A talk with Pete Hamill is serendipitous

Everyone should get the chance to see life through Pete Hamill’s eyes. His books undoubtedly give you a glimpse of it, as I mentioned in my review of his book Downtown: My Manhattan, but reading his words are nothing like listening to them. 

Today, Hamill came to talk to my Beat class at NYU and my 10 fellow students and I were engrossed by his 90-minute talk. In person, he looks just like he does on the cover of the book, but a little bit older and wiser. His eyelids sag a bit, giving him a wispy, sentimental look. 

We grilled him on his life – from his bouts with alcoholism to his divorce, from realizing he was a writer (and not a painter) to his optimism for the Internet. We each got the chance to ask him questions, but sometimes, I forgot my questions in his captivating narrative. He told us about the old journalism days and, though he never had a beat, he loved talking to musicians. This is when I stopped thinking and just turned to listen. 

“Music, to me, is the highest art,” he said. (Yes! I thought.) “The problem with musicians is that it’s hard for them to explain themselves. They don’t have a language because they don’t need one.” (Yes, yes, yes!) 

And the most fascinating person he ever interviewed was not Gloria Cardinale, as he joked (though any arts journalist would be happy to interview her, I’m sure – as would I), but Max Roach, a famous African-American drummer who worked with great jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. Hamill himself talks about them as if they were here only yesterday. He manages to combine days of yore with modernity in a wonderful grandpa-esque form of storytelling. 

Now, Hamill enjoys a life split between New York and Cuernavaca, Mexico. He’s married to a Japanese writer (this being his second marriage), and he has two daughters. But he is still wed to New York. In our interview, Hamill described New York as “existential,” “a marvel,” and a city that’s about possibility, and “the remaking of self.” 

His book doesn’t cover it, so we had to ask: is there anything Pete Hamill, New York’s wonder boy, hates about the city? Definitely. Some things annoy him, from the Starbucks on every corner to women who cart around nine-year-olds in strollers (and how the strollers can be like Hummers, he said.) 

He hates not seeing children wandering around the streets of Brooklyn, getting themselves in trouble and falling in love with the wrong people. (“I just worry that they’re having virtual childhoods,” he said.)

Another one of his hates, which I felt at heart because I hate it too, is the disappearance of great bookstores and record shops. He described how marvelous it is to walk into a store for one thing (a certain book or record) and walking out with something else. You can’t do that with iTunes or Amazon.com. 

“You lose a sense of serendipity,” Hamill said. 

Man, how can he do that! He just made me fall into a whim of sentimentality – one of the things I wasn’t fond of in his book – and love it! I lost my usual cynicism in the midst of his tales. He signed a postcard that I got in Japan for me. He also was more than happy for a photo op. (Photo to come soon!) 

All I can say now is: Thank you, Mr. Hamill.