Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  If I’d sometimes felt vaguely curious about the way I’d look in the reflection of a car window or a store mirror—always washed out, nearly unreadable—in the months/years after my pop’s death, I couldn’t bear to look at myself, even passingly. I remember feeling that the world seemed grotesque to me, and that, as I’d go through my days, my knees were weak and my shoulders tight, as if bearing too great a weight on them. Needless to say, when I actually sat down to study at home, during one of those rare moments when my mother wasn’t going on and on about something in another room, I only seemed vaguely aware of what I happened to be reading—I’d stash that information away somewhere—but for the most part I felt like a stupidly wounded animal barely attached to the world and rather benumbed to life. There is something else: I couldn’t help myself from looking back over my shoulder, as if I would turn around and see my pop standing on some street corner smoking a cigarette.

  The only things that lightened me up were the sight of a pretty female face and music, the latter of which, as you may by now have surmised, happened to be the central passion of my youth. Playing the guitar and writing songs kept me sane and helped me to make friends all over the city. And so I got into the habit of turning up at the school, at least a few times a week, with a beat-up Harmony guitar. There on the steps of Bronx Community, I’d befriended this wiry Italian guy from Co-op City, Nick, who knew his way around a fret board and loved to play bluesy tunes, mainly of his own composition. As the son of an Allerton Avenue barber, he, like me and so many of the others at that school, had been among the first in his family to try out that education thing, and loving music himself, it seemed natural that we put together a band.

  This consisted of some kids from my high school, along with a Columbia University football player turned pianist, my old friend Pete on bass, and a hammy, weird-looking tone-deaf singer who could not hold a tune but performed fearlessly, as if lifting outside of himself. Our first gig was at a fashion show for oversize ladies at the Lane Bryant department store, but we mainly performed, if it can be called that, at a locally famous watering hole known simply as the CDR, which occupied the basement floor of a residential building on 119th Street.

  I don’t recall ever once hearing about or seeing my father drinking there—if he walked into that place at all, it was to cash a check perhaps—and though he had known its affable owner, Larry Mascetti, if only casually, for over twenty years, he wouldn’t have had much use for the place otherwise. Aside from rarely spending his money in any bar except to leave a tip for the free drinks he came by at the Biltmore, he would not have felt too comfortable with the clientele, who were mainly Irish alcoholics—in the sense that just about every man above the age of eighteen in that neighborhood seemed to be one. A few black men hung out there, among them a well-known jazz violinist (he later died of cirrhosis of the liver), as well as a spattering of Japanese who’d grown up in the neighborhood, and the handful of Latinos who went into the place to drink would have hardly fit with my pop’s idea of what an authentic Cuban or Puerto Rican was about, except as Americanized versions. Most of the people who drank there were decent working-class stiffs, and yet among them were a few bigoted souls who, never taking me to be Latino, had on occasion blurted out within earshot a few references to some “spic” they’d seen around or, more blatantly, about how some “fuckin’ spic” had the nerve to give him a sly look—an atmosphere of derisiveness toward Latinos so prevalent that even I, as jaded and pissed off or distanced as I had begun to feel about my roots, took offense.

  I felt like a spy moving through both ranks—Latinos I didn’t know sometimes gave me the evil eye, while, on the other end, loudmouthed white guys betrayed their own prejudices without as much as giving one damn about my feelings, if they thought of me as Latino at all.

  And yet, on a social level, that place appealed to a lot of people: An oasis—literally the only watering hole for blocks and blocks—it was frequented by Columbia University and Teachers College people by day and, at night, by the locals who’d stop there to get tanked up on their way home from work, though there were the occasional dropins from the arty, hippie world. One of them lived just across the street, a quite interesting guitar player, Chris Donald, whose girlish dark hair hung down to his willowy waist. He’d always cash the big-time checks he’d receive for playing his white Telecaster guitar in a 1950s cover band quite famous in its time, Sha-Na-Na, that had originated at Columbia. I think the checks were for about fifteen hundred dollars—perhaps his weekly wage, I’m not sure, though I do know that Chris, with whom I had jammed on occasion in his one-room basement apartment, used a good part of that money to buy heroin. For that act, he’d wear period clothes and somehow tame his hair into a passable though wildly oversize Elvis-style pompadour and for at least a few years seemed to be on top of the world, when, of course, in the tradition of the very cool and uncautious, he went overboard one day and overdosed, throwing the universe away on a dime high. It was a jovially crowded, smoke-filled place that boasted a booming jukebox and had, given all the cops who dropped in, a rather laissez-faire policy about permitting certain things. Some of the regulars seemed to always have something shifty going on on the side, but the biggest heavies, it seemed to me, were the cops themselves. They’d sit around in their civilian outfits but always packing revolvers, sending out waves of suspicion, world-weariness, and menace. (As in “Do not fuck with me.”) They were famously depressed and sarcastic: “How’s law enforcement going?” “Fine, how’s crime?” With the rare exception, each seemed to me a prince of darkness.

  On certain nights, huge amounts of money were openly wagered in the banquettes off to the side, wafts of marijuana and hashish smoke occasionally drifting through the air. For whatever the reason, anything seemed to go on those premises. One night while I was in there, the comedian George Carlin, who grew up on 121st Street a few doors up from my grammar school, which he’d also attended and commemorated in an album entitled Class Clown, happened to be sitting by such a table, with what must have been an ounce of some white powdery substance splayed across a piece of wax paper before him. Observing this, a ruddy-faced police officer dressed in plain clothes walked over, and while it seemed he had gone over to investigate the situation, it turned out that this cop, whose eyes had the expression of a man looking through a plate-glass store window as if at a curious hat in a corner, had gone over simply to express his admiration that a local boy had made it into the big time, and would he, please, Mr. Carlin, possibly do him the honor of signing an autograph. I know this, because I was there just hanging around.

  The owner, Mr. Mascetti, by the way, was a burly and cheerful, bald-headed fellow of stout proportions who could have passed as a plump cousin to the musician David Crosby. In the 1950s, before moving on to this establishment, he ran a little bar on 123rd Street on Amsterdam, where, I’ve heard, the folksinger Burl Ives used to perform. When I first knew him, however, he managed the soda fountain of a pharmacy on 120th Street, where, running errands, I came into one of my first jobs. He had three kids, among them a spoiled son, Butch, who, as it happened, I always had fistfights with, though I owed him or his father my first excursion, at about the age of eleven, to Bear Mountain, something that has stuck in my mind ever since, not only because we had spent a beautiful day tranquilly walking that park’s wooded trails, but mainly because he had a car while my own family never made such journeys, not even once.

  A good-hearted man rumored to be a member of the genteel petit Mafia—his brother ran some kind of operation in Brooklyn—he might have kept a gun in the back and was probably someone not to be messed with, though he could not have been more kindly toward people—even threw me a couple of twenties when my pop died. Trusting me because of my quiet demeanor, he’d occasionally bring me along with him at night when he’d drive up to another bar uptown in Harlem to take care of some business transaction. In any event, when he heard that I had put together a group, he told me we could perform there any tim
e we wanted to. For a period of a few years, we were to be the occasional “special entertainment” billed as “the 118th Street R&B band.” With people having nothing better to do jamming the place, at two dollars a head, on a Saturday night each of us musicians ended up with a nice piece of change.

  On some weeks, I took home at least a few hundred dollars, twice as much as I think my father ever earned. But I can’t say I did anything meaningful with that money—in fact, I’m not quite sure what I did with it. Being of an age when other kids would go off on three-month summertime excursions to Europe on maybe nothing more than six hundred dollars—a figure I once heard—I never did anything quite so adventuresome, and not because I wouldn’t have wanted to, but because, as somewhat of a provincial, it simply didn’t enter my mind: At some level, for me, Europe did not quite exist.

  We’d play from around nine at night until three in the morning, long gigs that sometimes became wild affairs, what with all the booze and drugs floating around. Among the things I learned on such nights was that you don’t have to give a particularly good performance (though we did sometimes) if your audience is stoned. When LSD inevitably entered the picture, and folks began to circle the earth, anything one played seemed to that segment of the audience exalted, serene, and profoundly deep. Most people danced well enough, though some went off into a kind of proto-Aztec hieroglyph frenzy, or else, as in the case of super-medicated Vietnam vets, subdued, very slow, zombie waltzes; and while our repertoire included a few numbers that had something of the Latin rhythm to them—like “Bang Bang” and “Oye Cómo Va”—we were probably the farthest from a Cuban band imaginable, and our audience a far cry from the sorts of dancers my parents once consorted with.

  In fact, the closest the bar came to displaying a Latin flavor of a sort came down to the black and Latina hookers from around the Port Authority, whom someone would round up for the occasional bachelor party and bring uptown from Tenth Avenue by the carload. On some nights, these ladies would be out in the back taking care of one man after the other, and occasionally, some of these women blew their patrons in full view of the crowd. I had also seen one of the women splayed across a table and, with whipped cream from an aerosol can covering her privates, submit as one of the fellows, usually quite drunk, went down on her: There were other variations on these oral themes, and a few copulations as well, often enough in the somewhat funky bathroom. Altogether, it was the kind of scene that makes a show like The Sopranos seem sexually tame to me now, and it was so absurdly rank—and sleazy—on occasion as to make even the worst of my pop’s so-called dance-hall infidelities seem almost innocent by comparison. (And yet, why do I continue to remember that place with fondness?)

  Tucked back into that period, some months after I had turned eighteen, I had ended up in yet another smoke-filled room, this one situated in the draft board offices downtown on Whitehall Street, where I’d gone to register. Though it’s possible that a few in that room were feeling a patriotic fervor about fighting in Vietnam, most of the young men gathered there seemed bent upon getting out on psychological deferments—which meant that one fellow dressed up like Batman, another as a Watusi warrior with bells tied about his ankles, and yet another in a pair of fluffy slippers and diapers; there were some overtly effeminate sorts in there as well, and a gleeful bunch of hippies who were being eyed by the plainclothes cops in the crowd, singing and carrying on, all the while quite apparently high on something powerful, probably LSD. A few others sat, in the manner of soldiers about to go to war, sucking on cigarettes—it was thick as shit in that room—an air of worry tending toward obligation or resignation on their faces. I mention them because, to be honest, when I turned up, I had frankly resigned myself to going to Vietnam, not out of any deep sense of moral obligation or patriotism—as did my friend Richard—but quite simply because I didn’t care what they did with me. I filled out forms, answered a few questions in pencil—“How would you feel about confronting an enemy of the United States?” and others that essentially inquired after my interest in self-preservation and soldiering. Strangely enough, my laconic responses to those questions, along with the pertinent bit of information that my father had died the year before, led one interviewing officer to assign me, without as much as blinking an eye, a temporary, six-month deferment—which is what most of the crazies in that room would have been grateful for; and while I had expected to be called back there soon enough, the draft lottery intervened, and in one of those caprices of rare good luck, I ended up with a number so high, in the three hundreds, that I never had to return.

  CHAPTER 6

  My Two Selves

  In those years, I seemed to have vacillated between two versions of myself: One was musical and hip, somewhat sly, and occasionally wild, the other so completely solemn and conservative of demeanor as to be taken by Greenwich Village hippies as too straitlaced to trust. (When I cut my hair short, I was sometimes looked upon suspiciously by the bohemian sect as if I might be a cop—I suppose that had something to do with my overly preoccupied expression.) The hip Hijuelos smoked cigarettes and liked to get high; like black folks, who I never saw using any other brand, I preferred Kools, maybe a pack or two a night, not giving a damn about health issues. (I was convinced, however stupidly, that by the time I had smoked long enough to come down with cancer, they—the scientific world—would have developed a cure for it.) The other Hijuelos, the pensive shit who looked down on others’ self-indulgences and worried about his health, tended toward weight-induced high blood pressure and remained, despite the unpredictability of his mother’s moods, complacently disposed toward her. (“Sí, mamá.”) One did whatever the fuck he felt like doing, lived here and there, made out with the occasional girl, while the other demurely slipped into deep depressions, all the while craving not the escapes of sex or drugs, but eso de la comida—Cuban food especially—and the mental comfort foods of comic books and horror movies. That cooler version of myself trudged off one night through Central Park with the guitarist Duane Allman in search of a liquor store and later jammed with him in an uptown pad, while the other, completely insecure but having pretensions of musical grandeur, once boasted to his older brother that he had written the lyrics of a Beatles song called “When I’m Sixty-four.” (How on earth I thought I could get away with that is beyond me. I guess I believed they didn’t have radios in Brooklyn.)

  During that time, the strangeness of my life—of feeling that something had been torn out from inside of me, like a kidney, curiously enough, in my mind shaped like the island of Cuba, that I was as empty as air—gnawed at me every day. The same questions I had about myself kept repeating: Who and what am I? Why is it that I hate seeing what I see when I look in a mirror? Why is it that every now and then I suddenly turn around because of a voice saying, “Cuba, Cuba . . .”? And why is it that I always swear, as I begin to look behind me or turn a corner, that, in a moment, I will come upon all that I do not have—a world, perhaps Cuban, perhaps familial, that for so many reasons seems to have been taken from me?

  I tried to be a hippie for a while, but even that did not really afford me a refuge: I’m sorry to say I wasn’t very good at it. One summer, I had gone upstate, north of Saratoga Springs, to perform with a pianist friend in a makeshift band at a guitar player’s wedding; I knew the bridegroom from jam sessions around Columbia, and, two-timing my own band, for a while I moonlighted with him in a group we put together, the Ravens. He dressed entirely in black, wore dark glasses every hour of the day, had dark hair down to his shoulders, and, altogether, cultivated a look that present-day kids would call Goth. His “old lady,” a waitress at the Gold Rail, was all of twenty-two or so at the time and a long-legged auburn-haired fox and a half, as they’d say in my neighborhood. Their marriage, held on the shores of an upstate lake, went off with flower-child aplomb, and the party afterward, with folks coming from nearby communes as well as the city, became one of those all-day affairs, with musicians setting up their amps on a makeshift stage in a fie
ld and people lying out on blankets or wading naked in the water, partaking liberally of the booze and marijuana and other relaxants that were in plentiful supply, along with tables of food (of a typical American variety, with some healthfully boring grain and oat dishes).

  I’d played guitar with that impromptu troupe of musicians for a few hours, until the mosquitoes and black flies and the heat began to get to me, and, figuring that I’d paid my dues, left to check out the shoreside scene, what with a large number of lovely young women cavorting about in the flesh, along with something else of great interest just then taking place: On a small island some fifty yards into the lake, a couple were going at it with abandon—a woman, her shapely back to us, long hair trailing down her shoulders, straddling some lucky fellow, grinding her hips over him, and most juicily so. A lot of people were watching, among them the bridegroom himself, my friend, whom I sat beside and joined in a smoke (just a cigarette).

  Passing some jug wine between us, we took in their lovemaking, watched the woman, her bottom rising and falling, her head turning from side to side, while we said things like “Man, oh man” and “Where’d she come from?” our interest further heightening when, dismounting him, she rolled over and let the fellow go down on her, the two of us shaking our heads in wonderment and blowing out smoke rings, while she not long afterward turned her mouth into a ring and started blowing him, oh, that lucky fellow: It would have remained one of those capricious things that (I supposed) happened at hippie weddings, what with “free love” in the air, an afternoon’s drug-induced sexual reverie, if not for the fact, as we soon discovered, that the woman in question, having had her fill of that fellow’s masculinity and wading back to shore, wobblingly so, turned out to be my friend’s bride.