Old Neighborhood (2 page)

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. In this working-class neighborhood he was revered, the man who had led the nation out of the Depression, the Commander-in-Chief. People drifted into the streets and gathered on street corners to console each other. School was canceled on the day of the funeral, stores closed, strangers passed and nodded, sharing the sense of loss. Our doorbell rang and standing there was our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Cavanaugh, a widow who lived alone. No more than a “Good morning” had ever passed between Mrs. Cavanaugh and the members of my family. Alone in her sorrow, she asked if she might come in for a cup of tea. We sat with the radio playing and listened to the reports of the funeral, none of us speaking. Then Mrs. Cavanaugh began to talk about her life, about the details of her husband’s death, she wept for President Roosevelt and for her husband, then excused herself abruptly, never to approach us again or ever again to say any more than a “Good morning.”

When Germany surrendered, V-E Day was declared, for victory in Europe, and an avalanche of paper commemorated the event in the neighborhood. People threw paper out of their windows, the fastidious cut it into confetti, children hurled rolls of toilet paper from the roofs. I was with my friends, running through the paper that covered the streets. We kicked it, we scooped it, we tossed it like snow.

The Memorial Day parade along the Grand Concourse after V-E Day was a massive victory celebration. Everyone who could march was there—servicemen on leave wearing their uniforms, civilians from war organizations, the wounded in special cars. Those families whose windows faced the Concourse competed with each other in the sizes of their American flags. Arthur, whose apartment was on the Concourse, invited us to watch from his living-room window. Whenever a color guard passed by, the spectators sitting along the curb would rise and come to attention. Uncertain of protocol and wanting to do the correct thing on this important day, when a color guard passed beneath us, we stood at attention in the living room.

“Unconditional surrender!” the younger children yelled without comprehending the words. Victory over Japan, V-J Day, produced another blizzard of paper in the neighborhood. I was part of the celebration in the street when I happened to notice the gold star mother at her window. We did not know her name, but we had seen her, at times, looking down at us when we played. She opened the window and was holding a small brown paper bag. She emptied it and a little stream of cut-up paper went floating to the street below. She watched as the last pieces fell to the ground, then she closed her window. The war was over.

From December 7, 1941, to August 14, 1945, the people in the neighborhood did their share for the duration. The sons and the husbands, those who were able, went into service, those behind bought the war stamps and war bonds, saved the scrap paper, worked in the ground-observer corps and civilian defense, dealt with rationing and shortages, listened to the radio reports with the same hopes that the war would end quickly so the boys could come home. There was a feeling that the people of the neighborhood had been through something together. I was seven years old when the war began and eleven when it ended. Beyond the imagery, the war movies, the war posters, the war fantasies, what I remember is the sense of community in the neighborhood in those years. It was special and profound and I have never forgotten it.

I
N THE BRONX IN
the 1950s young people lined up early to be middle-aged. A tremendous force, greater than the power of all the D trains as they traveled up the Grand Concourse, was generated by Bronx parents to make certain their children went to college to get A Good Job.

“What’s to become of you?” my mother said. “Time is running out.” I was seventeen at the time. I stood before her with my cherished basketball under my arm, having spent an hour by lamplight in the park practicing one-handed push shots, which I considered a highly profitable hour. I was in my senior year at De Witt Clinton High School, a starting forward on the basketball team and possessor of a varsity jacket, with which I hoped to seduce a girl into going all the way—
actual.
Among the possible actuals were Barbara Semmelman of Taft High School—we had a rubbing-up-against-in-hallways, “inside on top” sexual relationship—and Cynthia Cohen of Roosevelt High School, “outside on bottom”—so near, yet so far.

The owners of the local candy store, Moe and Rhoda Fisher, lived in our building, and when I was small the Fishers allowed me to sit in the back of the store and read comic books without buying, making me something of a celebrity among my peers. Now the Fishers had given me a job part time in the candy store. “You can’t be a soda jerk forever,” my mother informed me. I was, by her determination, the only young man under twenty-five in the Bronx who did not know what he was going to do in life. My mother was under pressure. She saw me becoming the financial success for her that my father had failed to be. She assembled a collection of college catalogs that rivaled the number in the school guidance office. I did not share her anxieties about my future. What I considered significant was that I had made my high school basketball team, that I had worked my way up from three-man schoolyard games to the community center league to ownership of a varsity jacket that could be worn on weekends. Now that was personal progress.

“You’ve never even seen me play. I’m a good ballplayer.”

“Everybody knows what they want to be.”

“The Shadow knows.”

“Morty Papkin knows. He’s going to be a veterinarian.”

“Morty doesn’t realize you have to kiss a sheep before you get your license.”

“Stevie—”

“It’s true. A soul kiss.”

“Be serious. You need a plan.”

My role model was not Morty Papkin, it was Adolph Schayes, a boy from the Bronx who went on to be all-pro with the Syracuse Nats and who, in a playoff game against the Knicks, once made 11 for 19 from the field, 12 for 12 from the foul line with 16 rebounds. My ability to remember sports information was of particular interest to Sam the Man, the local bookmaker. Sam Goodstein was a slim man who wore glasses and looked more like an accountant than a person who made book. I enjoyed Sam’s company, he came into the candy store to use the pay phones in the back. Sam had seen Hank Luisetti play and sometimes he would watch our schoolyard games—everyone played harder knowing the neighborhood expert was watching. Both Sam and my mother had an interest in my future. Sam saw me in the new generation of bookies and had offered me a route peddling football betting cards. I was not interested, preferring to earn my pocket money through the purity of my egg creams.

“You’re breaking my heart, Stevie. With your head, you’d make a great bookie.”

“There’s no percentage in it, Sam. Bookies don’t get draft deferments.”

We had a television set in the living room now. The set was on every night. It seemed entire evenings passed with my parents never exchanging a word.

My closest friends were still Arthur Pollack and Jerry Rosen. Arthur was short and rotund, our Eddie Lopat, a dazzling pitching-in stickball player with an array of drop balls he achieved by digging his fingers into the ball like a potter. Jerry was between us in height and build, a speedy end in touch football. I was nearly six feet, the tallest, wiry, light-brown hair, light-brown eyes. I suppose I was a reasonably attractive young man, but my best physical feature, as I saw it, was my one-handed push shot. Arthur, Jerry and I went to neighborhood movies together, traveled downtown to Madison Square Garden for basketball and hockey games on our G.O. cards, took long walks together, and did a great deal of leaning—on lampposts, buildings, and cars as we talked about girls, what they were, how to get them, and what made them crazy.

“You know what makes them crazy?” Arthur said. “You lick them with the tip of your tongue just behind the ear.”

“You know what makes them crazier? You put your hand right on it,” Jerry said, beginning to laugh.

“Virginity—screw it!” I shouted.

We were laughing so hard it came to the attention of Mr. Veezo, the superintendent of the building next door, who liked to send his killer German shepherd, Hans, to retrieve “Spaldeens” from anyone Veezo caught playing off-the-point at the side of his building, Hans seizing the ball with his killer teeth, and Veezo flamboyantly cutting the rubber ball in half with his pocketknife. Laughter at night in front of his building was as unwelcome to Veezo as boys with “Spaldeens” by day, and Veezo and Hans appeared, prompting our anti-virginity group to scatter, Veezo yelling, “Bums! Laugh in front of your own building!”

“Where you applying?” became the key question among the seniors at De Witt Clinton High School. Jerry was applying to the pharmacy college at Fordham University, Arthur was going to Brandeis University for pre-law, and I was a man without a college placement. I knew I would not be going to an out-of-town college, or even a private college. We simply could not afford it.

“You could have had a scholarship,” my mother said, “if only you would have worked harder.”

“I might have had a scholarship if you were ten inches taller.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if you were ten inches taller, I might have been ten inches taller and I might have gotten a basketball scholarship.”

“Very funny. It’s only your future we’re talking about.”

I was due for my “Career Goals” interview with the school guidance counselor. I did not tell my mother for fear she would slip past the school guards and show up in the guidance counselor’s office. In the neighborhood, to be Jewish and not go to college was to commit some unspeakable act for which they would light candles for you, something on the level of going into the navy or getting a tattoo. If you were good in science, you were a potential doctor. If you were good in math, you were a potential engineer. If you were good in history, you were a potential lawyer. If you were good in English and you were a boy, you were in trouble, because you might have considered liberal arts, and in the neighborhood the liberal arts were not for boys—they did not lead to anything. Girls who went to college were expected to be teachers, except for the few who were allowed to major in literature, in exchange for which their parents expected them to use their superior intelligence to marry doctors. So there I was, preoccupied with basketball and virginity, my grades above average, with my highest grades in English.

“Have you thought about business administration?” the guidance counselor said to me.

He was Mr. Beale, a little man in his forties, in a faded blue suit, the collar of his shirt turning up at the ends like an elf’s shoes.

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Beale, I don’t know what I want to be.”

“Well, you have to
be
something.”

I was beginning to get the idea. Mr. Beale suggested, since he could not find a pattern to my grades, that I think about the School of Commerce at NYU or the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which were both beyond my family’s budget, or the business college at CCNY. It seemed to me by now that I was going to end up in business one way or the other, that I was not doctor-lawyer-engineer potential, and I might just as well go to a business college if it would help me get A Good Job. In the Bronx of the 1950s a career choice was required behavior for a young man of seventeen. So I decided I would be a businessman and go to a college of business for the right start. I applied and was accepted at the CCNY business school. My mother was overjoyed—Ronnie Hennessey upstairs had joined the navy—it could have happened to
her.
My father was redeemed, his son was going to college. And I was relieved, I had been placed.

The New York
Post
published its All-City rankings of high school basketball players. After the first-team and second-team listings, in small print was a long list of ballplayers who were given “honorable mention.” This was a courtesy list. Each high school in the city was represented by one graduating senior. My name was there for De Witt Clinton. For several days I had status in the neighborhood, little children would go out of their way to say hello to me, and people congratulated my parents—“I hear Stevie got his name in the paper.”

Sam the Man said to me in the candy store:

“Congratulations, Stevie. All-City.”

“If you read small print.”

“No, it’s really something. And you know what else it makes you?”

“What?”

“All-Neighborhood.”

“All-Neighborhood. I’ll take that. Thanks, Sam.”

“So where you going to college?”

“City Downtown.”

“City? They don’t even have a team now. What’s that all about?”

“It’s about getting a job, Sam.”

CCNY, Fordham, Brandeis—the guys were going to be college men. We wanted to celebrate by going to Poe Cozy Nook, a neighborhood bar. Not being eighteen, the legal drinking age, we had never been served in a bar. To accomplish this would be to officially place our high school years behind us. We went to the Adam Hat store on Fordham Road and bought porkpie hats to look older. On the way to the bar we practiced nonchalance and the ordering of drinks with deep voices. Arthur was not sure he looked eighteen even with the porkpie so he also bought a pair of sunglasses.

“How old do I look?” he asked, hoping.

“A young eighteen. Don’t worry, Stevie is going to carry us. He looks eighteen and a half, easy,” Jerry said.

“Do I look like Bogart?” I asked, doing a tough-guy pose.

“You look like Bogart’s baby brother,” Jerry answered, and we all started to giggle, not a very effective way of passing. We recovered outside the bar and entered, hats slung over our eyes.

“A martini please,” I said in my deepest voice.

The bartender gave me a withering look.

“And what about you guys?” I said to the boys, deeply.

“Rye and ginger,” Jerry said. Arthur merely nodded, afraid to speak.

The bartender looked us over, but decided to pour the drinks. We drank them down, then exploded onto the sidewalk, laughing and congratulating each other. “That was the worst thing I ever tasted in my life,” I said.