A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  Then one afternoon I came into the shop and Brady didn’t seem to know me.

  What the fuck do you want?

  I didn’t know what to say. And then I realized he was drunk. He was trying to letter an O. But he couldn’t hold the curve. He stopped, took the brush in his teeth, and furiously crumpled the paper.

  Goddammit, he said, goddammit, goddammit.

  I backed up quietly and slipped out into the night. I felt like crying, but couldn’t; everybody on the street would see me. I walked in a blur to Prospect Park and back, thinking: They’re all drunks. All of them. Every last one.

  12

  IN THE YEARS after the war, I stopped worrying about my father. He was there, all right, and I talked to him about baseball, or boxing, or the weather. But it was as if I understood that I would never get from him what I wanted most: the kind of casual affection that is a sign of love. I protected myself with indifference, dreams of substitute worlds, a belief in a limitless future that didn’t depend upon him. I certainly never talked to him about Jim Brady’s sign store, or cartooning, or art school. I knew better.

  Instead, I moved back and forth from the street to the Little Room (where Tommy and I now shared bunk beds), from stickball and fistfights to blue pencils, Higgins ink, and the mysteries of the crow quill pen. This wasn’t easy. Suddenly, down in the street, it was the time of the gangs.

  The street gangs were all over New York then, and the newspapers wrote about them every other day. In Brooklyn, there were immense black gangs in Bedford-Stuyvesant called the Bishops and the Robins; the Navy Street Boys from the waterfront in Fort Greene; tough Jewish gangs from Brownsville and Coney Island. And there were street gangs right in the Neighborhood.

  The gang at our end of the Neighborhood was called the Tigers, most of them Irish. Their great rivals were the South Brooklyn Boys, most of them Italian. They all wore variations on the zoot suit, brightly colored trousers with a three-or-four-inch rise above the belt, ballooning knees, tight thirteen-inch pegged ankles. The rear pockets were covered with gun-shaped flaps of a different color, called pistol pockets; sometimes a bright saddle stitch would run down the seam of the trouser leg. If the trousers were a bright green, the pistol pockets, narrow belt, and saddle stitches might all be yellow. Or the combination would be maroon and gray. Or black and tan. Or purple and pale blue. The colors and combinations were drastic, radical, personal, at once an affirmation of their owner’s uniqueness and a calculated affront to those locked in the gray dark memory of the Depression, the khaki and navy blue palette of the war, or suit-and-tie respectability. In summer, the gang members wore T-shirts with the sleeves rolled high on the shoulder and a cigarette pack folded into the roll. In chillier seasons, they added garish shirts, wide Windsor-knotted ties, belted jackets with wide padded shoulders called wrap-arounds, and wide-brimmed, narrow-crowned, pearl-gray “ginger-ella” hats. And like the boys at camp, they were all masters of the Walk. They would come down our avenue in groups of fifteen or twenty, walking with that practiced roll, their faces frozen in impassive masks, all smoking cigarettes, a few holding bats, their trousers billowing like visions from the Arabian Nights. The mixture of power and menace was thrilling.

  On the street, we learned their names and their histories and heard the legends of their wars. Tigers and South Brooklyn Boys lived by primitive codes, most of them outlined in what became their catechism: The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman, published in 1947, probably the best-read novel in the history of Brooklyn. The codes demanded that all loyalty go to the gang, ahead of family, church, city, or country. Everybody had to drink hard and fight to the death; the women had to “put out” for the men. Although they supported themselves with burglaries and other minor crimes, they despised the mugger, they would never hurt old people, they would not ambush drunks in the dark or roll lushes in bars. My father liked some of the Tigers, but he spoke of them sadly.

  The Tigers don’t stand a chance, my father said one evening. They’re fighting the guineas. That means they’re fighting the Mafia.

  He was right; dozens of South Brooklyn Boys ended up in the Mob. But for five or six years, the Tigers and South Brooklyn fought some epic battles, over women or insults (real and imaginary) or turf. One of the leaders of the Tigers was a handsome young man named Giacomo Fortunato, the dark blond son of the mustached barber next to Jim Brady’s sign shop. The son was a great stickball player, an elaborate zoot suiter, and seemed always to have a girl on his arm. One evening in 1950, the Tigers met South Brooklyn at the Swan Lake in Prospect Park, in a full-out prearranged rumble. And at one point, as they battered each other with fists, bats, and pipes, someone from South Brooklyn fired a gun. The cops later said that the shooter’s name was Anthony Scarpati, better known as Scappy. Everybody ran, except Giacomo Fortunato. He was dead.

  That evening, I was in the street with my brother Tommy and some of the other kids, playing cards under a lamppost. Dozens of people were out on the sidewalks, fanning themselves, cooling off with hot tea, talking about baseball and the weather and each other. Then an invisible wave that seemed made of billions of electrons — a charged mixture of fear, shock, and apprehension — came rolling down the avenue, shaking the thick hot air, penetrating every man, woman, and child. Police cars raced up and down Seventh Avenue. Mothers looked for their children. The poolroom closed. And the words were carried on the electric wave: Giacomo’s dead, they killed Giacomo, Giacomos dead. Nobody went to bed. They killed Giacomo! And I remember the early editions of the Daily News and Mirror coming up, people grabbing them, looking disappointed when the story of the killing of Giacomo Fortunato wasn’t there, saying, Maybe it ain’t true, maybe they’re lying, the bulls …

  But it was true, all right; the cops weren’t lying. In the morning, the story was in the late editions of the News and Mirror, and on the front pages of the afternoon papers. I told you, my father said. They can’t beat these people. It seemed impossible that someone I saw every day, someone only five years older than I was, someone so handsome and daring: impossible that someone like Giacomo could be shot to death. And that his death could be recorded in the newspapers. That morning, I walked along Seventh Avenue and saw a wreath in the window of the Fortunato barbershop and a sign saying they were closed until further notice due to a death in the family. Across the street, about a dozen Tigers were reading the papers under the marquee of the Minerva. One of them was Noona Taylor, the toughest and bravest of the Tigers. He was sobbing, great body-wracking sobs. Even long-legged and curly-haired Millie, the sexiest of the Tigerettes, could not console him.

  After a few days, the story vanished from the newspapers. On a few mornings that winter I passed the barbershop and saw Giacomo’s father sitting alone, smoking cigarettes.

  13

  IN 1947, I went to work in the grocery store that had once been a Roulston’s branch and then was taken over by a fat sweaty man named Ruby. I was there every day after school for three hours and all day on Saturday and was paid six dollars a week. In addition, I earned about three dollars in tips, delivering orders to people all over the Neighborhood. Every Saturday, I gave my mother half this money, an act that made me feel I was growing up, bringing home money to the family. I was determined not to be that species of lowlife who stood just a niche above the wino or informer: the freeloader.

  There was another reason for working: I wanted to be free of dependence upon my father. No matter what he did, how drunk he got, how indifferent he was, I wanted him to know that I could get along without him. I still remember telling him that I didn’t want an allowance anymore.

  What, are you a big shot now? he said

  No, I just don’t need it now, Dad. I have my own money.

  He gave me a long look, as if trying to decide if this was some sort of challenge, and then said: Good for you.

  Now I paid with my own money for drawing paper and ink and comics. I saved for books. I would sit down in the crowded kitchen (for we had no space for a tabl
e in the Little Room) and get lost in the act of drawing. I also felt I was living a dozen lives at the same time. At any given hour, I was a student, an altar boy, a son, brother, street fighter, Dodger fan, storyteller, cartoonist. I was, by most definitions, a “good” boy; but the gangster style kept calling. Sometimes I trembled with fear when the Tigers marched by on the way to the battlefield or when South Brooklyn launched a sudden invasion. Then I would think that the only way I could ever be safe would be to join them. Not now, not yet, but soon, in a few years, when I was old enough. And that scenario was also scary. Every possibility was imagined. I saw myself facing the South Brooklyn Boys at the Swan Lake, fists clenched, eyes narrow, ready to punch and stomp; saw myself pulling a gun; saw myself being dragged out of the house in handcuffs by two thick-necked bulls; even saw myself walking the last mile to the chair. Every image was as real as breakfast. Along with the stories in the newspapers and my body laid out in Mike Smith’s funeral parlor and my mother weeping and my father getting drunk, both of them consumed with shame.

  I was saved from the hot seat by a glorious palace of books called the Prospect Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, known to us simply as the Library. I went there every Saturday morning, during my break from the grocery store, following the familiar route along Seventh Avenue, my blood quickening as I crossed the trolley tracks on Ninth Street and passed the stately brownstones and small synagogue and saw up ahead the wild gloomy garden of the Library. I was always relieved, glancing through the high windows, to see that the lights were on, the leathery cliffs of books still there. The majestic mock Corinthian columns of the main entrance always made me feel puny but inside, behind walls as thick as those of any fortress, I always felt safe. Of one thing I was certain: in the Neighborhood, the bad guys never went to the Library.

  I loved that old high-roofed building. It was warm in winter and cool in summer, and although it seemed built to last forever, and the sense of space was unlike anything I knew except the lobbies of movie houses, the attraction of the Library was not merely shelter. I was there on a more exciting mission: the discovery of the world.

  To be sure, the idea of the Library alarmed me. Those thousands of books seemed to look down upon me with a wintry disdain. They were adult; they knew what I did not know; they were, in a collective way, the epitome of the unknowable, full of mystery and challenge and the most scary thing of all, doubt. The harder I worked at cracking their codes, the more certain I was that the task was impossible.

  At first, I was condemned to the children’s room. I liked the bound volumes of a British magazine called St. Nicholas, full of intricate pen drawings and the cheery innocence of the official 19th century. And I also found a book about Milton Caniff, called The Rembrandt of the Comic Strip, borrowing it at least once a month, virtually memorizing its pages. In that book Caniff suggested to would-be cartoonists that they study the art of narrative, by reading writers he called “yarn-spinners,” such as Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. I followed the lesson of the master. I memorized verses of Kipling’s “Gunga Din” (the movie version played every year at the Minerva along with Four Feathers) and read “The Man Who Would Be King” and The Jungle Book. As the son of Irish immigrants, I found Kipling a bit too British. But Stevenson was another matter. Of all his books I most cherished Treasure Island. How could a son of Billy Hamill resist Long John Silver, with his left leg cut off below the knee? And right there on the first page of the novel was that song of the perate, the desperado, the outlaw, the song that Noona could sing, or even my father:

  Fifteen men on the dead mans chest —

  Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

  I read the novel once. Then again. I was carried away by Kidnapped, defeated by the Scotch dialect in The Weir of Hermiston. But I kept going back to Treasure Island. Tommy and I would sing the tune: Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! And laugh and cheer and call each other matey. Then, tracking down Stevenson, I discovered Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

  I’d seen the movie, with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman, but the book was even scarier. With his gorgeous images and musical prose, Stevenson carried me into nineteenth-century London, where fog rolled down narrow cobblestoned streets day and night (“A great chocolate-covered pall lowered over heaven.…” Or, even better to my inflamed vision: “The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles…. ”). I looked up the word “carbuncles,” used it in school compositions (“Musial’s eyes glowed like carbuncles”), where I also described fogs that slept and gas lamps that shimmered. But I never used the Stevenson paragraph that chilled my heart:

  He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change — he seemed to swell — his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter — and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

  I read that passage and thought of my father. In Stevenson’s story, Dr. Jekyll says that he had lived “nine-tenths a life of effort, virtue and control”; but the chemical experiment had released Mr. Hyde, “the evil side of my nature.” I wanted that to be true of my father. When he first started a drinking session, he was often merry and funny, the joyful Irish singer of funny Irish songs; but as he went on, his face darkened, his eyes grew opaque, his jaw slack. Sometimes, he looked evil. And when he became enraged, I was often afraid of him. I saw the same eerie transformation in the other drunks of the neighborhood. Even Mr. Dix was decent enough until he downed too much of the amber liquid. After reading Stevenson’s great story, I could never look at my father the same way; I just hoped he would never come home with a silver-headed cane.

  I didn’t brood about Jekyll and Hyde or give up reading because the subject cut so close to my bones. I was also collecting Classic Comics (soon to be renamed, for some reason, Classics Illustrated), and they were a kind of road map to the real books. I had all the early Classic Comics in order: 1) The Three Musketeers; 2) Ivanhoe; 3) The Count of Monte Cristo; 4) The Last of the Mohicans; 5) Moby Dick; 6) A Tale of Two Cities; 7) Robin Hood; 8) The Arabian Nights; 9) Les Miserables; 10) Robinson Crusoe; and on through Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels, The Corsican Brothers, Huckleberry Finn, and dozens of others. From the stacks at the Library, I tried reading all of them. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Walter Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper were truly dreadful writers. And I was still too raw to enter Moby Dick. But Dumas père thrilled me with The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, and I found a copy of the tales told by Scheherazade during her Arabian nights; it was beautifully illustrated (probably by Arthur Rackham) and secretly erotic. I loved the writing of Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza moved into my mind for life, sharing space with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. And over and over again, I traveled down the dark river with Huck and the Nigger Jim and dreamed of lighting out for the territory. Tom Sawyer couldn’t have lasted long in the Neighborhood. But Huck Finn felt like one of us; after all, wasn’t his father the town drunk?

  In the comics — even in Milton Caniff — there were no drunks, no scary fathers; it was impossible to imagine Dagwood having a “fair one” with Blondie, the way Mr. Dix once did with his wife. I knew in the Library that in some of those books, I was coming closer to the truths of the world. They weren’t The Amboy Dukes. But then, of course, nothing was.

  The illustrators of these classics were often as important to me as the books and obviously served as a transition from comics. The fine-lined Cruikshank drawings in the Dickens books had a spidery texture, creepy and strange, and — in the horrific figure of the drunken Bill Sikes — an ability to make London feel like Twelfth Street in Brooklyn. I also consumed Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, checking it out many times, maki
ng pencil copies of the great paintings, reveling in the freebooting lives of pirates, men burnt from the sun, filled with rum, reaching for wenches. And in book after book, I was dazzled by the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth, so rich and thick with golden light; often I checked out books — Robin Hood or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — simply to look at those Wyeth paintings.

  But the rest of the books in the children’s section meant nothing to me. They all seemed to be about kids living in idyllic country glades, or rabbits who talked, or an elephant named Babar who had adventures in Africa. I was already traveling through Burne Hogarth’s fabulous baroque Africa in Tarzan (which ran in Sparkler comics and the Saturday Journal-American) and, of course, I had plunged through the South American jungles with Bomba. After reading The Count of Monte Cristo, I began thinking of the children’s room as another version of the Château d’If.

  That didn’t last long. Soon I was a regular in the main reading room. The librarians didn’t seem to care about enforcing the rule that confined me to the children’s room. And as I moved around those dark aisles, among books sad with dust or placed in some ghetto of the forbidden on high shelves (like that copy of The Arabian Nights), I began to find the entrance to the world. At first, I was still trapped in the primary colors of melodrama. But over the last years of the 1940s, the Library took my instincts for the lurid and refined them. The comics, radio serials, B movies, dirty stories, even The Amboy Dukes, were part of my experience, the foundations of my own sense of the mythic; I took them with me to the act of reading literature. But slowly the myths started assuming different shapes, a wider context, deeper roots. And reading became a kind of creative act. With each book, I was somehow collaborating with the writer in the creation of an alternative world. I was at once in Brooklyn and in not-Brooklyn. These books were more than simple collections of abstract symbols called words, printed on paper; they described real events that happened to me. So I was Jim Hawkins, hiding from Blind Pew. I was D’Artagnan, fighting duels with the henchmen of the evil Milady. I was Edmond Dantès, escaping from my prison cell to extract my terrible revenge. I was Sydney Carton doing a far, far better thing than I had ever done and going to a far, far better place than I had ever known.