The Harder They Fall

by Gary Stromberg

  Anyway, them people really helped me. It was a nice place, if you like deserts, but I’m not a desert kind of people.

  So this is where I got clean. Period. I made a decision in my head that I wasn’t gonna get caught up in this shit anymore. … That was in December 1989. From there, I was put in a psych ward, still pretty flipped out. While I was there, three croakers [doctors] decided to put me on psych meds. Each one thought the other ones was monitoring me. I was slowly being poisoned. Lithium poison. It’s called diabetes insipid. This was in California, where a lot of people were trying to help me. So eventually I get back to New York and end up seeing some psych-pharmacologist. This guy tells me I’m being poisoned from lithium and he wants to get me off of it. So now I’m off psych meds and I’m starting to flip out again. All this shit keeps piling up on me.

  I’m also with this woman that’s driving me crazy, so I try to throw her out of my pad, but she has extra keys, and when I come home off the road, she’s back in my pad and I’m getting crazier by the minute. Now I’m ready to kill this bitch, but I don’t go back to dope.

  I hang on to praying and doing things these people in rehab taught me to do. I moved into the Carlyle Hotel in New York, so I didn’t have to go to my pad, ’cause I knew I’d kill this woman. I was really getting crazier. I had herbs hanging everywhere and candles burning. The maids wouldn’t clean the room. I had incense burning and all kinds of weird shit. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Even the people that worked for me stayed away because I was so out there.

  I didn’t know I was still flipped out. I was diagnosed as having Tigerette syndrome and being a bisexual polar bear. Every night I’d walk all the way from the goddamn Carlyle Hotel on Eighty-something Street down to below Houston. I’d go to my friend Shane’s joint and hit on this chick that worked there. I’d walk along the river every night. I’d call people on the phone all night long. Anybody I had a number for I’d call. Some people would stay up all night talking to me, and finally they’d say, “I got to go to work.” I’d never let them get a word in the whole time, and they would put up with this crap.

  I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but I knew I wasn’t gonna start using. I had really started flipping out in California. I had did a song for a Walt Disney movie about dalmatian dogs, and I started really flipping out again. I started singing, “You motherfuckers, technicolor, Cecil B. DeMille wannabees” … insulting everybody and everything, telling them this is the city of Saint Francis the Sissy, in the state of fruits and nuts. There ought to be a video of this gig! I’m insulting everybody. I’m just out there!

  I got back to New York and kept doing weird shit. I couldn’t stop cussing. My managers, my shrink, my accountant … everybody was on my case. They had me go back on these psych meds, and I’m still on them today. I don’t flip out no more.

  So from that point on, I started learning how to take better care of myself. At that time, I was weighing about 350 pounds ’cause this bitch that I wanted to kill was feeding me ten tons of food each day. I was close to blowing up! I still had this water retention from being on methadone. I started seeing an acupuncturist and doing all this stuff. I also started seeing this shrink. I was starting to get positive about things. And most important, I was staying clean. It was not no bed from roses. During all this time, I was making records for people, getting dumped from record companies—typical musician stuff. I was still able to work gigs, but I was trying to take better care of me. I’m still not good at it, but my life started to shift.

  Since I’ve been offa narcotics, I just know that that ain’t the way to go. That’s a slow version of self-suicide. Some people it might not affect that way, but I ain’t one of them. I’m proud of the fact that I flipped out twice in recovery without picking up.

  It’s very funny that all of the things my pa told me when I was a kid proved out to be exactly correct. “Kid, if you smoke weed, you’re gonna take goofballs. If you take goofballs, you’re gonna shoot dope.” He always called dope fiends, back in the forties, “junkers.” Junkers. I don’t know where that word came from. There was a lot of things he told me. My pa always approved of me playing, even in these low-down strip joints, ’cause I was with the older guys. He knew they were good musicians and I’d learn how to play music. Ain’t nobody in that crew did anything like try to turn me out. I got turned out on my own. Wasn’t like anybody gave me my wings. Nobody gave me shit. I went out with whatever rebellious stupidity my head was into and I went that-a-way, and I couldn’t get out of it. That was another thing. I heard that from a million people. They’d all say, “Once you’re a dope fiend, you’ll die a dope fiend.” Even I used to say, “Yeah, Daddy, I’m a hope-to-die dope fiend.” There was a dope fiend toast I remember: “To all my dope fiend friends, we’ll be dope fiends till the end.” What the fuck was all that stupid shit about? It’s like all them codes of the street. “Fuck them before they fuck you.” All that dumb shit. And I’d buy into it, ’cause it’s all you need to know in the game.

  When my daughter passed away recently, a guy pulled my coat and asked me, “You know why they call it the game?” I thought about it and said, “No.” And he said, “Because nothing is real. The only thing real in the game is death.” That was pretty profound.

  I feel like I’m blessed now. It beats whatever I had in a million ways. Every day I wake up and you know the first thing I’m grateful for? The ability to take a crap! To make my daily deposit. All them years on methadone, living like a toxic waste dump. Sounds stupid, but to me it ain’t. When you ain’t used the turlet in two months, that’s a big deal.

  You know, anything I tell you is shit I heard from some other motherfucker. I hang on to a lot of stuff. I been around a lot of good people all my life. There was things people told me I didn’t understand till I was clean. You know, getting away from that life-style gave me time to think.

  Deacon Frank’s wife, in the Spiritual Church in New Orleans, told me, “You got to be in season, in order to catch the right season when it come. You got to be in order, all in order.” Now she was passing down words she learned from Mother Catherine. The Book of Ecclesiastic. If it’s your time, you get it, and when you ain’t, you ain’t. Simple.

  Nothing that is, or lives,

  But hath his Quickenings,

  and reprieves.

  —Henry Vaughn

  Pete Hamill

  (writer)

  * * *

  ONE OF THE THINGS I’ve asked myself in determining who I’d like to interview for this book is “Would I like to drink with this guy?” Pete Hamill, an author with enormous range, is a guy I’d most definitely like to have gotten drunk with.

  Throwing back a couple of cold ones in some dark, seedy pub, while we shared stories of the good old days … I can just hear the argument that would have ensued over the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles. For Brooklyn-born Pete, it was a travesty and an act of unforgivable abandonment. For me, a native Angelino, it was joyous. The dream of seeing guys like Koufax, Drysdale, Pee Wee, and The Duke in person was more than I could imagine. We could have easily come to blows over that one.

  Or how about politics, boxing, or women? I’m sure we would have spent hours working our way through those meaty subjects. I’d have bought a round for any guy who loves the fight game as much as Pete does. I know we could have shared a story or three about Muhammad Ali or any number of former champs, arguing their prowess or lack thereof while consuming a few whiskeys and a couple of good cigars at a local fight arena. And how about his knowledge of New York City? I’d try to outdo him with tales of intrigue about L.A., but I’m afraid I’d be no match for him. A restaurant I used to frequent, called Musso and Frank’s, billed itself as “Hollywood’s Oldest Restaurant—Established 1919.” “In New York, that’s considered a new restaurant,” Pete would have chided.

  I’ve been told by the women in my life that I’m a “guy’s guy.” I’ve always taken that as a compliment. Pete would have to rank as one of the great �
��guy’s guys,” and so it was with great appreciation that I conducted this interview.

  I never crashed and burned. I began to deteriorate and had other things I wanted to do. I knew that drinking was the most destructive path for a writer, because it attacks memory. You wake up in the morning and say, “Man, I had a great time last night,” but you don’t remember where you were. It wasn’t that I lost a job or crashed a car and killed two people. I didn’t even drive in those days. Nothing like that happened. In my book [A Drinking Life], I didn’t want to make what was going on with me worse than it was—for the entertainment of readers or for some moral lesson. It wasn’t a moral problem to me; it was a practical problem. I was a writer who wanted to be a better one.

  Working on newspapers and drinking, I could always squeeze enough out of my talent to get into the paper the next day, but the attempts to see what the limits of that talent were couldn’t be determined with drinking. In other words, could I write novels? Could I write movies? Could I write extended essays? I had no idea. I had already written one novel when I was still drinking. A thriller, which helped me figure out the form. It’s like starting with sprints and then saying, “Can I run a marathon?” So it was partly that—my work—but I also had custody of my two daughters at the time, after a divorce. That added a very simple reason: I didn’t want to look like an asshole in front of my kids. There was real responsibility to bringing them up … and not in the context of semi-consciousness! That was a factor too.

  When I got to the end of my drinking life, I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t even like this anymore.” It was reasonably easy to stop. I don’t mean that it was completely easy. It wasn’t like saying, “That’s it. I think I’ll go to the ball game.” It involved certain alterations in the way I lived. I emphasized in my book that it was not about the drinking life, it was about a drinking life. There could be ten thousand other reasons why people drank. This book was about how it got into my life, and how I started to get it out. It was also why I didn’t go to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] or anything like that, although I have great regard for AA. I’ve brought people there, but it wasn’t a thing that I could do. I couldn’t get up there and say, “I’m Pete Hamill, and I’m a drunk.” I couldn’t do it! For whatever reasons—upbringing or personality or whatever.

  It all depends on which way you emerge from this place where you’re lost. Some people climb a tree and look out to see where the hell the road is. If they’re lost in the forest, some people have to retrace their steps to get back. I had to retrace the steps.

  The first year of sobriety was the hardest in terms of readjusting the patterns of my life. Particularly in the newspaper business. And particularly in a world where the Lion’s Head—the great Village saloon in its day—was still alive. This was a world that was still very turbulent with Vietnam and Watergate and the rebellions they helped create. So it took some adjustment. How to walk into a saloon and order—of all goddamn things—a Diet Coke, which I would have laughed at a year earlier. Afterwards, I didn’t have any problems with cravings or anything. I wish I did so I could make it sound like Under the Volcano. But I didn’t. The only problem I encountered was this amazing sweet tooth. I began to eat ice cream and other stuff I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. I had cravings in that way, which was obviously not solely in my brain but in my physiology. “Where’s the sugar?” But I had by then learned that I was going to have to live my life without anesthesia, and that meant accepting the pain along with the laughs.

  As a writer, since I’ve stopped drinking, I published nineteen books. If I kept drinking, I wouldn’t have written as much as I have, and at the highest level I could reach. I’m not suggesting sobriety turned me into Balzac. But it helped me become the best possible Pete Hamill. In a certain way, the sense of renewed, more focused life came from the realities of death. There were a few people whose deaths showed me the consequence of continuing drinking. They were friends. And the consequences were visible. I saw them in my life. I saw them in Brooklyn when I was a kid. People get drunk and fall into a snow pile in winter and get taken out in the morning. It wasn’t that somebody died and I suddenly said, “That’s it, I’m stopping drinking.” It wasn’t like that. I wish it were. It would be a better story. As noted, my decision was based on a combination of factors. I didn’t stop drinking because Buddy Greco was a terrible singer. That was like the way people get divorced because their spouse burns the English muffins. There’s obviously something preceding that kind of moment.

  By the way, I almost never drank while I was working. If I had to write a column or go out and report on something, I didn’t do any drinking till after the work was over. It was a classic repetition of the patterns of my father’s generation of blue-collar Americans. You rewarded yourself with drinking … later. For them it was too physically dangerous to drink on the job. You couldn’t be an iron worker and go up to the thirty-ninth floor with a load on. I think one of the things drunks do, and I was certainly one of them, is find situations in which they feel normal. You know, your friends are all at the bar and it feels normal. You think the whole world is drinking, and it’s not till you stop that you discover it’s mostly sober. I didn’t choose my life on the basis of drinking, but if you go into the Navy as I did, sailors drink. They still do. All you have to do is watch a bunch of sailors on parade. Sailors are expected to be drunk.

  Certainly the newspaper business, when I went into it in 1960, was dominated by guys who had probably started in the last years of Prohibition and then had come through the Depression, where there were all sorts of vestiges of Prohibition, and then into World War II, where the culture of drinking was very much alive.

  In my new book, I talk about the kind of party mentality that prevailed in the Village in the late fifties, when I first set up in Manhattan. It was perfectly normal to go to somebody’s place for a party and find seventy-five people standing around like it was the “D” train. All in various stages of getting loaded. I was at parties where it was perfectly normal to stand there and discuss Krazy Kat, the comic strip, with LeRoi Jones, or explain the affinities of Willie Mays and Fred Astaire, or drink eleven bottles of Rheingold while arguing about Jackson Pollock. You didn’t feel you were doing something daring, or defying the bourgeoisie. It’s how people grew, given the previous twenty-five years of American culture.

  To be Irish American meant living in the same kind of culture of normalcy, even though all the collars were blue. You drank when you came home from work. You drank at weddings. You drank at funerals. You went to wakes and everybody got loaded. It was normal. We had no way of knowing that that’s not the way William Butler Yeats handled himself. Or, God knows, any number of other Irish characters I came to love. It’s hard to imagine getting loaded with Samuel Beckett, although I’m sure he did his share. I came to recognize that, aside from your own physiology and psychology, a lot of this stuff is environmental. It was how you grew up, and where you grew up, and how the larger world taught you the rules. The rules were based on what seemed normal.

  I think of my friend Carl Hiaasen, the wonderful Florida columnist and novelist. I’ve known him for many years. He once went off to do some reporting on the Cayman Islands, and when he came back, I called him up and said, “How was it, Carl?” And he said, “It’s the kind of place where they point out the honest people.” In certain New York neighborhoods when I was young, they pointed out the guys who had “taken the pledge” and didn’t drink. They would remind you sometimes that Hitler didn’t drink either.

  After I stopped drinking, I still kept going to places like the Lion’s Head because that’s where my friends went. I made the ultimate sacrifice: I ate there! Even the owners went out to eat. So I stayed in touch because I loved those guys, and the women too (there was a fairly good percentage of female drinkers at the time in the Village). I was more conscious, so I became, at once, one of their friends and also a kind of spy in the world. I would carry these index cards in my pocket, an
d when I’d hear a good line, I’d retreat to the john and write it down. I couldn’t write it down in front of them. So the world I knew was still feeding the part of my life that was about writing, even though I was detached from it. Writing became more important to me sober.

  I often thought of a line from … I’m almost sure it’s from Henry James, and I’m almost equally sure I’m misquoting it: “To become one of those people upon whom nothing is missed.” I certainly never got there. I missed a lot of things—sober, and still do. But I missed less. Less actually did become more, in that case, in terms of consciousness.

  As far as my friends were concerned, I didn’t become an object of suspicion because I was sober, but probably an object of some mixture of pity and weirdness. The one good thing about the Lion’s Head and some other saloons that were part of the same culture was that all sins were forgiven, except cruelty. So yes, even sobriety was forgiven. If the guy next to you threw up on your shoes, that was forgiven. So was this weird thing where you decided not to drink. I didn’t make any big pronouncement. I said, “I’m laying off the sauce for a month” so it didn’t look like some sort of permanent conversion. The road to Damascus running through Sheridan Square … it wasn’t that. But then it became a habit. They got used to me being sober.

  Something I noted sober was the amazing amount of repetition. One person would tell a tale, and I would have heard it four times before. In that sense, I lost a certain amount of benevolent patience. In a more important way, I realized that we drunks perform our lives instead of live them. You have a tale that once got a laugh. You want the laugh, so you tell the tale. Almost like an actor. That makes life easier. You don’t have to pull something out of your guts. Or think of something new. A lot of what happened in a weird way was a continuation of vaudeville. Which is why I had so much fun. I had an amazing number of laughs, and I learned a lot, in my own drinking years, from old newspapermen. Not just the Lion’s Head, but bars near the old New York Post—newspapermen’s bars. They were serious craftsmen, these people. They would look at the papers, and find your story, and say, “How the fuck could you write that?” And you’d learn something about craft. Even though there might have been more vehemence than you would get at Columbia School of Journalism, it was also a school.