One of the tests required that I keep my fingers steeped in a beaker of ice for as long as ten minutes, no easy thing: Checking out a stopwatch and writing figures down on a chart, which had graphs, the nurse would ask me to rate the degrees of pain I happened to be feeling in thirty-second intervals (I think) on a scale of 1 to 6; to impress her with my macho resolve, I’d usually hold out until my fingers had gone numb (which probably threw the tests out of whack, since, while waiting beforehand, I’d often hear other subjects quickly shrieking their lungs out.) A second test was a variation of the above: My fingers in a beaker, an electric current would be passed through wires into the water, which first registered as a tingle, as if one’s hand had slipped into a hornets’ hive; then, as she turned a knob, it widened into a more numbing prickly sensation, until that graduated into an out-and-out metallic—and broadening—burning, at which point even I would give up. But along the way, while uttering those numbers, I’d keep looking at the nurse’s compassionate face, which seemed to grow prettier and less disfigured each time I turned up as a subject.
The most ghastly—and the only test for which I had zero patience—involved what basically came down to the application of a thumbscrew: Each of my thumbs would be fitted with a clamp through which a blunt screw head could be passed; a kind of elongated paper puncher would be pressed, the pressure raised by increments, the nurse twisting a knob, until gradually the screw nub, progressing more and more deeply into the skin and tissue, began intruding on the bone, at which point it produced a kind of deadening pain that made the right side of my head and the top of my eyeballs ache. Despite my Catholic tolerances and everlasting desire to prove to myself that I was no kidney-diseased wimp, I always called out after no more than a few minutes of that medieval torture—it was creepy, even for a medical group testing aspirins and such, and she knew it, which was why, I suppose, she’d look my way apologetically.
However, the most erotic of the pain research trials involved a heating rod and a tincture of black ink, which the nurse would apply to my bared back, from my shoulders to the small of my back: Wearing a pair of latex gloves, she would spread the ink (or whatever it was) uniformly and gently along every inch of my skin, after which she would further smooth it down with a narrow camel-hair paintbrush, which, truth be told, had the texture of a slightly wet tongue. Taking a long black bulbous-headed device in hand, through whose head she could transmit increasing amounts of heat by turning a dial, the nurse would press it against my skin and slide it about in circles, the remotely pleasant warming sensations, which I hadn’t minded at all at first, gradually becoming more intrusive and searing, and this nurse, who must have been Irish, muttering with each increase of temperature, “Are you okay?” Interestingly enough, all that heat sent my blood rushing, and while it hurt an awful lot, it felt great at the same time. That heat, in fact, concentrating in my center, had an incredibly invigorating effect on my friskiness—and she knew that too. Later, while she’d clean off my back with paper towels soaked in rubbing alcohol, I had the impression that it wouldn’t have taken much at all to get something going with her, and I might have asked her out, except for the fact that I had stupidly blurted out something about having a girlfriend—but lord, that delicious tension came back any time I got near her.
Along the way, I’d drift back to some of my childhood fantasies of being cured of my illness by some caring nurse, even while the sex/ pain thing remained foremost in my mind—what else was there to think about? That strange job lasted only some three months, but it dropped me into a circumstance that, much like love, was both a torture and a pleasure at the same time.
Of my teachers in the City system, there were two whom I would credit the most with kindling my first interests in writing. The first happened to teach a basic literature course at Bronx Community, a certain professor Wertheim, who, receiving an essay I had written about one of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Magic Barrel,” whose atmosphere of immigrant melancholy sang to me like a siren perching on a rock, pointed out several instances in which I used easy alliteration in my sentences, crude as they were—frolicking freely. In the margin he, a wise guy, wrote something along the lines of “so here Hijuelos bellows.” When he gave me an A in the course, I felt exhilarated—but aside from doing well, even given my scattered nature, I had really enjoyed the stories, from beginning to end, that were included in the assigned textbook, a Norton anthology of fiction, which I absorbed very much like a sponge, and in that way I first began to fill in the rather huge gaps I had in my knowledge of literature. (Of course, being a sap for emotion, the authors I most cherished, aside from Malamud, included Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence; I still do today.)
Later, at City, a saintly professor, a certain Ernest Boynton, went out of his way to encourage my essay writing—in the afternoons, I’d spend an hour with him in his office as he’d carefully go over my work and explain how I might better develop some of my ideas, a line of other students always waiting outside his door. I grew attached to him; he was young enough, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, to bridge our age gap. All the students loved him, and he, a nerdish recently married black fellow with thick black-framed eyeglasses and dark rippling hair, a high-domed forehead and pinched-in dimpled chin, had been ever so happy to share with anyone who cared to know news about his wife’s expecting a child. It was he who first spoke seriously to me about perhaps becoming an English teacher one day, maybe getting a job in a New York City high school, and he was the first adult who really made me feel that I could do something good—just by putting together a few more or less orderly sentences.
But though I never really took his bookish suggestions to heart, I liked to be around the man just the same, feeling attracted, as I guess I inevitably would, to fatherly sorts. He was such a nice fellow that God naturally blessed him, of course, striking him down not five years later with a heart attack—the man dying while all the pricks in the world seem to keep on going strong.
All the while, I had always been one of those pensive fucks who really enjoyed street jive, the selling of “wolf tickets” by way of outlandish storytelling among BS artists hanging out on the sidewalks. Junkies were the best—really funny in fact, when not falling off the edge of the world, during slow nods that sometimes went badly, as in the case of this good-natured black kid named Alvin, whose sunny disposition did not prevent him from becoming an addict, nor from slipping backward off a rooftop ledge in the midst of a dream. One of my favorite folks, strung out sometimes, sometimes not, was Tommy, whom I would see mainly on the weekends while hanging with his younger brother Richard, finally home from Vietnam and, incidentally, also attending City. Tommy and I would find ourselves just walking around the neighborhood scoping out the action: I don’t recall how he made money in those days—he was a college dropout and already a seasoned veteran of the Addicts’ Rehabilitation Center on 125th Street, where I had visited him on occasion (they’d give you a little room and several doses of methadone a day, which gave you a kind of high). I think he must have earned some money dealing in soft drugs, though he, when not using the heavy stuff, seemed quite content with just enough to buy a little reefer and the endless quantities of beer, drunk from cans out of paper bags, that he cherished. (Theft has also struck me as a possible source of his income, though I can’t imagine that he had that in his nature.) For his own amusement, he liked to concoct the most outlandish tales—of seeing, for example, flying saucers in Central Park, or of going to Harlem and encountering a famous movie star in search of drugs, of having sex with two or three women at a time, stories that were, though hard to buy, easy to enjoy.
I am mentioning this because Tommy, it seemed to me, was destined to parlay his folkloric excesses about city life into an eventual livelihood as a writer. It was the one ambition he had ever professed and spoke about it constantly—I think from the time he was a kid. A short story he had written, in fact, about a young addict recovering in a Harlem rehab much like the ARC (if
I am remembering it correctly, he tries to clean up but is drawn back into drugs) made a paperback anthology of young black writers that came out sometime in the early 1970s. It was the only publication Tommy managed, that I know of, and the fact that he had been included in a black anthology didn’t bother him one bit. Since he spoke and acted, down to his every Soul Train dance move, pretty much like a black man, albeit one without much bitterness about anything, his white skin seemed just a technicality. Just where he had come from, an educated and erudite father and family (and with a brilliant younger brother), didn’t occur to him, and though he, with his swifter than swift mind, could have easily, in some other comfortably upper-middle-class setting, aspired to any number of other professions, such as a lawyer or a doctor or a college professor, Tommy just wanted to be himself—this down-home Harlem guy. His love of reading, by the way, never faded as long as I knew him and he is the only person I have ever seen who, losing himself in a narrative while in a state of physical ecstasy, could perk up suddenly to say, “You best believe I can write better shit than this”—about the works of someone like C. S. Lewis or Norman Mailer. “And I will one day, you’ll see” was the kind of the thing he’d tell me, his biggest admirer and a true believer in that future.
And myself? I liked the florid language of Shakespeare, though watching his plays performed in Central Park often put me half to sleep even when the casts included actors like Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep, among notable others. The blame would go to my short attention span and my own capacity for daydreaming: In the balmy night air, with a few persnickety stars managing to peek down at the world through the harsh New York–down-on-its-luck hazes, I would fantasize not about writing something like Shakespeare but about becoming an actor myself, or at least envying those sorts of folks, in the same way I secretly admired even the most outlandish of rock musicians for having the courage (balls) to get out there in a way that engaged the wider world.
Though there were some prose writers like Hubert Selby Jr. and Pietro di Donato whose work really spoke to me in school—I would see and hear their stories as if I were watching a movie—Tennessee Williams’s plays were the first things I’d ever read that made me want to pick up a pen and try writing something myself. (It was that detail of the glowing portrait of the father on the wall in his play The Glass Menagerie that absolutely killed me, as if the man were coming back as a spirit from the beyond to revisit—and mutely comment upon—the scenes of a life he had left behind.) But I also loved Mr. Williams’s lyric writing style, that tenderness that seemed to permeate all his scenes; and I liked him personally, brief as my meeting him had been. At an antiwar rally held in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he had come down from the pulpit after giving a short speech, and as a part of the crowd, I, having cojones and a half, had walked up to Mr. Williams and introduced myself: I’m sure that my being so young helped my cause, but he looked at me and smiled, and we spoke for a few moments. I can remember thinking that there was nothing sleazy about the man, just that his famous eyes, light blue, as I recall, and delicate in their shimmer, seemed lonely as hell.
So, having a few electives to fool around with, and wanting, based on my admiration for The Glass Menagerie, to eventually take up playwriting myself—if only as a lark—I ended up enrolling in a drama course. At the time, my teacher, Murray Schisgal, a warm, proletarian sort, was at work on a play, An American Millionaire, at the Circle in the Square, and it amazes me now that he was so generous to his students, bringing us down to the rehearsals. There I had the incredible luck of becoming, along with several others, a fly on the wall while the actors—Paul Sorvino, Bob Dishy, and Austin Pendleton—figured out their bits, and Schisgal tried to hammer the play’s somewhat amorphous scenes into shape (the show, unfortunately, would end up a flop). He had us write three- and four-page scenes for the acting school students there, which was the first time I ever heard anything I had written read aloud by someone else. (If you are wondering what I wrote about, it was this, as I recall: A man and a woman are in a kitchen. The man is a little drunk, the woman complaining, they have an argument; I can’t imagine where that came from.) But, in the end, at least in terms of writing dramatic scenes, I couldn’t begin to put down on paper what I had in my head—of course this went back to the way I had grown up. I just circled around the dramatic possibilities, as if I would be disturbing the dead by writing about certain things, and at the same time, it seems that I couldn’t quite own up to the fact that I was the son of Cubans, as if it were something I wanted to hide.
“You have some good stuff going on here,” Schisgal once told me in his kindly manner as he was reading something I had written. “But how come I’m not hearing any ethnic stuff in this? It’s your family you’re writing about, aren’t you?”
“I guess I am,” I’d say.
“Then why don’t you run with it?”
“I don’t know.”
Whatever notions I might have entertained, however, it was Schisgal, puffing away on a cheery wood pipe, who, noticing how I would write inordinately long stage directions but with some panache and verbal intensity, suggested that I might better find my voice by trying another form altogether: “Ever try writing prose, kid?” he asked me that day. “If you haven’t, it’s something you should consider.”
I hadn’t, but it was something that was to linger in the back of my head for a long time.
I am not quite sure how I made the transition from the kind of super naturalistic (but stiffly guarded) scenes I had put on paper into actually trying to write fiction, but I do recall that it was the writing department’s chairman, an affable and dapper fellow by the name of Frederic Tuten (a future teacher and a friend of mine to this day), who suggested that I submit a piece to one of the several fiction writers then teaching under the humble auspices of the City College banner, a list that, in those days, was rather stellar (and serious) in a New York City way. Anxiously enough, and naïve about the difficulties of writing good prose, I spent several nights furiously typing up what I seemed to think might have qualified as a short story, of some twenty-five pages in often misspelled, nongrammatical sentences—a tale about a pretty blind girl, Celeste (a name I took from one of the lovely Parks sisters across the street from where I grew up), trapped in a miserable marriage, who, while having an affair with someone across town, takes the subway and, getting on the wrong train, ends up in a really bad neighborhood where she is jumped and taken sexual advantage of. (Not an iota of my Cuban roots could be found anywhere in it—think I made her cruel husband a Greek or an Italian, and as far as Celeste herself went, I never bothered to identify her origins, though I did have her feeling instinctually frightened by the strangeness of a South Bronx Latino neighborhood, her mugging taking place in an abandoned lot such as those I remembered seeing and playing in during my childhood.)
As for the actual quality of the writing in that piece, it was, I think, rather dense and, in its way, colorful. (I always loved details, though; with the way I thought and still think, order was never one of my fortes.) Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, taught at City at the time, and I had originally intended to submit my piece for his class—going so far as to scribble in pen For Professor Heller across the top of its first page—but it so happened that Donald Barthelme was also teaching there and while I had never read anything by him, my actress girlfriend, Carol, a longtime reader of The New Yorker, thought him quite funny and cutting-edge, and planted in my mind the notion I would do quite well with him if I were fortunate enough to be accepted into his class. (Thank you, Carol.)
So one afternoon, I went prowling around the halls of the writing department, which was housed in a long Quonset hut on the south campus, with my short story in hand, in search of Donald Barthelme. Inside the first office, whose doors were not always marked, I saw Joseph Heller, whose face I knew from his book jackets, white haired, regal, quite handsome, in a checkered shirt and blue jeans, sitting by his desk, eating what I think was a pastrami on
rye with mustard sandwich (he looked up, asking, “Can I help you?”), and then moving on, I peered into another office, where sat the ethereally beautiful Francine du Plessix Gray in an elegant French-style dress, discussing some technicality intensely with some lucky student, and just beyond, I came to another doorway and saw someone who might have been Donald Barthelme: Behind a desk and typewriter sat a gray-haired man of late middle age, in a tie and rumpled jacket, with remarkably warm blue eyes and an incredibly florid complexion, who smiled at me gently as soon as he saw me.
“Excuse me, but are you Donald Barthelme?” I asked, to which he replied, “No, my name is William Burroughs.”
Of course, I’d heard of him—didn’t he write something crazy about drugs? Oh, yeah, that Naked Lunch, which Tommy Muller-Thym liked? I recall thinking—and though I didn’t have any business to take up with him, he was so friendly that when Mr. Burroughs, perhaps bored or feeling lonely at that moment, asked me if I wanted to sit and chat with him for a few minutes, I did. What we talked about were my doubts and hopes regarding what I had started to guardedly think of as a potential second vocation behind that of either becoming a musician (doubtful) or a high school teacher (far more probable). He was teaching at City as a special visitor, as was another Bohemian sort, Peter Orlovsky, also somewhere down the hall; of a congenial bent of mind, he listened to my plaintive musings patiently, saying things like “Oh, I’m sure you’ll succeed at whatever you try, young man.” Later, after I’d snooped around about his past, I was surprised to learn that he had built a youthful reputation as a drug-crazed sexual deviant who had once shot his wife, a supposed wreck of a human being. But for those ten or so minutes that I passed with him, he seemed as genteel and kindly as any writer I’d ever meet, not a single bit of self-centeredness or meanness in his being—which is to say, he was an anomaly, though I did not know that at the time. (I didn’t even know if he was gay—at least he did not check me over the way some men downtown in the Village did during my occasional excursions to see a show or check out music. Instead he seemed like he would have been perfectly at home in some midwestern high school counselor’s office.)