Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

I know, Daddy, but —

It’s not real, he said. It’s a lie.

I never showed him another comic book. Somehow, I knew that he was right: they were all lies. If we had all these caped people on our side, if we had all those secret serums and magic formulas, the war could be ended in about twenty minutes. But they were lies as irresistable as candy or ice cream. They certainly couldn’t be the kinds of lies that were called sins in the catechism I was studying at Holy Name. To start with, they were patriotic lies. And I wasn’t telling the lies. The stories of Cap’ and Bucky were told by the men who wrote their names on the crowded, bursting first pages of each episode: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. They must be the liars. Still, I couldn’t understand how their lies could be bad, if they were on our side, just like Joe Louis and God.

Until I learned the names of Simon and Kirby, around 1943, I didn’t know that men actually sat down to write and draw comics. That knowledge would change my life. But when we lived on Thirteenth Street, the content of the comics was driving deep into me. They filled me with secret and lurid narratives, a notion of the hero, a sense of the existence of evil. They showed me the uses of the mask, insisting that heroism was possible only when you fashioned an elaborate disguise. Most important was the lesson of the magic potion. The comics taught me, and millions of other kids, that even the weakest human being could take a drink and be magically transformed into someone smarter, bigger, braver. All you needed was the right drink.

Up at Holy Name, I went into the next grade, and the next, and the ones after that; listened to Miss Doheny and then Mrs. Hubbard and then Miss Smith, as they sketched the contours of the world and supplied the platitudes by which I must live: Birds of a feather flock together or Show me your friends and I’ll tell you what you are. I learned to write compositions and do arithmetic. But at night, when my father was gone to work, I would lie in the dark and drive away the fear of roaches and Nazis by imagining myself mixing secret liquids in a glass beaker.

ONE DAY my mother took us to New York on the subway. We came out in a place of immense buildings, and she started walking in her rushed, breathless way, all the way to the river. Here were the great piers for the ships I saw in the harbor. There were soldiers with guns guarding the entrances to the piers and high fences with barbed wire at the top and warnings about staying out and not using cameras. We could see giant cranes loading crates into the ships, and shirtless men heaving on ropes, and men with hooks in their belts showing passes to the soldiers. Seagulls careened around the sky. Deep throaty horns blew as one ship eased away from a pier out into the flowing waters of the Hudson.

Did your father work here? I said.

I’m sure he did, my mother said. But he didn’t do this kind of work. He was an engineer.

What is that?

He helped put in the refrigeration system, the air conditioning, she said. He worked for United Fruit, you see, and they had to keep the bananas from spoiling. That was his job. He was an officer.

Was he in the First World War?

No, she said. He was killed during the war, but he wasn’t in the war.

Then up ahead we saw a lot of people staring at something we couldn’t see. There were sailors in leggings holding rifles, Marines with.45s on their hips, New York policemen, all keeping people back; I paused, wanting to look at these men with guns, among the first I had seen in life. My mother walked faster, and then we saw what the crowd was looking at: the S.S. Normandie. The great French liner was lying on its side, wedged into the mud beneath the water, like a fat woman killed in a bathtub. The hull was scorched and tendrils of smoke still leaked from open portholes. I had never seen anything like it, even in the comics.

That’s the Normandie, my mother said. She was a great passenger ship before the war. A French ship. Then they were converting her for troops and she went on fire.

Wow, I said.

Wow, Tommy said.

They think it was sabotage, she said.

Wow!

I don’t know how long we stayed there but it must have been hours. All through the war, we would pester her to go back. Let’s see the Normandie, Let’s go back to Pier 88 and see the Normandie. And she took us there again and again, to gaze at the parched hull, more than a thousand feet long, its giant propellers high out of the water. In my memory, the ruined liner looks humiliated, like a drunk who has fallen down in public. But at the time, the Normandie represented something else to me: proof that not all the tales in the comics were lies. Maybe the Red Skull didn’t do the job, but somebody did.

ONE SUNDAY afternoon on Thirteenth Street, I looked up from the stoop, where I was playing with Ronnie Zellins and some other kids, and saw my father coming down the street. There was another man with him, taller, holding my father’s left elbow, while my father used his other hand to grip the picket fences of the areaways. I got up and hurried to him, certain he was hurt.

I looked up at him. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw slack.

Daddy, I said, are you all right?

He looked at me as if I were a stranger.

Zallright, the other man said. Just drunk as a skunk.

They went past me, and turned into 435 and my father wheeled, as if to fall. The other man grabbed him roughly and held him up. But all the kids laughed. One of the other kids was Brother Foppiano, the son of the owner of the candy store.

Hey, hey, your old man’s drunk, he said, in a singsong teasing voice.

Shut up, I said.

Your old man’s an Irish drunk! Your old man’s an Irish drunk!

As my father and his friend disappeared into the hallway, I had my first fight. I had never hit anyone before and had never been hit. But I threw myself in a rage upon Brother Foppiano. He hit me and hurt me and hit me again. My face went numb. Blood spurted from my nose. And I turned in tears and ran inside, full of shame. Behind me, everyone was laughing. Even my friend, Ronnie Zellins.

My mother was out with Tommy and Kathleen, so I went into the bathroom and saw the blood on my hands and shirt, then watched it drip into the sink. I turned on the taps and the water made the blood thin and pale, forming a rosy whirlpool before vanishing down the drain. I held a cold washcloth to my nose. The inside of my mouth was slippery and sticky, and I lurched aside and threw up into the toilet bowl, feeling as if my insides were coming out through my mouth. The stench was disgusting. I looked at the water pipes and saw cockroaches moving in steady lines, their long hairy feelers out in front of them. I flushed the toilet and closed the door behind me.

My father was facedown on a bed, his wooden leg hanging off the bed in an awkward position. He smelled like vomit too.

For a long time after the fight with Brother Foppiano, I didn’t play with the other kids, not even Ronnie Zellins. I had cried and run away from a fight, and that was a humiliation. So I went to school, I came home, I passed them on the stoop and retreated into homework, the Wonderland of Knowledge, and my comics. No book revealed the ingredients of any magic potion. I could not emerge from my room in mask and cape to avenge myself upon Brother Foppiano. I could not, like Billy Batson, the orphaned newsboy, say the word Shazam! and be transformed into Captain Marvel. My mother said nothing that I can remember, but she must have known that something awful had happened to me. Winter came. The yard filled with snow, and I would stand at the window and gaze at the blue shadows of the piled snow and the redbrick walls of the Factory and remember the light and the trees of the lost window on Fourteenth Street.