A Drinking Life: A Memoir

  But I remember the abrupt change at 378 Seventh Avenue in the first week of May. My mother was gone for a few days and then I came home from school and Brian was in a tiny crib in the kitchen, his head covered with black hair, his features all squinched up.

  What’s this? I said.

  That’s your new brother, my mother said, obviously blissful. His name is Brian.

  Another brother. I was so used to the three of us kids, and now there was a fourth. Tiny. A baby. Everything was changed again. I touched Brian as he slept, his hair silky, and then my mother let me hold him. I was afraid I would drop him, but she stood there and smiled. She showed me how she changed his diaper, washing him, using baby oil so his skin wouldn’t get sore, then pinning up the diapers with large safety pins.

  You have to be careful, she said. You don’t want to stick him with the pin. He’s such a wee thing.

  Again, as there was for Kathleen’s christening, we had a family party. The christening took place on a Saturday afternoon in the marble gloom of a long narrow church called St. Stanislaus, which was five blocks closer to us than Holy Name. Brian screamed when the priest poured water across his skull, and then everyone looked happy and posed with the baby for photographs and we walked home. The apartment soon filled up with everyone from 378 except the McEvoys. The aunts and uncles arrived, and my various cousins, along with the regulars from Rattigan’s and Patty Rattigan himself. Someone brought in a vat full of ice cubes. Everyone else arrived with bottles and gifts for the baby. Soon there were songs and sandwiches and beer, more singing and more beer, and then just beer. Gallons of it.

  Now I was in the grip of the curiosity that had ruined Adam. Everybody was drinking, except my mother, who never drank and was on this day too busy laying out sandwiches and finding clean glasses for the new arrivals. They all seemed so happy. And I wanted to taste the apparent source of their happiness: the beer. I knew it could harm people. I had seen it turn my father into a shambling wreck. But I wanted to know for myself.

  When no one was looking, I lifted a half-full glass off the kitchen table and retreated through the rooms. There were people in all the rooms, but they didn’t notice me. I went into the Little Room and locked the eye hook on the door. I stared at the glass, overwhelmed by the sense of the forbidden. But I needed to move into this unknown place, to cross this line, to see the back of this grown-up cave. I took a sip.

  The taste repelled me. It was sour, even bitter. The smell was vile as the glass passed under my nose when I sipped. But this couldn’t be all there was to drinking beer. If it was, why did anyone do it? I took another sip, then a third, expecting some powerful charge, some magical transformation, like the changes wrought by magical potions in the comic books. But nothing happened. Someone knocked on the door.

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

  Me, I said. I’ll be right out.

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

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

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

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

  8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Whatta you? he said.

  Whatta you mean, what am I?

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

  American, I said.

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

  American, I said. Irish American.

  I shoulda figured dat, he said. A fuckin’ Mick. ’Ey, who cut your fuckin’ hair, Mick? Tonto?
r />   I tried to ignore him, afraid of him, afraid of a fight, and he stepped between me and the cot.

  I’m tawkin’ to you, he said.

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

  I don’t want to talk to you, I said.

  Zat so?

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

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

  Nothing, I said.

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

  We wuz just foolin’ around, he said.

  Yeah, I said. Just kidding.

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

  Cappy shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Where’d you get that? I asked.

  Found it.

  Where?

  In the kitchen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Anybody in there? a grown-up voice said.

  Yeah, Arnold replied. We looking for snakes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Hey, why don’t we have a circle jerk?

  Cappy said: A what?

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

  One kid said: Wuz dat?

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

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

  Now you do it, Arnold said.

  The boy did.

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

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

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

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

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

  The boy took a sip, Arnold a long swallow.

  Who wants some juice? he said.

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