Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

By Monday, everybody was talking about Korea. We were in another war. It didn’t matter that there had been no direct attack on Americans. We were part of the United Nations. We might have to go. By Friday, the first American ground troops were on their way to the fighting.

It just goes on and on, my mother said one evening. Brian was now four. My newest brother, John, was less than a year old, crawling on the linoleum. They just keep on killing each other. There were no tears in her for this war. She didn’t weep at the news on the radio. She just crooned, in a sad way, It goes on and on.

By the Fourth of July, the mood of the Neighborhood had radically changed. It was clear now: the older guys were going off to the war in Korea. Truman was calling it a “police action,” but everybody else called it a war. If you were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you could be drafted. In August, the reserves were called up, including many men who had fought in World War II. The war would be tough; everybody said so; Seoul had fallen, the South Korean army was destroyed, and the American troops had poor equipment. If you went away, if you drew a number from the draft board that sent you to Korea, you might die.

That summer, Buddy Kelly died in Korea. He was the oldest son of the Kellys at 471 Fourteenth Street and had been on garrison duty in Japan when he was called up. One evening, I saw his brothers, Billy and Danny, sitting with his mother and father on the stoop where we’d all once lived. They sat in absolute silence, and I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t even remember Buddy clearly. I kept walking. What could I say? That Buddy Kelly had died for his country? He died for someone else’s country. Could I say he was a good man and a great American? I barely knew him. He was one of us, part of the tribe, a man of the Neighborhood; but we never got to know him.

Now there was a lot more drinking, everywhere: in the park, in the bars, at the beach. But the tone had changed. The feeling of mindless exuberance gave way to urgency, even desperation. Every weekend there was another going-away party, and you saw weeping girls walking in pairs as another boy went off to basic training or boot camp. Over the next two years at Holy Name, there were a lot of weddings and too many funerals: the bridegrooms were in uniform and the coffins were draped with flags.

When I went back to Regis in the fall, my mind was scrambled. In the yard, we talked a lot about the war. Many boys had brothers who had been drafted or called up. Almost everybody thought that communism had to be stopped. At the same time, they were attacking Truman and Acheson, blaming them for the war. I tried to make sense of this. If it was important to fight the communists, and Truman and Acheson were fighting them, why were they wrong?

The Red Scare didn’t dominate Regis the way it did the Neighborhood. But I do remember seeing a Catholic comic book that showed communist mobs attacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And there was an extended discussion of a papal encyclical called Atheistic Communism. The Church expressed itself in other ways. In the Journal-American, and other friendly forums, Cardinal Spellman, chubby and pink-skinned, kept warning about how America was in danger of destruction at the hands of the communists, those in Russia, those at home. In the Daily News, there were frantic warnings about pinkos, fellow travelers, New Dealers, and liberals. And even in Regis, where Jesuitical irony and skepticism generally prevailed, I started to hear a lot of favorable talk about the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Because we still couldn’t afford television, I didn’t see the way McCarthy moved and talked until much later. But I saw Herblock’s cartoons in the Post, in which an unshaven McCarthy, his brows kissing in a thuggish way, often worked in tandem with another unshaven character who kept climbing out of sewers: a senator from California named Richard Nixon. Cardinal Spellman loved them both.

In that second year at Regis, my allegiance to the Catholic Church ended. It was bad enough that I didn’t believe in God; I thought for a while that I might come around, like Ignatius Loyola himself did, the man who had committed all the sins of the world back in the sixteenth century, before undergoing a conversion and founding the Jesuits. Maybe I would get religion the way I finally got Terry and the Pirates. But McCarthy and Spellman finished me off. They merged with Brother Jan to create a collective image of a bullying, intolerant Catholicism that repelled me. If they were the heroes of the Catholic Church, I wanted nothing to do with it. And that deepened my feeling of unease and disconnection at Regis.

The school, of course, couldn’t be separated from the other parts of my life. With three brothers and a sister now at home, I had endless trouble working at my cartooning; it was difficult even to get homework done, sharing the kitchen table with Tommy and Kathleen. Worse, because there were now seven mouths to feed, we were even poorer. The boys at Regis were not rich, but they wore creased trousers and neat jackets and ties; I had to shuffle together the clothes I wore. I was now taller and heavier than my father, so I couldn’t wear any of his clothes; my brothers were younger than I was, so I couldn’t borrow theirs. My mother did her best. She took me to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side and bought cheap clothes; she set up time payments to get me slacks at Belmont’s on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. But the cheap clothes wore out quickly, holes in the pockets first, then the elbows, followed by chronic, mysterious tears under the arms. She patched and repaired them (hunched over a Singer sewing machine), but she had the other kids to tend to, along with my father. When I went to school I couldn’t imagine that the mothers of the other boys were up late at night patching their jackets after an evening of cooking, dishes, and helping with homework.

Shoes were an even worse problem. I never had two pairs of shoes at the same time. I wore one pair until they wore out; when the heels wore down or great holes appeared in the soles, I sat in a little booth at the shoemaker’s until he finished attaching new soles or heels. After a while, they could not be saved, the edges unable to take another nail, the cheap leather cracking across the top like overcooked bacon. Then my mother bought me a new pair.

In the beginning, I didn’t care much about any of this. But some of the boys — the upperclassmen — started making remarks. Where’d you get that air conditioned jacket, fella? Or, You buy those pants down the Bowery? They probably did this to other kids; they probably did it with each other; but I sometimes felt as if I were the only kid at Regis being inspected for the mortal sin of dressing badly. I began slipping into the yard as late as possible each morning, hugging the wall, avoiding the more wicked tongues. One rainy day I came to school with cardboard stuffed into my shoes because of the holes. In a corner of the locker room, I removed the shoes, wrung out the socks, and threw away the cardboard. A junior, fat-bodied and thick-necked, saw me, and started laughing, pointing at me and nudging his friends. My face flushed; I thought: Fuck you, you fat bastard, fuck you. His polished shoes had thick soles and seemed untouched by the morning rain. Quickly, I tied my laces and slipped away without looking at him. But all day long I kept seeing the Fat Boy’s grinning face, and my shame grew into rage. He had hurt me; I wanted to hurt him back. During Latin and German and English, I rehearsed what I would do, over and over again, remembering Frankie Nocera, and other fights on Seventh Avenue, wondering what Noona Taylor would do if the Fat Boy laughed at his shoes. And when school ended, I hurried down to Park Avenue to wait for him.