There’s criminal child abuse. And then there’s war ball.

Note before we get rolling: I’m updating my blogroll. If I have been neglectful, drop a note in the comments, and I’ll get you added. I really do like to keep tabs on all the people who visit this place.

Remember this post, where I dropped some names in the hopes my old pals would find me by egomaniacally googling their own names? Great idea, but it didn’t work. My pal Sharon (whom I’ve known since Mrs. Bisetti’s kindergarten class) found me because I dropped a reference to Malice, cuz she had a bit role in the movie. I think you were in scrubs, Sharon, but I knew it was you. No one else in that Hollywood OR knew how to act.

So Sharon dropped me an email, and we shot the shit, and she mentioned that a friend of hers might know something about an old friend of mine, whom I had googled once upon a time and came up with bupkes. He recently entered the blogosphere, though, and with Sharon’s additional information that he’s a freelance writer, I tracked him down. His name is Mike Imlay, and I’ve added him to my blogroll.

Mike, this post is for you.

***

Mike and I had to be the littlest kids in our junior high school class. I haven’t seen Mike since 9th grade, so I’m guessing he had a late growth spurt and now I’m the only little kid left from our junior high. My life is kind of like that.

Because Mike and I made up a weight class all our own, we paired off together for wrestling. This worked out to our advantage since we were both bright kids and the other boys would have murdered us, given the chance. We didn’t do so well at other PE activities, and in particular, our lives were in jeopardy every effin rainy day. That’s because rain meant indoor activities.

Rain meant war ball.

For those of you not familiar with the game, here are the rules. The class is divided into two groups. Each group gets one-half of the gymnasium. At the beginning of the game, three or four balls are placed at the midline of the gym, and all the players must be back at their respective walls. The balls are those big red rubber ones we used to use for kick ball — a much more civil sport, by the way. Lightweight, but that only makes it easier for the big kids to throw them at mach two.

Then the coach (in our case, the aptly named Mr. Johnson — get it? He was a dick) blows his whistle and we run to the center to grab a ball. Or, we cower against the wall, trying our best to be invisible. Running around and looking engaged, that works too. The fast kids always get to the balls first, anyway. After that, it’s every boy for himself.

The goal: throw the ball as hard as you can at the slowest, biggest target you can find. If you hit him, he’s out. If he catches the ball, you’re out, and one of your team’s “out” players gets to come back into play. This encourages you, the sadistic 13-year-old with pent-up hormonal rage, to throw the ball as hard as you possibly can, thereby making it impossible for any sane person to try to catch the ball.

Only one problem here: 13-year-old boys are not sane.

Mr. Johnson sat in his metal folding chair, ready to blow his whistle for fouls. You couldn’t cross the midline. Aside from that, there were no rules, no other fouls, so Mr. Johnson had little else to do but watch us try to maim one another, and, I suspect, touch himself inappropriately the whole time.

Meanwhile, boys angry over their parents’ messy divorces, upset over the subliminal knowledge that they would, five years hence, have nothing in their lives but an assistant manager spot at McDonalds and a pregnant Schlitz-addicted wife, or just a touch disturbed thanks to fetal alcohol syndrome would try their best to nail the rest of us in the nads. If you were in the Mike & Doug regime, you would hope for a body or leg hit, and then, please please God please, no one on your side should catch a ball, or else you’d have to go in yet again.

This continued until either (A) all the kids on one side were knocked out of the game, or (B) Mr. Johnson got off. Since war ball inevitably lasted all period, that guy must have had blue balls like nobody’s business.

Occasionally, whether by kismet or conspiracy I know not, a gang of ball-throwers would nail Mr. Johnson with everything they had. A grand cheer would go up. Somewhere in the cosmos, a balance would shift ever so slightly in our favor. And then Mr. Johnson would blow his whistle and scream at us to run laps.

This was a very good thing. No one ever got hit in the nads running laps.

I hate war ball, hate it with a deep and abiding hatred, hate it hate it hate it.

***

Know the worst thing about testicles? They’ll jump back into your body even if they don’t take a direct hit, and they’ll do it so briskly it’ll hurt every bit as bad as the real thing. I’m not making this up. It’s called the cremaster reflex — look it up if you don’t believe me.

Yes, I realize it’s an adaptive reflex designed to protect The Most Important Part of male anatomy, but it’s still a bitch.

***

Maureen, I’ll bet you thought I’d run out of testicle-related material. Then again, maybe not. You seem to have great faith in my ability to write about my nuts.

Anyway: welcome to the blogosphere, Mike. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot of you around here.

D.