A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  When I left school, the Fat Boy was waiting on the corner. I tensed, ready to fight again. And then he started walking toward me. He put out his hand. I hesitated, then shook it.

  I’m sorry, he said. You were right. I made fun of you and your shoes and that was a lousy thing to do.

  I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe now he would sly rap me. But he didn’t.

  Okay, I said. I’m sorry too.

  I walked off alone. We didn’t become friends. But I admired him. He’d done what I couldn’t do: admitted he was wrong. Without knowing it, the Fat Boy had accomplished something else; because he’d laughed at me, because I’d then given him a beating that could lead to expulsion, the idea of leaving Regis had blossomed in my head. Drinking that night on the Totes, the notion flowered. I began to imagine myself free of the rigor of the Jesuits. I imagined myself in another school, in classes with my friends from the Neighborhood. Then saw myself in other places, rolling around the world, working on the freighters the way my grandfather did, going to Panama and Honduras to pick up the bananas, traveling to Nagasaki. I imagined myself in the navy, sailing for Korea and the war. I imagined myself drawing cartoons the way Bill Mauldin did in World War II. I drank a lot of beer. The visions, as always, grew grander.

  2

  THAT WINTER, Steve Canyon enlisted in the air force and Caniff’s great comic strip began what most fans thought was a long decline. The Compass sent Bill Mauldin to Korea, and Willie and Joe found themselves at another front. The Post assigned its star sportswriter, Jimmy Cannon, to Korea, and his stories of GIs in trouble made me feel I was there. In contrast, my own problems seemed puny and childish.

  And the comics grew darker. A pair of comic books, Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, were first published that winter by a company called E.C., and they astonished me. The major artist was Harvey Kurtz-man, and he revolutionized the form. Unlike war as reflected by Caniff, these combat stories were hard, bleak, free of rah-rah patriotism. They were about men, not costumed superheroes. In Kurtzman’s Korean War, there was no Red Skull. The content wasn’t the only change. Kurtzman’s drawing style was fresh and powerful: full of stark figures, ferocious action, fat juicy brushstrokes applied with spectacular confidence. Somehow he’d created a new style while I was still imitating Caniff. So I’d be sitting in a classroom at Regis, looking at a teacher and instead of listening to what he was saying, I’d be trying to imagine new ways of drawing. Not like Caniff. Not like Kurtzman. I’d draw like myself, as free as handwriting, using crayons, or big brushes, or a million tiny pen lines. This became still another distraction. My grades started to slide.

  Around this time, on other shelves in the comic book stores, I was also discovering pulp magazines, drawn to them at first by the work of their illustrators. In the science fiction books Amazing and Astounding there was an artist named Virgil Finlay. His drawings were full of voluptuous women, almost naked, their breasts often bare except for seashells or veils or carefully placed foliage. Finlay used a pen, creating form by scalloping the shading with individual lines that were built up, thickened, then thinned according to their density; the drawings were full of wonder, the skies bursting with strange forms, the landscapes of his imaginary planets scary and strange. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t imitate him.

  The science fiction stories meant almost nothing to me but I couldn’t resist the detective pulps: Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flynn’s Detective Fiction, and Popular Detective. The drawings were dark, as full of shadows as the movie melodramas of the period, and the men, women, and guns were interchangeable. The stories carried titles like “Hellcats of Homicide Highway” or “Sinner Take All,” but often the writing was a lot better than the titles or the illustrations. The stories took place in a landscape I understood: not sagebrush or the plains of Venus, but bad parts of mean towns, where the streetlights were always dim, the cops always crooked, and nobody had a home. The heroes were tough guys, able to absorb ferocious beatings before shooting their enemies without remorse; they’d have felt little sympathy for Frankie Nocera or the Fat Boy. Almost all the women were bad: devious Delilahs, greedy, selfish, and dangerous. They worked in bars, hotels, the streets, and they usually went to bed with a man only to cut his throat. In a way, this vision of women was a perfect fit with the sinful temptresses portrayed by the Church. Naturally, I wished I could meet one of them.

  In all the pulp stories, the dark glamour of the scene revolved around drinking. The men met the women in bars. The whiskey was always warm when it went down. Lights were always dim, the jukebox muted, the bartenders sympathetic. Alone, or with women, the heroes always ended up buying a bottle to bring back with them to the hotel. I began to imagine myself in those pulp magazine bars, far from my father’s mundane neighborhood saloons. I put the money down and ordered my whiskey and then the girl came in, out of the rain or out of the fog or out of the past. Sometimes she wanted money. Sometimes she wanted help. Sometimes she wanted sex. I was ready to give her all three. In my reveries, I always bought her a drink, just the way the tough guys did, and after a while I paid for a bottle of rotgut (as they always called it) and took her and the bottle back to the brass bed with the hard mattress. That was life. That was how I would live too.

  In the pulps on sale at Sanew’s, or among the used copies sold in the stores where I once bought comic books, I began to notice the names of the pulp writers: John D. MacDonald, Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich. And I started copying paragraphs from their stories into notebooks, particularly from MacDonald, who described places and people in a style that always felt right. At first I thought I would use these paragraphs as text blocks for my sample comic strips. I’d heard from Jim Brady that to get any kind of work you needed to bring samples to the comic book publishers or newspaper syndicates. The pulp texts would make my pages look more professional.

  But copying took too much time and I started writing my own texts. I liked inventing names and characters and plots (most of them out of the memory of the stories I’d read). The people did what I wanted them to do and said what I made them say. It was like a magic trick. In some ways, writing stories was easier than trying to do comics; I didn’t need to draw the details of a gun; I just had to say the word “gun.” I began to think about pulp stories in bed, on the subway, in class.

  Soon I had a major problem at Regis. For an English composition assignment, I invented a pulp story about a man who murders his neighbor and buries him in the backyard, only to be discovered when the grass won’t grow above the buried body. There was no detective, no hero. Only a passing cop who gets suspicious. I slaved over the story, lettering each page in a composition book and adding illustrations that were drawn on separate sheets of bond paper and pasted into place. I used 435 Thirteenth Street as the house. I improved the backyard, giving it grass and flowers instead of clay. I picked names I knew: Nocero and Taylor. And that’s how I got into trouble. Nocero was the name of the man who was killed and buried. I named the murderer Chuck Taylor. Not Noona Taylor, but Chuck. The principal of Regis was the Rev. Charles Taylor, S.J.

  I handed in the story, proud of what I’d done, sure that the English teacher would get the joke. He would smile in a sly way (I thought) and praise me for the work I’d done; this wasn’t another of those idiotic compositions about “My Trip To Albany.” If he got the joke, he didn’t appreciate it. A few days later, he handed back the graded compositions. Inside the hand-drawn cover, on the title page (“Seeds of Death”), he had marked a large F and scribbled beneath it, Sophomoric contempt for authority. At the end of class, while the others filed out, he told me to remain in my seat. I still held my book in my hand, but now it felt like something dirty.

  You must think you’re a wise guy, he said.

  No, sir.

  Only a wise guy would do this.

  I said nothing.

  And in this world, there is no room for wise guys. They cause trouble. For everybody. For themselves.

&nbs
p; He stared at me. I looked at the cover of my book and the lettering of the title. I hoped that he would now forgive me. He didn’t.

  Come with me, Mister Hamill.

  I followed him down the corridors to the principal’s office. The English teacher opened the door, nodded, and then went away. The Rev. Charles Taylor was waiting for me, seated behind his desk. He did not get up. He made a little steeple with his fingers.

  Is that the famous book? he said in a chilly voice.

  Yes, Father.

  He reached across the desk and took it from me. He stared at the cover, the words “Seeds of Death,” then at the text. He began reading it. I waited, afraid to breathe. He read to the end. He closed the book and stared at the cover for a long moment. Then his chilly eyes fell upon me.

  You’re not happy at Regis, are you, Mister Hamill.

  I shrugged. Yes, sir. I mean, no sir. I mean — It’s all right, it’s hard work sometimes, but . . . .

  My words dribbled away. I looked at crosses on the wall, pictures of saints, some leather-bound missals.

  There is nothing keeping you here, young man, he said. If you feel you aren’t up to the work, to our standards, to our disciplines, then you are, of course, free to go elsewhere.

  He bit off the words.

  Your other grades are low. You’re failing plane geometry.

  It’s hard, Father. I have a job after school. I have —

  You have time to … to do this, though, don’t you? It must have taken many hours, making these drawings, doing this lettering.

  Yes, sir.

  He was quiet for a beat. Then:

  I’m placing you on probation. If your grades improve, you’ll have no problems. If not …

  He let the alternative hang in the air, unspoken. Then he looked back at my book. On one page, I had drawn a portrait of Chuck Taylor, his name carefully lettered at the side. He stopped and then looked up.

  Is that what I look like? he said.

  No, sir.

  He handed me the book.

  Actually, it’s not a bad likeness. You’ve got the nose. You’ve got the nose.

  I left in a daze. He’d told me I was on the brink of flunking out of Regis. But I did get his nose right.

  3

  THE GIRL’S NAME was Jenny. She had a long face framed by long brown hair. Her nose was long too, and she was self-conscious about it. I hate this nose, she said to me one night. I wish I could cut it off. Her brown eyes were among the saddest I’ve ever seen. In that dark snowy winter of 1950–51, I fell in love with her.

  I’m too old for you, she said. I’m seventeen.

  I’ll be sixteen in June, I said. A year doesn’t matter that much, does it?

  To some people it does, she said.

  Does it matter to you?

  No.

  I met her in the back booth of a soda fountain named Steven’s, which was just off the corner of Ninth Street on Seventh Avenue. There was a big modern jukebox against a wall, packed with 45 rpm records instead of the old 78s that you still saw in the bars of the Neighborhood. Here, Nat Cole was singing “Mona Lisa,” Teresa Brewer was belting out “Music, Music, Music,” Don Cornell was telling us that it wasn’t fair for him to love her, and Frankie Laine was proclaiming loudly that he was gonna live ’til he died. There were some old songs too, from all the way back in 1949: Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “Lucky Old Sun” and Vaughan Monroe’s evocation of those ghost riders in the sky. That night, I came into Steven’s with someone else, who knew the girl sitting with Jenny. We sat down and stayed for two hours. I walked Jenny home to a house on Tenth Street. She smiled goodnight in a tentative way and hurried into the vestibule. I went back to Steven’s the next night and she was there again and I walked her home again and asked her to go to a movie.

  That Friday night we went to Loew’s Metropolitan and saw In a Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. I loved that movie. Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter who has been assigned to make a script from a terrible best-selling book. This depresses him and he goes to a bar to get rid of his depression by getting drunk. He starts talking to a hatcheck girl, who tells Bogart that she has read the book. He invites her back to his apartment so that she can tell him the story. That way, he won’t have to read it himself. It wasn’t clear what else he had in mind, but I could make it up. Drinks, a small apartment, sex. The next day, the hatcheck girl is found murdered and the cops come looking for Bogart …

  I remember talking all the way home about this amazing movie. Did Jenny think the story had anything to do with all this anticommunist stuff? You know, the way people were being ruined by rumors? Wasn’t that what it meant? Jenny looked at me as if I were nuts.

  Come on, she said, it’s just a movie about this guy who drinks too much and beats people up.

  No, no, I insisted. It’s about more than that.

  She smiled at me and her eyes grew sadder.

  You’re weird, she said.

  In the weeks that followed, during that cold winter, I became a regular at Steven’s, seeing almost nothing of my friends on the Totes. I was going with Jenny.

  On those first dates, the Good Boy dominated the Bad Guy. I was polite. That is, I didn’t grab her tits as soon as we sat down. With the older guys now gone to the war, we younger boys were taking their place; the seventeen-year-old girls had no nineteen-year-old boys to take them into the nights. Suddenly, there was an aura of seriousness about most of us: guys disappearing for days with their girls, saying nothing about what they did or bragging too loudly when next they showed up on the Totes. I sat alone with Jenny in the booths, talking, listening to the jukebox: Tony Martin’s “There’s No Tomorrow” and “La Vie en Rose” and the Weavers singing “Goodnight, Irene.” On that jukebox, there were also two glorious celebrations of drinking: a Wynonie Harris shouting blues, “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me,” and a tune called “Cigarees and Whuskey and Wild, Wild Women.” I played them as if they were anthems.

  Within weeks, Jenny and I were going steady. This was a formal condition, like being engaged, or even being married. I asked her to go steady right after Christmas, coming home from a party. All the way home, I held her close to me; she was wearing a long brown coat with a curlicued design sewn on the back at her waist. I was sure I loved her, even though I knew virtually nothing about her, except that she lived with her mother in a small apartment on Tenth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the time we were together, I never once saw her mother.

  You don’t have any brothers or sisters? I asked her one freezing night as we sat on a bench beside the park.

  No. It’s just me and my mother. She’s a nurse down at Cumberland.

  And your father?

  She shook her head and looked away.

  I’m sorry, I said. Is he, uh, dead?

  No, she said. He just went away.

  That’s too bad, I said, thinking: Maybe she’s better off.

  Yeah, she said. It’s too bad.

  She started to cry and I hugged her and kissed her neck and her hair. She was the first girl who made me feel protective, the first who provoked in me the treacherous entanglement of pity with love. All that winter, in doorways, rooftops, park benches, we kissed and talked and talked and kissed, holding each other to keep warm. She said she loved me, but her eyes remained very sad; it was as if she could see some awful future. I started buying beer at the grocery store, telling Jack it was for my father, and Jenny and I would drink together on the parkside. She would get teary and cry and then bury her face against my neck. Finally, in the deep shadows of the parkside, she let me touch her breasts through her clothes. Then she let me open her blouse and touch her flesh. But whenever I moved my hand between her legs, she always stopped me.

  I can’t let you do that, she said. You’ll lose all respect for me.

  No, I won’t, I swear. I love you, Jenny. How could I lose respect for you?

  She should have laughed out loud — asshole! — but she s
aid nothing, just snuggled against me. I suppose she was exercising a kind of wisdom that had nothing to do with respect. I was still a kid. In a neighborhood of cops, firemen, ironworkers, and dock wallopers, I kept conjuring crazy visions of the future: writing comics, going to art school, seeing the world. Everything I talked about to Jenny was the opposite of security; my basic goal, unclear even to me, was to run away from home.

  Jenny was probably also sensing my own confused mixture of desire and fear. On some nights, I wanted so badly to put my cock in her that my body hurt (the condition even had a name — “blue balls”). But actual consummation was also scary. I’d never even seen a girl’s pubic hair or a vagina, not even in photographs (this was before Playboy, and long before Penthouse). For all the technical discussions on the street, I wasn’t even sure where I should put my cock. And even though I didn’t believe in God, all those years in Catholic schools surely had helped shape my psyche.

  These confusions accompanied me and Jenny to the benches along the parkside, to the darkened hallways and freezing rooftops. But we didn’t stay in the cold forever. One weekend, her mother moved them to Bay Ridge and soon after started working a 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. shift at the hospital. That first Saturday night, Jenny invited me to dinner. I took the trolley out to Sixty-ninth Street and picked up three quarts of Ballantine’s beer in a deli; the old man at the counter didn’t ask for proof of age. I felt like a man as I walked out, the bottles clunking in the paper bag.