Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

In all the pulp stories, the dark glamour of the scene revolved around drinking. The men met the women in bars. The whiskey was always warm when it went down. Lights were always dim, the jukebox muted, the bartenders sympathetic. Alone, or with women, the heroes always ended up buying a bottle to bring back with them to the hotel. I began to imagine myself in those pulp magazine bars, far from my father’s mundane neighborhood saloons. I put the money down and ordered my whiskey and then the girl came in, out of the rain or out of the fog or out of the past. Sometimes she wanted money. Sometimes she wanted help. Sometimes she wanted sex. I was ready to give her all three. In my reveries, I always bought her a drink, just the way the tough guys did, and after a while I paid for a bottle of rotgut (as they always called it) and took her and the bottle back to the brass bed with the hard mattress. That was life. That was how I would live too.

In the pulps on sale at Sanew’s, or among the used copies sold in the stores where I once bought comic books, I began to notice the names of the pulp writers: John D. MacDonald, Frank Gruber, Cornell Woolrich. And I started copying paragraphs from their stories into notebooks, particularly from MacDonald, who described places and people in a style that always felt right. At first I thought I would use these paragraphs as text blocks for my sample comic strips. I’d heard from Jim Brady that to get any kind of work you needed to bring samples to the comic book publishers or newspaper syndicates. The pulp texts would make my pages look more professional.

But copying took too much time and I started writing my own texts. I liked inventing names and characters and plots (most of them out of the memory of the stories I’d read). The people did what I wanted them to do and said what I made them say. It was like a magic trick. In some ways, writing stories was easier than trying to do comics; I didn’t need to draw the details of a gun; I just had to say the word “gun.” I began to think about pulp stories in bed, on the subway, in class.

Soon I had a major problem at Regis. For an English composition assignment, I invented a pulp story about a man who murders his neighbor and buries him in the backyard, only to be discovered when the grass won’t grow above the buried body. There was no detective, no hero. Only a passing cop who gets suspicious. I slaved over the story, lettering each page in a composition book and adding illustrations that were drawn on separate sheets of bond paper and pasted into place. I used 435 Thirteenth Street as the house. I improved the backyard, giving it grass and flowers instead of clay. I picked names I knew: Nocero and Taylor. And that’s how I got into trouble. Nocero was the name of the man who was killed and buried. I named the murderer Chuck Taylor. Not Noona Taylor, but Chuck. The principal of Regis was the Rev. Charles Taylor, S.J.

I handed in the story, proud of what I’d done, sure that the English teacher would get the joke. He would smile in a sly way (I thought) and praise me for the work I’d done; this wasn’t another of those idiotic compositions about “My Trip To Albany.” If he got the joke, he didn’t appreciate it. A few days later, he handed back the graded compositions. Inside the hand-drawn cover, on the title page (“Seeds of Death”), he had marked a large F and scribbled beneath it, Sophomoric contempt for authority. At the end of class, while the others filed out, he told me to remain in my seat. I still held my book in my hand, but now it felt like something dirty.

You must think you’re a wise guy, he said.

No, sir.

Only a wise guy would do this.

I said nothing.

And in this world, there is no room for wise guys. They cause trouble. For everybody. For themselves.

He stared at me. I looked at the cover of my book and the lettering of the title. I hoped that he would now forgive me. He didn’t.

Come with me, Mister Hamill.

I followed him down the corridors to the principal’s office. The English teacher opened the door, nodded, and then went away. The Rev. Charles Taylor was waiting for me, seated behind his desk. He did not get up. He made a little steeple with his fingers.

Is that the famous book? he said in a chilly voice.

Yes, Father.

He reached across the desk and took it from me. He stared at the cover, the words “Seeds of Death,” then at the text. He began reading it. I waited, afraid to breathe. He read to the end. He closed the book and stared at the cover for a long moment. Then his chilly eyes fell upon me.

You’re not happy at Regis, are you, Mister Hamill.

I shrugged. Yes, sir. I mean, no sir. I mean — It’s all right, it’s hard work sometimes, but. .

My words dribbled away. I looked at crosses on the wall, pictures of saints, some leather-bound missals.

There is nothing keeping you here, young man, he said. If you feel you aren’t up to the work, to our standards, to our disciplines, then you are, of course, free to go elsewhere.

He bit off the words.

Your other grades are low. You’re failing plane geometry.

It’s hard, Father. I have a job after school. I have —

You have time to … to do this, though, don’t you? It must have taken many hours, making these drawings, doing this lettering.

Yes, sir.

He was quiet for a beat. Then:

I’m placing you on probation. If your grades improve, you’ll have no problems. If not …

He let the alternative hang in the air, unspoken. Then he looked back at my book. On one page, I had drawn a portrait of Chuck Taylor, his name carefully lettered at the side. He stopped and then looked up.

Is that what I look like? he said.

No, sir.

He handed me the book.

Actually, it’s not a bad likeness. You’ve got the nose. You’ve got the nose.

I left in a daze. He’d told me I was on the brink of flunking out of Regis. But I did get his nose right.

THE GIRL’S NAME was Jenny. She had a long face framed by long brown hair. Her nose was long too, and she was self-conscious about it. I hate this nose, she said to me one night. I wish I could cut it off. Her brown eyes were among the saddest I’ve ever seen. In that dark snowy winter of 1950–51, I fell in love with her.

I’m too old for you, she said. I’m seventeen.

I’ll be sixteen in June, I said. A year doesn’t matter that much, does it?

To some people it does, she said.

Does it matter to you?

No.

I met her in the back booth of a soda fountain named Steven’s, which was just off the corner of Ninth Street on Seventh Avenue. There was a big modern jukebox against a wall, packed with 45 rpm records instead of the old 78s that you still saw in the bars of the Neighborhood. Here, Nat Cole was singing “Mona Lisa,” Teresa Brewer was belting out “Music, Music, Music,” Don Cornell was telling us that it wasn’t fair for him to love her, and Frankie Laine was proclaiming loudly that he was gonna live ’til he died. There were some old songs too, from all the way back in 1949: Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “Lucky Old Sun” and Vaughan Monroe’s evocation of those ghost riders in the sky. That night, I came into Steven’s with someone else, who knew the girl sitting with Jenny. We sat down and stayed for two hours. I walked Jenny home to a house on Tenth Street. She smiled goodnight in a tentative way and hurried into the vestibule. I went back to Steven’s the next night and she was there again and I walked her home again and asked her to go to a movie.

That Friday night we went to Loew’s Metropolitan and saw In a Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. I loved that movie. Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter who has been assigned to make a script from a terrible best-selling book. This depresses him and he goes to a bar to get rid of his depression by getting drunk. He starts talking to a hatcheck girl, who tells Bogart that she has read the book. He invites her back to his apartment so that she can tell him the story. That way, he won’t have to read it himself. It wasn’t clear what else he had in mind, but I could make it up. Drinks, a small apartment, sex. The next day, the hatcheck girl is found murdered and the cops come looking for Bogart …