Corky’s Brother

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 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.

“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.

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

“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!”

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.

Their mother worked as a saleswoman at A & S’s in downtown Brooklyn, near the Loew’s Metropolitan and the Fox, and I’d sit in the kitchen with Izzie, talking about what the games had been like that afternoon—who was improving and which guys were going to try out for the Erasmus team that year and things like that—while he started getting supper ready for the three of them.

His poems were pretty good, I thought—they had a lot of strange words in them that he’d invented himself—and when we were sophomores he had some published in the school literary magazine, The Erasmian. From then on, he stopped talking with me so much about basketball and spent most of his time working on his poems and being with his sister. I played on the school team and he didn’t, but we were still close friends. Not as close as we’d been, but pretty close, and even though I began spending most of my time after that with guys from the school team, I think I still thought of Izzie as my best friend. We’d meet each other at the comer every morning at 8:15 to walk to school together, and I was becoming too busy with practice sessions and games and dating girls to realize that I hardly ever stopped by his house any more and that he never came by mine to see me. Once in a while he’d come down to the schoolyard on a Sunday morning—he’d always have The New York Times tucked under his arm—and he’d get in a game or two of basketball, but he never stayed long.

We drifted apart during the last two years of high school. Because of his height, I guess, he didn’t go out with girls too much, and most people I knew at school, especially the guys on the team, thought he was weird. He’d do crazy things—like mimeographing his own poems and handing them out in the cafeteria during lunch period—and even though I always defended him when people said how screwy he was becoming, by the time we were seniors I had to agree with them, though I never said so.

He was editor-in-chief of The Erasmian by then, and he had his own set of friends and hung out in Greenwich Village with them. He dressed strangely, too. He was never sloppy, but he’d wear crazy combinations—a bright-red polka-dot bow tie with a blue flannel shirt, or a vest over a T-shirt—things like that. When the yearbook ran the popularity contests that year—most likely to succeed, best-looking, class athlete—he ran for Joe Erasmus. He had big glossy pictures made of himself dressed in nothing but a bathing suit, with a beret on his head and a cigar in his mouth. He was staring at a skull he held in his right hand and under the picture he’d printed: YORICK SAYS —VOTE FOR IZZIE COHEN.

The second set of basketball scandals broke during our senior year of high school, near the end of the basketball season. By then I’d grown to about six four and was a starter on the Erasmus team. Mr. Goldstein had had a heart attack the previous spring, so he wasn’t the coach any more. Instead, we had a young guy who’d been a big star at Erasmus and C.C.N.Y.—Al Newman. He was a good coach, but no Goldstein, and we were fighting just to get into the city playoffs. Mr. Goldstein had been made head of the Physical Education Department, but everybody knew that that didn’t take much work. He’d sit in his office all day and talk with anyone who came by. He still came to practices and games, and he said he’d be back coaching by the following year, but his wife had told me at camp that the doctor would never allow it.

“I’m happy where he is now,” she said. “And I’m grateful he has something to do with his days. You know he could stay home and live well—we have enough saved, Howie—and there’s always the teachers’ retirement plan waiting. But he wouldn’t be happy away from Erasmus. It’s part of him.”

I knew that what she said was true. Even the money part. Aside from the camp job, there was a stock-brokers firm on Flatbush Avenue, about a block away from school, and Mr. Goldstein would spend his lunch hour there with some other teachers. He’d bought a brand-new Dodge after the summer, and he was still the sharpest dresser around.

A few days after two big stars from N.Y.U. and Columbia confessed to fixing games, Izzie telephoned me. He told me he had big news about the latest basketball scandal and that if I came to his house right away he’d give me the lowdown. He sounded mysterious about it all, and I told him I’d be there in a few minutes.

We sat in his bedroom and he offered me a cigar. I told him the basketball season was still on, so I wasn’t smoking. He shrugged, leaned back in his swivel chair and inhaled. It was probably a year since I’d last been in his room, I realized. The room seemed smaller than it had a few years before, and it was cluttered—books and magazines stacked everywhere. On the walls he had pasted postcards of famous paintings you get from museums, and over his desk he’d painted a big hammer and sickle in red, white, and blue. There were shelves built into all the walls now, and half hidden by one over his bed, with clothes hanging over the edge across one side of it, I could see the picture of Bob Cousy. The edges were cracked and had been mended with scotch tape.

“This isn’t easy to talk about, Howie,” he began. He sipped from a glass. “Care for a drink?”

I shook my head. He leaned forward then and, even though we were just a few feet apart, he spoke in a whisper. “I have discovered, it seems, the newest of the basketball fixes.” He paused and closed his eyes knowingly. “Your revered Mr. Goldstein—’Uncle Abe,’ I believe you used to call him—is deeply implicated in them, I fear.”

I stood up. “What—?” He smiled up at me. “Oh, come off it, huh, Izzie,” I said. “He doesn’t coach college—he doesn’t even coach high school any more. And even if he did—”

“But Mr. Goldstein has quite an interest in the stock market, doesn’t he? And you and I, Howie, we know what teachers’ salaries are like…”

“Sure, sure—but his wife used to teach too—and he’s head counselor at Wanatoo—”

“Ah yes, yes,” he said. “All right. So add another thousand dollars. Two thousand dollars for the position of head counselor at Camp Wanatoo. Let’s even add a bit more for the bonus he gets for each camper he signs up. Could all that account for his new car? His trip to Miami every Christmas? His own home on Bedford Avenue?” He knocked some ash from the end of his cigar onto the floor. “And have you ever noticed the coat that Mrs. Goldstein wears at our school’s basketball games? I’ve been told that on chilly evenings during the summer she could be seen wearing her mink to the canteen of Camp Wanatoo. A marvelous image, I might note: mink at a canteen in a Catskill camp. I should use it. It’s difficult to believe, Howie, I know, but our beloved coach—”

“Look, Izzie,” I said, walking to the door. “You’re really going off the deep end. You better sober up and I’ll talk to you on the way to school one day this week, okay? Or—”

“I will assuage your fears, Howard,” Izzie said, rising and coming to me, his hand on my arm. “Mr. Goldstein has never conspired to prearrange the scores of high school basketball games—his dealings are far more nefarious.” He returned to his desk and pulled a manila envelope from a drawer. He started to hand it to me and just as I reached for it he pulled it back. “I have in this envelope proof of the—what shall we call it?—the finagling Mr. Goldstein has been engaged in. In my wildest imagination I could never have invented anything more absurd—or more tragic for those of us who look to our teachers, to our boyhood heroes, for guidance, for example, for—”

“When the scandals broke last week, I found them rather ludicrous,” he continued, sitting down again. “And it goes without saying that I do not at all condemn any of the players who have fixed games. For that philosophy I am still indebted to our one-time friend, Mack—if you remember him.”

“This time I thought to myself: Izzie, I said, there is something cockeyed in all this fixing business—all this moralizing from teachers and rabbis and newspapers. Rigged quiz shows, point-shaving, payola—what’s the big deal, eh?”

I sat down on the edge of his bed, leaned back, and listened as he talked on and on. I’d never felt so far away from him. The picture of Cousy was behind me and I wondered if Izzie had seen me glance at it. It was hard to remember any of the conversations we’d had when we’d been in grade school together, and it was harder to realize that the guy who was sitting across from me and talking had been the same guy I’d spent almost my whole life knowing. What I couldn’t understand, I suppose, was how any guy who’d loved sports so much could have turned out this way. All of us—Corky, Louie, Eddie, Marty, Kenny, Stan—we’d all had our different ways, our own strange ideas once in a while. If I’d wanted to think about it, I guess I could have found something weird in everybody’s home, including my own—you could never know everything that went on inside somebody’s house, behind his doors when you weren’t there. Still, if Corky had lived through all the stuff with his brother and his old man, and if Eddie could keep going, not having been able to play ball…

I shrugged, but Izzie didn’t seem to notice. “I thought to myself,” he was saying. “Izzie, I said, there must be some analogue, some microcosm in our own small Brooklyn-Jewish-Flatbush-Erasmus-world that would point up the inherent absurdity in these scandals. And so I said to myself: what honest good man in Erasmus could be tempted by the Almighty Dollar? Who could be our own Topaze? The answer came at once—Abraham Goldstein. In my mind’s eyes I saw it all: the parallel to the national scandals.” He spread his hand outward in an arc, as if the words he spoke were hanging in front of him. “Famous coach receives bribes from local Sporting Goods Store in return for letting them sell Erasmus boys and girls their gym suits—”

“What—?” I got up, then sat down again and started to laugh. I shouldn’t take him so seriously, I thought to myself.

“Yes, it’s funny, isn’t it, Howie? Goldstein grows rich while Levy’s Sporting Goods Store gets sole rights to sell us T-shirts, gym shorts, and jockstraps. Most men who are possessed by visions—Blake and Coleridge come to mind at once—rarely see them manifested in their own lives. But I have, Howie. While Levy’s has been supplying five thousand boy and girls with their gym apparel, Mr. Goldstein has been getting what is known along Flatbush Avenue as a good old-fashioned kickback.”

He leaned back, somewhat breathless, obviously pleased with himself. “If you’re lying,” I said, “I swear to God I’ll ram my fist straight through your face.”

“Tomorrow New York City shall know the truth,” Izzie went on. “My campaign will begin.” He took a sheet of paper from his envelope and handed it to me. It was handwritten in capital letters:

WHILE MR. GOLDSTEIN GROWS RICH WE WEAR

LEVY’S JOCKSTRAPS.

HAS ANYONE COMPARED PRICES???

WHAT IS BEHIND THE LATEST EVENT IN

THE GROWING SERIES OF ATHLETIC FIXES???

“You’re out of it,” I said, throwing the paper back at him. “I swear to God you are—”

“Ah, but like another famous madman, there is reason in my madness, eh? Tomorrow five hundred mimeographed copies of the sheet you have just seen will appear mysteriously in the classrooms and corridors of our school—”

I didn’t bother arguing with him. I just told him again that I thought he was nuts, and I left. On the staircase going out of his house, I met his sister. She smiled at me the way she always did when I saw her in the halls at Erasmus—not able to keep her eyes straight on me—and I felt uncomfortable this time. Her arms were full of packages from the store and I fumbled a little, offering to take them upstairs for her, but she wouldn’t let me and I was just as glad. She said something about my not coming by their house for a long time and I nodded. She was leaning back against the banister and I was a step below her. I could tell she wanted to talk with me, but I didn’t have anything to say. She asked me about my family, and said she’d seen how well I was doing on the basketball team, and I nodded again. Her hair was long—kind of dark brown—and it wasn’t combed too well. She shuffled her packages into the crook of one of her arms and brushed it back. “How’s Izzie?” she asked.

She nodded. “It’d be good if you could come by more often, but—” She stopped, then sighed. “Don’t mind me, Howie,” she said. “I don’t know sometimes—you know what I mean?” I felt a little dizzy. There was something in her face, the way she stood—kind of relaxed, yet unsure of herself—that made her seem younger and older at the same time. “Well,” she said when I didn’t answer—a kind of weak smile under her red cheeks. “I guess we can’t hold these packages all day, huh? I’ll get upstairs to Izzie—Momma’s still at the store—”

I asked her if she worked there too now—at A & S’s—and she said yes, and then I said I’d see her at school sometime and I ducked down the stairs.

The next day Izzie’s notices were all around the school and lots of guys came to me and asked about them, figuring that only Izzie would pull a stunt like that. I played dumb. When Mrs. Goldstein telephoned me that night and asked about the notices, I told her I couldn’t figure out what they meant.

Two days later Izzie had mimeographed up a new batch of sheets. On these he’d placed two lists: on the left-hand side were the prices Erasmus students paid for their gym uniforms, and on the right-hand side were the prices Davega charged for the same things. In almost every case, the Davega prices were lower.

Mr. Goldstein didn’t show up for school the next day, but Izzie’s notices did. This time he’d printed up a list of Mr. Goldstein’s property and expenses—his house, his car, Mrs. Goldstein’s mink coat, the trips to Miami, etc.—with the estimated cost of each. Then he’d listed Mr. Goldstein’s salaries from school and camp. Across the bottom of the sheet he’d printed: “Something is rotten in the borough of Brooklyn.”

Two days passed and there were no more messages from “The Shadow.” The weekend came and we won an important game against Madison, insuring us of a spot in the playoffs. I hoped Izzie would have stopped his campaign by the time we got back to school Monday, but he hadn’t. This time he’d printed leaflets which seemed to prove that Sears-Roebuck had sent a color television set to Mr. Goldstein’s house and had sent the bill to Levy’s Sporting Goods Store. At the bottom of this sheet was a quotation from Edmund Burke: “All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” The New York Post carried an item about Izzie’s leaflets in their evening edition that day—I figured Izzie must have mailed them the material—and on Tuesday night Mrs. Goldstein called me again. She pleaded with me to do something.

I called Izzie right after she hung up, and he was obviously excited by the fact that Mrs. Goldstein had been telephoning me. There was no talking with him, though. When I mentioned Mr. Goldstein’s bad heart, he only carried on more than ever. “Our names are all written in the Book of Life, Howard. I am not moved by your plea for pity…“I hung up on him.

A day or two later, our coach told us that Mr. Goldstein was going to send in a letter of resignation to the Board of Education. The guys all looked at me when he said it, as if it were my responsibility to do something, but I just shrugged and ignored them. Izzie hadn’t been seen in school for the previous two days. I went home for supper and took a walk along Flatbush Avenue. A little after nine I found myself knocking at Mr. Goldstein’s door. I don’t know what I would have said to him if he’d been there, but he wasn’t. Some neighbors saw me and told me that he’d been taken to the hospital a few hours before.

If Izzie had been there right then, I think I might have killed him. I headed straight for his house. By the time I reached it, though, I’d calmed down and decided to call the hospital to see how Mr. Goldstein was.

“Greetings, greetings, my basketball-hero comrade.” It was Izzie. He was leaning against a lamppost, in the shadows, puffing on a cigar. His beret was tilted to one side, so that it nearly covered his right eye.

“Forever, forever, Howie—since we were boys together, since we came in trailing those wings of glory…or were they clouds?”

Izzie nodded, as if he knew already. “Cowards—cowards die many times before their—”

“Oh, shut your trap already, huh? Just can it!” I took a step toward him and drew back my fist.

“Come, come,” he said calmly. “Get it over with. Hit me. Use your physical power. What else do you have, after all?”

“Forget it,” I said, shoving my hands in my pockets. “There’s no use talking with you—”

“Have you seen our friends down the street?” Izzie asked. I turned and looked. It was dark and I couldn’t make out much. At the end of the block, though, I could see the shapes of a group of guys. “I await them in the light of the lamppost. They called a while ago and told me they were coming to get me…”

I saw them coming toward us now. There were about a dozen guys, and I could make out faces.

“Are you totally nuts?” I said. “Get inside your damned house. Those guys’U beat shit out of you.”

He didn’t move. I whirled around. The guys were almost to us now—some of them were on the basketball team with me, and the rest were jocks from the football team. I looked back at Izzie. His eyes weren’t shifting. Instead, he had this weird smile on his face, and he just kept puffing away on his cigar, blowing smoke rings.

“You’re the first one here,” Hank Ebel said to me. “That means you got rights to go at him first, Howie.”

“Ah, lay off, huh?” I said. “You’ll just get in trouble if you do anything to him—”

“I need no defenders!” Izzie shouted. His voice was strong. “Let them have their way with me. We are in the arena, Howie!”

“You’re not gonna take up for him, are ya, Howie?” Stan Reiss asked. I looked at the others—Harvey Rosen, Jerry Charyn, Vic Fontani. “No,” I said. “No—but I’m not—I’m not gonna let you guys get yourselves in trouble. Just leave him be.”

One of the guys made a move toward Izzie and I backed up, spreading my arms out to protect him. He screamed. “Let me alone, Howie—I can fight my own battles. Let me alone! Let these boors tear me apart for telling them the truth. Let me alone. Let me alone…”

One of the football players grabbed at me to shove me aside, but I didn’t move.

“Look, Howie,” he said. “We got nothin’ against you—but if you don’t let us get him, we’re gonna have to get you too.”

“Okay,” I said. I meant it—but I knew already that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to be able to help Izzie. Still, I stood my ground, more tired than defiant. Somebody grabbed at my shoulder and I shook him off. Someone came at me from the other side and I swung. Then they were on me. They didn’t hit me much. Just grabbed me by the legs and arms. I fought and swung but there were too many of them. They dragged me away and a few of them sat on me while the rest took care of Izzie.

It didn’t take them long. I heard him laughing, shouting something—poetry, I guess—and then I heard him scream. He really howled! You could hear windows shding open in all the apartment houses on the block.

The guys let me up a second later and they took off down the street. Izzie was lying next to the lamppost. His lips were moving, producing a strange sound—I couldn’t tell if it was whimpering or laughing. I got him under one arm and helped him into his building and up the stairs. When we got into the apartment and his mother saw him, she nearly fainted. I told her to call a doctor, but she was too paralyzed to do anything. Miriam came out of her room then, and while she got Izzie to a couch in the living room, I telephoned. Izzie’d been pretty well mashed up around his face—and his left arm hung limply. While I held a compress on his eye, Miriam coaxed her mother into the bedroom and got her to lie down. Then she came back in. I looked at her, shrugging to indicate that I was sorry—hoping she’d know I didn’t have any part of it. “When it snows it pours,” she said. “Where’s it all gonna end, is what I want to know. You ever see anything like us?” She seemed in command and I just did what she told me to, getting Mercuro-chrome and Band-Aids from the bathroom. She had a ballpoint pen stuck in her hair right over her ear, and her sweater was loose. “I’m glad we weren’t working tonight, is all. I just don’t know sometimes, Howie, you know what I mean?” Izzie blinked and smiled at us. “You jerk,” Miriam said to him, and he smiled bigger. She talked to me like my own sister. “Like, where’s it all gonna end, Howie?” I shrugged again, and she seemed to take this for a good enough response. Her mother started crying from the other room, chanting in Yiddish about Izzie and Izzie’s father. “See what I mean?” Miriam said, and she left me. It was crazy, in the middle of everything, but I realized that for the last few minutes my eyes had been fastened right on her chest, as if I’d noticed for the first time what an enormous pair of knockers she had.

“Well, well, Howie my friend,” Izzie began. His voice cracked. “I—I suppose I cannot say Et tu, Brute—”

In the other room I could hear Miriam. “Shush, shush—you worked hard today, Momma—you take it easy. It’s okay, Momma. I’ll take care of everything. It’s okay…”

I kept thinking that Izzie’s mother was really his grandmother. His bottom hp was already swollen to twice its size and both his eyes were starting to close. I got more ice from the kitchen. When I came back, the door to Mrs. Cohen’s room was closed and Miriam was washing up some blood from the couch. She shook her head, and drew in deeply on a cigarette. I kept my eyes off her chest. “There are real idiots in this world, aren’t there, Howie? I mean—”

The doctor came in a little while and I was glad. He examined all of Izzie’s cuts and swellings, put his arm in a sling, and told him to come to the office the next day for X-rays. When he left, Izzie and I went into his room together and Miriam left us alone. The whole time the doctor had been there, Izzie had seemed cocky. As soon as he got into his room, though, he collapsed, just sort of folding and dropping to the floor. I lifted him to his chair and he opened his eyes halfway. He was shivering and I threw a blanket over his shoulders.

He shook his head from side to side. He seemed totally sober now and he gave me a long look, as if he were trying to tell me he couldn’t figure out why it had turned out this way either. I got him to lay down on his bed, under the covers, and then I left. “You try to sleep,” I said. “Maybe I’ll stop by in a few days.”

Mr. Goldstein was on critical for a week, and then he began to improve. He didn’t come back to school, though. I got a Graduation card from him that June. Izzie returned to classes about a week and a half later and, to my surprise, nobody paid much attention to him. We were all too busy worrying about the playoffs and which colleges we would be going to—events passed pretty quickly in those days. Izzie got a state scholarship and was supposed to go to Columbia the next fall, but when I was home for Thanksgiving during my first year at college my mother told me that he’d dropped out of school and was living at home.

The next time I saw him was at the end of my first year of college. I’d driven home with some guys who were on the freshman team with me and I took them over to the P.S. 92 schoolyard to show them around. I’d improved during my first year of college and I didn’t have much trouble with the Erasmus players. There were some other guys at the schoolyard who played college ball, and I could hold my own with them too. I’d developed a good outside shot and it surprised a lot of the guys who’d known me at Erasmus. My friends and I played a few games and then we started to leave.

“Hey, Howie—you see your friend Izzie lately?” one of the Erasmus players asked.

The guy laughed and I looked where he’d pointed. On the other side of the wire fence, at the far end of the playground, I could see a bunch of grade-school kids playing basketball. I had to squint at first. Then I recognized him. He was playing with a group of little kids. Some of them were already taller than he was. I turned away quickly.