Day Forty-four - Forever failure

This kid Valter, he was a strange one : tall - taller than me, and probably at least as tall as my brother, who back then towered over me, gangly, he wore glasses with these thick ass lenses, and his hair was this wavy, curly mess that was growing all over his head, leaving himm with a stranhe hairdo. He was ugly as well, and he use to boast that the only person uglier than him was myself, but even then I knew he was full of shit. Because above all, he was a bitter dude. And he was bitter because his younger brother Vilson was a very good looking dude. Think Joseph Gordon Levitt kind of pretty, and especially in those first '3rd Rock from the Sun' seasons, they looked pretty alike. The boy was everything his brother wasn't : outgoing, happy, athletic. Valter also harboured a bitterness inside him that stemmed from his relationship with his parents : his father has a hard man, who wasn't averse to smacking him in front of others, me included. It shocked the living daylights out of me the first time I saw it happen - for some reason I imagined my family being the only one where these things happened. And maybe in some way he also resented his mother for not sticking up to him and defending him when his father got angry with him. She was also a harsh kind of woman, who never seemed to smile. But they provided him and his brother with everything; I wouldn't say that their family was what one would call traditionally wealthy, but his grandfather had a business that made enough money, money enough that they had a life with some luxuries : they went on vacation every single year, they had an amazing modular Technics stereo system fully kitted, the kids had plenty of toys and comics, and Valter himself by the beginning of the 90's already had a prodigious music collection - hundreds of cassetes, probably already a couple of hundred CDs and a bunch of viny as well. He also had a crazy expensive Sony walkman - I always had the cheapest kind. 

But he was also a very talented kid in some repects. He could draw quite well, and though so could his brother, here he came out on top. Both would eventually go to art school, but by then our friendship was all but over. Ah, but that's a story for another day, though.

He had a network of friends who I got to meet, and though I am loath to ever having considered any of them as my friends, I got along pretty well with them - especially with a kid called David. I shopuld mention that Valter was a couple of years older than me, or maybe even three years older, he might have been the same age as my brother. But he always seemed closer to my age, than I ever seemed to my brother's. This was a very competitive kind of friendship, and maybe because of that, it really wasn't meant to last long.