A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

  That poor little girl, Ramona said, over and over again. That poor little girl …

  Deirdre was still not talking. One Saturday afternoon, she was walking with me on Fourteenth Street and suddenly fell on her bottom. I picked her up, and she looked at me with those brown eyes but didn’t cry. I stood her up and she walked a few more feet and plopped down again. Ramona told me she’d been doing the same thing in the apartment. I was alarmed. The next day, while I went to work at the newspaper, Ramona took Deirdre to St. Vincent’s.

  She called me at the paper, her voice trembling.

  They’re trying to tell me that she’s retarded, Ramona said.

  What?

  Retarded! It must be from that milk in Mexico! From the goddamned salmonella.

  I rushed to the hospital and looked at our little girl. I didn’t believe the analysis. Her eyes were bright. She recognized me. She laughed when I played with her. Ramona and I found another doctor and insisted that more tests be made. That girl, we told each other, is not retarded.

  We were right. There was a chemical imbalance in her brain, possibly brought on by the salmonella. But it could be cured with medication. There was no permanent damage. She was definitely not retarded. It was my time to cry, in thanks, in remorse. When Deirdre did resume talking, it was in complete sentences.

  Through all this time, I managed to do a lot of work: newspaper columns, magazine articles, a first novel. The novel was a thriller. I learned the form without risking an examination of myself. If I was able to function, to get the work done, there was no reason to worry about drinking. It was part of living, one of the rewards.

  But many things were being lost on the erratic journey. A shipment to some foreign place would never arrive, and notebooks, drawings, precious books, would vanish forever. I lost all my apprentice work. I lost my collection of original cartoons. A book of childhood photographs disappeared. I still didn’t realize that I was also losing my way.

  8

  I STARTED writing a column for the Post in October 1965. On the day after Christmas Paul Sann sent me to Vietnam, where in the first week I got drunk with some Marine Corps officers in Da Nang and heard them predict a dirty, bloody, perhaps endless war.

  What can be done to pacify Vietnam? I asked one of them, late at night, with the artillery rumbling in the distance.

  Pave it, he said, and stared at his drink.

  In Vietnam, I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of death. The stoic codes of Hemingway served me better at thirty than they did at eighteen. Maybe Hemingway was an asshole, but he knew something about war and fear. In Vietnam, my only worry was about my daughters: If something happened to me, who would bring them up? Who would get them through school? Ramona would survive, but I fretted about the girls. Sometimes I worried in the same way about Denis. I got rid of these imaginings by drinking on the roof of the Caravelle with the other correspondents, watching the distant orange flashes of the artillery, or by inspecting the pain and fear of uniformed strangers. I wrote often to Ramona, and I had the city desk call her each time a dispatch arrived, to tell her I was all right. I did not mention the bars of Tu Do Street or the long afternoon when I wandered drunkenly into Cholon and two boys bumped me and slipped my watch off my wrist. I did not mention the anxious turmoil in my stomach, the product of the conflict between my aching desire to stay for the duration of the war and my responsibilities as husband and father. I wanted to stay, to make this my war. I did not say this to Ramona.

  Every few days I went out to the killing fields, saw boys dying, heard the anguished screams of the wounded. A tourist at the war. Then I came back to Saigon and wrote my pieces in the room at the hotel and took them down to the post office for shipment to the Post. Afterward, wanting to stay and needing to go, wishing I were single and missing my children, I wandered through the bars of Tu Do Street, listening to Aretha and the Stones, talking to the perfumed women in their tight aodais. They were all very young, but their faces were hardening and they had no stories they were proud to tell. The sensuality of the war, its erotic demands, urged me toward sex with them; but I was afraid of disease, of having my money stolen, of ending up in some humiliating public mess. I got drunk instead.

  When I came home, there was a new outpost in my personal geography. Normand Poirier had discovered a saloon on Christopher Street called the Lion’s Head. In the beginning, the Head had a square three-sided bar, with dart boards on several walls and no jukebox. The location, a few steps from the Sheridan Square station of the Seventh Avenue IRT, was perfect for newspapermen from the Post, the Times, and the Herald Tribune; the Village Voice was then cramped into a few tight rooms upstairs; and within a few weeks of its opening, the joint was a roaring success.

  I don’t think many New York bars ever had such a glorious mixture of newspapermen, painters, musicians, seamen, ex-communists, priests and nuns, athletes, stockbrokers, politicians, and folksingers, bound together in the leveling democracy of drink. On any given night, the Clancy Brothers would take over the large round table in the back room and the place would be loud with “The Leaving of Liverpool” and “Eileen Aroon” and “The West’s Awake.” Everybody joined in the singing, drinking waterfalls of beer, emptying bottles of whiskey, full of laughter and noise and a sense that I can only describe as joy.

  It was as if we’d all been looking for the same Great Good Place and created it here. Not in some foreign land but in the West Village. I was soon one of the regulars, there every night, and sometimes every day. In the growing chaos of the Sixties, the Head became one of the metronomes of my life, as regulating as the deadlines for my column. It was also the place in which everything was forgiven. Lose your job? Betrayed by your wife? Throw up on your shoes? Great: have a drink on us.

  In addition, the Head provided a refuge from the more self-righteous fashions of the Sixties. Few of us did drugs. Not many were true fans of rock and roll. Almost all of us hated the war and despised Lyndon Johnson, but we did not slide off stools to join protest marches. We honored those who did. I covered all the great antiwar demonstrations in Washington and New York; but marching just wasn’t our style. In my columns, I defended “the kids” from the onslaught of cops and FBI men; but nobody from the Head was likely to join SDS or send money to the Black Panthers. I felt I was part of the Sixties and separate from them, sometimes a participant, more often a mere witness. My writing was altered by the fury and despair I saw in the ghetto riots. But it was Vietnam that inflamed the deepest emotions in my work and in the lives of millions. Vietnam was the focus for all public passion, the one great binder of generations. I don’t think any of us hated America; we wanted the war to end because we loved America. We wanted justice and baseball too.

  As the Sixties moved on, as the Head became my local Great Good Place, my marriage to Ramona was disintegrating. Once, in Rome, where I went off each day to try writing in the cafés of the Via Veneto, Ramona had asked me for a divorce. I was, in my invincible stupidity, stunned.

  What do you mean, a divorce?

  I mean I can’t live like this anymore, she said.

  How do you want to live?

  In a house. With a room for each of the girls, with a backyard, with a husband who comes home every night and has dinner.

  I can’t promise you that kind of life, I said.

  I know, she said, and started weeping. I know, I know, I know.

  That small crisis was healed with sweet talk and promises. But I began to imagine a life without her. I didn’t want that; I still believed that we would be together for the rest of our lives. After all, my mother had gone through much worse with my father, and they were still together all these years later. In my erratic way, I tried to be better. I’d come home three evenings in a row, find a baby-sitter, take Ramona to a movie. Then I would miss dinner, call with some excuse about meeting a source or doing an interview, and try to remember the excuse in the morning. By 1967, Ramona was immune to my words.

  You say things, she
said one Sunday morning. You don’t mean them. They’re just words.

  I make a living with words, I said. We eat because of my words. My words pay the rent.

  I mean the words you say to me. Not the words you say in the newspaper.

  Her disdain was clear. As I did after Richie cut into me on the night before I left for Barcelona, I saw the possibility that she was speaking the truth. Instead of accepting that possibility and bringing my life into line with my words, I turned her complaint around. I convinced myself that the problem wasn’t my neglect of her; it was her neglect of me. I would drop into the Head and have strangers praise some column I’d written. Letters about my columns poured into the newspaper. Most days, Paul Sann thought I was doing swell. But when I reached home for dinner, Ramona never said a word. She had stopped reading the Post. Instead of trying to earn her respect, I luxuriated in the delicious emotional state of feeling hurt.

  If my work was ignored at home (I reasoned), then I had a license to go where it was appreciated: the Lion’s Head. Sometimes we hired a baby-sitter and I took Ramona with me; but the combination of drinking, machismo, intellectual bullshitting, and flattery seemed to repel her. She was sober and, after a while, I wasn’t. I remember some very good times; her memories are surely different.

  9

  THERE WAS ONE final move, one last attempt at repair. I heard about an apartment in Brooklyn, a few doors down from 471 Fourteenth Street, the lost sunny paradise of the first six years of my life. Maybe the girls could play under the elm trees as I did so long ago. Maybe we could go on long green summer walks in Prospect Park and in winter I could stand with them in a bright white meadow and together we would eat snow, as I had that time when I was a child. Maybe I could leave behind the life of the Head, the slippery delusions of Manhattan, and begin to make something more solid, back here where I’d begun my life. In our marriage now, we were living on maybe.

  So we moved to Brooklyn, into what was called a parlor floor and basement. On the first day, I led the girls through the iron gate under the stoop and showed them their room to the left and the kitchen beyond it and then took them into the yard. A few doors away was the yard of 471, but when I looked for the great tree of my childhood, it was gone.

  For a while, we were happy. I cut down on drinking, stayed away from the Head, worked hard. The children asked me to tell them stories or draw pictures of alligators and elephants. People came to visit. Jose Torres stopped by once a week to talk about his own writing, which he was doing now for El Diario and then for the Post. My brothers came around, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. We had barbecues in the yard. We drank beer. My father rang the bell on his way to Farrell’s and occasionally I went with him. He didn’t care for Ramona, but he liked the children. They loved him to sing “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” So did the younger crowd at Farrell’s, the fans of Mick Jagger and John Lennon.

  But the Sixties were remorseless in their power. There were drugs everywhere, and my brothers were not immune. When he was sixteen, Denis came by one night and he was stoned. In tears and remorse, he explained that he’d been doing pills and reefer. I arranged for him to go to Ireland and work for a while on a farm owned by Patty Clancy of the Clancy Brothers. Driving him to the airport, I remembered his brown wounded eyes on the day I went to Spain; now those same shy eyes looked at me as he went off to a kind of exile of his own.

  I’ll be good, he said. I’ll make you proud of me.

  I know you will.

  I’ll write you letters.

  Write stories too.

  Off he went. But if Denis saved his life in Ireland, when he returned, his friends were already dying, some in Vietnam, too many from drugs. In 1969, Denis, along with Brian and John, put together a group that was going to the great rock festival in Woodstock. Ramona asked me if she could go with them.

  I need to have some fun, too, she said. You’ve had plenty of fun.

  Where will you stay? Are there hotels or inns?

  I don’t know, she said. I’ll stay where they stay.

  And I stay home with the kids?

  Well, yeah . . .

  Okay, I said. Go ahead. You need some fun too.

  So they all moved off to one of the great hedonistic festivals of the Sixties and I stayed home to mind the girls. They liked this, because I cooked each meal following recipes from a cookbook. I told them stories. I drew a lot of pictures. But while Ramona moved through the rains, drugs, and music of Woodstock, I was thinking about the grieving drizzle at the heart of our marriage. In a way, Ramona was now having the years that she’d lost when she married me at eighteen and had two children very quickly. At night, with the children asleep, I watched the television coverage of Woodstock and imagined her lost in the vast rain-drowned crowd.

  After Woodstock, the sense of unravelment returned to our marriage, more powerfully than ever. She seemed to be moving through a different landscape than the one I inhabited. There were visible signs of it: the music playing steadily, her music, not mine; no answers to my calls from the newspaper; eyes that made no contact. More and more, I cooked dinner while the laundry piled up and beds went unmade. There was an arctic chill in the marriage bed.

  I found consolation once more in the Head. The pattern resumed, the phone calls with excuses, the amiable lies. At the bar, I could believe that my life was a delight. When the talk turned to women, I assumed the mask of the stoic. Sometimes, hurting from hangover, I wondered whether my Lion’s Head friends were really my friends, whether they put up with me because of my personal qualities or because I wrote a newspaper column. The unspoken question was usually dissolved in vodka and laughter. I often got very drunk and then lurched into Sheridan Square to find a taxi that would bring me to Brooklyn, to the street where I was a boy with yellow hair. One time I came home drunk at three in the morning, made a mistake, went up the stoop of the house next door and climbed in the window. Two men were in bed together and started screaming in terror. I thought this was hilarious when I was told about it the next day. But the actual incident doesn’t exist in my memory; all I have is the version of the story told by others. That and the sense of shame that morning after when I tried to imagine what I looked like to those frightened men.

  Ramona and I now had only the common ground of the children. One night, drunk again, I came home, opened the outer gate beneath the stoop and lurched into the inner door, smashing the window. In my hand I had two roses I’d bought from a flower seller in the Lion’s Head, one for Adriene, the other for Deirdre. I stepped over the broken glass and turned left into their bedroom. They’d awakened with the crash and there, suddenly, was their father. Their eyes were wide in fright or apprehension. I handed each of them a rose and told them I loved them. I did — but I’d broken too many things. It was time for me to go.

  When we separated at last, I rented a basement apartment in a friend’s brownstone at the far end of Park Slope. The children could walk along the parkside to visit me; I could easily visit them. We went to Coney Island together, to block parties, to museums, as I played the new role of the Sunday father. The girls were delighted with the attention. They were baffled and confused about the fact that I was no longer living with them.

  When are you coming home, Daddy? Adriene asked one day.

  I don’t know, baby.

  I want you to come home, Daddy.

  We’ll see.

  Almost all our talks ended this way. Deirdre was too young to understand; but Adriene understood very well that something terrible had happened to her life. After dropping them at home, I would walk slowly back to my place, loaded with misery. Sometimes, I walked it off. Other times, I reached for the easy solace of a bar.

  In most ways, I felt an immense relief. It was no longer necessary to concoct lies if I wanted to stay up all night drinking. There were fewer evasions. The strained tension of life with Ramona was replaced with a correct civility. I realized finally that I could no longer escape to that elusive Great Good Place; it
didn’t exist. I did more drinking than ever, sometimes alone, but I felt better about myself in the morning. I started reading fiction again and writing more carefully. At the Lion’s Head now, I even had the freedom to go home with women.

  Then I started an affair with precisely the wrong woman for me. She was lovely, kind, smart, sensual, and rich. She was also a drinker. Soon we were parked together at the bar of the Lion’s Head. We were drinking at a table in Elaine’s (for she was an Uptown Girl). We were drinking at parties or traveling south to drink at some friend’s plantation. We got drunk a lot. And the drinking led to scenes, jealousies, anguished telephone calls, a variety of stupidities, not all of them mine. Doors were slammed. In the purple spirit of melodrama, all sudden departures were made in the dead of night.

  This went on for almost a year. That year, I wrote a movie script that was filmed in Spain. We got drunk a lot in Almería, where all the spaghetti westerns were staged, and one night, coming to the defense of one drunken actor, I knocked out another actor and thought I’d killed him. My Uptown Girl had already gone home. I soon followed her, moved in for a few days, then fled to Brooklyn. There was one final angry night, both of us sodden after two days of drinking. The details are lost. But words were hurled in cruelty. There were curses and tears. And I was gone for good.

  The next afternoon, I was alone in the Lion’s Head, reading the New York Times and sipping beer. I had no column to write and that was usually the best of days. Don Schlenck, the day bartender, was down at the far end, reading the Post and eating lunch. I looked up in the gloomy silence and peered out through the barred windows that opened at ground level to Christopher Street. I could see human legs going by. Two pairs of women’s legs. A man in jeans. A man in a gray suit. A man with a woman. Faceless. Without histories. Hurrying along. And then snow began to fall.