Of course I knew about Pete Hamill, and did read The Drinking Life, which I enjoyed. My own recovery from drinking was by then several years old—and continues— but I wanted to read someone's else's experience.
Perhaps oddly enough my memorable take aways from the book were not anything he wrote about alcoholism, but a few other things.
The dust jacket of the book was a great colorized photo of the high school boys in Brooklyn walking to what I'm sure was a Catholic High School, perhaps Bishop Ford. I'm sure it's a Catholic High School because they seemed dressed up a bit, carrying books. The great part of the picture is that they are passing one storefront after another that is a bar.
Bars in what the NYT calls "the outer boroughs" were omnipresent in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens in the '50s. Hamill was born in Brooklyn, and passed away in Brooklyn, in the same Methodist hospital his mother once worked in. Talk about a Möbius strip. In between the cradle and the grave he lived in Dublin, Barcelona, Mexico City, Saigon, San Juan, Rome and Tokyo. The rooftop homing pigeon came back to the nest.
Pete Hamill was 85 when he passed away, meaning of course we was born in 1935, s hardscrabble time between the wars dominated by the Depression and the end of Prohibition. Brooklyn was and still is part of New York City, but was its own city up until 1898, when it was incorporated into the political aegis of New York City.
The Borough/city had everything. Racetracks, Coney Island beaches, amusement rides, huge parks, colleges, the famous Green-wood a warship shipyard, gangsters, solid homes, and of course a major league baseball team, the Dodgers, named for what they called people who quickly crossed a street trying to avoid getting hit by a trolley. Sometimes their can't-wait-habits proved fatal, and their fatality held everything up. There were "sick" passengers even before there were subway announcements.
In his autobiography "A Drinking Life" Hamill recounts the awe of going into Manhattan as a youngster. It was Oz. He looked at Manhattan (what a true New Yorker will always refer to as the "city") just as Frank Sinatra looked at it from the New Jersey side of the Hudson River in Hoboken, their destination in life. THe land to conquer. Fittingly, Hamill wrote a well-regarded piece on Sinatra, "Why Sinatra Matters" (1998).
One of the most enduring nuggets of reading "A Drinking Life" was the mention of his father who had a leg amputated after it was broken in a soccer match. His father waited for hours at Kings County hospital before they treated him, and by then, the leg needed to he amputated.
What struck me on reading that was what I didn't read. There was no mention made of suing the great city of New York for inadequate care. People were not litigious then.
I have a good friend who has a somewhat similar story of having his tonsils out. It was the 1950s, and tonsillectomies were as common as circumcisions. The adenoids were usually taken out as well. A T&A. It was rite of passage. There wasn't a kid I knew, male or female, in my grammar school classes who hadn't had their tonsils and adenoids out.
For some reason, despite having tonsillitis, my tonsils were never taken out. My appendix was however removed, and gave me better surgical bragging rights.
My friend was slated for just a tonsillectomy, no adenoid removal. Seems the surgeon blundered, went for the adenoids and nicked a vital blood vessel, causing major bleeding complications. My friend spent a week in the hospital having almost died from a simple tonsillectomy. No lawsuit for negligence was ever filed by his family.
One of the Tweets that have popped up about Hamill is that long ago he bought a plot in Brooklyn's famous Green-Wood Cemetery. Supposedly the plot is near where the famously corrupt NYC politician Boss Tweed is buried. Hamill liked the idea of being buried near a rogue. "I bought a plot in Green-Wood Cemetery right next to Boss Tweed. Because if there's an afterlife, who wants to be with a saint?"
Certainly saints are boring and too hard to write bout. Hamill, like Jimmy Breslin, liked to paint the images of characters who might be less than saintlike, but were infinitely more interesting. I remember seeing an interview with Breslin not too long before he passed away and he was saddened by the disappearance of the local bookies in the candy stores. "The crooks were always more interesting."
I never knew Hamill won a Grammy for writing liner notes to a Bob Dylan album. Didn't know they even had a Grammy for that. Just another of his many acknowledgements and awards added to the pile.
I saw Pete Hamill a few years ago when he was at a Barnes and Noble book store on Warren Street in Manhattan. He, and a group of other writers were there to discuss a new book that was a collection of stories about boxers. "At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing (2104). On the stage set up in what is the children's section, where on any given day you'd find a slew of baby strollers parked there, were Pete, Mike Lupica, Robert Lipsyte, Colum McCann, and George Kimball, a co-editor of the book. McCann was the only one who wasn't newspaper writer, having just completed a novel "Let the Great World Spin." I think he wrote the introduction.
I remember Colum looked very literary with a scarf around his neck, and Mike Lupica is really short and comes from Canastoa, New York, home of the boxing Hall of Fame.
Pete remarked that Breslin was missing, someone who would tell you in a heartbeat that W.C. Heinz's "Brownsville Bum' about Al (Bummy) Davis was the best boxing story ever written. The story is in the collection. Pete also fondly remembered the smell of cigar smoke at the fights, when smoking was allowed indoors.
Being a Brooklyn native, Hamill was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. He was 12 when Jackie Robinson came into the league. Pete was an Ebbets Field diehard, who like anyone else in Brooklyn was stricken sick when the owner Walter O'Malley heartlessly decided to move the team to Los Angeles, getting a sweetheart deal to build a stadium in Chavez Ravine. O'Malley convinced his friend Horace Stoneham, the owner of the Giants, to also move after the 1957 season so that Dodgers wouldn't be all alone on the West Coast. The Dodgers and the Giants were following the population that would see the Pacific West become the population center it is today. Major League Baseball was finally going to be west of St. Louis.
The Dodgers were named after what they called pedestrians who couldn't wait to cross the street, and therefore "dodged" trolley cars, not always successfully. There were fatalities, and even then there were "sick" passengers who caused system delays long before the subway announcements of today.
I had a manager who was born in Brooklyn whose father was a vice president at Chase Manhattan bank. The father always told his son that O'Malley wasn't heartless, because that would be an anatomical impossibility.
In a famous story, Hamill and another reporter Jack Newfield were once in a place selling alcohol who asked each other to write down on separate cocktail napkins the three most reviled men of the 20th Century. Without any talk amongst themselves, they each separately wrote: Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Walter O'Malley. The votes were in.
Hamill was a man about town, dating A-List females like Jackie Kennedy, Shirley MacLaine and Linda Ronstadt. I don't know if he had a table at Rao's, but I'm sure he didn't have to wait at Elaine's or the TriBeCa Grill co-owned by Robert De Niro. Pete was a celebrity in his own right.
I remember reading his Op-Ed piece that was either in the NYT or the WSJ about why he wasn't going to be at the closing of the Red Lion, the Greenwich Village watering hole that is where The Clancy Brothers started.
Pete wrote he had given up drinking for several years ago, and that he wasn't going to go back to the scene of that past where he and his colleagues piled in after deadline from The New York Post on South Street. The Red Lion was their office.
He did fondly reminisce that he would never forget the time he was there and a man at a nearby table dropped dead of a heart attack, and another man at another table quickly told the waitress that he didn't want what he was having.
For someone who didn't read Pete Hamill I still felt he would be good to write to about the workplace shooting at Empire BlueCross and BlueShield that took place on September 16, 2002 when my vice president murdered two of my colleagues and then took his own life.
In 2004 I wrote a 9,000 word piece about the bloodbath, and what conditions might have driven someone to do something as heinous as a double murder, then suicide. I mailed the piece to his attention at his recent publisher, Little Brown, but never heard a word. Either he never got the piece, or he had no interest. Or, he was acting like Ulysses S. Grant who claimed he got less and less mail when he took to not answering it. I'll never know.
I've never even allowed more than a select handful of people to read the piece. It was my letter to James Wechsler, The New York Post editor Hamill wrote that led to his being hired as a young man just out of the Navy. I wasn't looking for a job, but rather hoping to reach an ear who might be interested in what might drive human behavior to such a horrible act.
Years ago Pete apparently bought a burial plot in Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn near where the infamously corrupt NYC politician Boss Tweed was buried. He offered his reasoning that if there's an afterlife, "who wants to be buried near a saint." The Irish/Catholics like Hamill always have an outlook toward death.
For myself, I can't boast the same lineage, but I've started to think about what instructions I might leave behind. I've flirted with two headstone inscriptions: "I Got Most Things Right" and "I'm Not Happy About This At All."
But lately I'm leaning toward something Pete wrote at the outset of an introduction for a collection of obituaries: "Life is the leading cause of death."
He is right about that.
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