Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Come quietly, kid, and we won’t hurt you,” they say.

  “C’mon!” says Sam.

  I look at Carlos, my friend. “Good luck—” I call. Just as the police go for him, he turns and tosses me his briefcase. “The diagrams!” he yells, and then he has slipped between them and is running like a maniac, in circles, screeching Spanish. Sam and I leave, satchels in both my hands. The police open the door to the courtyard, but Carlos throws himself between their legs. We hurry down and journey through a network of cellars, making our way to freedom.

  At night I confer with the man who protects the rights of the Puerto Rican people. He is my friend, and he says he will represent Carlos. Jail, he believes, cannot be avoided. I have my own idea, though, and we discuss it. Instructions are sent to Carlos.

  In court, Carlos’ teacher testifies that he is truly a C.R.M.D., Carlos attacks the court psychiatrist, he sings dirty Spanish songs while the judge speaks, his grandmother tells of a home with ten children and no father, and the man who protects the rights of the Puerto Rican people makes an eloquent speech about sickness instead of sin, help instead of punishment.

  The plan works. Carlos is sent to a state hospital. The hospital is far away on Long Island and Sam and I travel there on Sunday afternoon when all the other families come, their shopping bags filled with food and clothing, their eyes glazed. Carlos is happy to see us, but he cannot shake our hands. He is tied in a strait-jacket. Around us the other patients and visitors communicate with each other. All the attendants are Negro and Puerto Rican and Carlos says they take special care of him. He asks how the election is going and we tell him that his heroic act has made our victory certain. He asks me what he should do to stay out of jail and I look at the strait-jacket and I tell him he is doing fine. I ask him if he wants anything. He says he wants to return to Puerto Rico.

  We go back to the city in the hot subway. Everybody is out on my street. They ask me about Carlos. Children are playing with the garbage, the men are drinking beer, and music fills the air. Everybody is talking about Mr. Sanchez, who threw his baby against the wall that afternoon. The police have taken him away. Carmen’s big sister, her hair bleached a crazy pink color, comes switching down the street, looking for business. It is too hot. Everybody is sweaty and greasy. Under a lamppost she comes to me. “When you get some money, kid,” she says, “I be your first. Okay? I give you a good time.”

  “Carmen gives it to me for nothing,” I say. “She gives it to everybody for free.”

  She curses me and says she will kill Carmen. I go home but I roll around on my bed in the hot room and I cannot sleep. On the next visiting day I see that Carlos is changing. He does not smile. His eyes are almost closed, his neck is stiff. We tell him that we will wait until he comes out to have the victory party. He does not listen. He says that if he cannot go back to Puerto Rico he will stay in the hospital. He says it is not so bad in the hospital. It is like C.R.M.D.

  “I stay here a long time,” Carlos says. “I getting to like it here.”

  The next Sunday we come with good news. We have won the election.

  “Hector had it figured right,” Sam says. “It was a landslide.”

  “Now we wait for you to return,” I say. “So that we can have the victory party.”

  “If I get out, I kill Carmen,” he says. “I tell my doctor that.”

  I talk to him about the party we are going to make—the food, the music, the girls. “We got you to thank for being where we are,” Sam says.

  “I din do nothing,” Carlos says. We keep talking to him, building his confidence, telling him what we feel. I speak to one of the Spanish attendants and point out to him how calm Carlos has become.

  “Carlos,” I say. “If you say you will not make trouble, Mr. Garcia will take the jacket off.”

  “I no make trouble.”

  The jacket comes off, but Carlos continues to sulk, and I have little hope for him. He talks of only two things, the return to Puerto Rico and the murder of Carmen. When we are ready to leave, he asks if we will do his laundry for him and we say yes. He goes to his room and returns with a bundle of clothes. When we leave him, his eyes are almost shut, his thin body stiff, and I wonder if I do the right thing. Maybe he be better off in jail.

  “Tomorrow in assembly they swear us in,” Sam says when we are standing at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 8oth Street. Downstairs in the basement my people are singing with Pastor Ayala. The neon lights blink on and off:

  IGLESIA DE CRISTO MISIONERA

  VIDA ETERNA, INC.

  The sound of electric guitars and tambourines fills me with joy.

  “Yes,” I say, and finger my medallion. The music is fierce.

  “It’s really something,” Sam says. “We have what we want—but with Carl where he is, it doesn’t seem to matter, does it?”

  “No,” I say.

  Carmen is standing against a building, in the shadows, alone. She comes to me and I spit. “Go walk the streets,” I say. “Like your sister.”

  “Hector,” she pleads. “I am sorry. Forgive me—”

  Sam slaps her. “Your mother sniffs bicycle seats,” he says.

  “Please,” says Carmen, but I turn my back on her. She walks away from us, slowly. I feel something for her—but it passes. Her old friends exit from the church and shun her. They say they have prayed for Carlos. Rafaela says she sends candy and cards to the hospital. Everybody wants to visit him. I look beyond our circle of friends and see Carmen fade into the lights and noise of Columbus Avenue, heading uptown toward Harlem, las tetas grandes drooping toward the ground.

  Sam and I shake hands. “Some day,” he says. “You and me, we’re gonna own this city, Hector.”

  “We will always be friends,” I say.

  We leave each other and I carry Carlos’ laundry over my shoulder, into my apartment. My grandmother says she will take care of it. She has food ready for me and we eat together, without talking. Then I go to my room and try to do homework, but I can think only of Carlos my friend, and of the party that cannot be until he returns. I open the bundle of laundry on my bed, separating the socks from the underwear, the shirts from the handkerchiefs, and then I see it. My heart leaps! I grab it and hold it in front of me, then turn it around. The lettering is stamped in black: PROPERTY OF N.Y. STATE—Carlos has sent his strait-jacket home!

  I stuff it under my shirt and run down the stairs, into the hot street, waving my hand to all I pass. “Carlos will return!” I shout to the girls on the corner. “Carlos will return!” I cross Columbus Avenue and race toward Sam’s house on Central Park West. In my mind I can see Carlos’ sulky face as he sees me discovering what he has done, and I know that he will sleep happy tonight, a sheepish smile next to his pillow.

  Sam is hysterical when I show the strait-jacket to him, and we tie each other into it and laugh and talk of the party we will have when Carlos returns. “We will show them something, Mr. President,” I say. “Oh, how we will show them something.” And then, with devil’s eyes, the president glances at the closet where the briefcases are hidden, and offers his vice-president a cigar.

  Something Is Rotten in the Borough of Brooklyn

  IN 1951 when the first set of basketball scandals broke, Izzie and I were too young to be much interested. We were in the third grade then, at P.S. 92 in Brooklyn, and in those days basketball seemed far less important than lighting fires in alleys or knocking over the garbage cans that lined the sidewalks on our block.

  By the time we were in the seventh grade, though, basketball had come to mean everything to us. Every afternoon and all day Saturday and Sunday we lived in the schoolyard, and on Friday nights Izzie’s father and mine would take turns bringing us to see games at Erasmus Hall High School. Sometimes we’d chip in to buy sports magazines, and we’d cut out the full-page color photos of our heroes to scotch-tape on our walls. Once, at a Knick game at Madison Square Garden, between halves, Izzie got Cousy to sign a color picture of himself from Sp
ort magazine, and he mounted it on a piece of oaktag and pasted it to his wall, by his pillow.

  Izzie was really good then. Everybody thought for sure he’d be an All-American when he grew up. He had everything—speed, drive, and the greatest shooting eye anybody in our neighborhood had ever seen. What he had that amazed everybody most was a set-shot that he let go from his forehead with a little outward flick of his wrists. The way he held the ball just above his eyes you sometimes wondered how he saw the basket. But he did. And if you came up close to try to block his shot, he’d zip right around you for an easy lay-up.

  When the Erasmus team came to our public school that year, Izzie and I were excited. They came once a year and they put on a “clinic” for us—passing, dribbling, shooting, and going through patterns, while their coach, Mr. Goldstein, explained things to us, and we all sat on the floor, watching, and wishing that some day we’d be out there on the court in the blue and gold Erasmus uniforms, coming back to our school with every one of the seventh and eighth graders wishing they could be us.

  “I’d like to use one of your boys for our next demonstration,” Mr. Goldstein said to our gym teacher when the clinic was almost over. Mr. Goldstein was a short man, paunchy, but he dressed like a man who could have spent every weekend at the Concord Hotel if he’d wanted to. He was generally acknowledged to be the best coach in the city, and according to the guys in the schoolyard, every college team in the country had approached him at one time or another to leave Erasmus. But he’d stayed there, turning out top-notch teams for more than twenty years. I knew he didn’t have to worry much about money, because over the summers he was head counselor at Camp Wanatoo. “I hear you have a boy named Izzie Cohen who’s supposed to be pretty good, from what my players tell me,” Mr. Goldstein said to our gym teacher. “Is he here?”

  I was sure Izzie’s heart was going to bounce out on the court, but he didn’t seem flustered at all—he just stood up from where he was sitting beside me and walked straight over to Mr. Brown, our gym teacher. He didn’t seem nervous at all. When he stood next to them, though, for the first time in my life I think I realized how short he was. He wasn’t even as tall as Mr. Goldstein, and he seemed at least a foot and a half shorter than any of the Erasmus players.

  “Well, well,” Goldstein said, “so you’re the little hot-shot I’ve been hearing about.” He put his arm around Izzie’s shoulders. “Let’s see what you can do. John—throw Izzie here a ball—”

  Goldstein had called to Johnny Rudy, who was the best player Erasmus had that year, and Johnny threw Izzie the ball. “What’s your favorite shot?” Goldstein asked.

  “Set,” Izzie said.

  “Good—you just relax and let’s see you take a few. When you feel loose—”

  Izzie nodded and dribbled toward the foul-circle. All the Erasmus players stopped shooting and they stood around mumbling to each other and laughing. Nothing seemed to bother Izzie, though—he just went to the top of the key, put the ball over his eyebrows, nicked his wrists, and swish! the ball dropped through the basket.

  I don’t think our gym had ever heard a cheer like the one we let loose then. Izzie took the ball, picked out another spot on the floor, and shot again. He made six in a row from over twenty-five feet out before he missed one, and we didn’t stop cheering the whole time.

  For the rest of that year Izzie was the hero of our school. I’d have given anything to have been him. We still went to the schoolyard together every afternoon and on weekends, but things were different now. Before, we used to have to wait our nexts on Saturdays and Sundays, because all the guys who played were much older than us—so that we only got to play about twice all day—now, though, Izzie was getting picked all the time. The guys would set up picks for him and he’d bomb away, hardly ever missing. Once in a while—I guess because they felt sorry seeing me left out—I’d get picked too.

  There was one guy who always used to pick the two of us to play with him when he came down. He was a big black guy—at least six five and he looked more like a fullback than a basketball player. His left eye crossed toward his right one a little and he had big pinkish lips that didn’t seem to go right with his straight nose. When he played he was mean as the devil too, and he used to sort of snort when he dribbled. Nobody—but nobody—ever took a rebound away from him if he was planted under the boards, and when he started to drive, everybody backed out of the way or got run over. He’d been all-everything in high school, I figured, and I was sure—if I was sure of anything—that if he’d gone on to play pro ball he’d have been better than both Sweetwater Clifton and Carl Braun rolled into one.

  He didn’t come down too often—maybe once or twice every few months—and we used to wonder what he did the rest of the time. One day Izzie and I decided we’d find out, and that was how we first learned about the basketball scandals.

  Everybody shut up as if they were dead when Izzie turned to him and asked the question. For a second, the way he looked, I thought he was going to get angry. Everybody had stopped playing—right in the middle of a game—and they all stared at us.

  “Somethin’ the matter?”

  “No, nothin’, Mack—”

  “Then why’d you stop—?”

  They started again real quick. Mack leaned back against the wire fence where we were sitting.

  “I was in the scandals,” he said.

  “The what—?” I asked.

  “The scandals, man—the fixes. You know—shavin’ points, dumpin’ games—the whole works—”

  He sounded impatient and Izzie and I knew enough not to press him or say anything else. “Why I don’t play for some college?” He laughed. “Because I got me a real good job now. I work at the Minit-Wash, soaping down cars, you know? That’s how come I got such clean hands. Yeah, me, I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around—”

  He looked at Izzie then. “You’re gonna be a good ballplayer some day, kid,” he said. “You just don’t let nobody sweet-talk you, that’s all. You dump, if you want—if you’re good enough to. Only be careful. That’s the main thing. Ain’t nothing wrong with it, far as I can see—just you gotta play it cool. Be cool, man, and you do all right.”

  Then Mack got up, draped his sweatshirt over his shoulder, and started to walk out of the schoolyard. He knew everybody was staring at him, but he didn’t say anything. He just waved to Izzie and kept walking.

  He never came back. During the rest of the year, the guys talked more about Mack and the fixes, so that after a while I understood the whole thing better. But Izzie had worshipped Mack even more than I had and he didn’t like to hear any of the talk. Whenever anyone mentioned the fixes, Izzie would walk away.

  That summer, for the first time I could remember, Izzie and I were separated. My father knew how much I loved basketball, and he and my mother sent me to the camp where Mr. Goldstein was head counselor. Izzie’s parents couldn’t afford to send him along with me—his father worked as a tailor in a cleaning store—so he stayed home. I sent him a postcard about once a week, telling him how many points I was scoring in full-court games and how I’d talked with Johnny Rudy, who was a waiter at the camp, and how he’d give me pointers, and how I called Mr. Goldstein “Uncle Abe,” and things like that. When I got home at the end of August I didn’t even wait to change my clothes. As soon as I’d dropped my suitcase and my glove and ball in my bedroom, I raced out of the house and ran as fast as I could to the schoolyard—and there was Izzie, playing with a bunch of kids.

  It was great just watching him move around the court again, only something seemed different. He played from more of a crouch, even against kids shorter than himself, protecting the ball with his body, his back to the basket, and when he shot his set-shot now, it was from lower down—from the chin instead of the eyebrows. It didn’t seem to affect his accuracy, though—he still swished the ball through. I walked into the yard, sat down, and waited.

  When the game was over and his team had won, he came over to me. I stood up, smil
ing. “Boy—you sure did growl” he said. They were his first words. “You must of grown six inches!”

  “Five, according to the camp nurse,” I said.

  He hitched up his belt and looked away from me. “Well, pick two losers and let’s play.”

  I was probably a foot taller than Izzie now and I could tell it bothered him. He didn’t ask me anything about camp. He just concentrated on getting the game going. During that first time we played against each other, I didn’t know what to do. Izzie was guarding me and I knew that if I took him into the pivot I could score lay-ups all day long. But I didn’t want him to think I was taking it easy—

  “Watch my new corner jump-shot,” I called when the ball came to me. I dribbled away from the basket, Izzie next to me. “Goldstein taught it to me.”

  I didn’t even hit the rim the first time I shot. Izzie’s team got the rebound, passed it around, and Izzie started to take a set-shot. I was up on him right away and I smashed it. The next time I got the ball I hit a jump-shot from near the corner. I didn’t try to block any more of Izzie’s shots, but I didn’t need to because he couldn’t seem to hit for beans after I’d stuffed him that first time.

  He was pretty quiet when we’d finished playing, but I just kept talking about everything I’d done all summer, and when I switched the subject to college and pro teams he began to loosen up a bit and pretty soon it was like old times, comparing ballplayers and predicting which teams were going to do what that year, and imitating the moves of our favorite players.

  I went back to Camp Wanatoo the next summer and Izzie stayed in the city again. At the end of July his father died of cancer. Everybody knew it was going to happen and when Izzie wrote me about it he didn’t seem too upset—mostly he sounded annoyed about the religious stuff that had accompanied the funeral. He said the rabbi had made a cut in the collar of his good black suit with a razor blade.

  When we both entered Erasmus that September as freshmen, I was six one and Izzie wasn’t much more than five feet. Five feet one or two. He never grew after that either. Maybe an inch.