A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  I hear there is a big need for dental technicians, he said.

  Fuck you, I said, gathered my papers and walked out the door.

  All the way back to Brooklyn from Morningside Heights I kept saying, Fuck you, I’ll do it some other way. Fuck you, I’ll do it anyway.

  I was reading newspapers again, the comics behind me, but enthralled by Jimmy Cannon in the Post’s sports section and by Murray Kempton’s column on the editorial page. After Pensacola, the seven New York newspapers were a gorgeous feast. I no longer wanted to be a cartoonist. But the dream of painting in Paris also began to fade under the gray pressure of earning a living and a feeling of rejection. I wrote to the Sorbonne in Paris. I wrote to the Académie Julien. I never received answers. Fuck you, I said to Paris. Fuck you too.

  Now everyone in the Neighborhood had a television set — even my father — and on summer nights the streets were emptier, as each apartment lit up with a pale blue glow. I still listened to Symphony Sid and got drunk when Charlie Parker died and sneered at the arrival of rock and roll.

  In Brooklyn I felt stalled again. Most of my friends were still in the service; they’d gone in after me and stayed later. My best friend was Tim Lee, a brilliant guy who had boxed in the amateurs at Thomas Aquinas and came home on weekends from his army base in Maryland. In Boop’s or Rattigan’s or the Caton Inn, we talked a lot about going to college, doing something with our lives. Everything seemed possible over a beer. But in 1955, such talk was always interrupted by other matters. In Boop’s, we cheered in September when Archie Moore knocked down Rocky Marciano before getting knocked out himself. We were thrilled when Sugar Ray Robinson ended his amazing comeback in December by knocking out Bobo Olson in two rounds. At the bar there was a lot of talk now about heroin, which was claiming its first victims in the Neighborhood.

  Who brought this shit around anyway? I asked one night in Boop’s.

  The guineas, who else? said Vito Pinto.

  Hey, Vito, Duke Baluta said, you’re a guinea!

  You know who I mean, Vito said.

  Everybody knew, all right. The racket guys from South Brooklyn had started slowly peddling heroin, and now it was coming in a flood. The streets that once had the most drunks — Twelfth Street, Seventh Avenue, Seventeenth Street — now housed the most junkies. The South Brooklyn wise guys did to the Tigers with heroin what they couldn’t do with fists, bats, or guns: wasted them and robbed them of their pride. Seeing that, I was never tempted by hard drugs. But now drinking acquired another quality: it was the normal, healthy, even moral alternative to smack.

  That year, I also started hanging around with a tough funny ironworker named Jack Daugherty. He loved sentimental Irish songs, practical jokes, and fighting. He was the hardest-punching street fighter I ever knew. And soon, in bars and coffee shops all over Brooklyn, we were in fights every night. We fought strangers over change (I had t’ree quarters here when I went to take my piss) or looks (The fuck you lookin’ at, prickface?) or women (Whatta you, own this broad?). Sometimes Tim Lee was there; usually it was Jack and me. I broke my right hand twice and had a stabilizing pin inserted through my knuckles, forcing me for a few weeks to draw with my left. There were wild fights in Bickford’s cafeteria on Ninth Street and wilder ones on the sidewalks outside Nathan’s on Coney Island. I was drinking every day but seldom got drunk and never had hangovers; it was a matter of deep pride in the Neighborhood to be able to hold your drink.

  One night in the Caton Inn, a dark joint on Coney Island Avenue with a huge horseshoe bar, a booming jukebox, and a dance floor, I was drinking with my girl, Catherine. My broken right hand was in a cast. Then a guy grabbed Catherine’s ass on his way to the men’s room and I spun him around and hit him between the eyes with the cast. His head bounced off another guy’s foot, breaking his toe. It became known as The Night Pete Hamill Broke Frank Christie’s Toe with One Punch.

  Catherine was sweet, funny, a drinker, with dark hair cut in a bob, long legs, and smooth skin. All around us, people were getting married, as the men came back from Korea. It was assumed that we would be married too. My father knew her father; she lived two blocks from 378; I was told in a dozen different ways by several dozen grown-ups that there was nothing better than a good neighborhood girl. That year, Catherine went to a lot of baby showers. We went together to some weddings. She didn’t mind my drinking or fighting; that was what men did. She gushed about the drawings I took home from Pratt, giggled at the naked women, but looked blank when I tried to talk about a life as a painter. She didn’t dismiss the subject the way Maureen had; it just didn’t register with her. I could have been discussing the rings of Saturn. We ordered beers. We danced. She laughed at my jokes. We groped each other in the kitchen of her parents’ flat. I went home. Or stopped for a nightcap in a bar.

  One day in the Daily News there was a story about the ongoing demolition of the Third Avenue El. The work crews were moving uptown from the Bowery and were about to reach Fourteenth Street. I felt a pang; a piece of the world I knew was going to disappear. But there was more to it than that. After work, I went down to Tenth Street and Third Avenue, secretly hoping that Laura had seen the same news item and would feel the same pang. A half block from the El, we had pleasured each other on winter nights. I told myself that I wasn’t in love with her; I didn’t even want to take her to bed; I just wanted to see her again and hear from her what had happened. From the Astor Place subway station, I walked slowly east along Tenth Street. At her building, I went into the vestibule and looked at the mailboxes, but someone else was living in the old studio. Then I walked to the corner. Third Avenue felt empty and hollow without the great dark iron structures of the El and the steel growl of the trains. I went into a bar and sat there for a long time, sipping beers, watching the street. But I never saw Laura again. I never saw her name in the art magazines. She wasn’t listed in the directories of American artists. She was gone forever.

  4

  BY EARLY 1956, I began to feel that I was vanishing too. The production manager at the agency had quickly decided I wasn’t what he needed; he was about to fire me. The art director, Ernie Waivada, saved me, out of an excess of Christian pity, and from him I started to acquire some minor skills. I could draw a straight line with a steel T square, for example. I could do simple pasteups and mechanicals. I could “spec” type and do some primitive lettering (taming my cartoony instincts). I knew about repro proofs and photostats and Photo Lettering. I was trusted to black out cut lines on negative photostats, to cut mats, to “gang” various small pieces of art for photostats. I managed to keep the job and was even given a small raise.

  But at night in the dark, alone with myself, graphic design seemed a chilly discipline. It was basically a function of the intellect, and I was still in the sweaty grip of romance, full of Hemingway, reading the poems of García Lorca, soaking up James M. Cain, discovering the drawings of Heinrich Kley, copying George Grosz and Orozco. I still loved drawing human bodies, hair and teeth and flesh. I had much less interest in squares, circles, triangles, or the delicacies of Caslon Bold.

  In the small studio, upstairs from a rug importer on Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, there was another man who came to work three or four days a week. His name was Dave Hills. He was in his sixties, with age freckles on his hands, his back hunched from years bent over drawing boards. He had been the first art director of the agency but now worked as a part-time freelancer on some of the minor work, such as employee newsletters. He had a few peculiar specialities, one of which was lettering that looked like rope. But he never talked about the glories of design. His fundamental medium was the Job. He had started out long ago and come through the Depression and the war; he was happy to be there at all. Then one day he announced that he was going to retire. He was packing up and moving to Mexico.

  Why Mexico, Dave? I asked.

  Oh, I don’t know, he said. I like the people. I like the country. I like the booze. And besides, it’s cheap.

 
At almost the same time, I received a letter from a navy friend who also wanted to be a painter. He enclosed a catalog for a school called Mexico City College, approved for study on the GI Bill, with an art department offering a bachelor of fine arts degree. The language of instruction was English, but there were extensive courses in the Spanish language. Maybe this is our Paris, my friend wrote. And besides, it’s cheap, said Dave Hills.

  Suddenly Mexico cast a voluptuous spell. If a sixty-five-year-old man could pack up and go to Mexico, why couldn’t I? I sent the catalog to my friend Tim Lee, who was still in the army. Maybe, I wrote him, we could go there together. So what if nobody in the Neighborhood ever went to college; why shouldn’t we be the first? And in Mexico! The notion would not go away. In the agency, I was trying to letter a line of copy in Clarendon Bold and suddenly Orozco tore across my mind. I sat at the bar in the Caton Inn with Catherine and imagined hard brown mountains, cactus, distant volcanoes; bandidos out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; pyramids and lost cities; cantinas full of music and tequila and brownskinned women.

  Are you okay? Catherine said.

  Yeah, yeah.

  You’re not drunk?

  No, I’m not drunk.

  I hope you’re not thinking about some other girl.

  No.

  Or one of those naked women from school.

  No. No women. I swear. …

  In February, Tim got out of the army. And we ended up one night at the bar in Boop’s.

  What do you think? I said.

  About what?

  About going to Mexico.

  He laughed out loud.

  You’re nuts, he said.

  I know, I said. But I’m serious.

  He downed a beer, his brow furrowing, and said: Hey, why not? Why fucking not?

  In May, we sent the application forms to Mexico, just to see what would happen. Weeks passed. The Mexico fever ebbed as I assumed that I faced still another rejection. Then, on a Friday, a plump letter trimmed with orange and green arrived in my mailbox. The stamps were from Mexico. I tore it open and discovered that I was accepted. So was Tim. After the cold rejection by Columbia, and the silence of Paris, I was giddy with jubilation and went off to Boop’s to celebrate. They did not have tequila at the bar so I got wrecked on vodka. On Monday, I gave my notice at the agency, telling Ernie Waivada that I would leave in late August. I gave no notice to Catherine. I just couldn’t tell her anything that was not a lie, so I said nothing. To save money for the trip, I took a second job, as a page at NBC, starting at six in the evening and working until one in the morning. That summer, every hour seemed packed with excitement and discovery, as I learned about the world of television while dreaming of Mexico. There was an added benefit: the long hours kept me from facing Catherine.

  Meanwhile, Tim and I applied for U.S. passports and Mexican student visas. The summer raced by. Until the week before we left, none of it seemed real. We didn’t learn any Spanish, except the words for bread (pan), water (agua), and beer (cerveza). Three days before we left, I finally told Catherine. There were tears and scenes. I behaved badly.

  On the last weekend of August, Tim and I went to the Greyhound station and waited for the bus that would take us to Mexico City. I had eighty dollars in my pocket and a bag of sandwiches.

  Pan, I said to myself. Agua. Cerveza.

  5

  THE BUS from Transportes del Norte was climbing slowly, breaching one final ridge as it drove into a gigantic scarlet dawn. Suddenly we could go no higher. And there in the distance, spread out before us in the great valley of Anáhuac, was Mexico City.

  I remember the tumult of the bus station, the air drowned with vowels, and the taxi driver staring at the written address and then driving wildly to the house where we would stay, with a family arranged by the school. The address was Melchor Ocampo 288, an apartment house on the corner of Río Tiber. At the door on the fourth floor, an old woman smiled and nodded, speaking no English; her two homely daughters examined us discreetly and led us to the clean, bright rooms. We unpacked, had soup and rolls, trying to be polite. Pan, I said, agua, adding por favor, and ending with gracias. We bowed. We nodded. We smiled too much. Then we went out in search of cerveza.

  We found a bar three blocks away, where the Mexicans stood on the rail and so did we. Later we learned that they first thought we were making fun of them; they used the rail because the bar was high and they were short. There was a great pot of shrimp soup in the place, and our fellow drinkers laughed as they explained mezcal and the worm at the bottom of the bottle and tried to describe what pulque does to the human brain. That first night, a soldier came in with his girlfriend and placed himself in the doorway leading to the john, which was an open trench with a steel bar upon which you hoisted yourself if you had more to do than urinate. His girlfriend went in to hoist herself on the steel bar and the soldier held his rifle at the ready, glaring at all of us. Nobody said a word. A rifle is a useful guarantor of good manners. Then the woman was through and the soldier nodded gravely and said Buenas noches and they went into the night.

  The bottles of Carta Blanca beer were cold, bien fría, señor, very cold, sir. And from the great jukebox I first heard José Alfredo Jiménez growling his cantina poems and Cuco Sánchez with the harp and the bass guitar singing “La Cama de Piedra”:

  De piedra ha de ser la cama,

  De piedra la cabecera …

  And everyone joining in the mournful line Ay, ay: corazón porque no amas. My heart is broken. Because you don’t love me.

  Dos más, por favor.

  I had grown up in New York and visited Baltimore and Miami and New Orleans. But Mexico City was the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, as we walked in the cool nights along the hard-packed earth of the great wide Paseo de la Reforma. Ash trees climbed high above us. One-peso cabs hugged the curbs. Thick-bodied pigtailed maids met their boyfriends in the shadows and sat on stone benches to listen to the music drifting from the fancy supper clubs. There were elegant office buildings and great Victorian mansions from the days of Porfirio Díaz; cafés on the sidewalks of the Zona Rosa and tiny restaurants where they served octopus in its own ink and shrimp flown in from the Pacific ports. Freshly arrived from the countryside, campesinos in straw hats and white pajamas stared at the great light-bathed statue of the Angel of Independence in the center of the circular glorieta where Río Tiber intersected with the Reforma.

  In the crisp mornings, the air thin and clear at 7500 feet above sea level, we walked seven blocks to the school bus, passing shopkeepers washing their sidewalks, and schoolgirls in uniforms hurrying to class. We bought the sports papers, Esto and Ovaciones, and read about how Floyd Patterson, from Tim’s high school in Brooklyn, had knocked out Archie Moore in five rounds to become at twenty-one the youngest heavyweight champion in history. We were the same age as Floyd; wasn’t everything now possible for us too? We also read about the great Mexican fighters, the bantamweight Ratón Macias, who could box and punch and sell a hundred thousand tickets, or the featherweight Pajarito Moreno, who could punch out a Volkswagen with a right hand and was even the hero of his own comic book, or Toluco López, great macho, wonderful fighter, king of the cantinas.

  The orange school bus moved up past the monument honoring the 1938 nationalization of the petroleum industry into Las Lomas de Chapultepec, where the rich people had their great mansions behind stone walls topped with broken glass. That year in Mexico City, there were only three million citizens and the air was clear. On those crisp mornings we could see the snow-topped volcanoes Popocatéptl and Ixtac-cíhuatl, the first male, the second a sleeping woman, or so we were told, and so we believed. We came out of the Lomas and turned onto the two-lane Toluca highway, still climbing, with deep gorges falling away on either side, and a vast stone quarry way off to the left; until at the sixteenth kilometer we reached the school.

  Mexico City College was a converted country club with the name lettered in deco style over the main archway. I thought,
as I stood there on the first day: I’m here, in Mexico. I did it. I walked on the irregularly patterned stone path into the campus and found the administration office in a cluster of plain red sandstone buildings. Tim and I completed our forms for the Veterans Administration, then he went off to the general studies office and I went in search of the art department. The studios were on the top floor of an ivy-covered concrete structure that also housed the theater and the cafeteria, and as I climbed the stairs I picked up the fragrance of oil and terps. For a moment, I flashed on Laura. Maybe she was here. Painting. Teaching.

  She wasn’t, of course, but a pretty Mexican woman took my papers, checked them against her own list, and told me that all I needed for my first classes was charcoal and newsprint paper. My first class was in the morning. I was in. With any luck, I would stay for three years, learn the painter’s craft, become the first in my family to earn a degree. Here. In Mexico.

  6

  IN THOSE FIRST GLORIOUS MONTHS, I gazed in awe at the work of the Mexican muralists. I looked at the dark, brooding drawings and paintings of the new Mexican artists, led by José Luis Cuevas, who were the enemies of the painted oratory of the muralists. I studied Spanish. Money was always short, the checks from the Veterans Administration slow in arriving. But Carta Blanca was one peso a bottle, the equivalent of eight cents in that time when the peso was a solid 12.50 against the dollar. Bohemia and the dark fermented-looking Dos Equis cost more, but another brand, Don Quijote, was only fifty centavos a bottle, or eighty cents for a case of twenty.

  There was drinking everywhere, and Tim and I were part of it. We went drinking in the small hut across the highway from the school, in the cantinas near where we lived, at weekend student parties all over the city. Those parties bound us together. In some ways, it was like the navy. Everyone was far from home, far from Ohio and Illinois, from states with age limits on drinking, far from inspection by friends or family, all using drink to deal with strangeness and shyness and a variety of fears. At MCC, there were two American men for every American woman, and the sense of male contest gave the parties a tension that occasionally resembled hysteria. The rule was BYOB, bring your own bottle, and in the doors came cases of beer, bottles of tequila, mezcal, pulque, rum. These were 1950s parties, young men and women packing the chosen apartment, dancing, as we said, teeth to teeth, to the music of Benny More and Los Panchos, drinking with little care about food, faces swirling, ashtrays overflowing with butts, hot eyes falling upon asses and tits, tits and asses, until the midnight hour had long passed, and finally the last of the women were gone, and the remnants of the bleary male squadron kept drinking on until the beer ran out and you could see the worm in the bottom of the mezcal bottle and it was time to face the gray dawn.