Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

That was from A Farewell to Arms, and in that romantic novel, I first came across the notion of a separate peace. In the climax of the drama, Frederic Henry deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country. And from Cowley’s Exile’s Return, I realized that there was another way to make a separate peace: departure. Faced with an America dedicated to sobriety, thrift, puritanism, and commercialism, many Twenties writers and artists became expatriates. I loved that word. The expatriate Fitzgerald went to the Riviera, T. S. Eliot to London, Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico, Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I thought), in countries where food and shelter and drink were cheap and the women were beautiful.

In my imagination, searching for absinthe among the Hank Williams-Webb Pierce jukeboxes, Paris became the golden city of my imagination. It was so in the 1920s, I thought; it must be so now. I envisioned café tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparnasse, and there, coming in the door of the bal musette, striding right out of The Sun Also Rises, was Lady Brett Ashley.

She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey…

Around this time, I first saw Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, and here was Gene Kelly, living on the GI Bill after World War II — that is to say, now — telling me that if you can’t paint in Paris, you might as well marry the boss’s daughter. He had a studio in the Quarter that was smaller than Laura’s, with a bed on pulleys that he raised in the morning to the ceiling, and windows open to the spring air, the Paris rooftops, the cobblestoned streets, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread and, of course, the cafés. Oscar Levant was his best friend, a piano player, and they met each day in the Café Bel Ami. The girl he loved was Leslie Caron. His music was by George Gershwin, full of charm and confidence and bittersweet regret. This wasn’t the Paris of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises. But it was bright and gay and full of painters and music and beautiful women and I wanted it.

And began to think I might even get it. When I finished with the navy, I too was entitled to the GI Bill, just like Gene Kelly. I could go to Paris and see all the great paintings in the Louvre and read all the writers whose names were scattered through Cowley’s book: Joyce and Pound, Proust and Valéry, Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Why not? I’d find the Café Bel Ami and sit at a table and order Fundador and read little magazines too. And study at the Académie Julien or the Sorbonne. And paint in the street. All night long, I’d discuss with my fellow theologians the canon law of the religion of art. And sample other pleasures.

The only things that matter, said Gene Kelly, are women and wine.

And absinthe. Of course.

BUT I DIDN’T GO to Paris. The Korean War ended in a grim stalemate, and a year later the navy ended for me too, and I went back to New York. I found a job as a messenger and then proofreader in the production department of an advertising agency that specialized in industrial accounts. Everybody in the Neighborhood thought I was crazy.

You got a good job in the Navy Yard, Duke Baluta said. They gotta count your navy time toward your pension too.

I want to try something else, I said.

You could be there for life.

That’s what I’m afraid of.

Back home, I didn’t go very far. I found a new room, this one next to a synagogue on Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a half block from the library. I was soon going steady with another girl from the Neighborhood, this one named Catherine. I didn’t go back to C&I; there was some problem about the GI Bill. I enrolled instead in evening classes at Pratt Institute, where an English teacher named Tom McMahon looked at my compositions and encouraged me to write. McMahon was a fine teacher with a probing theatrical style. He was an expert on Hemingway, an admirer of Nathanael West and Horace McCoy, a cigarette smoker and wearer of trench coats, and at one point he urged me to try to get into Columbia University, where I could study literature or art. I went up to Morningside Heights and saw the registrar, a bald polished man. He looked at my academic record, such as it was, and suggested in a condescending voice that I consider going to a vocational school.

I hear there is a big need for dental technicians, he said.

Fuck you, I said, gathered my papers and walked out the door.

All the way back to Brooklyn from Morningside Heights I kept saying, Fuck you, I’ll do it some other way. Fuck you, I’ll do it anyway.

I was reading newspapers again, the comics behind me, but enthralled by Jimmy Cannon in the Post’s sports section and by Murray Kempton’s column on the editorial page. After Pensacola, the seven New York newspapers were a gorgeous feast. I no longer wanted to be a cartoonist. But the dream of painting in Paris also began to fade under the gray pressure of earning a living and a feeling of rejection. I wrote to the Sorbonne in Paris. I wrote to the Académie Julien. I never received answers. Fuck you, I said to Paris. Fuck you too.

Now everyone in the Neighborhood had a television set — even my father — and on summer nights the streets were emptier, as each apartment lit up with a pale blue glow. I still listened to Symphony Sid and got drunk when Charlie Parker died and sneered at the arrival of rock and roll.

In Brooklyn I felt stalled again. Most of my friends were still in the service; they’d gone in after me and stayed later. My best friend was Tim Lee, a brilliant guy who had boxed in the amateurs at Thomas Aquinas and came home on weekends from his army base in Maryland. In Boop’s or Rattigan’s or the Caton Inn, we talked a lot about going to college, doing something with our lives. Everything seemed possible over a beer. But in 1955, such talk was always interrupted by other matters. In Boop’s, we cheered in September when Archie Moore knocked down Rocky Marciano before getting knocked out himself. We were thrilled when Sugar Ray Robinson ended his amazing comeback in December by knocking out Bobo Olson in two rounds. At the bar there was a lot of talk now about heroin, which was claiming its first victims in the Neighborhood.

Who brought this shit around anyway? I asked one night in Boop’s.

The guineas, who else? said Vito Pinto.

Hey, Vito, Duke Baluta said, you’re a guinea!

You know who I mean, Vito said.

Everybody knew, all right. The racket guys from South Brooklyn had started slowly peddling heroin, and now it was coming in a flood. The streets that once had the most drunks — Twelfth Street, Seventh Avenue, Seventeenth Street — now housed the most junkies. The South Brooklyn wise guys did to the Tigers with heroin what they couldn’t do with fists, bats, or guns: wasted them and robbed them of their pride. Seeing that, I was never tempted by hard drugs. But now drinking acquired another quality: it was the normal, healthy, even moral alternative to smack.

That year, I also started hanging around with a tough funny ironworker named Jack Daugherty. He loved sentimental Irish songs, practical jokes, and fighting. He was the hardest-punching street fighter I ever knew. And soon, in bars and coffee shops all over Brooklyn, we were in fights every night. We fought strangers over change ( I had t’ree quarters here when I went to take my piss ) or looks ( The fuck you lookin’ at, prickface? ) or women ( Whatta you, own this broad? ). Sometimes Tim Lee was there; usually it was Jack and me. I broke my right hand twice and had a stabilizing pin inserted through my knuckles, forcing me for a few weeks to draw with my left. There were wild fights in Bickford’s cafeteria on Ninth Street and wilder ones on the sidewalks outside Nathan’s on Coney Island. I was drinking every day but seldom got drunk and never had hangovers; it was a matter of deep pride in the Neighborhood to be able to hold your drink.