A Drinking Life (16 page)
In 1947, Caniff, as announced, left
Terry
to another artist, George Wunder, and started
Steve Canyon
in the
Daily Mirror.
There was a great burst of publicity. Caniff appeared on the cover of
Time.
The
Mirror
did a series of ads building up to the debut of the new strip. I learned that Caniff was an Irish-American too, from Ohio; had gone to college; wanted to be an actor; came to New York to work for the Associated Press, where he drew a strip called
Dickie Dare,
and went on to do
Terry
in 1934 for the
Daily News.
He was syndicated in more than four hundred newspapers and now lived in a beautiful house in New City, New York. The photographs of the studio showed a room that was larger than our entire flat. I saved all this publicity, staring at Caniff’s face, looking at examples of his work going back to his childhood, and then, from the first great Sunday page, clipped every
Canyon
strip until I went into the navy in 1952.
That first Sunday page of
Steve Canyon,
dated January 18, 1947, was as good as any movie. For five panels, we don’t see Canyon’s face, but his character is established by various people who greet him on his way into an office building. An Irish cop thanks him for stopping off to see his sister in Shannon; the doorman thanks him for sending a souvenir from Egypt to his son; a blind newsdealer, called only “sarge,” and obviously a war veteran, thanks Canyon for backing him in setting up the newsstand; a flower girl offers him a carnation for his buttonhole, but when he turns her down he says that she and her mother are due for a movie on him; the elevator girls stammer a hello and say that for him, they won’t wait for a full car. So we know immediately that Canyon is a good, generous man, a world traveler, thoughtful, personal, attractive to women. We see his face for the first time in the sixth panel; it’s lean, and there’s a black streak in his blond hair. Wearing a checkered overcoat, he opens the door with his company’s name on the glass: Horizons Unlimited. Beyond the door is his secretary, a Polynesian woman named Feeta Feeta, with lovely breasts under a polka-dotted blouse, flowers in her hair, talking on the phone. On the line is Mr. Dayzee, the formal and officious male secretary to a woman named Copper Calhoun, “the big she-wolf of the stock market.” Dayzee virtually orders Canyon to come immediately to Calhoun’s apartment; Canyon refuses the order, objecting to the tone of the demand, and tells Dayzee that “the click you hear will mean you’re soloing.” Feeta Feeta looks resigned; the office rent is due, “but I guess it’s bad form to get into regular habits like that. …” In the final panel, Copper Calhoun, with sleek black hair, the arched eyebrows of the Dragon Lady, a long cigarette in one hand, says: “I want that man!! … Get him!”
I loved this and sat down to labor over a long letter to Caniff, telling him how great it was and how I wanted to be a cartoonist too. A few weeks later a package arrived in the mail from New City. Inside was a note from Caniff himself, a copy of a brochure he’d written for aspiring cartoonists, “A Guide for an Armchair Marco Polo,” and a colored picture of Steve Canyon. I was hooked. If
Terry
belonged to my mother first,
Steve Canyon
was mine from the start. On the street, nobody else cared much about my obsession, so this became another part of my secret life.
Later in 1947, I found a book called
The Comics
by Coulton Waugh, who back in the 1930s had succeeded Caniff on
Dickie Dare.
His book told the story of American comic strips from their beginnings in the 1890s with R. F. Outcault’s
The Yellow Kid
to the triumph of the comic books. There was, of course, a chapter on Caniff and his imitators, and for the first time my faith in the great man’s talents was shaken. Caniff was being imitated by hundreds of other cartoonists, with more appearing every day. Did I want to be just another imitator?
Could
I be an imitator? In Waugh’s book I saw the immense variety of possible cartoon styles: Roy Crane’s
Buz Sawyer
and
Captain Easy,
George, Herriman’s
Krazy Kat,
Cliff Sterrett’s
Polly and Her Pals,
Hal Foster’s
Prince Valiant,
Crockett Johnson’s
Barnaby.
There were so many different ways to be a cartoonist. So when I failed once more to capture the sultry pout of the Dragon Lady, I would console myself by thinking, Hey, so what, I don’t want to be just another hack imitator of Milton Caniff.
But I didn’t just want to draw the characters the way Caniff did. I didn’t really want to have his studio in New City. The truth was that I wanted to live the way his creations lived. I didn’t want to spend a lifetime doing a comic strip about husbands and wives, or the distant past, or funny animals. I wanted to see the exotic places of the world. I wanted to go where my grandfather had gone. In a notebook, I copied a sentence from Waugh’s book that described Roy Crane’s creations:
In the old days tubby Tubbs and lanky Easy were loose-footed soldiers of fortune, a big and little stone rolling through the romantic places of the earth, usually broke, sometimes fabulously wealthy, but always ready for fight, frolic, or feed.
That was it. To be a rolling stone. In the romantic places of the earth. Ready for a fight, a frolic, or a feed. And since I was Irish, since I was Billy Hamill’s son, since I was from Brooklyn: a drink too.
A
ROUND THE SAME
time, a sign painter named Jim Brady opened a shop on Seventh Avenue off the corner of Thirteenth Street, just past the swirling pole of Fortunato’s barbershop, where my father got his hair cut. One summer morning I walked past the shop and stopped short. In the window was an enlarged photostat of the first
Terry
daily, drawn by Caniff in a much more cartoony style than the richly brushed strip that had become my obsession. There were also mounted photostats of characters from
Terry
and some
Terry
comic books arranged in a display. The shop was closed. But I came back that evening and saw a heavy-set man with reddish hair working on a sign for a butcher. He had a red handkerchief tied across his brow to prevent his sweat from splashing on the posters. His eyes were hidden behind thick horn-rimmed glasses. He only had one hand, and held a paintpot in the crook of the injured right arm. He must have felt my eyes on him.
Can I help you, kid? he said.
Uh, I — Well, I saw the Milton Caniff drawings in the window.
He paused.
You a Caniff fan?
Yeah.
Come on in.
He let me watch as he worked on the sign, and asked me questions. Did I draw every day? Was there a drawing class in my school? Where did I live? Oh, so you’re Billy Hamill’s kid. Hell of a guy, your dad. What do you do after school? Well, maybe you could work for me. Sweep the store. Deliver the signs…. But I can’t pay much, kid.
So began my apprenticeship. I came back every day. And in that hot, narrow shop, smoky from Brady’s Pall Malls, with beautifully lettered signs for pork chops and clamb roasts appearing in black and red paint on rolls of poster paper that unfurled across a tilted plywood worktable, Brady told me tales of the world of comics. Before he became a sign painter, he explained, he was a professional letterer for comic books. That is, he was part of that mysterious and powerful world across the river in Manhattan, where they did the work that I loved so much. He showed me his collection of originals, by Alex Toth
(He’s the best around and he’s only a kid.)
and a man named Edmund Good (who worked for a time as the artist on
Scorchy Smith)
and some other artists whose names I no longer remember. These were oversized two-ply Strathmore pages in black and white, the blacks very black, with corrections made in china white. Brady explained how in comic books, one man wrote the script, another penciled all the panels
(Usually with a pale blue pencil, ‘cause that blue don’t photograph when they reduce the page to comic book size),
another inked the pencil drawings, and another, the letterer, did all the balloons. Caniff himself used a fabulous letterer named Frank Engli:
A great cartoonist in his own right, ya know, but a master letterer.
Brady said he loved doing lettering for comic books.
But my eyes started going so I had to stop….
He shook his head sadly, then removed his thick glasses and rubbed his eyes with the elbow of the bad arm. He didn’t explain what had happened to his hand, and I didn’t ask. But I felt pity for him; like my father, he had lost part of himself on the way to Seventh Avenue in Brooklyn.
Sometimes I brought him the latest old
Terry
comics I had discovered in the bookstores. He would look at them and point out what Caniff was doing.
You see, it’s like a movie, like a
frozen
movie, he said. Long shot, medium shot, closeup — see what I mean?
I said I did (and when I went to the movies, I started seeing Caniff in everything). Brady explained about lettering: thick verticals, thin horizontals.
If you have a lettering pen, the nib does it, but ya gotta do it over and over again to make it look natural.
He explained the difference between serif and sans serif. He showed me how Roy Crane and Will Eisner (in
The Spirit
comic books) used lettering to create sounds: Ka
-BONG,
Padda-pow!
Ya gotta draw and draw, he said, and when you’re old enough, ya gotta go to art school.
In a way, that was exactly what I was doing in Jim Brady’s shop. His art school even had a small library: old comics, books on drawing and lettering. One day, in a cardboard box, I discovered a book of cartoons by Caniff that I’d never seen before. He had drawn them every week for
Stars and Stripes,
and they weren’t meant for civilians. Or for kids. The strip was called
Male Call,
and it featured the most arousing woman of my young life: Miss Lace. She was dark-haired, sloe-eyed, with a lush body that seemed to struggle for release from her clothing. Lace was sexy, funny, generous; it wasn’t clear what she was doing in the various theaters of operations but she was certainly making the fighting men happy. Lace reminded me of Rita Hayworth (or, more precisely, the sultry Rita Hayworth provoked in me even more lavish images of Miss Lace), and whenever Brady left me alone in the shop I took out the book and stared at Miss Lace and her hair, mouth, teeth, breasts, and hips in an agony of desire. She didn’t exist anywhere in the world, and I didn’t care.
Then one afternoon I came into the shop and Brady didn’t seem to know me.
What the fuck do
you
want?
I didn’t know what to say. And then I realized he was drunk. He was trying to letter an O. But he couldn’t hold the curve. He stopped, took the brush in his teeth, and furiously crumpled the paper.
Goddammit, he said, goddammit, goddammit.
I backed up quietly and slipped out into the night. I felt like crying, but couldn’t; everybody on the street would see me. I walked in a blur to Prospect Park and back, thinking: They’re all drunks. All of them. Every last one.
I
N THE YEARS
after the war, I stopped worrying about my father. He was there, all right, and I talked to him about baseball, or boxing, or the weather. But it was as if I understood that I would never get from him what I wanted most: the kind of casual affection that is a sign of love. I protected myself with indifference, dreams of substitute worlds, a belief in a limitless future that didn’t depend upon him. I certainly never talked to him about Jim Brady’s sign store, or cartooning, or art school. I knew better.
Instead, I moved back and forth from the street to the Little Room (where Tommy and I now shared bunk beds), from stickball and fistfights to blue pencils, Higgins ink, and the mysteries of the crow quill pen. This wasn’t easy. Suddenly, down in the street, it was the time of the gangs.
The street gangs were all over New York then, and the newspapers wrote about them every other day. In Brooklyn, there were immense black gangs in Bedford-Stuyvesant called the Bishops and the Robins; the Navy Street Boys from the waterfront in Fort Greene; tough Jewish gangs from Brownsville and Coney Island. And there were street gangs right in the Neighborhood.
The gang at our end of the Neighborhood was called the Tigers, most of them Irish. Their great rivals were the South Brooklyn Boys, most of them Italian. They all wore variations on the zoot suit, brightly colored trousers with a three-or-four-inch rise above the belt, ballooning knees, tight thirteen-inch pegged ankles. The rear pockets were covered with gun-shaped flaps of a different color, called pistol pockets; sometimes a bright saddle stitch would run down the seam of the trouser leg. If the trousers were a bright green, the pistol pockets, narrow belt, and saddle stitches might all be yellow. Or the combination would be maroon and gray. Or black and tan. Or purple and pale blue. The colors and combinations were drastic, radical, personal, at once an affirmation of their owner’s uniqueness and a calculated affront to those locked in the gray dark memory of the Depression, the khaki and navy blue palette of the war, or suit-and-tie respectability. In summer, the gang members wore T-shirts with the sleeves rolled high on the shoulder and a cigarette pack folded into the roll. In chillier seasons, they added garish shirts, wide Windsor-knotted ties, belted jackets with wide padded shoulders called wrap-arounds, and wide-brimmed, narrow-crowned, pearl-gray “ginger-ella” hats. And like the boys at camp, they were all masters of the Walk. They would come down our avenue in groups of fifteen or twenty, walking with that practiced roll, their faces frozen in impassive masks, all smoking cigarettes, a few holding bats, their trousers billowing like visions from the Arabian Nights. The mixture of power and menace was thrilling.
On the street, we learned their names and their histories and heard the legends of their wars. Tigers and South Brooklyn Boys lived by primitive codes, most of them outlined in what became their catechism:
The Amboy Dukes
by Irving Shulman, published in 1947, probably the best-read novel in the history of Brooklyn. The codes demanded that all loyalty go to the gang, ahead of family, church, city, or country. Everybody had to drink hard and fight to the death; the women had to “put out” for the men. Although they supported themselves with burglaries and other minor crimes, they despised the mugger, they would never hurt old people, they would not ambush drunks in the dark or roll lushes in bars. My father liked some of the Tigers, but he spoke of them sadly.
