Grew up in the sticks, outside of OKC. Mom? Passed when I was three, combination of pneumonia and lymphoma. Dear old daddy up and disappeared not long after that. Left in foster care. No friends, except one. Kid two years my senior, named Jick. Real birth name, he swore. Like his parents fucked up on the birth certificate, and then told whoever pointed it out to them, "No no, let's mess this kid's life up right from the get go." He liked to bundle up dry leaves and burn them out back in the foster home we shared.
When I was 13, Jick showed me the shed. Backyard, empty house, about a block away from where we were living. It'd been up for so long the realtor's sign had fallen back into the dying grass. Jick told me he found it out while he was chasing a rabbit. Shed wasn't locked, so he went in, then came back to show me. Up till then, sheds existed in my mind as just the place where adults stored power tools. Never occurred to me they could be used for anything else.
I walked in, and staring straight at me, were two tables. They looked pristine, aside from the dust. Centaur and High Speed. Jick walked over to the latter, and demonstrated, plugging the machine into the charred outlet near the corner of the shed. In a second, the machine lit up, casting light onto all the gnarled surfaces of the previously darkened shed. Whoever owned that house must've never had the electric turned off.
For the next two years, that shed was where we spent most of our free time. We would switch off machines occasionally, trying to beat each other's high score each time. It was a constant arms race between the two of us-- We battled for top position in Centaur, but it took me a year and a half before I managed to top his score in High Speed. When the owner finally caught on and shut the power off, we saved up whatever money we had to buy a gasoline generator and ran some extension cords outside.
We managed to make it out of foster care in one piece. Jick moved down to Austin, and two years later I moved out east. We both debated on whether or not to try taking the tables out of the shed before Jick left, but in the end, we decided to keep it the way it was. Let some other kids find this place and have some fun. Maybe we were never even the first ones to find the shed. And God willing, we won't be the last.
RightNut
Pinside+ Frequent
3y 55,150 146 21 1
Neat story. Though, I'd have gone and got them the first chance I had!