A Drinking Life (28 page)
I waited for her outside the school. An icy wind was blowing off the East River. The streets looked dark and shiny, as if they’d been glazed. Then she came out.
Laura, I —
Come on, she said, and took my arm.
We went to Tenth Street and drank and fucked and fucked and drank. I stayed until morning.
She woke me with scrambled eggs on a plate and buttered rye toast. I suddenly panicked. It was Friday and the kitchen clock said it was eight thirty-five. I was due at the Navy Yard at eight.
The hell with it, she said. So you miss a day, so what?
Yeah. So what.
I looked at her more closely now as she made coffee. She was dressed in a loose flowered dress and sandals. Her hair was wild, but her face was clean and shining. The winter light threw cold shadows on the walls. I pulled a blanket over my shoulders and began eating greedily. She brought me a steaming cup of coffee and then sat at the end of the bed and looked at me in a forlorn way.
You’ll be going away, she said.
No, I said. I’ll stay here. Maybe we can go to a museum or a movie or something.
I have to work today. Besides, I wasn’t talking about today.
She got up and poured herself the first whiskey of the morning.
You’re the type who is always going away, she said.
Come on, I said. You know better. You gave me the brush for two weeks and here I am.
Temporary insanity, she said, and smiled. She stared into the glass.
I think you want me to go.
No, she said. Not yet.
T
HE ROOM
in Brooklyn became my center, and from that center I tried to sort out all the different strands of my story: art school, the Navy Yard, the Neighborhood, my father, my brothers and sister, my friends, drinking, Maureen and Laura. I couldn’t do it, and there was little time left for anything else. McCarthyism was gathering its dark force but I wasn’t thinking much about it; I had no time anymore for reading seven newspapers a day, for clipping the comics and filing them into envelopes. The comics themselves seemed small and cramped now, and I kept wanting to draw the way Hogarth did, with great sweeping movements, my body involved in the act. I had no money for paint and canvases. And the room was too small for truly gigantic canvases. All of that was up ahead somewhere.
But while I wanted a future, I also wanted my identity in the Neighborhood. The drawings gave me part of it. So did the room. And that winter of 1951–52 I found a place where the guys from the Totes could meet on frigid nights.
Boop’s was on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Tenth Avenue. Tommy Conroy and Mickey Horan took me there for my first visit, entering through a side door on the Tenth Avenue side. There were booths and an unused kitchen. We moved through a dark passageway, past the restrooms, and into the saloon itself. It was dark and golden, like a John Sloan painting, with a long bar, a TV set near the windows, a shuffleboard machine, a lone table, and a jukebox. Behind the bar, the bottles glistened. On the same shelf, the cash register was in the center, with a toaster for making hot dogs at one end and signs for the Miss Rheingold contest at the other. That first night, the bar was packed and warm and smoky from cigarettes. The windows were opaque with steam.
Boop himself was a heavy-set mild-mannered Italian guy who years later was head of security at Madison Square Garden. That first night, Conroy ordered three beers and Boop pulled them without asking for draft cards. He was too busy. I still remember the feeling, standing at a bar with my friends, paying my own way. In the Parkview I was the kid from upstairs. This was to be my own bar, a place to drink or sing, my first club. That night I got very drunk. In the morning, I woke up happy.
Soon, my routine got more elaborate. If I wasn’t with Laura, I usually stopped off in Boop’s on my way home from C&I. Part of this must have been a need for approval. I wanted them to marvel at my drawing skills, to recognize that I was different, that I wasn’t just another high school dropout. But I also wanted to be part of the widening fraternity of drinkers. On weekday nights, I didn’t get drunk; I didn’t have enough money and I had to be up early to go to the Navy Yard. Laura drank more than I did. But on weekend nights, I usually went out with Maureen, early in the evening, to see a movie at Loew’s Met or the Sanders or Prospect. I would take her for a soda, or coffee, at Lewnes’ and then walk her home. She was in before midnight. Then I’d walk up Prospect Avenue to Boop’s and all the other young men would be gathering. They’d almost all had Saturday nights like mine. They hadn’t gotten laid either. So with the jukebox blasting and the beers flowing, we’d all get roaring drunk.
There are permanent holes in my memory about most of those nights. I remember lurching home. I remember the streets rising and falling and lampposts swaying. Or lying in bed while the ceiling moved like the sea. Most of all, I remember the great heady closed feeling in the bar, pushing quarters around in the wetness, the
confirmed
feeling when the bartender bought me a free round after I’d paid for three. Beers were a dime and a tune on the jukebox cost a nickle (or six for a quarter). You could get drunk for a dollar and a half. Through the night I was filled with talk about fighters and ballplayers and the war, guys we knew who’d been hurt, and others who’d been arrested, and a few who’d just gone off somewhere. And the music of the jukebox drove into me. I sang along with Sinatra on “I’m a Fool to Want You” and joined everybody in the bar on Johnnie Ray’s “Cry.”
Nobody talked politics, except to make occasional remarks about politicians in general. And none of the others talked much about the future. The war in Korea got in the way. They would mention taking the tests for the cops or the firemen; someday, later. But first they had to decide what to do about the war. The draft waited for all of us. For some of the older guys, it was only months away. So they discussed the relative merits of the army or the navy, the Marine Corps or the air force. They didn’t question the reasons for Korea. It never occurred to them to protest it. There was a war on. When it was your turn, you went too.
Most of the time, I listened. These were my friends and I didn’t want to argue with them. But in certain ways I was already separated from them. I couldn’t tell them about Laura, because they wouldn’t believe me, and if they heard I was having sex with an old woman (she was forty-one!), they’d probably laugh. On the nights when I wasn’t at Boop’s, or on Saturday or Sunday mornings, I started making drawings for myself again, filling newsprint pads instead of making cartoons. I made great violent drawings of prizefighters, starting with photographs from newspapers or
Ring Magazine,
then abstracting them, then drawing them from memory, repeating alone the exercises from school. I took stiff classroom drawings of Laura and thinned her out and added Maureen’s face, smudging the features with my fingers to protect her from the judgments of my visiting friends. I began imagining Maureen’s body in detail, seeing her on the model stand instead of Laura, her pale skin blushing, her pubic hair dark and shiny. In those drawings she seemed more real than she did when she sat beside me in the Sanders.
Somehow, making those drawings, I knew that I could lose the Navy Yard, lose Laura, even lose Maureen, but I couldn’t afford to lose art school. That would be losing my life.
B
Y APRIL
, even Laura thought I was getting better.
You’ve got talent, she said one night, but you don’t know anything yet.
What do you mean?
I mean you’re intelligent, you learn fast, but you’re amazingly ignorant. You’re too much in love with being a mug from Brooklyn.
The words wounded me. She was right, and I knew it.
What should I learn? I asked her.
Laura smiled and said, Every fucking thing you can.
She would never go out anywhere with me, obviously (I thought) because she didn’t want her friends to laugh at her with a young man. But she began to show me drawings in art books and from folders of reproductions she’d torn from magazines. None of them looked like Burne Hogarth’s work or Milton Caniff’s or Jack Kirby’s. But I began to sense what Picasso was doing, and Matisse; I saw George Grosz for the first time and Otto Dix and a wonderful draftsman, now unjustly forgotten, named Rico Lebrun. Seeing my boxing pictures, she showed me
Stag at Sharkey’s
by George Bellows. She showed me pictures by Ben Shahn and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. And then she pulled out some drawings by a man who was doing what I wished I could be doing: José Clemente Orozco. He was a Mexican and drew figures with thick black lines and great bold power.
You’re a draftsman, she said. So study the great draftsmen. You can get to color later. Most artists use color to hide things they don’t understand. Photographers do it all the time.
She smoked her cigarettes and sipped her Canadian Club and rummaged through these files, which she kept in folders in a Campbell’s soup box, and there was always a running commentary.
Jesus H. Christ, I have saved an amazing amount of crap. I oughtta just throw it all out.
Where’d you get it all?
She held up a copy of
Art News.
Magazines like this, she said. But do yourself a favor, don’t read these rags. Just tear out the pictures. The writing is usually the most amazing bullshit.
Then she gave me a copy of a book called
The Art Spirit
by Robert Henri, and I devoured it. I felt connected to Henri because he was a friend of John Sloan. His book was a collection of notes about the study of art, written down by students in his classes at the Art Students League, and first published in 1923. As I read, I heard Henri speaking in Hogarth’s voice, and he seemed to be speaking directly to me.
The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life. …
This struck me as absolutely true; I knew, for example, that when I was alone I made drawings that went beyond the work I did in class. And I hoped I had the courage and stamina to see it through. I would sometimes remember these words while drinking in Boop’s — receiving what I thought Henri meant by sympathy, a kind of generalized human warmth; being, as he said, in company — and know that I should be home at work. Henri’s words became a kind of sweet curse. In my mind, the desire to be an artist had been a desire for freedom: from the routines of life, from the Navy Yards of the world. Until I read Henri, it had never occurred to me that there could be a cost, that an artist must pay a price in loneliness. That idea gave me a romantic thrill.
An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future. …
Was I a master of what I had? That is, had I pushed as hard as I could against my crudities, my clumsiness, my lack of skill? I knew I hadn’t. But nobody else at Boop’s had either. Most of them seemed content to go along, get a job, join the army. Who did I think I was anyway? Who was I to think I could go beyond myself?
You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. … I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do. …
In the Navy Yard, I met men who were doing hard work because they had to do it; to support wives, children, pay rent. In Boop’s, the guys who were working weren’t doing what they wanted to do. Most of them didn’t even
know
what they wanted to do. And what about my father? What did he want to do when he was my age, and how had it turned out? What could he have become if he hadn’t left Ireland or if he hadn’t lost his leg? What about my mother? I knew almost nothing about her, except that she was there, she worked, she was smart, she encouraged me to do anything I wanted to do. As Henri did.
An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. That is what I call self-development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself.
Yes.
I
N THE LATE
spring of 1952, as the Dodgers tried in the new season to recover from the Home Run, and the war in Korea was grinding on, and the papers said that Eisenhower was planning to run for president, everything shifted again. Laura disappeared.
For two nights, I didn’t see her at school, didn’t receive her Yes or No. On the third night, I asked about her at the office. The secretary was annoyed because Laura hadn’t even called. They had to cancel one painting class because they couldn’t find a substitute.
I was suddenly panicky. In class that night, I imagined her burning with some fever, alone in the studio without a telephone. I imagined her careening around the studio, drunk and falling, the blood running from a gash in her head. Or she flipped a cigarette in a careless way and it landed in the files or the turpentine and exploded and she was burned alive. Or a man climbed in through the air shaft window, to hold her prisoner, and was even now hurting her. The lurid scenarios filled my head while I tried to draw a lithe young brown-nippled Puerto Rican model in class. The model was exquisite, with sad brown eyes, and a thin trail of hair from her navel down her stomach to a thick black vee between her legs. But I couldn’t even focus my lust. When the bell rang for the first break, I packed my things and hurried down to Tenth Street.
