PETE Hamill at 60 looks better than many a man half his age. Stocky, a little over weight, his bright, intelligent face has scarcely a sign of wrinkles there's not a grey hair on his head. And this is after more than 20 years of what Hamill himself as "the drinking life."
"The drinking file" for Hamill was the life of the newspaperman in New York in the late 50s and 60s a frenzied round of reporting engagements, prize fights, baseball games, political meetings, fires, murders. And afterwards, the warm camaraderie and the gossip in the smoky back rooms along Broadway and Greenwich Village, where he says he learnt much about being human and mastering the craft of journalism.
It is a craft at which Pete Hamill has distinguished himself, in a long career which has taken him from New York to Vietnam, to South America and Northern Ireland. Along the way he has worked for all the big names in American publishing The New York Post, The New York Daily News, The Village Voice. Esquire, Vanity Fair. But it was a career he never dreamed he would enter, being as he was, a Brooklyn Mick, the son of poor, immigrant parents from Belfast.
He considers himself blessed to have been a journalist. He remembers going home from long stints on The New York Post and drinking sessions with journalist colleagues in the Page One bar, anxious to get to sleep so that he could wake up and do it all again. On the days he wasn't drinking, he sometimes couldn't sleep because sentences would be careering around his brain and he'd lie in bed in his flat on Ninth Street, rewriting copy that he had submitted to his editor hours earlier.
It was a wide, heady, exciting time, partying with people like the Rolling Stones, drinking with actors like Richard Harris, travelling to Spain and Italy and Mexico. But eventually the drinking began to take its toll. First his marriage broke up, then he began to notice warning physical signs misspelling simple words when typing out a story, trembling hands in the mornings, little spasms of protest. Gradually, Hamill came to realise that his drinking would have to stop.
HE remembers the last time he had a drink. He remembers what it was vodka and tonic. A party in Jimmy's Bar on Filly second Street, New York, New Year's Eve 1972. A crowd of old friends including the actress, Shirley McLaine, Buddy Greco singing on stage. The ice melting in the lime logged glass Hamill saying to himself and never going to do this again."
He has put it all in his biography, named appropriately Drinking Life which details his early years growing up in Brooklyn, his time in the US navy and his induction into the newspaper business. It is a warm, endearing book, written with humour and sharp observation, in the crisp style he first learned as a reporter on The New York Post It was an instant bestseller when it was first published in the US in 1994, shifting 160,000 copies in hardback and treble that in paperback. It went through seven reprintings and was 20 weeks in The New York Times bestsellers list.
Ham ill says he decided to write the book when some of his old friends from the drinking life began to die. He says they were decent, talented, generous and humane, but as they approached the end, physically ruined by decades of drinking, he remembered more of their good times than they did. The book is dedicated to them.
It has attracted the kind of reviews that a writer prays for names like John Gregory Dunne, Carl Hiassen, Pete Dexter, E.L. Doctorow, singing its praises in papers across the US. But Hamill is modest about his success. He has seven novels, two books of short stories and several books of journalism to his credit.
Today, he lives in the town of Walkill, New York. He keeps fit by walking a lot and says that his second wife, the writer, Fukiko Aoki makes sure he eats right.
He has just finished a novel called Shahbos Goy, about a Christian kid in Brooklyn who comes into the synagogue on Saturday to do the small jobs that the orthodox jew can't do because its the sabbath. It was a job Hamill himself did when he was growing up. Next, he will start work on an art book about Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist of the 1930s.