Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

The fuck you talkin’ about, man, Shitty Collins would say. They were sold out, man, by Truman and the commies in Washington.

No, they just stole the money we sent them, millions of dollars, and when they had to fight, they ran.

How do you know? Was you there?

No, I wasn’t there. But I tried to imagine Chiang’s troops at the docks, piling into boats, panicky and full of fear, while others were tearing off their uniforms, melting into the shadows, throwing down their guns; in my imagination, it was like some final packed and gorgeous panel of Terry and the Pirates. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was talking about in those sessions on the Totes; I was retailing opinions I had picked up from the Star or the Compass or the Post, all newspapers of the left. Since everybody in the Neighborhood swore by the Daily News or the Journal-American, I was going the other way. Against those newspapers. Against the pieties of the Neighborhood. Against the Church. Against my father.

I was lucky in these beery little debates because the others didn’t know what they were talking about either. It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow.

George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids.

Oney thing they respect is force.

That fuckin’ Rose-a-velt, he made a deal wit’ Stalin, let the Russians take Berlin, now look at the fuckin’ mess we’re in. .

The talk sputtered on into the night. Drinking beer on the Totes, arguing with my friends (or arguing at them), I sometimes even felt as if I understood how the world worked. I was that young. Even that September, when Truman announced that the Russians had tested an atom bomb, I thought that everything would be all right. If we each had the atom bomb, I reasoned, then nobody would ever start a war because nobody could win it. In the newspapers, there was great excitement: if the Russians had the atom bomb they must have stolen it from us. There must be spies everywhere, slipping our secrets to them. Some columnists pointed out that the Russians also had former Nazi scientists working for them, the way we did, and maybe they didn’t have to steal anything. Most of the guys couldn’t have cared less about politics or communism; they were more angry with the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees in five games in the 1949 World Series, than they were with anyone on the other side of the planet. They didn’t care that Dean Acheson had replaced George Marshall as secretary of state; they were wondering whether Dotty Long’s tits were real. Almost all of this talk was just riffs in the night. The wars were over. None of this distant bullshit would ever directly affect us. Even the air raid drills, the warnings about the Bomb, the bombardment of Moscow with Hail Marys, even the Fall of China, couldn’t convince us that these matters had anything to do with our lives. Pass the cardboard, Jake, I’m thirsty. . When we got bored with politics (which was quickly), we went on to baseball or what we all called pussy.

I hear Naomi puts out.

Who?

Naomi, from down Seventeenth Street. I hear she does it.

Who you hear that from?

Harry from the Parkview, you know him? Lives down Seeley Street? Tells me she does it for quarters. .

Then, on my fifteenth birthday, June 24, 1950, everything shifted again. That Saturday, seven divisions of North Korean troops and 150 North Korean tanks crossed the 38th parallel in an invasion of South Korea.

THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS told the story of the invasion in a sketchy way. They made clear that there was a crisis. President Truman was flying back to Washington from a vacation in Independence, Missouri, while General MacArthur was huddling with his staff at his headquarters in Tokyo. The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council. But that Sunday morning, up at the Totes, nobody talked about war. This wasn’t another Pearl Harbor; it was some distant battle between Koreans, a kind of civil war, nothing to do with us. Our war ended in August 1945. Around noon, we got on the Coney Island trolley car, picking up transfers to the Neptune Avenue line, and we went to the beach.

In the summer of 1950, all of us from the Neighborhood hung out in a place on Coney Island called Oceantide. Built on the boardwalk at Bay 22, it was a block-long complex with a swimming pool, lockers, a long packed bar, and a small fenced-off area where the young men danced with the young women to a bubbling Wurlitzer jukebox. Down the block was a shop called Mary’s, which sold the most fabulous hero sandwiches in New York, great thick concoctions of ham and cheese and tomatoes laced with mustard or mayonnaise, along with cases of ice cold sodas. Out on the beach we gathered on blankets placed like islands in the sand. One of the Big Guys always had a portable radio, and the music drifted across the hot afternoon as we drank beer and watched the girls lather themselves with suntan oil. Off to the right as we faced the sea was a walled development called Sea Gate, mostly Jewish, the place where Isaac Bashevis Singer came to live in 1935 when he arrived from Poland. And down on Surf Avenue, a block from the beach, there were two Irish bars where everyone did their serious drinking.

On that first Sunday of the Korean War, the older guys were laughing and drinking with their girlfriends on the blankets when there was a sudden roar. From out of the pack, a young man named Buddy Kiernan came running and laughing. He was naked. The others had pulled off his bathing suit and now he was grabbing at blankets and dancing around and the girls were giggling and blushing and the guys yawping and then Buddy Kiernan began to run to the sea. People stood up on all the blankets, watching Buddy run, his black hair wild, his legs pumping, his balls and penis bobbing, until he dived into the surf.

To great cheers.

I thought: I’ll remember this all my life.

We all got drunk that day, the younger guys sharing the wild exuberance of the Coney Island summer and the glorious performance of Buddy Kiernan. I fell asleep on the cold dark sand under the boardwalk, and when I woke up, everybody was gone. My mouth felt coarse. There was a sour smell to my body that I couldn’t erase with the salt of the sea. I went home alone on the trolley car, wondering about the war.