When I was about 7? I found my mother’s pink perfume bottle in the garbage can in her bedroom. I loved that perfume bottle because of it’s tactile feel. It had a pink rubbery/plastic cover over a glass aerosol bottle with a misting sprayer. The plastic was about 1/8 inch thick and felt lovely to touch.
I rescued it from the garbage, and set about refilling it. I devised an idea to use a hack saw and cut into the bottle, just wide enough to be able to get liquid into it and then seal it up with tape and see if it works.
So I took the bottle down to my father’s fairly large workshop in the basement. (His workshop will feature in a lot of these stories.) I put it in the vice to hold it while I cut it with the hack saw.
First I had to get through the plastic cover, and the hole had to be very small in that rubbery cover that I loved so much. So I started cutting through the cover with the hack saw. It was very hard to do, because the hacksaw blade would gouge into the cover and stick and the bottle would twist. So after a while, I tried to put the hacksaw blade on softly so it wouldn’t stick. I had to really tighten the vice down on the bottle to try to keep it from slipping, but in the end it would not work as the bottle kept twisting in the vice anyway.
I realized that with the cover on, I could not cut into the bottle. So I had to cut the cover off. I put the now bare glass bottle into the vice and tightened it as much as I dared and started hacksawing.
The hacksaw still kept causing the bottle to twist in the vice, so I tried to align the saw very carefully with the exact center of the point where the vice and the bottle touched. But there was still some twisting. I tightened the vice a little more to hold it better and restarted hacksawing.
On about the second stroke, there was a loud bang and the bottle blew up sending glass all over the workbench and the floor. I knew my mother was upstairs in the kitchen just above. With glass everywhere, I knew I didn’t have time to clean it up before she came down.
Panicking inside, I thought the best thing to do would be to rush over to the door, turn out the light in the workshop, and then walk calmly upstairs to the kitchen. I’ll clean it up later, no problem. I felt pretty confident that this would work. I just needed a noise story.
My Mother was at the top of the stairs and said “What was that?” As I was rapidly making up some believable story, I reached the steps below my mother and she saw my face. Her face contort in fear and she stare at me. I had a piece of glass in my eyebrow and was bleeding down onto my nose and chin.
I cannot remember what happened after that, but I am sure it wasn’t good.