A Drinking Life (20 page)

I also watched the way they walked up to the Sanders with a girl on a Saturday night, paying for two, the girl waiting to the side, then taking the guy’s hand as they walked inside to the dark balcony. I wanted a girl too and had tried to talk to girls in my grade at Holy Name; they didn’t share classrooms with us but they were our age and knew the same songs we knew. In their presence, however, I felt clumsy and awkward, and the girls seemed always to be holding back some secret knowledge, exchanging glances with other girls, prepared to dismiss me with a sigh or some form of mockery. It was as if they knew more about me than I did. They certainly knew more about me than I knew about them. I kept hearing about periods and sanitary napkins and didn’t understand what any of it meant. I don’t think any of the other guys knew either, as they played at being Bad Guys on the Totes on those long summer evenings.

Then one evening that summer, I was home after dinner, drawing at the kitchen table. I had sketched a cartoon in light blue pencil and was drawing with a fine-haired brush, dipping into the Higgins india ink. My father came in. He was drunk and lurching and his eyes were opaque. He bumped into the kitchen table and my hand jerked, ruining a line. And I rose in a fury. I tore up the drawing and threw the ink bottle against the sink and stormed out. I couldn’t do this! I wanted to be a cartoonist and this drunk,
my father,
made it impossible! I hated him then, with a white, ear-ringing, boyish hatred, and my rage and hatred carried me to the Totes. Among my friends, I drank to get rid of something.

That gave me a delicious sense of joy. I could drink until I got drunk because it was someone else’s fault. If I downed too many beers, it was my father’s fault; if I staggered, it was his fault; if I fell down in the grass in the park: it was his fault. The son of a bitch. I didn’t say any of this to the other guys. I kept thinking of Bogart in
Casablanca,
sitting at the bar in a pool of bitterness, drinking his whiskey. I would be like that. I would just drink, quietly and angrily, and say nothing. Sitting on the Totes, with the others laughing and grab-assing around me, I sipped the beer, telling myself that I enjoyed the taste. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to clean up the mess I’d made with the ink. I didn’t want to confront my father or explain to my mother. I wanted to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did a lot of that.

17

O
NE FRIDAY
in that spring of 1949, I opened an envelope in the hall of 378 and discovered that I’d won a scholarship to Regis High School. Another boy in my class, Bob McElynn, had won too; four of us had taken the examination together. Regis was a Jesuit school across the river in Manhattan and was said to be the most elite of the city’s Catholic high schools. Nobody at Holy Name had ever made it into Regis until McElynn and I did it, and all across that weekend, wondering if I should accept the prize that I’d won, I was happy, pleased, and scared.

The fear was caused in part by the relentless pressure of conformity in the parish. Most of the other boys were going on to Bishop Loughlin or St. Michael’s, to Xavier or LaSalle; a few went to Brooklyn Tech; many went to Manual Training, the public high school on Seventh Avenue and Fifth Street. If I went to Regis, I’d be separating myself from all of them. They would walk to school while I took three subway trains to get from my part of Brooklyn to Eighty-fifth Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.
Park Avenue!
Just the name of the street was a symbol of some other, rarefied existence in the region of the very rich. If the school really
was
an elite school, then I’d be declaring myself part of that elite. I didn’t want to join any elite. I wanted to live my life. But the choice of a high school also might have something to do with the way I lived that life. Regis was a prep school; that is, it prepared you for college. But I had never met anyone from the Neighborhood who’d gone to college. Not one. College was for rich kids, not for people from Brooklyn. Or so I thought. Besides, I wanted to be a cartoonist. I wanted to draw, to go to art school. Why should I prep for a school that I would never attend? Why not prep for art school? But in bed one night on that weekend after receiving the acceptance letter, I thought: Milton Caniff went to Ohio State. Maybe I could go to college
and
be a cartoonist. And besides, wasn’t a cartoonist part of an elite? Wouldn’t that profession separate me from my friends, from the Neighborhood, from everybody I now knew? Maybe separation was just inevitable.

So I decided to go to Regis, the Good Boy momentarily triumphing over the Bad Guy. The school was rigorous, severe, the teachers dedicated to excellence. I loved Latin, prepared by my years as an altar boy to hear the sounds and rhythms of the language. But there was something else involved: a sense of working on secret codes, discovering the meanings of strange words that linked me to the distant past.

But I couldn’t get algebra. It was too abstract, plotless, without narrative or time. I learned enough to pass and nothing more. I was reasonably good in English, bored by grammar, excited by putting stories on paper. It says something about the way difficulty puts its mark on consciousness that I can remember the algebra teacher now, his reddish hair, dry humor, even his name: Purcell. I remember nothing of the English or Latin teachers.

But I do remember another teacher, a heavy-set man in his thirties, who taught the first class after lunch. His face was always glazed with sweat, even when the windows were open to the cold winter air. He was looser and funnier than the others, and one afternoon I understood why. He came in, laughed, started writing on the blackboard, and then seemed to freeze. He turned and hurried out. Someone shouted:
He’s drunk!
And so he was. Even here, among the elite of Regis, there were drunks. I laughed with the others, but when the man returned, his face ashen, his eyes wet and rheumy, I felt only pity. I wondered if he had children who wanted to love him.

I wasn’t very happy at Regis. I used to think it was the school’s fault, that somehow I was a clumsy social fit among a group of upper-class kids. That wasn’t it at all. There was actually a leveling democracy of merit at Regis; some of the kids were poor, most were middle class, a few were rich; but no boy could buy his way into the school. You had to pass the test, just as McElynn and I had. There were constricting rules: a dress code, an obsession with punctuality, an assignment of privilege to the boys in the upper grades. But the school wasn’t riddled with problems of money and class.

My own problems at Regis were more complicated than the clichéd case of a poor kid thrown in with better-off boys. For the first time, I was in a classroom where everybody else was as smart as I was and many were smarter. That was a new experience to me. I couldn’t just sit there and pay attention and come out with decent grades. I had to work. But there were a number of distractions that made it hard for me to do the schoolwork at the level that Regis demanded. The distractions all flowed from the Neighborhood. I was still working after school and on Saturdays at the grocery store, to pay for the subway and lunch; I couldn’t stay at Regis after school, join the school clubs, play ball in the gym, try to work for
The Owl,
the school newspaper. When the bell rang to end the final period, I had to leave for work. At Holy Name, the kids in my class were the same kids I played with after school or on weekends; at Regis, I almost never saw the other boys after school, not even McElynn or two boys from the adjoining parish of St. Saviour’s, Jim Shea and John Duffy. We were friendly, we talked, we joked, we traveled together on the subway and sometimes worked together on homework; but we weren’t friends in that deep mysterious way that marks true friendships.

So I felt disconnected from the school. More than ever, I wanted to be with my friends up at the Totes. I was in a growing fever of adolescent sensuality, trying to find an outlet beyond masturbation, trying to get a girl who would go with me to a bush or a rooftop or the ink-black balcony of a movie house. I saw tits in geometry classes and asses in history and wondered if Julius Caesar was getting laid while he wrote his account of the Gallic Wars. During the Regis years, I was into a harder contest of wills with my father. Now he was sneering at my idea of becoming a cartoonist.
You’d better start thinking about something real. You’d better think about the cop’s test or the firemen or the Navy Yard. . . .
I preferred his indifference to his flat-out opposition. And as the first year at Regis ended, I was drinking in a more sustained way.

While drinking at the Totes, I asserted myself more often about politics, religion, and sports. In a way, it was simply verbal showing off; I didn’t say as much in the courtyard at Regis, afraid, I suppose, that I’d be challenged by the kids who were smarter than I was. Safe in Brooklyn, I said out loud that it was ridiculous that Alger Hiss was on trial or that Communist party leaders were being sent to jail. How could this be a free country if you couldn’t be free to be a Communist? To which someone would say: Whatta you? A fuckin’ commie too? And I’d say No, but in America you’re supposed to be free to be anything, right? In May 1949, the armies of Mao Tse-tung finally won the civil war in China, driving Chiang Kai-shek and his broken troops into permanent exile in Formosa. The newspapers were hysterical. On the radio, Gabriel Heatter told us once more that there was bad news tonight. Up at the Totes, I mouthed off about how Chiang was a thief, his regime corrupt, his soldiers cowardly.

The fuck you talkin’ about, man, Shitty Collins would say. They were sold out, man, by Truman and the commies in Washington.

No, they just stole the money we sent them, millions of dollars, and when they had to fight, they ran.

How do you know? Was you there?

No, I wasn’t there. But I tried to imagine Chiang’s troops at the docks, piling into boats, panicky and full of fear, while others were tearing off their uniforms, melting into the shadows, throwing down their guns; in my imagination, it was like some final packed and gorgeous panel of
Terry and the Pirates.
Of course, I didn’t really know what I was talking about in those sessions on the Totes; I was retailing opinions I had picked up from the
Star
or the
Compass
or the
Post,
all newspapers of the left. Since everybody in the Neighborhood swore by the
Daily News
or the
Journal-American,
I was going the other way. Against those newspapers. Against the pieties of the Neighborhood. Against the Church. Against my father.

I was lucky in these beery little debates because the others didn’t know what
they
were talking about either. It wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia, as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so many Americans so scared,
all the time?
We were the strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these people shitting in their pants when they thought about communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did so many people think that the communists might be behind anything that made sense: unions, health care, free education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept going all the way to Moscow.

George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids.

Oney thing they respect is force.

That fuckin’ Rose-a-velt, he made a deal wit’ Stalin, let the Russians take Berlin, now look at the fuckin’ mess we’re in . . . .

The talk sputtered on into the night. Drinking beer on the Totes, arguing with my friends (or arguing
at
them), I sometimes even felt as if I understood how the world worked. I was that young. Even that September, when Truman announced that the Russians had tested an atom bomb, I thought that everything would be all right. If we each had the atom bomb, I reasoned, then nobody would ever start a war because nobody could win it. In the newspapers, there was great excitement: if the Russians had the atom bomb they must have stolen it from us. There must be spies everywhere, slipping our secrets to them. Some columnists pointed out that the Russians also had former Nazi scientists working for them, the way we did, and maybe they didn’t have to steal anything. Most of the guys couldn’t have cared less about politics or communism; they were more angry with the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees in five games in the 1949 World Series, than they were with anyone on the other side of the planet. They didn’t care that Dean Acheson had replaced George Marshall as secretary of state; they were wondering whether Dotty Long’s tits were real. Almost all of this talk was just riffs in the night. The wars were over. None of this distant bullshit would ever directly affect us. Even the air raid drills, the warnings about the Bomb, the bombardment of Moscow with Hail Marys,
even the Fall of China,
couldn’t convince us that these matters had anything to do with our lives.
Pass the cardboard, Jake, I’m thirsty . . . .
When we got bored with politics (which was quickly), we went on to baseball or what we all called pussy.

I hear Naomi puts out.

Who?

Naomi, from down Seventeenth Street. I hear she does it.

Who you hear that from?