You Are My Heart and Other Stories

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Also by
JAY NEUGEBOREN

Big Man
(1966)
Listen Ruben Fontanez
(1968)
Sam's Legacy
(1974)
An Orphan's Tale
(1976)
The Stolen Jew
(1981)
Before My Life Began
(1985)
Poli: A Mexican Boy in Early Texas
(1989)
1940
(2008)

 

 

 

Corky's Brother
(1969)
Don't Worry About the Kids
(1997)
News from the New American Diaspora
(2005)

 

 

 

Parentheses: An Autobiographical Journey
(1970)
The Story of STORY Magazine
(Editor, 1980)
Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival
(1997)
Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness
(1999)
Open Heart: A Patient's Story of Life-Saving Medicine and
Life-Giving Friendship
(2003)
The Hillside Diary and Other Writings
(Editor, 2004)

I
t took three of us to move the sewer cover once we'd pried it up. Then the question was—who was going to go below and get the ball. Everyone looked at me, and I shrugged as if it to say: No big deal. Back then I was the kind of guy my friends would brag about because I'd take just about any dare—jumping onto the tracks in a subway station and waiting until the last second, a train bearing down on me, before vaulting back onto the platform, or, taking a running start, leaping from one rooftop to another—the gaps ran from five to ten feet—of four-, five-, and six-story apartment buildings.

This was 1953, in Brooklyn, and it was Olen Barksdale, my best friend that year, who volunteered to hold me upside down by the ankles. We were playing stickball in the P.S. 246 schoolyard on a cool Saturday afternoon in late October, and the sewer—a drain, really, that we used to mark third base—was one I'd been down before.

Olen and I were on the Erasmus basketball team together—he was a senior and I was a junior—and he'd been Honorable Mention All-City the year before when we'd made it to the quarterfinals of the city championships at Madison Square Garden. Most days after practice we'd take turns walking each other home, and a few nights a week, when our homework was done, we'd meet and take walks along Flatbush Avenue, usually winding up in a cafeteria, Bickford's or Garfield's, where we'd talk about everything—not just basketball, but personal stuff: about our families, and girls we liked, and why I did the crazy things I
did, and, most of all, about how much we wanted to get away from our homes, and what we'd do with our lives someday after college when we were on our own in the world.

My dream, ever since I'd read Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead
, was to become an architect. I was good at drawing and loved making model airplanes—I had a big collection of World War One and Two fighter planes—SPADs, Fokers, and Sopwith Camels; Messerschmitts, Flying Tigers, Spitfires, and Stukas—and not just the kind you carved from balsa wood, but the kind with rubber bands inside the fuselage, tail to propellor, that you wound up so that the planes would actually fly. You made the planes from what we called ‘formers'—thin, round or box-like pieces of balsa in which you cut slots with razor blades so you could install toothpick-like stringers and struts that gave shape to the planes, and over which you pinned tissue-thin Jap paper you glued down and painted with dope. I also spent a lot of time drawing imaginary houses, complete with floor plans, and during the previous year I'd begun making models of some of them.

Olen's dream was to become the first person in his family to go to college, after which he intended to play pro basketball while attending medical school. That way, when he retired from the pros he'd already be a doctor, like Ernie Vandeweghe of the Knicks, and could afford a house like those most of the doctors we went to had, where your family lived on the top floors and you had your office on the ground floor, and where, most of the time, your wife was your nurse or assistant.

1953 was also the year I became the only white person singing in the choir at Olen's church, The Barton African Methodist Episcopal Church, and this happened not because of what he did when he held me upside down in the sewer—though that had something to do with it—or because of any dare, but because of how much I came to love the music, and—more—because I fell in love with Olen's sister Karen.

Despite all my bravado, Olen knew I was pretty scared when I did the things I was famous for. He was a very quiet guy—I think I was the only guy at school, black
or
white, he'd ever exchanged more than a few sentences with—so that when I crawled over the edge of the sewer, belly first, and one of the guys yelled out “Geronimo!” and I pushed off, I was surprised to hear Olen call down to me that the sweat was making him lose his grip, and that rats in the sewers had a real thing for Jewish noses. Did I know about this Jewish kid, naked and blindfolded and with a huge erection, who ran full blast into a brick wall? “Yeah,” someone answered, giving the old line, “I heard he broke his nose.”

The sewer was about nine feet deep, and Olen swung me back and forth like a pendulum so that my head was about three feet from the bottom and my hands were free to grab at things. The ball, a pink Spaldeen, was resting on a clump of rotting leaves, and as soon as I had it—the odors made my stomach pulse—I yelled at Olen to haul me up. Olen was all muscle, about sixfoot-three and two hundred pounds, with wide shoulders and huge hands, and I was only five-seven and a hundred and thirtyfive pounds soaking wet—and when he'd pulled me almost all the way out and I was bracing myself on the sides of the sewer to hoist myself up the rest of the way, he suddenly grabbed my left ankle with both hands and shoved me off again, letting me plunge back down to within a few feet of the bottom. I flailed away, my heart booming so loud I was sure the guys could hear it, but without letting go of the ball and without giving Olen the satisfaction of crying out.

 

On the way home, I gave him the silent treatment, and he knew that when I did, nothing could make me be the one to talk first, so finally he gave in and put his arm around me, telling me he didn't know what had gotten into him but that when he went to church the next morning he was going to ask the Lord
for forgiveness. At first I thought he was kidding, and I almost said something about him asking God for a new brain while he was at it, but when I saw he was really feeling bad I didn't say anything, and a moment later he asked if Jews were allowed to go to church and would I want to go with him in the morning.

Sure, I said, and added that we weren't like the Catholic guys, who had to get permission if they wanted to come to synagogue for our Bar Mitzvahs. He told me he wasn't asking just because of what he'd done to me, but because it was going to be a special service where his sister Karen, who was my age, had a solo with the choir.

The next morning I got up before my parents did, put on a white shirt and a tie and, my good black dress shoes in my hands, tiptoed out of our apartment. Our street was quiet on Sunday mornings, with nobody going off to work or school, nobody yelling things down from apartment house windows, and only an occasional car going by. I sat on my stoop for a while after I put my shoes on, drinking in how peaceful things were—a rare moment for me because this was a period in my life when my parents were always checking up on me, my mother especially—wanting me to account for every minute of my life: where was I going, and who was I going with, and had I done my homework or brushed my teeth, and even wanting to know if I'd been having regular bowel movements. Both my parents worked, my father as a piece goods finisher in a dress factory (this was seasonal work, so he often spent long periods sitting around the apartment doing nothing, which drove my mother crazy), and my mother as a secretary for an insurance agent. I was an only child, and whenever the door to my room was closed she'd barge in without knocking and demand to know why I insisted on keeping the door closed and what I'd been doing during all the hours I was home alone.

Subtlety was never my parents' specialty, and though they never actually said anything
against
Olen, they'd say that they
couldn't understand why, with all the choices of people I had to be friends with, I chose to spend so much time with a
shvartze.

I had a pretty nasty temper in those days, and I'd yell at my parents that they were narrow-minded bigots who wanted to run my life for me. Were they going to choose my wife for me too some day? When my father was around and I said things like that, he'd whack me across the cheek, open-handed, yelling at me that I was an ingrate and a no-good, and the two of us would go at each other for a while. The angrier my father and I got, though, the calmer my mother became.

“Well, I always say the best way to judge a person's character is by the company he keeps,” she would declare, adding that she certainly had nothing against Negroes, and that Olen seemed like a perfectly nice young man, although how could she tell since he never said anything besides hello, goodby, and thank you, and—who knows?—maybe the way my parents objected to him was part of the reason I was so determined to stick to our friendship.

Olen was a terrific ballplayer, but he wasn't the best player on our team that year. Our best player was a red-headed Irish kid named Johnny Lee. Johnny's father was a cop and his mother was a schoolteacher, and Johnny was not only first team All-City but, according to
The Sporting News
, a pre-season pick to make first team high school All-American. He was also an Honors student with dozens of colleges recruiting him, and the word was that he was going to go to an Ivy League school, probably Yale or Princeton.

He was almost as quiet as Olen—they were about the same size and build, with Johnny being leaner and an inch or so taller—and according to
The Brooklyn Eagle
, having the two of them work in tandem made us odds-on favorites to win the city championship. Although Johnny didn't have Olen's raw strength or open court one-on-one moves, he was a better rebounder, with a real nose for the ball, and he was a much better shooter. But
then, there was probably no player in the city who was a better pure shooter than Johnny. In practice once, he hit eighteen straight jump shots from the right corner, and then followed with thirteen straight from the left corner before he missed. And he'd never leave the gym until he'd made twenty-five consecutive foul shots.

Most of the time Johnny would play in the middle, and Olen would roam along the baseline from one corner to the other, though they'd switch sometimes and Olen would move into the pivot. Even though Johnny often had to play against guys taller than he was, he had quick moves and such a soft touch, including a phenomenal fade-away jump shot, that eventually, in college, where he played at all five positions, sportswriters began calling him “The White O” after Oscar Robertson, who was probably the best player in the country during those years, and who, like Johnny, could play any position on the floor.