The Harder They Fall (16 page)

By the way, I almost never drank while I was working. If I had to write a column or go out and report on something, I didn’t do any drinking till after the work was over. It was a classic repetition of the patterns of my father’s generation of blue-collar Americans. You rewarded yourself with drinking … later. For them it was too physically dangerous to drink on the job. You couldn’t be an iron worker and go up to the thirty-ninth floor with a load on. I think one of the things drunks do, and I was certainly one of them, is find situations in which they feel normal. You know, your friends are all at the bar and it feels normal. You think the whole world is drinking, and it’s not till you stop that you discover it’s mostly sober. I didn’t choose my life on the basis of drinking, but if you go into the Navy as I did, sailors drink. They still do. All you have to do is watch a bunch of sailors on parade. Sailors are expected to be drunk.

Certainly the newspaper business, when I went into it in 1960, was dominated by guys who had probably started in the last years of Prohibition and then had come through the Depression, where there were all sorts of vestiges of Prohibition, and then into World War II, where the culture of drinking was very much alive.

In my new book, I talk about the kind of party mentality that prevailed in the Village in the late fifties, when I first set up in Manhattan. It was perfectly normal to go to somebody’s place for a party and find seventy-five people standing around like it was the “D” train. All in various stages of getting loaded. I was at parties where it was perfectly normal to stand there and discuss Krazy Kat, the comic strip, with LeRoi Jones, or explain the affinities of Willie Mays and Fred Astaire, or drink eleven bottles of
Rheingold while arguing about Jackson Pollock. You didn’t feel you were doing something daring, or defying the bourgeoisie. It’s how people grew, given the previous twenty-five years of American culture.

To be Irish American meant living in the same kind of culture of normalcy, even though all the collars were blue. You drank when you came home from work. You drank at weddings. You drank at funerals. You went to wakes and everybody got loaded. It was normal. We had no way of knowing that that’s not the way William Butler Yeats handled himself. Or, God knows, any number of other Irish characters I came to love. It’s hard to imagine getting loaded with Samuel Beckett, although I’m sure he did his share. I came to recognize that, aside from your own physiology and psychology, a lot of this stuff is environmental. It was how you grew up, and where you grew up, and how the larger world taught you the rules. The rules were based on what seemed normal.

I think of my friend Carl Hiaasen, the wonderful Florida columnist and novelist. I’ve known him for many years. He once went off to do some reporting on the Cayman Islands, and when he came back, I called him up and said, “How was it, Carl?” And he said, “It’s the kind of place where they
point out
the honest people.” In certain New York neighborhoods when I was young, they pointed out the guys who had “taken the pledge” and didn’t drink. They would remind you sometimes that Hitler didn’t drink either.

After I stopped drinking, I still kept going to places like the Lion’s Head because that’s where my friends went. I made the ultimate sacrifice: I ate there! Even the owners went out to eat. So I stayed in touch because I loved those guys, and the women too (there was a fairly good percentage of female drinkers at the time in the Village). I was more conscious, so I became, at once, one of their friends and also a kind of spy in the world. I would carry these index cards in my pocket, and when I’d hear a good line, I’d retreat to the john and write it down. I couldn’t write it down in front of them. So the world I knew was still feeding the part of my life that was about writing, even though I was detached from it. Writing became more important to me sober.

I often thought of a line from … I’m almost sure it’s from Henry James,
and I’m almost equally sure I’m misquoting it: “To become one of those people upon whom nothing is missed.” I certainly never got there. I missed a lot of things—sober, and still do. But I missed less. Less actually did become more, in that case, in terms of consciousness.

As far as my friends were concerned, I didn’t become an object of suspicion because I was sober, but probably an object of some mixture of pity and weirdness. The one good thing about the Lion’s Head and some other saloons that were part of the same culture was that all sins were forgiven, except cruelty. So yes, even sobriety was forgiven. If the guy next to you threw up on your shoes, that was forgiven. So was this weird thing where you decided not to drink. I didn’t make any big pronouncement. I said, “I’m laying off the sauce for a month” so it didn’t look like some sort of permanent conversion. The road to Damascus running through Sheridan Square … it wasn’t that. But then it became a habit. They got used to me being sober.

Something I noted sober was the amazing amount of repetition. One person would tell a tale, and I would have heard it four times before. In that sense, I lost a certain amount of benevolent patience. In a more important way, I realized that we drunks perform our lives instead of live them. You have a tale that once got a laugh. You want the laugh, so you tell the tale. Almost like an actor. That makes life easier. You don’t have to pull something out of your guts. Or think of something new. A lot of what happened in a weird way was a continuation of vaudeville. Which is why I had so much fun. I had an amazing number of laughs, and I learned a lot, in my own drinking years, from old newspapermen. Not just the Lion’s Head, but bars near the old
New York Post
—newspapermen’s bars. They were serious craftsmen, these people. They would look at the papers, and find your story, and say, “How the fuck could you write that?” And you’d learn something about craft. Even though there might have been more vehemence than you would get at Columbia School of Journalism, it was also a school.

Many things were of great value. There was a thing characteristic of newspapermen and other kinds of writers. I think that writers start off fairly shy, many of them, and become writers to overcome this shyness. I’m sure if you could really get into the brain of Ernest Hemingway or William
Faulkner, there would be some shy sixteen-year-old in there someplace. Nora Ephron once said, “The writer is the guy who thinks of the great line on the way home from the party.” All these writers created ways to live, to enjoy themselves, to feel like they were taller than they were, wittier than they were, and maybe more talented than they were. And in many ways, drinking was helpful. It allowed them to live lives instead of being buried in some boardinghouse somewhere.

The hard thing to figure out is where the tipping point is. Where you go from being a social animal to being a goddamn fool. Where drinking, which helped release you, becomes something that starts to destroy you. It’s very hard for people to determine that point.

I think the most dangerous drunk is the functioning drunk. It’s one thing to be some poor soul huddled in a doorway somewhere, having lost everything. But the guy who goes off to work, has a cocktail or two before he heads up to the office, and then some at lunch, and then goes home and whacks his wife around—he’s a much more dangerous guy. He forces the people who like him to become co-conspirators. They cover for him as long as they can. Although now, I think, there is much less tolerance of this stuff. In those days, everybody knew somebody who was fundamentally decent, who was turned into Mr. Hyde by drinking. I remember I met Robert Mitchum a couple of times and liked him very much. He was intelligent, self-deprecating, and had a real sense of irony. But if you stayed with him to the point at which he became drunk, he became a nasty piece of work. So that even in the movies, the directors knew that they could only get a performance out of him in the morning. After lunch it was impossible.

One advantage of being sober for the last thirty-two years is that I’ve lived long enough to see how different stories turn out. I had some friends that stopped drinking but died anyway. In some cases, in the world that I’m in (and it’s not a normal world)—the world of talent—you see people who start out bursting with potential and ability, but they burn out like shooting stars. I’m convinced, more than ever, that drinking did it to them because it cuts memory, which is the mother lode of every writer, and it cuts into physical energy because this is hard work. If you work the way I do, or any good writer does eventually, you get up in the morning, have
your breakfast, and then you go to work. And maybe late that afternoon you stop, but at night you’re tossing and turning with the work. All of which comes flowing out, for good or bad, the following morning. And you do it seven days a week even though there are days when you do no writing at all. Your consciousness doesn’t go away.

I’m walking down the street here in Mexico, yesterday, and I have a scene in my mind from the North River in 1935, part of my novel, a long way from where I am. And it’s vividly alive. That is why so many writers’ marriages collapse. It takes a rare woman or man who realizes that when the person they’re married to is looking out the window, the person is working!

The people who stay conscious derive amazing benefits from it. They’re aware of the only life that they are going to have, and without it, they end up lying in those hospital beds with tubes up their noses, wondering, “What the fuck was it all about?”

(boxer)