Remember when?

[Jerry Oz]

We had a hill in my neighborhood that we called "Kill Hill". We'd grab cardboard boxes from the trash bins of a local paper factory and climb up and slide down. Simple fun. I would swear that hill was 100 feet high, but when I drive by it now, it's probably about 35 feet high [with about 60 feet to slide].

I also remember playing football with my friends in local fields around my childhood home. Not sure how nobody ever broke a nose, leg or arm with how hard we hit each other. It was literally a crapshoot to avoid dog crap while we were out there. Nothing worse than smelling it and then realizing it's on your pants or shirt. Once we knew where it was, we somehow ran all of our plays far away from it.

Then, we also played a game we called Smear the Queer, which was essentially a rugby game where it was every man for himself. Imagine one guy running to the goal against 5-10 friends. It was brutal. But brutality is what we did.

We didn't play Buck Buck [thank God], but we played a game called Bebogees, where anybody caught saying a word beginning with a "b" got ruthlessly pummeled with fists into his arm, chest or back. And by "ruthlessly", I mean hitting as hard as possible. In order to stop it, the pummelee had to whistle and say "bebogees". [Try whistling while being punched].

We also played "Knuckles", where players whacked the back of their friends' hands a pencil until somebody gave up. Also, "Hot Hands" [one friend's hands on another, while the one on the bottom pulled his hand away to smack his opponent's hand] and gave each other "frogs", which was punching a knuckle into a friends' bicep to elicit a reflex where the muscle would contract painfully, looking like it had a frog in it.

And don't get me going on dodge ball.