Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

The rain was falling harder. I saw my friends hurrying across the avenue, then staying close to the wall as they ran to Eighty-sixth Street and the Lexington Avenue subway. Some had umbrellas. After a while, there were almost no kids leaving Regis and I thought that maybe the Fat Boy had taken another route home: along Madison Avenue, or over to Fifth Avenue and the downtown bus. My anger ebbed and I was about to go home. Then I saw him walking quickly, holding an umbrella almost daintily in one hand and his books in the other. He didn’t see me until he reached the corner.

Hey, you fat bastard.

He peered at me from under the umbrella and smiled. The same smile, I thought. A fucking smirk.

Without another word, I hit him hard in the face and his eyes got wide and the umbrella flew up and the books fell, and then I hit him again and again, blind with rage. He fell and I kicked him with those shameful ugly shoes and grabbed his hair and punched him in the neck, and then he started to scream. That stopped me. I looked around. The streets were empty, lashed by the hard rain. No cops, no pedestrians, not even a doorman. The Fat Boy sat up, his pants ruined, his jacket soaked, his eyes startled and afraid.

Don’t laugh at me any more, you fat fuck, I said.

Then I walked away.

That night, I was sure I was finished at Regis. In the morning, he would go to the principal’s office and report me. How could he not? His books were ruined, his notes spattered with rain and dirt. I had hurt him badly. He Would report me, all right, and they would call me down to the office and tell me that I’d been expelled.

All right, I thought. Fuck it. I’ll go to another school, to Loughlin or St. Agnes or even to Manual. But I won’t whimper. I won’t beg them to let me stay. If they kick me out, I’ll just walk out of there like a man.

I tossed and turned, alternately consumed with shame, failure and regret, satisfaction and defiance. I was most worried about what my mother would say. I thought that if they kicked me out, I’d have failed her. She had been so proud when I made it into Regis. It was proof to her that you could do anything in this country if you worked hard enough. I just hoped that she wouldn’t cry. I didn’t care what my father thought.

In the morning, I trembled all the way from Brooklyn to Park Avenue, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t focus on the Miss Subways sign or the girls who got on at Jay Street. I considered playing hooky, just riding the trains all day. It was Friday, I thought, and maybe by Monday they would have forgotten everything. But in those days, subway cops stopped kids who weren’t in school and if the kids didn’t have notes or good excuses, they picked them up. I didn’t want the police to take me back to Regis. I didn’t want faces turning to me as I was escorted down a corridor to the principal’s office. So I took my trains and came up into Eighty-sixth Street and walked to school. I waited outside the main gate for a while, where the seniors smoked cigarettes, and then went into the yard. The Fat Boy was there with his friends. His face was swollen but he didn’t look at me. I went off to my first class and sat through it, hearing nothing, waiting for someone to come to the door and escort me to the principal’s office. Nobody ever came. Not in the first period. Not through the day.

When I left school, the Fat Boy was waiting on the corner. I tensed, ready to fight again. And then he started walking toward me. He put out his hand. I hesitated, then shook it.

I’m sorry, he said. You were right. I made fun of you and your shoes and that was a lousy thing to do.

I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe now he would sly rap me. But he didn’t.

Okay, I said. I’m sorry too.

I walked off alone. We didn’t become friends. But I admired him. He’d done what I couldn’t do: admitted he was wrong. Without knowing it, the Fat Boy had accomplished something else; because he’d laughed at me, because I’d then given him a beating that could lead to expulsion, the idea of leaving Regis had blossomed in my head. Drinking that night on the Totes, the notion flowered. I began to imagine myself free of the rigor of the Jesuits. I imagined myself in another school, in classes with my friends from the Neighborhood. Then saw myself in other places, rolling around the world, working on the freighters the way my grandfather did, going to Panama and Honduras to pick up the bananas, traveling to Nagasaki. I imagined myself in the navy, sailing for Korea and the war. I imagined myself drawing cartoons the way Bill Mauldin did in World War II. I drank a lot of beer. The visions, as always, grew grander.

THAT WINTER, Steve Canyon enlisted in the air force and Caniff’s great comic strip began what most fans thought was a long decline. The Compass sent Bill Mauldin to Korea, and Willie and Joe found themselves at another front. The Post assigned its star sportswriter, Jimmy Cannon, to Korea, and his stories of GIs in trouble made me feel I was there. In contrast, my own problems seemed puny and childish.

And the comics grew darker. A pair of comic books, Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, were first published that winter by a company called E.C., and they astonished me. The major artist was Harvey Kurtz-man, and he revolutionized the form. Unlike war as reflected by Caniff, these combat stories were hard, bleak, free of rah-rah patriotism. They were about men, not costumed superheroes. In Kurtzman’s Korean War, there was no Red Skull. The content wasn’t the only change. Kurtzman’s drawing style was fresh and powerful: full of stark figures, ferocious action, fat juicy brushstrokes applied with spectacular confidence. Somehow he’d created a new style while I was still imitating Caniff. So I’d be sitting in a classroom at Regis, looking at a teacher and instead of listening to what he was saying, I’d be trying to imagine new ways of drawing. Not like Caniff. Not like Kurtzman. I’d draw like myself, as free as handwriting, using crayons, or big brushes, or a million tiny pen lines. This became still another distraction. My grades started to slide.

Around this time, on other shelves in the comic book stores, I was also discovering pulp magazines, drawn to them at first by the work of their illustrators. In the science fiction books Amazing and Astounding there was an artist named Virgil Finlay. His drawings were full of voluptuous women, almost naked, their breasts often bare except for seashells or veils or carefully placed foliage. Finlay used a pen, creating form by scalloping the shading with individual lines that were built up, thickened, then thinned according to their density; the drawings were full of wonder, the skies bursting with strange forms, the landscapes of his imaginary planets scary and strange. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t imitate him.

The science fiction stories meant almost nothing to me but I couldn’t resist the detective pulps: Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flynn’s Detective Fiction, and Popular Detective. The drawings were dark, as full of shadows as the movie melodramas of the period, and the men, women, and guns were interchangeable. The stories carried titles like “Hellcats of Homicide Highway” or “Sinner Take All,” but often the writing was a lot better than the titles or the illustrations. The stories took place in a landscape I understood: not sagebrush or the plains of Venus, but bad parts of mean towns, where the streetlights were always dim, the cops always crooked, and nobody had a home. The heroes were tough guys, able to absorb ferocious beatings before shooting their enemies without remorse; they’d have felt little sympathy for Frankie Nocera or the Fat Boy. Almost all the women were bad: devious Delilahs, greedy, selfish, and dangerous. They worked in bars, hotels, the streets, and they usually went to bed with a man only to cut his throat. In a way, this vision of women was a perfect fit with the sinful temptresses portrayed by the Church. Naturally, I wished I could meet one of them.