my blood runs cold

I spent a decent-sized chunk of my pre-adolescence at the local Boys’ Club, which is odd considering how much I loathed the place. I lay that paradox at the feet of peer pressure from my friends and the irresistible force generated by the mother of all childhood horrors, the cluelessly proactive parent. “It will be good for you,” they say as they pack you into the family sedan or set a slab of cooked liver in front of you, and no amount of whining or passive-aggressive manipulation can save you from your assigned date with destiny. Also, the club was one of the few places in the area at the time that possessed arcade videogame machines and was accessible to a ten year old. It’s amazing how effective the prospect of blasting Galaxians was at overcoming my better judgment.

Once the dollar I had been given for lunch had been converted to quarters and pissed away on Pac-Man or Lunar Lander (a process that took twenty minutes, tops), the bitter realization that I was trapped set in -- trapped in a shark tank full of semi-feral latchkey kids whose parents saw the club’s six dollar annual membership fee as an utter steal compared to the cost of a year’s worth of babysitter fees.

For all the PR and promo footage of kids learning how to build bitchin’ go-karts or woodworking skills, there really wasn’t a hell of a lot to do at the local Boys’ Club if you weren’t into shooting hoops or swimming (providing it was an open gym or free swim period). The game room was where the non-sporty set hung out, but the cooler fixtures, like the pool tables, were in perpetual use by the older boys, who weren’t inclined to let the snot-nosed rabble play through. The creaky foosball table was a mildly diverting alternative option, providing the prefect behind the main desk could locate a game ball. Even when such rare marvels occurred, there’s only so much foosball one can take (and the average person’s level of foosball tolerance is quite low, indeed).

With a full five hours to kill before being retrieved by a parent, time spent at the club resolved itself into a running down of the clock, either by wandering the Middlesex Canal path behind the club building, or, most usually, parking one’s ass on the cracked leather bench in the game room and watching long stretches of daytime TV on a wall-mounted 17” set. (The irony of this still staggers me.)

So, there I was, one afternoon in early 1982, watching some vaguely familiar celebrity try to lead a flustered corn-fed matron to the apex of Dick Clark’s $25,000 pyramid, and also keeping my eyes open lest one of many budding young sociopaths who haunted the club’s halls wandered into Indian burn distance. (Few places outside combat zones are as conducive towards one’s developing preternatural situational awareness as the club used to be.) I was in the process of formulating my strategy should I ever appear opposite Jimmy Walker in a struggle for cash and prizes when the club’s athletic director tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I wanted to participate in a bombardment tournament.

I said “yes.” I don’t know why, unless it was an early manifestation of the spontaneous bouts of recklessness that I have spent the past fifteen years attempting to suppress. If there is a game that I have no business playing, it is bombardment, a chancy bastardization of pin guard which itself is a chancy bastardization of dodge ball. It is a sport that devours skinny near-sighted kids with dubious athletic skills by the lab class-full, and yet one where I had a unique talent. The thing about being a skinny near-sighted kid with dubious athletic skills in an arena where aspiring sadists hurl red gym balls at high speeds is that I made an irresistible target, an irresistible target with a great facility for dodging thrown objects. Fixated on such, the opposition would toss game court tactics aside, thus making themselves easy pickings for my teammates.

A bombardment tournament? Why not? At the very least, I figured it would kill a couple of hours. Left unsaid in the invitation was that the tournament was being held two towns over, which I didn’t realize until my teammates and I were gathered in the club’s parking lot and being told to get into the coach’s van. (We don’ need no steenkeeg parental consent slips! I was a simpler time, then. These days the coach would have landed in jail.) We first made a quick stop at the Masonic Lodge by Horn Pond, presumably so the coach could pray for victory to the Invisible Overlords of the One World Order, before arriving at our destination, which may have been in either Arlington or Malden or Belmont. My geographical awareness at the time extended only to North Woburn and a few blocks of Woburn Center.

The club where the tournament was being held was one of the Boys’ Clubs they show in the TV commercials (and gave an early insight into Big Mama’s methods of social control through allocation of resources; this was definitely a double digit town, compared to our own 303 designation), and we marveled at its modernity before being shuttled off to the gym for the preliminary round. We acquitted ourselves admirably, with my skill in portraying the weak pigeon serving the team well. Four games later, we had reached the final four bracket, and it looked like we just might walk away with the title (which I never found out the name of). Then we went up against the kids from South Boston…

The fact that they wore matching uniforms should have been a warning. Anyone who makes the effort to have team shirts (complete with a picture of their mascot) printed up is a force to be reckoned with. The boyish rambunctiousness which springs from north suburban sandpits and subdivisions is a mild summer breeze compared to the tempest born of Southie’s housing projects and triple-decker row houses. We were slaughtered in a matter of moments. My weak pigeon decoy tactics didn’t matter; as far as the lads from Broadway were concerned, we were all weak pigeons ready to be plucked and roasted.

…and we were okay with that, given that our team hadn’t even existed a few hours previous. On the ride back home, we compared welts and enviously discussed the Vanguard machine in the hosting club’s game room. The coach turned on the van’s radio, which was tuned to WBCN, Boston’s main rock radio station, and it was then that I heard what seemed to be the best song ever, “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band. The cheesy organ and whistling bits, the fake “ending,” the naughty-yet-radio-friendly subject matter – it was tailor made for plucking the strings of pre-adolescent “rawk” fans, and we listened in rapt attention from the beginning until the final fade out, after which one of my teammates told us about the video, which “had that girl from MTV in it.” (Martha Quinn, so the rumor said, but wasn’t true.)

I couldn’t wait to hear it again, and in true W.W. Jacobs fashion, I soon got my wish fulfilled in a most unpleasant manner, where it seemed that nothing but “Centerfold” was being played 24/7 across the dial. The song soon devolved into audio wallpaper, heard but not listened to, familiar beyond contempt, with no personal resonance remaining outside of its role as a trigger for nostalgic reveries.

Eh, works for me…

The J. Geils Band – Centerfold (from Freeze Frame, 1981) – I’ve long since reached the point where I can recreate the song, note-perfect, from memory. So much so, in fact, that the real version now sounds a bit off to me.

…and for those of you who like to live life on the edge, within reasonably agreed upon limits established after weeks of intense consideration, here are two cover versions of the track – an outstanding southern-fried rendition by Hayseed Dixie and a very…Eurodance-y…Eurodance version by Captain Jack:

Hayseed Dixie – Centerfold (from Let There Be Rockgrass, 2002)

Captain Jack – Centerfold (from Party Warriors, 2002)