The Laguna Street War
How one marble sparked a conflict that spanned generations.
Playing marbles was high stakes in the neighborhood. You were forced to walk a tightrope of fear between pride and greed. We wandered around the greenways and sidewalks looking for plots of dirt to craft elaborate game areas. The drama played out within the borders of a large circle filled with advantageous plateaus, valleys of death, and winding pathways of chance.
You brought your bag of aggies, steelys, and cat’s-eyes. What you pulled out said something about you. It was a game governed by provocation and superstition. Over time, you rose and fell through the ranks, judged by how many and whose marbles you had.
And then everything changed.
A Vietnamese family moved into a house at the end of the street. There were 5 brothers in the family. One day, as we played on the corner near their house, they came out to join us. They couldn’t speak English, but we understood by their gestures and body language they wanted to play. We happily widened the circle to make room.
The oldest brother pulled a marble from his pocket. Not a bag of marbles, just one marble.
We used a traditional ‘knuckle-down’ technique. You placed your fist on the ground and cradled the marble between the tip of your thumb and crook of your index finger. You launched the marble by flicking your thumb, no ‘fudgies’. This kid did something we had never seen before.
He placed his left hand palm down. Using his right hand, he pulled back on the middle finger of his left hand, placed the marble on the tip, and released. It was a ping heard round the world, followed by a collective gasp. He shot from the outside boundary, which was custom for entry, and cleared a distance, through the air, of about 2 feet. He picked up his newly won marble and reoriented for his next shot. He ran the board. Round after round, shot after shot, he never missed. We eventually retreated, preserving what few marbles we had left.
So the Age of Marbles ended and a new age dawned, the Age of War.
It started with rubber bands, and then rubber band guns. The first gun was a foot long piece of board with a clothespin strapped down with more rubber bands. This created enough tension on the clothespin to hold one end of the rubber band in place, while the other end was secured around the tip of the board. You pressed down on the working end of the clothespin. Voila, the rubber band takes someone’s eye out.
We would attack the kids at the end of the street and they would defend from behind the wooden walls of their backyard. A simple and fun game. But Man’s quest for victory tears down more than walls made of wood, it tears down walls made of shame and decency.
We constructed longer guns, rifles, which could launch a daisy chain of three rubber bands, with greater distance and more pain. Eventually, we branched into a primitive form of chemical warfare. We filled old lightbulbs with dirt and fire ants, lobbing the grenades over the fence at one another. The combination of broken glass and angry ants was devastating.
The arms race culminated in the construction of an unholy war machine. We stole a large shopping cart. Not the wire frame ones you get at the grocery store, but the thick steel framed ones you get at home and hardware superstores. We secured sheets of plywood on the outside of the frame. From inside, we could ‘Fred Flintstone’ all the way to the fence, under fire, without taking casualties.
We rammed the gate. Back and forth we rolled until we broke through. Once inside the backyard we could fire upon our enemy with impunity, through the gaps between the armor plating.
They surrendered, and we accepted their surrender, gracious in victory.
Then their parents came out. I don’t know what they were screaming, but they were mad. Probably because we just broke the gate of their fence. We retreated to a parking garage across the street, along with our new found Vietnamese brethren. We forged a new alliance around a common threat. The Age of the Angry Vietnamese Parent was upon us.
