Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

After that, we fell into the rhythms of the days in camp: Softball, where I learned I could hit; footraces; nature walks; swimming and fishing in the stream. I loved the early mornings before breakfast, when the grass sparkled with dew. The nights were rowdier. There were assemblies around a roaring campfire, with sparks rising into the air to die in the dark, and songs made popular by the Sons of the Pioneers. “Cool Water” and “The Streets of Laredo.” While the city boys shouted, cursed, whispered, and fought, while they squirmed and scratched and slapped at mosquitoes, while they bragged about the many beers they’d drunk back home and the gangsters they knew and the women they’d “boffed” or “humped,” the poor counselors tried to get them to sit still for The Song of Hiawatha.

But I loved those campfires, the primitive sense they gave me of having a center, combined with the eerie feeling that I’d been there before, on an ancient battlefield or in Indian camp or on the edge of some lost city. Most of all, I was thrilled to be part of the crowd, sitting in the dark among the rough tribes of New York. Thrilled. And envious. And a little afraid.

The fear grew more specific when I came to know a black kid from our tent. His name was Arnold and he was from Bed-Stuy. He was small, taut, with skin the color of tea with milk, and hazel eyes that made him look both feminine and sinister.

Arnold was a steady presence at Fox Lair Camp, though he seemed also capable of vanishing as swiftly as Invisible Scarlet O’Neill. I don’t remember him playing ball, fishing, swimming, hiking along mountain trails. But there he was at breakfast, using the word “motherfucker” in every other sentence, explaining “cocksucker,” making detailed diagrams on writing paper of the mechanics of sex. As he walked across the field between the tents and the commissary, words like “cunt” and “pussy” would fall from his lips, followed by “muff diver” and “cunt lapper.” Even Cappy was both enthralled and mystified.

At dusk one day, Arnold motioned us into the woods. We disappeared behind a screen of bushes and Arnold reached into a hole burrowed in the roots of a tree. He removed a dirty quart bottle of red wine.

Where’d you get that? I asked.

Found it.

Where?

In the kitchen.

He looked at us with those eyes, a sly smile on his face, and removed the cork. He took a sip and handed it to Cappy. Without a word, Cappy took a swig. Then it was my turn. I didn’t want wine. I wanted to sit beside the campfire and watch the sparks merge with the stars. But this was a kind of dare, like that time on the roof with the Bottomless Pit. If I didn’t take a swig, they’d think I was a kid, a scaredy cat, a momma’s boy, a sissy.

So I took a drink, holding the wine in my mouth as I passed the bottle to Arnold. I hoped I could spit it out while the other two weren’t looking. But Arnold was staring at me, judging me. I swallowed the wine. Arnold grinned. Cappy whispered: Not bad. Arnold took another sip. Cappy talked about how his grandfather from Italy made his own wine, putting all the grapes in a big vat and jumping on them with his bare feet.

Arnold said: The motherfuckin’ wine must taste like fuckin’ feet.

Cappy said: No, no, it tastes fuckin’ great. I had some at my cousin’s wedding.

Arnold took a third swallow and passed the bottle to Cappy. My mouth felt sticky.

Cappy said: Not bad, Arnold, not motherfuckin’ bad.

They giggled. The bottle came to me again. I took my swig, swallowed, handed the bottle to Arnold. The sense of the forbidden flooded through me again. My father had once said to me, The wino is the lowest form of man, except for an informer. Would I become a wino if I kept drinking? Was drinking wine a mortal or a venial sin? And how could it be a sin at all? At every Mass, the priests drank wine. The blood of Jesus, they told us. How could it be a sin in the woods and a virtue on an altar? The bottle came around again and I drank once more of the blood of Jesus.

Then Arnold produced a cigarette. A Camel. My father’s brand. He lit it with a wooden match, snapping off the head just the way my father did during the match shortage, the way I never could. Arnold took a drag, handed it to Cappy, who did the same and passed it to me. I was listening for the sounds of counselors or other kids, afraid of being discovered.

Don’t slob it, Cappy said as I took the cigarette. Don’t get it wet wit’ spit.

I took a tense drag. The smoke made my head balloon. I started to cough, and Arnold looked around toward the camp, alarmed. But I didn’t slob the cigarette. I handed it to Arnold and said with confidence: Pass me the wine.

I took a slug, the cough stopped, but I never had another sip. Someone was crashing through the woods. Arnold capped the bottle, slipped it under the roots, then tamped out the cigarette.

Anybody in there? a grown-up voice said.

Yeah, Arnold replied. We looking for snakes.

Do that some other time. We’re roasting marshmallows.

So off we went to the marshmallow roast, looking, I suppose, like kids off a brotherhood poster.

In the first few days that followed the night of the wine, I found reasons to avoid the hideout in the woods. I was playing softball. I was swimming. I was picking wild strawberries. Arnold just stared at me with a thin smile on his face, as if he knew how much I wanted to return to the wine and the cigarettes, to the forbidden, to the secret life of the outlaw. I was desperate now for things to read, starved for the alternate lives of fantasy and imagination that had become part of my days; there were no books or newspapers in the camp.

But Arnold was weaving another world of fantasy for all of us in the tent. Sometimes he bragged about the number of times he had been drunk and how many times he’d smoked reefer, a kind of cigarette that made you feel real good. He described the taste of rum, of whiskey, of bourbon, beer, and wine. He described roaring parties, wild music, amazing adventures in the nights of motherfucking Brooklyn. One evening, he smuggled another bottle of wine into the tent and we all took swigs. It tasted better this time, like thick grape juice.

And when he wasn’t describing his greatness as a drinker, Arnold’s subject was sex. He told us that he fucked lots of women, all over his neighborhood. Fat ones, skinny ones, girls with big asses and tits. He even fucked his older sister once when she was drunk. That was the best way to fuck a woman. Get her drunk first. Wine and kisses. That was the way.

Arnold also led the way to one of the great astonishments of Fox Lair Camp: masturbation. I wasn’t the only boy in that tent who was ignorant of the practice. Once again, the devil’s agent was Arnold, age eleven. One night, after lights out, as we all shifted in our cots to find comfortable positions, Arnold spoke from the darkness.

Hey, why don’t we have a circle jerk?

Cappy said: A what?

Arnold said: We get in a circle and jerk off.

One kid said: Wuz dat?

A couple of kids laughed in a knowing way. But Arnold was a determined pedagogue. He got up, dropped his shorts (which all of us wore to bed), and stood before the boy in the dim shimmer of leaking moonlight. Arnold held his small penis in his hand.

Watch me now, he said, and started playing with himself. Almost immediately, his penis got larger and harder.

Now you do it, Arnold said.

The boy did.

Now you go up and down like this, Arnold said.

The boy moved his hand up and down on his erection. Everybody else was silent.

Now, Arnold said, you think about some woman … you know, like Betty Grable or Rita Haywort’. She got big tits. She gotta big ass. And you on top of her, you stickin’ it in her, you in her big wet hairy pussy, you in her motherfuckin’ ass!