Freddogg Off The Chain

This is Good Friday morning in Sussex County Delaware the land of Wasps and Carpenter Bees where Catholic boys are a minority and no children are forced to go to their rooms from 12 to 3 in respect for the three hours Christ hung on the cross two thousand years ago.
But when I was growing up in row house Philly, in a German Catholic neighborhood, all children were banished to the upstairs back bedrooms to suffer a sort of penance on the way to the Sunday Easter basket.

I was always a broad and big kid but my older brother was a huge kid. I was smaller, quicker and more aggressive and could kick his ass for the first hour of full contact pillow fighting. But eventually, a tremendous thud would bring my mother into the room and she’d yell at my brother, ”Tommy, I told you not to throw David into the wall.”

It wasn’t just that I got in more pillow whacks but also the psychological assault I unleashed calling him foul names the best a five year old could summon, things like, “fat fucking dick head” and my brother was bound by holiness as I never heard him utter a profane word ever, not then, not now.

When the clock chimed three, doors opened up and down the block, and kids raced into the street. The urban Olympics games began .There were Wire Ball games, Baby in the Air, Half Ball, Chink, Hose Ball and the Philly game popularized to the rest of the country by Bill Cosby, Buck-Buck.

I liked to sit on the wall down by the corner bar and make fun of drunks on the way out. “Hey, fat fucking dick head” and I would run and I learned that if you call someone a “fat fucking dick head” they will try to kill you and you have your own high stakes game of Chase afoot and you don’t have to recruit players.

There is no good way to end this treatise without being offensive in a sacrilegious sort of way but if someone had the courage to call Pontius Pilot a “fat fucking dick head” the resulting throw down would have changed the history on modern day mankind.

Peace

Father Freddogg