A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  There were times when the existence of the Good Boy forced the appearance of the Bad Guy. In the final three years of grammar school at Holy Name, I always finished at the top of the class in grades, averaging 98 or 99, was placed on the honor roll and granted awards for general excellence. But there was an assumption that if you got good grades you must be soft, a sissy, or an AK — an ass kisser. This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given you in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-denial was the supreme virtue. It was the perfect mentality for an infantryman, a civil servant, or a priest. And it added some very honorable lives to the world. But too often, it discouraged kids who aspired to something different. The boy who chose another road was accused of being Full of Himself; he was isolated, assigned a place outside the tribe. Be ordinary, was the message; maintain anonymity; tamp down desires or wild dreams. Some boys withered. And the girls were smothered worse than the boys. They could be nuns or wives, brides of Christ or mothers of us all. There were almost no other possibilities.

  But the Bad Guy in me resisted the demand for conformity that was so seductive to the Good Boy. I hated being called an AK. For one thing, it wasn’t true. I polished no apples, sought no favors. But worse, to say that I was an AK was to imply that what I had actually done was a fraud. I knew that I got those grades by doing the homework, reading the books, and above all, by paying attention; I didn’t get them by kissing ass. So, after a while, whenever I was called an AK, I struck back: punching and hurting my accusers. The Bad Guy shoved the Good Boy out of the way and went to work. By the time I was subjected to Brother Jan’s sick furies, nobody again called me an AK. And I’d acquired a vague notion in my head that I could be like Sugar Ray Robinson: a boxer and a puncher, smart and tough.

  By the spring of 1949, seething with anger at Brother Jan, I started hanging out in a different part of the neighborhood, two blocks from Holy Name. In a way, it was a matter of choosing my own place, rather than having it chosen by my parents; they had moved to Seventh Avenue but I didn’t have to hang around there. There was another aspect to it too; my brother Tommy was eleven and I was thirteen; eight and ten are somehow much closer than eleven and thirteen; so I was moving away from Tommy too.

  The place I chose was called Bartel-Pritchard Square, and it was more a circle than a square. Three different trolley lines converged here, turning around a center island before heading off to Coney Island, Mill Basin, or Smith Street. Off the square on one side were the two tall Corinthian columns that marked the entrance to Prospect Park; we called them the Totem Poles, or the Totes. They rose from cleanly carved granite bases, and in the evenings that spring, after work at the grocery store and after finishing my homework, I would walk up from Seventh Avenue and see the others and we’d gather around the bases, sitting on them, looking at girls, cursing, smoking, making jokes, and drinking beer. First, the Good Boy attended to his chores; then the Bad Guy went out into the evening.

  That was when I really started drinking. There were a lot of us hanging around the Totes that spring and summer: Boopie Conroy, Shitty Collins, Mickey Horan, Vito Pinto, Jack McAlevy. Among my friends was a thin, handsome guy named Richie Kelly. He was smart and tough but he always seemed cautious about drinking. Later in the summer, I learned why. His father, Jabbo Kelly, was one of the public rummies, a small group of men who’d been thrown out of their homes and lived on the streets. They slept in the park, or in the subways. They were filthy and panhandled for wine money. There was no way that Richie could avoid seeing Jabbo, because the rummies were always around the park, but I never saw them talk. I admired the way Richie handled a fact of his life that would have shamed others. He was cool and indifferent. For a while, we were close. I thought that with any kind of bad luck, my father could join Jabbo Kelly on his aimless wanderings.

  Richie was also our liaison to the older guys, who owned the benches in the center of the traffic island, across the street from the Totes. They played football together as the Raiders and fought occasional gang battles in Coney Island or in the park. Richie’s older brother, Tommy, was one of the Raiders. He was built like a safe and was a ferocious puncher but never went out of his way to fight. I never saw him talk to Jabbo either.

  I don’t know who bought the beer, but it was around, in cardboard containers or quart bottles. At first I didn’t join in the drinking. It was as if I knew I would be crossing a line in some permanent way. But I didn’t make a big deal out of this; I just shrugged and passed on the offered bottle. Then one evening, all of us laughing and joking, a guy named Johnny Rose handed me a container, casually, easily, and I took a sip.

  The first swallow triggered a vague remembrance of the beer I’d sipped when I was a little boy, and was accompanied by a yeasty smell I associated with Gallagher’s. I didn’t like the taste; unlike the sweet wine I’d drunk in the woods at Fox Lair Camp, the beer had a sourness to it. I passed the container to Boopie Conroy, who took a long swallow. After a while, it came back to me, I took another sip, and this time I picked up a repulsive odor that reminded me of my father’s breath when he was sleeping late on weekend mornings.

  But as the beer kept coming around to me, I felt oddly proud of myself. The taste and smell didn’t matter as much as the act. I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to do — drinking under the legal age of eighteen. Just by drinking beer, I was a certified Bad Guy. If the police saw us, and caught us, we’d be in trouble. We stayed on the side of the Totes that faced the park, safe from the scrutiny of passing cars. But several times, I wandered out under the streetlight with my container in my hand. That spring night, and on later evenings in summer, when I had graduated from Holy Name, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be seen by one person: Brother Jan. I wanted him to come over to me. I wanted him to try to stop me from drinking. And then I would crash into him, I’d beat and batter him, I’d stomp him and kick his balls out his ass. He was bigger than I was, heavier, with a fullback’s neck; I didn’t care. I wanted to hurt him back. On my turf. On the street.

  For the first time I began to experience a transformation that would later become familiar: the violent images grew larger in my head and everything else got smaller. It was as if the beer were editing the world, eliminating other elements, such as weather, light, form, beauty. I could hear talk bubbling around me from the others, random words colliding in my head, then a tightening of focus, the faces closest to me having the most solid reality. A few of us talked about Brother Jan and how we’d like to give him a good beating. But all sorts of other talk flew around the beer-tingling air: the Dodgers, the gangs, girls, prizefighters, the songs we heard on the radio.

  There were no transistors yet, only clumsy portables, and nobody had one of them. We learned the songs at home, on WNEW’s “Make Believe Ballroom,” and a nighttime show called “Your Hit Parade.” Record sales were smaller then, songs remained in the top ten for months, and the words drilled themselves into memory. Most of the songs were junk. But I can still sing “Slow Boat to China” or “A (You’re Adorable)” or “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” On summer evenings, we’d take turns singing the new tunes, even imitating the singers. I could do a pretty fair Nat “King” Cole on “Nature Boy” and what I thought was a smashing Ray Bolger on “Once in Love with Amy” (right down to the arch laugh). I tried to do Billy Eckstine on “I Apologize” and failed; my voice just wasn’t deep enough. Above all others, we loved Frankie Laine; each of us could shout every verse of “Mule Train” and we worked hard to sound smoky, sultry, and knowing on “That’s My Desire.”

  Up on the Totes, even while I was learning to like the taste of beer, I never mentioned cartooning. I never tried to discuss the books I was reading. I never let the Good B
oy get in the way of the apprentice Bad Guy.

  At first, I didn’t get drunk. Atleast I didn’t think I was getting drunk. I was always conscious of where I was. I always walked home and didn’t stagger (chewing gum or Sen-Sen so that my mother couldn’t smell the beer on my breath). I didn’t fall down inside the park to sleep, the way some of the others did. But I knew I was being changed. I talked more, postured as badly as all the others, tried on different attitudes as if they were suits. I watched the Raiders — we called them the Big Guys — and the way they dressed (in T-shirts and chino pants, in contrast to the pegged pants of Seventh Avenue) and the way they wore their hair (in crisp crew cuts, instead of the pompadours and sideburns of the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys), and I tried to look like that too. I liked the way they held their containers of beer, casually, firmly, passing them around in an open generous style.

  I also watched the way they walked up to the Sanders with a girl on a Saturday night, paying for two, the girl waiting to the side, then taking the guy’s hand as they walked inside to the dark balcony. I wanted a girl too and had tried to talk to girls in my grade at Holy Name; they didn’t share classrooms with us but they were our age and knew the same songs we knew. In their presence, however, I felt clumsy and awkward, and the girls seemed always to be holding back some secret knowledge, exchanging glances with other girls, prepared to dismiss me with a sigh or some form of mockery. It was as if they knew more about me than I did. They certainly knew more about me than I knew about them. I kept hearing about periods and sanitary napkins and didn’t understand what any of it meant. I don’t think any of the other guys knew either, as they played at being Bad Guys on the Totes on those long summer evenings.

  Then one evening that summer, I was home after dinner, drawing at the kitchen table. I had sketched a cartoon in light blue pencil and was drawing with a fine-haired brush, dipping into the Higgins india ink. My father came in. He was drunk and lurching and his eyes were opaque. He bumped into the kitchen table and my hand jerked, ruining a line. And I rose in a fury. I tore up the drawing and threw the ink bottle against the sink and stormed out. I couldn’t do this! I wanted to be a cartoonist and this drunk, my father, made it impossible! I hated him then, with a white, ear-ringing, boyish hatred, and my rage and hatred carried me to the Totes. Among my friends, I drank to get rid of something.

  That gave me a delicious sense of joy. I could drink until I got drunk because it was someone else’s fault. If I downed too many beers, it was my father’s fault; if I staggered, it was his fault; if I fell down in the grass in the park: it was his fault. The son of a bitch. I didn’t say any of this to the other guys. I kept thinking of Bogart in Casablanca, sitting at the bar in a pool of bitterness, drinking his whiskey. I would be like that. I would just drink, quietly and angrily, and say nothing. Sitting on the Totes, with the others laughing and grab-assing around me, I sipped the beer, telling myself that I enjoyed the taste. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to clean up the mess I’d made with the ink. I didn’t want to confront my father or explain to my mother. I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that.

  17

  ONE FRIDAY in that spring of 1949, I opened an envelope in the hall of 378 and discovered that I’d won a scholarship to Regis High School. Another boy in my class, Bob McElynn, had won too; four of us had taken the examination together. Regis was a Jesuit school across the river in Manhattan and was said to be the most elite of the city’s Catholic high schools. Nobody at Holy Name had ever made it into Regis until McElynn and I did it, and all across that weekend, wondering if I should accept the prize that I’d won, I was happy, pleased, and scared.

  The fear was caused in part by the relentless pressure of conformity in the parish. Most of the other boys were going on to Bishop Loughlin or St. Michael’s, to Xavier or LaSalle; a few went to Brooklyn Tech; many went to Manual Training, the public high school on Seventh Avenue and Fifth Street. If I went to Regis, I’d be separating myself from all of them. They would walk to school while I took three subway trains to get from my part of Brooklyn to Eighty-fifth Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Park Avenue! Just the name of the street was a symbol of some other, rarefied existence in the region of the very rich. If the school really was an elite school, then I’d be declaring myself part of that elite. I didn’t want to join any elite. I wanted to live my life. But the choice of a high school also might have something to do with the way I lived that life. Regis was a prep school; that is, it prepared you for college. But I had never met anyone from the Neighborhood who’d gone to college. Not one. College was for rich kids, not for people from Brooklyn. Or so I thought. Besides, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw, to go to art school. Why should I prep for a school that I would never attend? Why not prep for art school? But in bed one night on that weekend after receiving the acceptance letter, I thought: Milton Caniff went to Ohio State. Maybe I could go to college and be a cartoonist. And besides, wasn’t a cartoonist part of an elite? Wouldn’t that profession separate me from my friends, from the Neighborhood, from everybody I now knew? Maybe separation was just inevitable.

  So I decided to go to Regis, the Good Boy momentarily triumphing over the Bad Guy. The school was rigorous, severe, the teachers dedicated to excellence. I loved Latin, prepared by my years as an altar boy to hear the sounds and rhythms of the language. But there was something else involved: a sense of working on secret codes, discovering the meanings of strange words that linked me to the distant past.

  But I couldn’t get algebra. It was too abstract, plotless, without narrative or time. I learned enough to pass and nothing more. I was reasonably good in English, bored by grammar, excited by putting stories on paper. It says something about the way difficulty puts its mark on consciousness that I can remember the algebra teacher now, his reddish hair, dry humor, even his name: Purcell. I remember nothing of the English or Latin teachers.

  But I do remember another teacher, a heavy-set man in his thirties, who taught the first class after lunch. His face was always glazed with sweat, even when the windows were open to the cold winter air. He was looser and funnier than the others, and one afternoon I understood why. He came in, laughed, started writing on the blackboard, and then seemed to freeze. He turned and hurried out. Someone shouted: He’s drunk! And so he was. Even here, among the elite of Regis, there were drunks. I laughed with the others, but when the man returned, his face ashen, his eyes wet and rheumy, I felt only pity. I wondered if he had children who wanted to love him.

  I wasn’t very happy at Regis. I used to think it was the school’s fault, that somehow I was a clumsy social fit among a group of upper-class kids. That wasn’t it at all. There was actually a leveling democracy of merit at Regis; some of the kids were poor, most were middle class, a few were rich; but no boy could buy his way into the school. You had to pass the test, just as McElynn and I had. There were constricting rules: a dress code, an obsession with punctuality, an assignment of privilege to the boys in the upper grades. But the school wasn’t riddled with problems of money and class.

  My own problems at Regis were more complicated than the clichéd case of a poor kid thrown in with better-off boys. For the first time, I was in a classroom where everybody else was as smart as I was and many were smarter. That was a new experience to me. I couldn’t just sit there and pay attention and come out with decent grades. I had to work. But there were a number of distractions that made it hard for me to do the schoolwork at the level that Regis demanded. The distractions all flowed from the Neighborhood. I was still working after school and on Saturdays at the grocery store, to pay for the subway and lunch; I couldn’t stay at Regis after school, join the school clubs, play ball in the gym, try to work for The Owl, the school newspaper. When the bell rang to end the final period, I had to leave for work. At Holy Name, the kids in my class were the same kids I played with after school or on weekend
s; at Regis, I almost never saw the other boys after school, not even McElynn or two boys from the adjoining parish of St. Saviour’s, Jim Shea and John Duffy. We were friendly, we talked, we joked, we traveled together on the subway and sometimes worked together on homework; but we weren’t friends in that deep mysterious way that marks true friendships.

  So I felt disconnected from the school. More than ever, I wanted to be with my friends up at the Totes. I was in a growing fever of adolescent sensuality, trying to find an outlet beyond masturbation, trying to get a girl who would go with me to a bush or a rooftop or the ink-black balcony of a movie house. I saw tits in geometry classes and asses in history and wondered if Julius Caesar was getting laid while he wrote his account of the Gallic Wars. During the Regis years, I was into a harder contest of wills with my father. Now he was sneering at my idea of becoming a cartoonist. You’d better start thinking about something real. You’d better think about the cop’s test or the firemen or the Navy Yard. . . . I preferred his indifference to his flat-out opposition. And as the first year at Regis ended, I was drinking in a more sustained way.

  While drinking at the Totes, I asserted myself more often about politics, religion, and sports. In a way, it was simply verbal showing off; I didn’t say as much in the courtyard at Regis, afraid, I suppose, that I’d be challenged by the kids who were smarter than I was. Safe in Brooklyn, I said out loud that it was ridiculous that Alger Hiss was on trial or that Communist party leaders were being sent to jail. How could this be a free country if you couldn’t be free to be a Communist? To which someone would say: Whatta you? A fuckin’ commie too? And I’d say No, but in America you’re supposed to be free to be anything, right? In May 1949, the armies of Mao Tse-tung finally won the civil war in China, driving Chiang Kai-shek and his broken troops into permanent exile in Formosa. The newspapers were hysterical. On the radio, Gabriel Heatter told us once more that there was bad news tonight. Up at the Totes, I mouthed off about how Chiang was a thief, his regime corrupt, his soldiers cowardly.