A Drinking Life (42 page)

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.