Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was born in 1935, and I in 1939), our lives were o so similar and yet completely different. But that's the way things were in complex, composite 1940s Brooklyn.
The title of Hamill's memoir establishes the differences. It's well-named — A Drinking Life (1994) — and it is saturated with liquor and Irish bars and elbow-lifting and most especially with Pete's father's uncontrollable and disabling alcoholism. Yet just a few blocks over, in my part of Brooklyn, alcohol played no part whatsoever in my own family or my life in the neighborhood. I would not call an autobiography of my own An Abstinent Life, because we weren't teetotalers and there was always a glass of Scotch to offer to guests, but we hardly ever touched the stuff ourselves. It wasn't until much later in life that I came to realize that my father and I were genetically incapable of digesting alcohol. I've written about this peculiar phenomenon here.
Equally in contrast was Hamill's early education. The poor fellow was enrolled at Holy Name of Jesus, a Catholic parochial school where one of his teachers was the "snarling vicious Brother Jan, a thick-necked Pole with a jutting jaw and bent nose" — your classic sadist — who derived his joy in life by whipping with a thick ruler the bare hands and butts of defenseless boys. I myself learned to read and cipher at P.S. 217, a public elementary. At 217, we had teachers both gifted and incompetent but no deranged monsters and no corporal punishment. I can remember being bored at school, but not terrified. Not terrified of the teachers, that is — among the students we had our fair share of bullies and sociopaths.
Hamill's Park Slope family took Roman Catholicism seriously but he himself was not an enthusiast. Although he loved the costumes and the incense and the majestic hymns, and although he confesses that the loved the "cartoony name" of the Holy Ghost, he was, right from the start, an instinctive atheist. My Flatbush family proffered us nary a single drop of religious information or indoctrination or training. I myself had never attended a single religious service in either synagogue, church, temple, mosque or tabernacle until 2021, and then only because it was New Orleans and we heard that Ellis Marsalis had volunteered to improvise a few measures on the piano. Hamill was a atheist by dissent; I was one by inheritance.
Nevertheless, Hamill and I shared a great deal — mostly, I think, in the form of popular culture. Ring-o-levio, spaldeens, stoop ball. Where else but in Brooklyn was a "do-over" a "hindoo?" And baseball. Hamill remembers that an uncle confided to him that "the Dodgers are the greatest thing in the world." He delights in reciting a litany of familiar Dodger names: "Augie Galan, Dixie Walker, Ralph Branca, Joe Hatten, Henk Behrman, Hugh Casey." Except to a select few of us, these names are meaningless random syllables, but to those who were children at a particular time and place, they are poetry in its purest and most sublime form, each name a luscious mouthful of pure pleasure. Syllables that will forever bond Hamill and me to the end of the chapter. Syllables that transcend this transitory sublunary existence.
Like me, Hamill was a great lover and collector of comic books. Both of us savored heroes such as Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel jr. and the Human Torch and the Green Lantern and Plastic Man and the Sub-Mariner and Wonder Woman and Invisible Scarlet O'Neill. Hard to believe but there are those who think that Freddie Freeman is only an all-star first baseman, but Hamill and I know better.
And also like me, Hamill found his way the public library where he measured himself against Jim Hawkins and Edmond Dantes and Sydney Carton and D'Artagnan. Tough competition.
Sometimes, Pete Hamill leaves pop culture behind and delves into his own personal psychology. Here's a paragraph of unusual sincerity and one that touches at least tangentially on my own experience. It appears in a discussion of the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. (I should mention that I read everything of Stevenson's that the McDonald Avenue Library possessed.)
"I sensed (says Hamill) 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 the Bad Guy, tough, physical, a prince of the streets, at the same time I was driven to be the Good Boy: hardworking, loyal, honorable, 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."
In retrospect, I realize that I shared a bit of Hamill's doppelgangerism. In real life, I was a conforming Jekyll; but in my heart, in my soul, I was a fierce dissenter. Lots of anger, lots of unfocussed passion. I didn't much act upon my Hydeness, except for the occasional adolescent pilfering and the meaningless fights. But how else to account for the violent dreams — especially the regularly-repeated nightmares where I bashed in the heads of unidentifiable adults with a heavy shovel? And buried their bodies in my father's backyard garden underneath the hybrid teas?
