ONE TIME MORE JOE AND I’LL QUIT…WE’LL LET PETER PLAY
Imagine? ‘Okay, [then] we’ll let Peter play’. That’s the way it was then. But we’ll get to it.
I grew up in a house that was pretty big I guess. I never grasped this on any level because it was never brought to my attention at home. It was just where we lived. Like anyone else in the neighborhood. Large, small, apartment; believe me when I tell you that nobody cared back in the day, circa the ‘50s-’60s-’70s. The size of one’s domicile meant absolutely nothing. At least to us. It was more about the people who inhabited the place than the place itself, which of course is just exactly as it should have been and should be.
Our house had a big basement. We called it the cellar. “Are you going down the cellar?” No one uses that term today unless they’re referring to wine or perhaps to a hostage situation or a homicide. We lived across the street from one of the greatest playgrounds known to man and we spent nearly all of our free time there but the cellar served as a wonderful back-up in truly inclement weather or whenever the spirit moved us.
The space had three-and-a-half areas. The first room on the right as you mindfully came down the winding and rickety stairs had a functioning incinerator and was otherwise used for storage. Rakes, shovels, baseball equipment including cracked bats brought back to life courtesy of a nail or two deftly inserted a little above the handle, and other assorted relics and sundries of which there were many. Planters, old and older; some plastic and others kiln-baked. Garden tools. Tools in general. Largely forgotten junk really.
Down the musty hallway on the right was the double-door of the bulkhead and a stairway opening to a portion of the back yard. This offered easy access to the cellar for storage purposes and the entrance/exit was particularly useful when carrying large or unwieldy objects like bicycles, heavy garden hoses or a lawn mower for example. (Items such as these were not designed to be sleek or streamlined in any form or fashion back in the day).
Across from the heavy bulkhead door(s) was the most expansive part of the cellar, a room off of which there were two others as well as a working half-bathroom and a bin area which housed coal — and lots of it — underneath an industrial tarpaulin. There was a locked pantry located in this space too where a second freezer hummed along and canned goods were stored, bunker-style.
(As I think about it, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that the half-bath had one of the all-time greatest toilet-flushing mechanisms known to a then young boy. It was a long metal pull-chain with a ball handle which was suspended from the ceiling. To engage, you pulled the chain down with modest authority — I can still hear my mother’s admonishment: “not too hard Pete dear; it will break.” — conjuring an image of little kids playfully signalling the driver of an eighteen-wheeler to sound the rig’s air horn).
The ceiling in this part of the cellar was low but we somehow figured out how to hang an orange metal basketball rim — everything was made of metal it seems — on the wall about five feet from the floor. This made for enthusiastic and occasionally physical one-on-one contests using a partially deflated mini-basketball or a pair of balled-up socks. As it was impossible to dribble, travelling was permitted and the ultimate goal was to dunk.
Speaking of balled-up socks, the aforementioned musty hallway hosted some world-class games of ‘rag-tag,’ a game we made up which involved running at your opponent and faking a throw of the socks until you finally unloaded in a difficult-to-catch-but-catchable spot. First one to drop the throw loses. The other two rooms on either side of the main space were used for the storage of lawn furniture, screen and storm windows and the like.
And then there was the last area, the best one of all. Because into this space was wedged a ping-pong table, no small deal, believe you me. Surrounding the table, shiny and new for all of five minutes after it was assembled, were shelves of board games played infrequently and gathering dust. But the ping-pong table? We wore it out. My father was pretty good about being available for his two sons after a hard day’s work. So it never took too terribly much to get him in on the action. A little gentle cajoling perhaps and then some persistent whiny pleading if necessary. But he usually was game. He taught us how to play and then — at the beginning — gave us a licking as he was wont to say. He was competitive, less so at that time than when he was younger but he didn’t like to lose. (My mother was competitive too in her own way so there was little hope that we’d not inherit this personality trait). My brother and I turned out to be two of the more competitive sorts I have ever known, sometimes to a fault and we both abhorred losing…at anything.
The ping-pong classics as they were, turned into epic battle royales. When my father and my brother squared off the action was civil at first with play punctuated by the exchange of gentlemanly — in the “pip-pip old chap” stodgy British sense — banter. As the game progressed — we played to 21, 15 or 11 win-by-2 as either time or the inclination demanded — invariably things would become more heated. Cordial and largely innocuous commenting morphed into that era’s version of friendly and sometimes not-so-friendly trash talk.
My father was able to stem the flow of his competitive juices, somewhat masking his zeal. My brother, not so. He took to angrily staccato-chopping the side of his paddle on the end of the table after a lost point. I don’t know where this movement came from or how it even began but in the interests of fairness, symmetry and a level playing surface, we switched sides a lot. The manifestation of my brother’s disappointment was hardly lost on me. When it was my turn to play I would mimic it. My father was not pleased but let it go until he could no longer. “Joe, cut it out,” he would say. “Joe, stop it.” “Peter!” “DON’T!!!” “DOHHHN’T!!!” “DON’T!!!”
My father was not a patient man by nature and with us he was forced to tap whatever reserve he had on hand. When that dried up, he searched for more. He was adept in this pursuit, until he decided enough was enough.
If my brother’s obstinate banging of the paddle on the table continued — and mine thereafter — it was met with this remark: “[Boys] one time more.” It was never, “one more time…” but always “one time more.” We knew what that meant without further embellishment but elaboration was forthcoming in the wake of the next act of unsportsmanlike conduct. “One time more Joe [Peter],” he’d say, “and I’ll quit.”
And ultimately he did. We’d put him through the ringer. I still don’t know if it was his disdain for our behavior, the appearance of multiple mini-divots on each end of the table or that it was just time for him to read the paper.
