Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

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.

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.