The Harder They Fall (15 page)

I didn’t know I was still flipped out. I was diagnosed as having Tigerette syndrome and being a bisexual polar bear. Every night I’d walk all the way from the goddamn Carlyle Hotel on Eighty-something Street down to below Houston. I’d go to my friend Shane’s joint and hit on this chick that worked there. I’d walk along the river every night. I’d call people on the phone all night long. Anybody I had a number for I’d call. Some people would stay up all night talking to me, and finally they’d say, “I got to go to work.” I’d never let them get a word in the whole time, and they would put up with this crap.

I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but I knew I wasn’t gonna start using. I had really started flipping out in California. I had did a song for a Walt Disney movie about dalmatian dogs, and I started really flipping out again. I started singing, “You motherfuckers, technicolor, Cecil B. DeMille wannabees” … insulting everybody and everything, telling them this is the city of Saint Francis the Sissy, in the state of fruits and nuts. There ought to be a video of this gig! I’m insulting everybody. I’m just out there!

I got back to New York and kept doing weird shit. I couldn’t stop cussing. My managers, my shrink, my accountant … everybody was on my case. They had me go back on these psych meds, and I’m still on them today. I don’t flip out no more.

So from that point on, I started learning how to take better care of myself. At that time, I was weighing about 350 pounds ’cause this bitch that I wanted to kill was feeding me ten tons of food each day. I was close to blowing up! I still had this water retention from being on methadone. I started seeing an acupuncturist and doing all this stuff. I also started seeing this shrink. I was starting to get positive about things. And most important, I was staying clean. It was not no bed from roses. During all this time, I was making records for people, getting dumped from record companies—typical musician stuff. I was still able to work gigs, but I was trying to take better care of me. I’m still not good at it, but my life started to shift.

Since I’ve been offa narcotics, I just know that that ain’t the way to go. That’s a slow version of self-suicide. Some people it might not affect that way, but I ain’t one of them. I’m proud of the fact that I flipped out twice in recovery without picking up.

It’s very funny that all of the things my pa told me when I was a kid proved out to be exactly correct. “Kid, if you smoke weed, you’re gonna take goofballs. If you take goofballs, you’re gonna shoot dope.” He always called dope fiends, back in the forties, “junkers.” Junkers. I don’t know where that word came from. There was a lot of things he told me. My pa always approved of me playing, even in these low-down strip joints, ’cause I was with the older guys. He knew they were good musicians and I’d learn how to play music. Ain’t nobody in that crew did anything like try to turn me out. I got turned out on my own. Wasn’t like anybody gave me my wings. Nobody gave me shit. I went out with whatever rebellious stupidity my head was into and I went that-a-way, and I couldn’t get out of it. That was another thing. I heard that from a million people. They’d all say, “Once you’re a dope fiend, you’ll die a dope fiend.” Even I used to say, “Yeah, Daddy, I’m a hope-to-die dope fiend.” There was a dope fiend toast I remember: “To all my dope fiend friends, we’ll be dope fiends till the end.” What the fuck was all that stupid shit about? It’s like all them codes of the street. “Fuck them before they fuck you.” All that dumb shit. And I’d buy into it, ’cause it’s all you need to know in the game.

When my daughter passed away recently, a guy pulled my coat and asked me, “You know why they call it the game?” I thought about it and
said, “No.” And he said, “Because nothing is real. The only thing real in the game is death.” That was pretty profound.

I feel like I’m blessed now. It beats whatever I had in a million ways. Every day I wake up and you know the first thing I’m grateful for? The ability to take a crap! To make my daily deposit. All them years on methadone, living like a toxic waste dump. Sounds stupid, but to me it ain’t. When you ain’t used the turlet in two months, that’s a big deal.

You know, anything I tell you is shit I heard from some other motherfucker. I hang on to a lot of stuff. I been around a lot of good people all my life. There was things people told me I didn’t understand till I was clean. You know, getting away from that life-style gave me time to think.

Deacon Frank’s wife, in the Spiritual Church in New Orleans, told me, “You got to be in season, in order to catch the right season when it come. You got to be in order, all in order.” Now she was passing down words she learned from Mother Catherine. The Book of Ecclesiastic. If it’s your time, you get it, and when you ain’t, you ain’t. Simple.

(writer)

I never crashed and burned. I began to deteriorate and had other things I wanted to do. I knew that drinking was the most destructive path for a writer, because it attacks memory. You wake up in the morning and say, “Man, I had a great time last night,” but you don’t remember where you were. It wasn’t that I lost a job or crashed a car and killed two people. I didn’t even drive in those days. Nothing like that happened. In my book [
A Drinking Life
], I didn’t want to make what was going on with me worse than it was—for the entertainment of readers or for some moral lesson. It wasn’t a moral problem to me; it was a practical problem. I was a writer who wanted to be a better one.

Working on newspapers and drinking, I could always squeeze enough out of my talent to get into the paper the next day, but the attempts to see what the limits of that talent were couldn’t be determined with drinking. In other words, could I write novels? Could I write movies? Could I write extended essays? I had no idea. I had already written one novel when I was still drinking. A thriller, which helped me figure out the form. It’s like starting with sprints and then saying, “Can I run a marathon?” So it was partly that—my work—but I also had custody of my two daughters at the time, after a divorce. That added a very simple reason: I didn’t want to look like an asshole in front of my kids. There was real responsibility to bringing them up … and not in the context of semi-consciousness! That was a factor too.

When I got to the end of my drinking life, I said, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t even like this anymore.” It was reasonably easy to stop. I don’t
mean that it was
completely
easy. It wasn’t like saying, “That’s it. I think I’ll go to the ball game.” It involved certain alterations in the way I lived. I emphasized in my book that it was not about the drinking life, it was about a drinking life. There could be ten thousand other reasons why people drank. This book was about how it got into my life, and how I started to get it out. It was also why I didn’t go to AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] or anything like that, although I have great regard for AA. I’ve brought people there, but it wasn’t a thing that I could do. I couldn’t get up there and say, “I’m Pete Hamill, and I’m a drunk.” I couldn’t do it! For whatever reasons—upbringing or personality or whatever.

It all depends on which way you emerge from this place where you’re lost. Some people climb a tree and look out to see where the hell the road is. If they’re lost in the forest, some people have to retrace their steps to get back. I had to retrace the steps.

The first year of sobriety was the hardest in terms of readjusting the patterns of my life. Particularly in the newspaper business. And particularly in a world where the Lion’s Head—the great Village saloon in its day—was still alive. This was a world that was still very turbulent with Vietnam and Watergate and the rebellions they helped create. So it took some adjustment. How to walk into a saloon and order—of all goddamn things—a Diet Coke, which I would have laughed at a year earlier. Afterwards, I didn’t have any problems with cravings or anything. I wish I did so I could make it sound like
Under the Volcano
. But I didn’t. The only problem I encountered was this amazing sweet tooth. I began to eat ice cream and other stuff I hadn’t done since I was a teenager. I had cravings in that way, which was obviously not solely in my brain but in my physiology. “Where’s the sugar?” But I had by then learned that I was going to have to live my life without anesthesia, and that meant accepting the pain along with the laughs.

As a writer, since I’ve stopped drinking, I published nineteen books. If I kept drinking, I wouldn’t have written as much as I have, and at the highest level I could reach. I’m not suggesting sobriety turned me into Balzac. But it helped me become the best possible Pete Hamill. In a certain way, the sense of renewed, more focused life came from the realities of death. There were a few people whose deaths showed me the consequence of
continuing drinking. They were friends. And the consequences were visible. I saw them in my life. I saw them in Brooklyn when I was a kid. People get drunk and fall into a snow pile in winter and get taken out in the morning. It wasn’t that somebody died and I suddenly said, “That’s it, I’m stopping drinking.” It wasn’t like that. I wish it were. It would be a better story. As noted, my decision was based on a combination of factors. I didn’t stop drinking because Buddy Greco was a terrible singer. That was like the way people get divorced because their spouse burns the English muffins. There’s obviously something preceding that kind of moment.