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Sewer Balls | Mar 11 2002

I can remember two sewers. Three. There may have been more. The only one that mattered was the one in front of the house where the guy who washed his car all the time lived. A lot of balls went down that particular sewer because it was behind home plate when we played on the long field.

So at some point we stopped using new balls and only played with “sewer balls,” as we called them—balls fished from the sewer with a rake. Not a wooden rake; a metal rake: the kind with curved metal tongs on the end.

The hard part was getting the lid off the manhole. It had a slot on one side for you to slip two fingers under. One person would lift and another would grab the lid with two hands and slide it to the side. Before dropping the lid, you had to be damn sure to get your hands out.

The balls were tennis balls and pimple balls and sponge balls.

I did the fishing, since it was my rake.

I’d fish out fifteen, twenty balls at a time, and leave them overnight in a bucket of hot water and bleach. The next day I’d rinse the balls several times, stomp on each for a minute or so, and lay them on my lawn to dry.

Afterwards the balls still smelled like the sewer, but less so. Those were the balls we played with.