Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Ramona and I now had only the common ground of the children. One night, drunk again, I came home, opened the outer gate beneath the stoop and lurched into the inner door, smashing the window. In my hand I had two roses I’d bought from a flower seller in the Lion’s Head, one for Adriene, the other for Deirdre. I stepped over the broken glass and turned left into their bedroom. They’d awakened with the crash and there, suddenly, was their father. Their eyes were wide in fright or apprehension. I handed each of them a rose and told them I loved them. I did — but I’d broken too many things. It was time for me to go.

When we separated at last, I rented a basement apartment in a friend’s brownstone at the far end of Park Slope. The children could walk along the parkside to visit me; I could easily visit them. We went to Coney Island together, to block parties, to museums, as I played the new role of the Sunday father. The girls were delighted with the attention. They were baffled and confused about the fact that I was no longer living with them.

When are you coming home, Daddy? Adriene asked one day.

I don’t know, baby.

I want you to come home, Daddy.

We’ll see.

Almost all our talks ended this way. Deirdre was too young to understand; but Adriene understood very well that something terrible had happened to her life. After dropping them at home, I would walk slowly back to my place, loaded with misery. Sometimes, I walked it off. Other times, I reached for the easy solace of a bar.

In most ways, I felt an immense relief. It was no longer necessary to concoct lies if I wanted to stay up all night drinking. There were fewer evasions. The strained tension of life with Ramona was replaced with a correct civility. I realized finally that I could no longer escape to that elusive Great Good Place; it didn’t exist. I did more drinking than ever, sometimes alone, but I felt better about myself in the morning. I started reading fiction again and writing more carefully. At the Lion’s Head now, I even had the freedom to go home with women.

Then I started an affair with precisely the wrong woman for me. She was lovely, kind, smart, sensual, and rich. She was also a drinker. Soon we were parked together at the bar of the Lion’s Head. We were drinking at a table in Elaine’s (for she was an Uptown Girl). We were drinking at parties or traveling south to drink at some friend’s plantation. We got drunk a lot. And the drinking led to scenes, jealousies, anguished telephone calls, a variety of stupidities, not all of them mine. Doors were slammed. In the purple spirit of melodrama, all sudden departures were made in the dead of night.

This went on for almost a year. That year, I wrote a movie script that was filmed in Spain. We got drunk a lot in Almería, where all the spaghetti westerns were staged, and one night, coming to the defense of one drunken actor, I knocked out another actor and thought I’d killed him. My Uptown Girl had already gone home. I soon followed her, moved in for a few days, then fled to Brooklyn. There was one final angry night, both of us sodden after two days of drinking. The details are lost. But words were hurled in cruelty. There were curses and tears. And I was gone for good.

The next afternoon, I was alone in the Lion’s Head, reading the New York Times and sipping beer. I had no column to write and that was usually the best of days. Don Schlenck, the day bartender, was down at the far end, reading the Post and eating lunch. I looked up in the gloomy silence and peered out through the barred windows that opened at ground level to Christopher Street. I could see human legs going by. Two pairs of women’s legs. A man in jeans. A man in a gray suit. A man with a woman. Faceless. Without histories. Hurrying along. And then snow began to fall.

I guess God doesn’t want me to go home today, I said.

Didn’t you hear? God is dead. It says so in your own paper.

Don’t believe everything you read in a paper, Schlenck, I said.

I picked up my change and walked out into the storm. I walked downtown, block after block, as the swirling snow obliterated the edges of buildings. The snow-bright streets looked as innocent as childhood, and I wanted to walk somewhere with my girls. But I couldn’t even do that. A few months earlier, Ramona had made her own trip to Mexico, to work for a degree at the University of the Americas, and she had taken the children with her. I was in New York, alone in the snow; they were in Puebla. And I was sick of myself. Sick of drinking. Sick of the routines of my life. At City Hall, my hair and coat fat with snow, I hurried down into the subway and went home. In the basement apartment in Park Slope, I took the telephone off the hook and slept.

I MET Shirley MacLaine in Rome in 1966 at a party thrown by the producer Joe Levine. We talked and had a few laughs before she went off to another table. I saw her again during Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign in California. She was with her husband, Steve Parker, who lived in Tokyo. That night I ended up at her house in Encino, drinking whiskey at the bar in the living room with Steve and Shirley, talking politics until three in the morning. She was funny. She was intelligent. She was passionate about the problems of the world. She never talked about movies. I liked her very much.

A year after I separated from Ramona, Shirley published her first book, a charming memoir called Don’t Fall Off the Mountain. Reading it, I discovered that we shared one common childhood passion: Bomba the Jungle Boy. One night she came into Elaine’s with some friends and stopped at my table to say hello. I mentioned Bomba. She sat down.

The only book I could never find, I said, was Bomba at the Giant Cataract.

He had eye trouble too? she said.

I laughed.

Do you want a drink? I said.

I’m not here to ride horses, she said.

A month later, we went to England together, where she was working on a television series, and moved into a large rented house near Windsor Castle. I kept writing my newspaper column, shipping it from various places in Europe. Before we met, I’d started writing movie scripts to supplement my newspaper habit; with her, I learned much about the craft, about putting people on stage, establishing conflict, using action to show character. But I was still drinking. I didn’t often get drunk. In her world, most people simply didn’t drink the way I’d learned to drink; they would soon be out of the business. But I did drink steadily, easing the tension created by meeting so many new people, adjusting to a relationship in which I was not the principal.

Shirley never mentioned the drinking to me. Her father was a hard drinker too, and like me she’d grown up in the hard-drinking Fifties. But there was an indirect scrutiny. Sometimes in conversation she’d dismiss an actor or director as a drunk. If she saw a scene in a movie, or read a script where a character succumbs to another because of drunkenness, she’d shake her head. It’s a cheat, she’d say. It’s using the drink instead of forcing the painful choice. As an actress she was relentless in trying to get to the core of human character and discovering human weakness. Why does he do these things? she’d say about a character in a script. What hurt him? What warped him? What does he want, and what’s preventing him from getting it?

When she was off at work one morning, I was sitting at my typewriter, gazing at the gardens of England, and began applying those questions to myself. I couldn’t accept my own answers.

Back in New York, I started to work harder than ever before on movie scripts and magazine articles and columns. Necessity drove me: I needed the money. After they returned from Mexico; Ramona and I had agreed to place the girls in a boarding school, to give them some steadiness and structure while she tried to sort out her life. This arrangement wasn’t intended to be permanent; I bought a big house in Park Slope in Brooklyn, full of vague plans about getting custody of the children and having them live there with me and Shirley. This was absurd, of course; Shirley was an old Broadway gypsy, an itinerant who lived where the work was. She did help me set up the house. But she kept her apartment in Manhattan. She was never going to live among the burghers of Brooklyn.