Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

A few buildings away from ours, I met Mr. Dexter, a change clerk in the subway. He went to work before the morning rush hour and came home in early afternoon. Every afternoon in the good weather, he appeared on his roof to lift weights. Mr. Dexter was small and wore glasses, but his upper torso was ropy with muscle. I asked him if I could try lifting the barbell and he said sure. I was stronger than I thought I was. He showed me how to do curls and presses, how to adjust the bells with a small wrench, how to create daily routines of “reps,” the same exercise repeated dozens of times. Soon, I added weight lifting to the rhythm of my days.

At some point, I started going to the Police Athletic League gym on Eighth Street to watch the amateur fighters. Again, I saw how important repetition was to learning; on the floor, the fighters repeated the same punch over and over again, while time was chopped into three-minute segments by an automatic bell; then the punches were joined to others in combinations, with the flat-nosed paunchy trainer shouting his instructions: Jab, bend! Double the jab, bend! Now punch outta da bend! I was still too young for the boxing team, and too shy to insist (and afraid of getting hurt). But back home, alone on the roof, or crouched in front of the bedroom mirror, I would practice jabs and hooks and right hands. I would bend at the knees after the jab. I would double the jab and throw the right hand. All the while breathing hard through my nose, my mouth clamped shut into a hard mask.

On the street, boxing was as much a part of our talk as baseball. In the summer of 1946 everybody in New York was talking about Rocky Graziano, who was knocking out all comers. Rocky, the tough middleweight from the East Side, Rocky, who talked like a lot of the kids from Fox Lair Camp. But my father didn’t care much for Graziano. He fights little guys, he said. He’s the best middleweight in the welterweight division. Or put another way, he never fights anyone his own size. My father’s favorite was Willie Pep, a featherweight like himself, fast, fresh, audacious, a champion of the world. I was sure that if my father had legs, he’d box like Willie Pep.

But even Willie Pep wasn’t the best. One day, my father showed me a picture of a black fighter in the Daily News, handsome and slick and lean. That’s Sugar Ray Robinson, he said. He’s the greatest fighter who ever lived. There were no qualifications; he described Robinson in the same flat way he would use to describe Mount Everest as the highest mountain in the world.

How would he do against Graziano? I asked.

He would knock Graziano out in four rounds, he said flatly.

When they did fight years later, Robinson knocked out Graziano in three.

In the streets, we still played the now forgotten games of the New York summers. Stickball was the supreme game, a kind of tabloid version of baseball, played with a broom handle as a bat and a pink rubber ball manufactured by the A. G. Spalding Co. In every street in New York, this ball was called a spaldeen. The spaldeens had vanished during the war and the game was played for a while with hairy tennis balls, until even they had disappeared. But coming home from Fox Lair Camp, I felt a special excitement spreading through the neighborhood: Spaldeens are back!

From out of Unbeatable Joe’s and Rattigan’s and the other bars, the men and the veterans came piling into the streets again, taking our bats, once more playing the city’s greatest game, whacking spaldeens past trolley cars and over rooftops, running bases on heat-softened tar, making impossible catches, dodging trolley cars and trucks, almost delirious with joy. The war was over. The fucking war was finally over.

Stickball ruled us. On Saturday mornings, the older guys played big games against visitors from other neighborhoods or went off themselves to play beyond our frontiers. Money game! someone would shout, and suddenly we were all moving to the appointed court and the great noisy fiesta of the stickball morning. The players drank beer from cardboard containers on the sidelines and ate hero sandwiches and smoked cigarettes. They were cheered by neighbors, girlfriends, wives, and kids. And standing on the sidelines during those first games were the veterans, holding the spaldeens, bouncing them, smelling them in an almost sacramental way.

The men played on summer weekends; we kids played every day. There were still very few cars on the streets in that year after the war, so the “court” was always perfectly drawn, with sewer plates marking home and second base, while first and third were chalked against the curbs. The rules were settled before each game: one strike and you were out; off the factory wall or off a passing trolley car was a “hindoo” — which meant the play didn’t count. The great hitters could hit the ball at least “three sewers,” and it was said of Paulie McAleer of the Shamrock Boys that he once hit a ball an incredible five sewers. In memory, the games seem continuous and the days longer, richer, denser, and emptier than any others in my life. We did nothing and we did everything. You would wake, the radio playing, the rooms thick with the closed heat (and sometimes the sour smell of drink), grab something to eat — bread and butter covered with sugar, a piece of toast — and then race down the stairs, to burst into the streets. On a perfect Saturday in August, Twelfth Street would be wet from the water wagon, the air fresh, nobody else around, the tenements brooding in Edward Hopper light, and then a door would open and Billy Rossiter would appear with the bat and the spaldeen, and that was all we needed. We’d play off the factory walls until the others came down; we’d play ten hits a piece until there were enough players to choose up sides. And then we’d play until dark.

After stickball, or wedged between the ball games, there were other games too: kick the can, off the point, box ball and punchball, Johnny on the pony (Buck buck, how many borns are up), and the greatest of all: ring-o-Ievio.

One Saturday, we were playing ring-o-levio on Twelfth Street and one of the players on the other side was Frankie Nocera. He was a lean black-haired wild-tempered kid who lived in one of the corner tenements. A few years earlier, hitching a ride on a trolley car, he fell off and his foot went under a steel wheel; he lost the tip of his right foot and became known as No Toes Nocera. Winter and summer, he wore an ankle boot with a steel tip that replaced the missing toes. Because of my father’s leg, Frankie and I should have been friends. Frankie, after all, was a cripple. For some reason, he had become my nemesis, the way Dr. Sivana was the nemesis of Captain Marvel or the Joker of Batman. On Thirteenth Street, Brother Foppiano was my nemesis. Now, on Twelfth Street, it was No Toes Nocera. It must have had something to do with the great struggle between the Irish and Italians. Or maybe it was just chemistry.

Unlike Arnold, Frankie didn’t make me feel that I had opened a curtain and glimpsed Hell. But he was always there, pinching, leaning, nudging, harassing. I’d be playing marbles in the lot and he’d grab a peewee and walk off; if I went after him, he’d drop the marble, or roll it toward a sewer, and laugh. I’d be on a stoop after a game, reading a comic book, and he’d snatch at it, run away, force me into a losing tug-of-war over the comic, as if sensing that I wouldn’t risk tearing the cover. He’d squirt water pistols at me; he’d ask for a ride on a scooter and go off for an hour; he was one of those kids who was always grabbing your hat. He wasn’t bad. But he was a misery.

Naturally, when we played ring-o-levio, Frankie was on the opposing team. The rules of the game were as primitive as warfare. We divided ourselves into two teams, or sides. After a coin toss, one team went out, scattering around the immediate neighborhood, looking for hiding places. The second team would then hunt down the first, capturing each opponent and returning him to a pen whose walls were marked on the tarred street with chalk. The pen was called home. When the last man was captured, the sides switched roles, the hunters becoming the hunted. Imprisonment, however, wasn’t permanent. If you were one of the hunted, and could elude capture through guile or deception, you could make a sudden dash, race directly at the wall of defenders around the border of the pen, crash through them, shout the magical phrase Home free all! and liberate all members of your side. Most of the time it was impossible to breach the wall of defenders, who stood there with arms locked. But if you succeeded, it was a moment of sheer power and glory.