A Drinking Life

1

THE SUNDAY NEWSPAPERS told the story of the invasion in a sketchy way. They made clear that there was a crisis. President Truman was flying back to Washington from a vacation in Independence, Missouri, while General MacArthur was huddling with his staff at his headquarters in Tokyo. The secretary of state, Dean Acheson, had called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council. But that Sunday morning, up at the Totes, nobody talked about war. This wasn’t another Pearl Harbor; it was some distant battle between Koreans, a kind of civil war, nothing to do with us. Our war ended in August 1945. Around noon, we got on the Coney Island trolley car, picking up transfers to the Neptune Avenue line, and we went to the beach.

In the summer of 1950, all of us from the Neighborhood hung out in a place on Coney Island called Oceantide. Built on the boardwalk at Bay 22, it was a block-long complex with a swimming pool, lockers, a long packed bar, and a small fenced-off area where the young men danced with the young women to a bubbling Wurlitzer jukebox. Down the block was a shop called Mary’s, which sold the most fabulous hero sandwiches in New York, great thick concoctions of ham and cheese and tomatoes laced with mustard or mayonnaise, along with cases of ice cold sodas. Out on the beach we gathered on blankets placed like islands in the sand. One of the Big Guys always had a portable radio, and the music drifted across the hot afternoon as we drank beer and watched the girls lather themselves with suntan oil. Off to the right as we faced the sea was a walled development called Sea Gate, mostly Jewish, the place where Isaac Bashevis Singer came to live in 1935 when he arrived from Poland. And down on Surf Avenue, a block from the beach, there were two Irish bars where everyone did their serious drinking.

On that first Sunday of the Korean War, the older guys were laughing and drinking with their girlfriends on the blankets when there was a sudden roar. From out of the pack, a young man named Buddy Kiernan came running and laughing. He was naked. The others had pulled off his bathing suit and now he was grabbing at blankets and dancing around and the girls were giggling and blushing and the guys yawping and then Buddy Kiernan began to run to the sea. People stood up on all the blankets, watching Buddy run, his black hair wild, his legs pumping, his balls and penis bobbing, until he dived into the surf.

To great cheers.

I thought: I’ll remember this all my life.

We all got drunk that day, the younger guys sharing the wild exuberance of the Coney Island summer and the glorious performance of Buddy Kiernan. I fell asleep on the cold dark sand under the boardwalk, and when I woke up, everybody was gone. My mouth felt coarse. There was a sour smell to my body that I couldn’t erase with the salt of the sea. I went home alone on the trolley car, wondering about the war.

By Monday, everybody was talking about Korea. We were in another war. It didn’t matter that there had been no direct attack on Americans. We were part of the United Nations. We might have to go. By Friday, the first American ground troops were on their way to the fighting.

It just goes on and on, my mother said one evening. Brian was now four. My newest brother, John, was less than a year old, crawling on the linoleum. They just keep on killing each other. There were no tears in her for this war. She didn’t weep at the news on the radio. She just crooned, in a sad way, It goes on and on.

By the Fourth of July, the mood of the Neighborhood had radically changed. It was clear now: the older guys were going off to the war in Korea. Truman was calling it a “police action,” but everybody else called it a war. If you were eighteen, nineteen, twenty, you could be drafted. In August, the reserves were called up, including many men who had fought in World War II. The war would be tough; everybody said so; Seoul had fallen, the South Korean army was destroyed, and the American troops had poor equipment. If you went away, if you drew a number from the draft board that sent you to Korea, you might die.

That summer, Buddy Kelly died in Korea. He was the oldest son of the Kellys at 471 Fourteenth Street and had been on garrison duty in Japan when he was called up. One evening, I saw his brothers, Billy and Danny, sitting with his mother and father on the stoop where we’d all once lived. They sat in absolute silence, and I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t even remember Buddy clearly. I kept walking. What could I say? That Buddy Kelly had died for his country? He died for someone else’s country. Could I say he was a good man and a great American? I barely knew him. He was one of us, part of the tribe, a man of the Neighborhood; but we never got to know him.

Now there was a lot more drinking, everywhere: in the park, in the bars, at the beach. But the tone had changed. The feeling of mindless exuberance gave way to urgency, even desperation. Every weekend there was another going-away party, and you saw weeping girls walking in pairs as another boy went off to basic training or boot camp. Over the next two years at Holy Name, there were a lot of weddings and too many funerals: the bridegrooms were in uniform and the coffins were draped with flags.

When I went back to Regis in the fall, my mind was scrambled. In the yard, we talked a lot about the war. Many boys had brothers who had been drafted or called up. Almost everybody thought that communism had to be stopped. At the same time, they were attacking Truman and Acheson, blaming them for the war. I tried to make sense of this. If it was important to fight the communists, and Truman and Acheson were fighting them, why were they wrong?

The Red Scare didn’t dominate Regis the way it did the Neighborhood. But I do remember seeing a Catholic comic book that showed communist mobs attacking St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And there was an extended discussion of a papal encyclical called Atheistic Communism. The Church expressed itself in other ways. In the Journal-American, and other friendly forums, Cardinal Spellman, chubby and pink-skinned, kept warning about how America was in danger of destruction at the hands of the communists, those in Russia, those at home. In the Daily News, there were frantic warnings about pinkos, fellow travelers, New Dealers, and liberals. And even in Regis, where Jesuitical irony and skepticism generally prevailed, I started to hear a lot of favorable talk about the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Because we still couldn’t afford television, I didn’t see the way McCarthy moved and talked until much later. But I saw Herblock’s cartoons in the Post, in which an unshaven McCarthy, his brows kissing in a thuggish way, often worked in tandem with another unshaven character who kept climbing out of sewers: a senator from California named Richard Nixon. Cardinal Spellman loved them both.

In that second year at Regis, my allegiance to the Catholic Church ended. It was bad enough that I didn’t believe in God; I thought for a while that I might come around, like Ignatius Loyola himself did, the man who had committed all the sins of the world back in the sixteenth century, before undergoing a conversion and founding the Jesuits. Maybe I would get religion the way I finally got Terry and the Pirates. But McCarthy and Spellman finished me off. They merged with Brother Jan to create a collective image of a bullying, intolerant Catholicism that repelled me. If they were the heroes of the Catholic Church, I wanted nothing to do with it. And that deepened my feeling of unease and disconnection at Regis.

The school, of course, couldn’t be separated from the other parts of my life. With three brothers and a sister now at home, I had endless trouble working at my cartooning; it was difficult even to get homework done, sharing the kitchen table with Tommy and Kathleen. Worse, because there were now seven mouths to feed, we were even poorer. The boys at Regis were not rich, but they wore creased trousers and neat jackets and ties; I had to shuffle together the clothes I wore. I was now taller and heavier than my father, so I couldn’t wear any of his clothes; my brothers were younger than I was, so I couldn’t borrow theirs. My mother did her best. She took me to Orchard Street on the Lower East Side and bought cheap clothes; she set up time payments to get me slacks at Belmont’s on Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue. But the cheap clothes wore out quickly, holes in the pockets first, then the elbows, followed by chronic, mysterious tears under the arms. She patched and repaired them (hunched over a Singer sewing machine), but she had the other kids to tend to, along with my father. When I went to school I couldn’t imagine that the mothers of the other boys were up late at night patching their jackets after an evening of cooking, dishes, and helping with homework.

Shoes were an even worse problem. I never had two pairs of shoes at the same time. I wore one pair until they wore out; when the heels wore down or great holes appeared in the soles, I sat in a little booth at the shoemaker’s until he finished attaching new soles or heels. After a while, they could not be saved, the edges unable to take another nail, the cheap leather cracking across the top like overcooked bacon. Then my mother bought me a new pair.

In the beginning, I didn’t care much about any of this. But some of the boys — the upperclassmen — started making remarks. Where’d you get that air conditioned jacket, fella? Or, You buy those pants down the Bowery? They probably did this to other kids; they probably did it with each other; but I sometimes felt as if I were the only kid at Regis being inspected for the mortal sin of dressing badly. I began slipping into the yard as late as possible each morning, hugging the wall, avoiding the more wicked tongues. One rainy day I came to school with cardboard stuffed into my shoes because of the holes. In a corner of the locker room, I removed the shoes, wrung out the socks, and threw away the cardboard. A junior, fat-bodied and thick-necked, saw me, and started laughing, pointing at me and nudging his friends. My face flushed; I thought: Fuck you, you fat bastard, fuck you. His polished shoes had thick soles and seemed untouched by the morning rain. Quickly, I tied my laces and slipped away without looking at him. But all day long I kept seeing the Fat Boy’s grinning face, and my shame grew into rage. He had hurt me; I wanted to hurt him back. During Latin and German and English, I rehearsed what I would do, over and over again, remembering Frankie Nocera, and other fights on Seventh Avenue, wondering what Noona Taylor would do if the Fat Boy laughed at his shoes. And when school ended, I hurried down to Park Avenue to wait for him.

The rain was falling harder. I saw my friends hurrying across the avenue, then staying close to the wall as they ran to Eighty-sixth Street and the Lexington Avenue subway. Some had umbrellas. After a while, there were almost no kids leaving Regis and I thought that maybe the Fat Boy had taken another route home: along Madison Avenue, or over to Fifth Avenue and the downtown bus. My anger ebbed and I was about to go home. Then I saw him walking quickly, holding an umbrella almost daintily in one hand and his books in the other. He didn’t see me until he reached the corner.

Hey, you fat bastard.

He peered at me from under the umbrella and smiled. The same smile, I thought. A fucking smirk.

Without another word, I hit him hard in the face and his eyes got wide and the umbrella flew up and the books fell, and then I hit him again and again, blind with rage. He fell and I kicked him with those shameful ugly shoes and grabbed his hair and punched him in the neck, and then he started to scream. That stopped me. I looked around. The streets were empty, lashed by the hard rain. No cops, no pedestrians, not even a doorman. The Fat Boy sat up, his pants ruined, his jacket soaked, his eyes startled and afraid.

Don’t laugh at me any more, you fat fuck, I said.

Then I walked away.

That night, I was sure I was finished at Regis. In the morning, he would go to the principal’s office and report me. How could he not? His books were ruined, his notes spattered with rain and dirt. I had hurt him badly. He Would report me, all right, and they would call me down to the office and tell me that I’d been expelled.

All right, I thought. Fuck it. I’ll go to another school, to Loughlin or St. Agnes or even to Manual. But I won’t whimper. I won’t beg them to let me stay. If they kick me out, I’ll just walk out of there like a man.

I tossed and turned, alternately consumed with shame, failure and regret, satisfaction and defiance. I was most worried about what my mother would say. I thought that if they kicked me out, I’d have failed her. She had been so proud when I made it into Regis. It was proof to her that you could do anything in this country if you worked hard enough. I just hoped that she wouldn’t cry. I didn’t care what my father thought.

In the morning, I trembled all the way from Brooklyn to Park Avenue, I couldn’t read. I couldn’t focus on the Miss Subways sign or the girls who got on at Jay Street. I considered playing hooky, just riding the trains all day. It was Friday, I thought, and maybe by Monday they would have forgotten everything. But in those days, subway cops stopped kids who weren’t in school and if the kids didn’t have notes or good excuses, they picked them up. I didn’t want the police to take me back to Regis. I didn’t want faces turning to me as I was escorted down a corridor to the principal’s office. So I took my trains and came up into Eighty-sixth Street and walked to school. I waited outside the main gate for a while, where the seniors smoked cigarettes, and then went into the yard. The Fat Boy was there with his friends. His face was swollen but he didn’t look at me. I went off to my first class and sat through it, hearing nothing, waiting for someone to come to the door and escort me to the principal’s office. Nobody ever came. Not in the first period. Not through the day.

When I left school, the Fat Boy was waiting on the corner. I tensed, ready to fight again. And then he started walking toward me. He put out his hand. I hesitated, then shook it.

I’m sorry, he said. You were right. I made fun of you and your shoes and that was a lousy thing to do.

I didn’t know what to say. Maybe it was a trick. Maybe now he would sly rap me. But he didn’t.

Okay, I said. I’m sorry too.

I walked off alone. We didn’t become friends. But I admired him. He’d done what I couldn’t do: admitted he was wrong. Without knowing it, the Fat Boy had accomplished something else; because he’d laughed at me, because I’d then given him a beating that could lead to expulsion, the idea of leaving Regis had blossomed in my head. Drinking that night on the Totes, the notion flowered. I began to imagine myself free of the rigor of the Jesuits. I imagined myself in another school, in classes with my friends from the Neighborhood. Then saw myself in other places, rolling around the world, working on the freighters the way my grandfather did, going to Panama and Honduras to pick up the bananas, traveling to Nagasaki. I imagined myself in the navy, sailing for Korea and the war. I imagined myself drawing cartoons the way Bill Mauldin did in World War II. I drank a lot of beer. The visions, as always, grew grander.

2

THAT WINTER, Steve Canyon enlisted in the air force and Caniff’s great comic strip began what most fans thought was a long decline. The Compass sent Bill Mauldin to Korea, and Willie and Joe found themselves at another front. The Post assigned its star sportswriter, Jimmy Cannon, to Korea, and his stories of GIs in trouble made me feel I was there. In contrast, my own problems seemed puny and childish.

And the comics grew darker. A pair of comic books, Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat, were first published that winter by a company called E.C., and they astonished me. The major artist was Harvey Kurtz-man, and he revolutionized the form. Unlike war as reflected by Caniff, these combat stories were hard, bleak, free of rah-rah patriotism. They were about men, not costumed superheroes. In Kurtzman’s Korean War, there was no Red Skull. The content wasn’t the only change. Kurtzman’s drawing style was fresh and powerful: full of stark figures, ferocious action, fat juicy brushstrokes applied with spectacular confidence. Somehow he’d created a new style while I was still imitating Caniff. So I’d be sitting in a classroom at Regis, looking at a teacher and instead of listening to what he was saying, I’d be trying to imagine new ways of drawing. Not like Caniff. Not like Kurtzman. I’d draw like myself, as free as handwriting, using crayons, or big brushes, or a million tiny pen lines. This became still another distraction. My grades started to slide.

Around this time, on other shelves in the comic book stores, I was also discovering pulp magazines, drawn to them at first by the work of their illustrators. In the science fiction books Amazing and Astounding there was an artist named Virgil Finlay. His drawings were full of voluptuous women, almost naked, their breasts often bare except for seashells or veils or carefully placed foliage. Finlay used a pen, creating form by scalloping the shading with individual lines that were built up, thickened, then thinned according to their density; the drawings were full of wonder, the skies bursting with strange forms, the landscapes of his imaginary planets scary and strange. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t imitate him.

The science fiction stories meant almost nothing to me but I couldn’t resist the detective pulps: Black Mask, Dime Detective, Flynn’s Detective Fiction, and Popular Detective. The drawings were dark, as full of shadows as the movie melodramas of the period, and the men, women, and guns were interchangeable. The stories carried titles like “Hellcats of Homicide Highway” or “Sinner Take All,” but often the writing was a lot better than the titles or the illustrations. The stories took place in a landscape I understood: not sagebrush or the plains of Venus, but bad parts of mean towns, where the streetlights were always dim, the cops always crooked, and nobody had a home. The heroes were tough guys, able to absorb ferocious beatings before shooting their enemies without remorse; they’d have felt little sympathy for Frankie Nocera or the Fat Boy. Almost all the women were bad: devious Delilahs, greedy, selfish, and dangerous. They worked in bars, hotels, the streets, and they usually went to bed with a man only to cut his throat. In a way, this vision of women was a perfect fit with the sinful temptresses portrayed by the Church. Naturally, I wished I could meet one of them.

In all the pulp stories, the dark glamour of the scene revolved around drinking. The men met the women in bars. The whiskey was always warm when it went down. Lights were always dim, the jukebox muted, the bartenders sympathetic. Alone, or with women, the heroes always ended up buying a bottle to bring back with them to the hotel. I began to imagine myself in those pulp magazine bars, far from my father’s mundane neighborhood saloons. I put the money down and ordered my whiskey and then the girl came in, out of the rain or out of the fog or out of the past. Sometimes she wanted money. Sometimes she wanted help. Sometimes she wanted sex. I was ready to give her all three. In my reveries, I always bought her a drink, just the way the tough guys did, and after a while I paid for a bottle of rotgut (as they always called it) and took her and the bottle back to the brass bed with the hard mattress. That was life. That was how I would live too.

In the pulps on sale at Sanew’s, or among the used copies sold in the stores where I once bought comic books, I began to notice the names of the pulp writers: John D. MacDonald, Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich. And I started copying paragraphs from their stories into notebooks, particularly from MacDonald, who described places and people in a style that always felt right. At first I thought I would use these paragraphs as text blocks for my sample comic strips. I’d heard from Jim Brady that to get any kind of work you needed to bring samples to the comic book publishers or newspaper syndicates. The pulp texts would make my pages look more professional.

But copying took too much time and I started writing my own texts. I liked inventing names and characters and plots (most of them out of the memory of the stories I’d read). The people did what I wanted them to do and said what I made them say. It was like a magic trick. In some ways, writing stories was easier than trying to do comics; I didn’t need to draw the details of a gun; I just had to say the word “gun.” I began to think about pulp stories in bed, on the subway, in class.

Soon I had a major problem at Regis. For an English composition assignment, I invented a pulp story about a man who murders his neighbor and buries him in the backyard, only to be discovered when the grass won’t grow above the buried body. There was no detective, no hero. Only a passing cop who gets suspicious. I slaved over the story, lettering each page in a composition book and adding illustrations that were drawn on separate sheets of bond paper and pasted into place. I used 435 Thirteenth Street as the house. I improved the backyard, giving it grass and flowers instead of clay. I picked names I knew: Nocero and Taylor. And that’s how I got into trouble. Nocero was the name of the man who was killed and buried. I named the murderer Chuck Taylor. Not Noona Taylor, but Chuck. The principal of Regis was the Rev. Charles Taylor, S.J.

I handed in the story, proud of what I’d done, sure that the English teacher would get the joke. He would smile in a sly way (I thought) and praise me for the work I’d done; this wasn’t another of those idiotic compositions about “My Trip To Albany.” If he got the joke, he didn’t appreciate it. A few days later, he handed back the graded compositions. Inside the hand-drawn cover, on the title page (“Seeds of Death”), he had marked a large F and scribbled beneath it, Sophomoric contempt for authority. At the end of class, while the others filed out, he told me to remain in my seat. I still held my book in my hand, but now it felt like something dirty.

You must think you’re a wise guy, he said.

No, sir.

Only a wise guy would do this.

I said nothing.

And in this world, there is no room for wise guys. They cause trouble. For everybody. For themselves.

He stared at me. I looked at the cover of my book and the lettering of the title. I hoped that he would now forgive me. He didn’t.

Come with me, Mister Hamill.

I followed him down the corridors to the principal’s office. The English teacher opened the door, nodded, and then went away. The Rev. Charles Taylor was waiting for me, seated behind his desk. He did not get up. He made a little steeple with his fingers.

Is that the famous book? he said in a chilly voice.

Yes, Father.

He reached across the desk and took it from me. He stared at the cover, the words “Seeds of Death,” then at the text. He began reading it. I waited, afraid to breathe. He read to the end. He closed the book and stared at the cover for a long moment. Then his chilly eyes fell upon me.

You’re not happy at Regis, are you, Mister Hamill.

I shrugged. Yes, sir. I mean, no sir. I mean — It’s all right, it’s hard work sometimes, but. .

My words dribbled away. I looked at crosses on the wall, pictures of saints, some leather-bound missals.

There is nothing keeping you here, young man, he said. If you feel you aren’t up to the work, to our standards, to our disciplines, then you are, of course, free to go elsewhere.

He bit off the words.

Your other grades are low. You’re failing plane geometry.

It’s hard, Father. I have a job after school. I have —

You have time to … to do this, though, don’t you? It must have taken many hours, making these drawings, doing this lettering.

Yes, sir.

He was quiet for a beat. Then:

I’m placing you on probation. If your grades improve, you’ll have no problems. If not …

He let the alternative hang in the air, unspoken. Then he looked back at my book. On one page, I had drawn a portrait of Chuck Taylor, his name carefully lettered at the side. He stopped and then looked up.

Is that what I look like? he said.

No, sir.

He handed me the book.

Actually, it’s not a bad likeness. You’ve got the nose. You’ve got the nose.

I left in a daze. He’d told me I was on the brink of flunking out of Regis. But I did get his nose right.

3

THE GIRL’S NAME was Jenny. She had a long face framed by long brown hair. Her nose was long too, and she was self-conscious about it. I hate this nose, she said to me one night. I wish I could cut it off. Her brown eyes were among the saddest I’ve ever seen. In that dark snowy winter of 1950–51, I fell in love with her.

I’m too old for you, she said. I’m seventeen.

I’ll be sixteen in June, I said. A year doesn’t matter that much, does it?

To some people it does, she said.

Does it matter to you?

No.

I met her in the back booth of a soda fountain named Steven’s, which was just off the corner of Ninth Street on Seventh Avenue. There was a big modern jukebox against a wall, packed with 45 rpm records instead of the old 78s that you still saw in the bars of the Neighborhood. Here, Nat Cole was singing “Mona Lisa,” Teresa Brewer was belting out “Music, Music, Music,” Don Cornell was telling us that it wasn’t fair for him to love her, and Frankie Laine was proclaiming loudly that he was gonna live ’til he died. There were some old songs too, from all the way back in 1949: Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “Lucky Old Sun” and Vaughan Monroe’s evocation of those ghost riders in the sky. That night, I came into Steven’s with someone else, who knew the girl sitting with Jenny. We sat down and stayed for two hours. I walked Jenny home to a house on Tenth Street. She smiled goodnight in a tentative way and hurried into the vestibule. I went back to Steven’s the next night and she was there again and I walked her home again and asked her to go to a movie.

That Friday night we went to Loew’s Metropolitan and saw In a Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. I loved that movie. Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter who has been assigned to make a script from a terrible best-selling book. This depresses him and he goes to a bar to get rid of his depression by getting drunk. He starts talking to a hatcheck girl, who tells Bogart that she has read the book. He invites her back to his apartment so that she can tell him the story. That way, he won’t have to read it himself. It wasn’t clear what else he had in mind, but I could make it up. Drinks, a small apartment, sex. The next day, the hatcheck girl is found murdered and the cops come looking for Bogart …

I remember talking all the way home about this amazing movie. Did Jenny think the story had anything to do with all this anticommunist stuff? You know, the way people were being ruined by rumors? Wasn’t that what it meant? Jenny looked at me as if I were nuts.

Come on, she said, it’s just a movie about this guy who drinks too much and beats people up.

No, no, I insisted. It’s about more than that.

She smiled at me and her eyes grew sadder.

You’re weird, she said.

In the weeks that followed, during that cold winter, I became a regular at Steven’s, seeing almost nothing of my friends on the Totes. I was going with Jenny.

On those first dates, the Good Boy dominated the Bad Guy. I was polite. That is, I didn’t grab her tits as soon as we sat down. With the older guys now gone to the war, we younger boys were taking their place; the seventeen-year-old girls had no nineteen-year-old boys to take them into the nights. Suddenly, there was an aura of seriousness about most of us: guys disappearing for days with their girls, saying nothing about what they did or bragging too loudly when next they showed up on the Totes. I sat alone with Jenny in the booths, talking, listening to the jukebox: Tony Martin’s “There’s No Tomorrow” and “La Vie en Rose” and the Weavers singing “Goodnight, Irene.” On that jukebox, there were also two glorious celebrations of drinking: a Wynonie Harris shouting blues, “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me,” and a tune called “Cigarees and Whuskey and Wild, Wild Women.” I played them as if they were anthems.

Within weeks, Jenny and I were going steady. This was a formal condition, like being engaged, or even being married. I asked her to go steady right after Christmas, coming home from a party. All the way home, I held her close to me; she was wearing a long brown coat with a curlicued design sewn on the back at her waist. I was sure I loved her, even though I knew virtually nothing about her, except that she lived with her mother in a small apartment on Tenth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the time we were together, I never once saw her mother.

You don’t have any brothers or sisters? I asked her one freezing night as we sat on a bench beside the park.

No. It’s just me and my mother. She’s a nurse down at Cumberland.

And your father?

She shook her head and looked away.

I’m sorry, I said. Is he, uh, dead?

No, she said. He just went away.

That’s too bad, I said, thinking: Maybe she’s better off.

Yeah, she said. It’s too bad.

She started to cry and I hugged her and kissed her neck and her hair. She was the first girl who made me feel protective, the first who provoked in me the treacherous entanglement of pity with love. All that winter, in doorways, rooftops, park benches, we kissed and talked and talked and kissed, holding each other to keep warm. She said she loved me, but her eyes remained very sad; it was as if she could see some awful future. I started buying beer at the grocery store, telling Jack it was for my father, and Jenny and I would drink together on the parkside. She would get teary and cry and then bury her face against my neck. Finally, in the deep shadows of the parkside, she let me touch her breasts through her clothes. Then she let me open her blouse and touch her flesh. But whenever I moved my hand between her legs, she always stopped me.

I can’t let you do that, she said. You’ll lose all respect for me.

No, I won’t, I swear. I love you, Jenny. How could I lose respect for you?

She should have laughed out loud — asshole! — but she said nothing, just snuggled against me. I suppose she was exercising a kind of wisdom that had nothing to do with respect. I was still a kid. In a neighborhood of cops, firemen, ironworkers, and dock wallopers, I kept conjuring crazy visions of the future: writing comics, going to art school, seeing the world. Everything I talked about to Jenny was the opposite of security; my basic goal, unclear even to me, was to run away from home.

Jenny was probably also sensing my own confused mixture of desire and fear. On some nights, I wanted so badly to put my cock in her that my body hurt (the condition even had a name — “blue balls”). But actual consummation was also scary. I’d never even seen a girl’s pubic hair or a vagina, not even in photographs (this was before Playboy, and long before Penthouse). For all the technical discussions on the street, I wasn’t even sure where I should put my cock. And even though I didn’t believe in God, all those years in Catholic schools surely had helped shape my psyche.

These confusions accompanied me and Jenny to the benches along the parkside, to the darkened hallways and freezing rooftops. But we didn’t stay in the cold forever. One weekend, her mother moved them to Bay Ridge and soon after started working a 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. shift at the hospital. That first Saturday night, Jenny invited me to dinner. I took the trolley out to Sixty-ninth Street and picked up three quarts of Ballantine’s beer in a deli; the old man at the counter didn’t ask for proof of age. I felt like a man as I walked out, the bottles clunking in the paper bag.

Jenny met me at the door of the basement apartment. She was wearing a light brown dress that was tight across her breasts and wide at the bottom. She had crinolines underneath and high-heeled black shoes that made her look older. She put a stack of records on a thick-spindled 45 rpm player: Nat Cole and Don Cornell, Sinatra singing “I’m a Fool to Want You,” and Tommy Edwards doing “Blue Velvet.” My hands were damp, but when I took her hands, they were wet. There was a candle burning on the table, and she served spaghetti and meatballs and fresh Italian bread. I finished a glass of beer, then another, a full quart while eating greedily. She gazed at me with her sad eyes, as if afraid I’d hate the food. I told her dinner was wonderful (it was) and opened another beer. We danced. She cleared the table. She turned off the lights in the kitchen and the overhead lights in the living room, leaving one lamp burning. She made sure the curtains and drapes were closed. We danced again and then went to the couch. I kissed her, felt her up (as we said then), unzippered the back of her dress, unsnapped her bra, while her protests became whimpers and her breathing got heavier. I moved a hand between her legs, up to the flesh at the top of her stockings and then under her panties while the crinolines made a sighing sound. This time she didn’t stop me. She was wet. She fumbled with my belt. She unzipped my fly. She gripped my cock.

And so we did it. It was awful and amazing, clumsy and frantic and inept and vaguely comical. I exploded at the end. Jenny wept. I fell back, my shoes still on, my trousers and undershorts around my ankles. I looked down and laughed. That made her feel worse. She hurried into the bathroom, sobbing. I took off my shoes and pulled up my trousers. I couldn’t believe it: I had done it. I had put my cock in a cunt. I had come in a girl. Oh, man. The records had finished playing, so I turned them over and started playing the flip sides. I took another Ballantine’s from the refrigerator, and when I turned around, she was walking naked out of the bathroom.

I bet I’m pregnant, she said.

Nah, I said.

I know I am.

I’d never seen a naked woman before and I just stood there, gazing at her, at her breasts and belly and great black vee of pubic hair. I thought of Virgil Finlay’s women and Miss Lace and the hot women in the pulp magazines. She came over and kissed me, holding my face in both hands. I held her heavy hard-nippled breasts in my hands.

If I’m pregnant, will you marry me? she whispered.

Of course, I said, struggling with my panic.

Then, come on.

We went to her bedroom. I took the beer with me.

4

THE YEAR 1951 was terrible. I was at least six people: the schoolboy at Regis, the hardworking delivery boy after school, the opinionated angry young man raging at the world, the aspiring cartoonist, the lover of Jenny, the apprentice drinker and Bad Guy. In Latin class, I was struggling with the subjunctive; at night, I was fucking my brains out. Drinking became an integral part of sex. I’d drink three or four beers to feel confident; Jenny would drink three or four beers to have an excuse for letting me do it once again. It was as much a ritual as the Mass. Sometimes I bought condoms; sometimes I had to choose between a pack of Trojans or a quart of Ballantine’s. I always settled for beer and risk.

At home, I was miserable. My mother was trying to feed, clothe, and civilize the whole brood, while holding down her new part-time job as a cashier at the RKO Prospect movie house. She got little help from my father. He was drinking as hard as ever, particularly on the weekends. He began to go on binges, sometimes missing work on a Monday or Friday, thus granting me the self-righteous joy of despising him. I was too young and self-absorbed to ask him why he was drinking so much, what he feared, what made him weep, who he was. We worked out a ritual too. We made remarks about the weather. We talked about baseball. He predicted that Ray Robinson would beat Jake LaMotta for the middleweight championship, and he was right. But there was nothing else I could say to him.

I certainly couldn’t tell him, or my mother, about Jenny. I couldn’t tell anyone else either. If I told my friends, they’d immediately tell everybody in the Neighborhood that Jenny “put out.” If they thought she put out, they wouldn’t respect her. And how could I love a girl my friends didn’t respect? Besides, I didn’t think of it as putting out. To me, it was a love story.

The key word, of course, was “story.” After the fiasco of Chuck Taylor, I stopped writing my versions of pulp stories. But I wasn’t writing comics anymore either. One reason was the physical impossibility of doing it in the apartment. The kids were the infantry of disorder; they moved from room to room in a sustained campaign of disruption. At eleven, my sister, as the only girl, took title to the Little Room. I couldn’t lay out paper or board, ink, pens and brushes, on the kitchen table. Gradually, I just gave up. That long slow surrender ate at my guts, but I convinced myself that I had no choice. As long as I live here, I thought, I’ll be unable to work.

Instead of creating stories, I created Jenny. I invented her in my head, supplying her with qualities no girl could possess, granting her a perfection that had more to do with literature than with the scared, lonely girl who gave me her body. In some primitive, inarticulate way, our love story was driven by my need for narrative, for drama, for a sense of beginning, middle, and end. It was a better story than the ones I had invented out of comics and pulps; I just didn’t know how it would end.

In the spring, many things began to unravel while others took shape. I was doing worse at Regis. In March the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, and I read in one of the newspapers that there’d be a rally in their defense in Union Square. I tried to get some of the guys from school to meet me at the rally, and one of them said: What are you, some kind of communist? I said no, I wasn’t a communist; but this was a kind of history and I wanted to see it. Are you crazy? the guy said. You get arrested, you end up on some list, your life is ruined. I went anyway, alone. The crowd was small. But the sense of defiant energy was thrilling. I saw young women who didn’t look like anyone from the Neighborhood; they were older than I was, but I wanted to come back, see them again, know them. They cheered at the speeches. They smiled at people and asked them to sign petitions. They didn’t ask me.

When the rally ended, I wandered downtown to find the subway station at West Fourth Street. Along the way, I discovered two places that were to pull me back again and again: Book Row on Fourth Avenue and the neighborhood called Greenwich Village. The first was like a series of treasure houses, one used book store after another, the cheapest books stacked outside in stalls, selling for a nickel, the interiors dark, musty, packed from floor to ceiling with more expensive books. I was afraid to enter, afraid I’d see some glittering bauble that would exhaust the few dollars I had in my pocket — money for the beer that would grant me admission to Jenny’s bed. I ran my hands over the books as if they were holy objects and moved on.

Walking into the Village was like entering a movie set. The elegant houses, blooming trees, intimate bars, and scattered bookshops were lovely to look at, but I was even more enchanted by the way the people looked. They were completely different from the people in the Neighborhood or those I saw uptown near Regis. That first day, I saw bearded men with paint-spattered clothes lugging wildly painted abstract canvases into buildings with skylights on the rooftops. Women wore hair down to their hips, bright ceramic earrings, long black stockings, and they smoked cigarettes as they walked. Men carried books and talked to friends with excitement and passion. On Eighth Street, there were theaters showing movies from Italy and France. I passed coffee shops, cafeterias, and bars filled with people deep in argument, engulfed by cigarette smoke, and all of them looked different from the men in the bars of Brooklyn. I wanted to come back. And stay.

That day the unravelment at Regis and at home receded as I glimpsed the possibility of another life, only a subway ride from Brooklyn, in a place where I could fill my life with politics, art, books, and women. I didn’t want to wait. This was where I could live. Far from Brooklyn and my father and Rattigan’s and the insistence on being a plumber or a cop. I could be a bohemian! I’d read the word somewhere and looked it up in a dictionary, and it sounded romantically perfect. A bohemian, free of all the stupid dumb-ass constraints of the world! With a huge studio, my own drawing table, a bookcase full of books, a skylight. I’d work all day and go to the cafés at night, to drink brandy and listen to poetry. A free man. The vision excited me all the way home on the subway. Jenny was nowhere in it.

That vision didn’t help me at Regis; it might have accelerated my decline. I simply couldn’t concentrate. I’d sit in geometry class and think of Jenny’s nipples and get an erection. I’d be in a civics class and want to know why the Rosenbergs had been sentenced to death. I’d be in the English class, with a teacher discussing the assigned text, and see myself in a café reading books of my own choosing. Each morning, I would linger in bed, filled with resistance and dread. I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to go to school. If I’d seen Jenny the night before, and drunk too much beer, I’d be physically logy and sometimes emotionally hung over too. I’d try to remember if I wore a condom or not; sometimes I hadn’t, and that filled me with dread as I thought of Jenny pregnant. I don’t know if my mother suspected anything about the drinking; I tried to hide it, brushing my teeth or chewing gum. If she did, she said nothing. In a way, that made it worse for me, because I had to carry the burden of the drinking by myself. The effort of hiding it made me feel even more separated from my classmates at Regis.

That spring, failure entered me like an infection. My grades were falling and I had already been placed on probation by Father Taylor. I was certain I would suffer the humiliation of flunking out at the end of the term. That meant I might have to repeat my sophomore year at some other school. And that would delay my life.

Finally, I went to see the school counselor, a kind man named Father Burke, and explained most of it to him. I left out Jenny. I didn’t mention the drinking. But I told him that I just wasn’t able to do the work at Regis and wanted out.

Have you discussed this with your parents? he said.

No.

What will they say?

I don’t know.

Then you’d better tell them.

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

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

What school would take me?

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

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

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

No, Mom. It wasn’t you. It was me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

Like what? That movie?

Yeah.

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

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

Hey, Jenny, it’s a movie.

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

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

I will.

When?

Tomorrow night?

My mother’s home tomorrow night.

Next Friday.

You swear? she said, smiling.

I swear.

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

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

No, no, I said. Let’s try it.

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

Can I move? she said.

Yeah, I said. I’m finished.

Can I see it?

Sure.

I handed her the drawing pad. She looked at the picture, her eyes wide. And then burst into tears. She stood up, bawling, and threw the pad at me.

I’m ugly, she sobbed. You think I’m ugly!

No, Jenny, I don’t think you’re ugly. I was —

Look at my nose!

She turned away and buried her face in the pillows of the couch. I tried to console her, petting her hair, hugging her. She stopped crying and then sat up slowly, saw the picture on the floor before the chair and started crying again.

That’s the way you see me, she said. I’m ugly, ugly, ugly!

No, Jenny, I love you.

You love my — you love what I give you! You love what I let you do to me!

I stood up and closed the pad, so she wouldn’t see the hated picture. She wiped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress and then saw the pencil and it started again. I didn’t know what to do. I’d tried so hard to make the drawing real, and she obviously was wounded by it. A gift had become an instrument of torture. Joseph Cotten didn’t have this problem. I stayed a little longer and then took my pad and my pencil and fled.

That was the end of it. Suddenly, shockingly. We saw each other two days later outside Steven’s. She didn’t want coffee or a soda. Standing on the sidewalk, she announced that she was “breaking off” with me. She talked about needing “freedom” and how she was too young to get married or settle down and how she was afraid of getting caught by her mother or ending up pregnant.

You’re only fifteen, she said. It’s not right.

Her eyes looked sadder than ever. She turned her back on me and hurried down Ninth Street to catch the Fifth Avenue bus. I felt absolutely alone, engulfed by a delicious melancholy. Now, I thought, this story has an ending.

So back I went to my friends and the Totem Poles and drinking beer from cardboard containers. I listened to my friends talk about the glories of pussy, knowing they were almost all virgins. I started truly listening to Sinatra. I did almost no homework, drew no cartoons, attempted no portraits. The war ground on in Korea, back and forth with little gain. I saw more young women in grave little knots, going out together on Saturday nights. I didn’t call Jenny; she couldn’t call me. Suddenly, Tony Bennett was on all the radios and crooning from the jukeboxes: “I Won’t Cry Anymore” and “Cold, Cold Heart.” I would sing with him:

One night, I saw Jenny waiting to the side at the Sanders while the men lined up to buy tickets. She glanced over at the Totem Poles, but then turned and smiled at her date: a big dumb guy from Seventh Avenue who could hit a spaldeen about four blocks. She took his arm and they went in to see the movie. I never talked to her again.

6

I WAS BORED in St. Agnes and started playing hooky, the empty spring days spent wandering the city. Sometimes I sat in movie houses. Other times I worked my way through the dark caves of Book Row. In May, Willie Mays came up from the minors to play for the Giants.

They say he’s the greatest thing on two feet, my father said.

What do you think?

We’ll see, he said. We’ll see if he can hit the curveball.

Suppose he can?

Then the Dodgers are in trouble.

We talked about the Dodgers and about Kid Gavilan beating Johnny Bratton. But we talked about nothing else. He went to work and then to Rattigan’s. I went to school and then to the Totem Poles. In June, I finished at St. Agnes. I never went back.

Instead, I took an examination to get into the apprenticeship program at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My uncle David worked as a sheetmetal worker in the Yard (as it was called) and he told my father about the program. One night over dinner, the kids all there, my father mentioned it to me.

It’s a goddamn good thing, he said, if you can get into it.

My mother shook her head.

Ach, Billy, she said, let the boy finish high school.

But he went on explaining it to me. The program was simple: you worked for four weeks, then went to school for a week, right there in the Yard; when you finished, you got a high school diploma, and you got paid for the weeks you went to school; eventually you moved up to become a journeyman at your trade. I listened carefully; it was the first thing I’d ever heard my father approve for me. I could escape from the drudgery of high school. I’d start earning a living, no matter how small. Hell, he explained, you could have a job at the Yard for thirty years, and retire with a good pension. And remember, he said, it’s a federal civil service job. There’s nothing better than civil service, except federal civil service.

If there’s another Depression, he said, you’ll always work.

My mother said nothing. I was beginning to understand what the Depression had done to both of them. I took the test for the Navy Yard and passed.

That summer, I was in another kind of depression. Day and night, I felt that I’d lost my way. It was as if some long steady tide were flowing out of me, the waters rising in my skull and then tumbling me along with that tide I couldn’t control. It seemed absurd to think anymore about being a cartoonist. Or a bohemian. Maybe everybody was right, from my father to Brother Jan: it was arrogant, a sin of pride, to conceive of a life beyond the certainties, rhythms, and traditions of the Neighborhood. Sometimes the attitude was expressed directly, by my friends or the Big Guys or some of the men from Rattigan’s. More often, it was implied. But the Neighborhood view of the world had fierce power. Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I was? Forget these kid’s dreams, I told myself, give ’em up. Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down, have children. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Every year I’d do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God or not. I’d drink on the way home from work and spend most weekends with my friends in the saloons. I’d get old. I’d die and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith’s funeral parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let’s have a fucking drink.

7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was a mason. A stonemason.

No, I mean what kind of man was he?

Billy Hamill shrugged and lit a Camel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sounds great, I said.

Call me, and I’ll show it to you.

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

8

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

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

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

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

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

Who the hell is that? a guy would say.

You.

I don’t look like that, come on, kid.

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

If I did, I’d fuckin’ kill myself.

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

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

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

Impossible. He’s a fuckin’ Catlick!

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

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

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

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

9

AND SO I DID.

The classroom was a large studio on the top floor. Easels were scattered everywhere, facing a wooden model’s platform, while one easel faced us. There was an empty stool on the platform. The floors were scabbed with dried paint, a thousand drips and spatters of color. Most of the students were young men, all of them older than I was; there were three young women. They seemed to know each other and laughed and joked in an easy way. I found an empty easel and watched them set up their newsprint pads and take out their black chalks. I did the same. I was very nervous.

A few minutes before seven a gray-haired woman walked in, dressed in a blue-gray smock. She sat on the edge of the platform, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. She was wearing slippers. Her hair was pulled back tightly and tied into a pigtail. She was about forty. Nobody seemed to notice her. Three guys near me were looking at some yellowing pages of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. I looked at the woman’s face, her long nose and dark eyebrows, and wondered how Foster would draw her.

Then, at seven o’clock sharp, a compact mustached man arrived. His hair was a shiny black, combed straight back. He wore a button-down shirt, dark tie, sharply creased slacks, and polished loafers. The room hushed as the man placed his own large newsprint pad on the easel beside the stand. He looked more confident than anyone I’d ever seen. This was Burne Hogarth.

All right, folks, he said, let’s get started.

I realized that my hands were already black from a mixture of sweat and compressed charcoal. I saw the guy next to me tear the cover sheet off his pad and I did the same. The woman put out her cigarette in a small ashtray, then took off her robe, stepped out of her slippers, and went to the center of the platform. I gazed at her body, her small hard breasts, the thick ridges of pale flesh around her stomach and thighs. Jenny’s flesh was smoother and darker. The woman looked cold under the blue fluorescent lights. I could see veins in her legs. Her pubic hair was gray.

We’ll do some one-minute poses to loosen up, Hogarth said. All yours, model.

Suddenly everybody was drawing furiously, as the woman assumed one pose after another, bending, twisting, stretching, firing invisible arrows from invisible bows. My drawing was cramped and tight, as I started at the top of her head and worked my way down. I was used to small drawings, penciled first, then laboriously inked. Every time I moved down from the head, she changed the pose again. I heard the others tearing pages off their pads. I saw that one student was as stiff as I was; another was bold and swift. I felt clumsy. Suddenly Hogarth was beside me.

Forget the eyebrows, he said. Just get the gesture, the big shape. Scribble it, but make the big shape fit on the page. No details.

He moved away. I tore off the page, then scribbled in a big bold shape.

Use the side of the chalk, not the point, Hogarth was telling another student. Big and blocky, nice and bold.

Now I could hear chalk on paper all over the room. I didn’t look at anything except the model, locking in, me and her and the chalk on paper. Now I saw that she had a long beautiful neck, and I wondered how she had come to this room.

Hogarth said, Okay, now look at her and remember what you see, then close your eyes and draw what you remember.

I tried what he asked and drew the memory of the woman bending one knee and extending the other. When I opened my eyes, I was amazed. There was a big brutal form on my page, bold and strong. Then Hogarth said, All right, the quick poses are over, let’s do a twenty-minute pose.

The model sat on the stool and posed with one foot on the second rung, the other stretched out behind her on the floor. There was no expression on her face.

I started drawing but I cramped up again, starting at the top in a linear contoured way. When I stopped to look at it, everything was out of proportion. Her neck was too short, her shoulders too broad, her stomach too thick. Worse, she didn’t seem to be sitting on the stool; she looked pasted to it. Then Hogarth was beside me again.

You didn’t think this out, he said. The big forms have to come first. Look.

He took my chalk and made a few bold strokes over my labored drawing, showing me that the way I was going, the model’s feet would be off the page. He made them fit. And he showed me where the big forms were.

You lay it out in big quick forms, he said. Even if the forms are light, make them the basis. Later you can get into the details. Just don’t start with the details or you’ll get lost in them. It’s the old business about not seeing the forest for the trees. Or the trees for the leaves.

He was talking to me and talking to the full class. But he didn’t seem to be trying to make me feel small; there was no Brother Jan in him. He said his few words, in a sharp precise voice, and then moved on to another student. Everybody listened; we all learned.

When the twenty-minute pose ended, Hogarth called a break. The model slipped on her robe and slippers and took out a pack of Chester fields. She glanced at some of the drawings but not mine. I watched her go. She must have felt my eyes on her, because at the door she smiled in a polite way and walked into the hall. I wandered out to the hall too. I didn’t smoke then, but everybody else did. They were all talking and laughing and smoking. I wandered around the hall, looking at notices for art shows and foreign movies, glancing into classrooms where other students worked on oil paintings. I didn’t see the model anywhere.

The break ended, and now Hogarth was in front of his own newsprint pad, giving us an anatomy lesson. He explained the basic shape of the torso, how it was essentially several wedges, one large, one small; or, in a shorthand, more fluid way, a kind of peanut shape. He showed us how, if we established the peanut, there was a logic to the way you added shoulders, arms, and legs.

The head is the basic measure, Hogarth said. The ideal figure is seven heads high, although fashion illustrators — or our friend El Greco — make it nine heads high. Forget about them for now. Forget about short people or infants too. For our classes, seven heads should be the measure. And remember, your task isn’t to copy what’s in front of you. Any camera can do that. It’s to understand what the figure is doing and why it can do it. You learn anatomy to understand what’s beneath the skin. And you don’t express the figure by what it is, but by what it does. It is what it does.

I was awed by the man because it wasn’t just talk; he also put on a show, starting with the peanut, the shoulders roughed in as a kind of barbell, the hands beginning as mittens, then acquiring startling power. It is what it does, he said, making his own drawings look both easy and impossible, the chalk obeying his commands, providing shape, volume, and power to the figures. He luxuriated in foreshortening, in making the figure seem to leap off his pages. Sometimes he made forms simpler; at other times, he made them more complex, showing unseen muscles, bones, structures, beneath the sheath of skin. Those figures didn’t look like our models; a Hogarth drawing resembled nothing on the earth. But he seemed to be saying that it didn’t matter. The model was where you began, nothing more; the drawing was the result. The model was a collection of facts; the drawing was the truth.

When that first evening was over, my mind was a roar of words, bodies, drawings. I remember Hogarth saying to the model, Goodnight, Laura, and thank you. She pulled on the smock and fumbled for her cigarettes and left. I went home in a blur of exhaustion and excitement, thinking: My life has changed. Here. Tonight. This morning I was just another fuckup, a high school dropout from Brooklyn. Tonight I became an art student.

And hey, maybe I was going to be good at it. On the breaks I walked among the other easels. Some drawings were beautiful. Some were pretty good. Some were dreadful. Mine were at least okay. I was the youngest student in the class, but I was better than a lot of them. I thought: I can do this.

Back in the room beside the Parkview, I looked at the drawings I’d made, tearing up the truly dreadful ones, seeing a progression, an improvement. Lying in bed later in the dark, hearing the trolley move down Prospect Park Southwest for Coney Island, I thought about the model. What did Hogarth call her? Laura. Like the Stan Kenton record. Laura, on the train that is passing through. . I wondered if she had a husband or boyfriend or children and what they would think of her sitting naked every night in a roomful of strangers. I wondered what she thought as she held herself still for this group inspection and the only sound was chalk on paper. I wished she would come here to this place in Brooklyn and let me draw her. Slowly and lovingly. Until I got it right. I was tracing the outlines of her body in my mind, her small hard breasts and thickening hips, when I fell asleep.

So I worked in the Navy Yard days and went to C&I nights. On the weekends, there was drinking, openly in the Parkview or clandestinely in my own room, joined by some of my friends from the Totes. There was one difference. In the fall, I had drunk out of a sour sense of waste and failure. Now I was drinking exuberantly, certain I had earned that right. I felt that I was on my way.

Hogarth was a great teacher. He had a critical intelligence that could be sardonic but not devastating; I never saw him destroy anybody’s ego or try to establish his own worth by humiliating a kid. At the same time, he set up high standards of excellence and let us know when we weren’t pushing ourselves hard enough. Most of us failed, most of the time. But he encouraged us to try again, and although most of the students wanted to be cartoonists, he always reminded us that there were other options.

You might become a painter, he said. You might become a sculptor. You might make murals. Just work at the top of your talent and keep pushing past it. And remember: The figure is the key to everything.

I bought a small composition book and started writing down some of what he said, his phrases, the names of the artists he mentioned. During the week, there was no time to go to museums or galleries; on weekends, the rhythm of the Neighborhood seemed to eat my time — taking my clothes to the laundry, cleaning the apartment, visiting 378, drinking on the Totes or in the Parkview. But I did find time to go to the main library at Grand Army Plaza. In the reference room, where they kept the art books, I looked at pictures by Michelangelo and Rubens, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Leonardo and Velázquez, Picasso and Matisse. I realized I’d seen many of the paintings and drawings before, in magazines, or in religion books in grammar school, even in advertising; but now they were works made by men, calculated, planned, made by hand, in the same way that Steve Canyon was made by Milton Caniff.

They call them masters, Hogarth said. But they all started with the figure, with drawing. Among other things, they all understood the principle of contraposition. They understood that all forms become dynamic by moving in opposition to each other. The shoulder moves up, the biceps and triceps move to the front and the back. .

I didn’t get everything that Hogarth was saying, but it thrilled me. Drawing wasn’t just God-given, like a voice; it was something that could be learned, it had rules, axioms, formulas. As crude and unfinished as I was, I would get better. All it took was work.

At night, when I came out of the subway beside the Totes, or stopped for food in the back booths at Lewnes’, my drawings became a hit. Naked broads! Duke Baluta shouted, taking the drawings from my portfolio envelope. The other guys grinned lewdly.

You mean to tell me, Baluta said, that you sit there looking at this broad, naked, tits out and all — and you don’t get a hard-on?

Duke, I said, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re so involved in getting the drawing right that —

That you don’t want to fuck her?

Uh, I, well —

See, Duke said, he does want to fuck her!

No, it’s like it could be apples or pears or something, I told him, my head filling with half-baked Hogarthisms. You’re trying to get the contrapos — the basic form. You want to get to the core of the shape.

You mean you want to get to the core of her pussy.

Usually, they all guffawed and I laughed with them. Sometimes, they called over a few of the girls and showed them the drawings and the girls giggled or blushed or got huffy. Some of the girls thought I was weird. Living alone at sixteen. Drawing naked women. In that neighborhood, it was too strange, too dangerous.

10

AT SCHOOL, the models changed every week, sometimes from night to night. Laura was gone after a few nights and I didn’t see her around. Then one chilly night, I went out on the break and saw her down the hall, wearing her smock and sandals, smoking her cigarette. I walked toward her, glancing into a painting classroom, and nodded at her. She smiled back.

You must be cold out here, I said.

It’s colder in there, she said. Here, I get to wear this.

Your name is Laura, right?

Right, she said. She seemed surprised. Cigarette?

Thanks, I don’t smoke. Would you like a coffee or something?

She smiled, in an amused way; it was the first time I’d seen her smile and it made her seem younger.

Sure. After the last bell?

Okay.

That wasn’t what I’d meant; I meant that I could go downstairs and get coffee from the machine. Now, somehow, I had a date. Tonight. Dressed in my Navy Yard clothes. Back in class, my heart was thumping. We were drawing from a black male model, but I kept thinking about that last bell. And Laura. Who was she? How old was she? If she asks, how old am I? An artist and a model! Jesus. But what if she’s just playing a game on me? Calm down. She probably won’t show up. She’ll think it over and just come and shake my hand and tell me something came up, she had an appointment she forgot, maybe next week or next term.

But there she was at the end of the last class, waiting for me in the lobby. She was wearing a navy pea jacket, dungarees, a wool cap pulled over her hair, and sneakers. She looked much younger.

There’s a coffee shop over on Lexington, she said.

It had begun to snow. Big white flakes fell into Twenty-third Street, turning briefly black against the streetlamps, before melting on the roofs of cars.

Oh, great! she shouted, in an almost girlish voice. I love snow!

We sat in a window booth, facing each other and watching the snow falling steadily. She ordered an English muffin and black coffee; so did I (as in so many other things, I followed the lead of those who seemed to know what they were doing). Laura told me that she’d come to New York to be a dancer (and I wondered, When? Before the war?). But dancing hadn’t worked out. She married a photographer who took pictures of radios and refrigerators for catalogs; that didn’t work out either. But before it ended, the photographer introduced her to some painters, and after a while she started painting too.

The trouble is, there’s maybe twenty thousand painters in New York now, she said. Maybe more. That GI Bill, that made everybody think they could be painters. So it’s hard to make a living. That’s why I model. To make ends meet.

She smiled in a matter-of-fact way and sipped her coffee and lit another cigarette. I could see her nipples in my mind and her pubic hair and the thickness of her hips.

How do you feel, I said, with everyone looking at you up there?

Most of the time, I don’t feel anything. I think about the painting I’m working on. Or the book I’m reading. Or the landlord. Or the laundry.

She took a deep drag and then smiled, glancing at the snow.

But to tell the truth, Laura said, sometimes I get hot. I can feel all those eyes on me and I know some of the men must want to fuck me. Maybe some of the women too. And what happens is, I start thinking like them, some kind of transference, I am them, I’m them fucking me, kissing me, pressing against me, licking me; and I get hot. And then I’m afraid I’ll turn a certain way and you’ll see that I’m wet. Do you have a hard-on now?

Yeah.

Let’s go to my place.

Laura had a two-room apartment on Tenth Street, three buildings away from the Third Avenue El. The shades were drawn but I could hear the train rumble through the snowy night. One room was a kitchen with a table and two chairs beside a window that opened into an air shaft. The other room was studio and bedroom, cramped and messy. There were books packed on shelves, lying on the paint-spattered linoleum floor, used to hold open a door. There was a record player, a radio, stacks of records; a toolbox full of brushes and tubes of paint; a huge wooden easel; a long table covered with tomato cans full of paint, linseed oil, turpentine, and other cans holding big fat brushes; and dozens of canvases covered with shimmering abstract paintings, most of them in great splashy variations of a single color: blue.

My Billie Holiday paintings, she said. Want a drink?

Sure.

She poured an inch of Canadian Club into each of two water glasses. I felt unreal, as if I’d walked into a novel.

Okay, Laura said, now it’s my turn.

For what?

She sipped her drink and said, Take off your clothes.

I laughed.

You’ve been drawing me, she said. Now I draw you.

I’m sure I must have blushed. I took a sip of the whiskey, which burned into my stomach, and then put the glass on a table. I took off my shirt and undershirt, then my boots and socks and trousers. The paint-spattered floor felt pebbly. So did my skin in the chilly room.

Everything, she said.

So I slipped off my shorts and tossed them onto a chair, trying to look casual. In the chill, I was sure my cock had shrunk to its tiniest size. I was afraid to look. She was placing a newsprint pad on the easel, an amused look on her face.

Now what? I said.

Just like Hogarth’s class, she said. Quick poses.

I tried to remember what she did, bending, twisting, holding the pose. All I could hear was the chalk moving on paper, sheets being torn off the pad, ice clunking in her glass. Then she asked me to hold a longer pose, seated on a chair, right leg extended, left leg curled along the side of the chair. She brought me my drink; I sipped it and she took it away and put Billie Holiday on the record player. The recording was a worn version of “Strange Fruit.” I worked at holding the pose, knowing she was looking straight at me, sensing her presence but not seeing her. Then I remembered what she’d said in the coffee shop, how she’d imagine us thinking about fucking her. I tried to see myself on this chair, tried to be her, looking at my body, at my shoulders and belly and legs and cock, and then I could feel my cock getting hard. I tried to stop it then, shifting my imaginings, trying to will it away; but I only got harder.

And then Laura was there, on her knees, gripping my cock in a chalk-blackened hand. Then she took it in her mouth, gripping it more tightly, her hand moving slowly, as I held to the edge of the chair, looking at the slow movement of her head. She looked up at me, her eyes wide, her mouth stuffed with my cock, and I started to come. Violently. My whole body erupting as my pelvis thrust up off the chair. Laura held on as an involuntary roar rose from my throat and I went back again and over the chair to the floor.

Silence.

And then Laura began to laugh in a crazy way.

Jesus Christ, she squealed. Jesus H. Christ, that was amazing!

I got up slowly, my back aching. Laura sat there, sitting on her ankles, still fully clothed.

How old are you anyway? she said.

Almost seventeen, I said.

Jesus H. Christ.

I stood up, trying to look casual, and she went to the bathroom. I looked at her drawings. They were scribbled and loose, made up of hundreds of small lines that built up form and volume; later, I’d see a similar style in the drawings of Giacometti. I was shivering and sipped my drink and was warm again. Then Laura was back, wearing a thin robe, carrying a hot washcloth that gave off steam.

First things first, young man, she said, and began to wash the charcoal off my cock. She dropped the cloth on a table, switched off a lamp, then another, and then she came to me from behind and rubbed her hand on my stomach and began kissing and sucking on my neck.

Okay, she whispered. Now we can fuck.

11

THAT SPRING, I felt as if some enormous ice jam had broken. I was alive again after a long dead time. The feelings of failure, impotence, loneliness, ruin: all were washed away. Art school made me feel that I could do something that was valuable, special, part of me. Laura made my body tremble with sensuality, and that went into my drawings. Through the long days at the Navy Yard, I could handle any drudgery, full of the luxuries of the evening.

Then at a Saturday-night birthday party in the Neighborhood, I met a girl named Maureen Crowley. She was tall, thin, dark-haired, with a slouching walk and bright dark eyes. For a long time, I was in love with her in that diffuse, ambiguous, and obsessive way that can never be explained to strangers. Laura was from the world outside the Neighborhood; Maureen was part of it. I knew that Laura wasn’t part of some limitless future; I wanted to believe that Maureen was. She was the middle daughter in a respectable family that lived in a private home near where I had my room. Her father owned a grocery store and later ran a bar. It was clear from the beginning that he didn’t want his daughter to be going out with the likes of me: a high school dropout from Seventh Avenue, and perhaps worse, a son of Billy Hamill.

Much of this disapproval was surely about class. The Irish from Seventh Avenue were “shanty”: low, common, often violent and alcoholic. The Crowleys were “lace curtain”; the father worked for himself, wore a necktie to his job, had moved at least one step past the immigrant generation. When I first came calling at the house, I wore my best clothes. Or the clothes then considered the style on Seventh Avenue. The clothes of the hoodlum: pegged pants, shirts with wide Mr. B collars, wraparound jackets. I couldn’t afford a suit, or a tweed jacket; most of my spare money was going to tuition and art supplies. Gradually I adopted the chinos and plaid shirts favored by the Big Guys, but it was too late. With Maureen’s parents, first impressions were everything. To them, even art school was a negative; what sort of foolish dreamer went to art school?

But the very obstacles charged this new love story with an aching romanticism. I wanted to prove my worthiness; that meant I had to live a lie. I never told Maureen about Laura. I saw Maureen on Wednesday nights, when there were no classes at C&I, and on weekends. On the other weekday nights, I almost ran to Laura’s place.

Laura was amused by me, I suppose; I was a kind of earnest, untrained pet. I never found out whether she had other lovers; I knew almost nothing about the way she lived outside school and the studio on Tenth Street. At school, she seldom talked to me in the hallway; she would see me in the hallway and nod Yes or shake her head No and that would tell me all I needed to know for the night. If it was No, I’d be stabbed by jealousy; I’d try to see if she left alone or if she was sitting in the coffee shop with another student. Once, I waited in the shadows near her house, to see if she came home with someone else. That night, she never came home at all.

But if she nodded Yes, Laura always had something new for me. She’d tie me to the bed with cord or pieces of clothesline and lick my body until, as I did one memorable midnight, I ejaculated without being touched by anything but her tongue. She’d paint my cock with watercolors or have me apply lipstick to the lips of her vagina. She had me fuck her on tables and the floor and against the kitchen sink, sometimes while I wore only my work boots. Once she asked me to tie her to the easel and fuck her from behind. On several nights, she took me into a hot soapy bath, the walls perspiring, and sat on my cock until she came. Meanwhile, I couldn’t get much beyond Maureen’s breasts. And then one night, while I was frantically fucking Laura, she whispered to me:

What’s her name?

What’s whose name?

The girl you’re thinking about while you’re fucking me.

She had me. My erection started dying. I must have smiled in some dumb way, because she looked at me, her eyes squinting. I rolled over on my side, feeling as if I’d been unfaithful to Laura.

Hey, young man, she said. Hey, don’t feel bad. Everybody does it.

She began playing with my cock, and when it was hard again she whispered: Call me by her name.

I turned to her, seeing the outline of her face in the light from the street. I ran my fingers on her nipples and drew close to her.

Maureen, I whispered.

Yes, Laura murmured.

Maureen, Maureen.

Say my name. Come in me, baby.

Maureen, Maureen, Maureen.

She started twisting and heaving in a ferocious orgasm, pulling my hair, biting my neck and shoulders, jamming her heels into my thighs, digging her fingers into my ass.

My name!

Laura, Maureen, Laura, Maureen, Laura, Laura, Laura …

Then I exploded into her.

We lay there, very still, for a long while. The El rumbled by. She lit a cigarette and sipped from a drink.

You’d better go home now, she said.

I want to stay here tonight.

That would be a mistake, she said.

Please, I said. I want to sleep with you. I want to wake up with you.

You do that once, she whispered, and you’ll never come back.

Why?

She got up and switched on a small lamp. She pulled on a robe and started fixing me a whiskey and soda.

Why? You’ll see me in the cold light of day, that’s why. You’ll see I’m old enough to be your mother. You’ll want your nice little virgin from Brooklyn. That’s why.

I see you in Hogarth’s class, I said. With all those goddamned fluorescent lights!

That’s different, she said. I could be three lemons in a bowl.

Come on, Laura. I love you.

She turned on me, snarling.

For Chrissakes, don’t say that! Don’t ever say that to me again!

It’s true.

You don’t even know what the word means! You’ll find out, one of these days, and you won’t say it so easy. Love gets everything all screwed up. It’s one of those lies that ruin the world.

I thought, in a thrilled way: Jesus, that’s like a line from a movie.

I said: Then what do you feel about me?

I’m fucking you, kid, she said bitterly. But I don’t have to love you to fuck you.

That was not a movie line. She drained her glass, then poured another, staring at the floor. Her face was clenched. I started getting dressed. I noticed a new canvas against the far wall, leaning against the windowsill. She had sketched in a naked young man. His heart was outside the skin of his chest. Everything was blue, even the heart.

For a few weeks, she signaled me No. Twice, she modeled in Hogarth’s class, and I pulsed with jealousy. I stayed at an easel to the side, but was jealous of those who could see between her legs. I had been in there. I didn’t want her to be imagining them imagining entering her. On the second night, at the end of the second week, I tried to loathe her. Her gray pubic hair. The small breasts. The ridged white flesh around her hips.

But I couldn’t make the loathing work. I kept drawing her the way I knew her, remembered her, wanted her to be: in writhing Hogarthian movements. Hogarth himself took notice.

Pretty sexy, fella, he said. Now try it the other way. Not a pinup. Make her ugly. Make her a hundred years old.

I don’t know if I can, I said.

Invent it, he said, walking away. Use your imagination.

I didn’t know if Laura heard him, but I tried. I made her a wrinkled crone. I made her toothless. I made her immensely fat. Nothing worked. I still wanted her. My last drawing was made up of hundreds of small scribbles, like one of her own drawings. When the bell rang, she walked past my easel and glanced at the drawing. I started to say something but she kept moving.

I waited for her outside the school. An icy wind was blowing off the East River. The streets looked dark and shiny, as if they’d been glazed. Then she came out.

Laura, I —

Come on, she said, and took my arm.

We went to Tenth Street and drank and fucked and fucked and drank. I stayed until morning.

She woke me with scrambled eggs on a plate and buttered rye toast. I suddenly panicked. It was Friday and the kitchen clock said it was eight thirty-five. I was due at the Navy Yard at eight.

The hell with it, she said. So you miss a day, so what?

Yeah. So what.

I looked at her more closely now as she made coffee. She was dressed in a loose flowered dress and sandals. Her hair was wild, but her face was clean and shining. The winter light threw cold shadows on the walls. I pulled a blanket over my shoulders and began eating greedily. She brought me a steaming cup of coffee and then sat at the end of the bed and looked at me in a forlorn way.

You’ll be going away, she said.

No, I said. I’ll stay here. Maybe we can go to a museum or a movie or something.

I have to work today. Besides, I wasn’t talking about today.

She got up and poured herself the first whiskey of the morning.

You’re the type who is always going away, she said.

Come on, I said. You know better. You gave me the brush for two weeks and here I am.

Temporary insanity, she said, and smiled. She stared into the glass.

I think you want me to go.

No, she said. Not yet.

12

THE ROOM in Brooklyn became my center, and from that center I tried to sort out all the different strands of my story: art school, the Navy Yard, the Neighborhood, my father, my brothers and sister, my friends, drinking, Maureen and Laura. I couldn’t do it, and there was little time left for anything else. McCarthyism was gathering its dark force but I wasn’t thinking much about it; I had no time anymore for reading seven newspapers a day, for clipping the comics and filing them into envelopes. The comics themselves seemed small and cramped now, and I kept wanting to draw the way Hogarth did, with great sweeping movements, my body involved in the act. I had no money for paint and canvases. And the room was too small for truly gigantic canvases. All of that was up ahead somewhere.

But while I wanted a future, I also wanted my identity in the Neighborhood. The drawings gave me part of it. So did the room. And that winter of 1951–52 I found a place where the guys from the Totes could meet on frigid nights.

Boop’s was on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Tenth Avenue. Tommy Conroy and Mickey Horan took me there for my first visit, entering through a side door on the Tenth Avenue side. There were booths and an unused kitchen. We moved through a dark passageway, past the restrooms, and into the saloon itself. It was dark and golden, like a John Sloan painting, with a long bar, a TV set near the windows, a shuffleboard machine, a lone table, and a jukebox. Behind the bar, the bottles glistened. On the same shelf, the cash register was in the center, with a toaster for making hot dogs at one end and signs for the Miss Rheingold contest at the other. That first night, the bar was packed and warm and smoky from cigarettes. The windows were opaque with steam.

Boop himself was a heavy-set mild-mannered Italian guy who years later was head of security at Madison Square Garden. That first night, Conroy ordered three beers and Boop pulled them without asking for draft cards. He was too busy. I still remember the feeling, standing at a bar with my friends, paying my own way. In the Parkview I was the kid from upstairs. This was to be my own bar, a place to drink or sing, my first club. That night I got very drunk. In the morning, I woke up happy.

Soon, my routine got more elaborate. If I wasn’t with Laura, I usually stopped off in Boop’s on my way home from C&I. Part of this must have been a need for approval. I wanted them to marvel at my drawing skills, to recognize that I was different, that I wasn’t just another high school dropout. But I also wanted to be part of the widening fraternity of drinkers. On weekday nights, I didn’t get drunk; I didn’t have enough money and I had to be up early to go to the Navy Yard. Laura drank more than I did. But on weekend nights, I usually went out with Maureen, early in the evening, to see a movie at Loew’s Met or the Sanders or Prospect. I would take her for a soda, or coffee, at Lewnes’ and then walk her home. She was in before midnight. Then I’d walk up Prospect Avenue to Boop’s and all the other young men would be gathering. They’d almost all had Saturday nights like mine. They hadn’t gotten laid either. So with the jukebox blasting and the beers flowing, we’d all get roaring drunk.

There are permanent holes in my memory about most of those nights. I remember lurching home. I remember the streets rising and falling and lampposts swaying. Or lying in bed while the ceiling moved like the sea. Most of all, I remember the great heady closed feeling in the bar, pushing quarters around in the wetness, the confirmed feeling when the bartender bought me a free round after I’d paid for three. Beers were a dime and a tune on the jukebox cost a nickle (or six for a quarter). You could get drunk for a dollar and a half. Through the night I was filled with talk about fighters and ballplayers and the war, guys we knew who’d been hurt, and others who’d been arrested, and a few who’d just gone off somewhere. And the music of the jukebox drove into me. I sang along with Sinatra on “I’m a Fool to Want You” and joined everybody in the bar on Johnnie Ray’s “Cry.”

Nobody talked politics, except to make occasional remarks about politicians in general. And none of the others talked much about the future. The war in Korea got in the way. They would mention taking the tests for the cops or the firemen; someday, later. But first they had to decide what to do about the war. The draft waited for all of us. For some of the older guys, it was only months away. So they discussed the relative merits of the army or the navy, the Marine Corps or the air force. They didn’t question the reasons for Korea. It never occurred to them to protest it. There was a war on. When it was your turn, you went too.

Most of the time, I listened. These were my friends and I didn’t want to argue with them. But in certain ways I was already separated from them. I couldn’t tell them about Laura, because they wouldn’t believe me, and if they heard I was having sex with an old woman (she was forty-one!), they’d probably laugh. On the nights when I wasn’t at Boop’s, or on Saturday or Sunday mornings, I started making drawings for myself again, filling newsprint pads instead of making cartoons. I made great violent drawings of prizefighters, starting with photographs from newspapers or Ring Magazine, then abstracting them, then drawing them from memory, repeating alone the exercises from school. I took stiff classroom drawings of Laura and thinned her out and added Maureen’s face, smudging the features with my fingers to protect her from the judgments of my visiting friends. I began imagining Maureen’s body in detail, seeing her on the model stand instead of Laura, her pale skin blushing, her pubic hair dark and shiny. In those drawings she seemed more real than she did when she sat beside me in the Sanders.

Somehow, making those drawings, I knew that I could lose the Navy Yard, lose Laura, even lose Maureen, but I couldn’t afford to lose art school. That would be losing my life.

13

BY APRIL, even Laura thought I was getting better.

You’ve got talent, she said one night, but you don’t know anything yet.

What do you mean?

I mean you’re intelligent, you learn fast, but you’re amazingly ignorant. You’re too much in love with being a mug from Brooklyn.

The words wounded me. She was right, and I knew it.

What should I learn? I asked her.

Laura smiled and said, Every fucking thing you can.

She would never go out anywhere with me, obviously (I thought) because she didn’t want her friends to laugh at her with a young man. But she began to show me drawings in art books and from folders of reproductions she’d torn from magazines. None of them looked like Burne Hogarth’s work or Milton Caniff’s or Jack Kirby’s. But I began to sense what Picasso was doing, and Matisse; I saw George Grosz for the first time and Otto Dix and a wonderful draftsman, now unjustly forgotten, named Rico Lebrun. Seeing my boxing pictures, she showed me Stag at Sharkey’s by George Bellows. She showed me pictures by Ben Shahn and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. And then she pulled out some drawings by a man who was doing what I wished I could be doing: José Clemente Orozco. He was a Mexican and drew figures with thick black lines and great bold power.

You’re a draftsman, she said. So study the great draftsmen. You can get to color later. Most artists use color to hide things they don’t understand. Photographers do it all the time.

She smoked her cigarettes and sipped her Canadian Club and rummaged through these files, which she kept in folders in a Campbell’s soup box, and there was always a running commentary.

Jesus H. Christ, I have saved an amazing amount of crap. I oughtta just throw it all out.

Where’d you get it all?

She held up a copy of Art News.

Magazines like this, she said. But do yourself a favor, don’t read these rags. Just tear out the pictures. The writing is usually the most amazing bullshit.

Then she gave me a copy of a book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, and I devoured it. I felt connected to Henri because he was a friend of John Sloan. His book was a collection of notes about the study of art, written down by students in his classes at the Art Students League, and first published in 1923. As I read, I heard Henri speaking in Hogarth’s voice, and he seemed to be speaking directly to me.

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life. …

This struck me as absolutely true; I knew, for example, that when I was alone I made drawings that went beyond the work I did in class. And I hoped I had the courage and stamina to see it through. I would sometimes remember these words while drinking in Boop’s — receiving what I thought Henri meant by sympathy, a kind of generalized human warmth; being, as he said, in company — and know that I should be home at work. Henri’s words became a kind of sweet curse. In my mind, the desire to be an artist had been a desire for freedom: from the routines of life, from the Navy Yards of the world. Until I read Henri, it had never occurred to me that there could be a cost, that an artist must pay a price in loneliness. That idea gave me a romantic thrill.

An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future. …

Was I a master of what I had? That is, had I pushed as hard as I could against my crudities, my clumsiness, my lack of skill? I knew I hadn’t. But nobody else at Boop’s had either. Most of them seemed content to go along, get a job, join the army. Who did I think I was anyway? Who was I to think I could go beyond myself?

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. … I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do. …

In the Navy Yard, I met men who were doing hard work because they had to do it; to support wives, children, pay rent. In Boop’s, the guys who were working weren’t doing what they wanted to do. Most of them didn’t even know what they wanted to do. And what about my father? What did he want to do when he was my age, and how had it turned out? What could he have become if he hadn’t left Ireland or if he hadn’t lost his leg? What about my mother? I knew almost nothing about her, except that she was there, she worked, she was smart, she encouraged me to do anything I wanted to do. As Henri did.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. That is what I call self-development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself.

Yes.

14

IN THE LATE spring of 1952, as the Dodgers tried in the new season to recover from the Home Run, and the war in Korea was grinding on, and the papers said that Eisenhower was planning to run for president, everything shifted again. Laura disappeared.

For two nights, I didn’t see her at school, didn’t receive her Yes or No. On the third night, I asked about her at the office. The secretary was annoyed because Laura hadn’t even called. They had to cancel one painting class because they couldn’t find a substitute.

I was suddenly panicky. In class that night, I imagined her burning with some fever, alone in the studio without a telephone. I imagined her careening around the studio, drunk and falling, the blood running from a gash in her head. Or she flipped a cigarette in a careless way and it landed in the files or the turpentine and exploded and she was burned alive. Or a man climbed in through the air shaft window, to hold her prisoner, and was even now hurting her. The lurid scenarios filled my head while I tried to draw a lithe young brown-nippled Puerto Rican model in class. The model was exquisite, with sad brown eyes, and a thin trail of hair from her navel down her stomach to a thick black vee between her legs. But I couldn’t even focus my lust. When the bell rang for the first break, I packed my things and hurried down to Tenth Street.

The door to Laura’s studio was unlocked. I opened it slowly, remembering all those film noir scenes of the horror within. The rooms were black, but I knew where the kitchen light cord was and pulled it on.

Everything was gone except the bed.

The easel was gone. The paintings. The brushes and paints and tomato cans. The sumptuous art books. The folders full of reproductions. Laura.

The linoleum floor now looked like an immense abstract painting. Under the sink, there was a bag of garbage. Inside it were two empty pint bottles of Canadian Club. I stood there for a long moment. How could she just go like this, without a word? I’m fucking you, kid. But I don’t have to love you to fuck you. Why didn’t I see this coming? I looked everywhere for a note to me, even on the bathroom mirror where they left notes in the movies. Nothing. She was gone. I imagined a man coming to the door and the two of them laughing. She was already packed, the clothes folded into suitcases, the canvases wrapped and tied together, the easel broken down for shipment, and he helped her to the street with her things and shoved them into his car. A convertible. I was sure of that. The easel sticking up from the back like a cross. And off they drove, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and laughing, laughing.

She would never tell him about me, some kid from Brooklyn, some boy out of art school. She might never tell anyone about me, might already have forgotten my existence. I slammed the icebox door with the flat of my hand, then did it again and again. Then turned around and saw the bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. I walked over and ran my fingers along its edge. Then I fell upon its vast emptiness and heard the distant rumble of the El and wept.

A chill came into me. For weeks, I couldn’t read Henri, or look at the artists Laura had introduced me to. It was as if the whole world that she knew had walked out into the night. My need focused more than ever before on Maureen. We were now going steady. That was supposed to give me a sense of structure, and a shared intimacy on the inevitable path to engagement and marriage. Instead I was full of uncertainty and one huge silent lie: I couldn’t tell Maureen how numbed I was by the disappearance of Laura.

The notion of marriage was scary; it made me see an apartment in the Neighborhood, kids, noise, a job I might hate. For a while I tried to merge the notion with my vision of life as an artist. We’d live in the Village and have children later. Maureen would be my model and we’d spend our evenings together in the company of painters and poets. I must have been a hugely egocentric boyfriend. I remember almost nothing about what she wanted from life, but I’m certain I spent many hours talking about what I wanted. I do remember that she didn’t take seriously my grand plans. Or so I thought at the time. She might have simply been what most girls then were: a supreme realist.

When the school term ended in June, my life started to unravel again. Without Laura, I had no outlet for my sexuality. Maureen was a Good Girl and with her I usually played the Good Boy. It was only late at night, after I’d dropped her off, that the Bad Guy came to life. Neither Boop’s nor the Parkview was any help; there were almost no available women in the Neighborhood, and those who were free knew I was going steady with Maureen. One evening, I called the school office to see if Laura had returned for summer sessions. No, she wasn’t part of the modeling pool anymore. What about Gloria, the Puerto Rican girl? The secretary laughed.

What do you think this is, a dating service?

No, no, I lied. During the summer, some of the guys from class, we’re planning some life sessions, just to stay in shape for the fall.

She gave me a number for Gloria Vasquez. I called. A man answered in Spanish and I hung up.

In the lunchtime bars along Sands Street, some of the guys from the Navy Yard talked joyfully about the whores who showed up in the evenings. But I had seen them, painted, lacquered, with huge piles of hair and alarming mouths, and they made me afraid. Afraid of disease. Afraid of their experience: thousands of blow jobs, thousands of fucks. And besides, I couldn’t pay them.

So I got drunk a lot and into fights, drowning my cock in rivers of beer. Drunk, I called Gloria Vasquez again one night, my head full of her brown nipples and thick lustrous hair, and this time she answered. She was sweet. She was polite. But she knew I was drunk and soon hung up. I was too embarrassed ever to call again.

The summer came and we all went back to Bay 22 and Oceantide. I remember strutting too much under a Saturday sun, getting bleary with beer, and falling asleep on a blanket beside Maureen. I woke with a furry tongue but I wasn’t very ashamed of myself: everybody else from the Neighborhood was doing the same thing. For all of us, boys and girls, drinking was natural. It was also woven together with sex; you drank in order to get sex or you drank if you didn’t have sex. In those years before the Pill, sex was also woven together with fear. The girls surely wanted it as much as we did, but they would pay a tougher price. Instead of fucking, we got drunk.

On the beach, among all those oiled bodies, with Maureen beside me but untouchable, I sometimes tried to distract myself with books and allow a novel to lift me into some other world. But then someone would come over and say, Whatta you, studying for a test? And I’d put the book away and play the role to which the Neighborhood had assigned me. I went to the bar at Oceantide (where they did check draft cards) and sat on the side at a crowded table and sipped beer that older guys had bought. I talked much bullshit. Sometimes I even danced with Maureen.

On my seventeenth birthday, I stopped at 378. I brought my father some drawings I had made of Duke Snider and Sugar Ray Robinson and he seemed happy with them but didn’t know what to do with them. He rolled them up and put them in a closet. My mother had a cake for me and the kids all cheered. Then my mother saw something in my face.

You’re unhappy, aren’t you? she said.

I’m all right, I said.

What’s the matter?

I shrugged and didn’t answer.

Maybe you should come home, she said.

Maybe, I said.

But I didn’t want to go home. When I said goodnight, there were tears in her eyes, but she didn’t cry.

From the pay phone in Sanew’s, I called Maureen. Her father answered.

Who’s this? he said.

Pete.

She’s already asleep.

Could you tell her I called, Mr. Crowley? He sighed and hung up.

I was a mess of emotions and I wanted to get drunk. But I knew that wouldn’t help. I went back to the room, and for the first time since Laura left, I read The Art Spirit.

Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing. …

I was soon asleep.

15

MICKEY HORAN joined the navy in July. A few weeks later, he was followed by Jack McAlevy. And Joe Griffin. Suddenly, among the guys in Boop’s, it was our turn.

The radio and the newspapers were still full of the war. In my room, I was reading Harvey Kurtzman’s Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Even Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball, was back in the air force, joining Steve Canyon. I imagined myself in Korea. Or on ships plowing through icy northern waters.

You’re the type who is always going away, said Laura, before she went away herself.

And I thought: Maybe she was right. She was right about a lot of other things. Maybe I have to go away. It wasn’t just destiny; there were practical reasons too. The money I earned at the Navy Yard just wasn’t enough for me. I had to pay for rent, food, and carfare; I needed money for drinking, to see friends, to have a little enjoyment; and I was going steady with Maureen. In the fall, when school started again, I’d need tuition along with money for paint and canvases, because I was supposed to move on from the basic drawing course. But I didn’t even have a bank account. I couldn’t afford a telephone or a television set. Two days before payday, I always had to borrow a few dollars, just for carfare and hot dogs. I knew what I wanted: enough money to pay for art school, to buy paint and brushes and books. Without those things, I couldn’t imagine a life, even with Maureen. I just couldn’t afford the wanting.

In August, I decided to join the navy.

But why? Maureen said.

I can finish high school in the navy, I said. And when I get out, I’ll get the GI Bill. You know, they pay you to go to school. They give you loans to buy a house. I can save a lot of money while I’m in, and we’ll be in great shape when I get out. It’s for us, Maureen. For us.

She knew otherwise. She began to weep. I talked to her, caressed her, kissed her almost desperately. I hedged, layering doubt into my words, making it sound as if my mind wasn’t made up. She cried inconsolably for a while and then stopped. I walked her home. She ran inside without another word.

But the idea of the navy had possessed me, and the possession wasn’t based on the benefits of the GI Bill. That summer, I couldn’t see myself clearly; it was as if the mirror was warped. The navy would provide me with a clear identity, no matter how temporary. Once I could say I was an Eagle boy and everyone knew what I meant; now I could say I was a sailor. In the navy, I would earn my space in the world and in this country; the act would certify that I was American, not Irish, not simply my father’s son. Joining a group larger than myself would cause my hobbling ten-cent miseries to recede and vanish. Above all, the navy offered escape. I would escape the stunted geography of Brooklyn, going where nobody knew about my father, my drinking, my failure at Regis, my limitless uncertainties. I would escape the grinding pressure to pay my way in the world. Above all, I would escape the strained demands of choice. I wouldn’t have to choose between life as a cop or a bohemian, a plumber or an artist. I wouldn’t have to choose between art school or an early marriage and the baby carriage in the hallway.

In addition, there was the truant spirit of romance. I would be going from the known to the unknown, the safe to the dangerous. Alone at night, I saw myself on a cruiser, rocking in deep blue water as the heavy guns fired salvos at the dark Korean coast. I saw myself moving through radiant tropical ports with palm trees blowing in the wind and bars full of dark abundant women like Gloria Vasquez, with brown nipples and black hair. I thought about visiting all the ports where my grandfather had gone, drinking in his bars, and then, dressed in navy whites, tougher and older, walking into the sunlight and seeing Laura. She would stop and squint and say, Is that you? And I’d look at her in a bitter Bogart way and say, Not anymore, and turn to take Gloria Vasquez by the hand.

And Maureen? I made a different set of pictures, conjured another shadow-self. Maybe we’d get married. Not right away. Eventually. When Korea was over or something. She’d come and live with me in my home port, in Hawaii or San Diego, some bright gleaming place far from Brooklyn. Or we’d want until I was discharged. Sure.

Because I was only seventeen, I needed to be signed into the navy by one of my parents. But when I told them one evening in 378, my mother was horrified.

They’ll send you to the war, she said.

Everybody’s going to the war, Mom.

Buddy Kelly is dead in this war, she said. Buddy Kiernan is dead. Every week, more of them are dead.

They were in the army, Mom. I’ll be in the navy.

Can’t you wait a year? Until you’re eighteen? Maybe the war’ll be over by then.

I don’t want to wait, Mom.

She shook her head in sorrow and frustration. But my father was looking at me in a different way.

Don’t listen to her, he said. It’ll be the best thing you ever did. You can learn a trade. It’ll make you a man.

I don’t understand it, my mother said.

You’re not a man, Annie.

And so he signed the papers.

I was told to report three weeks later, on Monday, September 8, at eight in the morning. The recruiter said I could “strike” for a yeoman rate, which meant I might be able to work as an artist or cartoonist on a ship’s newspaper. There were no guarantees, he said, but since I’d gone to art school, it was possible. This inflamed me even more; with any luck, I could become the Bill Mauldin of the navy!

A week after signing up, I left the Navy Yard, saying good-bye to the men, who all wished me well. I wrote to C&I, explaining that I wouldn’t be back until I was out of the navy. Then I packed all my things, gave up the room next to the Parkview, and went home to 378. I didn’t show off the nude drawings; I sealed them with Scotch tape into the big portfolio envelopes. I got cardboard boxes from the grocery store and packed my art supplies, comics, and other books, including The Art Spirit. I stacked them all in the woodbin in the cellar, explaining to my brother Tommy that eventually he might send them to me when I was out at sea. He was now at Brooklyn Tech, a brilliant student, with plans to be an engineer. He took the assignment as if it were a sacred duty.

Then I went on a summer binge, ten days of tearful scenes with Maureen, wild nights at Boop’s, sunburns at Coney. The art school interlude was behind me; I had been reclaimed by the rituals of the Neighborhood. Everything culminated in a going-away party for me and three other young men in a VFW post down by the Venus theater. I arrived with Maureen and we clung to each other through the long evening. Now there was no going back; the papers were signed; my friends were here to say good-bye. The hall was packed, the tables stacked with whiskey and set-ups and pitchers of beer. The jukebox blasted. Maureen and I danced, her small breasts pushing hard against me, her hands tense and sweaty. She said very little, but at some point I made a joke and smiled and she turned away in tears. Her girlfriends came over and hurried her into the ladies room. I downed a cold beer and poured another. Goddammit, Maureen, I’m a man, I thought (incapable of irony or self-mockery); I have to do this because men do these things. When Maureen came back, her eyes were red. I took her hand and we went to dance. Jo Stafford was singing “You Belong to Me.”

She began to weep again, and I put my arm around her and waved good-bye to my friends and went into the cool autumn air. She lived a few blocks away, and we walked together with my arm around her waist. Suddenly, I didn’t want to go. I wanted to repeal everything: the decision to join, the signing of the papers, the surrender of room and job, the departure from the only school I’d ever loved. And I wanted to take back everything I’d said to Maureen.

But when we reached her house, huddling on the bottom step out of view of anyone inside, I couldn’t find the right words. There was no going back. Staying would be scarier than going. I kissed her. She cried. So did I.

Maybe I’ve made some terrible mistake, I said.

She didn’t answer. I said I’d write every day. She said she would too. I said I’d be home at Christmas. She said she’d see me then. I asked her to wait for me. A light went on inside her house, and she kissed me one final time on the cheek and moved quickly up the steps, opened the front door with a key, and vanished. I stood there for a long moment, wondering if I should go back to the VFW and get roaring drunk.

Then I started walking home through the Neighborhood, along the parkside and the dark brooding forest beyond the granite walls, past the Totem Poles and the Sanders, down past the shuttered synagogue and the gated armory to Seventh Avenue. The lights were out in most of the apartments. Even at 378. I wondered if any of them were doing what they wanted to do. I wondered if Maureen was asleep. I wondered where Laura was.

In the morning, I went off to the navy.