Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

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.

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.