Number One SonIt was not a politically correct era. Amos and Andy reigned on the radio. No one raised questioned about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. And even fewer thought much about who played the Chinese detective Charlie Chan in the movies or how his sons were represented. All I knew about this was that Charlie Chan had two sons, and one was decidedly “Number One Son.”
I knew and understood this because, to my father, I was then and always Number One Son. This was both my delight, to be considered Number One by him; and my burden, to have my relationship with my younger brother (inevitably Number Two Son) then and always defined this way. By nothing more than birth order. Or so it seemed.
By the time he arrived, my parents went to the hospital “to pick him up,” I was nearly six and had gotten used to being an only son, assuming this was a permanent condition. And since all my male cousins were only sons, I also thought this might even be the human condition. Or at least in my family.
So I was quite surprised by his appearance, and also by my mother’s seemingly miraculous loss of weight—she went to the hospital looking swollen and distorted and returned more as I had remembered her. Hospitals, I thought, must be remarkable places. Even more so than the fire house on Snyder Avenue.
At first I didn’t think of him as a brother. He seemed more like a squirmy toy or pet who spent all of his time sleeping and sucking on various things. Including I thought, since I caught a couple of furtive glimpses of this, something on my mother’s chest.
My father didn’t appear to pay any attention whatsoever to him. This suited me because by absenting himself from any seeming interest much less shared responsibility, he found more time for me. Especially on weekends when, because my mother appeared to want to draw him into some version of parental participation, he used being involved with me as both important to my wellbeing, since someone needed to pay attention to me now that I had to share my parents and even my room, and for him as a form of escape.
And escape we both eagerly did, roller skating together down all the length of Kings Highway to his mother’s house. Annie’s. Where the talk was thankfully not about eating, she served only coffee and cigarettes, but about her other son, Uncle Ben’s friend Mary Brady, who though she had neither boyfriend nor husband, and this was emphatically underlined by Annie’s ribald laugh, she at least had a full moustache.
My father was the most graceful of skaters and I was thrilled to be with him and to be seen with him as he glided from side to side, swinging his arms in a seamless rhythm, while I awkwardly attempted to keep up, stumbling hopelessly on every crack in the asphalt. Best was his accepting my ineptitude and effort to do as well as I could as it made him proud of my aspiring though still sputtering athleticism.
When he sensed my frustration, after yet another stumble, he would turn to me and say, “It’s all about the trying. Not everyone can succeed, but everyone can try.”
This is where we began—linked in common physical effort that was leavened by his sensitivity and helpful understanding. Things, however, would change and before too long take a very different turn.
* * *
Back at home, life quickly got more complicated. In spite of my mother’s tireless and devoted ministerings, my brother developed a case of colic which meant that he had to be moved out of my room into their bedroom so that he wouldn’t disturb my sleep and they could attend to him through the night. I had had a room of my own for six years and was not happy about his moving in on me, but now that I was alone again I felt ignored and in truth abandoned. I could hear his unhappiness seeping through the common wall that separated us, which upset me, but even more upsetting were the sounds of their concern and attention. Both my mother’s
and my father’s. I felt as if I was slipping away into insignificance.
Colic was followed by chronic cases of the croup, ear infections, tonsillitis (which soon required surgery), Pleurisy, Scarlet Fever (which led to our apartment being quarantined), and various poxes. And on top of that he seemed to stop growing, and suddenly one day the arches of his feet collapsed.
This took him and
them out of the care of Dr. Holsager, the faithful family doctor, and into the world of specialists and hospitals, some in far away Manhattan. I found myself more and more in the care of Aunt Tanna, who though she appeared to love me more than her own son, Cousin Chuck, was no substitute for what I felt had been snatched away from me—all because a stupid case of fallen arches.
I had those too and all that was provided for me were a few visits to the chiropodist, “Doctor” Bloom (“Doctor” in quotes because he never even graduated from college). All he was previously ever known to do, or was apparently capable of, was cut my mother’s and aunts’ toe nails and shave off some corns. But in me he had a real case to contemplate, which he enthusiastically and literally stooped to do. Crouching at my feet to examine my arches in many different kinds of light, including with a flashlight, rotating them to see them in all dimensions, in full relief. And then, after making Plaster of Paris molds of them, he fabricated a gleaming pair of stainless steel arches which he told me I had to wear until I was at least fifteen, which condemned me to a childhood-long sentence of “old-man” Oxford lace-up shoes.
With the prosthetics shined up and fitted, he smacked me on the back of my head and turned me back out onto the streets. For me there were no trips across the East River, no searches for
orthopedists and
endocrinologists—just some time in the chair in Dr. Bloom’s murky basement office, which reminded me more of Dr. Frankenstein’s dank laboratory than Dr. Holsager’s.
* * *
Those languid marathon days of roller skating were over. My father got pulled into my brother’s and mother’s world of doctors and medicines, as their driver or minimally to pick up an endless stream of prescriptions. I could barely get his attention.
That is until Mr. Ludwig, the coach of the P.S. 244 basketball team recruited me for the squad. Not because of any demonstrable shooting or rebounding skills but because, over the summer between fourth and fifth grades, I had shot up at least half a foot and was beginning to tower over not only every other kid in the school but all the teachers as well, Mr. Ludwig included, who had been a giant during his era at five-eleven.
This interest in my size was a mixed blessing since it also underlined the fact that my brother was still languishing at the height of a four year-old. But I decided, in spite of this, that I would continue to grow and to join the team.
Mr. Ludwig’s eyes lit up when he saw me slumping in the schoolyard, knowing from years of coaching that that telltale slump signaled the sure signs of premature tallness with its concomitant stigma of round-shouldered chestlessness. Just what he was seeking, the tallness, to fulfill his dream of winning the Borough of Brooklyn if not the City of New York Public School Championship. Something that had eluded him for decades. In fact, the situation was worse than that--the Rugby Rockets were famous for finishing last in their league ten years in a row. In me he saw the possibility of at least a winning season. Which would mean he could finally retire, as that was the goal he had set for himself—to go out in his version of on top.
If I had only known the stakes for which I would wind up playing. I naively thought it was just about jump and foul shots. I didn’t at the time realize it was really about fulfilling dreams—his and, I would learn, my father’s.
Mr. Ludwig, to mention Dr. Frankenstein again, needed to create his basketball monster out of my pathetic body parts—the chest has already been mentioned but not the lungs that it contained. These were one key to success on the hard-court—running relentless up and down and side to side required lung power and this in my case was in very short supply. So I was propelled into long afternoons of wind sprints until I either collapsed and puked (both happened so frequently that the custodian had to be stationed nearby to mop up after me) or began to build that essential capacity.
And at the same time I needed to learn to coordinate catching a pass without allowing the ball to slam into that chest, dribbling once or twice while sighting the basket rim, and launching the ball on a trajectory so true that at least one out of three times it would go through rather than ricochet woefully off the backboard. Three disparate moves that needed to be linked in quick and seamless succession, none of which was native to me.
But learn them I did to help Mr. Ludwig effect his escape to a Condo dream in Florida and to reengage my father’s attention since I learned very quickly that when I came home with scrapes, bruises, and occasional broken fingers and nose that he was not the least bit concerned about in the injuries but was rather obsessed, that’s the word, with my emerging prowess on the court.
He began to come to an occasional practice, unfathomably interested in the wind sprints and relentless foul shooting—one could not get released from the daily ordeal until sinking seven free throws in a row, which often took me a good forty extra minutes.
Not since the long-ago Saturday roller skating had my father passed along any of his acquired wisdom about “trying” or anything else since he was so involved with my brother’s feet and lack of growth. But in the P.S. 244 gym, though my brother still needed attention since he was still the shortest by far of anyone in his first grade class, with his full focus now on me, my father moved on to talk about what I learned were his actual principal subjects—“intestinal fortitude” and “improvement in the breed.”
I assumed he had learned about the former while trolling all those Manhattan hospitals seeking growth hormones for my brother; and the latter from his devotion to horse racing. I understood that the fortitude was related to the trying, and I knew the value of that as I panted my way up and down the gym floor. But the improvement in the breed imperative proved to be considerably more problematic. By it he meant that he saw himself as the
sire of the family’s next generation. Indeed as
my sire. And by defining himself that way, he was expanding the normal notions of fatherhood and what it meant to be a child. Really, a son. It was his expectation that in all aspects of life I was to exceed him, to be an improvement. As in horse breeding how sires were put to stud with carefully selected dams so that their foals when grown would outperform them—run faster, and as the ultimate measure win more races.
So what was going on on the basketball court was an objective measure of how effective a sire he had been, of his particular form of eugenics. Would I be taller? The answer to that was already “Yes.” Would I be a better athlete? That was still to be determined, but it was quite clear to me that these issues were cosmic.
It is only on reflection that I now know that not only was he tormented by the daily evidence of my brother’s tortured body, but that he was also struggling, indeed failing in business. Repeatedly. My mother needed to go back to work, which at that time was a public acknowledgement and humiliation that he was less than an adequate
man. So when after our first game of the season, after I had gathered in the key rebound by basically just standing flat-footed and graceless under the basket while merely extending my arms and hands at least six inches higher than anyone else could reach even when jumping, in the victorious locker room (yes he accompanied me into that sanctum), while I sat there lathered with sweat and wearing only a jock strop that in truth I didn’t require, it was then that he sat down beside me and for the first time and only time in my life put his arm around my shoulders, and said, “
You are my number one son.”
That more than made up for how embarrassed I felt by my father’s presence there, most of the other team members’ fathers hadn’t even come to the game, but with those words I belonged to him body and psyche.
And both of them he worked on.
* * *
As the years passed and my body gelled if not hardened and I became more adept at basketball, my height still my best asset, my father trailed along after me to practices and attended all games, sitting high up in the bleachers of school gyms, looking down on me while I labored as if he was the eye in the sky. It felt as if I was being simultaneously supported and scrutinized.
These conflicting pressures etched their way into my psyche, at the time what little there was of it. I basked in number-one-son-ness and how that set me clearly above and apart. But there was also a distinct price to bear--his support began to turn into a form of relentless expectation which in turn was transformed into ceaseless dissatisfaction and criticism. I was caught, therefore, in an emotional shredder—sheared between needing the intoxication of his regard while paying for it, as any addict must, by having to absorb and manage his disappointment and disfavor.
And all the while, my brother, Number Two, in seeming compensation for his physical underdevelopment, was acquiring a keen sensitivity to the vagaries of human nature and the hidden forces that shape all interactions. I later realized that though he appeared and passive and apathetic, I thought perhaps contemplating the consequences of his own misshapen destiny, he was in fact using these new capacities to observe the contradictions within what was transpiring between my father and me, and especially
to me. And he was plotting his revenge.
On many days when I was feeling especially confused and afflicted by my father’s barrage of mixed messages I noticed that my little brother was also trying out and perfecting a wry form of aggressiveness, which he directed toward me as surgically as my father applied the ambiguity of his expectations. I felt this the most from my brother on those days when my father’s criticism was harshest.
But because I still craved and clung to my place in the family hierarchy I simple plunged ahead heedless of the consequences, driven to excess by my father and still very much by Mr. Ludwig, who I spied one day looking at Florida real estate brochures as the Rugby Rocket’s record tipped to five wins with but four losses. A winning record.
One of those excesses took an unexpected turn. My frenzy to succeed and please got transmuted into sexual energy. I found that after each workout, especially after each game, I experienced a charge of desire so keen that I could not rest or sleep unless it was satisfied. Which it was, at first by accident, when I discovering that as I rolled around agitatedly in my bed, clutching my pillow, I would set off spasms of relief, at first dry but later accompanied by spurts of jissum, which were swiftly followed by dreamless sleep. After this blessed discovery I sought this solace every night, turning that accident now intentionally into a ritual that thankfully brought about rest. I practiced this magical art as assiduously as I continued to work on my foul shooting, setting my own private nocturnal goals just as Mr. Ludwig did on afternoons in the gym. Goals I prefer here not to describe.
I didn’t know what my brother might have been making of this, he had returned to his own bed in our room after recovering from the colic and the subsequent plague of bed-wetting and nightmares that continued until he was nearly five. I attempted to hold off until he was fully asleep and to stifle my movements and ultimate groans so as to keep my obsession secret. I took great pains to do this because I was well aware of how sharp an observer he had become and was concerned about what he would do with knowledge of my depravity. Which was how I viewed it.
As with other forms of addiction, my masturbatory need required more and more stimulation to satisfy it. And so on those occasions when my parents went to the movies, leaving me responsible for the two of us, I would attempt to induce my brother to go to bed as early as possible so I could sneak out to Bob’s Candy Store and once there slip in among the pocket books that Bob sold from rotating racks hidden in a dark back corner beside the stacked boxes of empty soda bottles.
The first few times I did this I rummaged surreptitiously through the books, taking a quick look at those that featured covers with pictures of girls in torn blouses. But then my cravings could not be satisfied by these mere glances; I needed to fondle the books, thumbing through the pages and stopping to read for a delicious moment wherever the words “throbbing loins” jumped alluringly off the page. And later still, not sufficiently satisfied by even this, I would, yes, steal one of the books that seemed most enticing, slipping it quickly inside my jacket while Bob dipped his head below the counter when hand-packing a pint of ice cream.
I began to accumulate a small collection of these books, and from it each night I would select one to take under the covers with me, reading through it by flashlight in order to find passages that could arouse.
The Amboy Dukes, set on the streets of Brooklyn, just walking distance away from where we lived, worked particularly well and was the first of my stolen books to have its cover in tatters. I still remember its opening lines:
The boys stood around on Saturday nights, ready for action. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, they stood on the corners and discussed the deadly gossip of rackets: whores, guys who were cut up, and the dough you could make from one sweet job.
Under that blanket, flashlit, I knew what they meant by
action, and the very word
whore overwhelmed my senses. Then on page 108, who could forget 108, when that
action was in the embrace of that
whore . . . . After a while it was difficult to unstick those pages.
And so I slept.
* * *
And practiced and played and studied because I had also discovered that I was by nature considerably better at school work than sports; and since my father seemed almost equally interested in my grades as in my points-per-game average, another form of genetic improvement, I took pride in his waving my report card in the faces of his brothers-in-law, whose sons had never been able to so successfully combine and perfect the arts of body and mind.
“So what do you think about
my son?” he would propose rhetorically, since no answers or acknowledgements would ever be forthcoming when the entire family was gathered for a Passover
Seder, “My Number One Son.” He would tousle my crew-cut hair so violently that it would make an audible sound as if to call everyone to attention and to make sure at least some eyes were turned
his way. I especially noticed my brother’s from under their serpentine lids.
With my mother working and my father moving from business to business and then to a job working for his younger brother—the ultimate humiliation—and then spending all his free time with me in the gym, schoolyard, or at a game, my brother began to slip off the family map. Largely I felt by intention. He would sleep well into the afternoon on weekends and when he was awake he would do whatever it is he did, alone the rest of the day in our room with the door decidedly shut tight. At the dinner table he would sit passively and eat with his head bowed, never saying a word, never asking or reaching for a second helping.
During one of those dinners, my mother, realizing how central a figure Mr. Ludwig had become in our lives—responsible for my transformation (I had begun to develop pectorals which I flexed so compulsively that Heshy, who knew of these matters, began to call me
Blaze after the stripper Blaze Starr); and for my father’s having something in his life that compensated at least somewhat for all his personal failures. Thus she offhandedly suggested that maybe it would be nice one evening to invite him over for supper.
My father exploded in instant rage, slamming his knife and fork on the table and sweeping his glass of water onto the floor where it shattered. He leapt to his feet and screamed at my mother, and then at me, “I don’t want that
bastard in my house. Ever. I know you think he is
Mr. Wonderful. For what reason I’ll never know. I can only imagine. All you ever do is talk about how perfect he is—his war record, which I have my doubts about, and how smart he is, and how handsome.” He snarled at the word “handsome,” glaring at her.
“And you,” wheeling toward me, pointing and threatening, “you too think he’s so special,” he was using his sing-song voice, lisping his s’s while mocking my fondness for Mr. Ludwig, “What’s so special? His fancy books and the way he struts around like a peacock? What’s so special? How he taught you to play basketball? Why, you can’t even jump and shoot at the same time. The only reason you’re on the team is because you’re so overgrown.”
And to drive the stake in deeper, while storming out of the apartment, he spat back at me over his shoulder before slamming the door, “
Some number one son.”
He returned two hours later with his arms filled with bags from various neighborhood stores and markets. As if nothing had happened. For my mother, who refused to acknowledge him, he had bought a bunch of red bananas, her favorite which were very rarely available; for my brother there was a pint of Breyer’s maple-walnut ice cream from Bob’s, his favorite, for which he grunted, “Thanks”; and for me there were two things—a new softball and a Brooklyn Dodger jacket, both from Davega’s Sports, which he knew I craved.
To me he turned, smiling, and said, “And these are for my number one son.”
These two sides of him, so juxtaposed in the course of only two hours, were at the time totally incomprehensible to me, but the jacket was the perfect size.
* * *
To this day I believe that evening was the catalyst for my brother’s incredible metamorphosis. In spite of all the medicines and diets and specialists, he lagged so far beyond his peers that he was beginning to be called by an assortment of cruel street names—
Tiny and
Half-Pint and
Pipsqueak were the best of them. There was also
Midget and
Rodent and
Toad. It did not help that he also had protruding ears and when Toad was coupled with Dumbo, after the cartoon elephant, it was understandable that he often had to be dragged to school. Not that I really noticed.
But I did notice what happened to him when he returned, after being forced to go, from a summer camp for kids with “problems.” There were no camps dedicated to midgets and he wasn’t retarded so they sent him to the only place at the time that specialized in kids with problems, Kinder Lake Camp for Special Children, where
Special really meant
Fat. And although he was thin as a rail they sent him there anyway thinking it might do him at least some sort of good. And it did--he returned unrecognizable.
He had shot up at least ten inches, which was miraculous. But the real miracle was that he also had developed muscles. Everywhere. And it quickly became evident that he had in addition somehow become a natural athlete—at least as graceful as my father—so that improvement in the family breed was breaking out all over.
This immediately made my life more complicated. As a consequence, since I could think of nothing else to do, I began to beat him up regularly, realizing that though I was five years older than he and still taller and perhaps stronger, my primogeniture would not last much longer if he continued to grow and bulge so I had better get my licks in while I could.
One of my schoolyard friends who had made a careful study of how the Amboy Dukes perpetrated violence (I of course continued to pour over the book for my own purposes) had taught me how to administer a beating in such a way that it would not show bruises and as a result you could deny that it had ever happened. It was called a
Noogie. It was simple, all you needed to do was punch someone on the top of his head and his hair, being there, would cover up whatever traces you might otherwise have left if you pounded on unprotected skin.
And so I took this good lesson to heart and applied it to my brother, punching him in the head with my bare knuckles just as he was about to fall asleep in the bed across from mine. Though I pummeled him this way every night as relentlessly and ritualistically as the other ritual I was celebrating later under my own blanket, he never once whimpered much less cried. Perhaps he had learned that as well at Kinder Lake.
His lack of response, his stoicism in the face of my nightly assault, and, most significant and unusual, the remarkable restraint and discipline he showed by not reporting what I was doing to him to my parents, all of this in combination perversely only spurred me own to other forms of attack.
The friend who was a student of the Dukes also taught me about
Indian Burns, how if you gabbed someone’s wrist in your two hands, gripped firmly and then twisted your hands in opposite directions, rapidly back and froth, you would inflict pain so severe on your victim that it felt as if his skin was on fire—hence the name of this form of torture.
I immediately put this new technique to use, administering Indian Burns to each of his wrists as an accompaniment to the nightly Noogies. But with the same result—nothing. At least nothing that I could fathom. Would that I had.
* * *
He had his revenge and it wasn’t sweet. I was hoisted by my own petard—by my faithful Amboy Dukes. The book.
Since she had returned to work it was unusual for my mother to be home before I came home from school, unless she was sick, which was rare. So when I got to the top of the steps and found her sitting, obviously waiting for me, at the breakfast room table I knew someone had died. Probably Aunt Bertha who had had a crippling stoke a year ago. I was already wondering when the funeral would be and if I would need to wear a suit.
She patted the chair to her right—my fathers! Indicating I should sit down even before tasking off my coat. I had never sat in it. Had he died? As Number One Son would this now be my chair?
Then I noticed, resting in the center of his placemat where his dinner would normally be set, instead of his plate, there was my copy of
The Amboy Dukes. I recognized it even though it was by then missing all of its cover.
She sat there just looking at me. Angry but also from the look on her fallen face, sad and profoundly disappointed.
I began to stammer, “Should I take my coat off?”
“You should,” she said in a voice I had never heard before, “And then you should go to your room—your brother will be sleeping with us now—and stay in your room until supper. And then after you eat you will go back there and do your homework and then go to sleep. You can only come out to go to the bathroom.”
Then in an even more somber voice, she said, pronouncing each word as if she were sounding them out syllable-by-syllable, “I have your flashlight and your other books. You will not been needing it or any of them any more.”
I was shivering, though still in my coat, in that perpetually overheated apartment.
“And,” she continued, “You will do this every day for the next ten days. On weekends you will come out only for breakfast and lunch and dinner. You will not play with the Rockets during this time though I know there are important games on the schedule and they are contending for the Borough Championship. And you will not go to practice. I already talked with Mr. Ludwig and he understands.”
Mr. Ludwig? What had she said? What did he “understand”? I tried to ask, croaking out a feeble, “Mr. Ludwig? What . . . ?
“Never mind that.” Which was impossible—all I could do was mind that. “And after the ten days are up you can resume your normal routine, including basketball.”
“And dad?” I stuttered.
“Never mind that either. I called him at his job and he agrees with your punishment.”
“And what did you tell . . . ?”
“Enough. Just go to your room now.” And with that she got up and went to her room, slamming the door with a sound that reverberated like the one my father made that catalytic evening.
* * *
So I did my time, humbled and exposed for what I truly was, unable for days to sleep without my books and flashlight. It was Cold Turkey, just like what the junkie experienced had to go through in
The Amboy Dukes. And like him I came out the other side.
After the ten days of Purgatory, I crawled back into my life, first silently making amends with Mr. Ludwig, who I sensed not only knew why I had been punished but hinted that I what I had done wasn’t anything that depraved. After all he had been a GI in France during the Big One, World War II.
And then with my father, who, with a wink, suggested that my reading habits had actually improved—less time with Mr. Ludwig’s and his androgynous brother Ben’s books and more with the kind he and other real men preferred from Bob’s Candy Store. I might actually turn out to be his ideal son after all as he was clearly still thinking primarily about biological progress.
And when things calmed down further, it was also clear that my brother too was doing well. He thankfully stopped growing when he reached six-two, even though for a while it was looking as if he might become another kind of “freak,” a Pituitary Giant, and he focused his athleticism on swimming, where he quickly excelled. His years of self-exile and private and public suffering had indeed inspired him to build the inner resources needed to do well in school and form deep and enduring friendships.
We haven’t to this day discussed what happened and what
he had done so subtly and successfully to me. But we both still bear the burden of where our father had placed us so enduringly in the family chain of being.
* * *
I should add that the Rockets in fact won the one game I missed when my mother had “benched me.” We lost the first one when I returned—I had slipped back in stamina from lack of practice and fouled out before the end of the first half. But we won the final two games, winding up with a nine and eight record. The team’s first winning season in a decade.
And Mr. Ludwig disappeared, abandoning his class, after that seventeenth and final game. No one knew where he had gone, though I had a pretty good idea having seen him fondling that brochure.
No one ever heard from him again. Including my mother.
