A Drinking Life " A Memoir"-Pete Hamill

Years ago when I was living in San Francisco, this book came across me through a mutual friend who was also a "heavy drinker". She was not reading the book, in fact someone else at the bar had shared the book with her. We were at our favorite craft beer spot in the lower Haight (the lower Haight is the lower part of the area that eventually leads to Haight-Ashbury for those of you who are not familiar with San Francisco. It was a ritual every saturday to spend time at the Beer Pub for hours and hours drinking beer with a very high alcohol content (the beer was really great "micro-brewed") and back with shots of Jagermeister. You see we were really kool we thought, many had come to San Francsisco to start companies and or work in the dot com industry. Groups would form and we would talk and talk, throw ideas around, talk about the tech companies where we worked, etc. It was not too long after that; a year or so that AA came into my life and and the fact that drinking in one's life, my life. was a problem. It was at that time that my initial awareness into booze problems and co-factors began and it would take many years of more drinking and learning to begin to understand the power of addiction and how it effects a person's life. I look forward to reading this book, which I will pick up in a few days. Also, in my research I was able to come across a great interview on C-Span as well as an earlier write up in the New York Times in 1994. AT HOME WITH: Pete Hamill; On Background By ALEX WITCHEL Published: February 24, 1994 IN the movies, at least, there was always a world-weary editor in the newsroom with smarts to spare for a neophyte reporter. He would say something magical and the kid would come back a star. Pete Hamill, the former New York Post columnist and the newspaper's editor during last year's frenzied Abe Hirshfeld reign, found such a mentor when he showed up for the night shift there in 1960. Paul Sann, who Mr. Hamill recalls smoked Camels and looked like Bogart (who else?), gave him a motto a journalist could live by: "If you've got the story, tell it. If you don't have the story, write it." Mr. Hamill has a story to tell in his new book, "A Drinking Life" (Little, Brown), his own story, and he tells it so well ("in the hard, spare prose of a journalist," a reviewer wrote) that the book hit the New York Times best-seller list last weekend at No. 9. It is the story of Mr. Hamill's growing up in Brooklyn as the oldest of seven children of Irish immigrant parents and how drinking helped define his sense of identity as he established himself outside "the neighborhood." It is also the story of how drinking came to destroy his memory, erode his talent and ruin his home life until he finally gave it up in 1973.

"Confession alone is not necessarily good for the soul," he says, in his Greenwich Village apartment. "People become writers in the first place by those things that hurt you into art, as Yeats said it. Then they become separated from what started out affecting them. Journalism forces you to look at the world so you don't get cut off." At 58, Mr. Hamill seems to have mellowed. His maverick, testosterone-fueled columns at The Post, The Village Voice and The New York Daily News evoked a New York where neckties were for loosening and subways smelled of sweat. He covered Vietnam, Lebanon, Northern Ireland and Nicaragua, wrote fiction and idolized Hemingway (who else?). A glass of whisky in his hand completed the picture. The Lion's Head, the writer's bar in the Village, was his home base. But for the last seven years, he has been married to the Japanese journalist Fukiko Aoki and has two real homes -- this one, near the meat-packing district, and another upstate in Ulster County. Here in the Village, he is surrounded by his paintings and drawings (as a teen-ager he wanted to be a cartoonist and before becoming a journalist earned his living as a graphic designer) and books, books, books, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Ms. Aoki writes a column about American culture for Bunshun, a Japanese weekly magazine. The marriage is successful, Mr. Hamill says, because she works even harder than he does. The two met in Tokyo when she interviewed him. During the interview there was an earthquake. "The earth moved, what can I tell you?" he says. On this sunny morning, with their black labrador, Gabo, lured to the kitchen by the promise of a sesame bagel, Mr. Hamill settles on the couch. Change slides from his pocket onto the cushions, unnoticed. He eats pastry and smokes cigarettes and his face is creased in all kinds of directions. This is a man from a bygone era, before bodies required preservation like works of art. But he's far from unattractive. He says he has had romances with Shirley Maclaine and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but turns a little pale at the prospect of a rehash. "I'm a happily married man," he says, reaching for a cigarette. "Only a cad would talk about his life that way." He's more comfortable talking about men. "I started to write this book when people I knew from the Lion's Head, people I had grown up with in the business, started to die at ages like 46," he says. "Everyone knew I had stopped drinking and always wanted to know how I did it. I had written a piece about it for New York magazine years ago, but it was like a memo. And I thought, I really should try to figure this out. "The tone was the hardest to establish. I didn't want to be preachy or judgmental about people who aren't as tough or as smart. To be clear about what actually happened and be patient enough to allow it to develop and not get it all in the lead like a newspaper story." He draws on a Vantage. "Cigarettes are much harder to kick than whisky," he says. "You can smoke and work, but you can't drink and work. "In the literature of drinking, like 'Under the Volcano,' 'The Iceman Cometh' and all over Fitzgerald, there are only drastic or extreme cases. One of the things I was determined to do was not make it worse than it was. I never ended up with the D.T.'s, shaking and seeing little men. I just wanted to write about a condition that had its own form of damage. One of the things I learned is that the functioning drinker causes more damage than the alkie in the doorway. "I don't remember as much about the 1960's as I do when I was 12. No matter what trick I use, I can't reconstruct a great night, what the jokes were, why we laughed. When I was writing, I used triggers, tapes of hit songs of the 40's and 50's, and as I would listen to them, whole months would come back. Rooms, linoleum, textures, pictures. It would all flow out of Bing Crosby singing 'Don't Fence Me In.' When I hear the Doors or Aretha, I think of Vietnam, because that's what was playing in all those bars in Saigon. When I hear parts of 'Hair' I remember the moratoriums. But I remember the things I covered, rather than the life I lived." Mr. Hamill's father, Billy, a clerk, began taking his eldest son to the bars when he was 8. A stellar soccer player, the elder Mr. Hamill lost his leg to gangrene after it was broken in a game and he had to wait a full day in a hospital before receiving treatment. He drank. His son drank. When he quit drinking he did it alone; he never went to Alcoholics Anonymous. "It was hard to go to A.A.," he says. "Especially the Brooklyn part of me. I just had to deal with it myself. If you're the oldest in a large family, you tend to do everything yourself, particularly if you are the first American. You begin a habit or pattern that makes it easy to reject other help. Also, in A.A. there was a religious element I couldn't accept. It was irrelevant to what I needed to be sober. Now I think there's an A.A. for atheists. A.A.A. or something." He smiles. "They even fix flats." He still goes to the Lion's Head, he says, but he doesn't stand at the bar. "It's hard for me. And I don't want the other guys to feel judged. I don't get aggravated with drunks as much as bored. Their conversation is like bad writing. Everything is in italics." One of the details Mr. Hamill remembered only when he began to write his book was how as a child he was influenced by the magic potions his comic book heroes would drink to become invincible. It sent a powerful message. So did what Mr. Hamill calls "the Irish thing," meaning the accepted wisdom that anyone who was too smart, who succeeded too much, became guilty of the sin of pride, having the nerve to be better than everyone else. It is not coincidence that after Mr. Hamill was admitted to an exclusive parochial school in Manhattan, he dropped out. Or that after earning a high school equivalency degree in the Navy, he enrolled in college but never graduated. Compounding "the Irish thing" was his father's torment over his leg and everything that might have been. "Clearly, my mother is the hero of the book," he says. "My father did shape me. He didn't drive because he had one leg, and for years I never drove. I had no mobility. The self-inflicted wound has an echo from things you don't even consciously understand. (Side Note Peter O'Toole is Great in this short performance-Lu'na) "But it was not him alone. My mother was also there. Last December, I was given an award by the National Cartoonist Society as an amateur cartoonist, and they found three letters I had written to Milton Caniff in 1946 and 1947 I didn't know existed. The kid who wrote them was so straight: 'I want to be a cartoonist, can you give me some tips.' None of my father's Brooklyn class stuff, being poor. The green ceiling, as the Irish call it, seemed to some part of me irrelevant. "My mother had made me think I could talk to Milton Caniff or the President of the United States as easily as a haberdasher. That's what it meant to be American, what pulled people from other countries. To have a sense of the possible." Mr. Hamill's mother, Anne, is 83 and suffers from Parkinson's disease. She lives in a nursing home in Brooklyn. His father died in 1986. His brother Tom is an engineer for the New York State Power Authority; his only sister, Kathleen, was until recently an editor for Navy publications. Brian is a still photographer for movies; John is a speechwriter at the New York Housing Authority; Denis is a columnist at The Daily News, and Joe is a television producer. From his first marriage, to Ramona Negron, Mr. Hamill has two grown daughters, Adriene Wellesley, a writer in Las Vegas, Nev., and Deirdre Hamill, a photographer for The Phoenix Gazette. Mrs. Wellesley was indicted on Friday on five counts of child abuse with substantial bodily harm and one count of murder in the death of her infant son in 1991. Her husband, Charles Wellesley, was also indicted in the death. Mr. Hamill says lawyers have advised him not to comment on the case. Though his children prefer living out West, Mr. Hamill will not leave New York. He has lived and worked in Mexico, as a student and as a journalist, enough in his lifetime to call it his second country, but his home is here. "More than anything, New York interests me," he says. "The New York I evoke in the 40's and 50's was a great big optimistic city. I felt I could grow up to be a cartoonist, play left field for the Dodgers, even in spite of the Irish thing. The older group was used to disappointment, but the kids had beaten Hitler. We could do anything. I don't feel that out on Pitkin Avenue now." He gestures toward the window. "The reason I like this neighborhood is that I see people physically working. Seeing a guy with his cleaver reminds me so much of that New York I miss. People stand differently when they have work. I go to Coney Island every summer. Nathan's is more or less the same, though the rides are all different. But the light is the same. Nobody can ruin that." Rather than return to writing columns, Mr. Hamill wants to concentrate on books. His next is a novel, and a collection of his columns and articles is also to be published. But in here, those books will have to fight for space. There is barely room for his easel and desk. ( Britain's rinking Problem) Ready Steady Drink....UK Amy Winehouse http://youtu.be/Cvyd9LTQWhE He shows off his collection of books from the old Bomba the Jungle Boy series, bracketed by Yeats and Joyce. There are sections on journalism, crime, Japan, Russia, New York, Georges Simenon, Mexico, Italy and Renaissance history. "If I could move Florence to the Mexican Riviera and get Joe's Stone Crab from Miami in the same town, I'd be happy," he says. The wall over his desk is filled with faces. Masks from Mexico, mug shots of gangsters. The infamous kiss photo, when Mr. Hirshfeld planted a big smacker on Mr. Hamill, who looked as horrified as everyone else felt, hangs in his bathroom. "I call it the Kiss of the Spider Man," he says. "When I got home that day, poor Fukiko said, 'Does this mean that what he has, you have?' " He also shows a few pictures of his mother. "She had a tremendous memory," he says. "It's sad for me now to see her. She always believed in America. She worked as a cashier at the RKO chain and wouldn't let my brothers into the theater before each one got a library card and read. Grand Army Plaza Library was so far away from where we lived, but it had so much more than the branch. The sign on the wall said, 'Here are enshrined the longings of great hearts.' And I looked at that sign and said, 'Let me be a great heart, please, whatever it is.' " He throws his arms up in a praying motion. "Sometimes," he says, "words even on the sides of buildings have meanings that people underestimate." YOU CAN ALSO CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE C-SPAN INTERVIEW.