A Drinking Life

1

I DIDN’T JOIN join Alcoholics Anonymous. I didn’t seek out other help. I just stopped. My goal was provisional and modest: one month without drinking. For the first few weeks, this wasn’t easy. I had to break the habits of a lifetime. But I did some mechanical things. I created a mantra for myself, saying over and over again, I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it. I began to type pages of private notes, reminding myself that writers were rememberers and I had already forgotten material for twenty novels. I urged myself to live in a state of complete consciousness, even when that meant pain or boredom.

The first weeks stretched into a month, and after thirty days, I already felt better physically. My hands stopped trembling. There were no more twitches in my legs or numbness in the morning. And the strange misspellings disappeared from my copy. I had a tremendous craving for sugar and began to eat more ice cream and candy than I had since moving away from Sanew’s. In the mornings, I felt clear and fresh.

When the month was up, I set a deadline for a second month. I sat down and wrote my novella, The Gift, in one miraculous spurt, working day and night, removed from the world. The book was full of drinking and love for my father and the sweat poured out of me while I wrote. I thought of the book as my own gift to him, a declaration of his value that he could read while he was alive, and an explanation of myself to him and to me. Jason Epstein bought it for Random House. Another dry month went by, and now my mind was teeming with ideas and projects. I realized that for years I’d been squeezing my talent out of a toothpaste tube. I’d misused it and abused it and failed to replenish it with deep reading and full consciousness. I began to listen to music again. To Erroll Garner and Ben Webster. To Ray Charles and rock and roll. I was greedy for what I had missed.

Finally I tested myself at the Lion’s Head, standing at the bar with the regulars. I didn’t want to come among them with the zeal of a new convert. They knew I was off the sauce and smiled in a knowing way when I ordered a ginger ale. The smiles were understandable; a lot of people we knew had quit drinking before, and some of them were right there at the bar, belting down whiskey. But I had one major ally among the regulars: the bearded poet Joel Oppenheimer. A few months earlier, the doctors had ordered him to stop drinking and he’d followed their orders. He still smoked his Gauloises, still arrived each day in the afternoon, still looked lecherously at the young women. But he did it all on Coca-Cola. You won’t have as much fun, Joel cautioned me. But the fun will really be fun.

The sensation of performance ebbed. I cared less about the way I appeared to others, prepared to be dismissed as a bore, no longer as quick, silly, or entertaining as I’d been in the past. But Joel laughed at my remarks; I laughed at his. It was the drunks who were the problem. I started hearing stories I’d heard many times before, or relatively new ones repeated four times in an evening. I was polite. I listened. I laughed at the punch lines. But I didn’t drink.

Shirley was on the road, and I enjoyed staying in the house in Brooklyn, leaving the Lion’s Head in the cold evenings, my eyes blurring from the wind, my lungs swelling with the fresh air. I liked reading myself to sleep a lot more than falling into a swollen stupor. When I was with my children at Easter — the months piling up now — they seemed to notice a difference. I took them to restaurants and they exchanged glances when I ordered ginger ale or club soda. They began asking me endless questions about American sports, American music, and American history. Adriene reminded me of the night I broke the door on Fourteenth Street and then gave them each a rose. She laughed. I felt a stab of pain. I never wanted to be drunk in their presence again.

There were some crucial tests. The first took place at the end of January, when Frank Crowther from the Lion’s Head organized a huge party at the Four Seasons to celebrate Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday. It was like a rush hour crowd in the A train, except that everybody was drinking or smoking joints or both. I put my back against a pole and watched the crowd eddy around me. Joe Flaherty. Jules Feiffer. Jack Lemmon. Hello. How are ya? What’s doing? Editors, photographers, politicians. Whatta you hear? Need a drink? No, I’m on the wagon.

And then Mailer stood up in a spotlight to make a speech, squinting into the light, adopting his most belligerent stance. He was very drunk, holding a glass in his hand. He told a pointless joke about an Oriental cunt and then moved into some heavy metaphysical description of an organization or movement or cult that he was founding, called the Fifth Estate. He said it would monitor the multiple paranoid operations of the CIA. I remembered the way he drove me all the way to Manhattan from the 1964 convention in Atlantic City when Deirdre was born. And how kind he’d always been to me at prizefights and parties. Up there in the light, did Mailer feel that he was performing his life too? From the safe darkness of the crowd, people started shouting insults; others laughed; Mailer looked confused, exactly like an actor who was being hooted for a performance he thought was brilliant. Suddenly I wanted a drink. This was like bearbaiting. A friend was in trouble and there was nothing I could do about it except join him. I turned toward the bar and saw more laughing idiot faces. And said: No. Fuck it all, no. Not a drop. Not here. Not with these people. Never. I pushed my way through the crowd, found my coat, and went out to the street.

I walked for blocks, suddenly understanding clearly that another of the many reasons I drank was to blur the embarrassment I felt for my friends. If a friend was drunk and making an ass of himself, then I’d get drunk and make an ass of myself too. And there was some residue in me of the old codes of the Neighborhood, some deep adherence to the rules about never, ever rising above your station. Getting drunk was a way of saying I would never act uppity, never forget where I came from. No drunk, after all, could look down on others. Being drunk was the great leveler, a kind of Christian act of communion. Who could ever point the finger of harsh judgment at a drunk if we all were drunk? I’d do the same thing in the company of friends who thought they were failures and I was a success. Who could accuse me of snobbery, a big head, deserting my friends, if I was just another bum in the men’s room throwing up on his shoes?

The second test was more dangerous. On May first, my father celebrated his seventieth birthday and we threw him a party. There were hams and pasta and chicken and cold cuts; cases of beer; bottles of whiskey and bowls of ice. With all the kids and cousins and the singing of songs, I was back in the dense sweet closed grip of family. And history. Irish history and my father’s history. And mine. The party rolled on. The music played. I was laughing, singing, making plump sandwiches, and then, suddenly, I wanted a drink. My father was being urged into “My Auld Scalera Hat.” Someone found a hat and he took it as his prop and his face was transformed, he was beaming and happy, his jet-black hair still as shining and young as it was back when I first saw him perform. I loved him; Jesus Christ, I loved him. But then I backed up, quiet, allowing him his moment on the stage. I was myself now, for better or worse. I was forever Billy Hamill’s son, but I did not want to be the next edition of Billy Hamill. He had his life and I had mine. And if there were patterns, endless repetitions, cycles of family history, if my father was the result of his father and his father’s father, on back through the generations into the Irish fogs, I could no longer accept any notion of predestination. Someone among the males of this family had to break the pattern. It might as well be me. I didn’t have a drink.

Across those first months, I began to think that I only had to give up one drink: the next one. If I didn’t have that drink, I’d never have another. If that was a trick, then the trick worked, most of the time. The rest of the time, I needed words. For years, I had interviewed politicians in bars. Now I suggested we go for a cup of coffee. Dinner parties were problems because I was always explaining myself.

No, I don’t drink, thank you.

Not even wine?

Nothing, thanks.

But why?

I have no talent for it, I said.

Now I saw more clearly what drinking did to people. In Hollywood, I met old directors and forgotten screenwriters and unemployed actors: all broken by booze. I heard jokes about the Malibu AA, where there were eleven actors in one group and one driver’s license. But I didn’t laugh, felt no comfort in their humiliation. I remembered some of the final tortured stories by Scott Fitzgerald and felt surges of pity, for Fitzgerald, for the people I met, for my friends. I resisted pitying myself. I have stopped, I said to myself. If I begin again, I don’t even deserve pity.

The temptation to begin again grew weaker and then, before the year was finished, disappeared. Somehow, I’d replaced the habit of drinking with the habit of nondrinking. I still visited bars, listened to the stories, remembered the few memorable remarks, but even the bartenders now began to pour a soda when I walked in. My own imagination helped me. I couldn’t imagine enduring again the physical horrors of hangover. And I didn’t ever want to spend a day lacerating myself over the social or personal crimes and misdemeanors I’d committed while drinking. No more apologies for stupid phone calls, asinine remarks, lapses in grace. I might still do such things, but I would do them with an unimpaired mind.

Now I had more time than I’d ever had as an adult. I had gained the time I once spent drinking and the time I needed for recovery. And I began writing as never before, studying the craft with a professional’s forever unsatisfied standards. I had lived past the first rush of arrival, when raw talent can carry you across most barriers. Now I had to learn enough to last a lifetime. I’m still learning.

2

ONE JANUARY afternoon, after five sober years, I went for another walk in the snow. The children were home in the big house on Prospect Park West, and if I had not yet repaired some of the damage I’d inflicted on them and others, I was trying, I was trying. I wandered into the park, which was whitening under the heavy snowfall. And stood under a dense pine tree and then imagined figures coming down hills and across snowy meadows. Down there by the lake, Maureen Crowley was waiting for me on a bench. Over in the boathouse, Burne Hogarth was explaining trapezoids and Laura was in a blue smock, pulling heavy drags on a cigarette, while snow skirled like fog. In the snow, my mother was calling us home to dinner. Tim was there and Billy and Jake, all of us laughing, bellywhopping on Suicide Hill before heading for Boop’s, and Jose was jogging down snowy roads, and Joel Oppenheimer was defiantly smoking his black tobacco cigarettes while snow gathered on his Mets cap. Beside the Swan Lake, the Tigers and the South Brooklyn Boys were gathering in some violent ritual of the tribe. Up on the hill beside the Quaker Cemetery, Bomba the Jungle Boy was waiting out the winter beside a fire in a cave.

Then I heard my father singing.

On the west coast of Ireland

One morning there was seen …

And I loved my life, with all its hurts and injuries and failures, and the things I now saw clearly, and the things I only remembered through the golden blur of drink. I reached down and took a great mound of fresh snow in my hands and began to eat. I was home. I was free. I’d leave the rest to Providence and Paddy McGinty’s goat.