Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Can I move? she said.

Yeah, I said. I’m finished.

Can I see it?

Sure.

I handed her the drawing pad. She looked at the picture, her eyes wide. And then burst into tears. She stood up, bawling, and threw the pad at me.

I’m ugly, she sobbed. You think I’m ugly!

No, Jenny, I don’t think you’re ugly. I was —

Look at my nose!

She turned away and buried her face in the pillows of the couch. I tried to console her, petting her hair, hugging her. She stopped crying and then sat up slowly, saw the picture on the floor before the chair and started crying again.

That’s the way you see me, she said. I’m ugly, ugly, ugly!

No, Jenny, I love you.

You love my — you love what I give you! You love what I let you do to me!

I stood up and closed the pad, so she wouldn’t see the hated picture. She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress and then saw the pencil and it started again. I didn’t know what to do. I’d tried so hard to make the drawing real, and she obviously was wounded by it. A gift had become an instrument of torture. Joseph Cotten didn’t have this problem. I stayed a little longer and then took my pad and my pencil and fled.

That was the end of it. Suddenly, shockingly. We saw each other two days later outside Steven’s. She didn’t want coffee or a soda. Standing on the sidewalk, she announced that she was “breaking off” with me. She talked about needing “freedom” and how she was too young to get married or settle down and how she was afraid of getting caught by her mother or ending up pregnant.

You’re only fifteen, she said. It’s not right.

Her eyes looked sadder than ever. She turned her back on me and hurried down Ninth Street to catch the Fifth Avenue bus. I felt absolutely alone, engulfed by a delicious melancholy. Now, I thought, this story has an ending.

So back I went to my friends and the Totem Poles and drinking beer from cardboard containers. I listened to my friends talk about the glories of pussy, knowing they were almost all virgins. I started truly listening to Sinatra. I did almost no homework, drew no cartoons, attempted no portraits. The war ground on in Korea, back and forth with little gain. I saw more young women in grave little knots, going out together on Saturday nights. I didn’t call Jenny; she couldn’t call me. Suddenly, Tony Bennett was on all the radios and crooning from the jukeboxes: “I Won’t Cry Anymore” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” I would sing with him:

One night, I saw Jenny waiting to the side at the Sanders while the men lined up to buy tickets. She glanced over at the Totem Poles, but then turned and smiled at her date: a big dumb guy from Seventh Avenue who could hit a spaldeen about four blocks. She took his arm and they went in to see the movie. I never talked to her again.

I WAS BORED in St. Agnes and started playing hooky, the empty spring days spent wandering the city. Sometimes I sat in movie houses. Other times I worked my way through the dark caves of Book Row. In May, Willie Mays came up from the minors to play for the Giants.

They say he’s the greatest thing on two feet, my father said.

What do you think?

We’ll see, he said. We’ll see if he can hit the curveball.

Suppose he can?

Then the Dodgers are in trouble.

We talked about the Dodgers and about Kid Gavilan beating Johnny Bratton. But we talked about nothing else. He went to work and then to Rattigan’s. I went to school and then to the Totem Poles. In June, I finished at St. Agnes. I never went back.

Instead, I took an examination to get into the apprenticeship program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My uncle David worked as a sheetmetal worker in the Yard (as it was called) and he told my father about the program. One night over dinner, the kids all there, my father mentioned it to me.

It’s a goddamn good thing, he said, if you can get into it.

My mother shook her head.

Ach, Billy, she said, let the boy finish high school.

But he went on explaining it to me. The program was simple: you worked for four weeks, then went to school for a week, right there in the Yard; when you finished, you got a high school diploma, and you got paid for the weeks you went to school; eventually you moved up to become a journeyman at your trade. I listened carefully; it was the first thing I’d ever heard my father approve for me. I could escape from the drudgery of high school. I’d start earning a living, no matter how small. Hell, he explained, you could have a job at the Yard for thirty years, and retire with a good pension. And remember, he said, it’s a federal civil service job. There’s nothing better than civil service, except federal civil service.

If there’s another Depression, he said, you’ll always work.

My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the test for the Navy Yard and passed.

That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day and night, I felt that I’d lost my way. It was as if some long steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn’t control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right, from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or some of the men from Rattigan’s. More often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I was? Forget these kid’s dreams, I told myself, give ’em up. Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down, have children. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Every year I’d do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God or not. I’d drink on the way home from work and spend most weekends with my friends in the saloons. I’d get old. I’d die and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith’s funeral parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let’s have a fucking drink.

I DIDN’T KNOW it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true.

Drinking also made me change my feelings about my father. In the Navy Yard, I worked with men who knew him. And after a day of labor, buried inside an aircraft carrier that was being converted for jets, or lugging angle irons on my shoulders across Shop 17, I would go to the bars on Sands Street with them and hear tales of young Billy Hamill.

He was a great soccer player, one of them said, a man named Hugh Delargy. He was fast and he was tough. Jesus, was he tough. Smart too.

I was there the day he got hurt, said Eddie McManus, a short, powerful balding welder. It was out at the oval in Bay Ridge, on a Sunday. We were playing a German team. Our team was called Belfast Celtic, after the team back home. And there were teams from the different countries, a Spanish team, a Jewish team called House of David. We were playing the German team that day and your father was at center forward. He was having a great day, bloody great.