Watching my son shooting baskets by himself yesterday, I realized how different his childhood is from my own. Dylan’s an only child; I had an older brother, my own personal torturer and private bodyguard, rolled into one. Moreover Dylan has also always lived in neighborhoods largely devoid of other kids; I grew up in a neighborhood teeming with like-minded, respectful hooligans.

Honestly, we didn’t get into much trouble—there always seemed to be a voice of reason among us who stepped up and took control just in the nick of time, just before any of us seriously crossed any lines. We were, however, an odd, large bunch who delighted in not-so-unintentionally terrorizing, by our sheer presence, the little old lady who loved her rose bushes more than the sound of children playing (she’d water them incessantly when we were nearby, as if a running garden hose could defend her prized flowers from our shenanigans, the errant kickball, or the high-flying phlegm produced solely for its disgust-inducing qualities). Although there were certainly peripheral characters who moved in and out of the neighborhood, the local mainstays were evenly divided by gender: among the girls, there was Gwenn, Dawna, Debbie and me; among the boys, there were the brothers from down the street, Eddie and Ottie, my brother, and the guy from next door, Joe.

We spent our days as a group, oftentimes engaging in rigorous athletic endeavors, fancying ourselves on the verge of our own professional careers. Swimming, football, tennis, kickball, basketball, butts-up and hot box were among the usual ways we chose to burn our daylight, but the absolute king of all activities was chase. And Joe was the King of Chase.

Now Joe, amongst our group, stood out. As a youngster, he had developed a very high fever, the result of which was brain damage. In the parlance of our youth, Joe was retarded. But mind you, he wasn’t our charity case; remember, we were big city kids on the edge of young adulthood—we weren’t exactly known for being generous of spirit or kind of heart. Rather, as kids who deeply valued sports and those who excelled at such, Joe was the coolest. He was the biggest, strongest, fastest among us, no matter that he was eight years older than we were…and was already shaving when we were still arguing with our parents to watch cartoons.

When it came to playing chase, no matter what the circumstances, Joe was It. Period. We weren’t taking advantage of him—he liked being It—it put him in the driver’s seat so to speak, giving him the right to run after us, at will, and if he so decided, to just fucking run. And run he did. He was tall, lean, muscular and fast and was simply a glorious athlete to watch when he ran. And he wasn’t quiet about it either. While the rest of us fantasized about being Julius Erving, Walter Payton or Chris Evert, Joe dreamed of being a fast race car, a fantasy that required of Joe to make the sound of shifting gears as he rounded corners, accelerated, or came in for a “pit stop” at the water spigot to “get some gas.” Sometimes he screeched his brakes too.

Joe did, however, have more to his life than dreaming of being a car. He loved Elvis, “Happy Days,” and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. We weren’t particularly fond of Elvis or “Happy Days,” but we certainly understood wanting the Bucs to win—we were all in agreement about that. But for the rest of us, during those early, “lean years” of our local team, it was a foregone conclusion that, if the Bucs suited up for a game, we could add another tick mark in the loss column. For Joe, however, those weekly losses caused a solemnity akin to bereavement. We didn’t laugh much about the race car fantasy, but his enduring loyalty to our hapless Buccaneers was a bit too much for us.

But I can’t really look back and claim that we assumed a sense of superiority in regards to him—we truly had no right to it. I mean, Joe got the best of us more than once. For instance, one Easter Sunday, after the neighborhood gang had completed the obligatory time with our families, all of us assembled at the usual meeting place, the Coyle household. We all had ventured outside with our baskets full of colored eggs. Not quite ready for the festivities to die down, we had decided to take turns hiding the eggs over and over and over and over. It was sure to be a game that would last for the entire afternoon.

We counted the eggs so that we knew exactly how many there were to find and then...we let Joe hide them first, thinking we could make him happy by allowing him the first turn at hiding them, a round of egg-finding that we expected to pass by rather quickly.

Joe sputtered all around the yard, both front and back, and then yelled to us that he was finished hiding the eggs. We flew off the front porch and started our search.

Now our initial assessment was that Joey wasn't a very good egg-hider. I mean, he just kind of put them in plain view—on the hoods of cars, on the window sills of the house, in the middle of the yard, etc--and we scrambled around rather quickly, finding all of the eggs...but one.

This was SO not cool. The guy who wanted to be a race car had stumped us. We weren't going to let him get one over on us by stumping us on one egg so early into our game...so we searched and searched and searched. But the game was beginning to be not so fun--we were getting hot, growing tired, and were becoming more and more frustrated and pissed.

After about an hour over of coming up empty-handed, we, one by one, conceded that Joey had gotten us good...that we couldn't find that last egg. In spite of our collective competitive spirit, we had to give up. With our heads hung low, choking on that bitter taste of defeat, we asked him to show us where that last egg had been hidden.

With a grin on his face, he led us to the backyard, where, in the center of the garden, my parents had a large rock. He pushed up against it and rocked it back and forth and back and forth until, finally, it rolled off the very flattened missing Easter egg. Joe couldn't have been more proud and we couldn't have laughed harder. We stopped playing at that point and declared Joe the best egg-hider ever...and never played again.

As for Joe now, he still lives in the same neighborhood, in the same house. I don’t know if he still plays chase, but he doesn’t seem to have changed much otherwise. In fact, I was in Tampa when the Bucs played in the SuperBowl a few years ago and, the morning after the game, while walking through the neighborhood, I met up with Joe. It was about 70 degrees that morning and Joe was wearing exactly what we’d expect of him, especially given the Bucs’ huge victory: a pair of jeans that were rolled up to expose his Buccaneers socks, a Bucs t-shirt over his Bucs sweatshirt topped by a Bucs windbreaker, and two Bucs caps. We chatted briefly about the game and then he shifted gears and went the other way.