When I Was the Greatest

“People say it’s bad, and sometimes it is, but I like to focus on the positives. We got bodegas on both ends, which is cool…”

Talking about his area of Bed-Stuy, Ali’s optimistic personality shines through. Rather than focusing on the more unsavory aspects of the neighborhood, he finds something, anything positive to talk about instead. Like any good New Yorker, he knows that having not one but two bodegas on his block is a definite highlight.

“I guess he didn’t hear me open the door, because he flinched, big-time, when I said, ‘Yo, man.’”

Noodles’s response to Ali’s innocuous greeting suggests that all is not well with him. Reflexively flinching like this can be considered an indicator of abuse and suggests that Noodles is constantly on edge. This makes sense considering the rough conditions of his apartment building, but it could also suggest that his upbringing and home life make feel unsafe.

“Every few minutes his arms would just shoot out in any direction. You never knew when it was coming, and you never knew in what direction they were going. But every time it happened, he would have to redo the whole knitting thing from the beginning. That would’ve made me crazy, but not Needles. He’d just start all over again like it was no big deal.”

This scene gives insight to how frequently Needles has tics, which clarifies the intensity of his symptoms. Having to repeatedly redo his loops closely mirrors the difficulty some people can experience in completing even the most rudimental tasks during intense Tourette’s episodes. Starting over does not ruin the fun of the distraction, which shows that Needles has an indefatigable spirit despite it all.

“‘And how exactly do you know this, Larry?’ Brother was getting ready to go in on him.

The older guy, Larry, started shifting positions in his seat like his butt was heating up. He looked like he wanted to run out of the shop when he said, ‘My wife, man. She makes me go sit in with her at these knitting classes.’

The shop broke out in laughter again.

‘She makes you go? Yeah, right! You love it!’

‘You volunteer to go, don’t you?’

‘You make her go sit in with you!’

‘I want a Kwanzaa sweater with a pair of clippers on it. Got me?’”

These exchanges capture the lighthearted banter of the barbershop environment. When you walk into the shop, everyone is fair game, and Noodles knows this. He gets ahead of any jokes at his brother’s expense by daring any of the men to laugh at him. It feels like an overaction, and in some ways it is, but Noodles is sensitive. Larry’s experience moments later shows Noodles had good reason to be defensive. Larry moving around in his seat “like his butt was heating up” is a reference to him being in the metaphorical hot seat while he is being roasted by his friends.

“‘Hey, Miss Yellow Shirt, I like them legs,’ he said. Then, when Miss Yellow Shirt looked at him sideways, he said, ‘You ain’t even that pretty.’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Yo, ain’t no black chicks down here?’”

The cycle of catcalling followed by abuse is common on city streets, but Reynolds does not include it here just to check another box on the bingo card of New York City features. It says a lot about Noodles’s level of insecurity that street harassment comes naturally to him. His comment about there not being any “black chicks” also characterizes Court Street as a predominantly white, or at least non-Black, setting. This is why it feels “like a whole other world” to them (33).

“To tell the truth, I was feeling kinda nervous about being in that neighborhood.”

Ali describes a feeling of anxiety being on Court Street, a part of Brooklyn to which he is unaccustomed traveling, especially without his mother. His nervousness reflects the fear of racial discrimination and violence felt by many Blacks boys in America when moving through strange and often hostile spaces.

“Malloy said, back then, he felt like the government was substituting all the poor black kids for the rich white kids when it came to serving in the war and that getting that letter in the mail, the one that said he had been drafted, felt like he was called from the far end of the home-team bench, asked to go in the game, and sucker punch the other team’s star player.”

Malloy is referring to draft evasion and the racial disparities in those who avoided having to fight and those who did not. Muhammad Ali, who was Muslim, refused the Vietnam draft on religious grounds. He was extremely vocal in his resistance, saying that fighting in a war would violate the tenets of Islam. Ali said he had no quarrel with the Vietnamese people and therefore no reason to fight them. Malloy echoes this sentiment by saying he felt called up to sucker punch the other player. Muhammad Ali’s reasons for refusing the draft were not accepted, and he was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to prison, though the Supreme Court later unanimously overturned the conviction. As a high-profile athlete, taking such a public stance was inspirational, especially to African Americans. Ali’s experience highlighted the racial inequality in punishing those who sought to avoid the draft. There are credible allegations of wealthy, and commonly white, parents using money and influence to obtain repeated deferments or medical exemptions for their children. Unlike Ali and countless other African Americans, none of them were prosecuted for draft evasion.

“He always wears an army T-shirt and old blue jeans, the thick, medium blue kind from back in the day. He knots them at the legs and cuts the extra fabric, which makes his legs look like denim sausages.”

Malloy’s amputations make Ali uncomfortable, and during his initial interactions with the old man, he avoids looking at them entirely. Using the absurd image of his amputations as the “legless elephant” in the room, Malloy pushes Ali to confront this discomfort and look at his legs. Ali copes with the awkwardness of it by conjuring a ridiculous and amusing image of his own, describing the nubs as sausages. This use of humor helps diffuse some the situation’s uneasiness.

“‘Now go home and pray to God for some balls,’ he chuckled. I knew he meant it as a joke, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. Low blow.”

Malloy never pulls his punches with Ali, and this blow lands squarely. After his gentle attempts to coax Ali into the ring, Malloy switches to goading him. Ali does not enjoy the wry jokes at his expense, particularly because he takes fighting so seriously—but also because he does not like his fears being exposed so cruelly. “Low blow” is also a fun play on words that draws on boxing imagery of hitting below the belt.

“All the old ladies with the big hats and mustaches came stepping out like the sidewalk was a runway. The boys our age were all dressed in oversize suits, dingy shirts, and sneakers. The girls, in loose skirts and clunky shoes. There were a few old men in pastel suits, limping, I think, on purpose. They used white rags to wipe sweat from their foreheads and then stuffed them deep into their back pockets.”

Sitting out on the stoop, the boys spend a lot of time people watching, enjoying a neighborhood alive with interesting characters. This scene captures the carefree idleness of teenage summers. With nothing else to do, Ali takes aim at both the older churchgoing adults overdoing the occasion and the younger children in hand-me-downs being held hostage in the Sunday heat. These descriptions add texture to the story by fleshing out the background of the neighborhood beyond the central cast of characters.

“He just wasn’t used to ever coming anywhere with us, I guess. It was like his mind had gotten used to us, and everyone, leaving him right there on that stoop, second step from the top. We called out to him, and he looked kind of startled.”

There are more interactions with just Ali and Noodles than there are with all three boys together, so one can infer that there are moments when Needles is alone, but seeing it dramatized in this scene makes his isolation more tangible. It is heartbreaking both because of the casualness of their disregard for Needles and his quiet acceptance of it as the norm.

“I looked out at Needles, sitting on the stoop, weaving the black yarn in and out with the needles just like my mother taught him. I could see that something had started to form. Something was being made, and even if it wasn’t anything specific, it was something, and I thought that was pretty cool. He was making progress.”

Reynolds uses the image of Needles making progress with his knitting to symbolize his improvements in coping with the disorder. Ali being impressed with the progress, even if he cannot discern a clear shape, also indicates progress in the way the disorder is being perceived by those around Needles.

“Little girls shouldn’t have to worry about their parents’ issues, but I guess when you’re eleven going on eighteen, it’s normal.”

In this scene Jazz questions Ali about whether his parents have a future together. As with he does with all things that could potentially be painful, he wishes he could shield her from this worry. The phrase “eleven going on eighteen” is an excellent description of the way Jazz acts much older than her age because of the adult responsibilities she shoulders.

“A MoMo party. I was at a freakin’ MoMo party. At fifteen. What more could anyone ask for?”

All the eagerness of the previous chapters reaches a crescendo when Ali enters the party at the start of Chapter 10. His excitement is used as rhetorical irony to set readers up for the emotional fall when Needles’s beating turns the night of their dreams into a nightmare.

“This is the story I was going to have to tell about my first time. A MoMo party, with a gorgeous drunk older girl, that for some reason I wasn’t really comfortable with. Maybe Doris’s training had made me soft, I thought. Naw, not soft, just safe.”

This scene is another instance in which Doris’s influence on Ali’s identity is apparent. His hesitance shows that he is self-aware enough to know he is not ready for sex despite his excitement. This self-awareness and restraint in a heated moment is a sign of Ali’s maturity.

“He ain’t want no kid with no syndrome. He figured Needles was crazy, so eventually I might be too, and we would make him look bad. This is what my mother told me. She said, when the doctors said Needles had the syndrome, my father was so mad that he punched a hole in the wall. I don’t remember that, but the next morning he was gone.”

Sensing that Ali is fed up with him, perhaps for good this time, Noodles calls out to stop him from leaving. He finally explains what happened to his father and tries to rationalize the way he treats Needles. He says he is hard on his brother because “if he ain’t have that stupid syndrome, we’d still have a father. We’d still have a family. It changed everything” (115). There is a parallel between Ali walking to the door, angry and worn down, and Noodles’s father who walked out in a rage and was never seen again. The fear of losing Ali gives Noodles the courage to share his deepest shame.

“I mean, I was his friend, but was he mine? Did he even know how to be a friend? How to be a brother? Maybe he didn’t mean any harm, and couldn’t control himself—like a different kind of syndrome.”

As with Noodles, the incident at MoMo’s party prompts a period of introspection for Ali. He realizes that he and Noodles do not share the same understanding of friendship and brotherhood. He also makes a breakthrough by seeing Noodles’s behavior as “a different kind of syndrome.” In his own layman way, Ali considers whether Noodles struggles with his mental health because of the trauma of his father leaving.

“I couldn’t have had my eyes closed for more than five minutes before I heard a noise coming from the living room. At first I thought it was a mouse, which was no big deal. Mice might as well pay rent around here.”

Mice are a common infestation in New York City; it is estimated that there is one mouse for every four people who live in city. Thus, mice are not an indicator of particularly impoverished housing conditions. Ali’s casual acceptance of their presence does suggest that the apartment’s mouse-to-human ratio may be above average.

“I thought about how this must be what it’s like to go to heaven—walking toward the blinding light, with the smell of bacon and eggs all around.”

In Chapter 1, Noodles asks Ali whether he would trade his sister to be Jay-Z’s little brother, and he refuses. When he thinks about it, Ali concludes that he would choose Doris over Oprah, too, if given the chance. Noodles finds this hard to believe, but Ali is a kid who enjoys simple pleasures. His vision of heaven—a relatively average American breakfast—shows that Ali does not need much to be happy.

“Let me tell you, son, punching bags don’t punch back. But sometimes, when you take them for granted, and you get cocky, you can really hurt yourself when you punch one.” Malloy wrapped the gauze in between my fingers and around my hand tightly. “Now, with them brothers, Needles and Noodles, who you think the punching bag is?”

Malloy turns one of the most difficult nights of Ali’s life into a teaching moment. As is typical of sage characters, he does not just give Ali the answers; rather, he uses a metaphor that directs Ali to finding the answers for himself.

“For the first time, I realized that his hair was thinning at the top. He very seldom took off his hat, if ever, so I had never noticed his scalp peeking through. He old, but not in an old man kind of way. Just older. More grown-up, which, I know, is weird to say about a middle-aged father.”

This quote exposes the disconnect between Ali’s and his father’s lives. It also shows the time that has passed; the younger version of John whom Ali remembers from his early childhood has aged into a more mature and wizened man. John’s thinning hair therefore symbolizes his maturity and personal growth. This quote also signals that Ali is approaching the state of young adulthood where children begin to see their parents’ frailties and recognize them as human and flawed, just like them.

“Lucky it was my dad, and though I had never really cried in front of him before, he was cool about it. He didn’t say stop crying, or toughen up. He just said to let it out.”

As a teenager approaching adulthood, Ali questions what it means to be a man. In this moment, his father teaches him that being a man can also mean being vulnerable. The phrase “toughen up” is used to shame boys into suppressing their emotions because of the perception that crying weakens their masculinity. By validating Ali’s crying as a healthy and necessary expression of emotion, John breaks the negative cycle of fathers teaching their sons to bury their pain.

“Look at y’all, looking like a perfect scene from a Spike Lee movie.”

Reynolds tips his hat to influential African American filmmaker Spike Lee, whose films have been integral to shaping the landscape of American cinema. Lee’s films are known for representing uncomfortable subjects and challenging racial stereotypes in their exploration of the African American experience. One of his most celebrated films, Do the Right Thing, explores racial tensions in 1980s Bed-Stuy. The film excelled because it so precisely reflected life in Brooklyn, and the broader Black experience nationally, at that time. Reynolds attempts produce a similar work of verisimilitude here.