A Drinking Life (15 page)
After stickball, or wedged between the ball games, there were other games too: kick the can, off the point, box ball and punchball, Johnny on the pony
(Buck buck, how many borns are up),
and the greatest of all: ring-o-Ievio.
One Saturday, we were playing ring-o-levio on Twelfth Street and one of the players on the other side was Frankie Nocera. He was a lean black-haired wild-tempered kid who lived in one of the corner tenements. A few years earlier, hitching a ride on a trolley car, he fell off and his foot went under a steel wheel; he lost the tip of his right foot and became known as No Toes Nocera. Winter and summer, he wore an ankle boot with a steel tip that replaced the missing toes. Because of my father’s leg, Frankie and I should have been friends. Frankie, after all, was a cripple. For some reason, he had become my nemesis, the way Dr. Sivana was the nemesis of Captain Marvel or the Joker of Batman. On Thirteenth Street, Brother Foppiano was my nemesis. Now, on Twelfth Street, it was No Toes Nocera. It must have had something to do with the great struggle between the Irish and Italians. Or maybe it was just chemistry.
Unlike Arnold, Frankie didn’t make me feel that I had opened a curtain and glimpsed Hell. But he was always
there,
pinching, leaning, nudging, harassing. I’d be playing marbles in the lot and he’d grab a peewee and walk off; if I went after him, he’d drop the marble, or roll it toward a sewer, and laugh. I’d be on a stoop after a game, reading a comic book, and he’d snatch at it, run away, force me into a losing tug-of-war over the comic, as if sensing that I wouldn’t risk tearing the cover. He’d squirt water pistols at me; he’d ask for a ride on a scooter and go off for an hour; he was one of those kids who was always grabbing your hat. He wasn’t
bad.
But he was a misery.
Naturally, when we played ring-o-levio, Frankie was on the opposing team. The rules of the game were as primitive as warfare. We divided ourselves into two teams, or sides. After a coin toss, one team went out, scattering around the immediate neighborhood, looking for hiding places. The second team would then hunt down the first, capturing each opponent and returning him to a pen whose walls were marked on the tarred street with chalk. The pen was called home. When the last man was captured, the sides switched roles, the hunters becoming the hunted. Imprisonment, however, wasn’t permanent. If you were one of the hunted, and could elude capture through guile or deception, you could make a sudden dash, race directly at the wall of defenders around the border of the pen, crash through them, shout the magical phrase
Home free all!
and liberate all members of your side. Most of the time it was impossible to breach the wall of defenders, who stood there with arms locked. But if you succeeded, it was a moment of sheer power and glory.
On this day, I was the last man out. I had evaded all my pursuers and then, gathering strength on the slope above Seventh Avenue, I started my run for home. I dodged left, feinted right, zigzagged, and twirled, never stopping; saw the crowd of defenders guarding home, under the lamppost in front of Mr. Dix’s house; saw my side waiting inside the pen, all of them tensing, the defenders crouching, then stepping forward, Frankie Nocero among them; saw them forming a human wall; saw them getting larger as I came closer. And then I leaped, high and strong, feeling that I could fly, saw a blur of bodies and faces, rammed into shoulders and elbows and torsos, and was through! Shouting
Home free all!
My side scattered into freedom. I whirled to escape. And then saw Frankie Nocero rising from the tangle of defenders. Saw Frankie’s eyes wide in rage. Saw him coming at me. Then felt a numbness in my face as a punch hit my nose, then a sharp pain on the side of my head as he threw another.
I backed up, numb, my ears ringing, the world suddenly filmy, and he threw another punch and missed, and someone yelled
Right hand.
I threw the right hand and hit him. Then threw it again, and missed. And again, and hit him, still backing up, Frankie making a snorting sound, his teeth bared, his hair all spiky. Someone else yelled:
Jab, jab, use da jab.
Then I remembered the PAL gym, and Graziano, and the pictures of Sugar Ray, and I raised my hands in the boxer’s stance; and when Frankie came at me again I speared him with a jab and threw a right hand behind it. For the first time in my life I heard cheers. A crowd was now gathering. I saw them as a blur, a presence, heads and bodies and no faces; but they were
there,
and they made the fight even more important. I couldn’t be humiliated in front of a crowd; I couldn’t run; I absolutely could not cry. I remember coiling into an almost ferocious concentration. I jabbed and hit Frankie, and jabbed again, then feinted the jab and threw the right hand and amazingly, Frankie went down. I went down on top of him, battering him with punches, until he started screaming
Stop stop I give up stop okay stop.
I got off him then, rising slowly, my hands still fists, afraid of a trick, and then heard more cheers, and suddenly my brother Tommy was there and Billy Rossiter and Billy Delaney and they were hugging me and clenching fists in approval and then I saw the crowd of men outside of Unbeatable Joe’s and they were clapping and laughing before going back to the bar. I had fought a street fight and won. Not with kids from camp whom I’d never see again. Here at home. On the court. In the Neighborhood. And men cheered. I hoped they would tell my father what I’d done.
Then I saw Frankie Nocera walking into his building. He was holding his face. There was blood all over the front of his shirt. Very red blood. He was absolutely alone, limping on that gimpy foot. I started to go to him, suddenly feeling sorry for him. I wanted to be gracious, the way winning prizefighters were after boxing matches. But Frankie vanished into the dark hallway. We all went to Sanew’s then and bought bottles of Frank’s Orange or Mission Bell Grape, drinking them greedily, passing them around. Soda had never tasted better. And someone said,
That Frankie, be needed a good fuckin’ beating and you sure give it to him.
But even in triumph, something bothered me about the fight.
The next day I saw Frankie again. He was sitting alone on his stoop. Both eyes were hidden behind pads of swollen purple flesh; his nose was thick and crooked. My brother Tommy told me later that Frankie had to go to the hospital because his nose was broken. So I went to him, my mind a confusion of power and pity, a bit nervous that he would lash out at me with the steel toes or come up with a knife.
I didn’t want the fight, Frankie, I said. You started it.
Fuck it, he said sadly, with a little wave of his hand.
Let’s forget about it, I said.
He looked at me as if knowing that he would never forget about it and neither would I.
Come on, I said. We’ll go read comics.
He stared at me for a long moment and then got up, and we walked off to look at stories of heroes and perils in a simpler world.
O
N SUNDAYS
, the family sometimes went visiting. That’s what it was called: visiting. You went to someone else’s house and brought along some cold cuts or Italian bread or beer and entertained each other. We almost always went to visit my father’s relatives; my mother had friends but no relatives in America. After Mass, the whole family would walk down to Fifth Avenue, still dressed in Sunday best, and get on the trolley and rattle out to Bay Ridge to see Uncle Tommy or Uncle Davey, Aunt Louie or Aunt Nellie, and all my cousins. We couldn’t play in the street because we were in our good clothes; but visiting wasn’t play to us, it was a show. There would be food and drink and singing in the parlor. And here, as in the bars, my father was always the star. The kids were called upon to perform too, singing songs or reciting poems. I was too shy to sing; how could I compete with my father? But every time we went visiting, I was asked that most awful question: What Are You Going to Be When You Grow Up? And during that crowded year, I started answering: a cartoonist.
Usually, they would laugh and someone would get paper and a pencil and ask me to draw something, and I would be forced to draw in a state of anxiety that was worse than fighting Frankie Nocera. I gave them Dick Tracy. Or Flattop. Or Batman. They were the easiest, the faces I could draw without copying. And they would laugh and say,
That’s good, Peter,
and then I was free, off the stage, released, and I could ease away from their attentions.
But I was telling the truth. That summer when I was eleven, I first conceived the idea of becoming a cartoonist. There wasn’t any special moment that I remember, no Shazam-like bolt of explosive insight that told me this. The ambition was, I suppose, tentative at first, whispered, a wish in the dark while the trolley cars ding-dinged through the night. But going back to Simon and Kirby and
Captain America,
I had learned that comics were written and drawn by men and those men were paid very well for their work. The money wasn’t the most important thing; it was something else: they were being paid for doing what they loved to do. My father had a job, and he was paid. But he wasn’t working at something he liked. Nobody paid men to drink in saloons.
The focus of my fantasy was Milton Caniff, who was in his last year drawing and writing
Terry and the Pirates.
Suddenly, I got it. The locale was something that my grandfather must have known: the coasts, rivers, plains, and mountains of southern China. I identified with Terry Lee, the blond young pilot. I wished I could talk as fast as the wisecracking Hot Shot Charlie, with his red hair, freckles, Boston accent, corncob pipe, and flight cap worn with a swagger on the back of his head. I wanted to have someone around who was like Pat Ryan or Flip Corkin, a guy who knew the world and could show me how to live in it.
There was something else: Caniff’s women put me in a kind of fever. Every one of them exuded a lush sexuality that no other cartoonist has ever matched and did so without ceasing to be a specific individual. They weren’t just pinups. Not one of them was a doormat. Every one of them made her way through the world of men without complaint. There was Burma, all blond and shimmering, like women in the thirties movies at the Minerva, a mixture of Sadie Thompson and Jean Harlow, always singing the “St. Louis Blues,” sometimes for money and sometimes for love, always smoking, tough with bad guys, soft on Pat Ryan, burning brightly in Terry’s life for a while then abruptly vanishing, only to turn up again in some other exotic Asian port. And even larger, grander, more powerful, was the Dragon Lady, Caniff’s most famous creation. Sleek black hair framed her oval Dolores Del Rio face with its almond eyes and high Eurasian cheekbones, the eyebrows reduced to fine lines that lay angrily on her face like tiny daggers. Usually the Dragon Lady wore a scarlet cape and under the cape, in fancy gowns or military trousers, she had the full-breasted body of a million wet dreams. The Dragon Lady was not only beautiful; she was often evil — venomous, treacherous, violent — and in a dark and scary way, that made her even more desirable to me.
I began to devour Caniff, driven by a sense of sudden urgency. It had been announced in the
Daily Mirror
that this was Caniff’s last year doing
Terry
for the
Daily News;
he would create a new strip that would run in the
Mirror.
I wanted to preserve
Terry
before it was gone forever. I clipped
Terry
from the
Daily News
every day and filed the strips in letter-sized envelopes. I saved the Sunday pages, with their beautiful colors and spectacular action panels. Then I started buying scrapbooks, oversized books made of cheap coarse paper, and began filling them with the
Terry
strips, using the pale yellow glue called mucilage. But there was a problem. In Caniff’s wonderful comic strip, time actually passed; Terry got older (although the women didn’t). The characters lived in the real world (or so I thought), the world of war and women and airplanes, the world described each day in the front of the newspaper. They didn’t inhabit Captain Marvel’s world of magic lightning or the garish places where Captain America pursued the Red Skull.
Terry and the Pirates
was like some long picaresque novel, and in 1946 I felt that I had started reading it near the end. The newspaper sequences were self-contained, each story taking about two months before shifting into another combination of heroes and villains. But I wanted to read the novel’s early chapters too. Caniff often brought back characters from Terry’s youth; the Dragon Lady, Pat Ryan, April Kane, Burma, made more than one appearance. I wanted the whole story, not just its final episodes.
The task of piecing together that story was like the search for the full run of the Bomba books (and resembled the basic task of reporting). I had to work backwards. In tiny type at the bottom of each strip there was a copyright line that supplied the year of its first appearance; a hand-lettered date gave the month and day: 4/1, say, or 6/24. Unfortunately, there were almost no old newspapers in the neighborhood; like my skates, they’d gone to the war, bundled up for scrap paper drives. But many of the newspaper strips had reappeared in the brightly colored pages of
Super Comics,
which also reprinted other strips from the
Daily News.
They had also been converted into Big Little Books. So I followed the same route taken in the Bomba search, exploring the archipelago of secondhand comics shops and bookstores. I was driven by fundamental questions. How did Terry Lee get to China? Who was Pat Ryan? When did they meet the Dragon Lady? Why on earth would Pat Ryan fall in love with prissy Normandie Drake if Burma was around? I wanted to read it all, to keep going back until I found the beginning. In a good story, something happened and as a result, something
else
happened. You went to China or to Fox Lair Camp, and you were changed by what happened to you. I wanted to know what happened to Pat Ryan and Terry Lee.
My obsession with
Terry and the Pirates
was different in one sense from the long pursuit of the Bomba books. I wanted to know Milton Caniff. In a way,
he
was the true hero of the comic strip. I would sit at the kitchen table and try to copy his figures and always failed; drawing Flip Corkin wasn’t as simple as making an image of Flattop or Batman, and the Dragon Lady was impossible. I would get the general shapes down on paper but there was always something wrong: the original expression changed into an empty smudge, the ears were in the wrong places, the hands looked thick and clumsy. But I kept trying. After all, Caniff was the best. Like Sugar Ray Robinson. And there was no point in trying to be less than the best, was there?