Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

DURING my time in the navy, drinking became more deeply ingrained in my nature. If I’d served my apprenticeship in Brooklyn, in the navy I became a journeyman. I learned much about race, sex, the South, literature, music, and all of it was absorbed in a delicious heady delirium of drink.

During a one-day liberty from boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, I careened around the flesh joints of East Baltimore Street, lusted for a stripper named Tempest Storm, threw up in an alley and laughed about it with my friends in the morning. I received a Dear John letter from Maureen, wrote her anguished letters, came home at Christmas, made a fool of myself over her, joined my father in a winning us-against-them fistfight in Rattigan’s, and was moved to beer-soaked tears when he said afterward, This is my son, Peter, in whom I am well proud.

Then I was off to Norman, Oklahoma, to airmen’s school (there turned out to be no great demand for yeomen who were high school dropouts). I arrived on the morning of New Year’s Eve and ended up that night in a tough Indian bar where I took a whore’s tits out of her bra under her sweater in a side booth and later followed her upstairs. She was very fat and we drank hootch from an unlabeled bottle. She blew me and I fell asleep and woke up at dawn with the door locked from the outside and my money gone. I had to move a bureau and climb out through the transom and then wandered the frozen streets until I found a bus to take me to the base. Then I was in Jacksonville, Florida, training for a storekeeper’s rate, learning to type, seeing palm trees for the first time, and the southern sun. Eisenhower had been elected, the North Koreans were negotiating, and I would see no war. In Daytona one weekend, I stood on the beach with another sailor, named Stamps, and watched the cars roll by on the hard-packed sand. Two college girls came along in a convertible and Stamps and I leaped into the back seat and then we were in their motel room, drinking beer and fucking them for hours. I was almost eighteen. At night in the enlisted men’s barracks, I longed for Maureen — O wounded vanity! — and in my fantasies was once again in the Tenth Street apartment with Laura tied to an easel.

From Jacksonville I was sent to Pensacola, to a helicopter training base at Ellyson Field. In the small base library I discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the myth of the Lost Generation. The discovery was set off by a single sentence by Malcolm Cowley in his 1944 introduction to a small compact Viking Portable that contained The Sun Also Rises, excerpts from other novels, and a selection of Hemingway’s short stories.

Going back to Hemingway’s work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be. …

I was a city boy; I hadn’t seen a brook since Fox Lair Camp, had never fished in any serious way, associated woods with the place where Arnold hid his bottle of wine. But something about that sentence pulled me in: a vision of clarity that was liquid and moving and cool.

Part of the appeal came from reading it in the heat of Florida. But I had never thought of a writer that way, making words as clear as flowing water. Cowley allowed Hemingway himself to talk:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

I knew that was true; the stuff of many books already lived in my mind as if it had happened to me. I didn’t remember the bad books.

And if the Hemingway world of Paris and Pamplona, the slopes of Kilimanjaro and the eddies of the Big Two-Hearted River had nothing concrete to do with my life, Cowley described a part of that world that surely did. The Hemingway heroes had one thing in common.

They drink early and late; they consume enough beer, wine, anis, grappa and Fundador to put them all into alcoholic wards, if they were ordinary mortals; but drinking seems to have the effect on them of a magic potion.

Yes! I had sampled that magic potion myself. And Cowley then quoted from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose hero, Robert Jordan, finds that a cup of absinthe

took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month … of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.

For weeks I tried to find absinthe in the dirt-floored bars of O Street, and failed. There were other forms of liquid alchemy, and so the lack of absinthe did not matter. I was soon in the Hemingway world, carrying his stoic ethic with me off the base, to sailor bars where drinking was sport, entertainment, clarification, and pleasure. I went on to Cowley’s Exile’s Return, about the Lost Generation that Gertrude Stein had named and Hemingway had made famous, and learned that drinking could be something more than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge fuck you to Authority.

The writers, artists, and poets of the 1920s, Cowley explained, were faced with one mammoth idiocy of Authority: the mistake called Prohibition. Then, as in my own 1953, right-wingers, bigots, bluenoses, and puritans ruled America. They used goons to break labor unions. Like our current political gangster Joe McCarthy, they sniffed around for people they called subversives, silenced them, jailed them, deported them. If people like that passed a law making it a crime to drink, you had only one choice: to get roaring drunk.

Cowley led me to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, to the world of bootleggers and speakeasies, and I remembered my father’s friends sitting in the kitchen that time talking about rumrunners. Nothing could have been more romantic. James Cagney lived in that world, in the old movies that kept playing in the Minerva and the Sixteenth Street; so did Bogart and Robinson and Raft. And now Wolfsheim the gambler was there and Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald himself, and Billy Hamill.

And Billy Hamill’s oldest son too.

All of them staring across the water at the green light on Daisy’s dock.

FROM HEMINGWAY, I stole the guise of the stoic drinker, mixing it up with Bogart and some old salts who had come through the war and knew that a helicopter base in the Florida panhandle was Mickey Mouse duty. These men carried deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors (or so I thought), but they taught us that the only unforgivable sin was self-pity. A girl broke your heart? Fuck her. Get another one. Break her heart. You lost a fight? Fuck it. Get up. Wipe off the blood. Have another whiskey and go get him again.

Most of them knew a lot about life in a concrete way. And they laughed out loud at the oratory of the politicians. That, too, fit in with the codes of Hemingway.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it… Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates…