A Drinking Life (12 page)

I ran home. I took the stairs two and three at a time and burst into the kitchen, giddy with excitement. Nobody was home. There was the usual note from my mother, explaining that the big pot contained the soup, the saucepan the peas. No matter. I sat at the table and read the
Eagle.
I looked at the comics. I read the sports pages. I looked at all the other pages. And then I went back and read through it again. I worked for a newspaper now. The
Brooklyn Eagle. My
newspaper. My skin pebbled with awareness; I was now a member of the real Newsboy Legion.

When my father came home, I told him about the job. He smiled and rubbed my hair and laughed.

Great, he said. Great.

He took the
Eagle
and turned to the want ads. Then looked up and said, What’s for dinner?

I worked every day after that for Danno Kelly, earning a dollar fifty a week. That was more than I’d ever had in my hand at one time. Because we were poor now, I gave the money to my mother, and she hugged me, and gave me fifty cents back. That was still a lot of money, and I used it in pursuit of Bomba books and the great new comics and some of the lost old ones. I also read the
Eagle
every day. The comics were an odd collection, from
Steve Roper
(which used to be called
Big Chief Wahoo)
to a dog strip named
Bo
and a terrific strip about a woman who could press a nerve in her wrist and vanish from sight:
Invisible Scarlet O’Neill.
I thought that would be a terrific power to have. But more important than the comics, I was reading the sports pages, where the columnists were Tommy Holmes and Harold C. Burr, and where there was only one real story: the Brooklyn Dodgers.

And the Dodgers brought me closer to my father.

6

A
FEW WEEKS
before Christmas, 1945, there was a sudden delivery of coal, carried into the house by a burly man with a blackened face. And on the day before Christmas, another man arrived with a turkey. I asked who the men were and was told by my father, the party. What party? The
Democratic
party. Said in the tone of: Are you an idiot? But I was still puzzled. This wasn’t relief, was it? Of course not. Well, if they give you a turkey and coal, what do you have to give them in return?

Loyalty, he said. Always remember the most important thing in life: Vote the straight ticket.

On the street, someone pointed out a person called the district leader to me and explained that he worked out of Jimmy Mangano’s Democratic Club on Union Street. The man was tall and bald and cheerful, and he worked the same piece of the world as my father, moving from bar to bar. He was very close to Patty Rattigan, who also worked for the party. They were important people, I was told. They were Big Shots.

In the spring of 1946, a few weeks after I became an
Eagle
boy, I realized what a Big Shot could do when my father finally went back to work. One of the Big Shots had arranged for a job, right across the street in the Factory. On Thirteenth Street, we had lived in its cold shadow; now the Factory would give my father a living. He was going to work for the Globe Lighting Company, which made the new fluorescent lights in the building on our side of the Alley. He would work on an assembly line in a vast loft on the second floor, wiring fixtures all day long. I remember his mood when he came home one Saturday with news of the job.

Well, Annie, he said, the bad times are over.

That’s wonderful, Billy, she said. I prayed and prayed, you know. I did a dozen rosaries.

You can buy that living room set now.

Well, maybe, she said. We’d better wait a bit and see.

He was drunk that night and drunk on Sunday too but he started on Monday, walking across the avenue, carrying his thermos, joining the stream of men coming up from the subways. Even with his wooden leg, he walked in a different way when he had a job.

That night, he came home late, looking tired. I heated up some stew and started talking about the Dodgers, rehashing a column from the
Eagle.
The team was on its way north and would soon begin the season at Ebbets Field.

This year, they’ll go all the way, he said. Mark what I’m saying. All the way.

So I had discovered one of his passions. I would understand later that baseball was what truly made him an American; the sports pages were more crucial documents than the Constitution. He loved Leo Durocher, who was the manager all through the war, and Eddie Stanky, the grizzled little second baseman. But now the war was over and here they were coming back to the ballfields: Pete Reiser and Pee Wee Reese and Carl Furillo and hundreds of others. The Dodger war veterans were joining the players who were Dodgers through the war years, Augie Galan and Ducky Medwick and Dixie Walker. The pitchers were Kirby Higbe, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Hank Behrman, Hugh Casey, Vic Lombardi. But Mickey Owen, who dropped the third strike in 1941, would not be back; he had run off to the Mexican League, like all those movie desperadoes who crossed the Mexican border ahead of the posse. It didn’t matter.
He’s just a bad memory,
my father said of Owen. I kept asking about Reiser, the outfielder they called Pistol Pete, the brilliant centerfielder who led the league in almost everything in 1941 but got hurt in 1942, crashing into the Ebbets Field wall, before going off to the navy. The
Eagle
was full of stories about him, his speed, his eye, his power, his immense heart.

He’s a great ballplayer, my father said. You’ll see.

Will the Dodgers win the pennant?

This is the year, he said. The pennant and then the World Series. That Mickey Owen’s gone and good riddance. This year, we win.

The Dodgers started winning from opening day, and all over the Neighborhood that spring, you could hear Red Barber on the radio, announcing the games. I heard them from the buildings with fire escapes; I heard them while delivering the
Eagle
to the comfortable people. The games lived in our heads with a gorgeous reality. The
Eagle
covered the Dodgers in encyclopedic detail and even carried long reports on the Dodger farm teams in Montreal and St. Paul; in addition, my father started bringing home
The Sporting News,
a tabloid published in distant St. Louis, home of the fearsome Cardinals; it was jammed with information about every team in both leagues, and all the minor league teams too. And I learned that in 1946 up at Montreal, the Dodgers had one spectacular rookie. He was tearing up the league. His name was John Roosevelt Robinson. He was a Negro.

Ya can’t have a nigger on a major league team, Tommy Moore said on Twelfth Street.

He can hit, I said. He can run. He can steal bases. Who cares if he’s colored?

He’ll never make it, Tommy Moore said.

We’ll see.

I listened to Red Barber and talked to my father and read the newspapers (not simply the
Eagle,
but the
Daily News, Daily Mirror,
and
Journal-American
too) and learned to hate the Giants and fear the Cardinals of Musial and Slaughter. Baseball was only happening in my imagination; we simply couldn’t afford to go to Ebbets Field, where tickets cost fifty cents. I fell into an afternoon routine: rushing home from school, delivering the
Eagle,
running home to listen to the serials and Stan Lomax, with the day’s doings in the world of sports. And while I tried to concentrate on homework, on the Louisiana Purchase and the Dred Scott decision, on the differences between the predicate nominative and the predicate adjective, as I diagrammed sentences and divided fractions, my head teemed with the Dodgers, with statistics, names, plays, and the distant figure of Jackie Robinson.

Then one evening, my father came home from work with a great smile on his face.

How’d you like to go to a ball game? he said.

That Sunday, in a big old Packard crowded with his friends from Rattigan’s, I went for the first time to Ebbets Field. They had been given tickets by some Big Shot. We parked on a street near the ballpark, and I waited outside while they all went into a bar that was packed with fans. I didn’t mind waiting. I watched thousands of people walking to the great ballpark, which seemed to rise heroically from the ground. People carried radios, stopped for hot dogs, even bought
my newspaper,
the
Eagle.
Music was playing. Traffic was jammed. I was jittery with excitement.

After a while, the men came out of the bar and we walked together to the ballpark, the other men pausing from time to time to let my father catch up. One of the men had the tickets, and we waited on line and then passed through the narrow gate into the rotunda.
Ebbets Field.
Hot dogs, music, shouts back and forth, thousands of fans: and we were going up a ramp, turning, climbing on another ramp, and then walking through a dark passage into the light.

And there it was: green and verdant and more beautiful than any place I had ever seen. Until that moment, the Dodgers were frozen black-and-white figures on the back pages of the
Daily News
under a headline saying FLOCK NIPS JINTS IN 11. But here they were, the color of human beings, running, throwing, hitting, lounging around, the white uniforms and blue caps gleaming in the sun. Down on the field, the Dodgers were taking batting practice, and one of the men handed me a program and showed me where the uniform numbers were listed. I knew most of them by heart, but now I could see them. There was Higbe. There was Furillo. That was Reese, slapping balls into the outfield. And there was Dixie Walker. The People’s Cherce, they called him. And hey, shagging flies, running across the grass: Pete Reiser!

What do you think? my father said.

I love it, I whispered.

He smiled and nodded his head and said: Yeah. I love it too.

Then it was time to play the game. The Dodgers took the field to a gigantic roar. They were playing the Pirates. All through the game , the men kept ordering beer. They bought me two hot dogs and a Coke and an Eskimo Pie. A band called the Brooklyn Sym-phony played music. The crowd cheered Durocher. They all stood and booed the umpires after a close play at second. They roared when Reiser doubled. They roared when Walker singled him home. The Dodgers won. It was the happiest day of my life.

That day, coming home in the crowded car from Ebbets Field, I was sure that now my father and I would be like fathers and sons in the movies and the magazines. He would teach me things about life. He would take me to places I had never seen. He would hug me when I did something right. We would be joined together, father and son. I was sure the Dodgers would win the pennant too.

7

O
N MAY
8, 1946, my brother Brian was born in Methodist Hospital. I have no memory of my mother being pregnant; I still didn’t understand the way children were conceived and born. She certainly never said anything to me, and my head was full of so many other things: comics, Bomba books, the Dodgers, school, the
Eagle,
and the sudden, mysterious appearance of erections in my life. The last had begun to happen on an almost daily basis and without any means of control: when I woke up; at school when I said the morning prayer with the rest of the class, pushed up against the back of a desk in a kneeling position; while gazing at Burma or the Dragon Lady in
Terry and the Pirates;
while falling asleep. I had no idea why this was happening and had nobody to ask.

But I remember the abrupt change at 378 Seventh Avenue in the first week of May. My mother was gone for a few days and then I came home from school and Brian was in a tiny crib in the kitchen, his head covered with black hair, his features all squinched up.

What’s this? I said.

That’s your new brother, my mother said, obviously blissful. His name is Brian.

Another brother. I was so used to the three of us kids, and now there was a fourth. Tiny. A baby. Everything was changed again. I touched Brian as he slept, his hair silky, and then my mother let me hold him. I was afraid I would drop him, but she stood there and smiled. She showed me how she changed his diaper, washing him, using baby oil so his skin wouldn’t get sore, then pinning up the diapers with large safety pins.

You have to be careful, she said. You don’t want to stick him with the pin. He’s such a wee thing.

Again, as there was for Kathleen’s christening, we had a family party. The christening took place on a Saturday afternoon in the marble gloom of a long narrow church called St. Stanislaus, which was five blocks closer to us than Holy Name. Brian screamed when the priest poured water across his skull, and then everyone looked happy and posed with the baby for photographs and we walked home. The apartment soon filled up with everyone from 378 except the McEvoys. The aunts and uncles arrived, and my various cousins, along with the regulars from Rattigan’s and Patty Rattigan himself. Someone brought in a vat full of ice cubes. Everyone else arrived with bottles and gifts for the baby. Soon there were songs and sandwiches and beer, more singing and more beer, and then just beer. Gallons of it.

Now I was in the grip of the curiosity that had ruined Adam. Everybody was drinking, except my mother, who never drank and was on this day too busy laying out sandwiches and finding clean glasses for the new arrivals. They all seemed so happy. And I wanted to taste the apparent source of their happiness: the beer. I knew it could harm people. I had seen it turn my father into a shambling wreck. But I wanted to know for myself.

When no one was looking, I lifted a half-full glass off the kitchen table and retreated through the rooms. There were people in all the rooms, but they didn’t notice me. I went into the Little Room and locked the eye hook on the door. I stared at the glass, overwhelmed by the sense of the forbidden. But I needed to move into this unknown place, to cross this line, to see the back of this grown-up cave. I took a sip.

The taste repelled me. It was sour, even bitter. The smell was vile as the glass passed under my nose when I sipped. But this couldn’t be all there was to drinking beer. If it was, why did anyone do it? I took another sip, then a third, expecting some powerful charge, some magical transformation, like the changes wrought by magical potions in the comic books. But nothing happened. Someone knocked on the door.