T
HE BIG JANITOR AT THE SCHOOL was good-natured but mentally slow. His name was Gravis. The kids picked on him all the time. They played jokes on him, like one time they pissed in the floor wax when he wasn’t looking and another time they put wet paint up on the top of the doorway where, he was so tall, his bushy hair got paint in it. They made his life miserable.
One day they put a plastic bucket full of water on top of the door to the supply closet so it would fall on his head when he went in. But what happened was, when the bucket fell, it didn’t tip over. It plunged straight down and knocked him unconscious.
Gravis, the big janitor, had plastic from the bucket melted right onto his face like a hideous mask. In fact, it had burned away some of the skin and replaced it with a charred hard veneer.
As Gravis lay there on the floor of the supply room, two 12th graders, Jink and Fawley, had an idea. Giggling with cruel glee, they squeezed a tube of super glue onto the top of the janitor’s head. They put the bucket over his head like a hood and pressed down so it would stick to his scalp. They left the poor guy in the supply room, shut the door, and went out to skip class and get high.
Gravis woke up confused in darkness. He slowly stood up and fumbled for the light switch. It was hard to breath with his head in the bucket. Gravis panicked and tried to find the door. He tripped over a mop and crashed into a shelf of cleaning supplies. A bottle of solvent cleaner spilled all over him. Gravis reached into his pocket for his cigarette lighter, thinking it would give him some light. When he flicked the Bic, the flammable liquid solvent cleaner went WHOOSH and the big janitor felt the flames of hell engulf him.
Within fifteen minutes, people in the hall saw smoke coming from under the door. In the past, Jink and Fawley had pulled the fire alarm as a joke, so they laughed and giggled at the irony that they were now actually doing it for the right reason. The fire trucks came. By now, all the kids and teachers were standing outside. When the firefighters entered the school, the halls were thick with smoke. They heard the loud crack of busting door hinges as Gravis exited the supply room, but they couldn’t see him stumbling through the smoke and out the back door.
Nobody knew where Gravis went, so they assumed that he had started the fire and ran off because he was afraid he would be in trouble.
The following Saturday night, Jink sat on the carpet in front of the TV in his parents’ nice new house in the new subdivision where they lived. His parents were out of town so he had snuck some Bacardi rum from their liquor cabinet. Jink sat there drinking rum and playing a video game called Grand Theft Auto. He had his back to the sliding glass doors that led to the back yard patio. He didn’t see the tall, Frankenstein-looking figure as it loomed up in the moonlight with the flat head and grotesque, partly melted face.
Gravis, the big janitor, had plastic from the bucket melted right onto his face like a hideous mask. In fact, it had burned away some of the skin and replaced it with a charred hard veneer. There were gaping eye-holes where he had peeled back the melting plastic like clay to see where he was going. His mouth was a gaping grave, mostly just teeth and tongue. There wasn’t much of a nose left, and the whole face was running down like a dried candle and the bottom of the upside-down bucket gave his head a wild, flat headed robot shape.
When the big, horrible brute crashed through the sliding glass doors, Jink the 12th grader jumped up and turned around, eyes open wide with fear. Gravis walked right into the living room. He saw the half full bottle of Bacardi 101 sitting on the floor. Remembering a trick his dad had taught him, Gravis picked up the bottle. His dad had been a bartender.
Gravis stepped forward and grabbed young Jink by the front of his T-shirt. The brute took a big swig of rum. The first swig was to kill the pain of the burn. But the second swig he let fill up in his mouth and cheeks. As he held Jink’s shirt-front with his left hand, Gravis brought his cigarette lighter out with his right hand and held it to his lips. He flicked the lighter and sprayed 101 proof rum from his mouth, igniting it, like he was blowing a big flame thrower from his mouth, right into Jink’s face. You can really do this. But don’t.
Jink screamed, “OOWWWW! Let me go!” as the flame singed his eyebrows off. He wriggled to break free but Gravis had a strong grip on him.
