A Drinking Life (40 page)

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

T
HE 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

T
HERE 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.