Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

None of it made any sense. So I carried my disbelief with me, even as an altar boy. I didn’t ask to be an altar boy; I was chosen by the brothers in the sixth grade. They probably believed that boys with good grades were also good Catholics; or perhaps they chose us only because we could remember all the Latin responses in the Mass. For whatever reason, I was drafted. But if anything, my time as an altar boy widened my separation from the Church. I learned the Latin; I got up on time every morning, winter and summer, draped my starched surplice over my arms and traveled up the hill to Holy Name. But from the beginning I felt part of a show, giving a rehearsed performance in which the lines never varied. I loved the sound of Latin, the roll of vowels, the way words changed according to their meaning; Latin was another code to be cracked. But even for the priests, it was all an act.

I did like some of the priests, particularly a kind man named Father Ahearn, and another named Father Kavanaugh, who said the fastest Mass in the parish, the Latin falling from his lips as if he were a tobacco auctioneer. But watching them get dressed in priestly garments or smoke cigarettes after Mass, being subjected to their scorn when I made a mistake, I saw them as human beings, not as officers in the army of Christ. I lost whatever sense of awe that I once felt during the Mass. They were men like other men.

At least one of them was like the men of Seventh Avenue, or like my father: a drunk. He had a sweet, smooth, baby’s pink face, and eyes without irises. Sometimes he staggered onto the altar. He often forgot some of the Latin, repeated other parts at least twice. His superiors seemed to know he had a problem and gave him the earliest, most sparsely attended Masses. Even at six-thirty in the morning, he was shaky, his breath reeking. The sight of him filled me with pity and anger. It was bad enough that he staggered around; he was forced by his work to do so before an audience. I was angry that nobody from the Church tried to save him from this humiliation.

There was another personal element to the ceremony of the Mass. Wine was central to the ritual. We were taught that during the Mass, bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ. As an altar boy, I held the wine cruets while the priest blessed them and then poured the sweetish liquid across his fingers during the Offertory. That was the “first act” of the Mass, the section when the priest offered up to God the wine and the small unleavened wafers called hosts. In the second act of the drama, the consecration, he transformed these banal elements, saying his magic words in Latin, holding the host up for all to see; it was the custom in Holy Name to hide one’s eyes and bow the head, refusing to look directly at the offered host because that little wafer had become God. Natives often did this in Tarzan movies, when facing their gods, and in Gunga Din, the murder cultists did the same with the image of Kali. Then the priest turned his back on the parishioners of Holy Name, ate the host, who was God, and washed Him down with the wine, or His blood. The more I learned, the more I thought that it was all very strange.

ON THE RADIO, there was a show called “Truth or Consequences.” The announcer would open in egg-shaped tones: You’ve gotta tell the truth or you’re gonna pay the consequences… The price for not telling the truth was usually a public humiliation.

But I couldn’t always tell the truth. Just as I couldn’t tell anyone that I didn’t believe in God, I couldn’t talk to many people about wanting to be a cartoonist. When I had my first cartoon published, in Ace Comics in 1949, on a page filled by young fans, I told nobody at Holy Name; I was afraid they’d think I was lording it over them. At the same time, I hated telling lies; even without God I had a sense of sin, and everything taught me that lying was a sin. So I learned to be silent about most of the deepest concerns in my life. On the street, I learned to be a tough guy, to curse, to tell jokes, to play ball. At home, and in my mind, I was someone else: more naive, more complicated, angrier, more romantic. I wanted to see the world, to be a man in that world, but a man cleansed of all stupidities. I didn’t want to be like my father. I didn’t want to be a drunk.

And yet drinking started to seem as natural to real life as breathing. I would hear my father and his friends weaving romantic tales of Prohibition, when they were young, and understood that when a country was made to live under a stupid law then the only way to defy that law was to do what it forbade; in that case, drinking. I heard Prohibition words like “rumdum” and “gin mill,” “speakeasy” and “needle beer,” and loved their bluntness, their bricklike shapes. The roguish way they came off the lips of the men made me want to talk that way too. Those words carried an additional glaze of meaning. The men used them like a code, one shared by members of an outlaw society. The Prohibition law had been passed by Protestants to curb the dreadful habits of the Catholic immigrants (or so they thought), and they had defied that law and won. In a way, I was a child of Prohibition, even though born two years after repeal.

Drinking seemed to be part of almost everything else, even politics. In 1948, Truman was running against Dewey, and in our neighborhood Dewey was despised. They laughed at him, at his size, his mustache, his prim image. In the New York Star, a cartoonist named Walt Kelly started drawing him like a bridegroom on a wedding cake. When Dewey’s monotonal midwestern voice came over the radio one evening, my father shouted: Shut that idjit off! And when I asked why Dewey made him so angry, he said: One good shot of whiskey and he’d be on his face on the floor.

That year, I started moving beyond the comics and the sports pages to the front of the newspaper; there was no war, but there was crime and politics. And my attention was focused by another event. In the used book stores of Pearl Street I made two additional discoveries: a run of a newsletter called In Fact by George Seldes, and Bill Mauldin’s Back Home. On Pearl Street, thirty issues of In Fact went home with me for sixty cents. I don’t remember anything from them except their format (which resembled the newsletter later published by I. F. Stone) and their suspicion of anything written in newspapers, in particular, newspapers published by Hearst. Mauldin’s book, which followed his masterpiece Up Front, made me think more sharply about politics. I loved Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, and their disdain for officers, regulations, rules; in the Up Front cartoons, they were hard-drinking, unshaven, probably bad-talking. But in Back Home, Mauldin was looking at the world after the war, the country to which Willie and Joe returned, the nation in which I lived. As he portrayed it, the United States was a country of fearful, ignorant men, bullies with slouch hats and paunches who worked for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even the name struck me as stupid; would the French have a committee on Un-French Activities? And what was an “American activity” anyway?

Reading Mauldin at thirteen, I felt an odd sense of merger; it was as if I had written these pages, as if I were saying these irreverent things about officers, right-wingers, war profiteers, conservative newspaper publishers, penthouse revolutionaries, professional veterans, and bigots and phonies of all stripes. I didn’t really understand some of what Mauldin was writing; but as I read and reread the book, the irreverent attitude felt natural to me. It was as if I’d picked up a glove, tried it on, and found a perfect fit.