Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

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.

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.

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.