Thoughts Without Cigarettes

  But until it was actually published, even as I continued my weekly routine at TDI, that book seemed an abstraction, whose eventual quite public nature I hardly even thought about at the time. I doubt, in fact, if I could have written that book were it not for the feeling that it would somehow remain an intimate and private affair: How else could one go ahead and dive into certain personal ordeals and write about them unself-consciously? Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that the novel would be read by some of the people it was actually about.

  But it wasn’t just that: I agonized over parts of Our House in a way that few people could ever imagine. And while I’ve since learned that it’s not really worth draining yourself emotionally (like I am doing now in this memoir) for what some cooler-hearted folks might categorize as quaintly visceral, as a younger person, I couldn’t help myself from striving to establish, through a book, some sense of just what I had experienced. Even when the catharsis you go through can leave you feeling euphoric or incredibly sad, the fact that you’ve allowed some fairly deep and personal secrets to escape into the world doesn’t hit you until it actually gets out there, coño!

  As the date of release approached, I had been told that one can never know about reviews, but bit by bit, over a period of a few months both before and after publication, a number of newspaper reviews, around fifteen in all (which seemed a colossal validation of my work), came out, and all favorably, about the novel. This crop included the New York Times Sunday book section: A certain Edith Milton reviewed Our House along with a novel by a Korean writer, Wendy Law-Yone, The Coffin Tree. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, as kindly as she spoke of my writing, she was the first to pigeonhole me as an “immigrant” writer (translation: “ethnic” spokesman for the primitive people known as Hispanics in those days).

  Strangely enough, when Ed Vega reviewed the novel in a literary magazine, Vega, though he really liked it, he pointed out that while it had been quite professionally produced, it was badly lacking in Spanish copyediting. (“Hey, man, uh, you remember that you proofed it?”) Nevertheless, I felt so buoyed by these attentions and rich—I’d made four thousand dollars for my five years of work!—that for the first time in my life, I actually believed I had a writing future.

  As it happened, so did the kindly people I worked alongside at TDI, who offered me a fairly large amount of car-card advertising space on the New York city buses at a rate that even I could afford. What’s more, my art director and our production department came up with the artwork for me, while I provided the written copy, which, for the record, went: “A family’s journey through three worlds: Cuba . . . America . . . and the Unknown!” Afterward, a friend of mine, Eddie Egan, head of Bristol-Myers’s production, prevailed upon some of his Chambers Street acquaintances, who operated some of the bigger presses in the city, to do him a favor by printing those ads up for free.

  In short order, not a month after the book had come out (on little cat’s feet), some several thousand car-card ads for Our House were gracing some of the more primo bus lines in New York City, among them the much-coveted Fifth Avenue route. And so it wasn’t long before a shopper heading down to Saks or Lord & Taylor on the number 5 line could look up and notice a deeply processed advertisement for Our House right next to one for Marlboro cigarettes. In fact, each bus would have had four or five of them. Other lines, covering Manhattan from east to west, with some extending into the Bronx and Brooklyn, on buses otherwise advertising the likes of The Mists of Avalon, also conveyed the not too spectacular news that a writer named Hijuelos had apparently arrived. Entertaining visions of popular success, I soon learned, however, that no matter how many buses ran ads about a novel, the books had to be in the stores. Only a few that I checked—think Scribner’s and some others downtown, as well Salters on 113th and the Book Forum in my neighborhood—had copies. Now and then, someone from the office would come over to my desk with a copy of Our House for me to sign. And what I usually heard was this: “Oh, but I had to look all ovah the place, just to find it.” (This, before the days of Amazon and ebooks and iPads.)

  But people couldn’t have been nicer. I got bottles of booze in the interoffice mail, with notes of congratulations, and one of my partners, Charlie, in subway clocks even took me out to lunch: “So you really fuckin’ did it, didn’t you, kid?” Folks from my neighborhood also appreciated the effort, given that I had captured something of the way they came up. And while very few of them bought my book—I can count those who did on one hand—my pal Richard purchased two, for himself and his brother Tommy, who, as I soon learned, had formed his own opinion about it.

  I bumped into Tommy in the park one afternoon, and the first thing he did was to slap me five.

  “Good for you, my man,” he told me. “I read your book, and I liked it, though I would have done a lot of things differently.” Tommy took a drag of a cigarette. “And better, you hear?”

  “If you say so.” I looked off, leaves whisked up by the wind in pinwheels along the cracked park pavement.

  “But the thing is, that novel doesn’t really count ’cause, like, it’s your story, and real books are about other shit, you know?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  That day, I made sure not to seem at all above him in any way: In fact, I told him that I couldn’t wait to see what he was writing himself—even offered to help him in whatever fashion I could. But it was as if it didn’t matter. Lighting one of his Tareytons with the butt of another, and offering me a sip from his can of beer, he said, “Nah, I’m all right—don’t even think about it, man.” Then we talked about hanging out again, and, parting, we kind of embraced. Leaving him, I hadn’t the slightest notion that I’d never see that beautiful and rambunctious dude again.

  My older brother, for what it’s worth, made no bones about telling me that my mother had been upset by the book (as if she could read it?), that she could not bear any of the passages about Pop’s drinking, and that, on top of it all, I had gotten a lot of stuff wrong. And he thought that my portrayals of family friends like Olga were offensive—that I had no business describing her (or someone like her) as the kind of vainglorious cubana who would parade around in negligees and brassieres, and undress, to reveal her fabulous figure, in our living room.

  “You know that she’s going to feel offended by that, don’t you?” he told me.

  In the end, I believed him, and took to skulking up my block whenever I’d visit my mother. Worried about running into any of the folks I had portrayed, I had almost gone ducking behind a car at the sight of Olga coming out of my mother’s building one day. But she saw me: “Oscarito, come over here!” she ordered. I did.

  “Why are you avoiding me? I’m not going to bite you.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, there’s something you should hear,” she said, with the severity of the Old World Spaniard she, with her curled Coco Chanel hairdo and intensely dark features, resembled. “I read your book, and I will tell you, mi vida, that I loved it!” And she flashed me a sweet, toothy smile. “And thank you for putting me in it—you got me right.”

  Indeed, Olga, in her sixties, well past her prime by then, seemed to have enjoyed the fact that I had more or less described the way she had once been as a shapely Cuban bombshell, whose mere glance left men breathless. But she did chastise me about other things. “You were too hard on your mother. I don’t blame you,” she said. “She could be difficult, but you were still too hard on her.” She did not mention my pop, though she must have been thinking about him as well. Happily though, as I went by her on the stoop, on my way to see my mother, whose face peered out at me from behind the venetian blinds, Olga gave me a kiss on the cheek and a slap to my bottom. Her final appraisal, as I blushed: “We’re proud of you. Fue un libro, muy muy lindo!”

  And my mother? As my brother had surmised, she wasn’t too pleased by whatever she had managed to read of that novel. Having come a long way since my childhood, in terms of her ability to understand wr
itten English, she had made it a monthly ritual to visit the corner bookstore and return with a bag full of romance novels, which she’d go through methodically, with, I believe, the help of a Spanish-English dictionary. Otherwise she passed her days working in some Harlem-based version of a temp agency like Manpower, or else she, knowing every Latina in the neighborhood, made some extra money watching the comings and goings of customers in a friend’s clothing shop along Broadway. However she spent her days, she seemed to have enormous amounts of time to read, though I think it took her weeks after I had given her an inscribed copy of Our House to get around to deciphering the text. Once she began to, however, she became quite circumspect about it. The only things she ever had to say about that novel? “Why did you have to write me in that way? Yo no fui tan mala! I wasn’t that bad!” And, as I recall: “Yes, your father was a good man who could be angry with me sometimes. Pero me quería mucho. But he loved me very much.”

  (Of course there was more to her reactions than those few words: Sometimes when I’d come over to see her with some Chinese food from Broadway, while sitting across the kitchen table from her, I’d catch her looking at me wistfully, as she used to when I was a child, as if I were a stranger who had somehow learned all about her. At least once, she told me, in such a moment: “But I never wanted to hurt Pascual in any way.”)

  She once mentioned that she could never get past a certain point (I never knew if the text became too difficult for her, or whether she could take only so much of her own life, however roughly, thrust back in her face), but whatever she may have felt about that book, my mother took the trouble to carefully wrap her copy in plastic so that it would not become worn-out on the shelf. Learning how impressed her New York Times—reading friends, like the Zabalas sisters and classy Chaclita, were by the fact that I had been reviewed there, she took to keeping a copy of that notice in her purse, ever willing to show it off to anyone she bumped into. Obviously her pride over the fact that she had a published author as a son overrode any reservations or hurt that my mother had surely felt over what she perceived to be its content.

  For my part, I can recall riding the subways uptown from work and thinking that even if that book couldn’t ever sell very much—I think maybe only fifteen hundred copies had been printed—I had begun, in some small way, to make something of myself. But aside from that feeling—ever so fleeting at three o’clock on a dreary afternoon—virtually nothing else had changed in my life. Though I had avoided the fate of so many would-be writers, I kept at my full-time job.

  Still, I had my occasional moment of glory. Not long after Our House came out, I got a call from the Endicott bookstore on Columbus Avenue and Eighty-first, then one of the great independents in Manhattan. Their manager, a lady named Susan Berkholtz, asked me if I wouldn’t mind coming by one morning to sign some books, and since I hadn’t ever done anything of that nature before, and because it felt like such a professional thing to do, I eagerly accepted. Leaving my office at about eleven, I made my way uptown. When I came in sight of that store’s two massive front windows, I almost fell over: One of the windows had been filled with pyramids of Our House in the Last World, copies adorning the wall in a row, and nothing else. It seemed the fulfillment of a dream, and, once inside, I passed the next hour or so by the front counter euphorically signing my book for the occasional customer—perhaps twenty in all, not a bad turnout. Afterward, Ms. Berkholtz, later an agent best known for representing Latino authors, had me sign some stock copies, and that also left me floating on air. Beaming with accomplishment, I sipped a cup of coffee, and thanking all her employees, I walked out of the store sometime after one, intending to go back to work.

  But once I got outside again, I couldn’t help feeling overwhelmed by the moment. I was filled with such pride that instead of heading downtown, I thought, “To hell with it,” and hailed a taxi instead, giving the driver my mother’s 118th Street address.

  I found her in the kitchen preparing a big pot of lentil soup, one of her favorite meals, as she had become quite a health food nut by then, and one bent on preserving herself into eternity—she was just a few years short of seventy. (Her dresser drawers, aside from containing a number of artifacts from her life with my pop, and religious pamphlets and rosaries, also brimmed over with Spanish-language magazines about health and diets.) When I walked in, after giving three quick trills of the timbre, she was surprised—and vaguely delighted—to see me in the middle of the day. She felt put out, however: My mother hadn’t gotten around to making herself up or bothered to get dressed. She wore only a robe and seemed as if she had not awakened too long before, and though she told me to sit down, and started to putter about the stove, I just said: “Mamá, get dressed, I want to show you something.”

  “Sí?”” she asked.

  “Sí, mamá, a surprise.”

  “Ah, una sorpresa,” she replied, rather happily.

  It took her a while: Years later, I’d learn the hard way that her side of the family had arthritic maladies in their blood, and as she moved deliberately but slowly about her bedroom, getting dressed, I could hear her giving little cries of “ay, ay, ay!” Finally, she had gotten herself together, and, escorting her down the street, rather impatiently, as I couldn’t wait for her to see that window, we finally reached the corner, where I hailed another taxi. By then, because of my mother’s rheumatic condition, it was always an operation getting her in and out of any vehicle, but did I care? My moment had arrived! No matter how often my mother asked me where we were going, and why, the only thing I could say to her, and gleefully so (you know, like a good son), was that she would soon enough see something to make her happy and proud of me.

  So we hurried downtown, and even though only an hour at most had passed since I’d left that store, by the time we pulled up to the curb, the window had already been changed, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose now in the place of honor so briefly given to me.

  Having no choice but to take her inside, the only thing I could show her were a few of my books on a shelf. The staff seemed embarrassed, as did I, but afterward I took my mother to a pastry shop nearby and bought her some napoleons, the sort my pop occasionally brought home. I don’t think she ever had a clue as to how crestfallen I felt: At least I got some insight, right there and then, into the nature of that business.

  As for those bus ads? They ran for about three months, and though my novel did not fly off the shelves, the enticement that I would produce a similar advertisement and space for a paperback induced a fellow named Pat O’Connor, at Washington Square Press, to spring for the paperback rights, a big twenty-five hundred dollars (half of which I split with the publisher). In exchange, they’d benefit from another ad campaign. I recall riding buses and seeing people looking up and checking out that advertisement, and occasionally I’d run into a friend who’d noticed it, but if it made my name and book known to the public in any way, I wasn’t particularly aware of it.

  Only once did it make a real difference. I think the paperback ads had started to run in the autumn of 1984, and that same October, I came down with another one of my horrific flus. Having become the sort of person who would do everything in his power to avoid seeing a doctor, I reluctantly decided to drag my sorry ass over to St. Luke’s emergency room one night, but only after I had started coughing up blood. (That scared me: Despite my plaguelike symptoms—bad stomach, aching bones, diarrhea, scorched throat, and burning nose—I had managed to continue smoking my Kool cigarettes until I could barely swallow.) Once I got to that waiting room, filled with every variety of junkie, alcoholic, stab victim, abused wife, and sick child, as well as a contingent of bloodied and bruised homeless people, I fell into an immediate gloom. Not only did going there again remind me of my childhood visits to that place, but I knew that however bad I felt, I’d have to spend half the night waiting.

  Up by the desk, manned by a Puerto Rican nurse who had the hardened demeanor of someone who had seen every possible permutation of human sufferi
ng, her porcelain face a mask of cinnamon indifference, I filled out a medical questionnaire and handed it to her. As she looked it over, her brows rose with interest: “Hijuelos? Where would I have seen this name before?” I didn’t connect anything with it and shrugged. But then something hit her: “Oh, yeah, I know, I seen it on a bus—the numbah eleven Amsterdam line—could that be?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You wrote a book, is that right?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Well, for God’s sake—good for you.” And she smiled. “Lord, I wish I could do that—oh, the things I’ve seen! You wouldn’t believe it.” Then she took a good long look at me—at my deathly sweaty pallor, my bloodshot eyes, my drooping body—and, leaning forward, confided: “Tell you what, to save you time, I’m gonna admit you right away, okay, honey?”

  “You kidding?”

  “Why would I kid an author”—she pronounced it Arthur—“like you?”

  I ended up getting out of there about an hour later, and it took me almost a week to get better; and when I did, I dropped a copy of the paperback of Our House off at that ward, inscribing it to that admitting nurse, whose name, it turned out, for all her toughness, was Daisy.

  And that, ladies and gentlemen, was about the extent to which those bus ads helped me.

  In the interim, a few interesting things happened: At one point, enriched by my final advance of some eight hundred dollars or so, I flew out to Southern California to visit my former down-the-hall neighbors from Eighty-third and, while staying in their complex in San Diego, began a poolside romance with a twentyish divorcée in progress who happened to be a former Miss Los Angeles. I won’t dwell on the tawdrier details, though I will say that after I had come back to New York, we often spoke by telephone in the evenings. As it happened, these took place during a period when, for reasons involving one of my cousin’s husbands, my line was tapped.