Poetry Of The Streets Pete Hamill’s Deadline Stories Go Far Beyond Reporting The News

“Piecework: Writings on Men and Women, Fools and Heroes, Lost Cities, Vanished Friends, Small Pleasures, Large Calamities, and How the Weather Was” By Pete Hamill (Little, Brown, $24.95, 448 pp.)

Agents say that essays don’t sell, especially pieces already published in any magazine or newspaper with a circulation of 1,000 or more.

Thankfully, Pete Hamill’s agent doesn’t listen to conventional wisdom. Neither does Hamill, for that matter. “Piecework,” even with its admittedly unwieldy subtitle, is the kind of journalism you just don’t see anymore. It’s the facts, ma’am, but it’s also the heart and soul.

Hamill takes the mundane and the great, spins them through his psyche and delivers absolute poetry of the streets. If you want to learn writing from the gracious mountaintop, go elsewhere. If you want to learn writing from the guts, go to Hamill. Without so much as an adjective or adverb, Hamill puts you where he is, right at the table (or under it), club-crawling with Frank Sinatra, arguing with Mike Tyson or (verbally) dissecting Madonna.

Hamill takes you along as he sifts through the ruins of a Mexican earthquake, hails a cab in Brooklyn and bangs out a story on deadline in Pago Pago.

And isn’t that what all journalists are supposed to be doing - educating, enlightening and entertaining, all three in one piece if you’re really, really good?

Hamill is often compared to Ernest Hemingway, from whom he borrowed the weather part of his subtitle. He has had similar problems with women and alcohol.

However, Hamill has what Hemingway always seemed to lack: honesty at the heart of his writing. He does not pretend to have all the answers, or even all the questions, but he prods and pokes and paints and comes up with the most amazing gems.

In one essay, he writes about a cab striking and killing an old man - not that uncommon an occurrence in his beloved New York. The dead man is loaded into an ambulance and Hamill writes:

“His gray plaid hat has rolled under the truck and lies beside the curb. I see a policeman’s hand reach down, circle it with chalk, pick it up. A pause. Then he drops it back in place… . The cab driver (still waiting for formal questions) hears this: ‘Is he - is the man dead?’ The cop shrugs sadly. The driver leans on his cab, his body wracked with dry heaves.” That is not fancy writing, but it is great, nevertheless.

Hamill started his writing career as a reporter at the old New York Post in 1960. His writing has since appeared in other New York publications such as the Village Voice and the Daily News, as well as Esquire and Playboy. He has written several novels, and a splendid memoir, “A Drinking Life.”