As a rule, I like to avoid nostalgia. As people get older, they tend to look back and often see the past as better than the present.

Yesterday always seems better than today, some people believe. Not me.

Nostalgia is a trap. Beware of the good old days, they quite often were not very good.

I do look back sometimes around New Year’s, the past looms up a bit, and I sometimes fall into the trap and review my life. There is, in fact, some good stuff back there.

Somebody asked me the other day what the best job in my life was, and I never have to think about it.  It was my two seasons as a Dunk’EmClown on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City.

It was in the 1960s, I was the one who got dumped into the water (in this case the ocean) if somebody threw a ball that hit a bullseye right next to the chair I was sitting in.

If the ball hit the bullseye, a gong sounded, a trap beneath me opened (by Jimmy, the proprietor), and I was dumped down 10 or 15 feet into the ocean, making sure to hold my nose and also watching out to make sure no big waves threw me into a wooden piling.

Jimmy, who ran the Dunking Game and traveled the carnival and circus circuit then, said there had been a lot of scraped shoulders and legs and a broken arm or two.

The game had a high turnover, Dunkem’Clowns didn’t stay long. I couldn’t understand why. It was the perfect job.

The money was good, I got paid $10 a day plus tips, which was pretty good for a summer job (my family moved to Atlantic City when I was a junior in high school). There were plenty of great summer jobs on the Boardwalk, this one was the best in my mind.

I was a table-clearer at Woolworth’s for a few months, then I ran a BB rifle range that shot at rubber ducks, but my favorite job came when I took a job as a Dunk’EmClown.

I have no doubt this job would be illegal today anywhere in the country but things were looser then and lawsuits were unheard of by anyone but rich people.

My job had two parts. One was to go out on the Boardwalk and wait for young couples in love to stroll by. I would look for the big and macho men, especially those in wife-beater (as we called them then) sleeveless T-shirts.

I hate bullies and can smell them a mile away. I always looked for bullies.

“Hey, pal, I would yell, “don’t you want to win your girl a big prize, a giant teddy or cuddly bear?” If they didn’t respond, I would call them names to provoke them and ding their pride.

It worked about 95 percent of the time and I only got slugged once, I wasn’t fast enough.

At the Dunking Ride, Jimmy had a dozen big and beautiful teddy bears lined up in the prize row. I don’t think I ever saw one of them leave the Pier, the prizes he gave away were from boxes imported from Mexico behind the Dunking Chair, they were small and cheap rubber birds and cats.

The big Teddy Bears were ringers, lures.

For that matter, the game itself was rigged.

Jimmy stood next to the lever he pushed when he wanted me dumped, it really had nothing to do with the aim of the thrower. He pulled the lever often enough to keep people interested but not so often it would cost him a lot of money.

The cheap little figures he gave out cost him a penny apiece, he told me proudly. The Pier was magical, a cacophony of music, organ sounds, popcorn, and cotton candy smells, flashing lights, crowds,  laughter, and screams from the roller coaster.

Once the man I taunted got inside and lined up to dunk me in front of their girlfriends, I would continue to taunt them – suggesting they were cowards and sissies and laughing at their hair or calling them losers. That made them crazy and made a lot of money for Jimmy.

Some of them would try to dunk me several times or failing that, just throw the balls at me.

The ones I taunted would sometimes only throw the ball at me, not the metal target. They didn’t care if I got dunked.

That stung. Jimmy would scold the offenders, but not very seriously. They would buy a lot of balls as the girls blushed and sighed. I got dunked from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. when the Pier closed.

My costume was cold cream and white powder on my face, make-up that Jimmy applied around my eyes, and a big clown hat. We got two free clown hats a week and had to pay ourselves for any others lost in the ocean when I was dunked.

I used diving flippers with towels wrapped around them for clown shoes. There was usually another Dunk’Em clown but we were both too busy to get to know each other.

I had red-eye all summer.

When I got dunked, I’d swim to a ladder hanging down and just climb back up. I bought a bike with the money I made, and on break, I would sit out on the Boardwalk and watch the parade, especially the girls. My job had some status – the girls thought I was brave – and they were a fringe benefit.

On breaks and after work, I would usually hang out with Dane, a gypsy kid whose fortune-telling mother had a booth next door. Jimmy warned me about the gypsies in the booth: “they would steal the clothes right of you while you sat there.” I told him he was stereotyping people, something I had been taught not to do.

He was not persuaded.

So, I thought but didn’t say, aren’t we thieves in our own right?

We were cheating people, I knew, but I also knew people loved the Pier and had fun playing the games and shrieked with joy when I got dunked. Nobody got hurt much, except me.

It cost a nickel for three balls. W.C. Fields began his career as a Dunking Clown two booths down from Jimmy’s and 30 years earlier.

I always made it a point to tell shocked and puzzled future employers that I got my first job in the same place W.C. Field’s got his – getting dunked into the ocean. Somehow, I figured this was good preparation for journalism.

Fields, FYI, is a hero of mine, ever since I learned that when he got drunk, which was every night, he would row out in his boat on Lake Tahoe in Nevada (his home) and try to clobber the resident swans, who he despised, with an oar.

It turned out that they were much more agile than he was and often jumped into the boat to bite him on his bulbous nose.

I was proud of my job. Dane told me his job – he was also 16 – was to wait under a floorboard until somebody was getting his fortune told by his mother in the darkened booth which had loud music playing during the seance.

He would open the trap, reach up and pick the wallet of the mark’s back pocket (men always had their wallets in their back pocket, he said.) He’d go through the wallet, take out any cash, and then put the wallet back. He said it was easy, and he timed the pickpocketing to the music and the darkness.

People usually didn’t miss the money until they got home or bought a hot dog, and they rarely connected it to the gypsy booth. If they did, his mother would call the police, who she paid money to every week, and they would say there was no evidence here, just move along.

I liked Dane very much, he was my best friend all summer, we both were learning to develop a flexible morality.  I slowly absorbed the view of some of the carny gypsies – everyone was a target, a mark, it made both of us feel strong.

I also felt strong teasing the big strong guys who usually teased me. At the Steep Pier, I was confident and wily. I knew I could handle myself.

Our friendship didn’t last, Dane’s mother forbid him to hang around with Gadjos or Gorgers.  The latter, he told me, was a derogatory term for ordinary people who live in houses, and eat too much and buy too many things.

I was a Gorger, no matter how much fun we had together. Dane had a wicked sense of humor and told great stories about his gypsy life. He was fascinated to know how “ordinary” people like me lived. At times, I thought we each wanted to be the other.

Gypsies lived simply then, and maybe now, in trailers and saved most of what they earned.

As for my parents, they wouldn’t let Dane into our house, not even for a snack. We were worlds apart but didn’t know it.

On Labor Day, when the pier closed and we had to get on with our other lives, Dane and I went to Woolworth’s for a farewell dinner together. We couldn’t tell our parents.

His family was heading down to Florida where his mother had a booth in Daytona Beach.

Dane loved his time at the Pier, as I did, and hated the rest of his life, as I did.

Dane’s family were always on the move if they got a good spot in a circus or carnival. I looked for Dane the next summer, my second and last job as a Dunk’EmClown, but his family wasn’t there and I never saw him again.

The job taught me a lot. My flexible morality worked well for me when I became a reporter, I had no qualms about stealing the photos of murdered or slain children off of fireplace mantle so we could have a picture for the paper.

The Steel Pier, long demolished, was a mystical place – trapeze artists, gypsies, diving horses, junk food, sugared pretzels, bearded ladies, giant men, lobster boys, pretzel girls, midgets, four-legged ladies, Ferris wheels, and roller coasters.

I don’t mourn the past, but I do wonder sometimes if we haven’t destroyed all of the magic. Does it seem magical to me because I was so young, or was it magical in a way we simply don’t make room for in our distracted lives?

I am so glad there was no gaming or TikTok or Instagram them, I would never have made my way to Jimmy’s booth and been hired as a Dunk’Em Clown.

We were slightly corrupt, but never greedy or violent, we never went too far, depending on how you look at it. I would never have made so wondrous a range of people if not for that job, and I never think of my time as a Dunk’EmClown without smiling. Nostalgia is a trap, but if I could go back in time for anything, it would be to sit in that bucket and wait to get dunked.

At home, I was a weird and lonely nerd, still wetting my bed and hating every minute of my life. On the Steel Pier, I was transformed, I learned that life has all kinds of amazing possibilities if you only have the drive and the will to go find them.

I liked Jimmy, even though he asked me only one question in the time I knew him: “can you swim?”

I felt strong taunted those big guys and handling all those dunks, I was a star, the center of a small and strange universe.

When I quit for the last time, Jimmy gave me one of those giant brown bears, “give it to our girlfriend if you ever get one,” he said. “They just love’em. You can come back anytime.”

I never saw him again either.

I was never so proud.