Shooting Bottle Rockets with the Next Tsar of Russia

by Patrick Best

My step-father said he was a pathological liar, but I loved T.J. like a brother. I was always fascinated by his stories… and I really wanted to believe them all. He once made me swear to never tell a soul that he was a descendent of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. I listened intently as he told me how the Bolsheviks killed the whole family in the basement except for one of the Tsar's four daughters, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. He told me his grandmother was Anastasia’s daughter and that she had tens of millions of dollars and priceless jewelry hidden in a safe somewhere in their house. He told me that he was the sole heir to her fortune because he’d always been kind to her, and that when she passed away he was going to take the money and travel all over the world. He said he expected to one day be recognized as royalty in Russia, but he never planned to live there. "For my family to be recognized will be enough," he said.

He told everyone in our neighborhood that he was a black belt in karate and that he had an IQ of 168. He was a pretty smart kid, so there were times when I believed his claims about being a genius. I’d known him since we were 10, and I never saw or heard of him visiting a dojo. He and I got into a nasty fight one day in my friend Mark's front yard. I was a lot bigger and heavier than T.J., so it wasn't much of a fight. I could never get him to back down or cry or say 'I give up', so I finally just quit punching him and walked home feeling terrible about fighting with my good friend. I was never declared the winner, even though it would have been clear to a blind man that I had gotten the better of him, because he told all our friends that he never hit me because he didn’t want to hurt me. He also stated that the swollen eye and bloody lip he received during our 15 rounds didn’t hurt him because he had gone into a trance that only five people in the world knew how to enter. Great stuff, right?

T.J. and I camped out a lot. In the early '80s in Ozark, Alabama there wasn't much else to do for 13-year-old boys on a Saturday night. We’d fish for bream and crappie in the lake for our supper and listen to loud music on his boom box until we got bored and hatched a plan to do something reckless and, sometimes, maybe just a little illegal. We never did anything to hurt anyone, but I will admit that every once in a while we’d take our battles against boredom a little too far. We definitely stepped into "too far" territory on one of our excursions a few nights after the 4th of July in 1984. We dressed up in some of his dad's old Army fatigues and grabbed a hundred or so of the bottle rockets we didn’t get around to shooting off to celebrate our nation’s independence. At some point during the evening, after eating a bowl of charred fish and Fritos, we decided it would be fun to mess with the guests at the Holiday Inn just off Highway 231. The hotel’s parking lot was across the lake from our camp site, so we loaded up his little john boat with a bushel of firecrackers and floated over to the bank.

As we neared the edge of the trees we got on our hands and knees and crawled up as close to the parking lot as we could get without being revealed by the bright yellow street lights that dozens of moths circled and kissed. It was after midnight, so it was quiet except for the howl of the occasional diesel truck that passed by the hotel on the highway. The room doors at the hotel are all accessible from the parking lot, and most of the big windows were covered by dark curtains that said the people inside were either sleeping or doing things didn’t require a lot of light.

It wasn’t a big hotel, so we weren’t more than 30 yards from the closest hotel room door. It took us five or six bottle rocket blasts to get a rise out of our first guest. A grey-haired old man wearing a white v-neck t-shirt and unbuttoned blue jeans came out onto the balcony of the second floor and looked up and down the parking lot. Puffs of smoke from the most recent explosions still twisted and curled in the night sky like tiny dancing ghosts. The man shook his head and walked back into his room muttering to himself when he couldn’t determine what had caused the noise that forced him out of bed. T.J. and I gave each other a quick high-five and readied our artillery.

A few short minutes after the old fellow had gone back into his room, closed the door and turned off the light, we were ready to fire again. He slid the red stick into the Coke bottle launcher we’d brought along and I lit the fuse. Just as that black powder ignited and we heard that beautiful “schoof” sound bottle rockets make at liftoff, a man with a bushy Geraldo Rivera-like mustache opened the door of the room directly in front of us. He was wearing boxers and flip flops and he was on his way to the ice machine (he had the little bucket in his hand). He must have had ears like an owl because he stared right in our direction. The rocket shot out of the bottle and headed right for him. He stood there, frozen, like a bushy-lipped statue in underwear that no self-respecting sculptor on the planet would ever create. That supercharged Black Cat flew right past his head and hit the rustled sheets at the end of the bed behind and… “POW!” I saw a woman’s bare legs kicking at the bed covers like she was trying to chase away a hundred angry yellow jackets. He made sure his lady friend was okay, and then ran toward the tree line like a man possessed.

We ran like hell, but the man kept coming - he wasn't afraid to follow us into the dark woods with bare feet and wearing only boxers. We hid in a pile of brush about 30 yards from where we were shooting the rockets. We lay there still, and listened as he pounded through the brush screaming for us to come out. “I’m going to find you!” he said in a frightening growl. We didn’t dare make a sound or a movement. I believed then, and now, that he would have killed us if he found us.

He came close enough to us that I could smell his beer and cigarette breath as he shouted threats and obscenities into the night. After a few minutes, I saw flashing blue lights from a police car that just rolled into the hotel parking lot. An officer began to call for the man in the woods to come out. I could see a flashlight beaming into the trees above us. “Hey Ronnie! Come on back out here before you get hurt!” the officer yelled. Ronnie’s girlfriend must have called 911, put on some clothes, and come out to greet the officer.

We knew we would be busted if the officer came into the woods with his flashlight, so as soon as Homicidal Ronnie found his way back to the parking lot, T.J. and I turned on our own flashlights and started running. The officer must have seen our beams bouncing up and down through the trees because he took chase. We only had about 100 yards to go to get back to the boat, but the woods were dense, overgrown. Thorn bushes ripped at our clothes and into our skin and thin branches slapped us in the face and neck as we ran. We made it to the boat, turned off our flashlights and pushed off into the black water. The policeman never made it close to the water. We watched as the lights from his flashlight slashed through the darkness in the woods and listened as he yelled “Come out with your hands up!” and “I see you, kids! Come on out!”

We knew he didn’t see us and we paddled harder than Olympic rowers until we got back to our camp site. We pulled the boat onto the shore and hid it under some bushes away from our sleeping bags. We said a few wisecracks about the man in his underwear and the officer fumbling around in the woods, but we didn’t laugh a lot. Mostly we just sat quietly in the darkness and listened for the sound of footsteps headed in our direction. We were bloodied and bruised and shaken to the core. We did a lot of other stupid things with each other in the next few years that followed... but we never shot bottle rockets at the Holiday Inn again.

Some names have been changed to protect the innocent.