Free A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill Page A

they came from sunken ships. It was true:
Loose lips sink ships, loose lips sink ships
… We were losing; we were winning; everyone must play a part. At one point, we were told to roll up toothpaste tubes while we used them and were forced to turn them in before we could get another; my mother started buying tooth powder, which was cheaper, the canister made with cardboard; but after a while there was none of that left either, and we brushed our teeth with bicarbonate of soda or didn’t brush them at all.
    On the radio now, they were singing
Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me
and
I got spurs that jingle jangle jingle,
and every morning, on a show called “Rambling with Gambling,” we heard
Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day
from a Broadway show called
Oklahoma.
    I’d love to see that show, my mother said one day. I love those songs.
    Why don’t you go and see it? I said.
    It’s over on Broadway, she said, as if explaining it was in Madrid. It’s much too dear.
    She said this as if ending the discussion. I was persistent.
    Why can’t Daddy take you? He has money for Rattigan’s. Why can’t he save up and take you over to Broadway?
    Well … maybe after the war is over.
    I’d like to see Broadway too, I said.
    She smiled and said, After the war …
    During the second year of the war, my father started giving me an allowance of a dime a week, and with a few more cents (again, deposits on those bottles) I began to go to the movies with other kids. Almost always, on a Saturday morning, our destination was the Minerva, which was one large malodorous room, with two aisles and about twenty rows noisy with kids. There were usually three features, a serial (which we called the “chapter”), a cartoon, a newsreel, and coming attractions; all for twelve cents if we got there before noon. We never knew what time a movie started; we just went to the Show. And sitting there in the noisy dark, I was transported to other worlds.
    I loved the Tarzan movies, with their lush scenes of jungles, tree houses, Johnny Weissmuller swinging on vines and bellowing his great triumphant calls. I also discovered the glories of the American West, vistas of amazing beauty, of deserts and mesas and mountains. Sitting in the dark of the Minerva, I could smell the leather saddles, the beans cooking in skillets on sagebrush fires, the dirty smoke billowing from an Iron Horse as it raced across the prairie. At the movies, I dove into mountain streams. I survived raging snowstorms and stampeding cattle. I faced down Indians, black hats, rustlers, desperadoes. I was pursued by posses and escaped into Mexico.
    In those westerns, in the gangster movies, in the war movies, and even the love movies, the men were always drinking. They shot each other in saloons and nightclubs. They got drunk on leave and got into wild, hilarious fights in waterfront bars. Some of the movie drunks were comical, some mean. With the exception of a few cowboys, even the heroes drank whiskey. They never got drunk.
    In the third year of the war, the Kilroy signs started appearing everywhere, brought home to America from Europe. They showed a long-nosed cartoon figure, his nose hanging over a fence, and the slogan: Kilroy Was Here. Nobody knew who Kilroy was. But he was everywhere (they said on the radio), he was every GI, he was every American fighting overseas. I mastered the head and nose of Kilroy hanging over the fence and chalked it on a hundred walls and fences. That year, Kilroy even made it to Brooklyn.
    On the radio there were stories about zoot suit riots in Los Angeles, on the other side of the country; sailors were chasing the zoot suiters, most of whom were Mexicans, stripping off their clothes, shaving their heads, and then beating them to a pulp. Almost everybody seemed to think this was a good thing. A riot broke out in Detroit, blacks against whites, and people were killed by the police. Then there was a riot closer to