A Drinking Life by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780316054539
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2008-12-14T10:00:00+00:00

3

THE GIRL’S NAME was Jenny. She had a long face framed by long brown hair. Her nose was long too, and she was self-conscious about it. I hate this nose, she said to me one night. I wish I could cut it off. Her brown eyes were among the saddest I’ve ever seen. In that dark snowy winter of 1950–51, I fell in love with her.

I’m too old for you, she said. I’m seventeen.

I’ll be sixteen in June, I said. A year doesn’t matter that much, does it?

To some people it does, she said.

Does it matter to you?

No.

I met her in the back booth of a soda fountain named Steven’s, which was just off the corner of Ninth Street on Seventh Avenue. There was a big modern jukebox against a wall, packed with 45 rpm records instead of the old 78s that you still saw in the bars of the Neighborhood. Here, Nat Cole was singing “Mona Lisa,” Teresa Brewer was belting out “Music, Music, Music,” Don Cornell was telling us that it wasn’t fair for him to love her, and Frankie Laine was proclaiming loudly that he was gonna live ’til he died. There were some old songs too, from all the way back in 1949: Frankie Laine’s “Mule Train” and “Lucky Old Sun” and Vaughan Monroe’s evocation of those ghost riders in the sky. That night, I came into Steven’s with someone else, who knew the girl sitting with Jenny. We sat down and stayed for two hours. I walked Jenny home to a house on Tenth Street. She smiled goodnight in a tentative way and hurried into the vestibule. I went back to Steven’s the next night and she was there again and I walked her home again and asked her to go to a movie.

That Friday night we went to Loew’s Metropolitan and saw In a Lonely Place, with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. I loved that movie. Bogart plays a Hollywood screenwriter who has been assigned to make a script from a terrible best-selling book. This depresses him and he goes to a bar to get rid of his depression by getting drunk. He starts talking to a hatcheck girl, who tells Bogart that she has read the book. He invites her back to his apartment so that she can tell him the story. That way, he won’t have to read it himself. It wasn’t clear what else he had in mind, but I could make it up. Drinks, a small apartment, sex. The next day, the hatcheck girl is found murdered and the cops come looking for Bogart …

I remember talking all the way home about this amazing movie. Did Jenny think the story had anything to do with all this anticommunist stuff? You know, the way people were being ruined by rumors? Wasn’t that what it meant? Jenny looked at me as if I were nuts.

Come on, she said, it’s just a movie about this guy who drinks too much and beats people up.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.