Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

That gave me a delicious sense of joy. I could drink until I got drunk because it was someone else’s fault. If I downed too many beers, it was my father’s fault; if I staggered, it was his fault; if I fell down in the grass in the park: it was his fault. The son of a bitch. I didn’t say any of this to the other guys. I kept thinking of Bogart in Casablanca, sitting at the bar in a pool of bitterness, drinking his whiskey. I would be like that. I would just drink, quietly and angrily, and say nothing. Sitting on the Totes, with the others laughing and grab-assing around me, I sipped the beer, telling myself that I enjoyed the taste. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to clean up the mess I’d made with the ink. I didn’t want to confront my father or explain to my mother. I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that.

ONE FRIDAY in that spring of 1949, I opened an envelope in the hall of 378 and discovered that I’d won a scholarship to Regis High School. Another boy in my class, Bob McElynn, had won too; four of us had taken the examination together. Regis was a Jesuit school across the river in Manhattan and was said to be the most elite of the city’s Catholic high schools. Nobody at Holy Name had ever made it into Regis until McElynn and I did it, and all across that weekend, wondering if I should accept the prize that I’d won, I was happy, pleased, and scared.

The fear was caused in part by the relentless pressure of conformity in the parish. Most of the other boys were going on to Bishop Loughlin or St. Michael’s, to Xavier or LaSalle; a few went to Brooklyn Tech; many went to Manual Training, the public high school on Seventh Avenue and Fifth Street. If I went to Regis, I’d be separating myself from all of them. They would walk to school while I took three subway trains to get from my part of Brooklyn to Eighty-fifth Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Park Avenue! Just the name of the street was a symbol of some other, rarefied existence in the region of the very rich. If the school really was an elite school, then I’d be declaring myself part of that elite. I didn’t want to join any elite. I wanted to live my life. But the choice of a high school also might have something to do with the way I lived that life. Regis was a prep school; that is, it prepared you for college. But I had never met anyone from the Neighborhood who’d gone to college. Not one. College was for rich kids, not for people from Brooklyn. Or so I thought. Besides, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw, to go to art school. Why should I prep for a school that I would never attend? Why not prep for art school? But in bed one night on that weekend after receiving the acceptance letter, I thought: Milton Caniff went to Ohio State. Maybe I could go to college and be a cartoonist. And besides, wasn’t a cartoonist part of an elite? Wouldn’t that profession separate me from my friends, from the Neighborhood, from everybody I now knew? Maybe separation was just inevitable.

So I decided to go to Regis, the Good Boy momentarily triumphing over the Bad Guy. The school was rigorous, severe, the teachers dedicated to excellence. I loved Latin, prepared by my years as an altar boy to hear the sounds and rhythms of the language. But there was something else involved: a sense of working on secret codes, discovering the meanings of strange words that linked me to the distant past.

But I couldn’t get algebra. It was too abstract, plotless, without narrative or time. I learned enough to pass and nothing more. I was reasonably good in English, bored by grammar, excited by putting stories on paper. It says something about the way difficulty puts its mark on consciousness that I can remember the algebra teacher now, his reddish hair, dry humor, even his name: Purcell. I remember nothing of the English or Latin teachers.

But I do remember another teacher, a heavy-set man in his thirties, who taught the first class after lunch. His face was always glazed with sweat, even when the windows were open to the cold winter air. He was looser and funnier than the others, and one afternoon I understood why. He came in, laughed, started writing on the blackboard, and then seemed to freeze. He turned and hurried out. Someone shouted: He’s drunk! And so he was. Even here, among the elite of Regis, there were drunks. I laughed with the others, but when the man returned, his face ashen, his eyes wet and rheumy, I felt only pity. I wondered if he had children who wanted to love him.

I wasn’t very happy at Regis. I used to think it was the school’s fault, that somehow I was a clumsy social fit among a group of upper-class kids. That wasn’t it at all. There was actually a leveling democracy of merit at Regis; some of the kids were poor, most were middle class, a few were rich; but no boy could buy his way into the school. You had to pass the test, just as McElynn and I had. There were constricting rules: a dress code, an obsession with punctuality, an assignment of privilege to the boys in the upper grades. But the school wasn’t riddled with problems of money and class.

My own problems at Regis were more complicated than the clichéd case of a poor kid thrown in with better-off boys. For the first time, I was in a classroom where everybody else was as smart as I was and many were smarter. That was a new experience to me. I couldn’t just sit there and pay attention and come out with decent grades. I had to work. But there were a number of distractions that made it hard for me to do the schoolwork at the level that Regis demanded. The distractions all flowed from the Neighborhood. I was still working after school and on Saturdays at the grocery store, to pay for the subway and lunch; I couldn’t stay at Regis after school, join the school clubs, play ball in the gym, try to work for The Owl, the school newspaper. When the bell rang to end the final period, I had to leave for work. At Holy Name, the kids in my class were the same kids I played with after school or on weekends; at Regis, I almost never saw the other boys after school, not even McElynn or two boys from the adjoining parish of St. Saviour’s, Jim Shea and John Duffy. We were friendly, we talked, we joked, we traveled together on the subway and sometimes worked together on homework; but we weren’t friends in that deep mysterious way that marks true friendships.

So I felt disconnected from the school. More than ever, I wanted to be with my friends up at the Totes. I was in a growing fever of adolescent sensuality, trying to find an outlet beyond masturbation, trying to get a girl who would go with me to a bush or a rooftop or the ink-black balcony of a movie house. I saw tits in geometry classes and asses in history and wondered if Julius Caesar was getting laid while he wrote his account of the Gallic Wars. During the Regis years, I was into a harder contest of wills with my father. Now he was sneering at my idea of becoming a cartoonist. You’d better start thinking about something real. You’d better think about the cop’s test or the firemen or the Navy Yard. . I preferred his indifference to his flat-out opposition. And as the first year at Regis ended, I was drinking in a more sustained way.

While drinking at the Totes, I asserted myself more often about politics, religion, and sports. In a way, it was simply verbal showing off; I didn’t say as much in the courtyard at Regis, afraid, I suppose, that I’d be challenged by the kids who were smarter than I was. Safe in Brooklyn, I said out loud that it was ridiculous that Alger Hiss was on trial or that Communist party leaders were being sent to jail. How could this be a free country if you couldn’t be free to be a Communist? To which someone would say: Whatta you? A fuckin’ commie too? And I’d say No, but in America you’re supposed to be free to be anything, right? In May 1949, the armies of Mao Tse-tung finally won the civil war in China, driving Chiang Kai-shek and his broken troops into permanent exile in Formosa. The newspapers were hysterical. On the radio, Gabriel Heatter told us once more that there was bad news tonight. Up at the Totes, I mouthed off about how Chiang was a thief, his regime corrupt, his soldiers cowardly.