There were two sets of brothers that made up the core of our group. The Stoners; a set of twins, Carey and Corey and their older brother, Brandon, who everyone simply called “Bubba.” He may have even signed his name that way, for all I know. There was also Tyler and Travis, who were half-brothers. Bringing up the rear was me. I was the “runt,” since I was at least 3-4 years younger than everyone else.

These guys put me in near-death situations more than one would think was physically possible for a simple, rambunctious group of country kids. There were the nighttime football game (full-tackle) under a single yard-light in the Stoners’ yard. In the middle of winter, bottle-rocket wars at night in the woods (which I’ll describe in detail later), and a plethora of other activities that, in retrospect, ranged from stupid to suicidal.

Another game we would play was basketball. The Stoners lived on an old farmstead, with all of the outbuildings, including a decrepit, six-story grain elevator. In their quonset, we cleaned out a rough semi-circle, moving all of the old truck parts and rusted, twisted junk just enough to spray paint a three-point line. We played in the summer, in the spring, in the fall and yes, even in the middle of winter. Turn on the old gigantic space-heater they kept in there and let it run for about a half hour and we’d be sweating about halfway through the first game.

Since I was the runt, it was up to me to do the little things to justify my existence. This included everything from running to the house to get Gatorade in the freezing cold to learning to throw a perfect alley-oop for a monster dunk. The rim was 9 feet at most, and it was abused it so much that we frequently had to stop the game to re-bolt the thing to the backboard and occasionally re-weld some of the joints. Unable to dunk, I hustled for loose balls, dished out assists instead of taking my own shots and was basically a pest.

In the middle of a hotly contested game, the ball took an awkward bounce and headed out-of-bounds. I dove to save it.

The next thing I remember is waking up with a splitting headache to the muffled sounds of the game still going on. When I dove for the ball, I collided headfirst with an anvil. It was one of those old-school blacksmith’s anvils, too. So picture me, horizontal in the air, eyes fixated on the basketball, colliding with a big, rusty anvil and falling in a pile to the ground. It has a bit of a Wiley E. Coyote feel to it, doesn’t it? The guys said that they rushed over to see if I was okay, and, after seeing that I wasn’t bleeding and was still breathing, they dragged me off the court, laid me on a pile of jackets and continued with the game. I thanked them for their concern.

To this day, I have a dent in the left side of my head and a excessive fear of big hunks of forged steel.