Corky's Brother

by Jay Neugeboren

  Corky’s Brother

  Jay Neugeboren

  Dzanc Books

  5220 Dexter Ann Arbor Rd

  Ann Arbor, MI 48103

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1969 by Jay Neugeboren

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2014 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-41-8

  eBook Cover Designed by Awarding Book Covers

  Published in the United States of America

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  for ROBERT

  Contents

  Luther

  Joe

  The Application

  The Zodiacs

  Finkel

  A Family Trip

  Ebbets Field

  The Campaign of Hector Rodriguez

  Something Is Rotten in the Borough of Brooklyn

  The Child

  Elijah

  The Pass

  Corky’s Brother

  NOTE

  THESE STORIES, including the six “Brooklyn stories,” were written between the years 1962 and 1969. My thanks to friends who have gone through these years, these stories with me. I would like to thank, in particular, those friends whose professional help during these years has been especially warm and kind. My deep gratitude, then, to Betsey Bendorf, Jerome Charyn, Joyce Hartman, Emilie Jacobson, William E. Wilson, Martha Winston, William Wiser, and the late Richard Chase.

  Joe McCrindle and Heathcote Williams of Transatlantic Review have been very generous—my thanks to them, and also to the editors of the publications in which some of these stories, in different form, first appeared, as follows: “The Application,” Transatlantic Review 17, 1964; “The Child,” Minnesota Review, 1965; “Luther,” Commentary, 1966; “The Zodiacs,” Transatlantic Review 20, 1966; “Ebbets Field,” Transatlantic Review 24, 1967; “Corky’s Brother,” Transatlantic Review 25, 1967; “Something Is Rotten in the Borough of Brooklyn,” Ararat, 1967; “A Family Trip,” Transatlantic Review 33, 1969; “The Pass,” Mademoiselle, 1969; and “Elijah,” Works, 1969.

  JAY NEUGEBOHEN

  Spéracèdes

  Alpes Maritimes

  March, 1969

  CORKY’S BROTHER

  Luther

  LUTHEB ARRIVED at Booker T. Washington Junior-High School (Columbus Avenue and 107th Street, Manhattan) in September of 1955, six months before I did. I met him at the end of February, the third week I taught there, when one of the assistant principals asked me to cover the cafeteria during fifth period for a teacher who had to be at a conference. “Good luck with the animals,” I remember him saying.

  I was on my guard when I entered the cafeteria; perhaps even a trifle scared. The stories I had been hearing in the teachers’ lounge had prepared me to expect anything. During the winter months the students were not allowed to leave the lunchroom and the results of keeping them penned in—the fights, the food throwing, the high-pitched incessant chattering in Spanish, the way the Negro and Puerto Rican boys and girls chased each other around the tables—such things did, I had to admit, give the room a zoo-like quality.

  The day I was assigned, however, was a Catholic holy day and many of the students were absent. Those who remained filled a little less than half of the large room and though they were noisy it was relatively easy to keep them in order. Luther sat at a table by himself, near the exit to the food line. Occasionally, I noticed, a few boys would come and sit next to him. The third time I patrolled his area, however, his table was empty and he stopped me.

  “Hey, man,” he said, poking me in the arm to get my attention, “you new here?”

  He had a stack of about ten cookies in his other hand and he put one into his mouth as he waited for an answer. When I told him that I was not new, he nodded and looked at me. “You have any trouble yet?”

  “No,” I said, as sternly as possible. Despite my feelings of sympathy for the students, I knew that if I ever hoped to get anywhere with them I had to appear tough and confident. “No,” I repeated, almost, I recall, as if I were challenging him. “I haven’t.”

  Luther cocked his head to one side then and smiled slowly. “You will,” he said, and went back to his cookies.

  In the teachers’ lounge, the first time I told the story, somebody asked if the boy who had stopped me was a little Negro kid, very black, with a slight hunchback. I said he was. The teachers laughed. “That’s Luther,” one of them said.

  “He’s batty,” said another. “Just leave him be.”

  I repeated the story endlessly. It was the first anecdote of my teaching experience that excited admiration and some sort of reaction from those I told it to, and this was important to me then. I had no more direct encounters with Luther that term, though I did see him in the halls, between classes. I always smiled at him and he would smile back—or at least I thought he did. I could never be sure. This bothered me, especially the first time it happened. Through my retelling of the story, I realized, he had become so real to me, so much a part of my life that I think I took it for granted that our encounter had assumed equal significance in his life. The possibility that he had not even repeated the story to a single one of his friends disturbed me.

  Once or twice during the term I spotted him wandering around the halls while classes were in session, slouching down a corridor, his body pressed against the tile walls. When I asked the other teachers if he was known for cutting classes, they told me again to just leave him be—that the guidance counselor had suggested the teachers let him do what he wanted to. He was harmless, they said, if you left him alone. Those teachers who had him in their classes agreed with the guidance counselor. Left alone, he didn’t annoy them. When he wanted to, he worked feverishly—and did competent work; but when he didn’t want to work he would either sit and stare or just get up, walk out of the room, and wander around the building. He was, they concluded, a mental case.

  I returned to Booker T. Washington Junior High School the following September, and Luther turned up in one of my English classes. He had changed. He was no longer small, having grown a good five inches over the summer, and he was no longer quiet. When classwork bored him now, he would stand up and, instead of leaving the room, would begin telling stories. Just like that. He had his favorite topics, too—his cousin Henry who had epilepsy, Willie Mays, what was on sale at the supermarket, the football team he played on, the stories in the latest Blackhawk comic book. When he ran out of stories, he would pull The National Enquirer out of his back pocket and begin reading from it, always starting with an item in the “Personals” columns that had caught his eye. I never knew what to do. When I would yell at him to sit down and be quiet, he would wave his hand at me impatiently and continue. Moreover, no expression on his face, nothing he ever said, indicated that he thought he was doing anything wrong. An hour after disrupting a class, if I would see him in the corridor, he would give me a big smile and a hello. After a while, of course, I gave up even trying to interrupt him. I listened with the other students—laughing, fascinated, amazed.

  I tried to remember some of his stories, but when I retold them they never seemed interesting, and so I purposely gave Luther’s class a lot of composition work, trying to make the topics as imaginative as possible—with the hope, of course, that he would use one of them to let loose. But all the topics, he declared, were “stupid” and he refused to write on any of them. Then, when I least expected it, whe
n I assigned the class a “How to—” composition, he handed one in. It was typewritten on a piece of lined notebook paper, single-spaced, beginning at the very top of the page and ending just at the first ruled line. It was titled “How To Steal Some Fruits.”

  How To Steal Some Fruits, by Luther Go to a fruit store and when the fruitman isn’t looking take some fruits. Then run. When the fruitman yells “Hey you stop taking those fruits” run harder. That is how to steal some fruits.

  The next day he sat quietly in class. When I looked at him, he looked down at his desk. When I called on him to answer a question, he shrugged and looked away. At three o’clock, however, no more than five seconds after I had returned from escorting my official class downstairs, he bounded into my room, full of life, and propped himself up on the edge of my desk.

  “Hey, man,” he said. “How’d you like my composition? It was deep, wasn’t it?”

  “Deep?”

  “Deep, swift, cool—you know.”

  “I liked it fine,” I said, laughing.

  “Ah, don’t put me on, man—how was it?”

  “I liked it,” I repeated, my hands clasped in front of me on the desk. “I mean it.”

  His face lit up. “You mean it? I worked hard on it, Mr. Carter. I swear to God I did.” It was the first time, I remember, that he had ever addressed me by my name. He stopped and wiped his mouth. “How’d you like the typing? Pretty good, huh?”

  “It was fine.”

  “Christ, man,” he said, stepping down from my desk and moving to the blackboard. He picked up a piece of chalk and wrote his name, printing it in capital letters. “How come you so tight? Why don’t you loosen up? I ain’t gonna do nothing. I just want to know about my composition. That’s all.”

  I felt I could reach him, talk to him. I wanted to—had wanted to for some time, I realized—but he was right. I was tight, uncomfortable, embarrassed. “Where’d you get a typewriter?” I offered.

  He smiled. “Where I get fruits,” he replied, then laughed and clapped his hands. I must have appeared shocked, for before I could say anything he was shaking his head back and forth. “Oh man,” he said. “You are really deep. I swear. You really are.” He climbed onto my desk again. “You mind talking?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. Let me ask you something—you married?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you think I should be married?”

  “It beats stealing fruits,” he said, and laughed again. His laugh was loud and harsh and at first it annoyed me, but then his body began rocking back and forth as if his comment had set off a chain of jokes that he was telling himself silently, and before I knew it I was laughing with him.

  “I really liked the composition,” I said. “In fact, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve already read it to some of the other teachers.”

  “No shit.”

  “They thought it was superb.”

  “It’s superb,” he said, shaking his head in agreement. “Oh, it’s superb, man,” he said, getting up again and walking away. His arms and legs moved in different directions and he seemed so loose that when he turned his back to me and I noticed the way his dirty flannel shirt was stretched tightly over his misshapen back, I was surprised—as if I’d noticed it for the first time. He walked around the room, muttering to himself, tapping on desks with his fingertips, and then he headed for the door. “I’m superb,” he said. “So I be rolling on my superb way home—”

  “Stay,” I said.

  He threw his arms apart. “You win!” he declared. “Ill stay.” He came back to my desk, looked at me directly, then rolled his eyes and smiled. “People been telling stories to you about me?”

  “No.”

  “None?” he questioned, coming closer.

  “All right,” I said. “Some—”

  “That’s all right,” he said, shrugging it off. He played with the binding of a book that was on my desk. Then he reached across and took my grade book. I snatched it away from him and he laughed again. “Oh, man,” he exclaimed. “I am just so restless!—You know what I mean?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer but started around the room again. The pockets of his pants were stuffed and bulging, the cuffs frayed. The corner of a red and white workman’s handkerchief hung out of a back pocket. He stopped in the back of the room, gazed into the glass bookcase, and then turned to me and leaned back. “You said to stay—what you got to say?”

  The question was in my mind, and impulsively I asked it: “Just curious—do you remember me from last year?”

  “Sure,” he said, and turned his back to me again. He looked in the bookcase, whirled around, and walked to the side of the room, opening a window. He leaned out and just as I was about to say something to him about it, he closed it and came back to the front of the room. “Man,” he exclaimed, sitting on my desk again. “Were you ever scared that day! If I’d set off a cherry bomb, you’d have gone through the fan.” He put his face closer to mine. “Man, you were scared green!”

  “Was I scared of you, Luther?” I asked, looking straight into his eyes.

  “Me? Nah. Nothing to be scared of.” He hopped off the desk and wiped his name off the blackboard with the palm of his hand; then he started laughing to himself. He looked at me, over his shoulder. “Bet I know what you’re thinking now,” he said.

  “Go ahead—”

  “You’re thinking you’d like to help a boy like me. Right? You’re getting this big speech ready in your head about—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “I wasn’t.”

  He eyed me suspiciously. “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Not even with compositions? Oh, man, if you’d help me with compositions, before we’d be through with me, I’d be typing like a whiz.” He banged on a desk with his palms, and then his fingers danced furiously on the wood as he made clicking noises inside his mouth. “Ding!” he said, swinging the carriage across. “Ain’t it fun to type!”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Maybe I was thinking that I would like to help you.”

  “I knew it, man,” he said to himself. “I just knew it.”

  “You have a good mind, Luther—much better than you let on.”

  “I do, I do,” he muttered, chuckling. I stood up and went to the closet to get my coat. “Okay. What do I get if I work for you?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Nothing, maybe. I can’t promise anything.”

  “I like that, man,” he said.

  “Could you call me Mr. Carter?” I asked somewhat irritably. “I don’t call you, ‘Hey, you’—”

  “Okay, Mr. Carter,” he said. He took my coat sleeve. “Let me help you on with your coat, Mr. Carter.”

  We walked out of the room and I locked the door. “You ain’t a real social worker like the others,” he commented as we started down the stairs. He held the door open for me. “I do like that.”

  I nodded.

  “Playing it close to the vest again, huh? Tight-mouthed.”

  “Just thinking,” I said.

  When we were outside, he asked me what he had to do.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “To get you to help me to be somebody, to educate myself—all that stuff.”

  “Do what you want to do,” I said. “Though you might start by doing your homework. Then we’ll see—”

  “I know,” he said, cocking his head to one side again. “If I play ball with you, you’ll play ball with me. Right? Okay, okay. I know.”

  Then he was gone, running down the street, his arms spread wide as if he were an airplane, a loud siren-like noise rising and falling from him as he disappeared from view.

  The next few months were without doubt the most satisfying to me of any during the eight years I’ve been a teacher. Luther worked like a fiend. He was bright, learned quickly, and was not really that far behind. He did his homework, he paid attention in class, he studied for tests, and he read books. That was most important. On every book he read
I asked him to write a book report: setting, plot, theme, characters, his opinion of the book—and once a week, on Thursday afternoons, we would get together in my room for a discussion. During the remainder of the term he must have gone through at least forty to fifty books. Most of them had to do with sports, airplanes, and insects. For some reason he loved books about insects. All the reports came to me typed, and on some he drew pictures—“illustrations” he called them, which, he claimed, would be a help to me in case I had not read the book.

  When we would finish talking about books, I would help him with his other subjects, and his improvement was spectacular. I looked forward to my sessions with him, to his reports, to just seeing him—yet from day to day, from moment to moment, I always expected him to bolt from me, and this pleased me. Every time he came to me for a talk I was truly surprised.

  When the term ended, he asked if I would continue to help him. I said I would. He was not programmed for any of my English classes during the spring term, but we kept up with our weekly discussions. As the weather improved, however, he read less and less; I didn’t want him to feel that he had to come see me every Thursday, and so, about a week before the opening of the baseball season, I told him I thought he had reached the point where he could go it alone. “When you feel like talking, just come knocking,” I said. “We don’t need a schedule.” He seemed relieved, I thought, and I was proud that I had had the sense to release him from any obligation he might have felt.

  Then, suddenly, I didn’t see him anywhere for three weeks. I asked his homeroom teacher about him and she said she hadn’t seen him either; she had sent him a few postcards but had received no reply. That very night—it was almost as if he had been there listening, I thought—he telephoned me at home.

  “Is this Mr. Carter? This is Luther here.”

  “Hi, Luther,” I said.

  “I looked you up in the telephone book. You mind me calling you at home?”

  “No, no. I don’t mind.”

  “Okay,” he said, breathing hard. “I just wanted to let you know not to worry about me because I’m not in school. Okay?”