A Life Once Distilled in Vodka and Tonic

Warm and snug in the Lion’s Head as an icy rain lashes the Greenwich Village streets outside, Pete Hamill is recalling when this bar built its following in the late ‘60s.

Seamen, stockbrokers, communists, bohemians, entertainers and newspapermen all found the subterranean haunt on Christopher Street--such an eclectic crew, he says, “that I think that’s what kept the sense of excitement going.”

Hamill--longtime Lion’s Head customer, novelist, veteran columnist and the editor of the New York Post during several tumultuous weeks last year--paints this nostalgic picture fueled not by strong waters, of which he consumed an ocean through the years, but by a diet soda. Later, he switches to black coffee.

Despite the enduring image of hard-swilling news animal that adheres so readily to a few columnists, Hamill ended his drinking days and nights 22 years ago. He was seeing in the new year with a vodka and tonic in one hand, Shirley MacLaine’s hand in the other and the lounge crooner Buddy Greco performing before a room rich with gangsters and beehive hairdos.

Feeling as if he was in a badly written play, he stared into his glass and said to himself, “I’m never going to do this again.” Cold turkey.

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That scene ends Hamill’s memoir, “A Drinking Life” (Little, Brown). He describes the moment when he decided “I will live my life from now on, I will not perform it,” only after he retraces his lifelong intimacy with booze and the resulting wreckage.

As a result, his story becomes a memoir of Brooklyn during the ‘40s and ‘50s, the thirsty Irish who peopled its street corner taverns and the complicated yearnings among first-generation Americans such as himself who were bound by the suffocating code of The Neighborhood. It tells of Hemingway-esque wanderlust in Spain and Mexico and the uneasy love between a father and his oldest son. And always, the glass.

“Part of being a man was to drink,” he writes. In Hamill’s case, more than two decades of the drinking life--working hard, but carousing with pals when he wasn’t working--cost him a marriage and left him with a lingering regret over unrealized opportunities.

“The last thing I wanted to do was write some kind of John Barleycorn, Jack London kind of screed about the evils of drink.” Hamill says. “And I know that you can’t separate the dancer from the dance. You can’t deal with the problem, particularly if it’s crucial to your life, without explaining the life and the way those two things were woven together.”

Hamill, 58, originally began writing a book about the year 1955 in New York, seeking to answer the question: The city has gone to hell compared to when? “And I realized that there was a common bond to a lot of the research--and that was drinking,” he says. “It was everywhere in the culture then. If you went to the Cedar Tavern, there were Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. It was all over, among the poets, among the writers. The ‘50s was still a very hard-drinking period in New York.”

He decided to set aside thick files of research material to mine his own history and how he ended up drying out.

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To those who have passed nights secure in what Hamill calls “the leveling democracy of drink,” his book may evoke a warm, perhaps dimly remembered feeling of those welcoming taverns where all are one and the past barely exists. A good bar is “the womb,” Hamill says. “I don’t think it’s sentimentalizing or romanticizing it to acknowledge the power of that.

“What I call ‘the drinking life’ or ‘the culture of drink’ includes not just the stuff that’s in the glass but everything that goes with it. A great bar when it’s working has an element of forgiveness in it. If you’re a total idiot, your friends forgive you.”

At the same time, Hamill concedes that, yes, he hopes that the honesty of his story will also prove helpful.

“If two people read it and say, ‘I got to stop this bleep . I gotta live my life and not perform it,’ then it’s accomplished something,” he says. “But I know from my own time as a drinker and from the lives of my friends and relatives who have had hard times with this thing, that the last thing you can do with a person is a sermon. You can’t go in and say, ‘Repent ye wicked, the day of judgment is nigh.’ And most of the literature that I looked at is basically sermonizing.”

Since draining that last vodka and tonic in 1972, Hamill has written pulp fiction, serious novels, short-story collections and books of reportage.

“A Drinking Life,” his 11th book, may turn out to be his biggest hit. Although it reached stores only recently, sales in New York and Los Angeles have begun strong, and, based on mostly good reviews, Little, Brown and Co. has ordered what it calls a “sizable” second printing.

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On the Racks: Six years after the death of Louis L’Amour, Dell Magazines has launched Louis L’Amour Western Magazine with a 300,000-copy print run, including 75,000 subscriptions. The new bimonthly will concentrate on new western fiction, in the tradition of the so-called “pulps,” the grainy publications that gave L’Amour an outlet for his stories starting in the 1940s. The premiere also features a travel piece about the Southwest by novelist Tony Hillerman.