KW is one of the smartest people I know. Not academically smart - I'm sure school was not the best time of his life - but still super smart. He was pretty much better than me at a lot of things I thought were really important: chess, ping-pong, mountain biking, rock climbing, building things (he laughed heartily the first time he saw me swing a hammer), fixing things with engines, backgammon, etc. In modern education parlance we would say that he had high bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. And his spatial reasoning kicked ass.
I think that because I thought of myself as smart, I tended to want to compete with KW a lot. Well that and we were in our 20s and teens while working at camp and drank a lot. Mix in testosterone and you have male egos clashing. KW and I were good friends, he introduced me to climbing and was the first of many mentors n that field to me. Though his bedside manner was often lacking (he liked to yell at partners to motivate them), he taught me a lot in my first few years at the Gunks.
Our competitions usually ended up with KW winning. I beat him at chess, once. Out of perhaps a hundred games. I never out-climbed him, then or now. I beat him at Ping-Pong, once, though he was quite drunk. Out of hundreds of card games of Hearts, I might have been victorious once. If I tried to shoot the moon, I ended up missing by one card, if he tried, he usually got it. Yet like the young buck I was, I kept at it.
The one place I had a fair shot was at the arcade. On Wednesday nights or on the weekends, the staff used to drive down to Lake George and wander around aimlessly. There's not much to do there except drink and play video games - so we usually spent a large deal of time in the arcade. KW and I would engage in marathon Tetris games, games in which I had a slight edge sometimes. I chalk this up to having skipped all my Sociology 101 lectures in college to go play Tetris. Right next to the Tetris machine was a classic air hockey table. It was here that the story I originally intended to write in this post took place.
KW and I were locked in a legendary battle. We were sending the puck back and forth at blinding speeds. Often spilling over the sides. We garnered quite a few sideways glances from patrons who thought we were taking our game a little too seriously.
At some point that summer we had discovered that we had a slight advantage placing our hands in the scooped out part of the paddles rather than holding the knob on top. This left our knuckles exposed to repeated bashings from the puck which we sent whizzing back and forth. There was very little strategy to these games, it was fake this way, fake that way, SHOOT, and repeat.
The battle had gone on for at least 20 minutes (which was quite long for an arcade air hockey battle) and we were all tied, next goal wins. Back and forth, ouch and ouch, it went. It was at this point that the impossible occurred. I sent a shot whizzing at KW so hard that when he intercepted it, the puck flew up in the air, over his shoulder, hit the Tetris machine behind him, bounced higher and hit a blade on the overhead fan which, though the cheap plastic cracked, used its momentum to send the puck back down to the table in front of Keith, where he promptly shot it past my paddle and scored the winning goal.
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