PRAISE FOR A DRINKING LIFE
“In straightforward candor, with unflinching staccato, Hamill
shows us that his fate was sealed from the moment of his
birth.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Pete Hamill has a story to tell, a good one, and doesn’t
waste a word doing it.”
—Elmore Leonard
“Pete Hamill’s thirty years of writing come to fruition in A
Drinking Life. It is constructed seamlessly, with the pacing
and eye for telling detail learned as a novelist and the hard,
spare prose of a fine journalist.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A Drinking Life is much more than the story of Pete Hamill
and the bottle. It’s also a classic American tale of a young
person’s struggle to expand his horizons without doing
violence to his personal identity.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“This vibrantly written memoir is as much a recollection of
Hamill’s Brooklyn childhood and his coming of age as a
writer as it is the story of his alcohol abuse…. He’s written
this book—and lived his life — with gusto and grace, and
without apology.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“It’s hard to change a family culture in one generation, and
it’s even harder to find a writer who can take us along on
this journey. In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill does both. For
any men trying to become the fathers they never had, and
all readers pioneering in new emotional territory, this book
is a gift of honesty, courage — and very good writing.”
—Gloria Steinem
“A Drinking Life is a vivid report of a journey to the edge of
self-destruction. It is tough-minded, brimming with energy
and unflinchingly honest. Mr. Hamill may lament what drink
did to his memories, but to judge from this account he
never lost the best of them.”
—New York Times
“From a vantage point of two decades later, Hamill has
written not a moralistic confession but a joyously honest
testament to the drinking life, to its rewards no less than to
its costs, which finally became too high.”
—New York Sunday Newsday
“This is an honest, thoughtful, richly detailed memoir… that
belongs on the same shelf with Jack London’s John
Barleycorn.”
— E. L. Doctorow
“A Drinking Life is Pete Hamill at the top of his game,
which puts him way up there with the best we have. If Scott
Fitzgerald had been able to read it sixty years ago, who
knows, we might have had half-a-dozen more Gatsbys and
Tender Is the Nights. Meanwhile, let’s count our blessings
with A Drinking Life.”
—Budd Schulberg
“Sad but never maudlin, tender but unsentimental, hard-
bitten yet revealing, A Drinking Life is an unblinking look
back at a life molded by a time and place that no longer
exist. Hamill’s re-creation of New York of the ’30, ’40s, and
’50s is bracingly evocative. A pleasure to read.”
—Hartford Courant
“An affectionate, accurate appraisal of a period — the ’40s
and ’50s—when taverns were to working people what
country clubs and health joints have become to so many
today. It’s about growing up and growing old, working and
trying to work, within the culture of drink.”
—Mike Barnicle in, the Boston Sunday Globe
“I felt at times during this book that I was reading my own
story, and so will many others. This is not just about Pete
Hamill’s seduction by booze but about a tragic condition….
Hamill’s book joins a new literature that eloquently shows a
‘drinking life’ isn’t the way to a writing life, or to any life at
all.”
—Dan Wakefield in The Nation
“Hamill has written an extraordinary and intimate reflection
on the roots of his character and his conscience and his
imagination, and Pete Hamill being who he is, that is
consequential reading.”
—Pete Dexter
“Hamill consistently defies the squeamish objectivity of
American journalism by writing explicitly about what he
feels. And he does it not in the detached manner of a
professional observer, but in his own strong, plainspoken
voice.”
— Utne Reader
“Pete Hamill has made a fine career of covering the news,
but his own story is probably as remarkable as any other
he’s written. A Drinking Life is startling in its candor, detail,
and insight.”
— Carl Hiassen
“An astonishing achievement. I can’t recall reading
anyone’s memories of the earliest years of life that pulled
me into them more forcefully and convincingly than Pete
Hamill’s. His choice of the particular incident, the precise
moment, the exact feeling, illuminates so much about the
time and place and people of his childhood and later years
that it is breathtaking. He has written a beautiful book.”
—Joan Ganz Cooney
“Hamill re-creates a time extinct, a Brooklyn of trolley cars,
Dodgers, pails of beer, and pals like No Toes Nocera. This
is not a jeremiad condemning drink but a thoughtful, funny,
street-smart reflection on its consequences.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This moving memoir of a working-class kid coming of age
simply demonstrates once again that Pete Hamill is in the
first rank of American writers. It should be mandatory
reading for every man (and woman), young or old.”
—Peter Maas
“The vivid and ultimately exhilarating account of the
conquest of a dread affliction by a first-class writer.”
—Louis Auchincloss
“In creating this frank, often unflattering record of his
personal struggles, Hamill has gone beyond simply
remembering. He has also bestowed a form of immortality
upon a neighborhood that now exists only in memory,
dissolved by drugs, poverty, and suburban exoduses. With
straightforward, two-fisted prose that is rarely maudlin,
Hamill both honors and transcends his past.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Pete Hamill… evokes a New York that exists today only in
memory. Read it and you feel the asphalt sticking to your
shoes in a summer stickball game and the cooling shower
of an open fire hydrant, remember the disappointment of
options foreclosed by a cruel economic determinism, taste
the blessed booze that loosens the tongue and fuels the
braggadocio that seems to offer the only escape from life’s
pitiless demands. Pete Hamill did escape, his virtue… lost,
but his humor intact, and the result is a memoir as sad and
brash and funny and compelling as the city he loves.”
—John Gregory Dunne
“The story is compelling; the writing is lean. Hamill the man
catches Hamill the aimless adolescent with powerful prose
that arrives in short, powerful bursts. He can say in a
paragraph what some writers—even good ones—can’t in
less than a chapter.”
—American Journalism Review
Books by Pete Hamill
NOVELS
A Killing for Christ
The Gift
Dirty Laundry
Flesh and Blood
The Deadly Piece
The Guns of Heaven
Loving Women
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
The Invisible City
Tokyo Sketches
JOURNALISM
Irrational Ravings
Copyright © 1994 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of
1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or
retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition
ISBN: 978-0-316-05453-9
The “Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company” name and logo are
trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
I: DURING THE WAR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
II: AFTER THE WAR
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
III: BREAKING OUT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
IV: TO THE GATES OF EDEN
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
V: A DRINKING LIFE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
VI: DRY
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
For my sister, Kathleen
MOST of the people who helped make this book possible
are mentioned in its pages; they also made my life
possible. But in addition I would like to thank Bill Phillips of
Little, Brown for his endless patience and superb editing;
Lynn Nesbit, for helping make the book happen; my
daughters, Adriene and Deirdre, for allowing me to invade
their privacy; my secretary, Meri McCall, for holding off the
demands of the world with good humor; and, of course, my
wife, Fukiko Aoki, for reasons that are beyond listing.
— P.H.
INTRODUCTION
THIS IS A BOOK about my time in the drinking life. It tells the
story of the way one human being became aware of
alcohol, embraced it, struggled with it, was hurt by it, and
finally left it behind. The tale has no hero.
The culture of drink endures because it offers so many
rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain,
solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the
elusive promises of friendship and love. From almost the
beginning of awareness, drinking was a part of my life;
there is no way that I could tell the story of the drinking
without telling the story of the life. Much of that story was
wonderful. In the snug darkness of saloons, I learned much
about being human and about mastering a craft. I had, as
they say, a million laughs. But those grand times also
caused great moral, physical, or psychological damage to
myself and others. Some of that harm was probably
permanent. There is little to be done now but take
responsibility. No man’s past can be changed; it’s a fact,
like red hair.
More than twenty years have gone by since I stopped
drinking. My father died at eighty; my mother lives on. I’m
happily married to a wonderful woman and work even
harder than I did when young. But life doesn’t get easier
when you walk away from the culture of drink; you simply
live it with greater lucidity.
I started writing this book when some of my friends from
the drinking life began to die. They were decent, talented,
generous, and humane. But as they approached the end,
physically ruined by decades of drinking, I remembered
more of their good times than they did. In a way, this book
is about them too.
New York City
December 1993
I
DURING THE WAR
Little enough I know of your
struggle,
although you come to me more
and more,
free of that heavy body armour
you tried to dissolve with
alcohol,
a pale face staring in dream
light
like a fish’s belly
upward to life.
— John Montague,“Stele
for a Northern
Republican”
1
AT THE BEGINNING of my remembering, I am four years old
and we are living on the top floor of a brick building on a
leafy street in Brooklyn, a half block from Prospect Park.
Before that place and that age, there is nothing. But in
those remembered rooms are my mother, my younger
brother Tommy, and me. It is the winter of 1939. I
remember the kitchen, with its intricately patterned blue-
and-red linoleum floors, and windows that opened into a
garden where an elm tree rose higher than the house. The
kitchen light was beautiful: suffused with a lemony green in
summer, dazzling when winter snow garnished the limbs of
the elm tree. I remember the smell of pine when my mother
mopped the floors. I remember her whistling when she was
happy, which was most of the time. I remember how tall she
seemed then, and how shiny her brown hair was after she
had washed it in the sink. And I remember my brother
Tommy, two years younger than I, small and curly-haired
and gentle. I don’t remember my father.
He was there, all right. Billy Hamill wasn’t one of those
Depression fathers who went for a loaf of bread at the
corner store and never came back. He moved through
those rooms. He slept in one of the beds. He shaved in the
bathroom and bathed in the tub. But for me, he wasn’t
there. In some ways, it made no difference. On summer
afternoons, I would sit outside the house, in a patch of earth
near the curb, playing with a small red fire engine, telling
myself stories.
Perhaps my father was in those stories. But he didn’t
take me on those long green walks through the endless
meadows and dark woods of Prospect Park. My mother
did. Nor did he take me to see my first movie. My mother
did that too. It was The Wizard of Oz, and the streets were
dark when we came out of the Sanders Theater and she
took my hand and we skipped home together, singing Off
to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, because
because because because Because. I have no memory of
him bouncing me on his knee or looking at the drawings I
made each day with my box of eight Crayolas. I remember
sitting on the stoop, watching Japanese beetles gnaw the
ivy that covered the face of the brownstone next door and
my mother teaching me a little song to be crooned to
another insect neighbor: Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away
home. Your house is on fire, your child is alone…. But I
learned no songs from my father. Not then.
In large part, my father’s absence was caused by his
work. He left home before I awoke and returned after I was
asleep. So in some ways, I didn’t really miss him. He wasn’t
in my presence often enough to be physically missed.
Besides, I was too busy learning the names of the world
and even having small adventures. Once I went to Prospect
Park with Billy Kelly, the boy who lived on the first floor. He
was my first friend, a year older than I was, and his family
owned 471 Fourteenth Street, the house where we lived on
the top floor. Our adventure began in a very simple way.
Billy said, Let’s go to the park. And I said, Okay, let’s go to
the park.
And yet I knew that what we were doing was full of risk.
Most important of all, it was the first time I’d ever gone
anywhere without my mother and this act could lead to
punishment. She might get cross. She might spank me. I
went anyway, trusting Billy Kelly, certain we would be back
before my mother noticed I was gone. I crossed the wide
avenue called Prospect Park West, following the vastly
more experienced Billy, watching for the trolley cars and the
few big boxy black automobiles that moved through the
streets in those days. We plunged into the park and
wandered through that green world whose trees loomed
high above us. Soon we were lost. We crossed streams,
gazed at lakes, threw stones into the woods, but never
could find the familiar playground and low stone wall
beyond which lay home. I was filled with panic. I might never
see my mother again or my brother Tommy or the kitchen at
471. We could end up in jail or someplace called the
Orphanage, where they put kids without parents.
We were still in the park at dusk, when my mother found
us. Her eyes were wide and angry, probably frantic. She
did nothing to Billy Kelly; that was not her right. But she
spanked me.
I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Peter, she said
sharply. You had me worried sick.
I cried all the way home, full of remorse, and shocked too,
because I had never before seen my mother angry,
certainly not at me. And then we were at the house, going
up the stoop in silence and into the vestibule and up the
stairs to the top floor. Then, suddenly, quietly, she hugged
me. And fed me. And put me to bed. The day had been the
most turbulent of my short life; but from beginning to end,
my father played no part in it at all.
In the summer of 1940, my mother started taking Tommy
and me to visit my father where he worked.
You should be very proud of your daddy, my mother said.
He only finished the eighth grade and he is working as a
clerk. The reason is his beautiful handwriting.
She didn’t explain what a clerk was, but she did show me
his handwriting on some sheets of ruled paper. I was just
learning to print the alphabet on the same kind of paper,
and the shape and steadiness of my father’s handwriting
did seem very beautiful. He was working at the main office
of a Brooklyn grocery chain called Thomas Roulston &
Sons and brought home nineteen dollars a week. The
Roulston company was housed in a redbrick factory
building near the Gowanus Canal, more than a mile from
where we lived. My mother would pack a lunch for him and
put Tommy in a stroller and off we would go, first crossing
along the parkside, then marching block after block, down
the great slope. From Ninth Street, I could see all the way to
the harbor, where there were ships on the water as small as
toys. I loved arriving down near the canal, where the Smith
and Ninth Street station of the Independent subway line
rose high above us on a concrete trestle. On some days, a
drawbridge would groan and squeal, rising slowly to allow
some tough squat tugboat to plow through the canal’s oily
waters to the harbor. There was a mountain of coal on one
of the banks and a machine for unloading it off barges and
another for putting it on thin-wheeled trucks with odd sloped
fronts like the points of steam irons. I’d wait beside the
bridge with Tommy while my mother took her plump brown
paper bag up to my father’s office. He never once came
down to the street to say hello to us.
But I do remember him sitting in the kitchen one bright
Sunday afternoon in May. Suddenly among us there was a
fat blond baby in a tiny crib. A white cake lay on the table
and my father was there, bigger than he’d ever seemed
before. He was celebrating his own birthday and the birth of
my sister, Kathleen.
Through the door that afternoon came Uncle Tommy,
gruff, friendly, my father’s brother, and his wife, Aunt Louie,
followed by another brother named Uncle David, tall and
lean and grave, and his wife, Aunt Nellie, who was chubby
and large and laughed a lot. Behind them came other men,
great huge men with sour smells clinging to their jackets
and enormous feet encased in shiny leather. They all wore
hats and smoked cigarettes and laughed very loudly and
drank beer from tall glasses and giant brown bottles. After
a while, one of them began to sing, a sad mournful song.
When he was finished my father rose and started singing
too. His song was funny. His eyes danced, he smiled, he
gestured with his hands to emphasize a point, used his
eyebrows for other points, and when he was finished they
all cheered. The baby cried. My mother picked her up and
went into the other room while my father filled his glass with
beer, took a long drink and started into another song. For a
long time, I sat on the floor near the window, watching this
magic show.
2
IN THE FALL, I started kindergarten at PS 107, down on the
corner. We played with blocks. We learned songs. We
made paintings and cutouts. Then it was winter. Great piles
of snow filled the schoolyard for weeks and once on a class
trip to the park I took a great mound of pure fresh-fallen
snow in my mittens and began to eat it. I didn’t know exactly
why; the snow was just so clean and white that I wanted it
inside me. But the other kids laughed. I was mortified by
their laughter and wanted to run home, but the teacher said,
It’s all right, young man; if you want to eat snow, there’s no
rule against it.
My mother had friends on the street: Mrs. Hogan directly
across the street, Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Cottingham, who lived
near the corner across from the schoolyard. Now I had
another friend: a beautiful girl named Roberta Perrin, who
had dark hair and lustrous eyes and inspired in me some
vague desire; her mother and mine were also friends.
Roberta was in my class at kindergarten, and I liked being
with her more than with my friend Billy Kelly, who was now
in first grade. After school, I found my way to her areaway,
which was always dark under great thick-trunked trees, and
we played together. When I ate snow, she didn’t laugh.
There was a grocery store on the corner, run by Syrians, but
my mother didn’t shop there; she went to a Roulston’s
branch a block away, loyal, as always, to my father. Except
for those long journeys down to the canal, the world was a
very small place.
Just before Christmas that year, we woke to the sight of
a tree with shiny colored bulbs and tinfoil decorations my
mother made from the lining of cigarette packs. We had no
blinking lights. There must have been Christmas trees in
our house before then, but I don’t remember them. This was
a special Christmas. I was given some toys, some candy
canes, and a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses, by
Robert Louis Stevenson. My mother read from it to me,
over and over, showing me the letters and the words. Then
it was summer again and we were taking our long journeys
to the Gowanus Canal. Now Tommy was walking and
Kathleen was in the carriage. My father still didn’t come
down to see us. One sunny day I asked why.
Oh, he’d love to come down, my mother said. But the
stairs are too hard on him. He works all the way up there.
She pointed to the top floor of the six-story building.
Then why can’t we go up and see him? I said.
Because they don’t let kids in the building.
Why?
Well, there must be two hundred men working for
Roulston’s. If every man had three kids visit him at
lunchtime, there’d be a riot in there.
She laughed, told us she wouldn’t be long, and hurried
into the building. I stared at the top floor, wishing my father
would come to a window and wave at us. He never did.
In the fall of 1941, I entered the first grade at Holy Name
of Jesus elementary school. My mother took me by the
hand to the schoolyard and then went away. A white brick
school building rose like a fortress before me, three severe
stories off the ground. At a right angle to the school was the
back of the church, its bricks painted the color of dried
blood. Those walls and the wire fence blocked any
possibility of escape, and I was swiftly trapped in a wild sea
of strangers. There were seventy-two boys in 1A that year,
and a tall nun with creamy skin struggled to tame us. This
was no easy task. On the first day, one frantic lank-haired
boy danced on top of a desk. Others shouted
encouragement, squealed in delight, whined, thumped
each other, and slammed the desktops. I sat there, wishing
I was home, alone on the stoop watching Japanese beetles
or staring out the window into the safe stillness of the green
garden. Somehow I got through the day. I was assigned a
desk. I started writing letters of the alphabet in a
composition book with a black-and-white cover. The boys
calmed down. Sister asserted her command.
A few weeks later, there was great excitement
everywhere: car horns blowing, bells ringing in a hundred
church steeples, sirens screaming from firehouses. The
Dodgers had won the pennant! I wasn’t sure what a
pennant was, but it must have been a glorious thing to win,
for we were given the day off from school and my mother
took us on another long walk, to Grand Army Plaza. There
we stood, among thousands of joyful strangers, on the new
steps of the gleaming white Brooklyn Public Library and
watched the Dodgers parade in triumph up Flatbush
Avenue on their way to Ebbets Field. The ball players were
huge tanned men with great smiles and enormous arms,
sitting on the backs of convertibles, waving at us all. That
night my father came home with two large bottles of beer
and sitting alone in the kitchen (because my mother knew
nothing of baseball) he celebrated the great triumph while
listening to reports on the radio.
Just remember one thing, McGee, he said to me, in a
grave voice. The Dodgers are the greatest thing on earth.
In school the next day, I told some of the other boys that
the Dodgers were the greatest thing on earth. They all
agreed with this, of course, and so did Sister, who had us
pray for the Dodgers as they moved on to the World Series
against the Yankees. But then a Dodger catcher named
Mickey Owen dropped a third strike, the Yankees won the
World Series, and we all had to wonder if God was a
Yankee fan. That couldn’t be possible. God was a Catholic,
wasn’t he? And since the Dodgers were from Brooklyn,
they must be Catholics too. Or so we thought.
As young as we were, we were learning fast that year
about the presence of calamity in the world. The Dodgers
were only the beginning. On December 7, the Japanese
attacked Pearl Harbor. I have no clear memory of that
Sunday or of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech on the
following day. But I can still see my mother in the kitchen a
few weeks later, cooking dinner and listening to music on
the radio. Then an announcer interrupted to describe
through veils of static the fall of Manila. He was telling us
about explosions and gunfire and Japanese soldiers
coming up the street when the broadcast abruptly stopped
and another announcer, free of static, spoke softly about
the war and this defeat. Suddenly, my mother was crying.
Those poor boys, she said, and hugged me. Those poor
boys….
She then explained to me that we were at war. I started to
cry too. Not because of the war or the poor boys in Manila,
wherever that was (the name itself provoked only an image
of vanilla ice cream). I cried because I had never seen my
mother cry before and I didn’t like it. I could cry. Tommy
could cry. Baby Kathleen could cry. We were kids. My
mother wasn’t supposed to cry.
That night, when my father came home, he bumped into
something and woke me up. I got up and tiptoed toward the
kitchen, stopping in the dark of the next room. His face
looked different, his jaw hanging loose, his slick black hair
disheveled and wild. He sat down hard at the table and
knocked over a glass of beer. My mother was no longer
crying but she was what we kids called “cross.”
Ach, Billy, she said, and started wiping up the beer with a
dishcloth.
Don’t say a thing! he said sharply. Just get me my bloody
dinner.
She turned away and I thought she was going to cry
again. Then he saw me.
What the hell are you looking at? he said to me. Get into
bed.
Billy —
I saw how upset she was and I started to whimper.
You’ve got damn all to cry about! he said.
Leave him alone! she said. You’re upsetting him! And
you’ll wake the baby.
He ignored her and pointed a finger at me.
Into bed! he said. Make it snappy!
I retreated into the darkness of the second room from the
kitchen, and lay facedown on a bed beside Tommy and
listened. I heard his voice, blurting and hard; then her voice;
then his again; then silence. I heard water running and
dishes clacking sharply against each other. Then silence
again. I stated back toward the kitchen. My mother was at
the sink. My father’s arm was straight out across the table,
his head resting on it, a fork still in his hand, though his
plate was gone. He was asleep.
3
IN SCHOOL that first year, I learned two things that began to
give me some sense of self. One, I was Irish. At school,
kids kept asking: What are you? I thought I was American,
but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what
you were, you answered with a nationality other than your
own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a
group called “Irish.” There were other Irish in 1A, a lot of
them, along with Italians and Germans and Poles. But
because my name wasn’t obviously Irish, like Kelly or
Murphy or O’Connor, they kept on asking me. My mother
had to explain it all to me.
She started with a book. For months, she had been
buying an encyclopedia called the Wonderland of
Knowledge, known to us simply as the Blue Books. Every
week there was a coupon in the New York Post; for the
coupon and a dime the newspaper sent us a volume. We
would soon have them all, and they truly were wonderful. My
mother found the right volume and turned to some maps
and showed me where Ireland was: a tiny spot off the coast
of a huge multicolored mass called Europe. Then she tried
to explain what it meant to be Irish.
I can’t remember her exact words. But she had a strong
sense of history and injustice, so I’m sure she told me that
day (as she told me in so many ways in the years to come)
that Ireland had been an independent country for more than
a thousand years and then, about eight hundred years ago,
the British had come with swords, horses, and treachery to
take it for themselves. They destroyed the language of the
Irish and made them speak English. They tried to destroy
their religion too, particularly during the reign of the wicked
Queen Elizabeth. But the Irish kept fighting, kept resisting,
almost always losing, but struggling on, until in 1916, they
rose in rebellion on Easter Sunday and drove the English
out. Or at least drove them out of twenty-six of the nation’s
thirty-two counties. The way she told it, the story was
thrilling.
What happened to the other counties? I asked.
They’re still occupied by the British, she said. They kept
six of them: the counties where our people are from. My
parents, Daddy’s parents. And there’ll be no peace until
they’re free. Someday they’ll finish the job they started in
1916.
She told me that 1916 was also the year her father died.
His name was Peter Devlin and he was a seaman. He fell
off a ship in a dry dock in Brooklyn and was crushed. So my
mother, who was a little girl in 1916, went back to Ireland
with her mother and her brother, Maurice. They lived there
until 1929, when her mother died and she decided it was
time to come back to America.
Those two dates always make me sad, she said, 1916
and 1929.
The room seemed to fill with sorrow as she tried, so
carefully, to explain herself to me. Her mother and father
were dead and she had come alone across that great
expanse of blue on the map to live here in Brooklyn. I was
happy she was here; who else could be my mother? But I
felt sorry that she had no mother or father of her own. That
was unfair. She had nobody except us. Even her brother,
Uncle Maurice, was in Ireland, far across the ocean.
And where did you live in Ireland?
In Belfast, she said. Right here, see that dot?
She paused and her voice grew soft.
We lived on Madrid Street, she said. It was named after
a city in Spain.
She showed me Madrid on the map, and I thought it was
a wonderful thing to live on a street with a name like Madrid
instead of a mere number, like ours. But she was unhappy
as she told me about Belfast (on that day, and many
others). The city was divided between Catholics like us and
Protestants, who were a different kind of Christian. And
though she knew some decent Protestants, in Belfast most
of them were bigots. She was a little girl in Belfast when the
Troubles started and the bigots formed into the Murder
Gang and came into the Catholic neighborhoods to burn
down houses and kill Catholics. The British army was there
too, with armored cars and machine guns, terrible men who
hated the Irish and hated the Catholics. All of that was in
Belfast, where the bigots ran everything.
This was at once scary and thrilling, and I made her tell
me the stories many times. I couldn’t imagine myself on
streets where gunmen shot rifles from the shadows, where
soldiers came rolling upon you in iron trucks, where you
could be beaten or killed because you were a Catholic. But
my mother seemed to me to be an amazing woman,
someone who had seen things when she was a little girl
that were more terrible than any movie. And here she was.
Smiling. Whistling when she was happy. Telling me that she
loved America for its freedom.
Freedom is a lot more important than money, she said.
Remember that. Here we’re free. And you must never ever
be a bigot.
What is a bigot anyway?
A bigot is a hater, she said. A bigot hates Catholics. A
bigot hates Jews. A bigot hates colored people. It’s no sin
to be poor, she said. It is a sin to be a bigot. Don’t ever be
one of them.
No, Mommy, I said. I won’t be one of them.
And imagined a bigot with yellow eyes and a tall black
hat and fangs for teeth. I said I would watch for them and if a
bigot came to our street I would tell her and she could use
the telephone in Mr. Kelly’s kitchen and call the police.
After I learned that I was Irish, I came to understand another
big thing: my father was a cripple. That’s what the kids in
1A said. He is not, I said (not knowing what they meant,
thinking perhaps that it was something like being a bigot).
He is too, they said. He’s a cripple.
Yes, my mother said, he is a cripple. He lost his left leg in
1927. He was a soccer player. That’s a game they play in
Ireland, with a round ball that they kick. They also play it out
in Bay Ridge, another part of Brooklyn, and in a lot of other
countries. She took a tobacco-colored photograph from a
drawer and showed it to me. My father was sitting with
other members of a team, all of them wearing short pants.
See, she said. He has two legs in this picture. But he only
has one leg now.
She explained how he had to wear a wooden leg. He had
a stump above the knee that fit into the wooden leg and
straps that went over his shoulders to hold it in place. That
was why the stairs at Roulston’s were hard on him. I hadn’t
known that. She told me more, about how he was playing
soccer one Sunday, here in America, in Brooklyn, in Bay
Ridge, and he was kicked very hard and his leg was
broken and they left him on the sidelines while they waited
for an ambulance. It was a long wait. When the ambulance
finally came, it took him away to Kings County Hospital, but
there were no doctors to treat him and by the next day
gangrene had set in and they had to cut off his leg.
How did they do that?
With a saw, she said. They had to do it to save his life.
You mean he almost died?
That’s what they said.
So that’s what they meant in 1A when they said my father
was a cripple. He only had one leg. Why did they yell that at
me? It wasn’t bis fault. The ambulance was late. There were
no doctors at the hospital. And besides, he had a wooden
leg. You could look at him and not know the difference. And
being a cripple wasn’t as bad as being a bigot. It wasn’t
bad at all.
That’s the way I reasoned to myself, but I’m sure I said
nothing to the kids at school. After a while, boredom must
have set in, and they stopped tormenting me about my
father’s leg. But I looked more closely at my father after that
and asked to see again the picture of him in his football
uniform with two legs sticking out of his shorts. Sometimes
when it was dark, the word “gangrene” would seep through
me, and I would see my father in a hospital bed, turning
green. His skin was green and rotting and his eyes were
green and his hands were green and there was a man at
the door with a saw.
4
THAT WINTER, after the war started in the Pacific, we moved
out of 471, leaving behind the elm tree, Roberta Perrin, and
the ivied walls next door. The Kellys had six children of their
own, and after Kathleen was born there were simply too
many kids for one three-story house. Mrs. Kelly wanted the
rooms for a nice mild bachelor. Without warning, we
packed everything into cardboard boxes and moved to the
first floor right at 435 Thirteenth Street. The colors of the
world instantly changed.
The new house was only one block away but it butted up
against the dirty redbrick bulk of the old Ansonia Clock
Factory, built in 1879 and for a while the largest industrial
building in New York. The dark blue shadow of the Factory
(as everyone called it) fell upon the stoop and across the
backyard. Nothing grew in that bald, forlorn yard; it was
made of tightly packed orange clay that cleaved as neatly
as ice cream when you drove a shovel into it. To get to the
backyard, we could climb out the kitchen window, or go
down into a damp cellar and up a flight of slippery stone
stairs. Usually we went out the window. Once, I planted
watermelon seeds in the orange clay and was astonished
when a tiny green plant shot up a few days later. The plant
didn’t last; everything withered in the hostile clay and
permanent darkness of that yard. It looked beautiful only
when packed with fresh snow.
There were some advantages, of course. The rooms
were larger and wider. More important, the apartment was
on the first floor and my father did not have to haul his
wooden leg up flights of stairs one step at a time. And the
rent was twenty-six dollars a month, including steam heat.
Within days, I knew that life would now be different, and
the principal reason was small, glossy-backed, and dark
brown: the cockroach. I saw them moving along the hot
water pipes, scurrying in corners of the kitchen, darting
around the tin breadbox, rising from the drain in the bathtub,
hiding in nests under the edge of the linoleum. They were
everywhere. At night, I was afraid to sleep, certain that one
of them would enter my ears and begin gnawing at my
brain. We hit them with newspapers, stomped them, threw
shoes at them. We learned what millions of New Yorkers
learned: cockroaches were invincible.
Within months, we were settled. I convinced my mother
that I could make my way to Holy Name without her beside
me (fearful, as were all the others, of being called a
momma’s boy). But the first few times I walked past our old
house at 471 Fourteenth Street, looking up as I passed our
stoop, walking under the familiar leafy canopy of our trees,
seeing Mrs. Hogan or Mrs. Fox or Mrs. Cottingham, seeing
Roberta Perrin with new friends, hurrying through that place
that was once the center of my existence, the essence of
my dailiness, then reaching the corner and turning right
under the marquee of the Sanders, I was filled with a
chaotic sadness. I couldn’t name what I felt. But for the first
time, I sensed that there was such a thing as the past.
So I changed my route, using Fifteenth Street, where
great boxy trolley cars rattled on steel tracks in two
directions and the neighborhood’s only black man worked
as a super in a large apartment house on the corner. There
were no trees here either, but that street had one virtue: it
did not make me sad.
In the roachy new house on Thirteenth Street, there were
some compensations. I discovered that a boy from my
class lived on the top floor. His name was Ronnie Zellins.
He was my first friend on the new street. I did homework
with him and went to the park with him and his mother, who
seemed to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
Best of all, Ronnie Zellins introduced me to comic books.
He had a collection but he couldn’t read them yet, so he just
followed the pictures. I could read them from the very
beginning, explaining to him what was in the balloons and
how the words helped make the pictures more exciting.
When it was cold, we sat in the vestibule just inside the
door, reading book after book and then reading them
again. Other kids had collections too and would come to
the door and shout: Wanna trade? And then we would go
through an elaborate process, the most refined bargain
being a decision to trade two ten-cent comics without
covers for one copy of World’s Finest, which was thicker
than the others and cost fifteen cents.
In the spring and summer, we were out on the stoop,
which had only three deep slablike steps (unlike the
narrower steps of the high stoop on Fourteenth Street). We
played card games. We fiddled with some kind of
punchboard that you pushed with a wooden match to find
tiny printed messages on compacted paper. We went roller
skating. The girls skipped rope or played potsy, and
sometimes we joined them. Other times, Ronnie and I and
my brother Tommy wandered down the street to look at the
Alley, a wide noisy cobblestoned warren of ancient trucks
and escaping steam and iron-barred windows. The Alley
ran from Thirteenth Street to Twelfth Street, splitting the
Factory into two unequal sections, and in the years of the
war, it seemed always jammed with men at work. I would
stand at the Thirteenth Street end, sometimes with Ronnie
Zellins, sometimes alone, and stare into the sweaty
turbulence. My mother told me to stay out of the Alley
because I might get hurt, and I knew that disobedience was
a sin. But after many months, I found the courage to dash
through to the other side. When I confessed this to a priest
in the confessional box at Holy Name, I was sure I heard
him laugh.
Now too I started to see more of my father. After we
moved, he left Roulston’s and took a job with the Arma
Corporation in a place called Bush Terminal. The leg, his
age, and his family combined to keep him out of the war,
but he was doing war work anyway. He started working
nights, earning the unbelievable salary of eighty dollars a
week, four times what he made as a clerk. But because he
was there through the night, my mother couldn’t bring him
lunch anymore; she packed it into a black metal lunchbox
that contained a thermos for tea or soup. I loved staring into
the thermos, where glass seemed laid upon glass, layer
upon fluid layer, in an impossibly perfect form.
My father slept during the days, so we had to be quiet in
the afternoons. I didn’t mind. He was helping the war effort.
More important, he was there. I could see him, feel his
rough beard, stare at the wooden leg. He never stripped his
trousers from the leg; it stood in a corner beside the bed,
with the tops of his trousers stuffed into the socket. Most
days, he would rise late in the afternoon, pull on the leg,
shave and dress, eat quickly, listening to the radio, smoke
some Camels, drink a few cups of tea with milk and sugar,
and then go out to the stoop, where some other men would
pick him up in a car. He seemed to have two faces then:
one long, the other round. He wore the long face when he
woke up with his hair all black and spiky and wild. Then
after he came out of the bathroom, his hair was tightly
combed to his skull and his face was suddenly round. He
shaved with a small heavy razor and used a bristle brush
and a mug. Sometimes after he left for work I would use the
brush to foam up the soapy block in the mug and cover my
face with lather and try to scare my brother Tommy. He
always laughed.
On Sundays, after I came home from the nine o’clock
Mass at Holy Name, my father was usually in the bathtub.
He was a man of routine. Bathed and shaved, he would go
into a bedroom and return all dressed up. We had no
washing machine, and the first launderettes didn’t open
until after the war. So while my mother washed his work
clothes by hand, or prepared his breakfast, he would look
at the sports pages of the Daily News. He ate breakfast
and talked to my mother. Sometimes there would be a pale
blue one-page onionskin letter from Ireland, slipped into the
mailbox on the second delivery on Saturday afternoon, after
he’d gone off to Arma, held for my father’s inspection on
Sunday morning. The letter was usually from his twin
brother, Frank, and my mother would read part of it aloud,
and he’d look at it carefully when she was through reading.
They were always happy to hear from Belfast and always a
bit anxious. After all, the Germans had bombed the Belfast
shipyards; they might come back and bomb civilians,
particularly on the Falls Road, where the Catholics lived.
Whenever a letter arrived on a weekday, my mother’s face
was a tight mask until she’d opened the envelope. On
Sundays, she wrote letters back to Ireland; for all the beauty
of his handwriting, I never saw my father write a letter.
After that late Sunday breakfast, after the talk, after the
reading of the Irish letter, my father would go out, down the
dark linoleum-covered hallway, into the street. He’d turn left
outside the areaway, and walk up the block, saying hello to
people. Sometimes I’d watch him from the stoop. He’d step
hard on the good right leg and swing the wooden left leg
behind him, and I thought that being a cripple wasn’t such a
terrible thing; he walked in his own special way, and that
made him different from the other men. Along the way, most
of the Sunday people smiled at him. He was off to Mass. Or
so he said.
And then one Sunday when I was almost eight, he said to
me, Come on, McGee. I walked with him up to the corner
and for the first time entered the tight, dark, amber-colored,
wool-smelling world of a saloon. This one was called
Gallagher’s.
In I went behind him, to stand among the stools and the
gigantic men, overwhelmed at first by the sour smell of
dried beer, then inhaling tobacco smells, the toilet smell,
the smell of men. The place had been a speakeasy during
Prohibition, and the men still entered through the back
door. There was a front entrance too, opening into a large
dim room with booths and tables; it was supposed to be a
restaurant, but the kitchen was dusty and dark and nobody
was ever there, except a few quiet women, who could not
get service in the barroom proper. In that room, the men
were jammed together at a high three-sided bar, talking,
smoking, singing, laughing, and drinking. They drank beer.
They drank whiskey. There was no television then, so they
made their own entertainments.
Hey, Billy, give us a song! someone yelled. And then he
started.
Mister Patrick McGinty,
An Irishman of note,
He fell into a fortune
And bought himself a goat.
A goat’s milk, said Paddy,
Of that I’ll have me fill,
But when he got the nanny
home
He found it was a bill….
Laughter and cheers and off he went, verse after verse,
even one about Hitler, added to help the war effort. Then
everyone in the bar joined him for the song’s final lines:
And we’ll leave the rest to
Providence —
And Paddy McGinty’s Goat!
They cheered and hooted and asked for another, and my
father raised his glass to his lips, beaming, delighted with
himself, took a long drink, and gave them what they wanted.
From where I was huddled against the wall, he was the star
of the place, ignoring the stools that the other men used,
standing almost defiantly with one hand on the lip of the bar
for balance, his face all curves, clearly the center of
attention. Even the portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
hanging in the dim light above the cash register, seemed to
approve.
This is where men go, I thought; this is what men do.
When he was finished, they bought him drinks and then
someone else began to sing and then Bing Crosby was
singing on the jukebox. One of my father’s friends slipped
me a nickel, another gave me a dime, and Dick the
Bartender, a mysterious shiny-faced fat man in a starched
collar, passed me some saltine crackers in cellophane and
a ginger ale with a cherry in it. Strangers rubbed my blond
head. They told me I was getting bigger. And then my rather
said, Go on now, go along home.
5
I WAS ALWAYS GLAD to leave Gallagher’s. I loved seeing my
father in his special place, but I hated the sour smells of the
bar and the cigarette smoke. Besides, the coins in my
hands seemed to be burning. I had discovered money and
what you could do with it. Darting out the side door of
Gallagher’s, a fortune in my hand, I would go down three
steps and hurry across the street into Foppiano’s candy
store. The glass cases and boxes on the counter held
amazing treasures: hard caramels, Houton’s (small
chocolate bars that were sweeter and cheaper than the
products of Mr. Hershey), gummy Mexican sombreros,
chocolate-dipped twists of nougat, strips of paper with
small dots of candy stuck to them, Black Crows and Dots,
Clark bars and Sky Bars, Kits and Jelly Royals, Mary Janes
and Winter Greens. I would buy what I wanted, and then go
down the block, looking for my brother Tommy so we could
share the sweet treasures.
But after the first great rush of chocolate days, when I
was gorged on this junk (my body suddenly light and my
blood tingling), I began to spend my fortune on more
substantial treasures: comic books. Comics I could own,
instead of borrowing from Ronnie Zellins. Comics I could
read over and over again. Comics I could trade with others.
These were the first great wartime comic books, thick
plump sixty-four-page extravaganzas, all in color, for a
dime: Superman, Captain Marvel and Batman, the
Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. The heroes were all
masked or caped and far more powerful than any seven- or
eight-year-old could ever hope to be.
More important, many of their secret powers came from
laboratory accidents or the ingestion of secret formulas.
There was the Blue Beetle, with a scaly chain mail
costume, a thin black mask, and strength that came from
the amazing vitamin ZX. In Police Comics, there was
Plastic Man, the only superhero with a sense of humor, able
to shrink or elongate or compact himself into any shape,
thanks to his own secret formula. More baroque, muscular,
and explosive was the great Captain America. Cap’ (as he
was called) was really a mild fellow named Steve Rogers
who before the war was just another skinny 4F, like the guy
in the Charles Atlas ads on the back covers. Then he too
drank a secret serum. Within seconds, he was transformed
into a pile of muscles. The scientist who invented the serum
was then killed by Nazi agents, the formula lost forever. No
longer 4F, Rogers went into the army, designed his
Captain America costume, and teamed up with Bucky
Barnes, a teenager who was allowed to hang around the
army post. For most of the war, these two were in steady
pursuit of a ferocious Nazi saboteur named the Red Skull.
I was very worried about the Red Skull, who was always
blowing up factories like the one where my father worked
nights. One evening, I told my father to be careful when he
went to work because the Red Skull might be around,
lurking somewhere in the dark.
Who? he said. The red who?
The Red Skull.
What the hell are you talking about? he said.
I showed him a copy of Captain America. He laughed
out loud.
You idjit! he said. That’s a goddamned comic book!
I know, Daddy, but —
It’s not real, he said. It’s a lie.
I never showed him another comic book. Somehow, I
knew that he was right: they were all lies. If we had all these
caped people on our side, if we had all those secret
serums and magic formulas, the war could be ended in
about twenty minutes. But they were lies as irresistable as
candy or ice cream. They certainly couldn’t be the kinds of
lies that were called sins in the catechism I was studying at
Holy Name. To start with, they were patriotic lies. And I
wasn’t telling the lies. The stories of Cap’ and Bucky were
told by the men who wrote their names on the crowded,
bursting first pages of each episode: Joe Simon and Jack
Kirby. They must be the liars. Still, I couldn’t understand how
their lies could be bad, if they were on our side, just like Joe
Louis and God.
Until I learned the names of Simon and Kirby, around
1943, I didn’t know that men actually sat down to write and
draw comics. That knowledge would change my life. But
when we lived on Thirteenth Street, the content of the
comics was driving deep into me. They filled me with secret
and lurid narratives, a notion of the hero, a sense of the
existence of evil. They showed me the uses of the mask,
insisting that heroism was possible only when you
fashioned an elaborate disguise. Most important was the
lesson of the magic potion. The comics taught me, and
millions of other kids, that even the weakest human being
could take a drink and be magically transformed into
someone smarter, bigger, braver. All you needed was the
right drink.
Up at Holy Name, I went into the next grade, and the next,
and the ones after that; listened to Miss Doheny and then
Mrs. Hubbard and then Miss Smith, as they sketched the
contours of the world and supplied the platitudes by which I
must live: Birds of a feather flock together or Show me
your friends and I’ll tell you what you are. I learned to write
compositions and do arithmetic. But at night, when my
father was gone to work, I would lie in the dark and drive
away the fear of roaches and Nazis by imagining myself
mixing secret liquids in a glass beaker.
6
ONE DAY my mother took us to New York on the subway.
We came out in a place of immense buildings, and she
started walking in her rushed, breathless way, all the way to
the river. Here were the great piers for the ships I saw in the
harbor. There were soldiers with guns guarding the
entrances to the piers and high fences with barbed wire at
the top and warnings about staying out and not using
cameras. We could see giant cranes loading crates into
the ships, and shirtless men heaving on ropes, and men
with hooks in their belts showing passes to the soldiers.
Seagulls careened around the sky. Deep throaty horns
blew as one ship eased away from a pier out into the
flowing waters of the Hudson.
Did your father work here? I said.
I’m sure he did, my mother said. But he didn’t do this kind
of work. He was an engineer.
What is that?
He helped put in the refrigeration system, the air
conditioning, she said. He worked for United Fruit, you see,
and they had to keep the bananas from spoiling. That was
his job. He was an officer.
Was he in the First World War?
No, she said. He was killed during the war, but he wasn’t
in the war.
Then up ahead we saw a lot of people staring at
something we couldn’t see. There were sailors in leggings
holding rifles, Marines with .45s on their hips, New York
policemen, all keeping people back; I paused, wanting to
look at these men with guns, among the first I had seen in
life. My mother walked faster, and then we saw what the
crowd was looking at: the S.S. Normandie. The great
French liner was lying on its side, wedged into the mud
beneath the water, like a fat woman killed in a bathtub. The
hull was scorched and tendrils of smoke still leaked from
open portholes. I had never seen anything like it, even in the
comics.
That’s the Normandie, my mother said. She was a great
passenger ship before the war. A French ship. Then they
were converting her for troops and she went on fire.
Wow, I said.
Wow, Tommy said.
They think it was sabotage, she said.
Wow!
I don’t know how long we stayed there but it must have
been hours. All through the war, we would pester her to go
back. Let’s see the Normandie, Let’s go back to Pier 88
and see the Normandie. And she took us there again and
again, to gaze at the parched hull, more than a thousand
feet long, its giant propellers high out of the water. In my
memory, the ruined liner looks humiliated, like a drunk who
has fallen down in public. But at the time, the Normandie
represented something else to me: proof that not all the
tales in the comics were lies. Maybe the Red Skull didn’t do
the job, but somebody did.
7
ONE SUNDAY afternoon on Thirteenth Street, I looked up
from the stoop, where I was playing with Ronnie Zellins and
some other kids, and saw my father coming down the
street. There was another man with him, taller, holding my
father’s left elbow, while my father used his other hand to
grip the picket fences of the areaways. I got up and hurried
to him, certain he was hurt.
I looked up at him. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw
slack.
Daddy, I said, are you all right?
He looked at me as if I were a stranger.
Zallright, the other man said. Just drunk as a skunk.
They went past me, and turned into 435 and my father
wheeled, as if to fall. The other man grabbed him roughly
and held him up. But all the kids laughed. One of the other
kids was Brother Foppiano, the son of the owner of the
candy store.
Hey, hey, your old man’s drunk, he said, in a singsong
teasing voice.
Shut up, I said.
Your old man’s an Irish drunk! Your old man’s an Irish
drunk!
As my father and his friend disappeared into the hallway,
I had my first fight. I had never hit anyone before and had
never been hit. But I threw myself in a rage upon Brother
Foppiano. He hit me and hurt me and hit me again. My face
went numb. Blood spurted from my nose. And I turned in
tears and ran inside, full of shame. Behind me, everyone
was laughing. Even my friend, Ronnie Zellins.
My mother was out with Tommy and Kathleen, so I went
into the bathroom and saw the blood on my hands and shirt,
then watched it drip into the sink. I turned on the taps and
the water made the blood thin and pale, forming a rosy
whirlpool before vanishing down the drain. I held a cold
washcloth to my nose. The inside of my mouth was slippery
and sticky, and I lurched aside and threw up into the toilet
bowl, feeling as if my insides were coming out through my
mouth. The stench was disgusting. I looked at the water
pipes and saw cockroaches moving in steady lines, their
long hairy feelers out in front of them. I flushed the toilet and
closed the door behind me.
My father was facedown on a bed, his wooden leg
hanging off the bed in an awkward position. He smelled like
vomit too.
For a long time after the fight with Brother Foppiano, I didn’t
play with the other kids, not even Ronnie Zellins. I had cried
and run away from a fight, and that was a humiliation. So I
went to school, I came home, I passed them on the stoop
and retreated into homework, the Wonderland of
Knowledge, and my comics. No book revealed the
ingredients of any magic potion. I could not emerge from
my room in mask and cape to avenge myself upon Brother
Foppiano. I could not, like Billy Batson, the orphaned
newsboy, say the word Shazam! and be transformed into
Captain Marvel. My mother said nothing that I can
remember, but she must have known that something awful
had happened to me. Winter came. The yard filled with
snow, and I would stand at the window and gaze at the blue
shadows of the piled snow and the redbrick walls of the
Factory and remember the light and the trees of the lost
window on Fourteenth Street.
Around this time, I also started reading Big Little Books,
squat thick bricks of text and pictures that were sold at the
five-and-ten-cent stores. The text was on the left-hand
page, the illustrations on the right. Their heroes were
different from the great baroque four-color visions of Simon
and Kirby, or from Captain Marvel pursuing the mad
scientist Dr. Sivana. Here were Dick Tracy, Dan Dunn,
Tailspin Tommy, Smilin’ Jack, Don Winslow of the Navy, all
neatly contained in square black-and-white panels. They
were more mundane heroes, men without masks or capes
or occult powers, but I liked reading the text and glancing at
the pages to see if the drawings matched the images in my
mind. My mother looked at them and explained that these
were comics that first appeared in newspapers.
This is my favorite, she told me, pointing at a comic strip
across the top of a page in the Daily News. It was called
Terry and the Pirates. The drawing was beautiful, full of
realistic detail, oiled guns, perfect airplanes, skies or
mountains brushed in with great rich blacks. But the
balloons were dense with dialogue that I didn’t really
understand. Terry was definitely made for grown-ups. Still, I
was thrilled that my mother could also care for a comic
strip. She didn’t say, This is my favorite lie. And because of
her, I started looking at the newspaper comics.
One day I ran into Brother Foppiano again. He was nastier
now, because he had bloodied me and made me cry and
run. Your old man’s an Irish drunk, your old man … I
realized I was being watched by other kids, including my
former friend Ronnie Zellins, and I knew that this time I
couldn’t run. So I piled into Brother, frantic, afraid, but
determined not to cry, not to “give up.” He hit me and hit
me, but I held on to him, tripped him, fell upon him, hit him,
then felt his hard wiry arms lock around my neck. I
struggled. I jerked. But I couldn’t get free.
So I whispered the word: Shazam.
Nothing happened. Brother Foppiano tightened his grip
and I tightened mine on him.
We might be locked in that violent embrace to this day if
Ronnie Zellins’s beautiful mother hadn’t come along and
ordered us to stop. I watched Brother walk away, his green
striped shirt as dirty as mine. There was a sneer on his
face, but he didn’t say anything; he didn’t speak badly
about my father. I felt better for another reason: the
humiliation of public crying and loss was erased. Then
Ronnie Zellins came over to me.
Want to go down the Alley? he said.
No.
What about comics? Want to go trading?
No, I said. I don’t want to do anything with you.
One Sunday afternoon, a week after my second fight with
Brother Foppiano, my father ordered me out of Gallagher’s.
His face was loose and bleary again, the way it had been
the day I first saw him drunk. I imagined him leaving the
saloon, helped by one of the men, staggering down the
street to our house, and Brother Foppiano emerging from
hiding to start his cruel chant. I asked him to come home.
Maybe I whined. Maybe I was annoying. I know I was
holding on to his coat. He jerked the coat out of my grip,
looked down at me, and ordered me in a harsh voice to go
home to my mother. Hurt and angry, I ran outside.
But I didn’t go home. I went directly to Foppiano’s candy
store. I was desperate now, even willing to fight Brother
again to be sure that he wouldn’t see my father drunk. I
could punch him. I could tease him. Or I could talk to him,
argue with him, maybe even try to make friends with him. I
just didn’t want him to see my father being helped down the
block. But Brother wasn’t around, not behind the counter,
not in the back room. His father sat there, reading a
newspaper and smoking a cigarette. And with a sense of
relief, I looked at the comic book racks near the door. I had
read most of the new comics and was not interested in the
books about funny animals or high school girls. Then I found
the very first issue of Master Comics. I began to read the
story of Captain Marvel, Jr., and was lifted out of Brooklyn.
Hey, Mister Foppiano said, ya gonna read or ya gonna
buy?
I handed him a dime and rushed home, clutching my
copy of Master Comics. Back at 435, I read this issue over
and over, watching a crippled boy named Freddy Freeman
hobble on his crutches. Suddenly he said his magic word
— “Captain Marvel,” the name of his hero — and was
transformed into a lithe, strong hero in a sleek blue gold-
trimmed costume. After my fight with Brother, I knew that
“Shazam” didn’t work for me; it probably was just a lie. But
maybe it could work for others. Maybe words, like potions,
were also capable of magic. And I wished that my father
had a secret word too. He would come home from
Gallagher’s and sit in the kitchen and whisper … Captain
Marvel. A lightning bolt would split the sky and there he
would be: two legs, young, whole, like the man in that old
photograph, his eyes sharply focused. He would smile at
me and reach over and hug me and off we would go
together to play ball.
That never happened.
After two years in the first floor right, we moved again.
8
THE NEW FLAT was only a few blocks away, but it was
another descent, into a harder, poorer world.
Seventh Avenue was a wide avenue with trolley cars of
the 67 line moving in both directions. The steel wheels of
those sleek green-and-silver “streamlined” cars ran on steel
tracks, and we would hear their squealing clattering sounds
through the night; some of us heard those trolleys for the
rest of our lives. The power lines were hidden in steel poles
that made a deep bonging sound when you hit them with
bats or pipes; from the tops of these poles cables fed the
lines that ran above the trolley tracks. Those poles and lines
and the steel tracks gave the avenue the look of an artist’s
exercise in perspective, with diminishing lines flowing away
into infinity, or its equal: Flatbush Avenue at one end of the
avenue, Greenwood Cemetery at the other. In the mind of
an eight-year-old, both were as far away as Madrid.
Our building was 378, a tenement rising four ominous
stories above the street. It was in the middle of the block,
between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets, with a butcher shop
on one side of the doorway and a fruit and vegetable store
called Teddy’s to the right. That first day, it was a place in
another country.
I stood on the sidewalk with my mother and Tommy and
Kathleen, who was bundled in a red snowsuit in a stroller
and bawling. My mother moved the stroller back and forth,
shushing Kathleen, while I gazed around at this new piece
of geography. There was a barbershop across the street,
with a red, white, and blue pole turning slowly outside. On
one side of the barbershop was a dry cleaner’s, the
windows opaque with steam, then a notions shop, a variety
store, a fish store, and a diner. To the left, filling the corner
of Eleventh Street, was Rattigan’s Bar & Grill, dark inside,
with men going and coming through the front door. Nobody
used the side door.
Across the street, on a diagonal from Rattigan’s, there
was one glimmer of the familiar: the red, white, and blue
sign of still another Roulston’s store. But otherwise I felt like
a stranger as we waited outside for the large men from
Gallagher’s to arrive in a truck with our furniture and our
stuffed cardboard boxes. My mother said, You’ll like it here.
But I looked up and saw fire escapes climbing the brick
face of the building, as if drawn with rulers, and a strange
canopy hanging over the edge of the roof, and a flock of
pigeons circling against the hard sky. I shivered in the cold,
and my mother told me to wait in the hallway. But I was
afraid to go through that door. I didn’t think I would like it
here at all. I wanted to go back to 471 Fourteenth Street,
my real home.
Do they have roaches here? I said.
My mother laughed. I hope not, she said.
I don’t want to live here if they have roaches, I said.
Well, she said without much hope, let’s wait and see.
Then the truck arrived and my father eased out of the
cab, smoking a cigarette, while the large men unloaded the
furniture and started moving us into 378. Groups of
nameless kids were gathering at the corners, watching us
with a mixture of curiosity and hostility; some of them were
my age, and all were wearing long pants while I still wore
knickers and knee socks. Faces appeared at the windows
of Rattigan’s. Someone wiped a peephole in the steam of
the dry cleaner’s. Maybe they had come to see the cripple.
Or maybe they had heard about the Irish drunk. Or a
crippled Irish drunk. Or maybe they just wanted to look at
the kid who still wore knickers.
When the truck arrived, my mother took us into the
warmth of a candy store, two doors away, and I felt better.
Nobody could watch us in here. The place was called
Sanew’s (we pronounced it Sen-you). Immediately inside
the door, atop a glass-topped counter, nickel candies were
arrayed on a stepped rack, like a sugary stoop. Beside it, a
small change dish, advertising Dentyne gum, sat on top of
a pebbled rubber mat, with the cash register next to it.
There were racks of cigarettes on the wall behind the
counter, including my father’s beloved Camels. That was
good. He could walk next door to get his cigarettes, even in
the snow.
Most of the good things of Sanew’s were on the right as
you walked in, including a soda fountain with four swivel-
topped stools. Behind the marble counter, spouts poured
soda, seltzer, a variety of syrups in endless combinations
(egg creams and lime rickeys and cherry Cokes), and
below the counter were silver-covered hidden places filled
with tubs of ice cream. That first day, Mrs. Sanew mixed
soda for us kids and made tea for my mother, looking
distracted in a way that would soon become familiar to all
of us. Mrs. Sanew had gray-streaked black hair pulled into
a tight bun, thick eyeglasses wedged on a longish nose, a
pinched sour mouth. She always wore thick-heeled
sensible shoes and a wine-colored wool sweater that
buttoned in the front. The sweater had two pockets, and
sometimes, when distracted, she would jingle coins in
those pockets, her eyes seeing something that was a long
way from Brooklyn. Behind that counter, seven days a
week, from seven in the morning until ten at night, Mrs.
Sanew made egg creams, or filled dishes with ice cream,
or prepared tea, or poured coffee. She sold cigarettes,
cigars, candies, and newspapers; she rang up purchases
on the cash register; she made change. There was simply
no time for joy or laughter. There also might have been
some darker cause for her permanent air of distraction,
some fierce Catholic denial of self, some permanent act of
mortification or penance. In all the years we lived there, I
never saw her eat or drink even one of the treats she made
for others; it was as if that would be some sign of
weakness, some surrender to illicit pleasures or desires
she held in contempt. That first day, as she served my
mother, her face was locked into a sad or angry mask.
There was one other ornament of Sanew’s: a rack on the
wall to the left of the door. The top row was filled with movie
magazines or copies of Collier’s, Liberty, Life. The next
was thick with pulps, with their garish, disturbing covers.
But the two bottom racks were full of comic books. Comics
with titles I didn’t know, covers I’d never seen, comics that
could have been from another country. Blue Bolt. Sheena,
Queen of the Jungle. The Spirit. They were completely
different from the comics at Foppiano’s and I must have
stared at them with something like passion and desire,
because I remember my mother saying to me: “Well, you’ll
be happy here.”
Then we walked back to 378, entering through the street
door for the first time. There were brass mailboxes on the
left of the vestibule, white octagonal tiles on the floor, then a
second door, filled with a panel of frosted glass, leading
into the hallway. For a moment, I was scared; the hallway
space was high, narrow, murky; the dark air was stained by
strange odors, as if something was rotting. On the left a
passageway led into the back of the hall, where I could see
three battered garbage cans. On the right were the narrow
stairs, with strips of ridged metal tacked to the lip of each
step, to protect the linoleum from the assault of thousands
of footsteps. My mother lifted Kathleen from the baby
carriage and parked it against the wall on the left and
started leading us up the stairs, into a deeper darkness.
The rough plaster walls were shiny with paint, dark brown
from the floor to the height of my mother’s shoulder, then a
paler ocher to the ceiling. I could smell meat cooking. I
could hear radios: music on one floor, announcers talking
on another. On the second landing, dogs barked from
behind a door. On each landing there was a small bare
yellowish light bulb, which heightened the feeling of deep
rich earth-colored darkness.
We went up three flights, to the top floor right, where a
door was open to the kitchen. This was where we were now
going to live. I paused in the hall, unable to move. Maybe if I
just stood there, they would change their minds and we
would put everything in the truck and drive away, skipping
435 Thirteenth Street, going all the way back to Fourteenth
Street. My father and some of the large men were standing
there, drinking beer from quart bottles, laughing and
smoking cigarettes, using saucers for ashtrays.
Don’t stand there like an idjit, my father said. Come in.
The large men laughed.
Come on, my father said. Give us a hand.
So I went in and the large men shook my hand and said
to my father, We shoulda brung some soda for the kid, Bill.
And my father said, We’ll bring some back.
And one of the men said, Hell, he’s big enough for a
beer, ain’t he, Bill?
My father smiled, and turned away, lifting silverware and
glasses from a Campbell’s soup box, discarding the
newspapers that wrapped them, then laying them in the
sink. It was as if I’d disappeared.
For a long time, the large men shifted furniture, grunting,
sweating, while my mother asked them to move a chair
here, a couch there. I wandered through the rooms of the
railroad flat. There was a small bedroom off the kitchen,
then a larger bedroom, then the living room, with two
windows looking down at Seventh Avenue. The new
building was only one story higher than the flat on
Fourteenth Street, but after two long years on the ground
floor at Thirteenth Street, the height here amazed me. I
could see the roofs of trolley cars, the tops of the black
steel poles that supplied their power, the bobbing hats and
shoulders of passing strangers. Unlike Fourteenth Street,
there were no trees to break a fall, no branches or tree
trunks to supply direction to the eye or the illusion of safety.
If I fell from this window, I would die. It was like coming to
the edge of the cliff I saw in the advertising on the back of
the comics, all about the Rosicrucians, whatever they were,
and the secrets of life.
To the right of the living room, facing the avenue, there
was a small room with a window that led to the fire escape.
We called this the Little Room and it was unique: it had a
door. From the Little Room’s window, I could see across
the avenue into the apartments of strangers, turrets and
chimneys on the rooftops, and away off, the distant ridge of
Prospect Park. I thought: This must be what it’s like to be a
giant.
In a rush of excitement, I ran back into the kitchen. This
wasn’t so bad, maybe. Up here in the top floor right, the
world was bright again after the darkness of the hall. The
kitchen windows looked down a long slope toward the
harbor, and I could even see the concrete railway trestle
where the subway went over the Gowanus Canal. That
astonished me. I had been under that trestle many times,
waiting for my mother when she brought my father his lunch;
now, I was above the trestle, up here at the top of the long
slope. From this back window, I could see the receding
rectangles of a thousand rooftops and the skeletal shapes
of ten thousand winter trees and the steeples of a hundred
churches rising above the houses. There were ships
moving in the distant harbor, sailing away to fight Hitler, and
my mother came over and pointed out the Statue of Liberty,
green and tiny, and the skyline of Manhattan, naming some
of the buildings. But there was something missing.
Where’s the backyard? I said.
Well, my mother said, that’s a wee bit of a problem.
There’s no backyard.
I looked straight down from the window and saw fenced-
off yards filled with the scrawny shapes of stunted trees and
patches of blackened snow. But those yards belonged to
the smaller houses on the side streets. The tenements on
the avenue had no yards. This was hard to imagine: a
house without a backyard. And I wished I still had the
backyard on Fourteenth Street or even the bald shadowed
clay of Thirteenth Street. After all, if there was no backyard,
where would I play on summer afternoons?
Suddenly the moving job was finished and my father and
the large men started to go out.
Will you bring me a soda, Daddy?
Sure, he said.
Hell, Billy, one of the large men said. He’s gettin’ pretty
big, the kid. Whyn’t you bring him over the bar?
Yeah, my father said, not meaning it.
But you gotta get him outta them knickers, another man
said. Ya can’t go drinkin’ in knickers, kid.
Yeah, one of these days, my father said.
And they went out. My mother then turned to look at the
boxes and bags, the mounds of clothes, the cluttered table,
the dishes in the sink. She sighed.
Mommy, I want long pants, I said.
You’ll have long pants soon enough, she said.
I hate knickers, I said.
We’ll talk about it later, she said. Let’s get moved in first.
And so we moved in. All that afternoon, we began to
explore this new place high above everything. The kitchen
was to become the center of almost everything we did; we
ate there, talked there, listened to the radio there, did
homework there. I can remember every inch of it, with the
table of much-painted pine in the center under a ceiling light
whose cord bobbed in the air. There were four chairs
around the table, with a sugar bowl in the middle beside my
father’s ashtray (my mother didn’t smoke or drink). Just
inside the door was a shallow corner closet shaped like a
triangle. It had no door, only a drape hanging from a rod.
Sometimes on rainy days, when we kids played hide and
seek, I would huddle in there under piles of clothes and
sheets, burrowed into a cave, wishing that I’d never be
discovered.
On that first day at 378, my father came home hours later,
bleary with drink. My mother tried to get him to eat some
sandwiches and soup. He couldn’t do it. He tried to sing but
the words stopped coming, choked in a phlegmy cough.
Finally, he rose from the kitchen table. I was in the first room
in a narrow bed that fit tightly against the wall. As he went
by I said, Hello, Daddy. He didn’t hear me. From the next
room, I heard him removing his trousers, change jingling in
the pockets, then the straps and the leg being slammed
against the wall before he fell heavily into bed. Then there
was silence from my mother in our brand-new kitchen.
Except for her sad breathing.
9
WE LIVED to the rhythms of the war. Years later, we even
marked time in a special way: Before the War, During the
War, After the War. There were other wars, Korea and
Vietnam, and American invasions of too many other
places, but for people my age there was only one War. That
war was in our comics, our movies, our dreams. The radio
was filled with it. Every evening, my mother listened to
Edward R. Murrow and Gabriel Heatter, and in school we
followed the war on maps. There was North Africa. And
Tobruk. And somewhere in all that yellow emptiness, El
Alamein.
At Holy Name, I heard about the war from new teachers
every year, each of them rolling down the maps and
showing us the places that were in the newspapers and on
the radio. There was much excitement when the Allies
landed in Sicily because the parents of most of the Italian
kids were from that island. They wanted the Americans to
win. They had brothers in our army and some of the
brothers died in those first battles. All of them said their
parents were worried. I got an aunt there, said Vito Pinto.
My grandmother is there, said Michael Tempesta. I got an
uncle over there, said George Poli. The war went on and
on.
I’d like to give that Hitler a boot in the ass, my father said
one night.
Billy, my mother said. The children …
I would, he said. I mean it. Let him walk into Rattigan’s
and drop one on his chin.
That struck me as a wonderful idea. Hitler goose-
stepping down Seventh Avenue, with Göring and Goebbels
and Himmler behind him (for we knew each of their names),
all of them marching into Rattigan’s, and my father walking
over and punching Hitler right in the mout’. Then my father’s
friends could mop up the rest of them, the way Captain
America went after the Red Skull. That would be that. No
more war.
But the war went on. We learned its common and proper
nouns: bomb, rifle, pillbox, Guadalcanal and grenade,
camouflage and convoy, submarine and torpedo, Salerno
and Monte Cassino, Rommel and Montgomery, infantry and
air force, destroyers, PT boats, cruisers and carriers,
casualties and conning towers, depth charges and bomb
bays, antiaircraft, bazookas and howitzers, wounded,
ambulances, shrapnel and flak, generals, colonels, majors,
lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, privates, along with
admirals, commanders, captains and seamen, WACS and
WAVES, 1A and 4F, Tojo and Mussolini, .45s and .88s,
tanks and jeeps, occupation and refugee and resistance.
And in comics and radio serials, in movies and
schoolyards, we heard the words Secret Weapon. Hitler
might have one; we had to get one.
In the windows of the neighborhood now you saw small
flags bearing a star for each son who had gone to serve the
country. Some flags had as many as four. And after the
invasion of North Africa, some of the stars were gold, telling
us that a son had died. There were more after Sicily and
many more after Anzio.
Up on Eighth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, a sandlot
football team called the Arrows erected a sign on the wall
beside Foppiano’s, listing the names of all the men who
were away in the service. Even after we moved to Seventh
Avenue, I passed it every day on my way to Holy Name. The
lettering was small and neat, but before the war was over,
the sign was completely filled and many of the young men
were dead. The sign was there for years After the War,
battered by weather, the names bleached by sun and
washed by rain, then repainted, then washed away again,
until the names were gone for good and nobody was left in
the neighborhood who could remember the living or the
dead.
Like other families, we experienced the war in small
ways. In addition to the vocabulary of the war itself, I learned
the word “shortage” and the phrase “black market.” There
was a shortage of sugar. There was a shortage of meat.
Butter was rare and there were no more bananas because
of the German submarines in the Caribbean. The Germans
were sinking all of the ships that used to come to New York
Before the War.
Ships like the ones your father worked on? I asked my
mother one night.
Yes, she said. Exactly like the ones he worked on. He
was all over South America, you know. He used to write
letters to my mother from all those places. He was even at
the Panama Canal when they were building it.
In the Blue Books, we found maps of the Caribbean and
Central America and located the Panama Canal. She
showed me a deck of playing cards adorned with scenes of
the canal’s construction, cards sent to her mother long ago,
and all the while, I was trying to imagine my mother when
she still had a father. He certainly existed, because she had
a photograph of him, in a dark suit, taken in New Orleans.
And she told me that I was named after him. Or I was
named after my father and her father: William Peter. But
they called me Peter anyway. So I had some connection to
that lost grandfather who had died. But when I asked her to
tell me about him, she always got busy doing something
else, and became very quiet.
When she talked about the black market, I imagined
some terrible place down near the Gowanus Canal, a huge
building painted black and filled with men in black suits and
black masks.
No, she said, it’s not like that.
A bunch of terrible people she called reprobates cheated
the government by hiding things that were part of the
shortages. If you knew the right people, you could get all the
sugar you wanted, all the meat. You just needed to know the
black market people, the reprobates. Why didn’t we know
them?
Because they’re bad people, she said. They love money
more than they love their country. Are they bigots? I asked.
Probably, she said. For sure, they are gangsters.
At some point, my mother received ration books and
tokens. When she went to buy meat or butter, she needed
to hand over the ration stamps or dime-sized cardboard
tokens. She saved bacon fat in tin cans, and when she
turned in the bacon fat at Semke’s butcher shop, she was
given more tokens in exchange. Once a month, she said,
the government picked up all the cans of bacon fat. One
day, I asked my father why the army needed bacon fat.
To grease the guns, he said. And for the soldiers to put
on their boots to keep out water.
I tried to imagine this. Wouldn’t the Nazis smell breakfast
when the Americans tried to sneak up on them in a raid?
There were some questions that could never be
answered, particularly about the war.
10
FOR THE CHRISTMAS of 1943, my mother bought me a pair
of roller skates. They were strong and tough, with clamps
over the front of your shoes that were tightened with a skate
key. The wheels were shiny; they would never wear out,
filling with those ruinous holes we called skellies. They had
probably cost her a lot of money, at least three dollars. But
on a frigid Saturday a week later, there was a huge scrap
metal drive, men in trucks moving slowly along the avenue,
shouting to everybody to haul out their old metal and iron so
we could turn the stuff into bombs and bullets. People came
out with beaten-up old metal chairs and lengths of pipe and
broken bicycles. I thought it was my duty to make the
ultimate sacrifice. I threw in my skates.
But as I watched the truck pull away, I began to cry. I
wanted those skates back. And then felt as if I were a
traitor, a regular Benedict Arnold. I stopped crying. I walked
around the block. A cold wind was blowing off the harbor. I
went home and lay down on my bed and started to read a
Newsboy Legion comic to restore my sense of patriotism.
Yes: I had made a sacrifice. But it was worth it. Somehow,
my skates would help beat Hitler and the Japs. Then my
mother came in and asked me what was the matter.
Nothing, I lied.
Come on, something’s the matter.
Nothing’s the matter.
What happened?
I was quiet for a moment and then I whispered: I gave my
skates to the scrap metal drive.
Mother of God.
She looked upset and I said, I’m sorry, Mommy.
Oh, she said, this damned war.
Then she went into the kitchen and started cooking in
silence. But that wasn’t the end of it.
An hour later, my father came home drunk. We sat down
to eat dinner. And he learned about the skates.
What? he said. What? You gave away your skates?
I didn’t give them away, I said. I gave them to the scrap
metal drive, you know, the war effort.
You bloody idjit, he said.
And he reached over and slapped my face.
My head seemed to explode. I went off the chair and got
up and ran into the other room, my face stinging, my ear
ringing.
Billy! my mother shouted. For the love of God, he’s only a
boy!
Tommy was crying, and that set off Kathleen.
I had to work for those goddamned skates! my father
shouted. And he gave them away?
Billy, he’s a boy. He wanted to help with the war! He
meant nothing bad, he —
I covered my head with a pillow. I didn’t want to hear any
more of it. I was full of shame, a real idjit. My father had
worked at Arma all night and paid for the skates and I gave
them away. Skates I loved. The first real pair of skates I
ever had. An idjit, an idjit.
Then my brother Tommy was beside me. He put a hand
on my head.
Don’t cry, Peter. Please don’t cry.
I took a deep breath and stopped. My face was still
stinging.
Come on, Tommy whispered. We’ll go in the Little Room
and read comics.
And so we did.
11
IN THOSE FIRST YEARS at 378, the roof became our backyard.
It was directly above our heads, reached by a flight of
stairs. A small tarpapered building sheltered the staircase,
rising off the roof itself like a second house with its own
skylight. When we first moved to 378, there was a wooden
deck running the length of the roof, with structures like
goalposts at each end and clotheslines strung between
them. On sweltering August afternoons, nothing was more
pleasurable than walking in shorts through the cold wet
wash. But in winter, the clothes froze and if you hit them you
would hurt your hands; when it was that cold, my mother
hung clothes on a line in the kitchen.
From the roof of the little house above the stairs, we
could see forever. In one direction, facing the harbor, we
saw the hills of Staten Island and the distant smudge of
New Jersey and the Narrows opening out to the Atlantic.
The harbor traffic never stopped; every day, ships moved
out through the Narrows, going to the war, while others
arrived in lines as steady as the trolley cars on Seventh
Avenue. To the right, we could see the towers of the
Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, the giant
building ways of the Navy Yard, the Empire State Building
and the Chrysler. We could not see the piers where the
Normandie lay in water and mud.
The New York sky was crowded with birds then, and I
would stare at some brave and lonesome hawk as he
caught an air current and careened away, heading for the
skyline until he vanished, and I would have dreams that
night about flying: magically possessed of the secret
powers of my heroes, weightless and strong, high above
Brooklyn, soaring to the towers of Manhattan.
One afternoon on that little roof, as I lay reading in the
sun, there was a deep churning sound in the distance,
growing steadily louder. My brother Tommy suddenly burst
through the door below me, looking at the empty sky. I
reached down and pulled him up. Then, above us, came a
flight of B-17s. Ten of them, twenty, then more and more,
hundreds, and we were frozen, suddenly jumping, as the
sky darkened with airplanes, the two of us yelling without
words, trying to roar with them, waving triumphant fists at
the Flying Fortresses as they flew over us, heading for the
Narrows, heading out over the Atlantic, going to get Hitler.
When my father woke up, we started telling him about the
airplanes, the words coming in a rush, and he told us that
out at Arma, they made bombsights for those Flying
Fortresses. We got very excited. This was war information.
The Red Skull would kill us to know this; he would kidnap
my father and threaten to drop him into a pool of sharks if
he didn’t give him the plans to the bombsight.
Now don’t tell anyone, he said, going in to shave.
Remember, he said: Loose lips sink ships.
Loose lips sink ships. That was one of the mantras of the
war. I was sure that loose lips had sunk the Normandie. But
that night, I didn’t want to talk about the Normandie. I
wanted to tell everyone about the bombsights, and how my
father might be a cripple, he might not be a soldier, he
might be a drunk, he might be a crippled Irish drunk, but he
was helping beat Hitler too! He was doing it every night,
going out to Arma, out there in Bush Terminal, and making
bombsights that would help our men blow up Nazi
shipyards and Nazi bases and Nazi tanks. And I remember
thinking, up on the roof one day, that maybe that’s why he
was a drunk. Maybe it was very hard to carry that secret
around, to have that inside him, knowing that he could be
captured. Maybe he thought that if he was drunk he wouldn’t
be able to talk. His loose lips would not sink ships.
Yeah, I thought. Maybe that was it.
When I left our cramped rooms for the roof, I always felt
free. The sky was limitless, the turmoil of the street far
below. The tenements and their roofs were all connected
and I explored every inch of that open terrain: roofs with
white or black pebbles, others with plain tar paper, some
with clotheslines, others with rough planked decks where
people sat on summer evenings. There were metal
chimneys on some rooftops, brick on others; the buildings
without hot water had no chimneys at all. A few tenements
were higher than the rest, and between several of them
there were air shafts.
One air shaft was wider, deeper, more foreboding than
the others. I sometimes stared into it, holding tightly to the
ledge beside it, and could barely see the black distant
bottom, which was a rubble of broken bottles, rusting cans,
old clothes. I dropped a pebble down the shaft; it took a
long time to hit bottom. Tommy and I called the shaft the
Bottomless Pit.
Then one afternoon, I was on the roof with Tommy and
two kids, Billy Rossiter and Billy Delaney. We wandered to
the edge of the Bottomless Pit. Rossiter, tall and skinny,
suddenly pushed me, then grabbed me before I could fall,
and laughed at the fear on my face. My heart thumped.
I dare you to jump across, Rossiter said.
Nah, I said, still full of fear.
I can do it, Delaney said.
What for? I said.
A dare is a dare, he said.
Then he backed up the width of one rooftop, took a deep
breath, started to run, leaped, and hit the ledge on the far
side of the Bottomless Pit. He didn’t make it! He was
holding on to the edge, dangling, grunting, the darkness
below him. Rossiter looked frightened, and then he and I
and Tommy were scrambling around to the other side to
save Delaney from falling.
But he held on and pulled himself up over the ledge
without our help and rolled over on his back. He laughed at
us.
Okay, he said, now it’s your turn.
Rossiter smiled thinly. He had made the dare. Billy
Delaney had accepted it. Now Rossiter had to do it. That
was only fair.
He backed up, the way the shorter Delaney had, a wan
look on his face. He shook his hands loosely and then
started to run on his long thin legs. He jumped. And landed
cleanly on his feet on the other side. He laughed like a loon,
jumped up and down, raised clenched fists to the sky.
Now it was my turn. Tommy was too small. I had to be the
last to leap across the Bottomless Pit.
Tommy whispered, Let’s go home, Pete. Come on …
I remembered my shame after Brother Foppiano made
me cry. I imagined Rossiter and Delaney laughing at me
down on the street, telling all the other kids. I had to do it.
Maybe I would die, but I had no choice. A dare was a dare.
I backed up the way the others had, not looking at them,
not looking at the air shaft. I imagined Robin Hood leaping
across the parapets of castles. I saw Gene Autry on his
horse Champion, jumping across canyons. Then in my
mind my father was on that roof. At my age. With two legs.
He would do it. I must do it. Even if I fell to my death in the
Bottomless Pit.
I ran in a burst, my legs pumping, head down, came to
the lip of the shaft, closed my eyes and made a roaring
sound as I jumped.
I hit the other side and rolled. When I opened my eyes, I
saw the sky. And Tommy’s face. He looked terrified.
I got up and hugged him and then Rossiter and Delaney
were there, laughing and excited. Rossiter said, That was
beautiful, wasn’t it? Whatta ya say we do it again?
No, I said, let’s get something to drink.
We turned away from the Bottomless Pit and went down
to Sanew’s to share an icy bottle of Mission Bell grape
soda.
On hot summer days, we went to the roof in bathing suits.
So did other people on the endless expanse of rooftops
that we later called Tar Beach. One humid August afternoon
I was alone on the roof and saw Billy Rossiter’s sister in a
bathing suit, lying out on the rooftop. His sister was much
older than Billy, maybe twenty, and she lay there alone, not
knowing she was being watched. She lathered suntan oil
on her bright pink body, rubbed some on the tops of her
breasts, then lay back with her eyes closed and her
abundant black hair spilling onto a large white towel. I didn’t
know why but that made me feel funny. I turned away and
went down to the street. I did not tell my mother about this.
Projecting upward from the edge of the roof, out over
Seventh Avenue, was a sloping tin canopy, its peak two
feet higher than the roof itself. It must have been designed
to dress up the building from the avenue side and to keep
kids like us from falling to our deaths. Sometimes I’d lie
back against the canopy, watching the clouds form horses
or lions against the sky. Other times, I’d lie with my head
over the canopy’s edge, staring down at the life of the
street, or into the apartments across the avenue. When
winter ended, people laid pillows on the windowsills and
watched the street for entertainment. Usually, the watchers
were women, looking for their children or their husbands or
any signs of danger. My father never gazed out the
windows, but neither did my mother. She was always too
busy.
But on the top floor above Rattigan’s, there was an entire
family of Syrians who took their places in the windows, all
day long: a grandmother, a mother, a middle-aged son,
three daughters. They watched everything and talked back
and forth from window to window. My mother called them
the Gapers Club.
On our roof, with just my head showing over the edge of
the canopy, I’d gape at the Gapers Club, trying to make
them nervous. Once I even succeeded. Fixed in my stare,
the grandmother heaved herself inside. And that afternoon,
down on the avenue, the mother complained to my mother
that I was a Peeping Tom. I didn’t know what this meant
when she told me about it at dinner. Did it have something
to do with brother Tommy?
A Peeping Tom is someone who looks at women in their
homes, she said carefully.
But the Gapers Club looks at us every day, I said. Even
at night sometimes.
A Peeping Tom, my father said, wants to see women
take off their clothes.
That scared me; I didn’t mention looking at Billy
Rossiter’s sister. I couldn’t be a Peeping Tom. After all, I
couldn’t see into her house.
Anyway, my father said, a Peeping Tom’s worse than a
masher.
A potato masher?
No, no, he said. It’s different.
Billy, my mother said, you’re confusing him.
Well, he’s got to learn, sooner or later.
I said, Is Tommy a Peeping Tom?
My father laughed and said, I’ve got to go to work.
I looked at my mother. She was laughing too.
12
ON DAYS of heavy rain, I sat inside the roof door, watching
little rivers carve their way through the glistening black
pebbles to the drain that emptied into the backyards.
Sometimes the water flowed in torrents. The rain came in
driving gray sheets off the harbor. And I felt safe and
sheltered, like Bomba the Jungle Boy in a cave in the
jungle.
I found my first Bomba book in a dingy little store on Sixth
Avenue near Tenth Street. The store sold old comics and
loose cigarettes (two cents each, two for three cents, just
like the pretzels in Sanew’s). But on a shelf I saw a book
called Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Moving Mountain.
The ocher cover showed a line drawing of a boy wearing an
animal skin that went over his right shoulder. He was
holding a bow in his left hand, while a mysterious animal —
either a monkey or a small jaguar — peered from the
jungle. The book cost six cents. I had a nickel in my hand. I
asked the old man at the door if he could trust me for the
penny.
Are you kiddin’? he said. Dat’s a hard-cover book!
I went home and told my mother about the Bomba book
and she gave me a milk bottle and told me to bring it to
Roulston’s and get the deposit. I took the bottle to the
grocer, was given two cents, and ran to Sixth Avenue, my
heart pounding with fear that someone else might buy the
Bomba book.
It was still there. I paid my six cents, held it in my hand,
smelled the paper. I hurried home and went to the roof. The
first sentence reached out and grabbed me: “As silently as
a panther, Bomba climbed the great dolado tree, the giant
of the forest. …” I soon learned that Bomba was about
fourteen and lived in a cabin deep in the jungles of the
Amazon, wearing the skin of Geluk the Puma, armed only
with a machete and a bow and arrows. With him was a
white-haired old naturalist named Cody Casson, who gave
Bomba some education but was evasive about the boy’s
origins. The old man was frail and had lost most of his
senses in an accident; he was really in the care of the boy.
That first book, and all the others in the series, were
driven by Bomba’s search for his lost parents, and
therefore a solution to the riddle of his own identity. The
entire series was a classic quest.
Once, when my father shouted at me, I ran to Prospect
Park and crawled into Devil’s Cave, which was hidden
beside a stream that fed the Swan Lake. In times of peril,
Bomba almost always took refuge in a cave. Mine was low,
narrow, extending about six feet into the hill. I sat there
alone, wishing for a thunderous Amazonian storm, fierce
lightning, the stream transformed into a swollen river.
Instead, a parkie came over and said, Hey, kid, you better
beat it. It’s gettin’ dark.
When I went home that evening, my father was gone. I
took down a Bomba book and retreated into the jungles of
South America, moving through the swamp of death, wary
of anacondas, using a pole to test for quicksand, the rubber
trees so tall that there was no light. In a way, I hoped
Bomba would never find his father. He might be sorry.
13
AT NIGHT FROM the kitchen windows, we could not see New
York. There were wartime blackouts, every light in the city
extinguished so that German bombers could never find us
and so that German submarines couldn’t see the freighters
and navy ships as they left New York Harbor. Mayor La
Guardia was in charge of all this, talking in his thin squeaky
voice over the radio, asking all New Yorkers to cooperate.
Everybody did, because almost everybody loved Mayor La
Guardia, except one of my aunts, who lost her job when
Jimmy Walker lost his. To keep out the light, people began
buying blackout shades, which were, of course, black, and
on some nights there would be air raid drills, with sirens
blaring from the firehouse up the block and air raid wardens
walking around in the dark streets shouting orders at the
deaf, the careless, or the indifferent.
On summer nights, these drills were exciting. Everybody
would be out in the street, sitting on chairs or stoops or the
front steps of the stores. Some of us even sat on Sanew’s
newsstand. If it was hot, the big people drank hot tea, which
was supposed to make you cooler. Most of the time they
talked and joked and made fun of the air raid wardens,
whose helmets for some reason were white, making them
perfect targets for roaming Messerschmitts.
On one such evening, a warden started shouting into
Rattigan’s. Someone shouted back. Then the warden went
into the saloon. Then he came hurtling out of the saloon and
landed on his back, the helmet skittering away into the
gutter. A group of men came outside behind him. One of
them was my father.
The warden stood up, shouting. On our side of the street,
everybody was standing now, moving down to the corner.
The argument got louder, the words still not clear. Then my
mother started across the street. I followed her.
Billy, she said, come on home.
Stay out of this! he shouted.
What’s the matter?
This bum called Eddie Malloy a draft dodger!
Draft dodger! The worst words in the English language.
Draft dodgers were rich guys. Draft dodgers were cowards.
Some draft dodgers even wanted the Nazis to win.
Yiz are all a bunch of draft dodgers! the warden said,
standing now, adjusting his white helmet, trying through his
anger to look dignified.
Then a big suety guy with a flushed face came forward.
This was Eddie Malloy.
You say dat again, you bum, I put you down the sewer! I
got t’ree kids in de army. I got one kid in da navy. I went
down an’ volunteered da day after Poirl Harba! Dey toirned
me down on accounta as’ma. An’ because I’m too old. I
tried da navy. I tried da Marines. Don’t call me no draft
dodger, you bastid.
Then suddenly a police car with its lights out came
around the corner of Twelfth Street and another one hurried
along the avenue from Ninth Street.
Come on home, Billy, my mother said, taking my father’s
arm as I watched from the doorway of the Gapers Club.
You go home, he said, shaking off her hand. This is none
of your goddamned business, woman.
She backed away, shocked and hurt. Then the cops
were piling out of the patrol cars, shouting, What the hell’s
going on? The air raid warden pointed at the crowd.
They assaulted me while I was doing my duty! he said.
That’s a load of bullshit, my father said. He came in
looking for trouble and he got it. Eddie Malloy was smoking
a cigarette at the bar and when this idjit told him to put it
out, Eddie laughed. Then he called Eddie a draft dodger.
The biggest cop said, You’re Mister Malloy? I went to
Holy Family with your son Jackie. How is he?
Inna Sout’ Pacific, killin’ them Japs.
The big cop turned to the crowd and said, Okay, let’s
everybody go home now.
Then he said to the air raid warden, Relax, pal. Go check
out who’s smoking on Thirteenth Street.
Then to Eddie Malloy, Go inside now, and for
Chrissakes, don’t smoke ‘til the drill is over.
The warden strode away in a fury. The cops got into their
cars and left. The men were laughing and slapping each
other on the back and then started inside. My father’s face
was beaming. He’d told them, yeah. He’d told them. Then,
as if remembering something, he separated from the
others and came over to my mother.
I’m sorry, Annie, he said. Come in, we’ll have a drink in
the back.
You can drink alone, she said, and took my hand and
walked quickly back across the street.
14
THE WAR was always with us. On the radio, we heard about
the men who were building Liberty Ships in two weeks and
how, at the great plant in Willow Run, a complete bomber
was coming off the assembly line every hour, twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week. But in the summer at
Coney Island, we saw lumpy blobs of congealed oil on the
beaches and were told they came from sunken ships. It was
true: Loose lips sink ships, loose lips sink ships … We
were losing; we were winning; everyone must play a part. At
one point, we were told to roll up toothpaste tubes while we
used them and were forced to turn them in before we could
get another; my mother started buying tooth powder, which
was cheaper, the canister made with cardboard; but after a
while there was none of that left either, and we brushed our
teeth with bicarbonate of soda or didn’t brush them at all.
On the radio now, they were singing Don’t sit under the
apple tree with anyone else but me and I got spurs that
jingle jangle jingle, and every morning, on a show called
“Rambling with Gambling,” we heard Oh what a beautiful
morning, Oh what a beautiful day from a Broadway show
called Oklahoma.
I’d love to see that show, my mother said one day. I love
those songs.
Why don’t you go and see it? I said.
It’s over on Broadway, she said, as if explaining it was in
Madrid. It’s much too dear.
She said this as if ending the discussion. I was
persistent.
Why can’t Daddy take you? He has money for Rattigan’s.
Why can’t he save up and take you over to Broadway?
Well … maybe after the war is over.
I’d like to see Broadway too, I said.
She smiled and said, After the war …
During the second year of the war, my father started giving
me an allowance of a dime a week, and with a few more
cents (again, deposits on those bottles) I began to go to the
movies with other kids. Almost always, on a Saturday
morning, our destination was the Minerva, which was one
large malodorous room, with two aisles and about twenty
rows noisy with kids. There were usually three features, a
serial (which we called the “chapter”), a cartoon, a
newsreel, and coming attractions; all for twelve cents if we
got there before noon. We never knew what time a movie
started; we just went to the Show. And sitting there in the
noisy dark, I was transported to other worlds.
I loved the Tarzan movies, with their lush scenes of
jungles, tree houses, Johnny Weissmuller swinging on vines
and bellowing his great triumphant calls. I also discovered
the glories of the American West, vistas of amazing beauty,
of deserts and mesas and mountains. Sitting in the dark of
the Minerva, I could smell the leather saddles, the beans
cooking in skillets on sagebrush fires, the dirty smoke
billowing from an Iron Horse as it raced across the prairie.
At the movies, I dove into mountain streams. I survived
raging snowstorms and stampeding cattle. I faced down
Indians, black hats, rustlers, desperadoes. I was pursued
by posses and escaped into Mexico.
In those westerns, in the gangster movies, in the war
movies, and even the love movies, the men were always
drinking. They shot each other in saloons and nightclubs.
They got drunk on leave and got into wild, hilarious fights in
waterfront bars. Some of the movie drunks were comical,
some mean. With the exception of a few cowboys, even the
heroes drank whiskey. They never got drunk.
In the third year of the war, the Kilroy signs started
appearing everywhere, brought home to America from
Europe. They showed a long-nosed cartoon figure, his
nose hanging over a fence, and the slogan: Kilroy Was
Here. Nobody knew who Kilroy was. But he was
everywhere (they said on the radio), he was every GI, he
was every American fighting overseas. I mastered the head
and nose of Kilroy hanging over the fence and chalked it on
a hundred walls and fences. That year, Kilroy even made it
to Brooklyn.
On the radio there were stories about zoot suit riots in
Los Angeles, on the other side of the country; sailors were
chasing the zoot suiters, most of whom were Mexicans,
stripping off their clothes, shaving their heads, and then
beating them to a pulp. Almost everybody seemed to think
this was a good thing. A riot broke out in Detroit, blacks
against whites, and people were killed by the police. Then
there was a riot closer to home: in Harlem, over in
Manhattan, where the Negroes lived. I saw pictures in the
Daily News of black men with bloodied heads and tough
cops with faces like slabs standing in front of them.
They oughtta kill all them niggers, a kid named Tommy
Moore said, standing outside Sanew’s, as we looked at the
headlines about the riot.
Why?
Why? We’re fightin’ Hitler and the Japs, and the niggers
are rioting! Whose side are they on?
Maybe they got a good reason. The paper says they
won’t let them in the army with whites.
Of course not! said Tommy Moore. They’re niggers! They
won’t fight!
But they’re fighting in Harlem!
That’s different! You can’t fight the Nazis wit’ a knife!
This was a puzzlement. There were no black people in
our part of Brooklyn except for one tall man in overalls, who
worked as a super in an apartment house on Fifteenth
Street. Nobody seemed to bother him; certainly he didn’t
bother anybody. When we traveled with my mother on the
subway, we saw blacks, but they behaved like everybody
else: dozing or reading newspapers or talking to each
other. Joe Louis sure could fight; but when I thought about
blacks in the movies I understood what Tommy Moore was
saying. In the movies, blacks were always wide-eyed and
comical, full of fear, running from ghosts or bad guys or their
own shadows. If they saw Nazis with guns, would they say,
as so many did in movies, Feets, get movin’?
As always, I brought this to the kitchen table. My mother
was rushing around, ladling out food. My father had gone to
work.
How come niggers won’t fight? I said.
What? she said. What did you say?
The niggers, you know, from Harlem? How come —
Don’t use that word in this house, my mother said. They
are called colored people. Or Negroes.
Everybody calls them —
Only bigots call them niggers, she said. And what does a
bigot know about fighting? Bigots are cowards and bullies.
She knew everything.
When the rioting ended, we were back to news of distant
battles. And other matters. A gangster named Lepke went
to the chair, and everybody talked proudly about how he
wouldn’t squeal on anyone, right up to the end, because he
was from Brooklyn and if you’re from Brooklyn, you don’t
squeal, ever. Jimmy Durante started saying “umbriago” on
the radio, and though nobody knew what this meant, in
school we said umbriago as if it were another version of
Shazam: a magic word, a curse, a mystery. There were
stories about strikes, and people cursed John L. Lewis,
who was keeping the coal from reaching the cities. My
father wondered how Lewis could be a union leader,
anyway. He was a goddamned Republican.
Then one wartime winter, there were no cigarettes. My
father was always irritated, smoking strange brands, like
Wings and Fatima (because the GIs were now using up the
entire supply of Camels); the black market had them, he
said, and they were holding them back to drive up the
prices. Paper matches suddenly disappeared too, so my
father started using wooden kitchen matches, snapping the
sulfur heads into flame with his thumbnail. Alone in the
kitchen I tried to do this many times, and always failed.
The war went on and on.
15
AT 378, Big Jack McEvoy was the super. He lived on the
first floor fight, with his wife, Mae, his son, Jackie, and his
daughter, Marilyn. Everybody in the building thought they
were strange people. For one thing, Big Jack was a Giant
fan. We never knew another Giant fan, though there was a
rumor that a Yankee fan lived on Ninth Street and Eighth
Avenue. Both breeds were as rare as Republicans. Big
Jack was probably a Republican too.
He’s a strange bird, my father said one Sunday morning.
Why? my mother said in an irritated way. Because he
doesn’t spend hours in Rattigan’s?
My father gave her a hard look.
He’s making good money at the shipyards but he still
works as a super, saving every dime, he said. He’s a
cheapskate. He comes into the bar and never says a word
and takes his pail home. I never trust a man that drinks
alone.
In spite of the father who drank his beer from a pail at
home, I became friendly with his son, Jackie. He was lean,
taut, black-haired, and a great stickball player. We didn’t
mind that he was a Giant fan too. He could play. Jackie was
three or four years older than I was and he had a terrible
temper, which was why the boys his own age wouldn’t play
with him, even though he was a great hitter. But he seemed
to like me. In the hall one day, a few weeks before
Christmas, I asked him if he wanted to trade comics. Sure,
he said, come to my house after dinner.
The McEvoy flat amazed me. Most of the living room was
filled with a green-topped table upon which an entire model
railroad line was operating in a perfect miniature world.
There were mountains, a farm with cows and horses, a
lake, streams, trees, stations, water towers, with the Lionel
trains racing through them all.
My father built it for me, Jackie said casually, showing
me how he operated switches, how he could make the
trains move from one track to another, how they could even
go backwards.
My father can build anything, Jackie said.
I said nothing in reply, thinking of my father calling Big
Jack a cheapskate before heading for Rattigan’s.
I was awed by the McEvoy living room. In a corner of the
room, an immense fat Christmas tree stood bright with
bulbs, blinking electric lights, silver strands draped along
the branches. Against one wall, a piano was covered with
Christmas cards. Our own living room was barren in
comparison; we wouldn’t have a tree until a few days
before Christmas, when the prices came down, and we
could never afford a real piano. Then Jackie showed me
his collection of comics, great stacks of them. And added
something else: comics he had drawn himself.
He had about seven of them, all in composition books,
the pages broken up into panels like real comic books.
Jackie’s hero was Smilin’ Jack, and the stories were all
about his pursuit across the Pacific of a villain called the
Red Bat. The panels were full, of ships and airplanes,
desert islands and dying Japanese soldiers. At the end of
each book, he wrote the ominous words: To Be Continued.
Pretty good, huh? he said.
Yeah, yeah, I said. They’re great, Jackie.
That night, back in our house, I started drawing my own
comic books. I had one blank composition book and used
a number 2 pencil to make my drawings. I asked my mother
for a story and she said I should just make one up. So I did,
sending Smilin’ Jack after the same Red Bat created by
Jackie McEvoy. But in my story I made them roam the
jungles of South America, using places from the Bomba
books. The airplanes were hard to draw, so I looked at
some comics, and tried to copy them. They didn’t come out
well. The page grew rough and dirty from erasing, but when
I was finished, they did look like airplanes.
When I finished my first book, I took it to show Jackie
McEvoy and he said it was lousy. I thought, Well, maybe it
is, but let me try again. I started filling book after book with
my own comics, all about Smilin’ Jack, then adding other
characters, then changing my hero’s name to Bob Sterling,
Secret Agent. My mother loved these books. She would
actually read them and laugh. Once more, she showed me
the comics in the newspapers, in particular Terry and the
Pirates, by Milton Caniff. I still didn’t quite connect with this
strip, but I liked Terry Lee, who was blond and in the air
force, and his commander, Flip Corkin, and his friend, Pat
Ryan. I just didn’t understand the talk.
But on other pages in the Daily News, I found Smilin’
Jack, who didn’t look anything like Jackie McEvoy’s version
of the character. In the newspaper, he was a handsome guy
with a mustache, who flew all over the Pacific, fighting the
Japanese. He met beautiful women everywhere and had
two friends: Fat Stuff, a black guy whose buttons kept
popping off his enormous belly, and Downwind Jaxon, who
was always seen in three-quarters view from the rear so
that his face remained a mystery. The airplanes were great.
But I could never draw Smilin’ Jack the way he really
looked. That’s why I invented Bob Sterling, who was a kind
of flying G-man, chasing Nazis through Brazil, where they
had taken over a lost city in the jungles. Naturally, they had
a secret weapon too, the incredible Death Bomb.
That summer I showed some of my later books to Jackie
McEvoy. This time, he didn’t dismiss me with contempt. He
got furious.
What are you doing? he shouted at me. Stealing my
idea? I write comic books, not you!
I never showed him another one.
In a way, I didn’t care. Jackie McEvoy’s approval didn’t
matter all that much to me; on the street, even the big guys
didn’t want to hang around with him. Besides, I had begun
to think that I could draw better than he could. After a year of
practice, I could make a credible Dick Tracy or Flattop
without looking at the Daily News. I could even turn out a
pretty fair Smilin’ Jack. I couldn’t draw women at all. But I
would sit at the kitchen table after dinner, filling pages with
airplanes, jungles, submarines, and heroes, packing
balloons with talk, ignoring the heat or the cold, the
cockroaches or the radio. The truth was, I only wanted the
approval of one person.
But when my mother showed him my hand-drawn comic
books one night, he stared at them, riffled through the
pages, nodded, said Nice, and reached for his cigarettes
and the quart bottle of Trommer’s.
16
UP TWELFTH STREET, in one of the buildings across from the
Factory, there was a woman with flaming red hair who was
called Betty the Whore (we pronounced the word who-uh).
We would see her in the late afternoons, coming down the
street in very high heels, short skirt, and jacket with padded
shoulders. She changed her hairstyle all the time, letting it
flow out, piling it on top of her head, flattening it under a
pillbox hat. She was also the first woman in the
neighborhood to wear slacks, which caused people to
stare at her just as much as that tangerine hair. Most
afternoons, when she started her walk, men would slowly
step out of the bars, just to look at her, and they’d yell at her
and she’d yell back and then she’d get on a trolley car and
go off toward Flatbush Avenue. The men would all laugh
and nudge each other and then go back into the bars.
I remember asking my mother about her: what the word
“who-uh” meant and why the woman wore slacks and why
the men yelled at her. She smiled and then shook her head.
She’s just a poor unfortunate, my mother said. Her
husband’s in the army and she’s all alone.
Why do the men shout at her?
Because they are horse’s asses, she snapped. If they
had any pity in them, they’d pray for her.
Do you pray for her?
I will. And you should too.
That night I prayed for Betty the Whore and the night after
that, and then I forgot about her. There were so many
people in the world to pray for that I just didn’t have time for
the Poor Unfortunate with the rolling hips and flaming red
hair.
17
THEN one June afternoon, I came home from Holy Name
and saw everyone rushing around, waving newspapers,
shouting, pumping clenched fists in the air. D day! We had
invaded France! Radios blared from hundreds of windows,
telling about landings in Normandy and heavy fighting as
the troops moved into France. My mother was happy,
listening carefully as my father shaved.
Well, maybe it’ll be over soon, she said.
How soon? I said.
They say it might be Christmas.
I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. My father
came out of the bathroom and I was proud of him. The
radio said that men were fighting on the beaches near
Cherbourg and flights of bombers were smashing the Ruhr,
which I knew was in Germany; they must have been using
his bombsights. He didn’t say anything for a long time, just
listened to the news reports.
Good, he said at last. They can hang old Hitler from a
telephone pole.
Off he went to work, and after a while I heard people
coming up the stairs. Mae McEvoy and her daughter, from
the first floor; Mrs. Halloran and Carrie Woods from the
second floor. They had sandwiches and soda bottles and
pails of beer and were heading for the roof. Across the hall
lived the Caputos, who were wonderful people. Mike
Caputo had a tough face and wore a tough longshoreman’s
cap but he always smiled at us and remembered our
names. Mrs. Caputo taught my mother how to make sauce
for spaghetti, which we immediately wanted to eat every
night instead of barley soup and stew. They had three sons,
Sonny, Babe, and Junior, and they were always friendly.
Then their door opened and all of them started for the roof
too.
Let’s go, Mommy. Come on! Everybody’s going up to the
roof.
She said, Okay, but be careful. It’s almost dark.
The roof was as packed as the street during an air raid
drill. I saw people from every building on the avenue, and
men from the bars, and they were all looking out at the
harbor. Mr. Caputo asked me how I was doing in school
and I said, Okay, vacation’s soon, and he said, Great, you
can get a job f’ the summer. But I wasn’t thinking about a
job. I was nine. Who would hire me at nine? The sun was
now setting into New Jersey, the sky all red and purple, the
skyline beginning to disappear into the darkness. We could
hear the foghorns of dozens of ships. And then the sun set,
the sky turned mauve and then black. The skyline
disappeared as it did every night during the war. For a long
time, people murmured to each other in hushed expectant
voices.
What’s going to happen? I asked. Why is everyone here?
Just wait, my mother said. Watch the skyline.
And then, without warning, the entire skyline of New York
erupted into glorious light: dazzling, glittering, throbbing in
triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared. They were
roaring on roofs all over Brooklyn, on streets, on bridges,
the whole city roaring for light. There it was, gigantic and
brilliant, the way they said it used to be: the skyline of New
York. Back again. On D day, at the command of Mayor La
Guardia. And it wasn’t just the skyline. Over on the left was
the Statue of Liberty, glowing green from dozens of light
beams, a bright red torch held high over her head. The
skyline and the statue: in all those years of the war, in all the
nights of my life, I had never seen either of them at night. I
stood there in the roar, transfixed. And then softly, her voice
trembling with emotion, my mother began to sing:
There’ll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, when the world is
free …
And the others joined in, most of them women, some of
whom had men in the army, fighting or dying out beyond the
Narrows, their voices now joined, singing hard and loud,
some crying, all gazing at that blaze of light.
There’ll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow — just you wait and
see …
The war wasn’t over by Christmas. There was a lot more
killing and a lot more dying. Across the summer, I played
ball in the street, learning the mysteries of stickball. But the
fall was very cold and the winter was brutal. The radio was
on almost all the time. I read and drew more comics, and
started drawing in sketchbooks. At the same time, I
searched for Bomba books, pushing out beyond the edges
of the Neighborhood to find little bookshops. I got good
grades in school. In 4B, I was given the religion prize, a
book about Thomas Aquinas, illustrated with silhouettes. I
copied the silhouettes and then made some of my own.
Roosevelt died in April. Flags were lowered to half mast
at the fire-house and the post office, schools were closed,
and my mother prayed for Roosevelt’s departed soul. His
picture remained on the kitchen wall. Truman became
president. My mother didn’t like him but my father said, At
least he’s a Democrat. Then on May 8, there was another
collective roar in Brooklyn, and when I came home from
school, people were out on the street, cheering and
dancing while others banged pots from their windows and
hung American flags on the fire escapes. The war was over
in Europe! This was V-E Day. Hitler was dead, the Nazis
had quit. Seventh Avenue was having a block party.
Patty Rattigan set up a keg of free beer on the sidewalk.
Mrs. Caputo burst out of 378 with a huge pot of spaghetti.
Other people brought down platters piled with sandwiches.
My mother cooked a rhubarb pie. Even the Gapers Club
abandoned the windows and came down to the street to
gape at the food and drink. Radios appeared on fire
escapes, loud with patriotic music and news from
Washington. There was wild dancing, with grown-ups doing
the Lindy Hop. Everybody was singing and drinking. My
father was still asleep and he went to work that night without
saying good-bye.
But V-E Day didn’t end the war. The fighting was still
going on in the Pacific, getting more brutal as it came
closer to Japan. In the Daily News maps I found Tarawa
and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, showing them to Tommy,
talking about them in the street. I added “kamikaze” and
“flame thrower” to the nomenclature of war. And then on a
still, thick day in August, Tommy Moore came bursting from
his house with the news about the atom bomb.
We got a friggin’ secret weapon, he said. It blew up a
whole friggin’ city!
I ran upstairs and turned on the radio. It was true. The
American secret weapon had blown the entire city of
Hiroshima to pieces. I ran downstairs again. To the kids in
the street, this was great news. The Japs had bombed
Pearl Harbor and now they were paying for it. Now the war
would end. The secret weapon that was part of the plot in
so many comic books was called the atomic bomb. And we
had it.
But that night my mother was upset by the news, and for
me that was confusing.
Those poor people, she said.
What poor people? my father said. They’re Japs!
They’re just people like us, she snapped back. Women
and children and working people. They didn’t start the war.
Some old politician did. But now thousands of them are
dead.
They had it coming, my father said.
They did not.
What the hell do you know about it? he said in a hard
voice. You’re not the president!
I know they’re just people, she said, holding her own.
He shut up then and finished his dinner and went to work.
When he was gone, my mother hugged me.
Pray for the poor Japanese, she said. And I did.
Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed. And now my
mother was more angry than sorrowful.
That old Truman, she said. He picked the one city in
Japan where the Catholics lived.
How do you know? my father said. I never heard of a Jap
that was Catholic.
It was on the radio, she said.
I don’t believe it, he said. Japs aren’t Catholics.
They are so, she said. Some of them. The Jesuits were
in Nagasaki, the French and the Portuguese. My father was
in Nagasaki.
With that, he went quiet. But I was in awe. Peter Devlin
had been in South America. He had seen real jungles. He
had refrigerated bananas. He had watched the building of
the Panama Canal. And now I learned that he had even
crossed the Pacific! He had been in Japan! In Nagasaki!
I ate fast and went down to tell everybody this news.
Nobody believed me; what could an Irishman be doing in
friggin’ Nagasaki? On the way home again, I met Jackie
McEvoy coming down the stairs. I told him all about my
grandfather and the Pacific and Nagasaki.
You’re such a goddamned kid, he said, and went past
me to the street.
18
THEN THE WAR ended for good. And on Seventh Avenue, V-
J Day was celebrated with the biggest, noisiest block party
of them all. Strangers kissed each other. Georgie Loftus,
the bartender, kissed Pat Mulroney, the taxi driver. Mrs.
Irwin from the second floor even kissed a cop. Carrie
Woods fell down the stairs, skinned her knees, and made
Cliff bring her another whiskey. A wild young guy named
Paulie McAleer vomited on a parked car and then
smashed his fist through the window of the Kent cleaners.
Teddy from the fruit store gave away free watermelon. My
father took the night off from work and joined the crowd in
front of Rattigan’s, where five kegs of free beer were lined
up on the sidewalk. The firemen all got drunk. A firehouse
dog bit a priest. Betty the Whore danced with three
sanitation men. The trolley cars kept ding-dinging for
passage but the avenue was so packed that the drivers
opened the doors and let everyone take free rides. For that
long day and into the night, everyone you saw was happy.
This was the fabulous tomorrow from the song, the day
when there would be joy and laughter and peace ever after.
This was tomorrow. The world was free.
Going upstairs that night, gorged with watermelon,
spaghetti, candy, and soda, I felt that I was about to begin
my life. The next day, at last, would begin the time called
After the War. The ballplayers would come home. My
mother would see Oklahoma! All shortages would end.
We’d be happy. Every one of us.
But on the second landing, I found my father asleep on
the stairs. I woke him up and he looked at me with dazed,
watery eyes, his jaw slack, saliva drying in the corners of
his mouth.
What’s the problem? he said.
Come on, I said. The war is over.
Yeah, he said. The war is over.
I helped him up the stairs, like Bomba taking Cody
Casson back to the cabin.
II
AFTER THE WAR
A father’s no shield
for his child.
We are like a lot of wild
spiders crying together,
but without tears.
— Robert Lowell, “Fall 1961”
The happy leave no clues.
— John Hewitt, “The
Happy Man”
1
AND SO the pattern had begun, the template was cut. There
was a celebration and you got drunk. There was a victory
and you got drunk. It didn’t matter if other people saw you;
they were doing the same thing. So if you were a man,
there was nothing to hide. Part of being a man was to drink.
I was ten years old that summer of the end of the war, but I
was learning the ways of the world.
In the lot on Twelfth Street, we still played war games,
using shovels to dig foxholes and trenches. We mowed
down Japanese holdouts with rifles made from broom
handles or guns shaped from the corners of orange crates.
We stuffed tin cans with stones and used them as hand
grenades, usually aimed at cats. We even played a game
called concentration camp, made up of jailers and the
pursued, sprinkling our talk with German words learned
from comic books and movies: Achtung! and
Schweinhund!
I played these games with all the other kids, but then one
rainy Sunday afternoon I went to the RKO Prospect to catch
a double bill and saw for the first time the newsreels from
Buchenwald. Grizzled American soldiers were at the edge
of the camp, some of them weeping. And just past them,
beyond the barbed wire, were men and women and
children in striped pajamas, unable to move, full of fear,
staring with eyes that couldn’t be seen. Some were lying on
tiers of bunks, too close to death to ask for help, their long
skeletal hands limply hanging to the floor. Their arms were
tattooed with numbers. Their heads were shaven. They
looked like zombies I’d seen in a movie at the Minerva.
This was what Hitler had left behind after killing himself in
the bunker: these silvery gray images of European horror,
these bony heaps that had once been human. I tried to get
someone to answer my questions: How did this happen?
Who did this? But my father only said, That son of a bitch
Hitler. And my mother said, That terrible bigot. And in
school, there was no answer at all.
For weeks, I read the newspaper stories about the
camps and stared at the photographs in Life that I found on
the racks in Sanew’s candy store, and there were no
answers. I dreamed of the camps, of slush-eyed men in
black SS uniforms herding us from boxcars into barracks
and finally to showers where gas hissed from the nozzles
on the ceiling. In one repeated dream, I was fighting,
struggling, pushing at the skeletal men, trying to get out of
the packed showers, trying to reach the door, to get to
Brooklyn, to safety, to my mother and father, and at least
once I woke up screaming. My mother came in and asked
what the matter was, and I cried and talked about the
concentration camps and the gas and the barbed wire, and
she crooned to me, Don’t worry, now, don’t worry anymore,
don’t worry, Peter, the war is over.
After that trip to the Prospect, I never played
concentration camp again.
During this time, I began to look more closely at the grown-
ups who inhabited the world of Seventh Avenue. Around the
corner on Twelfth Street, the men wore overalls or army
surplus and heavy steel-tipped boots. They always needed
a shave. Their hands were filthy. Most evenings, they
lurched home drunk from the bars on the avenue. The other
kids made fun of them, but I was almost always silent. In
one way, they made me see my father the way others might
see him. He didn’t dress like them; his lost leg made heavy
manual labor impossible. He did drink the way they did. So
the drunks were also consoling figures. They told me that
my father was not unique.
Once, I saw a man named Dix, rawboned and scary-
eyed, fight his wife, who was also drunk. They drew a huge
crowd. The wife, small and thick in what we called a
housedress, kept coming in a frantic rage, while Mr. Dix
stepped back and jabbed her, breaking up her face,
making blood flow from her mouth and nose, smirking until
his cap fell off, and then enraged, bending her over a fence
and hammering her until two of the other women stepped in
and broke it up. The men in the crowd did nothing to stop
the fight. Most of them laughed and cheered at the end, and
I heard one of them say: Never marry a woman you can’t
knock out with one punch. But a few feet from me, under the
lamppost, the smallest of the many Dix kids was sobbing,
holding on to his mother as the blood ran down between
her heaving breasts.
You fuck! she shouted after her husband, as he moved
off to the bar. You big fuck!
He turned, looking ominous.
Get inside, he said, or I’ll break your fucking neck,
woman.
Make me! she screamed. Make me, you bum! Hit a
woman! You fuckin’ bum!
The other women surrounded her, putting their bodies
between her and her husband, and took her into the house,
the sobbing kid behind them. Then Mr. Dix turned to us.
What are you little cocksuckers looking at? he said.
We walked away. The fight was sickening. I hated the
way he kept punishing her after he had made her bleed. I
hated the other men cheering.
But in some secret way, it made me feel better. My father
would never do that to my mother. He might speak harshly
to her, as he did the night of the blackout. He might tell her
she didn’t know what she was talking about; he did that
often. He might get drunk and miss meals or sleep in the
halls. But hit her? Curse her? Make her bleed in front of a
hundred people and her own kids? Never. When I
compared him to Mr. Dix, my father made me proud.
That afternoon, I retreated from the drunken melodramas
of Twelfth Street to the comparative serenity of Eleventh
Street, where the men wore suits to work and always
looked sober. First I went upstairs and found a Bomba
book, then I drifted around the corner to lie on the slanted
wooden cellarboard beside the Kent dry cleaning store,
whose windows had been smashed on V-J Day and were
now whole again.
I was reading there alone when I looked up and saw a
soldier moving slowly along Seventh Avenue. That was not
unusual. The soldiers were all coming home now.
Troopships arrived each day in the harbor, and there were
pictures in the newspapers of women rushing to kiss
husbands and sweethearts. Every morning, I’d see new
signs in neighborhood doorways: Welcome Home, Jimmy,
and God Bless You, Eddie. But this soldier was different.
He was alone. And he was on crutches. One trouser leg
was pinned up. Obviously, he’d lost a leg.
And then I saw my father coming out of Rattigan’s. He
stood alone on the corner, watching the soldier from
another angle. He hesitated, then started across the street,
swinging his wooden leg behind him. I stood up. My father
reached the younger man in front of Kent’s.
Hey, soldier, he said.
The soldier stopped, his eyes wary.
Yeah? he said.
You lost a leg, my father said.
Yeah.
So did I, my father said.
Well —
Don’t let it get to you, my father said. You can still have a
life.
The soldier shrugged as if he didn’t believe this at all.
Come on, my father said. We’ll have a drink.
Without discussion, they started back across the avenue
to Rattigan’s, the soldier swinging on the crutches, my
father leading the way.
I loved him very much that day.
2
ON THE STREETS I learned the limits of the Neighborhood.
This was our hamlet, marked by clear boundaries.
Sometimes we moved beyond those boundaries: to visit
aunts and uncles out in Bay Ridge; to gaze at the
Normandie; and on one wondrous fog-choked Saturday in
July, to stare up at the Empire State Building after a twin-
engined B-25 crashed into its north side between the
seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors, killing fourteen
people and hurting many others. But it was to the
Neighborhood that we always returned. Other
neighborhoods were not simply strange; they were
probably unknowable.
I was like everybody else. In the Neighborhood I always
knew where I was; it provided my center of gravity. And on
its streets I learned certain secrets that were shared by the
others. The fight between Mr. Dix and his wife was one
secret. I learned who the gangsters were in the
Neighborhood and the name of the bookmaker. Their
presence created other rules, none of them written on
paper. I heard tales of police informers who disappeared in
the night and others who were slashed with a knife, from the
corner of the mouth to the upper point of the cheek, the
mouth gashed into a grotesque elongation like the face of
the grinning man at Steeplechase Park in Coney Island: the
awful Mark of the Squealer. Such people were called stool
pigeons or rats.
There is no person worse in this world, my father said,
than a goddamned informer.
I learned too about what they called in religion class
“infidelity.” I didn’t know anything of the mechanics of sex,
but I did understand that if a father left a mother for another
woman, the family would be destroyed. I couldn’t imagine
my father leaving my mother for anyone else; but
sometimes, when he lay drunk in bed, I was terrified that
she might leave him. Sometimes I heard her say, Bill, I’m
fed up. And wondered if she would get so fed up she would
pack a bag, like women in the movies did, and just go
away.
In the Neighborhood, there were many women during the
war whose husbands were off at the fighting, and on
summer evenings, as the grownups sat around outside,
and one of these women went by, I heard whispers and
giggles. They weren’t just about Betty the Whore. I heard
about the woman who lived across the street from the
Minerva and welcomed men visitors at night while her
husband worked in the Navy Yard. And the woman from
Sixth Avenue who had a baby fifteen months after her
husband left for the South Pacific. None of this was
absolutely clear to me, but I knew they were talking about
sin. In some way, all sin had the same weight, so I also
knew the names of those who refused to go to Mass; those
who were forced to make general confessions after years
away from the Church; and, of course, the names of the
drunks.
All of these people were citizens of the Neighborhood, a
small state bound together by rivers — rivers of alcohol. On
weekends, my father moved on those rivers. Sometimes I
would follow him, desperate to know what he did and why.
On a few sunny Sunday afternoons, he would take me with
him, the way he took me to Gallagher’s when we lived on
Thirteenth Street. He said little; but I soon had charted the
map of his world.
In the center, of course, was Rattigan’s, directly across
the street, packed and smoky, the men discreetly hidden
from view by carefully hung café curtains. After the war, the
men of Rattigan’s started the Doghouse Club — as in “I’m
in the doghouse wit’ the little woman” — and behind the bar
there were rows of small white doghouses each with the
name of a member lettered on the front. Inside the
doghouses were bar tabs or messages, tickets for
racetracks or ballparks left by local politicians.
They give you a racetrack ticket, my father explained,
and you give them a vote. It’s a good deal.
There were stools at the bar and booths in the back
room, but most of the men preferred to stand. So did my
father. In those years, there was no jukebox or television
set. As they did in Gallagher’s, the men entertained
themselves. As in Gallagher’s, my father was a star
performer.
Presiding over the place was a huge man named Patty
Rattigan, round-faced and balding, like a pink version of the
Jolly Green Giant. He had a generous heart, a thick brogue,
a job in the borough president’s office, and proud
membership in the Democratic party. Patty wasn’t simply a
saloonkeeper. He helped find jobs for customers or their
sons. He loaned them money. He threw out the crazy
people. He loved singing and food and men drinking on
summer afternoons. My father loved him and loved his bar.
If anything ever happens to me, my father said one day,
Patty Rattigan will take care of the lot of you.
What about Mommy?
He’ll take care of her too.
He sipped his beer, and then started to sing “Galway
Bay.” I left, unable to bear the idea of something happening
to him, even if Patty Rattigan would take care of everything.
But on weekends, he went on small excursions beyond
Rattigan’s and I discovered other fueling stations on those
ceaseless rivers. Prospect Park meant nothing to my
father; what good were summer meadows if you couldn’t
play ball? But on Bartel-Pritchard Square, across from the
entrance to the park, he often stopped in two saloons:
Langton’s, and the bar attached to Lewnes’ restaurant. The
first was dark, odorous, and the only saloon in the
Neighborhood that served women at the bar. Lewnes’
(pronounced Looney’s) was full of heavy-set men crowded
against the bar in their Sunday best. My father knew many
people in both places but never stayed long.
Usually he was heading up the street, where Prospect
Park West became Ninth Avenue, to the bar that he kept
returning to until the end of his life: Farrell’s. A lot of Belfast
men were always there, short and wiry like my father, and
they would talk about the old country while I listened and
watched. The place was always packed, the men three
deep at the long polished wooden bar, served by two
bartenders in starched white shirts and neat ties. In the
men’s room there were two huge curved ceramic urinals,
as high as my head, and I loved pissing on the blocks of ice
that lay at the bottom, melting little gullies and caves. At that
bar, where the men made jokes, drank beer and whiskey,
placed bets on horses, and put cigarettes out on the tile
floors, I felt at home. I was, after all, Billy Hamill’s son.
There were other bars on my father’s map. He still went
to Gallagher’s, of course, but on weekend afternoons, when
the weather was good, he would patrol along Seventh
Avenue, where there were bars on almost every corner.
There was McAuley’s on Eighth Street, Diamond’s and
Denny’s on opposite corners of Ninth Street, Fitzgerald’s
on Tenth Street. I’d see him go in, and faces turn, and
smiles break out. If he walked in the other direction, he’d
visit Unbeatable Joe’s on Twelfth Street, Quigley’s on
Thirteenth Street, Connolly’s on Fifteenth Street. In a
neighborhood of cliques, Billy Hamill was welcomed by all
of them. Occasionally there were wider forays: down to
Loftus’s on Fifth Avenue, where the ironworkers did their
drinking; the Blue Eagle on Third Street, named after one of
the symbols of the New Deal, where a friend from Belfast
tended bar; a nameless place on Sixth Avenue and Ninth
Street next to the Knights of Columbus. He was known
everywhere, for his singing, his laughter, his Irish blarney.
When he took me with him, he was always greeted with
slaps on the back and glasses of beer. But there was
another side to him: on the days when I followed at a
distance, he often seemed lonesome and sad, heaving the
wooden leg behind him, lost in some abyss of memory right
up to the second that he opened the doors.
3
THAT WINTER, Betty the Whore’s husband came home. He
was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who had been a German
prisoner for two years. But when he went into the building
there were no Welcome Home signs and no Betty either.
We all heard about the way he reacted. He went into
Unbeatable Joe’s and got very drunk. Then he started
throwing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror
in the men’s room. The other men were very gentle. They
took him home and put him to bed. The next day, he left the
Neighborhood and never came back.
4
IN THE FALL of the year the war ended, we were suddenly
poor. The ferocious winter came howling into New York,
and so did a new kind of fear, replacing the old fear of
Nazis and Japanese. One afternoon, my father came home
to announce that he had lost his job at Arma. They were
laying off thousands, he said, now that the war was won. So
instead of a sense of triumph, we were filled with
uncertainty and doubt. My father had always worked, even
in the Depression that everyone still talked about in tones of
horror; now he was out of work, and on some of the radio
shows they were talking about the possibility of a return of
the Depression and how this one might even be worse.
If Roosevelt hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have this problem,
my mother said. Truman is just some damned
haberdasher….
In the other rooms, while my mother and father talked
about the layoffs, the bills, and the rent, Tommy and I
whispered in the dark about what would become of us. We
wondered if they’d have to put us in an orphanage, like
Oliver Twist, who was on the back of the HO Oats box,
begging the cook for more gruel. Tommy wondered if we’d
be evicted, like the Murphy family, who ended up sitting on
the furniture in the rain down on Twelfth Street, bawling in
shame while the street kids jeered.
Don’t worry, I told Tommy, Patty Rattigan will take care of
us.
And what if he loses his job?
He won’t lose his job, I said confidently. He owns a bar.
My father did lose his job. Now he was home every day. He
no longer slept in the afternoons and went off to work
through the night. He was here, waking late, going out to
look for a new job, often coming home drunk and sour.
My mother wasted no time with either blame or
consolation; she started working as a nurse’s aide at
Methodist Hospital, leaving at three in the afternoon,
coming home around eleven. Sometimes Tommy and I
walked her to work, passing the bars of my father’s world,
and watched her vanish into the hospital. On the way back,
we often saw him through the windows, head lifted in song.
If he was afraid, he didn’t show his fear to his friends. But
I’d wonder: If there is no money in the house, if we are so
poor that Mommy must go to work, then how can he afford
to drink? He is having fun while Mommy works. When he
was working, he couldn’t save enough money to take her to
Broadway. Now the war is over, he has no money at all, and
he still can go to Rattigan’s. My longing for him, my
desperate need to know him, was turning into anger.
We had an account at Roulston’s, where the cost of food
was entered in a composition book behind the counter, to
be settled later when my mother was paid. When she went
off to work, she left lists of groceries for me to pick up, and I
learned to say “on the book” with confidence. My father
never shopped. Nor did he cook. My mother left cooked
food in pots: lamb stew and barley soup, mixtures of
potatoes and carrots, potatoes and peas, potatoes and
turnips. These were to be heated up at dinnertime. And so,
while my mother helped feed patients at the hospital,
Tommy and I did what we called “the cooking.” There was
never any beef, of course. And that winter there was no
butter. The war might be over, but the shortages were not.
Into our kitchen came margarine. My mother told us the
butter people wouldn’t allow margarine to be pre-mixed, so
we’d place the white waxy blocks in a bowl, sprinkle them
with a yellow powder, and churn and mix and mix and churn
until the results looked vaguely like butter. My father never
did this job either; it was, he said, woman’s work. But after
Tommy and I did the work, he refused to use margarine on
his toast; if he couldn’t have butter, then he would have
nothing. My anger was building.
The rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally of
butter. But the shortages were not over. There was a
shortage of coal, and when the winter of 1946–47 arrived in
full force, we sat in the kitchen in sweaters — and on some
frigid nights wore coats, mackinaws, and mittens — while
listening to Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante or
Commissioner Lewis B. Valentine on “Gangbusters.” I was
finished with knickers now, wearing long pants to school,
but I was always cold and wore knee socks to bed. My
father never seemed cold; he slept his deep phlegmy
sleep, insulated by drink.
In the living room, (or as we called it, “the front room”), we
saved money by using the kerosene stove only a few hours
in the evening, to burn off the chill. But when the stove
burned down and went out, the windows grew frosted and I
would draw faces in the frost with my fingernails. When we
talked, steam came in small puffs from our mouths.
Overnight, shirts, underwear, and towels froze stiff on the
kitchen clothesline. The drainpipes of the 14th Regiment
Armory exploded from the cold, and great elaborate ice
sculptures bloomed from the broken places. Almost every
night, the fire engines woke us as they screamed to another
disaster caused by kerosene stoves that burst into fire. The
wind off the harbor howled through the night, and in the
mornings the trees in the yards were glazed with ice. I’ve
never again seen such a winter.
On the radio they were talking about starvation in Europe
and Japan. My mother used this information whenever she
served something like kelp. What did I mean, I didn’t like
kelp? Don’t you know they’re starving in Europe? Yes (I
thought, but did not say): Yes, I know that, I know they’re
starving; but we’re not doing too good in Brooklyn either.
On those bitter nights when there wasn’t enough food, I
devised a mental trick: I conjured up pictures from the
concentration camps, saying the words “Buchenwald” and
“Auschwitz,” reciting the rosary of horror. I made emaciated
men in striped pajamas walk through the top floor right at
378 Seventh Avenue, all of them barefoot, their eyes mere
dots in black holes, their cheekbones sharp and bare, their
arms like dowels, their mouths slack; and I’d say to myself,
You have it good, you have a bed, you have food to heat
up at night, you have pancakes, you have a kerosene
stove, you are not from Buchenwald, you are not being
buried by a tractor, fatherless motherless, brotherless,
sisterless, you are not a Jew. Almost always, that cured my
hunger and my cold and beat down my self-pity. And I would
lie in the dark, thinking that no matter what I would be when I
grew up, I would do nothing that sent men into camps to
die.
And then I would fall into the gray nightmare, fighting my
way through the skeletons of the gas chamber.
That winter refused to end. After school, every other
afternoon, I went down to Fifteenth Street, my head bent
into the wind off the harbor, and bought cheap day-old
bread in a bakery next to the Globe movie house. Scabs of
black snow were everywhere. My shoes wore out and my
mother lined them with cardboard. At school, my number 2
Eberhard Faber pencils wore down to stubs, and some
kids had no pencils at all. I drew my cartoons on wrapping
paper, and sometimes it was too cold to draw.
One freezing afternoon, in a hallway on Twelfth Street, I
heard from a friend about relief. If you were poor, he said,
you went to the government and they gave you money that
they called relief. There were many people on relief now,
my friend said, just like the Depression. He named the
families. And that night, after my mother came home, I
asked her why she didn’t get relief.
Never, she snapped.
Why?
Because we’re proud people. We’ll take nothing from
them. We’ll work.
In the spring, I went to work too.
5
THE BROOKLYN EAGLE was a handsome broadsheet that
sold 300,000 copies a day and was read by four times that
number. It was an afternoon paper and most of its
circulation was home delivered. One afternoon, as I was
walking to school at Holy Name, I saw Danno Kelly, one of
the older brothers of the Kelly family from 471 Fourteenth
Street, and said hello. He asked about my father and
mother and then asked me what I was doing. Nothing, I
said. Then he told me that if I wanted to work after school,
he could give me a job helping him deliver the Eagle.
I started the next day.
After school, I met Danno at the Eagle storefront on Sixth
Avenue, where dozens of boys were “boxing” papers in a
triple fold and sliding them into delivery bags. I was very
nervous. All of the boys were older than I was and they
shouted and kidded and worked with amazing speed.
Here, Danno Kelly said, help me box these and put them
in the bags.
I did, ineptly and clumsily, until I filled a bag. He was filling
two others.
Now, Danno said, put the bag over your shoulder and
let’s go.
We set out together, to the route (always rhymed with
“out”) that Danno had on Fourth and Fifth streets, tree-lined
streets of brownstones and white sandstone apartment
houses. The arrangement was simple: Danno worked for
the Eagle and I worked for Danno. I was discovering the
rudiments of capitalism.
Danno’s blocks were not part of the Neighborhood; the
comfortable people lived here, people even better off than
those on Eleventh Street. There were no fire escapes on
these blocks, no stores or bars, and every house had a
backyard. Peering through windows I saw another world,
made of polished tables, muted lamps, elaborate
wallpaper, rugs on wood floors. The men and women
seemed always dressed up; there was nobody like Mr. Dix.
The men were formal and sober, the women grave. But they
took a lot of newspapers, paying for them once a week.
Danno showed me how to throw a paper into a basement
doorway, how to wedge it between cut glass doorknobs or
into the grills of iron gates beneath the stoops. At the
beginning of the route, I wobbled under the weight of the
bag. But as I moved on, delivering the papers, the load got
lighter, and toward the end, with only a few papers left, I felt
stronger and light-headed and even powerful. I was
delivering a newspaper.
At the end of the route, my shoulder was sore and I was
wet with sweat inside my mackinaw but I felt as if I’d grown
six inches in one afternoon. Danno put an arm on my
shoulder and handed me a free copy of the paper.
Good job, he said. You’re a little slow, but you’ll get
faster. Meet me tomorrow at the Eagle office.
I ran home. I took the stairs two and three at a time and
burst into the kitchen, giddy with excitement. Nobody was
home. There was the usual note from my mother, explaining
that the big pot contained the soup, the saucepan the peas.
No matter. I sat at the table and read the Eagle. I looked at
the comics. I read the sports pages. I looked at all the other
pages. And then I went back and read through it again. I
worked for a newspaper now. The Brooklyn Eagle. My
newspaper. My skin pebbled with awareness; I was now a
member of the real Newsboy Legion.
When my father came home, I told him about the job. He
smiled and rubbed my hair and laughed.
Great, he said. Great.
He took the Eagle and turned to the want ads. Then
looked up and said, What’s for dinner?
I worked every day after that for Danno Kelly, earning a
dollar fifty a week. That was more than I’d ever had in my
hand at one time. Because we were poor now, I gave the
money to my mother, and she hugged me, and gave me
fifty cents back. That was still a lot of money, and I used it in
pursuit of Bomba books and the great new comics and
some of the lost old ones. I also read the Eagle every day.
The comics were an odd collection, from Steve Roper
(which used to be called Big Chief Wahoo) to a dog strip
named Bo and a terrific strip about a woman who could
press a nerve in her wrist and vanish from sight: Invisible
Scarlet O’Neill. I thought that would be a terrific power to
have. But more important than the comics, I was reading
the sports pages, where the columnists were Tommy
Holmes and Harold C. Burr, and where there was only one
real story: the Brooklyn Dodgers.
And the Dodgers brought me closer to my father.
6
A FEW WEEKS before Christmas, 1945, there was a sudden
delivery of coal, carried into the house by a burly man with a
blackened face. And on the day before Christmas, another
man arrived with a turkey. I asked who the men were and
was told by my father, the party. What party? The
Democratic party. Said in the tone of: Are you an idiot? But
I was still puzzled. This wasn’t relief, was it? Of course not.
Well, if they give you a turkey and coal, what do you have to
give them in return?
Loyalty, he said. Always remember the most important
thing in life: Vote the straight ticket.
On the street, someone pointed out a person called the
district leader to me and explained that he worked out of
Jimmy Mangano’s Democratic Club on Union Street. The
man was tall and bald and cheerful, and he worked the
same piece of the world as my father, moving from bar to
bar. He was very close to Patty Rattigan, who also worked
for the party. They were important people, I was told. They
were Big Shots.
In the spring of 1946, a few weeks after I became an
Eagle boy, I realized what a Big Shot could do when my
father finally went back to work. One of the Big Shots had
arranged for a job, right across the street in the Factory. On
Thirteenth Street, we had lived in its cold shadow; now the
Factory would give my father a living. He was going to work
for the Globe Lighting Company, which made the new
fluorescent lights in the building on our side of the Alley. He
would work on an assembly line in a vast loft on the second
floor, wiring fixtures all day long. I remember his mood when
he came home one Saturday with news of the job.
Well, Annie, he said, the bad times are over.
That’s wonderful, Billy, she said. I prayed and prayed, you
know. I did a dozen rosaries.
You can buy that living room set now.
Well, maybe, she said. We’d better wait a bit and see.
He was drunk that night and drunk on Sunday too but he
started on Monday, walking across the avenue, carrying his
thermos, joining the stream of men coming up from the
subways. Even with his wooden leg, he walked in a
different way when he had a job.
That night, he came home late, looking tired. I heated up
some stew and started talking about the Dodgers,
rehashing a column from the Eagle. The team was on its
way north and would soon begin the season at Ebbets
Field.
This year, they’ll go all the way, he said. Mark what I’m
saying. All the way.
So I had discovered one of his passions. I would
understand later that baseball was what truly made him an
American; the sports pages were more crucial documents
than the Constitution. He loved Leo Durocher, who was the
manager all through the war, and Eddie Stanky, the grizzled
little second baseman. But now the war was over and here
they were coming back to the ballfields: Pete Reiser and
Pee Wee Reese and Carl Furillo and hundreds of others.
The Dodger war veterans were joining the players who
were Dodgers through the war years, Augie Galan and
Ducky Medwick and Dixie Walker. The pitchers were Kirby
Higbe, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Hank Behrman, Hugh
Casey, Vic Lombardi. But Mickey Owen, who dropped the
third strike in 1941, would not be back; he had run off to the
Mexican League, like all those movie desperadoes who
crossed the Mexican border ahead of the posse. It didn’t
matter. He’s just a bad memory, my father said of Owen. I
kept asking about Reiser, the outfielder they called Pistol
Pete, the brilliant centerfielder who led the league in almost
everything in 1941 but got hurt in 1942, crashing into the
Ebbets Field wall, before going off to the navy. The Eagle
was full of stories about him, his speed, his eye, his power,
his immense heart.
He’s a great ballplayer, my father said. You’ll see.
Will the Dodgers win the pennant?
This is the year, he said. The pennant and then the World
Series. That Mickey Owen’s gone and good riddance. This
year, we win.
The Dodgers started winning from opening day, and all
over the Neighborhood that spring, you could hear Red
Barber on the radio, announcing the games. I heard them
from the buildings with fire escapes; I heard them while
delivering the Eagle to the comfortable people. The games
lived in our heads with a gorgeous reality. The Eagle
covered the Dodgers in encyclopedic detail and even
carried long reports on the Dodger farm teams in Montreal
and St. Paul; in addition, my father started bringing home
The Sporting News, a tabloid published in distant St. Louis,
home of the fearsome Cardinals; it was jammed with
information about every team in both leagues, and all the
minor league teams too. And I learned that in 1946 up at
Montreal, the Dodgers had one spectacular rookie. He was
tearing up the league. His name was John Roosevelt
Robinson. He was a Negro.
Ya can’t have a nigger on a major league team, Tommy
Moore said on Twelfth Street.
He can hit, I said. He can run. He can steal bases. Who
cares if he’s colored?
He’ll never make it, Tommy Moore said.
We’ll see.
I listened to Red Barber and talked to my father and read
the newspapers (not simply the Eagle, but the Daily News,
Daily Mirror, and Journal-American too) and learned to
hate the Giants and fear the Cardinals of Musial and
Slaughter. Baseball was only happening in my imagination;
we simply couldn’t afford to go to Ebbets Field, where
tickets cost fifty cents. I fell into an afternoon routine: rushing
home from school, delivering the Eagle, running home to
listen to the serials and Stan Lomax, with the day’s doings
in the world of sports. And while I tried to concentrate on
homework, on the Louisiana Purchase and the Dred Scott
decision, on the differences between the predicate
nominative and the predicate adjective, as I diagrammed
sentences and divided fractions, my head teemed with the
Dodgers, with statistics, names, plays, and the distant
figure of Jackie Robinson.
Then one evening, my father came home from work with
a great smile on his face.
How’d you like to go to a ball game? he said.
That Sunday, in a big old Packard crowded with his
friends from Rattigan’s, I went for the first time to Ebbets
Field. They had been given tickets by some Big Shot. We
parked on a street near the ballpark, and I waited outside
while they all went into a bar that was packed with fans. I
didn’t mind waiting. I watched thousands of people walking
to the great ballpark, which seemed to rise heroically from
the ground. People carried radios, stopped for hot dogs,
even bought my newspaper, the Eagle. Music was playing.
Traffic was jammed. I was jittery with excitement.
After a while, the men came out of the bar and we walked
together to the ballpark, the other men pausing from time to
time to let my father catch up. One of the men had the
tickets, and we waited on line and then passed through the
narrow gate into the rotunda. Ebbets Field. Hot dogs,
music, shouts back and forth, thousands of fans: and we
were going up a ramp, turning, climbing on another ramp,
and then walking through a dark passage into the light.
And there it was: green and verdant and more beautiful
than any place I had ever seen. Until that moment, the
Dodgers were frozen black-and-white figures on the back
pages of the Daily News under a headline saying FLOCK
NIPS JINTS IN 11. But here they were, the color of human
beings, running, throwing, hitting, lounging around, the white
uniforms and blue caps gleaming in the sun. Down on the
field, the Dodgers were taking batting practice, and one of
the men handed me a program and showed me where the
uniform numbers were listed. I knew most of them by heart,
but now I could see them. There was Higbe. There was
Furillo. That was Reese, slapping balls into the outfield.
And there was Dixie Walker. The People’s Cherce, they
called him. And hey, shagging flies, running across the
grass: Pete Reiser!
What do you think? my father said.
I love it, I whispered.
He smiled and nodded his head and said: Yeah. I love it
too.
Then it was time to play the game. The Dodgers took the
field to a gigantic roar. They were playing the Pirates. All
through the game , the men kept ordering beer. They
bought me two hot dogs and a Coke and an Eskimo Pie. A
band called the Brooklyn Sym-phony played music. The
crowd cheered Durocher. They all stood and booed the
umpires after a close play at second. They roared when
Reiser doubled. They roared when Walker singled him
home. The Dodgers won. It was the happiest day of my life.
That day, coming home in the crowded car from Ebbets
Field, I was sure that now my father and I would be like
fathers and sons in the movies and the magazines. He
would teach me things about life. He would take me to
places I had never seen. He would hug me when I did
something right. We would be joined together, father and
son. I was sure the Dodgers would win the pennant too.
7
ON MAY 8, 1946, my brother Brian was born in Methodist
Hospital. I have no memory of my mother being pregnant; I
still didn’t understand the way children were conceived and
born. She certainly never said anything to me, and my head
was full of so many other things: comics, Bomba books, the
Dodgers, school, the Eagle, and the sudden, mysterious
appearance of erections in my life. The last had begun to
happen on an almost daily basis and without any means of
control: when I woke up; at school when I said the morning
prayer with the rest of the class, pushed up against the
back of a desk in a kneeling position; while gazing at
Burma or the Dragon Lady in Terry and the Pirates; while
falling asleep. I had no idea why this was happening and
had nobody to ask.
But I remember the abrupt change at 378 Seventh
Avenue in the first week of May. My mother was gone for a
few days and then I came home from school and Brian was
in a tiny crib in the kitchen, his head covered with black
hair, his features all squinched up.
What’s this? I said.
That’s your new brother, my mother said, obviously
blissful. His name is Brian.
Another brother. I was so used to the three of us kids,
and now there was a fourth. Tiny. A baby. Everything was
changed again. I touched Brian as he slept, his hair silky,
and then my mother let me hold him. I was afraid I would
drop him, but she stood there and smiled. She showed me
how she changed his diaper, washing him, using baby oil
so his skin wouldn’t get sore, then pinning up the diapers
with large safety pins.
You have to be careful, she said. You don’t want to stick
him with the pin. He’s such a wee thing.
Again, as there was for Kathleen’s christening, we had a
family party. The christening took place on a Saturday
afternoon in the marble gloom of a long narrow church
called St. Stanislaus, which was five blocks closer to us
than Holy Name. Brian screamed when the priest poured
water across his skull, and then everyone looked happy and
posed with the baby for photographs and we walked home.
The apartment soon filled up with everyone from 378
except the McEvoys. The aunts and uncles arrived, and my
various cousins, along with the regulars from Rattigan’s and
Patty Rattigan himself. Someone brought in a vat full of ice
cubes. Everyone else arrived with bottles and gifts for the
baby. Soon there were songs and sandwiches and beer,
more singing and more beer, and then just beer. Gallons of
it.
Now I was in the grip of the curiosity that had ruined
Adam. Everybody was drinking, except my mother, who
never drank and was on this day too busy laying out
sandwiches and finding clean glasses for the new arrivals.
They all seemed so happy. And I wanted to taste the
apparent source of their happiness: the beer. I knew it
could harm people. I had seen it turn my father into a
shambling wreck. But I wanted to know for myself.
When no one was looking, I lifted a half-full glass off the
kitchen table and retreated through the rooms. There were
people in all the rooms, but they didn’t notice me. I went into
the Little Room and locked the eye hook on the door. I
stared at the glass, overwhelmed by the sense of the
forbidden. But I needed to move into this unknown place, to
cross this line, to see the back of this grown-up cave. I took
a sip.
The taste repelled me. It was sour, even bitter. The smell
was vile as the glass passed under my nose when I sipped.
But this couldn’t be all there was to drinking beer. If it was,
why did anyone do it? I took another sip, then a third,
expecting some powerful charge, some magical
transformation, like the changes wrought by magical
potions in the comic books. But nothing happened.
Someone knocked on the door.
Who’s in there? someone said; the voice sounded like
that of my cousin Billy.
Me, I said. I’ll be right out.
I finished the glass in one long gulp, belched, waited, hid
the glass beside the bed, and left the Little Room. Nothing
seemed different. The party roared on. But as I moved
through the rooms, I did feel a kind of tingle. It was probably
not from the drink. But I was sure that with one action I had
changed. I had taken my first drink of beer. And I had done
something that I could not reveal to my mother.
Back in the kitchen, nobody realized I’d been gone. My
cousin Billy was down in the street with his sister Marie; so
were Tommy and Kathleen. The singing got louder. Then, at
one point, my father almost dropped Brian. My mother took
the baby and handed him to me.
Don’t let your father have him, she said. Not while he’s
drinking.
At dusk that Saturday, I sat in a big chair in the living
room with Brian in my arms while my father once more
delivered “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” As always, the whole
crowd joined in the last lines about leaving it all to
Providence and Paddy McGinty’s goat. But I gazed out the
window, thinking about the waterfront dives I’d seen in
movies and ports along the Amazon and lost cities in
Yucatan, and I imagined myself coming to those places,
standing at the bar in some forsaken outpost and ordering
drinks like a man. Someday I’d do that. Someday.
8
AT THE END of June, a few days after my eleventh birthday,
school ended and so did my job with the Eagle. Danno told
me that people were canceling their subscriptions because
of the Depression (for that’s what everybody called it now in
the Neighborhood). To make things worse, some of the
other readers, the ones with a lot of money, were going off
on summer vacations. In the fall, he said, he could hire me
again. If the Depression ended. He would even recommend
that I be given my own route.
Thanks, kid, said Danno Kelly, and I’ll see you after
Labor Day.
I was heartbroken. It wasn’t just that I would no longer be
earning money, but after four long months, I had grown used
to the routine, hauling my Eagle bag over my shoulder each
day and walking alone up the hill, delivering newspapers.
That job gave me an identity; I wasn’t just an American, an
Irish Catholic, a student, a son, a brother; I was an Eagle
boy. Now that identity was gone. For those months, I had
given my all to the Brooklyn Eagle, my work and my loyalty,
and now it had rejected me. Without that job, I understood
how my father must have felt when they laid him off at Arma.
But I had little time to mourn. My mother told me that she
had enrolled me for summer camp. The camp was
sponsored by the Police Athletic League out of the 72nd
Precinct, and it was up in the Adiron-dacks in the north of
New York State. I’d be gone for three weeks.
This was fabulous news: an adventure, a trip into the
unknown, far from Brooklyn. One morning, my mother took
me to a Trailways bus station in New York, where I joined a
group of other kids for the journey north. She kissed me
good-bye, telling me to write. But as the bus pulled out, and
I saw her waving at me from the platform, she seemed sad,
even tearful. And I wanted to get up, rush to the front, get off
the bus, and hurry back to Brooklyn.
But it was too late. The bus groaned and turned a corner,
its engines making a gassy gargling sound, and my mother
and the bus station vanished from view. I settled back,
tense, guarded, looking at no one, thinking: At last, I am off
on an adventure. I am leaving home to see the world.
The camp was nestled in a green valley between
mountains. We lived in tents large enough for eight cots.
The floors were wooden platforms. In the center of the tents
was the main building, made of logs, where the kitchen was
and where the counselors lived. Along one side of the
camp, a cold clear stream moved swiftly over a bed of
smooth stones. On the other side, deep piney woods
climbed abruptly into the foothills. From a distance, the
place seemed like paradise.
Up close, Fox Lair Camp was much more complicated
than any paradise. I met poor boys from the great city
beyond the borders of the Neighborhood: Italians from Red
Hook and Bensonhurst; blacks from distant Harlem and
mysterious Bedford-Stuyvesant; Jews out of Brownsville
and the Lower East Side; “Spanish” kids from East Harlem
and the Bronx. It was like one of those scenes from a
desert movie, where the Red Shadow sends out his call
and from all points of the horizon, groups of fighting men
rally to his summons. Nobody had summoned these kids, of
course, but they all told wild tales of fighting and robbing,
knifing and shooting. They knew about all the great
gangsters, from Lepke Buchalter to Al Capone. They’d
seen blood and bodies. Or so they said. I thought Twelfth
Street was pretty tough, but these kids made me feel like
some sheltered boy.
On the first day, as I unpacked my small cloth bag and
shoved it under my mattress, I was forced to fight. It was
like a scene in a dozen movies. A kid named Cappy came
over to me.
Whatta you? he said.
Whatta you mean, what am I?
You a Jewboy? A Mick? A guinea like me? What are
you?
American, I said.
You a fucking wise guy or what? I ast you what the fuck
you are.
American, I said. Irish American.
I shoulda figured dat, he said. A fuckin’ Mick. ’Ey, who cut
your fuckin’ hair, Mick? Tonto?
I tried to ignore him, afraid of him, afraid of a fight, and he
stepped between me and the cot.
I’m tawkin’ to you, he said.
For a moment, I was riddled with fear. This was like the
first day in 1A, mixed up with Brother Foppiano, who was
also Italian American. Worse, I thought I saw something
cold and heartless in Cappy’s glistening brown eyes. Then,
I knew that if I let him beat me up, the three weeks in Fox
Lair Camp would be a long humiliation.
I don’t want to talk to you, I said.
Zat so?
He pushed me and I fell back a few feet and then lunged
at him. I punched him and kicked him and punched him
again, and he careened out through the tent opening onto
the dirt path. And then the counselor was there. He was tall,
tanned, thick-bodied, with hairy arms and the attitude of a
cop.
Hey, come on, what is this? he said, getting between us.
Nothing, I said.
Cappy was up now. He had a surprised look on his face.
We wuz just foolin’ around, he said.
Yeah, I said. Just kidding.
Kid around some other way, the counselor said. I’m in
charge of this tent and I don’t want any fighting. Got me?
Cappy shrugged.
Now shake hands, the counselor said. The voice of
authority.
Cappy held back. So did I. I had a strange feeling, as if I
were part of this scene but also watching it from outside.
I gotta tell you twice? the counselor said. Shake bands!
So we shook hands. And when the counselor was gone,
Cappy asked me my name and told me his and we went
together to dinner. He made me laugh, with his rowdy talk
and thick Brooklyn accent, and when the conversation
turned to comics, and he talked on and on about Captain
America and the Red Skull and Dr. Sivana and Hawkman,
we became friends.
After that, we fell into the rhythms of the days in camp:
Softball, where I learned I could hit; footraces; nature walks;
swimming and fishing in the stream. I loved the early
mornings before breakfast, when the grass sparkled with
dew. The nights were rowdier. There were assemblies
around a roaring campfire, with sparks rising into the air to
die in the dark, and songs made popular by the Sons of the
Pioneers. “Cool Water” and “The Streets of Laredo.” While
the city boys shouted, cursed, whispered, and fought, while
they squirmed and scratched and slapped at mosquitoes,
while they bragged about the many beers they’d drunk back
home and the gangsters they knew and the women they’d
“boffed” or “humped,” the poor counselors tried to get them
to sit still for The Song of Hiawatha.
But I loved those campfires, the primitive sense they
gave me of having a center, combined with the eerie
feeling that I’d been there before, on an ancient battlefield
or in Indian camp or on the edge of some lost city. Most of
all, I was thrilled to be part of the crowd, sitting in the dark
among the rough tribes of New York. Thrilled. And envious.
And a little afraid.
The fear grew more specific when I came to know a
black kid from our tent. His name was Arnold and he was
from Bed-Stuy. He was small, taut, with skin the color of tea
with milk, and hazel eyes that made him look both feminine
and sinister.
Arnold was a steady presence at Fox Lair Camp, though
he seemed also capable of vanishing as swiftly as Invisible
Scarlet O’Neill. I don’t remember him playing ball, fishing,
swimming, hiking along mountain trails. But there he was at
breakfast, using the word “motherfucker” in every other
sentence, explaining “cocksucker,” making detailed
diagrams on writing paper of the mechanics of sex. As he
walked across the field between the tents and the
commissary, words like “cunt” and “pussy” would fall from
his lips, followed by “muff diver” and “cunt lapper.” Even
Cappy was both enthralled and mystified.
At dusk one day, Arnold motioned us into the woods. We
disappeared behind a screen of bushes and Arnold
reached into a hole burrowed in the roots of a tree. He
removed a dirty quart bottle of red wine.
Where’d you get that? I asked.
Found it.
Where?
In the kitchen.
He looked at us with those eyes, a sly smile on his face,
and removed the cork. He took a sip and handed it to
Cappy. Without a word, Cappy took a swig. Then it was my
turn. I didn’t want wine. I wanted to sit beside the campfire
and watch the sparks merge with the stars. But this was a
kind of dare, like that time on the roof with the Bottomless
Pit. If I didn’t take a swig, they’d think I was a kid, a scaredy
cat, a momma’s boy, a sissy.
So I took a drink, holding the wine in my mouth as I
passed the bottle to Arnold. I hoped I could spit it out while
the other two weren’t looking. But Arnold was staring at me,
judging me. I swallowed the wine. Arnold grinned. Cappy
whispered: Not bad. Arnold took another sip. Cappy talked
about how his grandfather from Italy made his own wine,
putting all the grapes in a big vat and jumping on them with
his bare feet.
Arnold said: The motherfuckin’ wine must taste like
fuckin’ feet.
Cappy said: No, no, it tastes fuckin’ great. I had some at
my cousin’s wedding.
Arnold took a third swallow and passed the bottle to
Cappy. My mouth felt sticky.
Cappy said: Not bad, Arnold, not motherfuckin’ bad.
They giggled. The bottle came to me again. I took my
swig, swallowed, handed the bottle to Arnold. The sense of
the forbidden flooded through me again. My father had
once said to me, The wino is the lowest form of man,
except for an informer. Would I become a wino if I kept
drinking? Was drinking wine a mortal or a venial sin? And
how could it be a sin at all? At every Mass, the priests
drank wine. The blood of Jesus, they told us. How could it
be a sin in the woods and a virtue on an altar? The bottle
came around again and I drank once more of the blood of
Jesus.
Then Arnold produced a cigarette. A Camel. My father’s
brand. He lit it with a wooden match, snapping off the head
just the way my father did during the match shortage, the
way I never could. Arnold took a drag, handed it to Cappy,
who did the same and passed it to me. I was listening for
the sounds of counselors or other kids, afraid of being
discovered.
Don’t slob it, Cappy said as I took the cigarette. Don’t
get it wet wit’ spit.
I took a tense drag. The smoke made my head balloon. I
started to cough, and Arnold looked around toward the
camp, alarmed. But I didn’t slob the cigarette. I handed it to
Arnold and said with confidence: Pass me the wine.
I took a slug, the cough stopped, but I never had another
sip. Someone was crashing through the woods. Arnold
capped the bottle, slipped it under the roots, then tamped
out the cigarette.
Anybody in there? a grown-up voice said.
Yeah, Arnold replied. We looking for snakes.
Do that some other time. We’re roasting marshmallows.
So off we went to the marshmallow roast, looking, I
suppose, like kids off a brotherhood poster.
In the first few days that followed the night of the wine, I
found reasons to avoid the hideout in the woods. I was
playing softball. I was swimming. I was picking wild
strawberries. Arnold just stared at me with a thin smile on
his face, as if he knew how much I wanted to return to the
wine and the cigarettes, to the forbidden, to the secret life
of the outlaw. I was desperate now for things to read,
starved for the alternate lives of fantasy and imagination
that had become part of my days; there were no books or
newspapers in the camp.
But Arnold was weaving another world of fantasy for all of
us in the tent. Sometimes he bragged about the number of
times he had been drunk and how many times he’d
smoked reefer, a kind of cigarette that made you feel real
good. He described the taste of rum, of whiskey, of
bourbon, beer, and wine. He described roaring parties,
wild music, amazing adventures in the nights of
motherfucking Brooklyn. One evening, he smuggled
another bottle of wine into the tent and we all took swigs. It
tasted better this time, like thick grape juice.
And when he wasn’t describing his greatness as a
drinker, Arnold’s subject was sex. He told us that he fucked
lots of women, all over his neighborhood. Fat ones, skinny
ones, girls with big asses and tits. He even fucked his older
sister once when she was drunk. That was the best way to
fuck a woman. Get her drunk first. Wine and kisses. That
was the way.
Arnold also led the way to one of the great astonishments
of Fox Lair Camp: masturbation. I wasn’t the only boy in that
tent who was ignorant of the practice. Once again, the
devil’s agent was Arnold, age eleven. One night, after lights
out, as we all shifted in our cots to find comfortable
positions, Arnold spoke from the darkness.
Hey, why don’t we have a circle jerk?
Cappy said: A what?
Arnold said: We get in a circle and jerk off.
One kid said: Wuz dat?
A couple of kids laughed in a knowing way. But Arnold
was a determined pedagogue. He got up, dropped his
shorts (which all of us wore to bed), and stood before the
boy in the dim shimmer of leaking moonlight. Arnold held
his small penis in his hand.
Watch me now, he said, and started playing with himself.
Almost immediately, his penis got larger and harder.
Now you do it, Arnold said.
The boy did.
Now you go up and down like this, Arnold said.
The boy moved his hand up and down on his erection.
Everybody else was silent.
Now, Arnold said, you think about some woman … you
know, like Betty Grable or Rita Haywort’. She got big tits.
She gotta big ass. And you on top of her, you stickin’ it in
her, you in her big wet hairy pussy, you in her motherfuckin’
ass!
Arnold groaned and ejaculated on the floor. The boy
ejaculated on himself, moaning and whimpering. Some of
the boys giggled. Then Arnold sneaked outside, felt under
the floorboards of the tent platform, came back with a bottle
of wine.
Here, drink this, he said, handing the bottle to the boy.
Make you feel sweet and good and ready to do it again.
The boy took a sip, Arnold a long swallow.
Who wants some juice? he said.
Cappy took a swallow, then passed it to me. I swallowed
a long swig, then turned away to sleep. Arnold went back
outside. He came back and stood before the other boy,
holding his penis.
Wanna do it again? Arnold said.
Nah, I’m too tired. Maybe tomorrow.
Arnold went back to bed and then the tent was very still.
Boys shifted in their cots. Then one boy moaned. And
another. Arnold laughed. Away off in the mountains,
coyotes howled. The night breeze made the tent flaps billow
and sigh. Under the army blanket I reached down and
touched my hard penis and thought about the Dragon Lady.
I learned to talk the way the others did, using “fuck” and
“shit” and “prick” for punctuation and rhythm, saying “dis”
and “dat” instead of “this” and “that,” dropping my g’s,
removing t’s from other words (“bottle,” for example). I
practiced walking like the tough guys, in a rolling way,
putting the weight on one foot while the other dragged
behind. I stopped saying “excuse me.” I spit a lot.
Twice more, Cappy and I sneaked away to drink wine
with Arnold in the woods, but I did this more to show that I
could be as bad as anyone rather than for any real desire
for wine. To me, the taste of wine was as sickly sweet as
the taste of beer was sour; I wished I had a bottle of Frank’s
Orange. And though I felt a tingle in my head from the wine,
and an odd thickness in my hands, I felt no ache to have a
bottle all to myself. I much preferred hitting a softball past
the third baseman.
Then one night near the end of the second week, I was
awakened from a deep sleep. Arnold was beside me in my
bed, his hard prick up against my rectum.
Hey, I said. What —
Come on, baby, Arnold whispered. Open up your sweet
white ass.
I turned. His penis was against my hip now. His breath
had a stale sweet smell, like dried wine.
Get the fuck outta here, Arnold, I said.
Come on, baby, he purred. Make Arnold happy.
I pushed him away, but then his voice changed and he
locked an arm around my neck.
Do what I say, he whispered coldly. I got a knife and I’ll
cut your motherfuckin’ white throat.
I panicked at the mention of the knife, and shoved him
hard, kicking at him as he fell on the floor, and then Cappy
was awake, followed by the other kids. I kept punching and
kicking at Arnold as if my life depended on it. Cappy
looked astonished. But my fury must have convinced him
about who was right, so he kicked at Arnold too and
stomped on his knees. And then the lights came on. The
counselor stood there in his underwear. His hair was
mussed, his face rumpled and irritated.
Okay, he said, what’s going on in here?
Arnold stood up slowly, his hazel eyes wide in righteous
anger. I couldn’t see any knife.
This fuckin’ white boy is a faggot! he screamed.
His nose was bleeding, his lower lip split. He pointed at
me, spitting out the words: I’uz sleepin’ real peaceful and he
gets in bed with me, tries to fuck me inny ass!
That’s a lie! I said, rushing at him again. The counselor
grabbed me and spun me around. I was crazy with rage.
He’s lying! He’s a motherfuckin’ liar!
All right, watch your language …
Then Arnold looked at me from those eyes, a sneer on
his face, and made a slicing sign across his neck with a
finger. The counselor must have seen this too. He turned to
the other kids and asked them if they’d seen what
happened. There was a long silence. Nobody wanted to be
an informer. Arnold smirked. And then one boy spoke. It
was the boy who learned to masturbate from Arnold.
He tried to do it to me, too, he said.
Who did?
Arnold.
Then another kid cleared his throat and whispered: Me
too. The counselor looked around at us, studying our faces,
and then turned to Arnold.
Pack up, Arnold, he said. And come with me.
They went off to the main building, Arnold limping on the
leg hurt by Cappy’s stomping. He looked as if he were
under arrest. But as he vanished into the dark, carrying his
small cloth bag, I felt neither relief nor triumph. Instead, I lay
awake in the dark for a long time. I felt like a rat. A stool
pigeon. A creature even lower than a wino. It didn’t matter
that Arnold had lied about me and I had answered him
back. I had collaborated with the enemy.
The next day, Arnold was gone from Fox Lair Camp.
9
WHEN I CAME HOME from Fox Lair Camp, I was a changed
boy. I felt tougher, older, suddenly conscious that I was
moving toward becoming a man. After all, I had traveled
hundreds of miles to the distant Adirondacks, far beyond
the frontiers of the Neighborhood, an immense distance
from New York itself, and I had made that journey without
the protection of my mother or father. In the great mountain
gathering of the New York tribes, I had survived. I thought I
knew about sex now, that immense blurred mystery. I had
drunk wine. And fought off Arnold. Softball and wild
strawberries were marginal to the journey; I had learned to
walk in the world, with no help from anyone. It didn’t matter
that I could not explain much of this to my mother. These
were three weeks in my life, not hers, and certainly not
weeks in the life of my father; that journey belonged to me
alone.
In some ways, the trip to Fox Lair Camp was my first true
opening to consciousness. And drinking was a crucial part
of it. Drinking wine in the woods wasn’t simply another
sensual pleasure, like eating ice cream; it was an act of
rebellion, a declaration of self. The camp had rules and I
was breaking them. It was also an act of communion, with
Arnold, with Cappy. Both states of consciousness would
remain with me through years of drinking. Through the
agency of Arnold, I also discovered Evil. I don’t mean that
sex was evil. That, and drinking, were only part of a
generalized negation that flowed from Arnold with a dark
steady force. He made me afraid. The fear he inspired
wasn’t physical; it was deeper and darker than that. Arnold
lived by his own rules, not the rules I was learning. Nothing
could persuade him from his desires except force.
That summer, I was converted to the creed of machismo,
although I would not hear that word for another decade. On
the street when I was back from camp, I began to talk
tough, sprinkling my language with “fuck” and “cocksucker”
and “prick.” I could be as tough as the other kids on Twelfth
Street; from the start, language was part of the pose. At
home, my mother corrected my slide into “dis” and “dat,”
“dem” and “dose,” but I reverted to them when I hit the
street, wearing the Brooklyn accent like armor. I walked in
the rolling gait I’d picked up from the bad boys at camp. I
talked about girls and asses and tits. Much of this was a
mask, but I was quickly making myself comfortable behind
it. And of course I wasn’t alone; in that neighborhood,
looking like a hard guy was part of the deal.
On the roof next door to ours, Mr. Sicker and Mr. De
Saro built a pigeon coop that summer, talking with passion
to anyone who’d listen about “tiplets” and “homers” and the
intricacies of flight and habit and instinct. They spent hours
on the roof, watching their flocks gliding in tight formation
around the sky, as happy in their intensity as I was with my
books and comics. Their passion impressed me, but as
hard as I tried, I couldn’t share it; there was something
disturbing to me about the gurgling, swallowing sounds of
the pigeons. Besides, if you could fly like a homer, why
would you ever come home?
A few buildings away from ours, I met Mr. Dexter, a
change clerk in the subway. He went to work before the
morning rush hour and came home in early afternoon. Every
afternoon in the good weather, he appeared on his roof to
lift weights. Mr. Dexter was small and wore glasses, but his
upper torso was ropy with muscle. I asked him if I could try
lifting the barbell and he said sure. I was stronger than I
thought I was. He showed me how to do curls and presses,
how to adjust the bells with a small wrench, how to create
daily routines of “reps,” the same exercise repeated
dozens of times. Soon, I added weight lifting to the rhythm
of my days.
At some point, I started going to the Police Athletic
League gym on Eighth Street to watch the amateur fighters.
Again, I saw how important repetition was to learning; on
the floor, the fighters repeated the same punch over and
over again, while time was chopped into three-minute
segments by an automatic bell; then the punches were
joined to others in combinations, with the flat-nosed
paunchy trainer shouting his instructions: Jab, bend!
Double the jab, bend! Now punch outta da bend! I was still
too young for the boxing team, and too shy to insist (and
afraid of getting hurt). But back home, alone on the roof, or
crouched in front of the bedroom mirror, I would practice
jabs and hooks and right hands. I would bend at the knees
after the jab. I would double the jab and throw the right
hand. All the while breathing hard through my nose, my
mouth clamped shut into a hard mask.
On the street, boxing was as much a part of our talk as
baseball. In the summer of 1946 everybody in New York
was talking about Rocky Graziano, who was knocking out
all comers. Rocky, the tough middleweight from the East
Side, Rocky, who talked like a lot of the kids from Fox Lair
Camp. But my father didn’t care much for Graziano. He
fights little guys, he said. He’s the best middleweight in the
welterweight division. Or put another way, he never fights
anyone his own size. My father’s favorite was Willie Pep, a
featherweight like himself, fast, fresh, audacious, a
champion of the world. I was sure that if my father had legs,
he’d box like Willie Pep.
But even Willie Pep wasn’t the best. One day, my father
showed me a picture of a black fighter in the Daily News,
handsome and slick and lean. That’s Sugar Ray Robinson,
he said. He’s the greatest fighter who ever lived. There
were no qualifications; he described Robinson in the same
flat way he would use to describe Mount Everest as the
highest mountain in the world.
How would he do against Graziano? I asked.
He would knock Graziano out in four rounds, he said
flatly.
When they did fight years later, Robinson knocked out
Graziano in three.
In the streets, we still played the now forgotten games of the
New York summers. Stickball was the supreme game, a
kind of tabloid version of baseball, played with a broom
handle as a bat and a pink rubber ball manufactured by the
A. G. Spalding Co. In every street in New York, this ball was
called a spaldeen. The spaldeens had vanished during the
war and the game was played for a while with hairy tennis
balls, until even they had disappeared. But coming home
from Fox Lair Camp, I felt a special excitement spreading
through the neighborhood: Spaldeens are back!
From out of Unbeatable Joe’s and Rattigan’s and the
other bars, the men and the veterans came piling into the
streets again, taking our bats, once more playing the city’s
greatest game, whacking spaldeens past trolley cars and
over rooftops, running bases on heat-softened tar, making
impossible catches, dodging trolley cars and trucks, almost
delirious with joy. The war was over. The fucking war was
finally over.
Stickball ruled us. On Saturday mornings, the older guys
played big games against visitors from other
neighborhoods or went off themselves to play beyond our
frontiers. Money game! someone would shout, and
suddenly we were all moving to the appointed court and the
great noisy fiesta of the stickball morning. The players
drank beer from cardboard containers on the sidelines and
ate hero sandwiches and smoked cigarettes. They were
cheered by neighbors, girlfriends, wives, and kids. And
standing on the sidelines during those first games were the
veterans, holding the spaldeens, bouncing them, smelling
them in an almost sacramental way.
The men played on summer weekends; we kids played
every day. There were still very few cars on the streets in
that year after the war, so the “court” was always perfectly
drawn, with sewer plates marking home and second base,
while first and third were chalked against the curbs. The
rules were settled before each game: one strike and you
were out; off the factory wall or off a passing trolley car was
a “hindoo” — which meant the play didn’t count. The great
hitters could hit the ball at least “three sewers,” and it was
said of Paulie McAleer of the Shamrock Boys that he once
hit a ball an incredible five sewers. In memory, the games
seem continuous and the days longer, richer, denser, and
emptier than any others in my life. We did nothing and we
did everything. You would wake, the radio playing, the
rooms thick with the closed heat (and sometimes the sour
smell of drink), grab something to eat — bread and butter
covered with sugar, a piece of toast — and then race down
the stairs, to burst into the streets. On a perfect Saturday in
August, Twelfth Street would be wet from the water wagon,
the air fresh, nobody else around, the tenements brooding
in Edward Hopper light, and then a door would open and
Billy Rossiter would appear with the bat and the spaldeen,
and that was all we needed. We’d play off the factory walls
until the others came down; we’d play ten hits a piece until
there were enough players to choose up sides. And then
we’d play until dark.
After stickball, or wedged between the ball games, there
were other games too: kick the can, off the point, box ball
and punchball, Johnny on the pony (Buck buck, how many
borns are up), and the greatest of all: ring-o-Ievio.
One Saturday, we were playing ring-o-levio on Twelfth
Street and one of the players on the other side was Frankie
Nocera. He was a lean black-haired wild-tempered kid who
lived in one of the corner tenements. A few years earlier,
hitching a ride on a trolley car, he fell off and his foot went
under a steel wheel; he lost the tip of his right foot and
became known as No Toes Nocera. Winter and summer,
he wore an ankle boot with a steel tip that replaced the
missing toes. Because of my father’s leg, Frankie and I
should have been friends. Frankie, after all, was a cripple.
For some reason, he had become my nemesis, the way Dr.
Sivana was the nemesis of Captain Marvel or the Joker of
Batman. On Thirteenth Street, Brother Foppiano was my
nemesis. Now, on Twelfth Street, it was No Toes Nocera. It
must have had something to do with the great struggle
between the Irish and Italians. Or maybe it was just
chemistry.
Unlike Arnold, Frankie didn’t make me feel that I had
opened a curtain and glimpsed Hell. But he was always
there, pinching, leaning, nudging, harassing. I’d be playing
marbles in the lot and he’d grab a peewee and walk off; if I
went after him, he’d drop the marble, or roll it toward a
sewer, and laugh. I’d be on a stoop after a game, reading a
comic book, and he’d snatch at it, run away, force me into a
losing tug-of-war over the comic, as if sensing that I
wouldn’t risk tearing the cover. He’d squirt water pistols at
me; he’d ask for a ride on a scooter and go off for an hour;
he was one of those kids who was always grabbing your
hat. He wasn’t bad. But he was a misery.
Naturally, when we played ring-o-levio, Frankie was on
the opposing team. The rules of the game were as primitive
as warfare. We divided ourselves into two teams, or sides.
After a coin toss, one team went out, scattering around the
immediate neighborhood, looking for hiding places. The
second team would then hunt down the first, capturing each
opponent and returning him to a pen whose walls were
marked on the tarred street with chalk. The pen was called
home. When the last man was captured, the sides switched
roles, the hunters becoming the hunted. Imprisonment,
however, wasn’t permanent. If you were one of the hunted,
and could elude capture through guile or deception, you
could make a sudden dash, race directly at the wall of
defenders around the border of the pen, crash through
them, shout the magical phrase Home free all! and liberate
all members of your side. Most of the time it was
impossible to breach the wall of defenders, who stood
there with arms locked. But if you succeeded, it was a
moment of sheer power and glory.
On this day, I was the last man out. I had evaded all my
pursuers and then, gathering strength on the slope above
Seventh Avenue, I started my run for home. I dodged left,
feinted right, zigzagged, and twirled, never stopping; saw
the crowd of defenders guarding home, under the lamppost
in front of Mr. Dix’s house; saw my side waiting inside the
pen, all of them tensing, the defenders crouching, then
stepping forward, Frankie Nocero among them; saw them
forming a human wall; saw them getting larger as I came
closer. And then I leaped, high and strong, feeling that I
could fly, saw a blur of bodies and faces, rammed into
shoulders and elbows and torsos, and was through!
Shouting Home free all!
My side scattered into freedom. I whirled to escape. And
then saw Frankie Nocero rising from the tangle of
defenders. Saw Frankie’s eyes wide in rage. Saw him
coming at me. Then felt a numbness in my face as a punch
hit my nose, then a sharp pain on the side of my head as he
threw another.
I backed up, numb, my ears ringing, the world suddenly
filmy, and he threw another punch and missed, and
someone yelled Right hand. I threw the right hand and hit
him. Then threw it again, and missed. And again, and hit
him, still backing up, Frankie making a snorting sound, his
teeth bared, his hair all spiky. Someone else yelled: Jab,
jab, use da jab. Then I remembered the PAL gym, and
Graziano, and the pictures of Sugar Ray, and I raised my
hands in the boxer’s stance; and when Frankie came at me
again I speared him with a jab and threw a right hand
behind it. For the first time in my life I heard cheers. A
crowd was now gathering. I saw them as a blur, a
presence, heads and bodies and no faces; but they were
there, and they made the fight even more important. I
couldn’t be humiliated in front of a crowd; I couldn’t run; I
absolutely could not cry. I remember coiling into an almost
ferocious concentration. I jabbed and hit Frankie, and
jabbed again, then feinted the jab and threw the right hand
and amazingly, Frankie went down. I went down on top of
him, battering him with punches, until he started screaming
Stop stop I give up stop okay stop.
I got off him then, rising slowly, my hands still fists, afraid
of a trick, and then heard more cheers, and suddenly my
brother Tommy was there and Billy Rossiter and Billy
Delaney and they were hugging me and clenching fists in
approval and then I saw the crowd of men outside of
Unbeatable Joe’s and they were clapping and laughing
before going back to the bar. I had fought a street fight and
won. Not with kids from camp whom I’d never see again.
Here at home. On the court. In the Neighborhood. And men
cheered. I hoped they would tell my father what I’d done.
Then I saw Frankie Nocera walking into his building. He
was holding his face. There was blood all over the front of
his shirt. Very red blood. He was absolutely alone, limping
on that gimpy foot. I started to go to him, suddenly feeling
sorry for him. I wanted to be gracious, the way winning
prizefighters were after boxing matches. But Frankie
vanished into the dark hallway. We all went to Sanew’s then
and bought bottles of Frank’s Orange or Mission Bell
Grape, drinking them greedily, passing them around. Soda
had never tasted better. And someone said, That Frankie,
be needed a good fuckin’ beating and you sure give it to
him. But even in triumph, something bothered me about the
fight.
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 brought 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.
Then one afternoon I came into the shop and Brady didn’t
seem to know me.
What the fuck do you want?
I didn’t know what to say. And then I realized he was
drunk. He was trying to letter an O. But he couldn’t hold the
curve. He stopped, took the brush in his teeth, and furiously
crumpled the paper.
Goddammit, he said, goddammit, goddammit.
I backed up quietly and slipped out into the night. I felt like
crying, but couldn’t; everybody on the street would see me. I
walked in a blur to Prospect Park and back, thinking:
They’re all drunks. All of them. Every last one.
12
IN THE YEARS after the war, I stopped worrying about my
father. He was there, all right, and I talked to him about
baseball, or boxing, or the weather. But it was as if I
understood that I would never get from him what I wanted
most: the kind of casual affection that is a sign of love. I
protected myself with indifference, dreams of substitute
worlds, a belief in a limitless future that didn’t depend upon
him. I certainly never talked to him about Jim Brady’s sign
store, or cartooning, or art school. I knew better.
Instead, I moved back and forth from the street to the
Little Room (where Tommy and I now shared bunk beds),
from stickball and fistfights to blue pencils, Higgins ink, and
the mysteries of the crow quill pen. This wasn’t easy.
Suddenly, down in the street, it was the time of the gangs.
The street gangs were all over New York then, and the
newspapers wrote about them every other day. In Brooklyn,
there were immense black gangs in Bedford-Stuyvesant
called the Bishops and the Robins; the Navy Street Boys
from the waterfront in Fort Greene; tough Jewish gangs
from Brownsville and Coney Island. And there were street
gangs right in the Neighborhood.
The gang at our end of the Neighborhood was called the
Tigers, most of them Irish. Their great rivals were the South
Brooklyn Boys, most of them Italian. They all wore
variations on the zoot suit, brightly colored trousers with a
three-or-four-inch rise above the belt, ballooning knees,
tight thirteen-inch pegged ankles. The rear pockets were
covered with gun-shaped flaps of a different color, called
pistol pockets; sometimes a bright saddle stitch would run
down the seam of the trouser leg. If the trousers were a
bright green, the pistol pockets, narrow belt, and saddle
stitches might all be yellow. Or the combination would be
maroon and gray. Or black and tan. Or purple and pale
blue. The colors and combinations were drastic, radical,
personal, at once an affirmation of their owner’s
uniqueness and a calculated affront to those locked in the
gray dark memory of the Depression, the khaki and navy
blue palette of the war, or suit-and-tie respectability. In
summer, the gang members wore T-shirts with the sleeves
rolled high on the shoulder and a cigarette pack folded into
the roll. In chillier seasons, they added garish shirts, wide
Windsor-knotted ties, belted jackets with wide padded
shoulders called wrap-arounds, and wide-brimmed,
narrow-crowned, pearl-gray “ginger-ella” hats. And like the
boys at camp, they were all masters of the Walk. They
would come down our avenue in groups of fifteen or twenty,
walking with that practiced roll, their faces frozen in
impassive masks, all smoking cigarettes, a few holding
bats, their trousers billowing like visions from the Arabian
Nights. The mixture of power and menace was thrilling.
On the street, we learned their names and their histories
and heard the legends of their wars. Tigers and South
Brooklyn Boys lived by primitive codes, most of them
outlined in what became their catechism: The Amboy
Dukes by Irving Shulman, published in 1947, probably the
best-read novel in the history of Brooklyn. The codes
demanded that all loyalty go to the gang, ahead of family,
church, city, or country. Everybody had to drink hard and
fight to the death; the women had to “put out” for the men.
Although they supported themselves with burglaries and
other minor crimes, they despised the mugger, they would
never hurt old people, they would not ambush drunks in the
dark or roll lushes in bars. My father liked some of the
Tigers, but he spoke of them sadly.
The Tigers don’t stand a chance, my father said one
evening. They’re fighting the guineas. That means they’re
fighting the Mafia.
He was right; dozens of South Brooklyn Boys ended up
in the Mob. But for five or six years, the Tigers and South
Brooklyn fought some epic battles, over women or insults
(real and imaginary) or turf. One of the leaders of the Tigers
was a handsome young man named Giacomo Fortunato,
the dark blond son of the mustached barber next to Jim
Brady’s sign shop. The son was a great stickball player, an
elaborate zoot suiter, and seemed always to have a girl on
his arm. One evening in 1950, the Tigers met South
Brooklyn at the Swan Lake in Prospect Park, in a full-out
prearranged rumble. And at one point, as they battered
each other with fists, bats, and pipes, someone from South
Brooklyn fired a gun. The cops later said that the shooter’s
name was Anthony Scarpati, better known as Scappy.
Everybody ran, except Giacomo Fortunato. He was dead.
That evening, I was in the street with my brother Tommy
and some of the other kids, playing cards under a
lamppost. Dozens of people were out on the sidewalks,
fanning themselves, cooling off with hot tea, talking about
baseball and the weather and each other. Then an invisible
wave that seemed made of billions of electrons — a
charged mixture of fear, shock, and apprehension — came
rolling down the avenue, shaking the thick hot air,
penetrating every man, woman, and child. Police cars
raced up and down Seventh Avenue. Mothers looked for
their children. The poolroom closed. And the words were
carried on the electric wave: Giacomo’s dead, they killed
Giacomo, Giacomos dead. Nobody went to bed. They
killed Giacomo! And I remember the early editions of the
Daily News and Mirror coming up, people grabbing them,
looking disappointed when the story of the killing of
Giacomo Fortunato wasn’t there, saying, Maybe it ain’t
true, maybe they’re lying, the bulls …
But it was true, all right; the cops weren’t lying. In the
morning, the story was in the late editions of the News and
Mirror, and on the front pages of the afternoon papers. I
told you, my father said. They can’t beat these people. It
seemed impossible that someone I saw every day,
someone only five years older than I was, someone so
handsome and daring: impossible that someone like
Giacomo could be shot to death. And that his death could
be recorded in the newspapers. That morning, I walked
along Seventh Avenue and saw a wreath in the window of
the Fortunato barbershop and a sign saying they were
closed until further notice due to a death in the family.
Across the street, about a dozen Tigers were reading the
papers under the marquee of the Minerva. One of them was
Noona Taylor, the toughest and bravest of the Tigers. He
was sobbing, great body-wracking sobs. Even long-legged
and curly-haired Millie, the sexiest of the Tigerettes, could
not console him.
After a few days, the story vanished from the
newspapers. On a few mornings that winter I passed the
barbershop and saw Giacomo’s father sitting alone,
smoking cigarettes.
13
IN 1947, I went to work in the grocery store that had once
been a Roulston’s branch and then was taken over by a fat
sweaty man named Ruby. I was there every day after
school for three hours and all day on Saturday and was
paid six dollars a week. In addition, I earned about three
dollars in tips, delivering orders to people all over the
Neighborhood. Every Saturday, I gave my mother half this
money, an act that made me feel I was growing up, bringing
home money to the family. I was determined not to be that
species of lowlife who stood just a niche above the wino or
informer: the freeloader.
There was another reason for working: I wanted to be
free of dependence upon my father. No matter what he did,
how drunk he got, how indifferent he was, I wanted him to
know that I could get along without him. I still remember
telling him that I didn’t want an allowance anymore.
What, are you a big shot now? he said
No, I just don’t need it now, Dad. I have my own money.
He gave me a long look, as if trying to decide if this was
some sort of challenge, and then said: Good for you.
Now I paid with my own money for drawing paper and ink
and comics. I saved for books. I would sit down in the
crowded kitchen (for we had no space for a table in the
Little Room) and get lost in the act of drawing. I also felt I
was living a dozen lives at the same time. At any given
hour, I was a student, an altar boy, a son, brother, street
fighter, Dodger fan, storyteller, cartoonist. I was, by most
definitions, a “good” boy; but the gangster style kept calling.
Sometimes I trembled with fear when the Tigers marched
by on the way to the battlefield or when South Brooklyn
launched a sudden invasion. Then I would think that the only
way I could ever be safe would be to join them. Not now, not
yet, but soon, in a few years, when I was old enough. And
that scenario was also scary. Every possibility was
imagined. I saw myself facing the South Brooklyn Boys at
the Swan Lake, fists clenched, eyes narrow, ready to punch
and stomp; saw myself pulling a gun; saw myself being
dragged out of the house in handcuffs by two thick-necked
bulls; even saw myself walking the last mile to the chair.
Every image was as real as breakfast. Along with the
stories in the newspapers and my body laid out in Mike
Smith’s funeral parlor and my mother weeping and my
father getting drunk, both of them consumed with shame.
I was saved from the hot seat by a glorious palace of
books called the Prospect Branch of the Brooklyn Public
Library, known to us simply as the Library. I went there
every Saturday morning, during my break from the grocery
store, following the familiar route along Seventh Avenue, my
blood quickening as I crossed the trolley tracks on Ninth
Street and passed the stately brownstones and small
synagogue and saw up ahead the wild gloomy garden of
the Library. I was always relieved, glancing through the high
windows, to see that the lights were on, the leathery cliffs of
books still there. The majestic mock Corinthian columns of
the main entrance always made me feel puny but inside,
behind walls as thick as those of any fortress, I always felt
safe. Of one thing I was certain: in the Neighborhood, the
bad guys never went to the Library.
I loved that old high-roofed building. It was warm in winter
and cool in summer, and although it seemed built to last
forever, and the sense of space was unlike anything I knew
except the lobbies of movie houses, the attraction of the
Library was not merely shelter. I was there on a more
exciting mission: the discovery of the world.
To be sure, the idea of the Library alarmed me. Those
thousands of books seemed to look down upon me with a
wintry disdain. They were adult; they knew what I did not
know; they were, in a collective way, the epitome of the
unknowable, full of mystery and challenge and the most
scary thing of all, doubt. The harder I worked at cracking
their codes, the more certain I was that the task was
impossible.
At first, I was condemned to the children’s room. I liked
the bound volumes of a British magazine called St.
Nicholas, full of intricate pen drawings and the cheery
innocence of the official 19th century. And I also found a
book about Milton Caniff, called The Rembrandt of the
Comic Strip, borrowing it at least once a month, virtually
memorizing its pages. In that book Caniff suggested to
would-be cartoonists that they study the art of narrative, by
reading writers he called “yarn-spinners,” such as Rudyard
Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. I followed the lesson
of the master. I memorized verses of Kipling’s “Gunga Din”
(the movie version played every year at the Minerva along
with Four Feathers) and read “The Man Who Would Be
King” and The Jungle Book. As the son of Irish immigrants,
I found Kipling a bit too British. But Stevenson was another
matter. Of all his books I most cherished Treasure Island.
How could a son of Billy Hamill resist Long John Silver, with
his left leg cut off below the knee? And right there on the
first page of the novel was that song of the perate, the
desperado, the outlaw, the song that Noona could sing, or
even my father:
Fifteen men on the dead mans
chest —
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
I read the novel once. Then again. I was carried away by
Kidnapped, defeated by the Scotch dialect in The Weir of
Hermiston. But I kept going back to Treasure Island.
Tommy and I would sing the tune: Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of
rum! And laugh and cheer and call each other matey. Then,
tracking down Stevenson, I discovered Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
I’d seen the movie, with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid
Bergman, but the book was even scarier. With his
gorgeous images and musical prose, Stevenson carried
me into nineteenth-century London, where fog rolled down
narrow cobblestoned streets day and night (“A great
chocolate-covered pall lowered over heaven.…” Or, even
better to my inflamed vision: “The fog still slept on the wing
above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like
carbuncles…. ”). I looked up the word “carbuncles,” used it
in school compositions (“Musial’s eyes glowed like
carbuncles”), where I also described fogs that slept and
gas lamps that shimmered. But I never used the Stevenson
paragraph that chilled my heart:
He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A
cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the
table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping
with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I
thought, a change — he seemed to swell — his face
became suddenly black and the features seemed to
melt and alter — and the next moment, I had sprung
to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm
raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind
submerged in terror.
I read that passage and thought of my father. In
Stevenson’s story, Dr. Jekyll says that he had lived “nine-
tenths a life of effort, virtue and control”; but the chemical
experiment had released Mr. Hyde, “the evil side of my
nature.” I wanted that to be true of my father. When he first
started a drinking session, he was often merry and funny,
the joyful Irish singer of funny Irish songs; but as he went on,
his face darkened, his eyes grew opaque, his jaw slack.
Sometimes, he looked evil. And when he became enraged,
I was often afraid of him. I saw the same eerie
transformation in the other drunks of the neighborhood.
Even Mr. Dix was decent enough until he downed too much
of the amber liquid. After reading Stevenson’s great story, I
could never look at my father the same way; I just hoped he
would never come home with a silver-headed cane.
I didn’t brood about Jekyll and Hyde or give up reading
because the subject cut so close to my bones. I was also
collecting Classic Comics (soon to be renamed, for some
reason, Classics Illustrated), and they were a kind of road
map to the real books. I had all the early Classic Comics in
order: 1) The Three Musketeers; 2) Ivanhoe; 3) The Count
of Monte Cristo; 4) The Last of the Mohicans; 5) Moby
Dick; 6) A Tale of Two Cities; 7) Robin Hood; 8) The
Arabian Nights; 9) Les Miserables; 10) Robinson Crusoe;
and on through Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Gulliver’s Travels, The Corsican Brothers, Huckleberry
Finn, and dozens of others. From the stacks at the Library, I
tried reading all of them. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Walter
Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper were truly dreadful
writers. And I was still too raw to enter Moby Dick. But
Dumas père thrilled me with The Count of Monte Cristo
and The Three Musketeers, and I found a copy of the tales
told by Scheherazade during her Arabian nights; it was
beautifully illustrated (probably by Arthur Rackham) and
secretly erotic. I loved the writing of Jonathan Swift and
Charles Dickens; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza moved
into my mind for life, sharing space with Oliver Twist and
David Copperfield. And over and over again, I traveled
down the dark river with Huck and the Nigger Jim and
dreamed of lighting out for the territory. Tom Sawyer
couldn’t have lasted long in the Neighborhood. But Huck
Finn felt like one of us; after all, wasn’t his father the town
drunk?
In the comics — even in Milton Caniff — there were no
drunks, no scary fathers; it was impossible to imagine
Dagwood having a “fair one” with Blondie, the way Mr. Dix
once did with his wife. I knew in the Library that in some of
those books, I was coming closer to the truths of the world.
They weren’t The Amboy Dukes. But then, of course,
nothing was.
The illustrators of these classics were often as important
to me as the books and obviously served as a transition
from comics. The fine-lined Cruikshank drawings in the
Dickens books had a spidery texture, creepy and strange,
and — in the horrific figure of the drunken Bill Sikes — an
ability to make London feel like Twelfth Street in Brooklyn. I
also consumed Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, checking it
out many times, making pencil copies of the great
paintings, reveling in the freebooting lives of pirates, men
burnt from the sun, filled with rum, reaching for wenches.
And in book after book, I was dazzled by the illustrations of
N. C. Wyeth, so rich and thick with golden light; often I
checked out books — Robin Hood or Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea — simply to look at those Wyeth
paintings.
But the rest of the books in the children’s section meant
nothing to me. They all seemed to be about kids living in
idyllic country glades, or rabbits who talked, or an elephant
named Babar who had adventures in Africa. I was already
traveling through Burne Hogarth’s fabulous baroque Africa
in Tarzan (which ran in Sparkler comics and the Saturday
Journal-American) and, of course, I had plunged through
the South American jungles with Bomba. After reading The
Count of Monte Cristo, I began thinking of the children’s
room as another version of the Château d’If.
That didn’t last long. Soon I was a regular in the main
reading room. The librarians didn’t seem to care about
enforcing the rule that confined me to the children’s room.
And as I moved around those dark aisles, among books
sad with dust or placed in some ghetto of the forbidden on
high shelves (like that copy of The Arabian Nights), I began
to find the entrance to the world. At first, I was still trapped
in the primary colors of melodrama. But over the last years
of the 1940s, the Library took my instincts for the lurid and
refined them. The comics, radio serials, B movies, dirty
stories, even The Amboy Dukes, were part of my
experience, the foundations of my own sense of the mythic;
I took them with me to the act of reading literature. But
slowly the myths started assuming different shapes, a wider
context, deeper roots. And reading became a kind of
creative act. With each book, I was somehow collaborating
with the writer in the creation of an alternative world. I was
at once in Brooklyn and in not-Brooklyn. These books were
more than simple collections of abstract symbols called
words, printed on paper; they described real events that
happened to me. So I was Jim Hawkins, hiding from Blind
Pew. I was D’Artagnan, fighting duels with the henchmen of
the evil Milady. I was Edmond Dantès, escaping from my
prison cell to extract my terrible revenge. I was Sydney
Carton doing a far, far better thing than I had ever done and
going to a far, far better place than I had ever known.
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
wine 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 whipped
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.
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 Boy
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
weekends; 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.
The fuck you talkin’ about, man, Shitty Collins would say.
They were sold out, man, by Truman and the commies in
Washington.
No, they just stole the money we sent them, millions of
dollars, and when they had to fight, they ran.
How do you know? Was you there?
No, I wasn’t there. But I tried to imagine Chiang’s troops
at the docks, piling into boats, panicky and full of fear, while
others were tearing off their uniforms, melting into the
shadows, throwing down their guns; in my imagination, it
was like some final packed and gorgeous panel of Terry
and the Pirates. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was
talking about in those sessions on the Totes; I was retailing
opinions I had picked up from the Star or the Compass or
the Post, all newspapers of the left. Since everybody in the
Neighborhood swore by the Daily News or the Journal-
American, I was going the other way. Against those
newspapers. Against the pieties of the Neighborhood.
Against the Church. Against my father.
I was lucky in these beery little debates because the
others didn’t know what they were talking about either. It
wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which
were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his
hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew
that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia,
as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d
have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end
up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly
stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil
incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of
the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during
the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was
a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so
many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the
strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the
atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian
blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these
people shitting in their pants when they thought about
communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t
mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did
so many people think that the communists might be behind
anything that made sense: unions, health care, free
education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we
shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept
going all the way to Moscow.
George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids.
Oney thing they respect is force.
That fuckin’ Rose-a-velt, he made a deal wit’ Stalin, let
the Russians take Berlin, now look at the fuckin’ mess
we’re in . . . .
The talk sputtered on into the night. Drinking beer on the
Totes, arguing with my friends (or arguing at them), I
sometimes even felt as if I understood how the world
worked. I was that young. Even that September, when
Truman announced that the Russians had tested an atom
bomb, I thought that everything would be all right. If we each
had the atom bomb, I reasoned, then nobody would ever
start a war because nobody could win it. In the newspapers,
there was great excitement: if the Russians had the atom
bomb they must have stolen it from us. There must be spies
everywhere, slipping our secrets to them. Some columnists
pointed out that the Russians also had former Nazi
scientists working for them, the way we did, and maybe
they didn’t have to steal anything. Most of the guys couldn’t
have cared less about politics or communism; they were
more angry with the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees in
five games in the 1949 World Series, than they were with
anyone on the other side of the planet. They didn’t care that
Dean Acheson had replaced George Marshall as secretary
of state; they were wondering whether Dotty Long’s tits
were real. Almost all of this talk was just riffs in the night.
The wars were over. None of this distant bullshit would ever
directly affect us. Even the air raid drills, the warnings about
the Bomb, the bombardment of Moscow with Hail Marys,
even the Fall of China, couldn’t convince us that these
matters had anything to do with our lives. Pass the
cardboard, Jake, I’m thirsty . . . . When we got bored with
politics (which was quickly), we went on to baseball or what
we all called pussy.
I hear Naomi puts out.
Who?
Naomi, from down Seventeenth Street. I hear she does it.
Who you hear that from?
Harry from the Parkview, you know him? Lives down
Seeley Street? Tells me she does it for quarters . . . .
Then, on my fifteenth birthday, June 24, 1950, everything
shifted again. That Saturday, seven divisions of North
Korean troops and 150 North Korean tanks crossed the
38th parallel in an invasion of South Korea.
III
BREAKING OUT
How many bibles make a
Sabbath?
How many girls have
disappeared
Down musky avenues of
leaves?
It’s an autocracy, the past….
— Tom Paulin,“In the
Egyptian Gardens”
1
THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS told the story of the invasion in a
sketchy way. They made clear that there was a crisis.
President Truman was flying back to Washington from a
vacation in Independence, Missouri, while General
MacArthur was huddling with his staff at his headquarters in
Tokyo. The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had called
for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security
Council. But that Sunday morning, up at the Totes, nobody
talked about war. This wasn’t another Pearl Harbor; it was
some distant battle between Koreans, a kind of civil war,
nothing to do with us. Our war ended in August 1945.
Around noon, we got on the Coney Island trolley car,
picking up transfers to the Neptune Avenue line, and we
went to the beach.
In the summer of 1950, all of us from the Neighborhood
hung out in a place on Coney Island called Oceantide. Built
on the boardwalk at Bay 22, it was a block-long complex
with a swimming pool, lockers, a long packed bar, and a
small fenced-off area where the young men danced with the
young women to a bubbling Wurlitzer jukebox. Down the
block was a shop called Mary’s, which sold the most
fabulous hero sandwiches in New York, great thick
concoctions of ham and cheese and tomatoes laced with
mustard or mayonnaise, along with cases of ice cold
sodas. Out on the beach we gathered on blankets placed
like islands in the sand. One of the Big Guys always had a
portable radio, and the music drifted across the hot
afternoon as we drank beer and watched the girls lather
themselves with suntan oil. Off to the right as we faced the
sea was a walled development called Sea Gate, mostly
Jewish, the place where Isaac Bashevis Singer came to
live in 1935 when he arrived from Poland. And down on
Surf Avenue, a block from the beach, there were two Irish
bars where everyone did their serious drinking.
On that first Sunday of the Korean War, the older guys
were laughing and drinking with their girlfriends on the
blankets when there was a sudden roar. From out of the
pack, a young man named Buddy Kiernan came running
and laughing. He was naked. The others had pulled off his
bathing suit and now he was grabbing at blankets and
dancing around and the girls were giggling and blushing
and the guys yawping and then Buddy Kiernan began to run
to the sea. People stood up on all the blankets, watching
Buddy run, his black hair wild, his legs pumping, his balls
and penis bobbing, until he dived into the surf.
To great cheers.
I thought: I’ll remember this all my life.
We all got drunk that day, the younger guys sharing the
wild exuberance of the Coney Island summer and the
glorious performance of Buddy Kiernan. I fell asleep on the
cold dark sand under the boardwalk, and when I woke up,
everybody was gone. My mouth felt coarse. There was a
sour smell to my body that I couldn’t erase with the salt of
the sea. I went home alone on the trolley car, wondering
about the war.
By Monday, everybody was talking about Korea. We
were in another war. It didn’t matter that there had been no
direct attack on Americans. We were part of the United
Nations. We might have to go. By Friday, the first American
ground troops were on their way to the fighting.
It just goes on and on, my mother said one evening.
Brian was now four. My newest brother, John, was less than
a year old, crawling on the linoleum. They just keep on
killing each other. There were no tears in her for this war.
She didn’t weep at the news on the radio. She just crooned,
in a sad way, It goes on and on.
By the Fourth of July, the mood of the Neighborhood had
radically changed. It was clear now: the older guys were
going off to the war in Korea. Truman was calling it a
“police action,” but everybody else called it a war. If you
were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you could be drafted. In
August, the reserves were called up, including many men
who had fought in World War II. The war would be tough;
everybody said so; Seoul had fallen, the South Korean
army was destroyed, and the American troops had poor
equipment. If you went away, if you drew a number from the
draft board that sent you to Korea, you might die.
That summer, Buddy Kelly died in Korea. He was the
oldest son of the Kellys at 471 Fourteenth Street and had
been on garrison duty in Japan when he was called up. One
evening, I saw his brothers, Billy and Danny, sitting with his
mother and father on the stoop where we’d all once lived.
They sat in absolute silence, and I didn’t know what to say; I
didn’t even remember Buddy clearly. I kept walking. What
could I say? That Buddy Kelly had died for his country? He
died for someone else’s country. Could I say he was a
good man and a great American? I barely knew him. He
was one of us, part of the tribe, a man of the Neighborhood;
but we never got to know him.
Now there was a lot more drinking, everywhere: in the
park, in the bars, at the beach. But the tone had changed.
The feeling of mindless exuberance gave way to urgency,
even desperation. Every weekend there was another
going-away party, and you saw weeping girls walking in
pairs as another boy went off to basic training or boot
camp. Over the next two years at Holy Name, there were a
lot of weddings and too many funerals: the bridegrooms
were in uniform and the coffins were draped with flags.
When I went back to Regis in the fall, my mind was
scrambled. In the yard, we talked a lot about the war. Many
boys had brothers who had been drafted or called up.
Almost everybody thought that communism had to be
stopped. At the same time, they were attacking Truman
and Acheson, blaming them for the war. I tried to make
sense of this. If it was important to fight the communists,
and Truman and Acheson were fighting them, why were
they wrong?
The Red Scare didn’t dominate Regis the way it did the
Neighborhood. But I do remember seeing a Catholic comic
book that showed communist mobs attacking St. Patrick’s
Cathedral. And there was an extended discussion of a
papal encyclical called Atheistic Communism. The Church
expressed itself in other ways. In the Journal-American,
and other friendly forums, Cardinal Spellman, chubby and
pink-skinned, kept warning about how America was in
danger of destruction at the hands of the communists,
those in Russia, those at home. In the Daily News, there
were frantic warnings about pinkos, fellow travelers, New
Dealers, and liberals. And even in Regis, where Jesuitical
irony and skepticism generally prevailed, I started to hear a
lot of favorable talk about the junior senator from
Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.
Because we still couldn’t afford television, I didn’t see the
way McCarthy moved and talked until much later. But I saw
Herblock’s cartoons in the Post, in which an unshaven
McCarthy, his brows kissing in a thuggish way, often
worked in tandem with another unshaven character who
kept climbing out of sewers: a senator from California
named Richard Nixon. Cardinal Spellman loved them both.
In that second year at Regis, my allegiance to the
Catholic Church ended. It was bad enough that I didn’t
believe in God; I thought for a while that I might come
around, like Ignatius Loyola himself did, the man who had
committed all the sins of the world back in the sixteenth
century, before undergoing a conversion and founding the
Jesuits. Maybe I would get religion the way I finally got Terry
and the Pirates. But McCarthy and Spellman finished me
off. They merged with Brother Jan to create a collective
image of a bullying, intolerant Catholicism that repelled me.
If they were the heroes of the Catholic Church, I wanted
nothing to do with it. And that deepened my feeling of
unease and disconnection at Regis.
The school, of course, couldn’t be separated from the
other parts of my life. With three brothers and a sister now
at home, I had endless trouble working at my cartooning; it
was difficult even to get homework done, sharing the
kitchen table with Tommy and Kathleen. Worse, because
there were now seven mouths to feed, we were even
poorer. The boys at Regis were not rich, but they wore
creased trousers and neat jackets and ties; I had to shuffle
together the clothes I wore. I was now taller and heavier
than my father, so I couldn’t wear any of his clothes; my
brothers were younger than I was, so I couldn’t borrow
theirs. My mother did her best. She took me to Orchard
Street on the Lower East Side and bought cheap clothes;
she set up time payments to get me slacks at Belmont’s on
Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. But the cheap clothes wore out
quickly, holes in the pockets first, then the elbows, followed
by chronic, mysterious tears under the arms. She patched
and repaired them (hunched over a Singer sewing
machine), but she had the other kids to tend to, along with
my father. When I went to school I couldn’t imagine that the
mothers of the other boys were up late at night patching
their jackets after an evening of cooking, dishes, and
helping with homework.
Shoes were an even worse problem. I never had two
pairs of shoes at the same time. I wore one pair until they
wore out; when the heels wore down or great holes
appeared in the soles, I sat in a little booth at the
shoemaker’s until he finished attaching new soles or heels.
After a while, they could not be saved, the edges unable to
take another nail, the cheap leather cracking across the top
like overcooked bacon. Then my mother bought me a new
pair.
In the beginning, I didn’t care much about any of this. But
some of the boys — the upperclassmen — started making
remarks. Where’d you get that air conditioned jacket,
fella? Or, You buy those pants down the Bowery? They
probably did this to other kids; they probably did it with
each other; but I sometimes felt as if I were the only kid at
Regis being inspected for the mortal sin of dressing badly. I
began slipping into the yard as late as possible each
morning, hugging the wall, avoiding the more wicked
tongues. One rainy day I came to school with cardboard
stuffed into my shoes because of the holes. In a corner of
the locker room, I removed the shoes, wrung out the socks,
and threw away the cardboard. A junior, fat-bodied and
thick-necked, saw me, and started laughing, pointing at me
and nudging his friends. My face flushed; I thought: Fuck
you, you fat bastard, fuck you. His polished shoes had
thick soles and seemed untouched by the morning rain.
Quickly, I tied my laces and slipped away without looking at
him. But all day long I kept seeing the Fat Boy’s grinning
face, and my shame grew into rage. He had hurt me; I
wanted to hurt him back. During Latin and German and
English, I rehearsed what I would do, over and over again,
remembering Frankie Nocera, and other fights on Seventh
Avenue, wondering what Noona Taylor would do if the Fat
Boy laughed at his shoes. And when school ended, I
hurried down to Park Avenue to wait for him.
The rain was falling harder. I saw my friends hurrying
across the avenue, then staying close to the wall as they ran
to Eighty-sixth Street and the Lexington Avenue subway.
Some had umbrellas. After a while, there were almost no
kids leaving Regis and I thought that maybe the Fat Boy
had taken another route home: along Madison Avenue, or
over to Fifth Avenue and the downtown bus. My anger
ebbed and I was about to go home. Then I saw him walking
quickly, holding an umbrella almost daintily in one hand and
his books in the other. He didn’t see me until he reached
the corner.
Hey, you fat bastard.
He peered at me from under the umbrella and smiled.
The same smile, I thought. A fucking smirk.
Without another word, I hit him hard in the face and his
eyes got wide and the umbrella flew up and the books fell,
and then I hit him again and again, blind with rage. He fell
and I kicked him with those shameful ugly shoes and
grabbed his hair and punched him in the neck, and then he
started to scream. That stopped me. I looked around. The
streets were empty, lashed by the hard rain. No cops, no
pedestrians, not even a doorman. The Fat Boy sat up, his
pants ruined, his jacket soaked, his eyes startled and
afraid.
Don’t laugh at me any more, you fat fuck, I said.
Then I walked away.
That night, I was sure I was finished at Regis. In the
morning, he would go to the principal’s office and report
me. How could he not? His books were ruined, his notes
spattered with rain and dirt. I had hurt him badly. He Would
report me, all right, and they would call me down to the
office and tell me that I’d been expelled.
All right, I thought. Fuck it. I’ll go to another school, to
Loughlin or St. Agnes or even to Manual. But I won’t
whimper. I won’t beg them to let me stay. If they kick me
out, I’ll just walk out of there like a man.
I tossed and turned, alternately consumed with shame,
failure and regret, satisfaction and defiance. I was most
worried about what my mother would say. I thought that if
they kicked me out, I’d have failed her. She had been so
proud when I made it into Regis. It was proof to her that you
could do anything in this country if you worked hard enough.
I just hoped that she wouldn’t cry. I didn’t care what my
father thought.
In the morning, I trembled all the way from Brooklyn to
Park Avenue, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t focus on the Miss
Subways sign or the girls who got on at Jay Street. I
considered playing hooky, just riding the trains all day. It
was Friday, I thought, and maybe by Monday they would
have forgotten everything. But in those days, subway cops
stopped kids who weren’t in school and if the kids didn’t
have notes or good excuses, they picked them up. I didn’t
want the police to take me back to Regis. I didn’t want
faces turning to me as I was escorted down a corridor to
the principal’s office. So I took my trains and came up into
Eighty-sixth Street and walked to school. I waited outside
the main gate for a while, where the seniors smoked
cigarettes, and then went into the yard. The Fat Boy was
there with his friends. His face was swollen but he didn’t
look at me. I went off to my first class and sat through it,
hearing nothing, waiting for someone to come to the door
and escort me to the principal’s office. Nobody ever came.
Not in the first period. Not through the day.
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.
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
said 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.
Jenny met me at the door of the basement apartment.
She was wearing a light brown dress that was tight across
her breasts and wide at the bottom. She had crinolines
underneath and high-heeled black shoes that made her
look older. She put a stack of records on a thick-spindled
45 rpm player: Nat Cole and Don Cornell, Sinatra singing
“I’m a Fool to Want You,” and Tommy Edwards doing “Blue
Velvet.” My hands were damp, but when I took her hands,
they were wet. There was a candle burning on the table,
and she served spaghetti and meatballs and fresh Italian
bread. I finished a glass of beer, then another, a full quart
while eating greedily. She gazed at me with her sad eyes,
as if afraid I’d hate the food. I told her dinner was wonderful
(it was) and opened another beer. We danced. She
cleared the table. She turned off the lights in the kitchen and
the overhead lights in the living room, leaving one lamp
burning. She made sure the curtains and drapes were
closed. We danced again and then went to the couch. I
kissed her, felt her up (as we said then), unzippered the
back of her dress, unsnapped her bra, while her protests
became whimpers and her breathing got heavier. I moved
a hand between her legs, up to the flesh at the top of her
stockings and then under her panties while the crinolines
made a sighing sound. This time she didn’t stop me. She
was wet. She fumbled with my belt. She unzipped my fly.
She gripped my cock.
And so we did it. It was awful and amazing, clumsy and
frantic and inept and vaguely comical. I exploded at the
end. Jenny wept. I fell back, my shoes still on, my trousers
and undershorts around my ankles. I looked down and
laughed. That made her feel worse. She hurried into the
bathroom, sobbing. I took off my shoes and pulled up my
trousers. I couldn’t believe it: I had done it. I had put my
cock in a cunt. I had come in a girl. Oh, man. The records
had finished playing, so I turned them over and started
playing the flip sides. I took another Ballantine’s from the
refrigerator, and when I turned around, she was walking
naked out of the bathroom.
I bet I’m pregnant, she said.
Nah, I said.
I know I am.
I’d never seen a naked woman before and I just stood
there, gazing at her, at her breasts and belly and great
black vee of pubic hair. I thought of Virgil Finlay’s women
and Miss Lace and the hot women in the pulp magazines.
She came over and kissed me, holding my face in both
hands. I held her heavy hard-nippled breasts in my hands.
If I’m pregnant, will you marry me? she whispered.
Of course, I said, struggling with my panic.
Then, come on.
We went to her bedroom. I took the beer with me.
4
THE YEAR 1951 was terrible. I was at least six people: the
schoolboy at Regis, the hardworking delivery boy after
school, the opinionated angry young man raging at the
world, the aspiring cartoonist, the lover of Jenny, the
apprentice drinker and Bad Guy. In Latin class, I was
struggling with the subjunctive; at night, I was fucking my
brains out. Drinking became an integral part of sex. I’d
drink three or four beers to feel confident; Jenny would drink
three or four beers to have an excuse for letting me do it
once again. It was as much a ritual as the Mass.
Sometimes I bought condoms; sometimes I had to choose
between a pack of Trojans or a quart of Ballantine’s. I
always settled for beer and risk.
At home, I was miserable. My mother was trying to feed,
clothe, and civilize the whole brood, while holding down her
new part-time job as a cashier at the RKO Prospect movie
house. She got little help from my father. He was drinking
as hard as ever, particularly on the weekends. He began to
go on binges, sometimes missing work on a Monday or
Friday, thus granting me the self-righteous joy of despising
him. I was too young and self-absorbed to ask him why he
was drinking so much, what he feared, what made him
weep, who he was. We worked out a ritual too. We made
remarks about the weather. We talked about baseball. He
predicted that Ray Robinson would beat Jake LaMotta for
the middleweight championship, and he was right. But
there was nothing else I could say to him.
I certainly couldn’t tell him, or my mother, about Jenny. I
couldn’t tell anyone else either. If I told my friends, they’d
immediately tell everybody in the Neighborhood that Jenny
“put out.” If they thought she put out, they wouldn’t respect
her. And how could I love a girl my friends didn’t respect?
Besides, I didn’t think of it as putting out. To me, it was a
love story.
The key word, of course, was “story.” After the fiasco of
Chuck Taylor, I stopped writing my versions of pulp stories.
But I wasn’t writing comics anymore either. One reason
was the physical impossibility of doing it in the apartment.
The kids were the infantry of disorder; they moved from
room to room in a sustained campaign of disruption. At
eleven, my sister, as the only girl, took title to the Little
Room. I couldn’t lay out paper or board, ink, pens and
brushes, on the kitchen table. Gradually, I just gave up. That
long slow surrender ate at my guts, but I convinced myself
that I had no choice. As long as I live here, I thought, I’ll be
unable to work.
Instead of creating stories, I created Jenny. I invented her
in my head, supplying her with qualities no girl could
possess, granting her a perfection that had more to do with
literature than with the scared, lonely girl who gave me her
body. In some primitive, inarticulate way, our love story was
driven by my need for narrative, for drama, for a sense of
beginning, middle, and end. It was a better story than the
ones I had invented out of comics and pulps; I just didn’t
know how it would end.
In the spring, many things began to unravel while others
took shape. I was doing worse at Regis. In March the
Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, and I read in
one of the newspapers that there’d be a rally in their
defense in Union Square. I tried to get some of the guys
from school to meet me at the rally, and one of them said:
What are you, some kind of communist? I said no, I wasn’t
a communist; but this was a kind of history and I wanted to
see it. Are you crazy? the guy said. You get arrested, you
end up on some list, your life is ruined. I went anyway,
alone. The crowd was small. But the sense of defiant
energy was thrilling. I saw young women who didn’t look like
anyone from the Neighborhood; they were older than I was,
but I wanted to come back, see them again, know them.
They cheered at the speeches. They smiled at people and
asked them to sign petitions. They didn’t ask me.
When the rally ended, I wandered downtown to find the
subway station at West Fourth Street. Along the way, I
discovered two places that were to pull me back again and
again: Book Row on Fourth Avenue and the neighborhood
called Greenwich Village. The first was like a series of
treasure houses, one used book store after another, the
cheapest books stacked outside in stalls, selling for a
nickel, the interiors dark, musty, packed from floor to ceiling
with more expensive books. I was afraid to enter, afraid I’d
see some glittering bauble that would exhaust the few
dollars I had in my pocket — money for the beer that would
grant me admission to Jenny’s bed. I ran my hands over the
books as if they were holy objects and moved on.
Walking into the Village was like entering a movie set.
The elegant houses, blooming trees, intimate bars, and
scattered bookshops were lovely to look at, but I was even
more enchanted by the way the people looked. They were
completely different from the people in the Neighborhood or
those I saw uptown near Regis. That first day, I saw
bearded men with paint-spattered clothes lugging wildly
painted abstract canvases into buildings with skylights on
the rooftops. Women wore hair down to their hips, bright
ceramic earrings, long black stockings, and they smoked
cigarettes as they walked. Men carried books and talked to
friends with excitement and passion. On Eighth Street,
there were theaters showing movies from Italy and France. I
passed coffee shops, cafeterias, and bars filled with
people deep in argument, engulfed by cigarette smoke,
and all of them looked different from the men in the bars of
Brooklyn. I wanted to come back. And stay.
That day the unravelment at Regis and at home receded
as I glimpsed the possibility of another life, only a subway
ride from Brooklyn, in a place where I could fill my life with
politics, art, books, and women. I didn’t want to wait. This
was where I could live. Far from Brooklyn and my father and
Rattigan’s and the insistence on being a plumber or a cop. I
could be a bohemian! I’d read the word somewhere and
looked it up in a dictionary, and it sounded romantically
perfect. A bohemian, free of all the stupid dumb-ass
constraints of the world! With a huge studio, my own
drawing table, a bookcase full of books, a skylight. I’d work
all day and go to the cafés at night, to drink brandy and
listen to poetry. A free man. The vision excited me all the
way home on the subway. Jenny was nowhere in it.
That vision didn’t help me at Regis; it might have
accelerated my decline. I simply couldn’t concentrate. I’d sit
in geometry class and think of Jenny’s nipples and get an
erection. I’d be in a civics class and want to know why the
Rosenbergs had been sentenced to death. I’d be in the
English class, with a teacher discussing the assigned text,
and see myself in a café reading books of my own
choosing. Each morning, I would linger in bed, filled with
resistance and dread. I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to
go to school. If I’d seen Jenny the night before, and drunk
too much beer, I’d be physically logy and sometimes
emotionally hung over too. I’d try to remember if I wore a
condom or not; sometimes I hadn’t, and that filled me with
dread as I thought of Jenny pregnant. I don’t know if my
mother suspected anything about the drinking; I tried to
hide it, brushing my teeth or chewing gum. If she did, she
said nothing. In a way, that made it worse for me, because I
had to carry the burden of the drinking by myself. The effort
of hiding it made me feel even more separated from my
classmates at Regis.
That spring, failure entered me like an infection. My
grades were falling and I had already been placed on
probation by Father Taylor. I was certain I would suffer the
humiliation of flunking out at the end of the term. That meant
I might have to repeat my sophomore year at some other
school. And that would delay my life.
Finally, I went to see the school counselor, a kind man
named Father Burke, and explained most of it to him. I left
out Jenny. I didn’t mention the drinking. But I told him that I
just wasn’t able to do the work at Regis and wanted out.
Have you discussed this with your parents? he said.
No.
What will they say?
I don’t know.
Then you’d better tell them.
I don’t want to ask their permission, I said. I just want to
do it.
But you’ll have to transfer to another school, he said.
You’re not even sixteen yet, so you can’t just drop out.
What school would take me?
I’ll see, Father Burke said. If your mind is made up, I’ll try
to find you another school.
That night, I told my mother that I wanted to drop out of
Regis. She was concerned, sweet, apologetic.
I feel I didn’t help, she said. I feel that I should’ve given
you more help.
No, Mom. It wasn’t you. It was me.
She made tea, and said that she didn’t want me to be
unhappy, and if I wasn’t happy at Regis, then maybe I
should go to another school. I was relieved. I just didn’t want
to see her crying. That night, she seemed too tired to weep.
Her hair had turned gray, her face was pale. She was only
forty and starting to look old.
The next day was my last at Regis. I didn’t say good-bye
to any of my classmates. I didn’t stop in to see Father
Burke. I just packed my books and went home. But I didn’t
feel free. All the way back to Brooklyn, I felt that I’d done
something unbelievably stupid. Because of my laziness,
distraction, fear, and drinking, I had walked away from the
best Catholic high school in New York. As the F train came
up out of the tunnel after Bergen Street, I looked down from
the train and saw the Gowanus Canal beneath me and
knew that the building where my father had worked as a
clerk for Roulston’s was nearby. I remembered going there
with my mother when everything was still in the future, even
the war. Then I looked in the other direction and saw the
skyline of Manhattan, rising from the harbor, stone-gray and
indifferent, beautiful and unattainable, and I began to weep.
That night I went to Jenny’s and told her what had
happened and then tried to get rid of my failure in her body.
I drank too much beer and fell asleep. She woke me later,
shaking me in desperation, frantic that her mother would
find us, shouting that she had to make the bed and air out
the room. You’re drunk, she said. Don’t you understand
me? Are you too drunk to know what I’m saying? Carrying
the empties, I left in a rage, at her and at myself. She was
giving me orders, her panic transformed into wide-eyed fury
that seemed like the opposite of love. But I was at fault too;
I’d had too many beers and was sluggish and confused,
like my father on the second-floor landing at 378. Down by
the subway, I hurled the empty beer bottles at a parked
garbage truck, enjoying the way they smashed and
splintered.
On Monday, I started at my new school, St. Agnes on
Forty-fourth Street, in midtown Manhattan. It was dark and
gloomy after Regis, the classrooms smaller, the desks
more battered. But on the first day, I knew that I would do
well. Even with my terrible record at Regis, I was far ahead
of most of the students at St. Agnes. By the end of the
week, some of my broken ego was restored. And I loved
the physical act of going to that school. I came up out of
Grand Central and then walked east, passing under the
massive rumbling structure of the Third Avenue El. There
were Irish saloons on every corner of Third Avenue, with
men standing at the bars all day long.
Some of the drinkers were newspapermen. The Daily
News was on Forty-second Street between Second and
Third, and I liked going into the lobby to look at the
immense globe and the polished floors; it was like visiting
the Daily Planet (and years later the Daily News building
served as the setting for that imaginary newspaper in the
first Superman movie). Sometimes I saw men I was sure
were reporters (they all wore hats) hurry out the door,
straight to the bars. A few blocks away, on Forty-fifth Street,
was the Daily Mirror. I once saw their sports columnist, Dan
Parker, a huge man with a pencil-thin mustache, walk out of
the newspaper and stroll down to Third Avenue, whistling all
the way. I felt connected to the Mirror by Steve Canyon. But
I never saw Caniff come out of the building. Still, the sight of
Dan Parker was enough. I loved the idea of a
newspaperman who whistled.
I also came to love the gloomy light under the El and
wished I could walk into the bars and order a drink. At one
point, with some other kids from St. Agnes, I started
watching the Kefauver hearings through the windows,
seeing various gangsters and politicians talk in black and
white, and watched Frank Costello’s hands. I wanted a
television set now. And a telephone. And a room with a
door. Far more than we could afford at 378. Most of all I
wanted to walk into a Third Avenue bar and drink like a
man.
5
THEN ONE NIGHT, Jenny and I went to the Avon, a third-run
movie house on Ninth Street. One of the two movies was
Portrait of Jennie, with Joseph Cotten. I thought he was
great in The Third Man and we laughed about how those
people out in Hollywood couldn’t even spell Jenny. In the
movie, Joseph Cotten was a painter. He lived in the Village
and had an amazing studio, with easels, a fireplace and, of
course, a skylight. One day, he’s in Central Park and meets
Jennifer Jones, who is young and shy and beautiful. She
sings a strange little song:
Where I come from nobody
knows,
And where I’m going,
everything goes …
Joseph Cotten keeps meeting the girl over the next
month or two, and each time she’s older. He paints her
portrait and tries to learn more about her. But in fact, she’s
dead, killed years before in a storm. At the end of the
movie he meets her on the anniversary of her death. He
gets to kiss her and hug her; the music builds to an
amazing swell; she is swept out to sea to die again.
Jenny was crying at the end. I kept thinking about Joseph
Cotten’s studio. We didn’t stay for the second feature. All
the way to her house on the Fifth Avenue trolley, Jenny was
silent.
That’s the way life is, isn’t it? she said.
Like what? That movie?
Yeah.
Oh, sure. We always fall in love with ghosts we meet in
Central Park.
No, she said. I mean that things always turn out lousy.
Hey, Jenny, it’s a movie.
We reached her house. She asked me not to come in. It
was too late. Her mother would be home soon.
You keep saying you’re an artist, she said. Why don’t you
draw me?
I will.
When?
Tomorrow night?
My mother’s home tomorrow night.
Next Friday.
You swear? she said, smiling.
I swear.
That Friday night, she served me another dinner, this
time of baked ziti. I sipped my beer slowly, cleaned my
plate, and had seconds. After dinner, she stacked the
dishes in the sink, ran water over them, left them to soak,
then washed her hands and primped her hair. She seemed
very nervous.
Maybe you shouldn’t try this, she said. You don’t have to
draw me if you don’t want to.
No, no, I said. Let’s try it.
She sat on the edge of the couch in the muted yellow light
of the table lamp and I sat across from her and started to
draw. In my head I saw Joseph Cotten making his portrait
of Jennifer Jones, and I wished we were in some great
high-ceilinged garret in the Village instead of this basement
in Bay Ridge. But I worked hard, using a number 2 pencil
on a pad of white paper, outlining her head with very light
marks, blocking in the eyes and the nose and the mouth,
loosely indicating the hair, the neck, and the collar of her
white blouse. I was soon lost in the act, erasing, shading,
smudging with a finger, but the picture was not going well.
Jenny’s hair looked fine, and I’d captured those sad eyes;
but there was something wrong with the mouth, and the
nose looked enormous. I erased again, trying to make the
nose smaller, but that wasn’t right either; I couldn’t put
someone else’s nose on Jenny’s face. I paused, sipped my
beer, stared at her, trying to figure out what I was doing
wrong, then tried to outline her nose with absolute
exactitude. This time I thought I had it right. With the nose
recorded properly, the mouth was easier to fix. I hurried to
the end, blocking in the hair with what I thought were bold
strokes, then finishing the neck and blouse. I exhaled, then
took a deep breath and finished my beer.
Can I move? she said.
Yeah, I said. I’m finished.
Can I see it?
Sure.
I handed her the drawing pad. She looked at the picture,
her eyes wide. And then burst into tears. She stood up,
bawling, and threw the pad at me.
I’m ugly, she sobbed. You think I’m ugly!
No, Jenny, I don’t think you’re ugly. I was —
Look at my nose!
She turned away and buried her face in the pillows of the
couch. I tried to console her, petting her hair, hugging her.
She stopped crying and then sat up slowly, saw the picture
on the floor before the chair and started crying again.
That’s the way you see me, she said. I’m ugly, ugly, ugly!
No, Jenny, I love you.
You love my — you love what I give you! You love what I
let you do to me!
I stood up and closed the pad, so she wouldn’t see the
hated picture. She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her
dress and then saw the pencil and it started again. I didn’t
know what to do. I’d tried so hard to make the drawing real,
and she obviously was wounded by it. A gift had become
an instrument of torture. Joseph Cotten didn’t have this
problem. I stayed a little longer and then took my pad and
my pencil and fled.
That was the end of it. Suddenly, shockingly. We saw
each other two days later outside Steven’s. She didn’t want
coffee or a soda. Standing on the sidewalk, she announced
that she was “breaking off” with me. She talked about
needing “freedom” and how she was too young to get
married or settle down and how she was afraid of getting
caught by her mother or ending up pregnant.
You’re only fifteen, she said. It’s not right.
Her eyes looked sadder than ever. She turned her back
on me and hurried down Ninth Street to catch the Fifth
Avenue bus. I felt absolutely alone, engulfed by a delicious
melancholy. Now, I thought, this story has an ending.
So back I went to my friends and the Totem Poles and
drinking beer from cardboard containers. I listened to my
friends talk about the glories of pussy, knowing they were
almost all virgins. I started truly listening to Sinatra. I did
almost no homework, drew no cartoons, attempted no
portraits. The war ground on in Korea, back and forth with
little gain. I saw more young women in grave little knots,
going out together on Saturday nights. I didn’t call Jenny;
she couldn’t call me. Suddenly, Tony Bennett was on all the
radios and crooning from the jukeboxes: “I Won’t Cry
Anymore” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” I would sing with him:
I’ve shed a million tears since
we’re apart,
But tears will never mend a
broken heart.
One night, I saw Jenny waiting to the side at the Sanders
while the men lined up to buy tickets. She glanced over at
the Totem Poles, but then turned and smiled at her date: a
big dumb guy from Seventh Avenue who could hit a
spaldeen about four blocks. She took his arm and they
went in to see the movie. I never talked to her again.
6
I WAS BORED in St. Agnes and started playing hooky, the
empty spring days spent wandering the city. Sometimes I
sat in movie houses. Other times I worked my way through
the dark caves of Book Row. In May, Willie Mays came up
from the minors to play for the Giants.
They say he’s the greatest thing on two feet, my father
said.
What do you think?
We’ll see, he said. We’ll see if he can hit the curveball.
Suppose he can?
Then the Dodgers are in trouble.
We talked about the Dodgers and about Kid Gavilan
beating Johnny Bratton. But we talked about nothing else.
He went to work and then to Rattigan’s. I went to school and
then to the Totem Poles. In June, I finished at St. Agnes. I
never went back.
Instead, I took an examination to get into the
apprenticeship program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My
uncle David worked as a sheetmetal worker in the Yard (as
it was called) and he told my father about the program. One
night over dinner, the kids all there, my father mentioned it
to me.
It’s a goddamn good thing, he said, if you can get into it.
My mother shook her head.
Ach, Billy, she said, let the boy finish high school.
But he went on explaining it to me. The program was
simple: you worked for four weeks, then went to school for a
week, right there in the Yard; when you finished, you got a
high school diploma, and you got paid for the weeks you
went to school; eventually you moved up to become a
journeyman at your trade. I listened carefully; it was the first
thing I’d ever heard my father approve for me. I could
escape from the drudgery of high school. I’d start earning a
living, no matter how small. Hell, he explained, you could
have a job at the Yard for thirty years, and retire with a good
pension. And remember, he said, it’s a federal civil service
job. There’s nothing better than civil service, except federal
civil service.
If there’s another Depression, he said, you’ll always work.
My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand
what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the
test for the Navy Yard and passed.
That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day
and night, I felt that I’d lost my way. It was as if some long
steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my
skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn’t
control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a
cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right,
from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of
pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms,
and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude
was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or
some of the men from Rattigan’s. More often, it was
implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce
power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I
was? Forget these kid’s dreams, I told myself, give ’em up.
Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go
to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down,
have children. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat.
Every year I’d do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God
or not. I’d drink on the way home from work and spend most
weekends with my friends in the saloons. I’d get old. I’d die
and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith’s funeral
parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end
of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let’s have a
fucking drink.
7
I DIDN’T KNOW it at the time, but I had entered the drinking
life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an
integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and
mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the
sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward
for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or
defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease,
laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come
true.
Drinking also made me change my feelings about my
father. In the Navy Yard, I worked with men who knew him.
And after a day of labor, buried inside an aircraft carrier
that was being converted for jets, or lugging angle irons on
my shoulders across Shop 17, I would go to the bars on
Sands Street with them and hear tales of young Billy Hamill.
He was a great soccer player, one of them said, a man
named Hugh Delargy. He was fast and he was tough.
Jesus, was he tough. Smart too.
I was there the day he got hurt, said Eddie McManus, a
short, powerful balding welder. It was out at the oval in Bay
Ridge, on a Sunday. We were playing a German team. Our
team was called Belfast Celtic, after the team back home.
And there were teams from the different countries, a
Spanish team, a Jewish team called House of David. We
were playing the German team that day and your father was
at center forward. He was having a great day, bloody great.
And then, Delargy said, that German fucker came at him
. . . .
Kicked him so bloody hard, McManus said, it sounded
like a board breakin’.
Delargy sipped his whiskey and said, He went down and
we all knew he was hurt and everybody ran out on the field.
They wanted to kill the fuckin’ Kraut.
They took Billy over on the side, McManus said, and it
was pitiful, fuckin’ pitiful to see. The leg was broke beneath
the knee and the bone was sticking out through the blood.
And Billy was cryin’ like a baby, My leg, he kept saying, my
leg, my leg, my leg . . . .
DeLargy and McManus told me this in grave voices,
sipping whiskey while I drank my beer. I remember trying
very hard not to cry, then excusing myself and hurrying into
the men’s room. I sat on a bowl in a locked stall and bawled
for my father. And despised myself for the way I’d often
sneered at him. When I went back to the bar, I gulped the
beer and ordered another, engulfed in a sweet bitterness,
knowing that all my life I would see my father on that hard
winter playing field, crying like a baby.
After that talk, and other tales told in the bars near the Navy
Yard, I began to love my father again. Pity allowed me to
see him as a man, instead of a father who could not play
the role that my childish imagination and need had
assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running
streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a
kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands
from his own father. There was a photograph of his long-
dead father in our house now, recently sent from Ireland,
where it had been found by Uncle Frank in an old steamer
trunk. It was cracked with age and very formal, showing a
somber long-faced man whose white beard made him look
like George Bernard Shaw. He looked as capable of
silence as my own father.
What was he like, your father? I asked him one evening.
He was a mason. A stonemason.
No, I mean what kind of man was he?
Billy Hamill shrugged and lit a Camel.
He was stern, he said. He was very stern.
Then I saw my father in flight from the stern white-
bearded man, smoking Woodbines in the Belfast night,
watching British soldiers patrol streets, hearing endless talk
about Catholics and Protestants, playing soccer in frozen
fields, and learning to drink. Was it whiskey or was it beer?
Or did they drink the dark liquid called stout? And was he
drinking when he joined Sinn Fein? Did he and his friends
drink the night the bomb was planted and the British
soldiers were killed and they all took the night boat to
Liverpool and then America? After the bomb, did he shiver
in fear? Was he afraid of being caught and turned into an
informer? Or did they all go somewhere and get drunk and
sing the songs he now sang in Rattigan’s?
In a new way, Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person
cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination,
and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the
glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all
his black silences.
We still could not talk in any easy way. But in the bars
near the Navy Yard and on long evenings at the Totem
Poles I would speak to him in imagination and he would
speak to me. I have fucked up my life, Dad; I’ve quit high
school and gone to work in the Navy Yard and I don’t want
to be there. Well, he would say, do something about it.
What can I do? Do what you want to do, Son. Make yourself
happy, Son. Live every day of your life, Son. And I’d say,
Love me, Dad. And he’d answer, Let’s have a drink.
But we never had that conversation. And I knew I had to
save my life on my own. I was taking home forty dollars a
week from the Navy Yard and giving my mother ten. But I
couldn’t do at home what I still wanted to do. I couldn’t draw.
I couldn’t read. And I began thinking about a place of my
own. A place where I could leave unfinished drawings on
the table until I got home, with no fear they would be ruined.
A place where I could drink beer and slide girls between
sheets. Maybe I could even go to school at night. Maybe, in
spite of my dreadful failure, I could still try to be an artist.
On the subway one morning I met a guy I knew in Holy
Name. His name was Ronnie Zeilenhofer. He was smart
and decent. His father owned a delicatessen on Prospect
Park Southwest. We talked and joked for a few minutes,
but when I told him I’d dropped out of high school, his face
went oddly slack.
Jeez, I figured you’d be one of the guys that went to
college, he said. I can’t believe it, you dropping out.
I felt suddenly small and diminished. In two years I’d gone
from being the smartest kid in the class to another guy from
the Neighborhood, trudging off to work with his hands and
his back. Another loser from Brooklyn. I started talking
wildly about how I was just starting, I was gonna go to art
school and was looking for a place of my own. Panic and
shame produced something resembling the truth.
Zeilenhofer and I weren’t close, so in an odd way I could tell
him what I really felt. Then he said that if I was serious there
was a small place for rent upstairs from his father’s deli.
Eight dollars a week, with a bed and a refrigerator.
That sounds great, I said.
Call me, and I’ll show it to you.
A week later, I moved in. Three months after starting in
the Navy Yard, I was off on my own.
8
THE ROOM was small and bare, with flowered wallpaper
stained by old glue. There was one picture on the walls: a
framed magazine photo of the Rockies. The bed was
narrow, the mattress lumpy. But there was a bureau for my
clothes and I set out my inks and pens and brushes on a
small table and stacked some books on the windowsill and
I was happy.
The room was in the back, overlooking a chilly treeless
yard. On weekends and on cold evenings I would sit at the
table, deep in the luxury of solitude, and draw pictures of
aviators and pirates, of detectives, and villains with scarred
faces. I loved the feeling of standing up and going to the
sink and washing the india ink from the brushes, pushing
them into a bar of soap, rinsing them, then forming a
perfect needlelike tip with my mouth. I bought a small lamp.
I Scotch-taped my drawings to the walls. I learned to carry
dirty clothes to the launderette and feed myself in greasy
spoons.
Downstairs, to the left, was a bar called the Parkview,
and when I came home in the evenings from the Navy Yard I
could see faces staring from the windows. The faces were
almost the same as those in Rattigan’s: pouchy-eyed and
tight-lipped. One evening I ran into Mickey Horan, one of
the crowd from the Totes. He invited me in for a drink. The
bartender served us without asking for draft cards. Soon I
was walking in on my own, and the faces from the windows
acquired names. Like the men at the Navy Yard, they
seemed to accept me. I was sixteen. But I could put my
dollar on the bar with the others. That was enough. They
talked over and over again about Bobby Thomson’s home
run in the play-off game at the Polo Grounds and how it had
destroyed more than the Dodgers, it had wrecked them.
They talked about Ray Robinson’s revenge against Randy
Turpin, and how he battered the Englishman into a stupor at
the Polo Grounds. They talked about Rocky Marciano’s
destruction of Joe Louis. They didn’t talk about Korea. As
the year moved toward Christmas, I would come up to the
room, gassy with beer, and the ceiling would move and the
table bob and I would hold a pillow to my chest as if it were
an anchor. Sometimes, for no reason that I understood, I
would weep.
On Saturday mornings, I would go to Seventh Avenue
and climb the stairs to the apartment and give my mother
eight dollars. The Good Boy, of course. She would talk to
me as best she could about going on with my schooling,
maybe at night. But it was hard to sustain such talk; the kids
were running around; tie shopping must be done; she had
to be on the job at the movie house by five. I knew she was
right. But I didn’t know what to do about it. I walked back up
the slope to the Totes. I talked with my friends. I went to the
Parkview and drank beer and listened to the jukebox. The
Four Aces were singing “Tell Me Why.” Tony Bennett was
singing “Cold, Cold Heart.” Rosemary Clooney was singing
“Come On-A-My House.” I didn’t sing with them. After a
while, I went upstairs to the room and napped and woke up
and drew pictures. Sometimes the music would drift up
from the bar. Sinatra. I’m a fool to want you …
The newspapers fed me in a different way. And
everything I learned from the newspapers seemed to lead
to something else. In one of them, I saw a story about the
death of a painter named John Sloan. He was 80 years old
and a member of a group called the Ashcan School, the
paper said, and it showed one of his drawings of people
under the Third Avenue El. I went to the library and found
books that showed his paintings and etchings and copied
them into my own sketchbooks. Those pictures had nothing
to do with comics. Instead, they were about a world that I
recognized, even if most of them were made in the 1920s.
The El. The streets of Manhattan. The dark city looming at
twilight. I loved Sloan’s lumpy Irish face too; he could have
stood right at the bar in the Parkview, talking or singing. He
even painted bars, for the books showed several works
about a place in Manhattan called McSorley’s. He caught
the dark snug safety of a bar, the golden warmth it could
give you on a cold night. His bars had no jukeboxes or
shuffleboard machines in them. But I had seen places like
them all over Brooklyn. One Saturday afternoon, I went over
to see McSorley’s, down the street from the Third Avenue
El. The oldest bar in New York, a sign said. I was thrilled; it
was exactly the way Sloan had painted it, dark and
romantic, with old pictures on the wall and a potbelly stove
and lumpy men at the bar and tables. I took a breath and
went in. But the bartender asked me for a draft card and I
left in a mixture of humiliation and panic. Still, John Sloan
had his effect on me: I started sitting in booths at the
Parkview and drawing the men at the bar.
Who the hell is that? a guy would say.
You.
I don’t look like that, come on, kid.
You look worse than that, Jerry, another guy would say.
If I did, I’d fuckin’ kill myself.
The older men seemed amused by me, the kid from
upstairs who worked in the Navy Yard and drew pictures in
the bar.
You oughtta do that for a living, kid, said a bartender
named Brick.
Brick, don’t encourage him. He’ll end up in the fuckin’
Village wit’ the faggots.
Impossible. He’s a fuckin’ Catlick!
They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for
copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to
the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I
worked with men; in the Park-view, I could drink with men
because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand
confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand
wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie
alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story
that had lost its plot.
Then one Sunday before Christmas I saw a story in the
Journal-American about Burne Hogarth, the artist who
used to draw Tarzan. He and some other people had
started the Cartoonists and Illustrators School on Twenty-
third Street in Manhattan. There was a picture of Hogarth in
a classroom full of easels, just like the photographs of John
Sloan at the Art Students League. He was teaching in a
real school. Now. Not in the distant past. Not in some
remote place. Here. In New York.
Suddenly, after months without a narrative line for my own
life, I felt the story again. The next day after work, I went to
Twenty-third Street and after twenty minutes of hesitation,
walked into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. It was
located then on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-
third Street (later it became the School of Visual Arts and
moved up the street to grander quarters). I was dressed in
my rough work clothes from the Navy Yard, but that didn’t
seem to matter; almost everybody else was dressed the
same way. There was a wonderful pungent odor in the air
(a mixture, I learned later, of turpentine and linseed oil) and
a busy sense of purpose and direction, people carrying
large manila portfolio envelopes or stretched canvases or
pieces of unfinished plaster sculptures. There were dark-
haired girls with vivacious eyes. There were young men
with paint-stained dungarees. They talked and laughed and
smoked until a bell rang somewhere and they all hurried
away to unseen classrooms. In the office, I was given a
catalog, which I accepted clumsily. Then I turned around
and walked out.
All the way home on the subway, I read the catalog over
and over again. The newspaper story was true: the great
Burne Hogarth was teaching three nights a week. Drawing
and anatomy. The term started in the first week of January.
The tuition was thirty dollars a month. Almost a full week’s
pay. But I could do it. Somehow. If I ate less. If I didn’t spend
money drinking. I could do it. Yes. Do it.
9
AND SO I DID.
The classroom was a large studio on the top floor.
Easels were scattered everywhere, facing a wooden
model’s platform, while one easel faced us. There was an
empty stool on the platform. The floors were scabbed with
dried paint, a thousand drips and spatters of color. Most of
the students were young men, all of them older than I was;
there were three young women. They seemed to know each
other and laughed and joked in an easy way. I found an
empty easel and watched them set up their newsprint pads
and take out their black chalks. I did the same. I was very
nervous.
A few minutes before seven a gray-haired woman
walked in, dressed in a blue-gray smock. She sat on the
edge of the platform, smoking a cigarette and reading a
book. She was wearing slippers. Her hair was pulled back
tightly and tied into a pigtail. She was about forty. Nobody
seemed to notice her. Three guys near me were looking at
some yellowing pages of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. I
looked at the woman’s face, her long nose and dark
eyebrows, and wondered how Foster would draw her.
Then, at seven o’clock sharp, a compact mustached man
arrived. His hair was a shiny black, combed straight back.
He wore a button-down shirt, dark tie, sharply creased
slacks, and polished loafers. The room hushed as the man
placed his own large newsprint pad on the easel beside the
stand. He looked more confident than anyone I’d ever seen.
This was Burne Hogarth.
All right, folks, he said, let’s get started.
I realized that my hands were already black from a
mixture of sweat and compressed charcoal. I saw the guy
next to me tear the cover sheet off his pad and I did the
same. The woman put out her cigarette in a small ashtray,
then took off her robe, stepped out of her slippers, and went
to the center of the platform. I gazed at her body, her small
hard breasts, the thick ridges of pale flesh around her
stomach and thighs. Jenny’s flesh was smoother and
darker. The woman looked cold under the blue fluorescent
lights. I could see veins in her legs. Her pubic hair was gray.
We’ll do some one-minute poses to loosen up, Hogarth
said. All yours, model.
Suddenly everybody was drawing furiously, as the
woman assumed one pose after another, bending, twisting,
stretching, firing invisible arrows from invisible bows. My
drawing was cramped and tight, as I started at the top of
her head and worked my way down. I was used to small
drawings, penciled first, then laboriously inked. Every time I
moved down from the head, she changed the pose again. I
heard the others tearing pages off their pads. I saw that one
student was as stiff as I was; another was bold and swift. I
felt clumsy. Suddenly Hogarth was beside me.
Forget the eyebrows, he said. Just get the gesture, the
big shape. Scribble it, but make the big shape fit on the
page. No details.
He moved away. I tore off the page, then scribbled in a
big bold shape.
Use the side of the chalk, not the point, Hogarth was
telling another student. Big and blocky, nice and bold.
Now I could hear chalk on paper all over the room. I didn’t
look at anything except the model, locking in, me and her
and the chalk on paper. Now I saw that she had a long
beautiful neck, and I wondered how she had come to this
room.
Hogarth said, Okay, now look at her and remember what
you see, then close your eyes and draw what you
remember.
I tried what he asked and drew the memory of the woman
bending one knee and extending the other. When I opened
my eyes, I was amazed. There was a big brutal form on my
page, bold and strong. Then Hogarth said, All right, the
quick poses are over, let’s do a twenty-minute pose.
The model sat on the stool and posed with one foot on
the second rung, the other stretched out behind her on the
floor. There was no expression on her face.
I started drawing but I cramped up again, starting at the
top in a linear contoured way. When I stopped to look at it,
everything was out of proportion. Her neck was too short,
her shoulders too broad, her stomach too thick. Worse, she
didn’t seem to be sitting on the stool; she looked pasted to
it. Then Hogarth was beside me again.
You didn’t think this out, he said. The big forms have to
come first. Look.
He took my chalk and made a few bold strokes over my
labored drawing, showing me that the way I was going, the
model’s feet would be off the page. He made them fit. And
he showed me where the big forms were.
You lay it out in big quick forms, he said. Even if the
forms are light, make them the basis. Later you can get into
the details. Just don’t start with the details or you’ll get lost
in them. It’s the old business about not seeing the forest for
the trees. Or the trees for the leaves.
He was talking to me and talking to the full class. But he
didn’t seem to be trying to make me feel small; there was
no Brother Jan in him. He said his few words, in a sharp
precise voice, and then moved on to another student.
Everybody listened; we all learned.
When the twenty-minute pose ended, Hogarth called a
break. The model slipped on her robe and slippers and
took out a pack of Chester fields. She glanced at some of
the drawings but not mine. I watched her go. She must have
felt my eyes on her, because at the door she smiled in a
polite way and walked into the hall. I wandered out to the
hall too. I didn’t smoke then, but everybody else did. They
were all talking and laughing and smoking. I wandered
around the hall, looking at notices for art shows and foreign
movies, glancing into classrooms where other students
worked on oil paintings. I didn’t see the model anywhere.
The break ended, and now Hogarth was in front of his
own newsprint pad, giving us an anatomy lesson. He
explained the basic shape of the torso, how it was
essentially several wedges, one large, one small; or, in a
shorthand, more fluid way, a kind of peanut shape. He
showed us how, if we established the peanut, there was a
logic to the way you added shoulders, arms, and legs.
The head is the basic measure, Hogarth said. The ideal
figure is seven heads high, although fashion illustrators —
or our friend El Greco — make it nine heads high. Forget
about them for now. Forget about short people or infants
too. For our classes, seven heads should be the measure.
And remember, your task isn’t to copy what’s in front of you.
Any camera can do that. It’s to understand what the figure is
doing and why it can do it. You learn anatomy to understand
what’s beneath the skin. And you don’t express the figure
by what it is, but by what it does. It is what it does.
I was awed by the man because it wasn’t just talk; he
also put on a show, starting with the peanut, the shoulders
roughed in as a kind of barbell, the hands beginning as
mittens, then acquiring startling power. It is what it does, he
said, making his own drawings look both easy and
impossible, the chalk obeying his commands, providing
shape, volume, and power to the figures. He luxuriated in
foreshortening, in making the figure seem to leap off his
pages. Sometimes he made forms simpler; at other times,
he made them more complex, showing unseen muscles,
bones, structures, beneath the sheath of skin. Those figures
didn’t look like our models; a Hogarth drawing resembled
nothing on the earth. But he seemed to be saying that it
didn’t matter. The model was where you began, nothing
more; the drawing was the result. The model was a
collection of facts; the drawing was the truth.
When that first evening was over, my mind was a roar of
words, bodies, drawings. I remember Hogarth saying to the
model, Goodnight, Laura, and thank you. She pulled on the
smock and fumbled for her cigarettes and left. I went home
in a blur of exhaustion and excitement, thinking: My life has
changed. Here. Tonight. This morning I was just another
fuckup, a high school dropout from Brooklyn. Tonight I
became an art student.
And hey, maybe I was going to be good at it. On the
breaks I walked among the other easels. Some drawings
were beautiful. Some were pretty good. Some were
dreadful. Mine were at least okay. I was the youngest
student in the class, but I was better than a lot of them. I
thought: I can do this.
Back in the room beside the Parkview, I looked at the
drawings I’d made, tearing up the truly dreadful ones,
seeing a progression, an improvement. Lying in bed later in
the dark, hearing the trolley move down Prospect Park
Southwest for Coney Island, I thought about the model.
What did Hogarth call her? Laura. Like the Stan Kenton
record. Laura, on the train that is passing through . . . . I
wondered if she had a husband or boyfriend or children and
what they would think of her sitting naked every night in a
roomful of strangers. I wondered what she thought as she
held herself still for this group inspection and the only sound
was chalk on paper. I wished she would come here to this
place in Brooklyn and let me draw her. Slowly and lovingly.
Until I got it right. I was tracing the outlines of her body in my
mind, her small hard breasts and thickening hips, when I fell
asleep.
So I worked in the Navy Yard days and went to C&I nights.
On the weekends, there was drinking, openly in the
Parkview or clandestinely in my own room, joined by some
of my friends from the Totes. There was one difference. In
the fall, I had drunk out of a sour sense of waste and failure.
Now I was drinking exuberantly, certain I had earned that
right. I felt that I was on my way.
Hogarth was a great teacher. He had a critical
intelligence that could be sardonic but not devastating; I
never saw him destroy anybody’s ego or try to establish his
own worth by humiliating a kid. At the same time, he set up
high standards of excellence and let us know when we
weren’t pushing ourselves hard enough. Most of us failed,
most of the time. But he encouraged us to try again, and
although most of the students wanted to be cartoonists, he
always reminded us that there were other options.
You might become a painter, he said. You might become
a sculptor. You might make murals. Just work at the top of
your talent and keep pushing past it. And remember: The
figure is the key to everything.
I bought a small composition book and started writing
down some of what he said, his phrases, the names of the
artists he mentioned. During the week, there was no time to
go to museums or galleries; on weekends, the rhythm of the
Neighborhood seemed to eat my time — taking my clothes
to the laundry, cleaning the apartment, visiting 378, drinking
on the Totes or in the Parkview. But I did find time to go to
the main library at Grand Army Plaza. In the reference
room, where they kept the art books, I looked at pictures by
Michelangelo and Rubens, Rembrandt and Caravaggio,
Leonardo and Velázquez, Picasso and Matisse. I realized
I’d seen many of the paintings and drawings before, in
magazines, or in religion books in grammar school, even in
advertising; but now they were works made by men,
calculated, planned, made by hand, in the same way that
Steve Canyon was made by Milton Caniff.
They call them masters, Hogarth said. But they all started
with the figure, with drawing. Among other things, they all
understood the principle of contraposition. They understood
that all forms become dynamic by moving in opposition to
each other. The shoulder moves up, the biceps and triceps
move to the front and the back . . .
I didn’t get everything that Hogarth was saying, but it
thrilled me. Drawing wasn’t just God-given, like a voice; it
was something that could be learned, it had rules, axioms,
formulas. As crude and unfinished as I was, I would get
better. All it took was work.
At night, when I came out of the subway beside the
Totes, or stopped for food in the back booths at Lewnes’,
my drawings became a hit. Naked broads! Duke Baluta
shouted, taking the drawings from my portfolio envelope.
The other guys grinned lewdly.
You mean to tell me, Baluta said, that you sit there
looking at this broad, naked, tits out and all — and you
don’t get a hard-on?
Duke, I said, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re so involved in
getting the drawing right that —
That you don’t want to fuck her?
Uh, I, well —
See, Duke said, he does want to fuck her!
No, it’s like it could be apples or pears or something, I
told him, my head filling with half-baked Hogarthisms.
You’re trying to get the contrapos — the basic form. You
want to get to the core of the shape.
You mean you want to get to the core of her pussy.
Usually, they all guffawed and I laughed with them.
Sometimes, they called over a few of the girls and showed
them the drawings and the girls giggled or blushed or got
huffy. Some of the girls thought I was weird. Living alone at
sixteen. Drawing naked women. In that neighborhood, it
was too strange, too dangerous.
10
AT SCHOOL, the models changed every week, sometimes
from night to night. Laura was gone after a few nights and I
didn’t see her around. Then one chilly night, I went out on
the break and saw her down the hall, wearing her smock
and sandals, smoking her cigarette. I walked toward her,
glancing into a painting classroom, and nodded at her. She
smiled back.
You must be cold out here, I said.
It’s colder in there, she said. Here, I get to wear this.
Your name is Laura, right?
Right, she said. She seemed surprised. Cigarette?
Thanks, I don’t smoke. Would you like a coffee or
something?
She smiled, in an amused way; it was the first time I’d
seen her smile and it made her seem younger.
Sure. After the last bell?
Okay.
That wasn’t what I’d meant; I meant that I could go
downstairs and get coffee from the machine. Now,
somehow, I had a date. Tonight. Dressed in my Navy Yard
clothes. Back in class, my heart was thumping. We were
drawing from a black male model, but I kept thinking about
that last bell. And Laura. Who was she? How old was she?
If she asks, how old am I? An artist and a model! Jesus.
But what if she’s just playing a game on me? Calm down.
She probably won’t show up. She’ll think it over and just
come and shake my hand and tell me something came up,
she had an appointment she forgot, maybe next week or
next term.
But there she was at the end of the last class, waiting for
me in the lobby. She was wearing a navy pea jacket,
dungarees, a wool cap pulled over her hair, and sneakers.
She looked much younger.
There’s a coffee shop over on Lexington, she said.
It had begun to snow. Big white flakes fell into Twenty-
third Street, turning briefly black against the streetlamps,
before melting on the roofs of cars.
Oh, great! she shouted, in an almost girlish voice. I love
snow!
We sat in a window booth, facing each other and
watching the snow falling steadily. She ordered an English
muffin and black coffee; so did I (as in so many other
things, I followed the lead of those who seemed to know
what they were doing). Laura told me that she’d come to
New York to be a dancer (and I wondered, When? Before
the war?). But dancing hadn’t worked out. She married a
photographer who took pictures of radios and refrigerators
for catalogs; that didn’t work out either. But before it ended,
the photographer introduced her to some painters, and
after a while she started painting too.
The trouble is, there’s maybe twenty thousand painters in
New York now, she said. Maybe more. That GI Bill, that
made everybody think they could be painters. So it’s hard
to make a living. That’s why I model. To make ends meet.
She smiled in a matter-of-fact way and sipped her coffee
and lit another cigarette. I could see her nipples in my mind
and her pubic hair and the thickness of her hips.
How do you feel, I said, with everyone looking at you up
there?
Most of the time, I don’t feel anything. I think about the
painting I’m working on. Or the book I’m reading. Or the
landlord. Or the laundry.
She took a deep drag and then smiled, glancing at the
snow.
But to tell the truth, Laura said, sometimes I get hot. I can
feel all those eyes on me and I know some of the men must
want to fuck me. Maybe some of the women too. And what
happens is, I start thinking like them, some kind of
transference, I am them, I’m them fucking me, kissing me,
pressing against me, licking me; and I get hot. And then I’m
afraid I’ll turn a certain way and you’ll see that I’m wet. Do
you have a hard-on now?
Yeah.
Let’s go to my place.
Laura had a two-room apartment on Tenth Street, three
buildings away from the Third Avenue El. The shades were
drawn but I could hear the train rumble through the snowy
night. One room was a kitchen with a table and two chairs
beside a window that opened into an air shaft. The other
room was studio and bedroom, cramped and messy. There
were books packed on shelves, lying on the paint-spattered
linoleum floor, used to hold open a door. There was a
record player, a radio, stacks of records; a toolbox full of
brushes and tubes of paint; a huge wooden easel; a long
table covered with tomato cans full of paint, linseed oil,
turpentine, and other cans holding big fat brushes; and
dozens of canvases covered with shimmering abstract
paintings, most of them in great splashy variations of a
single color: blue.
My Billie Holiday paintings, she said. Want a drink?
Sure.
She poured an inch of Canadian Club into each of two
water glasses. I felt unreal, as if I’d walked into a novel.
Okay, Laura said, now it’s my turn.
For what?
She sipped her drink and said, Take off your clothes.
I laughed.
You’ve been drawing me, she said. Now I draw you.
I’m sure I must have blushed. I took a sip of the whiskey,
which burned into my stomach, and then put the glass on a
table. I took off my shirt and undershirt, then my boots and
socks and trousers. The paint-spattered floor felt pebbly.
So did my skin in the chilly room.
Everything, she said.
So I slipped off my shorts and tossed them onto a chair,
trying to look casual. In the chill, I was sure my cock had
shrunk to its tiniest size. I was afraid to look. She was
placing a newsprint pad on the easel, an amused look on
her face.
Now what? I said.
Just like Hogarth’s class, she said. Quick poses.
I tried to remember what she did, bending, twisting,
holding the pose. All I could hear was the chalk moving on
paper, sheets being torn off the pad, ice clunking in her
glass. Then she asked me to hold a longer pose, seated on
a chair, right leg extended, left leg curled along the side of
the chair. She brought me my drink; I sipped it and she took
it away and put Billie Holiday on the record player. The
recording was a worn version of “Strange Fruit.” I worked at
holding the pose, knowing she was looking straight at me,
sensing her presence but not seeing her. Then I
remembered what she’d said in the coffee shop, how she’d
imagine us thinking about fucking her. I tried to see myself
on this chair, tried to be her, looking at my body, at my
shoulders and belly and legs and cock, and then I could feel
my cock getting hard. I tried to stop it then, shifting my
imaginings, trying to will it away; but I only got harder.
And then Laura was there, on her knees, gripping my
cock in a chalk-blackened hand. Then she took it in her
mouth, gripping it more tightly, her hand moving slowly, as I
held to the edge of the chair, looking at the slow movement
of her head. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her
mouth stuffed with my cock, and I started to come. Violently.
My whole body erupting as my pelvis thrust up off the chair.
Laura held on as an involuntary roar rose from my throat
and I went back again and over the chair to the floor.
Silence.
And then Laura began to laugh in a crazy way.
Jesus Christ, she squealed. Jesus H. Christ, that was
amazing!
I got up slowly, my back aching. Laura sat there, sitting
on her ankles, still fully clothed.
How old are you anyway? she said.
Almost seventeen, I said.
Jesus H. Christ.
I stood up, trying to look casual, and she went to the
bathroom. I looked at her drawings. They were scribbled
and loose, made up of hundreds of small lines that built up
form and volume; later, I’d see a similar style in the
drawings of Giacometti. I was shivering and sipped my
drink and was warm again. Then Laura was back, wearing
a thin robe, carrying a hot washcloth that gave off steam.
First things first, young man, she said, and began to
wash the charcoal off my cock. She dropped the cloth on a
table, switched off a lamp, then another, and then she came
to me from behind and rubbed her hand on my stomach
and began kissing and sucking on my neck.
Okay, she whispered. Now we can fuck.
11
THAT SPRING, I felt as if some enormous ice jam had
broken. I was alive again after a long dead time. The
feelings of failure, impotence, loneliness, ruin: all were
washed away. Art school made me feel that I could do
something that was valuable, special, part of me. Laura
made my body tremble with sensuality, and that went into
my drawings. Through the long days at the Navy Yard, I
could handle any drudgery, full of the luxuries of the evening.
Then at a Saturday-night birthday party in the
Neighborhood, I met a girl named Maureen Crowley. She
was tall, thin, dark-haired, with a slouching walk and bright
dark eyes. For a long time, I was in love with her in that
diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be
explained to strangers. Laura was from the world outside
the Neighborhood; Maureen was part of it. I knew that
Laura wasn’t part of some limitless future; I wanted to
believe that Maureen was. She was the middle daughter in
a respectable family that lived in a private home near where
I had my room. Her father owned a grocery store and later
ran a bar. It was clear from the beginning that he didn’t want
his daughter to be going out with the likes of me: a high
school dropout from Seventh Avenue, and perhaps worse,
a son of Billy Hamill.
Much of this disapproval was surely about class. The Irish
from Seventh Avenue were “shanty”: low, common, often
violent and alcoholic. The Crowleys were “lace curtain”; the
father worked for himself, wore a necktie to his job, had
moved at least one step past the immigrant generation.
When I first came calling at the house, I wore my best
clothes. Or the clothes then considered the style on Seventh
Avenue. The clothes of the hoodlum: pegged pants, shirts
with wide Mr. B collars, wraparound jackets. I couldn’t
afford a suit, or a tweed jacket; most of my spare money
was going to tuition and art supplies. Gradually I adopted
the chinos and plaid shirts favored by the Big Guys, but it
was too late. With Maureen’s parents, first impressions
were everything. To them, even art school was a negative;
what sort of foolish dreamer went to art school?
But the very obstacles charged this new love story with
an aching romanticism. I wanted to prove my worthiness;
that meant I had to live a lie. I never told Maureen about
Laura. I saw Maureen on Wednesday nights, when there
were no classes at C&I, and on weekends. On the other
weekday nights, I almost ran to Laura’s place.
Laura was amused by me, I suppose; I was a kind of
earnest, untrained pet. I never found out whether she had
other lovers; I knew almost nothing about the way she lived
outside school and the studio on Tenth Street. At school,
she seldom talked to me in the hallway; she would see me
in the hallway and nod Yes or shake her head No and that
would tell me all I needed to know for the night. If it was No,
I’d be stabbed by jealousy; I’d try to see if she left alone or if
she was sitting in the coffee shop with another student.
Once, I waited in the shadows near her house, to see if she
came home with someone else. That night, she never came
home at all.
But if she nodded Yes, Laura always had something new
for me. She’d tie me to the bed with cord or pieces of
clothesline and lick my body until, as I did one memorable
midnight, I ejaculated without being touched by anything but
her tongue. She’d paint my cock with watercolors or have
me apply lipstick to the lips of her vagina. She had me fuck
her on tables and the floor and against the kitchen sink,
sometimes while I wore only my work boots. Once she
asked me to tie her to the easel and fuck her from behind.
On several nights, she took me into a hot soapy bath, the
walls perspiring, and sat on my cock until she came.
Meanwhile, I couldn’t get much beyond Maureen’s breasts.
And then one night, while I was frantically fucking Laura, she
whispered to me:
What’s her name?
What’s whose name?
The girl you’re thinking about while you’re fucking me.
She had me. My erection started dying. I must have
smiled in some dumb way, because she looked at me, her
eyes squinting. I rolled over on my side, feeling as if I’d
been unfaithful to Laura.
Hey, young man, she said. Hey, don’t feel bad.
Everybody does it.
She began playing with my cock, and when it was hard
again she whispered: Call me by her name.
I turned to her, seeing the outline of her face in the light
from the street. I ran my fingers on her nipples and drew
close to her.
Maureen, I whispered.
Yes, Laura murmured.
Maureen, Maureen.
Say my name. Come in me, baby.
Maureen, Maureen, Maureen.
She started twisting and heaving in a ferocious orgasm,
pulling my hair, biting my neck and shoulders, jamming her
heels into my thighs, digging her fingers into my ass.
My name!
Laura, Maureen, Laura, Maureen, Laura, Laura, Laura …
Then I exploded into her.
We lay there, very still, for a long while. The El rumbled
by. She lit a cigarette and sipped from a drink.
You’d better go home now, she said.
I want to stay here tonight.
That would be a mistake, she said.
Please, I said. I want to sleep with you. I want to wake up
with you.
You do that once, she whispered, and you’ll never come
back.
Why?
She got up and switched on a small lamp. She pulled on
a robe and started fixing me a whiskey and soda.
Why? You’ll see me in the cold light of day, that’s why.
You’ll see I’m old enough to be your mother. You’ll want your
nice little virgin from Brooklyn. That’s why.
I see you in Hogarth’s class, I said. With all those
goddamned fluorescent lights!
That’s different, she said. I could be three lemons in a
bowl.
Come on, Laura. I love you.
She turned on me, snarling.
For Chrissakes, don’t say that! Don’t ever say that to me
again!
It’s true.
You don’t even know what the word means! You’ll find
out, one of these days, and you won’t say it so easy. Love
gets everything all screwed up. It’s one of those lies that
ruin the world.
I thought, in a thrilled way: Jesus, that’s like a line from a
movie.
I said: Then what do you feel about me?
I’m fucking you, kid, she said bitterly. But I don’t have to
love you to fuck you.
That was not a movie line. She drained her glass, then
poured another, staring at the floor. Her face was clenched.
I started getting dressed. I noticed a new canvas against
the far wall, leaning against the windowsill. She had
sketched in a naked young man. His heart was outside the
skin of his chest. Everything was blue, even the heart.
For a few weeks, she signaled me No. Twice, she modeled
in Hogarth’s class, and I pulsed with jealousy. I stayed at an
easel to the side, but was jealous of those who could see
between her legs. I had been in there. I didn’t want her to be
imagining them imagining entering her. On the second
night, at the end of the second week, I tried to loathe her.
Her gray pubic hair. The small breasts. The ridged white
flesh around her hips.
But I couldn’t make the loathing work. I kept drawing her
the way I knew her, remembered her, wanted her to be: in
writhing Hogarthian movements. Hogarth himself took
notice.
Pretty sexy, fella, he said. Now try it the other way. Not a
pinup. Make her ugly. Make her a hundred years old.
I don’t know if I can, I said.
Invent it, he said, walking away. Use your imagination.
I didn’t know if Laura heard him, but I tried. I made her a
wrinkled crone. I made her toothless. I made her immensely
fat. Nothing worked. I still wanted her. My last drawing was
made up of hundreds of small scribbles, like one of her own
drawings. When the bell rang, she walked past my easel
and glanced at the drawing. I started to say something but
she kept moving.
I waited for her outside the school. An icy wind was
blowing off the East River. The streets looked dark and
shiny, as if they’d been glazed. Then she came out.
Laura, I —
Come on, she said, and took my arm.
We went to Tenth Street and drank and fucked and
fucked and drank. I stayed until morning.
She woke me with scrambled eggs on a plate and
buttered rye toast. I suddenly panicked. It was Friday and
the kitchen clock said it was eight thirty-five. I was due at
the Navy Yard at eight.
The hell with it, she said. So you miss a day, so what?
Yeah. So what.
I looked at her more closely now as she made coffee.
She was dressed in a loose flowered dress and sandals.
Her hair was wild, but her face was clean and shining. The
winter light threw cold shadows on the walls. I pulled a
blanket over my shoulders and began eating greedily. She
brought me a steaming cup of coffee and then sat at the
end of the bed and looked at me in a forlorn way.
You’ll be going away, she said.
No, I said. I’ll stay here. Maybe we can go to a museum
or a movie or something.
I have to work today. Besides, I wasn’t talking about
today.
She got up and poured herself the first whiskey of the
morning.
You’re the type who is always going away, she said.
Come on, I said. You know better. You gave me the brush
for two weeks and here I am.
Temporary insanity, she said, and smiled. She stared
into the glass.
I think you want me to go.
No, she said. Not yet.
12
THE ROOM in Brooklyn became my center, and from that
center I tried to sort out all the different strands of my story:
art school, the Navy Yard, the Neighborhood, my father, my
brothers and sister, my friends, drinking, Maureen and
Laura. I couldn’t do it, and there was little time left for
anything else. McCarthyism was gathering its dark force
but I wasn’t thinking much about it; I had no time anymore
for reading seven newspapers a day, for clipping the
comics and filing them into envelopes. The comics
themselves seemed small and cramped now, and I kept
wanting to draw the way Hogarth did, with great sweeping
movements, my body involved in the act. I had no money for
paint and canvases. And the room was too small for truly
gigantic canvases. All of that was up ahead somewhere.
But while I wanted a future, I also wanted my identity in
the Neighborhood. The drawings gave me part of it. So did
the room. And that winter of 1951–52 I found a place where
the guys from the Totes could meet on frigid nights.
Boop’s was on the corner of Seventeenth Street and
Tenth Avenue. Tommy Conroy and Mickey Horan took me
there for my first visit, entering through a side door on the
Tenth Avenue side. There were booths and an unused
kitchen. We moved through a dark passageway, past the
restrooms, and into the saloon itself. It was dark and
golden, like a John Sloan painting, with a long bar, a TV set
near the windows, a shuffleboard machine, a lone table,
and a jukebox. Behind the bar, the bottles glistened. On the
same shelf, the cash register was in the center, with a
toaster for making hot dogs at one end and signs for the
Miss Rheingold contest at the other. That first night, the bar
was packed and warm and smoky from cigarettes. The
windows were opaque with steam.
Boop himself was a heavy-set mild-mannered Italian guy
who years later was head of security at Madison Square
Garden. That first night, Conroy ordered three beers and
Boop pulled them without asking for draft cards. He was
too busy. I still remember the feeling, standing at a bar with
my friends, paying my own way. In the Parkview I was the
kid from upstairs. This was to be my own bar, a place to
drink or sing, my first club. That night I got very drunk. In the
morning, I woke up happy.
Soon, my routine got more elaborate. If I wasn’t with
Laura, I usually stopped off in Boop’s on my way home from
C&I. Part of this must have been a need for approval. I
wanted them to marvel at my drawing skills, to recognize
that I was different, that I wasn’t just another high school
dropout. But I also wanted to be part of the widening
fraternity of drinkers. On weekday nights, I didn’t get drunk; I
didn’t have enough money and I had to be up early to go to
the Navy Yard. Laura drank more than I did. But on
weekend nights, I usually went out with Maureen, early in the
evening, to see a movie at Loew’s Met or the Sanders or
Prospect. I would take her for a soda, or coffee, at Lewnes’
and then walk her home. She was in before midnight. Then
I’d walk up Prospect Avenue to Boop’s and all the other
young men would be gathering. They’d almost all had
Saturday nights like mine. They hadn’t gotten laid either. So
with the jukebox blasting and the beers flowing, we’d all get
roaring drunk.
There are permanent holes in my memory about most of
those nights. I remember lurching home. I remember the
streets rising and falling and lampposts swaying. Or lying in
bed while the ceiling moved like the sea. Most of all, I
remember the great heady closed feeling in the bar,
pushing quarters around in the wetness, the confirmed
feeling when the bartender bought me a free round after I’d
paid for three. Beers were a dime and a tune on the
jukebox cost a nickle (or six for a quarter). You could get
drunk for a dollar and a half. Through the night I was filled
with talk about fighters and ballplayers and the war, guys
we knew who’d been hurt, and others who’d been arrested,
and a few who’d just gone off somewhere. And the music of
the jukebox drove into me. I sang along with Sinatra on “I’m
a Fool to Want You” and joined everybody in the bar on
Johnnie Ray’s “Cry.”
Nobody talked politics, except to make occasional
remarks about politicians in general. And none of the
others talked much about the future. The war in Korea got in
the way. They would mention taking the tests for the cops or
the firemen; someday, later. But first they had to decide
what to do about the war. The draft waited for all of us. For
some of the older guys, it was only months away. So they
discussed the relative merits of the army or the navy, the
Marine Corps or the air force. They didn’t question the
reasons for Korea. It never occurred to them to protest it.
There was a war on. When it was your turn, you went too.
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 August, 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.
And Maureen? I made a different set of pictures,
conjured another shadow-self. Maybe we’d get married.
Not right away. Eventually. When Korea was over or
something. She’d come and live with me in my home port,
in Hawaii or San Diego, some bright gleaming place far
from Brooklyn. Or we’d want until I was discharged. Sure.
Because I was only seventeen, I needed to be signed into
the navy by one of my parents. But when I told them one
evening in 378, my mother was horrified.
They’ll send you to the war, she said.
Everybody’s going to the war, Mom.
Buddy Kelly is dead in this war, she said. Buddy Kiernan
is dead. Every week, more of them are dead.
They were in the army, Mom. I’ll be in the navy.
Can’t you wait a year? Until you’re eighteen? Maybe the
war’ll be over by then.
I don’t want to wait, Mom.
She shook her head in sorrow and frustration. But my
father was looking at me in a different way.
Don’t listen to her, he said. It’ll be the best thing you ever
did. You can learn a trade. It’ll make you a man.
I don’t understand it, my mother said.
You’re not a man, Annie.
And so he signed the papers.
I was told to report three weeks later, on Monday,
September 8, at eight in the morning. The recruiter said I
could “strike” for a yeoman rate, which meant I might be
able to work as an artist or cartoonist on a ship’s
newspaper. There were no guarantees, he said, but since
I’d gone to art school, it was possible. This inflamed me
even more; with any luck, I could become the Bill Mauldin of
the navy!
A week after signing up, I left the Navy Yard, saying
good-bye to the men, who all wished me well. I wrote to
C&I, explaining that I wouldn’t be back until I was out of the
navy. Then I packed all my things, gave up the room next to
the Parkview, and went home to 378. I didn’t show off the
nude drawings; I sealed them with Scotch tape into the big
portfolio envelopes. I got cardboard boxes from the grocery
store and packed my art supplies, comics, and other
books, including The Art Spirit. I stacked them all in the
woodbin in the cellar, explaining to my brother Tommy that
eventually he might send them to me when I was out at sea.
He was now at Brooklyn Tech, a brilliant student, with plans
to be an engineer. He took the assignment as if it were a
sacred duty.
Then I went on a summer binge, ten days of tearful
scenes with Maureen, wild nights at Boop’s, sunburns at
Coney. The art school interlude was behind me; I had been
reclaimed by the rituals of the Neighborhood. Everything
culminated in a going-away party for me and three other
young men in a VFW post down by the Venus theater. I
arrived with Maureen and we clung to each other through
the long evening. Now there was no going back; the papers
were signed; my friends were here to say good-bye. The
hall was packed, the tables stacked with whiskey and set-
ups and pitchers of beer. The jukebox blasted. Maureen
and I danced, her small breasts pushing hard against me,
her hands tense and sweaty. She said very little, but at
some point I made a joke and smiled and she turned away
in tears. Her girlfriends came over and hurried her into the
ladies room. I downed a cold beer and poured another.
Goddammit, Maureen, I’m a man, I thought (incapable of
irony or self-mockery); I have to do this because men do
these things. When Maureen came back, her eyes were
red. I took her hand and we went to dance. Jo Stafford was
singing “You Belong to Me.”
She began to weep again, and I put my arm around her
and waved good-bye to my friends and went into the cool
autumn air. She lived a few blocks away, and we walked
together with my arm around her waist. Suddenly, I didn’t
want to go. I wanted to repeal everything: the decision to
join, the signing of the papers, the surrender of room and
job, the departure from the only school I’d ever loved. And I
wanted to take back everything I’d said to Maureen.
But when we reached her house, huddling on the bottom
step out of view of anyone inside, I couldn’t find the right
words. There was no going back. Staying would be scarier
than going. I kissed her. She cried. So did I.
Maybe I’ve made some terrible mistake, I said.
She didn’t answer. I said I’d write every day. She said
she would too. I said I’d be home at Christmas. She said
she’d see me then. I asked her to wait for me. A light went
on inside her house, and she kissed me one final time on
the cheek and moved quickly up the steps, opened the front
door with a key, and vanished. I stood there for a long
moment, wondering if I should go back to the VFW and get
roaring drunk.
Then I started walking home through the Neighborhood,
along the parkside and the dark brooding forest beyond the
granite walls, past the Totem Poles and the Sanders, down
past the shuttered synagogue and the gated armory to
Seventh Avenue. The lights were out in most of the
apartments. Even at 378. I wondered if any of them were
doing what they wanted to do. I wondered if Maureen was
asleep. I wondered where Laura was.
In the morning, I went off to the navy.
IV
TO THE GATES OF EDEN
The Consul had not uttered a single word. It was all an
illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last,
at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and
complete, order.
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
the whole pasture looked like
our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out
of ice and water
— Frank O’Hara,
“Animals”
There are periods and occasions when drinking is in
the air, even seems to be a moral necessity.
— Alfred Kazin, “The Giant Killer”
1
DURING my time in the navy, drinking became more deeply
ingrained in my nature. If I’d served my apprenticeship in
Brooklyn, in the navy I became a journeyman. I learned
much about race, sex, the South, literature, music, and all of
it was absorbed in a delicious heady delirium of drink.
During a one-day liberty from boot camp in Bainbridge,
Maryland, I careened around the flesh joints of East
Baltimore Street, lusted for a stripper named Tempest
Storm, threw up in an alley and laughed about it with my
friends in the morning. I received a Dear John letter from
Maureen, wrote her anguished letters, came home at
Christmas, made a fool of myself over her, joined my father
in a winning us-against-them fistfight in Rattigan’s, and was
moved to beer-soaked tears when he said afterward, This
is my son, Peter, in whom I am well proud.
Then I was off to Norman, Oklahoma, to airmen’s school
(there turned out to be no great demand for yeomen who
were high school dropouts). I arrived on the morning of New
Year’s Eve and ended up that night in a tough Indian bar
where I took a whore’s tits out of her bra under her sweater
in a side booth and later followed her upstairs. She was
very fat and we drank hootch from an unlabeled bottle. She
blew me and I fell asleep and woke up at dawn with the
door locked from the outside and my money gone. I had to
move a bureau and climb out through the transom and then
wandered the frozen streets until I found a bus to take me to
the base. Then I was in Jacksonville, Florida, training for a
storekeeper’s rate, learning to type, seeing palm trees for
the first time, and the southern sun. Eisenhower had been
elected, the North Koreans were negotiating, and I would
see no war. In Daytona one weekend, I stood on the beach
with another sailor, named Stamps, and watched the cars
roll by on the hard-packed sand. Two college girls came
along in a convertible and Stamps and I leaped into the
back seat and then we were in their motel room, drinking
beer and fucking them for hours. I was almost eighteen. At
night in the enlisted men’s barracks, I longed for Maureen
— O wounded vanity! — and in my fantasies was once
again in the Tenth Street apartment with Laura tied to an
easel.
From Jacksonville I was sent to Pensacola, to a
helicopter training base at Ellyson Field. In the small base
library I discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the myth of
the Lost Generation. The discovery was set off by a single
sentence by Malcolm Cowley in his 1944 introduction to a
small compact Viking Portable that contained The Sun
Also Rises, excerpts from other novels, and a selection of
Hemingway’s short stories.
Going back to Hemingway’s work after several years
is like going back to a brook where you had often
fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as
they used to be. …
I was a city boy; I hadn’t seen a brook since Fox Lair
Camp, had never fished in any serious way, associated
woods with the place where Arnold hid his bottle of wine.
But something about that sentence pulled me in: a vision of
clarity that was liquid and moving and cool.
Part of the appeal came from reading it in the heat of
Florida. But I had never thought of a writer that way, making
words as clear as flowing water. Cowley allowed
Hemingway himself to talk:
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if
they had really happened and after you are finished
reading one you will feel that all that happened to you
and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the
bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people
and the places and how the weather was.
I knew that was true; the stuff of many books already lived
in my mind as if it had happened to me. I didn’t remember
the bad books.
And if the Hemingway world of Paris and Pamplona, the
slopes of Kilimanjaro and the eddies of the Big Two-
Hearted River had nothing concrete to do with my life,
Cowley described a part of that world that surely did. The
Hemingway heroes had one thing in common.
They drink early and late; they consume enough
beer, wine, anis, grappa and Fundador to put them all
into alcoholic wards, if they were ordinary mortals; but
drinking seems to have the effect on them of a magic
potion.
Yes! I had sampled that magic potion myself. And
Cowley then quoted from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls, whose hero, Robert Jordan, finds that a cup of
absinthe
took the place of the evening papers, of all the old
evenings in cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would
be in bloom now in this month … of all the things he
had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him
when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing,
brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing
liquid alchemy.
For weeks I tried to find absinthe in the dirt-floored bars
of O Street, and failed. There were other forms of liquid
alchemy, and so the lack of absinthe did not matter. I was
soon in the Hemingway world, carrying his stoic ethic with
me off the base, to sailor bars where drinking was sport,
entertainment, clarification, and pleasure. I went on to
Cowley’s Exile’s Return, about the Lost Generation that
Gertrude Stein had named and Hemingway had made
famous, and learned that drinking could be something more
than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge fuck
you to Authority.
The writers, artists, and poets of the 1920s, Cowley
explained, were faced with one mammoth idiocy of
Authority: the mistake called Prohibition. Then, as in my
own 1953, right-wingers, bigots, bluenoses, and puritans
ruled America. They used goons to break labor unions.
Like our current political gangster Joe McCarthy, they
sniffed around for people they called subversives, silenced
them, jailed them, deported them. If people like that passed
a law making it a crime to drink, you had only one choice: to
get roaring drunk.
Cowley led me to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, to
the world of bootleggers and speakeasies, and I
remembered my father’s friends sitting in the kitchen that
time talking about rumrunners. Nothing could have been
more romantic. James Cagney lived in that world, in the old
movies that kept playing in the Minerva and the Sixteenth
Street; so did Bogart and Robinson and Raft. And now
Wolfsheim the gambler was there and Nick Carraway and
Jay Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald himself, and Billy Hamill.
And Billy Hamill’s oldest son too.
All of them staring across the water at the green light on
Daisy’s dock.
2
FROM HEMINGWAY, I stole the guise of the stoic drinker,
mixing it up with Bogart and some old salts who had come
through the war and knew that a helicopter base in the
Florida panhandle was Mickey Mouse duty. These men
carried deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors
(or so I thought), but they taught us that the only unforgivable
sin was self-pity. A girl broke your heart? Fuck her. Get
another one. Break her heart. You lost a fight? Fuck it. Get
up. Wipe off the blood. Have another whiskey and go get
him again.
Most of them knew a lot about life in a concrete way. And
they laughed out loud at the oratory of the politicians. That,
too, fit in with the codes of Hemingway.
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred,
glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain.
We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain
almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words
came through, and had read them, on proclamations
that were slapped up by billposters over other
proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen
nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had
no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at
Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to
bury it…. Abstract words such as glory, honor,
courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete
names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names
of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates….
That was from A Farewell to Arms, and in that romantic
novel, I first came across the notion of a separate peace. In
the climax of the drama, Frederic Henry deserts to join his
woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions
of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more
important than dying; loving a woman was more important
than loving a country. And from Cowley’s Exile’s Return, I
realized that there was another way to make a separate
peace: departure. Faced with an America dedicated to
sobriety, thrift, puritanism, and commercialism, many
Twenties writers and artists became expatriates. I loved
that word. The expatriate Fitzgerald went to the Riviera, T.
S. Eliot to London, Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico,
Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among
civilized people (or so I thought), in countries where food
and shelter and drink were cheap and the women were
beautiful.
In my imagination, searching for absinthe among the
Hank Williams-Webb Pierce jukeboxes, Paris became the
golden city of my imagination. It was so in the 1920s, I
thought; it must be so now. I envisioned café tables on
summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on
the slopes of Montparnasse, and there, coming in the door
of the bal musette, striding right out of The Sun Also
Rises, was Lady Brett Ashley.
She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt,
and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She
started all that. She was built with curves like the hull
of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that
wool jersey….
Around this time, I first saw Vincente Minnelli’s An
American in Paris, and here was Gene Kelly, living on the
GI Bill after World War II — that is to say, now — telling me
that if you can’t paint in Paris, you might as well marry the
boss’s daughter. He had a studio in the Quarter that was
smaller than Laura’s, with a bed on pulleys that he raised in
the morning to the ceiling, and windows open to the spring
air, the Paris rooftops, the cobblestoned streets, the
bookstalls, and the fresh bread and, of course, the cafés.
Oscar Levant was his best friend, a piano player, and they
met each day in the Café Bel Ami. The girl he loved was
Leslie Caron. His music was by George Gershwin, full of
charm and confidence and bittersweet regret. This wasn’t
the Paris of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn from The Sun
Also Rises. But it was bright and gay and full of painters
and music and beautiful women and I wanted it.
And began to think I might even get it. When I finished
with the navy, I too was entitled to the GI Bill, just like Gene
Kelly. I could go to Paris and see all the great paintings in
the Louvre and read all the writers whose names were
scattered through Cowley’s book: Joyce and Pound, Proust
and Valéry, Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Why
not? I’d find the Café Bel Ami and sit at a table and order
Fundador and read little magazines too. And study at the
Académie Julien or the Sorbonne. And paint in the street.
All night long, I’d discuss with my fellow theologians the
canon law of the religion of art. And sample other
pleasures.
The only things that matter, said Gene Kelly, are women
and wine.
And absinthe. Of course.
3
BUT I DIDN’T GO to Paris. The Korean War ended in a grim
stalemate, and a year later the navy ended for me too, and I
went back to New York. I found a job as a messenger and
then proofreader in the production department of an
advertising agency that specialized in industrial accounts.
Everybody in the Neighborhood thought I was crazy.
You got a good job in the Navy Yard, Duke Baluta said.
They gotta count your navy time toward your pension too.
I want to try something else, I said.
You could be there for life.
That’s what I’m afraid of.
Back home, I didn’t go very far. I found a new room, this
one next to a synagogue on Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a half
block from the library. I was soon going steady with another
girl from the Neighborhood, this one named Catherine. I
didn’t go back to C&I; there was some problem about the
GI Bill. I enrolled instead in evening classes at Pratt
Institute, where an English teacher named Tom McMahon
looked at my compositions and encouraged me to write.
McMahon was a fine teacher with a probing theatrical style.
He was an expert on Hemingway, an admirer of Nathanael
West and Horace McCoy, a cigarette smoker and wearer
of trench coats, and at one point he urged me to try to get
into Columbia University, where I could study literature or
art. I went up to Morningside Heights and saw the registrar,
a bald polished man. He looked at my academic record,
such as it was, and suggested in a condescending voice
that I consider going to a vocational school.
I hear there is a big need for dental technicians, he said.
Fuck you, I said, gathered my papers and walked out the
door.
All the way back to Brooklyn from Morningside Heights I
kept saying, Fuck you, I’ll do it some other way. Fuck you, I’ll
do it anyway.
I was reading newspapers again, the comics behind me,
but enthralled by Jimmy Cannon in the Post’s sports section
and by Murray Kempton’s column on the editorial page.
After Pensacola, the seven New York newspapers were a
gorgeous feast. I no longer wanted to be a cartoonist. But
the dream of painting in Paris also began to fade under the
gray pressure of earning a living and a feeling of rejection. I
wrote to the Sorbonne in Paris. I wrote to the Académie
Julien. I never received answers. Fuck you, I said to Paris.
Fuck you too.
Now everyone in the Neighborhood had a television set
— even my father — and on summer nights the streets
were emptier, as each apartment lit up with a pale blue
glow. I still listened to Symphony Sid and got drunk when
Charlie Parker died and sneered at the arrival of rock and
roll.
In Brooklyn I felt stalled again. Most of my friends were
still in the service; they’d gone in after me and stayed later.
My best friend was Tim Lee, a brilliant guy who had boxed
in the amateurs at Thomas Aquinas and came home on
weekends from his army base in Maryland. In Boop’s or
Rattigan’s or the Caton Inn, we talked a lot about going to
college, doing something with our lives. Everything seemed
possible over a beer. But in 1955, such talk was always
interrupted by other matters. In Boop’s, we cheered in
September when Archie Moore knocked down Rocky
Marciano before getting knocked out himself. We were
thrilled when Sugar Ray Robinson ended his amazing
comeback in December by knocking out Bobo Olson in two
rounds. At the bar there was a lot of talk now about heroin,
which was claiming its first victims in the Neighborhood.
Who brought this shit around anyway? I asked one night
in Boop’s.
The guineas, who else? said Vito Pinto.
Hey, Vito, Duke Baluta said, you’re a guinea!
You know who I mean, Vito said.
Everybody knew, all right. The racket guys from South
Brooklyn had started slowly peddling heroin, and now it was
coming in a flood. The streets that once had the most
drunks — Twelfth Street, Seventh Avenue, Seventeenth
Street — now housed the most junkies. The South Brooklyn
wise guys did to the Tigers with heroin what they couldn’t
do with fists, bats, or guns: wasted them and robbed them
of their pride. Seeing that, I was never tempted by hard
drugs. But now drinking acquired another quality: it was the
normal, healthy, even moral alternative to smack.
That year, I also started hanging around with a tough
funny ironworker named Jack Daugherty. He loved
sentimental Irish songs, practical jokes, and fighting. He
was the hardest-punching street fighter I ever knew. And
soon, in bars and coffee shops all over Brooklyn, we were
in fights every night. We fought strangers over change (I
had t’ree quarters here when I went to take my piss) or
looks (The fuck you lookin’ at, prickface?) or women
(Whatta you, own this broad?). Sometimes Tim Lee was
there; usually it was Jack and me. I broke my right hand
twice and had a stabilizing pin inserted through my
knuckles, forcing me for a few weeks to draw with my left.
There were wild fights in Bickford’s cafeteria on Ninth
Street and wilder ones on the sidewalks outside Nathan’s
on Coney Island. I was drinking every day but seldom got
drunk and never had hangovers; it was a matter of deep
pride in the Neighborhood to be able to hold your drink.
One night in the Caton Inn, a dark joint on Coney Island
Avenue with a huge horseshoe bar, a booming jukebox,
and a dance floor, I was drinking with my girl, Catherine. My
broken right hand was in a cast. Then a guy grabbed
Catherine’s ass on his way to the men’s room and I spun
him around and hit him between the eyes with the cast. His
head bounced off another guy’s foot, breaking his toe. It
became known as The Night Pete Hamill Broke Frank
Christie’s Toe with One Punch.
Catherine was sweet, funny, a drinker, with dark hair cut
in a bob, long legs, and smooth skin. All around us, people
were getting married, as the men came back from Korea. It
was assumed that we would be married too. My father
knew her father; she lived two blocks from 378; I was told in
a dozen different ways by several dozen grown-ups that
there was nothing better than a good neighborhood girl.
That year, Catherine went to a lot of baby showers. We
went together to some weddings. She didn’t mind my
drinking or fighting; that was what men did. She gushed
about the drawings I took home from Pratt, giggled at the
naked women, but looked blank when I tried to talk about a
life as a painter. She didn’t dismiss the subject the way
Maureen had; it just didn’t register with her. I could have
been discussing the rings of Saturn. We ordered beers.
We danced. She laughed at my jokes. We groped each
other in the kitchen of her parents’ flat. I went home. Or
stopped for a nightcap in a bar.
One day in the Daily News there was a story about the
ongoing demolition of the Third Avenue El. The work crews
were moving uptown from the Bowery and were about to
reach Fourteenth Street. I felt a pang; a piece of the world I
knew was going to disappear. But there was more to it than
that. After work, I went down to Tenth Street and Third
Avenue, secretly hoping that Laura had seen the same
news item and would feel the same pang. A half block from
the El, we had pleasured each other on winter nights. I told
myself that I wasn’t in love with her; I didn’t even want to
take her to bed; I just wanted to see her again and hear
from her what had happened. From the Astor Place subway
station, I walked slowly east along Tenth Street. At her
building, I went into the vestibule and looked at the
mailboxes, but someone else was living in the old studio.
Then I walked to the corner. Third Avenue felt empty and
hollow without the great dark iron structures of the El and
the steel growl of the trains. I went into a bar and sat there
for a long time, sipping beers, watching the street. But I
never saw Laura again. I never saw her name in the art
magazines. She wasn’t listed in the directories of American
artists. She was gone forever.
4
BY EARLY 1956, I began to feel that I was vanishing too. The
production manager at the agency had quickly decided I
wasn’t what he needed; he was about to fire me. The art
director, Ernie Waivada, saved me, out of an excess of
Christian pity, and from him I started to acquire some minor
skills. I could draw a straight line with a steel T square, for
example. I could do simple pasteups and mechanicals. I
could “spec” type and do some primitive lettering (taming
my cartoony instincts). I knew about repro proofs and
photostats and Photo Lettering. I was trusted to black out
cut lines on negative photostats, to cut mats, to “gang”
various small pieces of art for photostats. I managed to
keep the job and was even given a small raise.
But at night in the dark, alone with myself, graphic design
seemed a chilly discipline. It was basically a function of the
intellect, and I was still in the sweaty grip of romance, full of
Hemingway, reading the poems of García Lorca, soaking
up James M. Cain, discovering the drawings of Heinrich
Kley, copying George Grosz and Orozco. I still loved
drawing human bodies, hair and teeth and flesh. I had much
less interest in squares, circles, triangles, or the delicacies
of Caslon Bold.
In the small studio, upstairs from a rug importer on Fifth
Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, there was another man
who came to work three or four days a week. His name
was Dave Hills. He was in his sixties, with age freckles on
his hands, his back hunched from years bent over drawing
boards. He had been the first art director of the agency but
now worked as a part-time freelancer on some of the minor
work, such as employee newsletters. He had a few peculiar
specialities, one of which was lettering that looked like
rope. But he never talked about the glories of design. His
fundamental medium was the Job. He had started out long
ago and come through the Depression and the war; he was
happy to be there at all. Then one day he announced that he
was going to retire. He was packing up and moving to
Mexico.
Why Mexico, Dave? I asked.
Oh, I don’t know, he said. I like the people. I like the
country. I like the booze. And besides, it’s cheap.
At almost the same time, I received a letter from a navy
friend who also wanted to be a painter. He enclosed a
catalog for a school called Mexico City College, approved
for study on the GI Bill, with an art department offering a
bachelor of fine arts degree. The language of instruction
was English, but there were extensive courses in the
Spanish language. Maybe this is our Paris, my friend
wrote. And besides, it’s cheap, said Dave Hills.
Suddenly Mexico cast a voluptuous spell. If a sixty-five-
year-old man could pack up and go to Mexico, why couldn’t
I? I sent the catalog to my friend Tim Lee, who was still in
the army. Maybe, I wrote him, we could go there together.
So what if nobody in the Neighborhood ever went to
college; why shouldn’t we be the first? And in Mexico! The
notion would not go away. In the agency, I was trying to
letter a line of copy in Clarendon Bold and suddenly Orozco
tore across my mind. I sat at the bar in the Caton Inn with
Catherine and imagined hard brown mountains, cactus,
distant volcanoes; bandidos out of The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre; pyramids and lost cities; cantinas full of
music and tequila and brownskinned women.
Are you okay? Catherine said.
Yeah, yeah.
You’re not drunk?
No, I’m not drunk.
I hope you’re not thinking about some other girl.
No.
Or one of those naked women from school.
No. No women. I swear. …
In February, Tim got out of the army. And we ended up
one night at the bar in Boop’s.
What do you think? I said.
About what?
About going to Mexico.
He laughed out loud.
You’re nuts, he said.
I know, I said. But I’m serious.
He downed a beer, his brow furrowing, and said: Hey,
why not? Why fucking not?
In May, we sent the application forms to Mexico, just to
see what would happen. Weeks passed. The Mexico fever
ebbed as I assumed that I faced still another rejection.
Then, on a Friday, a plump letter trimmed with orange and
green arrived in my mailbox. The stamps were from
Mexico. I tore it open and discovered that I was accepted.
So was Tim. After the cold rejection by Columbia, and the
silence of Paris, I was giddy with jubilation and went off to
Boop’s to celebrate. They did not have tequila at the bar so
I got wrecked on vodka. On Monday, I gave my notice at the
agency, telling Ernie Waivada that I would leave in late
August. I gave no notice to Catherine. I just couldn’t tell her
anything that was not a lie, so I said nothing. To save
money for the trip, I took a second job, as a page at NBC,
starting at six in the evening and working until one in the
morning. That summer, every hour seemed packed with
excitement and discovery, as I learned about the world of
television while dreaming of Mexico. There was an added
benefit: the long hours kept me from facing Catherine.
Meanwhile, Tim and I applied for U.S. passports and
Mexican student visas. The summer raced by. Until the
week before we left, none of it seemed real. We didn’t learn
any Spanish, except the words for bread (pan), water
(agua), and beer (cerveza). Three days before we left, I
finally told Catherine. There were tears and scenes. I
behaved badly.
On the last weekend of August, Tim and I went to the
Greyhound station and waited for the bus that would take us
to Mexico City. I had eighty dollars in my pocket and a bag
of sandwiches.
Pan, I said to myself. Agua. Cerveza.
5
THE BUS from Transportes del Norte was climbing slowly,
breaching one final ridge as it drove into a gigantic scarlet
dawn. Suddenly we could go no higher. And there in the
distance, spread out before us in the great valley of
Anáhuac, was Mexico City.
I remember the tumult of the bus station, the air drowned
with vowels, and the taxi driver staring at the written
address and then driving wildly to the house where we
would stay, with a family arranged by the school. The
address was Melchor Ocampo 288, an apartment house
on the corner of Río Tiber. At the door on the fourth floor, an
old woman smiled and nodded, speaking no English; her
two homely daughters examined us discreetly and led us to
the clean, bright rooms. We unpacked, had soup and rolls,
trying to be polite. Pan, I said, agua, adding por favor, and
ending with gracias. We bowed. We nodded. We smiled
too much. Then we went out in search of cerveza.
We found a bar three blocks away, where the Mexicans
stood on the rail and so did we. Later we learned that they
first thought we were making fun of them; they used the rail
because the bar was high and they were short. There was a
great pot of shrimp soup in the place, and our fellow
drinkers laughed as they explained mezcal and the worm at
the bottom of the bottle and tried to describe what pulque
does to the human brain. That first night, a soldier came in
with his girlfriend and placed himself in the doorway leading
to the john, which was an open trench with a steel bar upon
which you hoisted yourself if you had more to do than
urinate. His girlfriend went in to hoist herself on the steel bar
and the soldier held his rifle at the ready, glaring at all of us.
Nobody said a word. A rifle is a useful guarantor of good
manners. Then the woman was through and the soldier
nodded gravely and said Buenas noches and they went
into the night.
The bottles of Carta Blanca beer were cold, bien fría,
señor, very cold, sir. And from the great jukebox I first heard
José Alfredo Jiménez growling his cantina poems and
Cuco Sánchez with the harp and the bass guitar singing
“La Cama de Piedra”:
De piedra ha de ser la cama,
De piedra la cabecera …
And everyone joining in the mournful line Ay, ay: corazón
porque no amas. My heart is broken. Because you don’t
love me.
Dos más, por favor.
I had grown up in New York and visited Baltimore and
Miami and New Orleans. But Mexico City was the most
beautiful city I’d ever seen, as we walked in the cool nights
along the hard-packed earth of the great wide Paseo de la
Reforma. Ash trees climbed high above us. One-peso cabs
hugged the curbs. Thick-bodied pigtailed maids met their
boyfriends in the shadows and sat on stone benches to
listen to the music drifting from the fancy supper clubs.
There were elegant office buildings and great Victorian
mansions from the days of Porfirio Díaz; cafés on the
sidewalks of the Zona Rosa and tiny restaurants where they
served octopus in its own ink and shrimp flown in from the
Pacific ports. Freshly arrived from the countryside,
campesinos in straw hats and white pajamas stared at the
great light-bathed statue of the Angel of Independence in
the center of the circular glorieta where Río Tiber
intersected with the Reforma.
In the crisp mornings, the air thin and clear at 7500 feet
above sea level, we walked seven blocks to the school bus,
passing shopkeepers washing their sidewalks, and
schoolgirls in uniforms hurrying to class. We bought the
sports papers, Esto and Ovaciones, and read about how
Floyd Patterson, from Tim’s high school in Brooklyn, had
knocked out Archie Moore in five rounds to become at
twenty-one the youngest heavyweight champion in history.
We were the same age as Floyd; wasn’t everything now
possible for us too? We also read about the great Mexican
fighters, the bantamweight Ratón Macias, who could box
and punch and sell a hundred thousand tickets, or the
featherweight Pajarito Moreno, who could punch out a
Volkswagen with a right hand and was even the hero of his
own comic book, or Toluco López, great macho, wonderful
fighter, king of the cantinas.
The orange school bus moved up past the monument
honoring the 1938 nationalization of the petroleum industry
into Las Lomas de Chapultepec, where the rich people had
their great mansions behind stone walls topped with broken
glass. That year in Mexico City, there were only three
million citizens and the air was clear. On those crisp
mornings we could see the snow-topped volcanoes
Popocatéptl and Ixtac-cíhuatl, the first male, the second a
sleeping woman, or so we were told, and so we believed.
We came out of the Lomas and turned onto the two-lane
Toluca highway, still climbing, with deep gorges falling
away on either side, and a vast stone quarry way off to the
left; until at the sixteenth kilometer we reached the school.
Mexico City College was a converted country club with
the name lettered in deco style over the main archway. I
thought, as I stood there on the first day: I’m here, in
Mexico. I did it. I walked on the irregularly patterned stone
path into the campus and found the administration office in
a cluster of plain red sandstone buildings. Tim and I
completed our forms for the Veterans Administration, then
he went off to the general studies office and I went in search
of the art department. The studios were on the top floor of
an ivy-covered concrete structure that also housed the
theater and the cafeteria, and as I climbed the stairs I
picked up the fragrance of oil and terps. For a moment, I
flashed on Laura. Maybe she was here. Painting. Teaching.
She wasn’t, of course, but a pretty Mexican woman took
my papers, checked them against her own list, and told me
that all I needed for my first classes was charcoal and
newsprint paper. My first class was in the morning. I was in.
With any luck, I would stay for three years, learn the
painter’s craft, become the first in my family to earn a
degree. Here. In Mexico.
6
IN THOSE FIRST GLORIOUS MONTHS, I gazed in awe at the work
of the Mexican muralists. I looked at the dark, brooding
drawings and paintings of the new Mexican artists, led by
José Luis Cuevas, who were the enemies of the painted
oratory of the muralists. I studied Spanish. Money was
always short, the checks from the Veterans Administration
slow in arriving. But Carta Blanca was one peso a bottle,
the equivalent of eight cents in that time when the peso was
a solid 12.50 against the dollar. Bohemia and the dark
fermented-looking Dos Equis cost more, but another brand,
Don Quijote, was only fifty centavos a bottle, or eighty cents
for a case of twenty.
There was drinking everywhere, and Tim and I were part
of it. We went drinking in the small hut across the highway
from the school, in the cantinas near where we lived, at
weekend student parties all over the city. Those parties
bound us together. In some ways, it was like the navy.
Everyone was far from home, far from Ohio and Illinois,
from states with age limits on drinking, far from inspection
by friends or family, all using drink to deal with strangeness
and shyness and a variety of fears. At MCC, there were two
American men for every American woman, and the sense
of male contest gave the parties a tension that occasionally
resembled hysteria. The rule was BYOB, bring your own
bottle, and in the doors came cases of beer, bottles of
tequila, mezcal, pulque, rum. These were 1950s parties,
young men and women packing the chosen apartment,
dancing, as we said, teeth to teeth, to the music of Benny
More and Los Panchos, drinking with little care about food,
faces swirling, ashtrays overflowing with butts, hot eyes
falling upon asses and tits, tits and asses, until the midnight
hour had long passed, and finally the last of the women
were gone, and the remnants of the bleary male squadron
kept drinking on until the beer ran out and you could see the
worm in the bottom of the mezcal bottle and it was time to
face the gray dawn.
I was happier than I’d ever been.
One Saturday night in December, on the eve of the Feast of
the Virgin of Guadalupe, there was a big party in an
apartment shared by four MCC students. It was more
formal than usual, because some Mexican girls had been
invited from a commercial school downtown and we’d been
told to try to make a good impression. I wore my only suit,
dark blue with a thin pinstripe, a shirt and tie. The beer was
flowing. As the Orquesta Aragón played a charanga, I
watched the dancing Mexican women, in their formal
dresses, their tapered legs, rustling crinolines, high heels;
the American women seemed more formal than usual, even
awkward, and the men worked too hard at being cool. I
danced a mambo with a girl named Yolanda. Another guy
cut in and I moved aside and drank beer. I danced slowly
with a girl named Maria to “Sin Ti.” She thanked me and
hurried away and I drank beer. In the kitchen, I opened
another bottle of Bohemia and laughed when some of the
louder gringos made bad jokes about La Virgen. Tim Lee
was there with me but left early with one of the young
Mexican women. I danced a cha-cha with a woman named
Lourdes. She left early with two other women. Around
midnight, there were about fifteen men still drinking and two
American women, neither of whom was free. I was drinking
with a Mexican-American friend named Manny when he
suggested that we go out on the town.
There’s gotta be some women someplace, he said. Let’s
take a look.
¿Porqué no?
We ended up down on San Juan de Letran, the wide
neon main boulevard of la vida nocturna, where the dance
halls and strip joints and burlesque houses called to the
working class and the slumming ricos. Down here, you
could go in pursuit of the women of la vida galante. On this
chilly midnight, our goal was as clear as the vision was
blurry.
We moved off San Juan de Letran into dark side streets
lined with one-story houses, their walls painted, doors and
shutters locked against the night, iron grills over the
windows. Then we crossed a small cobble-stoned plaza
and a dry fountain and then up ahead there was a street full
of light and noise and people and music. I remember
hearing the song of Agustín Lara:
Solamente una vez
Amé en la vida,
Solamente una vez —
Y nada mas …
(I loved only one time in this life, only one time, and
nothing more.) I was singing the song — or those lines, for I
knew no others — as we walked into the Calle de la
Esperanza, the Street of Hope, lined on both sides with
bordellos. These were the ten-peso whorehouses, the
cheapest in the city, and had been here since before the
1910 Revolution. Each had a tall locked door with a window
opening into a parlor. Dozens of customers, all of them
Mexican, strolled along the street, gazing at the women
through those windows, making comparisons, whispering
offers or compliments before moving on or choosing
admission. I kept humming, Solamente una vez, and
thinking, in a thrilled, tingling way: Orozco must have come
here, and Cuevas, to look at these whores who were old
and listless or young and frightened, to see these altars to
La Virgen made of cigarette tinfoil and fat candles, to
remember the pale harsh light from the ceiling bulbs and
the worn furniture and the drinks served on beer trays. From
one parlor, glimpsed through the window, a young girl
smiled at a visiting gringo, her wide mouth full of gold;
another looked up and turned back to a comic book; a third
stared at the patterns on the rug as if she would never
again have enough sleep.
And then in one of the parlors I saw a frail young woman
with cinnamon skin and liquid eyes. She was sitting alone
on a flowered chair with worn arms, a Dos Equis calendar
of a bare-breasted Indian princess above her on the wall.
From a radio, Los Panchos were singing, and I went by,
wishing I had a sketchbook, imagining myself sitting in that
parlor and drawing that girl, the way Pascin or Toulouse-
Lautrec sketched the whores of Paris; imagined then taking
her away, to live with me in some other place, where I could
draw her and fuck her and sleep with her and then draw her
again. She wasn’t a beaten hulk, like the whores in Orozco,
or a grotesque out of Cuevas. She was beautiful. I was
certain of that. In all the other parlors, the women repelled
me, and as I moved on down the street, I had a sudden
moment of panic; someone else would see her, go in, take
her into the back and I would lose her.
Let’s go back to that place up the block, I said.
You see one you like?
Yeah.
She was still there. I went up to the door, bent down, and
leaned in through the window.
Perdóname, señorita.
She looked at me and smiled.
Uh ¿cómo se llamas? What’s your name?
She didn’t answer. Suddenly, an older woman stepped
over and heaved a pan of water at me, drenching me,
shouting in Spanish. I didn’t know why (and never found
out). But I reacted. I lunged forward, like a fullback hitting
the line, driving my body half into the window. The door
came off its hinges and went straight down, with the older
woman under it, screaming. In the same wild action, I
stepped on the door, squashing her, and then the young
woman, my model, the woman I would take to a more
gallant life, attacked, swinging a pocketbook at my head.
Other whores came out of the back, belting me with more
pocketbooks and ashtrays and a tray of tacos, all shouting
and cursing in Spanish, and then Manny grabbed my arm.
Let’s get the fuck out of here, man.
We ran out of the Calle de la Esperanza, laughing and
still a little drunk. In the cobblestoned plaza, a beat-up
rented car pulled over. Inside were three gringos, looking
for directions to the whorehouses. They were in their
twenties, tourists from Texas, beefy, drinking from a rum
bottle. We blurted out what had happened and they opened
the back doors and offered to drive us away. We were all
laughing now. Broke down the door of a fuckin’
whorehouse! In Mexico! Gab-damn!
We were laughing right up to the moment a taxi cut us off.
Out came the two whores followed by two policemen in blue
uniforms. The young whore, mi vida, mi corazón, amor de
mis amores, was enraged, her body coiled, her nostrils
wide, her eyes glazed in fury, with her arm straight out and
one painted fingernail pointing at me.
¡Eso es! she screamed. ¡Este cabrón, eso es! That’s
him! That son of a bitch, that’s him!
And then the cops were aiming guns at us. They ordered
us out of the car. The three Texans were jittery. I kept my
eyes on the guns while the whores shouted curses. Manny
was talking very quickly in Spanish, his manner conciliatory,
now smiling, now worried. The policemen were small and
mustached, with brown complexions and worn uniforms.
They did not look convinced of our good intentions. They
ordered us all back into the car, and one of them barked
orders at the two women, who hurled a few final curses,
entered the taxicab, and were driven away. In our car,
Manny sat in the front, between the nervous Texan who was
driving and one of the cops. I sat in the back, the other
Texans beside me and the second cop planted on my lap.
The cop in the front was giving orders to the driver.
Izquierda aquí. As commanded, the driver took a left. A la
derecha . . . . The Texan dutifully turned right, down empty
streets with blind windows.
I was suddenly very sober, struggling to believe that this
was happening. Clearly, we were under arrest. All of us. I
was the guilty party, but they were taking us all to a police
station. Over a broken door! But, hey (I told myself), I didn’t
do anything so terrible, did I? I asked a whore for her name
and another whore threw water on me and then … Shit.
What a pain in the ass. Still, it wasn’t murder. It wasn’t
some great armed robbery. We’d go to a police station and
pay for the broken door and that would be that. And I
remembered that I had almost no money. About sixty
pesos. Less than five dollars. Maybe Manny had money.
Maybe the Texans could loan us whatever we needed and
we’d pay them back when we got home. A few bucks. Just
for now. Solamente una vez.
But then, as the cop ordered an izquierda, the driver took
a derecha. The cop on my lap cursed at him, this pinche
gringo cabrón. The fucking gringo son of a bitch kept going
into the wrong street. And then the Texan beside me
changed everything. He threw a punch at the cop in the front
seat, hitting him on the side of the jaw. The driver panicked,
slammed the brakes, the car skidded, everyone was
shouting, and we spun to a halt. The cop on my lap had his
gun out. I pushed down on the door handle and he and I
rolled out in a tangled heap. I got up and started to run. And
then heard shots.
Pap, pap. Pap-pap-pap.
I heard at least three bullets whiz past my head.
I ran. Thinking: They’re trying to kill me.
And then, up ahead, I saw a blue wall of police. They
were piling out of a police station, alerted by the shots, and
I was running right at them. I stopped and one came at me
swinging a long club. I bent down and threw a punch and
knocked him down. Then all the others were on me,
swinging clubs, punching, kicking, screaming pinche
cabrón add chingado gringo, until I was on the ground,
pulling myself into a tight ball as they stomped me some
more.
They shoved me into the delegación, and I saw Manny at
the far end of a high-ceilinged greenish room, surrounded
by cops. The Texans were nowhere in sight. Obviously, they
had chosen a better street, and we never saw them again.
But in flight, they’d also taken one of the policemen’s
pistols. So I found myself charged by a fat lieutenant with
lesiones (causing cuts with punches), destruction of private
property (the whorehouse door), assault, resisting arrest,
and robo, for stealing the pistol. I didn’t have enough
Spanish to explain myself. My back and ribs and legs hurt.
My nose ached, and when I touched the bridge, blood
came off on my fingers. Worse, my teeth felt cracked and
sharp to my tongue; one small piece broke off, and when I
picked it out with my fingers, one of the cops smiled.
I was in a mess. I asked for el teléfono but the lieutenant
shook his head and grimaced. No hay, he said; there is
none. No hay teléfono público. I looked out through the
dirty window at a car passing on the street and wished I
was in it, heading home. The sound of the shots and the
whirring of the bullets now seemed louder. And I realized
that I could be dead. One bullet in the head and I’d have
ended on the sidewalk with my life over before it really
started.
The cops shoved me through a door and down a corridor
and then opened a blank steel door that led to a cell block.
In some ways, the long night was just beginning.
They put me into a large dark communal cell at the end of
the block. One high barred window opened to the night. As
the cop locked the cell door behind me, I gazed around.
There were about fifteen men in the cell, a few in modified
zoots, most in rough clothes; I was the only one in a suit and
tie, and I was certainly the only gringo. There were no beds,
but some men were sleeping, huddled on the filthy floor
against the scabrous walls. The air was a compost of stale
beer and rum, sweat and entrapment and shit. The only
toilet was an open hole in the floor in the far corner. The
men gazed at me. I nodded, shrugged, said buenas
noches, and smiled. A bone-thin mustached man came
over and asked me for a cigarette. I patted my pockets and
said, No fumo, which was true. He stared at me in a chilly
way, his face impassive, his eyes searching for some sign
of weakness. I stared back, tense, ready to fight. But he
turned and walked away. I felt exhausted and drained and
hurting, but I knew that I could not risk sleeping.
I squatted against the bars of the cell, wondering where
Manny was, and as my eyes adjusted to the murky light I
realized that there were three men in the cell directly across
the corridor. There was also a pile of bricks. Some kind of
construction must have been interrupted by the holiday
weekend. Now more men were being brought into the
cellblock, the gatherings of the holiday, and I could hear
shouts of recognition from other cells and banging on the
steel bars and much drunken laughter. I called Manny’s
name, yelling in English, Are you there, Manny? But there
was no answer. I wondered how I could get word to Tim, to
arrange for bail, to get a lawyer, maybe notify the American
Embassy. But there was nobody to ask. The guards came
in with prisoners, threw them into cells, ignored all pleas or
shouts, and disappeared beyond the steel door.
Then they started bringing in the women. Two of them
were thrown into the cell across the way, where there were
now about eight men. One of them was a worn-out woman,
her hair gray and wild. But the other was young. She was
wearing a yellow blouse. I could see her white teeth against
dark skin. The men in my cell moved toward the bars to
examine this new arrival. Suddenly the mood shifted; sexual
excitement seemed to thicken the air. Across the way, two
men were easing around the young woman. She was
terrified, backing away from each of them, screaming in a
thin voice, Ayúdeme, por favor, ayúdeme …
Help me, please, help me.
Nobody came to her aid. One of the men, short,
compact, muscular, reached out swiftly and tore open the
front of the blouse. She made a yipping birdlike sound, her
voice weak and trembling, and then he grabbed the center
of her black bra and ripped down, exposing her heavy dark
breasts, and now all the men in my cell were shouting
encouragement. ¡Vaya, macho! ¡Ándale! The old woman
cringed against a wall, but the rape was delayed. The
second man intervened and shoved the short, muscular
man, who threw a punch and grabbed at him, the two of
them closing violently, throwing punches to do damage, the
short man’s shirt coming off, the girl retreating in wide-eyed
fear, covering her breasts, screaming. And then the
combatants found the bricks. Their eyes were wide, faces
gleaming with lust and violence, as they circled each other
like boxers, each armed with a brick, the men in my cell
roaring now as if at a prizefight in the Arena Coliseo, urging
them to use the left or throw the right. Every time one of
them landed with a brick there was a loud thwacking sound
as if something had broken. Sweat glistened on the body of
the shirtless man. Blood ran from a gash in the other’s
cheekbone, and their shoulders and arms were welted and
raw.
Finally the young woman was shouting something to
them, something about death, and offering her breasts,
then placing a hand up under her skirt, as if saying that she
didn’t want them to kill each other for her. I couldn’t make
out the pleading words over the roar of the men in my cell.
But she seemed to be saying, Stop! Go ahead and rape
me if you must, but stop.
They paused.
My cell went silent.
And then the short man lunged at the other, prepared to
kill or die, and the roar was immense, the codes of men
triumphing over the mercy of women.
Finally, the steel door opened and guards rushed in,
hurrying down the corridor. One drew a gun, shouting into
the cell. The men stopped, then sullenly dropped the bricks.
The girl looked forlorn. The guards opened the cell door,
first called out the old woman, then the younger one, while
one guard shouted at another about his stupidity. The
fighters were locked in with their inexhaustible supply of
bricks. The men in my cell were still roaring, calling out to
the girl, Muñeca, eres mi reina, Hey, doll, you are my
queen, and offering to never fight again if only she would
take them forever to her bed. But she stared at the floor of
the corridor, walking sadly on one high-heeled shoe, the
other in her hand, covering her lovely breasts with the
shredded blouse. The two women went out through the
steel door. I didn’t know what had brought her to that cell; I
supposed she was a prostitute, perhaps a thief; but I felt
certain that she would carry that hour of horror with her for
all the years of her life. I knew I would too.
7
IN THE MORNING, they started moving me around. The first
stop was another jail, where I was put in solitary
confinement. The room was like a closet, no windows, no
toilet, no bed, with a thin line of light at the base of an iron
door. I ran my fingers over the wall and found letters gouged
in the surface. My eyes slowly adjusted. The letters said:
Viva Stalin, el Rey de los Rojos. Long live Stalin, the King
of the Reds. And I thought that maybe Siqueiros had been
here, or the leader of the railroad workers, or some
amazing guerrilla fighter brought down alive from the
Sierras. I wondered too if I was a political prisoner of some
crazy kind; maybe they’d separated me because they were
afraid the Mexicans would kill me, a gringo, one of the
people who stole Texas and California and New Mexico
and Arizona and Oklahoma and Utah, one of the people
who called them greasers, spics, beaners, and wetbacks
on the cold scary other side of the border. Maybe the cop I
hit had died. Maybe I fit the description of some other killer.
Some fugitive who killed eight people in Nebraska and
made it across the border.
And how did I get here? In the black closet, as I gazed at
that sliver of light, the night played out in my mind. If I hadn’t
gone to the party, or if nobody had cut in when I danced with
Yolanda, or if I’d said no to Manny, said, Manny, I don’t want
to go anywhere, if I’d gone home and read a book or made
some pictures; if I hadn’t seen the young girl in the crib on
the Street of Hope, hadn’t gone back to see her again; if I’d
had some money to bribe the cops; if I’d run down the
street behind the Texans; if. If, I said. If. I wondered what
time it was too. What day. Where Tim was. Wondered what
my mother would think if she heard I was spending my life in
a Mexican prison. Wondered if I’d ever read a book again
or paint a picture. And fell asleep, wedged against the wall,
under the name of Stalin.
That evening, they took me out of solitary, with no
explanation, and put me in another large cell with a dozen
guys. I was starving now, aching with thirst, my tongue furry
with hangover. The mood here was brighter, kinder, the
men speaking slowly so that I could understand their
Spanish. I quickly learned that nobody was fed in these
jails. Food was delivered by wives and girlfriends, and
when the other prisoners discovered I had neither, they
shared their food with me. They told jokes. They laughed.
They explained why they were there. A busdriver was
arguing with his girlfriend and ran his bus into a limousine
whose owner — a politician — had him arrested. Another
man had beaten up his father-in-law at a family party, for
coming on to some woman in the kitchen. A third had stolen
some shirts from a market and tried to sell them to buy a
dress for his mujer. When I told my story about the
whorehouse, they laughed and slapped each other and
handed me some water. I was one of them: another crazy
bastard fucked up by women.
They told more stories. They made jokes. They talked
about Ratón Macias and Toluco López. They sang mournful
ballads. They slept. In the morning, I was moved one final
time, outside to have my picture taken on the steps of the
jail (it appeared in El Universal, where an “I” was dropped
off my name and I was described as being of Arabic
descent) and then into a van with grilled windows. With four
other men I was taken through side streets and across wide
gray avenues into the city’s penitentiary at Lecumberri, a
looming pile called El Palacio Negro. The Black Palace.
I was let out of the van in a courtyard, then taken to a
second yard. Dark stone walls climbed above me, topped
by barbed wire and guards strolling casually with rifles at
the ready. No way out. I remember passing cells that were
elaborately decorated with pictures of women and boxers
and soccer players; men cooking at stoves; radios playing;
and the endless noise of steel upon steel. There seemed to
be thousands of men here, some walking independently
down aisles, others sleeping, dozens milling around. I knew
about this place from our Mexican history classes; Pancho
Villa was once a prisoner here; Francisco Madero was
murdered beside these walls. But this wasn’t a tour; I was a
prisoner.
They put me in a single cell and locked me in. There was
a scab on my nose now and my ribs hurt and my teeth were
a mess. But the fear had gone out of me; I stopped thinking
about what had happened and what might happen and
focused on what was happening. And for the moment I was
safe. Even death had lost its scary power. I knew now that if
a bullet had slammed into my skull and killed me, I’d have
felt nothing. But I was alive. The pain I felt was the proof.
Four days later, when they finally came to take me out, Tim
Lee was waiting in an outer office of the prison with a young
Mexican lawyer. They’d been trying for days to find me in
the labyrinth of the prison system. Tim saw my picture in El
Universal, flanked by cops on the stepe of the delegación
as I was being moved to the Black Palace. He got the
name of a lawyer from one of the teachers and used his
own money for bail. A functionary in the prison office told
me to report to the Black Palace once a week to sign in
while the judicial process ran its course. The lawyer
explained to the official that he was representing me,
signed some papers, gave me his card, and left. Then I
took a deep breath and walked out into the sunshine. There
were groups of shawled women waiting beside the walls to
deliver food to their men. They had helped feed me too.
I’m sorry, I said.
Forget it, Tim said. I just wish we’d found you sooner.
I’m glad you found me at all.
We hailed a cab.
Where to?
I laughed.
A bath, I said.
Nothing else? Not even a meal?
No, I said, not even a beer.
I went to bed in a darkened room and tried to pray to the
Virgin of Guadalupe. The words would not come. I tossed in
the dark for a long time, seeing sweaty men hammering at
each other with bricks. Then I turned on the light and slept
for eighteen hours.
8
W ITH MY FRIENDS, even with Tim, I affected a casual, blasé
attitude about what had happened in the night on the Calle
de la Esperanza. But for weeks, I woke up sweating, my
dreams instantly wiped away, leaving only an ashy residue
of dread. The memory of the whistling bullets, the fight with
the bricks and the whimpering young woman, the sense of
being lost in a system of steel rooms in which strangers
spoke a language I did not know: all were woven into me.
I didn’t blame the drunken party that had preceded the
trip to Calle de la Esperanza; by then, drinking was so
natural it would have been like placing blame on the act of
breathing. I continued going to the student parties, still got
drunk. I didn’t blame Mexico either. Too many Mexicans
had been kind to me. But something had happened. I was
trying to discover some deeper principle, some rule of adult
life that accounted for accident and choice and human
ugliness. Not some divine commandment. Not some vague
or blurry generalization. Something that I had learned from
experience. After all, an artist should know how to do that;
an artist shouldn’t just learn what other artists have learned;
he should know what his life has taught him. But when I
made drawings of the events of that evening they all came
out looking like comic strips. They were simpleminded and
crude, mere diagrams of place and action and
consequences. They seemed glimpsed from the outside,
instead of felt from the inside.
Because of that failure, and my dissatisfaction, I started
to write. I filled pages with accounts of what had happened,
telling the story, layering it with dread and fear, trying for
what Hemingway called the real thing, the sequence of
motion and fact that made the emotion. I might get fact
into a drawing or painting, but how could I get motion? I
could get both in writing. And as I wrote more, my passion
for painting faded.
There was another reason for this shift: money. Or the
lack of it. Drinking at some Saturday-night party, or hanging
out between classes at MCC, I could swagger in front of
other students about what happened in jail, as proof of a
macho ability to survive. I couldn’t swagger about money.
Like all the other veterans, I was receiving $110 a month.
From that I had to pay for tuition, room, board, and
expenses. After Christmas, Tim and I moved with two other
students into a large apartment off the Avenida Ejército
Nacional; that cut the rent to $25 each. But I was also
paying back Tim for the money he’d laid out for bail, and I
had to make monthly payments to the Mexican lawyer as
the case dragged on in legal hearings. I couldn’t write home
for money. In 1955 my mother had given birth to my brother
Joe, and with six kids in the house in Brooklyn, there was
no money to spare. Besides, I was a man now (or so I
thought), and a man didn’t borrow money from his mother. I
could borrow books from the Benjamin Franklin Library. I
couldn’t borrow brushes, paint, or canvas. In the second
quarter, I decided not to take an oil painting class and
enrolled in a writing class instead.
I did have enough money for a trip to Acapulco, sharing
the expenses with four other students to ride down through
the wild mountains of Guerrero, where bandits still
practiced their craft. After miles of twisting roads through
gorges and tropical valleys, we came around a bend and
the great curving bay of Acapulco lay before us. Mountains
dove sharply to the sea, with tiny white buildings set along
their ridges among palms and thick green foliage. The
beach looked like a white scythe, touched by the great
expanse of cobalt blue water that moved off to touch the
darker blue line of the sky. The light was as bright and clear
as Matisse.
One of the guys in the car had been there before, and he
explained about the morning beach and the afternoon
beach, the Caleta and the Caletilla, how one was sunny
until noon and then was abruptly plunged into shadow when
the sun moved behind the mountains. The white mansion
on the edge of the cliff: that was John Wayne’s house. He
had a Mexican wife and lived here between pictures. And
that lavender palace, out beyond the Duke’s, out there on
the Quebrada, past where the divers plunged into the
advancing tides: that belonged to Dolores del Rio.
A beer popped. We were sitting under a straw-roofed
palapa on the morning beach, the car parked on a
cobblestoned street, hawkers selling rum drinks in coconut
shells, and an argument briefly raged about which of
Mexico’s two greatest female stars was more beautiful,
Maria Felix or Dolores del Rio. I said there was no contest
about pure beauty. Dolores del Rio’s perfect oval face, her
high cheekbones, the slope of her brow: she was like a
Renaissance painting, man. That’s the problem, somebody
said. She’s too beautiful. You’d spend your time just
looking at her; you wouldn’t want to fuck her. And someone
else said, But you never get to fuck Maria Felix, either; she
fucks you.
We had no money for the tourist hotels, of course, but we
found a place on the beach south of the city where we could
rent hammocks tied to palm trees for one peso a night.
That beach is gone now, devoured long ago by the Pierre
Marqués Hotel, but no place in my memory remains more
beautiful. In the evenings, we sat on driftwood and drank
beer and laughed and told lies and listened to the
fishermen play guitars around an open fire. The Mexicans
were friendly, amazed at the crazy gringos who were down
there with them on la playa. The Mexicans were humble,
illiterate, generous, decent; they shared food with us and
beer and taught us the words of songs and talked about las
mujeres, about women gone off and women arriving, about
women full of betrayal and women full of trust. I remember
gently rocking into sleep under the stars, more stars than I’d
seen since Fox Lair Camp, stars forming clouds and
clusters, shapes and patterns, dwarfing us all. And then
waking in the dawn to the quiet lapping of surf and the
arrival of the orange ball of the sun while fishermen
dragged dead sharks onto the sand.
On the last day, drinking in the afternoon, I went Walking
north upon the beach, out beyond the point of the Playa
Caletilla. At the foot of a cliff, I lay down on the empty sand
and fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was darkening into
dusk. And off to the right a young woman in a one-piece
yellow bathing suit was sitting on a towel staring out to sea
toward the Isla la Roqueta. Her tightly braided pigtail hung
down her back, pointing at the towel. I sat there for a while,
brushing the sand off my back, looking at her smooth dark
skin. My own skin was reddening from the sun. My mouth
felt sour from drinking. She and I were the only people in
sight. I stood up and walked slowly toward the surf, angling
toward her. She turned to look at me. She was about
eighteen, with a long nose and an upper lip dark with down.
I saw that she’d been crying.
Are you all right? I said.
She turned away, wiping at her eyes with her forearm.
¿ Está bien? I said.
I squatted beside her and touched her hand. She pulled
away and then started talking very quickly in sobbing
Spanish, something about the novio — her boyfriend —
and her father, who was so cruel, and how her life was over.
I didn’t understand the details, but she was full of anger and
despair and heartbroken tears. And then she fell against
me, her body wracking with sobs, and I put my arm around
her and held her tight and whispered to her in English,
Don’t worry, don’t worry, murmured, It’ll be all right,
murmured, Go ahead and cry, just cry, baby, just cry. Until
the sobs ended, and my chest was wet with her tears, and
she was still, the warmth of her body entering mine as the
sun went down.
We held each other for a long time, whispering,
exchanging names, Pedro, Yolanda, the surf growling and
pulling and growling, buoys dinging in the dark. I kissed her.
She kissed me back. I lifted the pigtail and kissed the nape
of her neck. She touched my chest and stomach and
discovered my erection. I played with her breasts through
the wired bra of the bathing suit and then moved her zipper
down and took a lush pliant breast in my hand and a hard
nipple in my mouth in the Pacific night, as her hand moved
inside my bathing suit. Yolanda. At the foot of the cliff where
Dolores del Rio gazed at mirrors. Yolanda, excited and
writhing and then suddenly weeping again, withdrawing her
hand, pulling away, as I heard what she heard: distant
feminine voices calling on the dark beach.
Yo-laaaanda. ¿Dónde estás? Yolandaaaa.
And she was up, panicky, tucking breasts inside the
bathing suit, zippering it up in back.
Mañana, I said. Aquí en la playa. Exactamente aquí.
Sí, sí, she whispered. Mañana, en la tarde. Aquí en la
playa. . . . Tomorrow afternoon, here on the beach.
She hurried off in the dark toward the town and the
faceless disembodied voices of her keepers, her sisters or
aunts or mother. I plunged into the surf. The next day I went
back to the spot but she was not there. And that night we all
piled into the car to return to Mexico City.
9
MY CASE dragged on, month after month. I would go to a
hearing, answer questions, be given another date, then pay
the lawyer what I could. I kept taking drawing classes but
couldn’t afford the painting workshops; I started writing
short stories and poetry. In the last week of each month, the
VA money virtually all gone, I was eating sandwiches made
of hard rolls and slices of raw onion. For the first time, I
started smoking cigarettes, dark-papered Negritos, four
cents a pack, to help me across the hunger; I became an
instant addict. There was one more drunken party and a
fight with a young Mexican student. I was in the kitchen
when it started, and I hit him hard and he went down in a
pile of broken glasses and there was blood everywhere. I
thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but I hid for a few days,
afraid the police would come and get me. And then in May,
the school term was over and I knew I had to leave.
I decided to jump bail and try to make it back to New
York. Tim stayed behind, to work for a degree, while I
shared a ride with a guy from Buffalo who was heading
home. As we approached the border, I was certain that my
name must be on some list. I would show my visa to the
Mexican border guards and they’d see my name and start
to arrest me. I rehearsed escapes: sprinting across the
bridge, leaping into the shallow waters of the Rio Grande. In
my mind, I heard the cracking of shots. I heard bullets
whistling. I saw men fighting with bricks to possess the
body of a frightened woman.
When we reached the bridge, my heart was pounding,
my hands were wet. But there was no list. The guard took
my visa and waved us across. The dream of Mexico-as-
Paris was over. In Brownsville, we stopped for gas and I
had a cold bottle of Lone Star. I looked back at Mexico,
relieved and free, but overwhelmed with an almost
intolerable sadness.
10
HOME AGAIN in New York, after nine months away, I quickly
fell into the earnest rhythms of the 1950s. Necessity was
the goad; I needed to eat and get on with my life. I again
worked for Ernie Waivada in the advertising agency. I spent
a year at Pratt, studying design. I took a small flat on the
Lower East Side. After work or school, I went drinking. I
wrote a little and painted less.
On one level, the track was clear. Learn a trade and
you’ll never go hungry, my father said. Graphic design was
a trade, like plumbing or carpentry. If I mastered it, I would
never go hungry. But in truth I was hesitant about moving
down the track. In magazines like Graphis, I saw the cold
elegant layouts of Swiss designers and studied the bolder
work of the Americans. Some of them offered more than
the example of craft; they promised a vision based on
order, the reduction of chaos to a small neat space. But in
the art galleries, I finally saw the actual work of Kline and
Pollock, de Kooning and Motherwell, stood close to their
ferociously confident canvases. There was nothing cold
about their disorderly art and nothing small. They had the
size and boldness of the Mexican muralists but were free of
their preaching. I was drawn to the physicality of their
paintings, the almost athletic swagger of the brushwork. But
at the same time, their work seemed beyond me, their
vision too heroic. After this, where could painting go?
Where could I go?
Writing remained only a perhaps. In my flat off Second
Avenue, or in small dark bars, I filled notebooks with
questions about art, politics, my own chaotic ambitions.
Sometimes, late at night in the flat, I typed these notes on
an old upright Royal I’d bought in a secondhand store and
put them in file folders. I tried short stories in the
Hemingway manner, more variations on what had
happened to me in Mexico, even poems, transcribed from
fragments scribbled in bars. But it seemed an arrogant
ambition to be a writer, in a world where Hemingway and
Faulkner still lived. Who do you think you are? some
collective voice from the Neighborhood called to me. Who
the hell do you think you are? Besides, in bars at night, or
at Pratt, or at my part-time drawing table at the agency, I
could still show off with a drawing. And if there was even
small applause, I felt that I never could completely abandon
the dream of art; the prospect filled me with dread. For a
long time, I’d based my identity on the hope of being an
artist; to give up now might cast me into the shapeless fog
that had engulfed me after the failure at Regis.
I carried these confusions with me through a New York
terrain now permanently changed by the tubular Ben Shahn
forests of television antennas and highways leading to the
faceless Levittowns of Long Island. The Neighborhood, its
streets already emptied at night by television, began to reel
from departures to the new suburbs and the arrival of the
plague of heroin. When I visited 378, my mother talked for
the first time about danger. Standing with my father at the
bar in Rattigan’s, a full member now of the fraternity, I heard
about muggings and overdoses. A few men died of
cirrhosis from drinking, but compared to a needle in the
arm, that was an honorable death. In tenements where once
there was nothing much worth stealing, people now started
locking their doors.
The Eisenhower era bragged of the good life for all, a
time of abundance and prosperity, but it didn’t touch the
Neighborhood. The prosperous were gone to the suburbs;
among those who stayed, money was still short.
Everywhere in the city, factories were closing. Globe
Lighting, where my father worked, moved from the
Neighborhood to Flushing and then, later, to Georgia. In the
daytime, there were more men in the bars, drinking in
silence and defeat. The city was changing: gradually,
almost imperceptibly in some ways, drastically in others.
The world wasn’t as solid as it seemed when I was twelve;
and that was a confusion. You spent twenty years learning
how to live in the world and then it changed on you. I’d wake
up some mornings and buy the newspapers and think:
What the fuck is going on?
Even in bars, some things were not discussed. McCarthy
was gone, but the Great Fear had left its mark. At the
agency, I was on the fringe of the world of organization
men, men in gray flannel suits, men who talked about the
new cult of motivation research, of inner-directed and outer-
directed human beings, of lonely crowds and hidden
persuaders. They shrugged when you mentioned politics
(although Ernie Waivada, from Massachusetts, was a huge
fan of Senator Jack Kennedy). Politics was trouble. Get the
money. Or get the women. Luscious secretaries from
Lynbrook. Sweet fearful file clerks from the Bronx. Noble
defenders of the holy hymen. But willing to please at the
midnight hour. I knew I couldn’t exist for long in that world.
Painter or writer, I needed to be free.
In the fall of 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was
published by Viking Press, with a glowing review by Gilbert
Milstein in the New York Times. I went out and bought a
copy, that first hardcover edition with the famous
photograph of Kerouac in rough lumberjack shirt and silver
crucifix, his eyes brooding, his square fullback’s face
unshaven. I read the first sentence on the subway to
Brooklyn — I first met Dean not long after my wife and I
split up — and was carried away. I read in the Village
Voice (then three years old and full of surprises) that
Kerouac was due in town for a Friday-night jazz-poetry
reading at the Village Vanguard. I paid the admission, went
downstairs, ordered vodka at the bar, and for almost two
hours listened to Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and some other
poets. I was thrilled with the flow of words and the
counterpoint of jazz, and gazed through the cigarette
smoke at the remote women, who all seemed dressed in
black, cool as ice sculpture. Kerouac was older than I
expected (he was then thirty-five) and punched out with his
hands to punctuate his lines. At the end, the audience
cheered. I wanted to talk to him, about Mexico and
Pensacola and jail and women; but I couldn’t get close to
him when it was over; he was engulfed by reporters and
photographers and the cool dark women. That year, Jack
Kerouac was a star.
I went back upstairs into Seventh Avenue and wandered
east to University Place and eased into the packed bar of
the Cedar Street Tavern, where the painters did their
drinking. For an hour, I drank beer alone at the bar and
listened to an argument over centerfielders. Suddenly
Kerouac and his friends came in, shouldering through the
door, then merging with the other drinkers, three deep at
the bar. Kerouac edged in beside me. He was drunk. He
threw some crumpled bills on the bar. I said hello. He
looked at me in a suspicious, bleary way and nodded. The
others were crowding in, yelling, Jack, Jack, and he was
passing beers and whiskeys to them, and Jack, Jack, he
bought more, always polite, but his eyes scared, a twitch in
his face and a sour smell coming off him in the packed bar
that reminded me of the morning odor of my father in the
bed at 378. Soon he was ranting about Jesus and nirvana
and Moloch and bennies, then lapsing into what sounded
like Shakespeare but probably wasn’t, because his friends
all laughed. Under the combination of Kerouac and beer,
my brain was scrambling. The painters gave him a who-the-
fuck-is-this-guy? look. College girls were coming over. A
bearded painter bumped him on the way to the bathroom
and Corso let out a wail of protest at the ceiling and the
bartender looked nervous and soon I was drunk too.
When I woke up the next day I wrote a poem in Beat
cadences, mixing up the Village Vanguard and Brooklyn
College and some bad Kenneth Rexroth, and a few days
later submitted it (and another) to the Pratt literary
magazine. I was astonished when both were accepted.
They were my first published writings.
The confusions deepened. After Mexico, I wanted to have
enough money to forget about money and chose graphic
design as the way to make a living. But the life of a
designer demanded steadiness and clarity, qualities in
complete opposition to my image of the wild, free-living,
hard-drinking bohemian. Design also required submission
to the whole buttoned-down gray-flanneled organization-
man strictures of the Fifties. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t
want to accept those tame codes. But in an important way, I
used them as a license. Drinking became the medium of
my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a
refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid
rules of a bloodless national ethos.
I expressed that revolt at huge weekend parties, crowded
with students, where cases of beer were jammed into ice-
packed bathtubs, and big strapping young women from the
Midwest slipped into dark back rooms with various guys,
including me. The music pounded, Little Richard meeting
Miles Davis, Elvis contending with Coltrane, while the half-
digested words of painter-guru Hans Hofmann collided with
the lyrics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were wild nights in
Manhattan too, stops at The Cedars or the Five Spot, with
complete strangers saying, Let’s go, man, big party right up
the street. And they were right: hard loud whiskey drinking
beer-swilling parties were part of every New York weekend.
I remember being at two big parties at The Club on Eighth
Street, where I first saw Helen Frankenthaler, beautiful in a
camel’s-hair coat, de Kooning and Kline cracking wise to
each other, women grabbing men by the balls while
dancing, men dancing with men and women kissing
women. I was at another party in the packed sweaty
railroad flat that belonged to the poet LeRoi Jones, who
had started publishing a little magazine called Yugen and
talked to me in a smoky hallway about Krazy Kat. I spent
one glorious night drinking at The Cedars with Franz Kline,
talking about women and cartoonists and London art
schools. He took three of us to his studio at four in the
morning, where he showed us his big new paintings, which
were in color. He looked sad and fatalistic when he told us
that the dealers hated them. They wanted him to keep
doing “Franz Klines,” in his trademarked black and white. I
thought: Just like executives at some big company dictating
to a man from the advertising agency.
That night, I backed up a few feet from the bohemian
ideal. Kline, Pollock, de Kooning all had starved for twenty
years before selling any paintings. And here was Kline, at
the peak of his fame, worried that the galleries would stop
taking the pictures he wanted to make. What if I spent
twenty years and nobody ever bought a painting? I thought
of Laura’s bitterness, posing nude to pay rent, then
vanishing into obscurity. I knew from Brooklyn that poverty
wasn’t noble; it was a humiliation. If I chose the freedom of
the painter’s life, who would pay the bills? I suddenly
understood that I wasn’t painting because I was afraid to
discover that I had no talent. If I had no talent, I would starve.
That was the late 1950s for me. Torn between the desire
for personal freedom and the need for a proud security, I
postponed the choice. I drank a lot. I got laid a lot. In most
of the minor ways, I had a very good time.
11
MUCH OF MY MEMORY of those years is blurred, because
drinking was now slicing holes in my consciousness. I never
thought of myself as a drunk; I was, I thought, like many
others — a drinker. I certainly didn’t think I was an alcoholic.
But I was already having trouble on the morning after
remembering the details of the night before. It didn’t seem
to matter; everybody else was doing the same thing. We
made little jokes about having a great time last night — I
think. And we’d begun to reach for the hair of the dog.
To save money, I began sharing my seventy-five-dollar-a-
month apartment with Jake Conaboy and Bill Powers,
friends from the Neighborhood. Jake talked about
becoming an actor, Billy also wanted to be a painter, and
was studying at Pratt. At some point, Richie Kelly came
over too, took a flat next door, enrolled at the School of
Visual Arts, and began training as an illustrator. Drinking
cases of beer, we talked passionately about art, movies,
women; we read Pound, Eliot, Camus. We took our own
paths through the city but always ended up at the flat on
Ninth Street and Second Avenue, in the heart of the
Ukrainian blocks of the Lower East Side. And we threw our
own parties, mixing together people from the
Neighborhood, Pratt, and our jobs. They were noisy,
sweating, roaring affairs, full of music, dancing, and booze.
In the mornings after, we had to call people to find out what
we’d done. For a while, I was going out with a beautiful
slender Dominican girl who was saddened in equal
proportions by an early divorce and the smallness of her
breasts. Jake started going with her sister. We laughed so
hard on some nights that my body ached; today I can’t
remember a single line that was said.
At some point after Tim Lee returned from Mexico, with a
degree in philosophy, Billy found his own apartment and
Tim took his place in the third bedroom. A few weeks later,
Tom McMahon, my English teacher from Pratt, came home
from England, where he’d taken a degree at Oxford. He
soon had us organized into a weekly study group. Under
McMahon’s direction, we went through Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms; a number of stories in Understanding
Fiction, an anthology-textbook edited by Cleanth Brooks
and Robert Penn Warren, parts of Ezra Pound’s ABC of
Reading; George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English
Language.” We spent weeks reading and analyzing
Aristotle’s Ethics. All of us joined in, making jokes, sipping
beers, smoking too many cigarettes. McMahon had a
tough, unsatisfied intelligence; he was brilliant in seeing the
stylistic surface of a piece of writing but he also challenged
every sentimentality, every glib remark, and insisted that we
dig and dig until we’d discovered the moral core of the
work. Every session left a permanent mark on my own later
writing. McMahon truly taught me how to read. No small
thing.
Reading drew me deeper into writing, but I showed
almost nobody my own Hemingwayesque short stories,
Orwellian essays, Kerouackian poems. Surely they couldn’t
survive the scrutiny we were applying to Hemingway or
Orwell, and McMahon made clear his contempt for the
rambling formless style of the Beats. So I practiced writing
as a secret vice and kept working as an apprentice
designer. I had money now for oil and canvas, but I did no
painting at all.
A droll, balding artist’s agent named Tom Fortune used
to come around to the agency, trying to sell the work of his
illustrators. One day he asked me if I did any freelancing.
No, I said, but I could use the money. Did I think I could
handle the layout and pasteups for a magazine?
What kind of magazine? I asked.
Well, Fortune said, it’s a little unusual.
What do you mean, unusual?
It’s in Greek.
Within a few weeks I had my first freelance client, a
Greek magazine called Atlantis. The office was on Twenty-
third Street off Tenth Avenue. The editor was an
enthusiastic young guy named Jimmy Vlasto, whose father,
Solon G. Vlasto, was publisher of the magazine and a daily
newspaper of the same name. Obviously, I couldn’t read
Greek, but neither could Jimmy. We had a great time
together, laying out stories about Melina Mercouri or
holidays on Mykonos, hoping that the leftover text jumped
into the correct place in the back of the book. Sometimes it
did. Often it didn’t. And at some point I suggested to Jimmy
that maybe we should start running some articles in
English.
At least we can have something to read in the magazine,
I said. At least the fucking jumps will be in the right place.
Why not? Jimmy said. The old man’ll go nuts but what the
hell.
I had been following the career of a sensational young
middleweight named Jose Torres. He’d won a silver medal
in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, had won a number of
Golden Gloves, AAU, and All-Army championships, and
after seven victories in seven pro fights, he was the new
hero of the city’s growing Puerto Rican population. He was
managed by Cus D’Amato and trained in the Gramercy
Gym, five blocks from where I lived on Ninth Street. At a bar
near the magazine, I said to Jimmy Vlasto that I’d love to
write about Torres. Jimmy was also a fight fan. Go ahead,
he said.
A few days later, I found Torres at the gym. Almost
immediately, we became friends. He was not only a great
boxer but one of the smartest people I’d ever met. I hung
around with him, did some interviews, then went home and
wrote the article. I needed three days to get it right, and with
anxious heart I delivered it the following week to Jimmy
Vlasto. I sat in a tattered easy chair while Jimmy read the
piece. When he was finished, he smiled.
I love this, he said, his voice surprised. Fuck! Let’s run it!
Great.
But listen, he said, I can only pay you twenty-five bucks.
I’ll take it, I said.
That was it. I was a professional writer. Billy Powers took
some photographs, I laid out the pages, and ten days later
my first journalism was in print. I was runny with excitement.
But when I went to Twenty-third Street to pick up copies of
the issue, a glum Jimmy told me that his father wanted to
see both of us in his office. We went upstairs to the wood-
paneled room with its muted lamps and photographs of
Solon G. Vlasto in the company of presidents and
archbishops. The old man stared at the two of us from
behind his immense desk.
Let me ask you something, he said, in his thick Greek
accent.
Silence. Then his eyes flashed.
How come, he said, in a Grik magazine, is a story about
a Puerto Rican boxer, written by an Irish guy, in English?
A pause.
And then Jimmy burst out with an immortal line: The
young Greeks love him!
Mr. Vlasto looked at us in a deadpan way, thought about
this, looked suddenly as if he understood that the world was
passing him by, and then sighed.
Next time, he said, find a Grik boxer.
Then, dismissing us, he leaned forward to examine a
sheet covered with the logic of numbers.
12
THROUGH ALL OF this time, I was devouring newspapers.
There were still seven of them in New York then, and I read
them all, like a predator. My favorite was the Post.
Convinced by my work for Atlantis that I had some talent as
a writer, I wrote a few letters to the editor, and two of them
were printed. One of them took up the entire letters section,
a long screed about “my generation,” and for a week there
were letters of reaction. This got me on some obscure
radio show, which led to an invitation to appear on the
“Long John Nebel Show,” then the biggest thing on all-night
radio. Nebel liked me and kept inviting me back to his
freeform discussion of Martians, politics, extraterrestrials,
comics, and the Beats. I kept writing letters to the editor of
the Post.
Meanwhile, I was earning more money. I left the agency
to open a studio with a partner across the street from the
Art Brown art supply store on West Forty-sixth Street. I
thought this would give me freedom, the sense of being my
own man. But the harder I worked, the more letterheads I
designed, the more business cards and employee
publications I pasted up, the more I felt trapped. I had an
obligation to my partner to pay my share of the studio
expenses. My work was getting better, which brought me
more work, and longer hours. The office building was
deserted and forbidding at night, so I pitched a drawing
table in the kitchen of the flat on Ninth Street and often
worked until dawn, pasting up catalogs and listening to
Symphony Sid on the radio, with the volume turned down so
the other guys could sleep. On some nights, Coltrane
sounded like an accusation: Why are you doing that work
when you could be as free as I am?
Those long grinding hours entitled me to a reward. Of
course. On weekends, or on nights when I was not making
mechanicals for a doll catalog or designing an ad for a
machine operator, I went drinking. Sometimes I was with
my Dominican flaquita. Sometimes with Tim, Jake, and
Billy. Sometimes alone. I had money in my pocket, cash I’d
earned with hard hours. In the downtown bars, in joints like
Birdland, I could afford any drink in the house.
We were in the roaring midst of a New Year’s Eve party on
Ninth Street when someone arrived with great news.
It’s over! Castro wins! Batista left Havana.
You’re shitting me, Jake said.
No, man, it’s on the radio.
We turned on the radio and the news was true. The
bearded young revolutionary had triumphed over the cruel
dictator. His army was moving down from the Sierra
Maestra in triumph. All night long, we played charangas by
Orquesta Aragón and listened to bulletins and drank beer
and talked bad Spanish and cheered for Fidel. Nobody
knew that he was a communist. He was young, from our
time. He hadn’t just talked about change, he’d done
something. Faced with grinding oppression and a lack of
freedom, Fidel had picked up a rifle and gone to the
mountains. We cheered because we thought the good guys
had won. After a while, I took my Dominican girl next door
to a friend’s small apartment and fucked her wildly, the two
of us yelling together in the revolutionary solidarity of
Spanish. Then we went back to the party and danced some
more, full of exultation, beer, and joy. Later, when the party
was over, Jake went off with one woman and Tim with
another. I was alone with La Dominicana again. We made
love then in my own bed. The morning arrived, as gray as
hangover. I wished we could wake up in Havana.
More than ever, as Jack Kennedy made his great run for
the presidency, I was reading the political columns in the
newspapers, particularly in the Post. Since it had published
several of my letters, I thought of the Post as my
newspaper. In the late spring of 1960, Jimmy Wechsler, the
paper’s editor, published a book called Reflections of an
Angry Middle Aged Editor. The book was a kind of
situation report on American society after the fall of
McCarthy; it was sometimes despairing, about race and
class, but otherwise full of hope. I read it through in one
night and then typed a long letter to Wechsler, agreeing
with most of what he’d written, arguing with some of his
remarks, singling out a chapter on journalism for my
hardest criticism, implying that newspapers had no room
for people like me. Working-class people. People who
didn’t go to Ivy League schools, young men rejected by
places like Columbia. Such people, I said, might not have
great formal educations but they knew about New York, the
world, life. I worked hard on the letter, making three drafts. I
didn’t think of it as a job application. That’s what it turned
out to be.
A week later, a brief note arrived from Wechsler. He said
he’d enjoyed my letter and agreed with about 90 percent of
what I’d said. Why didn’t I give him a call sometime and
come down to the paper for a chat?
His secretary set up an appointment for a few days later
at the Post. I told Tim and Jake and tried to be casual about
it, but for the next few nights I had trouble sleeping. My mind
was full of images from newspaper movies, all those tough
fast-talking men in tumultuous city rooms, causing trouble,
being brave: Bogart pressing the button to start the presses
at the end of Deadline U.S.A., Robert Mitchum moving
through fog in a trench coat, Gregory Peck in a glorious
apartment in Rome, riding with Eddie Albert to an
assignment. Hemingway was there too, of course. He’d
started as reporter in Kansas City, without ever going to
college. He’d put a reporter named Jake Barnes into The
Sun Also Rises, his best novel. I couldn’t imagine him
writing a novel about a graphic designer.
Finally, on a late afternoon in the last week of May, I took
the IRT down to the old Post building at 75 West Street,
went in through the Washington Street entrance, and rode
the elevator to the second floor. I followed a gloomy
marbelized corridor around to the back and then, for the
first time, stepped into the city room.
Looking for someone? a tall, bespectacled man said.
Yes. Jimmy Wechsler.
All the way in the back.
The room was more exciting to me than any movie: an
organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys
dashing through doors into the composing room, men and
women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones
ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone
smoking and putting butts out on the floor. I remembered
the day I saw Dan Parker walking out of the Daily Mirror
building and the newspapermen hurrying to the bars of
Third Avenue. They’d all come from a place like this. But
this wasn’t a rag like the Mirror; this was the Post, the
smartest, bravest tabloid in New York, my paper. All these
men and women were doing work that was honorable, I
thought, work that added to the ideals and intelligence of
the world. I wanted desperately to be one of them.
Wechsler was a small man with a large head and
thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a bowtie and suspenders.
His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He took me
into his inner office and I sat beside a desk littered with
newspaper clippings, magazines, letters from readers,
copies of his book. While we talked, he smoked cigarettes
and sipped coffee. Near the end of our chat, he leaned
back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.
Have you ever thought about becoming a
newspaperman? he said.
I mumbled something in reply, but I don’t remember what.
It must have been something like, Only all my life.
Well, Wechsler said, call me in a couple of days. Maybe I
can get you a tryout around here.
At 1 A.M., on June 1, 1960, I was back in the city room,
clumsily disguised as a reporter, and my life changed
forever.
V
A DRINKING LIFE
Oh, I could drink a case of you,
darling
And I would still be on my feet
I would still be on my feet.
— Joni Mitchell, “A Case
of You”
I read the news today oh boy . .
.
— John Lennon and Paul
McCartney, “A Day in
the Life”
1
IN HUMILITY and arrogance, I started to learn the newspaper
trade. I was humbled by what I did not know, in the company
of so many skilled craftsmen; I was arrogant enough to
believe I could learn to do what they did. My teacher wasn’t
Jimmy Wechsler; for the first eighteen months I worked
nights while he worked days and we seldom saw each
other. He allowed me in the door, but a man named Paul
Sann kept me there.
I saw him for the first time at six o’clock in the morning of
my first shift at the Post. I had walked in that night full of fear
and trembling, not knowing what to expect, carrying a copy
of Under the Volcano to read on the subway home if they
threw me out. The assistant night city editor was Ed
Kosner, younger than I was by a few years. He parked me
at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had.
When I told him absolutely none, he laughed and without
pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on
“books,” four sheets of coarse copy paper separated by
carbons. The carbon copies were called “dupes.” In the
upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case
and then create a “slug,” a short word that identified the
story for editors and typesetters. The slug should reflect the
subject; a political story could be slugged POLS. But if it was
a story about a murder I should not slug it KILL because the
men setting type would kill the story. With that simple
lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite
it in two paragraphs, and my career had begun.
All through the night in the sparsely manned city room, I
wrote small stories based on press releases or items
clipped from the early editions of the morning papers. I
noticed that Kosner had Scotch-taped a single word to his
own typewriter: Focus. I appropriated the word as my
motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself:
What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it
to someone in a saloon? Focus, I said to myself. Focus. . . .
Near dawn, there was a lull as the editors discussed what
they would do with all the material they now had in type.
Beyond the high open windows, the sky was turning red. I
walked over and gazed out and saw that we were across
the street from the piers of United Fruit, whose bananas my
grandfather had shipped from faraway Honduras a half-
century before. I wondered if he had ever docked at this
pier, ever looked up at the building that housed the New
York Post. When I turned around, Paul Sann was walking
into the city room.
He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority,
as he moved without hellos across the city room to the
fenced-off pen at the far end, where he served as executive
editor. He was dressed entirely in black, with black cowboy
boots, carrying the morning papers under his arm. From
where I sat, I watched him go to his desk, light a Camel,
take a cardboard cup of coffee from a copyboy. His face
was gray, urban, Bogartian, his mouth pulled tight in a tough
guy’s mask, his gray hair cut short, and he wore horn-
rimmed glasses which he shoved to the top of his head
while reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a
thick black ebony pencil in his hand, marking some,
discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Around
seven, the other editors gathered at his desk to discuss the
flow of the paper. Sann always wrote the “wood,” the page-
one headline (so named because for decades it had been
set in wood type). Then he moved into the composing
room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid
out on stone-topped tables. He was still there when my shift
ended at eight and Kosner gave me a goodnight. Sann
didn’t talk to me that night. He didn’t talk to me for weeks.
But in the weeks that followed, as I started going out on
fires and murders, knocking on doors in Harlem and the
Bronx at three in the morning, I came to understand that
Paul Sann was the great piston of the New York Post.
Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann
made it a tough ballsy tabloid. Wechsler pressed for
coverage of civil rights, Cold War sanity, the reform
politicians of the Democratic party; Sann was skeptical of
all living beings, and leavened the political coverage with
murders, fires, disasters, and gangsters. They didn’t much
like each other, and their conflict was discussed almost
every morning after the shift ended, at the bar in the Page
One, a block away from the Post.
One guy wants a newspaper, said Carl Pelleck, the best
police reporter in the city. The other guy wants a pamphlet.
Yeah, someone else said, but without Wechsler, it has no
identity, no function, no soul. It’ll die.
Listen, it’s gonna die anyway. It won’t last past New
Year’s.
The uncertainty about the paper’s future didn’t bother me;
I was still working at the studio, and if the newspaper did go
down I wouldn’t starve. But in the meantime, I’d have had
the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long
enough for me to learn the trade. During my three-month
tryout, I watched Sann from a distance and got to know
other newspapermen up close, in the morning seminars at
the Page One. I loved their talk, its cynicism and fatalism,
its brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched
the stockbrokers coming up from the subways to trudge to
Walk Street while we waited for the first editions to arrive.
When the papers landed on the bar, the seminar would
begin. This was an often brutal analysis of stories,
headlines, and writing style, presided over by an immense,
burly, mustached copy editor named Fred McMorrow,
attended by two old pros named Gene Grove and Normand
Poirier. They were funny and merciless. About my stories.
About others, their works, themselves, and most of the
human race.
Then one stormy morning, an hour before deadline, after
I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn,
Sann called me over. He held the galley in his hands. I was
nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.
Not bad, he said.
Thanks.
I like the part about the rain rolling down his face.
Thanks.
By the way, did this guy speak English?
No.
So how the fuck did you get all these quotes?
I speak a little Spanish, I said.
You do? How come an uneducated Brooklyn Mick like
you speaks Spanish?
I went to school in Mexico for a year. On the GI Bill.
No shit?
No shit.
He lit a Camel. Then he pointed at a paragraph near the
end.
You see this, he said, where you say this is a tragedy?
Yeah.
I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word
“tragedy” again. You tell what happened, and let the reader
say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.
I see what you mean.
You better, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then
sipping the black coffee. He glanced at the story again.
Maybe in another eight or nine years, you could be pretty
good at this miserable trade.
Thanks, I said, and started to leave.
Oh, by the way, Paul Sann said. You’re hired.
2
NATURALLY, I got drunk in celebration. The next day, I told
my partner I was leaving the studio. He was furious,
shouting You’ve left me high and dry. He was right, of
course. But there was no going back. I’d found a life I
wanted. Every day or night would be different. I would have
a ringside seat at the big events of the day. I’d learn about
death and life and everything in between. It was honorable
work, not putting goods in pretty packages. Somehow the
desire for freedom and the need for security had merged. If
I worked hard, listened well, studied the masters of the
craft, I’d have a trade I could practice anywhere. Even if the
Post folded. I might never be Franz Kline in his heroic
studio. But I wouldn’t be a buttoned-down organization man
either. I’d be a newspaperman.
After I was hired, after they gave me my first Working
Press card, I brought my familiar sense of entitlement to the
bar of the Page One every morning. Those mornings were
free of the limits of time, and I would drink with McMorrow,
Grove, Poirier, and others, while fishmongers made
deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a morning
pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the
headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of
character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all
the whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who
passed through on their way from one town’s paper to
another. I loved it. I’d taken a cut in pay to work at the Post
but I didn’t care. I had enough for food, rent, and drink. Each
day, after the Page One, I’d take the subway to Astor Place
and walk from the station to the flat on Ninth Street, where
I’d sleep off the beer, wake up and eat pasta at the
Orchidia on the corner of Second Avenue before going off
again to the Post. My byline was in the paper every day,
and I couldn’t wait to go to sleep so that I could wake up
and do it all again. On days when I did no drinking, I often
couldn’t sleep, as sentences caromed around my brain and
I rewrote myself and others. On such days, I often moved to
the refrigerator and found a beer.
Everybody in the business was drinking then, the lovely
older woman on night rewrite, stars and editors, Murray
Kempton and the copyboys. Once, when I was working
days, Poirier came to me and said, How do you call in sick
if you’re in? We laughed and concocted a ludicrous story of
eating a bad clam at lunch, and sure enough, at lunch hour,
Poirier called in with his bad clam attack and took the rest
of the day off. Another day, working overtime during some
disaster in the dead of winter, I finished at noon instead of 8
A.M. and carried my exhaustion directly into the Lexington
Avenue IRT, skipping the Page One. Standing in the middle
of the subway car, his eyes glassy, a large black Russian-
style fur hat making him seem even taller, was McMorrow.
He was maintaining his balance with one finger delicately
touching the roof of the subway car and he was barking,
Copy! Copyboy! as strangers edged away from his
dangerous presence.
That first newspaper Christmas, there was a staff party in
the penthouse office of Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s owner.
The city editor got drunk and fell down the spiral staircase,
breaking his arm. He refused to risk the hazards of a city
hospital, saying I’d rather die here at my desk. He insisted
on being taken to his home in Oyster Bay. So Poirier and I
helped him to his car, both of us drunk too, and drove
through the frozen night to Oyster Bay. When his wife
opened the door and saw her wrecked husband and then
saw us, she started shouting at us, You bastards, you
bastards, look what you’ve done to him, you bastards.
One election night, Kempton was in his third-floor office,
sending down his copy one sentence at a time, until it was
six-thirty in the morning. The night managing editor, George
Trow, asked the copyboy to ask Mr. Kempton a simple, if
urgent, question: “How much more?” The copyboy ran up
the back stairs to the third floor, burst into the office and
said to the paper’s greatest columnist: Mr. Trow wants to
know, how much more? Kempton lifted his almost-
completed bottle of Dewar’s and said, Oh, about an inch.
After working a double shift one Friday, reporting three
stories, rewriting three others, and doing captions and
overlines for about fifteen photographs, I was reading
galleys in the city room. At his desk, Sann was typing fast
with two fingers on his Saturday page, a potpourri of news
items and smart remarks called “It Happened All Over.” He
finished editing it with a pencil, called for a copyboy,
rubbed his eyes, and then walked over to me.
Let’s have a drink, you lazy Mick bastard.
We took a cab to midtown and went into a joint called the
Spindletop. It was dark and fancy in a sleazy way; if it
wasn’t mobbed-up then the decorator had been inspired by
gangster movies. Sann ordered whiskey, I asked for a
beer. We talked for a while about craft and newspapers
and the Boston Celtics, whose coach was his friend. Then:
You got a broad?
No.
Good, Sann said. This business is lousy on women.
I had learned that already. My lovely Dominican was
gone, defeated by the hours of the newspaper trade.
But you’re married, I said.
Yeah, to the greatest woman in America. But it hasn’t
been easy for her.
I sipped my beer, uneasy about saying anything.
She’s sick now, he said.
I’m sorry to hear that.
She’s very sick, he said, as if speaking to himself.
Then he turned and walked to the pay phone. I heard him
placing a bet on the Cincinnati Reds. A few more people
came into the bar, and then Ike Gellis arrived. He was the
sports editor, short and stocky, Edward G. Robinson to
Sann’s Bogart.
Where is he? Ike said.
Phone booth.
I bet he’s betting baseball. He’s a fuckin’ degenerate on
Fridays.
Sann hung up and came straight to Gellis.
Well, well, the world’s shortest Jew.
I hope you didn’t bet the Reds game, Gellis said. The
Giants’ll kill ’em.
Shut up and drink, Sann said.
Two weeks later, early on a Friday morning, Sann’s wife
died of cancer. We heard the news about six A.M. Around
eight, Sann arrived. He walked on his usual hurried way
across the city room and went to his desk. He didn’t look at
galleys or dupes of stories. He started to type. He typed for
more than an hour, worked the copy with a pencil, called for
a copyboy, and then got up and walked out of the city room
without a word.
Someone passed around a carbon of the story. It was a
farewell to his wife. Tough, laconic, underwritten. He never
used the word “tragedy.” My friend Al Aronowitz read it and
started to weep.
Oh, man, he said. Oh, man.
Aronowitz was a great reporter, a wonderful writer, and a
lovely man. But he didn’t drink, so I saw little of him after
work. That morning he went to the Page One with me. We
drank for a couple of hours in virtual silence. But the booze
had no effect.
I don’t know if I can work in this business, Aronowitz said.
His wife dies and the first thing he does is come in and
write about it.
Shut up and drink, I said.
3
EARLY ON, I learned there were limits to the myth of the
hard-drinking reporter. One Saturday night, we threw a big
party in the place on Ninth Street. It lasted until dawn. I was
due at the Post at 1 A.M. Monday. But when we woke up on
Sunday afternoon, Jake and Tim and I were still full of the
exuberance of the party. We bought a case of beer and
started drinking again. Other people dropped in. The day
rolled on, full of laughs and drinks. When I arrived at the
Post that night, I felt sober, seeing things clearly and
thinking lucidly. But I was half-drunk. I must have laughed
too loud or bumped against a trash barrel too hard,
attracting some notice. Then I started to type and my
fingers kept hitting between keys. Finally an editor named
Al Davis came over and stood above me and said, I think
you better go home. I was mortified. Davis was part of the
saloon fraternity too; he wasn’t objecting to the drink but to
the obvious fact that I couldn’t hold it. I got up and pulled on
my coat and he stepped close to me and whispered, Don’t
you ever do this again. And I didn’t.
But if it was stupid to come into work carrying a package,
as we said, that was no reason to stop drinking. As in most
things, you needed rules of conduct. I drank in the mornings
when I worked nights and at night when I worked days.
When I was sent out to cover some fresh homicide, I usually
went into a neighborhood bar to find people who knew the
dead man or his murdered girlfriend. I talked to cops and
firemen in bars and met with petty gangsters in bars. That
wasn’t unusual. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the bars were
the clubs of New York’s many hamlets, serving as
clearinghouses for news, gossip, jobs. If you were a
stranger, you went to the bars to interview members of the
local club. As a reporter, your duty was to always order
beer and sip it very slowly.
On weekends, I went to Brooklyn to visit my father’s
clubs, and to see my mother, my brothers and sister. My
mother was proud of my new career, dutifully buying the
Post every day and clipping my bylined articles. She
reminded me that she had bought the Wonderland of
Knowledge with coupons from the Post, in the days before
it became a tabloid.
You look very happy, she said.
I am, I said. I am.
In Rattigan’s, there were mixed feelings about what I was
doing. In that neighborhood, there were still a lot of people
who thought the Post was edited by Joe Stalin. Their
papers were the Daily News, whose editorials kept calling
for the nuking of Peking and Moscow, and Hearst’s Daily
Mirror and Journal-American. The Post was always
attacking the people held sacred by the more pious and
patriotic: Cardinal Spellman, Francisco Franco, J. Edgar
Hoover, and Walter Winchell.
How’s it going over there, McGee? my father asked one
Saturday at the bar in Rattigan’s.
The Post? I’m having a great time, Dad.
Good. The checks are clearing, right?
Right.
He sipped his beer and nodded at Dinny Collins, a smart
heavy-set man, dying of cirrhosis, who was reading the
Daily News a few feet away.
What do you think of my stories? I said to my father.
Good, good. Very good. I just . . .
He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.
You just what? I said.
Goddammit, I just wish you were working for the Journal-
American!
I laughed out loud, but he didn’t see anything funny.
Dad, the Journal-American is a rag. They make things
up. I know. I’ve covered stories with their reporters, and they
make up quotes and details that aren’t true.
How do you know they’re not true?
I told you, Dad. I’ve been there on a story, talking to the
same people, seeing the same things. By the time their
stories get in the paper they’ve added stuff. Lies. Bullshit.
Dinny Collins leaned over and said, Listen to the kid, Bill.
I always said that Journal-American was a load of shit.
Especially, I said, when they interview Franco once a
year, or Cardinal Spellman three times a year.
You mean they make up stuff for Spellman?
No, I said. In that case, they just print the bullshit.
Collins laughed. But my father gathered his change.
That does it, he said. I’m going to Farrell’s.
Out he went. Collins was still laughing. I ordered a beer.
Don’t take him seriously, Collins said. You’ve made him
prouder than hell.
I hope you’re right, Dinny, I said, on my way to a long
afternoon in the bars of Brooklyn.
At about seven-thirty in the morning of July 2, 1961, in his
home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put a twelve-
gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. The
news was smothered for most of the morning. I heard the
first bulletin early that afternoon, while watching the
Dodgers play the Phillies on television. I was shaken to the
core. Hemingway was still the great bronze god of
American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking
macho artist. But since the day in the navy when I’d first
read Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking collection
of Hemingway’s work, he had been one of my heroes. No
other word could describe him: his writing, his life, his
courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image.
Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the
choice of a coward.
But I had little time to mourn Hemingway or even question
his motives. The telephone rang. It was Paul Sann.
Get your ass down here, he said. Hemingway knocked
himself off, and I want you and Aronowitz to write a series.
The Post was famous for its series; one of them — in
twenty-three daily installments — had ruined the career of
Walter Winchell. The writers were detached from the daily
routine and allowed weeks of luxurious reporting and
writing on a single subject. I’d never written a series, but Al
Aronowitz was a master of the form. He was five years
older than I was, heavy, red-bearded, full of sly laughter and
dissatisfied melancholy. In his own style, he was struggling
as I had struggled over the way to live in the world. He was
intoxicated by the careless freedoms of the Beats, about
whom he’d written a brilliant series, and pulled in the
opposite direction by the demands of a conventional life in
the suburbs of New Jersey. For a few years, drinking had
helped me postpone a choice; temporarily, at least,
newspapers had resolved it. For Aronowitz, newspapers
were not enough.
We began working that afternoon in an empty back
office. Aronowitz knew almost nothing about Hemingway; I
knew almost too much. So we divided the work. I stayed
one installment ahead of him, laying out the newspaper
clippings, the relevant passages in biographies and
monographs, marking passages in Hemingway’s own work
that were relevant to the installment. We shared the
reporting tasks, calling people all over the country who had
known Hemingway. Aronowitz did most of the writing. When
he finished each installment, I’d go back over the copy,
filling in blanks, cutting statements that seemed ludicrous,
trying to separate the myth from the facts. We finished
some installments near six in the morning, two hours before
the deadline.
When it was over, I knew a lot more about writing.
Aronowitz was a generous man, showing me what he was
doing and why, passing on his hatred of platitude and
cliché. And I’d gone more deeply than ever before into
Hemingway. I saw his writing mannerisms more clearly, his
personal posturing. Some of it was embarrassing. But I had
learned that it was possible to be a great writer and an
absolute asshole at the same time. None of us then knew
how terrible Hemingway’s final years had been and the
extent to which alcohol had contributed to his anguished
decline. It was right there on the pages. I just didn’t choose
to see it.
There were still parties on the weekend, but the gang that
came over from Brooklyn was breaking up. Richie Kelly,
who lived next door, found an apartment in another part of
Manhattan and started making a living at advertising art.
Billy Powers moved with a young actress to an apartment in
Chelsea. Tim married a beautiful woman from the
Neighborhood. We all got drunk in celebration, and Jake
and I decided that the newlyweds should keep the
apartment. Jake moved back to Brooklyn while I moved
next door. For a while, Jose Torres shared the place with
me, then he got married too, and we all danced and drank
at his wedding. Even Tom McMahon was leaving, to teach
in Puerto Rico. There was a sense of departure and
change in the air. It was as if we all had decided it was time
to grow up.
At the end of 1961, Jose took me to a Christmas party
on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I saw a small, lovely young
Puerto Rican woman there and danced with her and asked
for her phone number. Her mother was standing against a
wall beside the Christmas tree, looking at me in a
uspicious way, like one of the dueñas of Mexico. The girl
gave me the number. I wrote it on a matchbook and drank
some more beer and then moved on to another party. The
next day, thick with hangover, I remembered the girl but
couldn’t find the matchbook. I called Jose, who made some
calls and found out who she was. Her name was Ramona
Negron. She was seventeen. I was twenty-six. I called her
and we started going out. In February 1962, we were
married.
4
MARRIAGE didn’t end my drinking. Ramona didn’t drink, but
I did it for both of us. There was a lot of drinking at the
wedding reception; drinking in Acapulco, where we went on
our honeymoon; drinking to celebrate the birth of our first
daughter, Adriene; drinking on weekends; drinking on the
way home from work. We moved to an apartment in
Brooklyn, and I’d drink beers with dinner and invite friends
in to drink with me.
Sometimes I brought home total strangers. One
afternoon I found myself drinking in Bowery dives with
Richard Harris, the Irish actor, who was in town promoting
his first movie, This Sporting Life, and researching the
world of Eugene O’Neill. In the company of Bowery
rummies we talked about O’Neill and The Iceman Cometh
and about J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, a marvelous
book about an irresponsible drunk. Harris told me that he’d
played the part of Sebastian Dangerfield in a Dublin
production based on the Donleavy book and had even
tracked down the model for the hero, a man named Gainor
Christ. That book looks like a comedy, Harris said, but it’s
a terrible fuckin’ tragedy. . . . We talked and drank, drank
and talked, and I called Ramona and said I’d be home late
and home we arrived much later, Harris and I roaring drunk,
and I started to make hash in the small low-ceilinged
basement, the baby awake now and bawling, Ramona
exhausted, hash flying and sticking to the ceiling, until finally
Harris wandered into the night. Ramona wept.
Behind all this were some unacceptable facts. At the
newspaper, I could write about the problems, doubts,
mistakes, and felonies of strangers; I didn’t have to deal
with myself. I certainly didn’t have to look clearly at the girl
I’d married.
In the most important ways, we were strangers. I knew
facts about her: that she’d been born in Puerto Rico, taken
to New York by her mother when she was a year old. She’d
grown up in the projects on Grand Street, graduated from
Washington Irving High School, spoke perfect English, and
could dance the pachanga. But I knew nothing of her
dreams, her vision of herself, her conception of the future. I
never bothered to ask. In some ways, I knew more about
the people in my newspaper stories than I knew about my
wife.
Neither of us had a useful model for a marriage. Ramona
didn’t meet her father until she was fourteen; he’d broken
with her mother a few months after Ramona was born. He
was her mother’s second husband. I met him on a trip to
Puerto Rico with Ramona; he was white-haired and
handsome, charming, a piano player in a nightclub, living
with a fat black woman. I got the feeling that he barely
remembered Ramona’s mother, who was petite, fair-
skinned, vain, and given to complaint.
She was a very spoiled woman, he said to me over a
beer in the place where he worked. I’m glad Ramona isn’t
like her.
We spoke with the complicity of men. But when I told
Ramona what he’d said, she laughed.
What does he know? she said. As soon as he had to
feed a family, he left.
She lived through her teens without a father in the house,
and then her mother married a German-American guy who
did maintenance in the projects. He brought home a
paycheck. He was civil. He watched a lot of television and
even read some books. But he offered Ramona no clues
about how she should live with the likes of me.
I had no model either. My father went to work, earned his
money, found friendship and consolation in saloons. I’m
sure he never asked my mother about her dreams either.
The principle was clear through all my childhood: men went
out and earned the money; women organized the family.
Husbands were close-lipped, strong, stoic; wives were
conciliatory, open, allowed to show feeling. Without
thinking, I assumed the pattern. I didn’t work in a factory.
But I would do everything that must be done to keep
bringing home the paychecks. And I had other goals now:
to write novels and short stories, to master the form of
magazine articles, to do everything possible within the
limitations of my talent. This time I wouldn’t walk away, as I
had from Regis, as I had from painting. I would go as far as
I could go with what I had. Or as Robert Henri had said
about an art student, to be “master of such as he has.”
In the small flat where we lived in Brooklyn, I didn’t talk
much about such desires with Ramona. She was too busy
trying to become a woman and a mother. In both tasks, she
was on her own.
My brother Denis was a wonderfully sweet kid, with big
liquid brown eyes, broad shoulders, a wild sense of humor,
and an original way of looking at the world. Once, when he
was seven and struggling with the mysteries of the Catholic
catechism, he was walking with my mother and embarked
on a heavy theological discussion.
Mom, he said, is God everywhere?
Yes, Denis, she said. God is everywhere.
Is he in the sky?
Yes, he’s in the sky.
Is he in the street?
Yes, Denis, he’s in the street.
Is he in the park?
Yes, he’s in the park.
Mom?
Yes?
Is he up my ass?
My mother burst into laughter.
By the time he was ten, in 1962, Denis had begun to see
me as a kind of father, although I was only the big brother
who had lived elsewhere for all of his young life. I didn’t
mind the role; I was probably a better father to Denis than I
was to be a husband to Ramona. Around this time, my
father had entered a crabbed, unhappy middle age; there
was never enough money and always too much drinking.
He beat the kids when they annoyed him or when he
thought they weren’t doing homework or were talking in too
heavy a Brooklyn accent. Tommy was now grown up and
gone and Kathleen had a group of girlfriends from school.
My father didn’t bother either of them. But the smaller boys
were always in trouble with him, Denis most of all.
It was no surprise that Denis often turned to me for
guidance and male kindness. He was an erratic student,
and an unruly street kid, but in his school compositions, he
showed hilarious gifts for narrative. His spelling was often
atrocious. But he could certainly tell a story. I started helping
him, showing him ways to develop stories, correcting his
spelling, giving him books to read. When Ramona and I
took our first small apartment near Prospect Park, he
dropped by all the time, glad to run errands, to read some
of my books, to talk about movies or comics. Ramona said
she didn’t mind his unannounced arrivals; she thought he
was cute. I took him with me a few times to the newspaper
or to the Gramercy Gym to see the fighters. One of those
fighters was now my brother Brian, who at fifteen weighed
about ninety pounds and was boxing in amateur
tournaments, watched over by Jose and the other
professionals. He had a ferocious left hook, a good chin,
and a cocky style. Denis would get excited when he saw
Brian sparring, upset if Brian got hit, cheering when Brian
was punching; he hated to leave the place. My brother John
never came to the gym. He was only a year older than
Denis, a fine student with a sweet good heart. But he was
shy and self-contained where Denis was direct. If Denis
wanted to go with me to a gym, he asked. If he wanted to
stay at my house, wherever it was at the time, he said so.
John never asked.
One summer afternoon, Denis got into a fight outside the
YMCA. His opponent whipped out a knife and stabbed him
in the stomach. He was rushed to Methodist Hospital,
where he almost died. I arrived at the hospital after he
came out of the operation. His voice was weak and his
lustrous brown eyes were full of fear.
Am I gonna die, Pete?
No, you’re gonna be all right. The doctors said so.
I don’t wanna die.
You won’t.
You won’t let me die, will you?
The doctors won’t let you die, Denis. You’ll have a pretty
funny-looking scar, maybe, but you won’t die.
I don’t want you to die either, he said.
Okay, pal.
Be careful, all right, Pete?
Whatever you say, Denis.
I don’t want anyone to die, he said, his voice drowsy.
On December 8, 1962, the printers’ union struck the New
York Times. The Publishers Association, including Dorothy
Schiff of the Post, immediately locked arms in solidarity
against the proletarian rabble and closed the other six
papers. We were all locked out of our jobs. The strike and
lockout went on and on, past Christmas, past New Year’s,
past Valentine’s Day, 114 days into the spring.
That winter, I learned to write for money instead of sheer
love of the trade. I worked for thirty-five dollars a week on a
strike paper. I wrote two articles for the Police Gazette at
fifty dollars each. I borrowed money. I alternated between
rage and impotence, furious at the printers, even more
furious at the publishers. I had a wife and a baby girl and I
couldn’t put money on the table. What the hell kind of man
was I? What kind of husband? What kind of father? I began
to think the Post would fold. My newspaper. Denis didn’t
want anyone to die. I didn’t want a newspaper to die.
In the evenings, I stayed home more, playing with the
baby, cuddling her, cooing to her. In some way, this
angered Ramona. She was depressed for a long time after
Adriene was born, and I knew so little about the biology and
psyche of women that I took this as a personal rejection. It
was as if she blamed me for the pain she’d suffered when
Adriene entered the world. Her dark angers when I played
with the infant infuriated me.
You’re jealous of her, aren’t you? I shouted one night.
She’s only a baby and you’re jealous!
I’m not jealous, she shouted through tears. I just want you
to love me the way you love her.
I hugged her, whispered to her, felt her tears on my face. I
was ashamed of myself, at my anger, my inability to
understand. But I never pushed past the surface, past the
things she said to the things she most deeply felt. When
she was calm again, I went to the refrigerator and opened a
beer.
With the newspaper work gone, I used some of the empty
time to read again, everything from Raymond Chandler to
Stendhal. They took me out of the intolerable present. They
presented challenges too. The weather was gray and cold,
and reading novels made me want to go away again. To
hole up with Ramona and the baby in some cottage in
another country, where I would write stories about the things
I knew and discover things I didn’t. I wished I were
somewhere beyond that small flat.
Because of the lack of money, I didn’t see much of Jake
or Tim, Bill or Richie; there was no way to meet for a drink
without laying bills on the bar. I spoke by phone to Tim
every day and checked in every few days with Paul Sann, to
hear the latest about the contract negotiations. But I saw
nobody from the newspaper; they seemed to have
scattered to the winds.
Then, near the end of the strike I sold an article to the
Saturday Evening Post for $1500, the equivalent of ten
weeks’ pay at the newspaper. It seemed like all the money
in the world. Exuberantly, I paid off my debts and gave the
landlord the rent. I brought flowers to Ramona and hugged
her and told her I loved her. I bought a bag of toys for the
baby. I carried home fat bags of groceries. I lugged home
cases of beer and invited Richie, Jake, Billy, and Tim and
his wife, Georgie, over for a party. Celebration! Victory!
Drink up! A few days later, Dorothy Schiff left the Publishers
Association and reopened the newspaper. I went back to
work.
Don’t get used to being too happy, you Irish bum, Paul
Sann said when I took him for a fast drink after work. No
matter what happens, he said, newspapers will always
break your fucking heart.
5
SOMETHING SHIFTED in me during that strike. I thought I’d
work at the newspaper forever. The strike made me
understand that in the newspaper trade, there was no such
thing as forever. When I went back to work, I kept doing
freelance work on the side and found I had some talent for
magazine articles. Checks arrived. We moved to a larger
apartment in Brooklyn. But Ramona seemed no happier.
When I got excited about selling a piece, she seemed
uneasy. When the telephone kept ringing, with calls from
friends, press agents, editors, she grew annoyed. When I
came home drunk, a few days a week, she was disgusted.
She was getting to know me better than I knew her.
As spring turned into summer, the old dream of the
expatriate life blossomed again, ripening over beers on
Saturday afternoons. Who wanted to live here, back in the
bourgeois safety of Brooklyn? New York was a great city
and I had a job I loved. But there was a world out there. One
night, over dinner at home, I started talking to Ramona
about going to Spain. Maybe we could live in Barcelona.
The city where Orwell once carried a rifle, city of Dalí and
Picasso and Gaudi, city that held out to the end in defense
of the Spanish Republic. Barcelona! I’d write articles for the
Saturday Evening Post and we’d live well on the money
and to hell with newspapers. She looked at me as if I were
drunk.
What’s the matter with New York? she said.
It’s not Spain, I said.
But you’ve never been to Spain.
I know, I said. But I don’t want to see it when I’m sixty.
She shook her head in a dubious way, tempering my
enthusiasm. For weeks, I avoided any more discussion. I
worked hard at the paper. I won some awards. But the
notion of another escape wouldn’t go away. Over beers one
night, I talked about Spain to Tim, suggesting that he could
go too and work with me on the research while mastering
the magazine form himself. He was very smart and a good
clean writer; if I could do it, he could do it. At first, Tim was
skeptical. But we looked in the New York Times at the rate
of the peseta against the dollar, bought Spanish
newspapers in Times Square, and saw that we could live
more cheaply than in New York. We were young, we could
afford it; when would we have such a chance again? A
strange, inevitable momentum took over. It was like going
to Mexico again. There was nothing complicated about it.
We’d just go, live in a foreign land, walk where Hemingway
walked, speak Spanish and eat olives and brown ourselves
on the Costa Brava. We’d support ourselves with writing.
Ramona and Tim’s wife, Georgie, were at first skeptical.
We addressed every argument, speaking with the authority
of men who had lived in at least one foreign land. I showed
Ramona travel articles from magazines, picture books from
the library. I sold some more articles to magazines and built
up a small bank account. Slowly it must have seemed like a
great romantic adventure to the women too. By July we
were ready to leave.
You’re going where? Paul Sann said, when I came to his
desk to give him the news.
To Spain.
He chuckled in a sardonic way.
Vaya con Dios, pal, he said. I wish I’d done that when I
was your age. I wish I’d done it last fucking month.
For me, Sann’s words were the only blessing I needed. It
was settled. We were going to Spain.
The night before we left, Tim and I went to a farewell dinner
with the other guys who’d made the journey with us across
the river from Brooklyn: Bill Powers, Richie Kelly, Jake
Conaboy. After the delicious beer-swilling years on Ninth
Street, we’d gone our own ways. Billy had become an
excellent photographer and layout man, Richie an illustrator
and designer, while Jake returned to Brooklyn and the
safety of the Transit Authority. But I wanted to believe it
didn’t matter where we’d gone or where we were going; we
came from a common place, had shared a glorious time,
and we’d be friends for life.
The five of us took a table in the back room of a bar on
the corner of Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue. Jake
had been drinking before we arrived; whiskey always broke
him out of his shyness, and he was hilarious and profane.
We ate hamburgers and drank a lot of beer and whiskey. I
talked about the glories of the Spain I’d never seen, urging
the others to come and join us. I must have made it seem
like another subway ride from Brooklyn. We made jokes.
We talked about politics. Billy and I argued the comparative
merits of Matisse and Bonnard with the passion once
reserved for centerfielders. Around midnight, Jake’s chin
was resting on his chest. We talked on, drinking more,
laughing louder. Richie’s eyes were glassy, a thin smile on
his lips. Then it was time to go. Tim called for a check.
Richie stared hard at me, the smile gone, his eyes
suddenly deeper under his brows.
You’re really an arrogant bastard, you know, he said.
I laughed, thinking he was joking.
I know, I know, I said. Worse than Charles de Gaulle.
Richie didn’t smile. The muscles in his jaw tensed.
Nobody wants to tell you this, he said. But it’s true. You
treat the rest of us like inferiors. You think if you say it
should be done, then we should do it.
You’re serious, aren’t you?
Tim said, Hey, Richie, cool it.
Yeah, Billy said. This is a good-bye dinner, not a grand
jury.
Richie ignored them.
All this shit about Spain, this Hemingway crap, Richie
said. You’re saying you can do things and we don’t have
the balls to do them. You think you’re hot shit. You pose like
a good guy but you always think of yourself first. You always
did. Even back in Brooklyn.
It was as if he wanted to start a fight. But we were leaving
the following day for Spain. I didn’t want to arrive in
Barcelona with a split lip or a broken hand. I backed up.
Richie, I said, all I ever tried to be with you was a friend. If
I got lucky, I wanted you and the others to share it.
Yeah, so you could feel like you weve better than us.
Fuck it, I said, standing up abruptly. Come on, Tim. Let’s
go to Spain.
I threw some money on the table and turned for the door.
Look at the truth, Richie said. Look at the truth . . .
Tim and I took a cab back to Brooklyn. We were staying
at our parents’ places for this final night, because Ramona,
Adriene, and Georgie had gone on ahead to Barcelona to
find an apartment. Tim and I had closed our apartments,
stored or sold our possessions, settled most of our
accounts. All the way to Brooklyn, I was furious with Richie.
Some things I had taken for granted: he was my friend, he
shared the sentimental solidarity of the group, he cheered
for my small successes as I would cheer for his. Tonight, he
had pissed all over those assumptions. It was as if he
wanted me to feel his accusations all the way to Spain. And
though I was hurt and wounded, another thought slid through
my mind: Maybe he was right.
There was one final wrenching scene. A few weeks before
the date we chose to leave for Barcelona, I had told my
brother Denis that I was moving to Europe. He was twelve,
reading newspapers every day, but this news item hadn’t
seemed to register. I didn’t press it. But I worried about him
all the time. I had no idea how long we’d be gone. I might
make a career as a writer in Europe and stay forever. I
could be hack in six months. I was sure Brian and John
would be all right, but Denis had a fragility that made him
seem more vulnerable. I hoped the Neighborhood wouldn’t
trap him.
On that last morning at 378, Denis and the other kids
hung around the kitchen while I washed and ate breakfast.
My father was there, dim and silent. My mother busied
herself with dishes and tea. Fragments of Richie’s
indictment kept drilling into me, combining with hangover to
make me feel disconnected from the others. Finally, I
packed my last small bag, said my good-byes, and went
downstairs.
Suddenly, Denis came running after me, in tears.
Please don’t go, Pete, please don’t go, he kept saying.
Please, please . . .
Denis, I have to go. My wife is there. My baby . . .
Please, he said, please stay.
Tim was waiting with a cab in front of Rattigan’s and
came over to help me with my bags. But Denis was bawling
now, holding on to my arm with both hands, saying Don’t
go, Pete, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, pleaaaase . . .
Until I had to shake him off.
Send me some stories, Denis . . .
And he ran off then, his face a blur of tears, swinging his
hands wildly in the air. He was the last person I saw on
Seventh Avenue as the cab pulled away to take us to the
airport.
6
THUS BEGAN too many years of wandering, of arrivals and
departures, sitting in airport waiting rooms, packing and
unpacking books, smoking strange brands of cigarettes,
speaking badly the languages of strangers, and drinking
their beer and whiskey. Ramona and I exhausted the dream
of Spain in six months. We lived in Dublin then, and later in
Rome and San Juan and Mexico City, Laguna Beach and
Washington, D.C., and saw a lot of other places in
between. Each time, we made the long circle home, back
to New York.
The moves had a pattern, of course. I would return to
New York, settle in, start working at my trade. Then routine
would assert itself. The routine of work. The routine of
family. The multiple routines of the drinking life. These
couldn’t be separated. If I wrote a good column for the
newspaper, I’d go to a bar and celebrate; if I wrote a poor
column, I would drink away my regret. Then I’d go home,
another dinner missed, another chance to play with the
children gone, and in the morning, hung over, thick-tongued,
and thick-fingered, I’d attempt through my disgust to make
amends. That was a routine too.
Self-disgust would spread its stain to everything: my
work, the apartment, New York itself, until I felt I had to get
out of there or die trying. Then I’d grant myself the vision of
the Great Good Place. Most one the time, it was a place
where I heard more vowels than consonants, with
bougainvillea spilling down whitewashed walls, fountains
playing in the blaze of noon. In the Great Good Place I
would work like a monk on my writing. I would be a good
husband and father. I would be far from the tumult of
saloons, their giddy excitements and sly flatteries. Once the
vision took hold, we were soon packing the books. I never
did find the Great Good Place.
During this long odyssey, there were some wonderful
times. There were long sunny afternoons reading Lorca and
drinking beer in huge one-quart glasses in the Plaza Real
in Barcelona. There was one glorious evening in Rome with
the raffish producer Joe Levine at the Hotel Excelsior, the
two of us drinking brandy, with women all around us,
musicians playing violins, Joe’s wife pleading with him to
go to bed. I spent hours drinking rum with John Wayne
during an interview on his converted navy minesweeper in
Barcelona bay; I hated his politics and liked him. In
Brussels, I wandered into some huge beerhall with a
reporter from UPI and got hilariously drunk with some
touring American paratroopers. There were good beery
times in pubs in Dublin and England, the barmaids flirting,
the regulars grumpy at this Yank invasion, then offering the
pack of Senior Service and buying a round in the fraternity
of drink. I drank beer with the mariachis in the Plaza
Garibaldi. I got loaded in a place on the Calle Cristo in Old
San Juan, singing along with Los Panchos on the jukebox. I
got pleasantly smashed watching the sun crash into the
Pacific in Laguna. Sometimes Ramona came with me;
most of the time she stayed home.
She was with me in Belfast when my father came home
in the late fall of 1963. She was a background figure, her
dark skin exotic to the pale Irish, but existing only as an
appendage to the visiting Yank. On that trip, my father held
center stage.
He had been away since the early 1930s. I paid for his
ticket because I wanted to see him there in the home place,
on the streets that had shaped him. For a week, we
wandered those streets on foot or by cab, stopping at the
Rock Bar, the Beehive, the Long Bar, snug dark wool-
smelling refuges from the gray hard drizzle of the North. He
found old friends among the living and heard reports about
the dead. He sang his songs, making the young Irish laugh
with “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” A few times, confronted with
some old photograph of soccer teams, he turned away in
grief. He had less tolerance now for drink; he got drunk
quicker. But he was back where he’d started from and he
was happy to be there.
One evening, all of us were in my cousin Frankie
Bennett’s house, sipping warm lager, dressing to go out for
dinner. My father was at his brother Frank’s house and we
were to meet him later. The television was on in the small
living room. The Bennett kids were leaping over couches
and rolling around on chairs. A coal fire glowed in the
hearth. I was full of a buzzing warmth, part beer, part Ireland.
And then the first bulletin broke.
. . . President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.
What? I turned to the black-and-white screen of the
television set. What did he say? What the fuck did he just
say? And he said it again, grave, British, restrained: Shots
had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. No.
The president was being rushed to Parkland Hospital. No.
No. The room hushed, Frankie moved in from the kitchen,
Ramona came downstairs, holding Adriene in her arms,
Frankie’s wife stood by the set. No. I popped open a can of
warm lager. A sitcom was playing. Then the announcer was
back.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United
States, is dead.
I let out a wail, a deep scary banshee wail, primitive and
wounded, mariachi wail, Hank Williams wail, full of fury and
pain. Nonono-nononononononononoNo. Ramona hugged
me, weeping, and kids were wailing now, and Frankie was
there beside me, but I turned, ashamed of my pain and my
weeping, and rushed into the night. All through the Catholic
neighborhood called Andersonstown, doors were opening
and slamming and more wails came roaring at the sky.
wails without words, full of pagan furies as old as bogs. I
wanted to find my father, wanted to hug him and have him
hug me.
But I careened around dark streets, in the midst of the
wailing. I saw a man punch at a tree. I saw a stout woman
fall down in a sitting position on a doorstep, bawling. I ran
and ran, trying to burn out my grief, my anger, my
consciousness. I found myself on the Shankill Road, main
avenue of the Protestant district. It was no different there.
Kennedy wasn’t a mere Catholic, he was Irish, Kennedy
was ours, he was one of our sons, our Jack, and they have
killed him. Along the Shankill, I saw a man kicking a
garbage can over and over again in primitive rage. I saw
three young women heading somewhere, dissolved in
tears. I saw another man sitting on a curb, his body heaving
in gigantic sobs.
Somehow, I found my way back to Falls Road in the
Catholic area. My head was full of imagined demons, the
gunmen of Dallas: Cuban exiles and right-wing bastards,
Klansmen and Mob guys. But when I finally reached the
Rock Bar I only wanted to find my father. He was upstairs
where the television set was, sitting at a table beside a
retired IRA man with three fingers missing from his right
hand. I went to the table and the old IRA man said, It’s a
terrible bloody thing, lad, terrible, terrible . . . My father
stood up, his face a ruin. We held each other tight, saying
nothing, and then the bar was packed and we drank
whiskey and there was a documentary playing about
Kennedy’s trip to Ireland in May, smiling and laughing and
amused, promising at the airport to come back in the
springtime and I thought of the line from Yeats, What made
us think that he could comb gray hair?
After that, there was almost nothing left except whiskey.
Until the screen filled with Kennedy’s face, superimposed
on the American flag, while “The Star-Spangled Banner”
played on the sound track. And then the whole bar crowd
was standing, old men and young, men with hard whiskey-
raw Belfast faces, and all of them were saluting and so was
my father and so was I. That night in Belfast, we both
discovered how much we were Americans.
7
THE PRICE I was paying was very large, but for a long time,
nobody presented me with the check. Our daughter,
Deirdre, was conceived in Spain and born in St. Vincent’s
Hospital in Manhattan while I was thick with hangover at the
1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Norman
Mailer drove me to the hospital. I was full of joy when I saw
her. But Ramona never forgave my absence.
When Deirdre was less than a year old, we moved to
Mexico. That was always the basic model for the Great
Good Place, and going back was like an act of contrition. I
was heartily sorry for the way I’d messed up in 1956. But
now a decade had gone by. I thought I could repair the
great rupture by going back. A Mexican friend confirmed
what I suspected: the Mexican police were not looking for
me, my name was on no list, my offenses were lost in the
human avalanche of newer felonies. I signed a small
contract to write my first book and we left New York. We
sublet a friend’s apartment a block from the Pasco de la
Reforma in the Colonia Roma. For a week, I had dreams
about men bashing each other with bricks. But then Carta
Blanca gave me dreamless sleep. I talked to Ramona
about staying this time for good.
During the summer of 1965, Deirdre got sick with
salmonella, probably from unpasteurized milk. She had
begun talking before the infection; then all her talking
stopped. Most of the time she looked stunned. I was
heartsick, blaming myself for taking a child to Mexico,
risking her life in my own self-absorbed quest for the Great
Good Place. Work stopped; I never did write the book I’d
gone there to write. One night I sat in the dark, listening to
Cuco Sánchez, and got drunk alone, while Ramona and the
children slept. A few days later, a letter arrived from Paul
Sann. He wanted to know if I had any interest in going back
to work at the Post. If so, he was looking for a columnist.
Once more, we packed up and went home.
We took an apartment in a new building off Union
Square. Before we could furnish the place, I announced to
Ramona that we’d have a house-warming party. The place
was jammed. Tim, Billy, and Jake came from the
Neighborhood; dozens arrived from the Post, including
Sann, who looked around at his stumbling wards and left
early. Among the late arrivals were Mick Jagger and Keith
Richards, friends of Al Aronowitz, in town for their first
appearances in America. They were full of charm, smoking
joints and drinking vodka, but they too left around the
midnight hour. At some point, huge Fred McMorrow lurched
into the bedroom where Deirdre was sleeping, fell across a
glass-topped table, and smashed it. He didn’t even scratch
himself. But Deirdre woke up screaming and Ramona was
again in tears.
That poor little girl, Ramona said, over and over again.
That poor little girl …
Deirdre was still not talking. One Saturday afternoon, she
was walking with me on Fourteenth Street and suddenly fell
on her bottom. I picked her up, and she looked at me with
those brown eyes but didn’t cry. I stood her up and she
walked a few more feet and plopped down again. Ramona
told me she’d been doing the same thing in the apartment. I
was alarmed. The next day, while I went to work at the
newspaper, Ramona took Deirdre to St. Vincent’s.
She called me at the paper, her voice trembling.
They’re trying to tell me that she’s retarded, Ramona
said.
What?
Retarded! It must be from that milk in Mexico! From the
goddamned salmonella.
I rushed to the hospital and looked at our little girl. I didn’t
believe the analysis. Her eyes were bright. She recognized
me. She laughed when I played with her. Ramona and I
found another doctor and insisted that more tests be made.
That girl, we told each other, is not retarded.
We were right. There was a chemical imbalance in her
brain, possibly brought on by the salmonella. But it could be
cured with medication. There was no permanent damage.
She was definitely not retarded. It was my time to cry, in
thanks, in remorse. When Deirdre did resume talking, it
was in complete sentences.
Through all this time, I managed to do a lot of work:
newspaper columns, magazine articles, a first novel. The
novel was a thriller. I learned the form without risking an
examination of myself. If I was able to function, to get the
work done, there was no reason to worry about drinking. It
was part of living, one of the rewards.
But many things were being lost on the erratic journey. A
shipment to some foreign place would never arrive, and
notebooks, drawings, precious books, would vanish
forever. I lost all my apprentice work. I lost my collection of
original cartoons. A book of childhood photographs
disappeared. I still didn’t realize that I was also losing my
way.
8
I STARTED writing a column for the Post in October 1965. On
the day after Christmas Paul Sann sent me to Vietnam,
where in the first week I got drunk with some Marine Corps
officers in Da Nang and heard them predict a dirty, bloody,
perhaps endless war.
What can be done to pacify Vietnam? I asked one of
them, late at night, with the artillery rumbling in the distance.
Pave it, he said, and stared at his drink.
In Vietnam, I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of death. The
stoic codes of Hemingway served me better at thirty than
they did at eighteen. Maybe Hemingway was an asshole,
but he knew something about war and fear. In Vietnam, my
only worry was about my daughters: If something happened
to me, who would bring them up? Who would get them
through school? Ramona would survive, but I fretted about
the girls. Sometimes I worried in the same way about
Denis. I got rid of these imaginings by drinking on the roof
of the Caravelle with the other correspondents, watching
the distant orange flashes of the artillery, or by inspecting
the pain and fear of uniformed strangers. I wrote often to
Ramona, and I had the city desk call her each time a
dispatch arrived, to tell her I was all right. I did not mention
the bars of Tu Do Street or the long afternoon when I
wandered drunkenly into Cholon and two boys bumped me
and slipped my watch off my wrist. I did not mention the
anxious turmoil in my stomach, the product of the conflict
between my aching desire to stay for the duration of the war
and my responsibilities as husband and father. I wanted to
stay, to make this my war. I did not say this to Ramona.
Every few days I went out to the killing fields, saw boys
dying, heard the anguished screams of the wounded. A
tourist at the war. Then I came back to Saigon and wrote
my pieces in the room at the hotel and took them down to
the post office for shipment to the Post. Afterward, wanting
to stay and needing to go, wishing I were single and
missing my children, I wandered through the bars of Tu Do
Street, listening to Aretha and the Stones, talking to the
perfumed women in their tight aodais. They were all very
young, but their faces were hardening and they had no
stories they were proud to tell. The sensuality of the war, its
erotic demands, urged me toward sex with them; but I was
afraid of disease, of having my money stolen, of ending up
in some humiliating public mess. I got drunk instead.
When I came home, there was a new outpost in my
personal geography. Normand Poirier had discovered a
saloon on Christopher Street called the Lion’s Head. In the
beginning, the Head had a square three-sided bar, with
dart boards on several walls and no jukebox. The location,
a few steps from the Sheridan Square station of the
Seventh Avenue IRT, was perfect for newspapermen from
the Post, the Times, and the Herald Tribune; the Village
Voice was then cramped into a few tight rooms upstairs;
and within a few weeks of its opening, the joint was a
roaring success.
I don’t think many New York bars ever had such a
glorious mixture of newspapermen, painters, musicians,
seamen, ex-communists, priests and nuns, athletes,
stockbrokers, politicians, and folksingers, bound together
in the leveling democracy of drink. On any given night, the
Clancy Brothers would take over the large round table in the
back room and the place would be loud with “The Leaving
of Liverpool” and “Eileen Aroon” and “The West’s Awake.”
Everybody joined in the singing, drinking waterfalls of beer,
emptying bottles of whiskey, full of laughter and noise and a
sense that I can only describe as joy.
It was as if we’d all been looking for the same Great
Good Place and created it here. Not in some foreign land
but in the West Village. I was soon one of the regulars,
there every night, and sometimes every day. In the growing
chaos of the Sixties, the Head became one of the
metronomes of my life, as regulating as the deadlines for
my column. It was also the place in which everything was
forgiven. Lose your job? Betrayed by your wife? Throw up
on your shoes? Great: have a drink on us.
In addition, the Head provided a refuge from the more
self-righteous fashions of the Sixties. Few of us did drugs.
Not many were true fans of rock and roll. Almost all of us
hated the war and despised Lyndon Johnson, but we did
not slide off stools to join protest marches. We honored
those who did. I covered all the great antiwar
demonstrations in Washington and New York; but marching
just wasn’t our style. In my columns, I defended “the kids”
from the onslaught of cops and FBI men; but nobody from
the Head was likely to join SDS or send money to the Black
Panthers. I felt I was part of the Sixties and separate from
them, sometimes a participant, more often a mere witness.
My writing was altered by the fury and despair I saw in the
ghetto riots. But it was Vietnam that inflamed the deepest
emotions in my work and in the lives of millions. Vietnam
was the focus for all public passion, the one great binder of
generations. I don’t think any of us hated America; we
wanted the war to end because we loved America. We
wanted justice and baseball too.
As the Sixties moved on, as the Head became my local
Great Good Place, my marriage to Ramona was
disintegrating. Once, in Rome, where I went off each day to
try writing in the cafés of the Via Veneto, Ramona had
asked me for a divorce. I was, in my invincible stupidity,
stunned.
What do you mean, a divorce?
I mean I can’t live like this anymore, she said.
How do you want to live?
In a house. With a room for each of the girls, with a
backyard, with a husband who comes home every night
and has dinner.
I can’t promise you that kind of life, I said.
I know, she said, and started weeping. I know, I know, I
know.
That small crisis was healed with sweet talk and
promises. But I began to imagine a life without her. I didn’t
want that; I still believed that we would be together for the
rest of our lives. After all, my mother had gone through
much worse with my father, and they were still together all
these years later. In my erratic way, I tried to be better. I’d
come home three evenings in a row, find a baby-sitter, take
Ramona to a movie. Then I would miss dinner, call with
some excuse about meeting a source or doing an
interview, and try to remember the excuse in the morning.
By 1967, Ramona was immune to my words.
You say things, she said one Sunday morning. You don’t
mean them. They’re just words.
I make a living with words, I said. We eat because of my
words. My words pay the rent.
I mean the words you say to me. Not the words you say in
the newspaper.
Her disdain was clear. As I did after Richie cut into me
on the night before I left for Barcelona, I saw the possibility
that she was speaking the truth. Instead of accepting that
possibility and bringing my life into line with my words, I
turned her complaint around. I convinced myself that the
problem wasn’t my neglect of her; it was her neglect of me. I
would drop into the Head and have strangers praise some
column I’d written. Letters about my columns poured into
the newspaper. Most days, Paul Sann thought I was doing
swell. But when I reached home for dinner, Ramona never
said a word. She had stopped reading the Post. Instead of
trying to earn her respect, I luxuriated in the delicious
emotional state of feeling hurt.
If my work was ignored at home (I reasoned), then I had a
license to go where it was appreciated: the Lion’s Head.
Sometimes we hired a baby-sitter and I took Ramona with
me; but the combination of drinking, machismo, intellectual
bullshitting, and flattery seemed to repel her. She was
sober and, after a while, I wasn’t. I remember some very
good times; her memories are surely different.
9
THERE WAS ONE final move, one last attempt at repair. I
heard about an apartment in Brooklyn, a few doors down
from 471 Fourteenth Street, the lost sunny paradise of the
first six years of my life. Maybe the girls could play under
the elm trees as I did so long ago. Maybe we could go on
long green summer walks in Prospect Park and in winter I
could stand with them in a bright white meadow and
together we would eat snow, as I had that time when I was a
child. Maybe I could leave behind the life of the Head, the
slippery delusions of Manhattan, and begin to make
something more solid, back here where I’d begun my life. In
our marriage now, we were living on maybe.
So we moved to Brooklyn, into what was called a parlor
floor and basement. On the first day, I led the girls through
the iron gate under the stoop and showed them their room
to the left and the kitchen beyond it and then took them into
the yard. A few doors away was the yard of 471, but when I
looked for the great tree of my childhood, it was gone.
For a while, we were happy. I cut down on drinking, stayed
away from the Head, worked hard. The children asked me
to tell them stories or draw pictures of alligators and
elephants. People came to visit. Jose Torres stopped by
once a week to talk about his own writing, which he was
doing now for El Diario and then for the Post. My brothers
came around, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.
We had barbecues in the yard. We drank beer. My father
rang the bell on his way to Farrell’s and occasionally I went
with him. He didn’t care for Ramona, but he liked the
children. They loved him to sing “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.”
So did the younger crowd at Farrell’s, the fans of Mick
Jagger and John Lennon.
But the Sixties were remorseless in their power. There
were drugs everywhere, and my brothers were not immune.
When he was sixteen, Denis came by one night and he was
stoned. In tears and remorse, he explained that he’d been
doing pills and reefer. I arranged for him to go to Ireland
and work for a while on a farm owned by Patty Clancy of the
Clancy Brothers. Driving him to the airport, I remembered
his brown wounded eyes on the day I went to Spain; now
those same shy eyes looked at me as he went off to a kind
of exile of his own.
I’ll be good, he said. I’ll make you proud of me.
I know you will.
I’ll write you letters.
Write stories too.
Off he went. But if Denis saved his life in Ireland, when he
returned, his friends were already dying, some in Vietnam,
too many from drugs. In 1969, Denis, along with Brian and
John, put together a group that was going to the great rock
festival in Woodstock. Ramona asked me if she could go
with them.
I need to have some fun, too, she said. You’ve had plenty
of fun.
Where will you stay? Are there hotels or inns?
I don’t know, she said. I’ll stay where they stay.
And I stay home with the kids?
Well, yeah . . .
Okay, I said. Go ahead. You need some fun too.
So they all moved off to one of the great hedonistic
festivals of the Sixties and I stayed home to mind the girls.
They liked this, because I cooked each meal following
recipes from a cookbook. I told them stories. I drew a lot of
pictures. But while Ramona moved through the rains, drugs,
and music of Woodstock, I was thinking about the grieving
drizzle at the heart of our marriage. In a way, Ramona was
now having the years that she’d lost when she married me
at eighteen and had two children very quickly. At night, with
the children asleep, I watched the television coverage of
Woodstock and imagined her lost in the vast rain-drowned
crowd.
After Woodstock, the sense of unravelment returned to
our marriage, more powerfully than ever. She seemed to be
moving through a different landscape than the one I
inhabited. There were visible signs of it: the music playing
steadily, her music, not mine; no answers to my calls from
the newspaper; eyes that made no contact. More and
more, I cooked dinner while the laundry piled up and beds
went unmade. There was an arctic chill in the marriage bed.
I found consolation once more in the Head. The pattern
resumed, the phone calls with excuses, the amiable lies. At
the bar, I could believe that my life was a delight. When the
talk turned to women, I assumed the mask of the stoic.
Sometimes, hurting from hangover, I wondered whether my
Lion’s Head friends were really my friends, whether they put
up with me because of my personal qualities or because I
wrote a newspaper column. The unspoken question was
usually dissolved in vodka and laughter. I often got very
drunk and then lurched into Sheridan Square to find a taxi
that would bring me to Brooklyn, to the street where I was a
boy with yellow hair. One time I came home drunk at three
in the morning, made a mistake, went up the stoop of the
house next door and climbed in the window. Two men were
in bed together and started screaming in terror. I thought
this was hilarious when I was told about it the next day. But
the actual incident doesn’t exist in my memory; all I have is
the version of the story told by others. That and the sense of
shame that morning after when I tried to imagine what I
looked like to those frightened men.
Ramona and I now had only the common ground of the
children. One night, drunk again, I came home, opened the
outer gate beneath the stoop and lurched into the inner
door, smashing the window. In my hand I had two roses I’d
bought from a flower seller in the Lion’s Head, one for
Adriene, the other for Deirdre. I stepped over the broken
glass and turned left into their bedroom. They’d awakened
with the crash and there, suddenly, was their father. Their
eyes were wide in fright or apprehension. I handed each of
them a rose and told them I loved them. I did — but I’d
broken too many things. It was time for me to go.
When we separated at last, I rented a basement apartment
in a friend’s brownstone at the far end of Park Slope. The
children could walk along the parkside to visit me; I could
easily visit them. We went to Coney Island together, to
block parties, to museums, as I played the new role of the
Sunday father. The girls were delighted with the attention.
They were baffled and confused about the fact that I was no
longer living with them.
When are you coming home, Daddy? Adriene asked one
day.
I don’t know, baby.
I want you to come home, Daddy.
We’ll see.
Almost all our talks ended this way. Deirdre was too
young to understand; but Adriene understood very well that
something terrible had happened to her life. After dropping
them at home, I would walk slowly back to my place, loaded
with misery. Sometimes, I walked it off. Other times, I
reached for the easy solace of a bar.
In most ways, I felt an immense relief. It was no longer
necessary to concoct lies if I wanted to stay up all night
drinking. There were fewer evasions. The strained tension
of life with Ramona was replaced with a correct civility. I
realized finally that I could no longer escape to that elusive
Great Good Place; it didn’t exist. I did more drinking than
ever, sometimes alone, but I felt better about myself in the
morning. I started reading fiction again and writing more
carefully. At the Lion’s Head now, I even had the freedom to
go home with women.
Then I started an affair with precisely the wrong woman
for me. She was lovely, kind, smart, sensual, and rich. She
was also a drinker. Soon we were parked together at the
bar of the Lion’s Head. We were drinking at a table in
Elaine’s (for she was an Uptown Girl). We were drinking at
parties or traveling south to drink at some friend’s
plantation. We got drunk a lot. And the drinking led to
scenes, jealousies, anguished telephone calls, a variety of
stupidities, not all of them mine. Doors were slammed. In
the purple spirit of melodrama, all sudden departures were
made in the dead of night.
This went on for almost a year. That year, I wrote a movie
script that was filmed in Spain. We got drunk a lot in
Almería, where all the spaghetti westerns were staged, and
one night, coming to the defense of one drunken actor, I
knocked out another actor and thought I’d killed him. My
Uptown Girl had already gone home. I soon followed her,
moved in for a few days, then fled to Brooklyn. There was
one final angry night, both of us sodden after two days of
drinking. The details are lost. But words were hurled in
cruelty. There were curses and tears. And I was gone for
good.
The next afternoon, I was alone in the Lion’s Head,
reading the New York Times and sipping beer. I had no
column to write and that was usually the best of days. Don
Schlenck, the day bartender, was down at the far end,
reading the Post and eating lunch. I looked up in the gloomy
silence and peered out through the barred windows that
opened at ground level to Christopher Street. I could see
human legs going by. Two pairs of women’s legs. A man in
jeans. A man in a gray suit. A man with a woman. Faceless.
Without histories. Hurrying along. And then snow began to
fall.
I guess God doesn’t want me to go home today, I said.
Didn’t you hear? God is dead. It says so in your own
paper.
Don’t believe everything you read in a paper, Schlenck, I
said.
I picked up my change and walked out into the storm. I
walked downtown, block after block, as the swirling snow
obliterated the edges of buildings. The snow-bright streets
looked as innocent as childhood, and I wanted to walk
somewhere with my girls. But I couldn’t even do that. A few
months earlier, Ramona had made her own trip to Mexico,
to work for a degree at the University of the Americas, and
she had taken the children with her. I was in New York,
alone in the snow; they were in Puebla. And I was sick of
myself. Sick of drinking. Sick of the routines of my life. At
City Hall, my hair and coat fat with snow, I hurried down into
the subway and went home. In the basement apartment in
Park Slope, I took the telephone off the hook and slept.
10
I MET Shirley MacLaine in Rome in 1966 at a party thrown
by the producer Joe Levine. We talked and had a few
laughs before she went off to another table. I saw her again
during Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign in California. She
was with her husband, Steve Parker, who lived in Tokyo.
That night I ended up at her house in Encino, drinking
whiskey at the bar in the living room with Steve and Shirley,
talking politics until three in the morning. She was funny.
She was intelligent. She was passionate about the
problems of the world. She never talked about movies. I
liked her very much.
A year after I separated from Ramona, Shirley published
her first book, a charming memoir called Don’t Fall Off the
Mountain. Reading it, I discovered that we shared one
common childhood passion: Bomba the Jungle Boy. One
night she came into Elaine’s with some friends and
stopped at my table to say hello. I mentioned Bomba. She
sat down.
The only book I could never find, I said, was Bomba at
the Giant Cataract.
He had eye trouble too? she said.
I laughed.
Do you want a drink? I said.
I’m not here to ride horses, she said.
A month later, we went to England together, where she
was working on a television series, and moved into a large
rented house near Windsor Castle. I kept writing my
newspaper column, shipping it from various places in
Europe. Before we met, I’d started writing movie scripts to
supplement my newspaper habit; with her, I learned much
about the craft, about putting people on stage, establishing
conflict, using action to show character. But I was still
drinking. I didn’t often get drunk. In her world, most people
simply didn’t drink the way I’d learned to drink; they would
soon be out of the business. But I did drink steadily, easing
the tension created by meeting so many new people,
adjusting to a relationship in which I was not the principal.
Shirley never mentioned the drinking to me. Her father
was a hard drinker too, and like me she’d grown up in the
hard-drinking Fifties. But there was an indirect scrutiny.
Sometimes in conversation she’d dismiss an actor or
director as a drunk. If she saw a scene in a movie, or read
a script where a character succumbs to another because of
drunkenness, she’d shake her head. It’s a cheat, she’d say.
It’s using the drink instead of forcing the painful choice. As
an actress she was relentless in trying to get to the core of
human character and discovering human weakness. Why
does he do these things? she’d say about a character in a
script. What hurt him? What warped him? What does he
want, and what’s preventing him from getting it?
When she was off at work one morning, I was sitting at
my typewriter, gazing at the gardens of England, and began
applying those questions to myself. I couldn’t accept my
own answers.
Back in New York, I started to work harder than ever before
on movie scripts and magazine articles and columns.
Necessity drove me: I needed the money. After they
returned from Mexico; Ramona and I had agreed to place
the girls in a boarding school, to give them some
steadiness and structure while she tried to sort out her life.
This arrangement wasn’t intended to be permanent; I
bought a big house in Park Slope in Brooklyn, full of vague
plans about getting custody of the children and having them
live there with me and Shirley. This was absurd, of course;
Shirley was an old Broadway gypsy, an itinerant who lived
where the work was. She did help me set up the house. But
she kept her apartment in Manhattan. She was never going
to live among the burghers of Brooklyn.
A year went by, then another. Ramona and I were
divorced in an amicable way. She found another man to live
with and tried for a while to be a photographer. But the
children remained in boarding school in Switzerland.
Sometimes I paid for Ramona to visit them. I visited them
myself three or four times during the school year, laden
down with gifts, wrote them long letters, spoke to them by
telephone. They came home to stay with me at Christmas
and Easter and across the summers. But then it would be
time for them to leave and I’d be full of sorrow and grieving
guilt. I wanted them with me all the time, but Shirley made
clear to me that she wasn’t going to be part of a household
that included Adriene and Deirdre.
I have no talent for that, she said. I would be terrible at it.
It would be a mess.
The girls resented her, blaming her for the breakup with
Ramona, which wasn’t her fault at all, seeing her as the
person who was keeping them from her father, which was
true.
I want to come home to stay for good, Adriene said to
me one evening in the big house in Brooklyn. I want to live
in my own room. I want to be with you, Daddy. Please.
Please.
Her words drilled into me. But I felt paralyzed. Instead of
making a decision, choosing my children over a woman, I
postponed the choice. Off they went again to the airport,
Adriene in tears, Deirdre sullen. I went back to the empty
house, choked with remorse, and drank until I slept. There
were too many versions of this same scene.
In addition to vodka, I used movement and traveling to
prevent too much brooding. When good parts for women
began drying up in the movies, Shirley created a nightclub
act, singing and dancing and cracking wise. I admired the
power of her will, her refusal to simply end her career that
early, the way in which she whipped herself into physical
shape, driving herself harder than any athlete. I traveled a
lot with the show, back and forth to California, to Las Vegas
and Canada and Florida. In 1972, Shirley got involved in
the presidential campaign of George McGovern, which I
covered; that also put us on the road, checking in and out of
hotel rooms, making long-distance calls to friends and
children and family. Sometimes I would stay behind in New
York and return to the Head and get drunk in the old style.
Sometimes I would retreat to the Brooklyn house and get
drunk in its empty rooms. Then I’d be gone again, following
my star. Most of the time, when I was away, my brothers
Denis and John lived in the house, watering the plants,
reading the books, throwing parties. They loved the place.
But it never felt like a home to me. I didn’t want to look at
the rooms where the girls stayed on their holidays. I didn’t
want to imagine domestic scenes that could not become
real.
As the months passed, I began to notice odd little signs
of deterioration. Typing a column or a script, I would
misspell simple words, not just once, but eight or nine
times. Sometimes my fingers felt like gloves filled with
water and typing was a plodding effort of physical labor. My
hands trembled too, and there were odd twitches in my
legs, little spasms of protest, or I’d wake up with no feeling
in my legs. I shook off most of these signals. I was just
getting older, I told myself. I’m thirty-seven, and that makes
me older than most of the ballplayers and all of the
prizefighters. Hell, even the police lieutenants are younger
than I am. But on a few clear-eyed mornings I knew that my
body was sending me a message. I just wasn’t ready to
hear it.
Besides, I was also having a good time. There were
parties to attend, political fund-raisers, movie premieres.
Shirley sampled my world too. One St. Patrick’s night, we
piled into a car with five uniformed firemen, all of us
drinking, and went over the bridge to Brooklyn. That night,
Shirley became the first woman ever served at the bar at
Farrell’s, a personal triumph that was discussed for months
in the Neighborhood. She sampled hot dogs at Coney
Island and clams at Sheep’s Head Bay. She came with me
on some nights to the Lion’s Head, to stand at the bar,
talking politics, or to listen to the singing in the big table in
the back room. But these were usually mere excursions.
We ended up at Elaine’s or at her apartment. She never
got drunk. But now she was drinking even less, watching
her weight to stay in dancing trim. I was drinking more.
11
I N THE POLITICAL YEAR of 1972, I’d begun to hang out in a
new saloon on Fifty-second Street. It was called Jimmy’s
and was located in the building a few doors from 21 that
had once been occupied by Toots Shor’s famous joint.
Shor’s old circular bar was still there, and for a while the
place had a kind of forced magic. Two of Mayor John
Lindsay’s former aides — Sid Davidoff and Dick Aurelio —
owned the place, and they helped attract a core crowd of
newspapermen and politicians. A wonderful guy named
Doug Ireland was a regular, a pilgrim from the Lion’s Head;
he was a political operator who wanted to write. Some
other members of the downtown crowd found their way to
the circular bar, but the place was no substitute for the
Head. There were no Clancy Brothers singing at tables, no
old communists, nobody from the Lincoln Brigade, no
seamen or poets. That was the year of George McGovern
and the Watergate burglary; Nixon was triumphant; human
beings were still dying in Vietnam. The binding element of
the regular Jimmy’s crowd was politics.
As I stood at the bar of Jimmy’s one December night,
while Shirley was playing in Vegas, I talked with passion
about Nixon and the Watergate burglary, making epigrams,
telling jokes, repeating lines that had gotten laughs from
others. Suddenly, hearing myself repeat lines I’d used in
other places, I began to feel oddly detached. I was there;
but I was also looking at myself being there. Part of this
eerie feeling came from living with Shirley. From her, I had
learned much about the way actors worked, the
mechanisms they used to become other people, the small
signs and tags that they offered to display emotions they
might not feel. That night, for the first time, I began to feel
that I was performing my life instead of living it.
The feeling haunted me for days. The girls were home for
Christmas and I brought them to see my mother and father,
who had moved from 378 to a new flat in Bay Ridge. But as
Adriene and Deirdre ate dinner and accepted presents that
were not to be opened until Christmas, I wondered if I was
being their father or playing their father. Was I truly being
the thoughtful son with my mother, the loving admirer of my
father, or was I just playing a role? I wanted all four of them,
children and parents, to love me. But I felt as if my lines
were calculated, not spontaneous. They might love the
person I was presenting to them. But that person might not
be me.
A few nights later, Denis came to visit me in the Brooklyn
house. He was in college now. We sat in the living room,
drinking beer from cans, while the lights of the Christmas
tree bubbled and danced. The children were asleep in their
rooms on the top floor.
I’m gonna try and do it, he said. I mean, really become a
writer.
I waved at the bookshelves.
You have to read all of them, I said. They’ll teach you
everything. The more you read, the more you’ll know about
writing. Look at the way a guy writes a paragraph and try to
break it down. If the guy makes you cry or laugh, analyze
how he did it. . . .
I stopped. Was I speaking genuinely, or was this some
unwritten script I was performing? Was I being generous to
this good, talented kid or playing the wise older brother? In
some peculiar way, did I need him to need me? Was I
being real or playing a role? I didn’t know. I drank some
more beer and talked about Nixon.
On New Year’s Eve, Jimmy’s tossed a party. Shirley was
back from Vegas, and we went early in the evening and sat
at the crowded bar with Doug Ireland. Everybody was
drinking. Doug was witty. We exchanged lines. But once
more, I felt as if I were shooting the scene with a camera
from across the bar. At one point, as I lit a cigarette, I
noticed that my hand was trembling and wondered if that
was in the camera shot. Other people came in and I saw
myself embracing them, heard my voice wishing them well. I
saw Doug’s head fall forward, then jerk up. He recovered
with a funny line. It was New Year’s Eve. We were
supposed to be having a good time. Look: There were
balloons. There were funny hats. There were noisemakers.
Charlie? Bring me a vodka and tonic, will you please?
I was in the men’s room when I thought about Adriene
and Deirdre. I wanted to be with them in the house in
Brooklyn. I wanted to sit in the living room with them and
hug them and tell them stories. I wanted to heal some of the
wounds I’d cut into them. If this was a play, I wanted a better
script.
Back at the bar, I sipped my drink and held Shirley’s
hand. Then the band started playing. A group of gangsters
came in with a group of women in beehive hairdos. The
gangsters smoked cigars, the women chewed gum. They
sat down front, with waiters bowing to them. All played their
parts to perfection. Then the star of the evening came on.
Ladies and gennnulman, the one and only . . . Buddy
Greco! The singer was perfectly groomed and perfectly
dressed and he began to sing in still another of the endless
varieties of the Sinatra style his version of “Lulu’s Back in
Town.” The gangsters followed their scripts, nudging each
other in approval, their knees bobbing to the rhythm. A few
celebrants snapped their fingers. Doug nodded. I stared
into my glass, at the melting ice and vodka-logged lime.
And I said to myself, I’m never going to do this again.
I finished my drink. It was the last one I ever had.
VI
DRY
One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its
lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate.
Probably it was some final guest who had been away
at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party
was over.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
1
I DIDN’T JOIN join Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn’t seek out
other help. I just stopped. My goal was provisional and
modest: one month without drinking. For the first few
weeks, this wasn’t easy. I had to break the habits of a
lifetime. But I did some mechanical things. I created a
mantra for myself, saying over and over again, I will live my
life from now on, I will not perform it. I began to type pages
of private notes, reminding myself that writers were
rememberers and I had already forgotten material for
twenty novels. I urged myself to live in a state of complete
consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom.
The first weeks stretched into a month, and after thirty
days, I already felt better physically. My hands stopped
trembling. There were no more twitches in my legs or
numbness in the morning. And the strange misspellings
disappeared from my copy. I had a tremendous craving for
sugar and began to eat more ice cream and candy than I
had since moving away from Sanew’s. In the mornings, I felt
clear and fresh.
When the month was up, I set a deadline for a second
month. I sat down and wrote my novella, The Gift, in one
miraculous spurt, working day and night, removed from the
world. The book was full of drinking and love for my father
and the sweat poured out of me while I wrote. I thought of
the book as my own gift to him, a declaration of his value
that he could read while he was alive, and an explanation of
myself to him and to me. Jason Epstein bought it for
Random House. Another dry month went by, and now my
mind was teeming with ideas and projects. I realized that
for years I’d been squeezing my talent out of a toothpaste
tube. I’d misused it and abused it and failed to replenish it
with deep reading and full consciousness. I began to listen
to music again. To Erroll Garner and Ben Webster. To Ray
Charles and rock and roll. I was greedy for what I had
missed.
Finally I tested myself at the Lion’s Head, standing at the
bar with the regulars. I didn’t want to come among them
with the zeal of a new convert. They knew I was off the
sauce and smiled in a knowing way when I ordered a
ginger ale. The smiles were understandable; a lot of people
we knew had quit drinking before, and some of them were
right there at the bar, belting down whiskey. But I had one
major ally among the regulars: the bearded poet Joel
Oppenheimer. A few months earlier, the doctors had
ordered him to stop drinking and he’d followed their orders.
He still smoked his Gauloises, still arrived each day in the
afternoon, still looked lecherously at the young women. But
he did it all on Coca-Cola. You won’t have as much fun,
Joel cautioned me. But the fun will really be fun.
The sensation of performance ebbed. I cared less about
the way I appeared to others, prepared to be dismissed as
a bore, no longer as quick, silly, or entertaining as I’d been
in the past. But Joel laughed at my remarks; I laughed at
his. It was the drunks who were the problem. I started
hearing stories I’d heard many times before, or relatively
new ones repeated four times in an evening. I was polite. I
listened. I laughed at the punch lines. But I didn’t drink.
Shirley was on the road, and I enjoyed staying in the
house in Brooklyn, leaving the Lion’s Head in the cold
evenings, my eyes blurring from the wind, my lungs swelling
with the fresh air. I liked reading myself to sleep a lot more
than falling into a swollen stupor. When I was with my
children at Easter — the months piling up now — they
seemed to notice a difference. I took them to restaurants
and they exchanged glances when I ordered ginger ale or
club soda. They began asking me endless questions about
American sports, American music, and American history.
Adriene reminded me of the night I broke the door on
Fourteenth Street and then gave them each a rose. She
laughed. I felt a stab of pain. I never wanted to be drunk in
their presence again.
There were some crucial tests. The first took place at the
end of January, when Frank Crowther from the Lion’s Head
organized a huge party at the Four Seasons to celebrate
Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday. It was like a rush hour
crowd in the A train, except that everybody was drinking or
smoking joints or both. I put my back against a pole and
watched the crowd eddy around me. Joe Flaherty. Jules
Feiffer. Jack Lemmon. Hello. How are ya? What’s doing?
Editors, photographers, politicians. Whatta you hear? Need
a drink? No, I’m on the wagon.
And then Mailer stood up in a spotlight to make a
speech, squinting into the light, adopting his most
belligerent stance. He was very drunk, holding a glass in his
hand. He told a pointless joke about an Oriental cunt and
then moved into some heavy metaphysical description of
an organization or movement or cult that he was founding,
called the Fifth Estate. He said it would monitor the multiple
paranoid operations of the CIA. I remembered the way he
drove me all the way to Manhattan from the 1964
convention in Atlantic City when Deirdre was born. And how
kind he’d always been to me at prizefights and parties. Up
there in the light, did Mailer feel that he was performing his
life too? From the safe darkness of the crowd, people
started shouting insults; others laughed; Mailer looked
confused, exactly like an actor who was being hooted for a
performance he thought was brilliant. Suddenly I wanted a
drink. This was like bearbaiting. A friend was in trouble and
there was nothing I could do about it except join him. I
turned toward the bar and saw more laughing idiot faces.
And said: No. Fuck it all, no. Not a drop. Not here. Not with
these people. Never. I pushed my way through the crowd,
found my coat, and went out to the street.
I walked for blocks, suddenly understanding clearly that
another of the many reasons I drank was to blur the
embarrassment I felt for my friends. If a friend was drunk
and making an ass of himself, then I’d get drunk and make
an ass of myself too. And there was some residue in me of
the old codes of the Neighborhood, some deep adherence
to the rules about never, ever rising above your station.
Getting drunk was a way of saying I would never act uppity,
never forget where I came from. No drunk, after all, could
look down on others. Being drunk was the great leveler, a
kind of Christian act of communion. Who could ever point
the finger of harsh judgment at a drunk if we all were drunk?
I’d do the same thing in the company of friends who thought
they were failures and I was a success. Who could accuse
me of snobbery, a big head, deserting my friends, if I was
just another bum in the men’s room throwing up on his
shoes?
The second test was more dangerous. On May first, my
father celebrated his seventieth birthday and we threw him
a party. There were hams and pasta and chicken and cold
cuts; cases of beer; bottles of whiskey and bowls of ice.
With all the kids and cousins and the singing of songs, I
was back in the dense sweet closed grip of family. And
history. Irish history and my father’s history. And mine. The
party rolled on. The music played. I was laughing, singing,
making plump sandwiches, and then, suddenly, I wanted a
drink. My father was being urged into “My Auld Scalera
Hat.” Someone found a hat and he took it as his prop and
his face was transformed, he was beaming and happy, his
jet-black hair still as shining and young as it was back when
I first saw him perform. I loved him; Jesus Christ, I loved
him. But then I backed up, quiet, allowing him his moment
on the stage. I was myself now, for better or worse. I was
forever Billy Hamill’s son, but I did not want to be the next
edition of Billy Hamill. He had his life and I had mine. And if
there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family
history, if my father was the result of his father and his
father’s father, on back through the generations into the
Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of
predestination. Someone among the males of this family
had to break the pattern. It might as well be me. I didn’t
have a drink.
Across those first months, I began to think that I only had to
give up one drink: the next one. If I didn’t have that drink, I’d
never have another. If that was a trick, then the trick worked,
most of the time. The rest of the time, I needed words. For
years, I had interviewed politicians in bars. Now I
suggested we go for a cup of coffee. Dinner parties were
problems because I was always explaining myself.
No, I don’t drink, thank you.
Not even wine?
Nothing, thanks.
But why?
I have no talent for it, I said.
Now I saw more clearly what drinking did to people. In
Hollywood, I met old directors and forgotten screenwriters
and unemployed actors: all broken by booze. I heard jokes
about the Malibu AA, where there were eleven actors in
one group and one driver’s license. But I didn’t laugh, felt no
comfort in their humiliation. I remembered some of the final
tortured stories by Scott Fitzgerald and felt surges of pity,
for Fitzgerald, for the people I met, for my friends. I resisted
pitying myself. I have stopped, I said to myself. If I begin
again, I don’t even deserve pity.
The temptation to begin again grew weaker and then,
before the year was finished, disappeared. Somehow, I’d
replaced the habit of drinking with the habit of nondrinking. I
still visited bars, listened to the stories, remembered the
few memorable remarks, but even the bartenders now
began to pour a soda when I walked in. My own
imagination helped me. I couldn’t imagine enduring again
the physical horrors of hangover. And I didn’t ever want to
spend a day lacerating myself over the social or personal
crimes and misdemeanors I’d committed while drinking. No
more apologies for stupid phone calls, asinine remarks,
lapses in grace. I might still do such things, but I would do
them with an unimpaired mind.
Now I had more time than I’d ever had as an adult. I had
gained the time I once spent drinking and the time I needed
for recovery. And I began writing as never before, studying
the craft with a professional’s forever unsatisfied standards.
I had lived past the first rush of arrival, when raw talent can
carry you across most barriers. Now I had to learn enough
to last a lifetime. I’m still learning.
2
ONE JANUARY afternoon, after five sober years, I went for
another walk in the snow. The children were home in the big
house on Prospect Park West, and if I had not yet repaired
some of the damage I’d inflicted on them and others, I was
trying, I was trying. I wandered into the park, which was
whitening under the heavy snowfall. And stood under a
dense pine tree and then imagined figures coming down
hills and across snowy meadows. Down there by the lake,
Maureen Crowley was waiting for me on a bench. Over in
the boathouse, Burne Hogarth was explaining trapezoids
and Laura was in a blue smock, pulling heavy drags on a
cigarette, while snow skirled like fog. In the snow, my
mother was calling us home to dinner. Tim was there and
Billy and Jake, all of us laughing, bellywhopping on Suicide
Hill before heading for Boop’s, and Jose was jogging down
snowy roads, and Joel Oppenheimer was defiantly
smoking his black tobacco cigarettes while snow gathered
on his Mets cap. Beside the Swan Lake, the Tigers and the
South Brooklyn Boys were gathering in some violent ritual
of the tribe. Up on the hill beside the Quaker Cemetery,
Bomba the Jungle Boy was waiting out the winter beside a
fire in a cave.
Then I heard my father singing.
On the west coast of Ireland
One morning there was seen
…
And I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and
failures, and the things I now saw clearly, and the things I
only remembered through the golden blur of drink. I reached
down and took a great mound of fresh snow in my hands
and began to eat. I was home. I was free. I’d leave the rest
to Providence and Paddy McGinty’s goat.
The author is grateful for permission to include the following
previously copyrighted material:
Excerpt from “We’re Off to See the Wizard” by E. Y.
Harburg and Harold Arlen. Copyright © 1938, 1939
(renewed 1965, 1966) by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. c/o
EMI Feist Catalog Co. By permission of CPP/Belwin,
Inc.
Excerpt from “Paddy McGinty’s Goat” by R. P. Weston,
B. Lee, B. Adams, and B. Allen. Copyright © 1917
renewed 1945 by Francis Day & Hunter Ltd. and Jerry
Vogel. By permission of EMI Music Publishing.
Excerpt from “(There’ll Be Blue Birds Over) The White
Cliffs of Dover” words by Nat Burton and music by Walter
Kent. Copyright © 1941 by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co.,
Inc., and Walter Kent Music Company. By permission of
Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.
Excerpt from “Solamente Una Vez” by Agustin Lara.
Copyright © 1941 by Promotora Hispano Americana de
Musica S.A., copyright renewed. By permission of Peer
International Corporation.
Excerpt from “La Cama de Piedra” by Cuco Sá\nchez.
Copyright © 1957 by Editorial Musicana de Musica
Internacional S.A., copyright renewed. By permission of
Peer International Corporation.
Excerpt from “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell. Copyright
© 1971, 1975 by Joni Mitchell Publishing Corp. By
permission of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.
Excerpt from “Stele for a Northern Republican” from Born
in Brooklyn by John Montague. By permission of White
Pine Press.
Excerpt from “Fall 1961” from For the Union Dead by
Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1964 by Robert Lowell;
copyright renewed © 1992 by Harriet Lowell, Sheridan
Lowell, and Caroline Lowell. By permission of Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Excerpts from “In the Egyptian Gardens” from The
Strange Museum by Tom Paulin. By permission of
Faber and Faber Ltd.
Excerpt from “Animals” from The Collected Poems of
Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1969 by
Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of
Frank O’Hara. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
“Magnificent. A Drinking Life is about
growing up and growing old, working
and trying to work, within the culture of
drink.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete
Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of
being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration,
mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did
he discover its ability to destroy any writer’s most valuable
tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In A Drinking Life,
Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life,
and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he
summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with
the bittersweet fondness of a lifetime New Yorker.
“A vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-
destruction. Tough-minded, brimming with energy and
unflinchingly honest.”
— New York Times
“A remarkable memoir. Energetic, compelling, very
funny, and remarkably — indeed, often brutally —
candid, Hamill’s tale won’t soon be forgotten. An
author of rare distinction and moral force.”
— Entertainment weekly
PETE HAMILL began his writing career as a night-side
reporter for the New York Post in 1960. He is the author of
seven novels and two collections of stories, and his writing
has appeared in most national magazines. He has been a
columnist for many years, and currently writes a column for
New York Newsday. He lives in New York City with his wife,
writer Fukiko Aoki.
Cover design by Steve Snider
Cover photograph courtesy of Bettmann
Author photograph by Fred R. Conrad
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
Assignment 1:
Readings:
1. A Drinking Life Pete Hamill – Chapter 1 – 3
2. Inciardi and McElrath: Drug Testing Promotes Workplace Safety
Instructions:
The papers will be 1300-1400 words in length, single-spaced, 12-point font, 1” margins,
no heading. I only want your name at the top and nothing else. These papers will
include your thoughts on the assigned reading. There is no prompt. It is expected that
the assignment will be well-edited, thoughtful, and written in true essay format. Points
will be deducted for short papers, poor grammar, bullet points, and the like. The papers
will be checked with turnitin.com, so do not collaborate with others. Quotes from the
book can be used, but should not be the majority of your paper and should be marked
as quotations so as not to plagiarize. The paper should not show more than 10% match
with other sources in Turnitin.com. These papers can include: personal stories of
experiences you have had related to this section, information from the research you
found in the books that sheds more light on the topic, questions/arguments about the
reading you want to bring to light, thoughts on applications of the material to your own
life, etc. This is your time to show you thorough read the material and understand it.
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Title Page
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