Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

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As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In *A Drinking Life*, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.

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Someone passed around a carbon of the story. It was a farewell to his wife. Tough, laconic, underwritten. He never used the word “tragedy.” My friend Al Aronowitz read it and started to weep.

Oh, man, he said. Oh, man.

Aronowitz was a great reporter, a wonderful writer, and a lovely man. But he didn’t drink, so I saw little of him after work. That morning he went to the Page One with me. We drank for a couple of hours in virtual silence. But the booze had no effect.

I don’t know if I can work in this business, Aronowitz said. His wife dies and the first thing he does is come in and write about it.

Shut up and drink, I said.

3

EARLY ON, I learned there were limits to the myth of the hard-drinking reporter. One Saturday night, we threw a big party in the place on Ninth Street. It lasted until dawn. I was due at the Post at 1 A.M. Monday. But when we woke up on Sunday afternoon, Jake and Tim and I were still full of the exuberance of the party. We bought a case of beer and started drinking again. Other people dropped in. The day rolled on, full of laughs and drinks. When I arrived at the Post that night, I felt sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly. But I was half-drunk. I must have laughed too loud or bumped against a trash barrel too hard, attracting some notice. Then I started to type and my fingers kept hitting between keys. Finally an editor named Al Davis came over and stood above me and said, I think you better go home. I was mortified. Davis was part of the saloon fraternity too; he wasn’t objecting to the drink but to the obvious fact that I couldn’t hold it. I got up and pulled on my coat and he stepped close to me and whispered, Don’t you ever do this again. And I didn’t.

But if it was stupid to come into work carrying a package, as we said, that was no reason to stop drinking. As in most things, you needed rules of conduct. I drank in the mornings when I worked nights and at night when I worked days. When I was sent out to cover some fresh homicide, I usually went into a neighborhood bar to find people who knew the dead man or his murdered girlfriend. I talked to cops and firemen in bars and met with petty gangsters in bars. That wasn’t unusual. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the bars were the clubs of New York’s many hamlets, serving as clearinghouses for news, gossip, jobs. If you were a stranger, you went to the bars to interview members of the local club. As a reporter, your duty was to always order beer and sip it very slowly.

On weekends, I went to Brooklyn to visit my father’s clubs, and to see my mother, my brothers and sister. My mother was proud of my new career, dutifully buying the Post every day and clipping my bylined articles. She reminded me that she had bought the Wonderland of Knowledge with coupons from the Post, in the days before it became a tabloid.

You look very happy, she said.

I am, I said. I am.

In Rattigan’s, there were mixed feelings about what I was doing. In that neighborhood, there were still a lot of people who thought the Post was edited by Joe Stalin. Their papers were the Daily News, whose editorials kept calling for the nuking of Peking and Moscow, and Hearst’s Daily Mirror and Journal-American. The Post was always attacking the people held sacred by the more pious and patriotic: Cardinal Spellman, Francisco Franco, J. Edgar Hoover, and Walter Winchell.

How’s it going over there, McGee? my father asked one Saturday at the bar in Rattigan’s.

The Post? I’m having a great time, Dad.

Good. The checks are clearing, right?

Right.

He sipped his beer and nodded at Dinny Collins, a smart heavy-set man, dying of cirrhosis, who was reading the Daily News a few feet away.

What do you think of my stories? I said to my father.

Good, good. Very good. I just. .

He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.

You just what? I said.

Goddammit, I just wish you were working for the Journal-American!

I laughed out loud, but he didn’t see anything funny.

Dad, the Journal-American is a rag. They make things up. I know. I’ve covered stories with their reporters, and they make up quotes and details that aren’t true.

How do you know they’re not true?

I told you, Dad. I’ve been there on a story, talking to the same people, seeing the same things. By the time their stories get in the paper they’ve added stuff. Lies. Bullshit.

Dinny Collins leaned over and said, Listen to the kid, Bill. I always said that Journal-American was a load of shit.

Especially, I said, when they interview Franco once a year, or Cardinal Spellman three times a year.

You mean they make up stuff for Spellman?

No, I said. In that case, they just print the bullshit.

Collins laughed. But my father gathered his change.

That does it, he said. I’m going to Farrell’s.

Out he went. Collins was still laughing. I ordered a beer.

Don’t take him seriously, Collins said. You’ve made him prouder than hell.

I hope you’re right, Dinny, I said, on my way to a long afternoon in the bars of Brooklyn.

At about seven-thirty in the morning of July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. The news was smothered for most of the morning. I heard the first bulletin early that afternoon, while watching the Dodgers play the Phillies on television. I was shaken to the core. Hemingway was still the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist. But since the day in the navy when I’d first read Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking collection of Hemingway’s work, he had been one of my heroes. No other word could describe him: his writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image. Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward.

But I had little time to mourn Hemingway or even question his motives. The telephone rang. It was Paul Sann.

Get your ass down here, he said. Hemingway knocked himself off, and I want you and Aronowitz to write a series.

The Post was famous for its series; one of them — in twenty-three daily installments — had ruined the career of Walter Winchell. The writers were detached from the daily routine and allowed weeks of luxurious reporting and writing on a single subject. I’d never written a series, but Al Aronowitz was a master of the form. He was five years older than I was, heavy, red-bearded, full of sly laughter and dissatisfied melancholy. In his own style, he was struggling as I had struggled over the way to live in the world. He was intoxicated by the careless freedoms of the Beats, about whom he’d written a brilliant series, and pulled in the opposite direction by the demands of a conventional life in the suburbs of New Jersey. For a few years, drinking had helped me postpone a choice; temporarily, at least, newspapers had resolved it. For Aronowitz, newspapers were not enough.

We began working that afternoon in an empty back office. Aronowitz knew almost nothing about Hemingway; I knew almost too much. So we divided the work. I stayed one installment ahead of him, laying out the newspaper clippings, the relevant passages in biographies and monographs, marking passages in Hemingway’s own work that were relevant to the installment. We shared the reporting tasks, calling people all over the country who had known Hemingway. Aronowitz did most of the writing. When he finished each installment, I’d go back over the copy, filling in blanks, cutting statements that seemed ludicrous, trying to separate the myth from the facts. We finished some installments near six in the morning, two hours before the deadline.

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