Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

At least we can have something to read in the magazine, I said. At least the fucking jumps will be in the right place.

Why not? Jimmy said. The old man’ll go nuts but what the hell.

I had been following the career of a sensational young middleweight named Jose Torres. He’d won a silver medal in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, had won a number of Golden Gloves, AAU, and All-Army championships, and after seven victories in seven pro fights, he was the new hero of the city’s growing Puerto Rican population. He was managed by Cus D’Amato and trained in the Gramercy Gym, five blocks from where I lived on Ninth Street. At a bar near the magazine, I said to Jimmy Vlasto that I’d love to write about Torres. Jimmy was also a fight fan. Go ahead, he said.

A few days later, I found Torres at the gym. Almost immediately, we became friends. He was not only a great boxer but one of the smartest people I’d ever met. I hung around with him, did some interviews, then went home and wrote the article. I needed three days to get it right, and with anxious heart I delivered it the following week to Jimmy Vlasto. I sat in a tattered easy chair while Jimmy read the piece. When he was finished, he smiled.

I love this, he said, his voice surprised. Fuck! Let’s run it!

Great.

But listen, he said, I can only pay you twenty-five bucks.

I’ll take it, I said.

That was it. I was a professional writer. Billy Powers took some photographs, I laid out the pages, and ten days later my first journalism was in print. I was runny with excitement. But when I went to Twenty-third Street to pick up copies of the issue, a glum Jimmy told me that his father wanted to see both of us in his office. We went upstairs to the wood-paneled room with its muted lamps and photographs of Solon G. Vlasto in the company of presidents and archbishops. The old man stared at the two of us from behind his immense desk.

Let me ask you something, he said, in his thick Greek accent.

Silence. Then his eyes flashed.

How come, he said, in a Grik magazine, is a story about a Puerto Rican boxer, written by an Irish guy, in English?

A pause.

And then Jimmy burst out with an immortal line: The young Greeks love him!

Mr. Vlasto looked at us in a deadpan way, thought about this, looked suddenly as if he understood that the world was passing him by, and then sighed.

Next time, he said, find a Grik boxer.

Then, dismissing us, he leaned forward to examine a sheet covered with the logic of numbers.

THROUGH ALL OF this time, I was devouring newspapers. There were still seven of them in New York then, and I read them all, like a predator. My favorite was the Post. Convinced by my work for Atlantis that I had some talent as a writer, I wrote a few letters to the editor, and two of them were printed. One of them took up the entire letters section, a long screed about “my generation,” and for a week there were letters of reaction. This got me on some obscure radio show, which led to an invitation to appear on the “Long John Nebel Show,” then the biggest thing on all-night radio. Nebel liked me and kept inviting me back to his freeform discussion of Martians, politics, extraterrestrials, comics, and the Beats. I kept writing letters to the editor of the Post.

Meanwhile, I was earning more money. I left the agency to open a studio with a partner across the street from the Art Brown art supply store on West Forty-sixth Street. I thought this would give me freedom, the sense of being my own man. But the harder I worked, the more letterheads I designed, the more business cards and employee publications I pasted up, the more I felt trapped. I had an obligation to my partner to pay my share of the studio expenses. My work was getting better, which brought me more work, and longer hours. The office building was deserted and forbidding at night, so I pitched a drawing table in the kitchen of the flat on Ninth Street and often worked until dawn, pasting up catalogs and listening to Symphony Sid on the radio, with the volume turned down so the other guys could sleep. On some nights, Coltrane sounded like an accusation: Why are you doing that work when you could be as free as I am?

Those long grinding hours entitled me to a reward. Of course. On weekends, or on nights when I was not making mechanicals for a doll catalog or designing an ad for a machine operator, I went drinking. Sometimes I was with my Dominican flaquita. Sometimes with Tim, Jake, and Billy. Sometimes alone. I had money in my pocket, cash I’d earned with hard hours. In the downtown bars, in joints like Birdland, I could afford any drink in the house.

We were in the roaring midst of a New Year’s Eve party on Ninth Street when someone arrived with great news.

It’s over! Castro wins! Batista left Havana.

You’re shitting me, Jake said.

No, man, it’s on the radio.

We turned on the radio and the news was true. The bearded young revolutionary had triumphed over the cruel dictator. His army was moving down from the Sierra Maestra in triumph. All night long, we played charangas by Orquesta Aragón and listened to bulletins and drank beer and talked bad Spanish and cheered for Fidel. Nobody knew that he was a communist. He was young, from our time. He hadn’t just talked about change, he’d done something. Faced with grinding oppression and a lack of freedom, Fidel had picked up a rifle and gone to the mountains. We cheered because we thought the good guys had won. After a while, I took my Dominican girl next door to a friend’s small apartment and fucked her wildly, the two of us yelling together in the revolutionary solidarity of Spanish. Then we went back to the party and danced some more, full of exultation, beer, and joy. Later, when the party was over, Jake went off with one woman and Tim with another. I was alone with La Dominicana again. We made love then in my own bed. The morning arrived, as gray as hangover. I wished we could wake up in Havana.

More than ever, as Jack Kennedy made his great run for the presidency, I was reading the political columns in the newspapers, particularly in the Post. Since it had published several of my letters, I thought of the Post as my newspaper. In the late spring of 1960, Jimmy Wechsler, the paper’s editor, published a book called Reflections of an Angry Middle Aged Editor. The book was a kind of situation report on American society after the fall of McCarthy; it was sometimes despairing, about race and class, but otherwise full of hope. I read it through in one night and then typed a long letter to Wechsler, agreeing with most of what he’d written, arguing with some of his remarks, singling out a chapter on journalism for my hardest criticism, implying that newspapers had no room for people like me. Working-class people. People who didn’t go to Ivy League schools, young men rejected by places like Columbia. Such people, I said, might not have great formal educations but they knew about New York, the world, life. I worked hard on the letter, making three drafts. I didn’t think of it as a job application. That’s what it turned out to be.

A week later, a brief note arrived from Wechsler. He said he’d enjoyed my letter and agreed with about 90 percent of what I’d said. Why didn’t I give him a call sometime and come down to the paper for a chat?

His secretary set up an appointment for a few days later at the Post. I told Tim and Jake and tried to be casual about it, but for the next few nights I had trouble sleeping. My mind was full of images from newspaper movies, all those tough fast-talking men in tumultuous city rooms, causing trouble, being brave: Bogart pressing the button to start the presses at the end of Deadline U.S.A., Robert Mitchum moving through fog in a trench coat, Gregory Peck in a glorious apartment in Rome, riding with Eddie Albert to an assignment. Hemingway was there too, of course. He’d started as reporter in Kansas City, without ever going to college. He’d put a reporter named Jake Barnes into The Sun Also Rises, his best novel. I couldn’t imagine him writing a novel about a graphic designer.