Piecework

I used everything I knew to express, or refine, both rhythm and tone. When I was a teenager, I wanted for a brief season to be a jazz drummer. In an old issue of Down Beat, I read an interview with Gene Krupa, one of the stars of the Benny Goodman band, and he was asked a smart question: Since the drummer was the metronome of the band, how did he keep time? What served as his metronome? Krupa answered that he kept chanting to himself one simple phrase: “lyonnaise potatoes and some pork chops.” He would drag the word “lyonnaise” and emphasize the “some” to insure that the beat wouldn’t become too mechanical. So in those first years, I often sat at a Royal Standard typewriter in the city room, writing about some fire or homicide or snowstorm, all the while humming under my breath, “lyyyyy-oh-naise-p’taytas an’ some pork chops, yeah — lyy-yyy-oh-naise-p’taytas an’ some pork chops,” keeping time with my right foot, as if using a pedal on a bass drum. I wanted that rhythm in the sentences. I wanted to add some gaudy word to serve for a splash on the cymbals. Even now, when a deadline is crashing upon me, I chant Krupa’s mantra.

Over three decades, I’ve written newspaper and magazine columns for the New York Post, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, New York Newsday, Esquire, and New York, along with freelance articles for these and other periodicals. In a way, these columns and articles make up a kind of public diary, a recording of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way. In a meandering, unplanned way, they’re about one American writer grappling with the meaning of the public events of his time: Vietnam and Watergate, riots, assassinations, scandals, murders, political betrayals. During the period covered by this collection, I chose my own subjects. Usually I thought of them myself; sometimes suggestions for pieces came from editors, but as a freelancer I was, of course, free to decline.

Many pieces originated in my personal history; when I wrote about New York or Mexico or Ireland, I brought to those pieces the kinds of knowledge that didn’t always exist in books. Memory, myth, lore: all had their uses. But at other times, I often chose subjects about which I knew nothing. My ignorance would then force me to learn, to engage in a crash course of books, clippings, reporting. Gradually, I began to make connections among a variety of subjects; a civil rights story about Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael could also be informed by a knowledge of Faulkner and the blues. A murder at a good address might be written better with a knowledge of investment banking, real estate dealings, or the novels of Louis Auchincloss. I might more clearly understand the latest homegrown fascist if I knew about volkische nationalism, the history of Sparta, or the drawings of George Grosz. Specialization had no attraction for me; it would be like spending a life painting only roses. I wanted to be, and am, a generalist.

As a young man, my ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: “the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.” That ambition was amazingly presumptuous, of course, and in some obvious ways, comic. No tabloid newspaperman would ever admit to an editor (or anyone else) that he was looking for “the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow” in the streets of New York or believed he could fit them into 700 words. But as callow as I was, that scrap of Hemingway rhetoric did help me to understand that even fragments could serve a larger purpose. His words were not inconsistent with what gradually became a more modest ambition: to understand the way the world worked and how I fit into it.

These pieces are products of that ambition. In each of them, I first wanted to know something about a person, a place, an event, or an idea. I wanted to hear their music. Then I wanted to pass on what Fd learned to others. Looking at many of them for the first time since they were written, I remembered who I was when I wrote them, the houses I inhabited, the people I loved, my large stupidities and small triumphs, and yes, how the weather was.

PETE HAMILL, 1995

PART I THE CITIES OF NEW YORK