Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

It was no surprise that Denis often turned to me for guidance and male kindness. He was an erratic student, and an unruly street kid, but in his school compositions, he showed hilarious gifts for narrative. His spelling was often atrocious. But he could certainly tell a story. I started helping him, showing him ways to develop stories, correcting his spelling, giving him books to read. When Ramona and I took our first small apartment near Prospect Park, he dropped by all the time, glad to run errands, to read some of my books, to talk about movies or comics. Ramona said she didn’t mind his unannounced arrivals; she thought he was cute. I took him with me a few times to the newspaper or to the Gramercy Gym to see the fighters. One of those fighters was now my brother Brian, who at fifteen weighed about ninety pounds and was boxing in amateur tournaments, watched over by Jose and the other professionals. He had a ferocious left hook, a good chin, and a cocky style. Denis would get excited when he saw Brian sparring, upset if Brian got hit, cheering when Brian was punching; he hated to leave the place. My brother John never came to the gym. He was only a year older than Denis, a fine student with a sweet good heart. But he was shy and self-contained where Denis was direct. If Denis wanted to go with me to a gym, he asked. If he wanted to stay at my house, wherever it was at the time, he said so. John never asked.

One summer afternoon, Denis got into a fight outside the YMCA. His opponent whipped out a knife and stabbed him in the stomach. He was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where he almost died. I arrived at the hospital after he came out of the operation. His voice was weak and his lustrous brown eyes were full of fear.

Am I gonna die, Pete?

No, you’re gonna be all right. The doctors said so.

I don’t wanna die.

You won’t.

You won’t let me die, will you?

The doctors won’t let you die, Denis. You’ll have a pretty funny-looking scar, maybe, but you won’t die.

I don’t want you to die either, he said.

Okay, pal.

Be careful, all right, Pete?

Whatever you say, Denis.

I don’t want anyone to die, he said, his voice drowsy.

On December 8, 1962, the printers’ union struck the New York Times. The Publishers Association, including Dorothy Schiff of the Post, immediately locked arms in solidarity against the proletarian rabble and closed the other six papers. We were all locked out of our jobs. The strike and lockout went on and on, past Christmas, past New Year’s, past Valentine’s Day, 114 days into the spring.

That winter, I learned to write for money instead of sheer love of the trade. I worked for thirty-five dollars a week on a strike paper. I wrote two articles for the Police Gazette at fifty dollars each. I borrowed money. I alternated between rage and impotence, furious at the printers, even more furious at the publishers. I had a wife and a baby girl and I couldn’t put money on the table. What the hell kind of man was I? What kind of husband? What kind of father? I began to think the Post would fold. My newspaper. Denis didn’t want anyone to die. I didn’t want a newspaper to die.

In the evenings, I stayed home more, playing with the baby, cuddling her, cooing to her. In some way, this angered Ramona. She was depressed for a long time after Adriene was born, and I knew so little about the biology and psyche of women that I took this as a personal rejection. It was as if she blamed me for the pain she’d suffered when Adriene entered the world. Her dark angers when I played with the infant infuriated me.

You’re jealous of her, aren’t you? I shouted one night. She’s only a baby and you’re jealous!

I’m not jealous, she shouted through tears. I just want you to love me the way you love her.

I hugged her, whispered to her, felt her tears on my face. I was ashamed of myself, at my anger, my inability to understand. But I never pushed past the surface, past the things she said to the things she most deeply felt. When she was calm again, I went to the refrigerator and opened a beer.

With the newspaper work gone, I used some of the empty time to read again, everything from Raymond Chandler to Stendhal. They took me out of the intolerable present. They presented challenges too. The weather was gray and cold, and reading novels made me want to go away again. To hole up with Ramona and the baby in some cottage in another country, where I would write stories about the things I knew and discover things I didn’t. I wished I were somewhere beyond that small flat.

Because of the lack of money, I didn’t see much of Jake or Tim, Bill or Richie; there was no way to meet for a drink without laying bills on the bar. I spoke by phone to Tim every day and checked in every few days with Paul Sann, to hear the latest about the contract negotiations. But I saw nobody from the newspaper; they seemed to have scattered to the winds.

Then, near the end of the strike I sold an article to the Saturday Evening Post for $1500, the equivalent of ten weeks’ pay at the newspaper. It seemed like all the money in the world. Exuberantly, I paid off my debts and gave the landlord the rent. I brought flowers to Ramona and hugged her and told her I loved her. I bought a bag of toys for the baby. I carried home fat bags of groceries. I lugged home cases of beer and invited Richie, Jake, Billy, and Tim and his wife, Georgie, over for a party. Celebration! Victory! Drink up! A few days later, Dorothy Schiff left the Publishers Association and reopened the newspaper. I went back to work.

Don’t get used to being too happy, you Irish bum, Paul Sann said when I took him for a fast drink after work. No matter what happens, he said, newspapers will always break your fucking heart.

SOMETHING SHIFTED in me during that strike. I thought I’d work at the newspaper forever. The strike made me understand that in the newspaper trade, there was no such thing as forever. When I went back to work, I kept doing freelance work on the side and found I had some talent for magazine articles. Checks arrived. We moved to a larger apartment in Brooklyn. But Ramona seemed no happier. When I got excited about selling a piece, she seemed uneasy. When the telephone kept ringing, with calls from friends, press agents, editors, she grew annoyed. When I came home drunk, a few days a week, she was disgusted. She was getting to know me better than I knew her.

As spring turned into summer, the old dream of the expatriate life blossomed again, ripening over beers on Saturday afternoons. Who wanted to live here, back in the bourgeois safety of Brooklyn? New York was a great city and I had a job I loved. But there was a world out there. One night, over dinner at home, I started talking to Ramona about going to Spain. Maybe we could live in Barcelona. The city where Orwell once carried a rifle, city of Dalí and Picasso and Gaudi, city that held out to the end in defense of the Spanish Republic. Barcelona! I’d write articles for the Saturday Evening Post and we’d live well on the money and to hell with newspapers. She looked at me as if I were drunk.

What’s the matter with New York? she said.

It’s not Spain, I said.

But you’ve never been to Spain.

I know, I said. But I don’t want to see it when I’m sixty.

She shook her head in a dubious way, tempering my enthusiasm. For weeks, I avoided any more discussion. I worked hard at the paper. I won some awards. But the notion of another escape wouldn’t go away. Over beers one night, I talked about Spain to Tim, suggesting that he could go too and work with me on the research while mastering the magazine form himself. He was very smart and a good clean writer; if I could do it, he could do it. At first, Tim was skeptical. But we looked in the New York Times at the rate of the peseta against the dollar, bought Spanish newspapers in Times Square, and saw that we could live more cheaply than in New York. We were young, we could afford it; when would we have such a chance again? A strange, inevitable momentum took over. It was like going to Mexico again. There was nothing complicated about it. We’d just go, live in a foreign land, walk where Hemingway walked, speak Spanish and eat olives and brown ourselves on the Costa Brava. We’d support ourselves with writing.