A Drinking Life

1

AND SO the pattern had begun, the template was cut. There was a celebration and you got drunk. There was a victory and you got drunk. It didn’t matter if other people saw you; they were doing the same thing. So if you were a man, there was nothing to hide. Part of being a man was to drink. I was ten years old that summer of the end of the war, but I was learning the ways of the world.

In the lot on Twelfth Street, we still played war games, using shovels to dig foxholes and trenches. We mowed down Japanese holdouts with rifles made from broom handles or guns shaped from the corners of orange crates. We stuffed tin cans with stones and used them as hand grenades, usually aimed at cats. We even played a game called concentration camp, made up of jailers and the pursued, sprinkling our talk with German words learned from comic books and movies: Achtung! and Schweinhund!

I played these games with all the other kids, but then one rainy Sunday afternoon I went to the RKO Prospect to catch a double bill and saw for the first time the newsreels from Buchenwald. Grizzled American soldiers were at the edge of the camp, some of them weeping. And just past them, beyond the barbed wire, were men and women and children in striped pajamas, unable to move, full of fear, staring with eyes that couldn’t be seen. Some were lying on tiers of bunks, too close to death to ask for help, their long skeletal hands limply hanging to the floor. Their arms were tattooed with numbers. Their heads were shaven. They looked like zombies I’d seen in a movie at the Minerva. This was what Hitler had left behind after killing himself in the bunker: these silvery gray images of European horror, these bony heaps that had once been human. I tried to get someone to answer my questions: How did this happen? Who did this? But my father only said, That son of a bitch Hitler. And my mother said, That terrible bigot. And in school, there was no answer at all.

For weeks, I read the newspaper stories about the camps and stared at the photographs in Life that I found on the racks in Sanew’s candy store, and there were no answers. I dreamed of the camps, of slush-eyed men in black SS uniforms herding us from boxcars into barracks and finally to showers where gas hissed from the nozzles on the ceiling. In one repeated dream, I was fighting, struggling, pushing at the skeletal men, trying to get out of the packed showers, trying to reach the door, to get to Brooklyn, to safety, to my mother and father, and at least once I woke up screaming. My mother came in and asked what the matter was, and I cried and talked about the concentration camps and the gas and the barbed wire, and she crooned to me, Don’t worry, now, don’t worry anymore, don’t worry, Peter, the war is over.

After that trip to the Prospect, I never played concentration camp again.

During this time, I began to look more closely at the grown-ups who inhabited the world of Seventh Avenue. Around the corner on Twelfth Street, the men wore overalls or army surplus and heavy steel-tipped boots. They always needed a shave. Their hands were filthy. Most evenings, they lurched home drunk from the bars on the avenue. The other kids made fun of them, but I was almost always silent. In one way, they made me see my father the way others might see him. He didn’t dress like them; his lost leg made heavy manual labor impossible. He did drink the way they did. So the drunks were also consoling figures. They told me that my father was not unique.

Once, I saw a man named Dix, rawboned and scary-eyed, fight his wife, who was also drunk. They drew a huge crowd. The wife, small and thick in what we called a housedress, kept coming in a frantic rage, while Mr. Dix stepped back and jabbed her, breaking up her face, making blood flow from her mouth and nose, smirking until his cap fell off, and then enraged, bending her over a fence and hammering her until two of the other women stepped in and broke it up. The men in the crowd did nothing to stop the fight. Most of them laughed and cheered at the end, and I heard one of them say: Never marry a woman you can’t knock out with one punch. But a few feet from me, under the lamppost, the smallest of the many Dix kids was sobbing, holding on to his mother as the blood ran down between her heaving breasts.

You fuck! she shouted after her husband, as he moved off to the bar. You big fuck!

He turned, looking ominous.

Get inside, he said, or I’ll break your fucking neck, woman.

Make me! she screamed. Make me, you bum! Hit a woman! You fuckin’ bum!

The other women surrounded her, putting their bodies between her and her husband, and took her into the house, the sobbing kid behind them. Then Mr. Dix turned to us.

What are you little cocksuckers looking at? he said.

We walked away. The fight was sickening. I hated the way he kept punishing her after he had made her bleed. I hated the other men cheering.

But in some secret way, it made me feel better. My father would never do that to my mother. He might speak harshly to her, as he did the night of the blackout. He might tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about; he did that often. He might get drunk and miss meals or sleep in the halls. But hit her? Curse her? Make her bleed in front of a hundred people and her own kids? Never. When I compared him to Mr. Dix, my father made me proud.

That afternoon, I retreated from the drunken melodramas of Twelfth Street to the comparative serenity of Eleventh Street, where the men wore suits to work and always looked sober. First I went upstairs and found a Bomba book, then I drifted around the corner to lie on the slanted wooden cellarboard beside the Kent dry cleaning store, whose windows had been smashed on V-J Day and were now whole again.

I was reading there alone when I looked up and saw a soldier moving slowly along Seventh Avenue. That was not unusual. The soldiers were all coming home now. Troopships arrived each day in the harbor, and there were pictures in the newspapers of women rushing to kiss husbands and sweethearts. Every morning, I’d see new signs in neighborhood doorways: Welcome Home, Jimmy, and God Bless You, Eddie. But this soldier was different. He was alone. And he was on crutches. One trouser leg was pinned up. Obviously, he’d lost a leg.

And then I saw my father coming out of Rattigan’s. He stood alone on the corner, watching the soldier from another angle. He hesitated, then started across the street, swinging his wooden leg behind him. I stood up. My father reached the younger man in front of Kent’s.

Hey, soldier, he said.

The soldier stopped, his eyes wary.

Yeah? he said.

You lost a leg, my father said.

Yeah.

So did I, my father said.

Well —

Don’t let it get to you, my father said. You can still have a life.

The soldier shrugged as if he didn’t believe this at all.

Come on, my father said. We’ll have a drink.

Without discussion, they started back across the avenue to Rattigan’s, the soldier swinging on the crutches, my father leading the way.

I loved him very much that day.

2

ON THE STREETS I learned the limits of the Neighborhood. This was our hamlet, marked by clear boundaries. Sometimes we moved beyond those boundaries: to visit aunts and uncles out in Bay Ridge; to gaze at the Normandie; and on one wondrous fog-choked Saturday in July, to stare up at the Empire State Building after a twin-engined B-25 crashed into its north side between the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors, killing fourteen people and hurting many others. But it was to the Neighborhood that we always returned. Other neighborhoods were not simply strange; they were probably unknowable.

I was like everybody else. In the Neighborhood I always knew where I was; it provided my center of gravity. And on its streets I learned certain secrets that were shared by the others. The fight between Mr. Dix and his wife was one secret. I learned who the gangsters were in the Neighborhood and the name of the bookmaker. Their presence created other rules, none of them written on paper. I heard tales of police informers who disappeared in the night and others who were slashed with a knife, from the corner of the mouth to the upper point of the cheek, the mouth gashed into a grotesque elongation like the face of the grinning man at Steeplechase Park in Coney Island: the awful Mark of the Squealer. Such people were called stool pigeons or rats.

There is no person worse in this world, my father said, than a goddamned informer.

I learned too about what they called in religion class “infidelity.” I didn’t know anything of the mechanics of sex, but I did understand that if a father left a mother for another woman, the family would be destroyed. I couldn’t imagine my father leaving my mother for anyone else; but sometimes, when he lay drunk in bed, I was terrified that she might leave him. Sometimes I heard her say, Bill, I’m fed up. And wondered if she would get so fed up she would pack a bag, like women in the movies did, and just go away.

In the Neighborhood, there were many women during the war whose husbands were off at the fighting, and on summer evenings, as the grownups sat around outside, and one of these women went by, I heard whispers and giggles. They weren’t just about Betty the Whore. I heard about the woman who lived across the street from the Minerva and welcomed men visitors at night while her husband worked in the Navy Yard. And the woman from Sixth Avenue who had a baby fifteen months after her husband left for the South Pacific. None of this was absolutely clear to me, but I knew they were talking about sin. In some way, all sin had the same weight, so I also knew the names of those who refused to go to Mass; those who were forced to make general confessions after years away from the Church; and, of course, the names of the drunks.

All of these people were citizens of the Neighborhood, a small state bound together by rivers — rivers of alcohol. On weekends, my father moved on those rivers. Sometimes I would follow him, desperate to know what he did and why. On a few sunny Sunday afternoons, he would take me with him, the way he took me to Gallagher’s when we lived on Thirteenth Street. He said little; but I soon had charted the map of his world.

In the center, of course, was Rattigan’s, directly across the street, packed and smoky, the men discreetly hidden from view by carefully hung café curtains. After the war, the men of Rattigan’s started the Doghouse Club — as in “I’m in the doghouse wit’ the little woman” — and behind the bar there were rows of small white doghouses each with the name of a member lettered on the front. Inside the doghouses were bar tabs or messages, tickets for racetracks or ballparks left by local politicians.

They give you a racetrack ticket, my father explained, and you give them a vote. It’s a good deal.

There were stools at the bar and booths in the back room, but most of the men preferred to stand. So did my father. In those years, there was no jukebox or television set. As they did in Gallagher’s, the men entertained themselves. As in Gallagher’s, my father was a star performer.

Presiding over the place was a huge man named Patty Rattigan, round-faced and balding, like a pink version of the Jolly Green Giant. He had a generous heart, a thick brogue, a job in the borough president’s office, and proud membership in the Democratic party. Patty wasn’t simply a saloonkeeper. He helped find jobs for customers or their sons. He loaned them money. He threw out the crazy people. He loved singing and food and men drinking on summer afternoons. My father loved him and loved his bar.

If anything ever happens to me, my father said one day, Patty Rattigan will take care of the lot of you.

What about Mommy?

He’ll take care of her too.

He sipped his beer, and then started to sing “Galway Bay.” I left, unable to bear the idea of something happening to him, even if Patty Rattigan would take care of everything.

But on weekends, he went on small excursions beyond Rattigan’s and I discovered other fueling stations on those ceaseless rivers. Prospect Park meant nothing to my father; what good were summer meadows if you couldn’t play ball? But on Bartel-Pritchard Square, across from the entrance to the park, he often stopped in two saloons: Langton’s, and the bar attached to Lewnes’ restaurant. The first was dark, odorous, and the only saloon in the Neighborhood that served women at the bar. Lewnes’ (pronounced Looney’s) was full of heavy-set men crowded against the bar in their Sunday best. My father knew many people in both places but never stayed long.

Usually he was heading up the street, where Prospect Park West became Ninth Avenue, to the bar that he kept returning to until the end of his life: Farrell’s. A lot of Belfast men were always there, short and wiry like my father, and they would talk about the old country while I listened and watched. The place was always packed, the men three deep at the long polished wooden bar, served by two bartenders in starched white shirts and neat ties. In the men’s room there were two huge curved ceramic urinals, as high as my head, and I loved pissing on the blocks of ice that lay at the bottom, melting little gullies and caves. At that bar, where the men made jokes, drank beer and whiskey, placed bets on horses, and put cigarettes out on the tile floors, I felt at home. I was, after all, Billy Hamill’s son.

There were other bars on my father’s map. He still went to Gallagher’s, of course, but on weekend afternoons, when the weather was good, he would patrol along Seventh Avenue, where there were bars on almost every corner. There was McAuley’s on Eighth Street, Diamond’s and Denny’s on opposite corners of Ninth Street, Fitzgerald’s on Tenth Street. I’d see him go in, and faces turn, and smiles break out. If he walked in the other direction, he’d visit Unbeatable Joe’s on Twelfth Street, Quigley’s on Thirteenth Street, Connolly’s on Fifteenth Street. In a neighborhood of cliques, Billy Hamill was welcomed by all of them. Occasionally there were wider forays: down to Loftus’s on Fifth Avenue, where the ironworkers did their drinking; the Blue Eagle on Third Street, named after one of the symbols of the New Deal, where a friend from Belfast tended bar; a nameless place on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street next to the Knights of Columbus. He was known everywhere, for his singing, his laughter, his Irish blarney. When he took me with him, he was always greeted with slaps on the back and glasses of beer. But there was another side to him: on the days when I followed at a distance, he often seemed lonesome and sad, heaving the wooden leg behind him, lost in some abyss of memory right up to the second that he opened the doors.

3

THAT WINTER, Betty the Whore’s husband came home. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who had been a German prisoner for two years. But when he went into the building there were no Welcome Home signs and no Betty either. We all heard about the way he reacted. He went into Unbeatable Joe’s and got very drunk. Then he started throwing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror in the men’s room. The other men were very gentle. They took him home and put him to bed. The next day, he left the Neighborhood and never came back.

4

IN THE FALL of the year the war ended, we were suddenly poor. The ferocious winter came howling into New York, and so did a new kind of fear, replacing the old fear of Nazis and Japanese. One afternoon, my father came home to announce that he had lost his job at Arma. They were laying off thousands, he said, now that the war was won. So instead of a sense of triumph, we were filled with uncertainty and doubt. My father had always worked, even in the Depression that everyone still talked about in tones of horror; now he was out of work, and on some of the radio shows they were talking about the possibility of a return of the Depression and how this one might even be worse.

If Roosevelt hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have this problem, my mother said. Truman is just some damned haberdasher…

In the other rooms, while my mother and father talked about the layoffs, the bills, and the rent, Tommy and I whispered in the dark about what would become of us. We wondered if they’d have to put us in an orphanage, like Oliver Twist, who was on the back of the HO Oats box, begging the cook for more gruel. Tommy wondered if we’d be evicted, like the Murphy family, who ended up sitting on the furniture in the rain down on Twelfth Street, bawling in shame while the street kids jeered.

Don’t worry, I told Tommy, Patty Rattigan will take care of us.

And what if he loses his job?

He won’t lose his job, I said confidently. He owns a bar.

My father did lose his job. Now he was home every day. He no longer slept in the afternoons and went off to work through the night. He was here, waking late, going out to look for a new job, often coming home drunk and sour.

My mother wasted no time with either blame or consolation; she started working as a nurse’s aide at Methodist Hospital, leaving at three in the afternoon, coming home around eleven. Sometimes Tommy and I walked her to work, passing the bars of my father’s world, and watched her vanish into the hospital. On the way back, we often saw him through the windows, head lifted in song. If he was afraid, he didn’t show his fear to his friends. But I’d wonder: If there is no money in the house, if we are so poor that Mommy must go to work, then how can he afford to drink? He is having fun while Mommy works. When he was working, he couldn’t save enough money to take her to Broadway. Now the war is over, he has no money at all, and he still can go to Rattigan’s. My longing for him, my desperate need to know him, was turning into anger.

We had an account at Roulston’s, where the cost of food was entered in a composition book behind the counter, to be settled later when my mother was paid. When she went off to work, she left lists of groceries for me to pick up, and I learned to say “on the book” with confidence. My father never shopped. Nor did he cook. My mother left cooked food in pots: lamb stew and barley soup, mixtures of potatoes and carrots, potatoes and peas, potatoes and turnips. These were to be heated up at dinnertime. And so, while my mother helped feed patients at the hospital, Tommy and I did what we called “the cooking.” There was never any beef, of course. And that winter there was no butter. The war might be over, but the shortages were not. Into our kitchen came margarine. My mother told us the butter people wouldn’t allow margarine to be pre-mixed, so we’d place the white waxy blocks in a bowl, sprinkle them with a yellow powder, and churn and mix and mix and churn until the results looked vaguely like butter. My father never did this job either; it was, he said, woman’s work. But after Tommy and I did the work, he refused to use margarine on his toast; if he couldn’t have butter, then he would have nothing. My anger was building.

The rationing of shoes ended, then of meat and finally of butter. But the shortages were not over. There was a shortage of coal, and when the winter of 1946–47 arrived in full force, we sat in the kitchen in sweaters — and on some frigid nights wore coats, mackinaws, and mittens — while listening to Jack Benny and Jimmy Durante or Commissioner Lewis B. Valentine on “Gangbusters.” I was finished with knickers now, wearing long pants to school, but I was always cold and wore knee socks to bed. My father never seemed cold; he slept his deep phlegmy sleep, insulated by drink.

In the living room, (or as we called it, “the front room”), we saved money by using the kerosene stove only a few hours in the evening, to burn off the chill. But when the stove burned down and went out, the windows grew frosted and I would draw faces in the frost with my fingernails. When we talked, steam came in small puffs from our mouths. Overnight, shirts, underwear, and towels froze stiff on the kitchen clothesline. The drainpipes of the 14th Regiment Armory exploded from the cold, and great elaborate ice sculptures bloomed from the broken places. Almost every night, the fire engines woke us as they screamed to another disaster caused by kerosene stoves that burst into fire. The wind off the harbor howled through the night, and in the mornings the trees in the yards were glazed with ice. I’ve never again seen such a winter.

On the radio they were talking about starvation in Europe and Japan. My mother used this information whenever she served something like kelp. What did I mean, I didn’t like kelp? Don’t you know they’re starving in Europe? Yes (I thought, but did not say): Yes, I know that, I know they’re starving; but we’re not doing too good in Brooklyn either. On those bitter nights when there wasn’t enough food, I devised a mental trick: I conjured up pictures from the concentration camps, saying the words “Buchenwald” and “Auschwitz,” reciting the rosary of horror. I made emaciated men in striped pajamas walk through the top floor right at 378 Seventh Avenue, all of them barefoot, their eyes mere dots in black holes, their cheekbones sharp and bare, their arms like dowels, their mouths slack; and I’d say to myself, You have it good, you have a bed, you have food to heat up at night, you have pancakes, you have a kerosene stove, you are not from Buchenwald, you are not being buried by a tractor, fatherless motherless, brotherless, sisterless, you are not a Jew. Almost always, that cured my hunger and my cold and beat down my self-pity. And I would lie in the dark, thinking that no matter what I would be when I grew up, I would do nothing that sent men into camps to die.

And then I would fall into the gray nightmare, fighting my way through the skeletons of the gas chamber.

That winter refused to end. After school, every other afternoon, I went down to Fifteenth Street, my head bent into the wind off the harbor, and bought cheap day-old bread in a bakery next to the Globe movie house. Scabs of black snow were everywhere. My shoes wore out and my mother lined them with cardboard. At school, my number 2 Eberhard Faber pencils wore down to stubs, and some kids had no pencils at all. I drew my cartoons on wrapping paper, and sometimes it was too cold to draw.

One freezing afternoon, in a hallway on Twelfth Street, I heard from a friend about relief. If you were poor, he said, you went to the government and they gave you money that they called relief. There were many people on relief now, my friend said, just like the Depression. He named the families. And that night, after my mother came home, I asked her why she didn’t get relief.

Never, she snapped.

Why?

Because we’re proud people. We’ll take nothing from them. We’ll work.

In the spring, I went to work too.

5

THE BROOKLYN EAGLE was a handsome broadsheet that sold 300,000 copies a day and was read by four times that number. It was an afternoon paper and most of its circulation was home delivered. One afternoon, as I was walking to school at Holy Name, I saw Danno Kelly, one of the older brothers of the Kelly family from 471 Fourteenth Street, and said hello. He asked about my father and mother and then asked me what I was doing. Nothing, I said. Then he told me that if I wanted to work after school, he could give me a job helping him deliver the Eagle.

I started the next day.

After school, I met Danno at the Eagle storefront on Sixth Avenue, where dozens of boys were “boxing” papers in a triple fold and sliding them into delivery bags. I was very nervous. All of the boys were older than I was and they shouted and kidded and worked with amazing speed.

Here, Danno Kelly said, help me box these and put them in the bags.

I did, ineptly and clumsily, until I filled a bag. He was filling two others.

Now, Danno said, put the bag over your shoulder and let’s go.

We set out together, to the route (always rhymed with “out”) that Danno had on Fourth and Fifth streets, tree-lined streets of brownstones and white sandstone apartment houses. The arrangement was simple: Danno worked for the Eagle and I worked for Danno. I was discovering the rudiments of capitalism.

Danno’s blocks were not part of the Neighborhood; the comfortable people lived here, people even better off than those on Eleventh Street. There were no fire escapes on these blocks, no stores or bars, and every house had a backyard. Peering through windows I saw another world, made of polished tables, muted lamps, elaborate wallpaper, rugs on wood floors. The men and women seemed always dressed up; there was nobody like Mr. Dix. The men were formal and sober, the women grave. But they took a lot of newspapers, paying for them once a week. Danno showed me how to throw a paper into a basement doorway, how to wedge it between cut glass doorknobs or into the grills of iron gates beneath the stoops. At the beginning of the route, I wobbled under the weight of the bag. But as I moved on, delivering the papers, the load got lighter, and toward the end, with only a few papers left, I felt stronger and light-headed and even powerful. I was delivering a newspaper.

At the end of the route, my shoulder was sore and I was wet with sweat inside my mackinaw but I felt as if I’d grown six inches in one afternoon. Danno put an arm on my shoulder and handed me a free copy of the paper.

Good job, he said. You’re a little slow, but you’ll get faster. Meet me tomorrow at the Eagle office.

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

ON 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.

Who’s in there? someone said; the voice sounded like that of my cousin Billy.

Me, I said. I’ll be right out.

I finished the glass in one long gulp, belched, waited, hid the glass beside the bed, and left the Little Room. Nothing seemed different. The party roared on. But as I moved through the rooms, I did feel a kind of tingle. It was probably not from the drink. But I was sure that with one action I had changed. I had taken my first drink of beer. And I had done something that I could not reveal to my mother.

Back in the kitchen, nobody realized I’d been gone. My cousin Billy was down in the street with his sister Marie; so were Tommy and Kathleen. The singing got louder. Then, at one point, my father almost dropped Brian. My mother took the baby and handed him to me.

Don’t let your father have him, she said. Not while he’s drinking.

At dusk that Saturday, I sat in a big chair in the living room with Brian in my arms while my father once more delivered “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” As always, the whole crowd joined in the last lines about leaving it all to Providence and Paddy McGinty’s goat. But I gazed out the window, thinking about the waterfront dives I’d seen in movies and ports along the Amazon and lost cities in Yucatan, and I imagined myself coming to those places, standing at the bar in some forsaken outpost and ordering drinks like a man. Someday I’d do that. Someday.

8

AT THE END of June, a few days after my eleventh birthday, school ended and so did my job with the Eagle. Danno told me that people were canceling their subscriptions because of the Depression (for that’s what everybody called it now in the Neighborhood). To make things worse, some of the other readers, the ones with a lot of money, were going off on summer vacations. In the fall, he said, he could hire me again. If the Depression ended. He would even recommend that I be given my own route.

Thanks, kid, said Danno Kelly, and I’ll see you after Labor Day.

I was heartbroken. It wasn’t just that I would no longer be earning money, but after four long months, I had grown used to the routine, hauling my Eagle bag over my shoulder each day and walking alone up the hill, delivering newspapers. That job gave me an identity; I wasn’t just an American, an Irish Catholic, a student, a son, a brother; I was an Eagle boy. Now that identity was gone. For those months, I had given my all to the Brooklyn Eagle, my work and my loyalty, and now it had rejected me. Without that job, I understood how my father must have felt when they laid him off at Arma.

But I had little time to mourn. My mother told me that she had enrolled me for summer camp. The camp was sponsored by the Police Athletic League out of the 72nd Precinct, and it was up in the Adiron-dacks in the north of New York State. I’d be gone for three weeks.

This was fabulous news: an adventure, a trip into the unknown, far from Brooklyn. One morning, my mother took me to a Trailways bus station in New York, where I joined a group of other kids for the journey north. She kissed me good-bye, telling me to write. But as the bus pulled out, and I saw her waving at me from the platform, she seemed sad, even tearful. And I wanted to get up, rush to the front, get off the bus, and hurry back to Brooklyn.

But it was too late. The bus groaned and turned a corner, its engines making a gassy gargling sound, and my mother and the bus station vanished from view. I settled back, tense, guarded, looking at no one, thinking: At last, I am off on an adventure. I am leaving home to see the world.

The camp was nestled in a green valley between mountains. We lived in tents large enough for eight cots. The floors were wooden platforms. In the center of the tents was the main building, made of logs, where the kitchen was and where the counselors lived. Along one side of the camp, a cold clear stream moved swiftly over a bed of smooth stones. On the other side, deep piney woods climbed abruptly into the foothills. From a distance, the place seemed like paradise.

Up close, Fox Lair Camp was much more complicated than any paradise. I met poor boys from the great city beyond the borders of the Neighborhood: Italians from Red Hook and Bensonhurst; blacks from distant Harlem and mysterious Bedford-Stuyvesant; Jews out of Brownsville and the Lower East Side; “Spanish” kids from East Harlem and the Bronx. It was like one of those scenes from a desert movie, where the Red Shadow sends out his call and from all points of the horizon, groups of fighting men rally to his summons. Nobody had summoned these kids, of course, but they all told wild tales of fighting and robbing, knifing and shooting. They knew about all the great gangsters, from Lepke Buchalter to Al Capone. They’d seen blood and bodies. Or so they said. I thought Twelfth Street was pretty tough, but these kids made me feel like some sheltered boy.

On the first day, as I unpacked my small cloth bag and shoved it under my mattress, I was forced to fight. It was like a scene in a dozen movies. A kid named Cappy came over to me.

Whatta you? he said.

Whatta you mean, what am I?

You a Jewboy? A Mick? A guinea like me? What are you?

American, I said.

You a fucking wise guy or what? I ast you what the fuck you are.

American, I said. Irish American.

I shoulda figured dat, he said. A fuckin’ Mick. ’Ey, who cut your fuckin’ hair, Mick? Tonto?

I tried to ignore him, afraid of him, afraid of a fight, and he stepped between me and the cot.

I’m tawkin’ to you, he said.

For a moment, I was riddled with fear. This was like the first day in 1A, mixed up with Brother Foppiano, who was also Italian American. Worse, I thought I saw something cold and heartless in Cappy’s glistening brown eyes. Then, I knew that if I let him beat me up, the three weeks in Fox Lair Camp would be a long humiliation.

I don’t want to talk to you, I said.

Zat so?

He pushed me and I fell back a few feet and then lunged at him. I punched him and kicked him and punched him again, and he careened out through the tent opening onto the dirt path. And then the counselor was there. He was tall, tanned, thick-bodied, with hairy arms and the attitude of a cop.

Hey, come on, what is this? he said, getting between us.

Nothing, I said.

Cappy was up now. He had a surprised look on his face.

We wuz just foolin’ around, he said.

Yeah, I said. Just kidding.

Kid around some other way, the counselor said. I’m in charge of this tent and I don’t want any fighting. Got me?

Cappy shrugged.

Now shake hands, the counselor said. The voice of authority.

Cappy held back. So did I. I had a strange feeling, as if I were part of this scene but also watching it from outside.

I gotta tell you twice? the counselor said. Shake bands!

So we shook hands. And when the counselor was gone, Cappy asked me my name and told me his and we went together to dinner. He made me laugh, with his rowdy talk and thick Brooklyn accent, and when the conversation turned to comics, and he talked on and on about Captain America and the Red Skull and Dr. Sivana and Hawkman, we became friends.

After that, we fell into the rhythms of the days in camp: Softball, where I learned I could hit; footraces; nature walks; swimming and fishing in the stream. I loved the early mornings before breakfast, when the grass sparkled with dew. The nights were rowdier. There were assemblies around a roaring campfire, with sparks rising into the air to die in the dark, and songs made popular by the Sons of the Pioneers. “Cool Water” and “The Streets of Laredo.” While the city boys shouted, cursed, whispered, and fought, while they squirmed and scratched and slapped at mosquitoes, while they bragged about the many beers they’d drunk back home and the gangsters they knew and the women they’d “boffed” or “humped,” the poor counselors tried to get them to sit still for The Song of Hiawatha.

But I loved those campfires, the primitive sense they gave me of having a center, combined with the eerie feeling that I’d been there before, on an ancient battlefield or in Indian camp or on the edge of some lost city. Most of all, I was thrilled to be part of the crowd, sitting in the dark among the rough tribes of New York. Thrilled. And envious. And a little afraid.

The fear grew more specific when I came to know a black kid from our tent. His name was Arnold and he was from Bed-Stuy. He was small, taut, with skin the color of tea with milk, and hazel eyes that made him look both feminine and sinister.

Arnold was a steady presence at Fox Lair Camp, though he seemed also capable of vanishing as swiftly as Invisible Scarlet O’Neill. I don’t remember him playing ball, fishing, swimming, hiking along mountain trails. But there he was at breakfast, using the word “motherfucker” in every other sentence, explaining “cocksucker,” making detailed diagrams on writing paper of the mechanics of sex. As he walked across the field between the tents and the commissary, words like “cunt” and “pussy” would fall from his lips, followed by “muff diver” and “cunt lapper.” Even Cappy was both enthralled and mystified.

At dusk one day, Arnold motioned us into the woods. We disappeared behind a screen of bushes and Arnold reached into a hole burrowed in the roots of a tree. He removed a dirty quart bottle of red wine.

Where’d you get that? I asked.

Found it.

Where?

In the kitchen.

He looked at us with those eyes, a sly smile on his face, and removed the cork. He took a sip and handed it to Cappy. Without a word, Cappy took a swig. Then it was my turn. I didn’t want wine. I wanted to sit beside the campfire and watch the sparks merge with the stars. But this was a kind of dare, like that time on the roof with the Bottomless Pit. If I didn’t take a swig, they’d think I was a kid, a scaredy cat, a momma’s boy, a sissy.

So I took a drink, holding the wine in my mouth as I passed the bottle to Arnold. I hoped I could spit it out while the other two weren’t looking. But Arnold was staring at me, judging me. I swallowed the wine. Arnold grinned. Cappy whispered: Not bad. Arnold took another sip. Cappy talked about how his grandfather from Italy made his own wine, putting all the grapes in a big vat and jumping on them with his bare feet.

Arnold said: The motherfuckin’ wine must taste like fuckin’ feet.

Cappy said: No, no, it tastes fuckin’ great. I had some at my cousin’s wedding.

Arnold took a third swallow and passed the bottle to Cappy. My mouth felt sticky.

Cappy said: Not bad, Arnold, not motherfuckin’ bad.

They giggled. The bottle came to me again. I took my swig, swallowed, handed the bottle to Arnold. The sense of the forbidden flooded through me again. My father had once said to me, The wino is the lowest form of man, except for an informer. Would I become a wino if I kept drinking? Was drinking wine a mortal or a venial sin? And how could it be a sin at all? At every Mass, the priests drank wine. The blood of Jesus, they told us. How could it be a sin in the woods and a virtue on an altar? The bottle came around again and I drank once more of the blood of Jesus.

Then Arnold produced a cigarette. A Camel. My father’s brand. He lit it with a wooden match, snapping off the head just the way my father did during the match shortage, the way I never could. Arnold took a drag, handed it to Cappy, who did the same and passed it to me. I was listening for the sounds of counselors or other kids, afraid of being discovered.

Don’t slob it, Cappy said as I took the cigarette. Don’t get it wet wit’ spit.

I took a tense drag. The smoke made my head balloon. I started to cough, and Arnold looked around toward the camp, alarmed. But I didn’t slob the cigarette. I handed it to Arnold and said with confidence: Pass me the wine.

I took a slug, the cough stopped, but I never had another sip. Someone was crashing through the woods. Arnold capped the bottle, slipped it under the roots, then tamped out the cigarette.

Anybody in there? a grown-up voice said.

Yeah, Arnold replied. We looking for snakes.

Do that some other time. We’re roasting marshmallows.

So off we went to the marshmallow roast, looking, I suppose, like kids off a brotherhood poster.

In the first few days that followed the night of the wine, I found reasons to avoid the hideout in the woods. I was playing softball. I was swimming. I was picking wild strawberries. Arnold just stared at me with a thin smile on his face, as if he knew how much I wanted to return to the wine and the cigarettes, to the forbidden, to the secret life of the outlaw. I was desperate now for things to read, starved for the alternate lives of fantasy and imagination that had become part of my days; there were no books or newspapers in the camp.

But Arnold was weaving another world of fantasy for all of us in the tent. Sometimes he bragged about the number of times he had been drunk and how many times he’d smoked reefer, a kind of cigarette that made you feel real good. He described the taste of rum, of whiskey, of bourbon, beer, and wine. He described roaring parties, wild music, amazing adventures in the nights of motherfucking Brooklyn. One evening, he smuggled another bottle of wine into the tent and we all took swigs. It tasted better this time, like thick grape juice.

And when he wasn’t describing his greatness as a drinker, Arnold’s subject was sex. He told us that he fucked lots of women, all over his neighborhood. Fat ones, skinny ones, girls with big asses and tits. He even fucked his older sister once when she was drunk. That was the best way to fuck a woman. Get her drunk first. Wine and kisses. That was the way.

Arnold also led the way to one of the great astonishments of Fox Lair Camp: masturbation. I wasn’t the only boy in that tent who was ignorant of the practice. Once again, the devil’s agent was Arnold, age eleven. One night, after lights out, as we all shifted in our cots to find comfortable positions, Arnold spoke from the darkness.

Hey, why don’t we have a circle jerk?

Cappy said: A what?

Arnold said: We get in a circle and jerk off.

One kid said: Wuz dat?

A couple of kids laughed in a knowing way. But Arnold was a determined pedagogue. He got up, dropped his shorts (which all of us wore to bed), and stood before the boy in the dim shimmer of leaking moonlight. Arnold held his small penis in his hand.

Watch me now, he said, and started playing with himself. Almost immediately, his penis got larger and harder.

Now you do it, Arnold said.

The boy did.

Now you go up and down like this, Arnold said.

The boy moved his hand up and down on his erection. Everybody else was silent.

Now, Arnold said, you think about some woman … you know, like Betty Grable or Rita Haywort’. She got big tits. She gotta big ass. And you on top of her, you stickin’ it in her, you in her big wet hairy pussy, you in her motherfuckin’ ass!

Arnold groaned and ejaculated on the floor. The boy ejaculated on himself, moaning and whimpering. Some of the boys giggled. Then Arnold sneaked outside, felt under the floorboards of the tent platform, came back with a bottle of wine.

Here, drink this, he said, handing the bottle to the boy. Make you feel sweet and good and ready to do it again.

The boy took a sip, Arnold a long swallow.

Who wants some juice? he said.

Cappy took a swallow, then passed it to me. I swallowed a long swig, then turned away to sleep. Arnold went back outside. He came back and stood before the other boy, holding his penis.

Wanna do it again? Arnold said.

Nah, I’m too tired. Maybe tomorrow.

Arnold went back to bed and then the tent was very still. Boys shifted in their cots. Then one boy moaned. And another. Arnold laughed. Away off in the mountains, coyotes howled. The night breeze made the tent flaps billow and sigh. Under the army blanket I reached down and touched my hard penis and thought about the Dragon Lady.

I learned to talk the way the others did, using “fuck” and “shit” and “prick” for punctuation and rhythm, saying “dis” and “dat” instead of “this” and “that,” dropping my g’s, removing t’s from other words (“bottle,” for example). I practiced walking like the tough guys, in a rolling way, putting the weight on one foot while the other dragged behind. I stopped saying “excuse me.” I spit a lot.

Twice more, Cappy and I sneaked away to drink wine with Arnold in the woods, but I did this more to show that I could be as bad as anyone rather than for any real desire for wine. To me, the taste of wine was as sickly sweet as the taste of beer was sour; I wished I had a bottle of Frank’s Orange. And though I felt a tingle in my head from the wine, and an odd thickness in my hands, I felt no ache to have a bottle all to myself. I much preferred hitting a softball past the third baseman.

Then one night near the end of the second week, I was awakened from a deep sleep. Arnold was beside me in my bed, his hard prick up against my rectum.

Hey, I said. What —

Come on, baby, Arnold whispered. Open up your sweet white ass.

I turned. His penis was against my hip now. His breath had a stale sweet smell, like dried wine.

Get the fuck outta here, Arnold, I said.

Come on, baby, he purred. Make Arnold happy.

I pushed him away, but then his voice changed and he locked an arm around my neck.

Do what I say, he whispered coldly. I got a knife and I’ll cut your motherfuckin’ white throat.

I panicked at the mention of the knife, and shoved him hard, kicking at him as he fell on the floor, and then Cappy was awake, followed by the other kids. I kept punching and kicking at Arnold as if my life depended on it. Cappy looked astonished. But my fury must have convinced him about who was right, so he kicked at Arnold too and stomped on his knees. And then the lights came on. The counselor stood there in his underwear. His hair was mussed, his face rumpled and irritated.

Okay, he said, what’s going on in here?

Arnold stood up slowly, his hazel eyes wide in righteous anger. I couldn’t see any knife.

This fuckin’ white boy is a faggot! he screamed.

His nose was bleeding, his lower lip split. He pointed at me, spitting out the words: I’uz sleepin’ real peaceful and he gets in bed with me, tries to fuck me inny ass!

That’s a lie! I said, rushing at him again. The counselor grabbed me and spun me around. I was crazy with rage. He’s lying! He’s a motherfuckin’ liar!

All right, watch your language …

Then Arnold looked at me from those eyes, a sneer on his face, and made a slicing sign across his neck with a finger. The counselor must have seen this too. He turned to the other kids and asked them if they’d seen what happened. There was a long silence. Nobody wanted to be an informer. Arnold smirked. And then one boy spoke. It was the boy who learned to masturbate from Arnold.

He tried to do it to me, too, he said.

Who did?

Arnold.

Then another kid cleared his throat and whispered: Me too. The counselor looked around at us, studying our faces, and then turned to Arnold.

Pack up, Arnold, he said. And come with me.

They went off to the main building, Arnold limping on the leg hurt by Cappy’s stomping. He looked as if he were under arrest. But as he vanished into the dark, carrying his small cloth bag, I felt neither relief nor triumph. Instead, I lay awake in the dark for a long time. I felt like a rat. A stool pigeon. A creature even lower than a wino. It didn’t matter that Arnold had lied about me and I had answered him back. I had collaborated with the enemy.

The next day, Arnold was gone from Fox Lair Camp.

9

WHEN I CAME HOME from Fox Lair Camp, I was a changed boy. I felt tougher, older, suddenly conscious that I was moving toward becoming a man. After all, I had traveled hundreds of miles to the distant Adirondacks, far beyond the frontiers of the Neighborhood, an immense distance from New York itself, and I had made that journey without the protection of my mother or father. In the great mountain gathering of the New York tribes, I had survived. I thought I knew about sex now, that immense blurred mystery. I had drunk wine. And fought off Arnold. Softball and wild strawberries were marginal to the journey; I had learned to walk in the world, with no help from anyone. It didn’t matter that I could not explain much of this to my mother. These were three weeks in my life, not hers, and certainly not weeks in the life of my father; that journey belonged to me alone.

In some ways, the trip to Fox Lair Camp was my first true opening to consciousness. And drinking was a crucial part of it. Drinking wine in the woods wasn’t simply another sensual pleasure, like eating ice cream; it was an act of rebellion, a declaration of self. The camp had rules and I was breaking them. It was also an act of communion, with Arnold, with Cappy. Both states of consciousness would remain with me through years of drinking. Through the agency of Arnold, I also discovered Evil. I don’t mean that sex was evil. That, and drinking, were only part of a generalized negation that flowed from Arnold with a dark steady force. He made me afraid. The fear he inspired wasn’t physical; it was deeper and darker than that. Arnold lived by his own rules, not the rules I was learning. Nothing could persuade him from his desires except force.

That summer, I was converted to the creed of machismo, although I would not hear that word for another decade. On the street when I was back from camp, I began to talk tough, sprinkling my language with “fuck” and “cocksucker” and “prick.” I could be as tough as the other kids on Twelfth Street; from the start, language was part of the pose. At home, my mother corrected my slide into “dis” and “dat,” “dem” and “dose,” but I reverted to them when I hit the street, wearing the Brooklyn accent like armor. I walked in the rolling gait I’d picked up from the bad boys at camp. I talked about girls and asses and tits. Much of this was a mask, but I was quickly making myself comfortable behind it. And of course I wasn’t alone; in that neighborhood, looking like a hard guy was part of the deal.

On the roof next door to ours, Mr. Sicker and Mr. De Saro built a pigeon coop that summer, talking with passion to anyone who’d listen about “tiplets” and “homers” and the intricacies of flight and habit and instinct. They spent hours on the roof, watching their flocks gliding in tight formation around the sky, as happy in their intensity as I was with my books and comics. Their passion impressed me, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t share it; there was something disturbing to me about the gurgling, swallowing sounds of the pigeons. Besides, if you could fly like a homer, why would you ever come home?

A few buildings away from ours, I met Mr. Dexter, a change clerk in the subway. He went to work before the morning rush hour and came home in early afternoon. Every afternoon in the good weather, he appeared on his roof to lift weights. Mr. Dexter was small and wore glasses, but his upper torso was ropy with muscle. I asked him if I could try lifting the barbell and he said sure. I was stronger than I thought I was. He showed me how to do curls and presses, how to adjust the bells with a small wrench, how to create daily routines of “reps,” the same exercise repeated dozens of times. Soon, I added weight lifting to the rhythm of my days.

At some point, I started going to the Police Athletic League gym on Eighth Street to watch the amateur fighters. Again, I saw how important repetition was to learning; on the floor, the fighters repeated the same punch over and over again, while time was chopped into three-minute segments by an automatic bell; then the punches were joined to others in combinations, with the flat-nosed paunchy trainer shouting his instructions: Jab, bend! Double the jab, bend! Now punch outta da bend! I was still too young for the boxing team, and too shy to insist (and afraid of getting hurt). But back home, alone on the roof, or crouched in front of the bedroom mirror, I would practice jabs and hooks and right hands. I would bend at the knees after the jab. I would double the jab and throw the right hand. All the while breathing hard through my nose, my mouth clamped shut into a hard mask.

On the street, boxing was as much a part of our talk as baseball. In the summer of 1946 everybody in New York was talking about Rocky Graziano, who was knocking out all comers. Rocky, the tough middleweight from the East Side, Rocky, who talked like a lot of the kids from Fox Lair Camp. But my father didn’t care much for Graziano. He fights little guys, he said. He’s the best middleweight in the welterweight division. Or put another way, he never fights anyone his own size. My father’s favorite was Willie Pep, a featherweight like himself, fast, fresh, audacious, a champion of the world. I was sure that if my father had legs, he’d box like Willie Pep.

But even Willie Pep wasn’t the best. One day, my father showed me a picture of a black fighter in the Daily News, handsome and slick and lean. That’s Sugar Ray Robinson, he said. He’s the greatest fighter who ever lived. There were no qualifications; he described Robinson in the same flat way he would use to describe Mount Everest as the highest mountain in the world.

How would he do against Graziano? I asked.

He would knock Graziano out in four rounds, he said flatly.

When they did fight years later, Robinson knocked out Graziano in three.

In the streets, we still played the now forgotten games of the New York summers. Stickball was the supreme game, a kind of tabloid version of baseball, played with a broom handle as a bat and a pink rubber ball manufactured by the A. G. Spalding Co. In every street in New York, this ball was called a spaldeen. The spaldeens had vanished during the war and the game was played for a while with hairy tennis balls, until even they had disappeared. But coming home from Fox Lair Camp, I felt a special excitement spreading through the neighborhood: Spaldeens are back!

From out of Unbeatable Joe’s and Rattigan’s and the other bars, the men and the veterans came piling into the streets again, taking our bats, once more playing the city’s greatest game, whacking spaldeens past trolley cars and over rooftops, running bases on heat-softened tar, making impossible catches, dodging trolley cars and trucks, almost delirious with joy. The war was over. The fucking war was finally over.

Stickball ruled us. On Saturday mornings, the older guys played big games against visitors from other neighborhoods or went off themselves to play beyond our frontiers. Money game! someone would shout, and suddenly we were all moving to the appointed court and the great noisy fiesta of the stickball morning. The players drank beer from cardboard containers on the sidelines and ate hero sandwiches and smoked cigarettes. They were cheered by neighbors, girlfriends, wives, and kids. And standing on the sidelines during those first games were the veterans, holding the spaldeens, bouncing them, smelling them in an almost sacramental way.

The men played on summer weekends; we kids played every day. There were still very few cars on the streets in that year after the war, so the “court” was always perfectly drawn, with sewer plates marking home and second base, while first and third were chalked against the curbs. The rules were settled before each game: one strike and you were out; off the factory wall or off a passing trolley car was a “hindoo” — which meant the play didn’t count. The great hitters could hit the ball at least “three sewers,” and it was said of Paulie McAleer of the Shamrock Boys that he once hit a ball an incredible five sewers. In memory, the games seem continuous and the days longer, richer, denser, and emptier than any others in my life. We did nothing and we did everything. You would wake, the radio playing, the rooms thick with the closed heat (and sometimes the sour smell of drink), grab something to eat — bread and butter covered with sugar, a piece of toast — and then race down the stairs, to burst into the streets. On a perfect Saturday in August, Twelfth Street would be wet from the water wagon, the air fresh, nobody else around, the tenements brooding in Edward Hopper light, and then a door would open and Billy Rossiter would appear with the bat and the spaldeen, and that was all we needed. We’d play off the factory walls until the others came down; we’d play ten hits a piece until there were enough players to choose up sides. And then we’d play until dark.

After stickball, or wedged between the ball games, there were other games too: kick the can, off the point, box ball and punchball, Johnny on the pony (Buck buck, how many borns are up), and the greatest of all: ring-o-Ievio.

One Saturday, we were playing ring-o-levio on Twelfth Street and one of the players on the other side was Frankie Nocera. He was a lean black-haired wild-tempered kid who lived in one of the corner tenements. A few years earlier, hitching a ride on a trolley car, he fell off and his foot went under a steel wheel; he lost the tip of his right foot and became known as No Toes Nocera. Winter and summer, he wore an ankle boot with a steel tip that replaced the missing toes. Because of my father’s leg, Frankie and I should have been friends. Frankie, after all, was a cripple. For some reason, he had become my nemesis, the way Dr. Sivana was the nemesis of Captain Marvel or the Joker of Batman. On Thirteenth Street, Brother Foppiano was my nemesis. Now, on Twelfth Street, it was No Toes Nocera. It must have had something to do with the great struggle between the Irish and Italians. Or maybe it was just chemistry.

Unlike Arnold, Frankie didn’t make me feel that I had opened a curtain and glimpsed Hell. But he was always there, pinching, leaning, nudging, harassing. I’d be playing marbles in the lot and he’d grab a peewee and walk off; if I went after him, he’d drop the marble, or roll it toward a sewer, and laugh. I’d be on a stoop after a game, reading a comic book, and he’d snatch at it, run away, force me into a losing tug-of-war over the comic, as if sensing that I wouldn’t risk tearing the cover. He’d squirt water pistols at me; he’d ask for a ride on a scooter and go off for an hour; he was one of those kids who was always grabbing your hat. He wasn’t bad. But he was a misery.

Naturally, when we played ring-o-levio, Frankie was on the opposing team. The rules of the game were as primitive as warfare. We divided ourselves into two teams, or sides. After a coin toss, one team went out, scattering around the immediate neighborhood, looking for hiding places. The second team would then hunt down the first, capturing each opponent and returning him to a pen whose walls were marked on the tarred street with chalk. The pen was called home. When the last man was captured, the sides switched roles, the hunters becoming the hunted. Imprisonment, however, wasn’t permanent. If you were one of the hunted, and could elude capture through guile or deception, you could make a sudden dash, race directly at the wall of defenders around the border of the pen, crash through them, shout the magical phrase Home free all! and liberate all members of your side. Most of the time it was impossible to breach the wall of defenders, who stood there with arms locked. But if you succeeded, it was a moment of sheer power and glory.

On this day, I was the last man out. I had evaded all my pursuers and then, gathering strength on the slope above Seventh Avenue, I started my run for home. I dodged left, feinted right, zigzagged, and twirled, never stopping; saw the crowd of defenders guarding home, under the lamppost in front of Mr. Dix’s house; saw my side waiting inside the pen, all of them tensing, the defenders crouching, then stepping forward, Frankie Nocero among them; saw them forming a human wall; saw them getting larger as I came closer. And then I leaped, high and strong, feeling that I could fly, saw a blur of bodies and faces, rammed into shoulders and elbows and torsos, and was through! Shouting Home free all!

My side scattered into freedom. I whirled to escape. And then saw Frankie Nocero rising from the tangle of defenders. Saw Frankie’s eyes wide in rage. Saw him coming at me. Then felt a numbness in my face as a punch hit my nose, then a sharp pain on the side of my head as he threw another.

I backed up, numb, my ears ringing, the world suddenly filmy, and he threw another punch and missed, and someone yelled Right hand. I threw the right hand and hit him. Then threw it again, and missed. And again, and hit him, still backing up, Frankie making a snorting sound, his teeth bared, his hair all spiky. Someone else yelled: Jab, jab, use da jab. Then I remembered the PAL gym, and Graziano, and the pictures of Sugar Ray, and I raised my hands in the boxer’s stance; and when Frankie came at me again I speared him with a jab and threw a right hand behind it. For the first time in my life I heard cheers. A crowd was now gathering. I saw them as a blur, a presence, heads and bodies and no faces; but they were there, and they made the fight even more important. I couldn’t be humiliated in front of a crowd; I couldn’t run; I absolutely could not cry. I remember coiling into an almost ferocious concentration. I jabbed and hit Frankie, and jabbed again, then feinted the jab and threw the right hand and amazingly, Frankie went down. I went down on top of him, battering him with punches, until he started screaming Stop stop I give up stop okay stop.

I got off him then, rising slowly, my hands still fists, afraid of a trick, and then heard more cheers, and suddenly my brother Tommy was there and Billy Rossiter and Billy Delaney and they were hugging me and clenching fists in approval and then I saw the crowd of men outside of Unbeatable Joe’s and they were clapping and laughing before going back to the bar. I had fought a street fight and won. Not with kids from camp whom I’d never see again. Here at home. On the court. In the Neighborhood. And men cheered. I hoped they would tell my father what I’d done.

Then I saw Frankie Nocera walking into his building. He was holding his face. There was blood all over the front of his shirt. Very red blood. He was absolutely alone, limping on that gimpy foot. I started to go to him, suddenly feeling sorry for him. I wanted to be gracious, the way winning prizefighters were after boxing matches. But Frankie vanished into the dark hallway. We all went to Sanew’s then and bought bottles of Frank’s Orange or Mission Bell Grape, drinking them greedily, passing them around. Soda had never tasted better. And someone said, That Frankie, be needed a good fuckin’ beating and you sure give it to him. But even in triumph, something bothered me about the fight.

The next day I saw Frankie again. He was sitting alone on his stoop. Both eyes were hidden behind pads of swollen purple flesh; his nose was thick and crooked. My brother Tommy told me later that Frankie had to go to the hospital because his nose was broken. So I went to him, my mind a confusion of power and pity, a bit nervous that he would lash out at me with the steel toes or come up with a knife.

I didn’t want the fight, Frankie, I said. You started it.

Fuck it, he said sadly, with a little wave of his hand.

Let’s forget about it, I said.

He looked at me as if knowing that he would never forget about it and neither would I.

Come on, I said. We’ll go read comics.

He stared at me for a long moment and then got up, and we walked off to look at stories of heroes and perils in a simpler world.

10

ON SUNDAYS, the family sometimes went visiting. That’s what it was called: visiting. You went to someone else’s house and brought along some cold cuts or Italian bread or beer and entertained each other. We almost always went to visit my father’s relatives; my mother had friends but no relatives in America. After Mass, the whole family would walk down to Fifth Avenue, still dressed in Sunday best, and get on the trolley and rattle out to Bay Ridge to see Uncle Tommy or Uncle Davey, Aunt Louie or Aunt Nellie, and all my cousins. We couldn’t play in the street because we were in our good clothes; but visiting wasn’t play to us, it was a show. There would be food and drink and singing in the parlor. And here, as in the bars, my father was always the star. The kids were called upon to perform too, singing songs or reciting poems. I was too shy to sing; how could I compete with my father? But every time we went visiting, I was asked that most awful question: What Are You Going to Be When You Grow Up? And during that crowded year, I started answering: a cartoonist.

Usually, they would laugh and someone would get paper and a pencil and ask me to draw something, and I would be forced to draw in a state of anxiety that was worse than fighting Frankie Nocera. I gave them Dick Tracy. Or Flattop. Or Batman. They were the easiest, the faces I could draw without copying. And they would laugh and say, That’s good, Peter, and then I was free, off the stage, released, and I could ease away from their attentions.

But I was telling the truth. That summer when I was eleven, I first conceived the idea of becoming a cartoonist. There wasn’t any special moment that I remember, no Shazam-like bolt of explosive insight that told me this. The ambition was, I suppose, tentative at first, whispered, a wish in the dark while the trolley cars ding-dinged through the night. But going back to Simon and Kirby and Captain America, I had learned that comics were written and drawn by men and those men were paid very well for their work. The money wasn’t the most important thing; it was something else: they were being paid for doing what they loved to do. My father had a job, and he was paid. But he wasn’t working at something he liked. Nobody paid men to drink in saloons.

The focus of my fantasy was Milton Caniff, who was in his last year drawing and writing Terry and the Pirates. Suddenly, I got it. The locale was something that my grandfather must have known: the coasts, rivers, plains, and mountains of southern China. I identified with Terry Lee, the blond young pilot. I wished I could talk as fast as the wisecracking Hot Shot Charlie, with his red hair, freckles, Boston accent, corncob pipe, and flight cap worn with a swagger on the back of his head. I wanted to have someone around who was like Pat Ryan or Flip Corkin, a guy who knew the world and could show me how to live in it.

There was something else: Caniff’s women put me in a kind of fever. Every one of them exuded a lush sexuality that no other cartoonist has ever matched and did so without ceasing to be a specific individual. They weren’t just pinups. Not one of them was a doormat. Every one of them made her way through the world of men without complaint. There was Burma, all blond and shimmering, like women in the thirties movies at the Minerva, a mixture of Sadie Thompson and Jean Harlow, always singing the “St. Louis Blues,” sometimes for money and sometimes for love, always smoking, tough with bad guys, soft on Pat Ryan, burning brightly in Terry’s life for a while then abruptly vanishing, only to turn up again in some other exotic Asian port. And even larger, grander, more powerful, was the Dragon Lady, Caniff’s most famous creation. Sleek black hair framed her oval Dolores Del Rio face with its almond eyes and high Eurasian cheekbones, the eyebrows reduced to fine lines that lay angrily on her face like tiny daggers. Usually the Dragon Lady wore a scarlet cape and under the cape, in fancy gowns or military trousers, she had the full-breasted body of a million wet dreams. The Dragon Lady was not only beautiful; she was often evil — venomous, treacherous, violent — and in a dark and scary way, that made her even more desirable to me.

I began to devour Caniff, driven by a sense of sudden urgency. It had been announced in the Daily Mirror that this was Caniff’s last year doing Terry for the Daily News; he would create a new strip that would run in the Mirror. I wanted to preserve Terry before it was gone forever. I clipped Terry from the Daily News every day and filed the strips in letter-sized envelopes. I saved the Sunday pages, with their beautiful colors and spectacular action panels. Then I started buying scrapbooks, oversized books made of cheap coarse paper, and began filling them with the Terry strips, using the pale yellow glue called mucilage. But there was a problem. In Caniff’s wonderful comic strip, time actually passed; Terry got older (although the women didn’t). The characters lived in the real world (or so I thought), the world of war and women and airplanes, the world described each day in the front of the newspaper. They didn’t inhabit Captain Marvel’s world of magic lightning or the garish places where Captain America pursued the Red Skull. Terry and the Pirates was like some long picaresque novel, and in 1946 I felt that I had started reading it near the end. The newspaper sequences were self-contained, each story taking about two months before shifting into another combination of heroes and villains. But I wanted to read the novel’s early chapters too. Caniff often brought back characters from Terry’s youth; the Dragon Lady, Pat Ryan, April Kane, Burma, made more than one appearance. I wanted the whole story, not just its final episodes.

The task of piecing together that story was like the search for the full run of the Bomba books (and resembled the basic task of reporting). I had to work backwards. In tiny type at the bottom of each strip there was a copyright line that supplied the year of its first appearance; a hand-lettered date gave the month and day: 4/1, say, or 6/24. Unfortunately, there were almost no old newspapers in the neighborhood; like my skates, they’d gone to the war, bundled up for scrap paper drives. But many of the newspaper strips had reappeared in the brightly colored pages of Super Comics, which also reprinted other strips from the Daily News. They had also been converted into Big Little Books. So I followed the same route taken in the Bomba search, exploring the archipelago of secondhand comics shops and bookstores. I was driven by fundamental questions. How did Terry Lee get to China? Who was Pat Ryan? When did they meet the Dragon Lady? Why on earth would Pat Ryan fall in love with prissy Normandie Drake if Burma was around? I wanted to read it all, to keep going back until I found the beginning. In a good story, something happened and as a result, something else happened. You went to China or to Fox Lair Camp, and you were changed by what happened to you. I wanted to know what happened to Pat Ryan and Terry Lee.

My obsession with Terry and the Pirates was different in one sense from the long pursuit of the Bomba books. I wanted to know Milton Caniff. In a way, he was the true hero of the comic strip. I would sit at the kitchen table and try to copy his figures and always failed; drawing Flip Corkin wasn’t as simple as making an image of Flattop or Batman, and the Dragon Lady was impossible. I would get the general shapes down on paper but there was always something wrong: the original expression changed into an empty smudge, the ears were in the wrong places, the hands looked thick and clumsy. But I kept trying. After all, Caniff was the best. Like Sugar Ray Robinson. And there was no point in trying to be less than the best, was there?

In 1947, Caniff, as announced, left Terry to another artist, George Wunder, and started Steve Canyon in the Daily Mirror. There was a great burst of publicity. Caniff appeared on the cover of Time. The Mirror did a series of ads building up to the debut of the new strip. I learned that Caniff was an Irish-American too, from Ohio; had gone to college; wanted to be an actor; came to New York to work for the Associated Press, where he drew a strip called Dickie Dare, and went on to do Terry in 1934 for the Daily News. He was syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers and now lived in a beautiful house in New City, New York. The photographs of the studio showed a room that was larger than our entire flat. I saved all this publicity, staring at Caniff’s face, looking at examples of his work going back to his childhood, and then, from the first great Sunday page, clipped every Canyon strip until I went into the navy in 1952.

That first Sunday page of Steve Canyon, dated January 18, 1947, was as good as any movie. For five panels, we don’t see Canyon’s face, but his character is established by various people who greet him on his way into an office building. An Irish cop thanks him for stopping off to see his sister in Shannon; the doorman thanks him for sending a souvenir from Egypt to his son; a blind newsdealer, called only “sarge,” and obviously a war veteran, thanks Canyon for backing him in setting up the newsstand; a flower girl offers him a carnation for his buttonhole, but when he turns her down he says that she and her mother are due for a movie on him; the elevator girls stammer a hello and say that for him, they won’t wait for a full car. So we know immediately that Canyon is a good, generous man, a world traveler, thoughtful, personal, attractive to women. We see his face for the first time in the sixth panel; it’s lean, and there’s a black streak in his blond hair. Wearing a checkered overcoat, he opens the door with his company’s name on the glass: Horizons Unlimited. Beyond the door is his secretary, a Polynesian woman named Feeta Feeta, with lovely breasts under a polka-dotted blouse, flowers in her hair, talking on the phone. On the line is Mr. Dayzee, the formal and officious male secretary to a woman named Copper Calhoun, “the big she-wolf of the stock market.” Dayzee virtually orders Canyon to come immediately to Calhoun’s apartment; Canyon refuses the order, objecting to the tone of the demand, and tells Dayzee that “the click you hear will mean you’re soloing.” Feeta Feeta looks resigned; the office rent is due, “but I guess it’s bad form to get into regular habits like that. …” In the final panel, Copper Calhoun, with sleek black hair, the arched eyebrows of the Dragon Lady, a long cigarette in one hand, says: “I want that man!! … Get him!”

I loved this and sat down to labor over a long letter to Caniff, telling him how great it was and how I wanted to be a cartoonist too. A few weeks later a package arrived in the mail from New City. Inside was a note from Caniff himself, a copy of a brochure he’d written for aspiring cartoonists, “A Guide for an Armchair Marco Polo,” and a colored picture of Steve Canyon. I was hooked. If Terry belonged to my mother first, Steve Canyon was mine from the start. On the street, nobody else cared much about my obsession, so this became another part of my secret life.

Later in 1947, I found a book called The Comics by Coulton Waugh, who back in the 1930s had succeeded Caniff on Dickie Dare. His book told the story of American comic strips from their beginnings in the 1890s with R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid to the triumph of the comic books. There was, of course, a chapter on Caniff and his imitators, and for the first time my faith in the great man’s talents was shaken. Caniff was being imitated by hundreds of other cartoonists, with more appearing every day. Did I want to be just another imitator? Could I be an imitator? In Waugh’s book I saw the immense variety of possible cartoon styles: Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer and Captain Easy, George, Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby. There were so many different ways to be a cartoonist. So when I failed once more to capture the sultry pout of the Dragon Lady, I would console myself by thinking, Hey, so what, I don’t want to be just another hack imitator of Milton Caniff.

But I didn’t just want to draw the characters the way Caniff did. I didn’t really want to have his studio in New City. The truth was that I wanted to live the way his creations lived. I didn’t want to spend a lifetime doing a comic strip about husbands and wives, or the distant past, or funny animals. I wanted to see the exotic places of the world. I wanted to go where my grandfather had gone. In a notebook, I copied a sentence from Waugh’s book that described Roy Crane’s creations: In the old days tubby Tubbs and lanky Easy were loose-footed soldiers of fortune, a big and little stone rolling through the romantic places of the earth, usually broke, sometimes fabulously wealthy, but always ready for fight, frolic, or feed.

That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill’s son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.

11

AROUND THE SAME time, a sign painter named Jim Brady opened a shop on Seventh Avenue off the corner of Thirteenth Street, just past the swirling pole of Fortunato’s barbershop, where my father got his hair cut. One summer morning I walked past the shop and stopped short. In the window was an enlarged photostat of the first Terry daily, drawn by Caniff in a much more cartoony style than the richly brushed strip that had become my obsession. There were also mounted photostats of characters from Terry and some Terry comic books arranged in a display. The shop was closed. But I came back that evening and saw a heavy-set man with reddish hair working on a sign for a butcher. He had a red handkerchief tied across his brow to prevent his sweat from splashing on the posters. His eyes were hidden behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. He only had one hand, and held a paintpot in the crook of the injured right arm. He must have felt my eyes on him.

Can I help you, kid? he said.

Uh, I — Well, I saw the Milton Caniff drawings in the window.

He paused.

You a Caniff fan?

Yeah.

Come on in.

He let me watch as he worked on the sign, and asked me questions. Did I draw every day? Was there a drawing class in my school? Where did I live? Oh, so you’re Billy Hamill’s kid. Hell of a guy, your dad. What do you do after school? Well, maybe you could work for me. Sweep the store. Deliver the signs… But I can’t pay much, kid.

So began my apprenticeship. I came back every day. And in that hot, narrow shop, smoky from Brady’s Pall Malls, with beautifully lettered signs for pork chops and clamb roasts appearing in black and red paint on rolls of poster paper that unfurled across a tilted plywood worktable, Brady told me tales of the world of comics. Before he became a sign painter, he explained, he was a professional letterer for comic books. That is, he was part of that mysterious and powerful world across the river in Manhattan, where they did the work that I loved so much. He showed me his collection of originals, by Alex Toth (He’s the best around and he’s only a kid.) and a man named Edmund Good (who worked for a time as the artist on Scorchy Smith) and some other artists whose names I no longer remember. These were oversized two-ply Strathmore pages in black and white, the blacks very black, with corrections made in china white. Brady explained how in comic books, one man wrote the script, another penciled all the panels (Usually with a pale blue pencil, ‘cause that blue don’t photograph when they reduce the page to comic book size), another inked the pencil drawings, and another, the letterer, did all the balloons. Caniff himself used a fabulous letterer named Frank Engli: A great cartoonist in his own right, ya know, but a master letterer. Brady said he loved doing lettering for comic books. But my eyes started going so I had to stop… He shook his head sadly, then removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes with the elbow of the bad arm. He didn’t explain what had happened to his hand, and I didn’t ask. But I felt pity for him; like my father, he had lost part of himself on the way to Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn.

Sometimes I brought him the latest old Terry comics I had discovered in the bookstores. He would look at them and point out what Caniff was doing.

You see, it’s like a movie, like a frozen movie, he said. Long shot, medium shot, closeup — see what I mean?

I said I did (and when I went to the movies, I started seeing Caniff in everything). Brady explained about lettering: thick verticals, thin horizontals. If you have a lettering pen, the nib does it, but ya gotta do it over and over again to make it look natural. He explained the difference between serif and sans serif. He showed me how Roy Crane and Will Eisner (in The Spirit comic books) used lettering to create sounds: Ka-BONG, Padda-pow!

Ya gotta draw and draw, he said, and when you’re old enough, ya gotta go to art school.

In a way, that was exactly what I was doing in Jim Brady’s shop. His art school even had a small library: old comics, books on drawing and lettering. One day, in a cardboard box, I discovered a book of cartoons by Caniff that I’d never seen before. He had drawn them every week for Stars and Stripes, and they weren’t meant for civilians. Or for kids. The strip was called Male Call, and it featured the most arousing woman of my young life: Miss Lace. She was dark-haired, sloe-eyed, with a lush body that seemed to struggle for release from her clothing. Lace was sexy, funny, generous; it wasn’t clear what she was doing in the various theaters of operations but she was certainly making the fighting men happy. Lace reminded me of Rita Hayworth (or, more precisely, the sultry Rita Hayworth provoked in me even more lavish images of Miss Lace), and whenever Brady left me alone in the shop I took out the book and stared at Miss Lace and her hair, mouth, teeth, breasts, and hips in an agony of desire. She didn’t exist anywhere in the world, and I didn’t care.

Then one afternoon I came into the shop and Brady didn’t seem to know me.

What the fuck do you want?

I didn’t know what to say. And then I realized he was drunk. He was trying to letter an O. But he couldn’t hold the curve. He stopped, took the brush in his teeth, and furiously crumpled the paper.

Goddammit, he said, goddammit, goddammit.

I backed up quietly and slipped out into the night. I felt like crying, but couldn’t; everybody on the street would see me. I walked in a blur to Prospect Park and back, thinking: They’re all drunks. All of them. Every last one.

12

IN THE YEARS after the war, I stopped worrying about my father. He was there, all right, and I talked to him about baseball, or boxing, or the weather. But it was as if I understood that I would never get from him what I wanted most: the kind of casual affection that is a sign of love. I protected myself with indifference, dreams of substitute worlds, a belief in a limitless future that didn’t depend upon him. I certainly never talked to him about Jim Brady’s sign store, or cartooning, or art school. I knew better.

Instead, I moved back and forth from the street to the Little Room (where Tommy and I now shared bunk beds), from stickball and fistfights to blue pencils, Higgins ink, and the mysteries of the crow quill pen. This wasn’t easy. Suddenly, down in the street, it was the time of the gangs.

The street gangs were all over New York then, and the newspapers wrote about them every other day. In Brooklyn, there were immense black gangs in Bedford-Stuyvesant called the Bishops and the Robins; the Navy Street Boys from the waterfront in Fort Greene; tough Jewish gangs from Brownsville and Coney Island. And there were street gangs right in the Neighborhood.

The gang at our end of the Neighborhood was called the Tigers, most of them Irish. Their great rivals were the South Brooklyn Boys, most of them Italian. They all wore variations on the zoot suit, brightly colored trousers with a three-or-four-inch rise above the belt, ballooning knees, tight thirteen-inch pegged ankles. The rear pockets were covered with gun-shaped flaps of a different color, called pistol pockets; sometimes a bright saddle stitch would run down the seam of the trouser leg. If the trousers were a bright green, the pistol pockets, narrow belt, and saddle stitches might all be yellow. Or the combination would be maroon and gray. Or black and tan. Or purple and pale blue. The colors and combinations were drastic, radical, personal, at once an affirmation of their owner’s uniqueness and a calculated affront to those locked in the gray dark memory of the Depression, the khaki and navy blue palette of the war, or suit-and-tie respectability. In summer, the gang members wore T-shirts with the sleeves rolled high on the shoulder and a cigarette pack folded into the roll. In chillier seasons, they added garish shirts, wide Windsor-knotted ties, belted jackets with wide padded shoulders called wrap-arounds, and wide-brimmed, narrow-crowned, pearl-gray “ginger-ella” hats. And like the boys at camp, they were all masters of the Walk. They would come down our avenue in groups of fifteen or twenty, walking with that practiced roll, their faces frozen in impassive masks, all smoking cigarettes, a few holding bats, their trousers billowing like visions from the Arabian Nights. The mixture of power and menace was thrilling.

On the street, we learned their names and their histories and heard the legends of their wars. Tigers and South Brooklyn Boys lived by primitive codes, most of them outlined in what became their catechism: The Amboy Dukes by Irving Shulman, published in 1947, probably the best-read novel in the history of Brooklyn. The codes demanded that all loyalty go to the gang, ahead of family, church, city, or country. Everybody had to drink hard and fight to the death; the women had to “put out” for the men. Although they supported themselves with burglaries and other minor crimes, they despised the mugger, they would never hurt old people, they would not ambush drunks in the dark or roll lushes in bars. My father liked some of the Tigers, but he spoke of them sadly.

The Tigers don’t stand a chance, my father said one evening. They’re fighting the guineas. That means they’re fighting the Mafia.

He was right; dozens of South Brooklyn Boys ended up in the Mob. But for five or six years, the Tigers and South Brooklyn fought some epic battles, over women or insults (real and imaginary) or turf. One of the leaders of the Tigers was a handsome young man named Giacomo Fortunato, the dark blond son of the mustached barber next to Jim Brady’s sign shop. The son was a great stickball player, an elaborate zoot suiter, and seemed always to have a girl on his arm. One evening in 1950, the Tigers met South Brooklyn at the Swan Lake in Prospect Park, in a full-out prearranged rumble. And at one point, as they battered each other with fists, bats, and pipes, someone from South Brooklyn fired a gun. The cops later said that the shooter’s name was Anthony Scarpati, better known as Scappy. Everybody ran, except Giacomo Fortunato. He was dead.

That evening, I was in the street with my brother Tommy and some of the other kids, playing cards under a lamppost. Dozens of people were out on the sidewalks, fanning themselves, cooling off with hot tea, talking about baseball and the weather and each other. Then an invisible wave that seemed made of billions of electrons — a charged mixture of fear, shock, and apprehension — came rolling down the avenue, shaking the thick hot air, penetrating every man, woman, and child. Police cars raced up and down Seventh Avenue. Mothers looked for their children. The poolroom closed. And the words were carried on the electric wave: Giacomo’s dead, they killed Giacomo, Giacomos dead. Nobody went to bed. They killed Giacomo! And I remember the early editions of the Daily News and Mirror coming up, people grabbing them, looking disappointed when the story of the killing of Giacomo Fortunato wasn’t there, saying, Maybe it ain’t true, maybe they’re lying, the bulls …

But it was true, all right; the cops weren’t lying. In the morning, the story was in the late editions of the News and Mirror, and on the front pages of the afternoon papers. I told you, my father said. They can’t beat these people. It seemed impossible that someone I saw every day, someone only five years older than I was, someone so handsome and daring: impossible that someone like Giacomo could be shot to death. And that his death could be recorded in the newspapers. That morning, I walked along Seventh Avenue and saw a wreath in the window of the Fortunato barbershop and a sign saying they were closed until further notice due to a death in the family. Across the street, about a dozen Tigers were reading the papers under the marquee of the Minerva. One of them was Noona Taylor, the toughest and bravest of the Tigers. He was sobbing, great body-wracking sobs. Even long-legged and curly-haired Millie, the sexiest of the Tigerettes, could not console him.

After a few days, the story vanished from the newspapers. On a few mornings that winter I passed the barbershop and saw Giacomo’s father sitting alone, smoking cigarettes.

13

IN 1947, I went to work in the grocery store that had once been a Roulston’s branch and then was taken over by a fat sweaty man named Ruby. I was there every day after school for three hours and all day on Saturday and was paid six dollars a week. In addition, I earned about three dollars in tips, delivering orders to people all over the Neighborhood. Every Saturday, I gave my mother half this money, an act that made me feel I was growing up, bringing home money to the family. I was determined not to be that species of lowlife who stood just a niche above the wino or informer: the freeloader.

There was another reason for working: I wanted to be free of dependence upon my father. No matter what he did, how drunk he got, how indifferent he was, I wanted him to know that I could get along without him. I still remember telling him that I didn’t want an allowance anymore.

What, are you a big shot now? he said

No, I just don’t need it now, Dad. I have my own money.

He gave me a long look, as if trying to decide if this was some sort of challenge, and then said: Good for you.

Now I paid with my own money for drawing paper and ink and comics. I saved for books. I would sit down in the crowded kitchen (for we had no space for a table in the Little Room) and get lost in the act of drawing. I also felt I was living a dozen lives at the same time. At any given hour, I was a student, an altar boy, a son, brother, street fighter, Dodger fan, storyteller, cartoonist. I was, by most definitions, a “good” boy; but the gangster style kept calling. Sometimes I trembled with fear when the Tigers marched by on the way to the battlefield or when South Brooklyn launched a sudden invasion. Then I would think that the only way I could ever be safe would be to join them. Not now, not yet, but soon, in a few years, when I was old enough. And that scenario was also scary. Every possibility was imagined. I saw myself facing the South Brooklyn Boys at the Swan Lake, fists clenched, eyes narrow, ready to punch and stomp; saw myself pulling a gun; saw myself being dragged out of the house in handcuffs by two thick-necked bulls; even saw myself walking the last mile to the chair. Every image was as real as breakfast. Along with the stories in the newspapers and my body laid out in Mike Smith’s funeral parlor and my mother weeping and my father getting drunk, both of them consumed with shame.

I was saved from the hot seat by a glorious palace of books called the Prospect Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, known to us simply as the Library. I went there every Saturday morning, during my break from the grocery store, following the familiar route along Seventh Avenue, my blood quickening as I crossed the trolley tracks on Ninth Street and passed the stately brownstones and small synagogue and saw up ahead the wild gloomy garden of the Library. I was always relieved, glancing through the high windows, to see that the lights were on, the leathery cliffs of books still there. The majestic mock Corinthian columns of the main entrance always made me feel puny but inside, behind walls as thick as those of any fortress, I always felt safe. Of one thing I was certain: in the Neighborhood, the bad guys never went to the Library.

I loved that old high-roofed building. It was warm in winter and cool in summer, and although it seemed built to last forever, and the sense of space was unlike anything I knew except the lobbies of movie houses, the attraction of the Library was not merely shelter. I was there on a more exciting mission: the discovery of the world.

To be sure, the idea of the Library alarmed me. Those thousands of books seemed to look down upon me with a wintry disdain. They were adult; they knew what I did not know; they were, in a collective way, the epitome of the unknowable, full of mystery and challenge and the most scary thing of all, doubt. The harder I worked at cracking their codes, the more certain I was that the task was impossible.

At first, I was condemned to the children’s room. I liked the bound volumes of a British magazine called St. Nicholas, full of intricate pen drawings and the cheery innocence of the official 19th century. And I also found a book about Milton Caniff, called The Rembrandt of the Comic Strip, borrowing it at least once a month, virtually memorizing its pages. In that book Caniff suggested to would-be cartoonists that they study the art of narrative, by reading writers he called “yarn-spinners,” such as Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson. I followed the lesson of the master. I memorized verses of Kipling’s “Gunga Din” (the movie version played every year at the Minerva along with Four Feathers) and read “The Man Who Would Be King” and The Jungle Book. As the son of Irish immigrants, I found Kipling a bit too British. But Stevenson was another matter. Of all his books I most cherished Treasure Island. How could a son of Billy Hamill resist Long John Silver, with his left leg cut off below the knee? And right there on the first page of the novel was that song of the perate, the desperado, the outlaw, the song that Noona could sing, or even my father:

Fifteen men on the dead mans chest —

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

I read the novel once. Then again. I was carried away by Kidnapped, defeated by the Scotch dialect in The Weir of Hermiston. But I kept going back to Treasure Island. Tommy and I would sing the tune: Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! And laugh and cheer and call each other matey. Then, tracking down Stevenson, I discovered Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I’d seen the movie, with Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman, but the book was even scarier. With his gorgeous images and musical prose, Stevenson carried me into nineteenth-century London, where fog rolled down narrow cobblestoned streets day and night (“A great chocolate-covered pall lowered over heaven.…” Or, even better to my inflamed vision: “The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles… ”). I looked up the word “carbuncles,” used it in school compositions (“Musial’s eyes glowed like carbuncles”), where I also described fogs that slept and gas lamps that shimmered. But I never used the Stevenson paragraph that chilled my heart:

He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change — he seemed to swell — his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter — and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror.

I read that passage and thought of my father. In Stevenson’s story, Dr. Jekyll says that he had lived “nine-tenths a life of effort, virtue and control”; but the chemical experiment had released Mr. Hyde, “the evil side of my nature.” I wanted that to be true of my father. When he first started a drinking session, he was often merry and funny, the joyful Irish singer of funny Irish songs; but as he went on, his face darkened, his eyes grew opaque, his jaw slack. Sometimes, he looked evil. And when he became enraged, I was often afraid of him. I saw the same eerie transformation in the other drunks of the neighborhood. Even Mr. Dix was decent enough until he downed too much of the amber liquid. After reading Stevenson’s great story, I could never look at my father the same way; I just hoped he would never come home with a silver-headed cane.

I didn’t brood about Jekyll and Hyde or give up reading because the subject cut so close to my bones. I was also collecting Classic Comics (soon to be renamed, for some reason, Classics Illustrated), and they were a kind of road map to the real books. I had all the early Classic Comics in order: 1) The Three Musketeers; 2) Ivanhoe; 3) The Count of Monte Cristo; 4) The Last of the Mohicans; 5) Moby Dick; 6) A Tale of Two Cities; 7) Robin Hood; 8) The Arabian Nights; 9) Les Miserables; 10) Robinson Crusoe; and on through Don Quixote, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gulliver’s Travels, The Corsican Brothers, Huckleberry Finn, and dozens of others. From the stacks at the Library, I tried reading all of them. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Walter Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper were truly dreadful writers. And I was still too raw to enter Moby Dick. But Dumas père thrilled me with The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, and I found a copy of the tales told by Scheherazade during her Arabian nights; it was beautifully illustrated (probably by Arthur Rackham) and secretly erotic. I loved the writing of Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza moved into my mind for life, sharing space with Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. And over and over again, I traveled down the dark river with Huck and the Nigger Jim and dreamed of lighting out for the territory. Tom Sawyer couldn’t have lasted long in the Neighborhood. But Huck Finn felt like one of us; after all, wasn’t his father the town drunk?

In the comics — even in Milton Caniff — there were no drunks, no scary fathers; it was impossible to imagine Dagwood having a “fair one” with Blondie, the way Mr. Dix once did with his wife. I knew in the Library that in some of those books, I was coming closer to the truths of the world. They weren’t The Amboy Dukes. But then, of course, nothing was.

The illustrators of these classics were often as important to me as the books and obviously served as a transition from comics. The fine-lined Cruikshank drawings in the Dickens books had a spidery texture, creepy and strange, and — in the horrific figure of the drunken Bill Sikes — an ability to make London feel like Twelfth Street in Brooklyn. I also consumed Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates, checking it out many times, making pencil copies of the great paintings, reveling in the freebooting lives of pirates, men burnt from the sun, filled with rum, reaching for wenches. And in book after book, I was dazzled by the illustrations of N. C. Wyeth, so rich and thick with golden light; often I checked out books — Robin Hood or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — simply to look at those Wyeth paintings.

But the rest of the books in the children’s section meant nothing to me. They all seemed to be about kids living in idyllic country glades, or rabbits who talked, or an elephant named Babar who had adventures in Africa. I was already traveling through Burne Hogarth’s fabulous baroque Africa in Tarzan (which ran in Sparkler comics and the Saturday Journal-American) and, of course, I had plunged through the South American jungles with Bomba. After reading The Count of Monte Cristo, I began thinking of the children’s room as another version of the Château d’If.

That didn’t last long. Soon I was a regular in the main reading room. The librarians didn’t seem to care about enforcing the rule that confined me to the children’s room. And as I moved around those dark aisles, among books sad with dust or placed in some ghetto of the forbidden on high shelves (like that copy of The Arabian Nights), I began to find the entrance to the world. At first, I was still trapped in the primary colors of melodrama. But over the last years of the 1940s, the Library took my instincts for the lurid and refined them. The comics, radio serials, B movies, dirty stories, even The Amboy Dukes, were part of my experience, the foundations of my own sense of the mythic; I took them with me to the act of reading literature. But slowly the myths started assuming different shapes, a wider context, deeper roots. And reading became a kind of creative act. With each book, I was somehow collaborating with the writer in the creation of an alternative world. I was at once in Brooklyn and in not-Brooklyn. These books were more than simple collections of abstract symbols called words, printed on paper; they described real events that happened to me. So I was Jim Hawkins, hiding from Blind Pew. I was D’Artagnan, fighting duels with the henchmen of the evil Milady. I was Edmond Dantès, escaping from my prison cell to extract my terrible revenge. I was Sydney Carton doing a far, far better thing than I had ever done and going to a far, far better place than I had ever known.

I carried those books home, consumed them like food, then brought their stories and characters and lessons down to the streets with me. I couldn’t really tell my friends about them. But they were real in my head, they often peopled my dreams, and they helped give me a sense that the streets were not everything. It didn’t matter if I never hit a spaldeen five sewers like Paulie McAleer, or if I wasn’t the best street fighter in the Neighborhood. Nobody would care if I refused to join up with the Tigers and fight fair ones with the hoods from South Brooklyn. There was a bigger world out there. And by the time I was thirteen, I was sure I was going to see it.

14

I TRIED VERY HARD to believe in God, but I had almost no success. From the first grade on, I studied religion at Holy Name. I memorized endless pages of the Baltimore Catechism and even won religion prizes for reciting in a singsong way the questions and answers of the text. Who made the world? God made the world. Who is God? God is the creator of heaven and earth, and of all things. What is man? Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God. Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next. Where is God? God is everywhere.

The problem was that I didn’t believe any of this. On the surface, I was a reasonably good Catholic boy. I took my first communion, was confirmed, finally became an altar boy, memorizing the Latin responses for the whole Mass. Ad Deum qui laetificat, juventutum meum. … I loved the glazed baroque paintings on the walls of the church. I loved the statues of the flayed Jesus and his grieving mother. I loved the music most of all, with the great booming hymns filling the church on Sunday mornings. I even loved the smell of guttering candles, palm leaves at Easter, pine needles at Christmas. I just couldn’t believe in God.

This was one of the heaviest secrets that I carried through those years. I couldn’t talk to my mother or father about my terrible failure to imagine God; I certainly couldn’t discuss it with the Xaverian Brothers at Holy Name; and down on the street I was afraid that the other kids would think I was weird. So I kept silent. To be sure, the religious education I received taught me some valuable lessons. I didn’t care much about the Holy Ghost (though I loved his cartoony name), the Blessed Trinity, or Original Sin. But I did understand the catechism’s definition of a mortal sin; it had to be a grievous matter, committed with sufficient reflection and full consent of the will. That is, a mortal sin was a felony. And the Baltimore Catechism taught us that certain mortal sins cried to heaven for vengeance: willful murder, the sin of Sodom, oppression of the poor, defrauding laborers of their wages. For a long time, I didn’t know what the sin of Sodom was and couldn’t get anyone to explain it to me (not to mention whatever it was they did in Gomorrah). But the rest of the Church’s list of abhorrent sins was certainly admirable.

One trouble was that the Church in New York didn’t follow its own list of rules, as laid out in the catechism. It certainly didn’t seem to care very passionately about the poor. It shamed us into contributing money every Sunday by publishing our names in the church bulletin along with the amounts of the donations. But while altars were heavy with gold chalices and monstrances, and priests drove cars and grew fat, I never saw them down on Seventh Avenue. A Big Shot from the political club helped my father get a job; no priest ever did the same. I never saw priests on picket lines outside the Factory, joining in the fight against the bosses who were defrauding the workers. After sex, most of their negative passion was reserved for communism, which had absolutely nothing to do with life in the tenements of Seventh Avenue. The priests would never try to help a drunken man; all they ever did was judge him.

Still, the Xaverian Brothers at Holy Name tried hard to make me a good Catholic. I was taught the chief sources of sin: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth. But again, most of the focus seemed to be on Lust. In the sixth grade, Brother Eliot kept me after school one afternoon and tried to explain sex to me. I knew some of the mechanics now from Arnold, the boys at Fox Lair Camp, and the kids from Seventh Avenue. But somehow, in the vague, reverent, whispering way Brother Eliot described it, sex became even more awesome and darkly attractive. It was, Brother Eliot said, a wonderful gift from God. But that didn’t prevent the Baltimore Catechism from trying to make it a felony. “Lust,” the catechism said, “is the source of immodest looks and actions, which lead to blindness of intellect, hardness of heart, the loss of faith and piety, the ruin of health, and final impenitence.” Obviously, this was written by men with a well-developed sense of horror. But they didn’t understand that an experience so colossally ruinous could never truly be avoided by the young. Even at the risk of hardness of heart and the ruin of health. In a way, they were offering another dare.

I listened in religion class, and to the fearful whisperings of Brother Eliot, but I just didn’t understand it. There were people all over the Neighborhood who were bone poor. Night and day, there was violence on the streets. And I had seen those movies about the concentration camps. Why were the priests and brothers so crazy and fierce about sex? I was a virgin. I had no idea how it felt to fuck a woman. But I just couldn’t imagine that someone as all-powerful as God was sitting around heaven on some throne, pissed off about what I might do at night on Seventh Avenue. The good brothers made God sound like some glorified scorekeeper, endlessly filling in box scores and then punishing those who made errors. Since there were billions of people on the earth, it seemed to me that He would have almost nothing else to do. Just writing down the sins of the Tigers would keep him busy, and if he had to do all of Asia, all of Russia, all of Europe, every man and every woman committing sins of Lust, all the movie stars and all the baseball players and all the wise guys in the Mafia, when would He ever get around to noticing what Noona Taylor was doing on the roof with Millie from the Tigerettes?

None of it made any sense. So I carried my disbelief with me, even as an altar boy. I didn’t ask to be an altar boy; I was chosen by the brothers in the sixth grade. They probably believed that boys with good grades were also good Catholics; or perhaps they chose us only because we could remember all the Latin responses in the Mass. For whatever reason, I was drafted. But if anything, my time as an altar boy widened my separation from the Church. I learned the Latin; I got up on time every morning, winter and summer, draped my starched surplice over my arms and traveled up the hill to Holy Name. But from the beginning I felt part of a show, giving a rehearsed performance in which the lines never varied. I loved the sound of Latin, the roll of vowels, the way words changed according to their meaning; Latin was another code to be cracked. But even for the priests, it was all an act.

I did like some of the priests, particularly a kind man named Father Ahearn, and another named Father Kavanaugh, who said the fastest Mass in the parish, the Latin falling from his lips as if he were a tobacco auctioneer. But watching them get dressed in priestly garments or smoke cigarettes after Mass, being subjected to their scorn when I made a mistake, I saw them as human beings, not as officers in the army of Christ. I lost whatever sense of awe that I once felt during the Mass. They were men like other men.

At least one of them was like the men of Seventh Avenue, or like my father: a drunk. He had a sweet, smooth, baby’s pink face, and eyes without irises. Sometimes he staggered onto the altar. He often forgot some of the Latin, repeated other parts at least twice. His superiors seemed to know he had a problem and gave him the earliest, most sparsely attended Masses. Even at six-thirty in the morning, he was shaky, his breath reeking. The sight of him filled me with pity and anger. It was bad enough that he staggered around; he was forced by his work to do so before an audience. I was angry that nobody from the Church tried to save him from this humiliation.

There was another personal element to the ceremony of the Mass. Wine was central to the ritual. We were taught that during the Mass, bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ. As an altar boy, I held the wine cruets while the priest blessed them and then poured the sweetish liquid across his fingers during the Offertory. That was the “first act” of the Mass, the section when the priest offered up to God the wine and the small unleavened wafers called hosts. In the second act of the drama, the consecration, he transformed these banal elements, saying his magic words in Latin, holding the host up for all to see; it was the custom in Holy Name to hide one’s eyes and bow the head, refusing to look directly at the offered host because that little wafer had become God. Natives often did this in Tarzan movies, when facing their gods, and in Gunga Din, the murder cultists did the same with the image of Kali. Then the priest turned his back on the parishioners of Holy Name, ate the host, who was God, and washed Him down with the wine, or His blood. The more I learned, the more I thought that it was all very strange.

15

ON THE RADIO, there was a show called “Truth or Consequences.” The announcer would open in egg-shaped tones: You’ve gotta tell the truth or you’re gonna pay the consequences… The price for not telling the truth was usually a public humiliation.

But I couldn’t always tell the truth. Just as I couldn’t tell anyone that I didn’t believe in God, I couldn’t talk to many people about wanting to be a cartoonist. When I had my first cartoon published, in Ace Comics in 1949, on a page filled by young fans, I told nobody at Holy Name; I was afraid they’d think I was lording it over them. At the same time, I hated telling lies; even without God I had a sense of sin, and everything taught me that lying was a sin. So I learned to be silent about most of the deepest concerns in my life. On the street, I learned to be a tough guy, to curse, to tell jokes, to play ball. At home, and in my mind, I was someone else: more naive, more complicated, angrier, more romantic. I wanted to see the world, to be a man in that world, but a man cleansed of all stupidities. I didn’t want to be like my father. I didn’t want to be a drunk.

And yet drinking started to seem as natural to real life as breathing. I would hear my father and his friends weaving romantic tales of Prohibition, when they were young, and understood that when a country was made to live under a stupid law then the only way to defy that law was to do what it forbade; in that case, drinking. I heard Prohibition words like “rumdum” and “gin mill,” “speakeasy” and “needle beer,” and loved their bluntness, their bricklike shapes. The roguish way they came off the lips of the men made me want to talk that way too. Those words carried an additional glaze of meaning. The men used them like a code, one shared by members of an outlaw society. The Prohibition law had been passed by Protestants to curb the dreadful habits of the Catholic immigrants (or so they thought), and they had defied that law and won. In a way, I was a child of Prohibition, even though born two years after repeal.

Drinking seemed to be part of almost everything else, even politics. In 1948, Truman was running against Dewey, and in our neighborhood Dewey was despised. They laughed at him, at his size, his mustache, his prim image. In the New York Star, a cartoonist named Walt Kelly started drawing him like a bridegroom on a wedding cake. When Dewey’s monotonal midwestern voice came over the radio one evening, my father shouted: Shut that idjit off! And when I asked why Dewey made him so angry, he said: One good shot of whiskey and he’d be on his face on the floor.

That year, I started moving beyond the comics and the sports pages to the front of the newspaper; there was no war, but there was crime and politics. And my attention was focused by another event. In the used book stores of Pearl Street I made two additional discoveries: a run of a newsletter called In Fact by George Seldes, and Bill Mauldin’s Back Home. On Pearl Street, thirty issues of In Fact went home with me for sixty cents. I don’t remember anything from them except their format (which resembled the newsletter later published by I. F. Stone) and their suspicion of anything written in newspapers, in particular, newspapers published by Hearst. Mauldin’s book, which followed his masterpiece Up Front, made me think more sharply about politics. I loved Mauldin’s Willie and Joe, and their disdain for officers, regulations, rules; in the Up Front cartoons, they were hard-drinking, unshaven, probably bad-talking. But in Back Home, Mauldin was looking at the world after the war, the country to which Willie and Joe returned, the nation in which I lived. As he portrayed it, the United States was a country of fearful, ignorant men, bullies with slouch hats and paunches who worked for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even the name struck me as stupid; would the French have a committee on Un-French Activities? And what was an “American activity” anyway?

Reading Mauldin at thirteen, I felt an odd sense of merger; it was as if I had written these pages, as if I were saying these irreverent things about officers, right-wingers, war profiteers, conservative newspaper publishers, penthouse revolutionaries, professional veterans, and bigots and phonies of all stripes. I didn’t really understand some of what Mauldin was writing; but as I read and reread the book, the irreverent attitude felt natural to me. It was as if I’d picked up a glove, tried it on, and found a perfect fit.

None of what I was reading in the newspapers or in Mauldin’s book had anything to do with what I was learning in school. From Mauldin I learned that Japanese-Americans had been put in concentration camps during the war, their stores and homes and farms confiscated by white trash, and when the Nisei soldiers came back from fighting courageously in Italy, the whites who stole their property refused to give it up and the government did nothing. I learned how southern white bigots used the poll tax and other legal devices to prevent Negroes from voting. I learned the phrase anti-Semitism, the proper name for the bigotry that had caused Buchenwald. Mauldin confirmed and elaborated many of the lessons I’d absorbed from my mother.

But I heard nothing about such matters in school. Masturbation was a sin; but hatred? Hey, pay attention, young man. Mauldin’s world was not far away, in some distant country. Some of it was right there in the Neighborhood, where some people still called Jackie Robinson a nigger and others talked about kikes and yids.

If my mind was full of change, possibility, and notions of justice, other things remained the same. In November, there were great election-night bonfires on Twelfth Street after the voting ended. But the vote for president was very close; the counting went on all night, and some said that the hated Dewey had won. The following day, Truman was declared the winner. My mother wasn’t very happy about this. But my father headed for Rattigan’s, where the ward heelers were buying. Around midnight, two of their flunkies brought him home. He made it to the second-floor landing. He sat there for a while, crooning about the old country, until I went down and helped him up the last flight.

16

EIGHTH GRADE was a horror. Our teacher was a thick-necked Pole with a jutting jaw and a bent nose. His name was Brother Jan. In the seventh grade, we’d had a soft and saintly man named Brother Rembert as our teacher. We heard scary tales about Brother Jan, but nothing really prepared us for the reality of this snarling, vicious brute. On his desk, Brother Jan kept a thick eighteen-inch ruler called Elmer. He used it on someone every day. He used it if you were late. He used it if you didn’t finish your homework. He used it if you smiled or giggled. He used it if you talked back, or copied from another kid during an exam. I would watch him when he bent one of the boys over a front desk, and there was a tremble in his face, a fierce concentration, a sick look of enjoyment as he whacked Elmer on the ass of the chosen boy until the boy dissolved in tears and pain.

He picked on some kids over and over again: a funny guy named Bobby Connors; a slow, sweet boy named Shitty Collins, who lived up the block from me; a tall sly character named Boopie Conroy. Near the end of the first term, Brother Jan started picking on me. Somehow I infuriated him. Maybe it was because I got the highest grades in the class but after school spent my time with the harder kids. I shared my homework with Shitty Collins and some of the slower kids; when Brother Jan discovered this he didn’t see it as an act of Christian charity but as a case of subversion; he bent me over the front seat and whipped into me with Elmer. After the first time, he whipped me every week. He broke some other kids, reducing them to tears and humiliation; when he did that, his eyes seemed to recede under his brow and his lips curled into a knowing smile, as if he’d discovered the point at which he could destroy pride and will. I refused to cry. I would wait for the initial shock, then the cutting pain of the second blow, then wait for the next, and tighten my face, clamp my teeth together, feel it again, then again, still again, as many as fifteen times, thinking: Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you. And Brother Jan would swing again, grunting.

Then he’d be finished and I’d glance at him and sometimes he’d have a film of sweat on his face. And I’d think: You’re sick. I’d sit down in pain, and the other kids would look at me, and I would stare up at Brother Jan, thinking: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

Around this time I first sensed that I was my own version of Jekyll and Hyde. In my head, the Good Boy was constantly warring with the Bad Guy. I wanted to be a Bad Guy, tough, physical, a prince of the streets; at the same time, I was driven to be a Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, a protector of my brothers, an earner of money for the family. The Bad Guy cursed, growled, repeated dirty jokes and resisted Brother Jan; the Good Boy served Mass in the mornings and read novels in bed at night. The Bad Guy practiced walking like one of the Tigers, stole silverware from the Factory, and jerked off; the Good Boy delivered groceries to old ladies who couldn’t come down the stairs, memorized poems, and drew cartoons at the kitchen table on cold or rainy evenings. It seems clear to me now that the Bad Guy was demanding respect from my father, the Good Boy acknowledging love from my mother. It wasn’t at all clear when I was in my early teens.

There were times when the existence of the Good Boy forced the appearance of the Bad Guy. In the final three years of grammar school at Holy Name, I always finished at the top of the class in grades, averaging 98 or 99, was placed on the honor roll and granted awards for general excellence. But there was an assumption that if you got good grades you must be soft, a sissy, or an AK — an ass kisser. This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given you in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-denial was the supreme virtue. It was the perfect mentality for an infantryman, a civil servant, or a priest. And it added some very honorable lives to the world. But too often, it discouraged kids who aspired to something different. The boy who chose another road was accused of being Full of Himself; he was isolated, assigned a place outside the tribe. Be ordinary, was the message; maintain anonymity; tamp down desires or wild dreams. Some boys withered. And the girls were smothered worse than the boys. They could be nuns or wives, brides of Christ or mothers of us all. There were almost no other possibilities.

But the Bad Guy in me resisted the demand for conformity that was so seductive to the Good Boy. I hated being called an AK. For one thing, it wasn’t true. I polished no apples, sought no favors. But worse, to say that I was an AK was to imply that what I had actually done was a fraud. I knew that I got those grades by doing the homework, reading the books, and above all, by paying attention; I didn’t get them by kissing ass. So, after a while, whenever I was called an AK, I struck back: punching and hurting my accusers. The Bad Guy shoved the Good Boy out of the way and went to work. By the time I was subjected to Brother Jan’s sick furies, nobody again called me an AK. And I’d acquired a vague notion in my head that I could be like Sugar Ray Robinson: a boxer and a puncher, smart and tough.

By the spring of 1949, seething with anger at Brother Jan, I started hanging out in a different part of the neighborhood, two blocks from Holy Name. In a way, it was a matter of choosing my own place, rather than having it chosen by my parents; they had moved to Seventh Avenue but I didn’t have to hang around there. There was another aspect to it too; my brother Tommy was eleven and I was thirteen; eight and ten are somehow much closer than eleven and thirteen; so I was moving away from Tommy too.

The place I chose was called Bartel-Pritchard Square, and it was more a circle than a square. Three different trolley lines converged here, turning around a center island before heading off to Coney Island, Mill Basin, or Smith Street. Off the square on one side were the two tall Corinthian columns that marked the entrance to Prospect Park; we called them the Totem Poles, or the Totes. They rose from cleanly carved granite bases, and in the evenings that spring, after work at the grocery store and after finishing my homework, I would walk up from Seventh Avenue and see the others and we’d gather around the bases, sitting on them, looking at girls, cursing, smoking, making jokes, and drinking beer. First, the Good Boy attended to his chores; then the Bad Guy went out into the evening.

That was when I really started drinking. There were a lot of us hanging around the Totes that spring and summer: Boopie Conroy, Shitty Collins, Mickey Horan, Vito Pinto, Jack McAlevy. Among my friends was a thin, handsome guy named Richie Kelly. He was smart and tough but he always seemed cautious about drinking. Later in the summer, I learned why. His father, Jabbo Kelly, was one of the public rummies, a small group of men who’d been thrown out of their homes and lived on the streets. They slept in the park, or in the subways. They were filthy and panhandled for wine money. There was no way that Richie could avoid seeing Jabbo, because the rummies were always around the park, but I never saw them talk. I admired the way Richie handled a fact of his life that would have shamed others. He was cool and indifferent. For a while, we were close. I thought that with any kind of bad luck, my father could join Jabbo Kelly on his aimless wanderings.

Richie was also our liaison to the older guys, who owned the benches in the center of the traffic island, across the street from the Totes. They played football together as the Raiders and fought occasional gang battles in Coney Island or in the park. Richie’s older brother, Tommy, was one of the Raiders. He was built like a safe and was a ferocious puncher but never went out of his way to fight. I never saw him talk to Jabbo either.

I don’t know who bought the beer, but it was around, in cardboard containers or quart bottles. At first I didn’t join in the drinking. It was as if I knew I would be crossing a line in some permanent way. But I didn’t make a big deal out of this; I just shrugged and passed on the offered bottle. Then one evening, all of us laughing and joking, a guy named Johnny Rose handed me a container, casually, easily, and I took a sip.

The first swallow triggered a vague remembrance of the beer I’d sipped when I was a little boy, and was accompanied by a yeasty smell I associated with Gallagher’s. I didn’t like the taste; unlike the sweet wine I’d drunk in the woods at Fox Lair Camp, the beer had a sourness to it. I passed the container to Boopie Conroy, who took a long swallow. After a while, it came back to me, I took another sip, and this time I picked up a repulsive odor that reminded me of my father’s breath when he was sleeping late on weekend mornings.

But as the beer kept coming around to me, I felt oddly proud of myself. The taste and smell didn’t matter as much as the act. I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to do — drinking under the legal age of eighteen. Just by drinking beer, I was a certified Bad Guy. If the police saw us, and caught us, we’d be in trouble. We stayed on the side of the Totes that faced the park, safe from the scrutiny of passing cars. But several times, I wandered out under the streetlight with my container in my hand. That spring night, and on later evenings in summer, when I had graduated from Holy Name, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be seen by one person: Brother Jan. I wanted him to come over to me. I wanted him to try to stop me from drinking. And then I would crash into him, I’d beat and batter him, I’d stomp him and kick his balls out his ass. He was bigger than I was, heavier, with a fullback’s neck; I didn’t care. I wanted to hurt him back. On my turf. On the street.

For the first time I began to experience a transformation that would later become familiar: the violent images grew larger in my head and everything else got smaller. It was as if the beer were editing the world, eliminating other elements, such as weather, light, form, beauty. I could hear talk bubbling around me from the others, random words colliding in my head, then a tightening of focus, the faces closest to me having the most solid reality. A few of us talked about Brother Jan and how we’d like to give him a good beating. But all sorts of other talk flew around the beer-tingling air: the Dodgers, the gangs, girls, prizefighters, the songs we heard on the radio.

There were no transistors yet, only clumsy portables, and nobody had one of them. We learned the songs at home, on WNEW’s “Make Believe Ballroom,” and a nighttime show called “Your Hit Parade.” Record sales were smaller then, songs remained in the top ten for months, and the words drilled themselves into memory. Most of the songs were junk. But I can still sing “Slow Boat to China” or “A (You’re Adorable)” or “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” On summer evenings, we’d take turns singing the new tunes, even imitating the singers. I could do a pretty fair Nat “King” Cole on “Nature Boy” and what I thought was a smashing Ray Bolger on “Once in Love with Amy” (right down to the arch laugh). I tried to do Billy Eckstine on “I Apologize” and failed; my voice just wasn’t deep enough. Above all others, we loved Frankie Laine; each of us could shout every verse of “Mule Train” and we worked hard to sound smoky, sultry, and knowing on “That’s My Desire.”

Up on the Totes, even while I was learning to like the taste of beer, I never mentioned cartooning. I never tried to discuss the books I was reading. I never let the Good Boy get in the way of the apprentice Bad Guy.

At first, I didn’t get drunk. Atleast I didn’t think I was getting drunk. I was always conscious of where I was. I always walked home and didn’t stagger (chewing gum or Sen-Sen so that my mother couldn’t smell the beer on my breath). I didn’t fall down inside the park to sleep, the way some of the others did. But I knew I was being changed. I talked more, postured as badly as all the others, tried on different attitudes as if they were suits. I watched the Raiders — we called them the Big Guys — and the way they dressed (in T-shirts and chino pants, in contrast to the pegged pants of Seventh Avenue) and the way they wore their hair (in crisp crew cuts, instead of the pompadours and sideburns of the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys), and I tried to look like that too. I liked the way they held their containers of beer, casually, firmly, passing them around in an open generous style.

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

ONE 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?

Harry from the Parkview, you know him? Lives down Seeley Street? Tells me she does it for quarters. .

Then, on my fifteenth birthday, June 24, 1950, everything shifted again. That Saturday, seven divisions of North Korean troops and 150 North Korean tanks crossed the 38th parallel in an invasion of South Korea.