Z.E.L.

A lot of guys in Brooklyn did what we did back then — chipped in and rented a basement in someone’s house that we turned into a place where we could do the things we couldn’t do anywhere else, because even though we were all out of high school, we were all still living at home.  About half of us were going to local colleges — Brooklyn College, City College, L.I.U., St. Francis, St. John’s, Columbia — and the rest had gone straight from our high school, Erasmus, into regular jobs: working in restaurants, construction, the garment district, or as salesmen or buyers for department stores or sporting goods companies.

We had photos of Brooklyn Dodger players taped to one wall of our cellar club — Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Duke Snider, Preacher Roe, Don Newcombe, Carl Erskine — and at dead center, a large photo of a smiling Jackie Robinson, a man whose courage inspired us all, and next to Jackie, a framed photo of the 1955 Dodgers, the only Dodger team that had ever won a World Series.

Like other cellar clubs, we called ourselves a fraternity so that when our social secretary, Marty Cramer, telephoned the social secretary of a sorority, he could say he was calling on behalf of a fancy-sounding college fraternity. We called our club “Z.E.L.” — “Zeta Epsilon Lambda” to the sororities, but “Zayda Eyda Latka” to ourselves. Another cellar club on our block called itself “P.B.T.” — “Phi Beta Tau” to the sororities, but “Phelta Beta Thigh” to their members, and there was a club two blocks away that called itself “Sigma Chai.” Our artist-in-residence, Bobby Schreibman, had painted a large R. Crumb–style portrait of our Z.E.L. pin-up girl, Zelenka — complete with volcanic-like zits, a huge schnoz, and a pair of mighty bazookas spilling over her low-cut dress — on the wall opposite the wall where we posted photos of our sports heroes, and also of movie stars who’d gone to Erasmus like Jeff Chandler, Susan Hayward, Barbara Stanwyck, and Mae West.

Most Friday nights girls from high school sororities would show up, and sometimes Marty was able to get sorority girls from Brooklyn College to come. We’d set out drinks and snacks — chips and dips, soda, beer, and wine — put on music, and at about 10:30 we’d turn the lights down, and if any of us had connected and were slow-dancing or making out, the rest of us would take off, a bunch of us piling into Shimmy Schiffenbauer’s old Buick convertible and heading for Coney Island, or to downtown Brooklyn for a late movie at the Paramount or the Albee, or a snack at Junior’s restaurant.

Before that, though, at about 10:30, Danny Pignatano, who was our official Marshall-at-Arms — and a cousin of the Brooklyn–born Dodgers’ back-up catcher Joe Pignatano — would shut off the record player, announce that the party was over, that it was time for enterprising young men and women to exchange phone numbers. “Experienced escorts,” he’d add, “will be provided upon request.” And after the girls were gone, with a few of us getting lucky and being asked to provide Danny’s advertised service, we’d break out the hard stuff, gather around our dining room table, and play poker, nickel–dime, into the early hours of the morning.

An hour or so after midnight — a ritual we came to count on — Barry Berkman, who always made it his business to find a girl who’d let him take her home, would return. We’d ask how he’d made out, and he’d shake his head sadly.

“I don’t know why the girls don’t love me,” he’d say. “I’m such an easy lay!” And we’d make room for him at the table, and he’d buy in.

But this Friday night — October 17, 1957 — was different from all other nights.  Marty had cancelled visits from the two sororities he’d invited, and instead of socializing with young women, we held a memorial service for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and a funeral service for Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, who, a week before, had announced the departure of the team for Los Angeles.

Manny Plaut, who worked for the Faber Distributing Company delivering seltzer, beer, and soda, brought in a heavy tarp, and Milt Pollack, whose father was a plumber, brought in a large piece of sheet metal we laid down on top of the tarp. Phil Yagolnitzer, who’d started training as a mason for the Brooklyn Union Gas Company, brought in a flat of bricks, and we arranged the bricks, three high, in an oval on top of the sheet metal and the tarp.  We put some rolled up newspapers, along with split-up old wooden seltzer and soda cases, in the middle of the circle, Manny lit a match, set fire to the paper and wood, and our president, Angelo Mitari, laid an old, stuffed Raggedy Ann doll — a newspaper photo of Walter O’Malley glued to its head — onto the fire, and we watched Walter O’Malley burn to death.

“Burn, you asshole, burn!” we chanted. “Burn, you asshole, burn … Burn, you asshole, burn!”

Then we opened the door and front window, set a fan going to drive out the smoke, unzipped our flies, and pissed on O’Malley to put out the fire, after which, the lights turned off, and standing in a circle and holding hands, we said Kaddish and The Lord’s Prayer. Some of the guys were crying, and we went around the circle, each of us telling a story about the Dodgers — about the first Dodger game we’d been to, or the greatest Dodger game we’d ever seen, or the time we’d actually met a Dodger player.

I talked about the time I was invited to a clinic at Ebbets Field the Dodgers arranged for a group of Brooklyn high schools — I was 14, and a pitcher on the Erasmus Junior Varsity team — and how I’d been picked to be in a group of a half-dozen other players for a private on-field session with a rookie Dodger pitcher named Johnny Podres, who showed us how to make a pick–off move — we were all lefties, like him — and who, a few years later, in the 1955 World Series, would win two games and be named the Series’ Most Valuable Player.

Jerry Friedland, Art Rudy, and Rich Ratner talked about playing stickball on Montgomery Street, against the outside left field wall of Ebbets Field, and how when game-time grew closer they’d move onto the Bedford Avenue side where they’d wait for balls Dodger players hit over the right field wall during batting practice. In those days players were forbidden to toss foul balls back into the stands, but if you caught a ball on Bedford Avenue and gave it in at the gate, you could get into the game free, and some of the ticket takers — we knew which ones — would let two or three of us in for one ball.

Simeon David, who’d played second base for Erasmus, and now played weekends for a semi-pro team in Bushwick, talked about being on Happy Felton’s Knothole Gang — a TV show that took place in foul territory along the right field foul line before Dodger home games where kids like us got pointers from Dodger players. The Dodger second baseman “Junior” Gilliam was on the show with him that day, and how he got to sit in the dugout with the Dodger players for the whole game, and got an autographed ball with signatures from most of them.

Joe Cahalan, a pre-law student at Fordham who’d averaged nearly 17 points a game during our senior year at Erasmus and had made the college team, talked about how, when he was 11 years old, he’d get to Ebbets Field early, ask people coming to the ball park if they had any extra tickets, and when they did, and gave them to him, he’d thank them, and start walking toward the turnstiles. Once he saw the ticket–givers go through the turnstiles, though, he’d go back to where he was and he’d hawk the tickets — “Anybody need a good ticket for the game? … Great seats! Great seats!” — and on good days he’d make 20, 30, or even 40 bucks.

But it was Rich Helfant who set the waterworks going by talking about the time he was nine years old and playing boxball with friends on Empire Boulevard when suddenly Jackie Robinson came walking up and out of the Prospect Park subway station. All he could do was gape, he said. But Robinson smiled at him, and asked Rich if he needed help crossing the street. Rich nodded yes, and Robinson took Rich’s hand and started walking with him. Midway across, Rich stopped to show Jackie his batting stance — feet pigeon-toed and wide apart, bat cocked above his right shoulder but higher and further back than usual — and said he’d modeled his stance after Jackie’s, whereupon Jackie laughed and said he didn’t want his batting stance to get them both run over, took Rich’s hand in his again, walked him the rest of the way across the street, then waved goodbye.

“I didn’t wash my hand for a week,” Rich said.

After we folded the tarp and put it in our back room, where we also stacked the bricks, a half-dozen of us sat down to play poker. We always let Manny shuffle a new deck of cards — he had an amazing assortment of sleight-of-hand tricks and shuffles, including some false shuffles that could fool us no matter how closely we watched his hands — but he never got into a game because before we’d dealt our very first hand on our first Friday night in our clubhouse, he’d counted himself out by saying that he trusted himself not to cheat, but that once there were cards in his hands, he couldn’t vouch for what his fingers might decide to do.

By the time we played three or four hands, though, it got really quiet, and it was clear none of us felt much like playing cards, or shooting the shit, so when Manny said he was going to head home, I folded, told him to wait up and said I’d go with him. A minute later, the other guys threw in their cards, and said they were quitting too. We finished our drinks, talked about maybe getting together for a movie or bowling, or for a softball game on Sunday morning, and then we locked up and left. We helped Milt tie down the piece of sheet metal across the rear of Shimmy’s convertible — it was too long to fit in the trunk — and Shimmy offered to squeeze me and Manny in under it, and made a joke about us being experienced at getting into dark, tight spaces, but nobody laughed.

Manny and I started back to our neighborhood with some of the other guys, about a four–mile walk — our cellar club was on Rockaway Avenue, in a section of East New York that bordered on Canarsie — and though we’d begun the evening thinking we’d be cheering ourselves up by our ceremony, it had had the opposite effect, because it made the fact that the Dodgers were gone for good hit home big time, and I think we all realized that Brooklyn, and our lives in it, would never be the same again.

¤

Jay Neugeboren is the author of 22 books, including award–winning works of both fiction and nonfiction. His stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books, Commonweal, The Atlantic Monthly, and other venues, as well as in more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Storiesand O. Henry Prize Stories.