Corky's Brother (16 page)

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

I
N
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
Sport
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, smiling. “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.

He changed a lot too. We still saw each other every day and we had no trouble talking about sports and school, but he didn't come down to the schoolyard as much. He spent more time at home, taking care of his kid sister while his mother was away working. I'd stop by his house sometimes on my way home from the schoolyard for supper, and he'd be sitting on the couch, with his sister next to him, leaning on his shoulder. Her name was Miriam, and even though she was a year or so younger than we were, she was already bigger than Izzie. She wore a lot of Izzie's clothes—his shirts and his old baseball hats—and she reminded me of those refugee kids you saw in all the movies that came out after the war. I used to picture myself riding on the front of a Patton tank through a European village, with her looking up at me with big eyes, one hand in her mouth, while I'd reach into my pocket for a Hershey bar to give her. Izzie would read stories to her, and I'd stay with them for a while, drinking a Coke Izzie gave me, and listen also. Miriam hardly ever smiled, except when he read poems to her that he'd written himself. Then she'd giggle and snuggle up to him.