A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  I carried those books home, consumed them like food, then brought their stories and characters and lessons down to the streets with me. I couldn’t really tell my friends about them. But they were real in my head, they often peopled my dreams, and they helped give me a sense that the streets were not everything. It didn’t matter if I never hit a spaldeen five sewers like Paulie McAleer, or if I wasn’t the best street fighter in the Neighborhood. Nobody would care if I refused to join up with the Tigers and fight fair ones with the hoods from South Brooklyn. There was a bigger world out there. And by the time I was thirteen, I was sure I was going to see it.

  14

  I TRIED VERY HARD to believe in God, but I had almost no success. From the first grade on, I studied religion at Holy Name. I memorized endless pages of the Baltimore Catechism and even won religion prizes for reciting in a singsong way the questions and answers of the text. Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is the creator of heaven and earth, and of all things. What is man? Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God. Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. Where is God? God is everywhere.

  The problem was that I didn’t believe any of this. On the surface, I was a reasonably good Catholic boy. I took my first communion, was confirmed, finally became an altar boy, memorizing the Latin responses for the whole Mass. Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutum meum. … I loved the glazed baroque paintings on the walls of the church. I loved the statues of the flayed Jesus and his grieving mother. I loved the music most of all, with the great booming hymns filling the church on Sunday mornings. I even loved the smell of guttering candles, palm leaves at Easter, pine needles at Christmas. I just couldn’t believe in God.

  This was one of the heaviest secrets that I carried through those years. I couldn’t talk to my mother or father about my terrible failure to imagine God; I certainly couldn’t discuss it with the Xaverian Brothers at Holy Name; and down on the street I was afraid that the other kids would think I was weird. So I kept silent. To be sure, the religious education I received taught me some valuable lessons. I didn’t care much about the Holy Ghost (though I loved his cartoony name), the Blessed Trinity, or Original Sin. But I did understand the catechism’s definition of a mortal sin; it had to be a grievous matter, committed with sufficient reflection and full consent of the will. That is, a mortal sin was a felony. And the Baltimore Catechism taught us that certain mortal sins cried to heaven for vengeance: willful murder, the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor, defrauding laborers of their wages. For a long time, I didn’t know what the sin of Sodom was and couldn’t get anyone to explain it to me (not to mention whatever it was they did in Gomorrah). But the rest of the Church’s list of abhorrent sins was certainly admirable.

  One trouble was that the Church in New York didn’t follow its own list of rules, as laid out in the catechism. It certainly didn’t seem to care very passionately about the poor. It shamed us into contributing money every Sunday by publishing our names in the church bulletin along with the amounts of the donations. But while altars were heavy with gold chalices and monstrances, and priests drove cars and grew fat, I never saw them down on Seventh Avenue. A Big Shot from the political club helped my father get a job; no priest ever did the same. I never saw priests on picket lines outside the Factory, joining in the fight against the bosses who were defrauding the workers. After sex, most of their negative passion was reserved for communism, which had absolutely nothing to do with life in the tenements of Seventh Avenue. The priests would never try to help a drunken man; all they ever did was judge him.

  Still, the Xaverian Brothers at Holy Name tried hard to make me a good Catholic. I was taught the chief sources of sin: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth. But again, most of the focus seemed to be on Lust. In the sixth grade, Brother Eliot kept me after school one afternoon and tried to explain sex to me. I knew some of the mechanics now from Arnold, the boys at Fox Lair Camp, and the kids from Seventh Avenue. But somehow, in the vague, reverent, whispering way Brother Eliot described it, sex became even more awesome and darkly attractive. It was, Brother Eliot said, a wonderful gift from God. But that didn’t prevent the Baltimore Catechism from trying to make it a felony. “Lust,” the catechism said, “is the source of immodest looks and actions, which lead to blindness of intellect, hardness of heart, the loss of faith and piety, the ruin of health, and final impenitence.” Obviously, this was written by men with a well-developed sense of horror. But they didn’t understand that an experience so colossally ruinous could never truly be avoided by the young. Even at the risk of hardness of heart and the ruin of health. In a way, they were offering another dare.

  I listened in religion class, and to the fearful whisperings of Brother Eliot, but I just didn’t understand it. There were people all over the Neighborhood who were bone poor. Night and day, there was violence on the streets. And I had seen those movies about the concentration camps. Why were the priests and brothers so crazy and fierce about sex? I was a virgin. I had no idea how it felt to fuck a woman. But I just couldn’t imagine that someone as all-powerful as God was sitting around heaven on some throne, pissed off about what I might do at night on Seventh Avenue. The good brothers made God sound like some glorified scorekeeper, endlessly filling in box scores and then punishing those who made errors. Since there were billions of people on the earth, it seemed to me that He would have almost nothing else to do. Just writing down the sins of the Tigers would keep him busy, and if he had to do all of Asia, all of Russia, all of Europe, every man and every woman committing sins of Lust, all the movie stars and all the baseball players and all the wise guys in the Mafia, when would He ever get around to noticing what Noona Taylor was doing on the roof with Millie from the Tigerettes?

  None of it made any sense. So I carried my disbelief with me, even as an altar boy. I didn’t ask to be an altar boy; I was chosen by the brothers in the sixth grade. They probably believed that boys with good grades were also good Catholics; or perhaps they chose us only because we could remember all the Latin responses in the Mass. For whatever reason, I was drafted. But if anything, my time as an altar boy widened my separation from the Church. I learned the Latin; I got up on time every morning, winter and summer, draped my starched surplice over my arms and traveled up the hill to Holy Name. But from the beginning I felt part of a show, giving a rehearsed performance in which the lines never varied. I loved the sound of Latin, the roll of vowels, the way words changed according to their meaning; Latin was another code to be cracked. But even for the priests, it was all an act.

  I did like some of the priests, particularly a kind man named Father Ahearn, and another named Father Kavanaugh, who said the fastest Mass in the parish, the Latin falling from his lips as if he were a tobacco auctioneer. But watching them get dressed in priestly garments or smoke cigarettes after Mass, being subjected to their scorn when I made a mistake, I saw them as human beings, not as officers in the army of Christ. I lost whatever sense of awe that I once felt during the Mass. They were men like other men.

  At least one of them was like the men of Seventh Avenue, or like my father: a drunk. He had a sweet, smooth, baby’s pink face, and eyes without irises. Sometimes he staggered onto the altar. He often forgot some of the Latin, repeated other parts at least twice. His superiors seemed to know he had a problem and gave him the earliest, most sparsely attended Masses. Even at six-thirty in the morning, he was shaky, his breath reeking. The sight of him filled me with pity and anger. It was bad enough that he staggered around; he was forced by his work to do so before an audience. I was angry that nobody from the Church tried to save him from this humiliation.

  There was another personal element to the ceremony of the Mass. Wine was central to the ritual. We were taught that during the Mass, bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ. As an altar boy, I held the w
ine cruets while the priest blessed them and then poured the sweetish liquid across his fingers during the Offertory. That was the “first act” of the Mass, the section when the priest offered up to God the wine and the small unleavened wafers called hosts. In the second act of the drama, the consecration, he transformed these banal elements, saying his magic words in Latin, holding the host up for all to see; it was the custom in Holy Name to hide one’s eyes and bow the head, refusing to look directly at the offered host because that little wafer had become God. Natives often did this in Tarzan movies, when facing their gods, and in Gunga Din, the murder cultists did the same with the image of Kali. Then the priest turned his back on the parishioners of Holy Name, ate the host, who was God, and washed Him down with the wine, or His blood. The more I learned, the more I thought that it was all very strange.

  15

  ON THE RADIO, there was a show called “Truth or Consequences.” The announcer would open in egg-shaped tones: You’ve gotta tell the truth or you’re gonna pay the consequences…. The price for not telling the truth was usually a public humiliation.

  But I couldn’t always tell the truth. Just as I couldn’t tell anyone that I didn’t believe in God, I couldn’t talk to many people about wanting to be a cartoonist. When I had my first cartoon published, in Ace Comics in 1949, on a page filled by young fans, I told nobody at Holy Name; I was afraid they’d think I was lording it over them. At the same time, I hated telling lies; even without God I had a sense of sin, and everything taught me that lying was a sin. So I learned to be silent about most of the deepest concerns in my life. On the street, I learned to be a tough guy, to curse, to tell jokes, to play ball. At home, and in my mind, I was someone else: more naive, more complicated, angrier, more romantic. I wanted to see the world, to be a man in that world, but a man cleansed of all stupidities. I didn’t want to be like my father. I didn’t want to be a drunk.

  And yet drinking started to seem as natural to real life as breathing. I would hear my father and his friends weaving romantic tales of Prohibition, when they were young, and understood that when a country was made to live under a stupid law then the only way to defy that law was to do what it forbade; in that case, drinking. I heard Prohibition words like “rumdum” and “gin mill,” “speakeasy” and “needle beer,” and loved their bluntness, their bricklike shapes. The roguish way they came off the lips of the men made me want to talk that way too. Those words carried an additional glaze of meaning. The men used them like a code, one shared by members of an outlaw society. The Prohibition law had been passed by Protestants to curb the dreadful habits of the Catholic immigrants (or so they thought), and they had defied that law and won. In a way, I was a child of Prohibition, even though born two years after repeal.

  Drinking seemed to be part of almost everything else, even politics. In 1948, Truman was running against Dewey, and in our neighborhood Dewey was despised. They laughed at him, at his size, his mustache, his prim image. In the New York Star, a cartoonist named Walt Kelly started drawing him like a bridegroom on a wedding cake. When Dewey’s monotonal midwestern voice came over the radio one evening, my father shouted: Shut that idjit off! And when I asked why Dewey made him so angry, he said: One good shot of whiskey and he’d be on his face on the floor.

  That year, I started moving beyond the comics and the sports pages to the front of the newspaper; there was no war, but there was crime and politics. And my attention was focused by another event. In the used book stores of Pearl Street I made two additional discoveries: a run of a newsletter called In Fact by George Seldes, and Bill Mauldin’s Back Home. On Pearl Street, thirty issues of In Fact went home with me for sixty cents. I don’t remember anything from them except their format (which resembled the newsletter later published by I. F. Stone) and their suspicion of anything written in newspapers, in particular, newspapers published by Hearst. Mauldin’s book, which followed his masterpiece Up Front, made me think more sharply about politics. I loved Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, and their disdain for officers, regulations, rules; in the Up Front cartoons, they were hard-drinking, unshaven, probably bad-talking. But in Back Home, Mauldin was looking at the world after the war, the country to which Willie and Joe returned, the nation in which I lived. As he portrayed it, the United States was a country of fearful, ignorant men, bullies with slouch hats and paunches who worked for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even the name struck me as stupid; would the French have a committee on Un-French Activities? And what was an “American activity” anyway?

  Reading Mauldin at thirteen, I felt an odd sense of merger; it was as if I had written these pages, as if I were saying these irreverent things about officers, right-wingers, war profiteers, conservative newspaper publishers, penthouse revolutionaries, professional veterans, and bigots and phonies of all stripes. I didn’t really understand some of what Mauldin was writing; but as I read and reread the book, the irreverent attitude felt natural to me. It was as if I’d picked up a glove, tried it on, and found a perfect fit.

  None of what I was reading in the newspapers or in Mauldin’s book had anything to do with what I was learning in school. From Mauldin I learned that Japanese-Americans had been put in concentration camps during the war, their stores and homes and farms confiscated by white trash, and when the Nisei soldiers came back from fighting courageously in Italy, the whites who stole their property refused to give it up and the government did nothing. I learned how southern white bigots used the poll tax and other legal devices to prevent Negroes from voting. I learned the phrase anti-Semitism, the proper name for the bigotry that had caused Buchenwald. Mauldin confirmed and elaborated many of the lessons I’d absorbed from my mother.

  But I heard nothing about such matters in school. Masturbation was a sin; but hatred? Hey, pay attention, young man. Mauldin’s world was not far away, in some distant country. Some of it was right there in the Neighborhood, where some people still called Jackie Robinson a nigger and others talked about kikes and yids.

  If my mind was full of change, possibility, and notions of justice, other things remained the same. In November, there were great election-night bonfires on Twelfth Street after the voting ended. But the vote for president was very close; the counting went on all night, and some said that the hated Dewey had won. The following day, Truman was declared the winner. My mother wasn’t very happy about this. But my father headed for Rattigan’s, where the ward heelers were buying. Around midnight, two of their flunkies brought him home. He made it to the second-floor landing. He sat there for a while, crooning about the old country, until I went down and helped him up the last flight.

  16

  EIGHTH GRADE was a horror. Our teacher was a thick-necked Pole with a jutting jaw and a bent nose. His name was Brother Jan. In the seventh grade, we’d had a soft and saintly man named Brother Rembert as our teacher. We heard scary tales about Brother Jan, but nothing really prepared us for the reality of this snarling, vicious brute. On his desk, Brother Jan kept a thick eighteen-inch ruler called Elmer. He used it on someone every day. He used it if you were late. He used it if you didn’t finish your homework. He used it if you smiled or giggled. He used it if you talked back, or copied from another kid during an exam. I would watch him when he bent one of the boys over a front desk, and there was a tremble in his face, a fierce concentration, a sick look of enjoyment as he whacked Elmer on the ass of the chosen boy until the boy dissolved in tears and pain.

  He picked on some kids over and over again: a funny guy named Bobby Connors; a slow, sweet boy named Shitty Collins, who lived up the block from me; a tall sly character named Boopie Conroy. Near the end of the first term, Brother Jan started picking on me. Somehow I infuriated him. Maybe it was because I got the highest grades in the class but after school spent my time with the harder kids. I shared my homework with Shitty Collins and some of the slower kids; when Brother Jan discovered this he didn’t see it as an act of Christian charity but as a case of subversion; he bent me over the front seat and wh
ipped into me with Elmer. After the first time, he whipped me every week. He broke some other kids, reducing them to tears and humiliation; when he did that, his eyes seemed to recede under his brow and his lips curled into a knowing smile, as if he’d discovered the point at which he could destroy pride and will. I refused to cry. I would wait for the initial shock, then the cutting pain of the second blow, then wait for the next, and tighten my face, clamp my teeth together, feel it again, then again, still again, as many as fifteen times, thinking: Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you. And Brother Jan would swing again, grunting.

  Then he’d be finished and I’d glance at him and sometimes he’d have a film of sweat on his face. And I’d think: You’re sick. I’d sit down in pain, and the other kids would look at me, and I would stare up at Brother Jan, thinking: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

  Around this time I first sensed that I was my own version of Jekyll and Hyde. In my head, the Good Boy was constantly warring with the Bad Guy. I wanted to be a Bad Guy, tough, physical, a prince of the streets; at the same time, I was driven to be a Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, a protector of my brothers, an earner of money for the family. The Bad Guy cursed, growled, repeated dirty jokes and resisted Brother Jan; the Good Boy served Mass in the mornings and read novels in bed at night. The Bad Guy practiced walking like one of the Tigers, stole silverware from the Factory, and jerked off; the Good Boy delivered groceries to old ladies who couldn’t come down the stairs, memorized poems, and drew cartoons at the kitchen table on cold or rainy evenings. It seems clear to me now that the Bad Guy was demanding respect from my father, the Good Boy acknowledging love from my mother. It wasn’t at all clear when I was in my early teens.