Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

The place I chose was called Bartel-Pritchard Square, and it was more a circle than a square. Three different trolley lines converged here, turning around a center island before heading off to Coney Island, Mill Basin, or Smith Street. Off the square on one side were the two tall Corinthian columns that marked the entrance to Prospect Park; we called them the Totem Poles, or the Totes. They rose from cleanly carved granite bases, and in the evenings that spring, after work at the grocery store and after finishing my homework, I would walk up from Seventh Avenue and see the others and we’d gather around the bases, sitting on them, looking at girls, cursing, smoking, making jokes, and drinking beer. First, the Good Boy attended to his chores; then the Bad Guy went out into the evening.

That was when I really started drinking. There were a lot of us hanging around the Totes that spring and summer: Boopie Conroy, Shitty Collins, Mickey Horan, Vito Pinto, Jack McAlevy. Among my friends was a thin, handsome guy named Richie Kelly. He was smart and tough but he always seemed cautious about drinking. Later in the summer, I learned why. His father, Jabbo Kelly, was one of the public rummies, a small group of men who’d been thrown out of their homes and lived on the streets. They slept in the park, or in the subways. They were filthy and panhandled for wine money. There was no way that Richie could avoid seeing Jabbo, because the rummies were always around the park, but I never saw them talk. I admired the way Richie handled a fact of his life that would have shamed others. He was cool and indifferent. For a while, we were close. I thought that with any kind of bad luck, my father could join Jabbo Kelly on his aimless wanderings.

Richie was also our liaison to the older guys, who owned the benches in the center of the traffic island, across the street from the Totes. They played football together as the Raiders and fought occasional gang battles in Coney Island or in the park. Richie’s older brother, Tommy, was one of the Raiders. He was built like a safe and was a ferocious puncher but never went out of his way to fight. I never saw him talk to Jabbo either.

I don’t know who bought the beer, but it was around, in cardboard containers or quart bottles. At first I didn’t join in the drinking. It was as if I knew I would be crossing a line in some permanent way. But I didn’t make a big deal out of this; I just shrugged and passed on the offered bottle. Then one evening, all of us laughing and joking, a guy named Johnny Rose handed me a container, casually, easily, and I took a sip.

The first swallow triggered a vague remembrance of the beer I’d sipped when I was a little boy, and was accompanied by a yeasty smell I associated with Gallagher’s. I didn’t like the taste; unlike the sweet wine I’d drunk in the woods at Fox Lair Camp, the beer had a sourness to it. I passed the container to Boopie Conroy, who took a long swallow. After a while, it came back to me, I took another sip, and this time I picked up a repulsive odor that reminded me of my father’s breath when he was sleeping late on weekend mornings.

But as the beer kept coming around to me, I felt oddly proud of myself. The taste and smell didn’t matter as much as the act. I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to do — drinking under the legal age of eighteen. Just by drinking beer, I was a certified Bad Guy. If the police saw us, and caught us, we’d be in trouble. We stayed on the side of the Totes that faced the park, safe from the scrutiny of passing cars. But several times, I wandered out under the streetlight with my container in my hand. That spring night, and on later evenings in summer, when I had graduated from Holy Name, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be seen by one person: Brother Jan. I wanted him to come over to me. I wanted him to try to stop me from drinking. And then I would crash into him, I’d beat and batter him, I’d stomp him and kick his balls out his ass. He was bigger than I was, heavier, with a fullback’s neck; I didn’t care. I wanted to hurt him back. On my turf. On the street.

For the first time I began to experience a transformation that would later become familiar: the violent images grew larger in my head and everything else got smaller. It was as if the beer were editing the world, eliminating other elements, such as weather, light, form, beauty. I could hear talk bubbling around me from the others, random words colliding in my head, then a tightening of focus, the faces closest to me having the most solid reality. A few of us talked about Brother Jan and how we’d like to give him a good beating. But all sorts of other talk flew around the beer-tingling air: the Dodgers, the gangs, girls, prizefighters, the songs we heard on the radio.

There were no transistors yet, only clumsy portables, and nobody had one of them. We learned the songs at home, on WNEW’s “Make Believe Ballroom,” and a nighttime show called “Your Hit Parade.” Record sales were smaller then, songs remained in the top ten for months, and the words drilled themselves into memory. Most of the songs were junk. But I can still sing “Slow Boat to China” or “A (You’re Adorable)” or “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” On summer evenings, we’d take turns singing the new tunes, even imitating the singers. I could do a pretty fair Nat “King” Cole on “Nature Boy” and what I thought was a smashing Ray Bolger on “Once in Love with Amy” (right down to the arch laugh). I tried to do Billy Eckstine on “I Apologize” and failed; my voice just wasn’t deep enough. Above all others, we loved Frankie Laine; each of us could shout every verse of “Mule Train” and we worked hard to sound smoky, sultry, and knowing on “That’s My Desire.”

Up on the Totes, even while I was learning to like the taste of beer, I never mentioned cartooning. I never tried to discuss the books I was reading. I never let the Good Boy get in the way of the apprentice Bad Guy.

At first, I didn’t get drunk. Atleast I didn’t think I was getting drunk. I was always conscious of where I was. I always walked home and didn’t stagger (chewing gum or Sen-Sen so that my mother couldn’t smell the beer on my breath). I didn’t fall down inside the park to sleep, the way some of the others did. But I knew I was being changed. I talked more, postured as badly as all the others, tried on different attitudes as if they were suits. I watched the Raiders — we called them the Big Guys — and the way they dressed (in T-shirts and chino pants, in contrast to the pegged pants of Seventh Avenue) and the way they wore their hair (in crisp crew cuts, instead of the pompadours and sideburns of the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys), and I tried to look like that too. I liked the way they held their containers of beer, casually, firmly, passing them around in an open generous style.

I also watched the way they walked up to the Sanders with a girl on a Saturday night, paying for two, the girl waiting to the side, then taking the guy’s hand as they walked inside to the dark balcony. I wanted a girl too and had tried to talk to girls in my grade at Holy Name; they didn’t share classrooms with us but they were our age and knew the same songs we knew. In their presence, however, I felt clumsy and awkward, and the girls seemed always to be holding back some secret knowledge, exchanging glances with other girls, prepared to dismiss me with a sigh or some form of mockery. It was as if they knew more about me than I did. They certainly knew more about me than I knew about them. I kept hearing about periods and sanitary napkins and didn’t understand what any of it meant. I don’t think any of the other guys knew either, as they played at being Bad Guys on the Totes on those long summer evenings.

Then one evening that summer, I was home after dinner, drawing at the kitchen table. I had sketched a cartoon in light blue pencil and was drawing with a fine-haired brush, dipping into the Higgins india ink. My father came in. He was drunk and lurching and his eyes were opaque. He bumped into the kitchen table and my hand jerked, ruining a line. And I rose in a fury. I tore up the drawing and threw the ink bottle against the sink and stormed out. I couldn’t do this! I wanted to be a cartoonist and this drunk, my father, made it impossible! I hated him then, with a white, ear-ringing, boyish hatred, and my rage and hatred carried me to the Totes. Among my friends, I drank to get rid of something.