Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Finally, I went to see the school counselor, a kind man named Father Burke, and explained most of it to him. I left out Jenny. I didn’t mention the drinking. But I told him that I just wasn’t able to do the work at Regis and wanted out.

Have you discussed this with your parents? he said.

No.

What will they say?

I don’t know.

Then you’d better tell them.

I don’t want to ask their permission, I said. I just want to do it.

But you’ll have to transfer to another school, he said. You’re not even sixteen yet, so you can’t just drop out.

What school would take me?

I’ll see, Father Burke said. If your mind is made up, I’ll try to find you another school.

That night, I told my mother that I wanted to drop out of Regis. She was concerned, sweet, apologetic.

I feel I didn’t help, she said. I feel that I should’ve given you more help.

No, Mom. It wasn’t you. It was me.

She made tea, and said that she didn’t want me to be unhappy, and if I wasn’t happy at Regis, then maybe I should go to another school. I was relieved. I just didn’t want to see her crying. That night, she seemed too tired to weep. Her hair had turned gray, her face was pale. She was only forty and starting to look old.

The next day was my last at Regis. I didn’t say good-bye to any of my classmates. I didn’t stop in to see Father Burke. I just packed my books and went home. But I didn’t feel free. All the way back to Brooklyn, I felt that I’d done something unbelievably stupid. Because of my laziness, distraction, fear, and drinking, I had walked away from the best Catholic high school in New York. As the F train came up out of the tunnel after Bergen Street, I looked down from the train and saw the Gowanus Canal beneath me and knew that the building where my father had worked as a clerk for Roulston’s was nearby. I remembered going there with my mother when everything was still in the future, even the war. Then I looked in the other direction and saw the skyline of Manhattan, rising from the harbor, stone-gray and indifferent, beautiful and unattainable, and I began to weep.

That night I went to Jenny’s and told her what had happened and then tried to get rid of my failure in her body. I drank too much beer and fell asleep. She woke me later, shaking me in desperation, frantic that her mother would find us, shouting that she had to make the bed and air out the room. You’re drunk, she said. Don’t you understand me? Are you too drunk to know what I’m saying? Carrying the empties, I left in a rage, at her and at myself. She was giving me orders, her panic transformed into wide-eyed fury that seemed like the opposite of love. But I was at fault too; I’d had too many beers and was sluggish and confused, like my father on the second-floor landing at 378. Down by the subway, I hurled the empty beer bottles at a parked garbage truck, enjoying the way they smashed and splintered.

On Monday, I started at my new school, St. Agnes on Forty-fourth Street, in midtown Manhattan. It was dark and gloomy after Regis, the classrooms smaller, the desks more battered. But on the first day, I knew that I would do well. Even with my terrible record at Regis, I was far ahead of most of the students at St. Agnes. By the end of the week, some of my broken ego was restored. And I loved the physical act of going to that school. I came up out of Grand Central and then walked east, passing under the massive rumbling structure of the Third Avenue El. There were Irish saloons on every corner of Third Avenue, with men standing at the bars all day long.

Some of the drinkers were newspapermen. The Daily News was on Forty-second Street between Second and Third, and I liked going into the lobby to look at the immense globe and the polished floors; it was like visiting the Daily Planet (and years later the Daily News building served as the setting for that imaginary newspaper in the first Superman movie). Sometimes I saw men I was sure were reporters (they all wore hats) hurry out the door, straight to the bars. A few blocks away, on Forty-fifth Street, was the Daily Mirror. I once saw their sports columnist, Dan Parker, a huge man with a pencil-thin mustache, walk out of the newspaper and stroll down to Third Avenue, whistling all the way. I felt connected to the Mirror by Steve Canyon. But I never saw Caniff come out of the building. Still, the sight of Dan Parker was enough. I loved the idea of a newspaperman who whistled.

I also came to love the gloomy light under the El and wished I could walk into the bars and order a drink. At one point, with some other kids from St. Agnes, I started watching the Kefauver hearings through the windows, seeing various gangsters and politicians talk in black and white, and watched Frank Costello’s hands. I wanted a television set now. And a telephone. And a room with a door. Far more than we could afford at 378. Most of all I wanted to walk into a Third Avenue bar and drink like a man.

THEN ONE NIGHT, Jenny and I went to the Avon, a third-run movie house on Ninth Street. One of the two movies was Portrait of Jennie, with Joseph Cotten. I thought he was great in The Third Man and we laughed about how those people out in Hollywood couldn’t even spell Jenny. In the movie, Joseph Cotten was a painter. He lived in the Village and had an amazing studio, with easels, a fireplace and, of course, a skylight. One day, he’s in Central Park and meets Jennifer Jones, who is young and shy and beautiful. She sings a strange little song:

Joseph Cotten keeps meeting the girl over the next month or two, and each time she’s older. He paints her portrait and tries to learn more about her. But in fact, she’s dead, killed years before in a storm. At the end of the movie he meets her on the anniversary of her death. He gets to kiss her and hug her; the music builds to an amazing swell; she is swept out to sea to die again.

Jenny was crying at the end. I kept thinking about Joseph Cotten’s studio. We didn’t stay for the second feature. All the way to her house on the Fifth Avenue trolley, Jenny was silent.

That’s the way life is, isn’t it? she said.

Like what? That movie?

Yeah.

Oh, sure. We always fall in love with ghosts we meet in Central Park.

No, she said. I mean that things always turn out lousy.

Hey, Jenny, it’s a movie.

We reached her house. She asked me not to come in. It was too late. Her mother would be home soon.

You keep saying you’re an artist, she said. Why don’t you draw me?

I will.

When?

Tomorrow night?

My mother’s home tomorrow night.

Next Friday.

You swear? she said, smiling.

I swear.

That Friday night, she served me another dinner, this time of baked ziti. I sipped my beer slowly, cleaned my plate, and had seconds. After dinner, she stacked the dishes in the sink, ran water over them, left them to soak, then washed her hands and primped her hair. She seemed very nervous.

Maybe you shouldn’t try this, she said. You don’t have to draw me if you don’t want to.

No, no, I said. Let’s try it.

She sat on the edge of the couch in the muted yellow light of the table lamp and I sat across from her and started to draw. In my head I saw Joseph Cotten making his portrait of Jennifer Jones, and I wished we were in some great high-ceilinged garret in the Village instead of this basement in Bay Ridge. But I worked hard, using a number 2 pencil on a pad of white paper, outlining her head with very light marks, blocking in the eyes and the nose and the mouth, loosely indicating the hair, the neck, and the collar of her white blouse. I was soon lost in the act, erasing, shading, smudging with a finger, but the picture was not going well. Jenny’s hair looked fine, and I’d captured those sad eyes; but there was something wrong with the mouth, and the nose looked enormous. I erased again, trying to make the nose smaller, but that wasn’t right either; I couldn’t put someone else’s nose on Jenny’s face. I paused, sipped my beer, stared at her, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, then tried to outline her nose with absolute exactitude. This time I thought I had it right. With the nose recorded properly, the mouth was easier to fix. I hurried to the end, blocking in the hair with what I thought were bold strokes, then finishing the neck and blouse. I exhaled, then took a deep breath and finished my beer.