Hours and hours of painting. Days of it. Another day, another trip to Columbia. Another Mountain Dew, and another pack of miniature chocolate donuts. Columbia is a dirty industrial city that has stretched and grown faster than the city planners had allowed for. Its state house is surrounded by tall hundred year old black palmetto trees. They look like spiny coconut trees and give the old downtown area the appeal of an old-south inspired dime novel. In the middle of all that nostalgia is the city library. A big gray cinder block looking building all pieced together with enormous slabs of mirrored glass. The other buildings in the city are a similarly ill patched together assortment of modern architecture, antebellum estates, and suburbs filled with cookie cutter houses made out of red and brown brick that seemed so perfectly adorable to baby boomers. I always felt like a tourist on these painting expeditions. The kind of cheap tourist that doesn't buy key chains or post cards.... but perhaps the occasional Zero bar and a diet Pepsi.
At the end of the work day I never wanted anything but to return home and shower gobs of paint spatter off and practice piano. There was plenty of pressure to return to school in the fall with a good head start on my new fall repertoire line up. And I would practice too... I just never felt quite satisfied with what I was accomplishing on a daily basis. It's difficult to work in sweltering heat every day and then force new muscle memory from a weary cerebellum. But I would do what I could. If dandelions can grow through cracks in sidewalks, then I could most certainly memorize a Mozart sonata. Tom Grimble and everyone else who had anything to say on the matter had made it painfully clear to me that sophomore year would be the year that would decide if I could stay a piano performance major. Sophomore Check was the platform that I would pass in order to continue study in my major. I imagined that it would take place in a very dark room. Black walls, black ceilings, one spot light... the judges draped in black.... hoods and pale faces and you probably wouldn't be able to see their eyes. If my performance pleased the gods, then they would allow my continued study. If not... they would require that I bring forward my academic torch and extinguish it. That or if i met disapproval they would perhaps begin a chant of sorts and then bash in my skull with a conch shell.
I spent my free time taking all the pains necessary to memorize my Bach. A prelude and fugue that i was working on. Layers of melodic lines. Delicately sewn together. Twisting and undulating. Dancing around and behind one another. Doing their routine with formality, sophistication and old-world gracefulness. Sometimes on the drive to Columbia I would trace out the patterns of the music on my thy... hearing the expected corresponding sounds in my head all the while.
Every night before falling off to sleep I would pray my little prayer.
"God, make me stronger and faster. Make me sin less and make me sharp like a knife. Help me whittle away at myself until there's nothing left that isn't perfect."
The rest of the summer melted away like ice-cream on tarmac. I thought how different times where now than they had been.
I was eleven and John was nine. Beth was just seven or so. We would spend those summer days, not working and saving... but we had built little kingdoms in the woods behind our house. We would rake away the pine-straw and thick leaf layer that blanketed the floor of the woods. All the cast away leaves from seasons past. Hundreds of yards of little trails that snaked away into the wood, far away from our house. There were seven or eight acres and we took advantage of each one. And we would find twine, and lash together fallen limbs... so heavy that it sometimes took the both of us to lift and tie it off to a standing tree. We made little wigwams. We raked away the leaf floors of our forest homes. We almost never wore shoes. We would spend hours and hours gathering sour weeds from a nearby field and bundling them together with the twine. Hanging each small parcel upside down from the branched roof of our imaginary homes. We would develop pretend personalities.We would gather ripe scuppernogs and save them for the impending winter. Or the hard under-ripe green ones... we would gather and sling-shot them at one another... or pelt them at waring tribes of saber-tooth tigers that had wandered into our territory to eat our livestock and pillage our stores of weeds. You must be very careful not to attack a tiger without help. At least take Mini along. She was our fat old golden lab... and she was not afraid of tigers in the least. We grew up with the woods all around us... we all ran fast and climbed high, high up into the arms of the holly trees, who's smooth brown skin looked just like ours.
Later as we grew into teenagers.... our fantasy play time evolved. It became more violent and less forgiving. We replaced our wigwams with bunkers built strong and solid out of wood scavenged from the saw mill. And in place of the spears we had fashioned to fend off raiders from opposition tribes, we bought slick black semi-automatic paintball guns, with load hoppers that held enough ammo to last you through an hour of heavy fire. There were bunkers here and there dotted in the woods and two in the grassy field in front of the house. Three or four friends of equal age to us would come over and we'd split into teams. Objects of the game play changed. At times the objective might be to capture a flag from the opposing team. John and I were nearly never on the same team. The other kids considered us equivalent marksmen and it would be more than a little un-fair. Beth played sometimes.... but I'm sure it had a lot more to do with romance and the neighbor boys then winning a violent game of 'who's the alpha male?'. My Dad played along too... being short and round he found shelter mostly at ground-level or in one of the bunkers. Dad was a crack shot though and could light a match with a shot from 50 yards. I was deeply emotionally invested in these games and had secretly loosened the CO2 valve on my gun. This increased my range of fire by about 30 yards and left ugly bruises on my fallen opponents. During game play I would pull out a tiny octagonal wrench and quickly adjust gas pressure from "ok, i'm hit." to "I blacked out and my spleen is leaking." The other kids hated me for this, but I always managed to pull out the tiny wrench and re-adjust the pressure back to something a little more normal, so that I couldn't be accused of un-ethical game play. During these games, I would often be named a team captain and be responsible for organizing a defensive strategy. Poor marksmen and short or fat kids would remain close to base to pick their noses and over heat in all the armored clothing they were wearing. Lean fast running kids would run quickly well outside of the legally decided limits of decided game play and creep stealthily behind the enemy base. The fact that this strategy was not immediately obvious to the other members of my team was exquisitely painful, and I couldn't help but morn the fact that the rest of my team mates were clearly cave dwellers. Didn't anyone ever watch Alias? You know... where Sidney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) suits up in black leather and dies her hair bubble-gum pink in some tragic public restroom to avenge a fallen comrade who was gunned down on a mission in Uruguay? Christ! What a woman! .... None of my team mates had the drive to discover the accepted uses for a television.
I was usually responsible for these long winded runs across the field of play.... I would dart panther-like behind large trees. Bunker to bunker. On this day my brother was the opposing team leader and was responsible for slaughtering everyone else on my team except me. It was nearly a hung game seeing as he and I were the only players left. I was the last to stay close to the bunker where our flag was hidden. It was close to dusk and I was hiding behind a very large felled tree. I was waiting for John's approach. I would let him get within 10 feet of my hiding place and then easily snipe him. I listened intently and slowed my breaths so that I could be absolutely silent. He walked with purpose and without fear. He assumed that I would be using my limited resources to search for the opposing flag, and followed a little ATV trail directly towards me. Closer. A little closer. Come on.... He stopped for a second... fifteen feet from me and looked around. Perhaps sensing impending danger. I silently propped my gun on the tree... put my brother in my cross hairs and fired. (TWUP!) A neon green ball rocketed out the barrel of my gun and plastered across John's protective visor...
"AAAAH!" he yelled surprised.... and shot back at my tree in retaliation.
"You can't shoot people at point blank range! You're an idiot!" He screamed at me enraged. "You're gonna hurt some body!! What's wrong with you?"
I packed up my things and walked emotionless back to the house.
"Whatever. You lost." I said as I walked past him.
