Gunning for the Tans
It’s been a week now, the welts are starting to fade, the bruises are receding from the purple blackness, back through the colours of the pain rainbow, and I feel I can now revisit the horror of events last Thursday.
For Shaun Tan’s bucks night, Shaun’s brother Paul, being Best Man, decided that what we men really needed to do is bond during a session of indoor paintball. Fine, seemed like it would be an interesting experience, we all had a beer to get ready and then we got into it.
The lengthy instructions on what not to do in order to not lose an eye or be the instigator of someone else losing an eye did not put us off. Well, not nearly as much as the paper overalls we soon realized were not to protect one from the impact of a paintball. The complicated rules had no time to sink in before we were put out into the arena of slime. The floor is carpeted and drench in the juice of paintball interiors. It’s yellow, squishy, very slippery and altogether, unpleasant. We break up into two teams and go to our starting positions at opposite ends, there’s a five second warning and a whistle blows. The game begins. And ends.
Essentially, the game is, whistle blows, panic panic panic, game ends. Ends in pain. Sharp pain, sharp yelping pain. There is one word to describe indoor paintball, hurt. It hurts, the whole game hurts. Before the moment of hurt you are anticipating the hurt, then you get the hurt, then you feel the hurt for a bit and then you wait for the hurt to go away in time to begin the anticipation of hurt again.
You will consider spending more than thirty seconds in combat before receiving the hurt as victory. You consider a paintball getting you square in visor eyepiece as downright lucky. You won’t like it hitting the mouthpiece, though, exploding through the grid and stinging your lower lip and leaving a fowl taste in your mouth for about half an hour. Anyway, back to the pain, once you receive your pain, you can’t spend your time waiting for the pain to fade till you have left the battlefield and gone to a safe zone. To inform other players that you are in pain and retreating you keep your hand up. This is meant to be a signal that you have disengaged and should no longer be shot at. However, it often seems to be interpreted that you are now an easy target. A handful of small welts on my back are testament to this fact.
Have I emphasized the pain enough? Did I mention the time I ran out of cover to instantly be hit by five balls (five shooters) and I dropped in agony, whimpering while crawling away so to collapse on the side of the arena in a state of pain induced semi-narcosis? I so wanted to escape this horrid reality I almost imagined I was having an after death experience. What I was really doing was trying to ignore the pain by imagining I can see the fuckers who shot me and wish them ill-will, the kind of ill-will best presented by a little yellow ball of hate straight to their softest parts.
But I only ever got the number of one of those fuckers. One particularly painful moment of hurt was a shot right into my side just above my hip. It hurt. The mark is still visible. During a five minute break Shaun asks me if I was hit where I was hit. After confirmation and an exclamation of how much it hurt - because everyone compares shots by level of pain - he said, “Sorry, I think that was me.” Thanks Shaun, maybe I should’ve got him to sign it. Regardless, Shaun knows his way around paint, whether it be on a brush or in a plastic sphere inside a compress air powered instrument of pain infliction.
While my way of playing was, run, trip over, scurry madly, hide, peek, fire some random shots in all directions and then get hit in the collar bone with a bazooka launched cricket ball, Shaun and Paul were on the opposite team planning tactics. Did those tactics work? Almost certainly not, but it did result in a nasty welt I seem to show everyone who hears we played paintball; friends, family, coworkers, customers, little old ladies to get them to move away from the auto teller. Shaun might have said sorry, but I know he didn’t mean it. I know he actually felt great satisfaction at my brief agony that would become my exhibition of shirt lifting shame that had its highlight when Nick Stathopoulos, MC at Shaun and Inari’s nuptials, pulls my shirt up to show the bride the horror of flabby gut and dark satanic welts upon my person.
I know Shaun was not sorry. I know he had a secret glee. I know because of one incident, one I will carry with me forever. Once, just once, in one particular round I was not given the hurts in the first few seconds and realized that no one was trying to inflict those hurts. A colleague had pinned down the four remaining opposition with well aimed sniper fire. I found I could stalk across the far side of the arena and shoot the unsuspecting enemy who were all lying flat behind obstacles. I know one was Paul, the second was unknown to me but I heard their bark of pain when I hit their thigh. Then the third, it was the Mitch, big and hard to miss. Twenty feet away, unsuspecting, almost innocent, I shot him in the neck. I heard his cry. And though I felt bad for getting him in such a vulnerable place, the satisfaction of the kill was the kind that makes you envision smashing the top off a bottle of whisky and taking a swig, teeth clenched to strain the broken glass. And what made that supremely magical was that it was my last paintball.
I’d like to make you believe the game ended there, but it didn’t. The pain continued and included the crawling, whimpering like a child incident and three suicide runs into walls of yellow hell. I’m sure in the last few minutes of the game I was in a state of manic animal depravity, wide-eyed and heaving, desperately trying to look out of a heavily misted visor, dreaming of blissful fields of grass and flowers while screaming murderously, firing off paintballs in random directions and being shot from mysterious vantage points I’m sure were only feet from me. My darkest, most painful and most colourful bruises, my deep emotional scars, my fear of yellow all came from those last moments of paintball terror.
And then it was over. Exhausted, bloodied - a ball hit me in the hand and squeezed blood from my pores without breaking the skin - yellowed, ripped overalls, drenched in sticky sweat, we sauntered to the waiting room and collapsed in varying states of welty, bruisey pain. And after we were strong enough to talk we compared war wounds. We shared our scars of manly bonding. And after more beer and several rounds of pool, we went our separate ways. Till the wedding that is, where we’d recognize each other, seemingly like ordinary men, a groom, a best man, a bride’s sister’s boyfriend, Jeremy the video camera operator, members of the wedding band, certain fellows at different tables. We all at some point would give each other a look and a nod; for we shared something no one else would understand. We were silent brothers linked together by the shared memory of little plastic balls of yellow paint hitting our persons at horrendous speeds. We were paintball warriors and we shared the same unsaid motto.
Less we forget and never again.