A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill Page A

I soon had charted the map of his world.
    In the center, of course, was Rattigan’s, directly across the street, packed and smoky, the men discreetly hidden from view by carefully hung café curtains. After the war, the men of Rattigan’s started the Doghouse Club — as in “I’m in the doghouse wit’ the little woman” — and behind the bar there were rows of small white doghouses each with the name of a member lettered on the front. Inside the doghouses were bar tabs or messages, tickets for racetracks or ballparks left by local politicians.
    They give you a racetrack ticket, my father explained, and you give them a vote. It’s a good deal.
    There were stools at the bar and booths in the back room, but most of the men preferred to stand. So did my father. In those years, there was no jukebox or television set. As they did in Gallagher’s, the men entertained themselves. As in Gallagher’s, my father was a star performer.
    Presiding over the place was a huge man named Patty Rattigan, round-faced and balding, like a pink version of the Jolly Green Giant. He had a generous heart, a thick brogue, a job in the borough president’s office, and proud membership in the Democratic party. Patty wasn’t simply a saloonkeeper. He helped find jobs for customers or their sons. He loaned them money. He threw out the crazy people. He loved singing and food and men drinking on summer afternoons. My father loved him and loved his bar.
    If anything ever happens to me, my father said one day, Patty Rattigan will take care of the lot of you.
    What about Mommy?
    He’ll take care of her too.
    He sipped his beer, and then started to sing “Galway Bay.” I left, unable to bear the idea of something happening to him, even if Patty Rattigan would take care of everything.
    But on weekends, he went on small excursions beyond Rattigan’s and I discovered other fueling stations on those ceaseless rivers. Prospect Park meant nothing to my father; what good were summer meadows if you couldn’t play ball? But on Bartel-Pritchard Square, across from the entrance to the park, he often stopped in two saloons: Langton’s, and the bar attached to Lewnes’ restaurant. The first was dark, odorous, and the only saloon in the Neighborhood that served women at the bar. Lewnes’ (pronounced Looney’s) was full of heavy-set men crowded against the bar in their Sunday best. My father knew many people in both places but never stayed long.
    Usually he was heading up the street, where Prospect Park West became Ninth Avenue, to the bar that he kept returning to until the end of his life: Farrell’s. A lot of Belfast men were always there, short and wiry like my father, and they would talk about the old country while I listened and watched. The place was always packed, the men three deep at the long polished wooden bar, served by two bartenders in starched white shirts and neat ties. In the men’s room there were two huge curved ceramic urinals, as high as my head, and I loved pissing on the blocks of ice that lay at the bottom, melting little gullies and caves. At that bar, where the men made jokes, drank beer and whiskey, placed bets on horses, and put cigarettes out on the tile floors, I felt at home. I was, after all, Billy Hamill’s son.
    There were other bars on my father’s map. He still went to Gallagher’s, of course, but on weekend afternoons, when the weather was good, he would patrol along Seventh Avenue, where there were bars on almost every corner. There was McAuley’s on Eighth Street, Diamond’s and Denny’s on opposite corners of Ninth Street, Fitzgerald’s on Tenth Street. I’d see him go in, and faces turn, and smiles break out. If he walked in the other direction, he’d visit Unbeatable Joe’s on Twelfth Street, Quigley’s on Thirteenth Street, Connolly’s on Fifteenth Street. In a neighborhood of cliques, Billy Hamill was welcomed by all of them. Occasionally there were wider forays: down to Loftus’s on Fifth Avenue,