Remembering Pete Hamill..

of course, heard of his passing yesterday. I remember the first article of his that I read that caught my attention. It must have been in June or July of 65, and it was in the New York Post, then a liberal newspaper.  It was an interview with a Puerto Rican mother from the Bronx, who had just gotten the letter saying her son had been killed in Viet Nam. "Porque?" she kept saying, why did this have to happen. And Hamill was outraged that this unnecessary war had taken her son who was simply an innocent cog in the military wheel. It made me want to read whatever he wrote, and in the next few years, I read many of his articles, both in the Post, and some, I think in the Village Voice. But the article listed above is the only one that I remember. I did read his autobiography: A Drinking Life, full of vignettes about growing up in

South Brooklyn, and also with much information about his love life in his formative years. I liked it---glad that I read it. As the years went on, I am not sure how I felt about his high profile dating, and "cool man of the city" attitude. Was it too much "self" and not enough about the world around him. Still, till the end, I always admired him and trusted his vision of the city.

  Before he moved back to Brooklyn, he lived a long time in Tribeca. Then he moved back to Brooklyn---I don't know where---maybe Park Slope or Fort Greene. I always thought that on one of my long walks through the different neighborhoods of Brooklyn I might pass his porch, see him, and start a conversation. We both perceived the city as a world of tremendous excitement--we both understood that just by changing one block, one's whole sense of life in the city could change.  But it did not happen. I wonder how he must have felt as he returned to the borough of his birth and thought of his childhood---in a Brooklyn that was full of poverty, disorder---people fighting to just get by---to the well ordered, safe, complacent and expensive Brooklyn that he returned to. In a way he had lived through a an amazing

cycle of change. But wasn't the reason he could move back because he himself was a success story---somewhat

of a legend in his own time---did the arc of his own success mirror that of Brooklyn itself.

  He and Jimmy Breslin articulated a populist vision of the city--a place where a guy making a decent

salary could be comfortable---a place where the eccentrics and the rugged individuals might suffer

a bit, but make it through and be part of the community. A street corner place--a place where the

neighborhood bar could become the center of one's life. But neither of them wrote much after

2000, when a lot of the city became dominated by the wealthy. Whatever rage this evoked

in either of them, one did not see much of it in print. Their vision of the city was disappearing

before their eyes, and they were powerless to stop it. Their writing could not stop the

aggressiveness of developers or the passion for luxury housing that exploded in

city many times during those years. During that time, I hoped that one of them would

write an explosive piece of defiance, but to the best of my knowledge it never happened.

  And then, right before his death, came the protests--the explosion of pent up rage by both

blacks and whites. I wonder what he must have thought of those protests. Were they the

apocolypse that he longed for--the rejection of the power of the establishment that had

turned its back on his everyday people? Or did his celebrity make him too much of

that very establishment to accept it? We will never know. Still, an important life in

so many ways.