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If you know about Brooklyn street games of the past but you weren’t there, you may think of stickball (a variation of baseball played with a broomstick and a pink ‘Spaldeen’ ball. Spaldeens were used in a lot of games: Chinese handball (also called Ace-King-Queen), Boxball, Penny Boxball (the object was to hit a penny with the Spaldeen), Stoopball (for those of you not fortunate enough to grow up in New York City, a stoop is the staircase that hangs off the front of a brownstone or other apartment building).

You may also have heard of Ringoleevio, a variation of tag that was played in Brooklyn for at least a century. In some parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, they played Skelly (also known as Skully), a game I know nothing about except that it involved bottlecaps. These games were relatively painless, except for the occasional Johnny-On-A-Pony injury. You might know “Johnny-On-A-Pony” as “Buck-Buck” if you’re from Philly, or “High Cockalorum” in the U.K. You may not know the game, which involves a bunch of kids jumping on the backs of other kids, at all. It doesn’t matter. It was fun and had nothing to do with bullying.

There were two games that Brooklyn bullies loved: Knucks and Salugee.

Let’s talk about bullying for a moment. It looks like bullying today is worse than it was back then - more relentless, more anonymous, if not more terrifying. I’m glad I’m not a kid today. I’m glad I’m not on social media today.

I remember the name of the first kid who ever bullied me: Wayne Sternberg. The Sternbergs lived in the same row of apartments as we did, over a group of retail stores on Kings Highway. Wayne and his bully-in-training brother Kenneth were three doors down. Kenneth was a six-year-old mook and probably grew up to be a great low-level henchman, but Wayne was the big bully. He saved the worst of his threats and intimidation for the halls of P.S. 215, which was otherwise a great experience.

In fourth grade, Wayne knocked me down in the school hallway, injuring my right elbow. I can still feel it sixty years later, especially when the weather is humid. My teacher caught him (thank you, Mrs. Chwast). She gave him hell, which he, of course, passed on to me. My mom went to talk to his mom, whose response was, “My son wouldn’t do that.”

I was screwed until they moved away.

Then there was a kid down the block named Chris who went to Sts. Simon and Jude Catholic School, where the nuns taught him that I was a Christ-killer. He somehow decided that the best service he could do for his Lord was to beat me up, which he did with gusto.

My mom told me that a) Chris was wrong and b) I was a wimp for ‘letting’ him beat me up.

For the record, I didn’t kill anybody. And at that time, the only time I’d heard the name Jesus Christ was when my dad hit his thumb with a hammer.

Bully #3: Ronald Finkelstein. Ronald wasn’t particularly tough, but his catchphrase, “You’re dead after school,” was scary. He said it to just about every boy in class and some of the girls, so none of us believed him. Still, he’d get that psycho look in his eye, so we all tried not to cross him. No matter what we did or didn’t do, he’d pick a kid, give him the crazed look and tell him that he was dead after school.

About ten years later, I saw an article in the Daily News: Ronald Finkelstein (yes, that one) was convicted of murdering two high school kids after school. Took him long enough.

Back to games.

Knucks was a card game, played with a standard 52-card deck. I don’t remember any of the rules - trauma will do that. The important thing to know about knucks was that, if you lost, the deck of cards was used as an implement of pain upon your fisted knuckles. The number of knucks you received was based on how many cards were left at the end of a hand. Depending on how many knucks you were to receive, you would either be rapped on the knuckles or have the edge of the deck brought down brutally upon the knuckles, or scraped across the knuckles.

It hurt.

Bullies liked knucks because they could hurt you without blame. You signed up for the pain. You agreed to play. You couldn’t complain, and you certainly couldn’t cry.

But knucks wasn’t the bully's favorite, because as long as you didn’t cry or cry out, there was no humiliation involved. For humiliation, there was Salugee (sah-loo’-jee).

Salugee required either more than one bully, or more likely a bully with multiple henchmen - actually henchboys. It was a ‘keep away’ game, like Monkey-In-The-Middle, but it was never voluntary, nor was it really a game.

The bullies would snatch something from the hapless target (me). A hat was optimal, but a yarmulke was even better: it was easy to grab, difficult to intercept, and if your bully was a gentile, it added a little anti-Semitic frisson.

The bully and henchbullies would toss the object among themselves while the hapless target (I) would try to regain it. Other kids in the schoolyard would stand around and laugh at the hapless target. Eventually, Mr. Hapless (moi) realized that the only way to win was to refuse to play, thereby boring the little gangsters into returning the object.

Salugee, like taking a beating, taught me that whining or begging or even saying please was blood in the water and guaranteed to make it worse.

It wasn’t until adulthood that I discovered a technique for dealing with bullies: unpredictability. Convince them that you’re crazy and that messing with you might be very dangerous.

On second thought, that might not have worked on Ronald Finkelstein.

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