Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Then one stormy morning, an hour before deadline, after I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn, Sann called me over. He held the galley in his hands. I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.

Not bad, he said.

Thanks.

I like the part about the rain rolling down his face.

Thanks.

By the way, did this guy speak English?

No.

So how the fuck did you get all these quotes?

I speak a little Spanish, I said.

You do? How come an uneducated Brooklyn Mick like you speaks Spanish?

I went to school in Mexico for a year. On the GI Bill.

No shit?

No shit.

He lit a Camel. Then he pointed at a paragraph near the end.

You see this, he said, where you say this is a tragedy?

Yeah.

I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word “tragedy” again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.

I see what you mean.

You better, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping the black coffee. He glanced at the story again.

Maybe in another eight or nine years, you could be pretty good at this miserable trade.

Thanks, I said, and started to leave.

Oh, by the way, Paul Sann said. You’re hired.

NATURALLY, I got drunk in celebration. The next day, I told my partner I was leaving the studio. He was furious, shouting You’ve left me high and dry. He was right, of course. But there was no going back. I’d found a life I wanted. Every day or night would be different. I would have a ringside seat at the big events of the day. I’d learn about death and life and everything in between. It was honorable work, not putting goods in pretty packages. Somehow the desire for freedom and the need for security had merged. If I worked hard, listened well, studied the masters of the craft, I’d have a trade I could practice anywhere. Even if the Post folded. I might never be Franz Kline in his heroic studio. But I wouldn’t be a buttoned-down organization man either. I’d be a newspaperman.

After I was hired, after they gave me my first Working Press card, I brought my familiar sense of entitlement to the bar of the Page One every morning. Those mornings were free of the limits of time, and I would drink with McMorrow, Grove, Poirier, and others, while fishmongers made deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a morning pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all the whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who passed through on their way from one town’s paper to another. I loved it. I’d taken a cut in pay to work at the Post but I didn’t care. I had enough for food, rent, and drink. Each day, after the Page One, I’d take the subway to Astor Place and walk from the station to the flat on Ninth Street, where I’d sleep off the beer, wake up and eat pasta at the Orchidia on the corner of Second Avenue before going off again to the Post. My byline was in the paper every day, and I couldn’t wait to go to sleep so that I could wake up and do it all again. On days when I did no drinking, I often couldn’t sleep, as sentences caromed around my brain and I rewrote myself and others. On such days, I often moved to the refrigerator and found a beer.

Everybody in the business was drinking then, the lovely older woman on night rewrite, stars and editors, Murray Kempton and the copyboys. Once, when I was working days, Poirier came to me and said, How do you call in sick if you’re in? We laughed and concocted a ludicrous story of eating a bad clam at lunch, and sure enough, at lunch hour, Poirier called in with his bad clam attack and took the rest of the day off. Another day, working overtime during some disaster in the dead of winter, I finished at noon instead of 8 A.M. and carried my exhaustion directly into the Lexington Avenue IRT, skipping the Page One. Standing in the middle of the subway car, his eyes glassy, a large black Russian-style fur hat making him seem even taller, was McMorrow. He was maintaining his balance with one finger delicately touching the roof of the subway car and he was barking, Copy! Copyboy! as strangers edged away from his dangerous presence.

That first newspaper Christmas, there was a staff party in the penthouse office of Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s owner. The city editor got drunk and fell down the spiral staircase, breaking his arm. He refused to risk the hazards of a city hospital, saying I’d rather die here at my desk. He insisted on being taken to his home in Oyster Bay. So Poirier and I helped him to his car, both of us drunk too, and drove through the frozen night to Oyster Bay. When his wife opened the door and saw her wrecked husband and then saw us, she started shouting at us, You bastards, you bastards, look what you’ve done to him, you bastards.

One election night, Kempton was in his third-floor office, sending down his copy one sentence at a time, until it was six-thirty in the morning. The night managing editor, George Trow, asked the copyboy to ask Mr. Kempton a simple, if urgent, question: “How much more?” The copyboy ran up the back stairs to the third floor, burst into the office and said to the paper’s greatest columnist: Mr. Trow wants to know, how much more? Kempton lifted his almost-completed bottle of Dewar’s and said, Oh, about an inch.

After working a double shift one Friday, reporting three stories, rewriting three others, and doing captions and overlines for about fifteen photographs, I was reading galleys in the city room. At his desk, Sann was typing fast with two fingers on his Saturday page, a potpourri of news items and smart remarks called “It Happened All Over.” He finished editing it with a pencil, called for a copyboy, rubbed his eyes, and then walked over to me.

Let’s have a drink, you lazy Mick bastard.

We took a cab to midtown and went into a joint called the Spindletop. It was dark and fancy in a sleazy way; if it wasn’t mobbed-up then the decorator had been inspired by gangster movies. Sann ordered whiskey, I asked for a beer. We talked for a while about craft and newspapers and the Boston Celtics, whose coach was his friend. Then:

You got a broad?

No.

Good, Sann said. This business is lousy on women.

I had learned that already. My lovely Dominican was gone, defeated by the hours of the newspaper trade.

But you’re married, I said.

Yeah, to the greatest woman in America. But it hasn’t been easy for her.

I sipped my beer, uneasy about saying anything.

She’s sick now, he said.

I’m sorry to hear that.

She’s very sick, he said, as if speaking to himself.

Then he turned and walked to the pay phone. I heard him placing a bet on the Cincinnati Reds. A few more people came into the bar, and then Ike Gellis arrived. He was the sports editor, short and stocky, Edward G. Robinson to Sann’s Bogart.

Where is he? Ike said.

Phone booth.

I bet he’s betting baseball. He’s a fuckin’ degenerate on Fridays.

Sann hung up and came straight to Gellis.

Well, well, the world’s shortest Jew.

I hope you didn’t bet the Reds game, Gellis said. The Giants’ll kill ’em.

Shut up and drink, Sann said.

Two weeks later, early on a Friday morning, Sann’s wife died of cancer. We heard the news about six A.M. Around eight, Sann arrived. He walked on his usual hurried way across the city room and went to his desk. He didn’t look at galleys or dupes of stories. He started to type. He typed for more than an hour, worked the copy with a pencil, called for a copyboy, and then got up and walked out of the city room without a word.