A Drinking Life (11 page)

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

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

What about Mommy?

He’ll take care of her too.

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

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

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

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

3

T
HAT WINTER
, Betty the Whore’s husband came home. He was a gaunt, hollow-eyed man who had been a German prisoner for two years. But when he went into the building there were no Welcome Home signs and no Betty either. We all heard about the way he reacted. He went into Unbeatable Joe’s and got very drunk. Then he started throwing glasses and ashtrays and punched out the mirror in the men’s room. The other men were very gentle. They took him home and put him to bed. The next day, he left the Neighborhood and never came back.

4

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

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

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

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

And what if
he
loses his job?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never, she snapped.

Why?

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

In the spring, I went to work too.

5

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

I started the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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