Stoop Ball ‘59

A real-life poem.

3019 Ave W, Brooklyn NY. Sheepshead — Nostrand Projects. Didn’t look quite this refined back in the day. There used to be 3 steps or stoops.

“I got it,” Michael calls.
The pink ball rebounding high
and Brucie gives him room
as the waves of heat come off the stoop,
into the street
rising beyond the top floor
suspending the arcing ball.

Maybe he was distracted by the little colored girl’s crying
there were no blacks back then,
her light-skinned father, a detective we knew, stood on the curb,
sweating in his detective summer suit.
“You seen my son, Drew?”
No sir, nope, nah, not here choirs Stanley and Robbie and Brucie and me.

Michael turns, too,
but pivots to pick up the sky-high ball that,
falling through the steaming currents answers its inevitable call.

For every mother’s perfect son…
was it the heat, sweat, the colored girl or spherical physics that,
grazing his fingertips, the ball on its own course,
indifferent to Michael’s magic to make every play
bounces on?

The classic pink ‘Spaldeen” carried in every boy’s (and some girl’s) pockets in the fifties and sixties — and I’ll bet today still. We would go to the corner toy store and grab a handful and test them to see which one would bounce the highest and then buy it — 25 cents. This is the quintessential Brooklyn accouterment made so by ignoring the trademarked name of the manufacturer. Everyone called it a Spal-deen.

Stoopball is a substitute for baseball, played in a street, schoolyard, or other confined paved area, in which a ball is thrown forcibly against a stairway so that hits the edge of the step, rebounds into the air, bases and runs being awarded depending on the number of bounces the ball takes before being caught by the opposing player or team.