Day Forty-three - Creator, destroyer

Lee and Sean, though, were not the only kids I made friedns with that summer. There was another kid there, he was vacationing with his family in a neighbouring condo, and as such had access to the same private swimming pool. In fact, I not only met him, I met his younger brother as well. I am loath to name them, but screw it - older brother was Valter and younger brother was Vilson. I'm not sure what first drew us together, it was either a shared loved for comics - of which he had a prodigious vintage collection - or for Transformers, of which he had quite a bit more than I did. Whenever I wasn't socializing with any of the other british kids, my time was spent with these two. But unlike the other kids who were just spending their summer there and then returned to the United Kingdom, I kept in touch with the brothers I'd just met. They lived a bit far from where I live, and soon after that summer I started going to their house, and they to mine. By then, we all started getting addicted to videogames - I had an NES, a Megadrive, and then later a SNES, and they had both the Megadrive and the SNES, so there was also a healhty exchange of games between us. Everything seemed to work perfectly - we loved the same toys, the same comics, the same games. And I'd soon find out we loved pretty much the same music too. You see, since I was very young I'd nurtured a fascination for the heavy metal band Iron Maiden. It went so far as me having a bunch of their t-shirts, patches that my grandmother would sow on a denim sleeveless jacket that would be eventually stolen, and then my future godfather - who was a big fan of the band - started to tape some of the records for me so I could listen to them at home. Growing up, bands like Queen, Dire Straits and Iron Maiden were my top choices. And through both my godfather and a few other kids I'd meet here and there - I'd recognize them by the t-shirts they wore, and asked incessant questions about the band if I did not know the name, and demand they tape stuff for me - I'd start to learn a little bit about the world of metal. But little did I know that it wasn't a world, but a universe unto itself. Valter was a huge metal fan - and he knew tons and tons of bands I'd never heard about. In fact, I'd never even heard of any other subgenre of heavy metal, but soon I was listening to thrash and death and black metal. A lot I liked, some I never quite got, but the journey was astounding. Soon I'd start amassing my own growing collection of tapes and CDs - of which I now have none, having thrown away the tapes some twenty years ago, and sold off my CD collection as well.