by Pete Hamill
Most of the time, I listened. These were my friends and I didn’t want to argue with them. But in certain ways I was already separated from them. I couldn’t tell them about Laura, because they wouldn’t believe me, and if they heard I was having sex with an old woman (she was forty-one!), they’d probably laugh. On the nights when I wasn’t at Boop’s, or on Saturday or Sunday mornings, I started making drawings for myself again, filling newsprint pads instead of making cartoons. I made great violent drawings of prizefighters, starting with photographs from newspapers or Ring Magazine, then abstracting them, then drawing them from memory, repeating alone the exercises from school. I took stiff classroom drawings of Laura and thinned her out and added Maureen’s face, smudging the features with my fingers to protect her from the judgments of my visiting friends. I began imagining Maureen’s body in detail, seeing her on the model stand instead of Laura, her pale skin blushing, her pubic hair dark and shiny. In those drawings she seemed more real than she did when she sat beside me in the Sanders.
Somehow, making those drawings, I knew that I could lose the Navy Yard, lose Laura, even lose Maureen, but I couldn’t afford to lose art school. That would be losing my life.
13
BY APRIL, even Laura thought I was getting better.
You’ve got talent, she said one night, but you don’t know anything yet.
What do you mean?
I mean you’re intelligent, you learn fast, but you’re amazingly ignorant. You’re too much in love with being a mug from Brooklyn.
The words wounded me. She was right, and I knew it.
What should I learn? I asked her.
Laura smiled and said, Every fucking thing you can.
She would never go out anywhere with me, obviously (I thought) because she didn’t want her friends to laugh at her with a young man. But she began to show me drawings in art books and from folders of reproductions she’d torn from magazines. None of them looked like Burne Hogarth’s work or Milton Caniff’s or Jack Kirby’s. But I began to sense what Picasso was doing, and Matisse; I saw George Grosz for the first time and Otto Dix and a wonderful draftsman, now unjustly forgotten, named Rico Lebrun. Seeing my boxing pictures, she showed me Stag at Sharkey’s by George Bellows. She showed me pictures by Ben Shahn and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. And then she pulled out some drawings by a man who was doing what I wished I could be doing: José Clemente Orozco. He was a Mexican and drew figures with thick black lines and great bold power.
You’re a draftsman, she said. So study the great draftsmen. You can get to color later. Most artists use color to hide things they don’t understand. Photographers do it all the time.
She smoked her cigarettes and sipped her Canadian Club and rummaged through these files, which she kept in folders in a Campbell’s soup box, and there was always a running commentary.
Jesus H. Christ, I have saved an amazing amount of crap. I oughtta just throw it all out.
Where’d you get it all?
She held up a copy of Art News.
Magazines like this, she said. But do yourself a favor, don’t read these rags. Just tear out the pictures. The writing is usually the most amazing bullshit.
Then she gave me a copy of a book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, and I devoured it. I felt connected to Henri because he was a friend of John Sloan. His book was a collection of notes about the study of art, written down by students in his classes at the Art Students League, and first published in 1923. As I read, I heard Henri speaking in Hogarth’s voice, and he seemed to be speaking directly to me.
The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life. …
This struck me as absolutely true; I knew, for example, that when I was alone I made drawings that went beyond the work I did in class. And I hoped I had the courage and stamina to see it through. I would sometimes remember these words while drinking in Boop’s — receiving what I thought Henri meant by sympathy, a kind of generalized human warmth; being, as he said, in company — and know that I should be home at work. Henri’s words became a kind of sweet curse. In my mind, the desire to be an artist had been a desire for freedom: from the routines of life, from the Navy Yards of the world. Until I read Henri, it had never occurred to me that there could be a cost, that an artist must pay a price in loneliness. That idea gave me a romantic thrill.
An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future. …
Was I a master of what I had? That is, had I pushed as hard as I could against my crudities, my clumsiness, my lack of skill? I knew I hadn’t. But nobody else at Boop’s had either. Most of them seemed content to go along, get a job, join the army. Who did I think I was anyway? Who was I to think I could go beyond myself?
You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. … I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do. …
In the Navy Yard, I met men who were doing hard work because they had to do it; to support wives, children, pay rent. In Boop’s, the guys who were working weren’t doing what they wanted to do. Most of them didn’t even know what they wanted to do. And what about my father? What did he want to do when he was my age, and how had it turned out? What could he have become if he hadn’t left Ireland or if he hadn’t lost his leg? What about my mother? I knew almost nothing about her, except that she was there, she worked, she was smart, she encouraged me to do anything I wanted to do. As Henri did.
An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. That is what I call self-development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself.
Yes.
14
IN THE LATE spring of 1952, as the Dodgers tried in the new season to recover from the Home Run, and the war in Korea was grinding on, and the papers said that Eisenhower was planning to run for president, everything shifted again. Laura disappeared.
For two nights, I didn’t see her at school, didn’t receive her Yes or No. On the third night, I asked about her at the office. The secretary was annoyed because Laura hadn’t even called. They had to cancel one painting class because they couldn’t find a substitute.
I was suddenly panicky. In class that night, I imagined her burning with some fever, alone in the studio without a telephone. I imagined her careening around the studio, drunk and falling, the blood running from a gash in her head. Or she flipped a cigarette in a careless way and it landed in the files or the turpentine and exploded and she was burned alive. Or a man climbed in through the air shaft window, to hold her prisoner, and was even now hurting her. The lurid scenarios filled my head while I tried to draw a lithe young brown-nippled Puerto Rican model in class. The model was exquisite, with sad brown eyes, and a thin trail of hair from her navel down her stomach to a thick black vee between her legs. But I couldn’t even focus my lust. When the bell rang for the first break, I packed my things and hurried down to Tenth Street.
The door to Laura’s studio was unlocked. I opened it slowly, remembering all those film noir scenes of the horror within. The rooms were black, but I knew where the kitchen light cord was and pulled it on.
Everything was
gone except the bed.
The easel was gone. The paintings. The brushes and paints and tomato cans. The sumptuous art books. The folders full of reproductions. Laura.
The linoleum floor now looked like an immense abstract painting. Under the sink, there was a bag of garbage. Inside it were two empty pint bottles of Canadian Club. I stood there for a long moment. How could she just go like this, without a word? I’m fucking you, kid. But I don’t have to love you to fuck you. Why didn’t I see this coming? I looked everywhere for a note to me, even on the bathroom mirror where they left notes in the movies. Nothing. She was gone. I imagined a man coming to the door and the two of them laughing. She was already packed, the clothes folded into suitcases, the canvases wrapped and tied together, the easel broken down for shipment, and he helped her to the street with her things and shoved them into his car. A convertible. I was sure of that. The easel sticking up from the back like a cross. And off they drove, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and laughing, laughing.
She would never tell him about me, some kid from Brooklyn, some boy out of art school. She might never tell anyone about me, might already have forgotten my existence. I slammed the icebox door with the flat of my hand, then did it again and again. Then turned around and saw the bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. I walked over and ran my fingers along its edge. Then I fell upon its vast emptiness and heard the distant rumble of the El and wept.
A chill came into me. For weeks, I couldn’t read Henri, or look at the artists Laura had introduced me to. It was as if the whole world that she knew had walked out into the night. My need focused more than ever before on Maureen. We were now going steady. That was supposed to give me a sense of structure, and a shared intimacy on the inevitable path to engagement and marriage. Instead I was full of uncertainty and one huge silent lie: I couldn’t tell Maureen how numbed I was by the disappearance of Laura.
The notion of marriage was scary; it made me see an apartment in the Neighborhood, kids, noise, a job I might hate. For a while I tried to merge the notion with my vision of life as an artist. We’d live in the Village and have children later. Maureen would be my model and we’d spend our evenings together in the company of painters and poets. I must have been a hugely egocentric boyfriend. I remember almost nothing about what she wanted from life, but I’m certain I spent many hours talking about what I wanted. I do remember that she didn’t take seriously my grand plans. Or so I thought at the time. She might have simply been what most girls then were: a supreme realist.
When the school term ended in June, my life started to unravel again. Without Laura, I had no outlet for my sexuality. Maureen was a Good Girl and with her I usually played the Good Boy. It was only late at night, after I’d dropped her off, that the Bad Guy came to life. Neither Boop’s nor the Parkview was any help; there were almost no available women in the Neighborhood, and those who were free knew I was going steady with Maureen. One evening, I called the school office to see if Laura had returned for summer sessions. No, she wasn’t part of the modeling pool anymore. What about Gloria, the Puerto Rican girl? The secretary laughed.
What do you think this is, a dating service?
No, no, I lied. During the summer, some of the guys from class, we’re planning some life sessions, just to stay in shape for the fall.
She gave me a number for Gloria Vasquez. I called. A man answered in Spanish and I hung up.
In the lunchtime bars along Sands Street, some of the guys from the Navy Yard talked joyfully about the whores who showed up in the evenings. But I had seen them, painted, lacquered, with huge piles of hair and alarming mouths, and they made me afraid. Afraid of disease. Afraid of their experience: thousands of blow jobs, thousands of fucks. And besides, I couldn’t pay them.
So I got drunk a lot and into fights, drowning my cock in rivers of beer. Drunk, I called Gloria Vasquez again one night, my head full of her brown nipples and thick lustrous hair, and this time she answered. She was sweet. She was polite. But she knew I was drunk and soon hung up. I was too embarrassed ever to call again.
The summer came and we all went back to Bay 22 and Oceantide. I remember strutting too much under a Saturday sun, getting bleary with beer, and falling asleep on a blanket beside Maureen. I woke with a furry tongue but I wasn’t very ashamed of myself: everybody else from the Neighborhood was doing the same thing. For all of us, boys and girls, drinking was natural. It was also woven together with sex; you drank in order to get sex or you drank if you didn’t have sex. In those years before the Pill, sex was also woven together with fear. The girls surely wanted it as much as we did, but they would pay a tougher price. Instead of fucking, we got drunk.
On the beach, among all those oiled bodies, with Maureen beside me but untouchable, I sometimes tried to distract myself with books and allow a novel to lift me into some other world. But then someone would come over and say, Whatta you, studying for a test? And I’d put the book away and play the role to which the Neighborhood had assigned me. I went to the bar at Oceantide (where they did check draft cards) and sat on the side at a crowded table and sipped beer that older guys had bought. I talked much bullshit. Sometimes I even danced with Maureen.
On my seventeenth birthday, I stopped at 378. I brought my father some drawings I had made of Duke Snider and Sugar Ray Robinson and he seemed happy with them but didn’t know what to do with them. He rolled them up and put them in a closet. My mother had a cake for me and the kids all cheered. Then my mother saw something in my face.
You’re unhappy, aren’t you? she said.
I’m all right, I said.
What’s the matter?
I shrugged and didn’t answer.
Maybe you should come home, she said.
Maybe, I said.
But I didn’t want to go home. When I said goodnight, there were tears in her eyes, but she didn’t cry.
From the pay phone in Sanew’s, I called Maureen. Her father answered.
Who’s this? he said.
Pete.
She’s already asleep.
Could you tell her I called, Mr. Crowley? He sighed and hung up.
I was a mess of emotions and I wanted to get drunk. But I knew that wouldn’t help. I went back to the room, and for the first time since Laura left, I read The Art Spirit.
Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing. …
I was soon asleep.
15
MICKEY HORAN joined the navy in July. A few weeks later, he was followed by Jack McAlevy. And Joe Griffin. Suddenly, among the guys in Boop’s, it was our turn.
The radio and the newspapers were still full of the war. In my room, I was reading Harvey Kurtzman’s Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Even Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball, was back in the air force, joining Steve Canyon. I imagined myself in Korea. Or on ships plowing through icy northern waters.
You’re the type who is always going away, said Laura, before she went away herself.
And I thought: Maybe she was right. She was right about a lot of other things. Maybe I have to go away. It wasn’t just destiny; there were practical reasons too. The money I earned at the Navy Yard just wasn’t enough for me. I had to pay for rent, food, and carfare; I needed money for drinking, to see friends, to have a little enjoyment; and I was going steady with Maureen. In the fall, when school started again, I’d need tuition along with money for paint and canvases, because I was supposed to move on from the basic drawing course. But I didn’t even have a bank account. I couldn’t afford a telephone or a television set. Two days before payday, I always had to borrow a few dollars, just for carfare and hot dogs. I knew what I wanted: enough money to pay for art school, to buy paint and brushes and books. Without those things, I couldn’t imagine a life, even with Maureen. I just couldn’t afford the wanting.
In Augu
st, I decided to join the navy.
But why? Maureen said.
I can finish high school in the navy, I said. And when I get out, I’ll get the GI Bill. You know, they pay you to go to school. They give you loans to buy a house. I can save a lot of money while I’m in, and we’ll be in great shape when I get out. It’s for us, Maureen. For us.
She knew otherwise. She began to weep. I talked to her, caressed her, kissed her almost desperately. I hedged, layering doubt into my words, making it sound as if my mind wasn’t made up. She cried inconsolably for a while and then stopped. I walked her home. She ran inside without another word.
But the idea of the navy had possessed me, and the possession wasn’t based on the benefits of the GI Bill. That summer, I couldn’t see myself clearly; it was as if the mirror was warped. The navy would provide me with a clear identity, no matter how temporary. Once I could say I was an Eagle boy and everyone knew what I meant; now I could say I was a sailor. In the navy, I would earn my space in the world and in this country; the act would certify that I was American, not Irish, not simply my father’s son. Joining a group larger than myself would cause my hobbling ten-cent miseries to recede and vanish. Above all, the navy offered escape. I would escape the stunted geography of Brooklyn, going where nobody knew about my father, my drinking, my failure at Regis, my limitless uncertainties. I would escape the grinding pressure to pay my way in the world. Above all, I would escape the strained demands of choice. I wouldn’t have to choose between life as a cop or a bohemian, a plumber or an artist. I wouldn’t have to choose between art school or an early marriage and the baby carriage in the hallway.
In addition, there was the truant spirit of romance. I would be going from the known to the unknown, the safe to the dangerous. Alone at night, I saw myself on a cruiser, rocking in deep blue water as the heavy guns fired salvos at the dark Korean coast. I saw myself moving through radiant tropical ports with palm trees blowing in the wind and bars full of dark abundant women like Gloria Vasquez, with brown nipples and black hair. I thought about visiting all the ports where my grandfather had gone, drinking in his bars, and then, dressed in navy whites, tougher and older, walking into the sunlight and seeing Laura. She would stop and squint and say, Is that you? And I’d look at her in a bitter Bogart way and say, Not anymore, and turn to take Gloria Vasquez by the hand.