Remember when you were a kid, and you used to play Slug
Bug? You’d be going somewhere in the
family car, and you and your siblings or friends would be watching the road
like hawks from the back seat. As soon
as you saw a Volkswagen Beetle, you’d lean back and WHAM! let your neighbor have it by punching them in the arm,
shoulder, ribs, neck, or wherever you thought you could inflict the most damage
(aside from the obvious). In our family’s
version of Slug Bug, if the person made a sound while being hit, you got to hit
them again. I don’t know how many times we’d
start a game of Slug Bug, and some time later I would find myself waking up in
the waiting room of the local hospital.
Man, little sisters can be vicious.
I don’t know why, but for some reason Slug Bug only worked
when you were in a car. Inside a car,
belting someone for being the first to see a Beetle was fine; outside a car, it
was considered assault and battery. I
think even the hospital workers understood this. When they found out that I had been beaten
unconscious in the back seat during a game of Slug Bug, they’d just nod
knowingly and tear up the child abuse reporting form they were filling out.
Remember how prolific the VW Bug used to be? Yet, despite the German zest for the, shall
we say…autocratic, they were never
considered the king of the road. Despite
their lineage, Beetles just weren’t big enough, intimidating enough, or all-around
serious enough for that. No, the Beetle
was all about mob rule, but of a decidedly friendly sort. As a kid, peering out the car window at a
cluster of Beetles surrounding you was like being licked to death by a dog; that
is, provided there was no one wailing on you mercilessly at the time.
In 1977 Volkswagen stopped selling Beetles in the U.S., and I think the game of Slug Bug gradually went
dormant as the vehicles that once swarmed America’s streets, parking lots,
and highways slowly dwindled. Or maybe I
just grew out of it. Hard to know for
sure.
Of course, Volkswagen revived the Beetle in the late 90’s,
and several years ago, my daughter introduced me to a game she learned from
some of her school friends called Buggy Punch.
She patiently explained the rules in the car one day, after suddenly
exclaiming “Buggy Punch!” and hitting me on the back of my head. I listened as though it were all new to me,
while simultaneously fighting off panic-filled flashbacks to my childhood.