A Drinking Life: A Memoir Read online

  PRAISE FOR A DRINKING LIFE

  “In straightforward candor, with unflinching staccato, Hamill shows us that his fate was sealed from the moment of his birth.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Pete Hamill has a story to tell, a good one, and doesn’t waste a word doing it.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “Pete Hamill’s thirty years of writing come to fruition in A Drinking Life. It is constructed seamlessly, with the pacing and eye for telling detail learned as a novelist and the hard, spare prose of a fine journalist.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “A Drinking Life is much more than the story of Pete Hamill and the bottle. It’s also a classic American tale of a young person’s struggle to expand his horizons without doing violence to his personal identity.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “This vibrantly written memoir is as much a recollection of Hamill’s Brooklyn childhood and his coming of age as a writer as it is the story of his alcohol abuse…. He’s written this book—and lived his life — with gusto and grace, and without apology.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “It’s hard to change a family culture in one generation, and it’s even harder to find a writer who can take us along on this journey. In A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill does both. For any men trying to become the fathers they never had, and all readers pioneering in new emotional territory, this book is a gift of honesty, courage — and very good writing.”

  —Gloria Steinem

  “A Drinking Life is a vivid report of a journey to the edge of self-destruction. It is tough-minded, brimming with energy and unflinchingly honest. Mr. Hamill may lament what drink did to his memories, but to judge from this account he never lost the best of them.”

  —New York Times

  “From a vantage point of two decades later, Hamill has written not a moralistic confession but a joyously honest testament to the drinking life, to its rewards no less than to its costs, which finally became too high.”

  —New York Sunday Newsday

  “This is an honest, thoughtful, richly detailed memoir… that belongs on the same shelf with Jack London’s John Barleycorn.”

  — E. L. Doctorow

  “A Drinking Life is Pete Hamill at the top of his game, which puts him way up there with the best we have. If Scott Fitzgerald had been able to read it sixty years ago, who knows, we might have had half-a-dozen more Gatsbys and Tender Is the Nights. Meanwhile, let’s count our blessings with A Drinking Life.”

  —Budd Schulberg

  “Sad but never maudlin, tender but unsentimental, hard-bitten yet revealing, A Drinking Life is an unblinking look back at a life molded by a time and place that no longer exist. Hamill’s re-creation of New York of the ’30, ’40s, and ’50s is bracingly evocative. A pleasure to read.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “An affectionate, accurate appraisal of a period — the ’40s and ’50s—when taverns were to working people what country clubs and health joints have become to so many today. It’s about growing up and growing old, working and trying to work, within the culture of drink.”

  —Mike Barnicle in, the Boston Sunday Globe

  “I felt at times during this book that I was reading my own story, and so will many others. This is not just about Pete Hamill’s seduction by booze but about a tragic condition…. Hamill’s book joins a new literature that eloquently shows a ‘drinking life’ isn’t the way to a writing life, or to any life at all.”

  —Dan Wakefield in The Nation

  “Hamill has written an extraordinary and intimate reflection on the roots of his character and his conscience and his imagination, and Pete Hamill being who he is, that is consequential reading.”

  —Pete Dexter

  “Hamill consistently defies the squeamish objectivity of American journalism by writing explicitly about what he feels. And he does it not in the detached manner of a professional observer, but in his own strong, plainspoken voice.”

  — Utne Reader

  “Pete Hamill has made a fine career of covering the news, but his own story is probably as remarkable as any other he’s written. A Drinking Life is startling in its candor, detail, and insight.”

  — Carl Hiassen

  “An astonishing achievement. I can’t recall reading anyone’s memories of the earliest years of life that pulled me into them more forcefully and convincingly than Pete Hamill’s. His choice of the particular incident, the precise moment, the exact feeling, illuminates so much about the time and place and people of his childhood and later years that it is breathtaking. He has written a beautiful book.”

  —Joan Ganz Cooney

  “Hamill re-creates a time extinct, a Brooklyn of trolley cars, Dodgers, pails of beer, and pals like No Toes Nocera. This is not a jeremiad condemning drink but a thoughtful, funny, street-smart reflection on its consequences.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This moving memoir of a working-class kid coming of age simply demonstrates once again that Pete Hamill is in the first rank of American writers. It should be mandatory reading for every man (and woman), young or old.”

  —Peter Maas

  “The vivid and ultimately exhilarating account of the conquest of a dread affliction by a first-class writer.”

  —Louis Auchincloss

  “In creating this frank, often unflattering record of his personal struggles, Hamill has gone beyond simply remembering. He has also bestowed a form of immortality upon a neighborhood that now exists only in memory, dissolved by drugs, poverty, and suburban exoduses. With straightforward, two-fisted prose that is rarely maudlin, Hamill both honors and transcends his past.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Pete Hamill… evokes a New York that exists today only in memory. Read it and you feel the asphalt sticking to your shoes in a summer stickball game and the cooling shower of an open fire hydrant, remember the disappointment of options foreclosed by a cruel economic determinism, taste the blessed booze that loosens the tongue and fuels the braggadocio that seems to offer the only escape from life’s pitiless demands. Pete Hamill did escape, his virtue… lost, but his humor intact, and the result is a memoir as sad and brash and funny and compelling as the city he loves.”

  —John Gregory Dunne

  “The story is compelling; the writing is lean. Hamill the man catches Hamill the aimless adolescent with powerful prose that arrives in short, powerful bursts. He can say in a paragraph what some writers—even good ones—can’t in less than a chapter.”

  —American Journalism Review

  Books by Pete Hamill

  NOVELS

  A Killing for Christ

  The Gift

  Dirty Laundry

  Flesh and Blood

  The Deadly Piece

  The Guns of Heaven

  Loving Women

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Invisible City

  Tokyo Sketches

  JOURNALISM

  Irrational Ravings

  Copyright © 1994 by Deidre Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05453-9

  The “Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company” name and logo are trademarks
of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  I: DURING THE WAR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  II: AFTER THE WAR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  III: BREAKING OUT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  IV: TO THE GATES OF EDEN

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  V: A DRINKING LIFE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  VI: DRY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  For my sister, Kathleen

  MOST of the people who helped make this book possible are mentioned in its pages; they also made my life possible. But in addition I would like to thank Bill Phillips of Little, Brown for his endless patience and superb editing; Lynn Nesbit, for helping make the book happen; my daughters, Adriene and Deirdre, for allowing me to invade their privacy; my secretary, Meri McCall, for holding off the demands of the world with good humor; and, of course, my wife, Fukiko Aoki, for reasons that are beyond listing.

  — P.H.

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS IS A BOOK about my time in the drinking life. It tells the story of the way one human being became aware of alcohol, embraced it, struggled with it, was hurt by it, and finally left it behind. The tale has no hero.

  The culture of drink endures because it offers so many rewards: confidence for the shy, clarity for the uncertain, solace to the wounded and lonely, and above all, the elusive promises of friendship and love. From almost the beginning of awareness, drinking was a part of my life; there is no way that I could tell the story of the drinking without telling the story of the life. Much of that story was wonderful. In the snug darkness of saloons, I learned much about being human and about mastering a craft. I had, as they say, a million laughs. But those grand times also caused great moral, physical, or psychological damage to myself and others. Some of that harm was probably permanent. There is little to be done now but take responsibility. No man’s past can be changed; it’s a fact, like red hair.

  More than twenty years have gone by since I stopped drinking. My father died at eighty; my mother lives on. I’m happily married to a wonderful woman and work even harder than I did when young. But life doesn’t get easier when you walk away from the culture of drink; you simply live it with greater lucidity.

  I started writing this book when some of my friends from the drinking life began to die. They were decent, talented, generous, and humane. But as they approached the end, physically ruined by decades of drinking, I remembered more of their good times than they did. In a way, this book is about them too.

  New York City

  December 1993

  I

  DURING THE WAR

  Little enough I know of your struggle,

  although you come to me more and more,

  free of that heavy body armour

  you tried to dissolve with alcohol,

  a pale face staring in dream light

  like a fish’s belly

  upward to life.

  — John Montague,“Stele for a Northern Republican”

  1

  AT THE BEGINNING of my remembering, I am four years old and we are living on the top floor of a brick building on a leafy street in Brooklyn, a half block from Prospect Park. Before that place and that age, there is nothing. But in those remembered rooms are my mother, my younger brother Tommy, and me. It is the winter of 1939. I remember the kitchen, with its intricately patterned blue-and-red linoleum floors, and windows that opened into a garden where an elm tree rose higher than the house. The kitchen light was beautiful: suffused with a lemony green in summer, dazzling when winter snow garnished the limbs of the elm tree. I remember the smell of pine when my mother mopped the floors. I remember her whistling when she was happy, which was most of the time. I remember how tall she seemed then, and how shiny her brown hair was after she had washed it in the sink. And I remember my brother Tommy, two years younger than I, small and curly-haired and gentle. I don’t remember my father.

  He was there, all right. Billy Hamill wasn’t one of those Depression fathers who went for a loaf of bread at the corner store and never came back. He moved through those rooms. He slept in one of the beds. He shaved in the bathroom and bathed in the tub. But for me, he wasn’t there. In some ways, it made no difference. On summer afternoons, I would sit outside the house, in a patch of earth near the curb, playing with a small red fire engine, telling myself stories.

  Perhaps my father was in those stories. But he didn’t take me on those long green walks through the endless meadows and dark woods of Prospect Park. My mother did. Nor did he take me to see my first movie. My mother did that too. It was The Wizard of Oz, and the streets were dark when we came out of the Sanders Theater and she took my hand and we skipped home together, singing Off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, because because because because Because. I have no memory of him bouncing me on his knee or looking at the drawings I made each day with my box of eight Crayolas. I remember sitting on the stoop, watching Japanese beetles gnaw the ivy that covered the face of the brownstone next door and my mother teaching me a little song to be crooned to another insect neighbor: Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your child is alone…. But I learned no songs from my father. Not then.

  In large part, my father’s absence was caused by his work. He left home before I awoke and returned after I was asleep. So in some ways, I didn’t really miss him. He wasn’t in my presence often enough to be physically missed. Besides, I was too busy learning the names of the world and even having small adventures. Once I went to Prospect Park with Billy Kelly, the boy who lived on the first floor. He was my first friend, a year older than I was, and his family owned 471 Fourteenth Street, the house where we lived on the top floor. Our adventure began in a very simple way. Billy said, Let’s go to the park. And I said, Okay, let’s go to the park.

  And yet I knew that what we were doing was full of risk. Most important of all, it was the first time I’d ever gone anywhere without my mother and this act could lead to punishment. She might get cross. She might spank me. I went anyway, trusting Billy Kelly, certain we would be back before my mother noticed I was gone. I crossed the wide avenue called Prospect Park West, following the vastly
more experienced Billy, watching for the trolley cars and the few big boxy black automobiles that moved through the streets in those days. We plunged into the park and wandered through that green world whose trees loomed high above us. Soon we were lost. We crossed streams, gazed at lakes, threw stones into the woods, but never could find the familiar playground and low stone wall beyond which lay home. I was filled with panic. I might never see my mother again or my brother Tommy or the kitchen at 471. We could end up in jail or someplace called the Orphanage, where they put kids without parents.

  We were still in the park at dusk, when my mother found us. Her eyes were wide and angry, probably frantic. She did nothing to Billy Kelly; that was not her right. But she spanked me.

  I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Peter, she said sharply. You had me worried sick.

  I cried all the way home, full of remorse, and shocked too, because I had never before seen my mother angry, certainly not at me. And then we were at the house, going up the stoop in silence and into the vestibule and up the stairs to the top floor. Then, suddenly, quietly, she hugged me. And fed me. And put me to bed. The day had been the most turbulent of my short life; but from beginning to end, my father played no part in it at all.

  In the summer of 1940, my mother started taking Tommy and me to visit my father where he worked.

  You should be very proud of your daddy, my mother said. He only finished the eighth grade and he is working as a clerk. The reason is his beautiful handwriting.

  She didn’t explain what a clerk was, but she did show me his handwriting on some sheets of ruled paper. I was just learning to print the alphabet on the same kind of paper, and the shape and steadiness of my father’s handwriting did seem very beautiful. He was working at the main office of a Brooklyn grocery chain called Thomas Roulston & Sons and brought home nineteen dollars a week. The Roulston company was housed in a redbrick factory building near the Gowanus Canal, more than a mile from where we lived. My mother would pack a lunch for him and put Tommy in a stroller and off we would go, first crossing along the parkside, then marching block after block, down the great slope. From Ninth Street, I could see all the way to the harbor, where there were ships on the water as small as toys. I loved arriving down near the canal, where the Smith and Ninth Street station of the Independent subway line rose high above us on a concrete trestle. On some days, a drawbridge would groan and squeal, rising slowly to allow some tough squat tugboat to plow through the canal’s oily waters to the harbor. There was a mountain of coal on one of the banks and a machine for unloading it off barges and another for putting it on thin-wheeled trucks with odd sloped fronts like the points of steam irons. I’d wait beside the bridge with Tommy while my mother took her plump brown paper bag up to my father’s office. He never once came down to the street to say hello to us.