When I was 10, I had a drawing contest with this kid Steven who lived down the street. Steven was a kid who had an awesome pool, and when you know a kid with a pool, you will automatically do anything short of sucking private parts to get in that pool. Those of you who had a pool as a kid...well, maybe some sucking was done to you? Either way, he had a pool and we had a drawing contest.
Steven drew a firetruck with a 3-D ladder popping off the page. It was pretty cool. I could not draw three dimensionally, or at all for that matter. So, I chose to go for the low blow.
My drawing was of a man screaming in pain, trapped in a room with a single lightbulb dangling above his head that looked like a crooked penis with rays of sun shooting out of it. Around him, and here's where the low blow comes in, I chose to have the man surrounded by cockroaches. This entailed that I draw hundreds of miniature circles, with four legs coming out of each circle. I made sure I drew four legs for perfect realism and detail, as to accentuate the cockroaches horror inflicted upon the man.
When I finished, three hours later, my drawing was a mess. You couldn't tell roach from roach. It just looked like a screaming guy, with a penis still dangling above his head shooting sunbeams out of it, stuck in a pool of lead colored spaghetti. Meanwhile, Steven had finished his firetruck drawing and sat playing Maximum Carnage or Sim City on the SNES.
When I finally finished for good, Steven asked the friendly, local art critic to judge our pictures. His mom took a long hard look at both pictures, eyeballing the intricacies of both. Would it be Steven's block shaped, 3-D, yet kind of primitive firetruck? Or my cockroach nightmare? The pressure was intense, to say the least.
Finally, after some sweet talking to her, and friendly competitive banter to each other, she said, "Well, this 3-D ladder is pretty neat but I like Eric's bug picture." I won the contest, leaving Steven to mope around, trying to whine to his mommy that firetrucks helped people stay safe and how it was really tough to draw and all that nonsense. I had stumped his mom into thinking my hundreds of cockroaches actually took skill, and not geeklike persistence, to sketch.
Steven didn't talk to me for about an hour and said we couldn't play with his Nerf guns anymore. I sat on his couch in the basement watching him play Super Mario World. We didn't speak. Finally, he said he was bored and I agreed I was too. I went home, leaving my drawing in his basement, not knowing if I'd see him again. It was pretty brutal.
The next day we hung out and swam in his pool because, again, being a pool guy makes you tops in my book. That day, while doing the dog paddle in the deep end, I got to thinking about his firetruck and how he actually he drew a pretty realistic looking hose on the side of it. All I wanted to do was win, so his mom could tell me I was a champion. She wasn't even hot for Christ's sake. So now, sitting here thinking about the days of past artistries, I'd like to had my championship over to you Steven. Even if you go to your grave, never laying eyes on this tale of two egos gone wrong.
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