A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill

Obviously, he’d lost a leg.
    And then I saw my father coming out of Rattigan’s. He stood alone on the corner, watching the soldier from another angle. He hesitated, then started across the street, swinging his wooden leg behind him. I stood up. My father reached the younger man in front of Kent’s.
    Hey, soldier, he said.
    The soldier stopped, his eyes wary.
    Yeah? he said.
    You lost a leg, my father said.
    Yeah.
    So did I, my father said.
    Well —
    Don’t let it get to you, my father said. You can still have a life.
    The soldier shrugged as if he didn’t believe this at all.
    Come on, my father said. We’ll have a drink.
    Without discussion, they started back across the avenue to Rattigan’s, the soldier swinging on the crutches, my father leading the way.
    I loved him very much that day.

2
    O N THE STREETS I learned the limits of the Neighborhood. This was our hamlet, marked by clear boundaries. Sometimes we moved beyond those boundaries: to visit aunts and uncles out in Bay Ridge; to gaze at the
Normandie;
and on one wondrous fog-choked Saturday in July, to stare up at the Empire State Building after a twin-engined B-25 crashed into its north side between the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors, killing fourteen people and hurting many others. But it was to the Neighborhood that we always returned. Other neighborhoods were not simply strange; they were probably unknowable.
    I was like everybody else. In the Neighborhood I always knew where I was; it provided my center of gravity. And on its streets I learned certain secrets that were shared by the others. The fight between Mr. Dix and his wife was one secret. I learned who the gangsters were in the Neighborhood and the name of the bookmaker. Their presence created other rules, none of them written on paper. I heard tales of police informers who disappeared in the night and others who were slashed with a knife, from the corner of the mouth to the upper point of the cheek, the mouth gashed into a grotesque elongation like the face of the grinning man at Steeplechase Park in Coney Island: the awful Mark of the Squealer. Such people were called stool pigeons or rats.
    There is no person worse in this world,
my father said,
than a goddamned informer.
    I learned too about what they called in religion class “infidelity.” I didn’t know anything of the mechanics of sex, but I did understand that if a father left a mother for another woman, the family would be destroyed. I couldn’t imagine my father leaving my mother for anyone else; but sometimes, when he lay drunk in bed, I was terrified that she might leave him. Sometimes I heard her say,
Bill, I’m fed up.
And wondered if she would get so fed up she would pack a bag, like women in the movies did, and just go away.
    In the Neighborhood, there were many women during the war whose husbands were off at the fighting, and on summer evenings, as the grownups sat around outside, and one of these women went by, I heard whispers and giggles. They weren’t just about Betty the Whore. I heard about the woman who lived across the street from the Minerva and welcomed men visitors at night while her husband worked in the Navy Yard. And the woman from Sixth Avenue who had a baby fifteen months after her husband left for the South Pacific. None of this was absolutely clear to me, but I knew they were talking about sin. In some way, all sin had the same weight, so I also knew the names of those who refused to go to Mass; those who were forced to make general confessions after years away from the Church; and, of course, the names of the drunks.
    All of these people were citizens of the Neighborhood, a small state bound together by rivers — rivers of alcohol. On weekends, my father moved on those rivers. Sometimes I would follow him, desperate to know what he did and why. On a few sunny Sunday afternoons, he would take me with him, the way he took me to Gallagher’s when we lived on Thirteenth Street. He said little; but