A Drinking Life

1

IN HUMILITY and arrogance, I started to learn the newspaper trade. I was humbled by what I did not know, in the company of so many skilled craftsmen; I was arrogant enough to believe I could learn to do what they did. My teacher wasn’t Jimmy Wechsler; for the first eighteen months I worked nights while he worked days and we seldom saw each other. He allowed me in the door, but a man named Paul Sann kept me there.

I saw him for the first time at six o’clock in the morning of my first shift at the Post. I had walked in that night full of fear and trembling, not knowing what to expect, carrying a copy of Under the Volcano to read on the subway home if they threw me out. The assistant night city editor was Ed Kosner, younger than I was by a few years. He parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had. When I told him absolutely none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on “books,” four sheets of coarse copy paper separated by carbons. The carbon copies were called “dupes.” In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a “slug,” a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters. The slug should reflect the subject; a political story could be slugged POLS. But if it was a story about a murder I should not slug it KILL because the men setting type would kill the story. With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite it in two paragraphs, and my career had begun.

All through the night in the sparsely manned city room, I wrote small stories based on press releases or items clipped from the early editions of the morning papers. I noticed that Kosner had Scotch-taped a single word to his own typewriter: Focus. I appropriated the word as my motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself: What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it to someone in a saloon? Focus, I said to myself. Focus. . Near dawn, there was a lull as the editors discussed what they would do with all the material they now had in type. Beyond the high open windows, the sky was turning red. I walked over and gazed out and saw that we were across the street from the piers of United Fruit, whose bananas my grandfather had shipped from faraway Honduras a half-century before. I wondered if he had ever docked at this pier, ever looked up at the building that housed the New York Post. When I turned around, Paul Sann was walking into the city room.

He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the city room to the fenced-off pen at the far end, where he served as executive editor. He was dressed entirely in black, with black cowboy boots, carrying the morning papers under his arm. From where I sat, I watched him go to his desk, light a Camel, take a cardboard cup of coffee from a copyboy. His face was gray, urban, Bogartian, his mouth pulled tight in a tough guy’s mask, his gray hair cut short, and he wore horn-rimmed glasses which he shoved to the top of his head while reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick black ebony pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Around seven, the other editors gathered at his desk to discuss the flow of the paper. Sann always wrote the “wood,” the page-one headline (so named because for decades it had been set in wood type). Then he moved into the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on stone-topped tables. He was still there when my shift ended at eight and Kosner gave me a goodnight. Sann didn’t talk to me that night. He didn’t talk to me for weeks.

But in the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and murders, knocking on doors in Harlem and the Bronx at three in the morning, I came to understand that Paul Sann was the great piston of the New York Post. Wechsler gave the paper its liberal political soul; but Sann made it a tough ballsy tabloid. Wechsler pressed for coverage of civil rights, Cold War sanity, the reform politicians of the Democratic party; Sann was skeptical of all living beings, and leavened the political coverage with murders, fires, disasters, and gangsters. They didn’t much like each other, and their conflict was discussed almost every morning after the shift ended, at the bar in the Page One, a block away from the Post.

One guy wants a newspaper, said Carl Pelleck, the best police reporter in the city. The other guy wants a pamphlet.

Yeah, someone else said, but without Wechsler, it has no identity, no function, no soul. It’ll die.

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

The uncertainty about the paper’s future didn’t bother me; I was still working at the studio, and if the newspaper did go down I wouldn’t starve. But in the meantime, I’d have had the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade. During my three-month tryout, I watched Sann from a distance and got to know other newspapermen up close, in the morning seminars at the Page One. I loved their talk, its cynicism and fatalism, its brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched the stockbrokers coming up from the subways to trudge to Walk Street while we waited for the first editions to arrive. When the papers landed on the bar, the seminar would begin. This was an often brutal analysis of stories, headlines, and writing style, presided over by an immense, burly, mustached copy editor named Fred McMorrow, attended by two old pros named Gene Grove and Normand Poirier. They were funny and merciless. About my stories. About others, their works, themselves, and most of the human race.

Then one stormy morning, an hour before deadline, after I’d written a story about the eviction of a family in Brooklyn, Sann called me over. He held the galley in his hands. I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional.

Not bad, he said.

Thanks.

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

Thanks.

By the way, did this guy speak English?

No.

So how the fuck did you get all these quotes?

I speak a little Spanish, I said.

You do? How come an uneducated Brooklyn Mick like you speaks Spanish?

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

No shit?

No shit.

He lit a Camel. Then he pointed at a paragraph near the end.

You see this, he said, where you say this is a tragedy?

Yeah.

I’m taking it out. And don’t you ever use the fucking word “tragedy” again. You tell what happened, and let the reader say it’s a tragedy. If you’re crying, the reader won’t.

I see what you mean.

You better, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping the black coffee. He glanced at the story again.

Maybe in another eight or nine years, you could be pretty good at this miserable trade.

Thanks, I said, and started to leave.

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

2

NATURALLY, I got drunk in celebration. The next day, I told my partner I was leaving the studio. He was furious, shouting You’ve left me high and dry. He was right, of course. But there was no going back. I’d found a life I wanted. Every day or night would be different. I would have a ringside seat at the big events of the day. I’d learn about death and life and everything in between. It was honorable work, not putting goods in pretty packages. Somehow the desire for freedom and the need for security had merged. If I worked hard, listened well, studied the masters of the craft, I’d have a trade I could practice anywhere. Even if the Post folded. I might never be Franz Kline in his heroic studio. But I wouldn’t be a buttoned-down organization man either. I’d be a newspaperman.

After I was hired, after they gave me my first Working Press card, I brought my familiar sense of entitlement to the bar of the Page One every morning. Those mornings were free of the limits of time, and I would drink with McMorrow, Grove, Poirier, and others, while fishmongers made deliveries and the day-shift guys showed up for a morning pop before starting at ten. The Page One was the headquarters of the fraternity, a place completely devoid of character except for the men at the bar, a way station for all the whiskey-wounded boomers of the business who passed through on their way from one town’s paper to another. I loved it. I’d taken a cut in pay to work at the Post but I didn’t care. I had enough for food, rent, and drink. Each day, after the Page One, I’d take the subway to Astor Place and walk from the station to the flat on Ninth Street, where I’d sleep off the beer, wake up and eat pasta at the Orchidia on the corner of Second Avenue before going off again to the Post. My byline was in the paper every day, and I couldn’t wait to go to sleep so that I could wake up and do it all again. On days when I did no drinking, I often couldn’t sleep, as sentences caromed around my brain and I rewrote myself and others. On such days, I often moved to the refrigerator and found a beer.

Everybody in the business was drinking then, the lovely older woman on night rewrite, stars and editors, Murray Kempton and the copyboys. Once, when I was working days, Poirier came to me and said, How do you call in sick if you’re in? We laughed and concocted a ludicrous story of eating a bad clam at lunch, and sure enough, at lunch hour, Poirier called in with his bad clam attack and took the rest of the day off. Another day, working overtime during some disaster in the dead of winter, I finished at noon instead of 8 A.M. and carried my exhaustion directly into the Lexington Avenue IRT, skipping the Page One. Standing in the middle of the subway car, his eyes glassy, a large black Russian-style fur hat making him seem even taller, was McMorrow. He was maintaining his balance with one finger delicately touching the roof of the subway car and he was barking, Copy! Copyboy! as strangers edged away from his dangerous presence.

That first newspaper Christmas, there was a staff party in the penthouse office of Dorothy Schiff, the Post’s owner. The city editor got drunk and fell down the spiral staircase, breaking his arm. He refused to risk the hazards of a city hospital, saying I’d rather die here at my desk. He insisted on being taken to his home in Oyster Bay. So Poirier and I helped him to his car, both of us drunk too, and drove through the frozen night to Oyster Bay. When his wife opened the door and saw her wrecked husband and then saw us, she started shouting at us, You bastards, you bastards, look what you’ve done to him, you bastards.

One election night, Kempton was in his third-floor office, sending down his copy one sentence at a time, until it was six-thirty in the morning. The night managing editor, George Trow, asked the copyboy to ask Mr. Kempton a simple, if urgent, question: “How much more?” The copyboy ran up the back stairs to the third floor, burst into the office and said to the paper’s greatest columnist: Mr. Trow wants to know, how much more? Kempton lifted his almost-completed bottle of Dewar’s and said, Oh, about an inch.

After working a double shift one Friday, reporting three stories, rewriting three others, and doing captions and overlines for about fifteen photographs, I was reading galleys in the city room. At his desk, Sann was typing fast with two fingers on his Saturday page, a potpourri of news items and smart remarks called “It Happened All Over.” He finished editing it with a pencil, called for a copyboy, rubbed his eyes, and then walked over to me.

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

We took a cab to midtown and went into a joint called the Spindletop. It was dark and fancy in a sleazy way; if it wasn’t mobbed-up then the decorator had been inspired by gangster movies. Sann ordered whiskey, I asked for a beer. We talked for a while about craft and newspapers and the Boston Celtics, whose coach was his friend. Then:

You got a broad?

No.

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

I had learned that already. My lovely Dominican was gone, defeated by the hours of the newspaper trade.

But you’re married, I said.

Yeah, to the greatest woman in America. But it hasn’t been easy for her.

I sipped my beer, uneasy about saying anything.

She’s sick now, he said.

I’m sorry to hear that.

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

Then he turned and walked to the pay phone. I heard him placing a bet on the Cincinnati Reds. A few more people came into the bar, and then Ike Gellis arrived. He was the sports editor, short and stocky, Edward G. Robinson to Sann’s Bogart.

Where is he? Ike said.

Phone booth.

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

Sann hung up and came straight to Gellis.

Well, well, the world’s shortest Jew.

I hope you didn’t bet the Reds game, Gellis said. The Giants’ll kill ’em.

Shut up and drink, Sann said.

Two weeks later, early on a Friday morning, Sann’s wife died of cancer. We heard the news about six A.M. Around eight, Sann arrived. He walked on his usual hurried way across the city room and went to his desk. He didn’t look at galleys or dupes of stories. He started to type. He typed for more than an hour, worked the copy with a pencil, called for a copyboy, and then got up and walked out of the city room without a word.

Someone passed around a carbon of the story. It was a farewell to his wife. Tough, laconic, underwritten. He never used the word “tragedy.” My friend Al Aronowitz read it and started to weep.

Oh, man, he said. Oh, man.

Aronowitz was a great reporter, a wonderful writer, and a lovely man. But he didn’t drink, so I saw little of him after work. That morning he went to the Page One with me. We drank for a couple of hours in virtual silence. But the booze had no effect.

I don’t know if I can work in this business, Aronowitz said. His wife dies and the first thing he does is come in and write about it.

Shut up and drink, I said.

3

EARLY ON, I learned there were limits to the myth of the hard-drinking reporter. One Saturday night, we threw a big party in the place on Ninth Street. It lasted until dawn. I was due at the Post at 1 A.M. Monday. But when we woke up on Sunday afternoon, Jake and Tim and I were still full of the exuberance of the party. We bought a case of beer and started drinking again. Other people dropped in. The day rolled on, full of laughs and drinks. When I arrived at the Post that night, I felt sober, seeing things clearly and thinking lucidly. But I was half-drunk. I must have laughed too loud or bumped against a trash barrel too hard, attracting some notice. Then I started to type and my fingers kept hitting between keys. Finally an editor named Al Davis came over and stood above me and said, I think you better go home. I was mortified. Davis was part of the saloon fraternity too; he wasn’t objecting to the drink but to the obvious fact that I couldn’t hold it. I got up and pulled on my coat and he stepped close to me and whispered, Don’t you ever do this again. And I didn’t.

But if it was stupid to come into work carrying a package, as we said, that was no reason to stop drinking. As in most things, you needed rules of conduct. I drank in the mornings when I worked nights and at night when I worked days. When I was sent out to cover some fresh homicide, I usually went into a neighborhood bar to find people who knew the dead man or his murdered girlfriend. I talked to cops and firemen in bars and met with petty gangsters in bars. That wasn’t unusual. From Brooklyn to the Bronx, the bars were the clubs of New York’s many hamlets, serving as clearinghouses for news, gossip, jobs. If you were a stranger, you went to the bars to interview members of the local club. As a reporter, your duty was to always order beer and sip it very slowly.

On weekends, I went to Brooklyn to visit my father’s clubs, and to see my mother, my brothers and sister. My mother was proud of my new career, dutifully buying the Post every day and clipping my bylined articles. She reminded me that she had bought the Wonderland of Knowledge with coupons from the Post, in the days before it became a tabloid.

You look very happy, she said.

I am, I said. I am.

In Rattigan’s, there were mixed feelings about what I was doing. In that neighborhood, there were still a lot of people who thought the Post was edited by Joe Stalin. Their papers were the Daily News, whose editorials kept calling for the nuking of Peking and Moscow, and Hearst’s Daily Mirror and Journal-American. The Post was always attacking the people held sacred by the more pious and patriotic: Cardinal Spellman, Francisco Franco, J. Edgar Hoover, and Walter Winchell.

How’s it going over there, McGee? my father asked one Saturday at the bar in Rattigan’s.

The Post? I’m having a great time, Dad.

Good. The checks are clearing, right?

Right.

He sipped his beer and nodded at Dinny Collins, a smart heavy-set man, dying of cirrhosis, who was reading the Daily News a few feet away.

What do you think of my stories? I said to my father.

Good, good. Very good. I just. .

He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.

You just what? I said.

Goddammit, I just wish you were working for the Journal-American!

I laughed out loud, but he didn’t see anything funny.

Dad, the Journal-American is a rag. They make things up. I know. I’ve covered stories with their reporters, and they make up quotes and details that aren’t true.

How do you know they’re not true?

I told you, Dad. I’ve been there on a story, talking to the same people, seeing the same things. By the time their stories get in the paper they’ve added stuff. Lies. Bullshit.

Dinny Collins leaned over and said, Listen to the kid, Bill. I always said that Journal-American was a load of shit.

Especially, I said, when they interview Franco once a year, or Cardinal Spellman three times a year.

You mean they make up stuff for Spellman?

No, I said. In that case, they just print the bullshit.

Collins laughed. But my father gathered his change.

That does it, he said. I’m going to Farrell’s.

Out he went. Collins was still laughing. I ordered a beer.

Don’t take him seriously, Collins said. You’ve made him prouder than hell.

I hope you’re right, Dinny, I said, on my way to a long afternoon in the bars of Brooklyn.

At about seven-thirty in the morning of July 2, 1961, in his home in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway put a twelve-gauge shotgun under his jaw and pulled the trigger. The news was smothered for most of the morning. I heard the first bulletin early that afternoon, while watching the Dodgers play the Phillies on television. I was shaken to the core. Hemingway was still the great bronze god of American literature, the epitome of the hard-drinking macho artist. But since the day in the navy when I’d first read Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Viking collection of Hemingway’s work, he had been one of my heroes. No other word could describe him: his writing, his life, his courage, his drinking, were all part of the heroic image. Suicide was not. Suicide, I believed at the time, was the choice of a coward.

But I had little time to mourn Hemingway or even question his motives. The telephone rang. It was Paul Sann.

Get your ass down here, he said. Hemingway knocked himself off, and I want you and Aronowitz to write a series.

The Post was famous for its series; one of them — in twenty-three daily installments — had ruined the career of Walter Winchell. The writers were detached from the daily routine and allowed weeks of luxurious reporting and writing on a single subject. I’d never written a series, but Al Aronowitz was a master of the form. He was five years older than I was, heavy, red-bearded, full of sly laughter and dissatisfied melancholy. In his own style, he was struggling as I had struggled over the way to live in the world. He was intoxicated by the careless freedoms of the Beats, about whom he’d written a brilliant series, and pulled in the opposite direction by the demands of a conventional life in the suburbs of New Jersey. For a few years, drinking had helped me postpone a choice; temporarily, at least, newspapers had resolved it. For Aronowitz, newspapers were not enough.

We began working that afternoon in an empty back office. Aronowitz knew almost nothing about Hemingway; I knew almost too much. So we divided the work. I stayed one installment ahead of him, laying out the newspaper clippings, the relevant passages in biographies and monographs, marking passages in Hemingway’s own work that were relevant to the installment. We shared the reporting tasks, calling people all over the country who had known Hemingway. Aronowitz did most of the writing. When he finished each installment, I’d go back over the copy, filling in blanks, cutting statements that seemed ludicrous, trying to separate the myth from the facts. We finished some installments near six in the morning, two hours before the deadline.

When it was over, I knew a lot more about writing. Aronowitz was a generous man, showing me what he was doing and why, passing on his hatred of platitude and cliché. And I’d gone more deeply than ever before into Hemingway. I saw his writing mannerisms more clearly, his personal posturing. Some of it was embarrassing. But I had learned that it was possible to be a great writer and an absolute asshole at the same time. None of us then knew how terrible Hemingway’s final years had been and the extent to which alcohol had contributed to his anguished decline. It was right there on the pages. I just didn’t choose to see it.

There were still parties on the weekend, but the gang that came over from Brooklyn was breaking up. Richie Kelly, who lived next door, found an apartment in another part of Manhattan and started making a living at advertising art. Billy Powers moved with a young actress to an apartment in Chelsea. Tim married a beautiful woman from the Neighborhood. We all got drunk in celebration, and Jake and I decided that the newlyweds should keep the apartment. Jake moved back to Brooklyn while I moved next door. For a while, Jose Torres shared the place with me, then he got married too, and we all danced and drank at his wedding. Even Tom McMahon was leaving, to teach in Puerto Rico. There was a sense of departure and change in the air. It was as if we all had decided it was time to grow up.

At the end of 1961, Jose took me to a Christmas party on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. I saw a small, lovely young Puerto Rican woman there and danced with her and asked for her phone number. Her mother was standing against a wall beside the Christmas tree, looking at me in a uspicious way, like one of the dueñas of Mexico. The girl gave me the number. I wrote it on a matchbook and drank some more beer and then moved on to another party. The next day, thick with hangover, I remembered the girl but couldn’t find the matchbook. I called Jose, who made some calls and found out who she was. Her name was Ramona Negron. She was seventeen. I was twenty-six. I called her and we started going out. In February 1962, we were married.

4

MARRIAGE didn’t end my drinking. Ramona didn’t drink, but I did it for both of us. There was a lot of drinking at the wedding reception; drinking in Acapulco, where we went on our honeymoon; drinking to celebrate the birth of our first daughter, Adriene; drinking on weekends; drinking on the way home from work. We moved to an apartment in Brooklyn, and I’d drink beers with dinner and invite friends in to drink with me.

Sometimes I brought home total strangers. One afternoon I found myself drinking in Bowery dives with Richard Harris, the Irish actor, who was in town promoting his first movie, This Sporting Life, and researching the world of Eugene O’Neill. In the company of Bowery rummies we talked about O’Neill and The Iceman Cometh and about J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, a marvelous book about an irresponsible drunk. Harris told me that he’d played the part of Sebastian Dangerfield in a Dublin production based on the Donleavy book and had even tracked down the model for the hero, a man named Gainor Christ. That book looks like a comedy, Harris said, but it’s a terrible fuckin’ tragedy. . We talked and drank, drank and talked, and I called Ramona and said I’d be home late and home we arrived much later, Harris and I roaring drunk, and I started to make hash in the small low-ceilinged basement, the baby awake now and bawling, Ramona exhausted, hash flying and sticking to the ceiling, until finally Harris wandered into the night. Ramona wept.

Behind all this were some unacceptable facts. At the newspaper, I could write about the problems, doubts, mistakes, and felonies of strangers; I didn’t have to deal with myself. I certainly didn’t have to look clearly at the girl I’d married.

In the most important ways, we were strangers. I knew facts about her: that she’d been born in Puerto Rico, taken to New York by her mother when she was a year old. She’d grown up in the projects on Grand Street, graduated from Washington Irving High School, spoke perfect English, and could dance the pachanga. But I knew nothing of her dreams, her vision of herself, her conception of the future. I never bothered to ask. In some ways, I knew more about the people in my newspaper stories than I knew about my wife.

Neither of us had a useful model for a marriage. Ramona didn’t meet her father until she was fourteen; he’d broken with her mother a few months after Ramona was born. He was her mother’s second husband. I met him on a trip to Puerto Rico with Ramona; he was white-haired and handsome, charming, a piano player in a nightclub, living with a fat black woman. I got the feeling that he barely remembered Ramona’s mother, who was petite, fair-skinned, vain, and given to complaint.

She was a very spoiled woman, he said to me over a beer in the place where he worked. I’m glad Ramona isn’t like her.

We spoke with the complicity of men. But when I told Ramona what he’d said, she laughed.

What does he know? she said. As soon as he had to feed a family, he left.

She lived through her teens without a father in the house, and then her mother married a German-American guy who did maintenance in the projects. He brought home a paycheck. He was civil. He watched a lot of television and even read some books. But he offered Ramona no clues about how she should live with the likes of me.

I had no model either. My father went to work, earned his money, found friendship and consolation in saloons. I’m sure he never asked my mother about her dreams either. The principle was clear through all my childhood: men went out and earned the money; women organized the family. Husbands were close-lipped, strong, stoic; wives were conciliatory, open, allowed to show feeling. Without thinking, I assumed the pattern. I didn’t work in a factory. But I would do everything that must be done to keep bringing home the paychecks. And I had other goals now: to write novels and short stories, to master the form of magazine articles, to do everything possible within the limitations of my talent. This time I wouldn’t walk away, as I had from Regis, as I had from painting. I would go as far as I could go with what I had. Or as Robert Henri had said about an art student, to be “master of such as he has.”

In the small flat where we lived in Brooklyn, I didn’t talk much about such desires with Ramona. She was too busy trying to become a woman and a mother. In both tasks, she was on her own.

My brother Denis was a wonderfully sweet kid, with big liquid brown eyes, broad shoulders, a wild sense of humor, and an original way of looking at the world. Once, when he was seven and struggling with the mysteries of the Catholic catechism, he was walking with my mother and embarked on a heavy theological discussion.

Mom, he said, is God everywhere?

Yes, Denis, she said. God is everywhere.

Is he in the sky?

Yes, he’s in the sky.

Is he in the street?

Yes, Denis, he’s in the street.

Is he in the park?

Yes, he’s in the park.

Mom?

Yes?

Is he up my ass?

My mother burst into laughter.

By the time he was ten, in 1962, Denis had begun to see me as a kind of father, although I was only the big brother who had lived elsewhere for all of his young life. I didn’t mind the role; I was probably a better father to Denis than I was to be a husband to Ramona. Around this time, my father had entered a crabbed, unhappy middle age; there was never enough money and always too much drinking. He beat the kids when they annoyed him or when he thought they weren’t doing homework or were talking in too heavy a Brooklyn accent. Tommy was now grown up and gone and Kathleen had a group of girlfriends from school. My father didn’t bother either of them. But the smaller boys were always in trouble with him, Denis most of all.

It was no surprise that Denis often turned to me for guidance and male kindness. He was an erratic student, and an unruly street kid, but in his school compositions, he showed hilarious gifts for narrative. His spelling was often atrocious. But he could certainly tell a story. I started helping him, showing him ways to develop stories, correcting his spelling, giving him books to read. When Ramona and I took our first small apartment near Prospect Park, he dropped by all the time, glad to run errands, to read some of my books, to talk about movies or comics. Ramona said she didn’t mind his unannounced arrivals; she thought he was cute. I took him with me a few times to the newspaper or to the Gramercy Gym to see the fighters. One of those fighters was now my brother Brian, who at fifteen weighed about ninety pounds and was boxing in amateur tournaments, watched over by Jose and the other professionals. He had a ferocious left hook, a good chin, and a cocky style. Denis would get excited when he saw Brian sparring, upset if Brian got hit, cheering when Brian was punching; he hated to leave the place. My brother John never came to the gym. He was only a year older than Denis, a fine student with a sweet good heart. But he was shy and self-contained where Denis was direct. If Denis wanted to go with me to a gym, he asked. If he wanted to stay at my house, wherever it was at the time, he said so. John never asked.

One summer afternoon, Denis got into a fight outside the YMCA. His opponent whipped out a knife and stabbed him in the stomach. He was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where he almost died. I arrived at the hospital after he came out of the operation. His voice was weak and his lustrous brown eyes were full of fear.

Am I gonna die, Pete?

No, you’re gonna be all right. The doctors said so.

I don’t wanna die.

You won’t.

You won’t let me die, will you?

The doctors won’t let you die, Denis. You’ll have a pretty funny-looking scar, maybe, but you won’t die.

I don’t want you to die either, he said.

Okay, pal.

Be careful, all right, Pete?

Whatever you say, Denis.

I don’t want anyone to die, he said, his voice drowsy.

On December 8, 1962, the printers’ union struck the New York Times. The Publishers Association, including Dorothy Schiff of the Post, immediately locked arms in solidarity against the proletarian rabble and closed the other six papers. We were all locked out of our jobs. The strike and lockout went on and on, past Christmas, past New Year’s, past Valentine’s Day, 114 days into the spring.

That winter, I learned to write for money instead of sheer love of the trade. I worked for thirty-five dollars a week on a strike paper. I wrote two articles for the Police Gazette at fifty dollars each. I borrowed money. I alternated between rage and impotence, furious at the printers, even more furious at the publishers. I had a wife and a baby girl and I couldn’t put money on the table. What the hell kind of man was I? What kind of husband? What kind of father? I began to think the Post would fold. My newspaper. Denis didn’t want anyone to die. I didn’t want a newspaper to die.

In the evenings, I stayed home more, playing with the baby, cuddling her, cooing to her. In some way, this angered Ramona. She was depressed for a long time after Adriene was born, and I knew so little about the biology and psyche of women that I took this as a personal rejection. It was as if she blamed me for the pain she’d suffered when Adriene entered the world. Her dark angers when I played with the infant infuriated me.

You’re jealous of her, aren’t you? I shouted one night. She’s only a baby and you’re jealous!

I’m not jealous, she shouted through tears. I just want you to love me the way you love her.

I hugged her, whispered to her, felt her tears on my face. I was ashamed of myself, at my anger, my inability to understand. But I never pushed past the surface, past the things she said to the things she most deeply felt. When she was calm again, I went to the refrigerator and opened a beer.

With the newspaper work gone, I used some of the empty time to read again, everything from Raymond Chandler to Stendhal. They took me out of the intolerable present. They presented challenges too. The weather was gray and cold, and reading novels made me want to go away again. To hole up with Ramona and the baby in some cottage in another country, where I would write stories about the things I knew and discover things I didn’t. I wished I were somewhere beyond that small flat.

Because of the lack of money, I didn’t see much of Jake or Tim, Bill or Richie; there was no way to meet for a drink without laying bills on the bar. I spoke by phone to Tim every day and checked in every few days with Paul Sann, to hear the latest about the contract negotiations. But I saw nobody from the newspaper; they seemed to have scattered to the winds.

Then, near the end of the strike I sold an article to the Saturday Evening Post for $1500, the equivalent of ten weeks’ pay at the newspaper. It seemed like all the money in the world. Exuberantly, I paid off my debts and gave the landlord the rent. I brought flowers to Ramona and hugged her and told her I loved her. I bought a bag of toys for the baby. I carried home fat bags of groceries. I lugged home cases of beer and invited Richie, Jake, Billy, and Tim and his wife, Georgie, over for a party. Celebration! Victory! Drink up! A few days later, Dorothy Schiff left the Publishers Association and reopened the newspaper. I went back to work.

Don’t get used to being too happy, you Irish bum, Paul Sann said when I took him for a fast drink after work. No matter what happens, he said, newspapers will always break your fucking heart.

5

SOMETHING SHIFTED in me during that strike. I thought I’d work at the newspaper forever. The strike made me understand that in the newspaper trade, there was no such thing as forever. When I went back to work, I kept doing freelance work on the side and found I had some talent for magazine articles. Checks arrived. We moved to a larger apartment in Brooklyn. But Ramona seemed no happier. When I got excited about selling a piece, she seemed uneasy. When the telephone kept ringing, with calls from friends, press agents, editors, she grew annoyed. When I came home drunk, a few days a week, she was disgusted. She was getting to know me better than I knew her.

As spring turned into summer, the old dream of the expatriate life blossomed again, ripening over beers on Saturday afternoons. Who wanted to live here, back in the bourgeois safety of Brooklyn? New York was a great city and I had a job I loved. But there was a world out there. One night, over dinner at home, I started talking to Ramona about going to Spain. Maybe we could live in Barcelona. The city where Orwell once carried a rifle, city of Dalí and Picasso and Gaudi, city that held out to the end in defense of the Spanish Republic. Barcelona! I’d write articles for the Saturday Evening Post and we’d live well on the money and to hell with newspapers. She looked at me as if I were drunk.

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

It’s not Spain, I said.

But you’ve never been to Spain.

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

She shook her head in a dubious way, tempering my enthusiasm. For weeks, I avoided any more discussion. I worked hard at the paper. I won some awards. But the notion of another escape wouldn’t go away. Over beers one night, I talked about Spain to Tim, suggesting that he could go too and work with me on the research while mastering the magazine form himself. He was very smart and a good clean writer; if I could do it, he could do it. At first, Tim was skeptical. But we looked in the New York Times at the rate of the peseta against the dollar, bought Spanish newspapers in Times Square, and saw that we could live more cheaply than in New York. We were young, we could afford it; when would we have such a chance again? A strange, inevitable momentum took over. It was like going to Mexico again. There was nothing complicated about it. We’d just go, live in a foreign land, walk where Hemingway walked, speak Spanish and eat olives and brown ourselves on the Costa Brava. We’d support ourselves with writing.

Ramona and Tim’s wife, Georgie, were at first skeptical. We addressed every argument, speaking with the authority of men who had lived in at least one foreign land. I showed Ramona travel articles from magazines, picture books from the library. I sold some more articles to magazines and built up a small bank account. Slowly it must have seemed like a great romantic adventure to the women too. By July we were ready to leave.

You’re going where? Paul Sann said, when I came to his desk to give him the news.

To Spain.

He chuckled in a sardonic way.

Vaya con Dios, pal, he said. I wish I’d done that when I was your age. I wish I’d done it last fucking month.

For me, Sann’s words were the only blessing I needed. It was settled. We were going to Spain.

The night before we left, Tim and I went to a farewell dinner with the other guys who’d made the journey with us across the river from Brooklyn: Bill Powers, Richie Kelly, Jake Conaboy. After the delicious beer-swilling years on Ninth Street, we’d gone our own ways. Billy had become an excellent photographer and layout man, Richie an illustrator and designer, while Jake returned to Brooklyn and the safety of the Transit Authority. But I wanted to believe it didn’t matter where we’d gone or where we were going; we came from a common place, had shared a glorious time, and we’d be friends for life.

The five of us took a table in the back room of a bar on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue. Jake had been drinking before we arrived; whiskey always broke him out of his shyness, and he was hilarious and profane. We ate hamburgers and drank a lot of beer and whiskey. I talked about the glories of the Spain I’d never seen, urging the others to come and join us. I must have made it seem like another subway ride from Brooklyn. We made jokes. We talked about politics. Billy and I argued the comparative merits of Matisse and Bonnard with the passion once reserved for centerfielders. Around midnight, Jake’s chin was resting on his chest. We talked on, drinking more, laughing louder. Richie’s eyes were glassy, a thin smile on his lips. Then it was time to go. Tim called for a check. Richie stared hard at me, the smile gone, his eyes suddenly deeper under his brows.

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

I laughed, thinking he was joking.

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

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

Nobody wants to tell you this, he said. But it’s true. You treat the rest of us like inferiors. You think if you say it should be done, then we should do it.

You’re serious, aren’t you?

Tim said, Hey, Richie, cool it.

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

Richie ignored them.

All this shit about Spain, this Hemingway crap, Richie said. You’re saying you can do things and we don’t have the balls to do them. You think you’re hot shit. You pose like a good guy but you always think of yourself first. You always did. Even back in Brooklyn.

It was as if he wanted to start a fight. But we were leaving the following day for Spain. I didn’t want to arrive in Barcelona with a split lip or a broken hand. I backed up.

Richie, I said, all I ever tried to be with you was a friend. If I got lucky, I wanted you and the others to share it.

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

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

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

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

Tim and I took a cab back to Brooklyn. We were staying at our parents’ places for this final night, because Ramona, Adriene, and Georgie had gone on ahead to Barcelona to find an apartment. Tim and I had closed our apartments, stored or sold our possessions, settled most of our accounts. All the way to Brooklyn, I was furious with Richie. Some things I had taken for granted: he was my friend, he shared the sentimental solidarity of the group, he cheered for my small successes as I would cheer for his. Tonight, he had pissed all over those assumptions. It was as if he wanted me to feel his accusations all the way to Spain. And though I was hurt and wounded, another thought slid through my mind: Maybe he was right.

There was one final wrenching scene. A few weeks before the date we chose to leave for Barcelona, I had told my brother Denis that I was moving to Europe. He was twelve, reading newspapers every day, but this news item hadn’t seemed to register. I didn’t press it. But I worried about him all the time. I had no idea how long we’d be gone. I might make a career as a writer in Europe and stay forever. I could be hack in six months. I was sure Brian and John would be all right, but Denis had a fragility that made him seem more vulnerable. I hoped the Neighborhood wouldn’t trap him.

On that last morning at 378, Denis and the other kids hung around the kitchen while I washed and ate breakfast. My father was there, dim and silent. My mother busied herself with dishes and tea. Fragments of Richie’s indictment kept drilling into me, combining with hangover to make me feel disconnected from the others. Finally, I packed my last small bag, said my good-byes, and went downstairs.

Suddenly, Denis came running after me, in tears.

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

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

Please, he said, please stay.

Tim was waiting with a cab in front of Rattigan’s and came over to help me with my bags. But Denis was bawling now, holding on to my arm with both hands, saying Don’t go, Pete, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go, pleaaaase. .

Until I had to shake him off.

Send me some stories, Denis. .

And he ran off then, his face a blur of tears, swinging his hands wildly in the air. He was the last person I saw on Seventh Avenue as the cab pulled away to take us to the airport.

6

THUS BEGAN too many years of wandering, of arrivals and departures, sitting in airport waiting rooms, packing and unpacking books, smoking strange brands of cigarettes, speaking badly the languages of strangers, and drinking their beer and whiskey. Ramona and I exhausted the dream of Spain in six months. We lived in Dublin then, and later in Rome and San Juan and Mexico City, Laguna Beach and Washington, D.C., and saw a lot of other places in between. Each time, we made the long circle home, back to New York.

The moves had a pattern, of course. I would return to New York, settle in, start working at my trade. Then routine would assert itself. The routine of work. The routine of family. The multiple routines of the drinking life. These couldn’t be separated. If I wrote a good column for the newspaper, I’d go to a bar and celebrate; if I wrote a poor column, I would drink away my regret. Then I’d go home, another dinner missed, another chance to play with the children gone, and in the morning, hung over, thick-tongued, and thick-fingered, I’d attempt through my disgust to make amends. That was a routine too.

Self-disgust would spread its stain to everything: my work, the apartment, New York itself, until I felt I had to get out of there or die trying. Then I’d grant myself the vision of the Great Good Place. Most one the time, it was a place where I heard more vowels than consonants, with bougainvillea spilling down whitewashed walls, fountains playing in the blaze of noon. In the Great Good Place I would work like a monk on my writing. I would be a good husband and father. I would be far from the tumult of saloons, their giddy excitements and sly flatteries. Once the vision took hold, we were soon packing the books. I never did find the Great Good Place.

During this long odyssey, there were some wonderful times. There were long sunny afternoons reading Lorca and drinking beer in huge one-quart glasses in the Plaza Real in Barcelona. There was one glorious evening in Rome with the raffish producer Joe Levine at the Hotel Excelsior, the two of us drinking brandy, with women all around us, musicians playing violins, Joe’s wife pleading with him to go to bed. I spent hours drinking rum with John Wayne during an interview on his converted navy minesweeper in Barcelona bay; I hated his politics and liked him. In Brussels, I wandered into some huge beerhall with a reporter from UPI and got hilariously drunk with some touring American paratroopers. There were good beery times in pubs in Dublin and England, the barmaids flirting, the regulars grumpy at this Yank invasion, then offering the pack of Senior Service and buying a round in the fraternity of drink. I drank beer with the mariachis in the Plaza Garibaldi. I got loaded in a place on the Calle Cristo in Old San Juan, singing along with Los Panchos on the jukebox. I got pleasantly smashed watching the sun crash into the Pacific in Laguna. Sometimes Ramona came with me; most of the time she stayed home.

She was with me in Belfast when my father came home in the late fall of 1963. She was a background figure, her dark skin exotic to the pale Irish, but existing only as an appendage to the visiting Yank. On that trip, my father held center stage.

He had been away since the early 1930s. I paid for his ticket because I wanted to see him there in the home place, on the streets that had shaped him. For a week, we wandered those streets on foot or by cab, stopping at the Rock Bar, the Beehive, the Long Bar, snug dark wool-smelling refuges from the gray hard drizzle of the North. He found old friends among the living and heard reports about the dead. He sang his songs, making the young Irish laugh with “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” A few times, confronted with some old photograph of soccer teams, he turned away in grief. He had less tolerance now for drink; he got drunk quicker. But he was back where he’d started from and he was happy to be there.

One evening, all of us were in my cousin Frankie Bennett’s house, sipping warm lager, dressing to go out for dinner. My father was at his brother Frank’s house and we were to meet him later. The television was on in the small living room. The Bennett kids were leaping over couches and rolling around on chairs. A coal fire glowed in the hearth. I was full of a buzzing warmth, part beer, part Ireland.

And then the first bulletin broke.

. . President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.

What? I turned to the black-and-white screen of the television set. What did he say? What the fuck did he just say? And he said it again, grave, British, restrained: Shots had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. No. The president was being rushed to Parkland Hospital. No. No. The room hushed, Frankie moved in from the kitchen, Ramona came downstairs, holding Adriene in her arms, Frankie’s wife stood by the set. No. I popped open a can of warm lager. A sitcom was playing. Then the announcer was back.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the president of the United States, is dead.

I let out a wail, a deep scary banshee wail, primitive and wounded, mariachi wail, Hank Williams wail, full of fury and pain. Nonono-nononononononononoNo. Ramona hugged me, weeping, and kids were wailing now, and Frankie was there beside me, but I turned, ashamed of my pain and my weeping, and rushed into the night. All through the Catholic neighborhood called Andersonstown, doors were opening and slamming and more wails came roaring at the sky. wails without words, full of pagan furies as old as bogs. I wanted to find my father, wanted to hug him and have him hug me.

But I careened around dark streets, in the midst of the wailing. I saw a man punch at a tree. I saw a stout woman fall down in a sitting position on a doorstep, bawling. I ran and ran, trying to burn out my grief, my anger, my consciousness. I found myself on the Shankill Road, main avenue of the Protestant district. It was no different there. Kennedy wasn’t a mere Catholic, he was Irish, Kennedy was ours, he was one of our sons, our Jack, and they have killed him. Along the Shankill, I saw a man kicking a garbage can over and over again in primitive rage. I saw three young women heading somewhere, dissolved in tears. I saw another man sitting on a curb, his body heaving in gigantic sobs.

Somehow, I found my way back to Falls Road in the Catholic area. My head was full of imagined demons, the gunmen of Dallas: Cuban exiles and right-wing bastards, Klansmen and Mob guys. But when I finally reached the Rock Bar I only wanted to find my father. He was upstairs where the television set was, sitting at a table beside a retired IRA man with three fingers missing from his right hand. I went to the table and the old IRA man said, It’s a terrible bloody thing, lad, terrible, terrible. . My father stood up, his face a ruin. We held each other tight, saying nothing, and then the bar was packed and we drank whiskey and there was a documentary playing about Kennedy’s trip to Ireland in May, smiling and laughing and amused, promising at the airport to come back in the springtime and I thought of the line from Yeats, What made us think that he could comb gray hair?

After that, there was almost nothing left except whiskey. Until the screen filled with Kennedy’s face, superimposed on the American flag, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played on the sound track. And then the whole bar crowd was standing, old men and young, men with hard whiskey-raw Belfast faces, and all of them were saluting and so was my father and so was I. That night in Belfast, we both discovered how much we were Americans.

7

THE PRICE I was paying was very large, but for a long time, nobody presented me with the check. Our daughter, Deirdre, was conceived in Spain and born in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan while I was thick with hangover at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. Norman Mailer drove me to the hospital. I was full of joy when I saw her. But Ramona never forgave my absence.

When Deirdre was less than a year old, we moved to Mexico. That was always the basic model for the Great Good Place, and going back was like an act of contrition. I was heartily sorry for the way I’d messed up in 1956. But now a decade had gone by. I thought I could repair the great rupture by going back. A Mexican friend confirmed what I suspected: the Mexican police were not looking for me, my name was on no list, my offenses were lost in the human avalanche of newer felonies. I signed a small contract to write my first book and we left New York. We sublet a friend’s apartment a block from the Pasco de la Reforma in the Colonia Roma. For a week, I had dreams about men bashing each other with bricks. But then Carta Blanca gave me dreamless sleep. I talked to Ramona about staying this time for good.

During the summer of 1965, Deirdre got sick with salmonella, probably from unpasteurized milk. She had begun talking before the infection; then all her talking stopped. Most of the time she looked stunned. I was heartsick, blaming myself for taking a child to Mexico, risking her life in my own self-absorbed quest for the Great Good Place. Work stopped; I never did write the book I’d gone there to write. One night I sat in the dark, listening to Cuco Sánchez, and got drunk alone, while Ramona and the children slept. A few days later, a letter arrived from Paul Sann. He wanted to know if I had any interest in going back to work at the Post. If so, he was looking for a columnist.

Once more, we packed up and went home.

We took an apartment in a new building off Union Square. Before we could furnish the place, I announced to Ramona that we’d have a house-warming party. The place was jammed. Tim, Billy, and Jake came from the Neighborhood; dozens arrived from the Post, including Sann, who looked around at his stumbling wards and left early. Among the late arrivals were Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, friends of Al Aronowitz, in town for their first appearances in America. They were full of charm, smoking joints and drinking vodka, but they too left around the midnight hour. At some point, huge Fred McMorrow lurched into the bedroom where Deirdre was sleeping, fell across a glass-topped table, and smashed it. He didn’t even scratch himself. But Deirdre woke up screaming and Ramona was again in tears.

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

Deirdre was still not talking. One Saturday afternoon, she was walking with me on Fourteenth Street and suddenly fell on her bottom. I picked her up, and she looked at me with those brown eyes but didn’t cry. I stood her up and she walked a few more feet and plopped down again. Ramona told me she’d been doing the same thing in the apartment. I was alarmed. The next day, while I went to work at the newspaper, Ramona took Deirdre to St. Vincent’s.

She called me at the paper, her voice trembling.

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

What?

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

I rushed to the hospital and looked at our little girl. I didn’t believe the analysis. Her eyes were bright. She recognized me. She laughed when I played with her. Ramona and I found another doctor and insisted that more tests be made. That girl, we told each other, is not retarded.

We were right. There was a chemical imbalance in her brain, possibly brought on by the salmonella. But it could be cured with medication. There was no permanent damage. She was definitely not retarded. It was my time to cry, in thanks, in remorse. When Deirdre did resume talking, it was in complete sentences.

Through all this time, I managed to do a lot of work: newspaper columns, magazine articles, a first novel. The novel was a thriller. I learned the form without risking an examination of myself. If I was able to function, to get the work done, there was no reason to worry about drinking. It was part of living, one of the rewards.

But many things were being lost on the erratic journey. A shipment to some foreign place would never arrive, and notebooks, drawings, precious books, would vanish forever. I lost all my apprentice work. I lost my collection of original cartoons. A book of childhood photographs disappeared. I still didn’t realize that I was also losing my way.

8

I STARTED writing a column for the Post in October 1965. On the day after Christmas Paul Sann sent me to Vietnam, where in the first week I got drunk with some Marine Corps officers in Da Nang and heard them predict a dirty, bloody, perhaps endless war.

What can be done to pacify Vietnam? I asked one of them, late at night, with the artillery rumbling in the distance.

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

In Vietnam, I discovered that I wasn’t afraid of death. The stoic codes of Hemingway served me better at thirty than they did at eighteen. Maybe Hemingway was an asshole, but he knew something about war and fear. In Vietnam, my only worry was about my daughters: If something happened to me, who would bring them up? Who would get them through school? Ramona would survive, but I fretted about the girls. Sometimes I worried in the same way about Denis. I got rid of these imaginings by drinking on the roof of the Caravelle with the other correspondents, watching the distant orange flashes of the artillery, or by inspecting the pain and fear of uniformed strangers. I wrote often to Ramona, and I had the city desk call her each time a dispatch arrived, to tell her I was all right. I did not mention the bars of Tu Do Street or the long afternoon when I wandered drunkenly into Cholon and two boys bumped me and slipped my watch off my wrist. I did not mention the anxious turmoil in my stomach, the product of the conflict between my aching desire to stay for the duration of the war and my responsibilities as husband and father. I wanted to stay, to make this my war. I did not say this to Ramona.

Every few days I went out to the killing fields, saw boys dying, heard the anguished screams of the wounded. A tourist at the war. Then I came back to Saigon and wrote my pieces in the room at the hotel and took them down to the post office for shipment to the Post. Afterward, wanting to stay and needing to go, wishing I were single and missing my children, I wandered through the bars of Tu Do Street, listening to Aretha and the Stones, talking to the perfumed women in their tight aodais. They were all very young, but their faces were hardening and they had no stories they were proud to tell. The sensuality of the war, its erotic demands, urged me toward sex with them; but I was afraid of disease, of having my money stolen, of ending up in some humiliating public mess. I got drunk instead.

When I came home, there was a new outpost in my personal geography. Normand Poirier had discovered a saloon on Christopher Street called the Lion’s Head. In the beginning, the Head had a square three-sided bar, with dart boards on several walls and no jukebox. The location, a few steps from the Sheridan Square station of the Seventh Avenue IRT, was perfect for newspapermen from the Post, the Times, and the Herald Tribune; the Village Voice was then cramped into a few tight rooms upstairs; and within a few weeks of its opening, the joint was a roaring success.

I don’t think many New York bars ever had such a glorious mixture of newspapermen, painters, musicians, seamen, ex-communists, priests and nuns, athletes, stockbrokers, politicians, and folksingers, bound together in the leveling democracy of drink. On any given night, the Clancy Brothers would take over the large round table in the back room and the place would be loud with “The Leaving of Liverpool” and “Eileen Aroon” and “The West’s Awake.” Everybody joined in the singing, drinking waterfalls of beer, emptying bottles of whiskey, full of laughter and noise and a sense that I can only describe as joy.

It was as if we’d all been looking for the same Great Good Place and created it here. Not in some foreign land but in the West Village. I was soon one of the regulars, there every night, and sometimes every day. In the growing chaos of the Sixties, the Head became one of the metronomes of my life, as regulating as the deadlines for my column. It was also the place in which everything was forgiven. Lose your job? Betrayed by your wife? Throw up on your shoes? Great: have a drink on us.

In addition, the Head provided a refuge from the more self-righteous fashions of the Sixties. Few of us did drugs. Not many were true fans of rock and roll. Almost all of us hated the war and despised Lyndon Johnson, but we did not slide off stools to join protest marches. We honored those who did. I covered all the great antiwar demonstrations in Washington and New York; but marching just wasn’t our style. In my columns, I defended “the kids” from the onslaught of cops and FBI men; but nobody from the Head was likely to join SDS or send money to the Black Panthers. I felt I was part of the Sixties and separate from them, sometimes a participant, more often a mere witness. My writing was altered by the fury and despair I saw in the ghetto riots. But it was Vietnam that inflamed the deepest emotions in my work and in the lives of millions. Vietnam was the focus for all public passion, the one great binder of generations. I don’t think any of us hated America; we wanted the war to end because we loved America. We wanted justice and baseball too.

As the Sixties moved on, as the Head became my local Great Good Place, my marriage to Ramona was disintegrating. Once, in Rome, where I went off each day to try writing in the cafés of the Via Veneto, Ramona had asked me for a divorce. I was, in my invincible stupidity, stunned.

What do you mean, a divorce?

I mean I can’t live like this anymore, she said.

How do you want to live?

In a house. With a room for each of the girls, with a backyard, with a husband who comes home every night and has dinner.

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

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

That small crisis was healed with sweet talk and promises. But I began to imagine a life without her. I didn’t want that; I still believed that we would be together for the rest of our lives. After all, my mother had gone through much worse with my father, and they were still together all these years later. In my erratic way, I tried to be better. I’d come home three evenings in a row, find a baby-sitter, take Ramona to a movie. Then I would miss dinner, call with some excuse about meeting a source or doing an interview, and try to remember the excuse in the morning. By 1967, Ramona was immune to my words.

You say things, she said one Sunday morning. You don’t mean them. They’re just words.

I make a living with words, I said. We eat because of my words. My words pay the rent.

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

Her disdain was clear. As I did after Richie cut into me on the night before I left for Barcelona, I saw the possibility that she was speaking the truth. Instead of accepting that possibility and bringing my life into line with my words, I turned her complaint around. I convinced myself that the problem wasn’t my neglect of her; it was her neglect of me. I would drop into the Head and have strangers praise some column I’d written. Letters about my columns poured into the newspaper. Most days, Paul Sann thought I was doing swell. But when I reached home for dinner, Ramona never said a word. She had stopped reading the Post. Instead of trying to earn her respect, I luxuriated in the delicious emotional state of feeling hurt.

If my work was ignored at home (I reasoned), then I had a license to go where it was appreciated: the Lion’s Head. Sometimes we hired a baby-sitter and I took Ramona with me; but the combination of drinking, machismo, intellectual bullshitting, and flattery seemed to repel her. She was sober and, after a while, I wasn’t. I remember some very good times; her memories are surely different.

9

THERE WAS ONE final move, one last attempt at repair. I heard about an apartment in Brooklyn, a few doors down from 471 Fourteenth Street, the lost sunny paradise of the first six years of my life. Maybe the girls could play under the elm trees as I did so long ago. Maybe we could go on long green summer walks in Prospect Park and in winter I could stand with them in a bright white meadow and together we would eat snow, as I had that time when I was a child. Maybe I could leave behind the life of the Head, the slippery delusions of Manhattan, and begin to make something more solid, back here where I’d begun my life. In our marriage now, we were living on maybe.

So we moved to Brooklyn, into what was called a parlor floor and basement. On the first day, I led the girls through the iron gate under the stoop and showed them their room to the left and the kitchen beyond it and then took them into the yard. A few doors away was the yard of 471, but when I looked for the great tree of my childhood, it was gone.

For a while, we were happy. I cut down on drinking, stayed away from the Head, worked hard. The children asked me to tell them stories or draw pictures of alligators and elephants. People came to visit. Jose Torres stopped by once a week to talk about his own writing, which he was doing now for El Diario and then for the Post. My brothers came around, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. We had barbecues in the yard. We drank beer. My father rang the bell on his way to Farrell’s and occasionally I went with him. He didn’t care for Ramona, but he liked the children. They loved him to sing “Paddy McGinty’s Goat.” So did the younger crowd at Farrell’s, the fans of Mick Jagger and John Lennon.

But the Sixties were remorseless in their power. There were drugs everywhere, and my brothers were not immune. When he was sixteen, Denis came by one night and he was stoned. In tears and remorse, he explained that he’d been doing pills and reefer. I arranged for him to go to Ireland and work for a while on a farm owned by Patty Clancy of the Clancy Brothers. Driving him to the airport, I remembered his brown wounded eyes on the day I went to Spain; now those same shy eyes looked at me as he went off to a kind of exile of his own.

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

I know you will.

I’ll write you letters.

Write stories too.

Off he went. But if Denis saved his life in Ireland, when he returned, his friends were already dying, some in Vietnam, too many from drugs. In 1969, Denis, along with Brian and John, put together a group that was going to the great rock festival in Woodstock. Ramona asked me if she could go with them.

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

Where will you stay? Are there hotels or inns?

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

And I stay home with the kids?

Well, yeah. .

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

So they all moved off to one of the great hedonistic festivals of the Sixties and I stayed home to mind the girls. They liked this, because I cooked each meal following recipes from a cookbook. I told them stories. I drew a lot of pictures. But while Ramona moved through the rains, drugs, and music of Woodstock, I was thinking about the grieving drizzle at the heart of our marriage. In a way, Ramona was now having the years that she’d lost when she married me at eighteen and had two children very quickly. At night, with the children asleep, I watched the television coverage of Woodstock and imagined her lost in the vast rain-drowned crowd.

After Woodstock, the sense of unravelment returned to our marriage, more powerfully than ever. She seemed to be moving through a different landscape than the one I inhabited. There were visible signs of it: the music playing steadily, her music, not mine; no answers to my calls from the newspaper; eyes that made no contact. More and more, I cooked dinner while the laundry piled up and beds went unmade. There was an arctic chill in the marriage bed.

I found consolation once more in the Head. The pattern resumed, the phone calls with excuses, the amiable lies. At the bar, I could believe that my life was a delight. When the talk turned to women, I assumed the mask of the stoic. Sometimes, hurting from hangover, I wondered whether my Lion’s Head friends were really my friends, whether they put up with me because of my personal qualities or because I wrote a newspaper column. The unspoken question was usually dissolved in vodka and laughter. I often got very drunk and then lurched into Sheridan Square to find a taxi that would bring me to Brooklyn, to the street where I was a boy with yellow hair. One time I came home drunk at three in the morning, made a mistake, went up the stoop of the house next door and climbed in the window. Two men were in bed together and started screaming in terror. I thought this was hilarious when I was told about it the next day. But the actual incident doesn’t exist in my memory; all I have is the version of the story told by others. That and the sense of shame that morning after when I tried to imagine what I looked like to those frightened men.

Ramona and I now had only the common ground of the children. One night, drunk again, I came home, opened the outer gate beneath the stoop and lurched into the inner door, smashing the window. In my hand I had two roses I’d bought from a flower seller in the Lion’s Head, one for Adriene, the other for Deirdre. I stepped over the broken glass and turned left into their bedroom. They’d awakened with the crash and there, suddenly, was their father. Their eyes were wide in fright or apprehension. I handed each of them a rose and told them I loved them. I did — but I’d broken too many things. It was time for me to go.

When we separated at last, I rented a basement apartment in a friend’s brownstone at the far end of Park Slope. The children could walk along the parkside to visit me; I could easily visit them. We went to Coney Island together, to block parties, to museums, as I played the new role of the Sunday father. The girls were delighted with the attention. They were baffled and confused about the fact that I was no longer living with them.

When are you coming home, Daddy? Adriene asked one day.

I don’t know, baby.

I want you to come home, Daddy.

We’ll see.

Almost all our talks ended this way. Deirdre was too young to understand; but Adriene understood very well that something terrible had happened to her life. After dropping them at home, I would walk slowly back to my place, loaded with misery. Sometimes, I walked it off. Other times, I reached for the easy solace of a bar.

In most ways, I felt an immense relief. It was no longer necessary to concoct lies if I wanted to stay up all night drinking. There were fewer evasions. The strained tension of life with Ramona was replaced with a correct civility. I realized finally that I could no longer escape to that elusive Great Good Place; it didn’t exist. I did more drinking than ever, sometimes alone, but I felt better about myself in the morning. I started reading fiction again and writing more carefully. At the Lion’s Head now, I even had the freedom to go home with women.

Then I started an affair with precisely the wrong woman for me. She was lovely, kind, smart, sensual, and rich. She was also a drinker. Soon we were parked together at the bar of the Lion’s Head. We were drinking at a table in Elaine’s (for she was an Uptown Girl). We were drinking at parties or traveling south to drink at some friend’s plantation. We got drunk a lot. And the drinking led to scenes, jealousies, anguished telephone calls, a variety of stupidities, not all of them mine. Doors were slammed. In the purple spirit of melodrama, all sudden departures were made in the dead of night.

This went on for almost a year. That year, I wrote a movie script that was filmed in Spain. We got drunk a lot in Almería, where all the spaghetti westerns were staged, and one night, coming to the defense of one drunken actor, I knocked out another actor and thought I’d killed him. My Uptown Girl had already gone home. I soon followed her, moved in for a few days, then fled to Brooklyn. There was one final angry night, both of us sodden after two days of drinking. The details are lost. But words were hurled in cruelty. There were curses and tears. And I was gone for good.

The next afternoon, I was alone in the Lion’s Head, reading the New York Times and sipping beer. I had no column to write and that was usually the best of days. Don Schlenck, the day bartender, was down at the far end, reading the Post and eating lunch. I looked up in the gloomy silence and peered out through the barred windows that opened at ground level to Christopher Street. I could see human legs going by. Two pairs of women’s legs. A man in jeans. A man in a gray suit. A man with a woman. Faceless. Without histories. Hurrying along. And then snow began to fall.

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

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

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

I picked up my change and walked out into the storm. I walked downtown, block after block, as the swirling snow obliterated the edges of buildings. The snow-bright streets looked as innocent as childhood, and I wanted to walk somewhere with my girls. But I couldn’t even do that. A few months earlier, Ramona had made her own trip to Mexico, to work for a degree at the University of the Americas, and she had taken the children with her. I was in New York, alone in the snow; they were in Puebla. And I was sick of myself. Sick of drinking. Sick of the routines of my life. At City Hall, my hair and coat fat with snow, I hurried down into the subway and went home. In the basement apartment in Park Slope, I took the telephone off the hook and slept.

10

I MET Shirley MacLaine in Rome in 1966 at a party thrown by the producer Joe Levine. We talked and had a few laughs before she went off to another table. I saw her again during Bobby Kennedy’s last campaign in California. She was with her husband, Steve Parker, who lived in Tokyo. That night I ended up at her house in Encino, drinking whiskey at the bar in the living room with Steve and Shirley, talking politics until three in the morning. She was funny. She was intelligent. She was passionate about the problems of the world. She never talked about movies. I liked her very much.

A year after I separated from Ramona, Shirley published her first book, a charming memoir called Don’t Fall Off the Mountain. Reading it, I discovered that we shared one common childhood passion: Bomba the Jungle Boy. One night she came into Elaine’s with some friends and stopped at my table to say hello. I mentioned Bomba. She sat down.

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

He had eye trouble too? she said.

I laughed.

Do you want a drink? I said.

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

A month later, we went to England together, where she was working on a television series, and moved into a large rented house near Windsor Castle. I kept writing my newspaper column, shipping it from various places in Europe. Before we met, I’d started writing movie scripts to supplement my newspaper habit; with her, I learned much about the craft, about putting people on stage, establishing conflict, using action to show character. But I was still drinking. I didn’t often get drunk. In her world, most people simply didn’t drink the way I’d learned to drink; they would soon be out of the business. But I did drink steadily, easing the tension created by meeting so many new people, adjusting to a relationship in which I was not the principal.

Shirley never mentioned the drinking to me. Her father was a hard drinker too, and like me she’d grown up in the hard-drinking Fifties. But there was an indirect scrutiny. Sometimes in conversation she’d dismiss an actor or director as a drunk. If she saw a scene in a movie, or read a script where a character succumbs to another because of drunkenness, she’d shake her head. It’s a cheat, she’d say. It’s using the drink instead of forcing the painful choice. As an actress she was relentless in trying to get to the core of human character and discovering human weakness. Why does he do these things? she’d say about a character in a script. What hurt him? What warped him? What does he want, and what’s preventing him from getting it?

When she was off at work one morning, I was sitting at my typewriter, gazing at the gardens of England, and began applying those questions to myself. I couldn’t accept my own answers.

Back in New York, I started to work harder than ever before on movie scripts and magazine articles and columns. Necessity drove me: I needed the money. After they returned from Mexico; Ramona and I had agreed to place the girls in a boarding school, to give them some steadiness and structure while she tried to sort out her life. This arrangement wasn’t intended to be permanent; I bought a big house in Park Slope in Brooklyn, full of vague plans about getting custody of the children and having them live there with me and Shirley. This was absurd, of course; Shirley was an old Broadway gypsy, an itinerant who lived where the work was. She did help me set up the house. But she kept her apartment in Manhattan. She was never going to live among the burghers of Brooklyn.

A year went by, then another. Ramona and I were divorced in an amicable way. She found another man to live with and tried for a while to be a photographer. But the children remained in boarding school in Switzerland. Sometimes I paid for Ramona to visit them. I visited them myself three or four times during the school year, laden down with gifts, wrote them long letters, spoke to them by telephone. They came home to stay with me at Christmas and Easter and across the summers. But then it would be time for them to leave and I’d be full of sorrow and grieving guilt. I wanted them with me all the time, but Shirley made clear to me that she wasn’t going to be part of a household that included Adriene and Deirdre.

I have no talent for that, she said. I would be terrible at it. It would be a mess.

The girls resented her, blaming her for the breakup with Ramona, which wasn’t her fault at all, seeing her as the person who was keeping them from her father, which was true.

I want to come home to stay for good, Adriene said to me one evening in the big house in Brooklyn. I want to live in my own room. I want to be with you, Daddy. Please. Please.

Her words drilled into me. But I felt paralyzed. Instead of making a decision, choosing my children over a woman, I postponed the choice. Off they went again to the airport, Adriene in tears, Deirdre sullen. I went back to the empty house, choked with remorse, and drank until I slept. There were too many versions of this same scene.

In addition to vodka, I used movement and traveling to prevent too much brooding. When good parts for women began drying up in the movies, Shirley created a nightclub act, singing and dancing and cracking wise. I admired the power of her will, her refusal to simply end her career that early, the way in which she whipped herself into physical shape, driving herself harder than any athlete. I traveled a lot with the show, back and forth to California, to Las Vegas and Canada and Florida. In 1972, Shirley got involved in the presidential campaign of George McGovern, which I covered; that also put us on the road, checking in and out of hotel rooms, making long-distance calls to friends and children and family. Sometimes I would stay behind in New York and return to the Head and get drunk in the old style. Sometimes I would retreat to the Brooklyn house and get drunk in its empty rooms. Then I’d be gone again, following my star. Most of the time, when I was away, my brothers Denis and John lived in the house, watering the plants, reading the books, throwing parties. They loved the place. But it never felt like a home to me. I didn’t want to look at the rooms where the girls stayed on their holidays. I didn’t want to imagine domestic scenes that could not become real.

As the months passed, I began to notice odd little signs of deterioration. Typing a column or a script, I would misspell simple words, not just once, but eight or nine times. Sometimes my fingers felt like gloves filled with water and typing was a plodding effort of physical labor. My hands trembled too, and there were odd twitches in my legs, little spasms of protest, or I’d wake up with no feeling in my legs. I shook off most of these signals. I was just getting older, I told myself. I’m thirty-seven, and that makes me older than most of the ballplayers and all of the prizefighters. Hell, even the police lieutenants are younger than I am. But on a few clear-eyed mornings I knew that my body was sending me a message. I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

Besides, I was also having a good time. There were parties to attend, political fund-raisers, movie premieres. Shirley sampled my world too. One St. Patrick’s night, we piled into a car with five uniformed firemen, all of us drinking, and went over the bridge to Brooklyn. That night, Shirley became the first woman ever served at the bar at Farrell’s, a personal triumph that was discussed for months in the Neighborhood. She sampled hot dogs at Coney Island and clams at Sheep’s Head Bay. She came with me on some nights to the Lion’s Head, to stand at the bar, talking politics, or to listen to the singing in the big table in the back room. But these were usually mere excursions. We ended up at Elaine’s or at her apartment. She never got drunk. But now she was drinking even less, watching her weight to stay in dancing trim. I was drinking more.

11

I N THE POLITICAL YEAR of 1972, I’d begun to hang out in a new saloon on Fifty-second Street. It was called Jimmy’s and was located in the building a few doors from 21 that had once been occupied by Toots Shor’s famous joint. Shor’s old circular bar was still there, and for a while the place had a kind of forced magic. Two of Mayor John Lindsay’s former aides — Sid Davidoff and Dick Aurelio — owned the place, and they helped attract a core crowd of newspapermen and politicians. A wonderful guy named Doug Ireland was a regular, a pilgrim from the Lion’s Head; he was a political operator who wanted to write. Some other members of the downtown crowd found their way to the circular bar, but the place was no substitute for the Head. There were no Clancy Brothers singing at tables, no old communists, nobody from the Lincoln Brigade, no seamen or poets. That was the year of George McGovern and the Watergate burglary; Nixon was triumphant; human beings were still dying in Vietnam. The binding element of the regular Jimmy’s crowd was politics.

As I stood at the bar of Jimmy’s one December night, while Shirley was playing in Vegas, I talked with passion about Nixon and the Watergate burglary, making epigrams, telling jokes, repeating lines that had gotten laughs from others. Suddenly, hearing myself repeat lines I’d used in other places, I began to feel oddly detached. I was there; but I was also looking at myself being there. Part of this eerie feeling came from living with Shirley. From her, I had learned much about the way actors worked, the mechanisms they used to become other people, the small signs and tags that they offered to display emotions they might not feel. That night, for the first time, I began to feel that I was performing my life instead of living it.

The feeling haunted me for days. The girls were home for Christmas and I brought them to see my mother and father, who had moved from 378 to a new flat in Bay Ridge. But as Adriene and Deirdre ate dinner and accepted presents that were not to be opened until Christmas, I wondered if I was being their father or playing their father. Was I truly being the thoughtful son with my mother, the loving admirer of my father, or was I just playing a role? I wanted all four of them, children and parents, to love me. But I felt as if my lines were calculated, not spontaneous. They might love the person I was presenting to them. But that person might not be me.

A few nights later, Denis came to visit me in the Brooklyn house. He was in college now. We sat in the living room, drinking beer from cans, while the lights of the Christmas tree bubbled and danced. The children were asleep in their rooms on the top floor.

I’m gonna try and do it, he said. I mean, really become a writer.

I waved at the bookshelves.

You have to read all of them, I said. They’ll teach you everything. The more you read, the more you’ll know about writing. Look at the way a guy writes a paragraph and try to break it down. If the guy makes you cry or laugh, analyze how he did it. .

I stopped. Was I speaking genuinely, or was this some unwritten script I was performing? Was I being generous to this good, talented kid or playing the wise older brother? In some peculiar way, did I need him to need me? Was I being real or playing a role? I didn’t know. I drank some more beer and talked about Nixon.

On New Year’s Eve, Jimmy’s tossed a party. Shirley was back from Vegas, and we went early in the evening and sat at the crowded bar with Doug Ireland. Everybody was drinking. Doug was witty. We exchanged lines. But once more, I felt as if I were shooting the scene with a camera from across the bar. At one point, as I lit a cigarette, I noticed that my hand was trembling and wondered if that was in the camera shot. Other people came in and I saw myself embracing them, heard my voice wishing them well. I saw Doug’s head fall forward, then jerk up. He recovered with a funny line. It was New Year’s Eve. We were supposed to be having a good time. Look: There were balloons. There were funny hats. There were noisemakers. Charlie? Bring me a vodka and tonic, will you please?

I was in the men’s room when I thought about Adriene and Deirdre. I wanted to be with them in the house in Brooklyn. I wanted to sit in the living room with them and hug them and tell them stories. I wanted to heal some of the wounds I’d cut into them. If this was a play, I wanted a better script.

Back at the bar, I sipped my drink and held Shirley’s hand. Then the band started playing. A group of gangsters came in with a group of women in beehive hairdos. The gangsters smoked cigars, the women chewed gum. They sat down front, with waiters bowing to them. All played their parts to perfection. Then the star of the evening came on. Ladies and gennnulman, the one and only. . Buddy Greco! The singer was perfectly groomed and perfectly dressed and he began to sing in still another of the endless varieties of the Sinatra style his version of “Lulu’s Back in Town.” The gangsters followed their scripts, nudging each other in approval, their knees bobbing to the rhythm. A few celebrants snapped their fingers. Doug nodded. I stared into my glass, at the melting ice and vodka-logged lime.

And I said to myself, I’m never going to do this again.

I finished my drink. It was the last one I ever had.