Corky's Brother (4 page)

When he'd gone, my mother would always praise me for not having laughed at him. Joe must have been in his forties or fifties then, and for as long as I could remember he'd been the delivery boy for Mr. Fontani's fruit and grocery store on Rogers Avenue. One of the big treats of my life, I remember, was being allowed to go with Joe on a round of deliveries. While my mother was doing her shopping, I'd sit on top of Joe's cart—it was made of wood, not aluminum—and we'd zoom through the streets, in and out of traffic—up Linden Boulevard, down Nostrand Avenue, through Martense Street, Church Avenue, Lenox Road, into courtyards, backyards, through alleys, down cellars. “Fast enough for you, Howie?” he'd always shout, and he'd speed up until I felt I was going to be blown off the top of his cart. Then I'd scream for him to slow down and he'd laugh a lot. At one time or another all my friends had been taken for rides by Joe, and when we were together we'd swap tales of our trips, each of us claiming to have come closest to getting killed.

Joe was tremendous in size. He was over six feet tall and must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds. His eyes were small and pale blue, his nose was large and red, his ears stuck out, his face was usually unshaven, and his long hair, which was silver-gray, stuck out in wild curls from under his baseball cap. It was inevitable, I guess, that we called him Mighty Joe Young. If any of us had ever been caught under the wheels of a car or truck, we were sure that Joe would have appeared, lifted the truck, and saved our lives. Watching him carry crates of vegetables into Mr. Fontani's store, or sides of beef into Mr. Klein's kosher butcher shop, we used to make bets about how many pounds he could lift. The figures usually started at five hundred.

In March of 1956, when President Eisenhower announced that he would seek re-election, Joe removed the black streamers from his cart and in their place he put a smiling picture of the President, framed in red, white, and blue. By that time, though, it wasn't the outside of his cart that interested us. We were all about twelve or thirteen then, most of us in the sixth or seventh grade at P.S. 92, and for almost a year—starting the previous spring—the inside of Joe's delivery cart had been the center of our lives, a treasure chest of pornography.

It contained everything—photography magazines, decks of playing cards, glossy eight-by-ten's of naked women, calendars, rubber dolls, comic books, stories, books on exotic methods of love-making, and these dull brown photos of live men and women making love and doing things in positions that drove us wild. Joe kept his collection carefully stored behind wooden slats that he'd removed from orange crates and had nailed to the insides of his cart. He'd show us the same books and pictures again and again, always telling us how much he'd paid for an item, always pointing and asking, “Do you like that, huh?” We must have looked through some of those books a thousand times during that year, but every time we'd get together with him it was as if each of us was seeing it all for the first time. “I got some collection, huh?” he'd say proudly, and we'd always tell him that he did, and then we'd ask to see the three or four photos he kept in his wallet, the ones we knew were his favorites.

We usually met in a cellar of one of the big apartment houses on Linden Boulevard or Lenox Road—no more than six or seven of us at a time. We always entered and left in groups of two's, so that it wouldn't look suspicious. Sometimes, though, when we were sure it was safe and Joe was scheduled for a delivery, we'd get together in one of our own homes and Joe would carry his collection upstairs in a grocery carton. And sometimes—right in my own house—Izzie and Corky would get on my parents' bed and try to see if the positions in the pictures were possible for human beings. They'd say all kinds of crazy things to each other—the way people in the comic books did while they were doing things—and we'd go out of our minds laughing at them. Joe liked to watch them fool around and he'd laugh and try to help them get their legs and arms going the right way.

The biggest thrill that year came when Joe invited us up to his apartment. He lived on the top floor of an apartment house on Linden Boulevard, right around the corner from Mr. Fontani's store. We came on a Sunday morning in June, about two weeks before school was out. There were fifteen or twenty of us: Izzie, Corky, Louie, Marty—most of the guys from our baseball team, and a few others we'd invited. We came in small groups, with our bats and balls and gloves—we all told our parents we had a game at the Parade Grounds—and we made up that if anyone asked us questions we would say we were looking for Kenny Murphy, who lived on the third floor of Joe's building. I got there with Izzie and Louie at about eleven o'clock, and there were already a half dozen guys sitting around eating cookies and fruit and drinking sodas.

Joe was dressed in a white shirt and tie and almost before he'd closed the door behind us he was asking what we wanted to eat. In the middle of the living room he'd set up a table and piled it high with all kinds of food—apples, oranges, peaches, pears, cookies, candy bars, potato chips, soda, milk, even lettuce and tomatoes and mushrooms, I remember—and all the while we were there he kept bringing new supplies out of his kitchen to refill the plates we were emptying.

He served ice cream, too—Mel-o-rolls and Dixie cups—and he was as happy as I'd ever seen him, just going around and asking us again and again if we were having a good time, if we had enough to eat. We were all surprised, I think, at what his place looked like. It was neat and clean, and the furniture seemed to be almost brand-new. When Louie went up to him and told him how much we all liked his place, his face lit up and he began telling us how much each thing had cost him. At the time, I remember, his place reminded me of a motel I'd been in once on a trip to Connecticut with my parents—mainly because of the bright-colored slipcovers and rugs, and the wrought-iron supports on the couches and chairs and tables. On the walls, though, instead of a few neatly framed pictures, Joe had taped up his own drawings of naked men and women, some traced on tissue-thin paper with pencil, others copied free-hand with crayons. At about noon, when all the guys were there, Joe got out his collection from under his bed and began passing around books and pictures and dolls for us to look at, but I wasn't too interested. I just kept looking at his own drawings. There seemed to be thousands of them in all different sizes, drawn on all kinds of paper—flattened-out paper bags, strips of wallpaper, colored poster paper, envelopes, shirt cardboards—and they covered the walls of his three rooms.

We stayed until about four o'clock that day. When we were about to leave, Joe made us swear not to tell our parents, the way he always did when we'd finished a session. He never threatened to do anything to us if we did tell—he just asked us not to, because he said it would get him into trouble with Mr. Fontani if any customers found out. Then he told us that he was saving his money and he promised that the next time we came over, after the summer, he'd have a movie projector and a bunch of French films he was planning to buy. He had a lot of money saved, he said, but the films were very expensive. We thanked him, and those of us who were going to the country or to camp for July and August promised we'd send him postcards.

We never got to see the French films at Joe's apartment. The next fall, one day about a month or so after I'd gotten back from camp, Izzie gave me the news. We were in the schoolyard, shooting around, waiting to get enough guys to start a game. “You won't believe it,” he said, “but Joe is getting married.”

“What—?”

He shook his head. “Yeah. I didn't believe it either—but Mr. Fontani told my mother that it's the truth.”

After supper that night I ran out of the house and met the guys at the comer of Linden and Rogers, where we always hung out. They'd all heard the news by then and they all seemed very sad about it. We kept shaking our heads in disbelief and asking each other if it was really true. Before we went home that night we made up that Kenny and I would go by Mr. Fontani's store the next morning and ask Joe ourselves. He couldn't get married, we told each other. He just couldn't.

But the next morning Joe told us that it was so. “Wait till you see her,” he said, with this big smile on his face. “My aunt got her for me—but that don't matter. Wait till you see her.” We talked for a while, he thanked me for the postcard I'd sent him, and then—we were standing by the curb, I remember—he put down a big sack of potatoes he'd been carrying, wiped his hands on his apron, and after looking around to make sure nobody could hear him, he rolled his eyes and whispered to us: “Who needs pictures when you can have the real thing, huh?”

When we reported to the other guys later that day, they all seemed to feel betrayed in the way we did—and about the only thing that cheered us up was Louie's suggestion that we chip in and offer to buy Joe's collection from him. But even if he would sell, we realized, none of us was brave enough to keep the stuff in his house.

Joe was married sometime around Thanksgiving—I was never exactly sure where and how—and the first time any of us ever saw his wife was the week after Thanksgiving. We were standing on the corner when Corky spotted them. They walked toward us slowly, arm in arm. Joe was wearing a blue suit, a shirt and tie, and instead of his baseball cap, a new straw hat. He was smoking a cigar and nodding proudly to everyone he passed. His wife seemed to be just as proud as he was—and when they reached us and Joe introduced her to each one of us, she smiled and repeated our names. She was very short—maybe a little over five feet—plump, but not fat. She seemed to be much younger than ]oe—thirty-three or thirty-four at the most—and she had very pretty, reddish-colored hair which was cut short and straight. Her face was oval, pushed-in, fleshy—to be truthful, it was pretty obvious to all of us that if she wasn't a true Mongolian idiot, she was pretty close to it. You could tell just from the way she walked, kind of duck-footed.

“Why'd he do it?” Corky kept asking after they'd gone. “Why'd he do it?”

The following night Joe and his wife came by at about the same time, arm in arm, and we went through the introductions all over again. At about the end of a week Joe stopped introducing us and would just walk by and say something like “Nice evening for a walk with your wife, huh?” and keep going. That fall he took her for a walk every night, and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons we sometimes saw them in Prospect Park, sitting by the lake. After a while we took them pretty much for granted and hardly gave them much thought when we'd see them together.

After the first snow they came by only about once a week. When they did appear, she would always be dressed warmly in a heavy Persian lamb coat that was too big for her. During Christmas vacation they didn't go walking at all. One night, though, Joe came down by himself and stopped to talk to us.

“I'm going to the store to get something to eat for me and my wife,” he said, smiling.

“Is she feeling okay?” Louie asked. “We haven't seen her for a while.”

“Oh, she's fine,” Joe said. “She's just fine.”

Then Izzie, trying to be a wise guy, I guess, looked up at Joe and as seriously as he could, in a man-to-man voice, asked: “Tell us something, Joe—how do you like married life?”

Joe burst into a big smile then. “I like it fine,” he said. He shook his head up and down a few times before he spoke again. “It's really good for a man to have a wife. I mean it. Everybody should get married.” Then he stopped and lowered his huge head toward us. “I'll tell you something, though. C'mere—” We gathered closer to him and he spoke to us softly, confidentially. “I'll tell you something—it's true what they say about that sex stuff.” Nobody said anything. Joe shook his head vigorously, as if agreeing with himself, then he shrugged. “It's good, but after a while the thrill wears off. You'll all see some day—”

During the winter we didn't think very much about Joe and his wife, and we hardly ever saw them. It snowed a lot and because it got dark so early most of our parents didn't let us stay outside too late anyway. When it started to get warmer, though, and we began to get together again every night after supper, we expected to begin seeing Joe and his wife take their walks again. In a way, I think, we were looking forward to it. At the end of February Joe came down alone a few times and we asked him how his wife was. He said she was fine, but he didn't stop to talk to us. During the month of March he kept going for his walks—almost every night now—but he still took them by himself.

When the warm weather came in the middle of April, Joe was still going for his walks alone. May came and we realized that nobody had seen his wife for over four months. More important, when Joe passed us at night and we asked him about her, he never answered any more. He just kept walking—almost as if he were angry with us. We began to speculate. Izzie started to make up wild stories about what he was probably doing to her, and Corky kept insisting that she'd been dead since New Year's but that Joe didn't know what to do with the body. A few of the guys even began talking about calling the police—that maybe he'd murdered her or chopped her up—you don't know the things you can dream up standing on a corner at night with a bunch of guys.

The second or third week in May we decided to do something. One night when Joe came down we stood around so as to block him from getting by. We did it casually—then, when he'd stopped, Izzie took out a cigarette and asked him if he had a match. While Joe was reaching into his pocket, we shot our questions at him. He lit Izzie's cigarette for him and looked at us. “Okay,” he said. “I'll tell you guys. C'mere—” We moved back from the curb, toward the fence that surrounded the garden of the corner apartment house. “Do you guys listen to the radio?” he asked. “All you hear about is women getting raped and beat up. I'm not kidding.” He took out a page from a newspaper he had in his pocket and unfolded it for us. There were pictures of four different women on the page, all of them in bad shape—bloody, bruised, their dresses torn, their legs or breasts cut and mangled. “Look at what happens nowadays, huh? I gotta protect my wife. The streets aren't safe for women. I could handle one or two guys, but if a whole
bunch
attacked her, I just don't know…you see what I mean?”