Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

I remember talking all the way home about this amazing movie. Did Jenny think the story had anything to do with all this anticommunist stuff? You know, the way people were being ruined by rumors? Wasn’t that what it meant? Jenny looked at me as if I were nuts.

Come on, she said, it’s just a movie about this guy who drinks too much and beats people up.

No, no, I insisted. It’s about more than that.

She smiled at me and her eyes grew sadder.

You’re weird, she said.

In the weeks that followed, during that cold winter, I became a regular at Steven’s, seeing almost nothing of my friends on the Totes. I was going with Jenny.

On those first dates, the Good Boy dominated the Bad Guy. I was polite. That is, I didn’t grab her tits as soon as we sat down. With the older guys now gone to the war, we younger boys were taking their place; the seventeen-year-old girls had no nineteen-year-old boys to take them into the nights. Suddenly, there was an aura of seriousness about most of us: guys disappearing for days with their girls, saying nothing about what they did or bragging too loudly when next they showed up on the Totes. I sat alone with Jenny in the booths, talking, listening to the jukebox: Tony Martin’s “There’s No Tomorrow” and “La Vie en Rose” and the Weavers singing “Goodnight, Irene.” On that jukebox, there were also two glorious celebrations of drinking: a Wynonie Harris shouting blues, “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me,” and a tune called “Cigarees and Whuskey and Wild, Wild Women.” I played them as if they were anthems.

Within weeks, Jenny and I were going steady. This was a formal condition, like being engaged, or even being married. I asked her to go steady right after Christmas, coming home from a party. All the way home, I held her close to me; she was wearing a long brown coat with a curlicued design sewn on the back at her waist. I was sure I loved her, even though I knew virtually nothing about her, except that she lived with her mother in a small apartment on Tenth Street near Sixth Avenue. In the time we were together, I never once saw her mother.

You don’t have any brothers or sisters? I asked her one freezing night as we sat on a bench beside the park.

No. It’s just me and my mother. She’s a nurse down at Cumberland.

And your father?

She shook her head and looked away.

I’m sorry, I said. Is he, uh, dead?

No, she said. He just went away.

That’s too bad, I said, thinking: Maybe she’s better off.

Yeah, she said. It’s too bad.

She started to cry and I hugged her and kissed her neck and her hair. She was the first girl who made me feel protective, the first who provoked in me the treacherous entanglement of pity with love. All that winter, in doorways, rooftops, park benches, we kissed and talked and talked and kissed, holding each other to keep warm. She said she loved me, but her eyes remained very sad; it was as if she could see some awful future. I started buying beer at the grocery store, telling Jack it was for my father, and Jenny and I would drink together on the parkside. She would get teary and cry and then bury her face against my neck. Finally, in the deep shadows of the parkside, she let me touch her breasts through her clothes. Then she let me open her blouse and touch her flesh. But whenever I moved my hand between her legs, she always stopped me.

I can’t let you do that, she said. You’ll lose all respect for me.

No, I won’t, I swear. I love you, Jenny. How could I lose respect for you?

She should have laughed out loud — asshole! — but she said nothing, just snuggled against me. I suppose she was exercising a kind of wisdom that had nothing to do with respect. I was still a kid. In a neighborhood of cops, firemen, ironworkers, and dock wallopers, I kept conjuring crazy visions of the future: writing comics, going to art school, seeing the world. Everything I talked about to Jenny was the opposite of security; my basic goal, unclear even to me, was to run away from home.

Jenny was probably also sensing my own confused mixture of desire and fear. On some nights, I wanted so badly to put my cock in her that my body hurt (the condition even had a name — “blue balls”). But actual consummation was also scary. I’d never even seen a girl’s pubic hair or a vagina, not even in photographs (this was before Playboy, and long before Penthouse). For all the technical discussions on the street, I wasn’t even sure where I should put my cock. And even though I didn’t believe in God, all those years in Catholic schools surely had helped shape my psyche.

These confusions accompanied me and Jenny to the benches along the parkside, to the darkened hallways and freezing rooftops. But we didn’t stay in the cold forever. One weekend, her mother moved them to Bay Ridge and soon after started working a 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. shift at the hospital. That first Saturday night, Jenny invited me to dinner. I took the trolley out to Sixty-ninth Street and picked up three quarts of Ballantine’s beer in a deli; the old man at the counter didn’t ask for proof of age. I felt like a man as I walked out, the bottles clunking in the paper bag.

Jenny met me at the door of the basement apartment. She was wearing a light brown dress that was tight across her breasts and wide at the bottom. She had crinolines underneath and high-heeled black shoes that made her look older. She put a stack of records on a thick-spindled 45 rpm player: Nat Cole and Don Cornell, Sinatra singing “I’m a Fool to Want You,” and Tommy Edwards doing “Blue Velvet.” My hands were damp, but when I took her hands, they were wet. There was a candle burning on the table, and she served spaghetti and meatballs and fresh Italian bread. I finished a glass of beer, then another, a full quart while eating greedily. She gazed at me with her sad eyes, as if afraid I’d hate the food. I told her dinner was wonderful (it was) and opened another beer. We danced. She cleared the table. She turned off the lights in the kitchen and the overhead lights in the living room, leaving one lamp burning. She made sure the curtains and drapes were closed. We danced again and then went to the couch. I kissed her, felt her up (as we said then), unzippered the back of her dress, unsnapped her bra, while her protests became whimpers and her breathing got heavier. I moved a hand between her legs, up to the flesh at the top of her stockings and then under her panties while the crinolines made a sighing sound. This time she didn’t stop me. She was wet. She fumbled with my belt. She unzipped my fly. She gripped my cock.

And so we did it. It was awful and amazing, clumsy and frantic and inept and vaguely comical. I exploded at the end. Jenny wept. I fell back, my shoes still on, my trousers and undershorts around my ankles. I looked down and laughed. That made her feel worse. She hurried into the bathroom, sobbing. I took off my shoes and pulled up my trousers. I couldn’t believe it: I had done it. I had put my cock in a cunt. I had come in a girl. Oh, man. The records had finished playing, so I turned them over and started playing the flip sides. I took another Ballantine’s from the refrigerator, and when I turned around, she was walking naked out of the bathroom.

I bet I’m pregnant, she said.

Nah, I said.

I know I am.

I’d never seen a naked woman before and I just stood there, gazing at her, at her breasts and belly and great black vee of pubic hair. I thought of Virgil Finlay’s women and Miss Lace and the hot women in the pulp magazines. She came over and kissed me, holding my face in both hands. I held her heavy hard-nippled breasts in my hands.

If I’m pregnant, will you marry me? she whispered.

Of course, I said, struggling with my panic.