A Drinking Life: A Memoir

by Pete Hamill

In the third year of the war, the Kilroy signs started appearing everywhere, brought home to America from Europe. They showed a long-nosed cartoon figure, his nose hanging over a fence, and the slogan: Kilroy Was Here. Nobody knew who Kilroy was. But he was everywhere (they said on the radio), he was every GI, he was every American fighting overseas. I mastered the head and nose of Kilroy hanging over the fence and chalked it on a hundred walls and fences. That year, Kilroy even made it to Brooklyn.

Loyalty, he said. Always remember the most important thing in life: Vote the straight ticket.

My mother told me that she had enrolled me for summer camp. The camp was sponsored by the Police Athletic League out of the 72nd Precinct, and it was up in the Adiron-dacks in the north of New York State. I’d be gone for three weeks.

Drinking wine in the woods wasn’t simply another sensual pleasure, like eating ice cream; it was an act of rebellion, a declaration of self. The camp had rules and I was breaking them. It was also an act of communion, with Arnold, with Cappy. Both states of consciousness would remain with me through years of drinking. Through the agency of Arnold, I also discovered Evil. I don’t mean that sex was evil. That, and drinking, were only part of a generalized negation that flowed from Arnold with a dark steady force. He made me afraid. The fear he inspired wasn’t physical; it was deeper and darker than that. Arnold lived by his own rules, not the rules I was learning. Nothing could persuade him from his desires except force.

That’s Sugar Ray Robinson, he said. He’s the greatest fighter who ever lived. There were no qualifications; he described Robinson in the same flat way he would use to describe Mount Everest as the highest mountain in the world.

ON SUNDAYS, the family sometimes went visiting. That’s what it was called: visiting. You went to someone else’s house and brought along some cold cuts or Italian bread or beer and entertained each other. We almost always went to visit my father’s relatives; my mother had friends but no relatives in America. After Mass, the whole family would walk down to Fifth Avenue, still dressed in Sunday best, and get on the trolley and rattle out to Bay Ridge to see Uncle Tommy or Uncle Davey, Aunt Louie or Aunt Nellie, and all my cousins. We couldn’t play in the street because we were in our good clothes; but visiting wasn’t play to us, it was a show. There would be food and drink and singing in the parlor. And here, as in the bars, my father was always the star. The kids were called upon to perform too, singing songs or reciting poems.

In the old days tubby Tubbs and lanky Easy were loose-footed soldiers of fortune, a big and little stone rolling through the romantic places of the earth, usually broke, sometimes fabulously wealthy, but always ready for fight, frolic, or feed.

I did understand the catechism’s definition of a mortal sin; it had to be a grievous matter, committed with sufficient reflection and full consent of the will.

That was the “first act” of the Mass, the section when the priest offered up to God the wine and the small unleavened wafers called hosts. In the second act of the drama, the consecration, he transformed these banal elements, saying his magic words in Latin, holding the host up for all to see; it was the custom in Holy Name to hide one’s eyes and bow the head, refusing to look directly at the offered host because that little wafer had become God.

I heard Prohibition words like “rumdum” and “gin mill,” “speakeasy” and “needle beer,” and loved their bluntness, their bricklike shapes.

Vaughan Monroe’s evocation of those ghost riders in the sky.

there were also two glorious celebrations of drinking: a Wynonie Harris shouting blues, “Don’t Roll Those Bloodshot Eyes at Me,” and a tune called “Cigarees and Whuskey and Wild, Wild Women.” I played them as if they were anthems.

Who did I think I was? Who the fuck did I think I was? Forget these kid’s dreams, I told myself, give ’em up. Do what everybody else does: drop out of high school, go to work, join the army or navy, get married, settle down, have children. Don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Every year I’d do my Easter duty, whether I believed in God or not. I’d drink on the way home from work and spend most weekends with my friends in the saloons. I’d get old. I’d die and my friends would see me off in Mike Smith’s funeral parlor across the street from Holy Name. That was the end of every story in the Neighborhood. Come on: let’s have a fucking drink.

I DIDN’T KNOW it at the time, but I had entered the drinking life. Drinking was part of being a man. Drinking was an integral part of sexuality, easing entrance to its dark and mysterious treasure chambers. Drinking was the sacramental binder of friendships. Drinking was the reward for work, the fuel of celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true.

The ideal figure is seven heads high, although fashion illustrators — or our friend El Greco — make it nine heads high. Forget about them for now. Forget about short people or infants too. For our classes, seven heads should be the measure. And remember, your task isn’t to copy what’s in front of you. Any camera can do that. It’s to understand what the figure is doing and why it can do it. You learn anatomy to understand what’s beneath the skin. And you don’t express the figure by what it is, but by what it does. It is what it does.

Stag at Sharkey’s by George Bellows.

if you can’t paint in Paris, you might as well marry the boss’s daughter.

Cuco Sánchez with the harp and the bass guitar singing “La Cama de Piedra”:

The Neighborhood, its streets already emptied at night by television, began to reel from departures to the new suburbs and the arrival of the plague of heroin.

Drinking became the medium of my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid rules of a bloodless national ethos.

I never thought of myself as a drunk; I was, I thought, like many others — a drinker. I certainly didn’t think I was an alcoholic. But I was already having trouble on the morning after remembering the details of the night before. It didn’t seem to matter; everybody else was doing the same thing. We made little jokes about having a great time last night — I think. And we’d begun to reach for the hair of the dog.

He lit a Camel. Then he pointed at a paragraph near the end. You see this, he said, where you say this is a tragedy? Yeah. I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word “tragedy” again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.

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?