Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  I’d slip, not wanting to write much at all, and then go drifting back to my old pursuits—like hanging around with my musician pals. Or I’d go through periods of getting high again, anything, as an old song might go, to forget that which I was trying my best not to remember. I would also occasionally head down to the bar to see how the old gang happened to be faring, but with the difference that now, since I’d gone to college, some prick would like to ride me about the run of my good luck—“Didn’t they figure out that you’re a dumb fuck yet?”

  At school, my professor Frederic Tuten helped smooth me out. With a Bronx-transplanted European sophistication and bon vivant personality, he made you feel good not only about books and literature but about the calling itself, as if to write was the greatest dream one could ever aspire to. We’d talk about books in a more emotional manner than I ever could with Barthelme, who seemed to be quite methodical in his approach to writing, his passions emanating more from his head, rather than from his heart. Altogether, Frederic, with his union organizer father, German and Sicilian forebears, and working-class upbringing, was far more approachable and easier for someone like me to know. It was he, more so than Barthelme, who encouraged my first efforts at writing a novel—even if I didn’t know what the hell I was doing—and, as if to restate the benefit of attending a public college with a quite hip writing department, he put me into a workshop that would turn out to be a once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience: the only class in fiction writing that Susan Sontag ever taught.

  We shouldn’t have gotten along: Her disposition, taste, haughty manner, and way of being—above the world—couldn’t have been more different from my own. And in her utter sophistication and Bohemian snootiness, she was far removed from any woman I’d ever met. Physically, she was imposing; on the tallish side, she had a shock of raven black hair, sans the famous white streak, in those days at least, and an expressive and alluringly intelligent face, her dark eyes intensely powerful: Truth be told, there was something about her that, upon our first meeting, reminded me of some of the more severe nuns from Corpus, as if she too, in some ways, were completely bottled up. She wasn’t easy at first. Her once-weekly class met in her penthouse apartment on 106th Street, in a building right across from the Duke Ellington mansion, which overlooked Riverside Park, its entryway and halls, I recall, covered in books. (Another detail of the few I can remember? On a wall overlooking her kitchen counter, she kept a poster taken from a still depicting ancient Babylon from the D. W. Griffith film Intolerance. Elsewhere, like half the population of Bohemian New York, she’d put up one of those iconic portraits of Che.) Seated around her living room, we students would listen, riveted, to her every word, as she’d deliberate, often cruelly and bluntly, about a piece at hand: “This is not worth my time,” she’d glumly say about someone’s fiction. And once, to a young woman who had the strongest aspirations of becoming a writer, Sontag, looking over her words and shaking her head in misery, told her: “If I were you, I’d drop this course right now and forget about ever writing anything again. You just don’t have it.”

  She sent that young woman from her apartment—and that course—crying; afterward, she seemed befuddled, as if she believed she had done the young lady a favor. As a result of that early event, those first classes were nerve-racking for the students, each of us waiting for our own moment of doom to arrive; but, of course, such dressing-down depended on her mood, and, as we eventually learned, her mood depended on the state of her precarious health, for my enrollment in her graduate workshop happened to coincide with the period in her life when she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. So, faced with the prospect of those treatments—a mastectomy awaiting her—and taking medications, her moods vacillated. Some classes, she skipped going over student pieces, preferring to talk instead about the books she liked—like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, which she considered a masterpiece; and another, “for the voice alone,” I recall her saying, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Once she spoke at length about her own fiction, of which she was quite proud. (Frankly, I didn’t get it, having always been somewhat numb-headed to the charms of certain kinds of conceptual, high-toned writing.) She’d talk, as well, about how she went about her own work: “I go through countless drafts, and sometimes spend hours over a single paragraph,” she’d say (to my horror!). In her living room, she kept a writing desk on which, just as with Barthelme, she had a typewriter alongside which sat a neatly arranged pile of paper, an austerity about the setup that both of them shared.

  Of course, she eventually got around to my class submissions, and because I’d started to write more and more about Cuba, and did so while having many a dream about my father, and therefore wrote of a world that, rightly or wrongly, was rife with ghosts, something about the way I seemed to believe in an afterlife, and my often Catholic imagery, really appealed to her, as did my precocious awareness of mortality. But though she mainly had nice things to say about it—rich was the word that both Sontag and Barthelme used to describe my writing (I think it was code for verbose)—she could really dislike a passage for a very simple flaw. “This is just no good,” she’d say. “This just doesn’t work,” which would confuse the hell out of me, since, reviewing the same passage in a different context a few weeks before, she had loved it. She’d shake her head distastefully and attempt to rescue it: Often for Sontag, who seemed of the Oscar Wilde “I spent the morning taking out a comma and the afternoon putting it back in” school of writing, the solution, the very change that would restore a passage to its finest state, would, in fact, come down to moving a few words around or changing a period to a semicolon: Then her face would brighten up and all was well with the world again.

  And I’d hang around with her after class sometimes. She liked the company. I got to meet her son, David Rieff—he owned a red F-hole hollow-body electric guitar and seemed to enjoy playing country music. (We talked about “jamming, man” once—but it never happened.) On one of those afternoons, she told me that she had always wanted to learn how to play tennis and asked if, when she got better, I would ever be interested in hitting a few balls with her—from her windows, one could see the courts of 122nd Street in the park. She’d also confess that fame was tiring, that the best part of writing came during the actual conception of an idea. She’d talk about going downtown to have dinner sometime—and once when she dropped me off in a taxi on her way to Union Square, she seemed sincere in expressing her disappointment that she couldn’t spend more time with me and had to see her publisher at FSG, Roger Straus Jr., instead.

  In Sontag’s class, as with Barthelme’s and every literature course I took as a graduate student, with some real first-rate scholars like Frederick Karl, I received an A—a grade, from one of the leading intellectuals of the day, which, in retrospect, I should have taken as an enormous encouragement about my future prospects as a writer. But you know what? Even when I felt this immediate jolt of elation and truly happy for a few days at such a recognition, once I slipped back into feeling like my real self—not the smart guy who had impressed even such a brilliant writer as Sontag (or Barthelme), but the crude and undereducated snooker artist who still felt like shoplifting every time he walked into a store—all that faded. It would hit me the hardest when I’d go up and visit my mother, bring her some takeout Chinese food, doing my best to hang in there with her, and I’d want to tell her that some big-shot lady, mi maestra, really thought I had something going with my work. But it would have meant nothing to her anyway—what would she have known of Sontag or Barthelme—and, you know, once I’d sit down by that kitchen table, where my pop had passed so many nights, I’d remember that I had a certain place in the world, and I’d be stupid to try to exceed it: I’d be better off leaving all that writing business to the real talents in those classes.

  CHAPTER 7

  My Life on Madison Avenue

  By the time I left that program, with the writing of my MFA thesis deferred for the future, I had packed in the notion of
becoming a schoolteacher, along with my musical aspirations, leaving them to molder in that realm of passed-over possibilities. At the same time, I did not think of myself as a writer by any stretch of the imagination. Instead I considered myself an appreciator of writing with some hands-on experience of it, some three or so years’ worth, though without a thing to show for myself by way of publishing, save a single Barthelme-like short story, which appeared in an issue of a literary magazine called Persea. (Perhaps only because it had happened to be edited by one of my fellow students at City, a certain Karen Braziller.)

  In any event, I remained far behind the pack: By comparison, one of my fellow students, Ted Mooney, had already published a rather remarkable and much-lauded story, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in the quite prestigious North American Review, while another of our first-rate talents, Philip Graham, had come out with a book of his own finely hewn experimental short stories. (Since I’m going there, some of the other students who were writing and publishing wonderful work were Wesley Brown, Linsey Abrams, and Myra Goldberg, among those I remember.) At the same time, I could not pick up a literary journal without seeing something by the Barthelme-esque T. Coraghessan Boyle, or Jayne Anne Phillips, author of the mysterious and fluid Black Tickets, or by the most radiantly successful Ann Beattie, another emerging star whose first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, came out shortly after I had left City, in 1976. That list of emerging talents could go on, but no matter where one looked in those days, I can’t keep from adding, it was a very rare thing to see published work by any members of that primitive tribe from our urban jungles known as los Latinos.

  And while I seemed to have acquired, through my own novice writings, a growing appreciation (or love/hate relationship) for my roots and their Cuban-ness, however skewered by the events that had formed me, I thought it would be years before I could write anything worthwhile. Even then, who out there would publish it? For, in those days at least, it was not as if publishing houses or literary magazines were knocking down doors to find what I would call homegrown Latino/Hispanic writers. As American letters stood, its Mount Rushmore would have been carved with the granite faces of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, with a descending pantheon of names from Barthelme to John Gardner forming the rushing funnel below, while even the greatest of black writers, like Ralph Ellison (whose work I also loved), would have hovered about those bodies like some distantly circling satellite. (Of course, behind earlier successes like James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones—later Amiri Baraka—there were younger black writers coming up, John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison being the most prominent. Now try to find a comparable list of Latinos in any discussion of American letters from that period—or earlier—and you won’t find a single name to mention.)

  Having said all this, I’m turning my own stomach with my selfrighteous and somewhat pedantic tone and would prefer to move on to a more exciting subject. And so I will leave it at this: If American readers thought about “Spanish” writing at all, it came down to the highly revered Latin Americans of that day, and even they were being appreciated only by the highbrow liberal intellectuals and some of the better-educated general public. For what it’s worth, homegrown Latino writing—Cuban-American or otherwise—if it already existed, wasn’t being noticed, nor celebrated to a degree that would have drawn out a somewhat reticent and self-doubting fellow like me: In that way, I was frightened to death of going onstage.

  Any ambitions that I might have developed weren’t helped by my then in-laws who thought me self-deluded for ever having wasted my time in graduate school. Even before I’d married their daughter, they sat me down as someone who wouldn’t have much of a future without their assistance and offered to get me, through connections, into the University of Chicago Law School. Of course, once we were to move out there and I started attending classes, we’d need a car and a place to live, which they would most generously provide, as well as their active financial support. But, even without thinking seriously about my future, that whole notion about becoming a respectable lawyer son-in-law, living the middle-class life with all those strings attached, just wasn’t for me. (And the mother could be condescending: While discussing seating arrangements for a wedding dinner that never happened, when someone suggested that it might be nice if she sat next to my mother, she quipped, “Then who would I have to talk to?”)

  Deep down, that marriage wasn’t anything I really wanted, which was probably why I got incredibly drunk at my own wedding reception. For the record, that was an easy thing to do: With tons of booze available, but little food, and while the band playing Top Forty stuff kept a lot of the attendees out on the dance floor, several of my friends, and my cousin by marriage Angel Tamayo, drinking on a canapé-filled stomach, got violently ill and, after throwing up all over a table, passed out. I did no better: The only part of the reception I remembered the next day was dancing with my aunt Cheo, to whom, prompted by my mother, I whispered a carefully prepared line: “Estoy muy contento de que hayas venido a mi boda ”—“I am very happy that you have come to my wedding.” She, with her Cuban Edith Bunker sweetness, was delighted and pulled me close, saying: “Te quiero mucho, nieto”—“I love you very much, nephew.” And I would be able to recall running into some of my school friends and a few of my neighbors from Eighty-third Street, as well as pals from the old neighborhood, and sitting beside Barthelme and smoking a few cigarettes, all the while asking, “So what do you think?” (His answer? “How very interesting.”)

  But, in general, it seemed that I behaved disastrously: Long after that rooftop terrace had been cleared out, around midnight, as I sat in some diner with my psychologist in-laws, who doubtlessly had many a reason for feeling annoyed with me (“Must you smoke?” the mother asked. “You realize that you drank too much!”), they reiterated the aforementioned plan for me as a demand: “You do realize that we expect our daughter to live in a certain way.” Never one to hide my feelings, the fact that my fair-skinned face turned a livid red could not have pleased them much at all. In any event, from that night onward, the days of that ill-advised marriage were already numbered.

  For the sake of brevity and to get on with this story, sometime in December of 1976, on a cold and miserable day a few weeks before Christmas, I woke up in our apartment with an awful influenza. I was so sick I could barely get out of bed, but my wife thought I should go to my new job, which I’d held since September at that point, so that “we,” as she put it, could use any leftover sick days for a future vacation. Though I had the chills, felt like death, vomited my guts out a few times, and happened to be running a fever, I somehow dragged myself into the rawness of that day and caught a train from West Seventy-ninth Street to work.

  On a good day without delays, it took ten minutes to get down to the Times Square station, and riding the front car, I’d get out through the Fashion Avenue exit and walk east along Fortieth toward Madison: There, taking up the southeast corner and right across from the Young & Rubicam agency, stood 275, one of those great old art deco office buildings, with marble pilasters and gilded ceilings in the lobby, that remind one (reminded me, at any rate) of a New York that perhaps only ever really existed in the movies. (Just walking in that neighborhood always brought to mind the films of Fred MacMurray—for I had caught the tail end of a time when a great number of male office workers, the older ones at least, streaming to and fro out of Grand Central Terminal, still wore hats.) Altogether, I just found that ambience—so 1940s–1950s—reassuring, in almost a supernatural, time-dissolving way.

  Or at least that’s what the daydreamer in me would think, even in the midst of an awful illness. As I’d cut over eastward from the subway, I was always fooling with all kinds of tautologies—feeling, for example, that in the same way I happened to be thinking about what it must have been like back in the 1940s, someone far in the future was also thinking about what it must have been like in the 1970s, a kind of cubist (not Cuban) time thing going on in my head.

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; Often enough, as I’d zip past Bryant Park, I’d have a book, usually borrowed from the Forty-second Street library, opened in my hands, weather permitting. I’d pass anonymously through that perpetually bustling world in my tie and jacket and overcoat, without taking my eyes off a page except when I came to a light, cars and trucks and buses zooming by ruthlessly, or noticed a pretty girl with a nice figure sauntering along in high heels nearby. Rarely, I should add, did I daydream about writing in those days, at least as a priority, and if you had asked me what I did on the sly, I would have told you that I occasionally messed around with some of the crap I had written for school, in the same way I drew sometimes, or went downstairs to visit and play guitar with my friend Ching, or jammed uptown with my old pals—all my creative outlets being roughly equal in my estimation—just interesting ways of going through my days.

  Ah, but my job: Apparently, after finally deciding to get “serious” about my life, I didn’t really care what I did with my precious time. I hadn’t been looking for work too long and, recession or not, should have been more discerning, but I considered myself lucky to find any job at all. When a certain Mr. Belsky, my interviewer, offered me an entry-level clerk’s position with the transit advertising company known as TDI (or Transportation Display Inc.), whose offices occupied the third and fourth floors at the aforementioned address, I, without giving much thought to my future, accepted. Even if it was the kind of work that I couldn’t have imagined for myself while a graduate student at City, and there were other things I could have been doing—like taking a gamble and hitting the road as a backpacker to see the world, or, for that matter, following in the paths of so many of my classmates by heading into the relatively serene haven of academia—I simply didn’t care how I earned my livelihood as long as I’d somehow remain faithful to “my true self.”