Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Then, come on.

We went to her bedroom. I took the beer with me.

THE YEAR 1951 was terrible. I was at least six people: the schoolboy at Regis, the hardworking delivery boy after school, the opinionated angry young man raging at the world, the aspiring cartoonist, the lover of Jenny, the apprentice drinker and Bad Guy. In Latin class, I was struggling with the subjunctive; at night, I was fucking my brains out. Drinking became an integral part of sex. I’d drink three or four beers to feel confident; Jenny would drink three or four beers to have an excuse for letting me do it once again. It was as much a ritual as the Mass. Sometimes I bought condoms; sometimes I had to choose between a pack of Trojans or a quart of Ballantine’s. I always settled for beer and risk.

At home, I was miserable. My mother was trying to feed, clothe, and civilize the whole brood, while holding down her new part-time job as a cashier at the RKO Prospect movie house. She got little help from my father. He was drinking as hard as ever, particularly on the weekends. He began to go on binges, sometimes missing work on a Monday or Friday, thus granting me the self-righteous joy of despising him. I was too young and self-absorbed to ask him why he was drinking so much, what he feared, what made him weep, who he was. We worked out a ritual too. We made remarks about the weather. We talked about baseball. He predicted that Ray Robinson would beat Jake LaMotta for the middleweight championship, and he was right. But there was nothing else I could say to him.

I certainly couldn’t tell him, or my mother, about Jenny. I couldn’t tell anyone else either. If I told my friends, they’d immediately tell everybody in the Neighborhood that Jenny “put out.” If they thought she put out, they wouldn’t respect her. And how could I love a girl my friends didn’t respect? Besides, I didn’t think of it as putting out. To me, it was a love story.

The key word, of course, was “story.” After the fiasco of Chuck Taylor, I stopped writing my versions of pulp stories. But I wasn’t writing comics anymore either. One reason was the physical impossibility of doing it in the apartment. The kids were the infantry of disorder; they moved from room to room in a sustained campaign of disruption. At eleven, my sister, as the only girl, took title to the Little Room. I couldn’t lay out paper or board, ink, pens and brushes, on the kitchen table. Gradually, I just gave up. That long slow surrender ate at my guts, but I convinced myself that I had no choice. As long as I live here, I thought, I’ll be unable to work.

Instead of creating stories, I created Jenny. I invented her in my head, supplying her with qualities no girl could possess, granting her a perfection that had more to do with literature than with the scared, lonely girl who gave me her body. In some primitive, inarticulate way, our love story was driven by my need for narrative, for drama, for a sense of beginning, middle, and end. It was a better story than the ones I had invented out of comics and pulps; I just didn’t know how it would end.

In the spring, many things began to unravel while others took shape. I was doing worse at Regis. In March the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, and I read in one of the newspapers that there’d be a rally in their defense in Union Square. I tried to get some of the guys from school to meet me at the rally, and one of them said: What are you, some kind of communist? I said no, I wasn’t a communist; but this was a kind of history and I wanted to see it. Are you crazy? the guy said. You get arrested, you end up on some list, your life is ruined. I went anyway, alone. The crowd was small. But the sense of defiant energy was thrilling. I saw young women who didn’t look like anyone from the Neighborhood; they were older than I was, but I wanted to come back, see them again, know them. They cheered at the speeches. They smiled at people and asked them to sign petitions. They didn’t ask me.

When the rally ended, I wandered downtown to find the subway station at West Fourth Street. Along the way, I discovered two places that were to pull me back again and again: Book Row on Fourth Avenue and the neighborhood called Greenwich Village. The first was like a series of treasure houses, one used book store after another, the cheapest books stacked outside in stalls, selling for a nickel, the interiors dark, musty, packed from floor to ceiling with more expensive books. I was afraid to enter, afraid I’d see some glittering bauble that would exhaust the few dollars I had in my pocket — money for the beer that would grant me admission to Jenny’s bed. I ran my hands over the books as if they were holy objects and moved on.

Walking into the Village was like entering a movie set. The elegant houses, blooming trees, intimate bars, and scattered bookshops were lovely to look at, but I was even more enchanted by the way the people looked. They were completely different from the people in the Neighborhood or those I saw uptown near Regis. That first day, I saw bearded men with paint-spattered clothes lugging wildly painted abstract canvases into buildings with skylights on the rooftops. Women wore hair down to their hips, bright ceramic earrings, long black stockings, and they smoked cigarettes as they walked. Men carried books and talked to friends with excitement and passion. On Eighth Street, there were theaters showing movies from Italy and France. I passed coffee shops, cafeterias, and bars filled with people deep in argument, engulfed by cigarette smoke, and all of them looked different from the men in the bars of Brooklyn. I wanted to come back. And stay.

That day the unravelment at Regis and at home receded as I glimpsed the possibility of another life, only a subway ride from Brooklyn, in a place where I could fill my life with politics, art, books, and women. I didn’t want to wait. This was where I could live. Far from Brooklyn and my father and Rattigan’s and the insistence on being a plumber or a cop. I could be a bohemian! I’d read the word somewhere and looked it up in a dictionary, and it sounded romantically perfect. A bohemian, free of all the stupid dumb-ass constraints of the world! With a huge studio, my own drawing table, a bookcase full of books, a skylight. I’d work all day and go to the cafés at night, to drink brandy and listen to poetry. A free man. The vision excited me all the way home on the subway. Jenny was nowhere in it.

That vision didn’t help me at Regis; it might have accelerated my decline. I simply couldn’t concentrate. I’d sit in geometry class and think of Jenny’s nipples and get an erection. I’d be in a civics class and want to know why the Rosenbergs had been sentenced to death. I’d be in the English class, with a teacher discussing the assigned text, and see myself in a café reading books of my own choosing. Each morning, I would linger in bed, filled with resistance and dread. I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to go to school. If I’d seen Jenny the night before, and drunk too much beer, I’d be physically logy and sometimes emotionally hung over too. I’d try to remember if I wore a condom or not; sometimes I hadn’t, and that filled me with dread as I thought of Jenny pregnant. I don’t know if my mother suspected anything about the drinking; I tried to hide it, brushing my teeth or chewing gum. If she did, she said nothing. In a way, that made it worse for me, because I had to carry the burden of the drinking by myself. The effort of hiding it made me feel even more separated from my classmates at Regis.

That spring, failure entered me like an infection. My grades were falling and I had already been placed on probation by Father Taylor. I was certain I would suffer the humiliation of flunking out at the end of the term. That meant I might have to repeat my sophomore year at some other school. And that would delay my life.