A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  Brick, don’t encourage him. He’ll end up in the fuckin’ Village wit’ the faggots.

  Impossible. He’s a fuckin’ Catlick!

  They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I worked with men; in the Park-view, I could drink with men because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.

  Then one Sunday before Christmas I saw a story in the Journal-American about Burne Hogarth, the artist who used to draw Tarzan. He and some other people had started the Cartoonists and Illustrators School on Twenty-third Street in Manhattan. There was a picture of Hogarth in a classroom full of easels, just like the photographs of John Sloan at the Art Students League. He was teaching in a real school. Now. Not in the distant past. Not in some remote place. Here. In New York.

  Suddenly, after months without a narrative line for my own life, I felt the story again. The next day after work, I went to Twenty-third Street and after twenty minutes of hesitation, walked into the Cartoonists and Illustrators School. It was located then on the corner of Second Avenue and Twenty-third Street (later it became the School of Visual Arts and moved up the street to grander quarters). I was dressed in my rough work clothes from the Navy Yard, but that didn’t seem to matter; almost everybody else was dressed the same way. There was a wonderful pungent odor in the air (a mixture, I learned later, of turpentine and linseed oil) and a busy sense of purpose and direction, people carrying large manila portfolio envelopes or stretched canvases or pieces of unfinished plaster sculptures. There were dark-haired girls with vivacious eyes. There were young men with paint-stained dungarees. They talked and laughed and smoked until a bell rang somewhere and they all hurried away to unseen classrooms. In the office, I was given a catalog, which I accepted clumsily. Then I turned around and walked out.

  All the way home on the subway, I read the catalog over and over again. The newspaper story was true: the great Burne Hogarth was teaching three nights a week. Drawing and anatomy. The term started in the first week of January. The tuition was thirty dollars a month. Almost a full week’s pay. But I could do it. Somehow. If I ate less. If I didn’t spend money drinking. I could do it. Yes. Do it.

  9

  AND SO I DID.

  The classroom was a large studio on the top floor. Easels were scattered everywhere, facing a wooden model’s platform, while one easel faced us. There was an empty stool on the platform. The floors were scabbed with dried paint, a thousand drips and spatters of color. Most of the students were young men, all of them older than I was; there were three young women. They seemed to know each other and laughed and joked in an easy way. I found an empty easel and watched them set up their newsprint pads and take out their black chalks. I did the same. I was very nervous.

  A few minutes before seven a gray-haired woman walked in, dressed in a blue-gray smock. She sat on the edge of the platform, smoking a cigarette and reading a book. She was wearing slippers. Her hair was pulled back tightly and tied into a pigtail. She was about forty. Nobody seemed to notice her. Three guys near me were looking at some yellowing pages of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. I looked at the woman’s face, her long nose and dark eyebrows, and wondered how Foster would draw her.

  Then, at seven o’clock sharp, a compact mustached man arrived. His hair was a shiny black, combed straight back. He wore a button-down shirt, dark tie, sharply creased slacks, and polished loafers. The room hushed as the man placed his own large newsprint pad on the easel beside the stand. He looked more confident than anyone I’d ever seen. This was Burne Hogarth.

  All right, folks, he said, let’s get started.

  I realized that my hands were already black from a mixture of sweat and compressed charcoal. I saw the guy next to me tear the cover sheet off his pad and I did the same. The woman put out her cigarette in a small ashtray, then took off her robe, stepped out of her slippers, and went to the center of the platform. I gazed at her body, her small hard breasts, the thick ridges of pale flesh around her stomach and thighs. Jenny’s flesh was smoother and darker. The woman looked cold under the blue fluorescent lights. I could see veins in her legs. Her pubic hair was gray.

  We’ll do some one-minute poses to loosen up, Hogarth said. All yours, model.

  Suddenly everybody was drawing furiously, as the woman assumed one pose after another, bending, twisting, stretching, firing invisible arrows from invisible bows. My drawing was cramped and tight, as I started at the top of her head and worked my way down. I was used to small drawings, penciled first, then laboriously inked. Every time I moved down from the head, she changed the pose again. I heard the others tearing pages off their pads. I saw that one student was as stiff as I was; another was bold and swift. I felt clumsy. Suddenly Hogarth was beside me.

  Forget the eyebrows, he said. Just get the gesture, the big shape. Scribble it, but make the big shape fit on the page. No details.

  He moved away. I tore off the page, then scribbled in a big bold shape.

  Use the side of the chalk, not the point, Hogarth was telling another student. Big and blocky, nice and bold.

  Now I could hear chalk on paper all over the room. I didn’t look at anything except the model, locking in, me and her and the chalk on paper. Now I saw that she had a long beautiful neck, and I wondered how she had come to this room.

  Hogarth said, Okay, now look at her and remember what you see, then close your eyes and draw what you remember.

  I tried what he asked and drew the memory of the woman bending one knee and extending the other. When I opened my eyes, I was amazed. There was a big brutal form on my page, bold and strong. Then Hogarth said, All right, the quick poses are over, let’s do a twenty-minute pose.

  The model sat on the stool and posed with one foot on the second rung, the other stretched out behind her on the floor. There was no expression on her face.

  I started drawing but I cramped up again, starting at the top in a linear contoured way. When I stopped to look at it, everything was out of proportion. Her neck was too short, her shoulders too broad, her stomach too thick. Worse, she didn’t seem to be sitting on the stool; she looked pasted to it. Then Hogarth was beside me again.

  You didn’t think this out, he said. The big forms have to come first. Look.

  He took my chalk and made a few bold strokes over my labored drawing, showing me that the way I was going, the model’s feet would be off the page. He made them fit. And he showed me where the big forms were.

  You lay it out in big quick forms, he said. Even if the forms are light, make them the basis. Later you can get into the details. Just don’t start with the details or you’ll get lost in them. It’s the old business about not seeing the forest for the trees. Or the trees for the leaves.

  He was talking to me and talking to the full class. But he didn’t seem to be trying to make me feel small; there was no Brother Jan in him. He said his few words, in a sharp precise voice, and then moved on to another student. Everybody listened; we all learned.

  When the twenty-minute pose ended, Hogarth called a break. The model slipped on her robe and slippers and took out a pack of Chester fields. She glanced at some of the drawings but not mine. I watched her go. She must have felt my eyes on her, because at the door she smiled in a polite way and walked into the hall. I wandered out to the hall too. I didn’t smoke then, but everybody else did. They were all talking and laughing and smoking. I wandered around the hall, looking at notices for art shows and foreign movies, glancing into classrooms where other students worked on oil paintings. I didn’t see the model anywhere.

  The break ended, and now Hogarth was in front of his own newsprint pad, giving us an anatomy lesson. He explained the basic shape of the torso, how it was essentially several wedges, one lar
ge, one small; or, in a shorthand, more fluid way, a kind of peanut shape. He showed us how, if we established the peanut, there was a logic to the way you added shoulders, arms, and legs.

  The head is the basic measure, Hogarth said. The ideal figure is seven heads high, although fashion illustrators — or our friend El Greco — make it nine heads high. Forget about them for now. Forget about short people or infants too. For our classes, seven heads should be the measure. And remember, your task isn’t to copy what’s in front of you. Any camera can do that. It’s to understand what the figure is doing and why it can do it. You learn anatomy to understand what’s beneath the skin. And you don’t express the figure by what it is, but by what it does. It is what it does.

  I was awed by the man because it wasn’t just talk; he also put on a show, starting with the peanut, the shoulders roughed in as a kind of barbell, the hands beginning as mittens, then acquiring startling power. It is what it does, he said, making his own drawings look both easy and impossible, the chalk obeying his commands, providing shape, volume, and power to the figures. He luxuriated in foreshortening, in making the figure seem to leap off his pages. Sometimes he made forms simpler; at other times, he made them more complex, showing unseen muscles, bones, structures, beneath the sheath of skin. Those figures didn’t look like our models; a Hogarth drawing resembled nothing on the earth. But he seemed to be saying that it didn’t matter. The model was where you began, nothing more; the drawing was the result. The model was a collection of facts; the drawing was the truth.

  When that first evening was over, my mind was a roar of words, bodies, drawings. I remember Hogarth saying to the model, Goodnight, Laura, and thank you. She pulled on the smock and fumbled for her cigarettes and left. I went home in a blur of exhaustion and excitement, thinking: My life has changed. Here. Tonight. This morning I was just another fuckup, a high school dropout from Brooklyn. Tonight I became an art student.

  And hey, maybe I was going to be good at it. On the breaks I walked among the other easels. Some drawings were beautiful. Some were pretty good. Some were dreadful. Mine were at least okay. I was the youngest student in the class, but I was better than a lot of them. I thought: I can do this.

  Back in the room beside the Parkview, I looked at the drawings I’d made, tearing up the truly dreadful ones, seeing a progression, an improvement. Lying in bed later in the dark, hearing the trolley move down Prospect Park Southwest for Coney Island, I thought about the model. What did Hogarth call her? Laura. Like the Stan Kenton record. Laura, on the train that is passing through . . . . I wondered if she had a husband or boyfriend or children and what they would think of her sitting naked every night in a roomful of strangers. I wondered what she thought as she held herself still for this group inspection and the only sound was chalk on paper. I wished she would come here to this place in Brooklyn and let me draw her. Slowly and lovingly. Until I got it right. I was tracing the outlines of her body in my mind, her small hard breasts and thickening hips, when I fell asleep.

  So I worked in the Navy Yard days and went to C&I nights. On the weekends, there was drinking, openly in the Parkview or clandestinely in my own room, joined by some of my friends from the Totes. There was one difference. In the fall, I had drunk out of a sour sense of waste and failure. Now I was drinking exuberantly, certain I had earned that right. I felt that I was on my way.

  Hogarth was a great teacher. He had a critical intelligence that could be sardonic but not devastating; I never saw him destroy anybody’s ego or try to establish his own worth by humiliating a kid. At the same time, he set up high standards of excellence and let us know when we weren’t pushing ourselves hard enough. Most of us failed, most of the time. But he encouraged us to try again, and although most of the students wanted to be cartoonists, he always reminded us that there were other options.

  You might become a painter, he said. You might become a sculptor. You might make murals. Just work at the top of your talent and keep pushing past it. And remember: The figure is the key to everything.

  I bought a small composition book and started writing down some of what he said, his phrases, the names of the artists he mentioned. During the week, there was no time to go to museums or galleries; on weekends, the rhythm of the Neighborhood seemed to eat my time — taking my clothes to the laundry, cleaning the apartment, visiting 378, drinking on the Totes or in the Parkview. But I did find time to go to the main library at Grand Army Plaza. In the reference room, where they kept the art books, I looked at pictures by Michelangelo and Rubens, Rembrandt and Caravaggio, Leonardo and Velázquez, Picasso and Matisse. I realized I’d seen many of the paintings and drawings before, in magazines, or in religion books in grammar school, even in advertising; but now they were works made by men, calculated, planned, made by hand, in the same way that Steve Canyon was made by Milton Caniff.

  They call them masters, Hogarth said. But they all started with the figure, with drawing. Among other things, they all understood the principle of contraposition. They understood that all forms become dynamic by moving in opposition to each other. The shoulder moves up, the biceps and triceps move to the front and the back . . .

  I didn’t get everything that Hogarth was saying, but it thrilled me. Drawing wasn’t just God-given, like a voice; it was something that could be learned, it had rules, axioms, formulas. As crude and unfinished as I was, I would get better. All it took was work.

  At night, when I came out of the subway beside the Totes, or stopped for food in the back booths at Lewnes’, my drawings became a hit. Naked broads! Duke Baluta shouted, taking the drawings from my portfolio envelope. The other guys grinned lewdly.

  You mean to tell me, Baluta said, that you sit there looking at this broad, naked, tits out and all — and you don’t get a hard-on?

  Duke, I said, it’s like, I don’t know, you’re so involved in getting the drawing right that —

  That you don’t want to fuck her?

  Uh, I, well —

  See, Duke said, he does want to fuck her!

  No, it’s like it could be apples or pears or something, I told him, my head filling with half-baked Hogarthisms. You’re trying to get the contrapos — the basic form. You want to get to the core of the shape.

  You mean you want to get to the core of her pussy.

  Usually, they all guffawed and I laughed with them. Sometimes, they called over a few of the girls and showed them the drawings and the girls giggled or blushed or got huffy. Some of the girls thought I was weird. Living alone at sixteen. Drawing naked women. In that neighborhood, it was too strange, too dangerous.

  10

  AT SCHOOL, the models changed every week, sometimes from night to night. Laura was gone after a few nights and I didn’t see her around. Then one chilly night, I went out on the break and saw her down the hall, wearing her smock and sandals, smoking her cigarette. I walked toward her, glancing into a painting classroom, and nodded at her. She smiled back.

  You must be cold out here, I said.

  It’s colder in there, she said. Here, I get to wear this.

  Your name is Laura, right?

  Right, she said. She seemed surprised. Cigarette?

  Thanks, I don’t smoke. Would you like a coffee or something?

  She smiled, in an amused way; it was the first time I’d seen her smile and it made her seem younger.

  Sure. After the last bell?

  Okay.

  That wasn’t what I’d meant; I meant that I could go downstairs and get coffee from the machine. Now, somehow, I had a date. Tonight. Dressed in my Navy Yard clothes. Back in class, my heart was thumping. We were drawing from a black male model, but I kept thinking about that last bell. And Laura. Who was she? How old was she? If she asks, how old am I? An artist and a model! Jesus. But what if she’s just playing a game on me? Calm down. She probably won’t show up. She’ll think it over and just come and shake my hand and tell me something came up, she had an appointment she forgot, maybe next week or next term.
/>   But there she was at the end of the last class, waiting for me in the lobby. She was wearing a navy pea jacket, dungarees, a wool cap pulled over her hair, and sneakers. She looked much younger.

  There’s a coffee shop over on Lexington, she said.

  It had begun to snow. Big white flakes fell into Twenty-third Street, turning briefly black against the streetlamps, before melting on the roofs of cars.

  Oh, great! she shouted, in an almost girlish voice. I love snow!

  We sat in a window booth, facing each other and watching the snow falling steadily. She ordered an English muffin and black coffee; so did I (as in so many other things, I followed the lead of those who seemed to know what they were doing). Laura told me that she’d come to New York to be a dancer (and I wondered, When? Before the war?). But dancing hadn’t worked out. She married a photographer who took pictures of radios and refrigerators for catalogs; that didn’t work out either. But before it ended, the photographer introduced her to some painters, and after a while she started painting too.

  The trouble is, there’s maybe twenty thousand painters in New York now, she said. Maybe more. That GI Bill, that made everybody think they could be painters. So it’s hard to make a living. That’s why I model. To make ends meet.

  She smiled in a matter-of-fact way and sipped her coffee and lit another cigarette. I could see her nipples in my mind and her pubic hair and the thickness of her hips.

  How do you feel, I said, with everyone looking at you up there?

  Most of the time, I don’t feel anything. I think about the painting I’m working on. Or the book I’m reading. Or the landlord. Or the laundry.

  She took a deep drag and then smiled, glancing at the snow.

  But to tell the truth, Laura said, sometimes I get hot. I can feel all those eyes on me and I know some of the men must want to fuck me. Maybe some of the women too. And what happens is, I start thinking like them, some kind of transference, I am them, I’m them fucking me, kissing me, pressing against me, licking me; and I get hot. And then I’m afraid I’ll turn a certain way and you’ll see that I’m wet. Do you have a hard-on now?