I
l
I
LEONARD
KRJEGEL
581
brace-bound legs being driven through streets threatening him not be–
cause they were filled with dark people but because those people, like
the people in his Bronx neighborhood, could walk and run and jump -
I took it upon myself to serve as defender of the blacks.
A fat crippled Jewish adolescent transforming himself into an imagi–
nary normal - can one conceive of a more natural role for a New
Yorker? And why not me? God knows, I had enough time on my hands
to
argue the case of those "damn loafers" with Mr. Cooper. Society had
lined its heavy guns up against those boys; they were correct in assuming
they were going nowhere; he himself was giving aid and comfort to the
enemy. Throughout my tirade, Mr. Cooper would sneer at me. Then he
would smile and blow smoke out the driver's window. ''I'm a
Republican, boy," he would say, a signal he had heard enough from me
as defender of the blacks. Enraged, I shut up.
Oli,
my
America,
my
new found land.
"Mulatto" is no longer an acceptable word in the city of the politi–
cally correct. But it was a word whites and blacks both used in 1948,
when my physical therapy consisted of swimming for half an hour in a
heated pool and then lying on a tile slab, submitting my polio-ravaged
dead legs to the finger-subtle touch of a beautiful copper-haired
"mulatto" therapist whose NYU class ring hung like life's promised
medallion in her cleavage, nipples outlined in the wet gray bathing suit.
My session with my therapist was over by noon. But the station wagon
didn't pick n"le up for the trip back to the Bronx until 3:00.
Winter afternoons would find me in the hospital lobby, fantasizing
about Mrs. R. or else reading pulp magazines and historical novels that
allowed me to dream of different Mrs. R.'s (white, black, yellow - my
fantasy life formed its own rainbow coalition).
In
search of those fan–
tasies , I would burrow myself near the office where hospital social work–
ers interviewed young black mothers holding onto their small children.
They were no more capable of paying for the services the state rendered
them than my own mother was. During the spring and fall (therapy was
not offered to outpatients in summer), I would wander to Mount
Morris Park across Madison Avenue or to the drugstore on 124th Street.
I talked to old black men on park benches and those young black
"loafers" hanging out at the drugstore luncheonette.
Victillls together.
A curious osmosis, this assumption of imaginary blackness.
Sometimes, a patrol car would cruise through the street and I would in–
stinctively stiffen with fear. Wedged against a lamp post on my braces
and crutches, body rigid, as if I were a suspect in a movie lineup being
