JANUARY 30, 2008

I waited outside of my informants High School on this afternoon, as I agreed to pick him up from school. Christopher says he usually gets out around 2:30 p.m., however, I called his phone, and fervently scanned the hordes of students leaving with no site of my cousin. I called his cell phone once more around 3:15(which went directly to his voice mail) and left a message telling him that I could not find him and that I would be waiting for him at his house. There was only a few students coming out of the building at this time and figured it to be very unlikely that Christopher would be one of them.
When I arrived at my cousin's house, I was greeted to the sound of Santana bellowing Black Magic Women at an extremely high volume. Heading towards the source, I discovered my informant donning a plastic guitar along with another band member strumming in tandem.
Christopher looked up as I entered the living room; my presence appeared to abruptly end the concert.
"oh crap-a-loader, you were supposed to pick me up from school weren't you? muh bad, Wally's dad took us home, I forget" he said
I told him it was perfectly fine. "So, this is Wally"? I asked.
"oh, yea, Wally, this is Michael, he's my cousin"
Wally said hi with a nod of his head then returned his glare back to the television that was the pause screen for a video game. With this being said Christopher looked at Wally and asked, "ready"?
Wally just continued to look at the screen; and a moment later, Santana was performing once again in the living room.
I took a seat as Christopher and Wally both produced a synchronous clicking from their guitars as they watched the screen, which showed two race track-like areas blotted with red, yellow, blue, green, and orange dots that were speeding towards us. As the colored circles got to the edge of the screen, the color would "squirt" off of the track into a small poof of fire. I asked them what was going on.
"It's Guitar Hero" Christopher said, then added "well Guitar Hero 3, you hit the notes as they go down the neck of the guitar on the screen". Trying to comprehend this as I watched the dots come at us in incredible speeds, I couldn't imagine that the two guitar players in this living room were actually playing in sync to a tempo that even Santana himself might have found daunting, but that was apparently the case.
At the end of the last note, "YOU ROCK!!!" flashed on the screen behind a background of fire and flames.
"Aw man, you suck, only 96%, I got 99% with a 275 streak WHATS UP NOW!" Christopher said to Wally. Wally maintained his silent demeanor as he pulled the guitar over his head.
"You wanna try? Wally give em your guitar" Christopher said before waiting for an answer from me.
Wally offered me his guitar. It was a white and black plastic replica of a Les Paul, it was customized with stickers and Sharpie Marker art. Both Christopher's and Wally's guitar had identical stickers, but found in different locations on the guitar, only Wally's guitar had Sharpie marker on it.
I asked Christopher, "Are you planning on drawing on your guitar sometime?"
"naw, my mom is so gay, she would probably yell at me for ruining it like that".
Christopher said that we had to go back to the options screen so he could lower the difficulty level from expert to easy for me, which I was not complaining about. We also choose a song that he said was much easier than what they had just played.
I absolutely ruined the song Slow Ride scoring a 71%, while Christopher's score showed 100%. Neither Christopher or Wally made fun of me, or even commented on my performance, which almost felt like the same treatment adults give to teenagers when they dont perform as well on something that they're not expected to perform well on, like trying to mow the lawn for the first time. The whole notion of well at least you tried.

"It's time to go home Wally" Christopher said as Wally headed for the front door.
"He can stay if it's because of me, it's actually better to be able to do this work with your friends around"
"No, he has to go home, he can't be here when my mom gets home, she gets annoyed when people are here when she gets home from work, I already got permission for you to be here for a little bit" Christopher said to me. I found this to be interesting, seeing that I usually just stopped by their house all the time, and without notice; but because I was here specifically to hang out with Christopher, my role has become Friend and not Family. The fact that I was here to specifically do school work as opposed to just hanging out, allowed me to stay a little longer than Wally.
My aunt got home no more than 5 minutes after Wally's departure followed by my uncle. Christopher had to end our project early saying that he had to go do his part-time job with his father; checking a few houses that were for sale for a real estate agency to make sure everything inside was okay and that nobody had broken in, etc. I also recalled Christopher's comment from before and thought this would be a good time to go. I find it really interesting that throughout this entire encounter, I never once heard Wally's voice.