A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  The next day I saw Frankie again. He was sitting alone on his stoop. Both eyes were hidden behind pads of swollen purple flesh; his nose was thick and crooked. My brother Tommy told me later that Frankie had to go to the hospital because his nose was broken. So I went to him, my mind a confusion of power and pity, a bit nervous that he would lash out at me with the steel toes or come up with a knife.

  I didn’t want the fight, Frankie, I said. You started it.

  Fuck it, he said sadly, with a little wave of his hand.

  Let’s forget about it, I said.

  He looked at me as if knowing that he would never forget about it and neither would I.

  Come on, I said. We’ll go read comics.

  He stared at me for a long moment and then got up, and we walked off to look at stories of heroes and perils in a simpler world.

  10

  ON SUNDAYS, the family sometimes went visiting. That’s what it was called: visiting. You went to someone else’s house and brought along some cold cuts or Italian bread or beer and entertained each other. We almost always went to visit my father’s relatives; my mother had friends but no relatives in America. After Mass, the whole family would walk down to Fifth Avenue, still dressed in Sunday best, and get on the trolley and rattle out to Bay Ridge to see Uncle Tommy or Uncle Davey, Aunt Louie or Aunt Nellie, and all my cousins. We couldn’t play in the street because we were in our good clothes; but visiting wasn’t play to us, it was a show. There would be food and drink and singing in the parlor. And here, as in the bars, my father was always the star. The kids were called upon to perform too, singing songs or reciting poems. I was too shy to sing; how could I compete with my father? But every time we went visiting, I was asked that most awful question: What Are You Going to Be When You Grow Up? And during that crowded year, I started answering: a cartoonist.

  Usually, they would laugh and someone would get paper and a pencil and ask me to draw something, and I would be forced to draw in a state of anxiety that was worse than fighting Frankie Nocera. I gave them Dick Tracy. Or Flattop. Or Batman. They were the easiest, the faces I could draw without copying. And they would laugh and say, That’s good, Peter, and then I was free, off the stage, released, and I could ease away from their attentions.

  But I was telling the truth. That summer when I was eleven, I first conceived the idea of becoming a cartoonist. There wasn’t any special moment that I remember, no Shazam-like bolt of explosive insight that told me this. The ambition was, I suppose, tentative at first, whispered, a wish in the dark while the trolley cars ding-dinged through the night. But going back to Simon and Kirby and Captain America, I had learned that comics were written and drawn by men and those men were paid very well for their work. The money wasn’t the most important thing; it was something else: they were being paid for doing what they loved to do. My father had a job, and he was paid. But he wasn’t working at something he liked. Nobody paid men to drink in saloons.

  The focus of my fantasy was Milton Caniff, who was in his last year drawing and writing Terry and the Pirates. Suddenly, I got it. The locale was something that my grandfather must have known: the coasts, rivers, plains, and mountains of southern China. I identified with Terry Lee, the blond young pilot. I wished I could talk as fast as the wisecracking Hot Shot Charlie, with his red hair, freckles, Boston accent, corncob pipe, and flight cap worn with a swagger on the back of his head. I wanted to have someone around who was like Pat Ryan or Flip Corkin, a guy who knew the world and could show me how to live in it.

  There was something else: Caniff’s women put me in a kind of fever. Every one of them exuded a lush sexuality that no other cartoonist has ever matched and did so without ceasing to be a specific individual. They weren’t just pinups. Not one of them was a doormat. Every one of them made her way through the world of men without complaint. There was Burma, all blond and shimmering, like women in the thirties movies at the Minerva, a mixture of Sadie Thompson and Jean Harlow, always singing the “St. Louis Blues,” sometimes for money and sometimes for love, always smoking, tough with bad guys, soft on Pat Ryan, burning brightly in Terry’s life for a while then abruptly vanishing, only to turn up again in some other exotic Asian port. And even larger, grander, more powerful, was the Dragon Lady, Caniff’s most famous creation. Sleek black hair framed her oval Dolores Del Rio face with its almond eyes and high Eurasian cheekbones, the eyebrows reduced to fine lines that lay angrily on her face like tiny daggers. Usually the Dragon Lady wore a scarlet cape and under the cape, in fancy gowns or military trousers, she had the full-breasted body of a million wet dreams. The Dragon Lady was not only beautiful; she was often evil — venomous, treacherous, violent — and in a dark and scary way, that made her even more desirable to me.

  I began to devour Caniff, driven by a sense of sudden urgency. It had been announced in the Daily Mirror that this was Caniff’s last year doing Terry for the Daily News; he would create a new strip that would run in the Mirror. I wanted to preserve Terry before it was gone forever. I clipped Terry from the Daily News every day and filed the strips in letter-sized envelopes. I saved the Sunday pages, with their beautiful colors and spectacular action panels. Then I started buying scrapbooks, oversized books made of cheap coarse paper, and began filling them with the Terry strips, using the pale yellow glue called mucilage. But there was a problem. In Caniff’s wonderful comic strip, time actually passed; Terry got older (although the women didn’t). The characters lived in the real world (or so I thought), the world of war and women and airplanes, the world described each day in the front of the newspaper. They didn’t inhabit Captain Marvel’s world of magic lightning or the garish places where Captain America pursued the Red Skull. Terry and the Pirates was like some long picaresque novel, and in 1946 I felt that I had started reading it near the end. The newspaper sequences were self-contained, each story taking about two months before shifting into another combination of heroes and villains. But I wanted to read the novel’s early chapters too. Caniff often brought back characters from Terry’s youth; the Dragon Lady, Pat Ryan, April Kane, Burma, made more than one appearance. I wanted the whole story, not just its final episodes.

  The task of piecing together that story was like the search for the full run of the Bomba books (and resembled the basic task of reporting). I had to work backwards. In tiny type at the bottom of each strip there was a copyright line that supplied the year of its first appearance; a hand-lettered date gave the month and day: 4/1, say, or 6/24. Unfortunately, there were almost no old newspapers in the neighborhood; like my skates, they’d gone to the war, bundled up for scrap paper drives. But many of the newspaper strips had reappeared in the brightly colored pages of Super Comics, which also reprinted other strips from the Daily News. They had also been converted into Big Little Books. So I followed the same route taken in the Bomba search, exploring the archipelago of secondhand comics shops and bookstores. I was driven by fundamental questions. How did Terry Lee get to China? Who was Pat Ryan? When did they meet the Dragon Lady? Why on earth would Pat Ryan fall in love with prissy Normandie Drake if Burma was around? I wanted to read it all, to keep going back until I found the beginning. In a good story, something happened and as a result, something else happened. You went to China or to Fox Lair Camp, and you were changed by what happened to you. I wanted to know what happened to Pat Ryan and Terry Lee.

  My obsession with Terry and the Pirates was different in one sense from the long pursuit of the Bomba books. I wanted to know Milton Caniff. In a way, he was the true hero of the comic strip. I would sit at the kitchen table and try to copy his figures and always failed; drawing Flip Corkin wasn’t as simple as making an image of Flattop or Batman, and the Dragon Lady was impossible. I would get the general shapes down on paper but there was always something wrong: the original expression changed into an empty smudge, the ears were in the wrong places, the hands looked thick and clumsy. But I kept trying. After all, Caniff was the best. Like Sugar Ray Robinson. And there was no point in trying to
be less than the best, was there?

  In 1947, Caniff, as announced, left Terry to another artist, George Wunder, and started Steve Canyon in the Daily Mirror. There was a great burst of publicity. Caniff appeared on the cover of Time. The Mirror did a series of ads building up to the debut of the new strip. I learned that Caniff was an Irish-American too, from Ohio; had gone to college; wanted to be an actor; came to New York to work for the Associated Press, where he drew a strip called Dickie Dare, and went on to do Terry in 1934 for the Daily News. He was syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers and now lived in a beautiful house in New City, New York. The photographs of the studio showed a room that was larger than our entire flat. I saved all this publicity, staring at Caniff’s face, looking at examples of his work going back to his childhood, and then, from the first great Sunday page, clipped every Canyon strip until I went into the navy in 1952.

  That first Sunday page of Steve Canyon, dated January 18, 1947, was as good as any movie. For five panels, we don’t see Canyon’s face, but his character is established by various people who greet him on his way into an office building. An Irish cop thanks him for stopping off to see his sister in Shannon; the doorman thanks him for sending a souvenir from Egypt to his son; a blind newsdealer, called only “sarge,” and obviously a war veteran, thanks Canyon for backing him in setting up the newsstand; a flower girl offers him a carnation for his buttonhole, but when he turns her down he says that she and her mother are due for a movie on him; the elevator girls stammer a hello and say that for him, they won’t wait for a full car. So we know immediately that Canyon is a good, generous man, a world traveler, thoughtful, personal, attractive to women. We see his face for the first time in the sixth panel; it’s lean, and there’s a black streak in his blond hair. Wearing a checkered overcoat, he opens the door with his company’s name on the glass: Horizons Unlimited. Beyond the door is his secretary, a Polynesian woman named Feeta Feeta, with lovely breasts under a polka-dotted blouse, flowers in her hair, talking on the phone. On the line is Mr. Dayzee, the formal and officious male secretary to a woman named Copper Calhoun, “the big she-wolf of the stock market.” Dayzee virtually orders Canyon to come immediately to Calhoun’s apartment; Canyon refuses the order, objecting to the tone of the demand, and tells Dayzee that “the click you hear will mean you’re soloing.” Feeta Feeta looks resigned; the office rent is due, “but I guess it’s bad form to get into regular habits like that. …” In the final panel, Copper Calhoun, with sleek black hair, the arched eyebrows of the Dragon Lady, a long cigarette in one hand, says: “I want that man!! … Get him!”

  I loved this and sat down to labor over a long letter to Caniff, telling him how great it was and how I wanted to be a cartoonist too. A few weeks later a package arrived in the mail from New City. Inside was a note from Caniff himself, a copy of a brochure he’d written for aspiring cartoonists, “A Guide for an Armchair Marco Polo,” and a colored picture of Steve Canyon. I was hooked. If Terry belonged to my mother first, Steve Canyon was mine from the start. On the street, nobody else cared much about my obsession, so this became another part of my secret life.

  Later in 1947, I found a book called The Comics by Coulton Waugh, who back in the 1930s had succeeded Caniff on Dickie Dare. His book told the story of American comic strips from their beginnings in the 1890s with R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid to the triumph of the comic books. There was, of course, a chapter on Caniff and his imitators, and for the first time my faith in the great man’s talents was shaken. Caniff was being imitated by hundreds of other cartoonists, with more appearing every day. Did I want to be just another imitator? Could I be an imitator? In Waugh’s book I saw the immense variety of possible cartoon styles: Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer and Captain Easy, George, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby. There were so many different ways to be a cartoonist. So when I failed once more to capture the sultry pout of the Dragon Lady, I would console myself by thinking, Hey, so what, I don’t want to be just another hack imitator of Milton Caniff.

  But I didn’t just want to draw the characters the way Caniff did. I didn’t really want to have his studio in New City. The truth was that I wanted to live the way his creations lived. I didn’t want to spend a lifetime doing a comic strip about husbands and wives, or the distant past, or funny animals. I wanted to see the exotic places of the world. I wanted to go where my grandfather had gone. In a notebook, I copied a sentence from Waugh’s book that described Roy Crane’s creations: In the old days tubby Tubbs and lanky Easy were loose-footed soldiers of fortune, a big and little stone rolling through the romantic places of the earth, usually broke, sometimes fabulously wealthy, but always ready for fight, frolic, or feed.

  That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill’s son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.

  11

  AROUND THE SAME time, a sign painter named Jim Brady opened a shop on Seventh Avenue off the corner of Thirteenth Street, just past the swirling pole of Fortunato’s barbershop, where my father got his hair cut. One summer morning I walked past the shop and stopped short. In the window was an enlarged photostat of the first Terry daily, drawn by Caniff in a much more cartoony style than the richly brushed strip that had become my obsession. There were also mounted photostats of characters from Terry and some Terry comic books arranged in a display. The shop was closed. But I came back that evening and saw a heavy-set man with reddish hair working on a sign for a butcher. He had a red handkerchief tied across his brow to prevent his sweat from splashing on the posters. His eyes were hidden behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. He only had one hand, and held a paintpot in the crook of the injured right arm. He must have felt my eyes on him.

  Can I help you, kid? he said.

  Uh, I — Well, I saw the Milton Caniff drawings in the window.

  He paused.

  You a Caniff fan?

  Yeah.

  Come on in.

  He let me watch as he worked on the sign, and asked me questions. Did I draw every day? Was there a drawing class in my school? Where did I live? Oh, so you’re Billy Hamill’s kid. Hell of a guy, your dad. What do you do after school? Well, maybe you could work for me. Sweep the store. Deliver the signs…. But I can’t pay much, kid.

  So began my apprenticeship. I came back every day. And in that hot, narrow shop, smoky from Brady’s Pall Malls, with beautifully lettered signs for pork chops and clamb roasts appearing in black and red paint on rolls of poster paper that unfurled across a tilted plywood worktable, Brady told me tales of the world of comics. Before he became a sign painter, he explained, he was a professional letterer for comic books. That is, he was part of that mysterious and powerful world across the river in Manhattan, where they did the work that I loved so much. He showed me his collection of originals, by Alex Toth (He’s the best around and he’s only a kid.) and a man named Edmund Good (who worked for a time as the artist on Scorchy Smith) and some other artists whose names I no longer remember. These were oversized two-ply Strathmore pages in black and white, the blacks very black, with corrections made in china white. Brady explained how in comic books, one man wrote the script, another penciled all the panels (Usually with a pale blue pencil, ‘cause that blue don’t photograph when they reduce the page to comic book size), another inked the pencil drawings, and another, the letterer, did all the balloons. Caniff himself used a fabulous letterer named Frank Engli: A great cartoonist in his own right, ya know, but a master letterer. Brady said he loved doing lettering for comic books. But my eyes started going so I had to stop…. He shook his head sadly, then removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes with the elbow of the bad arm. He didn’t explain what had happened to his hand, and I didn’t ask. But I felt pity for him; like my father, he had lost part of himself on the way to Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn.

  Sometimes I brou
ght him the latest old Terry comics I had discovered in the bookstores. He would look at them and point out what Caniff was doing.

  You see, it’s like a movie, like a frozen movie, he said. Long shot, medium shot, closeup — see what I mean?

  I said I did (and when I went to the movies, I started seeing Caniff in everything). Brady explained about lettering: thick verticals, thin horizontals. If you have a lettering pen, the nib does it, but ya gotta do it over and over again to make it look natural. He explained the difference between serif and sans serif. He showed me how Roy Crane and Will Eisner (in The Spirit comic books) used lettering to create sounds: Ka-BONG, Padda-pow!

  Ya gotta draw and draw, he said, and when you’re old enough, ya gotta go to art school.

  In a way, that was exactly what I was doing in Jim Brady’s shop. His art school even had a small library: old comics, books on drawing and lettering. One day, in a cardboard box, I discovered a book of cartoons by Caniff that I’d never seen before. He had drawn them every week for Stars and Stripes, and they weren’t meant for civilians. Or for kids. The strip was called Male Call, and it featured the most arousing woman of my young life: Miss Lace. She was dark-haired, sloe-eyed, with a lush body that seemed to struggle for release from her clothing. Lace was sexy, funny, generous; it wasn’t clear what she was doing in the various theaters of operations but she was certainly making the fighting men happy. Lace reminded me of Rita Hayworth (or, more precisely, the sultry Rita Hayworth provoked in me even more lavish images of Miss Lace), and whenever Brady left me alone in the shop I took out the book and stared at Miss Lace and her hair, mouth, teeth, breasts, and hips in an agony of desire. She didn’t exist anywhere in the world, and I didn’t care.