Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

When it was over, I knew a lot more about writing. Aronowitz was a generous man, showing me what he was doing and why, passing on his hatred of platitude and cliché. And I’d gone more deeply than ever before into Hemingway. I saw his writing mannerisms more clearly, his personal posturing. Some of it was embarrassing. But I had learned that it was possible to be a great writer and an absolute asshole at the same time. None of us then knew how terrible Hemingway’s final years had been and the extent to which alcohol had contributed to his anguished decline. It was right there on the pages. I just didn’t choose to see it.

There were still parties on the weekend, but the gang that came over from Brooklyn was breaking up. Richie Kelly, who lived next door, found an apartment in another part of Manhattan and started making a living at advertising art. Billy Powers moved with a young actress to an apartment in Chelsea. Tim married a beautiful woman from the Neighborhood. We all got drunk in celebration, and Jake and I decided that the newlyweds should keep the apartment. Jake moved back to Brooklyn while I moved next door. For a while, Jose Torres shared the place with me, then he got married too, and we all danced and drank at his wedding. Even Tom McMahon was leaving, to teach in Puerto Rico. There was a sense of departure and change in the air. It was as if we all had decided it was time to grow up.

At the end of 1961, Jose took me to a Christmas party on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I saw a small, lovely young Puerto Rican woman there and danced with her and asked for her phone number. Her mother was standing against a wall beside the Christmas tree, looking at me in a uspicious way, like one of the dueñas of Mexico. The girl gave me the number. I wrote it on a matchbook and drank some more beer and then moved on to another party. The next day, thick with hangover, I remembered the girl but couldn’t find the matchbook. I called Jose, who made some calls and found out who she was. Her name was Ramona Negron. She was seventeen. I was twenty-six. I called her and we started going out. In February 1962, we were married.

MARRIAGE didn’t end my drinking. Ramona didn’t drink, but I did it for both of us. There was a lot of drinking at the wedding reception; drinking in Acapulco, where we went on our honeymoon; drinking to celebrate the birth of our first daughter, Adriene; drinking on weekends; drinking on the way home from work. We moved to an apartment in Brooklyn, and I’d drink beers with dinner and invite friends in to drink with me.

Sometimes I brought home total strangers. One afternoon I found myself drinking in Bowery dives with Richard Harris, the Irish actor, who was in town promoting his first movie, This Sporting Life, and researching the world of Eugene O’Neill. In the company of Bowery rummies we talked about O’Neill and The Iceman Cometh and about J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, a marvelous book about an irresponsible drunk. Harris told me that he’d played the part of Sebastian Dangerfield in a Dublin production based on the Donleavy book and had even tracked down the model for the hero, a man named Gainor Christ. That book looks like a comedy, Harris said, but it’s a terrible fuckin’ tragedy. . We talked and drank, drank and talked, and I called Ramona and said I’d be home late and home we arrived much later, Harris and I roaring drunk, and I started to make hash in the small low-ceilinged basement, the baby awake now and bawling, Ramona exhausted, hash flying and sticking to the ceiling, until finally Harris wandered into the night. Ramona wept.

Behind all this were some unacceptable facts. At the newspaper, I could write about the problems, doubts, mistakes, and felonies of strangers; I didn’t have to deal with myself. I certainly didn’t have to look clearly at the girl I’d married.

In the most important ways, we were strangers. I knew facts about her: that she’d been born in Puerto Rico, taken to New York by her mother when she was a year old. She’d grown up in the projects on Grand Street, graduated from Washington Irving High School, spoke perfect English, and could dance the pachanga. But I knew nothing of her dreams, her vision of herself, her conception of the future. I never bothered to ask. In some ways, I knew more about the people in my newspaper stories than I knew about my wife.

Neither of us had a useful model for a marriage. Ramona didn’t meet her father until she was fourteen; he’d broken with her mother a few months after Ramona was born. He was her mother’s second husband. I met him on a trip to Puerto Rico with Ramona; he was white-haired and handsome, charming, a piano player in a nightclub, living with a fat black woman. I got the feeling that he barely remembered Ramona’s mother, who was petite, fair-skinned, vain, and given to complaint.

She was a very spoiled woman, he said to me over a beer in the place where he worked. I’m glad Ramona isn’t like her.

We spoke with the complicity of men. But when I told Ramona what he’d said, she laughed.

What does he know? she said. As soon as he had to feed a family, he left.

She lived through her teens without a father in the house, and then her mother married a German-American guy who did maintenance in the projects. He brought home a paycheck. He was civil. He watched a lot of television and even read some books. But he offered Ramona no clues about how she should live with the likes of me.

I had no model either. My father went to work, earned his money, found friendship and consolation in saloons. I’m sure he never asked my mother about her dreams either. The principle was clear through all my childhood: men went out and earned the money; women organized the family. Husbands were close-lipped, strong, stoic; wives were conciliatory, open, allowed to show feeling. Without thinking, I assumed the pattern. I didn’t work in a factory. But I would do everything that must be done to keep bringing home the paychecks. And I had other goals now: to write novels and short stories, to master the form of magazine articles, to do everything possible within the limitations of my talent. This time I wouldn’t walk away, as I had from Regis, as I had from painting. I would go as far as I could go with what I had. Or as Robert Henri had said about an art student, to be “master of such as he has.”

In the small flat where we lived in Brooklyn, I didn’t talk much about such desires with Ramona. She was too busy trying to become a woman and a mother. In both tasks, she was on her own.

My brother Denis was a wonderfully sweet kid, with big liquid brown eyes, broad shoulders, a wild sense of humor, and an original way of looking at the world. Once, when he was seven and struggling with the mysteries of the Catholic catechism, he was walking with my mother and embarked on a heavy theological discussion.

Mom, he said, is God everywhere?

Yes, Denis, she said. God is everywhere.

Is he in the sky?

Yes, he’s in the sky.

Is he in the street?

Yes, Denis, he’s in the street.

Is he in the park?

Yes, he’s in the park.

Mom?

Yes?

Is he up my ass?

My mother burst into laughter.

By the time he was ten, in 1962, Denis had begun to see me as a kind of father, although I was only the big brother who had lived elsewhere for all of his young life. I didn’t mind the role; I was probably a better father to Denis than I was to be a husband to Ramona. Around this time, my father had entered a crabbed, unhappy middle age; there was never enough money and always too much drinking. He beat the kids when they annoyed him or when he thought they weren’t doing homework or were talking in too heavy a Brooklyn accent. Tommy was now grown up and gone and Kathleen had a group of girlfriends from school. My father didn’t bother either of them. But the smaller boys were always in trouble with him, Denis most of all.