Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

We took an apartment in a new building off Union Square. Before we could furnish the place, I announced to Ramona that we’d have a house-warming party. The place was jammed. Tim, Billy, and Jake came from the Neighborhood; dozens arrived from the Post, including Sann, who looked around at his stumbling wards and left early. Among the late arrivals were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, friends of Al Aronowitz, in town for their first appearances in America. They were full of charm, smoking joints and drinking vodka, but they too left around the midnight hour. At some point, huge Fred McMorrow lurched into the bedroom where Deirdre was sleeping, fell across a glass-topped table, and smashed it. He didn’t even scratch himself. But Deirdre woke up screaming and Ramona was again in tears.

That poor little girl, Ramona said, over and over again. That poor little girl …

Deirdre was still not talking. One Saturday afternoon, she was walking with me on Fourteenth Street and suddenly fell on her bottom. I picked her up, and she looked at me with those brown eyes but didn’t cry. I stood her up and she walked a few more feet and plopped down again. Ramona told me she’d been doing the same thing in the apartment. I was alarmed. The next day, while I went to work at the newspaper, Ramona took Deirdre to St. Vincent’s.

She called me at the paper, her voice trembling.

They’re trying to tell me that she’s retarded, Ramona said.

What?

Retarded! It must be from that milk in Mexico! From the goddamned salmonella.

I rushed to the hospital and looked at our little girl. I didn’t believe the analysis. Her eyes were bright. She recognized me. She laughed when I played with her. Ramona and I found another doctor and insisted that more tests be made. That girl, we told each other, is not retarded.

We were right. There was a chemical imbalance in her brain, possibly brought on by the salmonella. But it could be cured with medication. There was no permanent damage. She was definitely not retarded. It was my time to cry, in thanks, in remorse. When Deirdre did resume talking, it was in complete sentences.

Through all this time, I managed to do a lot of work: newspaper columns, magazine articles, a first novel. The novel was a thriller. I learned the form without risking an examination of myself. If I was able to function, to get the work done, there was no reason to worry about drinking. It was part of living, one of the rewards.

But many things were being lost on the erratic journey. A shipment to some foreign place would never arrive, and notebooks, drawings, precious books, would vanish forever. I lost all my apprentice work. I lost my collection of original cartoons. A book of childhood photographs disappeared. I still didn’t realize that I was also losing my way.

I STARTED writing a column for the Post in October 1965. On the day after Christmas Paul Sann sent me to Vietnam, where in the first week I got drunk with some Marine Corps officers in Da Nang and heard them predict a dirty, bloody, perhaps endless war.

What can be done to pacify Vietnam? I asked one of them, late at night, with the artillery rumbling in the distance.

Pave it, he said, and stared at his drink.

In Vietnam, I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of death. The stoic codes of Hemingway served me better at thirty than they did at eighteen. Maybe Hemingway was an asshole, but he knew something about war and fear. In Vietnam, my only worry was about my daughters: If something happened to me, who would bring them up? Who would get them through school? Ramona would survive, but I fretted about the girls. Sometimes I worried in the same way about Denis. I got rid of these imaginings by drinking on the roof of the Caravelle with the other correspondents, watching the distant orange flashes of the artillery, or by inspecting the pain and fear of uniformed strangers. I wrote often to Ramona, and I had the city desk call her each time a dispatch arrived, to tell her I was all right. I did not mention the bars of Tu Do Street or the long afternoon when I wandered drunkenly into Cholon and two boys bumped me and slipped my watch off my wrist. I did not mention the anxious turmoil in my stomach, the product of the conflict between my aching desire to stay for the duration of the war and my responsibilities as husband and father. I wanted to stay, to make this my war. I did not say this to Ramona.

Every few days I went out to the killing fields, saw boys dying, heard the anguished screams of the wounded. A tourist at the war. Then I came back to Saigon and wrote my pieces in the room at the hotel and took them down to the post office for shipment to the Post. Afterward, wanting to stay and needing to go, wishing I were single and missing my children, I wandered through the bars of Tu Do Street, listening to Aretha and the Stones, talking to the perfumed women in their tight aodais. They were all very young, but their faces were hardening and they had no stories they were proud to tell. The sensuality of the war, its erotic demands, urged me toward sex with them; but I was afraid of disease, of having my money stolen, of ending up in some humiliating public mess. I got drunk instead.

When I came home, there was a new outpost in my personal geography. Normand Poirier had discovered a saloon on Christopher Street called the Lion’s Head. In the beginning, the Head had a square three-sided bar, with dart boards on several walls and no jukebox. The location, a few steps from the Sheridan Square station of the Seventh Avenue IRT, was perfect for newspapermen from the Post, the Times, and the Herald Tribune; the Village Voice was then cramped into a few tight rooms upstairs; and within a few weeks of its opening, the joint was a roaring success.

I don’t think many New York bars ever had such a glorious mixture of newspapermen, painters, musicians, seamen, ex-communists, priests and nuns, athletes, stockbrokers, politicians, and folksingers, bound together in the leveling democracy of drink. On any given night, the Clancy Brothers would take over the large round table in the back room and the place would be loud with “The Leaving of Liverpool” and “Eileen Aroon” and “The West’s Awake.” Everybody joined in the singing, drinking waterfalls of beer, emptying bottles of whiskey, full of laughter and noise and a sense that I can only describe as joy.

It was as if we’d all been looking for the same Great Good Place and created it here. Not in some foreign land but in the West Village. I was soon one of the regulars, there every night, and sometimes every day. In the growing chaos of the Sixties, the Head became one of the metronomes of my life, as regulating as the deadlines for my column. It was also the place in which everything was forgiven. Lose your job? Betrayed by your wife? Throw up on your shoes? Great: have a drink on us.

In addition, the Head provided a refuge from the more self-righteous fashions of the Sixties. Few of us did drugs. Not many were true fans of rock and roll. Almost all of us hated the war and despised Lyndon Johnson, but we did not slide off stools to join protest marches. We honored those who did. I covered all the great antiwar demonstrations in Washington and New York; but marching just wasn’t our style. In my columns, I defended “the kids” from the onslaught of cops and FBI men; but nobody from the Head was likely to join SDS or send money to the Black Panthers. I felt I was part of the Sixties and separate from them, sometimes a participant, more often a mere witness. My writing was altered by the fury and despair I saw in the ghetto riots. But it was Vietnam that inflamed the deepest emotions in my work and in the lives of millions. Vietnam was the focus for all public passion, the one great binder of generations. I don’t think any of us hated America; we wanted the war to end because we loved America. We wanted justice and baseball too.