SOCLST

V

A DRINKING LIFE

Oh, I could drink a case of you,

darling

And I would still be on my feet

I would still be on my feet.

— Joni Mitchell, “A Case

of You”

I read the news today oh boy . .

.

— John Lennon and Paul

McCartney, “A Day in

the Life”

1

IN HUMILITY and arrogance, I started to learn the newspaper

trade. I was humbled by what I did not know, in the company

of so many skilled craftsmen; I was arrogant enough to

believe I could learn to do what they did. My teacher wasn’t

Jimmy Wechsler; for the first eighteen months I worked

nights while he worked days and we seldom saw each

other. He allowed me in the door, but a man named Paul

Sann kept me there.

I saw him for the first time at six o’clock in the morning of

my first shift at the Post. I had walked in that night full of fear

and trembling, not knowing what to expect, carrying a copy

of Under the Volcano to read on the subway home if they

threw me out. The assistant night city editor was Ed

Kosner, younger than I was by a few years. He parked me

at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had.

When I told him absolutely none, he laughed and without

pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on

“books,” four sheets of coarse copy paper separated by

carbons. The carbon copies were called “dupes.” In the

upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case

and then create a “slug,” a short word that identified the

story for editors and typesetters. The slug should reflect the

subject; a political story could be slugged POLS. But if it was

a story about a murder I should not slug it KILL because the

men setting type would kill the story. With that simple

lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite

it in two paragraphs, and my career had begun.

All through the night in the sparsely manned city room, I

wrote small stories based on press releases or items

clipped from the early editions of the morning papers. I

noticed that Kosner had Scotch-taped a single word to his

own typewriter: Focus. I appropriated the word as my

motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself:

What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it

to someone in a saloon? Focus, I said to myself. Focus. . . .

Near dawn, there was a lull as the editors discussed what

they would do with all the material they now had in type.

Beyond the high open windows, the sky was turning red. I

walked over and gazed out and saw that we were across

the street from the piers of United Fruit, whose bananas my

grandfather had shipped from faraway Honduras a half-

century before. I wondered if he had ever docked at this

pier, ever looked up at the building that housed the New

York Post. When I turned around, Paul Sann was walking

into the city room.

He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority,

as he moved without hellos across the city room to the

fenced-off pen at the far end, where he served as executive

editor. He was dressed entirely in black, with black cowboy

boots, carrying the morning papers under his arm. From

where I sat, I watched him go to his desk, light a Camel,

take a cardboard cup of coffee from a copyboy. His face

was gray, urban, Bogartian, his mouth pulled tight in a tough

guy’s mask, his gray hair cut short, and he wore horn-

rimmed glasses which he shoved to the top of his head

while reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a

thick black ebony pencil in his hand, marking some,

discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Around

seven, the other editors gathered at his desk to discuss the

flow of the paper. Sann always wrote the “wood,” the page-

one headline (so named because for decades it had been

set in wood type). Then he moved into the composing

room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid

out on stone-topped tables. He was still there when my shift

ended at eight and Kosner gave me a goodnight. Sann

didn’t talk to me that night. He didn’t talk to me for weeks.

But in the weeks that followed, as I started going out on

fires and murders, knocking on doors in Harlem and the

Bronx at three in the morning, I came to understand that

Paul Sann was the great piston of the New York Post.

Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann

made it a tough ballsy tabloid. Wechsler pressed for

coverage of civil rights, Cold War sanity, the reform

politicians of the Democratic party; Sann was skeptical of

all living beings, and leavened the political coverage with

murders, fires, disasters, and gangsters. They didn’t much

like each other, and their conflict was discussed almost

every morning after the shift ended, at the bar in the Page

One, a block away from the Post.

One guy wants a newspaper, said Carl Pelleck, the best

police reporter in the city. The other guy wants a pamphlet.

Yeah, someone else said, but without Wechsler, it has no

identity, no function, no soul. It’ll die.

Listen, it’s gonna die anyway. It won’t last past New

Year’s.

The uncertainty about the paper’s future didn’t bother me;

I was still working at the studio, and if the newspaper did go

down I wouldn’t starve. But in the meantime, I’d have had

the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long

enough for me to learn the trade. During my three-month

tryout, I watched Sann from a distance and got to know

other newspapermen up close, in the morning seminars at

the Page One. I loved their talk, its cynicism and fatalism,

its brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched

the stockbrokers coming up from the subways to trudge to

Walk Street while we waited for the first editions to arrive.

When the papers landed on the bar, the seminar would

begin. This was an often brutal analysis of stories,

headlines, and writing style, presided over by an immense,

burly, mustached copy editor named Fred McMorrow,

attended by two old pros named Gene Grove and Normand

Poirier. They were funny and merciless. About my stories.

About others, their works, themselves, and most of the

human race.

Then one stormy morning, an hour before deadline, after

I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn,

Sann called me over. He held the galley in his hands. I was

nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.

Not bad, he said.

Thanks.

I like the part about the rain rolling down his face.

Thanks.

By the way, did this guy speak English?

No.

So how the fuck did you get all these quotes?

I speak a little Spanish, I said.

You do? How come an uneducated Brooklyn Mick like

you speaks Spanish?

I went to school in Mexico for a year. On the GI Bill.

No shit?

No shit.

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.

I see what you mean.

You better, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then

sipping the black coffee. He glanced at the story again.

Maybe in another eight or nine years, you could be pretty

good at this miserable trade.

Thanks, I said, and started to leave.

Oh, by the way, Paul Sann said. You’re hired.

2

NATURALLY, I got drunk in celebration. The next day, I told

my partner I was leaving the studio. He was furious,

shouting You’ve left me high and dry. He was right, of

course. But there was no going back. I’d found a life I

wanted. Every day or night would be different. I would have

a ringside seat at the big events of the day. I’d learn about

death and life and everything in between. It was honorable

work, not putting goods in pretty packages. Somehow the

desire for freedom and the need for security had merged. If

I worked hard, listened well, studied the masters of the

craft, I’d have a trade I could practice anywhere. Even if the

Post folded. I might never be Franz Kline in his heroic

studio. But I wouldn’t be a buttoned-down organization man

either. I’d be a newspaperman.

After I was hired, after they gave me my first Working

Press card, I brought my familiar sense of entitlement to the

bar of the Page One every morning. Those mornings were

free of the limits of time, and I would drink with McMorrow,

Grove, Poirier, and others, while fishmongers made

deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a morning

pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the

headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of

character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all

the whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who

passed through on their way from one town’s paper to

another. I loved it. I’d taken a cut in pay to work at the Post but I didn’t care. I had enough for food, rent, and drink. Each

day, after the Page One, I’d take the subway to Astor Place

and walk from the station to the flat on Ninth Street, where

I’d sleep off the beer, wake up and eat pasta at the

Orchidia on the corner of Second Avenue before going off

again to the Post. My byline was in the paper every day,

and I couldn’t wait to go to sleep so that I could wake up

and do it all again. On days when I did no drinking, I often

couldn’t sleep, as sentences caromed around my brain and

I rewrote myself and others. On such days, I often moved to

the refrigerator and found a beer.

Everybody in the business was drinking then, the lovely

older woman on night rewrite, stars and editors, Murray

Kempton and the copyboys. Once, when I was working

days, Poirier came to me and said, How do you call in sick

if you’re in? We laughed and concocted a ludicrous story of

eating a bad clam at lunch, and sure enough, at lunch hour,

Poirier called in with his bad clam attack and took the rest

of the day off. Another day, working overtime during some

disaster in the dead of winter, I finished at noon instead of 8

A.M. and carried my exhaustion directly into the Lexington

Avenue IRT, skipping the Page One. Standing in the middle

of the subway car, his eyes glassy, a large black Russian-

style fur hat making him seem even taller, was McMorrow.

He was maintaining his balance with one finger delicately

touching the roof of the subway car and he was barking,

Copy! Copyboy! as strangers edged away from his

dangerous presence.

That first newspaper Christmas, there was a staff party in

the penthouse office of Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s owner.

The city editor got drunk and fell down the spiral staircase,

breaking his arm. He refused to risk the hazards of a city

hospital, saying I’d rather die here at my desk. He insisted

on being taken to his home in Oyster Bay. So Poirier and I

helped him to his car, both of us drunk too, and drove

through the frozen night to Oyster Bay. When his wife

opened the door and saw her wrecked husband and then

saw us, she started shouting at us, You bastards, you bastards, look what you’ve done to him, you bastards.

One election night, Kempton was in his third-floor office,

sending down his copy one sentence at a time, until it was

six-thirty in the morning. The night managing editor, George

Trow, asked the copyboy to ask Mr. Kempton a simple, if

urgent, question: “How much more?” The copyboy ran up

the back stairs to the third floor, burst into the office and

said to the paper’s greatest columnist: Mr. Trow wants to

know, how much more? Kempton lifted his almost-

completed bottle of Dewar’s and said, Oh, about an inch.

After working a double shift one Friday, reporting three

stories, rewriting three others, and doing captions and

overlines for about fifteen photographs, I was reading

galleys in the city room. At his desk, Sann was typing fast

with two fingers on his Saturday page, a potpourri of news

items and smart remarks called “It Happened All Over.” He

finished editing it with a pencil, called for a copyboy,

rubbed his eyes, and then walked over to me.

Let’s have a drink, you lazy Mick bastard.

We took a cab to midtown and went into a joint called the

Spindletop. It was dark and fancy in a sleazy way; if it

wasn’t mobbed-up then the decorator had been inspired by

gangster movies. Sann ordered whiskey, I asked for a

beer. We talked for a while about craft and newspapers

and the Boston Celtics, whose coach was his friend. Then:

You got a broad?

No.

Good, Sann said. This business is lousy on women.

I had learned that already. My lovely Dominican was

gone, defeated by the hours of the newspaper trade.

But you’re married, I said.

Yeah, to the greatest woman in America. But it hasn’t

been easy for her.

I sipped my beer, uneasy about saying anything.

She’s sick now, he said.

I’m sorry to hear that.

She’s very sick, he said, as if speaking to himself.

Then he turned and walked to the pay phone. I heard him

placing a bet on the Cincinnati Reds. A few more people

came into the bar, and then Ike Gellis arrived. He was the

sports editor, short and stocky, Edward G. Robinson to

Sann’s Bogart.

Where is he? Ike said.

Phone booth.

I bet he’s betting baseball. He’s a fuckin’ degenerate on

Fridays.

Sann hung up and came straight to Gellis.

Well, well, the world’s shortest Jew.

I hope you didn’t bet the Reds game, Gellis said. The

Giants’ll kill ’em.

Shut up and drink, Sann said.

Two weeks later, early on a Friday morning, Sann’s wife

died of cancer. We heard the news about six A.M. Around

eight, Sann arrived. He walked on his usual hurried way

across the city room and went to his desk. He didn’t look at

galleys or dupes of stories. He started to type. He typed for

more than an hour, worked the copy with a pencil, called for

a copyboy, and then got up and walked out of the city room

without a word.

Someone passed around a carbon of the story. It was a

farewell to his wife. Tough, laconic, underwritten. He never

used the word “tragedy.” My friend Al Aronowitz read it and

started to weep.

Oh, man, he said. Oh, man.

Aronowitz was a great reporter, a wonderful writer, and a

lovely man. But he didn’t drink, so I saw little of him after

work. That morning he went to the Page One with me. We

drank for a couple of hours in virtual silence. But the booze

had no effect.

I don’t know if I can work in this business, Aronowitz said.

His wife dies and the first thing he does is come in and

write about it.

Shut up and drink, I said.

3

EARLY ON, I learned there were limits to the myth of the

hard-drinking reporter. One Saturday night, we threw a big

party in the place on Ninth Street. It lasted until dawn. I was

due at the Post at 1 A.M. Monday. But when we woke up on

Sunday afternoon, Jake and Tim and I were still full of the

exuberance of the party. We bought a case of beer and

started drinking again. Other people dropped in. The day

rolled on, full of laughs and drinks. When I arrived at the

Post that night, I felt sober, seeing things clearly and

thinking lucidly. But I was half-drunk. I must have laughed

too loud or bumped against a trash barrel too hard,

attracting some notice. Then I started to type and my

fingers kept hitting between keys. Finally an editor named

Al Davis came over and stood above me and said, I think you better go home. I was mortified. Davis was part of the

saloon fraternity too; he wasn’t objecting to the drink but to

the obvious fact that I couldn’t hold it. I got up and pulled on

my coat and he stepped close to me and whispered, Don’t you ever do this again. And I didn’t.

But if it was stupid to come into work carrying a package,

as we said, that was no reason to stop drinking. As in most

things, you needed rules of conduct. I drank in the mornings

when I worked nights and at night when I worked days.

When I was sent out to cover some fresh homicide, I usually

went into a neighborhood bar to find people who knew the

dead man or his murdered girlfriend. I talked to cops and

firemen in bars and met with petty gangsters in bars. That

wasn’t unusual. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the bars were

the clubs of New York’s many hamlets, serving as

clearinghouses for news, gossip, jobs. If you were a

stranger, you went to the bars to interview members of the

local club. As a reporter, your duty was to always order

beer and sip it very slowly.

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

production 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.

Don’t get used to being too happy, you Irish bum, Paul

Sann said when I took him for a fast drink after work. No

matter what happens, he said, newspapers will always

break your fucking heart.

5

SOMETHING SHIFTED in me during that strike. I thought I’d

work at the newspaper forever. The strike made me

understand that in the newspaper trade, there was no such

thing as forever. When I went back to work, I kept doing

freelance work on the side and found I had some talent for

magazine articles. Checks arrived. We moved to a larger

apartment in Brooklyn. But Ramona seemed no happier.

When I got excited about selling a piece, she seemed

uneasy. When the telephone kept ringing, with calls from

friends, press agents, editors, she grew annoyed. When I

came home drunk, a few days a week, she was disgusted.

She was getting to know me better than I knew her.

As spring turned into summer, the old dream of the

expatriate life blossomed again, ripening over beers on

Saturday afternoons. Who wanted to live here, back in the

bourgeois safety of Brooklyn? New York was a great city

and I had a job I loved. But there was a world out there. One

night, over dinner at home, I started talking to Ramona

about going to Spain. Maybe we could live in Barcelona.

The city where Orwell once carried a rifle, city of Dalí and

Picasso and Gaudi, city that held out to the end in defense

of the Spanish Republic. Barcelona! I’d write articles for the

Saturday Evening Post and we’d live well on the money

and to hell with newspapers. She looked at me as if I were

drunk.

What’s the matter with New York? she said.

It’s not Spain, I said.

But you’ve never been to Spain.

I know, I said. But I don’t want to see it when I’m sixty.

She shook her head in a dubious way, tempering my

enthusiasm. For weeks, I avoided any more discussion. I

worked hard at the paper. I won some awards. But the

notion of another escape wouldn’t go away. Over beers one

night, I talked about Spain to Tim, suggesting that he could

go too and work with me on the research while mastering

the magazine form himself. He was very smart and a good

clean writer; if I could do it, he could do it. At first, Tim was

skeptical. But we looked in the New York Times at the rate

of the peseta against the dollar, bought Spanish

newspapers in Times Square, and saw that we could live

more cheaply than in New York. We were young, we could

afford it; when would we have such a chance again? A

strange, inevitable momentum took over. It was like going

to Mexico again. There was nothing complicated about it.

We’d just go, live in a foreign land, walk where Hemingway

walked, speak Spanish and eat olives and brown ourselves

on the Costa Brava. We’d support ourselves with writing.

Ramona and Tim’s wife, Georgie, were at first skeptical.

We addressed every argument, speaking with the authority

of men who had lived in at least one foreign land. I showed

Ramona travel articles from magazines, picture books from

the library. I sold some more articles to magazines and built

up a small bank account. Slowly it must have seemed like a

great romantic adventure to the women too. By July we

were ready to leave.

You’re going where? Paul Sann said, when I came to his

desk to give him the news.

To Spain.

He chuckled in a sardonic way.

Vaya con Dios, pal, he said. I wish I’d done that when I

was your age. I wish I’d done it last fucking month.

For me, Sann’s words were the only blessing I needed. It

was settled. We were going to Spain.

The night before we left, Tim and I went to a farewell dinner

with the other guys who’d made the journey with us across

the river from Brooklyn: Bill Powers, Richie Kelly, Jake

Conaboy. After the delicious beer-swilling years on Ninth

Street, we’d gone our own ways. Billy had become an

excellent photographer and layout man, Richie an illustrator

and designer, while Jake returned to Brooklyn and the

safety of the Transit Authority. But I wanted to believe it

didn’t matter where we’d gone or where we were going; we

came from a common place, had shared a glorious time,

and we’d be friends for life.

The five of us took a table in the back room of a bar on

the corner of Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue. Jake

had been drinking before we arrived; whiskey always broke

him out of his shyness, and he was hilarious and profane.

We ate hamburgers and drank a lot of beer and whiskey. I

talked about the glories of the Spain I’d never seen, urging

the others to come and join us. I must have made it seem

like another subway ride from Brooklyn. We made jokes.

We talked about politics. Billy and I argued the comparative

merits of Matisse and Bonnard with the passion once

reserved for centerfielders. Around midnight, Jake’s chin

was resting on his chest. We talked on, drinking more,

laughing louder. Richie’s eyes were glassy, a thin smile on

his lips. Then it was time to go. Tim called for a check.

Richie stared hard at me, the smile gone, his eyes

suddenly deeper under his brows.

You’re really an arrogant bastard, you know, he said.

I laughed, thinking he was joking.

I know, I know, I said. Worse than Charles de Gaulle.

Richie didn’t smile. The muscles in his jaw tensed.

Nobody wants to tell you this, he said. But it’s true. You

treat the rest of us like inferiors. You think if you say it

should be done, then we should do it.

You’re serious, aren’t you?

Tim said, Hey, Richie, cool it.

Yeah, Billy said. This is a good-bye dinner, not a grand

jury.

Richie ignored them.

All this shit about Spain, this Hemingway crap, Richie

said. You’re saying you can do things and we don’t have

the balls to do them. You think you’re hot shit. You pose like

a good guy but you always think of yourself first. You always

did. Even back in Brooklyn.

It was as if he wanted to start a fight. But we were leaving

the following day for Spain. I didn’t want to arrive in

Barcelona with a split lip or a broken hand. I backed up.

Richie, I said, all I ever tried to be with you was a friend. If

I got lucky, I wanted you and the others to share it.

Yeah, so you could feel like you weve better than us.

Fuck it, I said, standing up abruptly. Come on, Tim. Let’s

go to Spain.

I threw some money on the table and turned for the door.

Look at the truth, Richie said. Look at the truth . . .

Tim and I took a cab back to Brooklyn. We were staying

at our parents’ places for this final night, because Ramona,

Adriene, and Georgie had gone on ahead to Barcelona to

find an apartment. Tim and I had closed our apartments,

stored or sold our possessions, settled most of our

accounts. All the way to Brooklyn, I was furious with Richie.

Some things I had taken for granted: he was my friend, he

shared the sentimental solidarity of the group, he cheered

for my small successes as I would cheer for his. Tonight, he

had pissed all over those assumptions. It was as if he

wanted me to feel his accusations all the way to Spain. And

though I was hurt and wounded, another thought slid through

my mind: Maybe he was right.

There was one final wrenching scene. A few weeks before

the date we chose to leave for Barcelona, I had told my

brother Denis that I was moving to Europe. He was twelve,

reading newspapers every day, but this news item hadn’t

seemed to register. I didn’t press it. But I worried about him

all the time. I had no idea how long we’d be gone. I might

make a career as a writer in Europe and stay forever. I

could be hack in six months. I was sure Brian and John

would be all right, but Denis had a fragility that made him

seem more vulnerable. I hoped the Neighborhood wouldn’t

trap him.

On that last morning at 378, Denis and the other kids

hung around the kitchen while I washed and ate breakfast.

My father was there, dim and silent. My mother busied

herself with dishes and tea. Fragments of Richie’s

indictment kept drilling into me, combining with hangover to

make me feel disconnected from the others. Finally, I

packed my last small bag, said my good-byes, and went

downstairs.

Suddenly, Denis came running after me, in tears.

Please don’t go, Pete, please don’t go, he kept saying.

Please, please . . .

Denis, I have to go. My wife is there. My baby . . .

Please, he said, please stay.

Tim was waiting with a cab in front of Rattigan’s and

came over to help me with my bags. But Denis was bawling

now, holding on to my arm with both hands, saying Don’t go, Pete, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, pleaaaase . . .

Until I had to shake him off.

Send me some stories, Denis . . .

And he ran off then, his face a blur of tears, swinging his

hands wildly in the air. He was the last person I saw on

Seventh Avenue as the cab pulled away to take us to the

airport.

6

THUS BEGAN too many years of wandering, of arrivals and

departures, sitting in airport waiting rooms, packing and

unpacking books, smoking strange brands of cigarettes,

speaking badly the languages of strangers, and drinking

their beer and whiskey. Ramona and I exhausted the dream

of Spain in six months. We lived in Dublin then, and later in

Rome and San Juan and Mexico City, Laguna Beach and

Washington, D.C., and saw a lot of other places in

between. Each time, we made the long circle home, back

to New York.

The moves had a pattern, of course. I would return to

New York, settle in, start working at my trade. Then routine

would assert itself. The routine of work. The routine of

family. The multiple routines of the drinking life. These

couldn’t be separated. If I wrote a good column for the

newspaper, I’d go to a bar and celebrate; if I wrote a poor

column, I would drink away my regret. Then I’d go home,

another dinner missed, another chance to play with the

children gone, and in the morning, hung over, thick-tongued,

and thick-fingered, I’d attempt through my disgust to make

amends. That was a routine too.

Self-disgust would spread its stain to everything: my

work, the apartment, New York itself, until I felt I had to get

out of there or die trying. Then I’d grant myself the vision of

the Great Good Place. Most one the time, it was a place

where I heard more vowels than consonants, with

bougainvillea spilling down whitewashed walls, fountains

playing in the blaze of noon. In the Great Good Place I

would work like a monk on my writing. I would be a good

husband and father. I would be far from the tumult of

saloons, their giddy excitements and sly flatteries. Once the

vision took hold, we were soon packing the books. I never

did find the Great Good Place.

During this long odyssey, there were some wonderful

times. There were long sunny afternoons reading Lorca and

drinking beer in huge one-quart glasses in the Plaza Real

in Barcelona. There was one glorious evening in Rome with

the raffish producer Joe Levine at the Hotel Excelsior, the

two of us drinking brandy, with women all around us,

musicians playing violins, Joe’s wife pleading with him to

go to bed. I spent hours drinking rum with John Wayne

during an interview on his converted navy minesweeper in

Barcelona bay; I hated his politics and liked him. In

Brussels, I wandered into some huge beerhall with a

reporter from UPI and got hilariously drunk with some

touring American paratroopers. There were good beery

times in pubs in Dublin and England, the barmaids flirting,

the regulars grumpy at this Yank invasion, then offering the

pack of Senior Service and buying a round in the fraternity

of drink. I drank beer with the mariachis in the Plaza

Garibaldi. I got loaded in a place on the Calle Cristo in Old

San Juan, singing along with Los Panchos on the jukebox. I

got pleasantly smashed watching the sun crash into the

Pacific in Laguna. Sometimes Ramona came with me;

most of the time she stayed home.

She was with me in Belfast when my father came home

in the late fall of 1963. She was a background figure, her

dark skin exotic to the pale Irish, but existing only as an

appendage to the visiting Yank. On that trip, my father held

center stage.

He had been away since the early 1930s. I paid for his

ticket because I wanted to see him there in the home place,

on the streets that had shaped him. For a week, we

wandered those streets on foot or by cab, stopping at the

Rock Bar, the Beehive, the Long Bar, snug dark wool-

smelling refuges from the gray hard drizzle of the North. He

found old friends among the living and heard reports about

the dead. He sang his songs, making the young Irish laugh

with “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” A few times, confronted with

some old photograph of soccer teams, he turned away in

grief. He had less tolerance now for drink; he got drunk

quicker. But he was back where he’d started from and he

was happy to be there.

One evening, all of us were in my cousin Frankie

Bennett’s house, sipping warm lager, dressing to go out for

dinner. My father was at his brother Frank’s house and we

were to meet him later. The television was on in the small

living room. The Bennett kids were leaping over couches

and rolling around on chairs. A coal fire glowed in the

hearth. I was full of a buzzing warmth, part beer, part Ireland.

And then the first bulletin broke.

. . . President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.

What? I turned to the black-and-white screen of the

television set. What did he say? What the fuck did he just say? And he said it again, grave, British, restrained: Shots

had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. No. The president was being rushed to Parkland Hospital. No. No. The room hushed, Frankie moved in from the kitchen,

Ramona came downstairs, holding Adriene in her arms,

Frankie’s wife stood by the set. No. I popped open a can of

warm lager. A sitcom was playing. Then the announcer was

back.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United

States, is dead.

I let out a wail, a deep scary banshee wail, primitive and

wounded, mariachi wail, Hank Williams wail, full of fury and

pain. Nonono-nononononononononoNo. Ramona hugged

me, weeping, and kids were wailing now, and Frankie was

there beside me, but I turned, ashamed of my pain and my

weeping, and rushed into the night. All through the Catholic

neighborhood called Andersonstown, doors were opening

and slamming and more wails came roaring at the sky.

wails without words, full of pagan furies as old as bogs. I

wanted to find my father, wanted to hug him and have him

hug me.

But I careened around dark streets, in the midst of the

wailing. I saw a man punch at a tree. I saw a stout woman

fall down in a sitting position on a doorstep, bawling. I ran

and ran, trying to burn out my grief, my anger, my

consciousness. I found myself on the Shankill Road, main

avenue of the Protestant district. It was no different there.

Kennedy wasn’t a mere Catholic, he was Irish, Kennedy

was ours, he was one of our sons, our Jack, and they have

killed him. Along the Shankill, I saw a man kicking a

garbage can over and over again in primitive rage. I saw

three young women heading somewhere, dissolved in

tears. I saw another man sitting on a curb, his body heaving

in gigantic sobs.

Somehow, I found my way back to Falls Road in the

Catholic area. My head was full of imagined demons, the

gunmen of Dallas: Cuban exiles and right-wing bastards,

Klansmen and Mob guys. But when I finally reached the

Rock Bar I only wanted to find my father. He was upstairs

where the television set was, sitting at a table beside a

retired IRA man with three fingers missing from his right

hand. I went to the table and the old IRA man said, It’s a terrible bloody thing, lad, terrible, terrible . . . My father

stood up, his face a ruin. We held each other tight, saying

nothing, and then the bar was packed and we drank

whiskey and there was a documentary playing about

Kennedy’s trip to Ireland in May, smiling and laughing and

amused, promising at the airport to come back in the

springtime and I thought of the line from Yeats, What made us think that he could comb gray hair?

After that, there was almost nothing left except whiskey.

Until the screen filled with Kennedy’s face, superimposed

on the American flag, while “The Star-Spangled Banner”

played on the sound track. And then the whole bar crowd

was standing, old men and young, men with hard whiskey-

raw Belfast faces, and all of them were saluting and so was

my father and so was I. That night in Belfast, we both

discovered how much we were Americans.

7

THE PRICE I was paying was very large, but for a long time,

nobody presented me with the check. Our daughter,

Deirdre, was conceived in Spain and born in St. Vincent’s

Hospital in Manhattan while I was thick with hangover at the

1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Norman

Mailer drove me to the hospital. I was full of joy when I saw

her. But Ramona never forgave my absence.

When Deirdre was less than a year old, we moved to

Mexico. That was always the basic model for the Great

Good Place, and going back was like an act of contrition. I

was heartily sorry for the way I’d messed up in 1956. But

now a decade had gone by. I thought I could repair the

great rupture by going back. A Mexican friend confirmed

what I suspected: the Mexican police were not looking for

me, my name was on no list, my offenses were lost in the

human avalanche of newer felonies. I signed a small

contract to write my first book and we left New York. We

sublet a friend’s apartment a block from the Pasco de la

Reforma in the Colonia Roma. For a week, I had dreams

about men bashing each other with bricks. But then Carta

Blanca gave me dreamless sleep. I talked to Ramona

about staying this time for good.

During the summer of 1965, Deirdre got sick with

salmonella, probably from unpasteurized milk. She had

begun talking before the infection; then all her talking

stopped. Most of the time she looked stunned. I was

heartsick, blaming myself for taking a child to Mexico,

risking her life in my own self-absorbed quest for the Great

Good Place. Work stopped; I never did write the book I’d

gone there to write. One night I sat in the dark, listening to

Cuco Sánchez, and got drunk alone, while Ramona and the

children slept. A few days later, a letter arrived from Paul

Sann. He wanted to know if I had any interest in going back

to work at the Post. If so, he was looking for a columnist.

Once more, we packed up and went home.

We took an apartment in a new building off Union

Square. Before we could furnish the place, I announced to

Ramona that we’d have a house-warming party. The place

was jammed. Tim, Billy, and Jake came from the

Neighborhood; dozens arrived from the Post, including

Sann, who looked around at his stumbling wards and left

early. Among the late arrivals were Mick Jagger and Keith

Richards, friends of Al Aronowitz, in town for their first

appearances in America. They were full of charm, smoking

joints and drinking vodka, but they too left around the

midnight hour. At some point, huge Fred McMorrow lurched

into the bedroom where Deirdre was sleeping, fell across a

glass-topped table, and smashed it. He didn’t even scratch

himself. But Deirdre woke up screaming and Ramona was

again in tears.

That poor little girl, Ramona said, over and over again.

That poor little girl …

Deirdre was still not talking. One Saturday afternoon, she

was walking with me on Fourteenth Street and suddenly fell

on her bottom. I picked her up, and she looked at me with

those brown eyes but didn’t cry. I stood her up and she

walked a few more feet and plopped down again. Ramona

told me she’d been doing the same thing in the apartment. I

was alarmed. The next day, while I went to work at the

newspaper, Ramona took Deirdre to St. Vincent’s.

She called me at the paper, her voice trembling.

They’re trying to tell me that she’s retarded, Ramona

said.

What?

Retarded! It must be from that milk in Mexico! From the

goddamned salmonella.

I rushed to the hospital and looked at our little girl. I didn’t

believe the analysis. Her eyes were bright. She recognized

me. She laughed when I played with her. Ramona and I

found another doctor and insisted that more tests be made.

That girl, we told each other, is not retarded.

We were right. There was a chemical imbalance in her

brain, possibly brought on by the salmonella. But it could be

cured with medication. There was no permanent damage.

She was definitely not retarded. It was my time to cry, in

thanks, in remorse. When Deirdre did resume talking, it

was in complete sentences.

Through all this time, I managed to do a lot of work:

newspaper columns, magazine articles, a first novel. The

novel was a thriller. I learned the form without risking an

examination of myself. If I was able to function, to get the

work done, there was no reason to worry about drinking. It

was part of living, one of the rewards.

But many things were being lost on the erratic journey. A

shipment to some foreign place would never arrive, and

notebooks, drawings, precious books, would vanish

forever. I lost all my apprentice work. I lost my collection of

original cartoons. A book of childhood photographs

disappeared. I still didn’t realize that I was also losing my

way.

8

I STARTED writing a column for the Post in October 1965. On

the day after Christmas Paul Sann sent me to Vietnam,

where in the first week I got drunk with some Marine Corps

officers in Da Nang and heard them predict a dirty, bloody,

perhaps endless war.

What can be done to pacify Vietnam? I asked one of

them, late at night, with the artillery rumbling in the distance.

Pave it, he said, and stared at his drink.

In Vietnam, I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of death. The

stoic codes of Hemingway served me better at thirty than

they did at eighteen. Maybe Hemingway was an asshole,

but he knew something about war and fear. In Vietnam, my

only worry was about my daughters: If something happened

to me, who would bring them up? Who would get them

through school? Ramona would survive, but I fretted about

the girls. Sometimes I worried in the same way about

Denis. I got rid of these imaginings by drinking on the roof

of the Caravelle with the other correspondents, watching

the distant orange flashes of the artillery, or by inspecting

the pain and fear of uniformed strangers. I wrote often to

Ramona, and I had the city desk call her each time a

dispatch arrived, to tell her I was all right. I did not mention

the bars of Tu Do Street or the long afternoon when I

wandered drunkenly into Cholon and two boys bumped me

and slipped my watch off my wrist. I did not mention the

anxious turmoil in my stomach, the product of the conflict

between my aching desire to stay for the duration of the war

and my responsibilities as husband and father. I wanted to

stay, to make this my war. I did not say this to Ramona.

Every few days I went out to the killing fields, saw boys

dying, heard the anguished screams of the wounded. A

tourist at the war. Then I came back to Saigon and wrote

my pieces in the room at the hotel and took them down to

the post office for shipment to the Post. Afterward, wanting

to stay and needing to go, wishing I were single and

missing my children, I wandered through the bars of Tu Do

Street, listening to Aretha and the Stones, talking to the

perfumed women in their tight aodais. They were all very

young, but their faces were hardening and they had no

stories they were proud to tell. The sensuality of the war, its

erotic demands, urged me toward sex with them; but I was

afraid of disease, of having my money stolen, of ending up

in some humiliating public mess. I got drunk instead.

When I came home, there was a new outpost in my

personal geography. Normand Poirier had discovered a

saloon on Christopher Street called the Lion’s Head. In the

beginning, the Head had a square three-sided bar, with

dart boards on several walls and no jukebox. The location,

a few steps from the Sheridan Square station of the

Seventh Avenue IRT, was perfect for newspapermen from

the Post, the Times, and the Herald Tribune; the Village Voice was then cramped into a few tight rooms upstairs;

and within a few weeks of its opening, the joint was a

roaring success.

I don’t think many New York bars ever had such a

glorious mixture of newspapermen, painters, musicians,

seamen, ex-communists, priests and nuns, athletes,

stockbrokers, politicians, and folksingers, bound together

in the leveling democracy of drink. On any given night, the

Clancy Brothers would take over the large round table in the

back room and the place would be loud with “The Leaving

of Liverpool” and “Eileen Aroon” and “The West’s Awake.”

Everybody joined in the singing, drinking waterfalls of beer,

emptying bottles of whiskey, full of laughter and noise and a

sense that I can only describe as joy.

It was as if we’d all been looking for the same Great

Good Place and created it here. Not in some foreign land

but in the West Village. I was soon one of the regulars,

there every night, and sometimes every day. In the growing

chaos of the Sixties, the Head became one of the

metronomes of my life, as regulating as the deadlines for

my column. It was also the place in which everything was

forgiven. Lose your job? Betrayed by your wife? Throw up

on your shoes? Great: have a drink on us.

In addition, the Head provided a refuge from the more

self-righteous fashions of the Sixties. Few of us did drugs.

Not many were true fans of rock and roll. Almost all of us

hated the war and despised Lyndon Johnson, but we did

not slide off stools to join protest marches. We honored

those who did. I covered all the great antiwar

demonstrations in Washington and New York; but marching

just wasn’t our style. In my columns, I defended “the kids”

from the onslaught of cops and FBI men; but nobody from

the Head was likely to join SDS or send money to the Black

Panthers. I felt I was part of the Sixties and separate from

them, sometimes a participant, more often a mere witness.

My writing was altered by the fury and despair I saw in the

ghetto riots. But it was Vietnam that inflamed the deepest

emotions in my work and in the lives of millions. Vietnam

was the focus for all public passion, the one great binder of

generations. I don’t think any of us hated America; we

wanted the war to end because we loved America. We

wanted justice and baseball too.

As the Sixties moved on, as the Head became my local

Great Good Place, my marriage to Ramona was

disintegrating. Once, in Rome, where I went off each day to

try writing in the cafés of the Via Veneto, Ramona had

asked me for a divorce. I was, in my invincible stupidity,

stunned.

What do you mean, a divorce? I mean I can’t live like this anymore, she said.

How do you want to live?

In a house. With a room for each of the girls, with a

backyard, with a husband who comes home every night

and has dinner.

I can’t promise you that kind of life, I said.

I know, she said, and started weeping. I know, I know, I

know.

That small crisis was healed with sweet talk and

promises. But I began to imagine a life without her. I didn’t

want that; I still believed that we would be together for the

rest of our lives. After all, my mother had gone through

much worse with my father, and they were still together all

these years later. In my erratic way, I tried to be better. I’d

come home three evenings in a row, find a baby-sitter, take

Ramona to a movie. Then I would miss dinner, call with

some excuse about meeting a source or doing an

interview, and try to remember the excuse in the morning.

By 1967, Ramona was immune to my words.

You say things, she said one Sunday morning. You don’t

mean them. They’re just words.

I make a living with words, I said. We eat because of my

words. My words pay the rent.

I mean the words you say to me. Not the words you say in

the newspaper.

Her disdain was clear. As I did after Richie cut into me

on the night before I left for Barcelona, I saw the possibility

that she was speaking the truth. Instead of accepting that

possibility and bringing my life into line with my words, I

turned her complaint around. I convinced myself that the

problem wasn’t my neglect of her; it was her neglect of me. I

would drop into the Head and have strangers praise some

column I’d written. Letters about my columns poured into

the newspaper. Most days, Paul Sann thought I was doing

swell. But when I reached home for dinner, Ramona never

said a word. She had stopped reading the Post. Instead of

trying to earn her respect, I luxuriated in the delicious

emotional state of feeling hurt.

If my work was ignored at home (I reasoned), then I had a

license to go where it was appreciated: the Lion’s Head.

Sometimes we hired a baby-sitter and I took Ramona with

me; but the combination of drinking, machismo, intellectual

bullshitting, and flattery seemed to repel her. She was

sober and, after a while, I wasn’t. I remember some very

good times; her memories are surely different.

9

THERE WAS ONE final move, one last attempt at repair. I

heard about an apartment in Brooklyn, a few doors down

from 471 Fourteenth Street, the lost sunny paradise of the

first six years of my life. Maybe the girls could play under

the elm trees as I did so long ago. Maybe we could go on

long green summer walks in Prospect Park and in winter I

could stand with them in a bright white meadow and

together we would eat snow, as I had that time when I was a

child. Maybe I could leave behind the life of the Head, the

slippery delusions of Manhattan, and begin to make

something more solid, back here where I’d begun my life. In

our marriage now, we were living on maybe.

So we moved to Brooklyn, into what was called a parlor

floor and basement. On the first day, I led the girls through

the iron gate under the stoop and showed them their room

to the left and the kitchen beyond it and then took them into

the yard. A few doors away was the yard of 471, but when I

looked for the great tree of my childhood, it was gone.

For a while, we were happy. I cut down on drinking, stayed

away from the Head, worked hard. The children asked me

to tell them stories or draw pictures of alligators and

elephants. People came to visit. Jose Torres stopped by

once a week to talk about his own writing, which he was

doing now for El Diario and then for the Post. My brothers

came around, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.

We had barbecues in the yard. We drank beer. My father

rang the bell on his way to Farrell’s and occasionally I went

with him. He didn’t care for Ramona, but he liked the

children. They loved him to sing “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.”

So did the younger crowd at Farrell’s, the fans of Mick

Jagger and John Lennon.

But the Sixties were remorseless in their power. There

were drugs everywhere, and my brothers were not immune.

When he was sixteen, Denis came by one night and he was

stoned. In tears and remorse, he explained that he’d been

doing pills and reefer. I arranged for him to go to Ireland

and work for a while on a farm owned by Patty Clancy of the

Clancy Brothers. Driving him to the airport, I remembered

his brown wounded eyes on the day I went to Spain; now

those same shy eyes looked at me as he went off to a kind

of exile of his own.

I’ll be good, he said. I’ll make you proud of me.

I know you will.

I’ll write you letters.

Write stories too.

Off he went. But if Denis saved his life in Ireland, when he

returned, his friends were already dying, some in Vietnam,

too many from drugs. In 1969, Denis, along with Brian and

John, put together a group that was going to the great rock

festival in Woodstock. Ramona asked me if she could go

with them.

I need to have some fun, too, she said. You’ve had plenty

of fun.

Where will you stay? Are there hotels or inns?

I don’t know, she said. I’ll stay where they stay.

And I stay home with the kids?

Well, yeah . . .

Okay, I said. Go ahead. You need some fun too.

So they all moved off to one of the great hedonistic

festivals of the Sixties and I stayed home to mind the girls.

They liked this, because I cooked each meal following

recipes from a cookbook. I told them stories. I drew a lot of

pictures. But while Ramona moved through the rains, drugs,

and music of Woodstock, I was thinking about the grieving

drizzle at the heart of our marriage. In a way, Ramona was

now having the years that she’d lost when she married me

at eighteen and had two children very quickly. At night, with

the children asleep, I watched the television coverage of

Woodstock and imagined her lost in the vast rain-drowned

crowd.

After Woodstock, the sense of unravelment returned to

our marriage, more powerfully than ever. She seemed to be

moving through a different landscape than the one I

inhabited. There were visible signs of it: the music playing

steadily, her music, not mine; no answers to my calls from

the newspaper; eyes that made no contact. More and

more, I cooked dinner while the laundry piled up and beds

went unmade. There was an arctic chill in the marriage bed.

I found consolation once more in the Head. The pattern

resumed, the phone calls with excuses, the amiable lies. At

the bar, I could believe that my life was a delight. When the

talk turned to women, I assumed the mask of the stoic.

Sometimes, hurting from hangover, I wondered whether my

Lion’s Head friends were really my friends, whether they put

up with me because of my personal qualities or because I

wrote a newspaper column. The unspoken question was

usually dissolved in vodka and laughter. I often got very

drunk and then lurched into Sheridan Square to find a taxi

that would bring me to Brooklyn, to the street where I was a

boy with yellow hair. One time I came home drunk at three

in the morning, made a mistake, went up the stoop of the

house next door and climbed in the window. Two men were

in bed together and started screaming in terror. I thought

this was hilarious when I was told about it the next day. But

the actual incident doesn’t exist in my memory; all I have is

the version of the story told by others. That and the sense of

shame that morning after when I tried to imagine what I

looked like to those frightened men.

Ramona and I now had only the common ground of the

children. One night, drunk again, I came home, opened the

outer gate beneath the stoop and lurched into the inner

door, smashing the window. In my hand I had two roses I’d

bought from a flower seller in the Lion’s Head, one for

Adriene, the other for Deirdre. I stepped over the broken

glass and turned left into their bedroom. They’d awakened

with the crash and there, suddenly, was their father. Their

eyes were wide in fright or apprehension. I handed each of

them a rose and told them I loved them. I did — but I’d

broken too many things. It was time for me to go.

When we separated at last, I rented a basement apartment

in a friend’s brownstone at the far end of Park Slope. The

children could walk along the parkside to visit me; I could

easily visit them. We went to Coney Island together, to

block parties, to museums, as I played the new role of the

Sunday father. The girls were delighted with the attention.

They were baffled and confused about the fact that I was no

longer living with them.

When are you coming home, Daddy? Adriene asked one

day.

I don’t know, baby.

I want you to come home, Daddy.

We’ll see.

Almost all our talks ended this way. Deirdre was too

young to understand; but Adriene understood very well that

something terrible had happened to her life. After dropping

them at home, I would walk slowly back to my place, loaded

with misery. Sometimes, I walked it off. Other times, I

reached for the easy solace of a bar.

In most ways, I felt an immense relief. It was no longer

necessary to concoct lies if I wanted to stay up all night

drinking. There were fewer evasions. The strained tension

of life with Ramona was replaced with a correct civility. I

realized finally that I could no longer escape to that elusive

Great Good Place; it didn’t exist. I did more drinking than

ever, sometimes alone, but I felt better about myself in the

morning. I started reading fiction again and writing more

carefully. At the Lion’s Head now, I even had the freedom to

go home with women.

Then I started an affair with precisely the wrong woman

for me. She was lovely, kind, smart, sensual, and rich. She

was also a drinker. Soon we were parked together at the

bar of the Lion’s Head. We were drinking at a table in

Elaine’s (for she was an Uptown Girl). We were drinking at

parties or traveling south to drink at some friend’s

plantation. We got drunk a lot. And the drinking led to

scenes, jealousies, anguished telephone calls, a variety of

stupidities, not all of them mine. Doors were slammed. In

the purple spirit of melodrama, all sudden departures were

made in the dead of night.

This went on for almost a year. That year, I wrote a movie

script that was filmed in Spain. We got drunk a lot in

Almería, where all the spaghetti westerns were staged, and

one night, coming to the defense of one drunken actor, I

knocked out another actor and thought I’d killed him. My

Uptown Girl had already gone home. I soon followed her,

moved in for a few days, then fled to Brooklyn. There was

one final angry night, both of us sodden after two days of

drinking. The details are lost. But words were hurled in

cruelty. There were curses and tears. And I was gone for

good.

The next afternoon, I was alone in the Lion’s Head,

reading the New York Times and sipping beer. I had no

column to write and that was usually the best of days. Don

Schlenck, the day bartender, was down at the far end,

reading the Post and eating lunch. I looked up in the gloomy

silence and peered out through the barred windows that

opened at ground level to Christopher Street. I could see

human legs going by. Two pairs of women’s legs. A man in

jeans. A man in a gray suit. A man with a woman. Faceless.

Without histories. Hurrying along. And then snow began to

fall.

I guess God doesn’t want me to go home today, I said.

Didn’t you hear? God is dead. It says so in your own

paper.

Don’t believe everything you read in a paper, Schlenck, I

said.

I picked up my change and walked out into the storm. I

walked downtown, block after block, as the swirling snow

obliterated the edges of buildings. The snow-bright streets

looked as innocent as childhood, and I wanted to walk

somewhere with my girls. But I couldn’t even do that. A few

months earlier, Ramona had made her own trip to Mexico,

to work for a degree at the University of the Americas, and

she had taken the children with her. I was in New York,

alone in the snow; they were in Puebla. And I was sick of

myself. Sick of drinking. Sick of the routines of my life. At

City Hall, my hair and coat fat with snow, I hurried down into

the subway and went home. In the basement apartment in

Park Slope, I took the telephone off the hook and slept.

10

I MET Shirley MacLaine in Rome in 1966 at a party thrown

by the producer Joe Levine. We talked and had a few

laughs before she went off to another table. I saw her again

during Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign in California. She

was with her husband, Steve Parker, who lived in Tokyo.

That night I ended up at her house in Encino, drinking

whiskey at the bar in the living room with Steve and Shirley,

talking politics until three in the morning. She was funny.

She was intelligent. She was passionate about the

problems of the world. She never talked about movies. I

liked her very much.

A year after I separated from Ramona, Shirley published

her first book, a charming memoir called Don’t Fall Off the Mountain. Reading it, I discovered that we shared one

common childhood passion: Bomba the Jungle Boy. One

night she came into Elaine’s with some friends and

stopped at my table to say hello. I mentioned Bomba. She

sat down.

The only book I could never find, I said, was Bomba at the Giant Cataract.

He had eye trouble too? she said.

I laughed.

Do you want a drink? I said.

I’m not here to ride horses, she said.

A month later, we went to England together, where she

was working on a television series, and moved into a large

rented house near Windsor Castle. I kept writing my

newspaper column, shipping it from various places in

Europe. Before we met, I’d started writing movie scripts to

supplement my newspaper habit; with her, I learned much

about the craft, about putting people on stage, establishing

conflict, using action to show character. But I was still

drinking. I didn’t often get drunk. In her world, most people

simply didn’t drink the way I’d learned to drink; they would

soon be out of the business. But I did drink steadily, easing

the tension created by meeting so many new people,

adjusting to a relationship in which I was not the principal.

Shirley never mentioned the drinking to me. Her father

was a hard drinker too, and like me she’d grown up in the

hard-drinking Fifties. But there was an indirect scrutiny.

Sometimes in conversation she’d dismiss an actor or

director as a drunk. If she saw a scene in a movie, or read

a script where a character succumbs to another because of

drunkenness, she’d shake her head. It’s a cheat, she’d say.

It’s using the drink instead of forcing the painful choice. As

an actress she was relentless in trying to get to the core of

human character and discovering human weakness. Why does he do these things? she’d say about a character in a

script. What hurt him? What warped him? What does he

want, and what’s preventing him from getting it? When she was off at work one morning, I was sitting at

my typewriter, gazing at the gardens of England, and began

applying those questions to myself. I couldn’t accept my

own answers.

Back in New York, I started to work harder than ever before

on movie scripts and magazine articles and columns.

Necessity drove me: I needed the money. After they

returned from Mexico; Ramona and I had agreed to place

the girls in a boarding school, to give them some

steadiness and structure while she tried to sort out her life.

This arrangement wasn’t intended to be permanent; I

bought a big house in Park Slope in Brooklyn, full of vague

plans about getting custody of the children and having them

live there with me and Shirley. This was absurd, of course;

Shirley was an old Broadway gypsy, an itinerant who lived

where the work was. She did help me set up the house. But

she kept her apartment in Manhattan. She was never going

to live among the burghers of Brooklyn.

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.

11

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?

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.

VI

DRY

One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its

lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate.

Probably it was some final guest who had been away

at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party

was over.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

1

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?

The second test was more dangerous. On May first, my

father celebrated his seventieth birthday and we threw him

a party. There were hams and pasta and chicken and cold

cuts; cases of beer; bottles of whiskey and bowls of ice.

With all the kids and cousins and the singing of songs, I

was back in the dense sweet closed grip of family. And

history. Irish history and my father’s history. And mine. The

party rolled on. The music played. I was laughing, singing,

making plump sandwiches, and then, suddenly, I wanted a

drink. My father was being urged into “My Auld Scalera

Hat.” Someone found a hat and he took it as his prop and

his face was transformed, he was beaming and happy, his

jet-black hair still as shining and young as it was back when

I first saw him perform. I loved him; Jesus Christ, I loved

him. But then I backed up, quiet, allowing him his moment

on the stage. I was myself now, for better or worse. I was

forever Billy Hamill’s son, but I did not want to be the next

edition of Billy Hamill. He had his life and I had mine. And if

there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family

history, if my father was the result of his father and his

father’s father, on back through the generations into the

Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of

predestination. Someone among the males of this family

had to break the pattern. It might as well be me. I didn’t

have a drink.

Across those first months, I began to think that I only had to

give up one drink: the next one. If I didn’t have that drink, I’d

never have another. If that was a trick, then the trick worked,

most of the time. The rest of the time, I needed words. For

years, I had interviewed politicians in bars. Now I

suggested we go for a cup of coffee. Dinner parties were

problems because I was always explaining myself.

No, I don’t drink, thank you.

Not even wine? Nothing, thanks.

But why? I have no talent for it, I said.

Now I saw more clearly what drinking did to people. In

Hollywood, I met old directors and forgotten screenwriters

and unemployed actors: all broken by booze. I heard jokes

about the Malibu AA, where there were eleven actors in

one group and one driver’s license. But I didn’t laugh, felt no

comfort in their humiliation. I remembered some of the final

tortured stories by Scott Fitzgerald and felt surges of pity,

for Fitzgerald, for the people I met, for my friends. I resisted

pitying myself. I have stopped, I said to myself. If I begin

again, I don’t even deserve pity.

The temptation to begin again grew weaker and then,

before the year was finished, disappeared. Somehow, I’d

replaced the habit of drinking with the habit of nondrinking. I

still visited bars, listened to the stories, remembered the

few memorable remarks, but even the bartenders now

began to pour a soda when I walked in. My own

imagination helped me. I couldn’t imagine enduring again

the physical horrors of hangover. And I didn’t ever want to

spend a day lacerating myself over the social or personal

crimes and misdemeanors I’d committed while drinking. No

more apologies for stupid phone calls, asinine remarks,

lapses in grace. I might still do such things, but I would do

them with an unimpaired mind.

Now I had more time than I’d ever had as an adult. I had

gained the time I once spent drinking and the time I needed

for recovery. And I began writing as never before, studying

the craft with a professional’s forever unsatisfied standards.

I had lived past the first rush of arrival, when raw talent can

carry you across most barriers. Now I had to learn enough

to last a lifetime. I’m still learning.

2

ONE JANUARY afternoon, after five sober years, I went for

another walk in the snow. The children were home in the big

house on Prospect Park West, and if I had not yet repaired

some of the damage I’d inflicted on them and others, I was

trying, I was trying. I wandered into the park, which was

whitening under the heavy snowfall. And stood under a

dense pine tree and then imagined figures coming down

hills and across snowy meadows. Down there by the lake,

Maureen Crowley was waiting for me on a bench. Over in

the boathouse, Burne Hogarth was explaining trapezoids

and Laura was in a blue smock, pulling heavy drags on a

cigarette, while snow skirled like fog. In the snow, my

mother was calling us home to dinner. Tim was there and

Billy and Jake, all of us laughing, bellywhopping on Suicide

Hill before heading for Boop’s, and Jose was jogging down

snowy roads, and Joel Oppenheimer was defiantly

smoking his black tobacco cigarettes while snow gathered

on his Mets cap. Beside the Swan Lake, the Tigers and the

South Brooklyn Boys were gathering in some violent ritual

of the tribe. Up on the hill beside the Quaker Cemetery,

Bomba the Jungle Boy was waiting out the winter beside a

fire in a cave.

Then I heard my father singing.

On the west coast of Ireland One morning there was seen …

And I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and

failures, and the things I now saw clearly, and the things I

only remembered through the golden blur of drink. I reached

down and took a great mound of fresh snow in my hands

and began to eat. I was home. I was free. I’d leave the rest

to Providence and Paddy McGinty’s goat.

The author is grateful for permission to include the following

previously copyrighted material:

Excerpt from “We’re Off to See the Wizard” by E. Y.

Harburg and Harold Arlen. Copyright © 1938, 1939

(renewed 1965, 1966) by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. c/o

EMI Feist Catalog Co. By permission of CPP/Belwin,

Inc.

Excerpt from “Paddy McGinty’s Goat” by R. P. Weston,

B. Lee, B. Adams, and B. Allen. Copyright © 1917

renewed 1945 by Francis Day & Hunter Ltd. and Jerry

Vogel. By permission of EMI Music Publishing.

Excerpt from “(There’ll Be Blue Birds Over) The White

Cliffs of Dover” words by Nat Burton and music by Walter

Kent. Copyright © 1941 by Shapiro, Bernstein & Co.,

Inc., and Walter Kent Music Company. By permission of

Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.

Excerpt from “Solamente Una Vez” by Agustin Lara.

Copyright © 1941 by Promotora Hispano Americana de

Musica S.A., copyright renewed. By permission of Peer

International Corporation.

Excerpt from “La Cama de Piedra” by Cuco Sá\nchez.

Copyright © 1957 by Editorial Musicana de Musica

Internacional S.A., copyright renewed. By permission of

Peer International Corporation.

Excerpt from “A Case of You” by Joni Mitchell. Copyright

© 1971, 1975 by Joni Mitchell Publishing Corp. By

permission of Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.

Excerpt from “Stele for a Northern Republican” from Born in Brooklyn by John Montague. By permission of White

Pine Press.

Excerpt from “Fall 1961” from For the Union Dead by

Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1964 by Robert Lowell;

copyright renewed © 1992 by Harriet Lowell, Sheridan

Lowell, and Caroline Lowell. By permission of Farrar,

Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Excerpts from “In the Egyptian Gardens” from The Strange Museum by Tom Paulin. By permission of

Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt from “Animals” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1969 by

Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of

Frank O’Hara. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.