A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  Don’t get used to being too happy, you Irish bum, Paul Sann said when I took him for a fast drink after work. No matter what happens, he said, newspapers will always break your fucking heart.

  5

  SOMETHING SHIFTED in me during that strike. I thought I’d work at the newspaper forever. The strike made me understand that in the newspaper trade, there was no such thing as forever. When I went back to work, I kept doing freelance work on the side and found I had some talent for magazine articles. Checks arrived. We moved to a larger apartment in Brooklyn. But Ramona seemed no happier. When I got excited about selling a piece, she seemed uneasy. When the telephone kept ringing, with calls from friends, press agents, editors, she grew annoyed. When I came home drunk, a few days a week, she was disgusted. She was getting to know me better than I knew her.

  As spring turned into summer, the old dream of the expatriate life blossomed again, ripening over beers on Saturday afternoons. Who wanted to live here, back in the bourgeois safety of Brooklyn? New York was a great city and I had a job I loved. But there was a world out there. One night, over dinner at home, I started talking to Ramona about going to Spain. Maybe we could live in Barcelona. The city where Orwell once carried a rifle, city of Dalí and Picasso and Gaudi, city that held out to the end in defense of the Spanish Republic. Barcelona! I’d write articles for the Saturday Evening Post and we’d live well on the money and to hell with newspapers. She looked at me as if I were drunk.

  What’s the matter with New York? she said.

  It’s not Spain, I said.

  But you’ve never been to Spain.

  I know, I said. But I don’t want to see it when I’m sixty.

  She shook her head in a dubious way, tempering my enthusiasm. For weeks, I avoided any more discussion. I worked hard at the paper. I won some awards. But the notion of another escape wouldn’t go away. Over beers one night, I talked about Spain to Tim, suggesting that he could go too and work with me on the research while mastering the magazine form himself. He was very smart and a good clean writer; if I could do it, he could do it. At first, Tim was skeptical. But we looked in the New York Times at the rate of the peseta against the dollar, bought Spanish newspapers in Times Square, and saw that we could live more cheaply than in New York. We were young, we could afford it; when would we have such a chance again? A strange, inevitable momentum took over. It was like going to Mexico again. There was nothing complicated about it. We’d just go, live in a foreign land, walk where Hemingway walked, speak Spanish and eat olives and brown ourselves on the Costa Brava. We’d support ourselves with writing.

  Ramona and Tim’s wife, Georgie, were at first skeptical. We addressed every argument, speaking with the authority of men who had lived in at least one foreign land. I showed Ramona travel articles from magazines, picture books from the library. I sold some more articles to magazines and built up a small bank account. Slowly it must have seemed like a great romantic adventure to the women too. By July we were ready to leave.

  You’re going where? Paul Sann said, when I came to his desk to give him the news.

  To Spain.

  He chuckled in a sardonic way.

  Vaya con Dios, pal, he said. I wish I’d done that when I was your age. I wish I’d done it last fucking month.

  For me, Sann’s words were the only blessing I needed. It was settled. We were going to Spain.

  The night before we left, Tim and I went to a farewell dinner with the other guys who’d made the journey with us across the river from Brooklyn: Bill Powers, Richie Kelly, Jake Conaboy. After the delicious beer-swilling years on Ninth Street, we’d gone our own ways. Billy had become an excellent photographer and layout man, Richie an illustrator and designer, while Jake returned to Brooklyn and the safety of the Transit Authority. But I wanted to believe it didn’t matter where we’d gone or where we were going; we came from a common place, had shared a glorious time, and we’d be friends for life.

  The five of us took a table in the back room of a bar on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue. Jake had been drinking before we arrived; whiskey always broke him out of his shyness, and he was hilarious and profane. We ate hamburgers and drank a lot of beer and whiskey. I talked about the glories of the Spain I’d never seen, urging the others to come and join us. I must have made it seem like another subway ride from Brooklyn. We made jokes. We talked about politics. Billy and I argued the comparative merits of Matisse and Bonnard with the passion once reserved for centerfielders. Around midnight, Jake’s chin was resting on his chest. We talked on, drinking more, laughing louder. Richie’s eyes were glassy, a thin smile on his lips. Then it was time to go. Tim called for a check. Richie stared hard at me, the smile gone, his eyes suddenly deeper under his brows.

  You’re really an arrogant bastard, you know, he said.

  I laughed, thinking he was joking.

  I know, I know, I said. Worse than Charles de Gaulle.

  Richie didn’t smile. The muscles in his jaw tensed.

  Nobody wants to tell you this, he said. But it’s true. You treat the rest of us like inferiors. You think if you say it should be done, then we should do it.

  You’re serious, aren’t you?

  Tim said, Hey, Richie, cool it.

  Yeah, Billy said. This is a good-bye dinner, not a grand jury.

  Richie ignored them.

  All this shit about Spain, this Hemingway crap, Richie said. You’re saying you can do things and we don’t have the balls to do them. You think you’re hot shit. You pose like a good guy but you always think of yourself first. You always did. Even back in Brooklyn.

  It was as if he wanted to start a fight. But we were leaving the following day for Spain. I didn’t want to arrive in Barcelona with a split lip or a broken hand. I backed up.

  Richie, I said, all I ever tried to be with you was a friend. If I got lucky, I wanted you and the others to share it.

  Yeah, so you could feel like you weve better than us.

  Fuck it, I said, standing up abruptly. Come on, Tim. Let’s go to Spain.

  I threw some money on the table and turned for the door.

  Look at the truth, Richie said. Look at the truth . . .

  Tim and I took a cab back to Brooklyn. We were staying at our parents’ places for this final night, because Ramona, Adriene, and Georgie had gone on ahead to Barcelona to find an apartment. Tim and I had closed our apartments, stored or sold our possessions, settled most of our accounts. All the way to Brooklyn, I was furious with Richie. Some things I had taken for granted: he was my friend, he shared the sentimental solidarity of the group, he cheered for my small successes as I would cheer for his. Tonight, he had pissed all over those assumptions. It was as if he wanted me to feel his accusations all the way to Spain. And though I was hurt and wounded, another thought slid through my mind: Maybe he was right.

  There was one final wrenching scene. A few weeks before the date we chose to leave for Barcelona, I had told my brother Denis that I was moving to Europe. He was twelve, reading newspapers every day, but this news item hadn’t seemed to register. I didn’t press it. But I worried about him all the time. I had no idea how long we’d be gone. I might make a career as a writer in Europe and stay forever. I could be hack in six months. I was sure Brian and John would be all right, but Denis had a fragility that made him seem more vulnerable. I hoped the Neighborhood wouldn’t trap him.

  On that last morning at 378, Denis and the other kids hung around the kitchen while I washed and ate breakfast. My father was there, dim and silent. My mother busied herself with dishes and tea. Fragments of Richie’s indictment kept drilling into me, combining with hangover to make me feel disconnected from the others. Finally, I packed my last small bag, said my good-byes, and went downstairs.

  Suddenly, Denis came running after me, in tears.

  Please don’t go, Pete, please don’t go, he kept saying. Please, please . . .

  Denis, I have to go. My wife is there. My baby . . .

&nb
sp; Please, he said, please stay.

  Tim was waiting with a cab in front of Rattigan’s and came over to help me with my bags. But Denis was bawling now, holding on to my arm with both hands, saying Don’t go, Pete, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, pleaaaase . . .

  Until I had to shake him off.

  Send me some stories, Denis . . .

  And he ran off then, his face a blur of tears, swinging his hands wildly in the air. He was the last person I saw on Seventh Avenue as the cab pulled away to take us to the airport.

  6

  THUS BEGAN too many years of wandering, of arrivals and departures, sitting in airport waiting rooms, packing and unpacking books, smoking strange brands of cigarettes, speaking badly the languages of strangers, and drinking their beer and whiskey. Ramona and I exhausted the dream of Spain in six months. We lived in Dublin then, and later in Rome and San Juan and Mexico City, Laguna Beach and Washington, D.C., and saw a lot of other places in between. Each time, we made the long circle home, back to New York.

  The moves had a pattern, of course. I would return to New York, settle in, start working at my trade. Then routine would assert itself. The routine of work. The routine of family. The multiple routines of the drinking life. These couldn’t be separated. If I wrote a good column for the newspaper, I’d go to a bar and celebrate; if I wrote a poor column, I would drink away my regret. Then I’d go home, another dinner missed, another chance to play with the children gone, and in the morning, hung over, thick-tongued, and thick-fingered, I’d attempt through my disgust to make amends. That was a routine too.

  Self-disgust would spread its stain to everything: my work, the apartment, New York itself, until I felt I had to get out of there or die trying. Then I’d grant myself the vision of the Great Good Place. Most one the time, it was a place where I heard more vowels than consonants, with bougainvillea spilling down whitewashed walls, fountains playing in the blaze of noon. In the Great Good Place I would work like a monk on my writing. I would be a good husband and father. I would be far from the tumult of saloons, their giddy excitements and sly flatteries. Once the vision took hold, we were soon packing the books. I never did find the Great Good Place.

  During this long odyssey, there were some wonderful times. There were long sunny afternoons reading Lorca and drinking beer in huge one-quart glasses in the Plaza Real in Barcelona. There was one glorious evening in Rome with the raffish producer Joe Levine at the Hotel Excelsior, the two of us drinking brandy, with women all around us, musicians playing violins, Joe’s wife pleading with him to go to bed. I spent hours drinking rum with John Wayne during an interview on his converted navy minesweeper in Barcelona bay; I hated his politics and liked him. In Brussels, I wandered into some huge beerhall with a reporter from UPI and got hilariously drunk with some touring American paratroopers. There were good beery times in pubs in Dublin and England, the barmaids flirting, the regulars grumpy at this Yank invasion, then offering the pack of Senior Service and buying a round in the fraternity of drink. I drank beer with the mariachis in the Plaza Garibaldi. I got loaded in a place on the Calle Cristo in Old San Juan, singing along with Los Panchos on the jukebox. I got pleasantly smashed watching the sun crash into the Pacific in Laguna. Sometimes Ramona came with me; most of the time she stayed home.

  She was with me in Belfast when my father came home in the late fall of 1963. She was a background figure, her dark skin exotic to the pale Irish, but existing only as an appendage to the visiting Yank. On that trip, my father held center stage.

  He had been away since the early 1930s. I paid for his ticket because I wanted to see him there in the home place, on the streets that had shaped him. For a week, we wandered those streets on foot or by cab, stopping at the Rock Bar, the Beehive, the Long Bar, snug dark wool-smelling refuges from the gray hard drizzle of the North. He found old friends among the living and heard reports about the dead. He sang his songs, making the young Irish laugh with “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” A few times, confronted with some old photograph of soccer teams, he turned away in grief. He had less tolerance now for drink; he got drunk quicker. But he was back where he’d started from and he was happy to be there.

  One evening, all of us were in my cousin Frankie Bennett’s house, sipping warm lager, dressing to go out for dinner. My father was at his brother Frank’s house and we were to meet him later. The television was on in the small living room. The Bennett kids were leaping over couches and rolling around on chairs. A coal fire glowed in the hearth. I was full of a buzzing warmth, part beer, part Ireland.

  And then the first bulletin broke.

  . . . President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.

  What? I turned to the black-and-white screen of the television set. What did he say? What the fuck did he just say? And he said it again, grave, British, restrained: Shots had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. No. The president was being rushed to Parkland Hospital. No. No. The room hushed, Frankie moved in from the kitchen, Ramona came downstairs, holding Adriene in her arms, Frankie’s wife stood by the set. No. I popped open a can of warm lager. A sitcom was playing. Then the announcer was back.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United States, is dead.

  I let out a wail, a deep scary banshee wail, primitive and wounded, mariachi wail, Hank Williams wail, full of fury and pain. Nonono-nononononononononoNo. Ramona hugged me, weeping, and kids were wailing now, and Frankie was there beside me, but I turned, ashamed of my pain and my weeping, and rushed into the night. All through the Catholic neighborhood called Andersonstown, doors were opening and slamming and more wails came roaring at the sky. wails without words, full of pagan furies as old as bogs. I wanted to find my father, wanted to hug him and have him hug me.

  But I careened around dark streets, in the midst of the wailing. I saw a man punch at a tree. I saw a stout woman fall down in a sitting position on a doorstep, bawling. I ran and ran, trying to burn out my grief, my anger, my consciousness. I found myself on the Shankill Road, main avenue of the Protestant district. It was no different there. Kennedy wasn’t a mere Catholic, he was Irish, Kennedy was ours, he was one of our sons, our Jack, and they have killed him. Along the Shankill, I saw a man kicking a garbage can over and over again in primitive rage. I saw three young women heading somewhere, dissolved in tears. I saw another man sitting on a curb, his body heaving in gigantic sobs.

  Somehow, I found my way back to Falls Road in the Catholic area. My head was full of imagined demons, the gunmen of Dallas: Cuban exiles and right-wing bastards, Klansmen and Mob guys. But when I finally reached the Rock Bar I only wanted to find my father. He was upstairs where the television set was, sitting at a table beside a retired IRA man with three fingers missing from his right hand. I went to the table and the old IRA man said, It’s a terrible bloody thing, lad, terrible, terrible . . . My father stood up, his face a ruin. We held each other tight, saying nothing, and then the bar was packed and we drank whiskey and there was a documentary playing about Kennedy’s trip to Ireland in May, smiling and laughing and amused, promising at the airport to come back in the springtime and I thought of the line from Yeats, What made us think that he could comb gray hair?

  After that, there was almost nothing left except whiskey. Until the screen filled with Kennedy’s face, superimposed on the American flag, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played on the sound track. And then the whole bar crowd was standing, old men and young, men with hard whiskey-raw Belfast faces, and all of them were saluting and so was my father and so was I. That night in Belfast, we both discovered how much we were Americans.

  7

  THE PRICE I was paying was very large, but for a long time, nobody presented me with the check. Our daughter, Deirdre, was conceived in Spain and born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan while I was thick with hangover at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Norman Mailer drove me to the hospital. I was full of joy when I saw her. But Ramona never forgave my absence.

  W
hen Deirdre was less than a year old, we moved to Mexico. That was always the basic model for the Great Good Place, and going back was like an act of contrition. I was heartily sorry for the way I’d messed up in 1956. But now a decade had gone by. I thought I could repair the great rupture by going back. A Mexican friend confirmed what I suspected: the Mexican police were not looking for me, my name was on no list, my offenses were lost in the human avalanche of newer felonies. I signed a small contract to write my first book and we left New York. We sublet a friend’s apartment a block from the Pasco de la Reforma in the Colonia Roma. For a week, I had dreams about men bashing each other with bricks. But then Carta Blanca gave me dreamless sleep. I talked to Ramona about staying this time for good.

  During the summer of 1965, Deirdre got sick with salmonella, probably from unpasteurized milk. She had begun talking before the infection; then all her talking stopped. Most of the time she looked stunned. I was heartsick, blaming myself for taking a child to Mexico, risking her life in my own self-absorbed quest for the Great Good Place. Work stopped; I never did write the book I’d gone there to write. One night I sat in the dark, listening to Cuco Sánchez, and got drunk alone, while Ramona and the children slept. A few days later, a letter arrived from Paul Sann. He wanted to know if I had any interest in going back to work at the Post. If so, he was looking for a columnist.

  Once more, we packed up and went home.

  We took an apartment in a new building off Union Square. Before we could furnish the place, I announced to Ramona that we’d have a house-warming party. The place was jammed. Tim, Billy, and Jake came from the Neighborhood; dozens arrived from the Post, including Sann, who looked around at his stumbling wards and left early. Among the late arrivals were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, friends of Al Aronowitz, in town for their first appearances in America. They were full of charm, smoking joints and drinking vodka, but they too left around the midnight hour. At some point, huge Fred McMorrow lurched into the bedroom where Deirdre was sleeping, fell across a glass-topped table, and smashed it. He didn’t even scratch himself. But Deirdre woke up screaming and Ramona was again in tears.