A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  In the fall of 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published by Viking Press, with a glowing review by Gilbert Milstein in the New York Times. I went out and bought a copy, that first hardcover edition with the famous photograph of Kerouac in rough lumberjack shirt and silver crucifix, his eyes brooding, his square fullback’s face unshaven. I read the first sentence on the subway to Brooklyn — I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up — and was carried away. I read in the Village Voice (then three years old and full of surprises) that Kerouac was due in town for a Friday-night jazz-poetry reading at the Village Vanguard. I paid the admission, went downstairs, ordered vodka at the bar, and for almost two hours listened to Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and some other poets. I was thrilled with the flow of words and the counterpoint of jazz, and gazed through the cigarette smoke at the remote women, who all seemed dressed in black, cool as ice sculpture. Kerouac was older than I expected (he was then thirty-five) and punched out with his hands to punctuate his lines. At the end, the audience cheered. I wanted to talk to him, about Mexico and Pensacola and jail and women; but I couldn’t get close to him when it was over; he was engulfed by reporters and photographers and the cool dark women. That year, Jack Kerouac was a star.

  I went back upstairs into Seventh Avenue and wandered east to University Place and eased into the packed bar of the Cedar Street Tavern, where the painters did their drinking. For an hour, I drank beer alone at the bar and listened to an argument over centerfielders. Suddenly Kerouac and his friends came in, shouldering through the door, then merging with the other drinkers, three deep at the bar. Kerouac edged in beside me. He was drunk. He threw some crumpled bills on the bar. I said hello. He looked at me in a suspicious, bleary way and nodded. The others were crowding in, yelling, Jack, Jack, and he was passing beers and whiskeys to them, and Jack, Jack, he bought more, always polite, but his eyes scared, a twitch in his face and a sour smell coming off him in the packed bar that reminded me of the morning odor of my father in the bed at 378. Soon he was ranting about Jesus and nirvana and Moloch and bennies, then lapsing into what sounded like Shakespeare but probably wasn’t, because his friends all laughed. Under the combination of Kerouac and beer, my brain was scrambling. The painters gave him a who-the-fuck-is-this-guy? look. College girls were coming over. A bearded painter bumped him on the way to the bathroom and Corso let out a wail of protest at the ceiling and the bartender looked nervous and soon I was drunk too.

  When I woke up the next day I wrote a poem in Beat cadences, mixing up the Village Vanguard and Brooklyn College and some bad Kenneth Rexroth, and a few days later submitted it (and another) to the Pratt literary magazine. I was astonished when both were accepted. They were my first published writings.

  The confusions deepened. After Mexico, I wanted to have enough money to forget about money and chose graphic design as the way to make a living. But the life of a designer demanded steadiness and clarity, qualities in complete opposition to my image of the wild, free-living, hard-drinking bohemian. Design also required submission to the whole buttoned-down gray-flanneled organization-man strictures of the Fifties. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to accept those tame codes. But in an important way, I used them as a license. Drinking became the medium of my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid rules of a bloodless national ethos.

  I expressed that revolt at huge weekend parties, crowded with students, where cases of beer were jammed into ice-packed bathtubs, and big strapping young women from the Midwest slipped into dark back rooms with various guys, including me. The music pounded, Little Richard meeting Miles Davis, Elvis contending with Coltrane, while the half-digested words of painter-guru Hans Hofmann collided with the lyrics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were wild nights in Manhattan too, stops at The Cedars or the Five Spot, with complete strangers saying, Let’s go, man, big party right up the street. And they were right: hard loud whiskey drinking beer-swilling parties were part of every New York weekend. I remember being at two big parties at The Club on Eighth Street, where I first saw Helen Frankenthaler, beautiful in a camel’s-hair coat, de Kooning and Kline cracking wise to each other, women grabbing men by the balls while dancing, men dancing with men and women kissing women. I was at another party in the packed sweaty railroad flat that belonged to the poet LeRoi Jones, who had started publishing a little magazine called Yugen and talked to me in a smoky hallway about Krazy Kat. I spent one glorious night drinking at The Cedars with Franz Kline, talking about women and cartoonists and London art schools. He took three of us to his studio at four in the morning, where he showed us his big new paintings, which were in color. He looked sad and fatalistic when he told us that the dealers hated them. They wanted him to keep doing “Franz Klines,” in his trademarked black and white. I thought: Just like executives at some big company dictating to a man from the advertising agency.

  That night, I backed up a few feet from the bohemian ideal. Kline, Pollock, de Kooning all had starved for twenty years before selling any paintings. And here was Kline, at the peak of his fame, worried that the galleries would stop taking the pictures he wanted to make. What if I spent twenty years and nobody ever bought a painting? I thought of Laura’s bitterness, posing nude to pay rent, then vanishing into obscurity. I knew from Brooklyn that poverty wasn’t noble; it was a humiliation. If I chose the freedom of the painter’s life, who would pay the bills? I suddenly understood that I wasn’t painting because I was afraid to discover that I had no talent. If I had no talent, I would starve.

  That was the late 1950s for me. Torn between the desire for personal freedom and the need for a proud security, I postponed the choice. I drank a lot. I got laid a lot. In most of the minor ways, I had a very good time.

  11

  MUCH OF MY MEMORY of those years is blurred, because drinking was now slicing holes in my consciousness. I never thought of myself as a drunk; I was, I thought, like many others — a drinker. I certainly didn’t think I was an alcoholic. But I was already having trouble on the morning after remembering the details of the night before. It didn’t seem to matter; everybody else was doing the same thing. We made little jokes about having a great time last night — I think. And we’d begun to reach for the hair of the dog.

  To save money, I began sharing my seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment with Jake Conaboy and Bill Powers, friends from the Neighborhood. Jake talked about becoming an actor, Billy also wanted to be a painter, and was studying at Pratt. At some point, Richie Kelly came over too, took a flat next door, enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, and began training as an illustrator. Drinking cases of beer, we talked passionately about art, movies, women; we read Pound, Eliot, Camus. We took our own paths through the city but always ended up at the flat on Ninth Street and Second Avenue, in the heart of the Ukrainian blocks of the Lower East Side. And we threw our own parties, mixing together people from the Neighborhood, Pratt, and our jobs. They were noisy, sweating, roaring affairs, full of music, dancing, and booze. In the mornings after, we had to call people to find out what we’d done. For a while, I was going out with a beautiful slender Dominican girl who was saddened in equal proportions by an early divorce and the smallness of her breasts. Jake started going with her sister. We laughed so hard on some nights that my body ached; today I can’t remember a single line that was said.

  At some point after Tim Lee returned from Mexico, with a degree in philosophy, Billy found his own apartment and Tim took his place in the third bedroom. A few weeks later, Tom McMahon, my English teacher from Pratt, came home from England, where he’d taken a degree at Oxford. He soon had us organized into a weekly study group. Under McMahon’s direction, we went through Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; a number of stories in Understanding Fiction, an anthology-textbook edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, parts of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading; George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” We spent weeks reading and analyzing Arist
otle’s Ethics. All of us joined in, making jokes, sipping beers, smoking too many cigarettes. McMahon had a tough, unsatisfied intelligence; he was brilliant in seeing the stylistic surface of a piece of writing but he also challenged every sentimentality, every glib remark, and insisted that we dig and dig until we’d discovered the moral core of the work. Every session left a permanent mark on my own later writing. McMahon truly taught me how to read. No small thing.

  Reading drew me deeper into writing, but I showed almost nobody my own Hemingwayesque short stories, Orwellian essays, Kerouackian poems. Surely they couldn’t survive the scrutiny we were applying to Hemingway or Orwell, and McMahon made clear his contempt for the rambling formless style of the Beats. So I practiced writing as a secret vice and kept working as an apprentice designer. I had money now for oil and canvas, but I did no painting at all.

  A droll, balding artist’s agent named Tom Fortune used to come around to the agency, trying to sell the work of his illustrators. One day he asked me if I did any freelancing. No, I said, but I could use the money. Did I think I could handle the layout and pasteups for a magazine?

  What kind of magazine? I asked.

  Well, Fortune said, it’s a little unusual.

  What do you mean, unusual?

  It’s in Greek.

  Within a few weeks I had my first freelance client, a Greek magazine called Atlantis. The office was on Twenty-third Street off Tenth Avenue. The editor was an enthusiastic young guy named Jimmy Vlasto, whose father, Solon G. Vlasto, was publisher of the magazine and a daily newspaper of the same name. Obviously, I couldn’t read Greek, but neither could Jimmy. We had a great time together, laying out stories about Melina Mercouri or holidays on Mykonos, hoping that the leftover text jumped into the correct place in the back of the book. Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t. And at some point I suggested to Jimmy that maybe we should start running some articles in English.

  At least we can have something to read in the magazine, I said. At least the fucking jumps will be in the right place.

  Why not? Jimmy said. The old man’ll go nuts but what the hell.

  I had been following the career of a sensational young middleweight named Jose Torres. He’d won a silver medal in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, had won a number of Golden Gloves, AAU, and All-Army championships, and after seven victories in seven pro fights, he was the new hero of the city’s growing Puerto Rican population. He was managed by Cus D’Amato and trained in the Gramercy Gym, five blocks from where I lived on Ninth Street. At a bar near the magazine, I said to Jimmy Vlasto that I’d love to write about Torres. Jimmy was also a fight fan. Go ahead, he said.

  A few days later, I found Torres at the gym. Almost immediately, we became friends. He was not only a great boxer but one of the smartest people I’d ever met. I hung around with him, did some interviews, then went home and wrote the article. I needed three days to get it right, and with anxious heart I delivered it the following week to Jimmy Vlasto. I sat in a tattered easy chair while Jimmy read the piece. When he was finished, he smiled.

  I love this, he said, his voice surprised. Fuck! Let’s run it!

  Great.

  But listen, he said, I can only pay you twenty-five bucks.

  I’ll take it, I said.

  That was it. I was a professional writer. Billy Powers took some photographs, I laid out the pages, and ten days later my first journalism was in print. I was runny with excitement. But when I went to Twenty-third Street to pick up copies of the issue, a glum Jimmy told me that his father wanted to see both of us in his office. We went upstairs to the wood-paneled room with its muted lamps and photographs of Solon G. Vlasto in the company of presidents and archbishops. The old man stared at the two of us from behind his immense desk.

  Let me ask you something, he said, in his thick Greek accent.

  Silence. Then his eyes flashed.

  How come, he said, in a Grik magazine, is a story about a Puerto Rican boxer, written by an Irish guy, in English?

  A pause.

  And then Jimmy burst out with an immortal line: The young Greeks love him!

  Mr. Vlasto looked at us in a deadpan way, thought about this, looked suddenly as if he understood that the world was passing him by, and then sighed.

  Next time, he said, find a Grik boxer.

  Then, dismissing us, he leaned forward to examine a sheet covered with the logic of numbers.

  12

  THROUGH ALL OF this time, I was devouring newspapers. There were still seven of them in New York then, and I read them all, like a predator. My favorite was the Post. Convinced by my work for Atlantis that I had some talent as a writer, I wrote a few letters to the editor, and two of them were printed. One of them took up the entire letters section, a long screed about “my generation,” and for a week there were letters of reaction. This got me on some obscure radio show, which led to an invitation to appear on the “Long John Nebel Show,” then the biggest thing on all-night radio. Nebel liked me and kept inviting me back to his freeform discussion of Martians, politics, extraterrestrials, comics, and the Beats. I kept writing letters to the editor of the Post.

  Meanwhile, I was earning more money. I left the agency to open a studio with a partner across the street from the Art Brown art supply store on West Forty-sixth Street. I thought this would give me freedom, the sense of being my own man. But the harder I worked, the more letterheads I designed, the more business cards and employee publications I pasted up, the more I felt trapped. I had an obligation to my partner to pay my share of the studio expenses. My work was getting better, which brought me more work, and longer hours. The office building was deserted and forbidding at night, so I pitched a drawing table in the kitchen of the flat on Ninth Street and often worked until dawn, pasting up catalogs and listening to Symphony Sid on the radio, with the volume turned down so the other guys could sleep. On some nights, Coltrane sounded like an accusation: Why are you doing that work when you could be as free as I am?

  Those long grinding hours entitled me to a reward. Of course. On weekends, or on nights when I was not making mechanicals for a doll catalog or designing an ad for a machine operator, I went drinking. Sometimes I was with my Dominican flaquita. Sometimes with Tim, Jake, and Billy. Sometimes alone. I had money in my pocket, cash I’d earned with hard hours. In the downtown bars, in joints like Birdland, I could afford any drink in the house.

  We were in the roaring midst of a New Year’s Eve party on Ninth Street when someone arrived with great news.

  It’s over! Castro wins! Batista left Havana.

  You’re shitting me, Jake said.

  No, man, it’s on the radio.

  We turned on the radio and the news was true. The bearded young revolutionary had triumphed over the cruel dictator. His army was moving down from the Sierra Maestra in triumph. All night long, we played charangas by Orquesta Aragón and listened to bulletins and drank beer and talked bad Spanish and cheered for Fidel. Nobody knew that he was a communist. He was young, from our time. He hadn’t just talked about change, he’d done something. Faced with grinding oppression and a lack of freedom, Fidel had picked up a rifle and gone to the mountains. We cheered because we thought the good guys had won. After a while, I took my Dominican girl next door to a friend’s small apartment and fucked her wildly, the two of us yelling together in the revolutionary solidarity of Spanish. Then we went back to the party and danced some more, full of exultation, beer, and joy. Later, when the party was over, Jake went off with one woman and Tim with another. I was alone with La Dominicana again. We made love then in my own bed. The morning arrived, as gray as hangover. I wished we could wake up in Havana.

  More than ever, as Jack Kennedy made his great run for the presidency, I was reading the political columns in the newspapers, particularly in the Post. Since it had published several of my letters, I thought of the Post as my newspaper. In the late spring of 1960, Jimmy Wechsler, the paper’s editor, published a book called Reflections of an Angry Middle Aged
Editor. The book was a kind of situation report on American society after the fall of McCarthy; it was sometimes despairing, about race and class, but otherwise full of hope. I read it through in one night and then typed a long letter to Wechsler, agreeing with most of what he’d written, arguing with some of his remarks, singling out a chapter on journalism for my hardest criticism, implying that newspapers had no room for people like me. Working-class people. People who didn’t go to Ivy League schools, young men rejected by places like Columbia. Such people, I said, might not have great formal educations but they knew about New York, the world, life. I worked hard on the letter, making three drafts. I didn’t think of it as a job application. That’s what it turned out to be.

  A week later, a brief note arrived from Wechsler. He said he’d enjoyed my letter and agreed with about 90 percent of what I’d said. Why didn’t I give him a call sometime and come down to the paper for a chat?

  His secretary set up an appointment for a few days later at the Post. I told Tim and Jake and tried to be casual about it, but for the next few nights I had trouble sleeping. My mind was full of images from newspaper movies, all those tough fast-talking men in tumultuous city rooms, causing trouble, being brave: Bogart pressing the button to start the presses at the end of Deadline U.S.A., Robert Mitchum moving through fog in a trench coat, Gregory Peck in a glorious apartment in Rome, riding with Eddie Albert to an assignment. Hemingway was there too, of course. He’d started as reporter in Kansas City, without ever going to college. He’d put a reporter named Jake Barnes into The Sun Also Rises, his best novel. I couldn’t imagine him writing a novel about a graphic designer.