Corky's Brother (7 page)

“Sure—but giving us a crazy name isn't going to win us any games.”

“Right. What will win you games? I'll tell you. A good pitcher. I've been going down to the Parade Grounds to watch games, making a study of the teams there, and I've found that pitching is about ninety percent of winning. Especially at our age, when we're not fully built up yet. Did you know, for example, that on high school teams pitchers average about eleven strike-outs a game? It's like with baseball teams in spring training—the pitchers are way ahead of the hitters, because the hitters' reflexes aren't developed yet.”

“Izzie's a pretty good pitcher,” I said. Izzie was my best friend, and the pitcher for our team.

“Sure, but let's face it, he's not a real top-drawer pitcher. He's just not big enough to be. He's got good control, I'll admit that—but his fast ball is almost a change-up. If you let me be general manager, Howie, I'll get the best pitcher in our school to play for us.”

“Who's that?”

“George Santini.”

I gulped.
“Him?”

“That's right.”

George Santini was a year ahead of us at P.S. 92 and he was always getting in trouble with the teachers and the cops. He was about six feet tall, had black greasy hair which was long and cut square in back, and the biggest pair of shoulders I'd ever seen on a guy. He was also the best athlete in our school. The coaches and teachers were always talking to him about going straight and being a star in high school and college, but George never seemed to care much. He was the leader of this gang, which, as far as everybody in our section of Brooklyn was concerned, was the most dangerous gang the world had ever known.

What made George's reputation even worse was his older brother, Vinnie. Vinnie was about nineteen years old and he'd already spent two years in jail. He was a skinny guy—not at all like George—and the word on him was that he was really chicken. To listen to George, though, you would have thought that Vinnie was the toughest guy ever to hit Brooklyn. Whenever he wanted an audience, George would sit down on the steps of the school—on Rogers Avenue—and start telling tales of all the jobs he and Vinnie had pulled off. Sometimes, if we'd bother him enough, he'd tell us about the gang wars he had fought in with Vinnie—in Prospect Park, in Red Hook, in Bay Ridge. If he was sure no teachers or cops were around he'd show us his zip gun, the gun that Johnny Angelo—one of George's lackeys—claimed George had once used to kill a guy with.

“I don't know,” I said. “If my mother ever caught me hanging around with him, I'd really get it—and, anyway, how would you get him to play for us?”

Louie smiled. “You leave that to me.”

A few days later I got all the guys together at my house and I let Louie speak to them. He told them what he'd told me about how he would make our team special, maybe famous—and he also told them that George Santini had agreed to pitch for us. A few of the guys reacted the way I did to this news—they were scared. But when Louie insisted he'd be able to handle George, Izzie and I backed him up.

“I say it's worth a try,” Izzie said. “Even though I'm pitcher and he'll take my place. I'll bet we could beat lots of high school teams with him pitching for us.”

“Sure,” I said. “You ever see the way he can blaze a ball in?”

A few more guys followed our lead, and after a while we all agreed that we'd probably be invincible with George Santini pitching for us.

“One thing, though,” asked Kenny Murphy, our second baseman. “How'd you get him to play for us?”

“Simple,” said Louie. “I offered him the one thing he couldn't refuse—fame. I told him I'd get his name in the newspapers. It's not hard. All you have to do is telephone in the box score to the
Brooklyn Eagle
and they'll print it. My father knows a guy who works there.”

For the next few weeks Louie was the busiest guy in the world—calling up guys at other schools, arranging games, getting permits from the Park Department, coming to our practices…When he started giving us suggestions on things, nobody objected either. He may have been a lousy ballplayer, but he knew more about the game than any of us. Izzie and I gave up playing basketball in the schoolyard afternoons and weekends and spent all our time practicing with
The Zodiacs
.

Our first game was scheduled for a Saturday morning the second week in April. Louie had gotten us a permit to use one of the diamonds at the Parade Grounds, next to Prospect Park, from nine to twelve in the morning, and we were supposed to play a team of eighth-graders from P.S. 246. I was at the field with Izzie by 8:30, but the other team didn't get there until after nine. We ran through infield practice and then let them have the field for a while. Kenny Murphy's father, who'd played for the Bushwicks when they were a semi-pro team, had agreed to umpire the game. By a quarter to ten neither Louie nor George had shown up and the other team was hollering that we were afraid to play them.

Since George had never come to any practices, some of us were a little worried, but at about five to ten he showed up. He was wearing a baseball hat like the rest of us, with a Z sewn on the front, and he looked a little embarrassed. He was smoking and he didn't say much to anybody. He just asked who the catcher was and started warming up. He wore a T-shirt, with the sleeves cut off. Looking at him, you would have thought he was too muscle-bound to be a pitcher, but when he reared back and kicked his left foot high in the air, then whipped his arm around, he was as smooth as Warren Spahn, only righty, with the natural straight overhand motion that every coach spends his nights dreaming about. Stan Reiss, our catcher, had to put an extra sponge in his mitt, but he was so proud, catching George with all the guys looking at the two of them, that I think he would have let the ball burn a hole in his hand before he would have given up his position.

“C'mon,” George said after a dozen or so warm-ups. “Let's get the game going.”

“We were waiting for Louie,” I said. “He should be here any minute.”

“Okay,” George said. “But he better hurry. I got better things to do than spend all day strikin' out a bunch of fags.”

He said the last thing loudly, for the benefit of the other team. Then he turned and spit in their direction, daring one of them to contradict him. No one did.

A minute later I saw Louie. He was getting out of his mother's car, on Caton Avenue, and he was carrying this tremendous thing. From my position at shortstop I couldn't make it out, but as he came nearer, running awkwardly and holding it in front of him like a package of groceries, I realized what it was: his old victrola.

“Hey, George!” Louie called. “You ready to break Feller's strike-out record?”

George laughed. “Anytime they get in the batter's box—”

“Wait a second,” Louie said. He put the victrola down next to the backstop. He started fiddling with it, cranking it up the way you had to to get it to work, and then he started playing a record. At first it wasn't cranked up enough and you couldn't tell what kind of music it was. But then Louie cranked some more—and I whipped off my hat and stood at attention as the strains of “The Star-Spangled Banner” came blasting across the infield. I looked at George and he was smiling as broadly as he could, holding his cap across his heart, standing rigid, at attention. The team from P.S. 246 must have been as shocked as we were, but by the time the music got to “and the rockets' red glare” both teams were standing at attention, saluting, listening, while Louie kept cranking away so that the music wouldn't slow down. People sitting on benches, guys playing on other diamonds, men and women walking along Caton Avenue, a few park cops—they all stopped and started drifting toward our diamond. When the record was over, Louie—in the loudest voice I'd ever heard—shouted “Play ball!” and we started the game. We must have had a crowd of over fifty people watching us play our first game, and I told myself that if George had been pitching for a Major League team that day he would have pitched at least a shut-out.

He struck out all but two of their men—one guy hit a grounder to me at shortstop, and another fouled out to Corky Williams at first base. He also hit four home runs. I got a double and two singles, I remember. We won, 19-0, and the next day, as Louie'd promised, our box score was in the
Brooklyn Eagle
.

Louie got us six more games during the next two weeks, and we won all of them. George gave up a total of seven hits in the six games, and he was a pretty happy guy during that time. He had clippings of the box scores of all the games in his wallet, the way we all did. Clippings of the box scores—and then, the first week in May, the best clipping of all: an item in Jimmy O'Brien's column in the
Brooklyn Eagle
about our team, mentioning George, and Louie's victrola. I think I carried that clipping around with me until my third year in high school.

After that we began getting even more attention and teams from all over Brooklyn were challenging us to games. We played as many of them as we could—and George kept shutting out every team we played.

In the meantime Louie devised another plan. He called a meeting of the team the second week in May to discuss it. He told us that a team with our ability and prestige had to live up to its name. We said we were—we were winning games, weren't we?

“Sure,” Louie said. “But what do you look like out on the field? People are starting to come in pretty large numbers to see us play—they hear about us, we got a reputation—and then when they see us, we look like a bunch of pick-ups.” He lowered his voice and went on. “What we have to do,” he said, “is develop some class. And I've got the plan worked out. It's not new, I'll admit—lots of the high school guys use it. I say we run a raffle and use the money to buy ourselves jackets and uniforms.”

We all liked the idea of jackets and uniforms, naturally, but they cost a lot of money—especially the kind of uniforms and jackets we wanted to have.

“I got it all figured out,” Louie said, pulling out some pieces of paper. Then he started talking about numbers, and once he did that, I knew we'd get those uniforms and jackets. It turned out that Louie could get a clock radio at a discount from an uncle of his. Then he said he could get Levy's Sporting Goods Store, on Flatbush Avenue, to donate a glove and ball for the raffle. He also said they'd sell us the uniforms and jackets at cost if Jimmy O'Brien would mention them in his column sometime. Louie said his father could take care of that. We'd make the radio first prize and the glove and ball second prize, but we'd tell the kids at school that if they won first prize we'd give them the glove and ball anyway. There were fifteen of us and if we each sold five books of ten chances at a quarter apiece, that'd be almost two hundred dollars. Louie said that he himself would sell at least fifteen books, and he expected most of us to sell more than five. If we took in three hundred dollars in the raffle, we could have the uniforms and jackets.

George was at the meeting this time—in Louie's house—and he volunteered to get his gang to sell chances. All of us were pretty glad then that we'd be on the selling end of the raffle during the next few weeks. Louie smiled and said he'd already had the raffle books printed and that the drawing would take place on Friday afternoon, June 1. On June 2, we all knew, we had a big game with the Flatbush Raiders, a team from P.S. 139 that had lost only one game. Louie said that if we could give Levy's a down payment of one hundred dollars they'd go ahead and get the uniforms and jackets made in time for the game against the Raiders.

We only had two games during the next week, and the rest of the time all of us were running around getting everybody we knew—friends, relatives, neighbors, teachers, store owners—to buy chances. By the following Friday, Louie reported that we had more than a hundred dollars and that Levy's had already started making the uniforms and jackets. The uniforms would be gray with orange lettering and the jackets were going to be made of an orange and black material that felt like satin, with
The Zodiacs
written across the back in bright yellow.

By the middle of the following week Louie reported to us that if we went over three hundred dollars—and it looked like we would, the extra money would be used to get Louisville Sluggers and official National League baseballs for the team. Louie also told us that his father could probably get Jimmy O'Brien to come down to see our game against the Raiders.

On Wednesday afternoon, two days before the raffle drawing, Louie rode out on his bicycle to Marine Park, where the Raiders were playing a game, and when he showed up at our big meeting on Friday, June 1, he had a stack of scouting notes.

“Before we get to our skull session on the Raiders,” he said, “we have to get this raffle business over with. First, some of you haven't given me all the money—or the leftover raffles.”

While Louie took care of the final accounts on the raffle, George stayed by himself in a corner, looking through Louie's sports magazines. Although he spoke to a few of us a little more, you couldn't really say that any of us had become pals with him. At school he stayed pretty much with his gang, and after school—on the days when we didn't have games—we knew that he still hung around with his brother.

“Okay,” said Louie. “I got it all figured out. Just a few things don't check. You, Marty, you took out seven books and only gave me fifteen dollars.”

“I forgot,” Marty said. He handed Louie a book of tickets. “I didn't sell these.”

Louie crossed his name off. He seemed to be stalling, because he kept adding and subtracting figures and I knew that he never had that much trouble figuring things out.

“George?”

“Yeah?”

“According to my records you gave me raffle stubs from sixteen books, which means you owe forty dollars.”