A Drinking Life

1

DURING my time in the navy, drinking became more deeply ingrained in my nature. If I’d served my apprenticeship in Brooklyn, in the navy I became a journeyman. I learned much about race, sex, the South, literature, music, and all of it was absorbed in a delicious heady delirium of drink.

During a one-day liberty from boot camp in Bainbridge, Maryland, I careened around the flesh joints of East Baltimore Street, lusted for a stripper named Tempest Storm, threw up in an alley and laughed about it with my friends in the morning. I received a Dear John letter from Maureen, wrote her anguished letters, came home at Christmas, made a fool of myself over her, joined my father in a winning us-against-them fistfight in Rattigan’s, and was moved to beer-soaked tears when he said afterward, This is my son, Peter, in whom I am well proud.

Then I was off to Norman, Oklahoma, to airmen’s school (there turned out to be no great demand for yeomen who were high school dropouts). I arrived on the morning of New Year’s Eve and ended up that night in a tough Indian bar where I took a whore’s tits out of her bra under her sweater in a side booth and later followed her upstairs. She was very fat and we drank hootch from an unlabeled bottle. She blew me and I fell asleep and woke up at dawn with the door locked from the outside and my money gone. I had to move a bureau and climb out through the transom and then wandered the frozen streets until I found a bus to take me to the base. Then I was in Jacksonville, Florida, training for a storekeeper’s rate, learning to type, seeing palm trees for the first time, and the southern sun. Eisenhower had been elected, the North Koreans were negotiating, and I would see no war. In Daytona one weekend, I stood on the beach with another sailor, named Stamps, and watched the cars roll by on the hard-packed sand. Two college girls came along in a convertible and Stamps and I leaped into the back seat and then we were in their motel room, drinking beer and fucking them for hours. I was almost eighteen. At night in the enlisted men’s barracks, I longed for Maureen — O wounded vanity! — and in my fantasies was once again in the Tenth Street apartment with Laura tied to an easel.

From Jacksonville I was sent to Pensacola, to a helicopter training base at Ellyson Field. In the small base library I discovered Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the myth of the Lost Generation. The discovery was set off by a single sentence by Malcolm Cowley in his 1944 introduction to a small compact Viking Portable that contained The Sun Also Rises, excerpts from other novels, and a selection of Hemingway’s short stories.

Going back to Hemingway’s work after several years is like going back to a brook where you had often fished and finding the woods as deep and cool as they used to be. …

I was a city boy; I hadn’t seen a brook since Fox Lair Camp, had never fished in any serious way, associated woods with the place where Arnold hid his bottle of wine. But something about that sentence pulled me in: a vision of clarity that was liquid and moving and cool.

Part of the appeal came from reading it in the heat of Florida. But I had never thought of a writer that way, making words as clear as flowing water. Cowley allowed Hemingway himself to talk:

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

I knew that was true; the stuff of many books already lived in my mind as if it had happened to me. I didn’t remember the bad books.

And if the Hemingway world of Paris and Pamplona, the slopes of Kilimanjaro and the eddies of the Big Two-Hearted River had nothing concrete to do with my life, Cowley described a part of that world that surely did. The Hemingway heroes had one thing in common.

They drink early and late; they consume enough beer, wine, anis, grappa and Fundador to put them all into alcoholic wards, if they were ordinary mortals; but drinking seems to have the effect on them of a magic potion.

Yes! I had sampled that magic potion myself. And Cowley then quoted from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose hero, Robert Jordan, finds that a cup of absinthe

took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month … of all the things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.

For weeks I tried to find absinthe in the dirt-floored bars of O Street, and failed. There were other forms of liquid alchemy, and so the lack of absinthe did not matter. I was soon in the Hemingway world, carrying his stoic ethic with me off the base, to sailor bars where drinking was sport, entertainment, clarification, and pleasure. I went on to Cowley’s Exile’s Return, about the Lost Generation that Gertrude Stein had named and Hemingway had made famous, and learned that drinking could be something more than mere fuel for a wild night out. It could be a huge fuck you to Authority.

The writers, artists, and poets of the 1920s, Cowley explained, were faced with one mammoth idiocy of Authority: the mistake called Prohibition. Then, as in my own 1953, right-wingers, bigots, bluenoses, and puritans ruled America. They used goons to break labor unions. Like our current political gangster Joe McCarthy, they sniffed around for people they called subversives, silenced them, jailed them, deported them. If people like that passed a law making it a crime to drink, you had only one choice: to get roaring drunk.

Cowley led me to Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, to the world of bootleggers and speakeasies, and I remembered my father’s friends sitting in the kitchen that time talking about rumrunners. Nothing could have been more romantic. James Cagney lived in that world, in the old movies that kept playing in the Minerva and the Sixteenth Street; so did Bogart and Robinson and Raft. And now Wolfsheim the gambler was there and Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, along with Fitzgerald himself, and Billy Hamill.

And Billy Hamill’s oldest son too.

All of them staring across the water at the green light on Daisy’s dock.

2

FROM HEMINGWAY, I stole the guise of the stoic drinker, mixing it up with Bogart and some old salts who had come through the war and knew that a helicopter base in the Florida panhandle was Mickey Mouse duty. These men carried deep wounded feelings beneath the tough exteriors (or so I thought), but they taught us that the only unforgivable sin was self-pity. A girl broke your heart? Fuck her. Get another one. Break her heart. You lost a fight? Fuck it. Get up. Wipe off the blood. Have another whiskey and go get him again.

Most of them knew a lot about life in a concrete way. And they laughed out loud at the oratory of the politicians. That, too, fit in with the codes of Hemingway.

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it… Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates…

That was from A Farewell to Arms, and in that romantic novel, I first came across the notion of a separate peace. In the climax of the drama, Frederic Henry deserts to join his woman, Catherine Barkley, leaving behind the abstractions of patriotism, loyalty, and solemn oaths. Living was more important than dying; loving a woman was more important than loving a country. And from Cowley’s Exile’s Return, I realized that there was another way to make a separate peace: departure. Faced with an America dedicated to sobriety, thrift, puritanism, and commercialism, many Twenties writers and artists became expatriates. I loved that word. The expatriate Fitzgerald went to the Riviera, T. S. Eliot to London, Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico, Hemingway to Paris. They lived the expatriate life among civilized people (or so I thought), in countries where food and shelter and drink were cheap and the women were beautiful.

In my imagination, searching for absinthe among the Hank Williams-Webb Pierce jukeboxes, Paris became the golden city of my imagination. It was so in the 1920s, I thought; it must be so now. I envisioned café tables on summer afternoons, smoky dives in the winter, painters on the slopes of Montparnasse, and there, coming in the door of the bal musette, striding right out of The Sun Also Rises, was Lady Brett Ashley.

She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey…

Around this time, I first saw Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, and here was Gene Kelly, living on the GI Bill after World War II — that is to say, now — telling me that if you can’t paint in Paris, you might as well marry the boss’s daughter. He had a studio in the Quarter that was smaller than Laura’s, with a bed on pulleys that he raised in the morning to the ceiling, and windows open to the spring air, the Paris rooftops, the cobblestoned streets, the bookstalls, and the fresh bread and, of course, the cafés. Oscar Levant was his best friend, a piano player, and they met each day in the Café Bel Ami. The girl he loved was Leslie Caron. His music was by George Gershwin, full of charm and confidence and bittersweet regret. This wasn’t the Paris of Jake Barnes and Robert Cohn from The Sun Also Rises. But it was bright and gay and full of painters and music and beautiful women and I wanted it.

And began to think I might even get it. When I finished with the navy, I too was entitled to the GI Bill, just like Gene Kelly. I could go to Paris and see all the great paintings in the Louvre and read all the writers whose names were scattered through Cowley’s book: Joyce and Pound, Proust and Valéry, Verlaine and Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Why not? I’d find the Café Bel Ami and sit at a table and order Fundador and read little magazines too. And study at the Académie Julien or the Sorbonne. And paint in the street. All night long, I’d discuss with my fellow theologians the canon law of the religion of art. And sample other pleasures.

The only things that matter, said Gene Kelly, are women and wine.

And absinthe. Of course.

3

BUT I DIDN’T GO to Paris. The Korean War ended in a grim stalemate, and a year later the navy ended for me too, and I went back to New York. I found a job as a messenger and then proofreader in the production department of an advertising agency that specialized in industrial accounts. Everybody in the Neighborhood thought I was crazy.

You got a good job in the Navy Yard, Duke Baluta said. They gotta count your navy time toward your pension too.

I want to try something else, I said.

You could be there for life.

That’s what I’m afraid of.

Back home, I didn’t go very far. I found a new room, this one next to a synagogue on Ninth Street in Brooklyn, a half block from the library. I was soon going steady with another girl from the Neighborhood, this one named Catherine. I didn’t go back to C&I; there was some problem about the GI Bill. I enrolled instead in evening classes at Pratt Institute, where an English teacher named Tom McMahon looked at my compositions and encouraged me to write. McMahon was a fine teacher with a probing theatrical style. He was an expert on Hemingway, an admirer of Nathanael West and Horace McCoy, a cigarette smoker and wearer of trench coats, and at one point he urged me to try to get into Columbia University, where I could study literature or art. I went up to Morningside Heights and saw the registrar, a bald polished man. He looked at my academic record, such as it was, and suggested in a condescending voice that I consider going to a vocational school.

I hear there is a big need for dental technicians, he said.

Fuck you, I said, gathered my papers and walked out the door.

All the way back to Brooklyn from Morningside Heights I kept saying, Fuck you, I’ll do it some other way. Fuck you, I’ll do it anyway.

I was reading newspapers again, the comics behind me, but enthralled by Jimmy Cannon in the Post’s sports section and by Murray Kempton’s column on the editorial page. After Pensacola, the seven New York newspapers were a gorgeous feast. I no longer wanted to be a cartoonist. But the dream of painting in Paris also began to fade under the gray pressure of earning a living and a feeling of rejection. I wrote to the Sorbonne in Paris. I wrote to the Académie Julien. I never received answers. Fuck you, I said to Paris. Fuck you too.

Now everyone in the Neighborhood had a television set — even my father — and on summer nights the streets were emptier, as each apartment lit up with a pale blue glow. I still listened to Symphony Sid and got drunk when Charlie Parker died and sneered at the arrival of rock and roll.

In Brooklyn I felt stalled again. Most of my friends were still in the service; they’d gone in after me and stayed later. My best friend was Tim Lee, a brilliant guy who had boxed in the amateurs at Thomas Aquinas and came home on weekends from his army base in Maryland. In Boop’s or Rattigan’s or the Caton Inn, we talked a lot about going to college, doing something with our lives. Everything seemed possible over a beer. But in 1955, such talk was always interrupted by other matters. In Boop’s, we cheered in September when Archie Moore knocked down Rocky Marciano before getting knocked out himself. We were thrilled when Sugar Ray Robinson ended his amazing comeback in December by knocking out Bobo Olson in two rounds. At the bar there was a lot of talk now about heroin, which was claiming its first victims in the Neighborhood.

Who brought this shit around anyway? I asked one night in Boop’s.

The guineas, who else? said Vito Pinto.

Hey, Vito, Duke Baluta said, you’re a guinea!

You know who I mean, Vito said.

Everybody knew, all right. The racket guys from South Brooklyn had started slowly peddling heroin, and now it was coming in a flood. The streets that once had the most drunks — Twelfth Street, Seventh Avenue, Seventeenth Street — now housed the most junkies. The South Brooklyn wise guys did to the Tigers with heroin what they couldn’t do with fists, bats, or guns: wasted them and robbed them of their pride. Seeing that, I was never tempted by hard drugs. But now drinking acquired another quality: it was the normal, healthy, even moral alternative to smack.

That year, I also started hanging around with a tough funny ironworker named Jack Daugherty. He loved sentimental Irish songs, practical jokes, and fighting. He was the hardest-punching street fighter I ever knew. And soon, in bars and coffee shops all over Brooklyn, we were in fights every night. We fought strangers over change (I had t’ree quarters here when I went to take my piss) or looks (The fuck you lookin’ at, prickface?) or women (Whatta you, own this broad?). Sometimes Tim Lee was there; usually it was Jack and me. I broke my right hand twice and had a stabilizing pin inserted through my knuckles, forcing me for a few weeks to draw with my left. There were wild fights in Bickford’s cafeteria on Ninth Street and wilder ones on the sidewalks outside Nathan’s on Coney Island. I was drinking every day but seldom got drunk and never had hangovers; it was a matter of deep pride in the Neighborhood to be able to hold your drink.

One night in the Caton Inn, a dark joint on Coney Island Avenue with a huge horseshoe bar, a booming jukebox, and a dance floor, I was drinking with my girl, Catherine. My broken right hand was in a cast. Then a guy grabbed Catherine’s ass on his way to the men’s room and I spun him around and hit him between the eyes with the cast. His head bounced off another guy’s foot, breaking his toe. It became known as The Night Pete Hamill Broke Frank Christie’s Toe with One Punch.

Catherine was sweet, funny, a drinker, with dark hair cut in a bob, long legs, and smooth skin. All around us, people were getting married, as the men came back from Korea. It was assumed that we would be married too. My father knew her father; she lived two blocks from 378; I was told in a dozen different ways by several dozen grown-ups that there was nothing better than a good neighborhood girl. That year, Catherine went to a lot of baby showers. We went together to some weddings. She didn’t mind my drinking or fighting; that was what men did. She gushed about the drawings I took home from Pratt, giggled at the naked women, but looked blank when I tried to talk about a life as a painter. She didn’t dismiss the subject the way Maureen had; it just didn’t register with her. I could have been discussing the rings of Saturn. We ordered beers. We danced. She laughed at my jokes. We groped each other in the kitchen of her parents’ flat. I went home. Or stopped for a nightcap in a bar.

One day in the Daily News there was a story about the ongoing demolition of the Third Avenue El. The work crews were moving uptown from the Bowery and were about to reach Fourteenth Street. I felt a pang; a piece of the world I knew was going to disappear. But there was more to it than that. After work, I went down to Tenth Street and Third Avenue, secretly hoping that Laura had seen the same news item and would feel the same pang. A half block from the El, we had pleasured each other on winter nights. I told myself that I wasn’t in love with her; I didn’t even want to take her to bed; I just wanted to see her again and hear from her what had happened. From the Astor Place subway station, I walked slowly east along Tenth Street. At her building, I went into the vestibule and looked at the mailboxes, but someone else was living in the old studio. Then I walked to the corner. Third Avenue felt empty and hollow without the great dark iron structures of the El and the steel growl of the trains. I went into a bar and sat there for a long time, sipping beers, watching the street. But I never saw Laura again. I never saw her name in the art magazines. She wasn’t listed in the directories of American artists. She was gone forever.

4

BY EARLY 1956, I began to feel that I was vanishing too. The production manager at the agency had quickly decided I wasn’t what he needed; he was about to fire me. The art director, Ernie Waivada, saved me, out of an excess of Christian pity, and from him I started to acquire some minor skills. I could draw a straight line with a steel T square, for example. I could do simple pasteups and mechanicals. I could “spec” type and do some primitive lettering (taming my cartoony instincts). I knew about repro proofs and photostats and Photo Lettering. I was trusted to black out cut lines on negative photostats, to cut mats, to “gang” various small pieces of art for photostats. I managed to keep the job and was even given a small raise.

But at night in the dark, alone with myself, graphic design seemed a chilly discipline. It was basically a function of the intellect, and I was still in the sweaty grip of romance, full of Hemingway, reading the poems of García Lorca, soaking up James M. Cain, discovering the drawings of Heinrich Kley, copying George Grosz and Orozco. I still loved drawing human bodies, hair and teeth and flesh. I had much less interest in squares, circles, triangles, or the delicacies of Caslon Bold.

In the small studio, upstairs from a rug importer on Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, there was another man who came to work three or four days a week. His name was Dave Hills. He was in his sixties, with age freckles on his hands, his back hunched from years bent over drawing boards. He had been the first art director of the agency but now worked as a part-time freelancer on some of the minor work, such as employee newsletters. He had a few peculiar specialities, one of which was lettering that looked like rope. But he never talked about the glories of design. His fundamental medium was the Job. He had started out long ago and come through the Depression and the war; he was happy to be there at all. Then one day he announced that he was going to retire. He was packing up and moving to Mexico.

Why Mexico, Dave? I asked.

Oh, I don’t know, he said. I like the people. I like the country. I like the booze. And besides, it’s cheap.

At almost the same time, I received a letter from a navy friend who also wanted to be a painter. He enclosed a catalog for a school called Mexico City College, approved for study on the GI Bill, with an art department offering a bachelor of fine arts degree. The language of instruction was English, but there were extensive courses in the Spanish language. Maybe this is our Paris, my friend wrote. And besides, it’s cheap, said Dave Hills.

Suddenly Mexico cast a voluptuous spell. If a sixty-five-year-old man could pack up and go to Mexico, why couldn’t I? I sent the catalog to my friend Tim Lee, who was still in the army. Maybe, I wrote him, we could go there together. So what if nobody in the Neighborhood ever went to college; why shouldn’t we be the first? And in Mexico! The notion would not go away. In the agency, I was trying to letter a line of copy in Clarendon Bold and suddenly Orozco tore across my mind. I sat at the bar in the Caton Inn with Catherine and imagined hard brown mountains, cactus, distant volcanoes; bandidos out of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; pyramids and lost cities; cantinas full of music and tequila and brownskinned women.

Are you okay? Catherine said.

Yeah, yeah.

You’re not drunk?

No, I’m not drunk.

I hope you’re not thinking about some other girl.

No.

Or one of those naked women from school.

No. No women. I swear. …

In February, Tim got out of the army. And we ended up one night at the bar in Boop’s.

What do you think? I said.

About what?

About going to Mexico.

He laughed out loud.

You’re nuts, he said.

I know, I said. But I’m serious.

He downed a beer, his brow furrowing, and said: Hey, why not? Why fucking not?

In May, we sent the application forms to Mexico, just to see what would happen. Weeks passed. The Mexico fever ebbed as I assumed that I faced still another rejection. Then, on a Friday, a plump letter trimmed with orange and green arrived in my mailbox. The stamps were from Mexico. I tore it open and discovered that I was accepted. So was Tim. After the cold rejection by Columbia, and the silence of Paris, I was giddy with jubilation and went off to Boop’s to celebrate. They did not have tequila at the bar so I got wrecked on vodka. On Monday, I gave my notice at the agency, telling Ernie Waivada that I would leave in late August. I gave no notice to Catherine. I just couldn’t tell her anything that was not a lie, so I said nothing. To save money for the trip, I took a second job, as a page at NBC, starting at six in the evening and working until one in the morning. That summer, every hour seemed packed with excitement and discovery, as I learned about the world of television while dreaming of Mexico. There was an added benefit: the long hours kept me from facing Catherine.

Meanwhile, Tim and I applied for U.S. passports and Mexican student visas. The summer raced by. Until the week before we left, none of it seemed real. We didn’t learn any Spanish, except the words for bread (pan), water (agua), and beer (cerveza). Three days before we left, I finally told Catherine. There were tears and scenes. I behaved badly.

On the last weekend of August, Tim and I went to the Greyhound station and waited for the bus that would take us to Mexico City. I had eighty dollars in my pocket and a bag of sandwiches.

Pan, I said to myself. Agua. Cerveza.

5

THE BUS from Transportes del Norte was climbing slowly, breaching one final ridge as it drove into a gigantic scarlet dawn. Suddenly we could go no higher. And there in the distance, spread out before us in the great valley of Anáhuac, was Mexico City.

I remember the tumult of the bus station, the air drowned with vowels, and the taxi driver staring at the written address and then driving wildly to the house where we would stay, with a family arranged by the school. The address was Melchor Ocampo 288, an apartment house on the corner of Río Tiber. At the door on the fourth floor, an old woman smiled and nodded, speaking no English; her two homely daughters examined us discreetly and led us to the clean, bright rooms. We unpacked, had soup and rolls, trying to be polite. Pan, I said, agua, adding por favor, and ending with gracias. We bowed. We nodded. We smiled too much. Then we went out in search of cerveza.

We found a bar three blocks away, where the Mexicans stood on the rail and so did we. Later we learned that they first thought we were making fun of them; they used the rail because the bar was high and they were short. There was a great pot of shrimp soup in the place, and our fellow drinkers laughed as they explained mezcal and the worm at the bottom of the bottle and tried to describe what pulque does to the human brain. That first night, a soldier came in with his girlfriend and placed himself in the doorway leading to the john, which was an open trench with a steel bar upon which you hoisted yourself if you had more to do than urinate. His girlfriend went in to hoist herself on the steel bar and the soldier held his rifle at the ready, glaring at all of us. Nobody said a word. A rifle is a useful guarantor of good manners. Then the woman was through and the soldier nodded gravely and said Buenas noches and they went into the night.

The bottles of Carta Blanca beer were cold, bien fría, señor, very cold, sir. And from the great jukebox I first heard José Alfredo Jiménez growling his cantina poems and Cuco Sánchez with the harp and the bass guitar singing “La Cama de Piedra”:

And everyone joining in the mournful line Ay, ay: corazón porque no amas. My heart is broken. Because you don’t love me.

I had grown up in New York and visited Baltimore and Miami and New Orleans. But Mexico City was the most beautiful city I’d ever seen, as we walked in the cool nights along the hard-packed earth of the great wide Paseo de la Reforma. Ash trees climbed high above us. One-peso cabs hugged the curbs. Thick-bodied pigtailed maids met their boyfriends in the shadows and sat on stone benches to listen to the music drifting from the fancy supper clubs. There were elegant office buildings and great Victorian mansions from the days of Porfirio Díaz; cafés on the sidewalks of the Zona Rosa and tiny restaurants where they served octopus in its own ink and shrimp flown in from the Pacific ports. Freshly arrived from the countryside, campesinos in straw hats and white pajamas stared at the great light-bathed statue of the Angel of Independence in the center of the circular glorieta where Río Tiber intersected with the Reforma.

In the crisp mornings, the air thin and clear at 7500 feet above sea level, we walked seven blocks to the school bus, passing shopkeepers washing their sidewalks, and schoolgirls in uniforms hurrying to class. We bought the sports papers, Esto and Ovaciones, and read about how Floyd Patterson, from Tim’s high school in Brooklyn, had knocked out Archie Moore in five rounds to become at twenty-one the youngest heavyweight champion in history. We were the same age as Floyd; wasn’t everything now possible for us too? We also read about the great Mexican fighters, the bantamweight Ratón Macias, who could box and punch and sell a hundred thousand tickets, or the featherweight Pajarito Moreno, who could punch out a Volkswagen with a right hand and was even the hero of his own comic book, or Toluco López, great macho, wonderful fighter, king of the cantinas.

The orange school bus moved up past the monument honoring the 1938 nationalization of the petroleum industry into Las Lomas de Chapultepec, where the rich people had their great mansions behind stone walls topped with broken glass. That year in Mexico City, there were only three million citizens and the air was clear. On those crisp mornings we could see the snow-topped volcanoes Popocatéptl and Ixtac-cíhuatl, the first male, the second a sleeping woman, or so we were told, and so we believed. We came out of the Lomas and turned onto the two-lane Toluca highway, still climbing, with deep gorges falling away on either side, and a vast stone quarry way off to the left; until at the sixteenth kilometer we reached the school.

Mexico City College was a converted country club with the name lettered in deco style over the main archway. I thought, as I stood there on the first day: I’m here, in Mexico. I did it. I walked on the irregularly patterned stone path into the campus and found the administration office in a cluster of plain red sandstone buildings. Tim and I completed our forms for the Veterans Administration, then he went off to the general studies office and I went in search of the art department. The studios were on the top floor of an ivy-covered concrete structure that also housed the theater and the cafeteria, and as I climbed the stairs I picked up the fragrance of oil and terps. For a moment, I flashed on Laura. Maybe she was here. Painting. Teaching.

She wasn’t, of course, but a pretty Mexican woman took my papers, checked them against her own list, and told me that all I needed for my first classes was charcoal and newsprint paper. My first class was in the morning. I was in. With any luck, I would stay for three years, learn the painter’s craft, become the first in my family to earn a degree. Here. In Mexico.

6

IN THOSE FIRST GLORIOUS MONTHS, I gazed in awe at the work of the Mexican muralists. I looked at the dark, brooding drawings and paintings of the new Mexican artists, led by José Luis Cuevas, who were the enemies of the painted oratory of the muralists. I studied Spanish. Money was always short, the checks from the Veterans Administration slow in arriving. But Carta Blanca was one peso a bottle, the equivalent of eight cents in that time when the peso was a solid 12.50 against the dollar. Bohemia and the dark fermented-looking Dos Equis cost more, but another brand, Don Quijote, was only fifty centavos a bottle, or eighty cents for a case of twenty.

There was drinking everywhere, and Tim and I were part of it. We went drinking in the small hut across the highway from the school, in the cantinas near where we lived, at weekend student parties all over the city. Those parties bound us together. In some ways, it was like the navy. Everyone was far from home, far from Ohio and Illinois, from states with age limits on drinking, far from inspection by friends or family, all using drink to deal with strangeness and shyness and a variety of fears. At MCC, there were two American men for every American woman, and the sense of male contest gave the parties a tension that occasionally resembled hysteria. The rule was BYOB, bring your own bottle, and in the doors came cases of beer, bottles of tequila, mezcal, pulque, rum. These were 1950s parties, young men and women packing the chosen apartment, dancing, as we said, teeth to teeth, to the music of Benny More and Los Panchos, drinking with little care about food, faces swirling, ashtrays overflowing with butts, hot eyes falling upon asses and tits, tits and asses, until the midnight hour had long passed, and finally the last of the women were gone, and the remnants of the bleary male squadron kept drinking on until the beer ran out and you could see the worm in the bottom of the mezcal bottle and it was time to face the gray dawn.

I was happier than I’d ever been.

One Saturday night in December, on the eve of the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, there was a big party in an apartment shared by four MCC students. It was more formal than usual, because some Mexican girls had been invited from a commercial school downtown and we’d been told to try to make a good impression. I wore my only suit, dark blue with a thin pinstripe, a shirt and tie. The beer was flowing. As the Orquesta Aragón played a charanga, I watched the dancing Mexican women, in their formal dresses, their tapered legs, rustling crinolines, high heels; the American women seemed more formal than usual, even awkward, and the men worked too hard at being cool. I danced a mambo with a girl named Yolanda. Another guy cut in and I moved aside and drank beer. I danced slowly with a girl named Maria to “Sin Ti.” She thanked me and hurried away and I drank beer. In the kitchen, I opened another bottle of Bohemia and laughed when some of the louder gringos made bad jokes about La Virgen. Tim Lee was there with me but left early with one of the young Mexican women. I danced a cha-cha with a woman named Lourdes. She left early with two other women. Around midnight, there were about fifteen men still drinking and two American women, neither of whom was free. I was drinking with a Mexican-American friend named Manny when he suggested that we go out on the town.

There’s gotta be some women someplace, he said. Let’s take a look.

¿Porqué no?

We ended up down on San Juan de Letran, the wide neon main boulevard of la vida nocturna, where the dance halls and strip joints and burlesque houses called to the working class and the slumming ricos. Down here, you could go in pursuit of the women of la vida galante. On this chilly midnight, our goal was as clear as the vision was blurry.

We moved off San Juan de Letran into dark side streets lined with one-story houses, their walls painted, doors and shutters locked against the night, iron grills over the windows. Then we crossed a small cobble-stoned plaza and a dry fountain and then up ahead there was a street full of light and noise and people and music. I remember hearing the song of Agustín Lara:

(I loved only one time in this life, only one time, and nothing more.) I was singing the song — or those lines, for I knew no others — as we walked into the Calle de la Esperanza, the Street of Hope, lined on both sides with bordellos. These were the ten-peso whorehouses, the cheapest in the city, and had been here since before the 1910 Revolution. Each had a tall locked door with a window opening into a parlor. Dozens of customers, all of them Mexican, strolled along the street, gazing at the women through those windows, making comparisons, whispering offers or compliments before moving on or choosing admission. I kept humming, Solamente una vez, and thinking, in a thrilled, tingling way: Orozco must have come here, and Cuevas, to look at these whores who were old and listless or young and frightened, to see these altars to La Virgen made of cigarette tinfoil and fat candles, to remember the pale harsh light from the ceiling bulbs and the worn furniture and the drinks served on beer trays. From one parlor, glimpsed through the window, a young girl smiled at a visiting gringo, her wide mouth full of gold; another looked up and turned back to a comic book; a third stared at the patterns on the rug as if she would never again have enough sleep.

And then in one of the parlors I saw a frail young woman with cinnamon skin and liquid eyes. She was sitting alone on a flowered chair with worn arms, a Dos Equis calendar of a bare-breasted Indian princess above her on the wall. From a radio, Los Panchos were singing, and I went by, wishing I had a sketchbook, imagining myself sitting in that parlor and drawing that girl, the way Pascin or Toulouse-Lautrec sketched the whores of Paris; imagined then taking her away, to live with me in some other place, where I could draw her and fuck her and sleep with her and then draw her again. She wasn’t a beaten hulk, like the whores in Orozco, or a grotesque out of Cuevas. She was beautiful. I was certain of that. In all the other parlors, the women repelled me, and as I moved on down the street, I had a sudden moment of panic; someone else would see her, go in, take her into the back and I would lose her.

Let’s go back to that place up the block, I said.

You see one you like?

Yeah.

She was still there. I went up to the door, bent down, and leaned in through the window.

Perdóname, señorita.

She looked at me and smiled.

Uh ¿cómo se llamas? What’s your name?

She didn’t answer. Suddenly, an older woman stepped over and heaved a pan of water at me, drenching me, shouting in Spanish. I didn’t know why (and never found out). But I reacted. I lunged forward, like a fullback hitting the line, driving my body half into the window. The door came off its hinges and went straight down, with the older woman under it, screaming. In the same wild action, I stepped on the door, squashing her, and then the young woman, my model, the woman I would take to a more gallant life, attacked, swinging a pocketbook at my head. Other whores came out of the back, belting me with more pocketbooks and ashtrays and a tray of tacos, all shouting and cursing in Spanish, and then Manny grabbed my arm.

Let’s get the fuck out of here, man.

We ran out of the Calle de la Esperanza, laughing and still a little drunk. In the cobblestoned plaza, a beat-up rented car pulled over. Inside were three gringos, looking for directions to the whorehouses. They were in their twenties, tourists from Texas, beefy, drinking from a rum bottle. We blurted out what had happened and they opened the back doors and offered to drive us away. We were all laughing now. Broke down the door of a fuckin’ whorehouse! In Mexico! Gab-damn!

We were laughing right up to the moment a taxi cut us off. Out came the two whores followed by two policemen in blue uniforms. The young whore, mi vida, mi corazón, amor de mis amores, was enraged, her body coiled, her nostrils wide, her eyes glazed in fury, with her arm straight out and one painted fingernail pointing at me.

¡Eso es! she screamed. ¡Este cabrón, eso es! That’s him! That son of a bitch, that’s him!

And then the cops were aiming guns at us. They ordered us out of the car. The three Texans were jittery. I kept my eyes on the guns while the whores shouted curses. Manny was talking very quickly in Spanish, his manner conciliatory, now smiling, now worried. The policemen were small and mustached, with brown complexions and worn uniforms. They did not look convinced of our good intentions. They ordered us all back into the car, and one of them barked orders at the two women, who hurled a few final curses, entered the taxicab, and were driven away. In our car, Manny sat in the front, between the nervous Texan who was driving and one of the cops. I sat in the back, the other Texans beside me and the second cop planted on my lap. The cop in the front was giving orders to the driver. Izquierda aquí. As commanded, the driver took a left. A la derecha. . The Texan dutifully turned right, down empty streets with blind windows.

I was suddenly very sober, struggling to believe that this was happening. Clearly, we were under arrest. All of us. I was the guilty party, but they were taking us all to a police station. Over a broken door! But, hey (I told myself), I didn’t do anything so terrible, did I? I asked a whore for her name and another whore threw water on me and then … Shit. What a pain in the ass. Still, it wasn’t murder. It wasn’t some great armed robbery. We’d go to a police station and pay for the broken door and that would be that. And I remembered that I had almost no money. About sixty pesos. Less than five dollars. Maybe Manny had money. Maybe the Texans could loan us whatever we needed and we’d pay them back when we got home. A few bucks. Just for now. Solamente una vez.

But then, as the cop ordered an izquierda, the driver took a derecha. The cop on my lap cursed at him, this pinche gringo cabrón. The fucking gringo son of a bitch kept going into the wrong street. And then the Texan beside me changed everything. He threw a punch at the cop in the front seat, hitting him on the side of the jaw. The driver panicked, slammed the brakes, the car skidded, everyone was shouting, and we spun to a halt. The cop on my lap had his gun out. I pushed down on the door handle and he and I rolled out in a tangled heap. I got up and started to run. And then heard shots.

Pap, pap. Pap-pap-pap.

I heard at least three bullets whiz past my head.

I ran. Thinking: They’re trying to kill me.

And then, up ahead, I saw a blue wall of police. They were piling out of a police station, alerted by the shots, and I was running right at them. I stopped and one came at me swinging a long club. I bent down and threw a punch and knocked him down. Then all the others were on me, swinging clubs, punching, kicking, screaming pinche cabrón add chingado gringo, until I was on the ground, pulling myself into a tight ball as they stomped me some more.

They shoved me into the delegación, and I saw Manny at the far end of a high-ceilinged greenish room, surrounded by cops. The Texans were nowhere in sight. Obviously, they had chosen a better street, and we never saw them again. But in flight, they’d also taken one of the policemen’s pistols. So I found myself charged by a fat lieutenant with lesiones (causing cuts with punches), destruction of private property (the whorehouse door), assault, resisting arrest, and robo, for stealing the pistol. I didn’t have enough Spanish to explain myself. My back and ribs and legs hurt. My nose ached, and when I touched the bridge, blood came off on my fingers. Worse, my teeth felt cracked and sharp to my tongue; one small piece broke off, and when I picked it out with my fingers, one of the cops smiled.

I was in a mess. I asked for el teléfono but the lieutenant shook his head and grimaced. No hay, he said; there is none. No hay teléfono público. I looked out through the dirty window at a car passing on the street and wished I was in it, heading home. The sound of the shots and the whirring of the bullets now seemed louder. And I realized that I could be dead. One bullet in the head and I’d have ended on the sidewalk with my life over before it really started.

The cops shoved me through a door and down a corridor and then opened a blank steel door that led to a cell block. In some ways, the long night was just beginning.

They put me into a large dark communal cell at the end of the block. One high barred window opened to the night. As the cop locked the cell door behind me, I gazed around. There were about fifteen men in the cell, a few in modified zoots, most in rough clothes; I was the only one in a suit and tie, and I was certainly the only gringo. There were no beds, but some men were sleeping, huddled on the filthy floor against the scabrous walls. The air was a compost of stale beer and rum, sweat and entrapment and shit. The only toilet was an open hole in the floor in the far corner. The men gazed at me. I nodded, shrugged, said buenas noches, and smiled. A bone-thin mustached man came over and asked me for a cigarette. I patted my pockets and said, No fumo, which was true. He stared at me in a chilly way, his face impassive, his eyes searching for some sign of weakness. I stared back, tense, ready to fight. But he turned and walked away. I felt exhausted and drained and hurting, but I knew that I could not risk sleeping.

I squatted against the bars of the cell, wondering where Manny was, and as my eyes adjusted to the murky light I realized that there were three men in the cell directly across the corridor. There was also a pile of bricks. Some kind of construction must have been interrupted by the holiday weekend. Now more men were being brought into the cellblock, the gatherings of the holiday, and I could hear shouts of recognition from other cells and banging on the steel bars and much drunken laughter. I called Manny’s name, yelling in English, Are you there, Manny? But there was no answer. I wondered how I could get word to Tim, to arrange for bail, to get a lawyer, maybe notify the American Embassy. But there was nobody to ask. The guards came in with prisoners, threw them into cells, ignored all pleas or shouts, and disappeared beyond the steel door.

Then they started bringing in the women. Two of them were thrown into the cell across the way, where there were now about eight men. One of them was a worn-out woman, her hair gray and wild. But the other was young. She was wearing a yellow blouse. I could see her white teeth against dark skin. The men in my cell moved toward the bars to examine this new arrival. Suddenly the mood shifted; sexual excitement seemed to thicken the air. Across the way, two men were easing around the young woman. She was terrified, backing away from each of them, screaming in a thin voice, Ayúdeme, por favor, ayúdeme …

Help me, please, help me.

Nobody came to her aid. One of the men, short, compact, muscular, reached out swiftly and tore open the front of the blouse. She made a yipping birdlike sound, her voice weak and trembling, and then he grabbed the center of her black bra and ripped down, exposing her heavy dark breasts, and now all the men in my cell were shouting encouragement. ¡Vaya, macho! ¡Ándale! The old woman cringed against a wall, but the rape was delayed. The second man intervened and shoved the short, muscular man, who threw a punch and grabbed at him, the two of them closing violently, throwing punches to do damage, the short man’s shirt coming off, the girl retreating in wide-eyed fear, covering her breasts, screaming. And then the combatants found the bricks. Their eyes were wide, faces gleaming with lust and violence, as they circled each other like boxers, each armed with a brick, the men in my cell roaring now as if at a prizefight in the Arena Coliseo, urging them to use the left or throw the right. Every time one of them landed with a brick there was a loud thwacking sound as if something had broken. Sweat glistened on the body of the shirtless man. Blood ran from a gash in the other’s cheekbone, and their shoulders and arms were welted and raw.

Finally the young woman was shouting something to them, something about death, and offering her breasts, then placing a hand up under her skirt, as if saying that she didn’t want them to kill each other for her. I couldn’t make out the pleading words over the roar of the men in my cell. But she seemed to be saying, Stop! Go ahead and rape me if you must, but stop.

They paused.

My cell went silent.

And then the short man lunged at the other, prepared to kill or die, and the roar was immense, the codes of men triumphing over the mercy of women.

Finally, the steel door opened and guards rushed in, hurrying down the corridor. One drew a gun, shouting into the cell. The men stopped, then sullenly dropped the bricks. The girl looked forlorn. The guards opened the cell door, first called out the old woman, then the younger one, while one guard shouted at another about his stupidity. The fighters were locked in with their inexhaustible supply of bricks. The men in my cell were still roaring, calling out to the girl, Muñeca, eres mi reina, Hey, doll, you are my queen, and offering to never fight again if only she would take them forever to her bed. But she stared at the floor of the corridor, walking sadly on one high-heeled shoe, the other in her hand, covering her lovely breasts with the shredded blouse. The two women went out through the steel door. I didn’t know what had brought her to that cell; I supposed she was a prostitute, perhaps a thief; but I felt certain that she would carry that hour of horror with her for all the years of her life. I knew I would too.

7

IN THE MORNING, they started moving me around. The first stop was another jail, where I was put in solitary confinement. The room was like a closet, no windows, no toilet, no bed, with a thin line of light at the base of an iron door. I ran my fingers over the wall and found letters gouged in the surface. My eyes slowly adjusted. The letters said: Viva Stalin, el Rey de los Rojos. Long live Stalin, the King of the Reds. And I thought that maybe Siqueiros had been here, or the leader of the railroad workers, or some amazing guerrilla fighter brought down alive from the Sierras. I wondered too if I was a political prisoner of some crazy kind; maybe they’d separated me because they were afraid the Mexicans would kill me, a gringo, one of the people who stole Texas and California and New Mexico and Arizona and Oklahoma and Utah, one of the people who called them greasers, spics, beaners, and wetbacks on the cold scary other side of the border. Maybe the cop I hit had died. Maybe I fit the description of some other killer. Some fugitive who killed eight people in Nebraska and made it across the border.

And how did I get here? In the black closet, as I gazed at that sliver of light, the night played out in my mind. If I hadn’t gone to the party, or if nobody had cut in when I danced with Yolanda, or if I’d said no to Manny, said, Manny, I don’t want to go anywhere, if I’d gone home and read a book or made some pictures; if I hadn’t seen the young girl in the crib on the Street of Hope, hadn’t gone back to see her again; if I’d had some money to bribe the cops; if I’d run down the street behind the Texans; if. If, I said. If. I wondered what time it was too. What day. Where Tim was. Wondered what my mother would think if she heard I was spending my life in a Mexican prison. Wondered if I’d ever read a book again or paint a picture. And fell asleep, wedged against the wall, under the name of Stalin.

That evening, they took me out of solitary, with no explanation, and put me in another large cell with a dozen guys. I was starving now, aching with thirst, my tongue furry with hangover. The mood here was brighter, kinder, the men speaking slowly so that I could understand their Spanish. I quickly learned that nobody was fed in these jails. Food was delivered by wives and girlfriends, and when the other prisoners discovered I had neither, they shared their food with me. They told jokes. They laughed. They explained why they were there. A busdriver was arguing with his girlfriend and ran his bus into a limousine whose owner — a politician — had him arrested. Another man had beaten up his father-in-law at a family party, for coming on to some woman in the kitchen. A third had stolen some shirts from a market and tried to sell them to buy a dress for his mujer. When I told my story about the whorehouse, they laughed and slapped each other and handed me some water. I was one of them: another crazy bastard fucked up by women.

They told more stories. They made jokes. They talked about Ratón Macias and Toluco López. They sang mournful ballads. They slept. In the morning, I was moved one final time, outside to have my picture taken on the steps of the jail (it appeared in El Universal, where an “I” was dropped off my name and I was described as being of Arabic descent) and then into a van with grilled windows. With four other men I was taken through side streets and across wide gray avenues into the city’s penitentiary at Lecumberri, a looming pile called El Palacio Negro. The Black Palace.

I was let out of the van in a courtyard, then taken to a second yard. Dark stone walls climbed above me, topped by barbed wire and guards strolling casually with rifles at the ready. No way out. I remember passing cells that were elaborately decorated with pictures of women and boxers and soccer players; men cooking at stoves; radios playing; and the endless noise of steel upon steel. There seemed to be thousands of men here, some walking independently down aisles, others sleeping, dozens milling around. I knew about this place from our Mexican history classes; Pancho Villa was once a prisoner here; Francisco Madero was murdered beside these walls. But this wasn’t a tour; I was a prisoner.

They put me in a single cell and locked me in. There was a scab on my nose now and my ribs hurt and my teeth were a mess. But the fear had gone out of me; I stopped thinking about what had happened and what might happen and focused on what was happening. And for the moment I was safe. Even death had lost its scary power. I knew now that if a bullet had slammed into my skull and killed me, I’d have felt nothing. But I was alive. The pain I felt was the proof.

Four days later, when they finally came to take me out, Tim Lee was waiting in an outer office of the prison with a young Mexican lawyer. They’d been trying for days to find me in the labyrinth of the prison system. Tim saw my picture in El Universal, flanked by cops on the stepe of the delegación as I was being moved to the Black Palace. He got the name of a lawyer from one of the teachers and used his own money for bail. A functionary in the prison office told me to report to the Black Palace once a week to sign in while the judicial process ran its course. The lawyer explained to the official that he was representing me, signed some papers, gave me his card, and left. Then I took a deep breath and walked out into the sunshine. There were groups of shawled women waiting beside the walls to deliver food to their men. They had helped feed me too.

I’m sorry, I said.

Forget it, Tim said. I just wish we’d found you sooner.

I’m glad you found me at all.

We hailed a cab.

Where to?

I laughed.

A bath, I said.

Nothing else? Not even a meal?

No, I said, not even a beer.

I went to bed in a darkened room and tried to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The words would not come. I tossed in the dark for a long time, seeing sweaty men hammering at each other with bricks. Then I turned on the light and slept for eighteen hours.

8

WITH MY FRIENDS, even with Tim, I affected a casual, blasé attitude about what had happened in the night on the Calle de la Esperanza. But for weeks, I woke up sweating, my dreams instantly wiped away, leaving only an ashy residue of dread. The memory of the whistling bullets, the fight with the bricks and the whimpering young woman, the sense of being lost in a system of steel rooms in which strangers spoke a language I did not know: all were woven into me.

I didn’t blame the drunken party that had preceded the trip to Calle de la Esperanza; by then, drinking was so natural it would have been like placing blame on the act of breathing. I continued going to the student parties, still got drunk. I didn’t blame Mexico either. Too many Mexicans had been kind to me. But something had happened. I was trying to discover some deeper principle, some rule of adult life that accounted for accident and choice and human ugliness. Not some divine commandment. Not some vague or blurry generalization. Something that I had learned from experience. After all, an artist should know how to do that; an artist shouldn’t just learn what other artists have learned; he should know what his life has taught him. But when I made drawings of the events of that evening they all came out looking like comic strips. They were simpleminded and crude, mere diagrams of place and action and consequences. They seemed glimpsed from the outside, instead of felt from the inside.

Because of that failure, and my dissatisfaction, I started to write. I filled pages with accounts of what had happened, telling the story, layering it with dread and fear, trying for what Hemingway called the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact that made the emotion. I might get fact into a drawing or painting, but how could I get motion? I could get both in writing. And as I wrote more, my passion for painting faded.

There was another reason for this shift: money. Or the lack of it. Drinking at some Saturday-night party, or hanging out between classes at MCC, I could swagger in front of other students about what happened in jail, as proof of a macho ability to survive. I couldn’t swagger about money. Like all the other veterans, I was receiving $110 a month. From that I had to pay for tuition, room, board, and expenses. After Christmas, Tim and I moved with two other students into a large apartment off the Avenida Ejército Nacional; that cut the rent to $25 each. But I was also paying back Tim for the money he’d laid out for bail, and I had to make monthly payments to the Mexican lawyer as the case dragged on in legal hearings. I couldn’t write home for money. In 1955 my mother had given birth to my brother Joe, and with six kids in the house in Brooklyn, there was no money to spare. Besides, I was a man now (or so I thought), and a man didn’t borrow money from his mother. I could borrow books from the Benjamin Franklin Library. I couldn’t borrow brushes, paint, or canvas. In the second quarter, I decided not to take an oil painting class and enrolled in a writing class instead.

I did have enough money for a trip to Acapulco, sharing the expenses with four other students to ride down through the wild mountains of Guerrero, where bandits still practiced their craft. After miles of twisting roads through gorges and tropical valleys, we came around a bend and the great curving bay of Acapulco lay before us. Mountains dove sharply to the sea, with tiny white buildings set along their ridges among palms and thick green foliage. The beach looked like a white scythe, touched by the great expanse of cobalt blue water that moved off to touch the darker blue line of the sky. The light was as bright and clear as Matisse.

One of the guys in the car had been there before, and he explained about the morning beach and the afternoon beach, the Caleta and the Caletilla, how one was sunny until noon and then was abruptly plunged into shadow when the sun moved behind the mountains. The white mansion on the edge of the cliff: that was John Wayne’s house. He had a Mexican wife and lived here between pictures. And that lavender palace, out beyond the Duke’s, out there on the Quebrada, past where the divers plunged into the advancing tides: that belonged to Dolores del Rio.

A beer popped. We were sitting under a straw-roofed palapa on the morning beach, the car parked on a cobblestoned street, hawkers selling rum drinks in coconut shells, and an argument briefly raged about which of Mexico’s two greatest female stars was more beautiful, Maria Felix or Dolores del Rio. I said there was no contest about pure beauty. Dolores del Rio’s perfect oval face, her high cheekbones, the slope of her brow: she was like a Renaissance painting, man. That’s the problem, somebody said. She’s too beautiful. You’d spend your time just looking at her; you wouldn’t want to fuck her. And someone else said, But you never get to fuck Maria Felix, either; she fucks you.

We had no money for the tourist hotels, of course, but we found a place on the beach south of the city where we could rent hammocks tied to palm trees for one peso a night. That beach is gone now, devoured long ago by the Pierre Marqués Hotel, but no place in my memory remains more beautiful. In the evenings, we sat on driftwood and drank beer and laughed and told lies and listened to the fishermen play guitars around an open fire. The Mexicans were friendly, amazed at the crazy gringos who were down there with them on la playa. The Mexicans were humble, illiterate, generous, decent; they shared food with us and beer and taught us the words of songs and talked about las mujeres, about women gone off and women arriving, about women full of betrayal and women full of trust. I remember gently rocking into sleep under the stars, more stars than I’d seen since Fox Lair Camp, stars forming clouds and clusters, shapes and patterns, dwarfing us all. And then waking in the dawn to the quiet lapping of surf and the arrival of the orange ball of the sun while fishermen dragged dead sharks onto the sand.

On the last day, drinking in the afternoon, I went Walking north upon the beach, out beyond the point of the Playa Caletilla. At the foot of a cliff, I lay down on the empty sand and fell asleep. When I woke up, the sky was darkening into dusk. And off to the right a young woman in a one-piece yellow bathing suit was sitting on a towel staring out to sea toward the Isla la Roqueta. Her tightly braided pigtail hung down her back, pointing at the towel. I sat there for a while, brushing the sand off my back, looking at her smooth dark skin. My own skin was reddening from the sun. My mouth felt sour from drinking. She and I were the only people in sight. I stood up and walked slowly toward the surf, angling toward her. She turned to look at me. She was about eighteen, with a long nose and an upper lip dark with down. I saw that she’d been crying.

Are you all right? I said.

She turned away, wiping at her eyes with her forearm.

¿ Está bien? I said.

I squatted beside her and touched her hand. She pulled away and then started talking very quickly in sobbing Spanish, something about the novio — her boyfriend — and her father, who was so cruel, and how her life was over. I didn’t understand the details, but she was full of anger and despair and heartbroken tears. And then she fell against me, her body wracking with sobs, and I put my arm around her and held her tight and whispered to her in English, Don’t worry, don’t worry, murmured, It’ll be all right, murmured, Go ahead and cry, just cry, baby, just cry. Until the sobs ended, and my chest was wet with her tears, and she was still, the warmth of her body entering mine as the sun went down.

We held each other for a long time, whispering, exchanging names, Pedro, Yolanda, the surf growling and pulling and growling, buoys dinging in the dark. I kissed her. She kissed me back. I lifted the pigtail and kissed the nape of her neck. She touched my chest and stomach and discovered my erection. I played with her breasts through the wired bra of the bathing suit and then moved her zipper down and took a lush pliant breast in my hand and a hard nipple in my mouth in the Pacific night, as her hand moved inside my bathing suit. Yolanda. At the foot of the cliff where Dolores del Rio gazed at mirrors. Yolanda, excited and writhing and then suddenly weeping again, withdrawing her hand, pulling away, as I heard what she heard: distant feminine voices calling on the dark beach.

Yo-laaaanda. ¿Dónde estás? Yolandaaaa.

And she was up, panicky, tucking breasts inside the bathing suit, zippering it up in back.

Mañana, I said. Aquí en la playa. Exactamente aquí.

Sí, sí, she whispered. Mañana, en la tarde. Aquí en la playa. . Tomorrow afternoon, here on the beach.

She hurried off in the dark toward the town and the faceless disembodied voices of her keepers, her sisters or aunts or mother. I plunged into the surf. The next day I went back to the spot but she was not there. And that night we all piled into the car to return to Mexico City.

9

MY CASE dragged on, month after month. I would go to a hearing, answer questions, be given another date, then pay the lawyer what I could. I kept taking drawing classes but couldn’t afford the painting workshops; I started writing short stories and poetry. In the last week of each month, the VA money virtually all gone, I was eating sandwiches made of hard rolls and slices of raw onion. For the first time, I started smoking cigarettes, dark-papered Negritos, four cents a pack, to help me across the hunger; I became an instant addict. There was one more drunken party and a fight with a young Mexican student. I was in the kitchen when it started, and I hit him hard and he went down in a pile of broken glasses and there was blood everywhere. I thought he was dead. He wasn’t, but I hid for a few days, afraid the police would come and get me. And then in May, the school term was over and I knew I had to leave.

I decided to jump bail and try to make it back to New York. Tim stayed behind, to work for a degree, while I shared a ride with a guy from Buffalo who was heading home. As we approached the border, I was certain that my name must be on some list. I would show my visa to the Mexican border guards and they’d see my name and start to arrest me. I rehearsed escapes: sprinting across the bridge, leaping into the shallow waters of the Rio Grande. In my mind, I heard the cracking of shots. I heard bullets whistling. I saw men fighting with bricks to possess the body of a frightened woman.

When we reached the bridge, my heart was pounding, my hands were wet. But there was no list. The guard took my visa and waved us across. The dream of Mexico-as-Paris was over. In Brownsville, we stopped for gas and I had a cold bottle of Lone Star. I looked back at Mexico, relieved and free, but overwhelmed with an almost intolerable sadness.

10

HOME AGAIN in New York, after nine months away, I quickly fell into the earnest rhythms of the 1950s. Necessity was the goad; I needed to eat and get on with my life. I again worked for Ernie Waivada in the advertising agency. I spent a year at Pratt, studying design. I took a small flat on the Lower East Side. After work or school, I went drinking. I wrote a little and painted less.

On one level, the track was clear. Learn a trade and you’ll never go hungry, my father said. Graphic design was a trade, like plumbing or carpentry. If I mastered it, I would never go hungry. But in truth I was hesitant about moving down the track. In magazines like Graphis, I saw the cold elegant layouts of Swiss designers and studied the bolder work of the Americans. Some of them offered more than the example of craft; they promised a vision based on order, the reduction of chaos to a small neat space. But in the art galleries, I finally saw the actual work of Kline and Pollock, de Kooning and Motherwell, stood close to their ferociously confident canvases. There was nothing cold about their disorderly art and nothing small. They had the size and boldness of the Mexican muralists but were free of their preaching. I was drawn to the physicality of their paintings, the almost athletic swagger of the brushwork. But at the same time, their work seemed beyond me, their vision too heroic. After this, where could painting go? Where could I go?

Writing remained only a perhaps. In my flat off Second Avenue, or in small dark bars, I filled notebooks with questions about art, politics, my own chaotic ambitions. Sometimes, late at night in the flat, I typed these notes on an old upright Royal I’d bought in a secondhand store and put them in file folders. I tried short stories in the Hemingway manner, more variations on what had happened to me in Mexico, even poems, transcribed from fragments scribbled in bars. But it seemed an arrogant ambition to be a writer, in a world where Hemingway and Faulkner still lived. Who do you think you are? some collective voice from the Neighborhood called to me. Who the hell do you think you are? Besides, in bars at night, or at Pratt, or at my part-time drawing table at the agency, I could still show off with a drawing. And if there was even small applause, I felt that I never could completely abandon the dream of art; the prospect filled me with dread. For a long time, I’d based my identity on the hope of being an artist; to give up now might cast me into the shapeless fog that had engulfed me after the failure at Regis.

I carried these confusions with me through a New York terrain now permanently changed by the tubular Ben Shahn forests of television antennas and highways leading to the faceless Levittowns of Long Island. The Neighborhood, its streets already emptied at night by television, began to reel from departures to the new suburbs and the arrival of the plague of heroin. When I visited 378, my mother talked for the first time about danger. Standing with my father at the bar in Rattigan’s, a full member now of the fraternity, I heard about muggings and overdoses. A few men died of cirrhosis from drinking, but compared to a needle in the arm, that was an honorable death. In tenements where once there was nothing much worth stealing, people now started locking their doors.

The Eisenhower era bragged of the good life for all, a time of abundance and prosperity, but it didn’t touch the Neighborhood. The prosperous were gone to the suburbs; among those who stayed, money was still short. Everywhere in the city, factories were closing. Globe Lighting, where my father worked, moved from the Neighborhood to Flushing and then, later, to Georgia. In the daytime, there were more men in the bars, drinking in silence and defeat. The city was changing: gradually, almost imperceptibly in some ways, drastically in others. The world wasn’t as solid as it seemed when I was twelve; and that was a confusion. You spent twenty years learning how to live in the world and then it changed on you. I’d wake up some mornings and buy the newspapers and think: What the fuck is going on?

Even in bars, some things were not discussed. McCarthy was gone, but the Great Fear had left its mark. At the agency, I was on the fringe of the world of organization men, men in gray flannel suits, men who talked about the new cult of motivation research, of inner-directed and outer-directed human beings, of lonely crowds and hidden persuaders. They shrugged when you mentioned politics (although Ernie Waivada, from Massachusetts, was a huge fan of Senator Jack Kennedy). Politics was trouble. Get the money. Or get the women. Luscious secretaries from Lynbrook. Sweet fearful file clerks from the Bronx. Noble defenders of the holy hymen. But willing to please at the midnight hour. I knew I couldn’t exist for long in that world. Painter or writer, I needed to be free.

In the fall of 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published by Viking Press, with a glowing review by Gilbert Milstein in the New York Times. I went out and bought a copy, that first hardcover edition with the famous photograph of Kerouac in rough lumberjack shirt and silver crucifix, his eyes brooding, his square fullback’s face unshaven. I read the first sentence on the subway to Brooklyn — I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up — and was carried away. I read in the Village Voice (then three years old and full of surprises) that Kerouac was due in town for a Friday-night jazz-poetry reading at the Village Vanguard. I paid the admission, went downstairs, ordered vodka at the bar, and for almost two hours listened to Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and some other poets. I was thrilled with the flow of words and the counterpoint of jazz, and gazed through the cigarette smoke at the remote women, who all seemed dressed in black, cool as ice sculpture. Kerouac was older than I expected (he was then thirty-five) and punched out with his hands to punctuate his lines. At the end, the audience cheered. I wanted to talk to him, about Mexico and Pensacola and jail and women; but I couldn’t get close to him when it was over; he was engulfed by reporters and photographers and the cool dark women. That year, Jack Kerouac was a star.

I went back upstairs into Seventh Avenue and wandered east to University Place and eased into the packed bar of the Cedar Street Tavern, where the painters did their drinking. For an hour, I drank beer alone at the bar and listened to an argument over centerfielders. Suddenly Kerouac and his friends came in, shouldering through the door, then merging with the other drinkers, three deep at the bar. Kerouac edged in beside me. He was drunk. He threw some crumpled bills on the bar. I said hello. He looked at me in a suspicious, bleary way and nodded. The others were crowding in, yelling, Jack, Jack, and he was passing beers and whiskeys to them, and Jack, Jack, he bought more, always polite, but his eyes scared, a twitch in his face and a sour smell coming off him in the packed bar that reminded me of the morning odor of my father in the bed at 378. Soon he was ranting about Jesus and nirvana and Moloch and bennies, then lapsing into what sounded like Shakespeare but probably wasn’t, because his friends all laughed. Under the combination of Kerouac and beer, my brain was scrambling. The painters gave him a who-the-fuck-is-this-guy? look. College girls were coming over. A bearded painter bumped him on the way to the bathroom and Corso let out a wail of protest at the ceiling and the bartender looked nervous and soon I was drunk too.

When I woke up the next day I wrote a poem in Beat cadences, mixing up the Village Vanguard and Brooklyn College and some bad Kenneth Rexroth, and a few days later submitted it (and another) to the Pratt literary magazine. I was astonished when both were accepted. They were my first published writings.

The confusions deepened. After Mexico, I wanted to have enough money to forget about money and chose graphic design as the way to make a living. But the life of a designer demanded steadiness and clarity, qualities in complete opposition to my image of the wild, free-living, hard-drinking bohemian. Design also required submission to the whole buttoned-down gray-flanneled organization-man strictures of the Fifties. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to accept those tame codes. But in an important way, I used them as a license. Drinking became the medium of my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid rules of a bloodless national ethos.

I expressed that revolt at huge weekend parties, crowded with students, where cases of beer were jammed into ice-packed bathtubs, and big strapping young women from the Midwest slipped into dark back rooms with various guys, including me. The music pounded, Little Richard meeting Miles Davis, Elvis contending with Coltrane, while the half-digested words of painter-guru Hans Hofmann collided with the lyrics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were wild nights in Manhattan too, stops at The Cedars or the Five Spot, with complete strangers saying, Let’s go, man, big party right up the street. And they were right: hard loud whiskey drinking beer-swilling parties were part of every New York weekend. I remember being at two big parties at The Club on Eighth Street, where I first saw Helen Frankenthaler, beautiful in a camel’s-hair coat, de Kooning and Kline cracking wise to each other, women grabbing men by the balls while dancing, men dancing with men and women kissing women. I was at another party in the packed sweaty railroad flat that belonged to the poet LeRoi Jones, who had started publishing a little magazine called Yugen and talked to me in a smoky hallway about Krazy Kat. I spent one glorious night drinking at The Cedars with Franz Kline, talking about women and cartoonists and London art schools. He took three of us to his studio at four in the morning, where he showed us his big new paintings, which were in color. He looked sad and fatalistic when he told us that the dealers hated them. They wanted him to keep doing “Franz Klines,” in his trademarked black and white. I thought: Just like executives at some big company dictating to a man from the advertising agency.

That night, I backed up a few feet from the bohemian ideal. Kline, Pollock, de Kooning all had starved for twenty years before selling any paintings. And here was Kline, at the peak of his fame, worried that the galleries would stop taking the pictures he wanted to make. What if I spent twenty years and nobody ever bought a painting? I thought of Laura’s bitterness, posing nude to pay rent, then vanishing into obscurity. I knew from Brooklyn that poverty wasn’t noble; it was a humiliation. If I chose the freedom of the painter’s life, who would pay the bills? I suddenly understood that I wasn’t painting because I was afraid to discover that I had no talent. If I had no talent, I would starve.

That was the late 1950s for me. Torn between the desire for personal freedom and the need for a proud security, I postponed the choice. I drank a lot. I got laid a lot. In most of the minor ways, I had a very good time.

11

MUCH OF MY MEMORY of those years is blurred, because drinking was now slicing holes in my consciousness. I never thought of myself as a drunk; I was, I thought, like many others — a drinker. I certainly didn’t think I was an alcoholic. But I was already having trouble on the morning after remembering the details of the night before. It didn’t seem to matter; everybody else was doing the same thing. We made little jokes about having a great time last night — I think. And we’d begun to reach for the hair of the dog.

To save money, I began sharing my seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment with Jake Conaboy and Bill Powers, friends from the Neighborhood. Jake talked about becoming an actor, Billy also wanted to be a painter, and was studying at Pratt. At some point, Richie Kelly came over too, took a flat next door, enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, and began training as an illustrator. Drinking cases of beer, we talked passionately about art, movies, women; we read Pound, Eliot, Camus. We took our own paths through the city but always ended up at the flat on Ninth Street and Second Avenue, in the heart of the Ukrainian blocks of the Lower East Side. And we threw our own parties, mixing together people from the Neighborhood, Pratt, and our jobs. They were noisy, sweating, roaring affairs, full of music, dancing, and booze. In the mornings after, we had to call people to find out what we’d done. For a while, I was going out with a beautiful slender Dominican girl who was saddened in equal proportions by an early divorce and the smallness of her breasts. Jake started going with her sister. We laughed so hard on some nights that my body ached; today I can’t remember a single line that was said.

At some point after Tim Lee returned from Mexico, with a degree in philosophy, Billy found his own apartment and Tim took his place in the third bedroom. A few weeks later, Tom McMahon, my English teacher from Pratt, came home from England, where he’d taken a degree at Oxford. He soon had us organized into a weekly study group. Under McMahon’s direction, we went through Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; a number of stories in Understanding Fiction, an anthology-textbook edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, parts of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading; George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” We spent weeks reading and analyzing Aristotle’s Ethics. All of us joined in, making jokes, sipping beers, smoking too many cigarettes. McMahon had a tough, unsatisfied intelligence; he was brilliant in seeing the stylistic surface of a piece of writing but he also challenged every sentimentality, every glib remark, and insisted that we dig and dig until we’d discovered the moral core of the work. Every session left a permanent mark on my own later writing. McMahon truly taught me how to read. No small thing.

Reading drew me deeper into writing, but I showed almost nobody my own Hemingwayesque short stories, Orwellian essays, Kerouackian poems. Surely they couldn’t survive the scrutiny we were applying to Hemingway or Orwell, and McMahon made clear his contempt for the rambling formless style of the Beats. So I practiced writing as a secret vice and kept working as an apprentice designer. I had money now for oil and canvas, but I did no painting at all.

A droll, balding artist’s agent named Tom Fortune used to come around to the agency, trying to sell the work of his illustrators. One day he asked me if I did any freelancing. No, I said, but I could use the money. Did I think I could handle the layout and pasteups for a magazine?

What kind of magazine? I asked.

Well, Fortune said, it’s a little unusual.

What do you mean, unusual?

It’s in Greek.

Within a few weeks I had my first freelance client, a Greek magazine called Atlantis. The office was on Twenty-third Street off Tenth Avenue. The editor was an enthusiastic young guy named Jimmy Vlasto, whose father, Solon G. Vlasto, was publisher of the magazine and a daily newspaper of the same name. Obviously, I couldn’t read Greek, but neither could Jimmy. We had a great time together, laying out stories about Melina Mercouri or holidays on Mykonos, hoping that the leftover text jumped into the correct place in the back of the book. Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t. And at some point I suggested to Jimmy that maybe we should start running some articles in English.

At least we can have something to read in the magazine, I said. At least the fucking jumps will be in the right place.

Why not? Jimmy said. The old man’ll go nuts but what the hell.

I had been following the career of a sensational young middleweight named Jose Torres. He’d won a silver medal in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, had won a number of Golden Gloves, AAU, and All-Army championships, and after seven victories in seven pro fights, he was the new hero of the city’s growing Puerto Rican population. He was managed by Cus D’Amato and trained in the Gramercy Gym, five blocks from where I lived on Ninth Street. At a bar near the magazine, I said to Jimmy Vlasto that I’d love to write about Torres. Jimmy was also a fight fan. Go ahead, he said.

A few days later, I found Torres at the gym. Almost immediately, we became friends. He was not only a great boxer but one of the smartest people I’d ever met. I hung around with him, did some interviews, then went home and wrote the article. I needed three days to get it right, and with anxious heart I delivered it the following week to Jimmy Vlasto. I sat in a tattered easy chair while Jimmy read the piece. When he was finished, he smiled.

I love this, he said, his voice surprised. Fuck! Let’s run it!

Great.

But listen, he said, I can only pay you twenty-five bucks.

I’ll take it, I said.

That was it. I was a professional writer. Billy Powers took some photographs, I laid out the pages, and ten days later my first journalism was in print. I was runny with excitement. But when I went to Twenty-third Street to pick up copies of the issue, a glum Jimmy told me that his father wanted to see both of us in his office. We went upstairs to the wood-paneled room with its muted lamps and photographs of Solon G. Vlasto in the company of presidents and archbishops. The old man stared at the two of us from behind his immense desk.

Let me ask you something, he said, in his thick Greek accent.

Silence. Then his eyes flashed.

How come, he said, in a Grik magazine, is a story about a Puerto Rican boxer, written by an Irish guy, in English?

A pause.

And then Jimmy burst out with an immortal line: The young Greeks love him!

Mr. Vlasto looked at us in a deadpan way, thought about this, looked suddenly as if he understood that the world was passing him by, and then sighed.

Next time, he said, find a Grik boxer.

Then, dismissing us, he leaned forward to examine a sheet covered with the logic of numbers.

12

THROUGH ALL OF this time, I was devouring newspapers. There were still seven of them in New York then, and I read them all, like a predator. My favorite was the Post. Convinced by my work for Atlantis that I had some talent as a writer, I wrote a few letters to the editor, and two of them were printed. One of them took up the entire letters section, a long screed about “my generation,” and for a week there were letters of reaction. This got me on some obscure radio show, which led to an invitation to appear on the “Long John Nebel Show,” then the biggest thing on all-night radio. Nebel liked me and kept inviting me back to his freeform discussion of Martians, politics, extraterrestrials, comics, and the Beats. I kept writing letters to the editor of the Post.

Meanwhile, I was earning more money. I left the agency to open a studio with a partner across the street from the Art Brown art supply store on West Forty-sixth Street. I thought this would give me freedom, the sense of being my own man. But the harder I worked, the more letterheads I designed, the more business cards and employee publications I pasted up, the more I felt trapped. I had an obligation to my partner to pay my share of the studio expenses. My work was getting better, which brought me more work, and longer hours. The office building was deserted and forbidding at night, so I pitched a drawing table in the kitchen of the flat on Ninth Street and often worked until dawn, pasting up catalogs and listening to Symphony Sid on the radio, with the volume turned down so the other guys could sleep. On some nights, Coltrane sounded like an accusation: Why are you doing that work when you could be as free as I am?

Those long grinding hours entitled me to a reward. Of course. On weekends, or on nights when I was not making mechanicals for a doll catalog or designing an ad for a machine operator, I went drinking. Sometimes I was with my Dominican flaquita. Sometimes with Tim, Jake, and Billy. Sometimes alone. I had money in my pocket, cash I’d earned with hard hours. In the downtown bars, in joints like Birdland, I could afford any drink in the house.

We were in the roaring midst of a New Year’s Eve party on Ninth Street when someone arrived with great news.

It’s over! Castro wins! Batista left Havana.

You’re shitting me, Jake said.

No, man, it’s on the radio.

We turned on the radio and the news was true. The bearded young revolutionary had triumphed over the cruel dictator. His army was moving down from the Sierra Maestra in triumph. All night long, we played charangas by Orquesta Aragón and listened to bulletins and drank beer and talked bad Spanish and cheered for Fidel. Nobody knew that he was a communist. He was young, from our time. He hadn’t just talked about change, he’d done something. Faced with grinding oppression and a lack of freedom, Fidel had picked up a rifle and gone to the mountains. We cheered because we thought the good guys had won. After a while, I took my Dominican girl next door to a friend’s small apartment and fucked her wildly, the two of us yelling together in the revolutionary solidarity of Spanish. Then we went back to the party and danced some more, full of exultation, beer, and joy. Later, when the party was over, Jake went off with one woman and Tim with another. I was alone with La Dominicana again. We made love then in my own bed. The morning arrived, as gray as hangover. I wished we could wake up in Havana.

More than ever, as Jack Kennedy made his great run for the presidency, I was reading the political columns in the newspapers, particularly in the Post. Since it had published several of my letters, I thought of the Post as my newspaper. In the late spring of 1960, Jimmy Wechsler, the paper’s editor, published a book called Reflections of an Angry Middle Aged Editor. The book was a kind of situation report on American society after the fall of McCarthy; it was sometimes despairing, about race and class, but otherwise full of hope. I read it through in one night and then typed a long letter to Wechsler, agreeing with most of what he’d written, arguing with some of his remarks, singling out a chapter on journalism for my hardest criticism, implying that newspapers had no room for people like me. Working-class people. People who didn’t go to Ivy League schools, young men rejected by places like Columbia. Such people, I said, might not have great formal educations but they knew about New York, the world, life. I worked hard on the letter, making three drafts. I didn’t think of it as a job application. That’s what it turned out to be.

A week later, a brief note arrived from Wechsler. He said he’d enjoyed my letter and agreed with about 90 percent of what I’d said. Why didn’t I give him a call sometime and come down to the paper for a chat?

His secretary set up an appointment for a few days later at the Post. I told Tim and Jake and tried to be casual about it, but for the next few nights I had trouble sleeping. My mind was full of images from newspaper movies, all those tough fast-talking men in tumultuous city rooms, causing trouble, being brave: Bogart pressing the button to start the presses at the end of Deadline U.S.A., Robert Mitchum moving through fog in a trench coat, Gregory Peck in a glorious apartment in Rome, riding with Eddie Albert to an assignment. Hemingway was there too, of course. He’d started as reporter in Kansas City, without ever going to college. He’d put a reporter named Jake Barnes into The Sun Also Rises, his best novel. I couldn’t imagine him writing a novel about a graphic designer.

Finally, on a late afternoon in the last week of May, I took the IRT down to the old Post building at 75 West Street, went in through the Washington Street entrance, and rode the elevator to the second floor. I followed a gloomy marbelized corridor around to the back and then, for the first time, stepped into the city room.

Looking for someone? a tall, bespectacled man said.

Yes. Jimmy Wechsler.

All the way in the back.

The room was more exciting to me than any movie: an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing at big manual typewriters, telephones ringing, the wire service tickers clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor. I remembered the day I saw Dan Parker walking out of the Daily Mirror building and the newspapermen hurrying to the bars of Third Avenue. They’d all come from a place like this. But this wasn’t a rag like the Mirror; this was the Post, the smartest, bravest tabloid in New York, my paper. All these men and women were doing work that was honorable, I thought, work that added to the ideals and intelligence of the world. I wanted desperately to be one of them.

Wechsler was a small man with a large head and thoughtful eyes. He was wearing a bowtie and suspenders. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows. He took me into his inner office and I sat beside a desk littered with newspaper clippings, magazines, letters from readers, copies of his book. While we talked, he smoked cigarettes and sipped coffee. Near the end of our chat, he leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.

Have you ever thought about becoming a newspaperman? he said.

I mumbled something in reply, but I don’t remember what. It must have been something like, Only all my life.

Well, Wechsler said, call me in a couple of days. Maybe I can get you a tryout around here.

At 1 A.M., on June 1, 1960, I was back in the city room, clumsily disguised as a reporter, and my life changed forever.