Croquet

Summer is a little different in Jersey. As a kid in the Garden State in the 60s, my childhood was exactly like yours…only different. Sure, we had all those summery things. Days at the Beach and sweet memories of too much sun too soon and peeling until the Fourth of July. Opened windows and strategically placed fans in the futile fight against oppressive humidity. Crickets and the wonder of where they went when it snowed. Adults circled in Lawn Chairs with cold beers and warm stories. All those things…with a bit of a twist.

It might have been because of Saint Anne’s School and the Ladies in Black. That was surely a factor. They were Nuns. Sisters of Mercy. The very concept of Nuns. Take a group of women, deny any aspect of sex, house them all together, dress them in black, and put them in charge of children all day. Steven King could do a series of books on that and have enough material left over for a weekly talk show. Saint Anne’s School was Mayberry meets the Other World Kingdom. The Nuns set the bar high, believed in home work, and lived to teach. Catholic school is not for mamby-pambys. We had that for nine months and then were paroled each summer. Too much time off for kids with way too much energy and no Nuns in sight…add in two working parents, shit on TV, not enough money for camp and you had a recipe for disaster on a grand scale. The prisoners were released without any guards. We were loose cannons.

Of course, my parents tried to keep us busy. A combination of keep them busy and prayer….they rushed home from work every night and called a still standing house with no emergency vehicles success. We had chores. Mom wanted the house not roped off as a crime scene and clean when she got home from work at 3:30. That meant Damage Control began at 3 every day. We whirling dervished from house destroyed to “hi, Mom, how was your day” with amazing efficiency. We removed the bodies, shooed the animals, picked up debris, put the furniture back in the right places in the right rooms, swept, vacuumed, showered, dressed, found a book to pretend to read, and waited for Mom’s carpool with a look on our faces like the Vienna Boys Choir. Most days, it worked really well. Sometimes she was less than satisfied with our efforts. Still, more often than not, we were successful in what was not discovered.

As the summer progressed, Mom and/or Dad added a few more chores to fill the day. Usually based on the evidence. First offense, tend the garden. Next offense, cut the grass and rake the yard once a week until we got our heads out of our asses. By the end of the summer, we were to dig a canal linking the Raritan bay to the Red Sea just to keep busy.

It was not all penance and punishment. My parents wanted us to have some regular fun too. I had my brother’s hand me down baseball glove that was well loved twice over. My sister and I had beach passes. Lots of time spent in and near the Raritan Bay. There were wiffle bats. My sister turned out to be a master of the cruel but sickly amusing sport of Lightening Bug baseball. Her laugh when their little butts flared across the yard was as beautiful as it was perverse. Next to her pee stain on Lane 6 at Harmony Bowl, it was her best moment in sports.

We had outside kid games. Tag. Freeze Tag. Hide and Seek. Those had some variations as did everything in the only state that sounds even more truthful when you drop the New from the name. We combined the relatively innocent One-Two-Three Red light with the rather sinister Mumpries. When you were “it” in Mumpries, when you were caught, you were basically pummeled until you counted to ten loud and clear. Combine that with One-Two-Three Red Light and the level of intensity increased dramatically. One of the most unusual Jersey spins on anything, however, involved Croquet.

Croquet has the best press agents in the world. It has a brand. The very image of the game. Pastoral. Peaceful. Almost regal. A fine gathering of fine people playing a fine game on a fine summer day. Each dressed sweetly and with great dignity. White sweaters with the Gale Storm, Yale ain’t just a lock, tube sock as an upper garment fashion. Lads and Lassies conversing quietly at each takes their turn in a game more about enjoying company rather than competition. That is what my parents thought when they were gifted a Croquet set. Another hand me down that promised summer sweetness.

It turned out a tad bit different on Exit 117 and just off of Highway 36 at the corner of Maple and Main. Croquet was not quite ready for that Twilight Zone. My parents should have known better. The first clue should have been the dangers of any sport that involved mallets and driving spikes into the ground. It calmed for about as long as it took to for a Good Humor bar to melt in the Jersey summer sun. We were more Dead End Kids than Little Rascals.

Dirty Eddie, one of the older kids, found the sexual connotations of Croquet. That did not surprise us. Eddie found sexual connotations in Howdy Dowdy, Superman, Ethel and Lucy, and most cloud formations. Dirty Eddie, really from the Dead End street, enjoyed putting his nice big ball though the hole thingy. He routinely asked the girls if they liked the size of his mallet and to please “be gentle with my balls, Ladies”. Before I knew what a slime ball was, I knew Dirty Eddie was one. He showed up, muscled his way into the game, and insisted on being the blue ball guy. Since Dirty Eddie was the first kid in Keansburg with a switchblade, he got his way, blue ball wise. We tolerated him because we were busy with a whole new level of this wonderful game. One Maple Avenue was the birthplace of Extreme Croquet.

We only played Extreme Croquet a few times. There were kinda rules. We were really flexible on that though since the game developed, some might say deteriorated, on its own. Mallets became giant hammers to drive wooden balls across the yard. Croquet became a contact sport. Elimination. No Marques of Queensbury rules. The game developed with each new discovery. I think it was my sister that discovered Super Bunking. No gentle tap here. Super Bunking involved pressing your ball lower than your opponents. With the right angle and a hard enough swing, the opponent’s ball went airborne.

Keansburg geophysics were perfectly suited for Super Bunking. Main Street was concrete. Long and flat…ideal for bunks measured in blocks. The asphalt of Maple Avenue was less desirable due to parked cars and narrower curbs. The sewer system on Main Street also promised elimination since time to dig the ball from the openings counted as disqualification. While people shagged Nuclear bunks, Mallets became swords and jousting sticks. The Jets and the Sharks fought for rule while Patty next door asked Doctor Berman if her ball passed his office. Extreme Croquet was a very fluid event.

So fluid that Mom’s carpool arrived home one day in the middle of a game that started sometime early that morning. I am not sure what set her off. She described the scene in so many different ways that night at dinner. Jousting. Polo. Sword fights. Gang wars. Maybe Glen and his brother sword fighting with mallets on the roof of the shed lit her fuse. Could have been the jousting match with the bicycles and mallets pointed to kill that forced the car she was in up onto the sidewalk. It might have been the alleged report of a Gang War at that damn house on the corner. (I think that was fabricated). My money was on the busted Wind Window on Studebaker parked by the PAL building. Something sure got her mad. She banned Extreme Croquet from any oxygen based planet that day. She was out of the car quicker than an Nuclear Bunked croquet ball. She was not happy. She had that “What the Fuck?” look on her face. Her hands were raised louder than her voice.

The rest of the kids disappeared like cockroaches when the lights come on. My sister and I had to gather up what was left of the Crocket Set. Much of it was missing it seemed. Sis fished a mallet and two balls from the tree in front of the Viking House. One mallet turned up on the roof of the shed a few weeks later. Rumor has it that the red ball caught the bus to Perth Amboy on Carr Avenue and showed up years later on “The Sopranos”. Unfortunately, Tony and the Bada-Bing crew cut that scene due to its violent nature.

Most of the survivors of Extreme Croquet suspect the blue ball and its mallet went south with Dirty Eddie. Most of the croquet sets in the Burg were sans those very same things. Dirty Eddie got around. My therapist recommends I paint those images in crayon and burn them while saying a decade of the Rosary. That seems sacrilegious as well as hokey. I shall embrace my nightmares. If captured by Hannibal Lecter, I will know it could be worse. Hannibal could be Dirty Eddie with years of experience and a collection of mallets and blue balls.

Croquet with a Jersey twist is quite the thing to behold. If you ask someone about their limp and they inform you it is an old Croquet injury, Ask them “What exit?”