A Drinking Life

by Pete Hamill

  Can I move? she said.

  Yeah, I said. I’m finished.

  Can I see it?

  Sure.

  I handed her the drawing pad. She looked at the picture, her eyes wide. And then burst into tears. She stood up, bawling, and threw the pad at me.

  I’m ugly, she sobbed. You think I’m ugly!

  No, Jenny, I don’t think you’re ugly. I was —

  Look at my nose!

  She turned away and buried her face in the pillows of the couch. I tried to console her, petting her hair, hugging her. She stopped crying and then sat up slowly, saw the picture on the floor before the chair and started crying again.

  That’s the way you see me, she said. I’m ugly, ugly, ugly!

  No, Jenny, I love you.

  You love my — you love what I give you! You love what I let you do to me!

  I stood up and closed the pad, so she wouldn’t see the hated picture. She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress and then saw the pencil and it started again. I didn’t know what to do. I’d tried so hard to make the drawing real, and she obviously was wounded by it. A gift had become an instrument of torture. Joseph Cotten didn’t have this problem. I stayed a little longer and then took my pad and my pencil and fled.

  That was the end of it. Suddenly, shockingly. We saw each other two days later outside Steven’s. She didn’t want coffee or a soda. Standing on the sidewalk, she announced that she was “breaking off” with me. She talked about needing “freedom” and how she was too young to get married or settle down and how she was afraid of getting caught by her mother or ending up pregnant.

  You’re only fifteen, she said. It’s not right.

  Her eyes looked sadder than ever. She turned her back on me and hurried down Ninth Street to catch the Fifth Avenue bus. I felt absolutely alone, engulfed by a delicious melancholy. Now, I thought, this story has an ending.

  So back I went to my friends and the Totem Poles and drinking beer from cardboard containers. I listened to my friends talk about the glories of pussy, knowing they were almost all virgins. I started truly listening to Sinatra. I did almost no homework, drew no cartoons, attempted no portraits. The war ground on in Korea, back and forth with little gain. I saw more young women in grave little knots, going out together on Saturday nights. I didn’t call Jenny; she couldn’t call me. Suddenly, Tony Bennett was on all the radios and crooning from the jukeboxes: “I Won’t Cry Anymore” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” I would sing with him:

  I’ve shed a million tears since we’re apart,

  But tears will never mend a broken heart.

  One night, I saw Jenny waiting to the side at the Sanders while the men lined up to buy tickets. She glanced over at the Totem Poles, but then turned and smiled at her date: a big dumb guy from Seventh Avenue who could hit a spaldeen about four blocks. She took his arm and they went in to see the movie. I never talked to her again.

  6

  I WAS BORED in St. Agnes and started playing hooky, the empty spring days spent wandering the city. Sometimes I sat in movie houses. Other times I worked my way through the dark caves of Book Row. In May, Willie Mays came up from the minors to play for the Giants.

  They say he’s the greatest thing on two feet, my father said.

  What do you think?

  We’ll see, he said. We’ll see if he can hit the curveball.

  Suppose he can?

  Then the Dodgers are in trouble.

  We talked about the Dodgers and about Kid Gavilan beating Johnny Bratton. But we talked about nothing else. He went to work and then to Rattigan’s. I went to school and then to the Totem Poles. In June, I finished at St. Agnes. I never went back.

  Instead, I took an examination to get into the apprenticeship program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My uncle David worked as a sheetmetal worker in the Yard (as it was called) and he told my father about the program. One night over dinner, the kids all there, my father mentioned it to me.

  It’s a goddamn good thing, he said, if you can get into it.

  My mother shook her head.

  Ach, Billy, she said, let the boy finish high school.

  But he went on explaining it to me. The program was simple: you worked for four weeks, then went to school for a week, right there in the Yard; when you finished, you got a high school diploma, and you got paid for the weeks you went to school; eventually you moved up to become a journeyman at your trade. I listened carefully; it was the first thing I’d ever heard my father approve for me. I could escape from the drudgery of high school. I’d start earning a living, no matter how small. Hell, he explained, you could have a job at the Yard for thirty years, and retire with a good pension. And remember, he said, it’s a federal civil service job. There’s nothing better than civil service, except federal civil service.

  If there’s another Depression, he said, you’ll always work.

  My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the test for the Navy Yard and passed.

  That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day and night, I felt that I’d lost my way. It was as if some long steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn’t control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right, from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or some of the men from Rattigan’s. More often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I was? Forget these kid’s dreams, I told myself, give ’em up. Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down, have children. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Every year I’d do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God or not. I’d drink on the way home from work and spend most weekends with my friends in the saloons. I’d get old. I’d die and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith’s funeral parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let’s have a fucking drink.

  7

  I DIDN’T KNOW it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true.

  Drinking also made me change my feelings about my father. In the Navy Yard, I worked with men who knew him. And after a day of labor, buried inside an aircraft carrier that was being converted for jets, or lugging angle irons on my shoulders across Shop 17, I would go to the bars on Sands Street with them and hear tales of young Billy Hamill.

  He was a great soccer player, one of them said, a man named Hugh Delargy. He was fast and he was tough. Jesus, was he tough. Smart too.

  I was there the day he got hurt, said Eddie McManus, a short, powerful balding welder. It was out at the oval in Bay Ridge, on a Sunday. We were playing a German team. Our team was called Belfast Celtic, after the team back home. And there were teams from the different countries, a Spanish team, a Jewish team called House of David. We were playing the German team that day and your father was at center forward. He was having a great day, bloody great.

  And then, Delargy said, that German fucker came at him . . . .

  Kicked him so bloody hard, McManus said, it sounded like a board breakin’.

  Delargy sipped his whiskey and said, He went down and we all knew he was hurt and everybody ran out on the field. They wanted to kill the fuckin’ Kraut.

  They took Billy over on the side, McManus said, and it was pitiful, fuckin’ pitiful t
o see. The leg was broke beneath the knee and the bone was sticking out through the blood. And Billy was cryin’ like a baby, My leg, he kept saying, my leg, my leg, my leg . . . .

  DeLargy and McManus told me this in grave voices, sipping whiskey while I drank my beer. I remember trying very hard not to cry, then excusing myself and hurrying into the men’s room. I sat on a bowl in a locked stall and bawled for my father. And despised myself for the way I’d often sneered at him. When I went back to the bar, I gulped the beer and ordered another, engulfed in a sweet bitterness, knowing that all my life I would see my father on that hard winter playing field, crying like a baby.

  After that talk, and other tales told in the bars near the Navy Yard, I began to love my father again. Pity allowed me to see him as a man, instead of a father who could not play the role that my childish imagination and need had assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands from his own father. There was a photograph of his long-dead father in our house now, recently sent from Ireland, where it had been found by Uncle Frank in an old steamer trunk. It was cracked with age and very formal, showing a somber long-faced man whose white beard made him look like George Bernard Shaw. He looked as capable of silence as my own father.

  What was he like, your father? I asked him one evening.

  He was a mason. A stonemason.

  No, I mean what kind of man was he?

  Billy Hamill shrugged and lit a Camel.

  He was stern, he said. He was very stern.

  Then I saw my father in flight from the stern white-bearded man, smoking Woodbines in the Belfast night, watching British soldiers patrol streets, hearing endless talk about Catholics and Protestants, playing soccer in frozen fields, and learning to drink. Was it whiskey or was it beer? Or did they drink the dark liquid called stout? And was he drinking when he joined Sinn Fein? Did he and his friends drink the night the bomb was planted and the British soldiers were killed and they all took the night boat to Liverpool and then America? After the bomb, did he shiver in fear? Was he afraid of being caught and turned into an informer? Or did they all go somewhere and get drunk and sing the songs he now sang in Rattigan’s?

  In a new way, Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination, and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all his black silences.

  We still could not talk in any easy way. But in the bars near the Navy Yard and on long evenings at the Totem Poles I would speak to him in imagination and he would speak to me. I have fucked up my life, Dad; I’ve quit high school and gone to work in the Navy Yard and I don’t want to be there. Well, he would say, do something about it. What can I do? Do what you want to do, Son. Make yourself happy, Son. Live every day of your life, Son. And I’d say, Love me, Dad. And he’d answer, Let’s have a drink.

  But we never had that conversation. And I knew I had to save my life on my own. I was taking home forty dollars a week from the Navy Yard and giving my mother ten. But I couldn’t do at home what I still wanted to do. I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t read. And I began thinking about a place of my own. A place where I could leave unfinished drawings on the table until I got home, with no fear they would be ruined. A place where I could drink beer and slide girls between sheets. Maybe I could even go to school at night. Maybe, in spite of my dreadful failure, I could still try to be an artist.

  On the subway one morning I met a guy I knew in Holy Name. His name was Ronnie Zeilenhofer. He was smart and decent. His father owned a delicatessen on Prospect Park Southwest. We talked and joked for a few minutes, but when I told him I’d dropped out of high school, his face went oddly slack.

  Jeez, I figured you’d be one of the guys that went to college, he said. I can’t believe it, you dropping out.

  I felt suddenly small and diminished. In two years I’d gone from being the smartest kid in the class to another guy from the Neighborhood, trudging off to work with his hands and his back. Another loser from Brooklyn. I started talking wildly about how I was just starting, I was gonna go to art school and was looking for a place of my own. Panic and shame produced something resembling the truth. Zeilenhofer and I weren’t close, so in an odd way I could tell him what I really felt. Then he said that if I was serious there was a small place for rent upstairs from his father’s deli. Eight dollars a week, with a bed and a refrigerator.

  That sounds great, I said.

  Call me, and I’ll show it to you.

  A week later, I moved in. Three months after starting in the Navy Yard, I was off on my own.

  8

  THE ROOM was small and bare, with flowered wallpaper stained by old glue. There was one picture on the walls: a framed magazine photo of the Rockies. The bed was narrow, the mattress lumpy. But there was a bureau for my clothes and I set out my inks and pens and brushes on a small table and stacked some books on the windowsill and I was happy.

  The room was in the back, overlooking a chilly treeless yard. On weekends and on cold evenings I would sit at the table, deep in the luxury of solitude, and draw pictures of aviators and pirates, of detectives, and villains with scarred faces. I loved the feeling of standing up and going to the sink and washing the india ink from the brushes, pushing them into a bar of soap, rinsing them, then forming a perfect needlelike tip with my mouth. I bought a small lamp. I Scotch-taped my drawings to the walls. I learned to carry dirty clothes to the launderette and feed myself in greasy spoons.

  Downstairs, to the left, was a bar called the Parkview, and when I came home in the evenings from the Navy Yard I could see faces staring from the windows. The faces were almost the same as those in Rattigan’s: pouchy-eyed and tight-lipped. One evening I ran into Mickey Horan, one of the crowd from the Totes. He invited me in for a drink. The bartender served us without asking for draft cards. Soon I was walking in on my own, and the faces from the windows acquired names. Like the men at the Navy Yard, they seemed to accept me. I was sixteen. But I could put my dollar on the bar with the others. That was enough. They talked over and over again about Bobby Thomson’s home run in the play-off game at the Polo Grounds and how it had destroyed more than the Dodgers, it had wrecked them. They talked about Ray Robinson’s revenge against Randy Turpin, and how he battered the Englishman into a stupor at the Polo Grounds. They talked about Rocky Marciano’s destruction of Joe Louis. They didn’t talk about Korea. As the year moved toward Christmas, I would come up to the room, gassy with beer, and the ceiling would move and the table bob and I would hold a pillow to my chest as if it were an anchor. Sometimes, for no reason that I understood, I would weep.

  On Saturday mornings, I would go to Seventh Avenue and climb the stairs to the apartment and give my mother eight dollars. The Good Boy, of course. She would talk to me as best she could about going on with my schooling, maybe at night. But it was hard to sustain such talk; the kids were running around; tie shopping must be done; she had to be on the job at the movie house by five. I knew she was right. But I didn’t know what to do about it. I walked back up the slope to the Totes. I talked with my friends. I went to the Parkview and drank beer and listened to the jukebox. The Four Aces were singing “Tell Me Why.” Tony Bennett was singing “Cold, Cold Heart.” Rosemary Clooney was singing “Come On-A-My House.” I didn’t sing with them. After a while, I went upstairs to the room and napped and woke up and drew pictures. Sometimes the music would drift up from the bar. Sinatra. I’m a fool to want you …

  The newspapers fed me in a different way. And everything I learned from the newspapers seemed to lead to something else. In one of them, I saw a story about the death of a painter named John Sloan. He was 80 years old and a member of a group called the Ashcan School, the paper said, and it showed one of his drawings of people under the Third Avenue El. I went to the library and found books that showed his paintings and etchings and copied
them into my own sketchbooks. Those pictures had nothing to do with comics. Instead, they were about a world that I recognized, even if most of them were made in the 1920s. The El. The streets of Manhattan. The dark city looming at twilight. I loved Sloan’s lumpy Irish face too; he could have stood right at the bar in the Parkview, talking or singing. He even painted bars, for the books showed several works about a place in Manhattan called McSorley’s. He caught the dark snug safety of a bar, the golden warmth it could give you on a cold night. His bars had no jukeboxes or shuffleboard machines in them. But I had seen places like them all over Brooklyn. One Saturday afternoon, I went over to see McSorley’s, down the street from the Third Avenue El. The oldest bar in New York, a sign said. I was thrilled; it was exactly the way Sloan had painted it, dark and romantic, with old pictures on the wall and a potbelly stove and lumpy men at the bar and tables. I took a breath and went in. But the bartender asked me for a draft card and I left in a mixture of humiliation and panic. Still, John Sloan had his effect on me: I started sitting in booths at the Parkview and drawing the men at the bar.

  Who the hell is that? a guy would say.

  You.

  I don’t look like that, come on, kid.

  You look worse than that, Jerry, another guy would say.

  If I did, I’d fuckin’ kill myself.

  The older men seemed amused by me, the kid from upstairs who worked in the Navy Yard and drew pictures in the bar.

  You oughtta do that for a living, kid, said a bartender named Brick.