Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

When no one was looking, I lifted a half-full glass off the kitchen table and retreated through the rooms. There were people in all the rooms, but they didn’t notice me. I went into the Little Room and locked the eye hook on the door. I stared at the glass, overwhelmed by the sense of the forbidden. But I needed to move into this unknown place, to cross this line, to see the back of this grown-up cave. I took a sip.

The taste repelled me. It was sour, even bitter. The smell was vile as the glass passed under my nose when I sipped. But this couldn’t be all there was to drinking beer. If it was, why did anyone do it? I took another sip, then a third, expecting some powerful charge, some magical transformation, like the changes wrought by magical potions in the comic books. But nothing happened. Someone knocked on the door.

Who’s in there? someone said; the voice sounded like that of my cousin Billy.

Me, I said. I’ll be right out.

I finished the glass in one long gulp, belched, waited, hid the glass beside the bed, and left the Little Room. Nothing seemed different. The party roared on. But as I moved through the rooms, I did feel a kind of tingle. It was probably not from the drink. But I was sure that with one action I had changed. I had taken my first drink of beer. And I had done something that I could not reveal to my mother.

Back in the kitchen, nobody realized I’d been gone. My cousin Billy was down in the street with his sister Marie; so were Tommy and Kathleen. The singing got louder. Then, at one point, my father almost dropped Brian. My mother took the baby and handed him to me.

Don’t let your father have him, she said. Not while he’s drinking.

At dusk that Saturday, I sat in a big chair in the living room with Brian in my arms while my father once more delivered “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” As always, the whole crowd joined in the last lines about leaving it all to Providence and Paddy McGinty’s goat. But I gazed out the window, thinking about the waterfront dives I’d seen in movies and ports along the Amazon and lost cities in Yucatan, and I imagined myself coming to those places, standing at the bar in some forsaken outpost and ordering drinks like a man. Someday I’d do that. Someday.

AT THE END of June, a few days after my eleventh birthday, school ended and so did my job with the Eagle. Danno told me that people were canceling their subscriptions because of the Depression (for that’s what everybody called it now in the Neighborhood). To make things worse, some of the other readers, the ones with a lot of money, were going off on summer vacations. In the fall, he said, he could hire me again. If the Depression ended. He would even recommend that I be given my own route.

Thanks, kid, said Danno Kelly, and I’ll see you after Labor Day.

I was heartbroken. It wasn’t just that I would no longer be earning money, but after four long months, I had grown used to the routine, hauling my Eagle bag over my shoulder each day and walking alone up the hill, delivering newspapers. That job gave me an identity; I wasn’t just an American, an Irish Catholic, a student, a son, a brother; I was an Eagle boy. Now that identity was gone. For those months, I had given my all to the Brooklyn Eagle, my work and my loyalty, and now it had rejected me. Without that job, I understood how my father must have felt when they laid him off at Arma.

But I had little time to mourn. My mother told me that she had enrolled me for summer camp. The camp was sponsored by the Police Athletic League out of the 72nd Precinct, and it was up in the Adiron-dacks in the north of New York State. I’d be gone for three weeks.

This was fabulous news: an adventure, a trip into the unknown, far from Brooklyn. One morning, my mother took me to a Trailways bus station in New York, where I joined a group of other kids for the journey north. She kissed me good-bye, telling me to write. But as the bus pulled out, and I saw her waving at me from the platform, she seemed sad, even tearful. And I wanted to get up, rush to the front, get off the bus, and hurry back to Brooklyn.

But it was too late. The bus groaned and turned a corner, its engines making a gassy gargling sound, and my mother and the bus station vanished from view. I settled back, tense, guarded, looking at no one, thinking: At last, I am off on an adventure. I am leaving home to see the world.

The camp was nestled in a green valley between mountains. We lived in tents large enough for eight cots. The floors were wooden platforms. In the center of the tents was the main building, made of logs, where the kitchen was and where the counselors lived. Along one side of the camp, a cold clear stream moved swiftly over a bed of smooth stones. On the other side, deep piney woods climbed abruptly into the foothills. From a distance, the place seemed like paradise.

Up close, Fox Lair Camp was much more complicated than any paradise. I met poor boys from the great city beyond the borders of the Neighborhood: Italians from Red Hook and Bensonhurst; blacks from distant Harlem and mysterious Bedford-Stuyvesant; Jews out of Brownsville and the Lower East Side; “Spanish” kids from East Harlem and the Bronx. It was like one of those scenes from a desert movie, where the Red Shadow sends out his call and from all points of the horizon, groups of fighting men rally to his summons. Nobody had summoned these kids, of course, but they all told wild tales of fighting and robbing, knifing and shooting. They knew about all the great gangsters, from Lepke Buchalter to Al Capone. They’d seen blood and bodies. Or so they said. I thought Twelfth Street was pretty tough, but these kids made me feel like some sheltered boy.

On the first day, as I unpacked my small cloth bag and shoved it under my mattress, I was forced to fight. It was like a scene in a dozen movies. A kid named Cappy came over to me.

Whatta you? he said.

Whatta you mean, what am I?

You a Jewboy? A Mick? A guinea like me? What are you?

American, I said.

You a fucking wise guy or what? I ast you what the fuck you are.

American, I said. Irish American.

I shoulda figured dat, he said. A fuckin’ Mick. ’Ey, who cut your fuckin’ hair, Mick? Tonto?

I tried to ignore him, afraid of him, afraid of a fight, and he stepped between me and the cot.

I’m tawkin’ to you, he said.

For a moment, I was riddled with fear. This was like the first day in 1A, mixed up with Brother Foppiano, who was also Italian American. Worse, I thought I saw something cold and heartless in Cappy’s glistening brown eyes. Then, I knew that if I let him beat me up, the three weeks in Fox Lair Camp would be a long humiliation.

I don’t want to talk to you, I said.

Zat so?

He pushed me and I fell back a few feet and then lunged at him. I punched him and kicked him and punched him again, and he careened out through the tent opening onto the dirt path. And then the counselor was there. He was tall, tanned, thick-bodied, with hairy arms and the attitude of a cop.

Hey, come on, what is this? he said, getting between us.

Nothing, I said.

Cappy was up now. He had a surprised look on his face.

We wuz just foolin’ around, he said.

Yeah, I said. Just kidding.

Kid around some other way, the counselor said. I’m in charge of this tent and I don’t want any fighting. Got me?

Cappy shrugged.

Now shake hands, the counselor said. The voice of authority.

Cappy held back. So did I. I had a strange feeling, as if I were part of this scene but also watching it from outside.

I gotta tell you twice? the counselor said. Shake bands!

So we shook hands. And when the counselor was gone, Cappy asked me my name and told me his and we went together to dinner. He made me laugh, with his rowdy talk and thick Brooklyn accent, and when the conversation turned to comics, and he talked on and on about Captain America and the Red Skull and Dr. Sivana and Hawkman, we became friends.