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The Diarrhea Debacle I couldn’t get home fast enough. Diarrhea ran down my leg like someone opened the floodgates on the Hoover Dam. With every push on my bike’s pedals, my ass exploded with atomic force. The quicker I went, the more disgusting a display I became. I wasn’t the only one either. Behind me, at varying distances, were another dozen kids suffering the same malady. The root cause of this catastrophe was baseball. Our entire lives were centered on it in the summer. Every day of the week, except Sunday, all the neighborhood kids would assemble at noon at the local schoolyard for a game of baseball. Sometimes kids from other neighborhoods would show up to play us, but most of the time it was just us sharpening our skills. We had some real players too. First, there was Hank O’Riely, we called him O’Henry. That kid could hit anything. Low and inside, high and outside, or right down the middle; it didn’t matter where you put the ball, Hank would cream it. Then there was Ron Dodge, Ronnie the Rocket. That kid was fast, super human fast. One time, Ron hit a pop fly to shallow center field. By the time the ball dropped, he was on his way to second, and by the time the centerfielder tossed the ball to the second baseman, Ron was firmly planted at third base. We were known as the 72nd Street Brigade. We got the name from a poem I had read once. All of us lived on 72nd Street in Kenosha Wisconsin and five of us were cousins. My four cousins and I lived on 44th Avenue, an offshoot of 72nd Street. 44th Avenue was a dead-end hill. Both sides of the hill were lined with nine or ten houses, and all the families living there were related one way or another. Nobody in this neighborhood ever knocked. On the day of the diarrhea disaster we had a big game planned. A group of kids from Prairie Lane School had challenged us to the summer championship. We hated these guys. They were always copying us. Our group made our own baseball jerseys with white t-shirts and black paint. All the shirts had 72nd Street Brigade and the player’s number painted on the back.
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