Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

As the Sixties moved on, as the Head became my local Great Good Place, my marriage to Ramona was disintegrating. Once, in Rome, where I went off each day to try writing in the cafés of the Via Veneto, Ramona had asked me for a divorce. I was, in my invincible stupidity, stunned.

What do you mean, a divorce?

I mean I can’t live like this anymore, she said.

How do you want to live?

In a house. With a room for each of the girls, with a backyard, with a husband who comes home every night and has dinner.

I can’t promise you that kind of life, I said.

I know, she said, and started weeping. I know, I know, I know.

That small crisis was healed with sweet talk and promises. But I began to imagine a life without her. I didn’t want that; I still believed that we would be together for the rest of our lives. After all, my mother had gone through much worse with my father, and they were still together all these years later. In my erratic way, I tried to be better. I’d come home three evenings in a row, find a baby-sitter, take Ramona to a movie. Then I would miss dinner, call with some excuse about meeting a source or doing an interview, and try to remember the excuse in the morning. By 1967, Ramona was immune to my words.

You say things, she said one Sunday morning. You don’t mean them. They’re just words.

I make a living with words, I said. We eat because of my words. My words pay the rent.

I mean the words you say to me. Not the words you say in the newspaper.

Her disdain was clear. As I did after Richie cut into me on the night before I left for Barcelona, I saw the possibility that she was speaking the truth. Instead of accepting that possibility and bringing my life into line with my words, I turned her complaint around. I convinced myself that the problem wasn’t my neglect of her; it was her neglect of me. I would drop into the Head and have strangers praise some column I’d written. Letters about my columns poured into the newspaper. Most days, Paul Sann thought I was doing swell. But when I reached home for dinner, Ramona never said a word. She had stopped reading the Post. Instead of trying to earn her respect, I luxuriated in the delicious emotional state of feeling hurt.

If my work was ignored at home (I reasoned), then I had a license to go where it was appreciated: the Lion’s Head. Sometimes we hired a baby-sitter and I took Ramona with me; but the combination of drinking, machismo, intellectual bullshitting, and flattery seemed to repel her. She was sober and, after a while, I wasn’t. I remember some very good times; her memories are surely different.

THERE WAS ONE final move, one last attempt at repair. I heard about an apartment in Brooklyn, a few doors down from 471 Fourteenth Street, the lost sunny paradise of the first six years of my life. Maybe the girls could play under the elm trees as I did so long ago. Maybe we could go on long green summer walks in Prospect Park and in winter I could stand with them in a bright white meadow and together we would eat snow, as I had that time when I was a child. Maybe I could leave behind the life of the Head, the slippery delusions of Manhattan, and begin to make something more solid, back here where I’d begun my life. In our marriage now, we were living on maybe.

So we moved to Brooklyn, into what was called a parlor floor and basement. On the first day, I led the girls through the iron gate under the stoop and showed them their room to the left and the kitchen beyond it and then took them into the yard. A few doors away was the yard of 471, but when I looked for the great tree of my childhood, it was gone.

For a while, we were happy. I cut down on drinking, stayed away from the Head, worked hard. The children asked me to tell them stories or draw pictures of alligators and elephants. People came to visit. Jose Torres stopped by once a week to talk about his own writing, which he was doing now for El Diario and then for the Post. My brothers came around, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. We had barbecues in the yard. We drank beer. My father rang the bell on his way to Farrell’s and occasionally I went with him. He didn’t care for Ramona, but he liked the children. They loved him to sing “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” So did the younger crowd at Farrell’s, the fans of Mick Jagger and John Lennon.

But the Sixties were remorseless in their power. There were drugs everywhere, and my brothers were not immune. When he was sixteen, Denis came by one night and he was stoned. In tears and remorse, he explained that he’d been doing pills and reefer. I arranged for him to go to Ireland and work for a while on a farm owned by Patty Clancy of the Clancy Brothers. Driving him to the airport, I remembered his brown wounded eyes on the day I went to Spain; now those same shy eyes looked at me as he went off to a kind of exile of his own.

I’ll be good, he said. I’ll make you proud of me.

I know you will.

I’ll write you letters.

Write stories too.

Off he went. But if Denis saved his life in Ireland, when he returned, his friends were already dying, some in Vietnam, too many from drugs. In 1969, Denis, along with Brian and John, put together a group that was going to the great rock festival in Woodstock. Ramona asked me if she could go with them.

I need to have some fun, too, she said. You’ve had plenty of fun.

Where will you stay? Are there hotels or inns?

I don’t know, she said. I’ll stay where they stay.

And I stay home with the kids?

Well, yeah. .

Okay, I said. Go ahead. You need some fun too.

So they all moved off to one of the great hedonistic festivals of the Sixties and I stayed home to mind the girls. They liked this, because I cooked each meal following recipes from a cookbook. I told them stories. I drew a lot of pictures. But while Ramona moved through the rains, drugs, and music of Woodstock, I was thinking about the grieving drizzle at the heart of our marriage. In a way, Ramona was now having the years that she’d lost when she married me at eighteen and had two children very quickly. At night, with the children asleep, I watched the television coverage of Woodstock and imagined her lost in the vast rain-drowned crowd.

After Woodstock, the sense of unravelment returned to our marriage, more powerfully than ever. She seemed to be moving through a different landscape than the one I inhabited. There were visible signs of it: the music playing steadily, her music, not mine; no answers to my calls from the newspaper; eyes that made no contact. More and more, I cooked dinner while the laundry piled up and beds went unmade. There was an arctic chill in the marriage bed.

I found consolation once more in the Head. The pattern resumed, the phone calls with excuses, the amiable lies. At the bar, I could believe that my life was a delight. When the talk turned to women, I assumed the mask of the stoic. Sometimes, hurting from hangover, I wondered whether my Lion’s Head friends were really my friends, whether they put up with me because of my personal qualities or because I wrote a newspaper column. The unspoken question was usually dissolved in vodka and laughter. I often got very drunk and then lurched into Sheridan Square to find a taxi that would bring me to Brooklyn, to the street where I was a boy with yellow hair. One time I came home drunk at three in the morning, made a mistake, went up the stoop of the house next door and climbed in the window. Two men were in bed together and started screaming in terror. I thought this was hilarious when I was told about it the next day. But the actual incident doesn’t exist in my memory; all I have is the version of the story told by others. That and the sense of shame that morning after when I tried to imagine what I looked like to those frightened men.