Partners in Crime

Story ID:	5
Written by:	Scott R. Lupo
Organization:	OurEcho
Story type:	Story
Location:	Phenix City Alabama USA
Year:	1969
Person:	Mark Lupo Scott Lupo

I was watching my two boys wrestle around on the living room floor the other night and it brought back many good memories. My brother is a year and half older than I am and we spent much of our childhood doing much the same. There weren’t any other kids in our area, so that just left us with each other as playmates most of the time. It’s strange the way the mind remembers things, and for me, childhood seemed to revolve around seasons and an associated activity. Autumn – football… Winter – hunting… Summer – swimming. You get the picture.

It probably sounds a lot like Forrest Gump, but if I close my eyes, I can see those first cool nights of autumn. When there was the first nip in the air, we pulled out a football and since there were only two of us, it really meant kill-the-man-with-the-ball. We sometimes referred to it as smear-the-queer, though neither of us had any idea what a queer was. I realize it sounds horribly derogatory at this point in my life, but when you’re six, it’s always great to play games that have names that rhyme. Don’t ask me why. It just makes it easier. And although political correctness has changed somewhat in the last 40 years, the rules that applied then still do. Rocks, trees, concrete and water are out of bounds. You play until someone cries. It took me a while to convince my two boys of the righteousness of these regulations, but after a few skinned knees and broken bones, they have finally accepted these rules as law.

In the summer, we would spend almost every waking moment in the muddy water of the Chattahoochee. We truly loved to swim, but since our home didn’t have an air conditioner, it was also the only way to get cool. We’d play knife fights in the shallow water, dive for mud in the deeper water, sometimes venturing out long enough to run down the dock to jump over stacked inner tubes at the end, again splashing into the muddy green water. On the really hot days of July and August, we'd dive several feet below the water's surface to escape the bath water temperature of the top layer. When the sun would go down, we’d strip off and skinny dip in the warm night air. My parents are in their seventies and they still skinny dip regularly. I’ve given up trying to convince them to wait until after sunset.

The picture above was taken just after Christmas when we were four or five. I still think of us this way even today. I’m the cute one on the right. And yes, both Peyton Manning and Brett Favre would wear cowboy boots with their uniforms if they were allowed to. I loved those damn boots, but I am sorry to have to admit that they encountered a horrible demise. About a year after this picture was taken, Mark and I climbed down a large muddy bank next to my grandmother’s house. It was the kind of place that if we let our kids play there today, social services would come and take them away. Of course, we played there all the time. One time it had been raining for a several days and it was particularly treacherous. Mark and I got about half way down this thing and it started getting really muddy. At first, the mud was sticking to us. It was like walking with manhole covers on your feet, but then we started sinking. I’m talking quicksand. Soon the mud was up past our knees. We tried to wiggle out gracefully, but we didn’t have much luck. When we were finally able to extract our feet and legs from the sticky, slimy mess, the boots didn’t come out with them. The hole in the mud where our legs had been, quickly closed. Those poor boots were lost forever.

As we grew older, we ventured farther from the house. Periodically, we would go up to the rock quarries and shoot our rifles. Mainly we went to the wet quarry, throwing bottles out into the water and shooting them with our 22’s. Sometimes we would make our way over to the dry quarry (so named because the large hole there was not filled with water like its counterpart). Both quarries were part of an abandoned granite mining operation. The dry quarry was about the size of a football field. The walls at the high end were about 25 feet high, the bottom was littered with granite boulders the size of Volkswagons. On one occasion, Mark was carrying my father’s 22 Hornet. The Hornet was a varmint rifle that shot a round that looked more like an m-16 round than one from a 22 long-rifle. Our guns were loaded and we were jumping from boulder to boulder. I was just ahead of Mark when all of a sudden we heard this tremendous “Bam”. We immediately assumed someone was shooting at us and took cover. We sat crouched under a rock for a moment before Mark began smelling the gunpowder. “I think it was me,” he finally said. Sure enough, the safety was broken and as we were jumping from rock to rock, his finger squeezed the trigger. It still makes me a little nervous when I think about how close I came to getting shot.

But, life was not always an adventure. Sometimes we were bored and when we were, we would always talk about the important things in life - like the grossest thing we could think of (i.e.- falling off the Empire State Building and catching your eye on a nail) or what would be the worse way to die (i.e. - putting a rat on your stomach with a bowl over him and then putting a candle to it so he would get hot and dig his way out). Sometimes we would try to swallow our tongues while we were at a restaurant waiting for dinner to come. I guess when you have a brother, there’s always something fun to talk about.