The Games We Played

Rite of Passage? No. Try Wrong of Passage.

I grew up in LA County’s unincorporated concrete strip of strife, Bassett 91746 in the San Gabriel Valley.

IYKYK.

IYDKALYK.

I went to Sunkist Elementary, named after the citrus packing powerhouse of yesteryear, a sweet ode to the region’s pastoral memories. By the 80s, tho, that patch of grass hosted something else entirely: brutal schoolyard games.

I’m not sure why we played them.

Were we inventing new trauma or just recycling the old? Were we the architects of our own misery, or did we inherit it, passed down like some secret, violent rite of passage?

If you grew up around that time and around that place, some of these will ring a bell.

BB Bridges: this game didn’t have its origins in gang culture as far as I could tell, but Crips would be enthused to know that any person saying any word starting with the letter “B” would get socked…until they bled. Simple. Effective. Terrorizing.

And then there was this doozy:

The OK Game: flash the “OK” sign below your belt and try to get someone to look. If they did, you socked them. If they were fast enough to poke the “O” in your hand… they socked you. Unless you trapped their finger, in which case you socked them. Ok?

Recess could only mean one thing:

Slaughter House: catch a rubber ball off the wall. Drop it and get punched in the small of the back until you ran like a mad horse to the wall and tapped out. Debt cleared. Pain obligatory. Who punched the hardest? Harvey Segura. Who ran fastest? Yours truly.

Don’t call the cops but we also played:

Butts Up: drop the ricocheting ball three times, walk to the wall, bend over, and take tennis balls to the ass from 15 yards away while Ms Brockway (allegedly) watched, grinning like the queen of full court chaos.

There were more games. Knuckles. Chests. Eraser burns. Staples and paper clips shot with lethality across this and that class for no reason other than boredom.

Childhood was wholesome, except when it wasn’t.

So the next time you see someone my age staring through a red light, upset with the world, tears running a river, they just might be rehashing one of these childhood games where pain was the price and pride the elusive payoff.

What do you think of these games? Were we made the better or the worse for them?