Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Around this time, I also started reading Big Little Books, squat thick bricks of text and pictures that were sold at the five-and-ten-cent stores. The text was on the left-hand page, the illustrations on the right. Their heroes were different from the great baroque four-color visions of Simon and Kirby, or from Captain Marvel pursuing the mad scientist Dr. Sivana. Here were Dick Tracy, Dan Dunn, Tailspin Tommy, Smilin’ Jack, Don Winslow of the Navy, all neatly contained in square black-and-white panels. They were more mundane heroes, men without masks or capes or occult powers, but I liked reading the text and glancing at the pages to see if the drawings matched the images in my mind. My mother looked at them and explained that these were comics that first appeared in newspapers.

This is my favorite, she told me, pointing at a comic strip across the top of a page in the Daily News. It was called Terry and the Pirates. The drawing was beautiful, full of realistic detail, oiled guns, perfect airplanes, skies or mountains brushed in with great rich blacks. But the balloons were dense with dialogue that I didn’t really understand. Terry was definitely made for grown-ups. Still, I was thrilled that my mother could also care for a comic strip. She didn’t say, This is my favorite lie. And because of her, I started looking at the newspaper comics.

One day I ran into Brother Foppiano again. He was nastier now, because he had bloodied me and made me cry and run. Your old man’s an Irish drunk, your old man … I realized I was being watched by other kids, including my former friend Ronnie Zellins, and I knew that this time I couldn’t run. So I piled into Brother, frantic, afraid, but determined not to cry, not to “give up.” He hit me and hit me, but I held on to him, tripped him, fell upon him, hit him, then felt his hard wiry arms lock around my neck. I struggled. I jerked. But I couldn’t get free.

So I whispered the word: Shazam.

Nothing happened. Brother Foppiano tightened his grip and I tightened mine on him.

We might be locked in that violent embrace to this day if Ronnie Zellins’s beautiful mother hadn’t come along and ordered us to stop. I watched Brother walk away, his green striped shirt as dirty as mine. There was a sneer on his face, but he didn’t say anything; he didn’t speak badly about my father. I felt better for another reason: the humiliation of public crying and loss was erased. Then Ronnie Zellins came over to me.

Want to go down the Alley? he said.

No.

What about comics? Want to go trading?

No, I said. I don’t want to do anything with you.

One Sunday afternoon, a week after my second fight with Brother Foppiano, my father ordered me out of Gallagher’s. His face was loose and bleary again, the way it had been the day I first saw him drunk. I imagined him leaving the saloon, helped by one of the men, staggering down the street to our house, and Brother Foppiano emerging from hiding to start his cruel chant. I asked him to come home. Maybe I whined. Maybe I was annoying. I know I was holding on to his coat. He jerked the coat out of my grip, looked down at me, and ordered me in a harsh voice to go home to my mother. Hurt and angry, I ran outside.

But I didn’t go home. I went directly to Foppiano’s candy store. I was desperate now, even willing to fight Brother again to be sure that he wouldn’t see my father drunk. I could punch him. I could tease him. Or I could talk to him, argue with him, maybe even try to make friends with him. I just didn’t want him to see my father being helped down the block. But Brother wasn’t around, not behind the counter, not in the back room. His father sat there, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. And with a sense of relief, I looked at the comic book racks near the door. I had read most of the new comics and was not interested in the books about funny animals or high school girls. Then I found the very first issue of Master Comics. I began to read the story of Captain Marvel, Jr., and was lifted out of Brooklyn. Hey, Mister Foppiano said, ya gonna read or ya gonna buy?

I handed him a dime and rushed home, clutching my copy of Master Comics. Back at 435, I read this issue over and over, watching a crippled boy named Freddy Freeman hobble on his crutches. Suddenly he said his magic word — “Captain Marvel,” the name of his hero — and was transformed into a lithe, strong hero in a sleek blue gold-trimmed costume. After my fight with Brother, I knew that “Shazam” didn’t work for me; it probably was just a lie. But maybe it could work for others. Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic. And I wished that my father had a secret word too. He would come home from Gallagher’s and sit in the kitchen and whisper … Captain Marvel. A lightning bolt would split the sky and there he would be: two legs, young, whole, like the man in that old photograph, his eyes sharply focused. He would smile at me and reach over and hug me and off we would go together to play ball.

That never happened.

After two years in the first floor right, we moved again.

THE NEW FLAT was only a few blocks away, but it was another descent, into a harder, poorer world.

Seventh Avenue was a wide avenue with trolley cars of the 67 line moving in both directions. The steel wheels of those sleek green-and-silver “streamlined” cars ran on steel tracks, and we would hear their squealing clattering sounds through the night; some of us heard those trolleys for the rest of our lives. The power lines were hidden in steel poles that made a deep bonging sound when you hit them with bats or pipes; from the tops of these poles cables fed the lines that ran above the trolley tracks. Those poles and lines and the steel tracks gave the avenue the look of an artist’s exercise in perspective, with diminishing lines flowing away into infinity, or its equal: Flatbush Avenue at one end of the avenue, Greenwood Cemetery at the other. In the mind of an eight-year-old, both were as far away as Madrid.

Our building was 378, a tenement rising four ominous stories above the street. It was in the middle of the block, between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets, with a butcher shop on one side of the doorway and a fruit and vegetable store called Teddy’s to the right. That first day, it was a place in another country.

I stood on the sidewalk with my mother and Tommy and Kathleen, who was bundled in a red snowsuit in a stroller and bawling. My mother moved the stroller back and forth, shushing Kathleen, while I gazed around at this new piece of geography. There was a barbershop across the street, with a red, white, and blue pole turning slowly outside. On one side of the barbershop was a dry cleaner’s, the windows opaque with steam, then a notions shop, a variety store, a fish store, and a diner. To the left, filling the corner of Eleventh Street, was Rattigan’s Bar & Grill, dark inside, with men going and coming through the front door. Nobody used the side door.

Across the street, on a diagonal from Rattigan’s, there was one glimmer of the familiar: the red, white, and blue sign of still another Roulston’s store. But otherwise I felt like a stranger as we waited outside for the large men from Gallagher’s to arrive in a truck with our furniture and our stuffed cardboard boxes. My mother said, You’ll like it here. But I looked up and saw fire escapes climbing the brick face of the building, as if drawn with rulers, and a strange canopy hanging over the edge of the roof, and a flock of pigeons circling against the hard sky. I shivered in the cold, and my mother told me to wait in the hallway. But I was afraid to go through that door. I didn’t think I would like it here at all. I wanted to go back to 471 Fourteenth Street, my real home.