Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

There was another reason for this shift: money. Or the lack of it. Drinking at some Saturday-night party, or hanging out between classes at MCC, I could swagger in front of other students about what happened in jail, as proof of a macho ability to survive. I couldn’t swagger about money. Like all the other veterans, I was receiving $110 a month. From that I had to pay for tuition, room, board, and expenses. After Christmas, Tim and I moved with two other students into a large apartment off the Avenida Ejército Nacional; that cut the rent to $25 each. But I was also paying back Tim for the money he’d laid out for bail, and I had to make monthly payments to the Mexican lawyer as the case dragged on in legal hearings. I couldn’t write home for money. In 1955 my mother had given birth to my brother Joe, and with six kids in the house in Brooklyn, there was no money to spare. Besides, I was a man now (or so I thought), and a man didn’t borrow money from his mother. I could borrow books from the Benjamin Franklin Library. I couldn’t borrow brushes, paint, or canvas. In the second quarter, I decided not to take an oil painting class and enrolled in a writing class instead.

I did have enough money for a trip to Acapulco, sharing the expenses with four other students to ride down through the wild mountains of Guerrero, where bandits still practiced their craft. After miles of twisting roads through gorges and tropical valleys, we came around a bend and the great curving bay of Acapulco lay before us. Mountains dove sharply to the sea, with tiny white buildings set along their ridges among palms and thick green foliage. The beach looked like a white scythe, touched by the great expanse of cobalt blue water that moved off to touch the darker blue line of the sky. The light was as bright and clear as Matisse.

One of the guys in the car had been there before, and he explained about the morning beach and the afternoon beach, the Caleta and the Caletilla, how one was sunny until noon and then was abruptly plunged into shadow when the sun moved behind the mountains. The white mansion on the edge of the cliff: that was John Wayne’s house. He had a Mexican wife and lived here between pictures. And that lavender palace, out beyond the Duke’s, out there on the Quebrada, past where the divers plunged into the advancing tides: that belonged to Dolores del Rio.

A beer popped. We were sitting under a straw-roofed palapa on the morning beach, the car parked on a cobblestoned street, hawkers selling rum drinks in coconut shells, and an argument briefly raged about which of Mexico’s two greatest female stars was more beautiful, Maria Felix or Dolores del Rio. I said there was no contest about pure beauty. Dolores del Rio’s perfect oval face, her high cheekbones, the slope of her brow: she was like a Renaissance painting, man. That’s the problem, somebody said. She’s too beautiful. You’d spend your time just looking at her; you wouldn’t want to fuck her. And someone else said, But you never get to fuck Maria Felix, either; she fucks you.

We had no money for the tourist hotels, of course, but we found a place on the beach south of the city where we could rent hammocks tied to palm trees for one peso a night. That beach is gone now, devoured long ago by the Pierre Marqués Hotel, but no place in my memory remains more beautiful. In the evenings, we sat on driftwood and drank beer and laughed and told lies and listened to the fishermen play guitars around an open fire. The Mexicans were friendly, amazed at the crazy gringos who were down there with them on la playa. The Mexicans were humble, illiterate, generous, decent; they shared food with us and beer and taught us the words of songs and talked about las mujeres, about women gone off and women arriving, about women full of betrayal and women full of trust. I remember gently rocking into sleep under the stars, more stars than I’d seen since Fox Lair Camp, stars forming clouds and clusters, shapes and patterns, dwarfing us all. And then waking in the dawn to the quiet lapping of surf and the arrival of the orange ball of the sun while fishermen dragged dead sharks onto the sand.

On the last day, drinking in the afternoon, I went Walking north upon the beach, out beyond the point of the Playa Caletilla. At the foot of a cliff, I lay down on the empty sand and fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was darkening into dusk. And off to the right a young woman in a one-piece yellow bathing suit was sitting on a towel staring out to sea toward the Isla la Roqueta. Her tightly braided pigtail hung down her back, pointing at the towel. I sat there for a while, brushing the sand off my back, looking at her smooth dark skin. My own skin was reddening from the sun. My mouth felt sour from drinking. She and I were the only people in sight. I stood up and walked slowly toward the surf, angling toward her. She turned to look at me. She was about eighteen, with a long nose and an upper lip dark with down. I saw that she’d been crying.

Are you all right? I said.

She turned away, wiping at her eyes with her forearm.

¿ Está bien? I said.

I squatted beside her and touched her hand. She pulled away and then started talking very quickly in sobbing Spanish, something about the novio — her boyfriend — and her father, who was so cruel, and how her life was over. I didn’t understand the details, but she was full of anger and despair and heartbroken tears. And then she fell against me, her body wracking with sobs, and I put my arm around her and held her tight and whispered to her in English, Don’t worry, don’t worry, murmured, It’ll be all right, murmured, Go ahead and cry, just cry, baby, just cry. Until the sobs ended, and my chest was wet with her tears, and she was still, the warmth of her body entering mine as the sun went down.

We held each other for a long time, whispering, exchanging names, Pedro, Yolanda, the surf growling and pulling and growling, buoys dinging in the dark. I kissed her. She kissed me back. I lifted the pigtail and kissed the nape of her neck. She touched my chest and stomach and discovered my erection. I played with her breasts through the wired bra of the bathing suit and then moved her zipper down and took a lush pliant breast in my hand and a hard nipple in my mouth in the Pacific night, as her hand moved inside my bathing suit. Yolanda. At the foot of the cliff where Dolores del Rio gazed at mirrors. Yolanda, excited and writhing and then suddenly weeping again, withdrawing her hand, pulling away, as I heard what she heard: distant feminine voices calling on the dark beach.

Yo-laaaanda. ¿Dónde estás? Yolandaaaa.

And she was up, panicky, tucking breasts inside the bathing suit, zippering it up in back.

Mañana, I said. Aquí en la playa. Exactamente aquí.

Sí, sí, she whispered. Mañana, en la tarde. Aquí en la playa . . Tomorrow afternoon, here on the beach.

She hurried off in the dark toward the town and the faceless disembodied voices of her keepers, her sisters or aunts or mother. I plunged into the surf. The next day I went back to the spot but she was not there. And that night we all piled into the car to return to Mexico City.

MY CASE dragged on, month after month. I would go to a hearing, answer questions, be given another date, then pay the lawyer what I could. I kept taking drawing classes but couldn’t afford the painting workshops; I started writing short stories and poetry. In the last week of each month, the VA money virtually all gone, I was eating sandwiches made of hard rolls and slices of raw onion. For the first time, I started smoking cigarettes, dark-papered Negritos, four cents a pack, to help me across the hunger; I became an instant addict. There was one more drunken party and a fight with a young Mexican student. I was in the kitchen when it started, and I hit him hard and he went down in a pile of broken glasses and there was blood everywhere. I thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but I hid for a few days, afraid the police would come and get me. And then in May, the school term was over and I knew I had to leave.