Duly punished, St. Michael’s children would fly weeping toward their pillows, their burning hands tucked under their armpits, scuttling barefoot over the wooden floor like skinny little wingless birds. In bed, in the darkness, they would moan with pain and rage against the state of things, against Brother Francis and God’s will, against their alcoholic fathers, feckless mothers or stepparents. Children can never imagine a suffering greater than their own.
Mackay was an intelligent child who liked books and so was able to mythologize his experience. One of the favorite myths informing his early childhood was the Dickensian one of the highborn orphan, fallen among brutish commoners. Sometimes he would try to identify and encourage in himself those traits of character that gave evidence of his lost eminence. The question of his own courage in the face of danger and enmity often occupied his thoughts. Years later, in navy boot camp, Mackay would discover that in the course of his years at St. Michael’s he had acquired an instinctive cringe. This would be the first indication in adult life that he had not passed altogether unmarked through his early education.
When Mackay’s mother was released from the hospital, Mackay left St. Michael’s and went to live with her in a single bathless room at a welfare hotel on the West Side. He spent as much time as possible out of the room, on the street. In his second year of high school, he began to cut classes. He had become a “junior” of a West Side gang and spent much time drinking beer in Central Park at night and smoking, with a sense of abandon, the occasional reefer.
Once, in the dead hours of a summer night, he was drinking Scotch and Pepsi-Cola with four other youths around the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park called Cleopatra’s Needle when a hostile band happened by. One of Mackay’s friends had a knife, and in the fight that ensued a boy of the other party was stabbed. It was impossible to see everything in the darkness. The fight was almost silent. Mackay found that adrenaline worked against the sense of time; time advanced with his pulse beats, moment by moment. There was a cry of “Shank!” The stabbed boy cursed and groaned. At the height of the battle two mounted policemen from the Central Park precinct came galloping across the Great Lawn, bearing down on the combatants. Everyone scattered for cover.
Mackay and Chris Kiernan escaped over a wall and onto the transverse road across the park at Seventy-ninth Street. There they found the teenager who had been stabbed, standing by the curb watching glassy-eyed as cars sped past him. He had been stabbed twice in the arm, warding off thrusts at his body. The wounds seemed deep and, Mackay thought, might well have killed had they been placed as intended.
The stabbed youth cursed them. Mackay and Kiernan felt compromised. Custom discouraged the promiscuous use of knives against white enemies. It seemed impossible to just leave him there, so they decided to help. Mackay and Kiernan made a tourniquet of his bloody white shirt. They walked him, talking encouragement, to the door of the nearest hospital, a luxurious private establishment off Madison Avenue. His shirt had become suffused with blood. Blood ran off his sneakers onto the pavement. As they approached the inner glass door of the hospital a man in white came forward from behind a reception desk and locked the door. When they protested, the man in white simply shook his head. Mackay and Kiernan somehow got the youth to Bellevue, left him outside Emergency and fled.
The following March, on St. Patrick’s Day, Mackay was one of the drunken youths who, then as now, made the Upper East Side horrible with their carousing after the parade. His mother was back in the hospital and he was staying in an apartment in East Harlem with half a dozen other dropouts. Parents, not unwisely, cautioned their teenage children against association with him.
On the St. Patrick’s Day in question, Mackay was drunk and unhappy. He picked a fight with his friend Kiernan in a poolroom on East Eighty-sixth Street. Kiernan, with what Mackay always felt was a lucky punch, stretched him out cold on the poolroom floor. He actually lay unconscious for a minute or two, whereupon the proprietors of the poolroom ejected him from the premises by throwing him down the many steps that led to the street. Mackay, tasting defeat, learned a certain embittered caution. Kiernan, on the other hand, came to regard his own belligerence too indulgently, as events years later would make clear.
In his last year of high school, Mackay joined the navy. He was fond of sea stories. He took the subway to South Ferry and signed the necessary papers in the offices at Whitehall Street, and by the end of the day he was on his way to the naval training center at Bainbridge, Maryland.
The navy Mackay joined in the mid-fifties was the navy of World War II, a tradition-minded, conservative service that prided itself on stiff discipline. It sought to produce individuals who could perform technical tasks under pressure, and its training procedures reflected this requirement. Every morning recruits turned out for inspection. It was summer and whites were the uniform of the day. The whites could not be machine washed or ironed. They were hand washed with a scrub brush and a bar of Ivory soap, then rolled in the regulation manner. If any part of a recruit’s uniform was imperfectly washed or in some way out of order, the drill instructors would make him regret it.
In the second week of boot camp, during a performance of the manual of arms, a drill instructor named Igo discovered Mackay’s cringe. Igo was a first-class boatswain’s mate.
“My word!” Igo exclaimed. He enjoyed using this mild expletive because of the contrast it made with the rest of his vocabulary. “My word! This recruit has the attitude of a dog.”
Mackay himself was surprised. He had never noticed himself cringing.
Igo took to addressing Mackay as “Pooch.” He announced that he would drill the cringe out of him. He made things very unpleasant. Every morning after the training company was dismissed from inspection, Igo would drill him in the manual of arms.
“Here, Pooch,” he would call amiably, to summon Mackay.
At one point Mackay told himself that if Igo called him Pooch once more, he would bash the boatswain’s mate’s brains out with his useless Springfield training rifle. He decided instead to interpret Igo’s drilling as being in his own best interest. He had noticed that in the navy people were rarely actually struck; in that way the navy was unlike St. Michael’s. He noticed also that the food was good, better than he had ever had anywhere.
Every morning he drilled with Igo. When they had gone through the manual of arms, Igo would menace him by waving a variety of objects over his head and try to catch him cringing. It was absurd and comical. Still, Mackay found it very hard to stare straight ahead and not to wince at the expected blows. Mackay thought of his cringe as a rat that lived near his heart, a rat with his own face. He hated it far worse than he hated Igo.
By the time he left boot camp for the fleet, he was able to stare the boatswain’s mate down.
“Congratulations, sailor,” Igo said to Mackay. “You’re too scared to cringe.”
Mastering the shameful reflex had been instructive, and Mackay never forgot it. He often wondered if everyone had a rat at his heart to kill.
Six years or so out of the navy, Mackay beheld himself a family man, married and the father of a baby boy. His mother was dead. Through good luck he was able to find a job as a photographer’s assistant. Eventually the job would lead to his working as a news photographer and then to his becoming an artist, but it was a hard job with long hours and low pay. Mackay enjoyed it nonetheless and supplemented his income by working as a house painter. He lived with his family in a pleasant apartment on the West Side near Central Park. His wife was a graduate of the High School of Music and Art and of Reed College. Their friends were people of spirit and artistic interest. It was the early sixties and a good time to be young in New York. Mackay felt that the city in which he lived was a different city from the one in which he had grown up.