A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  The rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally of butter. But the shortages were not over. There was a shortage of coal, and when the winter of 1946–47 arrived in full force, we sat in the kitchen in sweaters — and on some frigid nights wore coats, mackinaws, and mittens — while listening to Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante or Commissioner Lewis B. Valentine on “Gangbusters.” I was finished with knickers now, wearing long pants to school, but I was always cold and wore knee socks to bed. My father never seemed cold; he slept his deep phlegmy sleep, insulated by drink.

  In the living room, (or as we called it, “the front room”), we saved money by using the kerosene stove only a few hours in the evening, to burn off the chill. But when the stove burned down and went out, the windows grew frosted and I would draw faces in the frost with my fingernails. When we talked, steam came in small puffs from our mouths. Overnight, shirts, underwear, and towels froze stiff on the kitchen clothesline. The drainpipes of the 14th Regiment Armory exploded from the cold, and great elaborate ice sculptures bloomed from the broken places. Almost every night, the fire engines woke us as they screamed to another disaster caused by kerosene stoves that burst into fire. The wind off the harbor howled through the night, and in the mornings the trees in the yards were glazed with ice. I’ve never again seen such a winter.

  On the radio they were talking about starvation in Europe and Japan. My mother used this information whenever she served something like kelp. What did I mean, I didn’t like kelp? Don’t you know they’re starving in Europe? Yes (I thought, but did not say): Yes, I know that, I know they’re starving; but we’re not doing too good in Brooklyn either. On those bitter nights when there wasn’t enough food, I devised a mental trick: I conjured up pictures from the concentration camps, saying the words “Buchenwald” and “Auschwitz,” reciting the rosary of horror. I made emaciated men in striped pajamas walk through the top floor right at 378 Seventh Avenue, all of them barefoot, their eyes mere dots in black holes, their cheekbones sharp and bare, their arms like dowels, their mouths slack; and I’d say to myself, You have it good, you have a bed, you have food to heat up at night, you have pancakes, you have a kerosene stove, you are not from Buchenwald, you are not being buried by a tractor, fatherless motherless, brotherless, sisterless, you are not a Jew. Almost always, that cured my hunger and my cold and beat down my self-pity. And I would lie in the dark, thinking that no matter what I would be when I grew up, I would do nothing that sent men into camps to die.

  And then I would fall into the gray nightmare, fighting my way through the skeletons of the gas chamber.

  That winter refused to end. After school, every other afternoon, I went down to Fifteenth Street, my head bent into the wind off the harbor, and bought cheap day-old bread in a bakery next to the Globe movie house. Scabs of black snow were everywhere. My shoes wore out and my mother lined them with cardboard. At school, my number 2 Eberhard Faber pencils wore down to stubs, and some kids had no pencils at all. I drew my cartoons on wrapping paper, and sometimes it was too cold to draw.

  One freezing afternoon, in a hallway on Twelfth Street, I heard from a friend about relief. If you were poor, he said, you went to the government and they gave you money that they called relief. There were many people on relief now, my friend said, just like the Depression. He named the families. And that night, after my mother came home, I asked her why she didn’t get relief.

  Never, she snapped.

  Why?

  Because we’re proud people. We’ll take nothing from them. We’ll work.

  In the spring, I went to work too.

  5

  THE BROOKLYN EAGLE was a handsome broadsheet that sold 300,000 copies a day and was read by four times that number. It was an afternoon paper and most of its circulation was home delivered. One afternoon, as I was walking to school at Holy Name, I saw Danno Kelly, one of the older brothers of the Kelly family from 471 Fourteenth Street, and said hello. He asked about my father and mother and then asked me what I was doing. Nothing, I said. Then he told me that if I wanted to work after school, he could give me a job helping him deliver the Eagle.

  I started the next day.

  After school, I met Danno at the Eagle storefront on Sixth Avenue, where dozens of boys were “boxing” papers in a triple fold and sliding them into delivery bags. I was very nervous. All of the boys were older than I was and they shouted and kidded and worked with amazing speed.

  Here, Danno Kelly said, help me box these and put them in the bags.

  I did, ineptly and clumsily, until I filled a bag. He was filling two others.

  Now, Danno said, put the bag over your shoulder and let’s go.

  We set out together, to the route (always rhymed with “out”) that Danno had on Fourth and Fifth streets, tree-lined streets of brownstones and white sandstone apartment houses. The arrangement was simple: Danno worked for the Eagle and I worked for Danno. I was discovering the rudiments of capitalism.

  Danno’s blocks were not part of the Neighborhood; the comfortable people lived here, people even better off than those on Eleventh Street. There were no fire escapes on these blocks, no stores or bars, and every house had a backyard. Peering through windows I saw another world, made of polished tables, muted lamps, elaborate wallpaper, rugs on wood floors. The men and women seemed always dressed up; there was nobody like Mr. Dix. The men were formal and sober, the women grave. But they took a lot of newspapers, paying for them once a week. Danno showed me how to throw a paper into a basement doorway, how to wedge it between cut glass doorknobs or into the grills of iron gates beneath the stoops. At the beginning of the route, I wobbled under the weight of the bag. But as I moved on, delivering the papers, the load got lighter, and toward the end, with only a few papers left, I felt stronger and light-headed and even powerful. I was delivering a newspaper.

  At the end of the route, my shoulder was sore and I was wet with sweat inside my mackinaw but I felt as if I’d grown six inches in one afternoon. Danno put an arm on my shoulder and handed me a free copy of the paper.

  Good job, he said. You’re a little slow, but you’ll get faster. Meet me tomorrow at the Eagle office.

  I ran home. I took the stairs two and three at a time and burst into the kitchen, giddy with excitement. Nobody was home. There was the usual note from my mother, explaining that the big pot contained the soup, the saucepan the peas. No matter. I sat at the table and read the Eagle. I looked at the comics. I read the sports pages. I looked at all the other pages. And then I went back and read through it again. I worked for a newspaper now. The Brooklyn Eagle. My newspaper. My skin pebbled with awareness; I was now a member of the real Newsboy Legion.

  When my father came home, I told him about the job. He smiled and rubbed my hair and laughed.

  Great, he said. Great.

  He took the Eagle and turned to the want ads. Then looked up and said, What’s for dinner?

  I worked every day after that for Danno Kelly, earning a dollar fifty a week. That was more than I’d ever had in my hand at one time. Because we were poor now, I gave the money to my mother, and she hugged me, and gave me fifty cents back. That was still a lot of money, and I used it in pursuit of Bomba books and the great new comics and some of the lost old ones. I also read the Eagle every day. The comics were an odd collection, from Steve Roper (which used to be called Big Chief Wahoo) to a dog strip named Bo and a terrific strip about a woman who could press a nerve in her wrist and vanish from sight: Invisible Scarlet O’Neill. I thought that would be a terrific power to have. But more important than the comics, I was reading the sports pages, where the columnists were Tommy Holmes and Harold C. Burr, and where there was only one real story: the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  And the Dodgers brought me closer to my father.

  6

  A FEW WEEKS before Christmas, 1945, there was a sudden delivery of coal, carried into the house by a burly man with a blackened face. And on the day before Christmas, another man arrived with a turkey. I asked who the me
n were and was told by my father, the party. What party? The Democratic party. Said in the tone of: Are you an idiot? But I was still puzzled. This wasn’t relief, was it? Of course not. Well, if they give you a turkey and coal, what do you have to give them in return?

  Loyalty, he said. Always remember the most important thing in life: Vote the straight ticket.

  On the street, someone pointed out a person called the district leader to me and explained that he worked out of Jimmy Mangano’s Democratic Club on Union Street. The man was tall and bald and cheerful, and he worked the same piece of the world as my father, moving from bar to bar. He was very close to Patty Rattigan, who also worked for the party. They were important people, I was told. They were Big Shots.

  In the spring of 1946, a few weeks after I became an Eagle boy, I realized what a Big Shot could do when my father finally went back to work. One of the Big Shots had arranged for a job, right across the street in the Factory. On Thirteenth Street, we had lived in its cold shadow; now the Factory would give my father a living. He was going to work for the Globe Lighting Company, which made the new fluorescent lights in the building on our side of the Alley. He would work on an assembly line in a vast loft on the second floor, wiring fixtures all day long. I remember his mood when he came home one Saturday with news of the job.

  Well, Annie, he said, the bad times are over.

  That’s wonderful, Billy, she said. I prayed and prayed, you know. I did a dozen rosaries.

  You can buy that living room set now.

  Well, maybe, she said. We’d better wait a bit and see.

  He was drunk that night and drunk on Sunday too but he started on Monday, walking across the avenue, carrying his thermos, joining the stream of men coming up from the subways. Even with his wooden leg, he walked in a different way when he had a job.

  That night, he came home late, looking tired. I heated up some stew and started talking about the Dodgers, rehashing a column from the Eagle. The team was on its way north and would soon begin the season at Ebbets Field.

  This year, they’ll go all the way, he said. Mark what I’m saying. All the way.

  So I had discovered one of his passions. I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American; the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution. He loved Leo Durocher, who was the manager all through the war, and Eddie Stanky, the grizzled little second baseman. But now the war was over and here they were coming back to the ballfields: Pete Reiser and Pee Wee Reese and Carl Furillo and hundreds of others. The Dodger war veterans were joining the players who were Dodgers through the war years, Augie Galan and Ducky Medwick and Dixie Walker. The pitchers were Kirby Higbe, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Hank Behrman, Hugh Casey, Vic Lombardi. But Mickey Owen, who dropped the third strike in 1941, would not be back; he had run off to the Mexican League, like all those movie desperadoes who crossed the Mexican border ahead of the posse. It didn’t matter. He’s just a bad memory, my father said of Owen. I kept asking about Reiser, the outfielder they called Pistol Pete, the brilliant centerfielder who led the league in almost everything in 1941 but got hurt in 1942, crashing into the Ebbets Field wall, before going off to the navy. The Eagle was full of stories about him, his speed, his eye, his power, his immense heart.

  He’s a great ballplayer, my father said. You’ll see.

  Will the Dodgers win the pennant?

  This is the year, he said. The pennant and then the World Series. That Mickey Owen’s gone and good riddance. This year, we win.

  The Dodgers started winning from opening day, and all over the Neighborhood that spring, you could hear Red Barber on the radio, announcing the games. I heard them from the buildings with fire escapes; I heard them while delivering the Eagle to the comfortable people. The games lived in our heads with a gorgeous reality. The Eagle covered the Dodgers in encyclopedic detail and even carried long reports on the Dodger farm teams in Montreal and St. Paul; in addition, my father started bringing home The Sporting News, a tabloid published in distant St. Louis, home of the fearsome Cardinals; it was jammed with information about every team in both leagues, and all the minor league teams too. And I learned that in 1946 up at Montreal, the Dodgers had one spectacular rookie. He was tearing up the league. His name was John Roosevelt Robinson. He was a Negro.

  Ya can’t have a nigger on a major league team, Tommy Moore said on Twelfth Street.

  He can hit, I said. He can run. He can steal bases. Who cares if he’s colored?

  He’ll never make it, Tommy Moore said.

  We’ll see.

  I listened to Red Barber and talked to my father and read the newspapers (not simply the Eagle, but the Daily News, Daily Mirror, and Journal-American too) and learned to hate the Giants and fear the Cardinals of Musial and Slaughter. Baseball was only happening in my imagination; we simply couldn’t afford to go to Ebbets Field, where tickets cost fifty cents. I fell into an afternoon routine: rushing home from school, delivering the Eagle, running home to listen to the serials and Stan Lomax, with the day’s doings in the world of sports. And while I tried to concentrate on homework, on the Louisiana Purchase and the Dred Scott decision, on the differences between the predicate nominative and the predicate adjective, as I diagrammed sentences and divided fractions, my head teemed with the Dodgers, with statistics, names, plays, and the distant figure of Jackie Robinson.

  Then one evening, my father came home from work with a great smile on his face.

  How’d you like to go to a ball game? he said.

  That Sunday, in a big old Packard crowded with his friends from Rattigan’s, I went for the first time to Ebbets Field. They had been given tickets by some Big Shot. We parked on a street near the ballpark, and I waited outside while they all went into a bar that was packed with fans. I didn’t mind waiting. I watched thousands of people walking to the great ballpark, which seemed to rise heroically from the ground. People carried radios, stopped for hot dogs, even bought my newspaper, the Eagle. Music was playing. Traffic was jammed. I was jittery with excitement.

  After a while, the men came out of the bar and we walked together to the ballpark, the other men pausing from time to time to let my father catch up. One of the men had the tickets, and we waited on line and then passed through the narrow gate into the rotunda. Ebbets Field. Hot dogs, music, shouts back and forth, thousands of fans: and we were going up a ramp, turning, climbing on another ramp, and then walking through a dark passage into the light.

  And there it was: green and verdant and more beautiful than any place I had ever seen. Until that moment, the Dodgers were frozen black-and-white figures on the back pages of the Daily News under a headline saying FLOCK NIPS JINTS IN 11. But here they were, the color of human beings, running, throwing, hitting, lounging around, the white uniforms and blue caps gleaming in the sun. Down on the field, the Dodgers were taking batting practice, and one of the men handed me a program and showed me where the uniform numbers were listed. I knew most of them by heart, but now I could see them. There was Higbe. There was Furillo. That was Reese, slapping balls into the outfield. And there was Dixie Walker. The People’s Cherce, they called him. And hey, shagging flies, running across the grass: Pete Reiser!

  What do you think? my father said.

  I love it, I whispered.

  He smiled and nodded his head and said: Yeah. I love it too.

  Then it was time to play the game. The Dodgers took the field to a gigantic roar. They were playing the Pirates. All through the game , the men kept ordering beer. They bought me two hot dogs and a Coke and an Eskimo Pie. A band called the Brooklyn Sym-phony played music. The crowd cheered Durocher. They all stood and booed the umpires after a close play at second. They roared when Reiser doubled. They roared when Walker singled him home. The Dodgers won. It was the happiest day of my life.

  That day, coming home in the crowded car from Ebbets Field, I was sure that now my father and I would be like fathers and sons in the movies and the magazines. He would teach me thi
ngs about life. He would take me to places I had never seen. He would hug me when I did something right. We would be joined together, father and son. I was sure the Dodgers would win the pennant too.

  7

  ON MAY 8, 1946, my brother Brian was born in Methodist Hospital. I have no memory of my mother being pregnant; I still didn’t understand the way children were conceived and born. She certainly never said anything to me, and my head was full of so many other things: comics, Bomba books, the Dodgers, school, the Eagle, and the sudden, mysterious appearance of erections in my life. The last had begun to happen on an almost daily basis and without any means of control: when I woke up; at school when I said the morning prayer with the rest of the class, pushed up against the back of a desk in a kneeling position; while gazing at Burma or the Dragon Lady in Terry and the Pirates; while falling asleep. I had no idea why this was happening and had nobody to ask.