I lost both my hips. Their decline was due to poor genetic lotto and a thousand games played on concrete and asphalt. One stood out: Johnny on the Pony, a game of immense endurance and stupidity.
The game’s strategy involved one team (“The Pony”) forming a long bent-over row like a Chinese New Year’s dragon, while the other team tried to collapse the pony by jumping on it as hard as possible. The pony started with one guy against a fence facing everyone else. He was the anchor. The next fellow would bend over and grip the anchor’s sides with his butt in the air. All others would follow suit till the line resembled Hannibal’s elephants stumbling over the Alps. Once the line formed, the “Johnnies” would begin to strategize. The game usually had at least ten players on each side, so ten Johnnies got ready to put their weight and flaring elbows on top of the prone pony. The game ended when either the pony collapsed or all of the Johnnies successfully rode the pony without falling off for a count of ten one-thousands.
The Johnnies usually sent their smallest first and they shimmied up the pony towards the anchor. Then they sent their largest and aimed for the weakest links. The best area to target was a no man’s land between the thoracic and lumbar regions and drive yourself straight into the bone. Attention was paid to developing jumping technique. Since each team had ten or more players, the weakest link might be bent over way up front. Therefore, you wanted to attain maximum height and distance. We studied television cartoons and tried to learn the secrets of freezing in the air for a few seconds at the top of an arc—this was critical in order to allow gravity to pull your body back to the earth and maximize the impact into your opponent’s neck and back. Once you landed, you would make grapes with your heinie—making big rocks into little rocks, grinding away at the millstone, pushing your butt into the fellow beneath you as if a single remaining air bubble between you and him would bring life as we know it to an end.
As the pile grew, the moans and groans of the pony filled the air like a children’s orchestra at their first practice. From the top of the mountain, the noise below played in your head like a beautiful siren song. If it was a particularly strong pony, the Johnnies used the Tower of Babel strategy. With less than three jumpers in the shoot, all the Johnnies would begin to gather at one location in the chain, usually over the person who could use the most relief. Once the spot was chosen, the Johnnies would gravitate to that point and assume classic Greco-Roman moves to cling together. The tower would rise at the perceived weak spot. Unintelligible orders and exclamations flew out of this ball of humans braying and swaying like a deranged fire hose, while underneath the pony started behaving like a band of rogue elephants preparing to stampede a defenseless village.
Non-participants played a recurring game during the “Tower of Babel” too: grabbing fragments of sound out of the pile and convincing others it was English. “I understood that one! It was Freddy and he said, ‘Christ, get off my foot and stop grabbing my balls.’”
The tug of war would roll on until the pony broke, or the Johnnies rode the pony for the required time. It was hard to watch and not play, but if you did, you were rewarded with a show that combined all the best elements of a tragic ballet with a terrific car accident. A collapse was a beautiful kaleidoscope for your five senses, rich in complex detail. I imagine Sam Peckinpah would not have developed his keen eye for transfixing violence into a sumptuous slow motion dance unless he witnessed a bunch of Johnny on the Pony game-ending collapses.
For my hips, this game had the same allure as open-battlefield surgery without anesthesia. Would I do it again? Absolutely.
Matthew Brady set up his equipment and took photographic stills of our events.
Thomas Pryor has been featured on A Prairie Home Companion and This American Life, and his work has appeared in the New York Times. He curates City Stories: Stoops to Nuts, a storytelling show at the Cornelia Street Café on the second Tuesday of the month (next one June 12th). Check out his blog Yorkville: Stoops to Nuts.
