A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

ON SUNDAYS, the family sometimes went visiting. That’s what it was called: visiting. You went to someone else’s house and brought along some cold cuts or Italian bread or beer and entertained each other. We almost always went to visit my father’s relatives; my mother had friends but no relatives in America. After Mass, the whole family would walk down to Fifth Avenue, still dressed in Sunday best, and get on the trolley and rattle out to Bay Ridge to see Uncle Tommy or Uncle Davey, Aunt Louie or Aunt Nellie, and all my cousins. We couldn’t play in the street because we were in our good clothes; but visiting wasn’t play to us, it was a show. There would be food and drink and singing in the parlor. And here, as in the bars, my father was always the star. The kids were called upon to perform too, singing songs or reciting poems.