Pete Hamill - Piecework

“Full of the passions, action, opinions, and excesses one would expect from a man moving through all the journalistic hot spots of the last quarter century… The best of the book is flamboyant, fierce, and funny.”

— Philadelphia Inquirer

“Rock-solid… Hamill has a great eye and ear for detail and nuance, and the talent to evoke a real sense of places that no longer exist, especially the New York City of his childhood.”

— Chicago Tribune

“Acute. Candid. Courageous. Eloquent. Humane… Hamill’s best may be the best of the genre.”

— San Antonio Express

“A tour through the most frightening and fascinating decades of our lifetime, by a guide who has been in the front of the bus all the way… Nearly all of Hamill’s ruminations on the dark edges of society are as fresh as tomorrow’s headlines.”

— Virginian-Pilot

“Hamill takes the mundane and the great, spins them through his psyche, and delivers absolute poetry of the streets… Without so much as an adjective or adverb, Hamill puts you where he is, right at the table (or under it), club-crawling with Frank Sinatra, arguing with Mike Tyson, or (verbally) dissecting Madonna.”

— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Hamill has been writing for more than thirty years. Yet he retains a passion, a curiosity, a disgust for injustice that keeps his writing fresh and his spirit young. He delivers pieces of the world in thousand-word chunks that sound like truth, well-told; that inform and nourish. That, nothing else, is the standard measure of Piecework.”

— Buffalo News

NOVELS

A Killing for Christ

The Gift

Dirty Laundry

Flesh and Blood

The Deadly Piece

The Guns of Heaven

Loving Women

Snow in August

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

The Invisible City

Tokyo Sketches

JOURNALISM

Irrational Ravings

Piecework

MEMOIR

A Drinking Life

Acclaim for Pete Hamill’s Piecework

Books by Pete Hamill

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: THE CITIES OF NEW YORK

The Lost City

The Secret City

On the Street/I

God Is in the Details

On the Street / 2

Bridge of Dreams

Spaldeen Summers

City of the Damned

PART II: THE LAWLESS DECADES

Notes from Underground

White Line Fever

The Last Mob Guy

On the Run

Crack and the Box

Facing Up to Drugs

PART III: MEXICO

City of Palaces

City of Calamity

Under Lowry’s Volcano

In Zapata Country

El Nobel

In Puerto Vallarta

The Tortilla Curtain

PART IV: OUT THERE

Vietnam, Vietnam

Ireland

Lebanon

Nicaragua

Prague

PART V: TALENT IN THE ROO

JFK

Sinatra

Gleason

Franz

Keith

Cus

Tyson

Madonna

Fosse

PART VI: POSITIO PAPERS

Black and White at Brown

The New Race Hustle

A Confederacy of Complainers

Letter to a Black Friend

The New Victorians

Endgame

PART VII ROLLING THE DICE

52

Reprieve

As a writer for newspapers and magazines, I’ve been blessed by good editors. I’ve acknowledged elsewhere the inspiring influence of Paul Sann, who in my mind will always be the editor of the New York Post. At that newspaper, I was also guided by Fred McMorrow, Al Davis, Joe Rabinowitz, and Bob Friedman. At the New York Daily News, the late Sid Penner edited my columns with a master’s precision, while Pucci Meyer refined and clarified the longer articles and short stories I wrote for that newspaper’s Sunday magazine. At the Village Voice, Karen Durbin, Tom Morgan, and, later, Don Guttenplan were all fine editors of my pieces. At Esquire, Dave Hirshey has been ingenious at anticipating themes and stories that would remain fresh in spite of that magazine’s long lead time.

Early on, I learned many things about craft from Jack Nessel, Clay Felker, and Milton Glaser, when they worked together at New York magazine. Nessel placed his loupe upon my texts (and those of others) and with humor and patience worked only to make them better. Felker was always bursting with ideas and discoveries and enthusiasms, but Glaser edited Felker; listening to their debates was essential to my education. Under a later regime at New York, I was fortunate to be edited by Peter Herbst and Dick Babcock; they maintained the high standards established by the founding editors.

In a long, varied career, there were many others: Steve Gelman, Ray Robinson, Bill Ewald, Don McKinney, Seymour Krim, Wayne Lawson, Myra Appleton, Barry Golson, Peter Moore, Harvey Shapiro, George Walsh, Richard Kluger, Linda Perney, Jeff Schaire, Peter Biskind, Harriet Fier, and, in a later enlistment at the New York Post, Jerry Nachman, Richard Gooding, Eric Fettman, John Cotter, and Lou Colasuonno. Even brief encounters with their skills have added to my craft. Directly or indirectly, their work is in this book too.

But across the years, one magazine editor has provided a special kind of continuity. Ed Kosner was assistant night city editor at the New York Post on my first night in the city room. He edited my first piece of copy. Later, as editor of New York magazine for twelve years, he assigned many of the articles in this book. A lifetime has passed, and we’re still working together, now at Esquire, where Kosner is the editor. Hundreds of thousands of my words have come under his pencil. With his efficiency, clarity, and intelligence, he has always helped make them better. We communicate in a kind of intellectual shorthand, a few words here, a note there, and then back to the typewriter or computer. In a trade populated by prima donnas, we’ve never exchanged a harsh word. More important, we’re friends. Un abrazo, Eduardo.

For thirty-five years now, I have worked at the writing trade. Writing has fed me, housed me, educated my children. Writing has allowed me to travel the world and has provided me with a ringside seat at some of America’s biggest, most awful shows. Writing has permitted me to celebrate and embrace many public glories and to explore the darkest side of my own personality. Writing is so entwined with my being that I can’t imagine a life without it.

Usually, I work every day, seven days a week, at the tradesman’s last. When I go three days without writing, my body aches with anxiety, my mood is irritable, my night dreams grow wild with unconscious invention. Because I write fiction and journalism, I follow no set routine. Struggling with a novel, I’ve spent months at my desk, a bore to those who live with me. But when laboring at journalism, the days are more jagged, the hours broken by telephone calls, interviews, research in libraries or newspaper morgues. The desk has its attractions, but I’ve also worked in parked cars, in a hotel lobby where the air burned with tear gas, in a tent under a mortar attack. In my drinking days, I wrote in the back rooms of bars, too. I’ve written longhand on yellow pads and restaurant menus. Feeding coins into a pay phone, I’ve dictated complete paragraphs from scribbled notes. I started with manual typewriters and now use a computer. The work does not get easier.