A Drinking Life: A Memoir
Where’s the backyard? I said.
Well, my mother said, that’s a wee bit of a problem. There’s no backyard.
I looked straight down from the window and saw fenced-off yards filled with the scrawny shapes of stunted trees and patches of blackened snow. But those yards belonged to the smaller houses on the side streets. The tenements on the avenue had no yards. This was hard to imagine: a house without a backyard. And I wished I still had the backyard on Fourteenth Street or even the bald shadowed clay of Thirteenth Street. After all, if there was no backyard, where would I play on summer afternoons?
Suddenly the moving job was finished and my father and the large men started to go out.
Will you bring me a soda, Daddy?
Sure, he said.
Hell, Billy, one of the large men said. He’s gettin’ pretty big, the kid. Whyn’t you bring him over the bar?
Yeah, my father said, not meaning it.
But you gotta get him outta them knickers, another man said. Ya can’t go drinkin’ in knickers, kid.
Yeah, one of these days, my father said.
And they went out. My mother then turned to look at the boxes and bags, the mounds of clothes, the cluttered table, the dishes in the sink. She sighed.
Mommy, I want long pants, I said.
You’ll have long pants soon enough, she said.
I hate knickers, I said.
We’ll talk about it later, she said. Let’s get moved in first.
And so we moved in. All that afternoon, we began to explore this new place high above everything. The kitchen was to become the center of almost everything we did; we ate there, talked there, listened to the radio there, did homework there. I can remember every inch of it, with the table of much-painted pine in the center under a ceiling light whose cord bobbed in the air. There were four chairs around the table, with a sugar bowl in the middle beside my father’s ashtray (my mother didn’t smoke or drink). Just inside the door was a shallow corner closet shaped like a triangle. It had no door, only a drape hanging from a rod. Sometimes on rainy days, when we kids played hide and seek, I would huddle in there under piles of clothes and sheets, burrowed into a cave, wishing that I’d never be discovered.
On that first day at 378, my father came home hours later, bleary with drink. My mother tried to get him to eat some sandwiches and soup. He couldn’t do it. He tried to sing but the words stopped coming, choked in a phlegmy cough. Finally, he rose from the kitchen table. I was in the first room in a narrow bed that fit tightly against the wall. As he went by I said, Hello, Daddy. He didn’t hear me. From the next room, I heard him removing his trousers, change jingling in the pockets, then the straps and the leg being slammed against the wall before he fell heavily into bed. Then there was silence from my mother in our brand-new kitchen. Except for her sad breathing.
9
WE LIVED to the rhythms of the war. Years later, we even marked time in a special way: Before the War, During the War, After the War. There were other wars, Korea and Vietnam, and American invasions of too many other places, but for people my age there was only one War. That war was in our comics, our movies, our dreams. The radio was filled with it. Every evening, my mother listened to Edward R. Murrow and Gabriel Heatter, and in school we followed the war on maps. There was North Africa. And Tobruk. And somewhere in all that yellow emptiness, El Alamein.
At Holy Name, I heard about the war from new teachers every year, each of them rolling down the maps and showing us the places that were in the newspapers and on the radio. There was much excitement when the Allies landed in Sicily because the parents of most of the Italian kids were from that island. They wanted the Americans to win. They had brothers in our army and some of the brothers died in those first battles. All of them said their parents were worried. I got an aunt there, said Vito Pinto. My grandmother is there, said Michael Tempesta. I got an uncle over there, said George Poli. The war went on and on.
I’d like to give that Hitler a boot in the ass, my father said one night.
Billy, my mother said. The children …
I would, he said. I mean it. Let him walk into Rattigan’s and drop one on his chin.
That struck me as a wonderful idea. Hitler goose-stepping down Seventh Avenue, with Göring and Goebbels and Himmler behind him (for we knew each of their names), all of them marching into Rattigan’s, and my father walking over and punching Hitler right in the mout’. Then my father’s friends could mop up the rest of them, the way Captain America went after the Red Skull. That would be that. No more war.
But the war went on. We learned its common and proper nouns: bomb, rifle, pillbox, Guadalcanal and grenade, camouflage and convoy, submarine and torpedo, Salerno and Monte Cassino, Rommel and Montgomery, infantry and air force, destroyers, PT boats, cruisers and carriers, casualties and conning towers, depth charges and bomb bays, antiaircraft, bazookas and howitzers, wounded, ambulances, shrapnel and flak, generals, colonels, majors, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, privates, along with admirals, commanders, captains and seamen, WACS and WAVES, 1A and 4F, Tojo and Mussolini, .45s and .88s, tanks and jeeps, occupation and refugee and resistance. And in comics and radio serials, in movies and schoolyards, we heard the words Secret Weapon. Hitler might have one; we had to get one.
In the windows of the neighborhood now you saw small flags bearing a star for each son who had gone to serve the country. Some flags had as many as four. And after the invasion of North Africa, some of the stars were gold, telling us that a son had died. There were more after Sicily and many more after Anzio.
Up on Eighth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, a sandlot football team called the Arrows erected a sign on the wall beside Foppiano’s, listing the names of all the men who were away in the service. Even after we moved to Seventh Avenue, I passed it every day on my way to Holy Name. The lettering was small and neat, but before the war was over, the sign was completely filled and many of the young men were dead. The sign was there for years After the War, battered by weather, the names bleached by sun and washed by rain, then repainted, then washed away again, until the names were gone for good and nobody was left in the neighborhood who could remember the living or the dead.
Like other families, we experienced the war in small ways. In addition to the vocabulary of the war itself, I learned the word “shortage” and the phrase “black market.” There was a shortage of sugar. There was a shortage of meat. Butter was rare and there were no more bananas because of the German submarines in the Caribbean. The Germans were sinking all of the ships that used to come to New York Before the War.
Ships like the ones your father worked on? I asked my mother one night.
Yes, she said. Exactly like the ones he worked on. He was all over South America, you know. He used to write letters to my mother from all those places. He was even at the Panama Canal when they were building it.
In the Blue Books, we found maps of the Caribbean and Central America and located the Panama Canal. She showed me a deck of playing cards adorned with scenes of the canal’s construction, cards sent to her mother long ago, and all the while, I was trying to imagine my mother when she still had a father. He certainly existed, because she had a photograph of him, in a dark suit, taken in New Orleans. And she told me that I was named after him. Or I was named after my father and her father: William Peter. But they called me Peter anyway. So I had some connection to that lost grandfather who had died. But when I asked her to tell me about him, she always got busy doing something else, and became very quiet.
When she talked about the black market, I imagined some terrible place down near the Gowanus Canal, a huge building painted black and filled with men in black suits and black masks.
No, she said, it’s not like that.
A bunch of terrible people she called reprobates cheated the government by hiding things that were part of the shortages. If you knew the right people, you could get all the sugar you wanted, all the meat. You just needed to know the black market people, the repr
obates. Why didn’t we know them?
Because they’re bad people, she said. They love money more than they love their country. Are they bigots? I asked.
Probably, she said. For sure, they are gangsters.
At some point, my mother received ration books and tokens. When she went to buy meat or butter, she needed to hand over the ration stamps or dime-sized cardboard tokens. She saved bacon fat in tin cans, and when she turned in the bacon fat at Semke’s butcher shop, she was given more tokens in exchange. Once a month, she said, the government picked up all the cans of bacon fat. One day, I asked my father why the army needed bacon fat.
To grease the guns, he said. And for the soldiers to put on their boots to keep out water.
I tried to imagine this. Wouldn’t the Nazis smell breakfast when the Americans tried to sneak up on them in a raid?
There were some questions that could never be answered, particularly about the war.
10
FOR THE CHRISTMAS of 1943, my mother bought me a pair of roller skates. They were strong and tough, with clamps over the front of your shoes that were tightened with a skate key. The wheels were shiny; they would never wear out, filling with those ruinous holes we called skellies. They had probably cost her a lot of money, at least three dollars. But on a frigid Saturday a week later, there was a huge scrap metal drive, men in trucks moving slowly along the avenue, shouting to everybody to haul out their old metal and iron so we could turn the stuff into bombs and bullets. People came out with beaten-up old metal chairs and lengths of pipe and broken bicycles. I thought it was my duty to make the ultimate sacrifice. I threw in my skates.
But as I watched the truck pull away, I began to cry. I wanted those skates back. And then felt as if I were a traitor, a regular Benedict Arnold. I stopped crying. I walked around the block. A cold wind was blowing off the harbor. I went home and lay down on my bed and started to read a Newsboy Legion comic to restore my sense of patriotism. Yes: I had made a sacrifice. But it was worth it. Somehow, my skates would help beat Hitler and the Japs. Then my mother came in and asked me what was the matter.
Nothing, I lied.
Come on, something’s the matter.
Nothing’s the matter.
What happened?
I was quiet for a moment and then I whispered: I gave my skates to the scrap metal drive.
Mother of God.
She looked upset and I said, I’m sorry, Mommy.
Oh, she said, this damned war.
Then she went into the kitchen and started cooking in silence. But that wasn’t the end of it.
An hour later, my father came home drunk. We sat down to eat dinner. And he learned about the skates.
What? he said. What? You gave away your skates?
I didn’t give them away, I said. I gave them to the scrap metal drive, you know, the war effort.
You bloody idjit, he said.
And he reached over and slapped my face.
My head seemed to explode. I went off the chair and got up and ran into the other room, my face stinging, my ear ringing.
Billy! my mother shouted. For the love of God, he’s only a boy!
Tommy was crying, and that set off Kathleen.
I had to work for those goddamned skates! my father shouted. And he gave them away?
Billy, he’s a boy. He wanted to help with the war! He meant nothing bad, he —
I covered my head with a pillow. I didn’t want to hear any more of it. I was full of shame, a real idjit. My father had worked at Arma all night and paid for the skates and I gave them away. Skates I loved. The first real pair of skates I ever had. An idjit, an idjit.
Then my brother Tommy was beside me. He put a hand on my head.
Don’t cry, Peter. Please don’t cry.
I took a deep breath and stopped. My face was still stinging.
Come on, Tommy whispered. We’ll go in the Little Room and read comics.
And so we did.
11
IN THOSE FIRST YEARS at 378, the roof became our backyard. It was directly above our heads, reached by a flight of stairs. A small tarpapered building sheltered the staircase, rising off the roof itself like a second house with its own skylight. When we first moved to 378, there was a wooden deck running the length of the roof, with structures like goalposts at each end and clotheslines strung between them. On sweltering August afternoons, nothing was more pleasurable than walking in shorts through the cold wet wash. But in winter, the clothes froze and if you hit them you would hurt your hands; when it was that cold, my mother hung clothes on a line in the kitchen.
From the roof of the little house above the stairs, we could see forever. In one direction, facing the harbor, we saw the hills of Staten Island and the distant smudge of New Jersey and the Narrows opening out to the Atlantic. The harbor traffic never stopped; every day, ships moved out through the Narrows, going to the war, while others arrived in lines as steady as the trolley cars on Seventh Avenue. To the right, we could see the towers of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, the giant building ways of the Navy Yard, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler. We could not see the piers where the Normandie lay in water and mud.
The New York sky was crowded with birds then, and I would stare at some brave and lonesome hawk as he caught an air current and careened away, heading for the skyline until he vanished, and I would have dreams that night about flying: magically possessed of the secret powers of my heroes, weightless and strong, high above Brooklyn, soaring to the towers of Manhattan.
One afternoon on that little roof, as I lay reading in the sun, there was a deep churning sound in the distance, growing steadily louder. My brother Tommy suddenly burst through the door below me, looking at the empty sky. I reached down and pulled him up. Then, above us, came a flight of B-17s. Ten of them, twenty, then more and more, hundreds, and we were frozen, suddenly jumping, as the sky darkened with airplanes, the two of us yelling without words, trying to roar with them, waving triumphant fists at the Flying Fortresses as they flew over us, heading for the Narrows, heading out over the Atlantic, going to get Hitler.
When my father woke up, we started telling him about the airplanes, the words coming in a rush, and he told us that out at Arma, they made bombsights for those Flying Fortresses. We got very excited. This was war information. The Red Skull would kill us to know this; he would kidnap my father and threaten to drop him into a pool of sharks if he didn’t give him the plans to the bombsight.
Now don’t tell anyone, he said, going in to shave. Remember, he said: Loose lips sink ships.
Loose lips sink ships. That was one of the mantras of the war. I was sure that loose lips had sunk the Normandie. But that night, I didn’t want to talk about the Normandie. I wanted to tell everyone about the bombsights, and how my father might be a cripple, he might not be a soldier, he might be a drunk, he might be a crippled Irish drunk, but he was helping beat Hitler too! He was doing it every night, going out to Arma, out there in Bush Terminal, and making bombsights that would help our men blow up Nazi shipyards and Nazi bases and Nazi tanks. And I remember thinking, up on the roof one day, that maybe that’s why he was a drunk. Maybe it was very hard to carry that secret around, to have that inside him, knowing that he could be captured. Maybe he thought that if he was drunk he wouldn’t be able to talk. His loose lips would not sink ships.
Yeah, I thought. Maybe that was it.
When I left our cramped rooms for the roof, I always felt free. The sky was limitless, the turmoil of the street far below. The tenements and their roofs were all connected and I explored every inch of that open terrain: roofs with white or black pebbles, others with plain tar paper, some with clotheslines, others with rough planked decks where people sat on summer evenings. There were metal chimneys on some rooftops, brick on others; the buildings without hot water had no chimneys at all. A few tenements were higher than the rest, and between several of them there were air shafts.
One air shaft was wider, dee
per, more foreboding than the others. I sometimes stared into it, holding tightly to the ledge beside it, and could barely see the black distant bottom, which was a rubble of broken bottles, rusting cans, old clothes. I dropped a pebble down the shaft; it took a long time to hit bottom. Tommy and I called the shaft the Bottomless Pit.
Then one afternoon, I was on the roof with Tommy and two kids, Billy Rossiter and Billy Delaney. We wandered to the edge of the Bottomless Pit. Rossiter, tall and skinny, suddenly pushed me, then grabbed me before I could fall, and laughed at the fear on my face. My heart thumped.
I dare you to jump across, Rossiter said.
Nah, I said, still full of fear.
I can do it, Delaney said.
What for? I said.
A dare is a dare, he said.
Then he backed up the width of one rooftop, took a deep breath, started to run, leaped, and hit the ledge on the far side of the Bottomless Pit. He didn’t make it! He was holding on to the edge, dangling, grunting, the darkness below him. Rossiter looked frightened, and then he and I and Tommy were scrambling around to the other side to save Delaney from falling.
But he held on and pulled himself up over the ledge without our help and rolled over on his back. He laughed at us.
Okay, he said, now it’s your turn.
Rossiter smiled thinly. He had made the dare. Billy Delaney had accepted it. Now Rossiter had to do it. That was only fair.
He backed up, the way the shorter Delaney had, a wan look on his face. He shook his hands loosely and then started to run on his long thin legs. He jumped. And landed cleanly on his feet on the other side. He laughed like a loon, jumped up and down, raised clenched fists to the sky.