MOST autobiographies are memoirs of a career old actors or politicians tracing their progress without that scaffolding the structure tends to collapse, or lean towards fiction. Pete Hamill's approach reminds me of the Indian proverb "Use a thorn to remove a thorn" he uses drink, the great illusion maker, as a focus.
In a way this is a device, for he was at worst a heavy drinker, usually in control. But it is a strong device drink embraced him in adolescence and grew about him like a vine. Following the vine's growth, we can follow the twists of his life. When in 1972, approaching forty he chopped the vine down, we recognise in this oration to his old companion someone whom we all, drinkers or not, have known.
"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 Neighbourhood, 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.
For "others", read "father". His father, Billy Ham ill, was a drinker, a Belfast Catholic who emigrated to New York with his Belfast Catholic wife, who did not drink. All the strong cliches are here the father who could be maudlin but not affectionate the mother affectionate and religious. Here they are in August, 1945, when Hiroshima was bombed Mother "Those poor people."
Father "What poor people? They're Japs!"
When Nagasaki was bombed, Father and Mother agreed "That old Truman. He picked the one city in Japan that was Catholic.
I have read no better account of an Irish American childhood. New York City is as remote as Belfast. Home is not even Brooklyn, but that part of it called The Neighbourhood, where everyone knows everyone, where everyone lives in the street Syrians, Jews, Italians, Irish. Everyone gets letters from the Old Country far away, and yet home is a village where distances are measured by manhole covers "Six sewers away" is another country.
But this melting pot had its work cut out to dissolve old Irish stew bones Billy Hamill's moody drunkenness, his wife's stubborn faith. Children are like diplomats, back and forth between the parents trying to reconcile differences. This is done inwardly, too. Already as a boy Pete Hamill had turned to drawing and writing, making a harmonious new world. The melting pot offered solvents not to be had in the old country by fifteen he was sleeping with girls, by sixteen he had left home for his own apartment. But still those old Irish bones would not dissolve. Hamill took to drink for the next twenty years.
For lovers of sour grapes, there is a feast here Laura the art school model who took Hamill as her lover, trips to Mexico, adventures and assignations, money, film stars . . . and none of it satisfying, all of it overshadowed by drink. An envious fear crossed my mind sometimes that those grapes were sweet, that Hamill enjoyed himself, but got out in time.