Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Never, she snapped.

Why?

Because we’re proud people. We’ll take nothing from them. We’ll work.

In the spring, I went to work too.

THE BROOKLYN EAGLE was a handsome broadsheet that sold 300,000 copies a day and was read by four times that number. It was an afternoon paper and most of its circulation was home delivered. One afternoon, as I was walking to school at Holy Name, I saw Danno Kelly, one of the older brothers of the Kelly family from 471 Fourteenth Street, and said hello. He asked about my father and mother and then asked me what I was doing. Nothing, I said. Then he told me that if I wanted to work after school, he could give me a job helping him deliver the Eagle.

I started the next day.

After school, I met Danno at the Eagle storefront on Sixth Avenue, where dozens of boys were “boxing” papers in a triple fold and sliding them into delivery bags. I was very nervous. All of the boys were older than I was and they shouted and kidded and worked with amazing speed.

Here, Danno Kelly said, help me box these and put them in the bags.

I did, ineptly and clumsily, until I filled a bag. He was filling two others.

Now, Danno said, put the bag over your shoulder and let’s go.

We set out together, to the route (always rhymed with “out”) that Danno had on Fourth and Fifth streets, tree-lined streets of brownstones and white sandstone apartment houses. The arrangement was simple: Danno worked for the Eagle and I worked for Danno. I was discovering the rudiments of capitalism.

Danno’s blocks were not part of the Neighborhood; the comfortable people lived here, people even better off than those on Eleventh Street. There were no fire escapes on these blocks, no stores or bars, and every house had a backyard. Peering through windows I saw another world, made of polished tables, muted lamps, elaborate wallpaper, rugs on wood floors. The men and women seemed always dressed up; there was nobody like Mr. Dix. The men were formal and sober, the women grave. But they took a lot of newspapers, paying for them once a week. Danno showed me how to throw a paper into a basement doorway, how to wedge it between cut glass doorknobs or into the grills of iron gates beneath the stoops. At the beginning of the route, I wobbled under the weight of the bag. But as I moved on, delivering the papers, the load got lighter, and toward the end, with only a few papers left, I felt stronger and light-headed and even powerful. I was delivering a newspaper.

At the end of the route, my shoulder was sore and I was wet with sweat inside my mackinaw but I felt as if I’d grown six inches in one afternoon. Danno put an arm on my shoulder and handed me a free copy of the paper.

Good job, he said. You’re a little slow, but you’ll get faster. Meet me tomorrow at the Eagle office.

I ran home. I took the stairs two and three at a time and burst into the kitchen, giddy with excitement. Nobody was home. There was the usual note from my mother, explaining that the big pot contained the soup, the saucepan the peas. No matter. I sat at the table and read the Eagle. I looked at the comics. I read the sports pages. I looked at all the other pages. And then I went back and read through it again. I worked for a newspaper now. The Brooklyn Eagle. My newspaper. My skin pebbled with awareness; I was now a member of the real Newsboy Legion.

When my father came home, I told him about the job. He smiled and rubbed my hair and laughed.

Great, he said. Great.

He took the Eagle and turned to the want ads. Then looked up and said, What’s for dinner?

I worked every day after that for Danno Kelly, earning a dollar fifty a week. That was more than I’d ever had in my hand at one time. Because we were poor now, I gave the money to my mother, and she hugged me, and gave me fifty cents back. That was still a lot of money, and I used it in pursuit of Bomba books and the great new comics and some of the lost old ones. I also read the Eagle every day. The comics were an odd collection, from Steve Roper (which used to be called Big Chief Wahoo) to a dog strip named Bo and a terrific strip about a woman who could press a nerve in her wrist and vanish from sight: Invisible Scarlet O’Neill. I thought that would be a terrific power to have. But more important than the comics, I was reading the sports pages, where the columnists were Tommy Holmes and Harold C. Burr, and where there was only one real story: the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And the Dodgers brought me closer to my father.

A FEW WEEKS before Christmas, 1945, there was a sudden delivery of coal, carried into the house by a burly man with a blackened face. And on the day before Christmas, another man arrived with a turkey. I asked who the men were and was told by my father, the party. What party? The Democratic party. Said in the tone of: Are you an idiot? But I was still puzzled. This wasn’t relief, was it? Of course not. Well, if they give you a turkey and coal, what do you have to give them in return?

Loyalty, he said. Always remember the most important thing in life: Vote the straight ticket.

On the street, someone pointed out a person called the district leader to me and explained that he worked out of Jimmy Mangano’s Democratic Club on Union Street. The man was tall and bald and cheerful, and he worked the same piece of the world as my father, moving from bar to bar. He was very close to Patty Rattigan, who also worked for the party. They were important people, I was told. They were Big Shots.

In the spring of 1946, a few weeks after I became an Eagle boy, I realized what a Big Shot could do when my father finally went back to work. One of the Big Shots had arranged for a job, right across the street in the Factory. On Thirteenth Street, we had lived in its cold shadow; now the Factory would give my father a living. He was going to work for the Globe Lighting Company, which made the new fluorescent lights in the building on our side of the Alley. He would work on an assembly line in a vast loft on the second floor, wiring fixtures all day long. I remember his mood when he came home one Saturday with news of the job.

Well, Annie, he said, the bad times are over.

That’s wonderful, Billy, she said. I prayed and prayed, you know. I did a dozen rosaries.

You can buy that living room set now.

Well, maybe, she said. We’d better wait a bit and see.

He was drunk that night and drunk on Sunday too but he started on Monday, walking across the avenue, carrying his thermos, joining the stream of men coming up from the subways. Even with his wooden leg, he walked in a different way when he had a job.

That night, he came home late, looking tired. I heated up some stew and started talking about the Dodgers, rehashing a column from the Eagle. The team was on its way north and would soon begin the season at Ebbets Field.

This year, they’ll go all the way, he said. Mark what I’m saying. All the way.

So I had discovered one of his passions. I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American; the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution. He loved Leo Durocher, who was the manager all through the war, and Eddie Stanky, the grizzled little second baseman. But now the war was over and here they were coming back to the ballfields: Pete Reiser and Pee Wee Reese and Carl Furillo and hundreds of others. The Dodger war veterans were joining the players who were Dodgers through the war years, Augie Galan and Ducky Medwick and Dixie Walker. The pitchers were Kirby Higbe, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Hank Behrman, Hugh Casey, Vic Lombardi. But Mickey Owen, who dropped the third strike in 1941, would not be back; he had run off to the Mexican League, like all those movie desperadoes who crossed the Mexican border ahead of the posse. It didn’t matter. He’s just a bad memory, my father said of Owen. I kept asking about Reiser, the outfielder they called Pistol Pete, the brilliant centerfielder who led the league in almost everything in 1941 but got hurt in 1942, crashing into the Ebbets Field wall, before going off to the navy. The Eagle was full of stories about him, his speed, his eye, his power, his immense heart.