Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

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.

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.