Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  In any event, those demolitions sucked the life out of that street: So many of my neighbors, turned into air. Sure, kids still played out in front, doo-wop singers still managed to get together for their stoop sessions, and I managed to see my friend Richard—who’d moved with his family to a place on West End Avenue in the nineties—but, with so many familiar faces gone, the block often seemed deserted, especially at night, when you’d have to watch your back.

  Naturally, during those demolitions, we developed a heightened animosity, as townies, toward the university. I can remember going over to the campus and tossing clumps of dirt and stones in through classroom windows as the students, who had nothing to do with what happened, were sitting for a lecture. (Sorry, my friends.) And sometime later, aside from sneering at any students who crossed our paths, while adopting tough-guy personas, we—I’m talking about myself and a few other local kids—made it a regular practice to head over to the wide street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, by Teachers College, where we’d pass the afternoon prying Volkswagen insignias off the countless Beetles parked in rows out in front: I collected dozens of those things, for no good reason, though sometimes one of us would head down to a pawnshop on 125th Street to sell the medallions for two dollars apiece.

  Of course, within a year or so, they had put up the School of International Affairs, right across the street, where Richard’s building, 420, had once stood, and, a block south, Columbia’s law library, massive structures that to me, knowing nothing about modern architecture, seemed to lack charm. Spared were la casa italiana, with the grocers and a soda fountain left intact on that corner, as well as a few remaining buildings on the drive toward 117th Street. Suddenly, students came pouring in through the high glass doors of the new 420 (for that is its current address), and while that was something one came to accept, and even get used to, at night, when the institution closed down, that side of the block became eerily silent and dark. Our apartment, smothered by the shadows of that structure, saw less light during the day. (I’ve often wondered what my father thought about that building; oh, he still sat out on the stoop, smoking cigarettes in the afternoons, and looked out across the street, as those anonymous students made their way to their classes, and while I’m sure he had nothing against them, he probably missed seeing his friend Mr. Martinez, the superintendent, coming up the block, and the opportunity to invite him in.)

  It was pretty lousy from our end, though at least we had a friend in the new housing manager that Columbia had appointed to look after the block. His name was Mr. Foley, a congenial older, white-haired Irish man who always spoke with a thick brogue and who, until then, had worked as a janitor for the Corpus Christi Church; we knew him from there and were always kind to him, and that was a good thing, because in the coming years, he’d look out for us and, most importantly, later on, for my mother.

  On the other hand, despite our resentments, when the university held its annual spring fair, with its games of chance and food stands selling stuff like cotton candy, as well as an attraction in which one could pay to take a turn going at some wreck of a car with a sledgehammer, all of us flocked there, thrilled, as if a carnival had come to town. And some of the older guys did all right with the college girls, in local bars, though the thing that most impressed me about Columbia, as I’d cross the campus, predating the destruction of my street, were the students I’d see from time to time, sitting out on the steps of Butler Library, strumming folk tunes on guitars. I was probably twelve when I first stood enthralled watching a group that did covers of Beatles hits, performing on a makeshift stage in front of one of their student buildings—I think it was Ferris Booth Hall—and somewhere along the line, with all the crap going on at home, I decided that I would try to learn to play the guitar—a pursuit that turned out, in those years, to be one of my salvations.

  I bought my first guitar, a junky Stella, for five dollars from one of my brother’s friends, a dashingly handsome Irish fellow who had sung in the choir with him. On that guitar, warped and never easy to tune, I learned my first chords from a Mel Bay instruction book. On it I played my first Beatles and Bob Dylan tunes. I had my morning job at the laundry, which paid me five dollars a week, and, always working on the side making deliveries for a local printing outfit, I came up with enough bucks to send away for one of those fifteen-dollar electric guitars that were advertised on the back pages of comics. That guitar was also a piece of junk, and I lost heart for a while. (Well, keeping after my father was a part of that loss of heart.)

  But then, occasionally, I’d head over to the apartment of one of my school chums, this decent and quiet kid named Bobby Hannon. His mother was Polish, his father an Irish fireman, and they lived down on 122nd Street in one of those cluttered railroad flats that only exist today in the slums. Mr. Hannon, in some ways, with his close-cropped bristled-in-front haircut and etched face, resembled the actor Larry Storch, best known for the TV show F Troop. Like my father, he also liked to drink, but with a difference. He fancied himself a musician. On those afternoons when I’d hang around with his son, he’d occasionally take out his guitar, which, as I recall, was a left-handed F-holed jazz-style Gibson—a beautiful instrument, even to me. Before becoming a fireman, as a young man, he once had a radio show in Pennsylvania, in which people would call in and try to stump him by challenging him to play obscure tunes. So he knew everything of Gershwin, Porter, Rogers and Hart, etc., as well as any number of songs by polka musicians, both famous and lesser known. He had an ear and a half, and once, while reaching over to a table, his guitar on his lap, to get another glass of beer, told me that there was nothing he couldn’t play. “Try me.” Naturally, I was intrigued. But no matter what I came up with—not Cuban songs, but Top Forty hits—he’d figure anything out. Just after I’d whistle, say, the melody of a Beatles tune like “And I Love Her,” he’d not only figure out the chords but pick out the melody (somehow) with one of his fingers while holding on to his pick at the same time. “Kid’s stuff,” he called my choices. He smoked as much as my father, and his face had that same tendency to rawness at its edges. He was burly, most often liking to wear a T-shirt. With stacks and stacks of Les Paul and Mary Ford 78s clustered in the shelves above a console, he’d occasionally put one of them on so that I could hear “real music.”

  One day I brought my ratty Stella down, and as I played him the four chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he threw a fit, telling me I didn’t know a damned thing about the guitar (“You play like you’re wearing mittens,” he said), and commenced, on that afternoon, to teach me—or at least try to—my first bar chords, and jazzy ones that made my fingers ache for days. Nevertheless, I’d go back there, wanting to learn more, and, in time, I could play the square (to me) turnarounds of pieces like “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Afterward, I’d sit in Bobby’s room and feel relieved to hear, off his record player, the zippier 45s of the day. But I’d pick up stuff all over the place. Once Marcial García and his family had moved in upstairs and I’d sometimes end up there with my mother, I learned that he too played the guitar, but in the classical style, with sheet music for studies by Tárrega, Fernando Sor, and others lying in stacks on a table by a stand in his living room. He had a beautiful Spanish guitar from Valencia, full toned and plump in sound, that, made by an angel, did all the work for you—that is, if you knew how to play. He taught me some études, which I never quite got right, and because of the craziness in my head and despite all the lessons he gave me about reading music, during which he would fill up blank staffs with the notes written out in pencil, I simply tuned out, in the same way I did when it came to Spanish—some busy emotions in my head preventing, as it were, my momentary concentration.

  Still, I loved those lessons, and they brought me comfort, and especially so in that year when the explosions were going off, though I could hardly ever really feel good about what I was doing. If you own a guitar, however, as I learned, no matter how badly you play, you begin to acquire a self-nurturing attachment
to it. Often when sitting with my father on those nights when he would go on and on about the perils of his mortality, I’d drift off, thinking about the chords of a song, and in my mind, no matter what the song happened to be, I’d run through its entirety, even some bullshit piece like “Hanky Panky,” and coming back, I’d catch him staring at me quizzically, as if I hadn’t been listening to him at all.

  But I had other teachers as well. Remember Teddy Morganbesser, over on 119th Street, at whose apartment my father had tried to give me my first drink of wine? His squeeze, Belen, had two kids, the first being the fabulously beautiful and muy sexy Tanya, who would marry that gallant from my street, Napoleon, and a son, Philip, about one of the sharpest-dressed and most astute, forward-moving Latinos around. (I remember seeing him sitting on the stoop next to mine, studiously reading textbooks from his school.) He was outrageously handsome, with classic heartthrob looks—think of Ricardo Montalbán or, for more current generations, Julio Iglesias Jr., with a beautiful yet manly and effortlessly chiseled face. He was a scholarship student at Fordham and doing well, the kind of slick guy who’s conquering the world and I couldn’t help but admire. At an early point, he had taken up playing the guitar, and since he, so impeccable in his dress and manner, had set a high bar for his pursuits, his instrument turned out to be one of the most elegant and, I think, pricey guitars around, a curvaceous brass-knobbed Gretsch Anniversary guitar of a shining green luster with a tremolo bar and intricate inlay along the fret board. (Like the perfect woman—in fact, I think, the vast appeal of guitars has much to do with their female shape.)

  It was Philip (may God bless his soul, for he, like so many people from my neighborhood, would end in ruin because of drugs) who first taught me how to play that Beatles riff for the song “I Feel Fine.” We’d spent a couple of weeks working on it—why he did so, I don’t know to this day, except to say he was a generous soul. He had a tender demeanor about him, nodding when you got something right, shaking his head wildly when you didn’t. In the half-light of his living room, while he, thin yet muscular, seemed to glow, I tried my best. The rock and roll fingerings were different from the classical, but in the end, I could play that riff, and once I started listening to other Beatles tunes, I figured them out as well, though what would some dumb fuck kid do with useless knowledge like that?

  I went to Rolling Stones concerts on Fourteenth Street, at the old Academy of Music, when first-balcony tickets cost two dollars and fifty cents, and, with an empty guitar case in hand, I’d go running from one end of the line of miniskirted ticket holders to the other, hoping to meet some wildly screaming girl. (It sometimes worked, though I was too knuckle-brained to figure out what to do from there.) Over on La Salle Street, some ten blocks away from 118th, I’d hang outside the apartment building where Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist, lived, listening to him practicing his scales and tunes. On the same street, in a first-floor apartment, its windows facing the sidewalk, a Puerto Rican conjunto, the lead singer in coal-black sunglasses, rehearsed—their repertoire consisted of a few Latin tunes, but mainly they practiced Top Forty songs, a look of resignation and professional “let’s get this over with” on the lead’s face as he plucked away on his Telecaster. I remember thinking, I’d like to do this. And I’d go down to the Apollo when they had afternoon matinees featuring acts like James Brown and Wilson Pickett and the Cadillacs—and along the way, with my eyes always watching the guitar player in the band, I got some wild idea that I could become a musician.

  At sixteen, I’d played guitar behind a neighborhood doo-wop group that auditioned before a hashish-stoned audience on an openmike afternoon, singing vamped-up, multi-harmonized versions of popular folk tunes like “When I Die” at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village. (We cleared out the place.) I’d played in a little band in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with my friend Jerry, who had long since moved away, performing simple rock tunes by groups like the Kinks and Them, as well as some of our own, in more than a few deadend bars and social clubs in the midafternoon. (I never liked to hang around there at night, for it was a neighborhood where you heard guns popping off in the distance.) And, often enough, while crossing the campus, I’d hear some guy fingerpicking a tune and sit down, just watching his every move. If he sang, that was fine, but mostly I watched the way he played.

  Around the same time, a larcenous tendency arose in me. Or to put it differently, it suddenly blossomed. In 1966, a music shop, Levitt & Elrod, had just opened on Ninety-sixth Street, halfway down the block between Broadway and West End. (There’s a Salvation Army store there now.) I happened to walk by there one afternoon with a friend just as a delivery of instruments had been made. (My friend’s name was Peter, and I suppose we were on our way to Richard’s apartment, a few blocks over.) As I looked in, the owners were in the back trying to figure out how to situate things; there were a number of instruments piled inside by the front door, some in packing boxes and some not, among them a stellar four-pickup Kay guitar, which someone had just left leaning up against the front window, and seeing that no one seemed to be watching, I stepped inside and on an impulse grabbed it and began running with that instrument down the street toward West End Avenue. For the record, I was in my first year as a student at Cardinal Hayes High School up in the Bronx, which required that we wear a tie and jacket. Peter, attending a prep school—both his parents worked for Columbia in some bluecollar jobs but put their son in the best school they could afford—was dressed the same; and so, as we bounded down to the avenue, with that guitar bundled in my arms, it might have seemed, in a world of spoiled kids, which is what that neighborhood was to me, that we were just celebrating a recent purchase, even while the price tag—$187.50, as I remember—dangled, flapping, off its head. The crazy thing is that as we went around the corner, a police car was sitting there, two cops inside having coffee. I told Peter, “Pretend we’re rich kids,” and with that, we waved at the cops inside as we passed them by, and they, not even flinching, hardly paid any notice.

  Now, I’m sure if I were a swarthy spic, some dark-skinned Latino, those cops would have perked up, and, chances are, I would have ended up at some detention center in the Bronx for the next year. But it didn’t happen that way, and on one of the more delicious afternoons of my life, I arrived at Richard’s new digs, feeling exhilarated.

  I’d also been something of a vagabond performer in Washington Square on the weekends, going down there to Travis-pick on a guitar with a neighborhood friend who played the harmonica, the two of us wailing away for befuddled tourists who didn’t always quite know what to make of our “music.” Or I’d go to Central Park, where “be-ins”—impromptu gatherings of music and dance put together by aspiring hippies—took up the lawn of the Sheep Meadow. I’d bring my guitar and sit in with anyone, as long as they would let me. A lot of those kids were middle-class or rich, but playing guitar gave me an entrée, which I wouldn’t have had otherwise, into those circles. That’s how I met that guitar player Nick Katz, and because he had some good social connections, our little band, whose song lists consisted of covers of famous blues tunes as well as standards by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, got jobs performing at private parties, some in swanky Park Avenue brownstones—where I got a good notion of how people with money live—the best, however, in my opinion, taking place in one of those immense, high-ceilinged apartments in the Dakota apartment house on Seventy-second Street, in whose marijuana-sweetened rooms, with all kinds of well-dressed folks in Nehru jackets and Carnaby Street gear dancing away enthusiastically, I briefly suffered from the delusion that I was someone cool.

  I can recall envying the free spirits I saw around me, particularly on campus, those long-haired kids who seemed at the time to be about the future. I went through the same thing down in the Village, but however much I wanted to grow my hair long, my first two years at a Christian Brothers high school, with its strict rules about everything, made that impossible (and at any rate, in the summers when I tried to let my hair grow out, my usually
taciturn father would take me over to Broadway to get a trim—“You don’t want to look like a marica, do you?” I recall him saying).

  But I still pined away for that freedom. My idols, if I had any aside from the guys who wrote and drew the comic books I still read, were those icons of the British Invasion, from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, along with some very odd ones thrown in, like the girlish California band the Hullabaloos, whose records I must have listened to a thousand times over, along with those of Manfred Mann, on countless afternoons at Richard’s place downtown on West End Avenue, where the experience was heightened by the occasional drink or, if Tommy was around, by the offering of a joint to smoke. (But I had to be very cool whenever I’d come home.) Since I really had so little identity of my own—except as this “son of cubanos” who had once been sick and didn’t much identify with Latin culture in general, for when I’d hear any Spanish songs, they always sounded passé and locked in some perpetual, unchanging past, and I didn’t even consider my Spanish anything I should try to improve upon—I spent those years trying to become anything else but what I should have been, Oscar Hijuelos.

  While at Hayes, on those mornings when I’d leave my job without a prayer of making all the connections on time to the Bronx, I was often late coming to classes and spent most afternoons in detention. Altogether, it was the kind of school where the teachers, if they thought you were smirking or expressing a less than reverent attitude in class, made you pay for it. Getting slapped, being rapped in the knuckles with a ruler, or having someone squeezing the back of your neck with all his strength until you would finally say, “Yes, sir”—or worse, teachers who were known to take smart-ass kids into the gym and have it out with them in boxing matches—became a part of the daily experience. A good number of those Christian brothers seemed so certifiably gay and effeminate as to become the brunt of jokes, but most were pretty tough Irish guys who, coming up the hard way but taking the righteous path earlier in their lives, would brook no disrespect. If you as much as missed a homework assignment, you were sent into detention for a week and saddled with even more work than you could have dreamed up. I say this fondly because Hayes was good for someone like me, whose attention easily wandered.