Of the many Brooklyn novels that I've read this last while, Big Man, by Jay Neugeboren, comes closest to home. Neugeboren was newborn in 1938, just a year before me, and he attended fabled Erasmus Hall High School, most likely graduating with the class of 1955 (I was '56). It's a mark of my ignorance of modern American letters that I had no idea that my near-classmate was the author of 24 books, most of them novels. Big Man was Neugeboren's first novel.
Close to home? Here are couple of sentences that will shiver the nostalgia timbers of wistful ex-Erasmians.
I walk down Church Avenue, past the Kenmore Theater. Across the street the old church, used to cut classes and sit in the graveyard.... In front of Garfields's Cafeteria all the guys hanging out with their broads and their puffed hair.... Guys with Erasmus jackets on. I keep walking. Past the firehouse and the Holy Cross schoolyard.
Wow, it's a guided tour of the old neighborhood as it was in the 1950s. Who from Erasmus hasn't sprawled on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church?
The novel revolves around the 1951 basketball scandals, which were world-shaking news at the time. A number of New York City college players (CCNY, St. Johns, Fordham, LIU) fell into the clutches of shady gamblers and were paid to shave points. A few were indicted and convicted. I wrote a few melancholy and disillusioned paragraphs about the scandals some years ago -- here.
In Big Man, Neugeboren tells the story through the eyes and mouth of a character named Mack Davis, who had been an upcoming star but is now, because he missed a couple of baskets, stuck in a dead-end job at an automated carwash. It's an ambitious conceit and a promising plot. Big Man, I regret to say, is not a very artistic piece of work, but what the heck! Neugeboren was only 25 or 26 when he wrote it and had had only a few years to recover from uninspiring Erasmus Hall English classes.
I confess that I was uncomfortable that Neugeboren wrote the novel in a black voice. I don't object in theory, because there's no earthly reason why a white novelist can't impersonate a black person, any more than male novelist can't speak as a female (or vice versa), or a young writer speak in the voice of an old. So wny was I troubled? I think it was because the voice that the novelist invented didn't seem genuine. It seemed "literary" -- as though the Davis character had been heisted out of a blaxploitation film. Occasional inadvertent lapses in the dialect were particularly painful to my ever-sensitive ears.
Big Man reminds me how central basketball was to my adolescent life. I think if I had spent as much time and effort on my schoolwork as I did practicing my foul shots I might have been somebody. But I think I learned as much about life from basketball and its scandals as I did from any other 1950s phenomenon (such as the antics of "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy). I'm grateful to Jay Neugeboren for preserving an important piece of my history and especially for bringing the old neighborhood right to the forefront.
Jack Molinas was a piece of work. He could play--he played fairly well for the Fort Wayne Pistons in the NBA--but he also would gamble, and he was a fixer. He ended up ruining many lives before he was killed. The scandals of the 50s taught Molinas nothing, and as a result, basketball fans never saw the best of Tony Jackson of Jefferson, Connie Hawkins of Boys High, and the one I thought was better than all of them--Roger Brown of Wingate.
Posted by: Don Z. Block | April 04, 2022 at 07:23 PM