Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

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.

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.