Excerpt from "Blue wind"

This is an excerpt from a memoir I wrote about childhood shenanigans. Although some elements are fictionalized, and timeframes might be warped, welcome to my childhood in Rome with my best childhood friends Maddison and Cooper:

When Spring showed up, we realized we needed money to begin building our clubhouse. We made fliers and sent them out around the neighborhood offering to wash cars, clean houses, or do any other “service” needed in exchange for money or means for us to build the clubhouse (wood, nails, carton). Unfortunately, we didn’t receive any phone calls and resolved to wiping the windshields of passing cars. Our arms didn’t reach all the way across the windshields, leaving every car looking worse than it did before we touched it, but we were paid anyway. “For the effort,” they would say.

Filomena, our neighbor, who sometimes offered to give us cigarettes by the pool if our parents were not around, had consented for us to wash her car. The result was calamity. We found some sponges and buckets in the kitchen, filled them with water, and headed towards the Filomena's little blue car, which was waiting for us in the garden. We scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed some more, scouring every inch of the car until we had no scouring left inside of us, the bubbly soap completely covering the surface of the car like a fuzzy carpet. We had no idea what was going on underneath the white fizzes. “One job well done is better than nothing,” Cooper said right before we launched the buckets of water to get the soap off, and saw, jaws wide open, the unfortunate surprise that was in store for us. 

Every inch of the surface of the little blue car was scratched, grazed, and skinned to the point where we could see the grey frame of the car. We looked at the sponges in our hands and realized that we had mistakenly used the coarse pan-scrubbing sides. Filomena had to repaint her car, but didn’t make us pay a dime. A couple of weeks later we smoked our first cigarettes with her (and decided we didn’t like the taste it left in our mouths) while her two-year old son, Simone, swam in the pool with his arm-bands on, flapping his hands like a duck in the water. We could almost hear the quacks.

With not even a tenth of the money needed for us to build our clubhouse, we used the fifty Euros we had raised to buy walkie-talkies. Each one of us got one, and we took them everywhere. We could talk to each at night from our bedrooms, from one end of a field to the other. And we did eventually build our clubhouse out of bits and scraps that we found laying around.