SOCI12CT

16

EIGHTH GRADE was a horror. Our teacher was a thick-

necked Pole with a jutting jaw and a bent nose. His name

was Brother Jan. In the seventh grade, we’d had a soft and

saintly man named Brother Rembert as our teacher. We

heard scary tales about Brother Jan, but nothing really

prepared us for the reality of this snarling, vicious brute. On

his desk, Brother Jan kept a thick eighteen-inch ruler called

Elmer. He used it on someone every day. He used it if you

were late. He used it if you didn’t finish your homework. He

used it if you smiled or giggled. He used it if you talked

back, or copied from another kid during an exam. I would

watch him when he bent one of the boys over a front desk,

and there was a tremble in his face, a fierce concentration,

a sick look of enjoyment as he whacked Elmer on the ass

of the chosen boy until the boy dissolved in tears and pain.

He picked on some kids over and over again: a funny

guy named Bobby Connors; a slow, sweet boy named

Shitty Collins, who lived up the block from me; a tall sly

character named Boopie Conroy. Near the end of the first

term, Brother Jan started picking on me. Somehow I

infuriated him. Maybe it was because I got the highest

grades in the class but after school spent my time with the

harder kids. I shared my homework with Shitty Collins and

some of the slower kids; when Brother Jan discovered this

he didn’t see it as an act of Christian charity but as a case

of subversion; he bent me over the front seat and whipped

into me with Elmer. After the first time, he whipped me

every week. He broke some other kids, reducing them to

tears and humiliation; when he did that, his eyes seemed to

recede under his brow and his lips curled into a knowing

smile, as if he’d discovered the point at which he could

destroy pride and will. I refused to cry. I would wait for the

initial shock, then the cutting pain of the second blow, then

wait for the next, and tighten my face, clamp my teeth

together, feel it again, then again, still again, as many as

fifteen times, thinking: Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you,

and fuck you. And Brother Jan would swing again, grunting.

Then he’d be finished and I’d glance at him and

sometimes he’d have a film of sweat on his face. And I’d

think: You’re sick. I’d sit down in pain, and the other kids

would look at me, and I would stare up at Brother Jan,

thinking: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

Around this time I first sensed that I was my own version of

Jekyll and Hyde. In my head, the Good Boy was constantly

warring with the Bad Guy. I wanted to be a Bad Guy, tough,

physical, a prince of the streets; at the same time, I was

driven to be a Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, a

protector of my brothers, an earner of money for the family.

The Bad Guy cursed, growled, repeated dirty jokes and

resisted Brother Jan; the Good Boy served Mass in the

mornings and read novels in bed at night. The Bad Guy

practiced walking like one of the Tigers, stole silverware

from the Factory, and jerked off; the Good Boy delivered

groceries to old ladies who couldn’t come down the stairs,

memorized poems, and drew cartoons at the kitchen table

on cold or rainy evenings. It seems clear to me now that the

Bad Guy was demanding respect from my father, the Good

Boy acknowledging love from my mother. It wasn’t at all

clear when I was in my early teens.

There were times when the existence of the Good Boy

forced the appearance of the Bad Guy. In the final three

years of grammar school at Holy Name, I always finished at

the top of the class in grades, averaging 98 or 99, was

placed on the honor roll and granted awards for general

excellence. But there was an assumption that if you got

good grades you must be soft, a sissy, or an AK — an ass

kisser. This was part of the most sickening aspect of Irish-

American life in those days: the assumption that if you rose

above an acceptable level of mediocrity, you were guilty of

the sin of pride. You were to accept your place and stay in it

for the rest of your life; the true rewards would be given you

in heaven, after you were dead. There was ferocious

pressure to conform, to avoid breaking out of the pack; self-

denial was the supreme virtue. It was the perfect mentality

for an infantryman, a civil servant, or a priest. And it added

some very honorable lives to the world. But too often, it

discouraged kids who aspired to something different. The

boy who chose another road was accused of being Full of

Himself; he was isolated, assigned a place outside the

tribe. Be ordinary, was the message; maintain anonymity;

tamp down desires or wild dreams. Some boys withered.

And the girls were smothered worse than the boys. They

could be nuns or wives, brides of Christ or mothers of us all.

There were almost no other possibilities.

But the Bad Guy in me resisted the demand for

conformity that was so seductive to the Good Boy. I hated

being called an AK. For one thing, it wasn’t true. I polished

no apples, sought no favors. But worse, to say that I was an

AK was to imply that what I had actually done was a fraud. I

knew that I got those grades by doing the homework,

reading the books, and above all, by paying attention; I

didn’t get them by kissing ass. So, after a while, whenever I

was called an AK, I struck back: punching and hurting my

accusers. The Bad Guy shoved the Good Boy out of the

way and went to work. By the time I was subjected to

Brother Jan’s sick furies, nobody again called me an AK.

And I’d acquired a vague notion in my head that I could be

like Sugar Ray Robinson: a boxer and a puncher, smart

and tough.

By the spring of 1949, seething with anger at Brother Jan, I

started hanging out in a different part of the neighborhood,

two blocks from Holy Name. In a way, it was a matter of

choosing my own place, rather than having it chosen by my

parents; they had moved to Seventh Avenue but I didn’t

have to hang around there. There was another aspect to it

too; my brother Tommy was eleven and I was thirteen; eight

and ten are somehow much closer than eleven and thirteen;

so I was moving away from Tommy too.

The place I chose was called Bartel-Pritchard Square,

and it was more a circle than a square. Three different

trolley lines converged here, turning around a center island

before heading off to Coney Island, Mill Basin, or Smith

Street. Off the square on one side were the two tall

Corinthian columns that marked the entrance to Prospect

Park; we called them the Totem Poles, or the Totes. They

rose from cleanly carved granite bases, and in the evenings

that spring, after work at the grocery store and after

finishing my homework, I would walk up from Seventh

Avenue and see the others and we’d gather around the

bases, sitting on them, looking at girls, cursing, smoking,

making jokes, and drinking beer. First, the Good Boy

attended to his chores; then the Bad Guy went out into the

evening.

That was when I really started drinking. There were a lot

of us hanging around the Totes that spring and summer:

Boopie Conroy, Shitty Collins, Mickey Horan, Vito Pinto,

Jack McAlevy. Among my friends was a thin, handsome

guy named Richie Kelly. He was smart and tough but he

always seemed cautious about drinking. Later in the

summer, I learned why. His father, Jabbo Kelly, was one of

the public rummies, a small group of men who’d been

thrown out of their homes and lived on the streets. They

slept in the park, or in the subways. They were filthy and

panhandled for wine money. There was no way that Richie

could avoid seeing Jabbo, because the rummies were

always around the park, but I never saw them talk. I admired

the way Richie handled a fact of his life that would have

shamed others. He was cool and indifferent. For a while,

we were close. I thought that with any kind of bad luck, my

father could join Jabbo Kelly on his aimless wanderings.

Richie was also our liaison to the older guys, who owned

the benches in the center of the traffic island, across the

street from the Totes. They played football together as the

Raiders and fought occasional gang battles in Coney Island

or in the park. Richie’s older brother, Tommy, was one of

the Raiders. He was built like a safe and was a ferocious

puncher but never went out of his way to fight. I never saw

him talk to Jabbo either.

I don’t know who bought the beer, but it was around, in

cardboard containers or quart bottles. At first I didn’t join in

the drinking. It was as if I knew I would be crossing a line in

some permanent way. But I didn’t make a big deal out of

this; I just shrugged and passed on the offered bottle. Then

one evening, all of us laughing and joking, a guy named

Johnny Rose handed me a container, casually, easily, and I

took a sip.

The first swallow triggered a vague remembrance of the

beer I’d sipped when I was a little boy, and was

accompanied by a yeasty smell I associated with

Gallagher’s. I didn’t like the taste; unlike the sweet wine I’d

drunk in the woods at Fox Lair Camp, the beer had a

sourness to it. I passed the container to Boopie Conroy,

who took a long swallow. After a while, it came back to me,

I took another sip, and this time I picked up a repulsive odor

that reminded me of my father’s breath when he was

sleeping late on weekend mornings.

But as the beer kept coming around to me, I felt oddly

proud of myself. The taste and smell didn’t matter as much

as the act. I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to do

— drinking under the legal age of eighteen. Just by drinking

beer, I was a certified Bad Guy. If the police saw us, and

caught us, we’d be in trouble. We stayed on the side of the

Totes that faced the park, safe from the scrutiny of passing

cars. But several times, I wandered out under the streetlight

with my container in my hand. That spring night, and on later

evenings in summer, when I had graduated from Holy

Name, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to be seen by one

person: Brother Jan. I wanted him to come over to me. I

wanted him to try to stop me from drinking. And then I would

crash into him, I’d beat and batter him, I’d stomp him and

kick his balls out his ass. He was bigger than I was,

heavier, with a fullback’s neck; I didn’t care. I wanted to hurt

him back. On my turf. On the street.

For the first time I began to experience a transformation

that would later become familiar: the violent images grew

larger in my head and everything else got smaller. It was as

if the beer were editing the world, eliminating other

elements, such as weather, light, form, beauty. I could hear

talk bubbling around me from the others, random words

colliding in my head, then a tightening of focus, the faces

closest to me having the most solid reality. A few of us

talked about Brother Jan and how we’d like to give him a

good beating. But all sorts of other talk flew around the

beer-tingling air: the Dodgers, the gangs, girls,

prizefighters, the songs we heard on the radio.

There were no transistors yet, only clumsy portables, and

nobody had one of them. We learned the songs at home,

on WNEW’s “Make Believe Ballroom,” and a nighttime

show called “Your Hit Parade.” Record sales were smaller

then, songs remained in the top ten for months, and the

words drilled themselves into memory. Most of the songs

were junk. But I can still sing “Slow Boat to China” or “A

(You’re Adorable)” or “Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” On

summer evenings, we’d take turns singing the new tunes,

even imitating the singers. I could do a pretty fair Nat “King”

Cole on “Nature Boy” and what I thought was a smashing

Ray Bolger on “Once in Love with Amy” (right down to the

arch laugh). I tried to do Billy Eckstine on “I Apologize” and

failed; my voice just wasn’t deep enough. Above all others,

we loved Frankie Laine; each of us could shout every verse

of “Mule Train” and we worked hard to sound smoky, sultry,

and knowing on “That’s My Desire.”

Up on the Totes, even while I was learning to like the

taste of beer, I never mentioned cartooning. I never tried to

discuss the books I was reading. I never let the Good Boy

get in the way of the apprentice Bad Guy.

At first, I didn’t get drunk. Atleast I didn’t think I was

getting drunk. I was always conscious of where I was. I

always walked home and didn’t stagger (chewing gum or

Sen-Sen so that my mother couldn’t smell the beer on my

breath). I didn’t fall down inside the park to sleep, the way

some of the others did. But I knew I was being changed. I

talked more, postured as badly as all the others, tried on

different attitudes as if they were suits. I watched the

Raiders — we called them the Big Guys — and the way

they dressed (in T-shirts and chino pants, in contrast to the

pegged pants of Seventh Avenue) and the way they wore

their hair (in crisp crew cuts, instead of the pompadours

and sideburns of the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys),

and I tried to look like that too. I liked the way they held their

containers of beer, casually, firmly, passing them around in

an open generous style.

I also watched the way they walked up to the Sanders

with a girl on a Saturday night, paying for two, the girl

waiting to the side, then taking the guy’s hand as they

walked inside to the dark balcony. I wanted a girl too and

had tried to talk to girls in my grade at Holy Name; they

didn’t share classrooms with us but they were our age and

knew the same songs we knew. In their presence, however,

I felt clumsy and awkward, and the girls seemed always to

be holding back some secret knowledge, exchanging

glances with other girls, prepared to dismiss me with a sigh

or some form of mockery. It was as if they knew more about

me than I did. They certainly knew more about me than I

knew about them. I kept hearing about periods and sanitary

napkins and didn’t understand what any of it meant. I don’t

think any of the other guys knew either, as they played at

being Bad Guys on the Totes on those long summer

evenings.

Then one evening that summer, I was home after dinner,

drawing at the kitchen table. I had sketched a cartoon in

light blue pencil and was drawing with a fine-haired brush,

dipping into the Higgins india ink. My father came in. He

was drunk and lurching and his eyes were opaque. He

bumped into the kitchen table and my hand jerked, ruining a

line. And I rose in a fury. I tore up the drawing and threw the

ink bottle against the sink and stormed out. I couldn’t do

this! I wanted to be a cartoonist and this drunk, my father, made it impossible! I hated him then, with a white, ear-

ringing, boyish hatred, and my rage and hatred carried me

to the Totes. Among my friends, I drank to get rid of

something.

That gave me a delicious sense of joy. I could drink until I

got drunk because it was someone else’s fault. If I downed

too many beers, it was my father’s fault; if I staggered, it

was his fault; if I fell down in the grass in the park: it was his

fault. The son of a bitch. I didn’t say any of this to the other

guys. I kept thinking of Bogart in Casablanca, sitting at the

bar in a pool of bitterness, drinking his whiskey. I would be

like that. I would just drink, quietly and angrily, and say

nothing. Sitting on the Totes, with the others laughing and

grab-assing around me, I sipped the beer, telling myself

that I enjoyed the taste. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t

want to clean up the mess I’d made with the ink. I didn’t

want to confront my father or explain to my mother. I wanted

to sit there forever, drinking in bitter satisfaction, using

someone else as a license. In the years that followed, I did

a lot of that.

17

ONE FRIDAY in that spring of 1949, I opened an envelope in

the hall of 378 and discovered that I’d won a scholarship to

Regis High School. Another boy in my class, Bob McElynn,

had won too; four of us had taken the examination together.

Regis was a Jesuit school across the river in Manhattan

and was said to be the most elite of the city’s Catholic high

schools. Nobody at Holy Name had ever made it into Regis

until McElynn and I did it, and all across that weekend,

wondering if I should accept the prize that I’d won, I was

happy, pleased, and scared.

The fear was caused in part by the relentless pressure of

conformity in the parish. Most of the other boys were going

on to Bishop Loughlin or St. Michael’s, to Xavier or

LaSalle; a few went to Brooklyn Tech; many went to Manual

Training, the public high school on Seventh Avenue and

Fifth Street. If I went to Regis, I’d be separating myself from

all of them. They would walk to school while I took three

subway trains to get from my part of Brooklyn to Eighty-fifth

Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Park Avenue! Just

the name of the street was a symbol of some other, rarefied

existence in the region of the very rich. If the school really

was an elite school, then I’d be declaring myself part of that

elite. I didn’t want to join any elite. I wanted to live my life.

But the choice of a high school also might have something

to do with the way I lived that life. Regis was a prep school;

that is, it prepared you for college. But I had never met

anyone from the Neighborhood who’d gone to college. Not

one. College was for rich kids, not for people from

Brooklyn. Or so I thought. Besides, I wanted to be a

cartoonist. I wanted to draw, to go to art school. Why should

I prep for a school that I would never attend? Why not prep

for art school? But in bed one night on that weekend after

receiving the acceptance letter, I thought: Milton Caniff went

to Ohio State. Maybe I could go to college and be a

cartoonist. And besides, wasn’t a cartoonist part of an

elite? Wouldn’t that profession separate me from my

friends, from the Neighborhood, from everybody I now

knew? Maybe separation was just inevitable.

So I decided to go to Regis, the Good Boy momentarily

triumphing over the Bad Guy. The school was rigorous,

severe, the teachers dedicated to excellence. I loved Latin,

prepared by my years as an altar boy to hear the sounds

and rhythms of the language. But there was something else

involved: a sense of working on secret codes, discovering

the meanings of strange words that linked me to the distant

past.

But I couldn’t get algebra. It was too abstract, plotless,

without narrative or time. I learned enough to pass and

nothing more. I was reasonably good in English, bored by

grammar, excited by putting stories on paper. It says

something about the way difficulty puts its mark on

consciousness that I can remember the algebra teacher

now, his reddish hair, dry humor, even his name: Purcell. I

remember nothing of the English or Latin teachers.

But I do remember another teacher, a heavy-set man in

his thirties, who taught the first class after lunch. His face

was always glazed with sweat, even when the windows

were open to the cold winter air. He was looser and funnier

than the others, and one afternoon I understood why. He

came in, laughed, started writing on the blackboard, and

then seemed to freeze. He turned and hurried out.

Someone shouted: He’s drunk! And so he was. Even here,

among the elite of Regis, there were drunks. I laughed with

the others, but when the man returned, his face ashen, his

eyes wet and rheumy, I felt only pity. I wondered if he had

children who wanted to love him.

I wasn’t very happy at Regis. I used to think it was the

school’s fault, that somehow I was a clumsy social fit

among a group of upper-class kids. That wasn’t it at all.

There was actually a leveling democracy of merit at Regis;

some of the kids were poor, most were middle class, a few

were rich; but no boy could buy his way into the school. You

had to pass the test, just as McElynn and I had. There were

constricting rules: a dress code, an obsession with

punctuality, an assignment of privilege to the boys in the

upper grades. But the school wasn’t riddled with problems

of money and class.

My own problems at Regis were more complicated than

the clichéd case of a poor kid thrown in with better-off boys.

For the first time, I was in a classroom where everybody

else was as smart as I was and many were smarter. That

was a new experience to me. I couldn’t just sit there and

pay attention and come out with decent grades. I had to

work. But there were a number of distractions that made it

hard for me to do the schoolwork at the level that Regis

demanded. The distractions all flowed from the

Neighborhood. I was still working after school and on

Saturdays at the grocery store, to pay for the subway and

lunch; I couldn’t stay at Regis after school, join the school

clubs, play ball in the gym, try to work for The Owl, the

school newspaper. When the bell rang to end the final

period, I had to leave for work. At Holy Name, the kids in my

class were the same kids I played with after school or on

weekends; at Regis, I almost never saw the other boys after

school, not even McElynn or two boys from the adjoining

parish of St. Saviour’s, Jim Shea and John Duffy. We were

friendly, we talked, we joked, we traveled together on the

subway and sometimes worked together on homework; but

we weren’t friends in that deep mysterious way that marks

true friendships.

So I felt disconnected from the school. More than ever, I

wanted to be with my friends up at the Totes. I was in a

growing fever of adolescent sensuality, trying to find an

outlet beyond masturbation, trying to get a girl who would

go with me to a bush or a rooftop or the ink-black balcony

of a movie house. I saw tits in geometry classes and asses

in history and wondered if Julius Caesar was getting laid

while he wrote his account of the Gallic Wars. During the

Regis years, I was into a harder contest of wills with my

father. Now he was sneering at my idea of becoming a

cartoonist. You’d better start thinking about something real. You’d better think about the cop’s test or the firemen or the Navy Yard. . . . I preferred his indifference to his flat-

out opposition. And as the first year at Regis ended, I was

drinking in a more sustained way.

While drinking at the Totes, I asserted myself more often

about politics, religion, and sports. In a way, it was simply

verbal showing off; I didn’t say as much in the courtyard at

Regis, afraid, I suppose, that I’d be challenged by the kids

who were smarter than I was. Safe in Brooklyn, I said out

loud that it was ridiculous that Alger Hiss was on trial or that

Communist party leaders were being sent to jail. How could

this be a free country if you couldn’t be free to be a

Communist? To which someone would say: Whatta you? A

fuckin’ commie too? And I’d say No, but in America you’re

supposed to be free to be anything, right? In May 1949, the

armies of Mao Tse-tung finally won the civil war in China,

driving Chiang Kai-shek and his broken troops into

permanent exile in Formosa. The newspapers were

hysterical. On the radio, Gabriel Heatter told us once more

that there was bad news tonight. Up at the Totes, I mouthed

off about how Chiang was a thief, his regime corrupt, his

soldiers cowardly.

The fuck you talkin’ about, man, Shitty Collins would say.

They were sold out, man, by Truman and the commies in

Washington.

No, they just stole the money we sent them, millions of

dollars, and when they had to fight, they ran.

How do you know? Was you there?

No, I wasn’t there. But I tried to imagine Chiang’s troops

at the docks, piling into boats, panicky and full of fear, while

others were tearing off their uniforms, melting into the

shadows, throwing down their guns; in my imagination, it

was like some final packed and gorgeous panel of Terry and the Pirates. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was

talking about in those sessions on the Totes; I was retailing

opinions I had picked up from the Star or the Compass or

the Post, all newspapers of the left. Since everybody in the

Neighborhood swore by the Daily News or the Journal- American, I was going the other way. Against those

newspapers. Against the pieties of the Neighborhood.

Against the Church. Against my father.

I was lucky in these beery little debates because the

others didn’t know what they were talking about either. It

wasn’t that I was a fan of Stalin; I didn’t like his eyes, which

were beady and shifty in the news photographs; and his

hands looked too small for his body. More important, I knew

that there were no freedoms in the Soviet Union (or Russia,

as we all called it), and I was sure that if I lived there I’d

have to be against the government, and that meant I’d end

up in Siberia. But I thought there was something amazingly

stupid about the Cold War; Stalin was now the devil

incarnate, only four years after he had served on the side of

the angels, namely us. Either we’d made a mistake during

the war, or we were making a mistake now. And there was

a larger problem, of which Stalin was part: Why were so

many Americans so scared, all the time? We were the

strongest country in the world. We won the war. We had the

atom bomb. In May, Truman finally broke the Russian

blockade of Berlin with a giant airlift. So why were these

people shitting in their pants when they thought about

communists? The communists won in China, but that didn’t

mean they were about to land in Los Angeles. And why did

so many people think that the communists might be behind

anything that made sense: unions, health care, free

education? Even in 1949, there were people saying that we

shouldn’t have stopped in Berlin in 1945, we should’ve kept

going all the way to Moscow.

George Patton, he knew how to deal wit’ dese bastids.

Oney thing they respect is force.

That fuckin’ Rose-a-velt, he made a deal wit’ Stalin, let

the Russians take Berlin, now look at the fuckin’ mess

we’re in . . . .

The talk sputtered on into the night. Drinking beer on the

Totes, arguing with my friends (or arguing at them), I

sometimes even felt as if I understood how the world

worked. I was that young. Even that September, when

Truman announced that the Russians had tested an atom

bomb, I thought that everything would be all right. If we each

had the atom bomb, I reasoned, then nobody would ever

start a war because nobody could win it. In the newspapers,

there was great excitement: if the Russians had the atom

bomb they must have stolen it from us. There must be spies

everywhere, slipping our secrets to them. Some columnists

pointed out that the Russians also had former Nazi

scientists working for them, the way we did, and maybe

they didn’t have to steal anything. Most of the guys couldn’t

have cared less about politics or communism; they were

more angry with the Dodgers, who lost to the Yankees in

five games in the 1949 World Series, than they were with

anyone on the other side of the planet. They didn’t care that

Dean Acheson had replaced George Marshall as secretary

of state; they were wondering whether Dotty Long’s tits

were real. Almost all of this talk was just riffs in the night.

The wars were over. None of this distant bullshit would ever

directly affect us. Even the air raid drills, the warnings about

the Bomb, the bombardment of Moscow with Hail Marys,

even the Fall of China, couldn’t convince us that these

matters had anything to do with our lives. Pass the cardboard, Jake, I’m thirsty . . . . When we got bored with

politics (which was quickly), we went on to baseball or what

we all called pussy.

I hear Naomi puts out.

Who?

Naomi, from down Seventeenth Street. I hear she does it.

Who you hear that from?

Harry from the Parkview, you know him? Lives down

Seeley Street? Tells me she does it for quarters . . . .

Then, on my fifteenth birthday, June 24, 1950, everything

shifted again. That Saturday, seven divisions of North

Korean troops and 150 North Korean tanks crossed the

38th parallel in an invasion of South Korea.

III

BREAKING OUT

How many bibles make a

Sabbath?

How many girls have

disappeared

Down musky avenues of

leaves?

It’s an autocracy, the past….

— Tom Paulin,“In the

Egyptian Gardens”

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.