Bimmer Bummer

Those were the words in the subject line of my younger brother's email. This was notable for several reasons: My little brother does not tend to send email, preferring instead to send personalized art cards to assert his opinions and feelings. I appreciate this since the cards are such warm and connected pieces, especially when compared to the cyber cool messages sent via Al Gore's Internet. When I do get email from my younger brother, it's of the one to six word variety that gets straight to the point, with verbosity left to me. When I read the subject line, I had an idea what I was in for.
He wrote to tell me that one of the kids we hung out with back on that dead end street in Boulder, Colorado had died. After that, he went on to say, "Unclear of the details, much like I was unclear of the details of his life. What I do remember is him cracking me up when we were kids." For my younger brother, this was practically a novel. 
It made me remember stories about Bimmer, not the least of which was that this was not his Christian name. Like so many kids on our block, he had been bestowed with a unique moniker by which he was known by all of us who played Capture the Flag, touch football, hide and seek, kick the can and every other outdoor game conceived by us youngsters. I remembered two stories that centered on Bimmer's garage.
The first was a time when Bimmer and his pal Doomsday (again, not her Christian name) were playing darts in that garage. Not that they had reached the appropriate age according to the warning on the packaged for the steel tipped weapons of pain and destruction, but this was back when there weren't warning labels on darts. Or anything else, for that matter. The circumstances that lead up to the denouement are largely shrouded in faded memory and mystery, but everyone who was hanging around outside on the street that day does have this one indelible image: Bimmer running out of the garage, screaming, with one of those poorly labeled darts sticking out of the back of his head. It is possible that he put it there himself. It is also possible that darts were being thrown at one another, and it was only a matter of time before one of the combatants was injured in this or a more severe way. We also tend to remember Doomsday chasing after him, trying to get the dart out of the back of Bimmer's head.
Again, the years have made recalling for certain whether it was before or after this that this same pair chose to play with matches in that same garage. A garage that had an open, very toxic and highly flammable bag of fertilizer in it. One of those matches, which could have been properly labeled as dangerous, but it didn't matter because it only took a few minuted for that part of the house to erupt into flames. It was an opportunity for most of us to see a fire truck up close and personal. It was probably only a coincidence that there was a fire hydrant on the corner adjacent to Bimmer's house. Perhaps his family was planning ahead. 
These youthful indiscretions later evolved into real trouble. The kind for which you sometimes end up in jail. Bimmer sometimes ended up in jail. The years after he left our little neighborhood were hard ones on him, and whatever the details of his passing turn out to be, it probably has something to do with cramming all that danger into such a short life. The neighborhood is just a little smaller now.