The Gulya Blasters

This is just a story I've been wanting to get down in print somewhere. It's about my brothers and I when we were kids. Enjoy.


The Gulya Blasters


Most people who know my three brothers and I know that we did some pretty ridiculous things when I was growing up. Everyone plays make believe games, but we took this some pretty crazy levels. Starting when I was about eight year old, my brothers and I would embark on business ventures, get rich schemes, and fantasies of detail that, in hindsight, still kind of impresses me.

A lot of this was because I was pretty obsessed with watching TV. And I unfortunately, but fortunately because of the stories it created, usually believed that I was capable of doing what people were capable of doing on television. For example, when I was in the fifth-grade I watched the movie My Cousin Vinny and convinced myself for a long time that I was going to be a lawyer. I would involve my brothers and sometimes my entire family in elaborate courtroom enactments. There was never any preparation in the area of a set story or agreement on the facts of our "cases". We merely decided on a crime one of my brothers was being "accused" of, which were sometimes as meaningless as stealing cookies but sometimes actual crimes like grand theft and murder. I would always be the lawyer prosecuting him. Since there were no set “facts” of these cases, there was no way for whoever was playing judge to actually decide who was right, so every ruling was arbitrary. We used evidence that we literally created on the spot. More than once I incorporated Joe Pescis’ "How long does it take to cook a grit?" monologue which I had completely memorized, twisting whatever our story was to invent a context for it. The longest example of one of these trials was when my youngest brother Andrew was accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy, a crime of which he was convicted.

A further venture involved me leading my brother Robert on a voyage to the end of a creek in the woods near our house after watching the movie In Thin Air: The Voyage of Mount Everest. We dressed in coats and hiking boots, as if we were going on the most dangerous of missions, but we were just walking along a creak in the middle of the fall. There was this huge detail in the movie about the leader of the Everest Mission insisting that they stop at a certain point every night, so they remain safe and do not get frostbit. So, I wouldn’t insist on stopping after an arbitrary amount of time each day we walked along this creek. And the next day, we would just start from the beginning again. We finished this voyage inside a week.

Another had me campaigning against my brothers to elect the President of the family. Everyone in my family received one vote and all four of us would vote for ourselves, forcing my parents to cast the deciding votes. At separate points, the four of us made plans to finance our own chocolate factory and start our own fast food restaurant chain. In the latter example, all of my sandwich ideas were literally rip-offs of McDonalds sandwiches; my favorites being the "Big Foot Sandwich", which was exactly like a Big Mac, and the Double Big Foot Sandwich, which was exactly like a Big Mac with four patties instead of two. Although I did have an original idea for "Pancake Nuggets", which were small nuggets of pancake, filled with syrup.

All of our miss-adventures contained two interesting common details. One is that I was always the leader of our operations. I always insisted on being the manager, or president or lead singer (Yes, there was once a Gulya Family Band called "The Friends", inspired by Zach Moris' Band “Zach Attack” on that one episode of Saved by the Bell). The other is that my three brothers, despite the impossibilities of whatever my most recent plan was, would immediately and without the slightest hesitation agree to be a part of it. All of our plots involved lots of preparation, and our enthusiasm was always 100 percent invested for those weeks before we gave up on them. At age ten, my focus and time-management skills were far better than they are today. And I often wish I could put the kind of determination into any of my current projects that I once put into making my own Batman movie.

My favorite of our “make believe” schemes is also the greatest business venture I have ever been, or will ever be, involved in. This was the day my brothers and I started a window washing corporation in my back yard.

Yes, I said Window Washing Corporation. A company made up of workers who wash windows.

We started a corporation because during this particular summer I was OBSESSED with starting my own corporation. And we always did whatever I was obsessed with. It was that simple. I do not know which old movie or cheesy TV show told my eleven year old mind to choose a window washing company as my business venture, or why I thought there was great wealth to be found in washing windows, where, in all reality, the exact opposite is true. But, I do remember exactly how I created our window-washing solution.

I was playing in the sand-box in our back yard one day, thinking about the corporation I wanted to start, when I discovered a rock that was covered in dirt. I took my bucket, which was filled with water and a little bit of sand, and poured it over my rock. The rock was washed clean. I had discovered the secret!

The next thing I remember is us preparing for our first job. I apparently went to my brothers with my bucket of water and sand and said “Guys, I figured out how we’re going to do this,” and they immediately accepted it, because I next thing I knew we were filling buckets with this stuff and asking my parents if we could wash all of the windows on the front porch. My parents had always tried really hard to nurture me even through all of my ridiculous plans, so they couldn’t just tell me flat out that my idea would not work. So, in a gesture that defies all logic, my parents allowed me to wash the front porch windows with a mixture of water and sand.

And thusly, our corporation began. I, of course, was the President. There was soon a sign on the door to my room that read “Brandon’s Office”. I gave each of my three employees official positions like “district manager” and “chairman” which were just business terms I had heard thrown around.

We decided to call our-selves the Gulya Blasters. MY FAVORITE DETAIL about this entire operation (and perhaps my favorite detail about anything I’ve ever been a part of in my entire life) is that we originally wanted to call ourselves the Gulya Busters, but changed to the Gulya Blasters because we feared suit from either The Ghost Busters or Dust Buster.

Our first big job went off almost without a hitch. It basically consisted of us dirtying the windows with our solution and then rinsing it off. We were so proud of ourselves. The next thing I did was announce to my parents my plans to take the Gulya Blasters around the neighborhood. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be a good parent, trying to be supportive, but not wanting to be known as the one who let their son walk into stranger’s houses to spray their windows with mud. Somehow they convinced me that it was better to keep it at home for now, saying something about not wanting the business to grow too quickly. They also convinced me to use actual cleaning products when cleaning the windows at our house, using the delicate and ingenious word-choice of telling me to wait until I “perfected my formula.”

We only had two major squabbles during the length of this corportation. One was because of my finacial skills. I put such effort into deciding the wages I would pay my employees and eventually recieved a comically small amount of our earnings myself. This made me very upset and, I am ashamed to reveal, began to effect my work. The other was due to my power-hunger near the end of our run. Robert, during one job, used a scrub brush instead of a paper towl to wash a few windows, after I had insisted that we would use paper towls. I placed him on a leave of absense. I don't think he's been madder at me since. I am proud, howver, that as an eleven year old boy I knew what "leave of absense" meant.

We kept the Gulya Blasters going all through at summer and on and off through the following year. It eventually ended when I was in middle school and lost interest.

Whenever my brothers and I chat and talk about our business venture of long ago, we always describe it as a success. And in some ways, I would still swear more allegiance to the Gulya Blasters than any organization I have been a part of since.