Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  After he left the hospital, sticking to their diets and giving up smoking, he got even thinner and glowed, somewhat, from renewed health, the bad habits of those years left behind (his body must have been grateful). During that peaceful time, without any shouting in the house, my mother, though still worried about him, seemed far more content, and he, without taking a drink and not yet back working, acquired a more relaxed demeanor. Some things were tough, however—I can recall that we began to run a bigger tab than usual down at the corner grocery store, Whities, where he once used to send me to buy him cigarettes, and at Freddie’s Bodega, because he couldn’t bring his usual foodstuffs home from the hotel. And perhaps he went through a month or two without full pay (I don’t know). But even if we didn’t get a tree at Christmas that year, generally, things were good—we finally had a telephone installed, in case another emergency arose, a telephone to whose dial my mother affixed a cylinder lock. And my pop? At forty-seven, he was still young enough to look forward to years and years of life. He felt confident enough to buy the only new piece of furniture that I can recall ever coming into our house, an olive green leather easy chair with one of those extendable footrests, which he got on time payments from Macy’s. Nightly, instead of hanging around in the kitchen, he’d stretch out in luxury, watching our always flickering television set.

  By spring, when I’d come home from school, we’d pass a few hours taking strolls over to Riverside Park, where he was content to sit on the lawn, watching college girls go by, boats gliding along the water. He didn’t need much, though, as I think about it now; he probably had too much time to reflect back on what had happened to him. Sometimes, out of nowhere, while looking around at the loveliness of the day, at the wisps of clouds in the fine blue sky, the sparrows hopping merrily on the grass, or at a lilting butterfly, he’d sigh, and with that, I swear, from him emanated a palpable melancholy—I would just feel it, almost like a shudder, rising from his body. In such moments, I am certain that he, trapped by some dark thoughts or emotions, probably wanted a nice drink. Probably, he felt nostalgic for the good old days when he could just take out a cigarette for a relaxing smoke—he was, after all, a creature of his generation.

  He must have started back up with his bad habits, slowly at first, at the hotel, when, after some three months away, he’d returned to work. Down there, hidden from my mother’s eyes, there came the moment, during a midafternoon lull at the Men’s Bar, that he’d probably taken his first drink in a long time, and that warming elation, coming over him again, became something he could not continue to resist. And what would go more nicely with a belt of whiskey than a cigarette? After a while, he’d walk into our apartment with his face slightly flushed and think nothing of sitting down and, well, having a smoke. Just as often, coming home, in his trousers pocket, he’d have a pint bottle of whiskey stashed in a paper bag, and soon enough, once his friends started coming over again, the refrigerator began to fill with those sweating quart bottles of beer. My mother, beside herself with worry, became hysterical, and those nights, once his friends had left, of my mother scolding him continually in the kitchen also resumed, but with a difference: Where in times past she had reminded him of his old abuses, my mother now went at his carelessness in the wake of his heart attack—what she called “un ataque del corazón.”

  “You think you’re going to live forever, drinking and smoking? What are you, stupid, Pascual? . . . Qué carajo, are you crazy?” She’d go on for hours and in such a manner that, if anything, he took to drinking even more. Worse, he didn’t seem able to hold it the same as he used to, for he’d slur his Spanish in ways that I hadn’t heard before, and, as well, he’d drink so much that just getting down the hall to the toilet, he sometimes staggered so badly that he would be propelled forward as if someone had picked up the building and tipped it onto its side, or as if he were suddenly shot out of a cannon, or on a listing ship in the stormy sea. He’d sometimes fly headlong so wildly that he’d tumble down and end up slumped over on the floor—I know this because I often tried to help him up, something that got harder as he began to get heavier again, those pounds coming back to him with a vengeance.

  The evenings became something of a nightmare to me—to this day I feel a terrific melancholy when it begins to get dark. And not just because of my memories of all the shouting and arguments, but what they led to. No matter how much she tried to reform him, my poor mother, however well-intentioned, only managed in her strident ways to make things worse, while he, falling back on some macho pride, took her pleas (harangues) the only way he could, stubbornly and refusing to change: “Soy el hombre”—“I am the man”—was his only answer, “and if you don’t like it, divorce me.” I heard that word divorce night after night, shouted so loudly that everyone in the building did too. I can’t blame my mother for seeking her refuge with friends on those evenings, what with my father losing his self-control and falling apart in front of her; at a certain point, once she saw that he was getting a certain way—“muy borrachón”—she’d make herself scarce, for if she remained in the apartment, they’d spend half the night circling around the rooms, threatening each other.

  But that was not the worst of it for me. Indeed, during those years, on many a night, in the crushingly lonely interludes after his pals, who always visited in the evenings, had left and my mother had gone out, I became his sole companion and, I’ve since come to think, his babysitter. He would insist that I keep him company (which was fine, even if I would have preferred to just watch our buzzing TV or go over to see my friend Richard) and if I hung in there with him, as an eleven- and twelve- and thirteen-year-old kid, it was because I felt constantly afraid of leaving him alone. So I’d remain by his side night after night in our little cramped kitchen as he’d drink himself into oblivion, until there came a certain point when he’d start staring at me intensely from across the table, his eyes squinting, as if to bring me into focus. A cigarette burning before him, my pop, as if forgetting who I was, would speak only in Spanish to me, and in such a mangled fashion that I wonder now how I understood him. (Years later, while sitting in a bar with a Puerto Rican poet friend, a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish, two incredibly drunk Latino men across from us were holding a conversation about life, but with such slurring that even the well-educated Hispanist beside me could not begin to understand them, though I could.) By then, my father had been dwelling on his mortality for so long that he often cried at the thought of his own passing, and far from concealing that fear—or conviction—he took to repeating a single phrase: “Voy a morirme”—“I’m going to die.” “Voy a morirme, hijo,” he’d tell me. Then: “Entiendes?”—“You understand?” his warm liquid eyes glazing over with bewilderment and tears.

  I would just shrug or withdraw into myself—what else could I do?

  Then he might say, “Pero sabes que eres mi sangre, y que te quiero”—“But you know that you are my blood and I love you.” And while I realize now just what he must have wanted to hear back—“And I love you too, Pop”—I could never say it, and so those nights went until, at some point, he gave up the good fight and dragged himself off to bed for a few hours of sleep before he’d get up for work for his early morning shift at the Biltmore Hotel, his words of prophesy staying with me long after.

  In my way, I suppose, I took out whatever emotions I had from such evenings on other kids, such as the time when I put that cigarette out on my friend Richard’s head. (Sorry, man.) I had always gotten along with one of the French Haitian kids from upstairs, this burly, immense, unflappably cheerful boy about my age, Phillipe. It was he and his older brother John-John who once took me into the basement and, setting up a little projector in an abandoned room, showed me the first bawdy film I had ever seen, one of those grainy 16 mm movies you could get in one of the shops along sleazy Times Square, in which the women, by today’s standards, were too fat and too ruined looking, but who, with their bushy vaginas spread wide and their doughy flesh, seemed wildly exciting as well as wicked.
We also played a lot on the street, and one afternoon, as I stepped out off the stoop, wearing a pair of new Hush Puppies, for some reason, though he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, Phillipe shot me a faggy kiss with his lips smacking and chippie-chippie sounds: He was sitting against the stoop’s columns and when he did it again as I walked on, I turned and punched him as hard as I could on the side of his face, and his head began bleeding from its impact against the stone. He never did it again.

  At the same time, some need made me easily manipulated: I guess I wanted to please others, to have friends. A professor’s son, an affable, somewhat handsome fellow who lived around the corner, had brought me along to a party in the apartment of a well-off family whose son attended his prep school. He brought me not out of any intent to broaden my social horizons but because he wanted to beat up some foppish guy for no good reason. In the midst of this friendly occasion, my “friend” urged me, as a favor, to “put this guy straight,” and though I had nothing against him and hardly knew the fellow, I called him a faggot, and even when he begged me not to hit him, I did anyway, this professor’s son mirthfully looking on.

  He also masterminded a confrontation between me and this fellow named Ralph, said to be the toughest guy at the Horace Mann high school. I was out on Broadway and 116th Street when the professor’s son persuaded me to fight him, and, man, his reputation had been earned out of real abilities, and what I can mainly remember about that idiotic circumstance is that he turned out to be so tough that I ended up admiring the guy. He had a pretty sister, by the way, who must have been in awe of the fact that I had gone after her tough-guy brother, and from time to time when I’d see her on the street or on the subway, she’d always smile at me, though I was incapable of imagining that she could have any interest in someone from my background. (The irony is that, years later, when I ran into this fellow Ralph, he couldn’t have been more friendly, though the professor’s son, whom I saw again years later during a period when I was having a lot of success, actually said to me, “Good things happen to bad people.”)

  For a few years, during that time when my pop got worse, while playing softball in the Harlem league, we’d practice down on the Columbia athletic field near 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, on the very same property that would become a matter of contention during the campus upheavals of 1968. Out of laziness or because I might be late, I’d sometimes take a shortcut through the park, along its deserted paths and, inevitably more often than not, get jumped; I should have known better, but something about the danger thrilled me, or the punishment involved, for even if you’d handed over your change, someone just wanted to have it out with you anyway, and I’d find myself getting into more than a few fights that way. I was lucky not to get stabbed in the gut, like another friend of mine, Pete, did some years later, and I almost had my jaw broken once—or at least it felt like it—but I somehow kept making my way along those same trails, as if, indeed, I was asking for trouble.

  But I found other, “safer” means of escape as well. I began to drink, sometimes my pop’s stuff, a swig or two out of one of the pint bottles of rum or whiskey he’d keep in a kitchen cabinet—like father, like son, right?—and just enough to lift my spirits slightly, though I never liked the taste. Still, I eventually graduated into absolute intoxication—I think I was twelve—one evening at my pal Richard’s across the street. That too was inevitable.

  Mr. Muller-Thym, while attending to his paperwork at home, would sit by a table in his living room, sipping champagne, what he called “bubbly.” Starting in the mornings, he got through his days in a pleasantly hazy state of mind. Keeping a well-stocked liquor cabinet, he seemed absolutely unperturbed by the notion that his sons occasionally availed themselves of its contents. We’d sit around in Richard’s room, listening to jazz on a record player, sometimes to Latin-inflected cu-bop music, which for us, in the early sixties, came down to the vibraphone jazz of Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaria; again I think his father, an aficionado of Village clubs like the old Half Note on Spring Street, had influenced his son’s taste, which veered between the modern and baroque, Bach being another staple.

  One night, while listening to jazz in his book-laden room, and smoking cigarettes, we embarked on what had started as a casual experiment involving Coca-Cola, some ice, two glasses, and a bottle of 151-proof Jamaican rum, which Richard had somehow gotten ahold of. I’m not exactly sure just how his mother, Mary, off in the living room watching television, remained oblivious to our doings, but that evening, over the course of several rapturous hours, we drank one potent glass of that sweet cocktail after the other—I found it a revelation that it tasted far better than the wine my father once had me try at Teddy’s, or my father’s whiskey—and in the madness of that high, we got somewhat carried away.

  To confess, the very notion of literally lifting out of my own body as the world went spinning around me seemed a glorious relief. And I never felt so alive! At some hour, I can’t say when—I don’t remember—I staggered out of there, and getting home so obviously lit up, I received one of the more monumental beatings of my life. I really don’t remember a whole lot of what happened—but I do recall my mother dragging me down the hall and putting me in the shower. (“Cabrón!”she called me, slapping my face.) And my father? I’m not sure if he had gotten to that point himself—but I think on that night at least he hadn’t, because as soon as he saw me that way, he marched right over to the Muller-Thym apartment, where he pushed open their door (never locked), and finding Richard passed out in his room, made his way into the living room, where he had some unkind words with Richard’s mother, who for some time afterward did not want me coming to their house.

  Along the way, something happened on my block: By around 1964, working quietly, the university had purchased every building on 118th Street, and my pop, instead of making his usual rent payments in cash to a management office on 123rd Street, now made them, always in money orders, to Columbia Housing. Unlike everyone else who lived across the street, we were spared eviction, those less fortunate residents, over the course of the year, having been ordered to move out. (And those who didn’t want to move, I’ve heard, were harassed, agents forcing open doors and changing the locks while the tenants were away; the saddest of their victims were old ladies who should have been allowed to stay put. That was the rumor at least.) Most everybody moved—the Martinez family, the Monts, the Cintrons, the Haineses, and the Muller-Thyms among them. (It was heartbreaking to me.)

  Nevertheless, just like that, life on my street changed for good. First we lived with the sight of so many of our neighbors packing their things up into trucks, rows of them sometimes lining the block, most leaving by the spring of 1965. Then, for a year we had to put up with the demolition of those buildings, huge cranes and tractors and dump trucks and generators and Quonsets and portable toilets and huge bins piled up with doors, commodes, and bathtubs taking up the sidewalk and street on the other side of the block. Gradually, they brought down those buildings, which had been around since the turn of the century, with demolition cranes. Afterward, they started excavating for what would be the foundation of Columbia’s School of International Affairs as well as a high-rise dormitory down the block, dynamite blasts, preceded by a whistle, going off every twenty minutes or so for months. (No wonder I can’t stand the clamor of large construction sites.) Nothing good came from it for those who had remained behind: We had to get used to the mess, the noise, and the sudden appearance of guards patrolling the street to keep kids like myself out of those buildings when they were still up—I can remember sneaking into Richard’s building not long after it had been abandoned and making my way through that darkness with a flashlight, pushing open his front door (all the locks had been removed) and prowling about the apartment’s ghostly empty rooms, where I had spent so much time, all the while feeling that yet another world had been yanked away from under my feet.

  But the guards were there, as well, to keep away any junkies from scavenging for whate
ver they could carry away—copper wiring and light fixtures, for example. Heroin had begun to sweep through Harlem—a lot of drugs were being sold out of the projects along 124th Street and across the way in the projects of 125th Street and along the sidewalks below 110th, those blocks teeming with young addicts. I can recall accompanying one of the local junkies, a really nice guy, to cop his stuff, always a harrowing experience, what with those assignations held in dingy project hallways and with those dealers and their acquaintances, all of them black, frankly not liking whitey (me). On that end, things had been already changing for a few years; I won’t entertain any discussion of drugs here, or the ethos of getting high—poor and bored kids, without too many prospects, just liked doing it, and there were enough junkies around that the generally safe feeling one used to have about walking around that neighborhood vanished. (An older kid who lived across the way, addicted but a sharp fellow, used to knock on our door, asking my mother for a glass of water, and at first opportunity would manage to walk through the apartment, with its circular configuration, looking around for anything of value to conceivably take—fortunately, we had little worth taking.) Marijuana, by the way, seemed to have crept in on little cat’s feet a few years earlier—kids smoking joints while playing stickball on 120th Street were a common sight. (Most never bothered anyone, just wanting to have their fun, and reefers, at a dollar a stick, were always readily available, just like cigarettes.)