Summer met me when I got home. With hot sticky arms outstretched... welcoming me back to everything I loved the best. To the broad sands of the piedmont. South Carolina's midlands. Long needle pines everywhere and acres and acres of farm land with fresh corn sprouting up and coming now to about 3 feet tall. My brother and I could go back to spending hours and hours loudly challenging one another to passionate and violent games of Super Smash Brothers Melee.
Perhaps the most perfect multi-player video game of its time for venting sibling rivalry... and destroying the boredom that is understood to accompany living in the middle of a forest. It was certainly more entertaining than collecting four leaf clovers and looking for gnomes. Characters from at least a decade of different Nintendo games all got together and tried to punch and kick each other off of a stage... flinging lighting bolts and rocket punches. Hours and hours I spent with my brother challenging him to face my undeniable prowess. We had played so much that the joysticks on the handsets were starting to become less responsive due to repetitive motion wearing.
"Oh Oh! Right.... now you trash talkin! What about that!!??" John would yell quickly laying 80 or so damage points on me in a skillfully played chain attack which ended in his guiding Luigi to do a back flip and punt my poor little Pikachu skyward. It was at those precise moments that I realized exactly how invested in these little matches I was... and an little vein would pulse at my temple. I've never liked losing. Which is to say... I rather enjoy severing my falling opponent's head, and displaying them on stakes along the side-walk in front of my home. I liked playing with Pikachu. In the game he was one of the smallest and fastest characters... and could pull lightning out of the sky. I strangely identified with this powerful little creature, who looked about as dangerous as a kitten... but was actually quite a challenging opponent. Game play was almost always loud, and neither of us really ever blinked during a match. My devotion to winning was more than a hair psychotic and I'm sure that thousands of my healthy neurons are now crawling around my head... with broken backs and sprained ankles.
"Oh! Whatever! Come one! Best two-outta -three!!!???" I demanded as John leaned back on his bean-bag chair obviously content with his victory.
"Why? It's not like you're gonna win?" He shot back, but played me again anyway. This was how a large portion of my leisure time was spent. Wasted time perhaps... but at least it was positive interaction with one of my family members. Im betting I could still challenge my brother to one of those games, and I think he'd probably play.
My days stared early. Six or so.... Id get up while it was still cool and damp in the morning and head over to my neighbors house to climb into his huge white utility truck. Ed Sweatman owned a painting and repair business and had enlisted the help of myself and my brother to repaint apartments after a tenant had moved out. The complex was not aging gracefully. We took the hour drive to big dirty Columbia and Hampton Courts, which sighed and creaked towards collapse. Eddie is a broad shouldered man of a perpetual crew cut and nefarious past. He was incredibly hard working. He had to be. He had three kids. Twins and a little chatter box named Brelynn. (Bree-lin) His wife Samantha was a short little wisp of a lady who stayed home and took care of the kids, her advanced degrees from Columbia College not withstanding. They lived right next door and our two families sort of formed a little village, switching houses to have dinner in a couple of times a week.
The ride to work was more or less un-eventful. Somewhere along the way Eddie (who we referred to as Mr. Eddie... its South Carolina y'all.) would either discover a liter sized Mountain Dew that he had brought along, or we'd stop ad some petrol station for it. It was essential that he have this in the morning. I am convinced that the majority of his central nervous system was mostly built from components in the urine colored soda. I was content with coffee. Black.... and too hot to drink more of a 1/18th of an ounce of at a time, with great caution. It was understood that we would not speak to one another, and that no great noises would be created until Eddie had consumed at least half of his urine soda and one or two of the doughnut cakes that he had brought along in a little cellophane package. The dark lord 'Little Debbie' and her consorts had spent years perfecting the recipe for these particular chocolate covered doughnuts, and they had been scientifically engineered to shave a decade off a typical human life span.
We would arrive at the complex and wait in the truck while Eddie would go into the club house with the pool around back, and the vapid, overly manicured secretary and get a list of the apartments that were empty and needing re-painting. And then off we would truck to the building in question. Unloading gray five gallon buckets full of sand colored paint. They were heavy. You had to get used to the weight. An awkwardly large pneumatic paint sprayer. The machine had a very precise fan of spray... it would make a particular glick-glick-glick sound as it sucked the latex paint into its bowels and every now and then the air compressor would click on and roar for a while. We had pretty much accepted tasks that we were each supposed to fulfill in the each little empty house. After John had stretched and awakened from his slumber in the back of the truck, (he almost always slept on the way to work.) he'd start taping everything off and taking off outlet plates and throwing them in the sink. Sometimes we found things that the tenants had left behind. Once a love letter. A little green stone Buddha statue once. Things college kids leave behind. There were quite a lot of USC students who stayed there during the school year, but would move back home after the school year was over. Leaving behind little pieces of their lives. An earring. A bean-bag chair. Panties. Hair brushes. And even less pleasant things. What an odd way for humans to live, I remember thinking, living so close to people they don't really care to know. In a hive. It seemed unnatural to me.
The days would get hotter and hotter as summer pushed towards its apex. Every day dense sticky wet heat that rolled in from Charleston and didn't cool down as it past through the pine trees and over the sandy fields. Without fail, at atleast one point during the long summer we would have to scrape and re-paint the decorative wrought iron fencing around the pool and by some of the main entrances. The spindles in the rails were about the size of your smallest finger, and they stretched a distance of seemingly 300 miles around the pool. First we'd take metal brush scrapers and try to knock off as much of the cracked old paint that we could. The next step was to coat small paint rollers with an oily so green-that-its-nearly-black paint. The hours I spent on those railings were excruciating. And I would always tackle the task with the equivalent angst you might find in any song by Evanescense. Think 'the open door' album. The ambient heat would dry the viscous inky paint on the hot metal within hours. Irreversible skin damage has been done due to the amount of time I spent in the sun. This is how mexicans must feel. Poor mexicans. 18 year olds will do anything for a buck. It's probably because of these summer times that I lack respect for any able bodied person who lets their parents buy things for them. I reason that they should still let their parents change their underpants after an 'wiw axi' and stick a pacifier in their mouth whenever something doesn't go their way. Worthless slothful miscreants.
This was how that first summer past. With that particular rhythm. Sometimes we would hike out to a pond nearby and go swimming because we just couldn't abide the tropic heat anymore. I kept up a little with people from school... but not a lot. I talked to Christine often. Mostly just let the quiet routine of work and sleep wash over me and heal the little bumps and nicks that school scratched in my soul... Sand and heat and pine trees are good medicine. Oh, and sometimes swimming in ponds.
