Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

IN THE MORNING, they started moving me around. The first stop was another jail, where I was put in solitary confinement. The room was like a closet, no windows, no toilet, no bed, with a thin line of light at the base of an iron door. I ran my fingers over the wall and found letters gouged in the surface. My eyes slowly adjusted. The letters said: Viva Stalin, el Rey de los Rojos. Long live Stalin, the King of the Reds. And I thought that maybe Siqueiros had been here, or the leader of the railroad workers, or some amazing guerrilla fighter brought down alive from the Sierras. I wondered too if I was a political prisoner of some crazy kind; maybe they’d separated me because they were afraid the Mexicans would kill me, a gringo, one of the people who stole Texas and California and New Mexico and Arizona and Oklahoma and Utah, one of the people who called them greasers, spics, beaners, and wetbacks on the cold scary other side of the border. Maybe the cop I hit had died. Maybe I fit the description of some other killer. Some fugitive who killed eight people in Nebraska and made it across the border.

And how did I get here? In the black closet, as I gazed at that sliver of light, the night played out in my mind. If I hadn’t gone to the party, or if nobody had cut in when I danced with Yolanda, or if I’d said no to Manny, said, Manny, I don’t want to go anywhere, if I’d gone home and read a book or made some pictures; if I hadn’t seen the young girl in the crib on the Street of Hope, hadn’t gone back to see her again; if I’d had some money to bribe the cops; if I’d run down the street behind the Texans; if. If, I said. If. I wondered what time it was too. What day. Where Tim was. Wondered what my mother would think if she heard I was spending my life in a Mexican prison. Wondered if I’d ever read a book again or paint a picture. And fell asleep, wedged against the wall, under the name of Stalin.

That evening, they took me out of solitary, with no explanation, and put me in another large cell with a dozen guys. I was starving now, aching with thirst, my tongue furry with hangover. The mood here was brighter, kinder, the men speaking slowly so that I could understand their Spanish. I quickly learned that nobody was fed in these jails. Food was delivered by wives and girlfriends, and when the other prisoners discovered I had neither, they shared their food with me. They told jokes. They laughed. They explained why they were there. A busdriver was arguing with his girlfriend and ran his bus into a limousine whose owner — a politician — had him arrested. Another man had beaten up his father-in-law at a family party, for coming on to some woman in the kitchen. A third had stolen some shirts from a market and tried to sell them to buy a dress for his mujer. When I told my story about the whorehouse, they laughed and slapped each other and handed me some water. I was one of them: another crazy bastard fucked up by women.

They told more stories. They made jokes. They talked about Ratón Macias and Toluco López. They sang mournful ballads. They slept. In the morning, I was moved one final time, outside to have my picture taken on the steps of the jail (it appeared in El Universal, where an “I” was dropped off my name and I was described as being of Arabic descent) and then into a van with grilled windows. With four other men I was taken through side streets and across wide gray avenues into the city’s penitentiary at Lecumberri, a looming pile called El Palacio Negro. The Black Palace.

I was let out of the van in a courtyard, then taken to a second yard. Dark stone walls climbed above me, topped by barbed wire and guards strolling casually with rifles at the ready. No way out. I remember passing cells that were elaborately decorated with pictures of women and boxers and soccer players; men cooking at stoves; radios playing; and the endless noise of steel upon steel. There seemed to be thousands of men here, some walking independently down aisles, others sleeping, dozens milling around. I knew about this place from our Mexican history classes; Pancho Villa was once a prisoner here; Francisco Madero was murdered beside these walls. But this wasn’t a tour; I was a prisoner.

They put me in a single cell and locked me in. There was a scab on my nose now and my ribs hurt and my teeth were a mess. But the fear had gone out of me; I stopped thinking about what had happened and what might happen and focused on what was happening. And for the moment I was safe. Even death had lost its scary power. I knew now that if a bullet had slammed into my skull and killed me, I’d have felt nothing. But I was alive. The pain I felt was the proof.

Four days later, when they finally came to take me out, Tim Lee was waiting in an outer office of the prison with a young Mexican lawyer. They’d been trying for days to find me in the labyrinth of the prison system. Tim saw my picture in El Universal, flanked by cops on the stepe of the delegación as I was being moved to the Black Palace. He got the name of a lawyer from one of the teachers and used his own money for bail. A functionary in the prison office told me to report to the Black Palace once a week to sign in while the judicial process ran its course. The lawyer explained to the official that he was representing me, signed some papers, gave me his card, and left. Then I took a deep breath and walked out into the sunshine. There were groups of shawled women waiting beside the walls to deliver food to their men. They had helped feed me too.

I’m sorry, I said.

Forget it, Tim said. I just wish we’d found you sooner.

I’m glad you found me at all.

We hailed a cab.

Where to?

I laughed.

A bath, I said.

Nothing else? Not even a meal?

No, I said, not even a beer.

I went to bed in a darkened room and tried to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The words would not come. I tossed in the dark for a long time, seeing sweaty men hammering at each other with bricks. Then I turned on the light and slept for eighteen hours.

WITH MY FRIENDS, even with Tim, I affected a casual, blasé attitude about what had happened in the night on the Calle de la Esperanza. But for weeks, I woke up sweating, my dreams instantly wiped away, leaving only an ashy residue of dread. The memory of the whistling bullets, the fight with the bricks and the whimpering young woman, the sense of being lost in a system of steel rooms in which strangers spoke a language I did not know: all were woven into me.

I didn’t blame the drunken party that had preceded the trip to Calle de la Esperanza; by then, drinking was so natural it would have been like placing blame on the act of breathing. I continued going to the student parties, still got drunk. I didn’t blame Mexico either. Too many Mexicans had been kind to me. But something had happened. I was trying to discover some deeper principle, some rule of adult life that accounted for accident and choice and human ugliness. Not some divine commandment. Not some vague or blurry generalization. Something that I had learned from experience. After all, an artist should know how to do that; an artist shouldn’t just learn what other artists have learned; he should know what his life has taught him. But when I made drawings of the events of that evening they all came out looking like comic strips. They were simpleminded and crude, mere diagrams of place and action and consequences. They seemed glimpsed from the outside, instead of felt from the inside.

Because of that failure, and my dissatisfaction, I started to write. I filled pages with accounts of what had happened, telling the story, layering it with dread and fear, trying for what Hemingway called the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion. I might get fact into a drawing or painting, but how could I get motion? I could get both in writing. And as I wrote more, my passion for painting faded.