Cops usually ignored us but sometimes a person complained and the beat cop, a common presence then, would arrive to straighten us out and chase us away. Usually he was overweight, a middle-aged man in blue who carried a sidearm, a Billy club and handcuffs. He wore black shoes that flopped when he shuffled his way through the relatively calm streets. Cops walked everywhere. They twirled their Billy clubs as they slowly trudged through the streets. I never saw one sitting or resting. They looked around, and talked to people in the street. Everyone was friendly, especially the adults. We hardly ever saw a police car.

An old, burly cop struck me once on the back of my thigh with his club because I refused to move from the schoolyard fast enough when ordered. As I started to run away, he caught me by the neck, whacked me hard and sharply on the back of my leg – he knew exactly where to hit me so there would no mark anyone could see – and told me to take off. My thigh hurt for days, but he gained my respect, mainly because I did not want him to hit me again. Usually, after a cop turned the corner, we went back to our games. Either he had other things on his mind, or he really did not care to be bothered again.

I lived in a highly competitive neighborhood with highly competitive kids, many of whom were my age or slightly older. Perhaps the competition came from observing our parents and their friends. Many of my friends were the children of my parent’s friends, and they were usually the same age as me. We were all in the same circle and we had to learn how to survive and succeed within that narrow sphere. The competition showed in the games we played, and how we played them. Mainly, none of us gave an inch. If our parents were strict with us, we were strict with those who were our age.

In my neighborhood, especially on Avenue H, East 19th Street and then Argyle Road, we played games like those elsewhere on the streets of New York. They were variations of games played in the five boroughs. These were city games. These were street games. They were games with rhythms and rules of their own passed down by street lore in ways we never knew. Many of these games had nothing to with skill or finesse. We played King of the Hill, Horse, and Johnny on a Pony almost every day. These were tough, cruel, and perhaps mean-spirited. Did they prepare us for life later? Whether yes or no, we learned never to give in. We punched, kicked, shoved, and jumped on each other’s backs if that is what the game demanded. It is a wonder all our roughhousing did not permanently damage us. Brute force ruled. Power won. The strong survived. The weak suffered defeat.

With King of The Hill, if you were bigger, stronger, taller, with, perhaps, better balance and no fear, you won more times than you lost. Sometimes you perched yourself atop a pile of leaves, stood on castaway furniture, or, in my neighborhood, on an old concrete foundation behind the apartment house where I lived. When you claimed one of those places, you waited for someone to remove you by pure strength. If they did, they became King of the Hill. They stood tall, alone, and supreme.
For Johnny on a Pony, one of us would volunteer to lean against a wall, head at an angle, back parallel to the ground, legs firmly planted, waiting for the other kids to run and then jump onto your back. The more kids who landed on your back, the more difficult it was to hold your position until everyone would come crashing to the ground laughing and screaming with joy, as perverted as it may seem. After we righted ourselves, we reset the pony with another volunteer. Then the jumping and pounding started again, until, exhausted, we tired of the game and went off to do something else.

We played Hide and Go Seek and Ring-a-levio the same way, physical and harsh. In each of those games, freedom from jail after capture was the goal. Once the opposing side got a prisoner, and put him in jail, he stayed there until someone came running full speed and bounded into the designated jail to set him free. Knocking down, or at least pushing aside, the jailor and yelling “free, free,” the prisoners had a chance to escape, which they usually did. Everyone ran fast into hiding. We waited again for someone to capture us, or if not, until the game ended or we lay on the ground out of breath not caring who was the winner.

All was in the spirit of winning. All was in spirit of coming out on top. Oddly, we rarely got hurt. Battered, yes. Always bruised. Never really were we seriously hurt, not in a way that we would admit. Bleeding elbows and knees were part of the game. Scraping again a healing wound was even better because it proved we had the guts to go on. We rarely let a day go by without taking ourselves apart physically for the sake of showing each other we were men. Sure, every time we engaged in roughhouse games, we used up all our excess energy. We were kids. When we played those games, nothing intruded. Nothing except lunch or dinner ended a game. We had to eat to regain our strength. Why we played so hard, and all the time, was never an issue, never a question we asked. We were young so it really did not matter. So we thought. Looking back, it obviously did affect us in ways we did not understand then and probably do not understand now.

We played stickball on the streets using broom handles that we swiped from the apartment where we lived. When my mother, and other mothers, discovered their mop handle missing, they knew where to look. By then, it was too late. The consequence was a whack on my bottom and a caution never to do that again. But I did because the game had to go on. We found other broomsticks in the cellar of the buildings where we lived and where the super stored his cleaning equipment. Playing stickball on a Brooklyn street had many problems. We had to maneuver between the parked cars on each side of the street. We dodged on-coming traffic, angry motorists, and honking cars to survive to play another day. We were in competition with roller skaters and bicyclers. We measured our ability and strength by the number of sewers we could reach by hitting each slow ball thrown on a bounce by a pitcher who used the pink Spalding ball we all chipped in to buy. Unfortunately, the ball often split after only a few games. But the ball was cheap and we were able to pool the few pennies we had to buy a new one when needed.