A Drinking Life (14 page)

One kid said: Wuz dat?

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

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

Now
you
do it, Arnold said.

The boy did.

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

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

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

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

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

The boy took a sip, Arnold a long swallow.

Who wants some juice? he said.

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

Wanna do it again? Arnold said.

Nah, I’m too tired. Maybe tomorrow.

Arnold went back to bed and then the tent was very still. Boys shifted in their cots. Then one boy moaned. And another. Arnold laughed. Away off in the mountains, coyotes howled. The night breeze made the tent flaps billow and sigh. Under the army blanket I reached down and touched my hard penis and thought about the Dragon Lady.

I learned to talk the way the others did, using “fuck” and “shit” and “prick” for punctuation and rhythm, saying “dis” and “dat” instead of “this” and “that,” dropping my
g’
s, removing
t
’s from other words (“bottle,” for example). I practiced walking like the tough guys, in a rolling way, putting the weight on one foot while the other dragged behind. I stopped saying “excuse me.” I spit a lot.

Twice more, Cappy and I sneaked away to drink wine with Arnold in the woods, but I did this more to show that I could be as bad as anyone rather than for any real desire for wine. To me, the taste of wine was as sickly sweet as the taste of beer was sour; I wished I had a bottle of Frank’s Orange. And though I felt a tingle in my head from the wine, and an odd thickness in my hands, I felt no ache to have a bottle all to myself. I much preferred hitting a softball past the third baseman.

Then one night near the end of the second week, I was awakened from a deep sleep. Arnold was beside me in my bed, his hard prick up against my rectum.

Hey, I said. What —

Come on, baby, Arnold whispered. Open up your sweet white ass.

I turned. His penis was against my hip now. His breath had a stale sweet smell, like dried wine.

Get the fuck outta here, Arnold, I said.

Come on, baby, he purred. Make Arnold happy.

I pushed him away, but then his voice changed and he locked an arm around my neck.

Do what I say, he whispered coldly. I got a knife and I’ll cut your motherfuckin’ white throat.

I panicked at the mention of the knife, and shoved him hard, kicking at him as he fell on the floor, and then Cappy was awake, followed by the other kids. I kept punching and kicking at Arnold as if my life depended on it. Cappy looked astonished. But my fury must have convinced him about who was right, so he kicked at Arnold too and stomped on his knees. And then the lights came on. The counselor stood there in his underwear. His hair was mussed, his face rumpled and irritated.

Okay, he said, what’s going on in here?

Arnold stood up slowly, his hazel eyes wide in righteous anger. I couldn’t see any knife.

This fuckin’ white boy is a
faggot!
he screamed.

His nose was bleeding, his lower lip split. He pointed at me, spitting out the words: I’uz sleepin’ real peaceful and he gets in bed with me, tries to fuck me inny ass!

That’s a lie! I said, rushing at him again. The counselor grabbed me and spun me around. I was crazy with rage. He’s
lying!
He’s a motherfuckin’
liar!

All right, watch your language …

Then Arnold looked at me from those eyes, a sneer on his face, and made a slicing sign across his neck with a finger. The counselor must have seen this too. He turned to the other kids and asked them if they’d seen what happened. There was a long silence. Nobody wanted to be an informer. Arnold smirked. And then one boy spoke. It was the boy who learned to masturbate from Arnold.

He tried to do it to me, too, he said.

Who did?

Arnold.

Then another kid cleared his throat and whispered: Me too. The counselor looked around at us, studying our faces, and then turned to Arnold.

Pack up, Arnold, he said. And come with me.

They went off to the main building, Arnold limping on the leg hurt by Cappy’s stomping. He looked as if he were under arrest. But as he vanished into the dark, carrying his small cloth bag, I felt neither relief nor triumph. Instead, I lay awake in the dark for a long time. I felt like a rat. A stool pigeon. A creature even lower than a wino. It didn’t matter that Arnold had lied about me and I had answered him back. I had collaborated with the enemy.

The next day, Arnold was gone from Fox Lair Camp.

9

W
HEN I CAME HOME
from Fox Lair Camp, I was a changed boy. I felt tougher, older, suddenly conscious that I was moving toward becoming a man. After all, I had traveled hundreds of miles to the distant Adirondacks, far beyond the frontiers of the Neighborhood, an immense distance from New York itself, and I had made that journey without the protection of my mother or father. In the great mountain gathering of the New York tribes, I had survived. I thought I knew about sex now, that immense blurred mystery. I had drunk wine. And fought off Arnold. Softball and wild strawberries were marginal to the journey; I had learned to walk in the world, with no help from anyone. It didn’t matter that I could not explain much of this to my mother. These were three weeks in
my
life, not hers, and certainly not weeks in the life of my father; that journey belonged to me alone.

In some ways, the trip to Fox Lair Camp was my first true opening to consciousness. And drinking was a crucial part of it. Drinking wine in the woods wasn’t simply another sensual pleasure, like eating ice cream; it was an act of rebellion, a declaration of self. The camp had rules and I was breaking them. It was also an act of communion, with Arnold, with Cappy. Both states of consciousness would remain with me through years of drinking. Through the agency of Arnold, I also discovered Evil. I don’t mean that
sex
was evil. That, and drinking, were only part of a generalized negation that flowed from Arnold with a dark steady force. He made me afraid. The fear he inspired wasn’t physical; it was deeper and darker than that. Arnold lived by his own rules, not the rules I was learning. Nothing could persuade him from his desires except force.

That summer, I was converted to the creed of machismo, although I would not hear that word for another decade. On the street when I was back from camp, I began to talk tough, sprinkling my language with “fuck” and “cocksucker” and “prick.” I could be as tough as the other kids on Twelfth Street; from the start, language was part of the pose. At home, my mother corrected my slide into “dis” and “dat,” “dem” and “dose,” but I reverted to them when I hit the street, wearing the Brooklyn accent like armor. I walked in the rolling gait I’d picked up from the bad boys at camp. I talked about girls and asses and tits. Much of this was a mask, but I was quickly making myself comfortable behind it. And of course I wasn’t alone; in that neighborhood, looking like a hard guy was part of the deal.

On the roof next door to ours, Mr. Sicker and Mr. De Saro built a pigeon coop that summer, talking with passion to anyone who’d listen about “tiplets” and “homers” and the intricacies of flight and habit and instinct. They spent hours on the roof, watching their flocks gliding in tight formation around the sky, as happy in their intensity as I was with my books and comics. Their passion impressed me, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t share it; there was something disturbing to me about the gurgling, swallowing sounds of the pigeons. Besides, if you could fly like a homer, why would you ever come home?

A few buildings away from ours, I met Mr. Dexter, a change clerk in the subway. He went to work before the morning rush hour and came home in early afternoon. Every afternoon in the good weather, he appeared on his roof to lift weights. Mr. Dexter was small and wore glasses, but his upper torso was ropy with muscle. I asked him if I could try lifting the barbell and he said sure. I was stronger than I thought I was. He showed me how to do curls and presses, how to adjust the bells with a small wrench, how to create daily routines of “reps,” the same exercise repeated dozens of times. Soon, I added weight lifting to the rhythm of my days.

At some point, I started going to the Police Athletic League gym on Eighth Street to watch the amateur fighters. Again, I saw how important repetition was to learning; on the floor, the fighters repeated the same punch over and over again, while time was chopped into three-minute segments by an automatic bell; then the punches were joined to others in combinations, with the flat-nosed paunchy trainer shouting his instructions: Jab,
bend!
Double the jab,
bend!
Now
punch
outta da bend! I was still too young for the boxing team, and too shy to insist (and afraid of getting hurt). But back home, alone on the roof, or crouched in front of the bedroom mirror, I would practice jabs and hooks and right hands. I would bend at the knees after the jab. I would double the jab and throw the right hand. All the while breathing hard through my nose, my mouth clamped shut into a hard mask.

On the street, boxing was as much a part of our talk as baseball. In the summer of 1946 everybody in New York was talking about Rocky Graziano, who was knocking out all comers. Rocky, the tough middleweight from the East Side, Rocky, who talked like a lot of the kids from Fox Lair Camp. But my father didn’t care much for Graziano. He fights little guys, he said. He’s the best middleweight in the welterweight division. Or put another way, he never fights anyone his own size. My father’s favorite was Willie Pep, a featherweight like himself, fast, fresh, audacious, a champion of the world. I was sure that if my father had legs, he’d box like Willie Pep.

But even Willie Pep wasn’t the best. One day, my father showed me a picture of a black fighter in the
Daily News,
handsome and slick and lean.
That’s Sugar Ray Robinson,
he said.
He’s the greatest fighter who ever lived.
There were no qualifications; he described Robinson in the same flat way he would use to describe Mount Everest as the highest mountain in the world.

How would he do against Graziano? I asked.

He would knock Graziano out in four rounds, he said flatly.

When they did fight years later, Robinson knocked out Graziano in three.

In the streets, we still played the now forgotten games of the New York summers. Stickball was the supreme game, a kind of tabloid version of baseball, played with a broom handle as a bat and a pink rubber ball manufactured by the A. G. Spalding Co. In every street in New York, this ball was called a spaldeen. The spaldeens had vanished during the war and the game was played for a while with hairy tennis balls, until even they had disappeared. But coming home from Fox Lair Camp, I felt a special excitement spreading through the neighborhood:
Spaldeens are back!

From out of Unbeatable Joe’s and Rattigan’s and the other bars, the men and the veterans came piling into the streets again, taking our bats, once more playing the city’s greatest game, whacking spaldeens past trolley cars and over rooftops, running bases on heat-softened tar, making impossible catches, dodging trolley cars and trucks, almost delirious with joy. The war was over. The fucking war was finally over.

Stickball ruled us. On Saturday mornings, the older guys played big games against visitors from other neighborhoods or went off themselves to play beyond our frontiers.
Money game!
someone would shout, and suddenly we were all moving to the appointed court and the great noisy fiesta of the stickball morning. The players drank beer from cardboard containers on the sidelines and ate hero sandwiches and smoked cigarettes. They were cheered by neighbors, girlfriends, wives, and kids. And standing on the sidelines during those first games were the veterans, holding the spaldeens, bouncing them, smelling them in an almost sacramental way.

The men played on summer weekends; we kids played every day. There were still very few cars on the streets in that year after the war, so the “court” was always perfectly drawn, with sewer plates marking home and second base, while first and third were chalked against the curbs. The rules were settled before each game: one strike and you were out; off the factory wall or off a passing trolley car was a “hindoo” — which meant the play didn’t count. The great hitters could hit the ball at least “three sewers,” and it was said of Paulie McAleer of the Shamrock Boys that he once hit a ball an incredible five sewers. In memory, the games seem continuous and the days longer, richer, denser,
and
emptier than any others in my life. We did nothing and we did everything. You would wake, the radio playing, the rooms thick with the closed heat (and sometimes the sour smell of drink), grab something to eat — bread and butter covered with sugar, a piece of toast — and then race down the stairs, to burst into the streets. On a perfect Saturday in August, Twelfth Street would be wet from the water wagon, the air fresh, nobody else around, the tenements brooding in Edward Hopper light, and then a door would open and Billy Rossiter would appear with the bat and the spaldeen, and that was all we needed. We’d play off the factory walls until the others came down; we’d play ten hits a piece until there were enough players to choose up sides. And then we’d play until dark.