Ninety-five percent of the ping-pong I’ve played, I’ve played on a single table. The table is in the basement of my aunt and uncle’s house on Cape Cod, in the laundry room, and the house is great, and my aunt and uncle are great, but that laundry room…man. “Airless” really doesn’t begin to describe it; nary a molecule of fresh air has entered those linty precincts since the Nixon era, and anyone challenging a sibling to a best-of-five grudge-pong match will emerge not only disgustingly sweaty and coated in a fine layer of spider-web-related grime but also saying irony-less things like “sock it to me” and “groovy.” I believe there is a window down there, but nobody has ever attempted to open it, or even thought aloud that opening it is possible.

The table itself is hilariously terrible. In fact, all the “equipment” is pretty terrible, because the house is a rental property, and our fellow tenants must get really upset about ping-pong, because inevitably, my family arrives to find two paddles: one with half the handle split off, and the other with one side of grip missing and the other peeling off. Our fellow tenants do not believe in ball retrieval either, which has in the past necessitated the careful reshaping of that last mashed-in ball that Those Wiseacres Who Had The House Before Us stamped on in a fit of rage.

And we would play that way, every summer, and we still do, pouring sweat, coughing up chunks of dryer effluvium, honing shots based on the wood grain of the ping-pong paddle, arguing over who got The Good Side of the table. The table doesn’t have a good side, of course; it only has a side that’s less bad than the side closest to the door, because that side has a weird rash of bubbly bumps on the backhand side that skew the bounce. Also, it’s positioned directly under the bare bulb that “lights” the laundry room, leading to a number of no-contact flails at shadow balls while the real ball skips off the table and into one of the laundry room’s myriad disgusting and poorly lighted crannies, or behind the dryer, or into The Lair Of The Red Bike off to the left, there to prompt a volley of angry-homeowner squeaking from the mice whose dinner it interrupted. The Good Side has far fewer crannies, but for years featured an orange-tinged puddle of opaquely fetid water puked feebly up by the hot water heater, and if the ball rolled into it, we could either fish it out or we could go back to using the trapezoidal ball, so we always fished it out, usually by flipping it to the edge with the paddle and then rolling it along the floor to dry it off, picking it up with the very tips of our fingers, yelling “ew ew EW yellow fever YELLOW FEVER,” and serving as quickly as possible afterwards.

We didn’t have a table at home — nobody we knew at home had a table, either, so we loved that one like you do a really ugly child and we played on it every day for hours at a time. But it’s what I think prison ping-pong is probably like, except with a dirtier floor. And more cursing. Way more. My mother and I can hit the fishwife trifecta five times before we even finish warming up, because did I mention the myriad crannies? And how I feel about spiders? And what would happen if the ball rolled behind a door-sized board along the back wall that never got moved, and then stopped rolling exactly in the middle so you couldn’t use a five iron to poke it out, so you’d have to move the entire board, get a good look at the regiment of daddy longlegs, one of which had a teeny little hat on and rode a teeny little horse, the better to lead the arachnid cavalry up the leg of your shorts, and as a teeny little bugle played a teeny little “da da da DA da DAAAA — CHARGE!” you reached down and swiped at the ball, mummifying your arm in webs up to the elbow, and the ball rolled out and under the table and your opponent retrieved it while you danced around like Peter Gabriel at the end of the “Sledgehammer” video, except sped up and whipping your arm around to free it from the dusty web melding with your sweat and hardening into a cast? Because if you find yourself at my aunt and uncle’s house, reading a book in the living room, and you hear “ffffuuuuuuuu-uuuu-eeeeeeehhh-aiiieeeeeeeee-uuuu-UUUUUUU-yeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhh-ee!ee!eeeeeee!-aaahhhhhh-iiii-uck!”? The ball went behind the board. The ball went behind the board on Sarah’s side of the table, Sarah offered Mr. Stupidhead ten bucks to get it out for her, Mr. S wisely declined, and you know the rest, and ew.

In fact, you can tell exactly where the ball has gone, and on what shot, just by sitting in the living room and listening to the various howls and grunts wafting up the stairs. (Silence punctuated by thockety-thock-thock-ing means that Mr. S or I has endangered our father’s customary comfortable lead, and that Dad has begun grimly serving at Andy Roddick speeds and responding to compliments on his shots with “enough horsing around, let’s go.” I beat him once. One day they’ll make a movie about that hallowed bout.)

Usually, however, it sounds like a drunken chimpanzee convention down there (usually it is one, come to think of it), and most of the howling that isn’t non-verbal takes the form of the word “no.” “Oh, no” (player didn’t even hit table with return)…”no no no” (net straightened up all of a sudden and ate wicked forehand)…”nnnnn– [plek]” (player saw ball heading for face, failed to get out of way)…”No!” (opponent caught edge of table with wild shot)…and of course “nnnnooooooooo!” (ball has rolled into vermin lair undisturbed since ascendancy of Dexy’s Midnight Runners).

And then you’ve got the mirthless vow-of-destruction chortling; the gloating chuckle; the giggle/groan, happy to have won the point but sympathetic to the ball-retrieval issues the winning shot is now causing; and the guffawing punctuated by various pings, knocks, crashes, thumps, clatters, and bellows of “still in play, still in play, go go go!” (read: Mr. S and I just winging shots willy-nilly as hard as we can without regard for rules, table, or the threat of injury. Mr. S is still the reigning champ with a chip shot out of a bucket of water).

The less said about the accusations of cheating — which are neither few and far between nor lightly made in my family — the better. If a ball ricochets off the dryer, bounces up into the rafters, and lands in your cleavage, you still can (and, rest assured, will) be accused of “chiseling,” even though 1) you didn’t hit the ball, and 2) you lost the point anyway. You have a ball coated with typhoid fever and rodent poo nestled between your breasts for no reason that modern physics can explain, and yet you are the enemy of truth, justice, and rigorously correct ping-pong. You have no choice, then, but to serve as hard as you can into your opponent’s crotch without delay, or to pretend you see a roach and point in its phantom direction and then serve while your opponent is squinting into a shadowy corner, or to deliver a serve with so much spin that the ball corkscrews back towards the net and your opponent racks him- or herself on the corner of the table and begins keening in pain — not actual pain, mind you, but “feel sorry for me and serve it softly next time, thereby allowing me to take a giant wind-up and rocket the ball into your nostril” pain. Think you won’t fall for that? Think again. My brother is a quite a thespian. I can’t tell you how many times I truly believed he’d ruptured his scrotum, only to get a germosphere in the eye moments later, which is why I felt totally justified in tattling on him for refusing to honor a foot-fault call. Jerk.

The real tragedy in all this? I can’t play on “normal” ping-pong tables, because I can’t gauge the bounce. A nice new paddle feels all weird and heavy, and I can’t get any topspin. New ball? Too bright. Even net? Can’t handle it. And a game that isn’t interrupted seventy times to chase the trapezoid into a puddle of West Nile just plain goes by too fast. And I certainly can’t play with normal people, Lord knows. It’s a good thing I can’t fit a table in my apartment.

OR CAN I?

September 9, 2004

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