Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

During this long odyssey, there were some wonderful times. There were long sunny afternoons reading Lorca and drinking beer in huge one-quart glasses in the Plaza Real in Barcelona. There was one glorious evening in Rome with the raffish producer Joe Levine at the Hotel Excelsior, the two of us drinking brandy, with women all around us, musicians playing violins, Joe’s wife pleading with him to go to bed. I spent hours drinking rum with John Wayne during an interview on his converted navy minesweeper in Barcelona bay; I hated his politics and liked him. In Brussels, I wandered into some huge beerhall with a reporter from UPI and got hilariously drunk with some touring American paratroopers. There were good beery times in pubs in Dublin and England, the barmaids flirting, the regulars grumpy at this Yank invasion, then offering the pack of Senior Service and buying a round in the fraternity of drink. I drank beer with the mariachis in the Plaza Garibaldi. I got loaded in a place on the Calle Cristo in Old San Juan, singing along with Los Panchos on the jukebox. I got pleasantly smashed watching the sun crash into the Pacific in Laguna. Sometimes Ramona came with me; most of the time she stayed home.

She was with me in Belfast when my father came home in the late fall of 1963. She was a background figure, her dark skin exotic to the pale Irish, but existing only as an appendage to the visiting Yank. On that trip, my father held center stage.

He had been away since the early 1930s. I paid for his ticket because I wanted to see him there in the home place, on the streets that had shaped him. For a week, we wandered those streets on foot or by cab, stopping at the Rock Bar, the Beehive, the Long Bar, snug dark wool-smelling refuges from the gray hard drizzle of the North. He found old friends among the living and heard reports about the dead. He sang his songs, making the young Irish laugh with “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” A few times, confronted with some old photograph of soccer teams, he turned away in grief. He had less tolerance now for drink; he got drunk quicker. But he was back where he’d started from and he was happy to be there.

One evening, all of us were in my cousin Frankie Bennett’s house, sipping warm lager, dressing to go out for dinner. My father was at his brother Frank’s house and we were to meet him later. The television was on in the small living room. The Bennett kids were leaping over couches and rolling around on chairs. A coal fire glowed in the hearth. I was full of a buzzing warmth, part beer, part Ireland.

And then the first bulletin broke.

. . President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.

What? I turned to the black-and-white screen of the television set. What did he say? What the fuck did he just say? And he said it again, grave, British, restrained: Shots had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. No. The president was being rushed to Parkland Hospital. No. No. The room hushed, Frankie moved in from the kitchen, Ramona came downstairs, holding Adriene in her arms, Frankie’s wife stood by the set. No. I popped open a can of warm lager. A sitcom was playing. Then the announcer was back.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United States, is dead.

I let out a wail, a deep scary banshee wail, primitive and wounded, mariachi wail, Hank Williams wail, full of fury and pain. Nonono-nononononononononoNo. Ramona hugged me, weeping, and kids were wailing now, and Frankie was there beside me, but I turned, ashamed of my pain and my weeping, and rushed into the night. All through the Catholic neighborhood called Andersonstown, doors were opening and slamming and more wails came roaring at the sky. wails without words, full of pagan furies as old as bogs. I wanted to find my father, wanted to hug him and have him hug me.

But I careened around dark streets, in the midst of the wailing. I saw a man punch at a tree. I saw a stout woman fall down in a sitting position on a doorstep, bawling. I ran and ran, trying to burn out my grief, my anger, my consciousness. I found myself on the Shankill Road, main avenue of the Protestant district. It was no different there. Kennedy wasn’t a mere Catholic, he was Irish, Kennedy was ours, he was one of our sons, our Jack, and they have killed him. Along the Shankill, I saw a man kicking a garbage can over and over again in primitive rage. I saw three young women heading somewhere, dissolved in tears. I saw another man sitting on a curb, his body heaving in gigantic sobs.

Somehow, I found my way back to Falls Road in the Catholic area. My head was full of imagined demons, the gunmen of Dallas: Cuban exiles and right-wing bastards, Klansmen and Mob guys. But when I finally reached the Rock Bar I only wanted to find my father. He was upstairs where the television set was, sitting at a table beside a retired IRA man with three fingers missing from his right hand. I went to the table and the old IRA man said, It’s a terrible bloody thing, lad, terrible, terrible. . My father stood up, his face a ruin. We held each other tight, saying nothing, and then the bar was packed and we drank whiskey and there was a documentary playing about Kennedy’s trip to Ireland in May, smiling and laughing and amused, promising at the airport to come back in the springtime and I thought of the line from Yeats, What made us think that he could comb gray hair?

After that, there was almost nothing left except whiskey. Until the screen filled with Kennedy’s face, superimposed on the American flag, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played on the sound track. And then the whole bar crowd was standing, old men and young, men with hard whiskey-raw Belfast faces, and all of them were saluting and so was my father and so was I. That night in Belfast, we both discovered how much we were Americans.

THE PRICE I was paying was very large, but for a long time, nobody presented me with the check. Our daughter, Deirdre, was conceived in Spain and born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan while I was thick with hangover at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Norman Mailer drove me to the hospital. I was full of joy when I saw her. But Ramona never forgave my absence.

When Deirdre was less than a year old, we moved to Mexico. That was always the basic model for the Great Good Place, and going back was like an act of contrition. I was heartily sorry for the way I’d messed up in 1956. But now a decade had gone by. I thought I could repair the great rupture by going back. A Mexican friend confirmed what I suspected: the Mexican police were not looking for me, my name was on no list, my offenses were lost in the human avalanche of newer felonies. I signed a small contract to write my first book and we left New York. We sublet a friend’s apartment a block from the Pasco de la Reforma in the Colonia Roma. For a week, I had dreams about men bashing each other with bricks. But then Carta Blanca gave me dreamless sleep. I talked to Ramona about staying this time for good.

During the summer of 1965, Deirdre got sick with salmonella, probably from unpasteurized milk. She had begun talking before the infection; then all her talking stopped. Most of the time she looked stunned. I was heartsick, blaming myself for taking a child to Mexico, risking her life in my own self-absorbed quest for the Great Good Place. Work stopped; I never did write the book I’d gone there to write. One night I sat in the dark, listening to Cuco Sánchez, and got drunk alone, while Ramona and the children slept. A few days later, a letter arrived from Paul Sann. He wanted to know if I had any interest in going back to work at the Post. If so, he was looking for a columnist.

Once more, we packed up and went home.