This is what happens when you play table tennis at Transworld SURF … and lose. No, those are not bug bites or some sort of weird tropical rash. What happened to these unlucky young men? Let’s just say table tennis is a bloodsport at Transworld. Most of us have been playing for a while now, and eventually just winning alone wasn’t enough to sate our dysfunctional psyches. We were bored, so we upped the ante and started playing for money. That was more fun, but that eventually went sideways once a few people had racked up enough debt that it had to be collected the “hard way.”

So we stopped playing for money, and substituted it with beer, which was the best thing to happen here in a while. Suddenly there was a new determination in people’s forehand slams. People showed up to work early and stayed late to practice. Things got serious with the golden elixir on the line. And when you’d win, you got to pick the brand, so we’d always order the most expensive beer the “tweaker deli” down the street carried, just to make it that much more painful for the losers.

That was fun for a while, but it too grew kinda old. We needed a new prize to play for. The next logical step was physical pain, and that’s when we discovered the ultimate ping-pong wager: the back slap. It’s diabolical on a bunch of levels. This is how it works: the loser pulls his shirt up and turns around while the winner hits the pong ball as hard as he can at his opponents back. It was hard to hit people at first, but once we discovered the correct swing, hit percentages went way up and all hell broke loose. Ever since, we’ve been sending people home with welts that would make a social worker cringe. But it’s taken on a new level of power lately, and these two poor dudes got the brunt of it. Chris Cote’s victim is on the left (Ryan “ringworm” Brower) and my handiwork is on the right, on James  “spider bite” Tull’s back. Brower’s welts may look gnarlier, but it’s ‘cause he has fair skin. Note the hit percentage on “spider bite’s” back: four out of four. Either way, ouch.

There are a few people here who refuse to play for back slaps, whose names I won’t mention (Justin Cote). We think they are scared. They say they’re not down with the homoerotic punishment.  There’s probably some truth to both. At any rate, if you want to come play on the Transworld table, this is the going price. Unless you’re a lot better than us, then we’re going back to beer, and we’ll toast to that.