August 10, 2012--Chapter 2: 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. 

Larry Ruby was always second base; the identical Kirschner Twins were genetically predisposed to serve as goal posts; and Stanley Futoran was The Pillow.

For punch or stick ball 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 Ruby was an excellent second base and was eager to accommodate us since he was one of the worst athletes on the block.  If you passed a basketball to him, even gently, it would hit him in the chest and send him reeling. 

But to be a good second base you needed a number of qualities that he had in excess. 

Second Base needed to have that rare combination of immobility and agility—immobile enough to allow people trying to stretch a single into a double to crash into him with shoulder lowered yet willing to take the punishment for the sake of the game’s integrity.  But he also needed to be fast on his feet to avoid the cars speeding down the block, not caring at all that Larry, as Second Base, with his 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 eyes in the back of his head which helped him get out of the way at the last moment even if, in all other circumstances, he was slow and stumbling afoot. 

He also had to serve as the second base umpire.  As the base itself Larry was not only at times the object of someone trying to steal, but as Second Base he was in a critical position to make the call when on that once-a-year occasion a team attempted to turn a bang-bang double play.  

Being able to shout "safe" or "out" and stick by it while players from both teams screamed and cursed at him was something Larry Ruby could handle because he was also gifted with the certainty that whatever he concluded about anything was infallible.  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 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 duty, he was perfect.  He was born to play those dual roles.

It was an obvious advantage to be twins if you aspired to serve as goal posts.  Thus we were fortunate to have the Kirschner Twins living on our block.  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 in fact that when the Remsen Avenue Rockets played the Snyder Avenue Boys for the neighborhood touch-football championship, they recruited the Kirschners as ringers, even though they were from East 56^th Street and we were playing the consolation game for third place the same day against the Kings Highway Men.

 

If you were twins and clumsy athletes that made it more likely you would agree to be 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 position was and is very esteemed, but it assumes long passes occur and that they are likely to be completed.  But according to East 56th Street lore there had never been a successful pass of more than 20 yards.  Which didn’t leave much for free safeties to do except keep an eye out for cars or the police, who rousted us when on rare occasions they patrolled the neighborhood. 

Having twins as goal posts made it less confusing for the players.  What with all the running and screaming and smashing into each other, it would have been much more complicated if the left goal post was five-nine and skinny and the other was short and fat. This was especially true when anyone attempted a field goal. Thus the Kirschners were in demand throughout all of Brooklyn.

The pillow, however, was the most exotic role and was reserved for the plumpest person available. For this there was considerable competition at a time before we knew anything about calories or carbs.

The pillow was a specialized piece of equipment used for a game called Johnny-On-The-Pony.

To play required two teams with four to six players per side, chosen in traditional street-game fashion--alternately.  The captains In turn would pick members until the entire teams were selected.  If the pillow assignment hadn’t been reserved for Stanley Futoran, he would never be selected for this or any other game.  He could neither run nor jump. Even walking was a challenge for him. And since he could never be second base, he lacked agility and the right temperament, much less a goal post (there was no duplicate for him in the neighborhood), he fortunately had all the prerequisites to be The Pillow.

As The Pillow, Futoran stood with his back against a brick wall (in our case the side of Krinsky’s 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 mountain of a stomach while the second boy inserted his head between the legs of the person in front of him (in effect in his crotch), and so on until all five were linked together in a braided 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 opposing players with the weakest, most pathetic looking back.  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 shakiest 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 on itself.  That was the whole point--how a victory was recorded--when the pile would cave in and bones would be broken and arteries in danger of being 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, the battered but surviving team, would attempt to right themselves and then have their opportunity to crush their rival’s version of the Pony.

There was also a special version of Johnny-On-The-Pony:  a neighborhood religious war that saw the Christians battling the Jews.  When the opposing teams would divide up this way, it attracted a crowd of spectators from all over East Flatbush who cheered on their co-religionists.  

Before things got started, the goyim or guineas (as the Jews referred to their mostly Italian rivals) and their fans chanted, to the tune of the then popular song Shrimp Boats, “Jew boats are-a’comin’, there’s matzos tonight”; and the Jews, or kikes as they were referred to by the Italians, would retort, “Guinea boats are-a’comin’, there’s pizza tonight.”

Not to be outdone, as a final slur, Johnny Gatti on his own initiative, in his best imitation of a Nazi accent would declaim to all assembled, “Heinz, trow another Chew on the fire.”  And if that weren’t enough to contribute to the collapse of the Jewish conspiracy, he would add, “Arms for the Arabs, sneakers for the Jews.” None of us Jews ever figured out the sneakers part. The Arab reference, however, we fully comprehended.

These battles could rage for quite some time.  There was more at stake than simple victory--ethnic survival was at stake. Neighborhood legend had it that one Johnny-On-the-Pony intifada lasted more than two hours before one team finally caved and everyone—guineas and kikes alike--were taken away in A heap to the emergency room at Kings County Hospital. 

For such occasions Stanley Futoran had something beside soft bulk going for him—he was biologically ecumenical: his mother was Italian and his father Jewish so he could and did serve as the pillow for both teams.

But still he would wind up taking the most punishment.  If you were shaped like Futoran and couldn’t run or throw, in our neighborhood at that time, the only way to be accepted was by absorbing punishment and abuse.  He became quite adept at that, finding in it a way to excel. 

A few of the girls even thought that absorbing punishment and taking abuse might also be preparing Futoran to be a good husband.