As a kid and teenager, growing up in East New York was an ongoing test of manliness or machoness.
I guess the start of things like this was the " I dare you to" or even better " I double dare you". So we did stuff , like shoot a rubber band at an old lady, steal a candy bar, squirt a water gun at someone, drop a water balloon on a persons head, or maybe set a field on fire.
We played games like "stretch" aka "land" , where you put your foot out , next to your friends' feet and throw your knife in the ground, trying not to hit the other guy's foot. Yes, we all had knives, and yes sometimes the knife hit someone's foot. A favorite game was called "chicken" or "chicken fights" we would be on our bikes ( 2 wheel bicycles) most often Schwinn Hornets or Roll Fasts with 26 inch wheels. We would set up like knights on horses jousting. Go full speed and possibly crash into the oncoming bike. Of course quite often someone would turn away or bail out, thus it was called chicken fight, since someone often chickened out.
We played games similar to dodge ball but with pink rubber ball , called poison ball. same rules as dodge ball , but the ball was small and came faster and harder. Sometimes we had " punk tests".
One of the things we did was put two people's arms together. Forearm against forearm. then someone dropped a lit cigarette between the two arms. The forearms of each participant of the punk test would heat up and start to burn. The winner would be the one who didn't pull away. The one who pulled his arm away because he couldn't take the heat , was the "punk". I still have the scar on my left forearm from a cigarette burn.
Basically, we were nuts. We even took a nickel and rubbed it hard on our arm, making our initials. Rubbing the skin until it bled, and it scabbed. when the seab came off you had a scar with your initials. I still have a slight remnant of that. it is unrecognizable but I remember it well.
There were other silly things we did, like walk on hot coals, play William Tell with various items from paper clips and rubber bands, to pea shooters, to BB guns. That was totally dumb.
Anyway, i'm still alive today to reminisce and talk about it.
Walking was another thing,,, Yeah , how you walked. we would practice until it was natural. We would walk with a "bop". Some would call it jitterbuggin'. You would walk in a rhytnic way, bouncing back and forth. Almost with a sort of limp. We would keep our heads down and our collars up. We thought it looked tough. The bop became just our natural walk , that made our parents' heads spin. I still have a little bit of a bop. Crazy stuff.
