should have been.  In time the pain would be a memory, the whole episode fuel for gasconade at drinking parties.   

            But a deeper agony never to subside brought forth the fevered cursing.  He cursed his betrayal by the common run’s damned reality on that day when reality defied his special powers of will and allowed him to go up in blazes.  He’d had it.  This time reality had screwed the pooch.  Reality had picked the wrong grinning gentleman to shaft.  This grinning gentleman would now watch with the eyes of a bat, he would listen with the ears of the bat-eared fox of Etosha, and at the right moment, on the right pitch, he would swing a fat bat and knock reality out of the park—bam, five hundred feet.  Reality would soon be kneeling like a human soccer ball at the feet of a new master.  With these feet there would be waters to walk upon, air to walk upon, sunshine to walk upon.  Pepper was just that kind of a guy.  Henceforth he wasn’t taking any more crap from reality.