Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  Looking over the first page of my short story, he nodded with appreciation: “Very nice,” he said, rubbing his chin—what else could he say? Whether he meant it or not didn’t really matter to me—not then, not now. Above all, his kindness was obviously something I would never forget.

  Barthelme, it turned out, occupied a small and windowless office at the far end of the Quonset hut hall: I found him, with Burroughs pointing from his doorway and saying, “Just follow the smoke,” for, indeed, as I got down to that end, a few dense plains of filterless Pall Mall fumes, hanging magically in the air, seemed to lead inside: There I saw Donald Barthelme for the first time. He was wearing a blue denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and reading a New York Post with a pencil in hand (was he editing their prose?). He looked, with a longish beard and oval face, like a Dutch sea captain, or a little like a milder, less severe version of Solzhenitsyn. With sandy hair just dropping over his ears and broad shoulders, he seemed a sturdy man in his mid-forties, if that. Surely a writer, if only for his wire-rimmed glasses and nicotine-stained fingers (right hand). He barely looked up when I finally walked in and asked, “Professor Barthelme?” after which, hearing why I was there, he told me to sit down and offered me a smoke. (I happily accepted, puffing away anxiously.) Within a few minutes, however, he had read enough of my piece—which he’d already started marking up with a pencil, mainly correcting punctuation, but laughing a few times, over what I did not know—and without much deliberation gave me permission, by way of a signed note, to enroll in a class he was teaching for beginner’s fiction.

  I’d take two workshops with him as an undergraduate, and another while (somehow) advancing, on fellowship, into the MFA program at City. All his workshops were wonderfully intimate and easygoing, but, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just summarize here my experiences. In my initial class with him, he had us work mainly on notions of form and voice. His first assignment required that we go out and interview someone, and transcribe it in a narrative way. My subject, whom I found along 125th Street, was a young black kid whose life story, already at the age of twelve, would have made many a Fieldston and Horace Mann student faint: addict mother, dead father, brothers in jail. I felt bad afterward—I had asked him too much, in effect hitting the poor kid over the head with the shittiness of his life. Another assignment involved writing a sestina, then a sonnet, after Shakespeare. At the same time, he had us reading crazy books like Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish, The Blood Oranges by John Hawkes, and, among others, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, all of which, I have to confess, despite their sophistication, left me, cut from a primitive, emotionally blunt cloth, a little cold.

  But I eagerly responded to the written assignments. No amount of work bothered me, as I seemed to have all the time and energy in the world, no matter how cluttered my schedule. For about fifteen hours a week, I helped recently arrived students, mainly from Eastern Europe, with their writing assignments as part of my SEEK work-study program duties—my guess is that my formal English grammar was far better than it is now—and working at that Columbia library, as well as showing up for band rehearsals on the weekends. I still had so much energy left over that at the end of the day, it was nothing for me to spend half the night up by a desk, smoking up a storm while delving into whatever tasks lay before me. (At that age, the early twenties, you can eat, romp with your girlfriend, run around Central Park, romp some more, watch TV for an hour, bullshit on the telephone with whomever for a half an hour, read a chapter out of a textbook, romp yet again, and still have enough juice left over to swim across the East River if you want to.)

  Once we finally got around to our first attempts at fiction—though the use of that word fiction sounds overly lofty in connection with what I was doing in those days—we settled into a routine fairly common to writing workshops everywhere. Sitting at the head of a conference table (or classroom), Mr. Barthelme listened as his students, having passed out Xeroxed or mimeographed copies of their pieces (both kinds of now-archaic machines were in use in that always budget-challenged school), read from them aloud, while the others prepared themselves to make hopefully constructive comments, Barthelme presiding as if over a committee. (He must have done the same elsewhere, for he also taught occasionally at the much vaunted Valhalla of writing, Iowa, where the true and glorious future of American letters awaited the world.) I won’t go into that process any further, except to say that Barthelme did the brunt of his more insightful work, mainly as an editor, during his office hours—though if a word or phrase caught his ear in class, he might say something complimentary or funny about it. And while he left most of everything else to his students, I will say that, as far as I could tell, he seemed to genuinely enjoy his role as a teacher.

  My first pieces for him, incidentally, were either earthbound, leaden, and, given the influence of Hemingway, whose work I was then studying in another class, overly formal, or absolutely mad in the spirit of experimentation. Never writing about anything of importance to me, I seemed at my best inventing names—Charlie Lopso was one of them, and Opanio Santinio another, the latter being a stand-in for me. At the same time, I seemed to have somehow become, while reading ancient Egyptian history for yet another class, intent upon writing a humorous narrative about a scribe named Exetus lurking along the fringes of the pharaoh’s court during the building of the Great Pyramid—later I became fixated on a bread maker in ancient Rome (which I’ve always warmed to—the baker reminding me of my father, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time—and that setting, in ancient times, wonderful simply because it reminded me of how those New Testament texts always made me feel: hopeful, without really knowing just why). In other words, I drifted around like crazy, without much focus or serious intent. Nevertheless, Barthelme seemed most interested in improving whatever fledgling skills I had, which were not many, and though I finished that course feeling I had learned something about writing—perhaps that it really wasn’t for me—I had liked the social aspect of it enough (where else did one commune with other students in so direct a fashion?) that I decided to continue on along those creative lines for the hell of it.

  I have to say this about City: It was, and still is, about the most ethnically mixed university in the country, a true honeycomb of nationalities and cultural cliques. You couldn’t walk down a hallway without hearing three or four languages being spoken—from Russian to Chinese to Urdu. In one of my classes, during the onset of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, as soon as news of it broke, several of my fellow students, Israelis, got up from their seats and, leaving the classroom immediately, disappeared for the next three weeks. There were Chinese social clubs and gangs around campus, more or less secretive societies whose members seemed to keep themselves out of sight. For the most part unobtrusive, they did have some friction with the black gangs. One afternoon, while walking back from class in one of the main buildings, Shepherd Hall, I came upon a scuffle in which some black guys were doing their best to put a beating on a scrawny Chinese fellow. All I did was to go forward—knowing one of them from a class; he was ex–Special Forces, of recent Vietnam vintage, but a very nice fellow in general, though scary-looking with his Mohawk Afro—asking what was going on, and that was enough, it seemed, to break up the attack, though not without getting my share of dirty looks from my black brethren. In any event, I helped the Chinese guy up, and it turned out that this scrawny fellow, who really wasn’t worse for wear, happened to be the head of one of those gangs. Before running off to get his boys, I suppose for retribution, he told me: “Anyone messes with you, let me know.”

  No one did, though one evening as I went heading down the long hill from City toward the subway on 137th Street, this big black guy came up to me and did this knife-in-a-pocket thing, asking for my money. That’s when I explained to him that he was in the wrong place, that the kids who attended City College were generally poor immigrants without much money at all and that if he wanted to go where the students were better off, Columbia
University was the place to be. “Oh, yeah?” he asked me. “Where’s that?” And I told him—“Just take the train down to 116th Street. Or you can walk.” And I even advised him about where he should stand, in front of its entranceway gates along Broadway, and that since money didn’t mean much to them, because it came to them so easily, they wouldn’t give him any trouble at all. “Thanks, man,” he told me, before heading off on his noble mission.

  Ironically enough, I had more contact with black folks and Eastern Europeans than I did with the Latinos of City. Yet there was one fellow, a very cool, bone-thin Chilean graduate student with a Fu Manchu mustache and ponytail, whom I’d see from time to time in the English Department. He knew that I was named Hijuelos and seemed quite amused by the fact that I’d turn a deep red when he’d speak to me in Spanish, and answer him with some kind of jive muttering under my breath. After a while, he gave up on that conversational route but noticing that I seemed to have an interest in writing, for I was always turning up with books and clumps of my own work to show around, he began to preach the bible of his own aesthetic preferences—Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges. Of the three, I’d only heard of Borges and only because Barthelme, in trying to nudge me away from my purely naturalistic tendencies (and probably lumping all Latino nationalities together), thought he was putting me on to a writer I might consider a kind of kin. But I’d never bothered to check Borges out until the Chilean mentioned him as well: I suppose the fact that he was Latino indeed made a difference to me, as far as taking his advice to heart. Soon enough I got ahold of some of Borges’s works (Labyrinths and The Aleph and Other Stories, I recall) from the Salter’s bookstore on Broadway. Sometime later, as well, I purchased a copy of Cortázar’s Hopscotch and, becoming drunk with those worlds, fell into a swoon that lasted months, as if a ray of light filled with warmth and pride-making energies had struck me from heaven. Soon enough, I went wading into a sea of phenomenal Latin American writers—the most prominent of them García Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude was amazing—but others as well, like Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa, whose equally wonderful novels were behind the boom in Latin American letters then sweeping the world.

  I loved them all, could not get enough of their writings, and the fact those books were written by Latinos stirred up some crazy pride inside of me; and once I got on that trail, I discovered two Cuban writers—José Lezama Lima and Guillermo Cabrera Infante—whose works not only blew me away but left me feeling so good, as if I were back in Cuba or keeping company with Cubans, that I stepped back and, checking out my own work with a recently awakened eye, felt as if, in a way, I had been reborn. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel particularly ashamed of how and what I had come from and, thinking about my father and mother, began to conceive that perhaps, one day, I would be able to write something about them, and without the fears and shame that always entered me.

  Of course, that epiphany, and the euphoria that followed it, having its moment, left as quickly as it had come, and the truth remained, that once all that glorious smoke had cleared and I looked over my shoulder and behind me, and felt the indifference of the world—who the fuck would care about anything I would say?—I settled back into the safety of the refuge I had constructed for myself as an americano with wavering ambitions.

  However, by the time I’d returned to Barthelme’s classroom, he’d seemed to notice a marked improvement in my techniques and ear for language. I owed that not only to the wildly brilliant Latin Americans and Cubans I had been reading, but to the bookish influence of the aforementioned Frederic Tuten, who put me on to writers like Ferdinand Céline and Rabaleis and another of his favorites, Malamud, whom I had always liked but had not read extensively. (I even wrote a piece in his class that I still rather like to this day: an account—imaginary—of a boy’s outing to Coney Island with his father, which I read aloud, with my voice quavering with emotions I could not yet understand.)

  Lest I put you to sleep, I will try to conclude this by mentioning a few other authors whose works I read carefully and whose techniques I tried to understand in those days: Carson McCullers, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Peter Handke, Günter Grass, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, John Berger, and yes, the short stories of Barthelme himself—among others—and if there is no seeming logic to that list, it is because I read everything I could get my hands on, without any overriding design, a kind of madness—or book lust—coming over me. (Speaking of lust, no matter what I happened to be doing in bed, I’d look forward to getting back to whatever I happened to be reading: That’s how far gone I had become.)

  Along the way, I dove more deeply into the sea of Latin American letters and found those waters increasingly nourishing and warming. Naturally, even among them, there were writers who did not speak to my heart and soul, but they never bothered me to the degree that certain highly regarded mainstream Americans did: Though I admired their technique I never cared for what I will now call the three Johns: Cheever, Barth, and Updike.

  With Barthelme again, I began wanting to write more and more about Cuba. It simply possessed me. Reawakened memories, perhaps inspired by the likes of Lima and Infante (later Arenas and Severo Sarduy), came flowing into me. (And there was something else happening at the time: Hanging around my mother and her friends when they started up with their stories, the details of their lives, and the hardships they’d gone through as newcomers to this country, which had so bored me before, seemed suddenly so interesting. Coming back to my place on Eighty-third Street, I would be sitting by my desk—a fifteen-dollar beauty that I’d hauled up from a junk shop on Amsterdam—smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying to recall, however remotely time had placed it, the little journey I had once made down to Cuba with my mother and brother. There was something life-affirming about that summoning up of images—what was there to see? What did the house look like? What did we do? The smell of things, the taste, the feelings that the night sky seemed to bring out in me. (I’ll admit that when it came to Cuba, I had already become a hopeless romantic, an idealizer of that which I would never really know, but which, just the same, seemed a part of me.) And yet, in the midst of such warm feelings, I felt a little queasy at the same time (sucking harder on a cigarette, girlfriend walking in and asking, “Are you still up? And why are you smoking so much?”) because the more I wrote about my little corner of Cuba, the more I drifted inexorably into yet another story that was not as comforting: the time I spent in the hospital, that puzzling nightmare that was a part of my life, which I never liked to think about. Once I got to that place, it seemed that I was on the verge of opening yet another door, the stuff of my upbringing that, banging on the walls and screaming, I really didn’t have any interest in pursuing because out of a corner of my eye, whenever I looked inside, there were just too many things I didn’t particularly want to see again. That sensation shooting up through me had a curious effect on my body—my arms and back would burn up, my skin covering with welts, and a fierce itching such as I had never known before would overwhelm me, and I would swear, no way would I write about that time, which I’d rather forget.

  Still, there seemed something so wonderful about the very notion of writing. I liked it because, quite simply, I could hide behind the pages. No one could see my fair complexion, my non-Cuban countenance. At first I wrote a few strange stories but set them in Cuba—one I called “Invasion of the Star Creatures” or the “Aliens,” about this spaceship that lands in Cuba, and whose occupants take on the appearance of Rudolph Valentinos roaming the countryside, finding Cuban women to marry and, eventually, immigrating to the States and becoming “aliens” again. Without realizing it, while scrambling about the CCNY library stacks, as well as those of my local public library, and foraging through the sale racks in Columbia’s bookstores, anything even vaguely pertaining to Cuba became a source of inspiration to me, and out of the blue, while writing down every bit of interesting
lore and fact and legend I could find about Cuba’s history—and feeling nourished by just the fact of coming across the names I’d grown up hearing about, in the elegant and uplifting setting of a book, Jiguaní, Holguín, Girona, and Santiago, among so many others—such discoveries so uplifted my spirits that I couldn’t help myself from working into the late hours of the night. Back then, I felt so strongly about entering Cuba, as it were, through the dimension of paper that while slipping inside the very dream I had always carried around with me, I was rarely even aware of the time.

  And while I’d hang around on the weekends, playing electric blues and quasi-Latin jazz tunes with my downstairs neighbors, Juan “Ching” Ortíz, an aspiring comic book artist and great musician, and his crazy pissed-off-at-life brother, Eddie, on the bass, and still dreamed a little nostalgically about the fun of performing before crowds of drunk and stoned people with my friends like Nick, who, by then, had decided to focus on his other interest—modernistic painting (shades of Cy Twombly and Ronnie Bladen, to use art-world speak)—another side of me, fighting against my natural impulse to look down on myself, managed to work on. In any event, in the cornucopia of detail that possessed me in those days—because to write about Cuba, no matter how distant the details happened to be removed in time, they somehow brought me closer to an image of my father—I found myself, much to Barthelme’s amusement and measured admiration (for I was bringing in twenty pages of not-bad copy a week), writing a takeoff on a Havana guidebook, which, as it turned out, could have existed only in my head, and which, incidentally, made a liberal use of my own brand of “Spanglish,” as with my invented term for a Cuban taking a photograph—the verb snapar. Shameless, and not having a notion of just how gushing my efforts were—unlike today, when I agonize over a blank page—I quickly accumulated a couple of hundred largely plotless pages, which, however, in describing just about every major monument in Havana and digressively touching upon many another tale—as, say, the story of how the Taino chieftain Hatuey had refused baptism when he was about to be burned at the stake, or imagining Hernán Cortéz walking up a hill in colonial Santíago to his house when he was a governor of the island—I gradually began to sketch in portraits of a largish Cuban family made up of strong-minded women, perhaps like my mother or my aunts, a family who somehow lived in Havana and out on a farm at the same time. Whatever I submitted, Barthelme dutifully penciled in his corrections, and along the way, while reading parts of said work aloud to a class of fairly remarkable students—among them were Ted Mooney and the ever so affable Wesley Brown—I became my own most severe critic.