30 - 50 Feral Dreams
I read Pete Hamill's "A Drinking Life" and Fernando A. Flores's "Tears of the Trufflepig"
Creatures, sláinte! In this edition, two book notes.
Pete Hamill’s 1994 memoir A Drinking Life rolls out in a familiar cadence. He starts by showing you a Brooklyn where everybody drinks tea: the stickball years, years of scrap drives and butter rations, hard locust years from which even bitter memories of his drunken father can’t quite scrape the golden haze. Hamill studies art, loses his innocence at what sounds like the Fresh Air Fund camp from Hell, wanders the globe, does Mexican prison time, marries a Puerto Rican girl from the neighborhood, gets dug in at the New York Post in its immediately pre-Murdoch years; gets divorced, starts to see how alcohol has distorted his own life the way it damaged his dad’s, gets sober.
Hamill is especially good at describing public outbursts of emotion, whether it’s V-J Day (“The firemen all got drunk. A firehouse dog bit a priest”) or the assassination of JFK (“But I careened around dark streets, in the midst of the wailing. I saw a man punch at a tree”). I loved his descriptions of life at the Post. I should’ve loved this book, I think. If I’d read it before I read any Stephen King, or before David Carr published his extraordinary addiction memoir The Night of the Gun, maybe I would have. But King and Carr both have this big chop-licking style, pulpy, with a scouring and self-lacerating intelligence… whereas Hamill reads like a perfectly good newspaper columnist.
He’s got a tidier mind, is maybe the problem. He often gives pat explanations: I loved the Dodgers because I wanted to be close to my father, I drank because I wanted to blame other people for my problems. “I did X because of Y” is a sliver of the truth, probably something he really needed to figure out about his own life, but it starts to feel like life is an algebraic equation you can solve.
As a drinkin’ memoir, it’s interesting in its focus on drinking culture—not the individual alcoholic, an identity which I don’t know if Hamill would claim, but the world in which drunkenness is normal. Drinking because that’s what grown-ups do, because that’s what men do, because that’s what newspapermen do. Hamill also isn’t afraid to let drunkenness be fun. There’s a lot of communal singing in this book! Men get drunk and sing together, and there was real joy and communion there sometimes, although often (always?) there was also disconnection, oblivion, loss. Things sung that couldn’t be said, or that wouldn’t be remembered if they were said. Idk, young people nowadays seem very into letting us know that alcohol is a poison, which is interesting I guess but it also seems somewhat relevant that drinking is the third most popular form of ecstasy in world history. Only God and sex beat it!
He quits drinking on page 257. The book ends on page 265. This is the epic tale of Pete Hamill’s sobriety:
And I said to myself, I’m never going to do this again.
I finished my drink. It was the last one I ever had.
I obviously hate this because of my own defects of character (look at Mister Willpower over here, all la-di-dah!), but also, Hamill presents his not-drinking life as just like his drinking life but with a huge obstacle removed. The drinking itself seems to be the only thing that needs to change. Beyond my own preference for a real gutter-crawl through the Gracious Valley of Humiliation, it also seems like if Hamill drank because of a whole culture of drinking, then leaving the drinking part of that culture should require some other deep shifts in how one lives or relates. What was once an all-encompassing worldview shrinks down to some awkward social questions about why he’s ordering club soda. I guess I would like some exploration of non-drinking manhood, camaraderie, or American adulthood: some reckoning with what the difference between a drinking life and a post-drinking life might be.
Dining Out in Dystopia
I also read Fernando A. Flores’s terrific, absolutely sui generis 2019 fever dream of the Mexican-American border, Tears of the Trufflepig. I know I call everything “phantasmagoric” but come on! This book is about a world where the legalization of drugs led the cartels to switch to farming specially-bred extinct animals for the illegal exotic-foods trade. Scientists kidnapped by the cartels manufacture dodos… then unicorns… then, maybe, a lost god—the titular trufflepig, an Edward Goreyesque lizard-pig which may also be a Mexican Indian god of dreams.
There’s noir here, in the thickening atmosphere of corruption, in the conviction that poor people deserve better than they get, and in the low-to-the-ground protagonists, subcontractor Esteban Bellacosa and investigative reporter Paco Herbert. Chandler fans will enjoy both the heartfelt sentiment and the rampant similes, which always teeter on the edge of being too much: “Bellacosa felt uneasy, like how Lee Harvey must have felt as they were coming to get him.” There’s a waxy river and a turmeric sky, I don’t know enough Pynchon to know if I’m right to catch echoes of him here, but the significant names, the paranoia and mysticism, feel like my vague memories of The Crying of Lot 49.
The border is syncretically religious and intensely violent. It’s a place where you can make a lot of money, if you don’t mind dying young and getting dismembered. The science-fictional technology only exposes how weird and holy the world still is. Like, here is a scientist:
“We gave you a very potent dose of ground peyote. What you saw happen to the man that was here before you—pay no attention to that. And what you heard our friend say, don’t listen to any of that, either. That gangster died because he committed evil and his subconscious got him back. You’re not going to be able to move anymore, but don’t worry about that. I have to say, nobody has survived this test yet, but we’ve had nothing but the worst kind. Cold-blooded killers, people like that have different chemicals in their brains, their bodies. Committing unrepented sin knocks our chemicals off-balance each time, unless we do something about it. We are monitoring your heart rate. Remember now it’s all in your mind. We are leaving you alone in the room with El Grillo Cri-Cri here. Don’t be afraid of him. Where you’re going, you’ll learn more about him. Please tell us about it when you come back.”
Real estate, resurrected men, typewriters and cigarettes; loss and mourning, reconciliation and truth without justice. I would read twelve more books set in the borderworlds of the trufflepig.
“Dinner?” by A. Davey via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.