A Drinking Life (25 page)

7

I
DIDN’T KNOW
it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true.

Drinking also made me change my feelings about my father. In the Navy Yard, I worked with men who knew him. And after a day of labor, buried inside an aircraft carrier that was being converted for jets, or lugging angle irons on my shoulders across Shop 17, I would go to the bars on Sands Street with them and hear tales of young Billy Hamill.

He was a great soccer player, one of them said, a man named Hugh Delargy. He was fast and he was tough. Jesus, was he tough. Smart too.

I was there the day he got hurt, said Eddie McManus, a short, powerful balding welder. It was out at the oval in Bay Ridge, on a Sunday. We were playing a German team. Our team was called Belfast Celtic, after the team back home. And there were teams from the different countries, a Spanish team, a Jewish team called House of David. We were playing the German team that day and your father was at center forward. He was having a great day, bloody great.

And then, Delargy said, that German fucker came at him . . . .

Kicked him so bloody hard, McManus said, it sounded like a board breakin’.

Delargy sipped his whiskey and said, He went down and we all knew he was hurt and everybody ran out on the field. They wanted to kill the fuckin’ Kraut.

They took Billy over on the side, McManus said, and it was pitiful, fuckin’ pitiful to see. The leg was broke beneath the knee and the bone was sticking out through the blood. And Billy was cryin’ like a baby, My leg, he kept saying, my leg, my leg, my leg . . . .

DeLargy and McManus told me this in grave voices, sipping whiskey while I drank my beer. I remember trying very hard not to cry, then excusing myself and hurrying into the men’s room. I sat on a bowl in a locked stall and bawled for my father. And despised myself for the way I’d often sneered at him. When I went back to the bar, I gulped the beer and ordered another, engulfed in a sweet bitterness, knowing that all my life I would see my father on that hard winter playing field, crying like a baby.

After that talk, and other tales told in the bars near the Navy Yard, I began to love my father again. Pity allowed me to see him as a man, instead of a father who could not play the role that my childish imagination and need had assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands from his own father. There was a photograph of his long-dead father in our house now, recently sent from Ireland, where it had been found by Uncle Frank in an old steamer trunk. It was cracked with age and very formal, showing a somber long-faced man whose white beard made him look like George Bernard Shaw. He looked as capable of silence as my own father.

What was he like, your father? I asked him one evening.

He was a mason. A stonemason.

No, I mean what kind of
man
was he?

Billy Hamill shrugged and lit a Camel.

He was stern, he said. He was very stern.

Then I saw my father in flight from the stern white-bearded man, smoking Woodbines in the Belfast night, watching British soldiers patrol streets, hearing endless talk about Catholics and Protestants, playing soccer in frozen fields, and learning to drink. Was it whiskey or was it beer? Or did they drink the dark liquid called stout? And was he drinking when he joined Sinn Fein? Did he and his friends drink the night the bomb was planted and the British soldiers were killed and they all took the night boat to Liverpool and then America? After the bomb, did he shiver in fear? Was he afraid of being caught and turned into an informer? Or did they all go somewhere and get drunk and sing the songs he now sang in Rattigan’s?

In a new way, Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination, and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all his black silences.

We still could not talk in any easy way. But in the bars near the Navy Yard and on long evenings at the Totem Poles I would speak to him in imagination and he would speak to me. I have fucked up my life, Dad; I’ve quit high school and gone to work in the Navy Yard and I don’t want to be there. Well, he would say, do something about it. What can I do? Do what you want to do, Son. Make yourself happy, Son. Live every day of your life, Son. And I’d say, Love me, Dad. And he’d answer, Let’s have a drink.

But we never had that conversation. And I knew I had to save my life on my own. I was taking home forty dollars a week from the Navy Yard and giving my mother ten. But I couldn’t do at home what I still wanted to do. I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t read. And I began thinking about a place of my own. A place where I could leave unfinished drawings on the table until I got home, with no fear they would be ruined. A place where I could drink beer and slide girls between sheets. Maybe I could even go to school at night. Maybe, in spite of my dreadful failure, I could still try to be an artist.

On the subway one morning I met a guy I knew in Holy Name. His name was Ronnie Zeilenhofer. He was smart and decent. His father owned a delicatessen on Prospect Park Southwest. We talked and joked for a few minutes, but when I told him I’d dropped out of high school, his face went oddly slack.

Jeez, I figured you’d be one of the guys that went to college, he said. I can’t believe it, you dropping out.

I felt suddenly small and diminished. In two years I’d gone from being the smartest kid in the class to another guy from the Neighborhood, trudging off to work with his hands and his back. Another loser from Brooklyn. I started talking wildly about how I was just starting, I was gonna go to art school and was looking for a place of my own. Panic and shame produced something resembling the truth. Zeilenhofer and I weren’t close, so in an odd way I could tell him what I really felt. Then he said that if I was serious there was a small place for rent upstairs from his father’s deli. Eight dollars a week, with a bed and a refrigerator.

That sounds great, I said.

Call me, and I’ll show it to you.

A week later, I moved in. Three months after starting in the Navy Yard, I was off on my own.

8

T
HE ROOM
was small and bare, with flowered wallpaper stained by old glue. There was one picture on the walls: a framed magazine photo of the Rockies. The bed was narrow, the mattress lumpy. But there was a bureau for my clothes and I set out my inks and pens and brushes on a small table and stacked some books on the windowsill and I was happy.

The room was in the back, overlooking a chilly treeless yard. On weekends and on cold evenings I would sit at the table, deep in the luxury of solitude, and draw pictures of aviators and pirates, of detectives, and villains with scarred faces. I loved the feeling of standing up and going to the sink and washing the india ink from the brushes, pushing them into a bar of soap, rinsing them, then forming a perfect needlelike tip with my mouth. I bought a small lamp. I Scotch-taped my drawings to the walls. I learned to carry dirty clothes to the launderette and feed myself in greasy spoons.

Downstairs, to the left, was a bar called the Parkview, and when I came home in the evenings from the Navy Yard I could see faces staring from the windows. The faces were almost the same as those in Rattigan’s: pouchy-eyed and tight-lipped. One evening I ran into Mickey Horan, one of the crowd from the Totes. He invited me in for a drink. The bartender served us without asking for draft cards. Soon I was walking in on my own, and the faces from the windows acquired names. Like the men at the Navy Yard, they seemed to accept me. I was sixteen. But I could put my dollar on the bar with the others. That was enough. They talked over and over again about Bobby Thomson’s home run in the play-off game at the Polo Grounds and how it had destroyed more than the Dodgers, it had wrecked
them.
They talked about Ray Robinson’s revenge against Randy Turpin, and how he battered the Englishman into a stupor at the Polo Grounds. They talked about Rocky Marciano’s destruction of Joe Louis. They didn’t talk about Korea. As the year moved toward Christmas, I would come up to the room, gassy with beer, and the ceiling would move and the table bob and I would hold a pillow to my chest as if it were an anchor. Sometimes, for no reason that I understood, I would weep.

On Saturday mornings, I would go to Seventh Avenue and climb the stairs to the apartment and give my mother eight dollars. The Good Boy, of course. She would talk to me as best she could about going on with my schooling, maybe at night. But it was hard to sustain such talk; the kids were running around; tie shopping must be done; she had to be on the job at the movie house by five. I knew she was right. But I didn’t know what to do about it. I walked back up the slope to the Totes. I talked with my friends. I went to the Parkview and drank beer and listened to the jukebox. The Four Aces were singing “Tell Me Why.” Tony Bennett was singing “Cold, Cold Heart.” Rosemary Clooney was singing “Come On-A-My House.” I didn’t sing with them. After a while, I went upstairs to the room and napped and woke up and drew pictures. Sometimes the music would drift up from the bar. Sinatra.
I’m a fool to want you …

The newspapers fed me in a different way. And everything I learned from the newspapers seemed to lead to something else. In one of them, I saw a story about the death of a painter named John Sloan. He was 80 years old and a member of a group called the Ashcan School, the paper said, and it showed one of his drawings of people under the Third Avenue El. I went to the library and found books that showed his paintings and etchings and copied them into my own sketchbooks. Those pictures had nothing to do with comics. Instead, they were about a world that I recognized, even if most of them were made in the 1920s. The El. The streets of Manhattan. The dark city looming at twilight. I loved Sloan’s lumpy Irish face too; he could have stood right at the bar in the Parkview, talking or singing. He even painted bars, for the books showed several works about a place in Manhattan called McSorley’s. He caught the dark snug safety of a bar, the golden warmth it could give you on a cold night. His bars had no jukeboxes or shuffleboard machines in them. But I had seen places like them all over Brooklyn. One Saturday afternoon, I went over to see McSorley’s, down the street from the Third Avenue El. The oldest bar in New York, a sign said. I was thrilled; it was exactly the way Sloan had painted it, dark and romantic, with old pictures on the wall and a potbelly stove and lumpy men at the bar and tables. I took a breath and went in. But the bartender asked me for a draft card and I left in a mixture of humiliation and panic. Still, John Sloan had his effect on me: I started sitting in booths at the Parkview and drawing the men at the bar.

Who the hell is that? a guy would say.

You.

I don’t look like that, come on, kid.

You look worse than that, Jerry, another guy would say.

If I did, I’d fuckin’ kill myself.

The older men seemed amused by me, the kid from upstairs who worked in the Navy Yard and drew pictures in the bar.

You oughtta do that for a living, kid, said a bartender named Brick.

Brick, don’t encourage him. He’ll end up in the fuckin’ Village wit’ the faggots.

Impossible. He’s a fuckin’ Catlick!

They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I worked with men; in the Park-view, I could drink with men because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.

Then one Sunday before Christmas I saw a story in the
Journal-American
about Burne Hogarth, the artist who used to draw
Tarzan.
He and some other people had started the Cartoonists and Illustrators School on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. There was a picture of Hogarth in a classroom full of easels, just like the photographs of John Sloan at the Art Students League. He was teaching in a real school. Now. Not in the distant past. Not in some remote place. Here. In New York.

Suddenly, after months without a narrative line for my own life, I felt the story again. The next day after work, I went to Twenty-third Street and after twenty minutes of hesitation, walked into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. It was located then on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-third Street (later it became the School of Visual Arts and moved up the street to grander quarters). I was dressed in my rough work clothes from the Navy Yard, but that didn’t seem to matter; almost everybody else was dressed the same way. There was a wonderful pungent odor in the air (a mixture, I learned later, of turpentine and linseed oil) and a busy sense of purpose and direction, people carrying large manila portfolio envelopes or stretched canvases or pieces of unfinished plaster sculptures. There were dark-haired girls with vivacious eyes. There were young men with paint-stained dungarees. They talked and laughed and smoked until a bell rang somewhere and they all hurried away to unseen classrooms. In the office, I was given a catalog, which I accepted clumsily. Then I turned around and walked out.

All the way home on the subway, I read the catalog over and over again. The newspaper story was true: the great Burne Hogarth was teaching three nights a week. Drawing and anatomy. The term started in the first week of January. The tuition was thirty dollars a month. Almost a full week’s pay. But I could do it. Somehow. If I ate less. If I didn’t spend money drinking. I could do it. Yes.
Do
it.