December 3, 2005--Saturday Story: "Stanley (The Pillow) Futoran"
Stanley (The Pillow) Futoran
In my neighborhood if your weren't athletic but still wanted to participate in street games we could always accommodate you--rather than play, you could serve as equipment.
So for example, Larry Diamond was always second base; The Kirschner Twins were the goal posts; and Stanley Futouran was The Pillow.
First base could be the front wheel of a parked car as could third. But since second was out there in the middle of the street, it required someone to agree to play the part. Larry was an excellent second base and was eager to accommodate us since he was the absolutely worst athlete on the block. To give you a sense of this—if you passed a basketball to him, even gently, it always would hit him square in the chest and send him reeling, knocking the wind out of him.
But to be a good second base you needed a number of qualities that he had in excess.
First, you needed to be that rare combination of immobility and agility—immobile enough to allow people to race into you at break-neck speed with the certainty that though you might be slammed into, you would not blink nor duck out of the way. But you also needed to be fast on your feet to avoid the cars careening down the block, not caring at all that you, as second base, with your back to traffic, might get run down. In fact, most of the cars that entered our street attempted to run over whoever was serving as second base. To compensate for his innate clumsiness, God gave Larry a version of eyes in the back of his head which helped him get out of the way at the last moment even if, in truth, he was slow and stumbling afoot.
Second base also had to serve as the second base umpire. As the base itself you were not only at times the object of someone trying to steal a base or for someone attempting to stretch a single into a double, but as second base you were also in a critical position when on that once-a-year occasion a team miraculously managed to turn a double play—or at least tried to. So Larry had to be the base and at the same time, as umpire, make the close, controversial calls. Being able to make a call and stick by it while being screamed and cursed at, while being abused and pushed and shoved, was something Larry could handle because he was also gifted with the certainty that what he decided was infallible. (If he had been Catholic, he would have been a good candidate to become Pope.) It helped that he was the most stubborn person in the neighborhood and never, never changed his mind about anything, nor could he be persuaded or bullied into doing anything he had set his mind against. Stubbornness was not an otherwise attractive quality (in fact Larry managed to get himself punched in the face on occasion when he wouldn’t agree to change his mind about something as trivial as not wanting to sit through a double feature at the Rugby Movie Theater), but for second base/second-base umpire, he was perfect. He was born for it.
It was quite an advantage to be twins if you aspired to serve as goal posts. This is then where The Kirschner Twins came in and in their own way excelled. They couldn’t catch a pass or run even 20 feet without collapsing in a heap, but they were the best goal posts in all of East Flatbush. So good were they in fact that when East 53rd Street played East 59th Street for the local touch-football championship they recruited the Kirschners away from us on 56th Street even though we were playing the consolation game for third place the same day.
If you were twins and lousy athletes that made it more likely you would get to be the goal posts rather than face the humiliation of being picked last for a team and then being relegated to playing free safety. In real football that was and is very high status, but it assumes long passes occur and are likely to be completed. In our case, East 56 Street lore had it that there had never been a completed pass of more than nine yards. Which didn’t take us into free safety territory.
Having twins as goal posts made it less confusing for the rest of us who were the players. What with all the running and screaming and smashing into each other going on, imagine how much more complicated it would have been if the left goal post was five-nine and skinny and the other was short and fat? We had enough on our minds not to have to deal with that too. Thus the Kirschners were in hot demand.
The Pillow was the most exotic role and was reserved for the absolutely fattest person available--for which there was considerable competition even in an age before we knew anything about Carbs or Super Sizing.
The Pillow was a very specialized piece of equipment for a game called Johnny-On-The-Pony. Here's how it worked:
Of course as with everything else there were two teams with 4-6 players per side, chosen in traditional street-game fashion--alternately. I am the captain or one team and you of the other. In turn we pick members, first you then me, then you then me, and so on until the entire teams were selected. There was no way Stanley Futoran would be selected for this or any other game. He could never be second base much less a goal post, but he had all the prerequisites to be The Pillow. If you want evidence, look for his picture in the 1958 PS 244 yearbook—The Rugby Rocket.
As The Pillow, Futoran stood with his back against a brick wall (in our case the side of the proverbial Candy Store) and the first team, in snakelike fashion, leaned into him. The Johnny-On-The-Pony "snake" consisted of all members of one team bent over at 90 degree angles. With the first person's head resting on Stanley’s more than ample stomach while the second person inserted his head between the legs of the person in front of him (in effect under his crotch!). And so on until all four or five where in line.
Then the opposing team, again in turn, one by one, would race across the street, dodging traffic, and vault onto the line of bent over, crotch sniffing flower-of-Brooklyn youth, landing as hard as possible on the pathetic back of one of the opposing players. The most skilled players would leap so high that they would pile on top of their teammates so that about half way into the run there might be three or four in a squirming heap entangled in each other, ultimately on the back of their weakest, bent-over, hyphenated opponent.
Knees and elbows were a secondary weapon to body weight and squirming, useful for grinding and gouging into the backs of the players who were in effect the Pony. And of course, to be most damagingly effective a team would complete the piling-on as slowly as possible in the hope that by delaying completing the run the entire pile would collapse under them. That's was the whole point--how a win was recorded--when the pile would cave in and bones would be broken and arteries severed.
If somehow the team at the bottom of the pile could survive, not collapse--chanting in unison, "Johnny-On-the-Pony one-two-three. Johnny-On-the-Pony-one-two-three. Johnny-On-the-Pony-one-two-three" the piled-on team would attempt to right themselves (not always easy even for young bodies, considering the effects of the piling on and grinding) and would have their opportunity to attempt to wreck their rival’s version of the Pony.
This could go on for quite some time. Neighborhood legend had it that one Johnny-On-the-Pony contest lasted for more than two hours before one team finally caved in and everyone was taken away to the emergency room at Kings County Hospital.
Stanley Futoran, of course, would serve as The Pillow for both teams and would wind up taking the most punishment. But beyond that, if you were built like him, in that neighborhood, the only way to be accepted was by absorbing punishment and abuse. He became quite expert at that, finding in that a way to excel.
Some of the girls even thought that absorbing punishment and taking abuse might also be preparing Futoran to be a good husband!
I of course have no comment.
In my neighborhood if your weren't athletic but still wanted to participate in street games we could always accommodate you--rather than play, you could serve as equipment.
So for example, Larry Diamond was always second base; The Kirschner Twins were the goal posts; and Stanley Futouran was The Pillow.
First base could be the front wheel of a parked car as could third. But since second was out there in the middle of the street, it required someone to agree to play the part. Larry was an excellent second base and was eager to accommodate us since he was the absolutely worst athlete on the block. To give you a sense of this—if you passed a basketball to him, even gently, it always would hit him square in the chest and send him reeling, knocking the wind out of him.
But to be a good second base you needed a number of qualities that he had in excess.
First, you needed to be that rare combination of immobility and agility—immobile enough to allow people to race into you at break-neck speed with the certainty that though you might be slammed into, you would not blink nor duck out of the way. But you also needed to be fast on your feet to avoid the cars careening down the block, not caring at all that you, as second base, with your back to traffic, might get run down. In fact, most of the cars that entered our street attempted to run over whoever was serving as second base. To compensate for his innate clumsiness, God gave Larry a version of eyes in the back of his head which helped him get out of the way at the last moment even if, in truth, he was slow and stumbling afoot.
Second base also had to serve as the second base umpire. As the base itself you were not only at times the object of someone trying to steal a base or for someone attempting to stretch a single into a double, but as second base you were also in a critical position when on that once-a-year occasion a team miraculously managed to turn a double play—or at least tried to. So Larry had to be the base and at the same time, as umpire, make the close, controversial calls. Being able to make a call and stick by it while being screamed and cursed at, while being abused and pushed and shoved, was something Larry could handle because he was also gifted with the certainty that what he decided was infallible. (If he had been Catholic, he would have been a good candidate to become Pope.) It helped that he was the most stubborn person in the neighborhood and never, never changed his mind about anything, nor could he be persuaded or bullied into doing anything he had set his mind against. Stubbornness was not an otherwise attractive quality (in fact Larry managed to get himself punched in the face on occasion when he wouldn’t agree to change his mind about something as trivial as not wanting to sit through a double feature at the Rugby Movie Theater), but for second base/second-base umpire, he was perfect. He was born for it.
It was quite an advantage to be twins if you aspired to serve as goal posts. This is then where The Kirschner Twins came in and in their own way excelled. They couldn’t catch a pass or run even 20 feet without collapsing in a heap, but they were the best goal posts in all of East Flatbush. So good were they in fact that when East 53rd Street played East 59th Street for the local touch-football championship they recruited the Kirschners away from us on 56th Street even though we were playing the consolation game for third place the same day.
If you were twins and lousy athletes that made it more likely you would get to be the goal posts rather than face the humiliation of being picked last for a team and then being relegated to playing free safety. In real football that was and is very high status, but it assumes long passes occur and are likely to be completed. In our case, East 56 Street lore had it that there had never been a completed pass of more than nine yards. Which didn’t take us into free safety territory.
Having twins as goal posts made it less confusing for the rest of us who were the players. What with all the running and screaming and smashing into each other going on, imagine how much more complicated it would have been if the left goal post was five-nine and skinny and the other was short and fat? We had enough on our minds not to have to deal with that too. Thus the Kirschners were in hot demand.
The Pillow was the most exotic role and was reserved for the absolutely fattest person available--for which there was considerable competition even in an age before we knew anything about Carbs or Super Sizing.
The Pillow was a very specialized piece of equipment for a game called Johnny-On-The-Pony. Here's how it worked:
Of course as with everything else there were two teams with 4-6 players per side, chosen in traditional street-game fashion--alternately. I am the captain or one team and you of the other. In turn we pick members, first you then me, then you then me, and so on until the entire teams were selected. There was no way Stanley Futoran would be selected for this or any other game. He could never be second base much less a goal post, but he had all the prerequisites to be The Pillow. If you want evidence, look for his picture in the 1958 PS 244 yearbook—The Rugby Rocket.
As The Pillow, Futoran stood with his back against a brick wall (in our case the side of the proverbial Candy Store) and the first team, in snakelike fashion, leaned into him. The Johnny-On-The-Pony "snake" consisted of all members of one team bent over at 90 degree angles. With the first person's head resting on Stanley’s more than ample stomach while the second person inserted his head between the legs of the person in front of him (in effect under his crotch!). And so on until all four or five where in line.
Then the opposing team, again in turn, one by one, would race across the street, dodging traffic, and vault onto the line of bent over, crotch sniffing flower-of-Brooklyn youth, landing as hard as possible on the pathetic back of one of the opposing players. The most skilled players would leap so high that they would pile on top of their teammates so that about half way into the run there might be three or four in a squirming heap entangled in each other, ultimately on the back of their weakest, bent-over, hyphenated opponent.
Knees and elbows were a secondary weapon to body weight and squirming, useful for grinding and gouging into the backs of the players who were in effect the Pony. And of course, to be most damagingly effective a team would complete the piling-on as slowly as possible in the hope that by delaying completing the run the entire pile would collapse under them. That's was the whole point--how a win was recorded--when the pile would cave in and bones would be broken and arteries severed.
If somehow the team at the bottom of the pile could survive, not collapse--chanting in unison, "Johnny-On-the-Pony one-two-three. Johnny-On-the-Pony-one-two-three. Johnny-On-the-Pony-one-two-three" the piled-on team would attempt to right themselves (not always easy even for young bodies, considering the effects of the piling on and grinding) and would have their opportunity to attempt to wreck their rival’s version of the Pony.
This could go on for quite some time. Neighborhood legend had it that one Johnny-On-the-Pony contest lasted for more than two hours before one team finally caved in and everyone was taken away to the emergency room at Kings County Hospital.
Stanley Futoran, of course, would serve as The Pillow for both teams and would wind up taking the most punishment. But beyond that, if you were built like him, in that neighborhood, the only way to be accepted was by absorbing punishment and abuse. He became quite expert at that, finding in that a way to excel.
Some of the girls even thought that absorbing punishment and taking abuse might also be preparing Futoran to be a good husband!
I of course have no comment.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
11:02 AM
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