A Drinking Life (24 page)

No.

What will they say?

I don’t know.

Then you’d better tell them.

I don’t want to ask their permission, I said. I just want to do it.

But you’ll have to transfer to another school, he said. You’re not even sixteen yet, so you can’t just drop out.

What school would take me?

I’ll see, Father Burke said. If your mind is made up, I’ll try to find you another school.

That night, I told my mother that I wanted to drop out of Regis. She was concerned, sweet, apologetic.

I feel I didn’t help, she said. I feel that I should’ve given you more help.

No, Mom. It wasn’t you. It was me.

She made tea, and said that she didn’t want me to be unhappy, and if I wasn’t happy at Regis, then maybe I should go to another school. I was relieved. I just didn’t want to see her crying. That night, she seemed too tired to weep. Her hair had turned gray, her face was pale. She was only forty and starting to look old.

The next day was my last at Regis. I didn’t say good-bye to any of my classmates. I didn’t stop in to see Father Burke. I just packed my books and went home. But I didn’t feel free. All the way back to Brooklyn, I felt that I’d done something unbelievably stupid. Because of my laziness, distraction, fear, and drinking, I had walked away from the best Catholic high school in New York. As the F train came up out of the tunnel after Bergen Street, I looked down from the train and saw the Gowanus Canal beneath me and knew that the building where my father had worked as a clerk for Roulston’s was nearby. I remembered going there with my mother when everything was still in the future, even the war. Then I looked in the other direction and saw the skyline of Manhattan, rising from the harbor, stone-gray and indifferent, beautiful and unattainable, and I began to weep.

That night I went to Jenny’s and told her what had happened and then tried to get rid of my failure in her body. I drank too much beer and fell asleep. She woke me later, shaking me in desperation, frantic that her mother would find us, shouting that she had to make the bed and air out the room.
You’re drunk,
she said.
Don’t you understand me? Are you too drunk to know what I’m saying?
Carrying the empties, I left in a rage, at her and at myself. She was giving me
orders,
her panic transformed into wide-eyed fury that seemed like the opposite of love. But I was at fault too; I’d had too many beers and was sluggish and confused, like my father on the second-floor landing at 378. Down by the subway, I hurled the empty beer bottles at a parked garbage truck, enjoying the way they smashed and splintered.

On Monday, I started at my new school, St. Agnes on Forty-fourth Street, in midtown Manhattan. It was dark and gloomy after Regis, the classrooms smaller, the desks more battered. But on the first day, I knew that I would do well. Even with my terrible record at Regis, I was far ahead of most of the students at St. Agnes. By the end of the week, some of my broken ego was restored. And I loved the physical act of going to that school. I came up out of Grand Central and then walked east, passing under the massive rumbling structure of the Third Avenue El. There were Irish saloons on every corner of Third Avenue, with men standing at the bars all day long.

Some of the drinkers were newspapermen. The
Daily News
was on Forty-second Street between Second and Third, and I liked going into the lobby to look at the immense globe and the polished floors; it was like visiting the
Daily Planet
(and years later the
Daily News
building served as the setting for that imaginary newspaper in the first
Superman
movie). Sometimes I saw men I was sure were reporters (they all wore hats) hurry out the door, straight to the bars. A few blocks away, on Forty-fifth Street, was the
Daily Mirror.
I once saw their sports columnist, Dan Parker, a huge man with a pencil-thin mustache, walk out of the newspaper and stroll down to Third Avenue, whistling all the way. I felt connected to the
Mirror
by
Steve Canyon.
But I never saw Caniff come out of the building. Still, the sight of Dan Parker was enough. I loved the idea of a newspaperman who whistled.

I also came to love the gloomy light under the El and wished I could walk into the bars and order a drink. At one point, with some other kids from St. Agnes, I started watching the Kefauver hearings through the windows, seeing various gangsters and politicians talk in black and white, and watched Frank Costello’s hands. I wanted a television set now. And a telephone. And a room with a door. Far more than we could afford at 378. Most of all I wanted to walk into a Third Avenue bar and drink like a man.

5

T
HEN ONE NIGHT,
Jenny and I went to the Avon, a third-run movie house on Ninth Street. One of the two movies was
Portrait of Jennie,
with Joseph Cotten. I thought he was great in
The Third Man
and we laughed about how those people out in Hollywood couldn’t even spell Jenny. In the movie, Joseph Cotten was a painter. He lived in the Village and had an amazing studio, with easels, a fireplace and, of course, a skylight. One day, he’s in Central Park and meets Jennifer Jones, who is young and shy and beautiful. She sings a strange little song:

Where I come from nobody knows,

And where I’m going, everything goes …

Joseph Cotten keeps meeting the girl over the next month or two, and each time she’s older. He paints her portrait and tries to learn more about her. But in fact, she’s dead, killed years before in a storm. At the end of the movie he meets her on the anniversary of her death. He gets to kiss her and hug her; the music builds to an amazing swell; she is swept out to sea to die again.

Jenny was crying at the end. I kept thinking about Joseph Cotten’s studio. We didn’t stay for the second feature. All the way to her house on the Fifth Avenue trolley, Jenny was silent.

That’s the way life is, isn’t it? she said.

Like what? That movie?

Yeah.

Oh, sure. We always fall in love with ghosts we meet in Central Park.

No, she said. I mean that things always turn out lousy.

Hey, Jenny, it’s a movie.

We reached her house. She asked me not to come in. It was too late. Her mother would be home soon.

You keep saying you’re an artist, she said. Why don’t you draw me?

I will.

When?

Tomorrow night?

My mother’s home tomorrow night.

Next Friday.

You swear? she said, smiling.

I swear.

That Friday night, she served me another dinner, this time of baked ziti. I sipped my beer slowly, cleaned my plate, and had seconds. After dinner, she stacked the dishes in the sink, ran water over them, left them to soak, then washed her hands and primped her hair. She seemed very nervous.

Maybe you shouldn’t try this, she said. You don’t have to draw me if you don’t want to.

No, no, I said. Let’s try it.

She sat on the edge of the couch in the muted yellow light of the table lamp and I sat across from her and started to draw. In my head I saw Joseph Cotten making his portrait of Jennifer Jones, and I wished we were in some great high-ceilinged garret in the Village instead of this basement in Bay Ridge. But I worked hard, using a number 2 pencil on a pad of white paper, outlining her head with very light marks, blocking in the eyes and the nose and the mouth, loosely indicating the hair, the neck, and the collar of her white blouse. I was soon lost in the act, erasing, shading, smudging with a finger, but the picture was not going well. Jenny’s hair looked fine, and I’d captured those sad eyes; but there was something wrong with the mouth, and the nose looked enormous. I erased again, trying to make the nose smaller, but that wasn’t right either; I couldn’t put someone else’s nose on Jenny’s face. I paused, sipped my beer, stared at her, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, then tried to outline her nose with absolute exactitude. This time I thought I had it right. With the nose recorded properly, the mouth was easier to fix. I hurried to the end, blocking in the hair with what I thought were bold strokes, then finishing the neck and blouse. I exhaled, then took a deep breath and finished my beer.

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:

I’ve shed a million tears since we’re apart,

But tears will never mend a broken heart.

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.

6

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.