Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  “That’s a dollar, mister,” the policeman at the tollbooth said when we’d drove up and stopped. Pa had handed him seventy-five cents. “There’s four of you.”

  “She don’t count,” Pa said, pointing to Grandma. “She’s dead.”

  “Look, mister, quit the kiddin and fork over another quarter. There’s cars behind you.”

  But Pa wouldn’t pay for anyone he didn’t have to and the policeman finally got out of his booth and peered into the back seat, straight at Grandma. He looked at me too with a funny kind of smile, like he was half mad and half sick. I didn’t smile back at him, though, seeing the way he talked to Pa. The policeman, he got all excited, yellin’ at Pa and goin back and forth to the tollbooth, making telephone calls. My Pa and the policeman argued quite a bit, Pa standin’ his ground. He wouldn’t back down. Me, I looked out the back window at all the cars lined up behind us. They were honkin’ away and I felt pretty important, being in the car that was holding everything up.

  Ma just sat there and looked straight ahead. I guess she was proud of Pa, too. He sure did his damndest to save that quarter. He told the guy all kinds of reasons about how hearses didn’t pay and how if dead people counted, why weren’t they included in censuses, and then the policeman started talking about it being illegal to transport a dead body without a certificate. But Pa argued about that, too. He told him how it was his mother and he could do what he wanted with her, especially since what he wanted was only what she wanted him to do. He didn’t see how it was anybody else’s business. I agreed. Nobody’s gonna be able to tell me what to do with my Ma when she dies.

  Pa kept talkin’ to the man in the tollbooth and before long more police cars were there and we had to turn around and go to this little town a mile or two away and I stood around in this doctor’s waiting room while Pa kept insisting he was only letting them do it to save time (he didn’t flinch a bit when they spoke about being able to put him in jail for what he did). Ma stayed in the car. I tried to duck the first time a guy took a picture but the second flashbulb went off before I even saw the sneaky guy, and then when Pa had the certificate and they’d switched Grandma into a pine box and put her into the trunk they got another picture. If I knew it was gonna get into the papers that the kids from school’s parents read, I would of punched the guy.

  But the main thing was that we got away without Pa going to jail and that we got into Kentucky to Grandma’s funeral parlor before five o’clock. It wasn’t much of a funeral—just the three of us and an old friend of Grandpa’s who looked like he was at least a hundred years old and the minister and this nice old man who owned the parlor and give me some candy. I never saw Pa so serious. Ma neither. I guess she knew Pa done right.

  Even when the kids teased me and showed the picture around I didn’t mind too much, ’cause I remembered how proud Pa was all the way home. Kind of relaxed too—I haven’t seen him like that for a long time. He let me sit in the front seat and we stopped once outside of Greenfield and I had fried shrimp and a Coke and Pa kept winkin’ at Ma—not really smiling, but just proud, and repeating what he said to the policeman at the tollbooth the second time when he handed him seventy-five cents: that he guessed that was the right amount unless they were gonna stop the line again and look in the trunk.

  Pa was right. Nobody looked in the trunk.

  Ebbets Field

  EDDIE GOTTLIEB moved into my neighborhood in the fall of 1955 and I knew right away we were going to become pretty good friends. I was in the eighth grade then, at P.S. 92, and Eddie was brought into my official class about two weeks after school had started. At that time I was going through what my parents called one of my “growing periods”—always talking out in class, making some wiseacre remark, or doing something stupid to get attention, and for this I’d been rewarded with a seat right in front of the teacher’s desk, with nobody allowed to sit next to me.

  There were no other empty seats in the room, so when our teacher, Mrs. Demetri, told us that we were going to get a new boy in our class I figured he’d be sitting next to me. Our official class hadn’t changed much since first grade and it was always a big event when somebody new came into it. When I saw Eddie walk through the door behind Mr. Weiner, the assistant principal, though, my heart jumped. I could tell right away he was a good ballplayer. He was very tall and lanky—about six two then—with thick curly hair that reached down into the collar of his shirt. He sort of shuffled into the room, moving very slowly, his body swaying from side to side, his arms swinging freely. They were real long, coming down just about to his kneecaps. He kept staring at the floor, and when we all started laughing and giggling he must have thought we were laughing at him, because he blushed and fidgeted with his hands and feet a lot—what we were laughing at, though, was not the way Eddie looked but at the way he looked coming in behind Mr. Weiner, and I think Mr. Weiner knew it, because his face got red and angry. He was only about five foot one or two and when he walked he took huge steps, almost as if he were goose-stepping. At lunchtime we would always prance around the schoolyard or the lunchroom, mimicking him, and the teachers would never try very hard to make us stop. He was already at Mrs. Demetri’s desk, right in front of me, and Eddie was only a couple of steps away from the door when he whirled around and glared at him.

  “What’s taking you so long?” he demanded. “Come here!”

  Then, I remember, Eddie grinned broadly and in two giant steps he was in front of Mr. Weiner, towering over him, standing at attention, still grinning. We broke into hysterics. Mr. Weiner glared at us and we stopped. “Now, young man,” he said to Eddie, “wipe that grin off your face. What are you—some kind of gangling idiot?”

  Eddie shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  We laughed again and Mr. Weiner turned on us. “All right then. Who wants to be the first to have a private conference in my office today?” he asked.

  We shut up. Eddie was staring at the floor again. I could tell that he knew he had done something wrong—but it was obvious he didn’t know what it was.

  “What’s that in your pocket?” Mr. Weiner asked him, pointing.

  “A baseball.”

  “Let me see it.”

  Eddie put his lunchbag on my desk and twisted the ball out of his side pocket. He showed it to Mr. Weiner. When Mr. Weiner reached for it, though, Eddie pulled his hand away.

  “Let me have it,” Mr. Weiner demanded.

  “No,” Eddie said, and he put his hand behind his back, gripping the ball tightly. I could tell from the printing that it was an Official National League ball. It looked really beautiful!

  “I said let me have it!”

  Eddie shook his head sideways. “It’s mine,” he said. Everybody was perfectly quiet. I glanced across the room at Izzie and Corky and Louie. They were on the edges of their seats.

  “Young man, you will let me have it by the time I count three or I will know the reason why!”

  “Do you promise you’ll give it back?” Eddie asked.

  Mr. Weiner blinked. “Do I what—?”

  Eddie was looking at Mr. Weiner now, intently. “I gotta have it,” he said. “I just gotta! I never go anywhere without it.”

  “We do not allow hardball playing in this school.”

  Eddie grinned then, as if everything were okay, and brought the ball out from behind his back. “I didn’t know that,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He pushed the ball right in front of Mr. Weiner’s face. We all gasped and Mrs. Demetri took a step toward them. “See—?” Eddie said, smiling. “It’s got Campy’s signature on it.”

  “Who?”

  “Campy!” Eddie said.

  “Who, may I ask, is Campy?”

  “Campy—Roy Campanella—he catches for the Dodgers!” Eddie was excited now. “You know—”

  “Of course,” Mr. Weiner said. Then he smiled awkwardly. There was something about Eddie that had him mystified. You could tell. “Well, put that ball away and don’t bring it to school again,” he said. “T
his is your first day here, so I’ll excuse you. But there are no second chances with me. Remember that.”

  When he left, Mrs. Demetri introduced Eddie to us. I applauded and most of the guys followed my lead. Mrs. Demetri didn’t get too angry at me, though—in fact, after she gave Eddie the seat next to me, she put me in charge of getting him his books and making sure he knew where things were. Maybe she figured I’d be less trouble that way. At any rate, I was glad. The first thing I did was to ask him where he’d gotten the baseball.

  “I won it,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “On Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang.”

  “Really?”

  Eddie nodded and I nearly exploded out of my seat, I remember, wanting to tell all the guys. The Knothole Gang was this show they had on television then that came on before all the Dodger games. Three or four guys who played the same position would get together with Happy Felton and one of the Dodgers down the right-field line and they’d be tested on different things. Then, at the end, the Dodger would pick one of the guys as a winner and give the reasons he’d picked him.

  I asked Eddie a few more questions and then I began telling him about our baseball team, The Zodiacs. He said he’d read about us in Jimmy O’Brien’s column in the Brooklyn Eagle.

  “You got that good pitcher, don’t you—and that crazy kid who brings a victrola to the games and plays the Star-Spangled Banner on it—right?”

  “That’s Louie,” I said, pointing across the room. “He lives in my building. But we don’t have the pitcher any more. He’s in high school now. Izzie pitches for us most of the time this year.”

  We talked some more and I asked him if he wanted to play with us, as long as he was in our class now, and he said he’d love to, if we’d let him. Then I wrote out a note, telling all the guys that Eddie had won the baseball on Happy Felton’s show and that he’d agreed to play on our team, and I passed it across the room to Louie. His face lit up, and he passed it on to Corky. By the time we got into the yard for lunch that day, Eddie was a hero, and the guys all crowded around him, asking about what Campy had said to him and about what team he had played on before and things like that.

  I got to know Eddie pretty well during the next few weeks. He wasn’t very bright—this was pretty obvious the first time Mrs. Demetri called on him to read something—and he was very quiet, but he would have done anything for you if you were his friend. All the guys liked him and we were pretty happy he had moved into our neighborhood. He was the kind of guy you wished you had for a brother. His father had died a couple of years before, and until he moved he’d been living in Boro Park with his mother. He never talked much about her or his home or what it had been like living in Boro Park, but we all knew the most important thing—that his family was Orthodox. The first time one of us said something to him about making the big leagues some day, he shook his head and said that he didn’t think he ever would because he couldn’t play or travel on Saturdays. When we brought up the names of other Jewish ballplayers who’d played—Hank Greenberg, Cal Abrams, Sol Rogovin, Sid Gordon, Al Rosen—he said that they hadn’t come from families like his. He said it would kill his mother if any of his relatives ever found out about the things he did on Saturday—that he could hide most things as long as he wasn’t living near them, but if he ever got his picture in the papers for doing something on Saturday, they’d know about it.

  Eddie himself wasn’t very religious—he played ball with us at the Parade Grounds on Saturdays—but he was determined not to hurt his mother, and I guess I could understand why at the time. I knew she worked to support the two of them, and that Eddie felt pretty bad toward her about moving from their old neighborhood. I guess he felt she had moved because of him. Still, even though he may have felt obligated to her in a lot of ways, it didn’t stop him from wanting to be a big-league ballplayer. That was obvious.

  1955 was the year the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series, and Eddie came over to my house to watch the games on television. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guy get more excited than he did during the last game of that series. The Dodgers had one of their great teams then—Campy, Furillo, Robinson, Reese, Snider, Hodges, Newcombe, Erskine—but the heroes of that last game were two other guys, Sandy Amoros and Johnny Podres. When Amoros made his famous catch of Yogi Berra’s fly ball in the sixth inning and without hesitating turned and threw to Reese, who doubled up McDougald at first base, Eddie went wild. He couldn’t sit down after that. He just kept walking around the room, pounding guys on the back, shaking our hands, and repeating again and again: “Did you see that catch? Boy, did you see that catch?”

  We must have relived each inning of that series a hundred times during the rest of that year. I kept telling Eddie that since Podres—who had won the third and last games of the series—was only twenty-three years old, he’d still have plenty of years to pitch to Eddie when Eddie got to the Dodgers. Eddie always insisted it was an impossibility, but then Louie came up with another one of his bright ideas—if Eddie changed his name and grew a mustache some day, how would his relatives ever find out? Eddie liked the idea and that spring, for practice, Eddie used the name Johnny Campy when he played with our team.

  We played in the Ice Cream League at the Parade Grounds and we did pretty well, even though we didn’t win the championship. Eddie was fantastic. He batted over .400, was lightning on the bases, only made about two or three errors, threw out ten guys stealing, and did the one thing he did in no other place—he talked all the time. He’d be quiet until we got to the field, but the minute he put on his shin guards, protector, and mask, his mouth began moving a mile a minute, and he’d keep up the chatter the whole game. I loved to listen to him. “C’mon, Izzie babe,” he’d yell, crouched behind the plate. “Chuck it here, chuck it here. Plunk it home to Campy, honey babe. Show ’em how, show ’em how. Plunk it home to Campy! This batter’s just posin’ for pictures. Let’s go, babe. Plunk it home to Campy…”

  He was one of the greatest natural athletes I’ve ever seen—and not just in baseball, as we soon found out. Until he came to our school Izzie and I were generally considered the best basketball players of all the guys, but Eddie made us look like amateurs. We were only in the eighth grade then, but when we’d play in the schoolyard on weekends Eddie could hold his own with the high school and college boys.

  He was skinny and got banged around a lot under the boards, but he was the most fantastic leaper I’ve ever seen. Lots of times, even when he was boxed out, he’d just glide up in the air, over everybody else, and pluck the ball out of the sky with those big hands of his. He could dunk the ball with either hand.

  My parents knew how much I loved basketball and that summer, for the second straight year, they sent me to Camp Wanatoo, where Abe Goldstein, the Erasmus coach, was head counselor. I remember he got pretty upset when I told him that Eddie was supposed to go to Westinghouse—a vocational high school—instead of to Erasmus. Schoolyard reputations spread pretty fast in our neighborhood and he’d already heard about Eddie from a lot of the guys on his team. I explained to him about how Eddie’s grades weren’t too good, and about his mother.

  When I got back from camp and saw Eddie, the first thing he told me was that he’d decided to go to Erasmus. He said that Mr. Goldstein had visited him and promised him and his mother that Eddie would get through high school—and that he could get him a scholarship to college. We spent a lot of time that fall playing in the schoolyard together, and Eddie got better and better. He’d spent the summer in the city, working as a delivery boy and helper in his uncle’s butcher shop in Boro Park, and he’d developed a gorgeous fade-away jump shot that was impossible to stop. When we weren’t playing, we’d sit by the fence in the schoolyard and talk about the guys on the Erasmus team or about the Dodgers—and we’d have long debates on whether it was better to get a college education and then play pro basketball or to forget about college and take a big bonus from a major-league baseball team.


  That winter we played on a basketball team together in the Daily Mirror tournament and we probably would have won the championship, only in the big game for the Brooklyn title Eddie didn’t show up until the last quarter. He went wild then, putting in shots from crazy angles, rebounding like a madman, stealing the ball, and playing his heart out—but we were fifteen points behind when he arrived and when the clock ran out we were still down by four. For weeks afterwards you could hardly talk to him, he was so upset. All of us told him to forget it, that we understood about his mother getting sick and him having to stay with her until the doctor came, but he still felt he’d let us down.

  His mother got better, spring came, the baseball season started, and Eddie stopped coming to school almost completely. Any time the Dodgers were in town—except for the days our baseball team had a game or the afternoons he worked as a delivery boy for his uncle—Eddie would be at Ebbets Field. He was always trying to get me to come along with him, but I usually found one excuse or another not to. He kept telling me there was nothing to worry about. He said he knew somebody in the attendance office and that all we had to do was give him our programs and show up for homeroom period in the morning—the guy in the office would write in our names as absent on the sheets that went to the teachers whose classes we’d be cutting. He never seemed to get into any trouble and finally, in the middle of June, I told him I’d go with him.

  We made up to meet in front of Garfield’s Cafeteria, at the corner of Flatbush and Church, at 10:30, after second period. Eddie was there ahead of me and we got on the Flatbush Avenue bus and paid our fares. I kept looking around, expecting to see a teacher or a cop.

  “Just act normal,” Eddie told me. “And if anybody stops us, just put one of these on your head—” he reached into a pocket and pulled out two yamulkas—“and tell whoever asks you it’s a Jewish holiday and that we go to Yeshiva. That always works.”