Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

THAT WINTER, Betty the Whore’s husband came home. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who had been a German prisoner for two years. But when he went into the building there were no Welcome Home signs and no Betty either. We all heard about the way he reacted. He went into Unbeatable Joe’s and got very drunk. Then he started throwing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror in the men’s room. The other men were very gentle. They took him home and put him to bed. The next day, he left the Neighborhood and never came back.

IN THE FALL of the year the war ended, we were suddenly poor. The ferocious winter came howling into New York, and so did a new kind of fear, replacing the old fear of Nazis and Japanese. One afternoon, my father came home to announce that he had lost his job at Arma. They were laying off thousands, he said, now that the war was won. So instead of a sense of triumph, we were filled with uncertainty and doubt. My father had always worked, even in the Depression that everyone still talked about in tones of horror; now he was out of work, and on some of the radio shows they were talking about the possibility of a return of the Depression and how this one might even be worse.

If Roosevelt hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have this problem, my mother said. Truman is just some damned haberdasher…

In the other rooms, while my mother and father talked about the layoffs, the bills, and the rent, Tommy and I whispered in the dark about what would become of us. We wondered if they’d have to put us in an orphanage, like Oliver Twist, who was on the back of the HO Oats box, begging the cook for more gruel. Tommy wondered if we’d be evicted, like the Murphy family, who ended up sitting on the furniture in the rain down on Twelfth Street, bawling in shame while the street kids jeered.

Don’t worry, I told Tommy, Patty Rattigan will take care of us.

And what if he loses his job?

He won’t lose his job, I said confidently. He owns a bar.

My father did lose his job. Now he was home every day. He no longer slept in the afternoons and went off to work through the night. He was here, waking late, going out to look for a new job, often coming home drunk and sour.

My mother wasted no time with either blame or consolation; she started working as a nurse’s aide at Methodist Hospital, leaving at three in the afternoon, coming home around eleven. Sometimes Tommy and I walked her to work, passing the bars of my father’s world, and watched her vanish into the hospital. On the way back, we often saw him through the windows, head lifted in song. If he was afraid, he didn’t show his fear to his friends. But I’d wonder: If there is no money in the house, if we are so poor that Mommy must go to work, then how can he afford to drink? He is having fun while Mommy works. When he was working, he couldn’t save enough money to take her to Broadway. Now the war is over, he has no money at all, and he still can go to Rattigan’s. My longing for him, my desperate need to know him, was turning into anger.

We had an account at Roulston’s, where the cost of food was entered in a composition book behind the counter, to be settled later when my mother was paid. When she went off to work, she left lists of groceries for me to pick up, and I learned to say “on the book” with confidence. My father never shopped. Nor did he cook. My mother left cooked food in pots: lamb stew and barley soup, mixtures of potatoes and carrots, potatoes and peas, potatoes and turnips. These were to be heated up at dinnertime. And so, while my mother helped feed patients at the hospital, Tommy and I did what we called “the cooking.” There was never any beef, of course. And that winter there was no butter. The war might be over, but the shortages were not. Into our kitchen came margarine. My mother told us the butter people wouldn’t allow margarine to be pre-mixed, so we’d place the white waxy blocks in a bowl, sprinkle them with a yellow powder, and churn and mix and mix and churn until the results looked vaguely like butter. My father never did this job either; it was, he said, woman’s work. But after Tommy and I did the work, he refused to use margarine on his toast; if he couldn’t have butter, then he would have nothing. My anger was building.

The rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally of butter. But the shortages were not over. There was a shortage of coal, and when the winter of 1946–47 arrived in full force, we sat in the kitchen in sweaters — and on some frigid nights wore coats, mackinaws, and mittens — while listening to Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante or Commissioner Lewis B. Valentine on “Gangbusters.” I was finished with knickers now, wearing long pants to school, but I was always cold and wore knee socks to bed. My father never seemed cold; he slept his deep phlegmy sleep, insulated by drink.

In the living room, (or as we called it, “the front room”), we saved money by using the kerosene stove only a few hours in the evening, to burn off the chill. But when the stove burned down and went out, the windows grew frosted and I would draw faces in the frost with my fingernails. When we talked, steam came in small puffs from our mouths. Overnight, shirts, underwear, and towels froze stiff on the kitchen clothesline. The drainpipes of the 14th Regiment Armory exploded from the cold, and great elaborate ice sculptures bloomed from the broken places. Almost every night, the fire engines woke us as they screamed to another disaster caused by kerosene stoves that burst into fire. The wind off the harbor howled through the night, and in the mornings the trees in the yards were glazed with ice. I’ve never again seen such a winter.

On the radio they were talking about starvation in Europe and Japan. My mother used this information whenever she served something like kelp. What did I mean, I didn’t like kelp? Don’t you know they’re starving in Europe? Yes (I thought, but did not say): Yes, I know that, I know they’re starving; but we’re not doing too good in Brooklyn either. On those bitter nights when there wasn’t enough food, I devised a mental trick: I conjured up pictures from the concentration camps, saying the words “Buchenwald” and “Auschwitz,” reciting the rosary of horror. I made emaciated men in striped pajamas walk through the top floor right at 378 Seventh Avenue, all of them barefoot, their eyes mere dots in black holes, their cheekbones sharp and bare, their arms like dowels, their mouths slack; and I’d say to myself, You have it good, you have a bed, you have food to heat up at night, you have pancakes, you have a kerosene stove, you are not from Buchenwald, you are not being buried by a tractor, fatherless motherless, brotherless, sisterless, you are not a Jew. Almost always, that cured my hunger and my cold and beat down my self-pity. And I would lie in the dark, thinking that no matter what I would be when I grew up, I would do nothing that sent men into camps to die.

And then I would fall into the gray nightmare, fighting my way through the skeletons of the gas chamber.

That winter refused to end. After school, every other afternoon, I went down to Fifteenth Street, my head bent into the wind off the harbor, and bought cheap day-old bread in a bakery next to the Globe movie house. Scabs of black snow were everywhere. My shoes wore out and my mother lined them with cardboard. At school, my number 2 Eberhard Faber pencils wore down to stubs, and some kids had no pencils at all. I drew my cartoons on wrapping paper, and sometimes it was too cold to draw.

One freezing afternoon, in a hallway on Twelfth Street, I heard from a friend about relief. If you were poor, he said, you went to the government and they gave you money that they called relief. There were many people on relief now, my friend said, just like the Depression. He named the families. And that night, after my mother came home, I asked her why she didn’t get relief.