A game of extreme constraint, played in the tight confines of a handball court with the diamond grid of the ballpark chalked in miniature on the buckled cement, it demanded more cunning than real skill, more spryness than hand-eye coordination, more gumption than athletic prowess.

As an aphorism is to an epic, so slap ball shrank the expectations of the ballpark to bite-sized proportions. For whereas the vast sweep of the playing field ringed with onlookers had always seemed intimidating, invariably bringing on bowed shoulders of defeat and an asthmatic wheeze, its microcosmic equivalent squeezed into the confines of an outdoor handball court felt strangely comforting. It was as if the safe haven of my childhood nursery had been lifted, walls and all, from home and plunked down in a distant corner of the schoolyard where nobody noticed it. That precisely was the game’s greatest attraction and its greatest fault: that nobody noticed.

Slapball victories were won way off the radar of public approbation, and any attempt to boast about them would have been met with blank looks.

But I can still recall the day in sixth grade when a few of the same champions, gruff Kenny P., tall Mark R., glib Gary S., and my nemesis Robert H., not a one of whom would ever in the grand public sphere of the spectacle have deigned to choose me for their team, stood there holding their ground with meager expectations, when somebody pitched. Bluffing with a grin at Gary S. and a wink at Robert H., I swung with the flat palm of my hand, putting a devilish spin on the red rubber ball so that it went careening, almost perpendicular to my slap, in between the legs of a disconcerted Kenny P, grazed the crack at the chalk baseline near third base, and bounced toward a rattled Mark R., who fumbled with and dropped it, while Robert H.’s jaw dropped, permitting me ample time to round the bases and make my way to home plate.

They stared at me as if I had just stepped out of my loser’s skin and revealed a hidden side of myself, like the bespectacled Clark Kent morphing into Superman, or the wimpy Peter Parker into the spry Spiderman, a local hero who had recently made his first appearance in the pages of Amazing Fantasy. Just this once I might have earned bragging rights, were it not for the news report from Dallas.

It was just after the start of recess, approximately 11:35 Eastern Time, Friday, November 22, 1963. The teachers suddenly called us into the auditorium for an unexpected assembly, at which the principal announced in a solemn voice that the President had been shot, simultaneously perhaps also the death blow for slapball, and we were dismissed for the day. Expecting adulation, I could barely choke back my disappointment. Dallas seemed as far away as the moon. All everybody really cared about was the half day off from school.

A writer in multiple modes, Peter Wortsman is the author of fiction (A Modern Way to Die), drama (Tattooed Man Tells All and Burning Words), and travel writing for newspapers and websites, and selected for five consecutive issues of Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Travel Writing 2008-2012. He has also translated numerous books from the German. His forthcoming books include Ghost Dance in Berlin, a rhapsody in gray, Travelers’ Tales/Solas House, 2013; Tales of the German Imagination, From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, an anthology, Penguin Classics, 2013; and Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm, a new translation, Archipelago Books, 2013.

On the East you could have Jonathan Ames at shooting guard, once he shakes off the rust. For the point position, we could inquire as to weather Wesley Yang has some game. We could have Leonard Michaels - Godfather of the angry New York Jewish writers taking out the day's frustrations on the court and bragging about it in print - on our jerseys. Marv Albert could call the game. (Is it absurd to state that Marv Albert has a certain literary quality to his announcing style? Or am I just conflating a slight New York City edge with literary? And is this a valid conflation? Howard Cosell also seems literary. His sense of the absurd was literary.)

Where are all the ball playing New York writers? To my chagrin they are probably playing softball.

I have always wished there was a basketball version of the softball teams that all the literary magazines put forth every summer. A three on three version of Paris Review and The New Yorker, etc. Those summer softball pastorals are very nice, I'm told, but, in basketball parlance, softball is weak! And New York is a basketball town. Surely there are some writers who are athletes, too. My fantasy is for a 1,000 dollar buy-in charity league that plays a tournament at the end of the season, winner take all. Proceeds go to the charity of the winner's choice. Given that many of the league's publications would be 501c's, this would be an excellent fund-raising opportunity for small presses. A Hunger Games for non-profits. Random House, Tin House, everyone could have a team. The only criterion to play, as with softball, would be an affiliation with the magazine or publisher.

Please volunteer your organization!

“Tommy, want some action?” Al said to me on the school bus.
“No, the Giants are favored by 9 ½ points.” I answered.
“What about over and under, it’s 39 ½?”
Now he had my attention. I felt the Giants defense and running game would keep the score low.
“OK, twenty times under,” I said.
“Good boy!” Al smiled.
So I bet one hundred dollars that the combined score of both teams in Super Bowl XXI would be 39 points or lower.

It was January 25, 1987, an 80 degree cloudless Sunday in the warm California sun. I was headed to the Rose Bowl to see the New York Giants play the Denver Broncos. The trip started two weeks before. The day after the Giants beat Washington in the NFC Championship game I called airlines for a round trip to Los Angeles. They were sold out. Instead I bought a reservation to San Diego. Over the next ten days, I tried to locate a game ticket and had no success. On the Thursday afternoon before the Super Bowl I began calling travel agencies to try to sell my flight back to them. The first place asked me why I was selling it. I told her I couldn’t get a game ticket.

“I have one,” she said.
“How much?”
“$375.”
I swallowed and said “Yes.” Face value was $75.
An hour later, the messenger arrived, and I examined my ticket.

Gate B Tunnel 27 Row C Seat 111.

Possibly the worst seat in the 101,000 capacity Rose Bowl, but I was going to see the Giants.

I left the next day and prearranged staying with my friends Al and Janet an hour from Pasadena. The problem was traveling from San Diego to a hotel lobby in Irvine where Jane and I had worked out a pick up. When I landed, I started working the rental car counters. “Anybody driving to L.A.?” A guy my age in a suit said he was driving to San Francisco. I told him if he dropped me off at my hotel on the way north, I’d pay his first day rental cost. He agreed. Jim was an Encyclopedia Britannica salesman and tortured me for the entire ride on how my future children would thank me forever for buying this gift for them and their children. I declined, he pouted. When we got near the hotel Jim pulled the car over to the shoulder of the highway and said he was late. He took my money for the day rental and left me on the side of the road. I climbed down the embankment and over a six foot fence into the hotel’s parking lot. Jane was in the lobby when I ran in. It was Saturday morning three a m. The game of my life was only 36 hours away.

Jane found companies running buses to the Rose Bowl. For $15 I bought my ride. At noon on Sunday I was on the yellow school bus, with one other Giant fan and 40 Denver Bronco fans. I was excited and surrounded by the enemy. I waved goodbye to Al and Jane. They looked like proud parents, except for the fact that Al was counting on me giving him money to pay his bookie if I lost the bet.

Gliding over the California roads the bus was a happy land where Bronco fans, the other Giant fan and I joked together. The New York guy shared his blue tortilla chips with me, and kept asking, “Would you like another Giant chip?”

Off the bus I strolled around the Rose Bowl a few times to kill time and who do I run into to? Andy Rooney in his lucky Giant ~ Columbo looking raincoat. We talked about our love for the Giants and old Yankee Stadium.

Stepping through the dark tunnel into the Rose Bowl my heart smacked inside my chest. My long suffering was over. The New York Giants were my father’s and my unbreakable link. Our passion for football was unconditional. When I was 7 to 9 years old the Giants lost three consecutive NFL Championship games. Turning 10 in 1964 I knew that would be our year, the Giants, Dad and me. But they stunk, and kept on stinking.

After a good Bronco start the New York defense rose up and by half time I sensed victory even though the Giants were losing 10-9. In the third quarter the Giants exploded, scoring 17 points and led 26-10. Thinking of my dark fan days, thinking of my Dad and me going, watching, listening to hundreds of Giant games together I started to well up, but then I remembered my bet. My stupid $100 bet. Every time I had a good thought about what was happening on the field, I also thought 4 more points I lose my bet.

As I’m having these feelings, the Giants are driving towards my end of the field. On a trick play a receiver ends up wide open. Phil Simms throws the ball to him and I’m mumbling, “Drop it! Drop it!” The receiver catches the ball and my heart lifts then drops at the same time. How could I ever root against the Giants? Best day of my life and I tarnish it.

Final score was 39-20. The place rocked like a Springsteen concert. Giants carried Coach Parcells off the field. I couldn’t wait to talk to my father.

Back on the bus: silence and 40 broken Bronco fans, me and the guy with the blue chips. The Rose Bowl had only had two exits and all the VIP cars exited first. We idled in the parking lot for an hour. When we began to move I felt like I was in a funeral home on wheels. I could hear sad heaving coming from the grim Bronco fans. A tall woman had a tear rolling down his cheek. I felt bad for them but remembered how many times I had sat in their seat. Once in a while, the Giant fan and I would look at each other across the aisle and exchange a quick hand raise, a small yip and one word “Giants!”

Several hours after the game we arrived back at the hotel. I called Jane and asked her to delay one hour so I could celebrate at the hotel’s bar with any other Giant fan I found. I put money down on the bar and a sea of blue started forming where I stood. I remembered something important and slipped away to make a collect call to New York.

“Dad, we won, I love you.”
“I love you, Hon.” he said and we both hung up.

****

super bowl tix 1 25 87

Margolies, however, had one overriding passion. That was handball. He loved any kind of handball – one-wall, four-wall, black ball, pink ball – and its derivatives like paddleball and racquetball. Even when he was a kid, once the exercises were over in gym class, he’d head to the handball court.

Once I asked Mark, whom I met when I worked near his co-op in Brooklyn Heights, whether he played any other games, like basketball or softball. “Well, I learned to swim because I had to. Once I tried touch-football,” he said. “It was horrible!”

When I asked him how he got into handball, he said his father, a working-class Jew from Brownsville, worked for the Post Office, but his passion was boxing. “He was a boxer,” Margolies said, “and he trained for boxing by playing handball. He would go to the Betsy Head handball courts in Brownsville, and I’d go with him and watch.” At the same time, because Mark was very shy and had no friends, he never got into sports like the other kids.

“You know the last time I went to a baseball game? The last year the Dodgers were in Brooklyn—1957,” he said. “My brother took me. I sort of enjoyed it, but I never had any real desire to go again.”

Soon afterward, his family moved to the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. From there, it was an easy walk to the Brighton Beach handball courts, the mecca of New York City handball. "Everyone," he said, "played there—kids like him, guys in their seventies, A-level tournament players, beginners - everyone." Sometimes he’d have to wait a half hour to get on a court, but he didn’t care. He was hooked.

“When I was playing handball,” he said, “it was like I was taken to another dimension. There was such high energy, I was in such a state of ecstasy, that it was like I was removed from the world. Many of the courts had lights, so sometimes it would be midnight and I didn’t even know it. My parents had to come down and get me. I’d play singles, doubles, sometimes two against one – it didn’t matter, as long as it was handball.”

As time went on, playing on the neighborhood courts got a little boring for him. So he’d get on the trains and go to different neighborhoods all over the city. Even after he got married and moved away from Sheepshead Bay, he continued to go to the courts in Brighton Beach, where the best, most competitive handball players held forth. He went to neighborhoods that most of his peers considered dangerous, like Bushwick or Central Harlem. “Are you kidding?” he’d answer, after someone feared for his safety. “The guys there are some of the best players. They put their all, every part of their body, into it!”

He stopped playing for a few years after he had kids, but when the children got a little older, he went on his handball trips every Saturday and Sunday, while Gabrielle stayed home and pursued her own interests.

 One time I asked him if he'd gone to all five boroughs to play.

“Well, I went all over Brooklyn and all over Manhattan, up to about 168th Street. I never went to the Bronx – it was too far. I didn’t like Queens, didn’t play there except when I worked in a school there. I’d play on my lunch hour, in the schoolyard. The other teachers loved to play me, the custodians loved to play me, even the kids played me. They thought I was over the hill, but when I started to play, they couldn’t believe it!”

Hearing this story, I asked whether he was an “A-level” player. “Definitely not—I was a B-level player. But who cares!” he answered. “Besides, A-level players in handball don’t get that much recognition anyway—it’s just that they get into the record books.”

When Mark was about 45, his wrists were beginning to go, so he switched to racquetball – “not paddleball,” he’d say, “the wooden paddle was too heavy for me.” He joined the Eastern Athletic Club in Brooklyn Heights and played there. When his legs and his back started to go, he switched to ping-pong, but soon, he wasn’t even able to do that.

I saw Mark recently sitting at a counter at the Park Plaza Diner in the Heights. His hair was white, his beard was gray and he had a cane at his side.

“Been playing any ball lately?” I asked politely, thinking that the answer was no.

“No. My doctor forbids it—you know, my back,” he mumbled.

“Do you go to the handball courts at Brighton Beach to watch?” I asked, trying to salvage something good for him.

“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “But that’s all I can do.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” I sympathized.

“I’m not sad,” he said. “Handball gave me more than 50 years of fun. I’m can’t complain!”

And I said goodbye to him and walked away, satisfied that he had lived his life exactly the way he wanted to; that he had done something with it that he considered worthwhile.

Raanan Geberer is an editor at a local newspaper in New York and lives with his wife Rhea and his cat Bonnie in Chelsea. His hobbies include vegetable gardening, working out at the gym and playing rock music with friends. He is a lifelong railfan and has an overriding interest in politics, religion, history and literature.

The first time I tired to pass as a senior I told the young man at Paragon Sporting Goods that I was 62. He asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. He asked me what year I was born. This is where my math skills messed me up. Even though I’d prepared for this question with a pen and paper before I’d gone to the store to try to save on my tennis permit by adding five years to my age, I gave him the wrong answer.

I said I was born in 1950. He punched a few keys on his computer and looked puzzled at the result. “It says you’re only 61,” he said.

I was sweating already because I’m out of practice lying to authorities. True, it wasn’t like lying to the IRS or unemployment, but still I was out of practice.

“Oh, so I’m too young? I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said.

My friend Trevor from the East River Park courts told me about the scam and said it was easy to pull off because you didn’t have to show any id. Plus the Paragon clerks who you have to fool didn’t care much one way or the other. The other thing that made it such an easy hustle, although I’d just blown it, was that for anyone in their teens or twenties, the difference in looks between anyone over 45 and a tennis player who has reached the magic age of 62 is indistinguishable.

I knew I’d never be as cool as my 57-year old English buddy, Trevor, from the courts under the Williamsburg Bridge. He is the charming scoundrel type of sometime painter, sometime photographer, sleazy in the best way, émigré artist type of New Yorker who’s scraped out a living in the city for the last few decades. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, dated Madonna before her career got off the ground, and won a huge settlement from his landlord after not paying rent for years.

Now he works as a bartender at the hottest restaurant in the West Village, runs an antique lingerie web site and spends a few hours in the middle of most days at the East River Park tennis courts, or as he calls it, the East Village Country Club.

I think he is impressive in his way. And it is an approach that as we boomers get closer and closer, some of us are already there, to not having to scam for the geezer version of the city’s tennis license, that is disappearing. Trevor is a throwback to the Max’s Kansas City era and some of the more glamourous scenes from the city’s past. Plus he’s an expat who stayed, which to someone like me, who barely made it out of Jersey, also has a kind of allure

One of the things about aging is if you miss that chance to date Madonna in the 70's or to play in the NFL, Brett Favre aside, the opportunity, like all the years that add up to only having to pay $20 for your permit, is gone.

So while some of Trevor’s accomplishments are out of reach, no matter how much I might want to emulate his sleazy brand of cool, his reinvention of himself as a sophisticated, expat New Yorker, I thought, couldn’t I at least pull off his tennis permit ruse?

I did the math again. If I was going to be 62 in May 2011, I would have to be born in 1949.

This time at Paragon, there was a young woman running the permit desk. I said I wanted to buy a senior tennis permit. She asked me for ID. I said I didn’t have any on me. She asked me to spell out my name. She asked me when my birthday was. “November 2, 1949"

After some more clicks on her computer, she asked me to take three steps to the left and stand on the red line so she could take my picture for the permit.

A few days later I ran into Trevor at the courts. I showed him the plastic id-like card. It wasn’t as good as dating Madonna. It wasn’t as good as running an antique lingerie web site. But it was OK for me, a guy from Jersey who passed for 62 on only his second try.

Brent Shearer is the book critic for Long Island Tennis Magazine. He is the only reporter to have been kicked out of the 2008 U.S. Open.

“Feed me some vocab,” I whispered.

He started, turned to look at me. Blue eyes.

“Vocabulary,” I said.

“There’s no more port wine left,” he whispered back.

I looked at him.

“Port, left,” he said, looking down at his left hand, palm up. “Starboard, right.” His right hand held an invisible plate next to the first.

“I’m really good at physical stuff,” I said. “Work. I mean, farms. And sports.” I gestured over his palms, indicating winds and oceans and the muscle memory it took to move safely through both. “I learn fast.”

I left orientation early to make an apartment interview in Brooklyn. My brother was moving to the city in a week. The apartment had bars on the windows, but the sublettee had cat-eye glasses and a tiny ponytail.

“Jessie,” she said with one downward handshake. She apologized that her roommates weren’t home but assured me they were the greatest, bestest friends from art school in the south. I am from Kentucky. Her voice rang with sensible but persistent joy, and really, my only responsibility was to ensure the place wasn’t a crack den.

“Above and beyond,” I said, reaching for the deposit.

A week later my family arrived to shuttle their second child from landlocked horse farm to concrete island. My mom and I stood outside my Park Slope apartment, the base camp, loading the Subaru with boxes. She was taking pictures because she believes her children will find home here. A memorialized beginning supplies faith in what follows; you insist it is, in fact, a beginning. I was posing on the sidewalk when the guy, the sailor, Mr. Vocabulary, exited the building directly across the street. He mounted a red vintage motorcycle, kicked it into gear, and drove past us, uphill, into the morning.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Right after orientation, I had emailed my new boss to apologize for the tardy arrival. He had replied, saying all fine, but how much sailing experience do you actually have? We struck a deal involving the company’s adult sail camp and blitzkrieg training. I bought a book and a length of practice rope. I read the book and started calling the rope ‘line.’ Class started the Saturday after the Subaru’s departure. My sailor was my instructor.

“You’ll never guess,” I said. “Red motorcycle, 8 AM, Tuesday, Twelfth Street?”

“My girlfriend lives there,” he said toward the boathouse. He followed his voice inside and deep into a tide book

To his triangle back, I said softly, “I live there.”

On the water, somewhere around the cross-town canyon of 42nd Street, he taught me the choreography of the bowline with a rhyme about rabbits. Lessons and landmarks disappeared. We swapped the basic details, then stories. We echoed each other. We both had studied photography; he had taken it much further and was completing an MFA. Both our mothers were forgiving Catholics who had shopped for our school clothes at Goodwill. For a glossy magazine, he had photographed the southern horse show circuit.

“Oh, my brother just moved in with some southern artist types,” I said. “Shitty block, very happy people.”

“Where?” he said.

“Off the G,” I said. “Gates.”

He looked at me like he had during vocabulary lessons.

“Where exactly?”

“Oh, a good walk, Gates-and-something,” I said. The sun filled everything. The wind moved us toward the Statue of Liberty.

“Did he take Jessie’s room?”
“What?” I said. “Jessie Sears?” She had such a tiny ponytail.

He laughed the way you do when a miracle shakes your shoulders. “Chris,” he said. “Your brother, Chris. He lives in my house. Your brother is Chris.” I wanted to hold his grin in my hands. I or that girlfriend, one of us was sunk.

On charters for the forty-two foot Beneteau, there is a captain and a mate. When you work a sail, you captain or you mate that sail. My boss paired my sailor and I together for a few real jobs, trial runs. After that, when Mr. Vocab agreed to captain, he called to see if I wanted to mate. Yes, sure, absolutely. We captained and mated all summer.

Late June is proposal season, so every sunset job is a guy with a diamond and a woman with ready hands. The breathless couples invited us to weddings, included us in their engagements photos, confided the Statue of Liberty was their self-imposed deadline, asked us if everyone did this, left us in the cockpit while they made out on the bow, left us with the last of their champagne so we could toast the night after we docked. They all wanted to believe we were together. An older couple even assured us we would have kind, beautiful children. Blue eyes! I wanted to shout.

Aside from sharing his motorcycle downtown for tacos, we still hadn’t touched each other when we stole the dinghy for a midnight tour of the Jersey coast. And still not when we drove two hours upstate to buy orchard apples in the rain. I had memorialized our beginning, though, and maybe this was the wrong time, but this was definitely the start of something, meant for some time.

When I returned to Kentucky for Christmas, he was driving cross-country. He stopped for a night. Finally, finally. One night would turn to three. As we settled beneath the blankets, I imagined my mother in the morning, with a grin of conspiracy, whisking pancakes, something she did not do for other boyfriends.

Some six hours later, sooner than I imagined, she shouted, “Kate?” Then, immediately panicking, “Kate?”

“Oh boy,” I said into his chest.

“Chris?” she called. “Kate? Chris?” She was near the top of her register.

“Okay, okay,” I said, pulling on yesterday’s clothes.

I arrived to the kitchen as my brother streaked through, literally, with a soup pot full of water. The water sloshed onto his boxers. The back yard billowed black smoke.

Mom rushed after him, extending two saucepans awkwardly in front of her. “The compost was frozen shut. I dumped the fireplace ashes in the trashcan.” She shouldered open the storm door. “Leaves inside. It was leaning against the shed.”

The shed was, indeed, in flames. My bedmate appeared.

“What’s going on up here?” he said.

“Mom lit the shed on fire. Apparently the hose is frozen.” I revved, reached for the decorative tin pail above the fridge. As I filled the pail in the tub upstairs, I heard him opening and closing cabinets below. When I exited the backdoor with my full bucket, I was following him across the yard. Thinking he had nothing to offer, I scooted in front and pitched my water onto the almost-under-control flames. He sprayed something from a red cylinder until the something and the flames died completely. A fire extinguisher.

“Melinda,” he said, handing the extinguisher to my mom. “You’ll want to get that recharged.”

“Where did you get that?” I said. My heart awoke all over again.

“Always under the sink.”

My brother rolled his eyes. My mom beamed exactly like I had imagined. We were half-clothed around a melted trashcan, breaking the grass’s frost in borrowed shoes. I wanted to high-five the clouds.

Back in New York, in our winter lives, things were not the same. Things were horrible. We spent months in an indecisive dance. He was moving in the summer, at the completion of his MFA, and we had a hard time talking when there wasn’t a physical task to talk around and through. We had communicated in lessons and word games and stories of miraculous similarity. In the sloppy cold, walking to an unremarkable movie, how were we to believe where—or whether— we were going? We were at the stage that takes work, and we were overbundled in unflattering coats.

When the cold broke, our friendship—much less any sort of relationship—was a mess, but he asked me to sail with him, the first sail of the season. The charter was two middle-aged French women who didn’t speak a lick of English or boats. The winds were fifty miles an hour. The Beneteau would never tip completely, but the French women wanted to float lazy-river style, so we scrabbled to keep the boat from heeling deep into the Hudson.

“You’re wrapping the wrong way,” he said over the jib’s luffing.

“Yeah, yeah, okay.” I snapped the sheet to wrap clockwise.

The poor women could only understand the tone of our voices, which said something was capsizing. Not you, us, I wanted to tell them.

“It’s really fine,” he said to the two women, who had moved near the life vests. “Just wind,” he waved his hand in the air. “Wind.”

“Remember stealing the dinghy?” I said.

“I steal that dinghy like it’s my job,” he countered.

I persevered. “Do you remember how we met? Do you remember exactly?”

“You took a sailing lesson.” He lunged into trimming the main.

We finished the tack. The French women hugged each other. Instead of hanging behind him on a shroud, like usual, I joined him at the wheel. We bounced over wake. Steadying myself, I reminded him of the typed orientation packets and my frazzled rush down the dock. The sound of the fenders against the wall, my bad haircut, the springtime smell of wet polyurethane. I reminded him there’s no more port wine left. My litany of details was a plea, next time, to risk. At the very least, pay attention. Two people only get one beginning.

Kate grew up in Kentucky and now lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Press and The Accidental Extremist.

If we require just a modicum of excitement and slight adrenalin rushes, considering these as essential elements for attending any sporting event . . . well, baseball at any level might just not satisfy the casual fan. I realize that to so disrespect the national pastime borders on sacrilege, but I have to be honest: watching baseball brings on a level of boredom that is unparalleled even in typically mundane lives. I will admit openly that perhaps I don’t fully understand or appreciate the nuances of the game, the primal battle between pitcher and batter, the intricate strategy that underlies every movement on the field, every facial tick, every spit of excessive tobacco juice, every embarrassing grab of the pants and the constant twitchy movements of every player on the field. This is absolutely true. Perhaps it’s because baseball is a game that must be played and tit fails as a spectator sport. It’s too slow, too long and has too many breaks. It’s the only sport in which fans need a 7th inning stretch. Are you kidding . . . a professional sport that builds in a break for the spectators? Is it to catch our collective breaths, refocus our attention on the action or to refuel for the last two acts for a primordial battle? Hardly.

So as much as I am not looking forward to another baseball season of somnolence, I mark this time of year as a reminder. When I was younger, I actually played baseball with the neighborhood kids in the park across the street from the apartment building where I grew up. We rented a railroad tenement flat—four rooms all in a row—that shook when the trains rumbled by. It was a time, before cynicism reigned, when baseball was my entire world, and playing the game taught me something significant about life.

During most summers as a kid, I played baseball in Columbus Park along with the other boys in the Flats—a neighborhood made up of mostly immigrant families. The park, in the shadow of the New Haven line, transformed every spring and most of the summer to become our ball field. Neighborhood kids of all ages and abilities met in the park to play right after breakfast, sometimes took a break for lunch, and then played until dinner. On many long hot days we met again after dinner to play again until the street lamps and swarms of moths warned us that it was getting late. The next day the schedule was the same. We didn’t spend endless hours practicing. We just played. Everyone played and uneven sides meant that the team with the extra man usually did something to make it fair: they got one less strike, one less foul ball, one less out.

In particular, I still remember one neighborhood player, Vito—or “Veets”—a severely handicapped kid who played with us every day in the park; he had a deformed arm and hand and wore an unwieldy metal brace on his right leg. We didn’t know the cause or name of his affliction, but Veets could throw, catch and hit one-handed shots without any problem.

He labored terribly when he ran the bases after a hit, so if we didn’t need an out and he was close at first, we didn’t call him out. We didn’t announce this silent deal nor did we meet to discuss the value of this. We just did it. Veets wasn't the fastest player or slickest fielder, but he always played—almost always as the designated underhand pitcher for both teams. On the mound, he kept his glove tucked under his bad arm when he pitched and then deftly reversed the process after the ball left his working hand. Veets managed pretty well, and he always got picked to play. We never thought of him as anything else but another kid who wanted to play baseball.

Sometimes at bat, he would hit the ball just right with his one-arm lash and send it far out into our imaginary outfield—better identified as anywhere past the sidewalk that dissected our field. But even the longest drive meant only a double for Veets; I can still picture his wide grin, as he turned his head quickly from side to side just to make sure he had really beaten the ball to second.

The park where we played, Columbus Park, wasn’t actually designed as a ball field or recreation area for kids, so home plate was just a rough pentagon we drew in the dust in front of a huge rock emblazoned with a copper relief of Christopher Columbus, the park's namesake. First base became a well-worn oak tree, second a bare spot in the grass, and third an old shirt that somebody usually remembered to bring. If we forgot, we improvised by making a trip to one of the steel-wire trash baskets, and a paper bag or a flattened can was called into service. The pitcher's mound, an oval bare spot, was worn after days, weeks and months of someone—usually Veets—digging his Keds into what could never remain grass for long. We learned to make do with what we had and accept our situation—an attitude Veets modeled for us every day.

We loved to play baseball back then, and we learned to play with kids of all abilities. Instead of making someone feel bad for missing a ball or striking out, we learned quickly that it would be better to encourage him so that next time he might make the play. We won or lost, for what it was worth those days, with the guys we had on the field. So we tried to make major league plays, and if we failed . . . we just came back to the park the next day to play again. No one coached us in the ways of hitting, throwing, catching or sliding. We naturally acquired these skills by watching someone who could do them. And if someone didn't show up, we didn’t forfeit the game; we just agreed that if you hit the ball to right, where we could not field a player, it was an automatic out. Everyone always agreed and understood. You had to know when to compromise if you wanted to play in Columbus Park, but we were always ecstatic when we’d see someone in the distance running to the field to join us.

The beginning of spring training reminds me of those days in the park and especially of Veets. Where is he now? Does he remember those days in the park? As kids, we were never overtly schooled in accepting others with differences or those with physical handicaps; it just seemed natural for us back then to accept a kid like Veets. We learned a lot from watching a boy who struggled just to walk, to keep up with this rest of us. I can imagine now how difficult life must have been for Veets. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him in the distance limping towards the field dragging his bat and glove—ever smiling his wide grin. We never faulted him for what he couldn’t do, and we never prevented him from doing what he could. We couldn’t play without him—he was our pitcher.

So, as spring finds its way to us again, I admit that part of me misses those halcyon days. I must further admit that I am not looking forward with any degree of excitement to another baseball season; I am overjoyed through, that all this talk of spring training has allowed me to reurn in memory once again to a time when the only reason I rode my bike to the park was to play ball with my friends -- Veets included.

Joe Antinarella, a proud Native New Yorker, has been teaching Writing and English for thirty-five years. He has found talented writers in search of their voices in a middle school, an alternative high school, in a prison, at a university in St. Petersburg, Russia, and for the last eighteen years at Tidewater Community College in Virginia.

The first time I recall getting spanked, I was four. I had stolen a box of matches and lit a fire behind my house. My father spanked me down the hall.

The last time I recall getting spanked, I was 25. I was in Paddles, New York City’s main sadomasochist dungeon. Megan, my spanker, a fat chick with a tattoo of a pyramid on her chest, was steadily increasing the strength of her swats. “It’s getting rosy red now,” she said.

WHAP!

“You have a really nice ass,” she continued, running her hands over my glutes sensuously. “I love the ass.”

I had long wanted to become a libertine. I had been sexually frustrated since I was six, when I took up the habit of humping my stuffed walrus. All through my adolescence, the spectre of intimacy terrified me. I feared I would become the Forty Year Old Virgin. To transcend my fear, I solicited a fat chick on the internet. She sucked my dick behind a sand dune.

WHAP!

I spent several years of my young adulthood involuntarily celibate. “No one wants to fuck me,” I thought bitterly over many bottles of liquor. I fell in love twice, was rejected twice. When I asked the object of my second infatuation to go out with me, she looked at me, turned around, and walked away. “In Buddhism, one of the best things that can happen to you is disappointment,” she told me later. She ended up having a kid with some other guy. I still meditate regularly.

WHAP!

My problem, I deduced later, was that I had been too stiff and inhibited. Had I swept her off her feet like a Spanish knight, she would have loved me. I would lose all fear and shame, I decided. I would become totally virile. Furthermore, I would go to New York and establish myself as a recognized writer. I would follow the footsteps of Gay Talese through the sexual underground, attending orgies and patronizing massage parlors. I would write my magnum opus and prove wrong all the women who had once rejected me.

WHAP!

About a year previous to this paddling, at a friend’s place back home in California, I watched Shortbus. The film opened with one of the main characters trying to suck his own dick while a neighbor spies on him through the window. The character then attended a series of orgies held at an underground club in New York. Overseeing the club was a transvestite named Justin Bond. I wanted to be part of that scene, I thought. I wanted to recapture the erotic spirit of the ancients.

WHAP!

First, I braved a sex party in my tiny home town. I was mortified that I’d see a friend’s father there. To fit in, I wore nothing but a fez and boots, and carried a horse whip. One of the two attractive women present told me a rape joke, then spent the rest of the evening fucking her boyfriend. I remained a voyeur.

WHAP!

Shortly thereafter I moved to New York, where I figured I’d find the real scene. During my first months in the city, I dabbled in cross-dressing. Justin Bond once complimented my get-up at a party. I attended a queer film festival, where I saw a man's pectorals get skewered by a pair of sharp hooks and watched a film that combined war footage with gay porn. I attended a sex party advertised as “Brooklyn's nastiest.” It was held in a squalid basement that stank of sweat. A man asked me through an intermediary to suck his dick. I left after about twenty minutes.

Another time, I attended The Pleasure Salon, a kinkster gathering hosted by a couple of Tantric sex coaches at a club called The Happy Ending. When I walked in, the first thing I heard was a guy telling another guy "I was physically abused as a child, so I'm not really much of a masochist."

There were about 50 people there, mostly in their 40s, none of them lookers. There was one tranny-- an old, wrinkled, obvious one. A good number of men loitered near the walls. A computer programmer approached me haltingly and tried to start a conversation, but it petered out after a few exchanges.

I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged fat woman. She told me her name was Hectuba. She gave me her card. Just "Hectuba"; no last name. It listed her occupations as 2nd Degree Wiccan Priestess and Crystal Healer, and Level 1 Reiki Practitioner. She said that she was also a sadomasochist. She and her husband, Garry, maintained a dungeon in their Staten Island home.

Hectuba told me she became interested in the occult at age 13, when she found a thin booklet about it in the library. She got Tarot cards and a Ouija board. During this time she had several close scrapes with black magic. One time she was playing with her Ouija board and part of the room began to smell strongly of onions and liver, neither of which she was cooking.

Her ex-husband got her into S&M. They met when she was 22. He was 44, a virgin, and a conservative Jew. He convinced her to become Hasidic, and she followed the tradition strictly for ten years. She suspected that he had been sexually abused as a child, and that he was also schizophrenic, because he told her that he talked to angels. Whenever she would put her hands “down there,” she said, he pushed them away. They lived apart for eleven years, then moved in together but slept in separate rooms. She had sex with him only once in fifteen years of marriage.

He enjoyed being beaten, especially while wearing a certain type of sandal. But he had no fortitude as a submissive. He would “safe word out” at the slightest provocation. That is, he would prematurely use the word they’d agreed on to cut off her abuse.

So Hectuba began venturing out by herself to find new partners. She met Garry on an S&M chat room in 2002. They began playing together. Hectuba's husband didn't like it, and asked her to stop. Hectuba dumped him and married Garry.

Garry was a quiet, gentle type. Like Hectuba, he was a “switch”; he could play either dominant or submissive, though he leaned submissive, while Hectuba leaned dominant. On FetLife, the big kinkster social media site that Hectuba suggested I join, he listed himself as “heteroflexible” with a “big messy fetish.” His profile photos showed him in a bathtub, covered in chocolate sauce and whip cream. He was also interested in drowning, slave auctions, cock ridicule, mind control, abasiophilia, and capsaicin (the spicy chemical in chili peppers).

The couple considered themselves “on the verge of polyamory.” Hectuba had sex with other men with Garry’s knowledge. Garry also submitted to other women. A mutual friend of theirs, the druid who originally got Hectuba into Wiccanism, had recently dominated Garry during a trip to Disney World. “She forced him to ride a roller coaster,” Hectuba said. Garry had a mortal terror of roller coasters. He cursed her the whole way up. “He couldn’t handle it,” Hectuba said. She called such over-aggressive domination “breaking your toys.”

“You can’t play with your toys if you break them,” she said.

Garry said he wasn't jealous that Hectuba had other lovers, but he was jealous of her ability to pick up men. He was not so gifted in picking up women. I found Hectuba's success surprising, given her stout stature, greasy, unkempt hair, double chin and stubble.

But I was intrigued. I still hadn’t explored the sadomasochism scene. A couple months later I attended a seminar held by the Eulenspiegel Society, the city’s oldest S&M club. It was called “Knife Play with Master Z.”

Twenty-six people came. One ancient guy in the audience was swaying back and forth; he later mentioned that he had so many neurological problems he didn’t trust himself to wield a knife over a woman’s jugular, but the fact that he might cut her got him off.

There was a guy wearing a thick soul patch who called himself Evil Sausage. “I’m dominant, sadistic and controlling,” Evil Sausage said, and he called his ex-girlfriends “former slaves.”

Master Z stood before a scaffold next to table covered in murderous shanks. His wife “lizbeth” wore a leather collar, eye shadow and fishnet stockings, but the only sartorial clue about Master Z’s proclivities were his studded black boots.

He first discussed safety. Keep knives very sharp or a very dull, he said, so that you’d know exactly the limit of pressure that you could apply before you moved into “blood play.”

“We’re not going to be doing any blood play today,” Master Z said. “Unless I change my mind midway through.”

Master Z got out an eight-inch hunting knife with a serrated spine. Some of the audience members also got out knives. One guy in chaps kept his knife out the whole evening. He kept jabbing it towards Master Z.

A short, dark-skinned woman named Aden came up to the scaffolding. She had thick scars on her arms and tattoos on her hands and neck.

“It’s important to negotiate limits beforehand,” Master Z said. “Especially when you’re a hair’s breath from killing someone. So Aden and I have discussed her limits, and fortunately she has none.”

Master Z strapped restraints to Aden’s wrists and ankles and, while continuing to explain the importance of immobilizing your slave, he chained her to the scaffold so that she was standing, spread eagle, with her arms above her head.

“The best part about having a knife is that you don’t have to worry about getting her clothes off,” he said, and he cut her shirt and bra apart, breathing heavily. “This works great for a rape scene,” he said.

Aden’s wide dark areolas hung out and Master Z poked her armpits, ran the blade along the bottom of her tit, and then over the top. She squirmed and tried to move away from him. Then he dug the knife blade into her nipple, saying “Ah, you like that, huh? Do you like that?”

“Big knives and helpless naked women,” he said. “It’s the perfect combination.”

These proceedings pleased me. I could really mix up a routine bout of sex with something like a katana sword, I reasoned. Maybe I had found my scene.

I went to Paddles for the first time one evening soon after that seminar. The club’s entrance was set in a windowless wall perpendicular to the street, facing a parking lot. It looked like the door to a walk-in freezer. I passed a circle of smokers in black leather thongs and vests, descended a black stairwell, and emerged in a basement filled with the sounds of whips cracking and slaves shrieking.

At first I loitered uneasily at the Whips and Licks Cafe, which formed the center of the club. I could have used a dose of alcohol, but drinking and flogging is frowned upon in the community, so the cafe served only soda, cake, and ice cream. “You can cool down after a scene with a banana split,” a kinkster once quipped.

A television above me played a video of a woman's nipples being hung with weights while she was whipped. A huge mural opposite the cafe depicted a dominatrix forcing a man to drink nuclear waste in an apocalyptic landscape of broken cinder blocks and skulls. A dead woman was tied to a huge penis with horns. In the background, Paddles was still open for business.

After a while a dominatrix approached me and introduced herself as Miss Muse. She asked if I was new to the scene. I said I was. She offered to give me a tour of the club.

We walked first to the main play room, which evoked an Inquisition-era torture chamber. The grey stucco walls were made to look like stone. Thick, split wooden beams supported the ceiling. Gas lamps illuminated the space with a reddish light. Devices in this room included a four-poster bed with a leather mattress and cuff restraints hanging from pulleys on its tester. Each cuff could be pulled taught by wooden cranks on the frame of the bed. “Theoretically, you could be quartered,” Miss Muse said.

In the corridor leading to the back of the club, Miss Muse and I passed a naked man locked in a bird cage. We entered a stuffy room. A woman was hanging from by her hair from a hook in the ceiling, and a man was beating her. A chainsaw also hung from the ceiling. A kinkster named Ramon was blowing fire on his slave with a set of torches and an aerosol can. “Punieta!” his slave screamed. “No quiero mas!”

I can never go back to vanilla sex now, I thought to myself. Now, if I was really going to get off, I’d have to blast my partner’s vagina with burning alcohol.

Back home, I set up a profile on FetLife and trolled the events section. I found Hectuba’s profile. She suggested I attend a “munch” at Moonstruck, a mediocre diner in Chelsea popular amongst members of the sexual underground. A munch is a "vanilla” gathering at which kinksters eat and talk. I invited Evil Sausage to join me. Also present were Hectuba and Garry, a small, mousy man named Fred, his portly partner, and a guy with mutton-chop sideburns who called himself The Baron Von Brunk.

The Baron wore an American-flag tie. On his business card, which he also gave me, he was depicted wearing said tie. He was the chief executive officer of "Reel Splatter Productions," a film company, whose logo was a man in a gas mask chopping open someone's head with a machete. He said that he could reverse the the color scheme of this logo to transform the film company from one based on horror films to one based on zombie films.

Evil Sausage came in sweating, as he often did when he walked, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. He was rolling a suitcase behind him filled with floggers. He introduced himself to the others, using his real name, as always, and amending it with his FetLife name, as kinksters tended to do upon meeting. He had met Hectuba somewhere before.

Evil Sausage told me his awareness of his sadism had grown over many years. As a child, he went through his mother’s clothing catalogs and drew ropes around the wrists and ankles of the models, “especially the women.”

He had been estranged from his mother ever since he was a teenager, when she told his father that he was beating her. “You’re thinking that my conflict with my mother has lead me to want to dominate women,” he told me when he related this story. I told him I hadn’t been thinking that. “Well, you would have thought of that eventually, and you would be right.”

He got into the scene when he was in his thirties. He met his first S&M partner, Rebecca, on a website. “I beat Rebecca,” he said, his tone deadpan, and he nodded once and paused for two beats, as he did every time he said he beat a woman. “Then I brought her home.” She asked him to role play raping her, and he did so. After that, for the whole month that their relationship lasted, the couple’s foreplay involved Evil Sausage crawling through Rebecca’s window and assaulting her.

Evil Sausage had been polyamorous since his slave left him a few years previous, a betrayal that “left a scar.” He was 39, and his girlfriend was 19. She had moved into his apartment in Flushing. He put a collar on her-- Evil Sausage considered “collaring” equal in significance to putting on a wedding ring-- and she became his slave, a “24-7″ arrangement. That is, she submitted to him at all times, not just during sex. The only thing he had to do himself during their time together was to use the electric knife to carve roasts, since she was scared of it, and to shop for groceries, since she made irresponsible decisions at the store.

However, she flew into rages for the slightest reasons, such as when he tried to show her how to cook a roast without drying out the stuffing. One day, after he accidentally broke her laptop, she left him for a man her own age.

He was presently seeing three women, ages 23, 32, and 39, and seeking a new slave. He had not yet beaten his oldest girlfriend, because her Master had indicated that he wanted to watch Evil Sausage play before he let him beat her. “So one day, he and I and her will all see one another at a party, and I will beat her,” he said, and he nodded.

We spent much of the meal talking about tattoos. The Baron Von Brunk had tattoo of a Lego man on his arm. He had long been a Lego aficionado, and still built models, elaborate ones depicting such scenes as General Sherman's burning of Atlanta. On the middle of his chest Evil Sausage had a tarantula. To the left of the tarantula he said he would get a tattoo of Wolverine riding My Little Pony, surrounded by Care Bears wielding swords. He would get a second tattoo opposite the tarantula, that of a Smurf in a bloody smock, wielding a chainsaw.

Several of us went to Paddles. We sat awkwardly together for a long time. There were only about five other people there when we arrived, and there would only be about thirty through the whole evening. Hectuba blamed Passover and Easter. Evil Sausage blamed better parties elsewhere.

Hectuba donned a pair of high heels and Garry got into a leather thong and a vest. Frank and his partner came up to Hectuba and Frank stood there silently while his partner explained that he was into foot worship. She said that when Frank rubbed his stubble on her soles, she had a peak experience. So Hectuba sat in a leather throne and Frank worshiped her feet for ten minutes while she looked bored. “It's just not really what I'm into,” she explained later.

Eventually a young woman new to the scene came in and two fat dominatrixes strapped her to the quartering device. While a man put ice in her panties, Evil Sausage, delighted, poked her with the end of a rod he told me he'd once given to a friend, hoping to entice him to beat his girlfriend, who had confided in Evil Sausage that she liked such things. The friend had then suffered a psychotic break, though, compelling Evil Sausage to steal the device back.

In another room a beautiful young black woman in a leather suit and heel boots, which made her about 6'4”, was laying into a man's ass with a wide belt strap, throwing her whole shoulder into each flog and making the belt crack loudly. Every time he was flogged the man said “Thank you Miss Reign.”

The voyeurs sat silently. A fat young man in schlocky clothes who lived upstate chewed his fingernails. He asked Miss Reign's sidekick, a worse-looking, fatter woman, also in leather, how he should approach the dominatrix. “She would have you crawl up to her and kiss her feet,” the sidekick said. The man sat and kept looking at Miss Reign, his face sagging and expressionless, and when she came towards him to talk to her sidekick he scrambled away.

Later, I saw Miss Reign beating another fat man viciously. He was tied to a wall, writhing and moaning. “What's his safe word?” Miss Reign's sidekick asked her.

“He doesn't have a safe word!” Miss Reign said, laughing, and she flogged him again.

By this time, there were only about eight people and two scenes left in the club. I wandered between the two, feeling bored and alienated.

I hadn’t yet tried sadism myself, but I thought I should. One time, before a play party in Brooklyn, I bought a cheap whip at the Pussy Cat Boutique. I spent forty minutes on the train to get to the party. I walked twelve blocks from the station to the warehouse venue.

Before I entered, I looked inside. The room was black lit. A fat woman dressed like a Medieval wench drank from a goblet. A woman in a white leather corset had her boobs hanging out over a flogging bench. A woman in a leather thong was locked in a cage. Several men stood around by themselves, looking like they weren’t sure where to put their hands.

It was $35 to go in. I stood with my whip, pondering. I knew it would be a long, awkward evening, that I wouldn’t enjoy myself, that the guests would be sexually unattractive. I turned around and went home.

The night I was spanked, though, I wasn’t yet disillusioned with the scene. That night I had still found sadomasochism novel enough to pay Paddles’ $40 cover charge for single men. (To discourage creeps, a single man is charged $15 more than a single women or a member of a couple.)

When I met Megan, I told her I was a writer, and she told me that she wanted to spank me.

I looked around, nervous. A saw a man bent over with his pants down and a dominatrix paddling him.

WHAP!

“What are you so scared of?” Megan said.

“Ah, um, I don’t know,” I stammered.

I wandered away, but she followed me. Everywhere I went, people were providing social proof that a spanking was the thing to get. I realized that I was running up against my old, limiting fear, the fear that kept me isolated and conventional.

“Can we start with my pants up?” I asked Megan.

We went into a corner. She bent me over a rack. She began to spank me with her hand, but I was wearing thick jeans and couldn’t feel it.

“Can I take your pants down?” she asked after a few minutes.

“Yeah, okay, do it,” I said.

She pulled my pants down but kept my boxers up, and continued to spank me, and this time there was a bit more of a sting to it. I looked down through my legs at the corridor behind us. A small audience of feet had gathered, encouraging Megan.

Megan kept running her hands up and down my thighs, around my scrotum, and up and down my torso. Her hands were soft and pudgy. It was all about “getting in touch with sensation,” she explained. Once her hand strayed into my cock, and I said “Whoa!”

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I just meant to go up and down your thigh, but my hand slipped. Can I take your boxers down now?” she asked.

“Yeah, alright, sure,” I said. “Now I can say I really did it.”

“No more faking,” she said, slipping my boxers down.

Megan eventually switched to her paddle. After about ten minutes, my ass was sore. I stuck it out another five minutes-- WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!

The spanking satisfied me. It was sensual, like a massage. I felt high, like I had been working out. Most importantly, though, I was a new man, one capable of being spanked before all the patrons of Paddles and feeling no shame.

Nathaniel Page is a California writer who lives in Brooklyn.

When I was eight years old, nothing delighted me more than to watch wrinkled Italian men argue over the position of a green bocce ball. Donning fedoras in the summer and gray messenger caps in the winter, these men battled with a vigor that belied their advanced years. Geriatric lassitude seemed to melt away whenever a bocce player stepped onto the court, and a youthful gleam entered the eyes of any player who managed to drive the other team’s ball away from the target pallina. My friend Stephanie and I used to peep through the fence and giggle as we listened to these men curse animatedly in Italian (I had garnered an extensive knowledge of Italian profanities from Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ Brooklyn home).

To the left of the bocce courts was a giant, gnarled tree that I claimed as my own. Countless summer days passed in which I would purchase a dripping orange popsicle, scramble up to the third branch of the tree, and furtively watch the bocce players argue as I slurped. In between bocce games, I would devour a book along with my popsicle. As I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time, I was sorely disappointed when Boo Radley failed to leave small presents in my tree like he did for Scout Finch. It would be a year, at least, before I stopped scouring the branches for a gold pocket-watch.

Last year, on Super Bowl Sunday, I believe, I trekked through Dyker Park in order to photograph the bocce courts for a nostalgic piece I was writing about Brooklyn. As I approached my childhood haunt, my digital camera threatening to fall out of my frozen fingers, I felt sure that the icy winds had driven every sane person indoors. The monkey bars that had blistered my hands so many times were deserted, and the concrete softball field where I used to practice pitching with my dad, who would call balls and strikes in a soft but clear voice, was conspicuously empty. I wondered vaguely whether my destination would even be recognizable under a mound of snow.

It turned out that I needn’t have worried. Even from many yards away, the familiar accented shouts accosted my ears on a gust of frigid air. I couldn’t help but smile slightly as I turned the corner of the handball courts and saw—under a newly renovated steel roof—a group of men in puffy coats standing around a cluster of bocce balls, apparently in a heated argument. Two men sat at the stone chess table nearby, thoroughly savoring a large prosciutto and mozzarella hero. For a second, they eyed me warily, as if I were a stranger trespassing on some kind of sacred ritual. Then their attention returned to the confrontation at hand.

“Our boccia is-a closer,” a man in a red coat asserted. His cheeks were as red as the ball he just threw, but whether from anger or the sharp wind, I couldn’t tell.

“Whaddaya, nuts?” an opposing player cried, holding up his hands to show just how far the ball was from the pallina.

A colorful variety of Italian expletives ensued. Finally, the first man who had spoken threw down his measuring stick in a rage and yelled, in native Brooklynese, “Fuhgeddaboudit!”

Like domestic Brooklyn, which is often overshadowed by the glitz and glamour of adjacent Manhattan, the crumbling bocce court in Dyker Park is often eclipsed by its flashier surroundings—especially the million-dollar catering hall just added to the golf course. However, the men who play bocce at Dyker have created an invaluable microcosm in which Italian heritage is preserved and traditions are passed on from generation to generation. The bocce courts, like the borough in which they are located, seem almost timeless: a perfect combination of old and new.

I have barely any recollections from my childhood, whether in the dead of winter or the blistering summer heat, whether from a Super Bowl Sunday or a Black Friday, of an empty bocce court. The men who play there exude a kind of persistence of existence, a tie to generations before and after, that can also be attributed to Brooklyn itself. Somehow, the Italian bocce enthusiasts continue to smoke cigarettes, drink steaming espresso, and gesticulate with their hands while they are surrounded on all sides by other ethnic enclaves. Whether they be African-American basketball players and Mexican soccer players, just like these Italians on the bocce court, they are all Brooklyn.

Sorting through all of my memories of Dyker Park, I can only recall a single time when the crumbling bocce court was empty and the wooden scoreboard was blank. It was a warm summer evening, and a men's softball team had rudely invaded the field where I usually practiced. Quickly glancing around, my brown eyes lit upon the unusually empty bocce court, which just had new lights installed. Even now, if I concentrate, I can almost hear the echoing “pop” of my dad’s glove, carrying on the salty air to the outer edges of the park.

My grandmother had a Winchester repeating rifle in the attic. I liked pointing the unloaded gun out the window at the cars on Main Street.

Pulling the trigger produced a dry metallic click on the empty chamber and I imagined a star-burst crack of glass and then the car swerving off the road. One warm August afternoon my father walked into the attic. He ripped the weapon from my hand. I said I was sorry. He didn't hit me. That was my mother's job.

"Guns are a weapon. Not a toy." He learned this lesson testing 22mm cannons in B-25s during his service in the Army Air Corps.

I never received another toy gun from my parents.

I did shoot a .22 in Boy Scout camp. Ten bullets. Five of them hit the target. I got a merit badge for my marksmanship. I didn't mention this to my parents and avoided guns throughout my teenage years, although I tried to enlist in the Marines in 1968. I saw myself in a uniform with an M-16. My mother wouldn't sign the papers for her 16 year-old son. She had seen enough of her friends die in WWII.

Only cops and criminals had guns and New York had plenty of both in 1978. I was working at the door at Hurrah's on West 62nd Street. It was a rock disco. One of the bouncers was an NYPD off-duty cop, the other three bouncers came from Harlem. Jack Flood was the biggest of all. He had fought Joe Louis in a 1951 exhibition bout, a year before I was born. Louis knocked Battlin' Jack down three times without knocking him out. Most fighters would have sat after hitting the mat once. His record stood at 20-14-2 before he entered prison for several long stretches.

One night the B-52s were playing to a packed house. 3 Puerto Ricans tried to sneak in the side door. Jack and I threw them out. They yelled they were coming back. Neither of us thought much of their warning, since everyone said that after a beating.

Thirty minutes later the band was on stage. The show was sold-out. We didn't have much to do, so I got us drinks from the bar and returned to the entrance. Jack was leaning against the wall. His friends were upstairs watching the show. The cop was in a parked car with his girlfriend. It was only the two of us.

I handed Jack his cognac and coke. He didn't have time to drink it, because ten Puerto Ricans forced open the front doors. Five of them were holding stilettos and my stomach shrank behind my spine. Jack coldcocked the first attacker. The second stuck a shiv into his side. Jack said, "Motherfuckah, you fucked up my suit."

He broke this one's nose.

Another he booted with size 14 shoes. One of the boys from the previous night slashed at my face. Jack had had enough and pulled out a gun with his left hand. He threw the .38 to me. "Shoot the motherfuckahs."

I caught the pistol in my hand and the Puerto Ricans fled the scene. I followed them onto the sidewalk.

"Shoot 'em. Shoot 'em." Jack shouted holding his side.

They were already 100 feet away. My Boy Scout training hadn't covered shooting at people, but the 10 Commandments said 'Thou Shalt not Kill and I pulled the trigger aiming to the right.

The front windows of two car shattered upon the bullet's impact. The gang accelerated like a divine DJ had sped up a 45 to 78 rpm. Jack hobbled up to me. Blood was dripping between his fingers.

"I'm goin' to the hospital. You bettah get rid of that before the cops come." Jack was a gangster. His cousin Malcolm had told stories about his uncle. All of them were scary.

"I'll do it right now."

"Good. Now flag me down taxi. They don't pick up bleedin' brothers." Jack groaned and leaned on a car. I stepped in the street and stopped a taxi. The driver protested about messing up his seat. I gave him an extra $10. They drove away to Roosevelt on 8th Avenue and I went up on the roof of the nightclub. I thought about keeping the gun, then dropped it down an airshaft. It clanged twice on its ascent and I went down to the door, wondering about what to tell the cops and whether Jack would live.

The cops caught three of the Puerto Ricans. They had stolen a taxi and crashed it in Central Park. No charges were pressed by either side. No mention of gunfire either. The off-duty cop squashed that entry in the police report. The club's lawyer said Jack had a long record of violence and not just in the ring.

"Better Jack drop it."

Jack said the same thing in the hospital.

"Only a scratch." The bandages covered his ebony arm and chest. He was a tough old man. "Good thing I wasn't gettin' killed, because you shoot like shit and that's a good thing, because you don't want to be wounding people who are tryin' to kill you. You gotta have a killer instinct and you don't got that."

Jack and I remained friends. He came to my house for drinks and we ate in the Italian restaurant on the corner of 1st Avenue and 10th Street. Lanza's was always empty and the food was mediocre. Jack couldn't have been happier.

"Ain't nothin' bad gonna happen to a black man in an Italian restaurant."

After dinner he'd walk across the street to get a beer at the bodega. The dealers on the corner stepped aside for Jack. They recognized him without knowing who he was and that respect had nothing to do with the two guns he carried on him. He was a killer and everyone could see that, but Jack wasn't so hard.

"I'm a bad guy, but not so bad anymore."

Jack and I would go to nightclubs. He was about 50 and black as night in a coal mine. I was 25 and white as mozzarella. Nobody called us Salt and Pepper. Not within Jack's earshot.

We watched the first Robereto Duran-Sugar Ray Leonard fight at Danceteria on West 19th Street. Both of us had bet heavily on Duran and were ecstatic with the Panamanian's unanimous 15-round victory. I ordered drinks for Jack and his two cousins, Marvin and Wheeler. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a familiar face. It was one of the Puerto Ricans from the stabbing. Jack sensed something was not right and slowly swiveled his head.

"Is that who I think it is?" Jack wasn't expecting any lies.

"Yeah."

"You don't want a piece of this and you ain't seen nothin'." Jack snapped his fingers and his cousins trapped the Puerto Rican against the wall.

"Jack, we won money tonight." I was pleading for a life.

"I win money all the time." Jack's hand slipped behind his jacket. He liked keeping a gun in the small of his back, because that way he could feel it.

"Don't do this."

"Don't do what? Ain't nothin' happen yet." Jack walked across the room. People avoided contact. The young Puerto Rican boy was praying with quivering lips. Jack leaned over and whispered in his ear, then patted him on the cheek. Jack returned to the bar with his cousins. The Puerto Rican boy was gone.

"What you say to him?" I was scared too.

"Said it was his lucky day, but I'd see him again."

"And what will you do then?" I saw a boy on his knees in a dark alley.

"Depends on my mood and tonight my mood is good." He checked the position of his pistol and we celebrated that evening with champagne. I kept expecting the Puerto Rican boy to come back with an avenging gang, but I guess he thought better of a plan that had failed once. Jack and I remained friends into the 80s. He introduced me to James Brown at the Lone Star Bar on 5th Avenue after selling the tickets twice. We each had $300 more in our pockets.

"James is a friend," Jack said sitting in his Lincoln. "But James is doin' better than me."

"Jack, would you have killed that kid the night of Duran fight?"

"Kill 'em?" Jack scrunched his lips as if the next words were hard to say. "Nah, no reason for killin'. He ain't killed me. See everyone thinks it's easy pullin' a trigger. Never easy pullin' a trigger."

"That true?"

"If I says it is it is."

I never argued with Jack and we parted ways as people do in the lives we led. I never heard about him dying. No one ever said he passed away. His cousin Marvin got shot in a Harlem Alley. I heard that, but nothing about Jack, so I decided he lived on driving that big black Lincoln, bottom rusting out and I know that's what heaven in like for men with guns. Not all of them, but for Jack Flood understood the real value of 'thou shalt not kill', because every bit of him was a little bit you and me. At least I'd like to think it was, but then I'm only me and I don't like guns. Not any more. Not any less.

Peter Nolan Smith left New England in 1976 for the East Village. Most of his 21st Century has been spent in Pattaya, Thailand, although this year he summered in Palm Beach writing BET ON CRAZY, a semi-fiction book detailing his career as a diamond salesman on New York’s 47th Street. He is the editor and writer of www.mangozeen.com.