Still Pitching (7 page)

The day after the championship
game, our team picture appeared in the
Rockaway Beach Wave
. That afternoon, we all rode down Rockaway Beach Boulevard in open Lincoln Continentals and Cadillac convertibles, while our parents and friends lined the street cheering and tossing confetti. It was as if we'd won the World Series.

I'd struggled so hard to earn this moment of recognition. But the feeling lasted only for a few days. In less than three months, we'd all be moving on to junior high. As entering seventh graders, we'd be at the bottom of the pecking order. Which meant that even after so much hard work and suffering, I'd have to prove myself all over again.

In the summer between
the end of sixth grade and the beginning of junior high, Ira, Billy, and I were still making our Saturday pilgrimages to Ebbets Field. Now that they were eighth graders, they had a terrific time scaring the hell out of me with lurid tales of the horrors I'd soon encounter on the bus ride to and from school.

“The Arverne greasers have switch blades and zip guns,” Billy said with a note of awe in his voice.

He was positively wild-eyed when he told me about the hazing that the Belle Harbor kids had to endure. “If they pick you out,” he said, “they'll hang you upside down on the hand rails and turn your pockets inside out till your lunch money spills out.”

I was chewing on that image when Ira broke in.

“That's not the worst,” he said. “Just pray they don't cut off your belt and pull your pants down.”

“Yeah, I saw it happen to Sandy Dorfman,” Billy chimed in. “Right in front of all the girls.”

They had these big smirks on their faces. It was all a prerehearsed act. A little bit of one-upmanship—payback for all the times I'd accused them being such irreverent, uninformed Dodger fans.

If I wasn't already spooked, Ira made certain to warn me about “Big Tom” Sullivan, the Phys Ed and Hygiene teacher.

“Sullivan's got it in for Belle Harbor Jews,” he said. “In Hygiene, he called Eliot Reiss and Danny Klein ‘candy ass sugar babies.'”

“And you'd better watch your own ass when you do the rope climb in Gym,” Billy said.

“Right, if you're too slow” Ira added, “Big Tom'll whack you across the butt with his paddle.”

Ira forged on, describing in detail the notched wooden paddle that Sullivan kept in his office just for such occasions. Even if I could get out of Hygiene and Gym, there was no avoiding Sullivan. Not if I wanted to play baseball. He coached the VFW summer team.

The Sullivan stories
weren't the first time I'd encountered anti-Semitism. Over Easter break Mike Rubin and I tried to get into a pickup basketball game at the St. Francis De Sales playground. As soon as we were inside the gate, Larry Keeley and three other Irish Catholic kids descended on us. All four were scruffy looking urchins with holes in their shirts and sneakers. They reminded me of the orphans in
Oliver Twist
.

Larry was a short, scrawny kid with a legendary mean streak. We'd all heard the stories about his gang—how they liked to lay in wait for the school bus on 129th and Newport and then terrorize the Jewish kids who got off there.

“Can't you boys read the sign?” Larry said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

He was the ringleader. When he spoke, everyone stopped playing.

“No Jews allowed,” he said. His three toadies laughed on cue.

We were too scared to respond.

“Everyone knows that Jews can't read,” one of them said. More laughs. No one went back to playing ball. They were all waiting to see what was going to happen. If we didn't get out of there fast, we were in for it.

Keeley motioned with his left hand, and the four of them began pelting us with small stones that they'd fished out of their jacket pockets. I started running, with Mike trailing right behind. We sprinted through the front gate and up the block while they chased after us, still throwing stones and yelling, “Chicken-shit Jew boys,” and “the Jews killed Christ, the Jews killed Christ.”

We were lucky to get out of there without a fight. But when I got home, I was angry at myself for not having the nerve to stand up to them. How could I ever tell my father? Every time Billy Creelman from down the block would beat me up, my father told me, “The only way you'll get any respect from a bully is to stand up to him.”

It's the same story almost every father tells his son. What he neglected to inform me of, however, was how to stand up to four of them at once.

All summer, I continued
to follow the Dodgers' fortunes. Few of even their most loyal fans believed that the team could live down the disgrace of the previous season's disaster. But I didn't share that view. I was confident they'd make a comeback.

They did it, as usual, the hard way. Despite an off year by their best hitters, fewer victories from Carl Erskine and Preacher Roe, a key injury to Ralph Branca, and the loss of their ace, Don Newcombe, to military service—the Dodgers managed to fight off another Giant stretch run and win the pennant by four and half games. They lost the World Series to the Yankees again, but it took the Yanks seven games to beat them. When the season ended, the New York press once again wrote the Dodgers off as inveterate underachievers, if not out-and-out losers. But to my mind, they'd made a remarkable recovery by just winning the pennant.

The team's resurgence was in part due to the performance of a rookie pitcher, Joe Black, a previously unknown twenty-eight-year-old pitcher. Pitching mostly in relief, Black won fifteen games and saved fifteen more. Except for the Yankees' Joe Paige, the Giants' Hoyt Wilhelm, and a few select others, relief pitchers in the early ‘50s were undervalued role players. For most of the game, they'd huddle together in the bullpen, apart from the rest of their teammates, watching and waiting for a chance to contribute. Often with the game on the line, they'd be called in to pitch. If they succeeded, they'd earn what, in baseball lingo, is called a save.

I could identify with these relief specialists a lot more easily than I could relate to most of the other players. Their borderline status, coupled with the pressure of having to come though in clutch situations, made them perfect role models for a kid who had an aching need for the spotlight.

By midsummer I was
starting to obsess over the prospect of having to defend myself in school this fall. So I took out three library books:
The Amboy Dukes, A Stone for Danny Fisher;
and
Knock on Any Door
—all of which were about teenage street gangs. Two of the three main characters, Frank Goldfarb and Danny Fisher, were Jewish. Nick Romano, the third one, was Italian Catholic. They were all roughly my age.

The book that captivated me most was
The Amboy Dukes
. The gang leaders and henchmen had hoodlike names like Black Benny, Moishe, Larry Tunafish, Bull Bronstein, and Crazy Sachs. They sported Vaseline-slicked duck tailed (DA) haircuts and wore pegged pants—and they belonged to exotic sounding clubs like the Sutter Kings, the Killers, the D-Rape Artists, and the Enigmas.

All of them grew up in post-Depression New York—in rough neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York. They regularly cut school and hung around pool halls and seedy clubhouses—smoking reefers and planning petty crimes. To maintain respect or stature they had to prove they weren't afraid to fight, steal, lie, cheat, and deal drugs. They picked up young girls and bragged about having sex with them. They robbed neighborhood candy stores and shops, often at gunpoint. Some gang members even put their lives at risk.

The character I felt the most sympathy for was Frank Goldfarb. He was more intelligent and compassionate than the rest of the gang. His dream, in fact, was to marry his girlfriend and go to college. But he was too caught up in that world to ever escape. In the end, his misplaced loyalty to the group cost him his life.

I couldn't be more unlike these characters—even Frank. Yet there was something compelling about them and the world they inhabited. I yearned for the kind of camaraderie they shared. Sometimes, I even wished I had the chutzpah to live as close to the edge as they did.

P.S. 44 was less than
a five mile bus ride from my house. The turn-of-the-century red brick building and its fenced-in schoolyard sat squarely in the heart of the Arverne-Hammels-Holland section of Rockaway Beach—one of the roughest, most rundown areas in south Queens. But it might as well have been on another planet. Nothing we'd experienced, either at home or in six years of grade school, could have prepared us for this junior high.

The forty-five minute bus ride to school took us through neighborhoods our parents had warned us about since we were kids. Once you got past McGuire's Bar and Grill on Beach 108th, all you'd see were seedy looking bars, gated liquor stores, rundown markets, weed choked vacant lots, shuttered stores, ramshackle houses, and shops with iron bars on the windows. I'd been idealizing neighborhoods like these all summer. But when I saw them in person, I was unnerved by the ugliness and squalor. I couldn't imagine growing up in these conditions.

The kids who got on the bus after Beach 100th street were predominantly Irish and Italian Catholics. Most lived in dilapidated old wooden homes with two or sometimes three other families. The Blacks and Puerto Ricans lived in the city funded housing projects close to the El.

A lot of the white guys belonged to street gangs like the South Arverne Boy's Club and the Hammels' Raiders. They took special classes like automotive shop and woodworking. Many were just biding their time until they turned sixteen and could legally quit school.

We all knew better than to mess with them. Like the characters in
The Amboy Dukes
, they had slicked back DAs and wore the same uniform each day: black motorcycle jackets with upturned collars, tight black T-shirts with cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves, Garrison belts and dungarees, or pegged pants with white stitches running down the sides, and black shit kickers (steel-toed boots with straps and buckles).

The girls frequently came to school with curlers in their hair. They wore breast-hugging black sweaters, tight black wool skirts with slits down the side, black nylons with seams running down the back, and open-toed flats. Some had black cloth jackets with club names, like Pink Pussycats embroidered on the back. Most of them smoked and chewed gum.

The greasers and their girlfriends sat in the back of the bus, their feet up on the seat backs, smoking and cursing loudly enough for everyone to hear.

The school bus was
a microcosm of the junior high social hierarchy—a pecking order that had even more sharply defined boundaries than those we'd established in grade school.

Up front were the guys in the clique—who I now thought of as Archies and Reggies. They preened and held court with their Betty and Veronica girlfriends. The kids in the clique were clean-cut preppies. The boys—future class presidents and G.O. leaders—had VO-5-styled crew cuts, and they wore blue oxford button downs, khaki pants, and dirty white bucks. Their companions—would-be cheerleaders, baton twirlers, and boosters—were well-scrubbed, pony-tailed girls who dressed in starchy white blouses, plaid pleated skirts, and white bobby sox with saddle shoes.

Sitting behind them was a most unusual group, comprised of four guys I thought of as “genteel greasers.” All four were from my grade school, and none of them were athletes, big brains, social movers, or even hardcore hoods.

Their leader was Manny Angell—a ruggedly handsome Sephardic Jew whose father was rumored to be in the Jewish Mafia. Manny was tall, lean, and broad-shouldered, with a chiseled profile and a thick mane of dark, unruly hair. He had a brooding insolence that was reminiscent of a young Marlon Brando or the James Dean character in
Rebel Without a Cause
.

Manny's comrades—Stuie Issacs, Jerry Shapiro, Paul Goldman, and Larry Ramis—were always in some kind of trouble it seems. The buzz back in sixth grade was that Manny and Larry had already been to reform school. They'd got caught hot wiring other people's cars and taking them for joy rides in the Riis Park parking lot. I also heard that all of them smoked reefers, and that Paul and Larry raced souped-up Harleys. But the most titillating rumors were the ones about Manny and Stuie “going all the way” with the rich high school girls from the Five Towns—an exclusive enclave of gated villages just across the Queens county line.

I was thinking about those guys while I was reading
The Amboy Dukes
in the summer. Back in grade school, Manny and Stuie played punch ball with some of us. Both lived a few blocks away from me, so occasionally I'd walk to school with them.

On the school bus, they had an air of defiance that bought them a kind of unspoken respect. The greasers, I noticed, never taunted them like they did everyone else. And the girls who hung around with the clique would steal furtive glances at them when their boyfriends weren't looking.

The most hapless group was the losers and outcasts. They had no choice but to sit near the back between Manny's boys and the greasers. Poor Eli Rubinstein and Bernard Schoenberg still had Vitalis-trained hair and wore blue or brown gabardine pants and Buster Brown shoes. The girls, Stephanie Sterner and Francine Leibler, were both overweight and had oily skin and acne. They wore grey felt poodle skirts to school. At dances and make-out parties they'd always wind up doing the Lindy Hop with each other.

The greasers and their “gun molls” taunted the two guys unmercifully, sometimes calling them “kikes” and “dirty Jews.” I felt sorry for them, and yet, like everyone else, I kept my distance.

Where did I belong in this deviant hierarchy? As ambivalent as I felt about the clique, I still held out hope that those guys would someday warm up to me. I sat right behind them on the bus, listened in on their conversations, and tried to put in my two cents worth every so often. But not one of them went out of his way to include me in the group's activities—either the Friday night make-out parties or the after school pick-up basketball games in Frank Pearlman's driveway. The snubs were painful, of course. Yet the more indifferent they were toward me, the more I courted their approval. Whenever I asked myself why I was so desperate for their attention, all I had to do is look at the circle of popular girls and guys who were also vying for their attention.