Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  Of course, we’d talk about books. Deeply opinionated, Donald, in essence, had little patience with forced sentimentalism and false profundity (paging John Irving), and always tried to steer me in a certain direction. And while I don’t care to further elaborate on his tastes, those evenings, fueled by goblets of Scotch on the rocks, always arrived at a certain moment when he, growing impatient with making small talk, would cut to the chase: “And are you writing anything these days?” he’d ask me. And when I’d tell him, “Sure,” he’d simply say, “Okay, send it over and let me see what you’re doing.”

  It’s quite incredible to me now that he would make such an offer (though I also think it was his way of winding up the night) and that I didn’t take him seriously enough to follow through. I was too uncertain about my work to risk embarrassing myself—and I didn’t want to waste his time. Nor did I want him to think I had regressed in terms of technique and progress. (I fantasized that my former classmates were advancing way beyond me at a dizzying rate.) Above all, though I didn’t realize it, I obviously had a lot of my father, Pascual, in me: a fatalistic, nearly passive attitude about life that didn’t allow me to take advantage of real opportunities. Even then, I believed that just hanging around someone like Barthelme was a kind of credential unto itself.

  Inevitably, for the longest time, no matter how often Barthelme brought up the subject of my work—teaching part of the year in a new position at the University of Houston, he even telephoned me now and then over the years to see how I was progressing—I managed to put him off. And when he’d revisit the notion of my attending the University of Iowa—some three or four times over a six-year or so period—I never took that, or his other efforts to help me, seriously.

  Still, I kept fooling around on a typewriter at night and on the weekends, while accumulating stacks of unfinished scenes, vignettes, and, I suppose, what might pass as chapters of something about the way I had come up in life, too raw in both content and style, I thought deep down, for anyone in the publishing world to really care about.

  Besides, I had developed a new interest. Born of a flair that I had for gesture drawing and the fact that I had been a junkie for comic books, the children’s literature of my urban youth, for a time I wanted to become a cartoonist like Charles Schultz or Mort Walker. To that point, however, my pursuit of that vocation, which I occasionally spiced up with nighttime life drawing sessions at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design, with the random gorgeous (or homely) model as my subject, had only yielded a few strange children’s stories, an endless procession of birthday and Christmas cards that I made for friends and family (how I loved Christmas), and, given the recession-bound world of those years, some ridiculously obtuse ideas for syndicated strips.

  The closest I came to breaking into the biz I owed to my guitar-playing buddy Ching, a zippy draftsman who would later gain momentary fame as the artist of Krypto the Superdog for DC Comics. During one of those weeks when the repetitious nature of my office job had been getting to me, it was Ching, then an inker for DC, who suggested that I go over to their offices during lunch one day and chat with an editor over there, a fellow named Paul Levitz, who might be able to help me with some work. Not as an artist, however—I just didn’t have those chops—but as a scriptwriter. Though it wasn’t anything I’d particularly wanted to do, I gave it a shot, coming up with a story some eight pages long, about two brothers, the first a vampire, á la Dracula, and the second a vampire hunter, á la Van Helsing; I thought it was pretty good, sensitively written, etc., but he called it, to my surprise, “too literary” and highbrow for the average DC reader.

  Along the way, I came up with some writing that didn’t make me completely ill: in one instance, a narrative of some length that I’d written in a month or so of such sessions, involving a Cuban woman of an indeterminate age, remembering her childhood in Holguín, and a later romance with a fellow from the countryside. I have it somewhere, haven’t read it over since, and what I mainly recall is that it had a rather lyrical and nostalgic tone. Tightly written, during one of my anal phases in which I tried to be as “literary” as possible, I lavished upon it nearly every exotic word I could find in a dictionary and thesaurus. (There was no such thing as blue, rather it was cerulean, and pink became roseate and so on.) Xeroxing a few copies of it in the office, I sent one off as part of an application for some grant, and the other became the writing sample I attached to my application toward a “working fellowship” at a well-known writer’s conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Later, it thrilled me to learn that I had been accepted: I mean, what else would a young man working a nine-to-five full-time job want to do with his precious days off in the summer than wait tables?

  This took place during the last weeks of August 1979, just as I was about to turn twenty-eight: the conference, involving rustic housing, antique barns, and an ambience somewhere between that of a college campus and a wooded Zen retreat, had a pecking order that began with the paying writer aspirants, then the working fellows (like myself, usually folks who hadn’t published much), then regular, betterpublished fellows—minor stars as it were, whose only duty was to show up and read the auditor’s work (only if they wanted to)—and upward to the staggering Olympian heights where the great literary geniuses of our time apparently resided. Among those staggeringly great literary geniuses: John Irving, Tim O’Brien, Howard Nemerov, and the pharaoh himself, John Gardner, with his head of flaxen Prince Valiant hair. I, for one, had not read his famous and brilliantly titled Sunlight Dialogues—I’d peeked at it and found it, well, a bit on the plodding side, but what the hell did I know? I did read his On Moral Fiction, which, in its general attacks on many a postmodernist author, seemed to single out the work of Donald Barthelme as a model of the very worst kind of writing. However, it was one thing to read of such an opinion, quite another to breathe it in the air.

  Upon disembarking a bus to join my fellow “waitroids,” as we came to call ourselves, and settling in a cabin with several new friends, I had no idea that, for the two-week duration of the conference, Gardner’s ideas about nearly everything would be taken as God’s word spoken on earth, among them his disparagements of Barthelme. In such a world, Barthelme was a Satan—he would have laughed at the notion—but what surprised me the most was how often I overheard attendees, coming fresh from a lecture, parroting Gardner’s sentiments: One man literally spat on the ground, telling me, “Barthelme is full of shit!”—and there was worse. That hit me as a shock to my system, for aside from witnessing a little sniping and some hurt feelings in workshops, while at school, I had hardly experienced such viciousness from anyone and had simple-mindedly formed the notion that most writers respected and cared for each other. As much as I stood outside of it, I saw the literary life as a kind of brotherhood, a noble pursuit in which literature seemed an answer to the tawdrier aspects of existence. In other words, I was naïve, stupid, uninformed, green, and hopelessly idealistic despite the fact that, given the way I had come up, I should have known better.

  Of course, I had my job: With about twelve or so other fledgling writers, I spent those weeks getting up quite early in the morning to serve and bus the first of the day’s three meals, in a converted barn turned into a massive dining hall, where some two or three hundred people, eating in shifts, sat down at a time.

  The biggest rising star and resident sex symbol? John Irving, dressed in leather and riding around on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. At a reading he, handsome and Byronesque, held forth with the seriousness of a lama about to raise the dead: His prose electrified the audience; women sighed at the sight of him, as if he were a Sir Galahad in the flesh. (I don’t remember what he read—think it was a chapter in progress from a new novel—but, in its verbosity, one could sense the careful brick-by-brick masonry of his breathless prose.) As someone to wait upon in the mornings, however, he was not particularly pleasant—he’d flash you a dirty look if you picked up or served a dish while he was in the midst of saying some
thing—though he was not nearly so bad as a quite famous children’s author, of distinctly European origin, who at a certain point told me, as I served a glass of wine from the wrong side—only because someone was standing in the way—“Don’t you know anything about etiquette and proper dining? You should serve beverages from the right.” And John Gardner? He seemed affable enough but always gravely disposed, perhaps because of a hangover, which everyone seemed to have. He too held forth often about some high-toned miércoles or the other, his brightest and most adoring devotees always vying for his attention. Where Irving seemed to be the resident sex symbol, Mr. Gardner was more a papal figure or a shaman. He could not go anywhere without someone trying to slip some story or fragment from a novel into his hand. (He’d look it over, quickly, make his appraisal, and recommend another writer to help with that work.)

  One evening, he held the audience spellbound with a reading from his latest, the gothic, very interestingly written Grendel. Privately, however, his modus operandi was to comment on the weaknesses of someone else’s work—in one instance, after a reading by Tim O’Brien, he “confided” in me, as he must have with everyone else he spoke to, that the story, while interesting, didn’t really work in terms of its prose. (Sorry, Mr. O’Brien.) He was a trickster as well: Before a large gathering, he had a page of prose, the opening to a book by an anonymous author, projected onto a screen and asked his audience if it seemed an amateurish work, and, if so, how it could be improved upon. People wrote frantically in their notebooks for some twenty minutes, after which the suggestions were read aloud. It was something about an apple and a tree—and after dissecting the responses, which he mostly disapproved of, he revealed the identity of its author: Norman Mailer. The piece he had planted turned out to be the first page of the forthcoming Executioner’s Song. As the audience members murmured among themselves, Mr. Gardner beamed over his own saturnine cleverness. Still, at the breakfast or dinner table, Mr. Gardner could not have been more polite, and though there was something Napoleonic about him (he was quite a short man, though with a Viking visage, like a Thor), he seemed to go out of his way to be kind to the waiters, which kept him in good stead with us.

  As waiters, we actually had an advantage over everyone else in that we had a built-in community, whereas many of the attendees, arriving as strangers, had to endure a great deal of loneliness and, as a member of a large anonymous crowd, a low standing in the strict pecking order of things—until, inevitably, at one of the post-reading nightly barn dances, where the booze flowed and love flourished, they’d find a companion. (Also, I’m sure, as they’d gather with small groups of writers in workshops or in a meeting room and share, often enough, quite intimate information with one another through their prose, that too became a way of finding a kindred spirit.) More exclusive were the senior faculty cocktail parties that were held in a house called Tremont, which we, delivering liquor cases there, nicknamed Delirium Tremens. Since one could attend only by invitation, few of the waiters ever saw its interior: I only went once, and caused a row, as I had snuck inside through the back. The cocktails mainly took place (as I recall) in a cozy parlor with a fireplace, the mightiest writers on the planet talking literature with their favorites, who, I happened to notice, were, with perhaps one or two exceptions, the best-looking women at the conference. It was so blatantly sexist and hypocritical, given the air of sanctity hanging over people like Mr. Gardner, that even the more misogynist pricks I knew from the advertising world (and believe me, I met one every day) seemed, by contrast, far more earnest. What took place there was so blatant—one of our crew of waiters, a quite beautiful southern girl, had fallen under their spell and tended to come back to her quarters dead drunk and disoriented at three in the morning—that I couldn’t understand how those same folks could look at themselves in a mirror without sensing their own darkened souls, let alone participate in discussions about morality in fiction. (No wonder they were so awful in the mornings.) I recall having a brief and somewhat pleasant conversation with Gardner about Tolstoy before getting kicked out by an assistant to the gods. (“Are you aware that you’ve broken the protocol here?”) Mainly, I remember leaving Delirium Tremens with the impression that, for some of those writers—not all—the conference was mainly a way of what my friend Tommy would call “pulling some beaucoup pussy.”

  After about a week, there were afternoon sessions devoted to student works. One delicate-seeming young man, his voice trembling, read a too lyrical and tender narrative about a son following a broken-down drunk through a small midwestern town at night and its resolution and climax, at story’s end, is the narrator’s discovery that said broken-down drunk is his father; the audience, so seriously disposed, dissected its various elements quite thoroughly, though never too bluntly nor cruelly, and generally seemed to like it, while I, having lived with such a father (except my Midwest town happened to be situated in West Harlem), felt almost contemptuous of the way it ended, as if the guy didn’t really know what he was talking about—A pop like that is just there from the time you are old enough to become aware. In those moments, for whatever my reasons, I formed a notion that I have since, rightly or wrongly, usually clung to. This I shared with just about anyone I could that day: Stories often end just where they should begin. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant insight—a lot of writing is thinking aloud on paper, and necessary if only to discover the real heart of a story—but I can remember realizing it was the first opinion about craft or an approach to narrative I’d ever voiced aloud.

  Though I found an infinite number of things that put me off about such a place, something about that kind of environment—which is also true with art colonies—in its wall-to-wall nature, as it were, tends to push you into the center of whatever creative dream you are pursuing (or avoiding), whether you want it to or not. Quite simply, there were enough people around who sincerely loved the notion of literature as to embolden someone like me to give a reading one evening from that longish narrative about Cuba.

  I had to fortify myself with red wine, and, as I recall, I often paused to light a cigarette, which helped dampen my nerves. Still, I had a hard time of it: Even at City College, I had never read anything so directly hooked up (at least in my mind) with an abstracted, somewhat more vocabulary-wizened version of my mother’s voice, that is to say, her more charming Cuban, non-nagging side—a voice that I had cloaked in dazzling language. (The kind of language to impress novices, and to win literary prizes, if you have the right grad school provenance.) It tore my guts up just to read it aloud—at certain points, when I came to parts about the campesino who enters her life, I had to stop because my breathing became so halting. Later, a friend told me that I had turned a livid red, and then, alternately, as white as parchment. It was such an emotional experience that, finishing up, I had to take off alone. Wandering through a meadow, not far from where Robert Frost kept a cabin, I looked up at a brilliantly clear night sky, the Milky Way hanging low, and, strangely enough, felt my father’s presence all around me—or to put it differently, perhaps I felt his absence—but, in any event, I stayed out there for more than an hour, confounded by the whirl of emotions that was summoned up by what I had written; as it’s been said that all roads lead to Rome, anything I wrote eventually, however veiled, in some mystical way, led back to my pop.

  I continued to think about him, at some point, every day, long after I returned from that conference. Hanging on to his coattails, everything else about my life, from my childhood illness and the sadness I felt growing up, followed behind the images I had of him. In fact, though I was haunted by his memory, it remained something I hadn’t been particularly aware of, until, like a thief, at some moment, it would come up behind me. Once while attending the play Da, about an Irish man’s tribulations with his father’s (often humorous) ghost, there came a scene in which the father stands atop the roof of a house, and because it brought back to me that image of my father standing on the rooftop of Butler Hall the night he died, I lost it complet
ely, and would have broken down crying if it were not for the public nature of that place. (My girlfriend, by the way, without knowing it, once took me for a surprise birthday dinner at that restaurant. There I had tried to eat, without letting on that my father had died not ten yards from where we were sitting.) Oddly, for all the times I passed by the Biltmore Hotel, on Forty-third and Park, I never felt tempted to look inside its front lobby, which, I’ve been told, had remained largely unchanged from earlier years. (I don’t know if I was afraid to walk in there or if, in my mind, the old Biltmore of my childhood is the only one I wanted to see.) And at Christmas, despite all the frivolity and parties and drinking and screwing around that came with that season (oh, the things I would see in the office when people were really letting loose), I’d feel a special melancholy. Something about working downtown in what the kids in my neighborhood called the canyon, with the hawk—the wind—at my back, always seemed gratifying to me in a strangely ghostly way, as if, walking in a crowd along the avenue, I could picture my pop, back when he was alive, among them.