A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  Jenny met me at the door of the basement apartment. She was wearing a light brown dress that was tight across her breasts and wide at the bottom. She had crinolines underneath and high-heeled black shoes that made her look older. She put a stack of records on a thick-spindled 45 rpm player: Nat Cole and Don Cornell, Sinatra singing “I’m a Fool to Want You,” and Tommy Edwards doing “Blue Velvet.” My hands were damp, but when I took her hands, they were wet. There was a candle burning on the table, and she served spaghetti and meatballs and fresh Italian bread. I finished a glass of beer, then another, a full quart while eating greedily. She gazed at me with her sad eyes, as if afraid I’d hate the food. I told her dinner was wonderful (it was) and opened another beer. We danced. She cleared the table. She turned off the lights in the kitchen and the overhead lights in the living room, leaving one lamp burning. She made sure the curtains and drapes were closed. We danced again and then went to the couch. I kissed her, felt her up (as we said then), unzippered the back of her dress, unsnapped her bra, while her protests became whimpers and her breathing got heavier. I moved a hand between her legs, up to the flesh at the top of her stockings and then under her panties while the crinolines made a sighing sound. This time she didn’t stop me. She was wet. She fumbled with my belt. She unzipped my fly. She gripped my cock.

  And so we did it. It was awful and amazing, clumsy and frantic and inept and vaguely comical. I exploded at the end. Jenny wept. I fell back, my shoes still on, my trousers and undershorts around my ankles. I looked down and laughed. That made her feel worse. She hurried into the bathroom, sobbing. I took off my shoes and pulled up my trousers. I couldn’t believe it: I had done it. I had put my cock in a cunt. I had come in a girl. Oh, man. The records had finished playing, so I turned them over and started playing the flip sides. I took another Ballantine’s from the refrigerator, and when I turned around, she was walking naked out of the bathroom.

  I bet I’m pregnant, she said.

  Nah, I said.

  I know I am.

  I’d never seen a naked woman before and I just stood there, gazing at her, at her breasts and belly and great black vee of pubic hair. I thought of Virgil Finlay’s women and Miss Lace and the hot women in the pulp magazines. She came over and kissed me, holding my face in both hands. I held her heavy hard-nippled breasts in my hands.

  If I’m pregnant, will you marry me? she whispered.

  Of course, I said, struggling with my panic.

  Then, come on.

  We went to her bedroom. I took the beer with me.

  4

  THE YEAR 1951 was terrible. I was at least six people: the schoolboy at Regis, the hardworking delivery boy after school, the opinionated angry young man raging at the world, the aspiring cartoonist, the lover of Jenny, the apprentice drinker and Bad Guy. In Latin class, I was struggling with the subjunctive; at night, I was fucking my brains out. Drinking became an integral part of sex. I’d drink three or four beers to feel confident; Jenny would drink three or four beers to have an excuse for letting me do it once again. It was as much a ritual as the Mass. Sometimes I bought condoms; sometimes I had to choose between a pack of Trojans or a quart of Ballantine’s. I always settled for beer and risk.

  At home, I was miserable. My mother was trying to feed, clothe, and civilize the whole brood, while holding down her new part-time job as a cashier at the RKO Prospect movie house. She got little help from my father. He was drinking as hard as ever, particularly on the weekends. He began to go on binges, sometimes missing work on a Monday or Friday, thus granting me the self-righteous joy of despising him. I was too young and self-absorbed to ask him why he was drinking so much, what he feared, what made him weep, who he was. We worked out a ritual too. We made remarks about the weather. We talked about baseball. He predicted that Ray Robinson would beat Jake LaMotta for the middleweight championship, and he was right. But there was nothing else I could say to him.

  I certainly couldn’t tell him, or my mother, about Jenny. I couldn’t tell anyone else either. If I told my friends, they’d immediately tell everybody in the Neighborhood that Jenny “put out.” If they thought she put out, they wouldn’t respect her. And how could I love a girl my friends didn’t respect? Besides, I didn’t think of it as putting out. To me, it was a love story.

  The key word, of course, was “story.” After the fiasco of Chuck Taylor, I stopped writing my versions of pulp stories. But I wasn’t writing comics anymore either. One reason was the physical impossibility of doing it in the apartment. The kids were the infantry of disorder; they moved from room to room in a sustained campaign of disruption. At eleven, my sister, as the only girl, took title to the Little Room. I couldn’t lay out paper or board, ink, pens and brushes, on the kitchen table. Gradually, I just gave up. That long slow surrender ate at my guts, but I convinced myself that I had no choice. As long as I live here, I thought, I’ll be unable to work.

  Instead of creating stories, I created Jenny. I invented her in my head, supplying her with qualities no girl could possess, granting her a perfection that had more to do with literature than with the scared, lonely girl who gave me her body. In some primitive, inarticulate way, our love story was driven by my need for narrative, for drama, for a sense of beginning, middle, and end. It was a better story than the ones I had invented out of comics and pulps; I just didn’t know how it would end.

  In the spring, many things began to unravel while others took shape. I was doing worse at Regis. In March the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, and I read in one of the newspapers that there’d be a rally in their defense in Union Square. I tried to get some of the guys from school to meet me at the rally, and one of them said: What are you, some kind of communist? I said no, I wasn’t a communist; but this was a kind of history and I wanted to see it. Are you crazy? the guy said. You get arrested, you end up on some list, your life is ruined. I went anyway, alone. The crowd was small. But the sense of defiant energy was thrilling. I saw young women who didn’t look like anyone from the Neighborhood; they were older than I was, but I wanted to come back, see them again, know them. They cheered at the speeches. They smiled at people and asked them to sign petitions. They didn’t ask me.

  When the rally ended, I wandered downtown to find the subway station at West Fourth Street. Along the way, I discovered two places that were to pull me back again and again: Book Row on Fourth Avenue and the neighborhood called Greenwich Village. The first was like a series of treasure houses, one used book store after another, the cheapest books stacked outside in stalls, selling for a nickel, the interiors dark, musty, packed from floor to ceiling with more expensive books. I was afraid to enter, afraid I’d see some glittering bauble that would exhaust the few dollars I had in my pocket — money for the beer that would grant me admission to Jenny’s bed. I ran my hands over the books as if they were holy objects and moved on.

  Walking into the Village was like entering a movie set. The elegant houses, blooming trees, intimate bars, and scattered bookshops were lovely to look at, but I was even more enchanted by the way the people looked. They were completely different from the people in the Neighborhood or those I saw uptown near Regis. That first day, I saw bearded men with paint-spattered clothes lugging wildly painted abstract canvases into buildings with skylights on the rooftops. Women wore hair down to their hips, bright ceramic earrings, long black stockings, and they smoked cigarettes as they walked. Men carried books and talked to friends with excitement and passion. On Eighth Street, there were theaters showing movies from Italy and France. I passed coffee shops, cafeterias, and bars filled with people deep in argument, engulfed by cigarette smoke, and all of them looked different from the men in the bars of Brooklyn. I wanted to come back. And stay.

  That day the unravelment at Regis and at home receded as I glimpsed the possibility of another life, only a subway ride from Brooklyn, in a place where I could fill my life with politics, art, books, and women. I didn’t want to wait. This was where I could live. Far from Brookl
yn and my father and Rattigan’s and the insistence on being a plumber or a cop. I could be a bohemian! I’d read the word somewhere and looked it up in a dictionary, and it sounded romantically perfect. A bohemian, free of all the stupid dumb-ass constraints of the world! With a huge studio, my own drawing table, a bookcase full of books, a skylight. I’d work all day and go to the cafés at night, to drink brandy and listen to poetry. A free man. The vision excited me all the way home on the subway. Jenny was nowhere in it.

  That vision didn’t help me at Regis; it might have accelerated my decline. I simply couldn’t concentrate. I’d sit in geometry class and think of Jenny’s nipples and get an erection. I’d be in a civics class and want to know why the Rosenbergs had been sentenced to death. I’d be in the English class, with a teacher discussing the assigned text, and see myself in a café reading books of my own choosing. Each morning, I would linger in bed, filled with resistance and dread. I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to go to school. If I’d seen Jenny the night before, and drunk too much beer, I’d be physically logy and sometimes emotionally hung over too. I’d try to remember if I wore a condom or not; sometimes I hadn’t, and that filled me with dread as I thought of Jenny pregnant. I don’t know if my mother suspected anything about the drinking; I tried to hide it, brushing my teeth or chewing gum. If she did, she said nothing. In a way, that made it worse for me, because I had to carry the burden of the drinking by myself. The effort of hiding it made me feel even more separated from my classmates at Regis.

  That spring, failure entered me like an infection. My grades were falling and I had already been placed on probation by Father Taylor. I was certain I would suffer the humiliation of flunking out at the end of the term. That meant I might have to repeat my sophomore year at some other school. And that would delay my life.

  Finally, I went to see the school counselor, a kind man named Father Burke, and explained most of it to him. I left out Jenny. I didn’t mention the drinking. But I told him that I just wasn’t able to do the work at Regis and wanted out.

  Have you discussed this with your parents? he said.

  No.

  What will they say?

  I don’t know.

  Then you’d better tell them.

  I don’t want to ask their permission, I said. I just want to do it.

  But you’ll have to transfer to another school, he said. You’re not even sixteen yet, so you can’t just drop out.

  What school would take me?

  I’ll see, Father Burke said. If your mind is made up, I’ll try to find you another school.

  That night, I told my mother that I wanted to drop out of Regis. She was concerned, sweet, apologetic.

  I feel I didn’t help, she said. I feel that I should’ve given you more help.

  No, Mom. It wasn’t you. It was me.

  She made tea, and said that she didn’t want me to be unhappy, and if I wasn’t happy at Regis, then maybe I should go to another school. I was relieved. I just didn’t want to see her crying. That night, she seemed too tired to weep. Her hair had turned gray, her face was pale. She was only forty and starting to look old.

  The next day was my last at Regis. I didn’t say good-bye to any of my classmates. I didn’t stop in to see Father Burke. I just packed my books and went home. But I didn’t feel free. All the way back to Brooklyn, I felt that I’d done something unbelievably stupid. Because of my laziness, distraction, fear, and drinking, I had walked away from the best Catholic high school in New York. As the F train came up out of the tunnel after Bergen Street, I looked down from the train and saw the Gowanus Canal beneath me and knew that the building where my father had worked as a clerk for Roulston’s was nearby. I remembered going there with my mother when everything was still in the future, even the war. Then I looked in the other direction and saw the skyline of Manhattan, rising from the harbor, stone-gray and indifferent, beautiful and unattainable, and I began to weep.

  That night I went to Jenny’s and told her what had happened and then tried to get rid of my failure in her body. I drank too much beer and fell asleep. She woke me later, shaking me in desperation, frantic that her mother would find us, shouting that she had to make the bed and air out the room. You’re drunk, she said. Don’t you understand me? Are you too drunk to know what I’m saying? Carrying the empties, I left in a rage, at her and at myself. She was giving me orders, her panic transformed into wide-eyed fury that seemed like the opposite of love. But I was at fault too; I’d had too many beers and was sluggish and confused, like my father on the second-floor landing at 378. Down by the subway, I hurled the empty beer bottles at a parked garbage truck, enjoying the way they smashed and splintered.

  On Monday, I started at my new school, St. Agnes on Forty-fourth Street, in midtown Manhattan. It was dark and gloomy after Regis, the classrooms smaller, the desks more battered. But on the first day, I knew that I would do well. Even with my terrible record at Regis, I was far ahead of most of the students at St. Agnes. By the end of the week, some of my broken ego was restored. And I loved the physical act of going to that school. I came up out of Grand Central and then walked east, passing under the massive rumbling structure of the Third Avenue El. There were Irish saloons on every corner of Third Avenue, with men standing at the bars all day long.

  Some of the drinkers were newspapermen. The Daily News was on Forty-second Street between Second and Third, and I liked going into the lobby to look at the immense globe and the polished floors; it was like visiting the Daily Planet (and years later the Daily News building served as the setting for that imaginary newspaper in the first Superman movie). Sometimes I saw men I was sure were reporters (they all wore hats) hurry out the door, straight to the bars. A few blocks away, on Forty-fifth Street, was the Daily Mirror. I once saw their sports columnist, Dan Parker, a huge man with a pencil-thin mustache, walk out of the newspaper and stroll down to Third Avenue, whistling all the way. I felt connected to the Mirror by Steve Canyon. But I never saw Caniff come out of the building. Still, the sight of Dan Parker was enough. I loved the idea of a newspaperman who whistled.

  I also came to love the gloomy light under the El and wished I could walk into the bars and order a drink. At one point, with some other kids from St. Agnes, I started watching the Kefauver hearings through the windows, seeing various gangsters and politicians talk in black and white, and watched Frank Costello’s hands. I wanted a television set now. And a telephone. And a room with a door. Far more than we could afford at 378. Most of all I wanted to walk into a Third Avenue bar and drink like a man.

  5

  THEN ONE NIGHT, Jenny and I went to the Avon, a third-run movie house on Ninth Street. One of the two movies was Portrait of Jennie, with Joseph Cotten. I thought he was great in The Third Man and we laughed about how those people out in Hollywood couldn’t even spell Jenny. In the movie, Joseph Cotten was a painter. He lived in the Village and had an amazing studio, with easels, a fireplace and, of course, a skylight. One day, he’s in Central Park and meets Jennifer Jones, who is young and shy and beautiful. She sings a strange little song:

  Where I come from nobody knows,

  And where I’m going, everything goes …

  Joseph Cotten keeps meeting the girl over the next month or two, and each time she’s older. He paints her portrait and tries to learn more about her. But in fact, she’s dead, killed years before in a storm. At the end of the movie he meets her on the anniversary of her death. He gets to kiss her and hug her; the music builds to an amazing swell; she is swept out to sea to die again.

  Jenny was crying at the end. I kept thinking about Joseph Cotten’s studio. We didn’t stay for the second feature. All the way to her house on the Fifth Avenue trolley, Jenny was silent.

  That’s the way life is, isn’t it? she said.

  Like what? That movie?

  Yeah.

  Oh, sure. We always fall in love with ghosts we meet in Central Park.

  No, she said. I mean that things always turn ou
t lousy.

  Hey, Jenny, it’s a movie.

  We reached her house. She asked me not to come in. It was too late. Her mother would be home soon.

  You keep saying you’re an artist, she said. Why don’t you draw me?

  I will.

  When?

  Tomorrow night?

  My mother’s home tomorrow night.

  Next Friday.

  You swear? she said, smiling.

  I swear.

  That Friday night, she served me another dinner, this time of baked ziti. I sipped my beer slowly, cleaned my plate, and had seconds. After dinner, she stacked the dishes in the sink, ran water over them, left them to soak, then washed her hands and primped her hair. She seemed very nervous.

  Maybe you shouldn’t try this, she said. You don’t have to draw me if you don’t want to.

  No, no, I said. Let’s try it.

  She sat on the edge of the couch in the muted yellow light of the table lamp and I sat across from her and started to draw. In my head I saw Joseph Cotten making his portrait of Jennifer Jones, and I wished we were in some great high-ceilinged garret in the Village instead of this basement in Bay Ridge. But I worked hard, using a number 2 pencil on a pad of white paper, outlining her head with very light marks, blocking in the eyes and the nose and the mouth, loosely indicating the hair, the neck, and the collar of her white blouse. I was soon lost in the act, erasing, shading, smudging with a finger, but the picture was not going well. Jenny’s hair looked fine, and I’d captured those sad eyes; but there was something wrong with the mouth, and the nose looked enormous. I erased again, trying to make the nose smaller, but that wasn’t right either; I couldn’t put someone else’s nose on Jenny’s face. I paused, sipped my beer, stared at her, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, then tried to outline her nose with absolute exactitude. This time I thought I had it right. With the nose recorded properly, the mouth was easier to fix. I hurried to the end, blocking in the hair with what I thought were bold strokes, then finishing the neck and blouse. I exhaled, then took a deep breath and finished my beer.