A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  They told more stories. They made jokes. They talked about Ratón Macias and Toluco López. They sang mournful ballads. They slept. In the morning, I was moved one final time, outside to have my picture taken on the steps of the jail (it appeared in El Universal, where an “I” was dropped off my name and I was described as being of Arabic descent) and then into a van with grilled windows. With four other men I was taken through side streets and across wide gray avenues into the city’s penitentiary at Lecumberri, a looming pile called El Palacio Negro. The Black Palace.

  I was let out of the van in a courtyard, then taken to a second yard. Dark stone walls climbed above me, topped by barbed wire and guards strolling casually with rifles at the ready. No way out. I remember passing cells that were elaborately decorated with pictures of women and boxers and soccer players; men cooking at stoves; radios playing; and the endless noise of steel upon steel. There seemed to be thousands of men here, some walking independently down aisles, others sleeping, dozens milling around. I knew about this place from our Mexican history classes; Pancho Villa was once a prisoner here; Francisco Madero was murdered beside these walls. But this wasn’t a tour; I was a prisoner.

  They put me in a single cell and locked me in. There was a scab on my nose now and my ribs hurt and my teeth were a mess. But the fear had gone out of me; I stopped thinking about what had happened and what might happen and focused on what was happening. And for the moment I was safe. Even death had lost its scary power. I knew now that if a bullet had slammed into my skull and killed me, I’d have felt nothing. But I was alive. The pain I felt was the proof.

  Four days later, when they finally came to take me out, Tim Lee was waiting in an outer office of the prison with a young Mexican lawyer. They’d been trying for days to find me in the labyrinth of the prison system. Tim saw my picture in El Universal, flanked by cops on the stepe of the delegación as I was being moved to the Black Palace. He got the name of a lawyer from one of the teachers and used his own money for bail. A functionary in the prison office told me to report to the Black Palace once a week to sign in while the judicial process ran its course. The lawyer explained to the official that he was representing me, signed some papers, gave me his card, and left. Then I took a deep breath and walked out into the sunshine. There were groups of shawled women waiting beside the walls to deliver food to their men. They had helped feed me too.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  Forget it, Tim said. I just wish we’d found you sooner.

  I’m glad you found me at all.

  We hailed a cab.

  Where to?

  I laughed.

  A bath, I said.

  Nothing else? Not even a meal?

  No, I said, not even a beer.

  I went to bed in a darkened room and tried to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The words would not come. I tossed in the dark for a long time, seeing sweaty men hammering at each other with bricks. Then I turned on the light and slept for eighteen hours.

  8

  WITH MY FRIENDS, even with Tim, I affected a casual, blasé attitude about what had happened in the night on the Calle de la Esperanza. But for weeks, I woke up sweating, my dreams instantly wiped away, leaving only an ashy residue of dread. The memory of the whistling bullets, the fight with the bricks and the whimpering young woman, the sense of being lost in a system of steel rooms in which strangers spoke a language I did not know: all were woven into me.

  I didn’t blame the drunken party that had preceded the trip to Calle de la Esperanza; by then, drinking was so natural it would have been like placing blame on the act of breathing. I continued going to the student parties, still got drunk. I didn’t blame Mexico either. Too many Mexicans had been kind to me. But something had happened. I was trying to discover some deeper principle, some rule of adult life that accounted for accident and choice and human ugliness. Not some divine commandment. Not some vague or blurry generalization. Something that I had learned from experience. After all, an artist should know how to do that; an artist shouldn’t just learn what other artists have learned; he should know what his life has taught him. But when I made drawings of the events of that evening they all came out looking like comic strips. They were simpleminded and crude, mere diagrams of place and action and consequences. They seemed glimpsed from the outside, instead of felt from the inside.

  Because of that failure, and my dissatisfaction, I started to write. I filled pages with accounts of what had happened, telling the story, layering it with dread and fear, trying for what Hemingway called the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion. I might get fact into a drawing or painting, but how could I get motion? I could get both in writing. And as I wrote more, my passion for painting faded.

  There was another reason for this shift: money. Or the lack of it. Drinking at some Saturday-night party, or hanging out between classes at MCC, I could swagger in front of other students about what happened in jail, as proof of a macho ability to survive. I couldn’t swagger about money. Like all the other veterans, I was receiving $110 a month. From that I had to pay for tuition, room, board, and expenses. After Christmas, Tim and I moved with two other students into a large apartment off the Avenida Ejército Nacional; that cut the rent to $25 each. But I was also paying back Tim for the money he’d laid out for bail, and I had to make monthly payments to the Mexican lawyer as the case dragged on in legal hearings. I couldn’t write home for money. In 1955 my mother had given birth to my brother Joe, and with six kids in the house in Brooklyn, there was no money to spare. Besides, I was a man now (or so I thought), and a man didn’t borrow money from his mother. I could borrow books from the Benjamin Franklin Library. I couldn’t borrow brushes, paint, or canvas. In the second quarter, I decided not to take an oil painting class and enrolled in a writing class instead.

  I did have enough money for a trip to Acapulco, sharing the expenses with four other students to ride down through the wild mountains of Guerrero, where bandits still practiced their craft. After miles of twisting roads through gorges and tropical valleys, we came around a bend and the great curving bay of Acapulco lay before us. Mountains dove sharply to the sea, with tiny white buildings set along their ridges among palms and thick green foliage. The beach looked like a white scythe, touched by the great expanse of cobalt blue water that moved off to touch the darker blue line of the sky. The light was as bright and clear as Matisse.

  One of the guys in the car had been there before, and he explained about the morning beach and the afternoon beach, the Caleta and the Caletilla, how one was sunny until noon and then was abruptly plunged into shadow when the sun moved behind the mountains. The white mansion on the edge of the cliff: that was John Wayne’s house. He had a Mexican wife and lived here between pictures. And that lavender palace, out beyond the Duke’s, out there on the Quebrada, past where the divers plunged into the advancing tides: that belonged to Dolores del Rio.

  A beer popped. We were sitting under a straw-roofed palapa on the morning beach, the car parked on a cobblestoned street, hawkers selling rum drinks in coconut shells, and an argument briefly raged about which of Mexico’s two greatest female stars was more beautiful, Maria Felix or Dolores del Rio. I said there was no contest about pure beauty. Dolores del Rio’s perfect oval face, her high cheekbones, the slope of her brow: she was like a Renaissance painting, man. That’s the problem, somebody said. She’s too beautiful. You’d spend your time just looking at her; you wouldn’t want to fuck her. And someone else said, But you never get to fuck Maria Felix, either; she fucks you.

  We had no money for the tourist hotels, of course, but we found a place on the beach south of the city where we could rent hammocks tied to palm trees for one peso a night. That beach is gone now, devoured long ago by the Pierre Marqués Hotel, but no place in my memory remains more beautiful. In the evenings, we sat on driftwood and drank beer and laughed and told lies and listened to the fishermen play guitars around an open fire. The Mexicans were friendly, amazed at th
e crazy gringos who were down there with them on la playa. The Mexicans were humble, illiterate, generous, decent; they shared food with us and beer and taught us the words of songs and talked about las mujeres, about women gone off and women arriving, about women full of betrayal and women full of trust. I remember gently rocking into sleep under the stars, more stars than I’d seen since Fox Lair Camp, stars forming clouds and clusters, shapes and patterns, dwarfing us all. And then waking in the dawn to the quiet lapping of surf and the arrival of the orange ball of the sun while fishermen dragged dead sharks onto the sand.

  On the last day, drinking in the afternoon, I went Walking north upon the beach, out beyond the point of the Playa Caletilla. At the foot of a cliff, I lay down on the empty sand and fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was darkening into dusk. And off to the right a young woman in a one-piece yellow bathing suit was sitting on a towel staring out to sea toward the Isla la Roqueta. Her tightly braided pigtail hung down her back, pointing at the towel. I sat there for a while, brushing the sand off my back, looking at her smooth dark skin. My own skin was reddening from the sun. My mouth felt sour from drinking. She and I were the only people in sight. I stood up and walked slowly toward the surf, angling toward her. She turned to look at me. She was about eighteen, with a long nose and an upper lip dark with down. I saw that she’d been crying.

  Are you all right? I said.

  She turned away, wiping at her eyes with her forearm.

  ¿ Está bien? I said.

  I squatted beside her and touched her hand. She pulled away and then started talking very quickly in sobbing Spanish, something about the novio — her boyfriend — and her father, who was so cruel, and how her life was over. I didn’t understand the details, but she was full of anger and despair and heartbroken tears. And then she fell against me, her body wracking with sobs, and I put my arm around her and held her tight and whispered to her in English, Don’t worry, don’t worry, murmured, It’ll be all right, murmured, Go ahead and cry, just cry, baby, just cry. Until the sobs ended, and my chest was wet with her tears, and she was still, the warmth of her body entering mine as the sun went down.

  We held each other for a long time, whispering, exchanging names, Pedro, Yolanda, the surf growling and pulling and growling, buoys dinging in the dark. I kissed her. She kissed me back. I lifted the pigtail and kissed the nape of her neck. She touched my chest and stomach and discovered my erection. I played with her breasts through the wired bra of the bathing suit and then moved her zipper down and took a lush pliant breast in my hand and a hard nipple in my mouth in the Pacific night, as her hand moved inside my bathing suit. Yolanda. At the foot of the cliff where Dolores del Rio gazed at mirrors. Yolanda, excited and writhing and then suddenly weeping again, withdrawing her hand, pulling away, as I heard what she heard: distant feminine voices calling on the dark beach.

  Yo-laaaanda. ¿Dónde estás? Yolandaaaa.

  And she was up, panicky, tucking breasts inside the bathing suit, zippering it up in back.

  Mañana, I said. Aquí en la playa. Exactamente aquí.

  Sí, sí, she whispered. Mañana, en la tarde. Aquí en la playa. . . . Tomorrow afternoon, here on the beach.

  She hurried off in the dark toward the town and the faceless disembodied voices of her keepers, her sisters or aunts or mother. I plunged into the surf. The next day I went back to the spot but she was not there. And that night we all piled into the car to return to Mexico City.

  9

  MY CASE dragged on, month after month. I would go to a hearing, answer questions, be given another date, then pay the lawyer what I could. I kept taking drawing classes but couldn’t afford the painting workshops; I started writing short stories and poetry. In the last week of each month, the VA money virtually all gone, I was eating sandwiches made of hard rolls and slices of raw onion. For the first time, I started smoking cigarettes, dark-papered Negritos, four cents a pack, to help me across the hunger; I became an instant addict. There was one more drunken party and a fight with a young Mexican student. I was in the kitchen when it started, and I hit him hard and he went down in a pile of broken glasses and there was blood everywhere. I thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but I hid for a few days, afraid the police would come and get me. And then in May, the school term was over and I knew I had to leave.

  I decided to jump bail and try to make it back to New York. Tim stayed behind, to work for a degree, while I shared a ride with a guy from Buffalo who was heading home. As we approached the border, I was certain that my name must be on some list. I would show my visa to the Mexican border guards and they’d see my name and start to arrest me. I rehearsed escapes: sprinting across the bridge, leaping into the shallow waters of the Rio Grande. In my mind, I heard the cracking of shots. I heard bullets whistling. I saw men fighting with bricks to possess the body of a frightened woman.

  When we reached the bridge, my heart was pounding, my hands were wet. But there was no list. The guard took my visa and waved us across. The dream of Mexico-as-Paris was over. In Brownsville, we stopped for gas and I had a cold bottle of Lone Star. I looked back at Mexico, relieved and free, but overwhelmed with an almost intolerable sadness.

  10

  HOME AGAIN in New York, after nine months away, I quickly fell into the earnest rhythms of the 1950s. Necessity was the goad; I needed to eat and get on with my life. I again worked for Ernie Waivada in the advertising agency. I spent a year at Pratt, studying design. I took a small flat on the Lower East Side. After work or school, I went drinking. I wrote a little and painted less.

  On one level, the track was clear. Learn a trade and you’ll never go hungry, my father said. Graphic design was a trade, like plumbing or carpentry. If I mastered it, I would never go hungry. But in truth I was hesitant about moving down the track. In magazines like Graphis, I saw the cold elegant layouts of Swiss designers and studied the bolder work of the Americans. Some of them offered more than the example of craft; they promised a vision based on order, the reduction of chaos to a small neat space. But in the art galleries, I finally saw the actual work of Kline and Pollock, de Kooning and Motherwell, stood close to their ferociously confident canvases. There was nothing cold about their disorderly art and nothing small. They had the size and boldness of the Mexican muralists but were free of their preaching. I was drawn to the physicality of their paintings, the almost athletic swagger of the brushwork. But at the same time, their work seemed beyond me, their vision too heroic. After this, where could painting go? Where could I go?

  Writing remained only a perhaps. In my flat off Second Avenue, or in small dark bars, I filled notebooks with questions about art, politics, my own chaotic ambitions. Sometimes, late at night in the flat, I typed these notes on an old upright Royal I’d bought in a secondhand store and put them in file folders. I tried short stories in the Hemingway manner, more variations on what had happened to me in Mexico, even poems, transcribed from fragments scribbled in bars. But it seemed an arrogant ambition to be a writer, in a world where Hemingway and Faulkner still lived. Who do you think you are? some collective voice from the Neighborhood called to me. Who the hell do you think you are? Besides, in bars at night, or at Pratt, or at my part-time drawing table at the agency, I could still show off with a drawing. And if there was even small applause, I felt that I never could completely abandon the dream of art; the prospect filled me with dread. For a long time, I’d based my identity on the hope of being an artist; to give up now might cast me into the shapeless fog that had engulfed me after the failure at Regis.

  I carried these confusions with me through a New York terrain now permanently changed by the tubular Ben Shahn forests of television antennas and highways leading to the faceless Levittowns of Long Island. The Neighborhood, its streets already emptied at night by television, began to reel from departures to the new suburbs and the arrival of the plague of heroin. When I visited 378, my mother talked for the first time about danger. Standing with my father at the bar in Rattigan’s, a full membe
r now of the fraternity, I heard about muggings and overdoses. A few men died of cirrhosis from drinking, but compared to a needle in the arm, that was an honorable death. In tenements where once there was nothing much worth stealing, people now started locking their doors.

  The Eisenhower era bragged of the good life for all, a time of abundance and prosperity, but it didn’t touch the Neighborhood. The prosperous were gone to the suburbs; among those who stayed, money was still short. Everywhere in the city, factories were closing. Globe Lighting, where my father worked, moved from the Neighborhood to Flushing and then, later, to Georgia. In the daytime, there were more men in the bars, drinking in silence and defeat. The city was changing: gradually, almost imperceptibly in some ways, drastically in others. The world wasn’t as solid as it seemed when I was twelve; and that was a confusion. You spent twenty years learning how to live in the world and then it changed on you. I’d wake up some mornings and buy the newspapers and think: What the fuck is going on?

  Even in bars, some things were not discussed. McCarthy was gone, but the Great Fear had left its mark. At the agency, I was on the fringe of the world of organization men, men in gray flannel suits, men who talked about the new cult of motivation research, of inner-directed and outer-directed human beings, of lonely crowds and hidden persuaders. They shrugged when you mentioned politics (although Ernie Waivada, from Massachusetts, was a huge fan of Senator Jack Kennedy). Politics was trouble. Get the money. Or get the women. Luscious secretaries from Lynbrook. Sweet fearful file clerks from the Bronx. Noble defenders of the holy hymen. But willing to please at the midnight hour. I knew I couldn’t exist for long in that world. Painter or writer, I needed to be free.