A Drinking Life: A Memoir

  On weekends, I went to Brooklyn to visit my father’s clubs, and to see my mother, my brothers and sister. My mother was proud of my new career, dutifully buying the Post every day and clipping my bylined articles. She reminded me that she had bought the Wonderland of Knowledge with coupons from the Post, in the days before it became a tabloid.

  You look very happy, she said.

  I am, I said. I am.

  In Rattigan’s, there were mixed feelings about what I was doing. In that neighborhood, there were still a lot of people who thought the Post was edited by Joe Stalin. Their papers were the Daily News, whose editorials kept calling for the nuking of Peking and Moscow, and Hearst’s Daily Mirror and Journal-American. The Post was always attacking the people held sacred by the more pious and patriotic: Cardinal Spellman, Francisco Franco, J. Edgar Hoover, and Walter Winchell.

  How’s it going over there, McGee? my father asked one Saturday at the bar in Rattigan’s.

  The Post? I’m having a great time, Dad.

  Good. The checks are clearing, right?

  Right.

  He sipped his beer and nodded at Dinny Collins, a smart heavy-set man, dying of cirrhosis, who was reading the Daily News a few feet away.

  What do you think of my stories? I said to my father.

  Good, good. Very good. I just . . .

  He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.

  You just what? I said.

  Goddammit, I just wish you were working for the Journal-American!

  I laughed out loud, but he didn’t see anything funny.

  Dad, the Journal-American is a rag. They make things up. I know. I’ve covered stories with their reporters, and they make up quotes and details that aren’t true.

  How do you know they’re not true?

  I told you, Dad. I’ve been there on a story, talking to the same people, seeing the same things. By the time their stories get in the paper they’ve added stuff. Lies. Bullshit.

  Dinny Collins leaned over and said, Listen to the kid, Bill. I always said that Journal-American was a load of shit.

  Especially, I said, when they interview Franco once a year, or Cardinal Spellman three times a year.

  You mean they make up stuff for Spellman?

  No, I said. In that case, they just print the bullshit.

  Collins laughed. But my father gathered his change.

  That does it, he said. I’m going to Farrell’s.

  Out he went. Collins was still laughing. I ordered a beer.

  Don’t take him seriously, Collins said. You’ve made him prouder than hell.

  I hope you’re right, Dinny, I said, on my way to a long afternoon in the bars of Brooklyn.

  At about seven-thirty in the morning of July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. The news was smothered for most of the morning. I heard the first bulletin early that afternoon, while watching the Dodgers play the Phillies on television. I was shaken to the core. Hemingway was still the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist. But since the day in the navy when I’d first read Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking collection of Hemingway’s work, he had been one of my heroes. No other word could describe him: his writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image. Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward.

  But I had little time to mourn Hemingway or even question his motives. The telephone rang. It was Paul Sann.

  Get your ass down here, he said. Hemingway knocked himself off, and I want you and Aronowitz to write a series.

  The Post was famous for its series; one of them — in twenty-three daily installments — had ruined the career of Walter Winchell. The writers were detached from the daily routine and allowed weeks of luxurious reporting and writing on a single subject. I’d never written a series, but Al Aronowitz was a master of the form. He was five years older than I was, heavy, red-bearded, full of sly laughter and dissatisfied melancholy. In his own style, he was struggling as I had struggled over the way to live in the world. He was intoxicated by the careless freedoms of the Beats, about whom he’d written a brilliant series, and pulled in the opposite direction by the demands of a conventional life in the suburbs of New Jersey. For a few years, drinking had helped me postpone a choice; temporarily, at least, newspapers had resolved it. For Aronowitz, newspapers were not enough.

  We began working that afternoon in an empty back office. Aronowitz knew almost nothing about Hemingway; I knew almost too much. So we divided the work. I stayed one installment ahead of him, laying out the newspaper clippings, the relevant passages in biographies and monographs, marking passages in Hemingway’s own work that were relevant to the installment. We shared the reporting tasks, calling people all over the country who had known Hemingway. Aronowitz did most of the writing. When he finished each installment, I’d go back over the copy, filling in blanks, cutting statements that seemed ludicrous, trying to separate the myth from the facts. We finished some installments near six in the morning, two hours before the deadline.

  When it was over, I knew a lot more about writing. Aronowitz was a generous man, showing me what he was doing and why, passing on his hatred of platitude and cliché. And I’d gone more deeply than ever before into Hemingway. I saw his writing mannerisms more clearly, his personal posturing. Some of it was embarrassing. But I had learned that it was possible to be a great writer and an absolute asshole at the same time. None of us then knew how terrible Hemingway’s final years had been and the extent to which alcohol had contributed to his anguished decline. It was right there on the pages. I just didn’t choose to see it.

  There were still parties on the weekend, but the gang that came over from Brooklyn was breaking up. Richie Kelly, who lived next door, found an apartment in another part of Manhattan and started making a living at advertising art. Billy Powers moved with a young actress to an apartment in Chelsea. Tim married a beautiful woman from the Neighborhood. We all got drunk in celebration, and Jake and I decided that the newlyweds should keep the apartment. Jake moved back to Brooklyn while I moved next door. For a while, Jose Torres shared the place with me, then he got married too, and we all danced and drank at his wedding. Even Tom McMahon was leaving, to teach in Puerto Rico. There was a sense of departure and change in the air. It was as if we all had decided it was time to grow up.

  At the end of 1961, Jose took me to a Christmas party on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I saw a small, lovely young Puerto Rican woman there and danced with her and asked for her phone number. Her mother was standing against a wall beside the Christmas tree, looking at me in a uspicious way, like one of the dueñas of Mexico. The girl gave me the number. I wrote it on a matchbook and drank some more beer and then moved on to another party. The next day, thick with hangover, I remembered the girl but couldn’t find the matchbook. I called Jose, who made some calls and found out who she was. Her name was Ramona Negron. She was seventeen. I was twenty-six. I called her and we started going out. In February 1962, we were married.

  4

  MARRIAGE didn’t end my drinking. Ramona didn’t drink, but I did it for both of us. There was a lot of drinking at the wedding reception; drinking in Acapulco, where we went on our honeymoon; drinking to celebrate the birth of our first daughter, Adriene; drinking on weekends; drinking on the way home from work. We moved to an apartment in Brooklyn, and I’d drink beers with dinner and invite friends in to drink with me.

  Sometimes I brought home total strangers. One afternoon I found myself drinking in Bowery dives with Richard Harris, the Irish actor, who was in town promoting his first movie, This Sporting Life, and researching the world of Eugene O’Neill. In the company of Bowery rummies we talked about O’Neill and The Iceman Cometh and about J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, a marvelous book about an irresponsible drunk. Harris told me that he’d played the part of Sebastian Dangerfield in a Dublin p
roduction based on the Donleavy book and had even tracked down the model for the hero, a man named Gainor Christ. That book looks like a comedy, Harris said, but it’s a terrible fuckin’ tragedy. . . . We talked and drank, drank and talked, and I called Ramona and said I’d be home late and home we arrived much later, Harris and I roaring drunk, and I started to make hash in the small low-ceilinged basement, the baby awake now and bawling, Ramona exhausted, hash flying and sticking to the ceiling, until finally Harris wandered into the night. Ramona wept.

  Behind all this were some unacceptable facts. At the newspaper, I could write about the problems, doubts, mistakes, and felonies of strangers; I didn’t have to deal with myself. I certainly didn’t have to look clearly at the girl I’d married.

  In the most important ways, we were strangers. I knew facts about her: that she’d been born in Puerto Rico, taken to New York by her mother when she was a year old. She’d grown up in the projects on Grand Street, graduated from Washington Irving High School, spoke perfect English, and could dance the pachanga. But I knew nothing of her dreams, her vision of herself, her conception of the future. I never bothered to ask. In some ways, I knew more about the people in my newspaper stories than I knew about my wife.

  Neither of us had a useful model for a marriage. Ramona didn’t meet her father until she was fourteen; he’d broken with her mother a few months after Ramona was born. He was her mother’s second husband. I met him on a trip to Puerto Rico with Ramona; he was white-haired and handsome, charming, a piano player in a nightclub, living with a fat black woman. I got the feeling that he barely remembered Ramona’s mother, who was petite, fair-skinned, vain, and given to complaint.

  She was a very spoiled woman, he said to me over a beer in the place where he worked. I’m glad Ramona isn’t like her.

  We spoke with the complicity of men. But when I told Ramona what he’d said, she laughed.

  What does he know? she said. As soon as he had to feed a family, he left.

  She lived through her teens without a father in the house, and then her mother married a German-American guy who did maintenance in the projects. He brought home a paycheck. He was civil. He watched a lot of television and even read some books. But he offered Ramona no clues about how she should live with the likes of me.

  I had no model either. My father went to work, earned his money, found friendship and consolation in saloons. I’m sure he never asked my mother about her dreams either. The principle was clear through all my childhood: men went out and earned the money; women organized the family. Husbands were close-lipped, strong, stoic; wives were conciliatory, open, allowed to show feeling. Without thinking, I assumed the pattern. I didn’t work in a factory. But I would do everything that must be done to keep bringing home the paychecks. And I had other goals now: to write novels and short stories, to master the form of magazine articles, to do everything possible within the limitations of my talent. This time I wouldn’t walk away, as I had from Regis, as I had from painting. I would go as far as I could go with what I had. Or as Robert Henri had said about an art student, to be “master of such as he has.”

  In the small flat where we lived in Brooklyn, I didn’t talk much about such desires with Ramona. She was too busy trying to become a woman and a mother. In both tasks, she was on her own.

  My brother Denis was a wonderfully sweet kid, with big liquid brown eyes, broad shoulders, a wild sense of humor, and an original way of looking at the world. Once, when he was seven and struggling with the mysteries of the Catholic catechism, he was walking with my mother and embarked on a heavy theological discussion.

  Mom, he said, is God everywhere?

  Yes, Denis, she said. God is everywhere.

  Is he in the sky?

  Yes, he’s in the sky.

  Is he in the street?

  Yes, Denis, he’s in the street.

  Is he in the park?

  Yes, he’s in the park.

  Mom?

  Yes?

  Is he up my ass?

  My mother burst into laughter.

  By the time he was ten, in 1962, Denis had begun to see me as a kind of father, although I was only the big brother who had lived elsewhere for all of his young life. I didn’t mind the role; I was probably a better father to Denis than I was to be a husband to Ramona. Around this time, my father had entered a crabbed, unhappy middle age; there was never enough money and always too much drinking. He beat the kids when they annoyed him or when he thought they weren’t doing homework or were talking in too heavy a Brooklyn accent. Tommy was now grown up and gone and Kathleen had a group of girlfriends from school. My father didn’t bother either of them. But the smaller boys were always in trouble with him, Denis most of all.

  It was no surprise that Denis often turned to me for guidance and male kindness. He was an erratic student, and an unruly street kid, but in his school compositions, he showed hilarious gifts for narrative. His spelling was often atrocious. But he could certainly tell a story. I started helping him, showing him ways to develop stories, correcting his spelling, giving him books to read. When Ramona and I took our first small apartment near Prospect Park, he dropped by all the time, glad to run errands, to read some of my books, to talk about movies or comics. Ramona said she didn’t mind his unannounced arrivals; she thought he was cute. I took him with me a few times to the newspaper or to the Gramercy Gym to see the fighters. One of those fighters was now my brother Brian, who at fifteen weighed about ninety pounds and was boxing in amateur tournaments, watched over by Jose and the other professionals. He had a ferocious left hook, a good chin, and a cocky style. Denis would get excited when he saw Brian sparring, upset if Brian got hit, cheering when Brian was punching; he hated to leave the place. My brother John never came to the gym. He was only a year older than Denis, a fine student with a sweet good heart. But he was shy and self-contained where Denis was direct. If Denis wanted to go with me to a gym, he asked. If he wanted to stay at my house, wherever it was at the time, he said so. John never asked.

  One summer afternoon, Denis got into a fight outside the YMCA. His opponent whipped out a knife and stabbed him in the stomach. He was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where he almost died. I arrived at the hospital after he came out of the operation. His voice was weak and his lustrous brown eyes were full of fear.

  Am I gonna die, Pete?

  No, you’re gonna be all right. The doctors said so.

  I don’t wanna die.

  You won’t.

  You won’t let me die, will you?

  The doctors won’t let you die, Denis. You’ll have a pretty funny-looking scar, maybe, but you won’t die.

  I don’t want you to die either, he said.

  Okay, pal.

  Be careful, all right, Pete?

  Whatever you say, Denis.

  I don’t want anyone to die, he said, his voice drowsy.

  On December 8, 1962, the printers’ union struck the New York Times. The Publishers Association, including Dorothy Schiff of the Post, immediately locked arms in solidarity against the proletarian rabble and closed the other six papers. We were all locked out of our jobs. The strike and lockout went on and on, past Christmas, past New Year’s, past Valentine’s Day, 114 days into the spring.

  That winter, I learned to write for money instead of sheer love of the trade. I worked for thirty-five dollars a week on a strike paper. I wrote two articles for the Police Gazette at fifty dollars each. I borrowed money. I alternated between rage and impotence, furious at the printers, even more furious at the publishers. I had a wife and a baby girl and I couldn’t put money on the table. What the hell kind of man was I? What kind of husband? What kind of father? I began to think the Post would fold. My newspaper. Denis didn’t want anyone to die. I didn’t want a newspaper to die.

  In the evenings, I stayed home more, playing with the baby, cuddling her, cooing to her. In some way, this angered Ramona. She was depressed for a long time after Adriene was born, and I knew so little about the biology and
psyche of women that I took this as a personal rejection. It was as if she blamed me for the pain she’d suffered when Adriene entered the world. Her dark angers when I played with the infant infuriated me.

  You’re jealous of her, aren’t you? I shouted one night. She’s only a baby and you’re jealous!

  I’m not jealous, she shouted through tears. I just want you to love me the way you love her.

  I hugged her, whispered to her, felt her tears on my face. I was ashamed of myself, at my anger, my inability to understand. But I never pushed past the surface, past the things she said to the things she most deeply felt. When she was calm again, I went to the refrigerator and opened a beer.

  With the newspaper work gone, I used some of the empty time to read again, everything from Raymond Chandler to Stendhal. They took me out of the intolerable present. They presented challenges too. The weather was gray and cold, and reading novels made me want to go away again. To hole up with Ramona and the baby in some cottage in another country, where I would write stories about the things I knew and discover things I didn’t. I wished I were somewhere beyond that small flat.

  Because of the lack of money, I didn’t see much of Jake or Tim, Bill or Richie; there was no way to meet for a drink without laying bills on the bar. I spoke by phone to Tim every day and checked in every few days with Paul Sann, to hear the latest about the contract negotiations. But I saw nobody from the newspaper; they seemed to have scattered to the winds.

  Then, near the end of the strike I sold an article to the Saturday Evening Post for $1500, the equivalent of ten weeks’ pay at the newspaper. It seemed like all the money in the world. Exuberantly, I paid off my debts and gave the landlord the rent. I brought flowers to Ramona and hugged her and told her I loved her. I bought a bag of toys for the baby. I carried home fat bags of groceries. I lugged home cases of beer and invited Richie, Jake, Billy, and Tim and his wife, Georgie, over for a party. Celebration! Victory! Drink up! A few days later, Dorothy Schiff left the Publishers Association and reopened the newspaper. I went back to work.