Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

A year went by, then another. Ramona and I were divorced in an amicable way. She found another man to live with and tried for a while to be a photographer. But the children remained in boarding school in Switzerland. Sometimes I paid for Ramona to visit them. I visited them myself three or four times during the school year, laden down with gifts, wrote them long letters, spoke to them by telephone. They came home to stay with me at Christmas and Easter and across the summers. But then it would be time for them to leave and I’d be full of sorrow and grieving guilt. I wanted them with me all the time, but Shirley made clear to me that she wasn’t going to be part of a household that included Adriene and Deirdre.

I have no talent for that, she said. I would be terrible at it. It would be a mess.

The girls resented her, blaming her for the breakup with Ramona, which wasn’t her fault at all, seeing her as the person who was keeping them from her father, which was true.

I want to come home to stay for good, Adriene said to me one evening in the big house in Brooklyn. I want to live in my own room. I want to be with you, Daddy. Please. Please.

Her words drilled into me. But I felt paralyzed. Instead of making a decision, choosing my children over a woman, I postponed the choice. Off they went again to the airport, Adriene in tears, Deirdre sullen. I went back to the empty house, choked with remorse, and drank until I slept. There were too many versions of this same scene.

In addition to vodka, I used movement and traveling to prevent too much brooding. When good parts for women began drying up in the movies, Shirley created a nightclub act, singing and dancing and cracking wise. I admired the power of her will, her refusal to simply end her career that early, the way in which she whipped herself into physical shape, driving herself harder than any athlete. I traveled a lot with the show, back and forth to California, to Las Vegas and Canada and Florida. In 1972, Shirley got involved in the presidential campaign of George McGovern, which I covered; that also put us on the road, checking in and out of hotel rooms, making long-distance calls to friends and children and family. Sometimes I would stay behind in New York and return to the Head and get drunk in the old style. Sometimes I would retreat to the Brooklyn house and get drunk in its empty rooms. Then I’d be gone again, following my star. Most of the time, when I was away, my brothers Denis and John lived in the house, watering the plants, reading the books, throwing parties. They loved the place. But it never felt like a home to me. I didn’t want to look at the rooms where the girls stayed on their holidays. I didn’t want to imagine domestic scenes that could not become real.

As the months passed, I began to notice odd little signs of deterioration. Typing a column or a script, I would misspell simple words, not just once, but eight or nine times. Sometimes my fingers felt like gloves filled with water and typing was a plodding effort of physical labor. My hands trembled too, and there were odd twitches in my legs, little spasms of protest, or I’d wake up with no feeling in my legs. I shook off most of these signals. I was just getting older, I told myself. I’m thirty-seven, and that makes me older than most of the ballplayers and all of the prizefighters. Hell, even the police lieutenants are younger than I am. But on a few clear-eyed mornings I knew that my body was sending me a message. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

Besides, I was also having a good time. There were parties to attend, political fund-raisers, movie premieres. Shirley sampled my world too. One St. Patrick’s night, we piled into a car with five uniformed firemen, all of us drinking, and went over the bridge to Brooklyn. That night, Shirley became the first woman ever served at the bar at Farrell’s, a personal triumph that was discussed for months in the Neighborhood. She sampled hot dogs at Coney Island and clams at Sheep’s Head Bay. She came with me on some nights to the Lion’s Head, to stand at the bar, talking politics, or to listen to the singing in the big table in the back room. But these were usually mere excursions. We ended up at Elaine’s or at her apartment. She never got drunk. But now she was drinking even less, watching her weight to stay in dancing trim. I was drinking more.

I N THE POLITICAL YEAR of 1972, I’d begun to hang out in a new saloon on Fifty-second Street. It was called Jimmy’s and was located in the building a few doors from 21 that had once been occupied by Toots Shor’s famous joint. Shor’s old circular bar was still there, and for a while the place had a kind of forced magic. Two of Mayor John Lindsay’s former aides — Sid Davidoff and Dick Aurelio — owned the place, and they helped attract a core crowd of newspapermen and politicians. A wonderful guy named Doug Ireland was a regular, a pilgrim from the Lion’s Head; he was a political operator who wanted to write. Some other members of the downtown crowd found their way to the circular bar, but the place was no substitute for the Head. There were no Clancy Brothers singing at tables, no old communists, nobody from the Lincoln Brigade, no seamen or poets. That was the year of George McGovern and the Watergate burglary; Nixon was triumphant; human beings were still dying in Vietnam. The binding element of the regular Jimmy’s crowd was politics.

As I stood at the bar of Jimmy’s one December night, while Shirley was playing in Vegas, I talked with passion about Nixon and the Watergate burglary, making epigrams, telling jokes, repeating lines that had gotten laughs from others. Suddenly, hearing myself repeat lines I’d used in other places, I began to feel oddly detached. I was there; but I was also looking at myself being there. Part of this eerie feeling came from living with Shirley. From her, I had learned much about the way actors worked, the mechanisms they used to become other people, the small signs and tags that they offered to display emotions they might not feel. That night, for the first time, I began to feel that I was performing my life instead of living it.

The feeling haunted me for days. The girls were home for Christmas and I brought them to see my mother and father, who had moved from 378 to a new flat in Bay Ridge. But as Adriene and Deirdre ate dinner and accepted presents that were not to be opened until Christmas, I wondered if I was being their father or playing their father. Was I truly being the thoughtful son with my mother, the loving admirer of my father, or was I just playing a role? I wanted all four of them, children and parents, to love me. But I felt as if my lines were calculated, not spontaneous. They might love the person I was presenting to them. But that person might not be me.

A few nights later, Denis came to visit me in the Brooklyn house. He was in college now. We sat in the living room, drinking beer from cans, while the lights of the Christmas tree bubbled and danced. The children were asleep in their rooms on the top floor.

I’m gonna try and do it, he said. I mean, really become a writer.

I waved at the bookshelves.

You have to read all of them, I said. They’ll teach you everything. The more you read, the more you’ll know about writing. Look at the way a guy writes a paragraph and try to break it down. If the guy makes you cry or laugh, analyze how he did it. .

I stopped. Was I speaking genuinely, or was this some unwritten script I was performing? Was I being generous to this good, talented kid or playing the wise older brother? In some peculiar way, did I need him to need me? Was I being real or playing a role? I didn’t know. I drank some more beer and talked about Nixon.

On New Year’s Eve, Jimmy’s tossed a party. Shirley was back from Vegas, and we went early in the evening and sat at the crowded bar with Doug Ireland. Everybody was drinking. Doug was witty. We exchanged lines. But once more, I felt as if I were shooting the scene with a camera from across the bar. At one point, as I lit a cigarette, I noticed that my hand was trembling and wondered if that was in the camera shot. Other people came in and I saw myself embracing them, heard my voice wishing them well. I saw Doug’s head fall forward, then jerk up. He recovered with a funny line. It was New Year’s Eve. We were supposed to be having a good time. Look: There were balloons. There were funny hats. There were noisemakers. Charlie? Bring me a vodka and tonic, will you please?