A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  The fuck you talkin’ about, man, Shitty Collins would say. They were sold out, man, by Truman and the commies in Washington.

  No, they just stole the money we sent them, millions of dollars, and when they had to fight, they ran.

  How do you know? Was you there?

  No, I wasn’t there. But I tried to imagine Chiang’s troops at the docks, piling into boats, panicky and full of fear, while others were tearing off their uniforms, melting into the shadows, throwing down their guns; in my imagination, it was like some final packed and gorgeous panel of Terry and the Pirates. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was talking about in those sessions on the Totes; I was retailing opinions I had picked up from the Star or the Compass or the Post, all newspapers of the left. Since everybody in the Neighborhood swore by the Daily News or the Journal-American, I was going the other way. Against those newspapers. Against the pieties of the Neighborhood. Against the Church. Against my father.

  I was lucky in these beery little debates because the others didn’t know what they were talking about either. It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow.

  George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids.

  Oney thing they respect is force.

  That fuckin’ Rose-a-velt, he made a deal wit’ Stalin, let the Russians take Berlin, now look at the fuckin’ mess we’re in . . . .

  The talk sputtered on into the night. Drinking beer on the Totes, arguing with my friends (or arguing at them), I sometimes even felt as if I understood how the world worked. I was that young. Even that September, when Truman announced that the Russians had tested an atom bomb, I thought that everything would be all right. If we each had the atom bomb, I reasoned, then nobody would ever start a war because nobody could win it. In the newspapers, there was great excitement: if the Russians had the atom bomb they must have stolen it from us. There must be spies everywhere, slipping our secrets to them. Some columnists pointed out that the Russians also had former Nazi scientists working for them, the way we did, and maybe they didn’t have to steal anything. Most of the guys couldn’t have cared less about politics or communism; they were more angry with the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees in five games in the 1949 World Series, than they were with anyone on the other side of the planet. They didn’t care that Dean Acheson had replaced George Marshall as secretary of state; they were wondering whether Dotty Long’s tits were real. Almost all of this talk was just riffs in the night. The wars were over. None of this distant bullshit would ever directly affect us. Even the air raid drills, the warnings about the Bomb, the bombardment of Moscow with Hail Marys, even the Fall of China, couldn’t convince us that these matters had anything to do with our lives. Pass the cardboard, Jake, I’m thirsty . . . . When we got bored with politics (which was quickly), we went on to baseball or what we all called pussy.

  I hear Naomi puts out.

  Who?

  Naomi, from down Seventeenth Street. I hear she does it.

  Who you hear that from?

  Harry from the Parkview, you know him? Lives down Seeley Street? Tells me she does it for quarters . . . .

  Then, on my fifteenth birthday, June 24, 1950, everything shifted again. That Saturday, seven divisions of North Korean troops and 150 North Korean tanks crossed the 38th parallel in an invasion of South Korea.

  III

  BREAKING OUT

  How many bibles make a Sabbath?

  How many girls have disappeared

  Down musky avenues of leaves?

  It’s an autocracy, the past….

  — Tom Paulin,“In the Egyptian Gardens”

  1

  THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS told the story of the invasion in a sketchy way. They made clear that there was a crisis. President Truman was flying back to Washington from a vacation in Independence, Missouri, while General MacArthur was huddling with his staff at his headquarters in Tokyo. The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council. But that Sunday morning, up at the Totes, nobody talked about war. This wasn’t another Pearl Harbor; it was some distant battle between Koreans, a kind of civil war, nothing to do with us. Our war ended in August 1945. Around noon, we got on the Coney Island trolley car, picking up transfers to the Neptune Avenue line, and we went to the beach.

  In the summer of 1950, all of us from the Neighborhood hung out in a place on Coney Island called Oceantide. Built on the boardwalk at Bay 22, it was a block-long complex with a swimming pool, lockers, a long packed bar, and a small fenced-off area where the young men danced with the young women to a bubbling Wurlitzer jukebox. Down the block was a shop called Mary’s, which sold the most fabulous hero sandwiches in New York, great thick concoctions of ham and cheese and tomatoes laced with mustard or mayonnaise, along with cases of ice cold sodas. Out on the beach we gathered on blankets placed like islands in the sand. One of the Big Guys always had a portable radio, and the music drifted across the hot afternoon as we drank beer and watched the girls lather themselves with suntan oil. Off to the right as we faced the sea was a walled development called Sea Gate, mostly Jewish, the place where Isaac Bashevis Singer came to live in 1935 when he arrived from Poland. And down on Surf Avenue, a block from the beach, there were two Irish bars where everyone did their serious drinking.

  On that first Sunday of the Korean War, the older guys were laughing and drinking with their girlfriends on the blankets when there was a sudden roar. From out of the pack, a young man named Buddy Kiernan came running and laughing. He was naked. The others had pulled off his bathing suit and now he was grabbing at blankets and dancing around and the girls were giggling and blushing and the guys yawping and then Buddy Kiernan began to run to the sea. People stood up on all the blankets, watching Buddy run, his black hair wild, his legs pumping, his balls and penis bobbing, until he dived into the surf.

  To great cheers.

  I thought: I’ll remember this all my life.

  We all got drunk that day, the younger guys sharing the wild exuberance of the Coney Island summer and the glorious performance of Buddy Kiernan. I fell asleep on the cold dark sand under the boardwalk, and when I woke up, everybody was gone. My mouth felt coarse. There was a sour smell to my body that I couldn’t erase with the salt of the sea. I went home alone on the trolley car, wondering about the war.

  By Monday, everybody was talking about Korea. We were in another war. It didn’t matter that there had been no direct attack on Americans. We were part of the United Nations. We might have to go. By Friday, the first American ground troops were on their way to the fighting.

  It just goes on and on, my mother said one evening. Brian was now four. My newest brother, John, was less than a year old, crawling on the linoleum. They just keep on killing each other. There were no tears in her for this war. She didn’t w
eep at the news on the radio. She just crooned, in a sad way, It goes on and on.

  By the Fourth of July, the mood of the Neighborhood had radically changed. It was clear now: the older guys were going off to the war in Korea. Truman was calling it a “police action,” but everybody else called it a war. If you were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you could be drafted. In August, the reserves were called up, including many men who had fought in World War II. The war would be tough; everybody said so; Seoul had fallen, the South Korean army was destroyed, and the American troops had poor equipment. If you went away, if you drew a number from the draft board that sent you to Korea, you might die.

  That summer, Buddy Kelly died in Korea. He was the oldest son of the Kellys at 471 Fourteenth Street and had been on garrison duty in Japan when he was called up. One evening, I saw his brothers, Billy and Danny, sitting with his mother and father on the stoop where we’d all once lived. They sat in absolute silence, and I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t even remember Buddy clearly. I kept walking. What could I say? That Buddy Kelly had died for his country? He died for someone else’s country. Could I say he was a good man and a great American? I barely knew him. He was one of us, part of the tribe, a man of the Neighborhood; but we never got to know him.

  Now there was a lot more drinking, everywhere: in the park, in the bars, at the beach. But the tone had changed. The feeling of mindless exuberance gave way to urgency, even desperation. Every weekend there was another going-away party, and you saw weeping girls walking in pairs as another boy went off to basic training or boot camp. Over the next two years at Holy Name, there were a lot of weddings and too many funerals: the bridegrooms were in uniform and the coffins were draped with flags.

  When I went back to Regis in the fall, my mind was scrambled. In the yard, we talked a lot about the war. Many boys had brothers who had been drafted or called up. Almost everybody thought that communism had to be stopped. At the same time, they were attacking Truman and Acheson, blaming them for the war. I tried to make sense of this. If it was important to fight the communists, and Truman and Acheson were fighting them, why were they wrong?

  The Red Scare didn’t dominate Regis the way it did the Neighborhood. But I do remember seeing a Catholic comic book that showed communist mobs attacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And there was an extended discussion of a papal encyclical called Atheistic Communism. The Church expressed itself in other ways. In the Journal-American, and other friendly forums, Cardinal Spellman, chubby and pink-skinned, kept warning about how America was in danger of destruction at the hands of the communists, those in Russia, those at home. In the Daily News, there were frantic warnings about pinkos, fellow travelers, New Dealers, and liberals. And even in Regis, where Jesuitical irony and skepticism generally prevailed, I started to hear a lot of favorable talk about the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

  Because we still couldn’t afford television, I didn’t see the way McCarthy moved and talked until much later. But I saw Herblock’s cartoons in the Post, in which an unshaven McCarthy, his brows kissing in a thuggish way, often worked in tandem with another unshaven character who kept climbing out of sewers: a senator from California named Richard Nixon. Cardinal Spellman loved them both.

  In that second year at Regis, my allegiance to the Catholic Church ended. It was bad enough that I didn’t believe in God; I thought for a while that I might come around, like Ignatius Loyola himself did, the man who had committed all the sins of the world back in the sixteenth century, before undergoing a conversion and founding the Jesuits. Maybe I would get religion the way I finally got Terry and the Pirates. But McCarthy and Spellman finished me off. They merged with Brother Jan to create a collective image of a bullying, intolerant Catholicism that repelled me. If they were the heroes of the Catholic Church, I wanted nothing to do with it. And that deepened my feeling of unease and disconnection at Regis.

  The school, of course, couldn’t be separated from the other parts of my life. With three brothers and a sister now at home, I had endless trouble working at my cartooning; it was difficult even to get homework done, sharing the kitchen table with Tommy and Kathleen. Worse, because there were now seven mouths to feed, we were even poorer. The boys at Regis were not rich, but they wore creased trousers and neat jackets and ties; I had to shuffle together the clothes I wore. I was now taller and heavier than my father, so I couldn’t wear any of his clothes; my brothers were younger than I was, so I couldn’t borrow theirs. My mother did her best. She took me to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side and bought cheap clothes; she set up time payments to get me slacks at Belmont’s on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. But the cheap clothes wore out quickly, holes in the pockets first, then the elbows, followed by chronic, mysterious tears under the arms. She patched and repaired them (hunched over a Singer sewing machine), but she had the other kids to tend to, along with my father. When I went to school I couldn’t imagine that the mothers of the other boys were up late at night patching their jackets after an evening of cooking, dishes, and helping with homework.

  Shoes were an even worse problem. I never had two pairs of shoes at the same time. I wore one pair until they wore out; when the heels wore down or great holes appeared in the soles, I sat in a little booth at the shoemaker’s until he finished attaching new soles or heels. After a while, they could not be saved, the edges unable to take another nail, the cheap leather cracking across the top like overcooked bacon. Then my mother bought me a new pair.

  In the beginning, I didn’t care much about any of this. But some of the boys — the upperclassmen — started making remarks. Where’d you get that air conditioned jacket, fella? Or, You buy those pants down the Bowery? They probably did this to other kids; they probably did it with each other; but I sometimes felt as if I were the only kid at Regis being inspected for the mortal sin of dressing badly. I began slipping into the yard as late as possible each morning, hugging the wall, avoiding the more wicked tongues. One rainy day I came to school with cardboard stuffed into my shoes because of the holes. In a corner of the locker room, I removed the shoes, wrung out the socks, and threw away the cardboard. A junior, fat-bodied and thick-necked, saw me, and started laughing, pointing at me and nudging his friends. My face flushed; I thought: Fuck you, you fat bastard, fuck you. His polished shoes had thick soles and seemed untouched by the morning rain. Quickly, I tied my laces and slipped away without looking at him. But all day long I kept seeing the Fat Boy’s grinning face, and my shame grew into rage. He had hurt me; I wanted to hurt him back. During Latin and German and English, I rehearsed what I would do, over and over again, remembering Frankie Nocera, and other fights on Seventh Avenue, wondering what Noona Taylor would do if the Fat Boy laughed at his shoes. And when school ended, I hurried down to Park Avenue to wait for him.

  The rain was falling harder. I saw my friends hurrying across the avenue, then staying close to the wall as they ran to Eighty-sixth Street and the Lexington Avenue subway. Some had umbrellas. After a while, there were almost no kids leaving Regis and I thought that maybe the Fat Boy had taken another route home: along Madison Avenue, or over to Fifth Avenue and the downtown bus. My anger ebbed and I was about to go home. Then I saw him walking quickly, holding an umbrella almost daintily in one hand and his books in the other. He didn’t see me until he reached the corner.

  Hey, you fat bastard.

  He peered at me from under the umbrella and smiled. The same smile, I thought. A fucking smirk.

  Without another word, I hit him hard in the face and his eyes got wide and the umbrella flew up and the books fell, and then I hit him again and again, blind with rage. He fell and I kicked him with those shameful ugly shoes and grabbed his hair and punched him in the neck, and then he started to scream. That stopped me. I looked around. The streets were empty, lashed by the hard rain. No cops, no pedestrians, not even a doorman. The Fat Boy sat up, his pants ruined, his jacket soaked, his eyes startled and afraid.

  Don’t laugh at me any more, you fat
fuck, I said.

  Then I walked away.

  That night, I was sure I was finished at Regis. In the morning, he would go to the principal’s office and report me. How could he not? His books were ruined, his notes spattered with rain and dirt. I had hurt him badly. He Would report me, all right, and they would call me down to the office and tell me that I’d been expelled.

  All right, I thought. Fuck it. I’ll go to another school, to Loughlin or St. Agnes or even to Manual. But I won’t whimper. I won’t beg them to let me stay. If they kick me out, I’ll just walk out of there like a man.

  I tossed and turned, alternately consumed with shame, failure and regret, satisfaction and defiance. I was most worried about what my mother would say. I thought that if they kicked me out, I’d have failed her. She had been so proud when I made it into Regis. It was proof to her that you could do anything in this country if you worked hard enough. I just hoped that she wouldn’t cry. I didn’t care what my father thought.

  In the morning, I trembled all the way from Brooklyn to Park Avenue, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t focus on the Miss Subways sign or the girls who got on at Jay Street. I considered playing hooky, just riding the trains all day. It was Friday, I thought, and maybe by Monday they would have forgotten everything. But in those days, subway cops stopped kids who weren’t in school and if the kids didn’t have notes or good excuses, they picked them up. I didn’t want the police to take me back to Regis. I didn’t want faces turning to me as I was escorted down a corridor to the principal’s office. So I took my trains and came up into Eighty-sixth Street and walked to school. I waited outside the main gate for a while, where the seniors smoked cigarettes, and then went into the yard. The Fat Boy was there with his friends. His face was swollen but he didn’t look at me. I went off to my first class and sat through it, hearing nothing, waiting for someone to come to the door and escort me to the principal’s office. Nobody ever came. Not in the first period. Not through the day.