Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

The door to Laura’s studio was unlocked. I opened it slowly, remembering all those film noir scenes of the horror within. The rooms were black, but I knew where the kitchen light cord was and pulled it on.

Everything was gone except the bed.

The easel was gone. The paintings. The brushes and paints and tomato cans. The sumptuous art books. The folders full of reproductions. Laura.

The linoleum floor now looked like an immense abstract painting. Under the sink, there was a bag of garbage. Inside it were two empty pint bottles of Canadian Club. I stood there for a long moment. How could she just go like this, without a word? I’m fucking you, kid. But I don’t have to love you to fuck you. Why didn’t I see this coming? I looked everywhere for a note to me, even on the bathroom mirror where they left notes in the movies. Nothing. She was gone. I imagined a man coming to the door and the two of them laughing. She was already packed, the clothes folded into suitcases, the canvases wrapped and tied together, the easel broken down for shipment, and he helped her to the street with her things and shoved them into his car. A convertible. I was sure of that. The easel sticking up from the back like a cross. And off they drove, smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey and laughing, laughing.

She would never tell him about me, some kid from Brooklyn, some boy out of art school. She might never tell anyone about me, might already have forgotten my existence. I slammed the icebox door with the flat of my hand, then did it again and again. Then turned around and saw the bed, stripped of sheets and covers, the striped mattress as naked as a corpse. I walked over and ran my fingers along its edge. Then I fell upon its vast emptiness and heard the distant rumble of the El and wept.

A chill came into me. For weeks, I couldn’t read Henri, or look at the artists Laura had introduced me to. It was as if the whole world that she knew had walked out into the night. My need focused more than ever before on Maureen. We were now going steady. That was supposed to give me a sense of structure, and a shared intimacy on the inevitable path to engagement and marriage. Instead I was full of uncertainty and one huge silent lie: I couldn’t tell Maureen how numbed I was by the disappearance of Laura.

The notion of marriage was scary; it made me see an apartment in the Neighborhood, kids, noise, a job I might hate. For a while I tried to merge the notion with my vision of life as an artist. We’d live in the Village and have children later. Maureen would be my model and we’d spend our evenings together in the company of painters and poets. I must have been a hugely egocentric boyfriend. I remember almost nothing about what she wanted from life, but I’m certain I spent many hours talking about what I wanted. I do remember that she didn’t take seriously my grand plans. Or so I thought at the time. She might have simply been what most girls then were: a supreme realist.

When the school term ended in June, my life started to unravel again. Without Laura, I had no outlet for my sexuality. Maureen was a Good Girl and with her I usually played the Good Boy. It was only late at night, after I’d dropped her off, that the Bad Guy came to life. Neither Boop’s nor the Parkview was any help; there were almost no available women in the Neighborhood, and those who were free knew I was going steady with Maureen. One evening, I called the school office to see if Laura had returned for summer sessions. No, she wasn’t part of the modeling pool anymore. What about Gloria, the Puerto Rican girl? The secretary laughed.

What do you think this is, a dating service?

No, no, I lied. During the summer, some of the guys from class, we’re planning some life sessions, just to stay in shape for the fall.

She gave me a number for Gloria Vasquez. I called. A man answered in Spanish and I hung up.

In the lunchtime bars along Sands Street, some of the guys from the Navy Yard talked joyfully about the whores who showed up in the evenings. But I had seen them, painted, lacquered, with huge piles of hair and alarming mouths, and they made me afraid. Afraid of disease. Afraid of their experience: thousands of blow jobs, thousands of fucks. And besides, I couldn’t pay them.

So I got drunk a lot and into fights, drowning my cock in rivers of beer. Drunk, I called Gloria Vasquez again one night, my head full of her brown nipples and thick lustrous hair, and this time she answered. She was sweet. She was polite. But she knew I was drunk and soon hung up. I was too embarrassed ever to call again.

The summer came and we all went back to Bay 22 and Oceantide. I remember strutting too much under a Saturday sun, getting bleary with beer, and falling asleep on a blanket beside Maureen. I woke with a furry tongue but I wasn’t very ashamed of myself: everybody else from the Neighborhood was doing the same thing. For all of us, boys and girls, drinking was natural. It was also woven together with sex; you drank in order to get sex or you drank if you didn’t have sex. In those years before the Pill, sex was also woven together with fear. The girls surely wanted it as much as we did, but they would pay a tougher price. Instead of fucking, we got drunk.

On the beach, among all those oiled bodies, with Maureen beside me but untouchable, I sometimes tried to distract myself with books and allow a novel to lift me into some other world. But then someone would come over and say, Whatta you, studying for a test? And I’d put the book away and play the role to which the Neighborhood had assigned me. I went to the bar at Oceantide (where they did check draft cards) and sat on the side at a crowded table and sipped beer that older guys had bought. I talked much bullshit. Sometimes I even danced with Maureen.

On my seventeenth birthday, I stopped at 378. I brought my father some drawings I had made of Duke Snider and Sugar Ray Robinson and he seemed happy with them but didn’t know what to do with them. He rolled them up and put them in a closet. My mother had a cake for me and the kids all cheered. Then my mother saw something in my face.

You’re unhappy, aren’t you? she said.

I’m all right, I said.

What’s the matter?

I shrugged and didn’t answer.

Maybe you should come home, she said.

Maybe, I said.

But I didn’t want to go home. When I said goodnight, there were tears in her eyes, but she didn’t cry.

From the pay phone in Sanew’s, I called Maureen. Her father answered.

Who’s this? he said.

Pete.

She’s already asleep.

Could you tell her I called, Mr. Crowley? He sighed and hung up.

I was a mess of emotions and I wanted to get drunk. But I knew that wouldn’t help. I went back to the room, and for the first time since Laura left, I read The Art Spirit.

Find out what you really like if you can. Find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing. …

I was soon asleep.

MICKEY HORAN joined the navy in July. A few weeks later, he was followed by Jack McAlevy. And Joe Griffin. Suddenly, among the guys in Boop’s, it was our turn.

The radio and the newspapers were still full of the war. In my room, I was reading Harvey Kurtzman’s Two Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Even Ted Williams, the greatest hitter in baseball, was back in the air force, joining Steve Canyon. I imagined myself in Korea. Or on ships plowing through icy northern waters.

You’re the type who is always going away, said Laura, before she went away herself.

And I thought: Maybe she was right. She was right about a lot of other things. Maybe I have to go away. It wasn’t just destiny; there were practical reasons too. The money I earned at the Navy Yard just wasn’t enough for me. I had to pay for rent, food, and carfare; I needed money for drinking, to see friends, to have a little enjoyment; and I was going steady with Maureen. In the fall, when school started again, I’d need tuition along with money for paint and canvases, because I was supposed to move on from the basic drawing course. But I didn’t even have a bank account. I couldn’t afford a telephone or a television set. Two days before payday, I always had to borrow a few dollars, just for carfare and hot dogs. I knew what I wanted: enough money to pay for art school, to buy paint and brushes and books. Without those things, I couldn’t imagine a life, even with Maureen. I just couldn’t afford the wanting.