Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

On this day, I was the last man out. I had evaded all my pursuers and then, gathering strength on the slope above Seventh Avenue, I started my run for home. I dodged left, feinted right, zigzagged, and twirled, never stopping; saw the crowd of defenders guarding home, under the lamppost in front of Mr. Dix’s house; saw my side waiting inside the pen, all of them tensing, the defenders crouching, then stepping forward, Frankie Nocero among them; saw them forming a human wall; saw them getting larger as I came closer. And then I leaped, high and strong, feeling that I could fly, saw a blur of bodies and faces, rammed into shoulders and elbows and torsos, and was through! Shouting Home free all!

My side scattered into freedom. I whirled to escape. And then saw Frankie Nocero rising from the tangle of defenders. Saw Frankie’s eyes wide in rage. Saw him coming at me. Then felt a numbness in my face as a punch hit my nose, then a sharp pain on the side of my head as he threw another.

I backed up, numb, my ears ringing, the world suddenly filmy, and he threw another punch and missed, and someone yelled Right hand. I threw the right hand and hit him. Then threw it again, and missed. And again, and hit him, still backing up, Frankie making a snorting sound, his teeth bared, his hair all spiky. Someone else yelled: Jab, jab, use da jab. Then I remembered the PAL gym, and Graziano, and the pictures of Sugar Ray, and I raised my hands in the boxer’s stance; and when Frankie came at me again I speared him with a jab and threw a right hand behind it. For the first time in my life I heard cheers. A crowd was now gathering. I saw them as a blur, a presence, heads and bodies and no faces; but they were there, and they made the fight even more important. I couldn’t be humiliated in front of a crowd; I couldn’t run; I absolutely could not cry. I remember coiling into an almost ferocious concentration. I jabbed and hit Frankie, and jabbed again, then feinted the jab and threw the right hand and amazingly, Frankie went down. I went down on top of him, battering him with punches, until he started screaming Stop stop I give up stop okay stop.

I got off him then, rising slowly, my hands still fists, afraid of a trick, and then heard more cheers, and suddenly my brother Tommy was there and Billy Rossiter and Billy Delaney and they were hugging me and clenching fists in approval and then I saw the crowd of men outside of Unbeatable Joe’s and they were clapping and laughing before going back to the bar. I had fought a street fight and won. Not with kids from camp whom I’d never see again. Here at home. On the court. In the Neighborhood. And men cheered. I hoped they would tell my father what I’d done.

Then I saw Frankie Nocera walking into his building. He was holding his face. There was blood all over the front of his shirt. Very red blood. He was absolutely alone, limping on that gimpy foot. I started to go to him, suddenly feeling sorry for him. I wanted to be gracious, the way winning prizefighters were after boxing matches. But Frankie vanished into the dark hallway. We all went to Sanew’s then and bought bottles of Frank’s Orange or Mission Bell Grape, drinking them greedily, passing them around. Soda had never tasted better. And someone said, That Frankie, be needed a good fuckin’ beating and you sure give it to him. But even in triumph, something bothered me about the fight.

The next day I saw Frankie again. He was sitting alone on his stoop. Both eyes were hidden behind pads of swollen purple flesh; his nose was thick and crooked. My brother Tommy told me later that Frankie had to go to the hospital because his nose was broken. So I went to him, my mind a confusion of power and pity, a bit nervous that he would lash out at me with the steel toes or come up with a knife.

I didn’t want the fight, Frankie, I said. You started it.

Fuck it, he said sadly, with a little wave of his hand.

Let’s forget about it, I said.

He looked at me as if knowing that he would never forget about it and neither would I.

Come on, I said. We’ll go read comics.

He stared at me for a long moment and then got up, and we walked off to look at stories of heroes and perils in a simpler world.

ON SUNDAYS, the family sometimes went visiting. That’s what it was called: visiting. You went to someone else’s house and brought along some cold cuts or Italian bread or beer and entertained each other. We almost always went to visit my father’s relatives; my mother had friends but no relatives in America. After Mass, the whole family would walk down to Fifth Avenue, still dressed in Sunday best, and get on the trolley and rattle out to Bay Ridge to see Uncle Tommy or Uncle Davey, Aunt Louie or Aunt Nellie, and all my cousins. We couldn’t play in the street because we were in our good clothes; but visiting wasn’t play to us, it was a show. There would be food and drink and singing in the parlor. And here, as in the bars, my father was always the star. The kids were called upon to perform too, singing songs or reciting poems. I was too shy to sing; how could I compete with my father? But every time we went visiting, I was asked that most awful question: What Are You Going to Be When You Grow Up? And during that crowded year, I started answering: a cartoonist.

Usually, they would laugh and someone would get paper and a pencil and ask me to draw something, and I would be forced to draw in a state of anxiety that was worse than fighting Frankie Nocera. I gave them Dick Tracy. Or Flattop. Or Batman. They were the easiest, the faces I could draw without copying. And they would laugh and say, That’s good, Peter, and then I was free, off the stage, released, and I could ease away from their attentions.

But I was telling the truth. That summer when I was eleven, I first conceived the idea of becoming a cartoonist. There wasn’t any special moment that I remember, no Shazam-like bolt of explosive insight that told me this. The ambition was, I suppose, tentative at first, whispered, a wish in the dark while the trolley cars ding-dinged through the night. But going back to Simon and Kirby and Captain America, I had learned that comics were written and drawn by men and those men were paid very well for their work. The money wasn’t the most important thing; it was something else: they were being paid for doing what they loved to do. My father had a job, and he was paid. But he wasn’t working at something he liked. Nobody paid men to drink in saloons.

The focus of my fantasy was Milton Caniff, who was in his last year drawing and writing Terry and the Pirates. Suddenly, I got it. The locale was something that my grandfather must have known: the coasts, rivers, plains, and mountains of southern China. I identified with Terry Lee, the blond young pilot. I wished I could talk as fast as the wisecracking Hot Shot Charlie, with his red hair, freckles, Boston accent, corncob pipe, and flight cap worn with a swagger on the back of his head. I wanted to have someone around who was like Pat Ryan or Flip Corkin, a guy who knew the world and could show me how to live in it.

There was something else: Caniff’s women put me in a kind of fever. Every one of them exuded a lush sexuality that no other cartoonist has ever matched and did so without ceasing to be a specific individual. They weren’t just pinups. Not one of them was a doormat. Every one of them made her way through the world of men without complaint. There was Burma, all blond and shimmering, like women in the thirties movies at the Minerva, a mixture of Sadie Thompson and Jean Harlow, always singing the “St. Louis Blues,” sometimes for money and sometimes for love, always smoking, tough with bad guys, soft on Pat Ryan, burning brightly in Terry’s life for a while then abruptly vanishing, only to turn up again in some other exotic Asian port. And even larger, grander, more powerful, was the Dragon Lady, Caniff’s most famous creation. Sleek black hair framed her oval Dolores Del Rio face with its almond eyes and high Eurasian cheekbones, the eyebrows reduced to fine lines that lay angrily on her face like tiny daggers. Usually the Dragon Lady wore a scarlet cape and under the cape, in fancy gowns or military trousers, she had the full-breasted body of a million wet dreams. The Dragon Lady was not only beautiful; she was often evil — venomous, treacherous, violent — and in a dark and scary way, that made her even more desirable to me.