Jimmy Breslin - The World According to Breslin

JIMMY BRESLIN IS TOO FAT. He drinks too much, he smokes too much, and if he makes it past his fortieth birthday a lot of clockers and watchers are going to be surprised.

But he is not entirely uncaring about this. As he puts his cigarette down on the edge of the bar at Gallaghers on West 52nd Street and sips from his half-empty beer glass, he complains that he isnt feeling well. Most often he says that his circulation is going bad on him the way it went on Whitey Ford, and if you think pitchers need their arms, you should just know that a writer also needs his fingers. If the circulation isnt that troublesome for the moment, he can work up a pretty good case for the fact that his column isnt going as well as it should or that the Governor is avoiding him or that his wife, Rosemary, is upset with him again. And with every complaint comes a flow of reminiscence and anecdote that is almost uninterruptedly funny. It takes a happy man to sing a worried song that way.

Breslin is a walking contradiction who happens to be Irish and a little ambivalent about it. He is sometimes seen in the process of inventing himself, a luxury permitted only to the intelligent few, but he is inventing something pretty close to a kid who grew up in a rough section of Queens and never really left. When he is caught off-guard, he uses perfectly clear and well-articulated English because his mother is an English teacher in high school and thats the way she taught him to speak.

He is thirty-seven, which is on the borderline of not being young any more. His early days were spent in the parochial and then public schools of Queens. He likes the fact that few of the kids he grew up with ever get divorced, not because the Church is against divorce, but because so many of them came from broken homes that most of them determined to keep what they have together.

Facts on his education are hazy because he lies so much about it. He has claimed he has a doctorate from Cambridge. He also has said he attended Elmira Reformatory. There is a valid question as to whether he graduated from high school, which he attended for five years. He enrolled somehow in a college in 1948, but he was already working on a Long Island newspaper and he used his college status to impress editors with the idea that he was trying to improve himself. His only real interest was sports writing, which he did for practically no pay and on the worst shift. His scholastic career soon faded while he wrote about sandlot football games.

What made him a writer instead of just a sports reporter was sheer, scrambling necessity. The twins were born a year after he and Rosemary Dattolico were married fourteen years ago. They were premature; nobody in the family had any money; the cost of incubators for a months stay in the hospital is high, and you cant pay it with choirboy looks when the bill comes around. So he got out and began to sell the only thing he could make real money atstories for magazines.

It was a curious progress. He moved from the Newhouse papers to Scripps-Howard to Hearst, each time a step up the journalistic ladder, each time almost getting a column, each move made on the strength of the magazine articles he had to write to stay in the newspaper business. And he began to discover that Breslin was his most salable commodity. You take in the sights that other people see and you turn them out through the lens that makes you an individual, and suddenly other people see them better. Thats why he always writes about Breslin and why people go on reading about Breslin and why he keeps on living like Breslin. The bars and the drinking and the ever-present cigarette are part of a slapdash poetry that irritates the hell out of a lot of people and charms others. Breslin is just trying to capture the essence of his own life and turn it into words. He also happens to be lucky that people will pay to watch.

He has a furious energy to find out what happens in the city because he identifies himself with it, or at least with a sidelong view of it. When he works for a newspaper he is never long out of touch with the City Desk. He gets furious if something happens and no one calls him. He constantly betrays his pose of ignorance by calling the shots for better coverage of the city. He is always frantically scheming how to get the best story out of any news event. And this is the way he writes about himself.

Measles

Fat Thomas, the bookmaker, his 415 pounds encased in a plaid sports jacket, stood in the doorway of the bedroom. He would not come any closer.

How are you, baby? he said.

Terrible, I said.

What are you going to tell people? he said.

Im sick, I said. What the hell can I say?

Yeah, but you cant tell people you got the measles, Fat Thomas said. Everybody will be sending you baby food.

I feel so lousy I dont care.

Ill tell them you got a nervous breakdown, baby, Fat Thomas said. I cant mention the measles. Itll break everybody up.

I pulled the covers up over my eyes and said I didnt care. This was on a wet Thursday morning a couple of weeks ago. At thirty-four, and with a wife and children, and with enough debts to qualify as an adult any place in the world, I had the measles. Not just a touch of the measles. I had the measles from face to foot, and a fever and sore throat to go with them. The doctor was on his way, but his decision was going to be academic. When I had awakened an hour before, Kevin Breslin, aged nine, wandered into the bedroom and said hello, then looked at me carefully and let out a yell.

You got something, he said. You got the measles.

I got what?

Jamesy, come here and look at Daddy, he yelled. His twin brother came in. The two of them, the bills of their baseball caps poking me in the eyes, inspected my face close up.

Open your shirt, James said.

See? Hes got them all over his chest, James announced.

Does your throat hurt? Kevin asked.

It did. It hurt like hell.

Uh-huh. Kevin nodded. You got them all right. You have to stay in bed.

Then, with the experience of his years, he bent over, pulling down both the window shades, and announced that the room would have to stay dark. Then he and his brother left to go downstairs for breakfast.

Too bad, James said as he left the room. But you got them all right.

They went downstairs to announce, over Shredded Wheat, that their father had the measles. Their mother let out a scream, ran up the stairs, took one look, then went downstairs and was in tears when Fat Thomas arrived.

Dont get upset, he told her. Its only a kid thing. It cant be bad.

I dont care about the measles, she said. I just dont want him in the house all day.

The kids went to school. The doctor came and left. And now Fat Thomas, still standing in the doorway and coming no closer, said he had to leave and book his bets for the day, and when he disappeared from the doorway I was left to face probably the worst morning of my life.

Ive had bad mornings in my time. Once I had a hangover that was so bad I couldnt make it out of the house and had to hire a private ambulance to get to work. It cost 45 hard dollars and the attendants came and carried me out on a stretcher and threw me into the ambulance and I slept all the way to work. Then I was single and living with my friend Max in an apartment on the West Side. We had a policy of paying nobody and the bill collectors got so bad that one morning we woke up with the finance-company guy sitting at the kitchen table. It was unnerving, but we grabbed the bum and threw him into the shower and Max held him in while I turned on the cold water. It fixed the finance-company guy, but it was a tough way to start off the day.