Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

I was in the men’s room when I thought about Adriene and Deirdre. I wanted to be with them in the house in Brooklyn. I wanted to sit in the living room with them and hug them and tell them stories. I wanted to heal some of the wounds I’d cut into them. If this was a play, I wanted a better script.

Back at the bar, I sipped my drink and held Shirley’s hand. Then the band started playing. A group of gangsters came in with a group of women in beehive hairdos. The gangsters smoked cigars, the women chewed gum. They sat down front, with waiters bowing to them. All played their parts to perfection. Then the star of the evening came on. Ladies and gennnulman, the one and only. . Buddy Greco! The singer was perfectly groomed and perfectly dressed and he began to sing in still another of the endless varieties of the Sinatra style his version of “Lulu’s Back in Town.” The gangsters followed their scripts, nudging each other in approval, their knees bobbing to the rhythm. A few celebrants snapped their fingers. Doug nodded. I stared into my glass, at the melting ice and vodka-logged lime.

And I said to myself, I’m never going to do this again.

I finished my drink. It was the last one I ever had.

I DIDN’T JOIN join Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn’t seek out other help. I just stopped. My goal was provisional and modest: one month without drinking. For the first few weeks, this wasn’t easy. I had to break the habits of a lifetime. But I did some mechanical things. I created a mantra for myself, saying over and over again, I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it. I began to type pages of private notes, reminding myself that writers were rememberers and I had already forgotten material for twenty novels. I urged myself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom.

The first weeks stretched into a month, and after thirty days, I already felt better physically. My hands stopped trembling. There were no more twitches in my legs or numbness in the morning. And the strange misspellings disappeared from my copy. I had a tremendous craving for sugar and began to eat more ice cream and candy than I had since moving away from Sanew’s. In the mornings, I felt clear and fresh.

When the month was up, I set a deadline for a second month. I sat down and wrote my novella, The Gift, in one miraculous spurt, working day and night, removed from the world. The book was full of drinking and love for my father and the sweat poured out of me while I wrote. I thought of the book as my own gift to him, a declaration of his value that he could read while he was alive, and an explanation of myself to him and to me. Jason Epstein bought it for Random House. Another dry month went by, and now my mind was teeming with ideas and projects. I realized that for years I’d been squeezing my talent out of a toothpaste tube. I’d misused it and abused it and failed to replenish it with deep reading and full consciousness. I began to listen to music again. To Erroll Garner and Ben Webster. To Ray Charles and rock and roll. I was greedy for what I had missed.

Finally I tested myself at the Lion’s Head, standing at the bar with the regulars. I didn’t want to come among them with the zeal of a new convert. They knew I was off the sauce and smiled in a knowing way when I ordered a ginger ale. The smiles were understandable; a lot of people we knew had quit drinking before, and some of them were right there at the bar, belting down whiskey. But I had one major ally among the regulars: the bearded poet Joel Oppenheimer. A few months earlier, the doctors had ordered him to stop drinking and he’d followed their orders. He still smoked his Gauloises, still arrived each day in the afternoon, still looked lecherously at the young women. But he did it all on Coca-Cola. You won’t have as much fun, Joel cautioned me. But the fun will really be fun.

The sensation of performance ebbed. I cared less about the way I appeared to others, prepared to be dismissed as a bore, no longer as quick, silly, or entertaining as I’d been in the past. But Joel laughed at my remarks; I laughed at his. It was the drunks who were the problem. I started hearing stories I’d heard many times before, or relatively new ones repeated four times in an evening. I was polite. I listened. I laughed at the punch lines. But I didn’t drink.

Shirley was on the road, and I enjoyed staying in the house in Brooklyn, leaving the Lion’s Head in the cold evenings, my eyes blurring from the wind, my lungs swelling with the fresh air. I liked reading myself to sleep a lot more than falling into a swollen stupor. When I was with my children at Easter — the months piling up now — they seemed to notice a difference. I took them to restaurants and they exchanged glances when I ordered ginger ale or club soda. They began asking me endless questions about American sports, American music, and American history. Adriene reminded me of the night I broke the door on Fourteenth Street and then gave them each a rose. She laughed. I felt a stab of pain. I never wanted to be drunk in their presence again.

There were some crucial tests. The first took place at the end of January, when Frank Crowther from the Lion’s Head organized a huge party at the Four Seasons to celebrate Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday. It was like a rush hour crowd in the A train, except that everybody was drinking or smoking joints or both. I put my back against a pole and watched the crowd eddy around me. Joe Flaherty. Jules Feiffer. Jack Lemmon. Hello. How are ya? What’s doing? Editors, photographers, politicians. Whatta you hear? Need a drink? No, I’m on the wagon.

And then Mailer stood up in a spotlight to make a speech, squinting into the light, adopting his most belligerent stance. He was very drunk, holding a glass in his hand. He told a pointless joke about an Oriental cunt and then moved into some heavy metaphysical description of an organization or movement or cult that he was founding, called the Fifth Estate. He said it would monitor the multiple paranoid operations of the CIA. I remembered the way he drove me all the way to Manhattan from the 1964 convention in Atlantic City when Deirdre was born. And how kind he’d always been to me at prizefights and parties. Up there in the light, did Mailer feel that he was performing his life too? From the safe darkness of the crowd, people started shouting insults; others laughed; Mailer looked confused, exactly like an actor who was being hooted for a performance he thought was brilliant. Suddenly I wanted a drink. This was like bearbaiting. A friend was in trouble and there was nothing I could do about it except join him. I turned toward the bar and saw more laughing idiot faces. And said: No. Fuck it all, no. Not a drop. Not here. Not with these people. Never. I pushed my way through the crowd, found my coat, and went out to the street.

I walked for blocks, suddenly understanding clearly that another of the many reasons I drank was to blur the embarrassment I felt for my friends. If a friend was drunk and making an ass of himself, then I’d get drunk and make an ass of myself too. And there was some residue in me of the old codes of the Neighborhood, some deep adherence to the rules about never, ever rising above your station. Getting drunk was a way of saying I would never act uppity, never forget where I came from. No drunk, after all, could look down on others. Being drunk was the great leveler, a kind of Christian act of communion. Who could ever point the finger of harsh judgment at a drunk if we all were drunk? I’d do the same thing in the company of friends who thought they were failures and I was a success. Who could accuse me of snobbery, a big head, deserting my friends, if I was just another bum in the men’s room throwing up on his shoes?