A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  And Maureen? I made a different set of pictures, conjured another shadow-self. Maybe we’d get married. Not right away. Eventually. When Korea was over or something. She’d come and live with me in my home port, in Hawaii or San Diego, some bright gleaming place far from Brooklyn. Or we’d want until I was discharged. Sure.

  Because I was only seventeen, I needed to be signed into the navy by one of my parents. But when I told them one evening in 378, my mother was horrified.

  They’ll send you to the war, she said.

  Everybody’s going to the war, Mom.

  Buddy Kelly is dead in this war, she said. Buddy Kiernan is dead. Every week, more of them are dead.

  They were in the army, Mom. I’ll be in the navy.

  Can’t you wait a year? Until you’re eighteen? Maybe the war’ll be over by then.

  I don’t want to wait, Mom.

  She shook her head in sorrow and frustration. But my father was looking at me in a different way.

  Don’t listen to her, he said. It’ll be the best thing you ever did. You can learn a trade. It’ll make you a man.

  I don’t understand it, my mother said.

  You’re not a man, Annie.

  And so he signed the papers.

  I was told to report three weeks later, on Monday, September 8, at eight in the morning. The recruiter said I could “strike” for a yeoman rate, which meant I might be able to work as an artist or cartoonist on a ship’s newspaper. There were no guarantees, he said, but since I’d gone to art school, it was possible. This inflamed me even more; with any luck, I could become the Bill Mauldin of the navy!

  A week after signing up, I left the Navy Yard, saying good-bye to the men, who all wished me well. I wrote to C&I, explaining that I wouldn’t be back until I was out of the navy. Then I packed all my things, gave up the room next to the Parkview, and went home to 378. I didn’t show off the nude drawings; I sealed them with Scotch tape into the big portfolio envelopes. I got cardboard boxes from the grocery store and packed my art supplies, comics, and other books, including The Art Spirit. I stacked them all in the woodbin in the cellar, explaining to my brother Tommy that eventually he might send them to me when I was out at sea. He was now at Brooklyn Tech, a brilliant student, with plans to be an engineer. He took the assignment as if it were a sacred duty.

  Then I went on a summer binge, ten days of tearful scenes with Maureen, wild nights at Boop’s, sunburns at Coney. The art school interlude was behind me; I had been reclaimed by the rituals of the Neighborhood. Everything culminated in a going-away party for me and three other young men in a VFW post down by the Venus theater. I arrived with Maureen and we clung to each other through the long evening. Now there was no going back; the papers were signed; my friends were here to say good-bye. The hall was packed, the tables stacked with whiskey and set-ups and pitchers of beer. The jukebox blasted. Maureen and I danced, her small breasts pushing hard against me, her hands tense and sweaty. She said very little, but at some point I made a joke and smiled and she turned away in tears. Her girlfriends came over and hurried her into the ladies room. I downed a cold beer and poured another. Goddammit, Maureen, I’m a man, I thought (incapable of irony or self-mockery); I have to do this because men do these things. When Maureen came back, her eyes were red. I took her hand and we went to dance. Jo Stafford was singing “You Belong to Me.”

  She began to weep again, and I put my arm around her and waved good-bye to my friends and went into the cool autumn air. She lived a few blocks away, and we walked together with my arm around her waist. Suddenly, I didn’t want to go. I wanted to repeal everything: the decision to join, the signing of the papers, the surrender of room and job, the departure from the only school I’d ever loved. And I wanted to take back everything I’d said to Maureen.

  But when we reached her house, huddling on the bottom step out of view of anyone inside, I couldn’t find the right words. There was no going back. Staying would be scarier than going. I kissed her. She cried. So did I.

  Maybe I’ve made some terrible mistake, I said.

  She didn’t answer. I said I’d write every day. She said she would too. I said I’d be home at Christmas. She said she’d see me then. I asked her to wait for me. A light went on inside her house, and she kissed me one final time on the cheek and moved quickly up the steps, opened the front door with a key, and vanished. I stood there for a long moment, wondering if I should go back to the VFW and get roaring drunk.

  Then I started walking home through the Neighborhood, along the parkside and the dark brooding forest beyond the granite walls, past the Totem Poles and the Sanders, down past the shuttered synagogue and the gated armory to Seventh Avenue. The lights were out in most of the apartments. Even at 378. I wondered if any of them were doing what they wanted to do. I wondered if Maureen was asleep. I wondered where Laura was.

  In the morning, I went off to the navy.

  IV

  TO THE GATES OF EDEN

  The Consul had not uttered a single word. It was all an illusion, a whirling cerebral chaos, out of which, at last, at long last, at this very instant, emerged, rounded and complete, order.

  — Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

  the whole pasture looked like our meal

  we didn’t need speedometers

  we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

  — Frank O’Hara, “Animals”

  There are periods and occasions when drinking is in the air, even seems to be a moral necessity.

  — Alfred Kazin, “The Giant Killer”

  1

  DURING my time in the navy, drinking became more deeply ingrained in my nature. If I’d served my apprenticeship in Brooklyn, in the navy I became a journeyman. I learned much about race, sex, the South, literature, music, and all of it was absorbed in a delicious heady delirium of drink.

  During a one-day liberty from boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, I careened around the flesh joints of East Baltimore Street, lusted for a stripper named Tempest Storm, threw up in an alley and laughed about it with my friends in the morning. I received a Dear John letter from Maureen, wrote her anguished letters, came home at Christmas, made a fool of myself over her, joined my father in a winning us-against-them fistfight in Rattigan’s, and was moved to beer-soaked tears when he said afterward, This is my son, Peter, in whom I am well proud.

  Then I was off to Norman, Oklahoma, to airmen’s school (there turned out to be no great demand for yeomen who were high school dropouts). I arrived on the morning of New Year’s Eve and ended up that night in a tough Indian bar where I took a whore’s tits out of her bra under her sweater in a side booth and later followed her upstairs. She was very fat and we drank hootch from an unlabeled bottle. She blew me and I fell asleep and woke up at dawn with the door locked from the outside and my money gone. I had to move a bureau and climb out through the transom and then wandered the frozen streets until I found a bus to take me to the base. Then I was in Jacksonville, Florida, training for a storekeeper’s rate, learning to type, seeing palm trees for the first time, and the southern sun. Eisenhower had been elected, the North Koreans were negotiating, and I would see no war. In Daytona one weekend, I stood on the beach with another sailor, named Stamps, and watched the cars roll by on the hard-packed sand. Two college girls came along in a convertible and Stamps and I leaped into the back seat and then we were in their motel room, drinking beer and fucking them for hours. I was almost eighteen. At night in the enlisted men’s barracks, I longed for Maureen — O wounded vanity! — and in my fantasies was once again in the Tenth Street apartment with Laura tied to an easel.

  From Jacksonville I was sent to Pensacola, to a helicopter training base at Ellyson Field. In the small base library I discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the myth of the Lost Generation. The discovery was set off by a single sentence by Malcolm Cowley in his 1944 introduction to a small compact Viking Portable that contained The Sun Also Rises, excerpts from other novels, and a selection of Hemingway�
��s short stories.

  Going back to Hemingway’s work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be. …

  I was a city boy; I hadn’t seen a brook since Fox Lair Camp, had never fished in any serious way, associated woods with the place where Arnold hid his bottle of wine. But something about that sentence pulled me in: a vision of clarity that was liquid and moving and cool.

  Part of the appeal came from reading it in the heat of Florida. But I had never thought of a writer that way, making words as clear as flowing water. Cowley allowed Hemingway himself to talk:

  All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

  I knew that was true; the stuff of many books already lived in my mind as if it had happened to me. I didn’t remember the bad books.

  And if the Hemingway world of Paris and Pamplona, the slopes of Kilimanjaro and the eddies of the Big Two-Hearted River had nothing concrete to do with my life, Cowley described a part of that world that surely did. The Hemingway heroes had one thing in common.

  They drink early and late; they consume enough beer, wine, anis, grappa and Fundador to put them all into alcoholic wards, if they were ordinary mortals; but drinking seems to have the effect on them of a magic potion.

  Yes! I had sampled that magic potion myself. And Cowley then quoted from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose hero, Robert Jordan, finds that a cup of absinthe

  took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month … of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.

  For weeks I tried to find absinthe in the dirt-floored bars of O Street, and failed. There were other forms of liquid alchemy, and so the lack of absinthe did not matter. I was soon in the Hemingway world, carrying his stoic ethic with me off the base, to sailor bars where drinking was sport, entertainment, clarification, and pleasure. I went on to Cowley’s Exile’s Return, about the Lost Generation that Gertrude Stein had named and Hemingway had made famous, and learned that drinking could be something more than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge fuck you to Authority.

  The writers, artists, and poets of the 1920s, Cowley explained, were faced with one mammoth idiocy of Authority: the mistake called Prohibition. Then, as in my own 1953, right-wingers, bigots, bluenoses, and puritans ruled America. They used goons to break labor unions. Like our current political gangster Joe McCarthy, they sniffed around for people they called subversives, silenced them, jailed them, deported them. If people like that passed a law making it a crime to drink, you had only one choice: to get roaring drunk.

  Cowley led me to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, to the world of bootleggers and speakeasies, and I remembered my father’s friends sitting in the kitchen that time talking about rumrunners. Nothing could have been more romantic. James Cagney lived in that world, in the old movies that kept playing in the Minerva and the Sixteenth Street; so did Bogart and Robinson and Raft. And now Wolfsheim the gambler was there and Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald himself, and Billy Hamill.

  And Billy Hamill’s oldest son too.

  All of them staring across the water at the green light on Daisy’s dock.

  2

  FROM HEMINGWAY, I stole the guise of the stoic drinker, mixing it up with Bogart and some old salts who had come through the war and knew that a helicopter base in the Florida panhandle was Mickey Mouse duty. These men carried deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors (or so I thought), but they taught us that the only unforgivable sin was self-pity. A girl broke your heart? Fuck her. Get another one. Break her heart. You lost a fight? Fuck it. Get up. Wipe off the blood. Have another whiskey and go get him again.

  Most of them knew a lot about life in a concrete way. And they laughed out loud at the oratory of the politicians. That, too, fit in with the codes of Hemingway.

  I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it…. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates….

  That was from A Farewell to Arms, and in that romantic novel, I first came across the notion of a separate peace. In the climax of the drama, Frederic Henry deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country. And from Cowley’s Exile’s Return, I realized that there was another way to make a separate peace: departure. Faced with an America dedicated to sobriety, thrift, puritanism, and commercialism, many Twenties writers and artists became expatriates. I loved that word. The expatriate Fitzgerald went to the Riviera, T. S. Eliot to London, Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico, Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I thought), in countries where food and shelter and drink were cheap and the women were beautiful.

  In my imagination, searching for absinthe among the Hank Williams-Webb Pierce jukeboxes, Paris became the golden city of my imagination. It was so in the 1920s, I thought; it must be so now. I envisioned café tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparnasse, and there, coming in the door of the bal musette, striding right out of The Sun Also Rises, was Lady Brett Ashley.

  She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey….

  Around this time, I first saw Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, and here was Gene Kelly, living on the GI Bill after World War II — that is to say, now — telling me that if you can’t paint in Paris, you might as well marry the boss’s daughter. He had a studio in the Quarter that was smaller than Laura’s, with a bed on pulleys that he raised in the morning to the ceiling, and windows open to the spring air, the Paris rooftops, the cobblestoned streets, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread and, of course, the cafés. Oscar Levant was his best friend, a piano player, and they met each day in the Café Bel Ami. The girl he loved was Leslie Caron. His music was by George Gershwin, full of charm and confidence and bittersweet regret. This wasn’t the Paris of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises. But it was bright and gay and full of painters and music and beautiful women and I wanted it.

  And began to think I might even get it. When I finished with the navy, I too was entitled to the GI Bill, just like Gene Kelly. I could go to Paris and see all the great paintings in the Louvre and read all the writers whose names were scattered through Cowley’s book: Joyce and Pound, Proust and Valéry, Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Why not? I’d find the Café Bel Ami and sit at a table and order Fundador and read little magazines too. And study at the Académie Julien or the Sorbonne. And paint in the street. All night long, I’d discuss with my fellow theologians the canon law of the religion of art. And sample other pleasures.

  The only things that matter, said Gene Kelly, are women and wine.

  And absinthe. Of course.

  3

 
; BUT I DIDN’T GO to Paris. The Korean War ended in a grim stalemate, and a year later the navy ended for me too, and I went back to New York. I found a job as a messenger and then proofreader in the production department of an advertising agency that specialized in industrial accounts. Everybody in the Neighborhood thought I was crazy.

  You got a good job in the Navy Yard, Duke Baluta said. They gotta count your navy time toward your pension too.

  I want to try something else, I said.

  You could be there for life.

  That’s what I’m afraid of.

  Back home, I didn’t go very far. I found a new room, this one next to a synagogue on Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a half block from the library. I was soon going steady with another girl from the Neighborhood, this one named Catherine. I didn’t go back to C&I; there was some problem about the GI Bill. I enrolled instead in evening classes at Pratt Institute, where an English teacher named Tom McMahon looked at my compositions and encouraged me to write. McMahon was a fine teacher with a probing theatrical style. He was an expert on Hemingway, an admirer of Nathanael West and Horace McCoy, a cigarette smoker and wearer of trench coats, and at one point he urged me to try to get into Columbia University, where I could study literature or art. I went up to Morningside Heights and saw the registrar, a bald polished man. He looked at my academic record, such as it was, and suggested in a condescending voice that I consider going to a vocational school.