Still, I tried to look upon it as part of my job, though I couldn’t have begun to predict how much the baring of my soul (as in this book) over the years would become a part of my life.
That’s probably why I welcomed any opportunities to slip uptown, though returning to my neighborhood and spending time in the old apartment always provoked a melancholic detour into Memoryville—which, like religion, was good for creativity but bad for living. Or to put it differently, the same melancholy that bled through the Mambo Kings continued to pour through my veins. Though my agent told me that all kinds of good things were about to happen—“Just watch how your life will change!”—I’m not sure that it was anything I wanted to hear. Perhaps that’s why I went out of my way to keep my feet on the ground. Not once forgetting where I had come from, I allowed myself to become more deeply entangled with my family duties, and these mainly came down to looking after my mother (“As I once took care of you, now it’s your turn to take care of me,” she’d say). Every so often I’d take her to the hospital for her checkups (with which she had become obsessed) or to such and such an office for some document, or, as often was the case, out to visit with my brother in Staten Island (or the “Latin from Staten Island” as went the name of an old rumba of the 1930s).
As with earlier times, such trips required of me great patience, not only because my mother, as if trapped in a certain groove on a 78 RPM record that skipped, could not restrain herself from going over her life with my father, but because, in her mid-seventies and slowing up from the more typical maladies of advancing years (though her mind remained as sharp as ever), just getting her around—on foot to the subway, and then to the ferry boat—seemed interminable, a two-or-so-hour trek that felt like a day. Oddly, even back then, as I’d walk slowly across the flagstone promenade of Columbia, my mother holding on to me so tightly, the same feelings that dogged me as a sickly child—of wanting to break away and run off to some faraway place—came back to me, and I’d wish to God that I could have somehow managed to have stayed in Italy, or, at any rate, somewhere else. At the same time, I came up with the notion that my Cuban identity, however New Yorkized, required that I do the right thing and never, never turn my back on my family, no matter what other desires drove me. And why?
Even I didn’t have a clue, coño.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the literary life, whatever that may have been, in the first place. From what I had observed of it, from my safe distance, it didn’t always treat people kindly. Over the past decade, Donald Barthelme’s reputation, for example, had seemed to sink and sink into a kind of near-oblivion. Where once his books were reviewed on the front page of the almighty New York Times Sunday Book Review and greeted as masterpieces, by 1989, his works had been relegated to a quarter page in the back of that publication. Where his experimental fictions had once been considered timely, relevant, brilliant, and cutting-edge, he had been most recently eclipsed by Raymond Carver, whose surgically precise but often maudlin prose had become the new standard of excellence. (And all the more so after the poor man, a reformed alcoholic who often wrote of those trials so transcendently, died of cancer in 1988.)
Surely this sea change affected Barthelme’s spirits. During my visits with him on Eleventh Street, just as I had returned from Rome and about a year and a half later, he had seemed, in terms of his own creativity, somewhat of a lost soul, a writer trapped by his self-imposed restrictions and obviously perplexed by his own disenchantment. Confessing to a writer’s block, he once told me that he would love to write an autobiographical novel but thought that he couldn’t, as it would be a betrayal of his aesthetic and of what people expected of him. (The closest he came to doing so was a lovely story called “Bishop.”) I didn’t quite understand his resistance to a bit of change, but what concerned me more was the horrific doubling-over cough he had developed by then. On those evenings, keeping up with him as a smoker seemed a stupidity—he had gotten to a point when his episodes became violent, his face turning such a deep red that the only way he could soothe his burning, nearly rupturing throat was to down, in one quick and continuous gulp, a full goblet of Scotch, and only then would that retching abate. Though he didn’t seem to flinch at my suggestion that he should write whatever the fuck he felt like writing, he blew up at me when I suggested that he see a doctor: “Mind your own business,” he snapped, lighting up another cigarette. “I know what I’m doing,” he told me. “Trust me.”
Then, feeling better, he poured me another Scotch and said: “Okay, one more, then you have to go.”
We did speak a few more times and remained on a friendly basis, and when I finally received a galley of the Mambo Kings I almost sent it to him. Despite all the work I’d already put into it, there were a few paragraphs in the novel, as well as some passages, that I just had to rewrite, and because I wanted to impress him, I decided to wait until I’d had a chance to put in my changes and planned to give him the finished version instead. In the meantime, Donald, through his friend and colleague at the University of Houston Ed Hirsch, a poet who had won the Rome Prize in Literature that year, 1989, traveled to Italy and took up a three-month residency at the American Academy, among the happiest and most carefree of Signor Barthelme’s professional life, he and the Eternal City having gotten quite well along. The only caveat is that when Donald finally returned to Houston, with worsening symptoms, he was found to be suffering from throat cancer, by then at an advanced stage. Shortly, the following happened: On a midsummer day in July, while in the hospital, with his wife Marion by his side, and, as I’ve been told, somewhat sedated on morphine, he was sitting up in his bed when, at a certain moment, he slipped into a coma from which he, lingering for two weeks, never awakened.
The craziest thing? When I first heard about it, I kicked myself for having held my novel back from him (as if my changes would have made much difference in his opinion), but beyond that, I kept thinking that he had been one the few people who had ever looked out for me, and that he was about my pop’s age at his passing.
(In fact, Donald passed away on July 23, my father July 26, twenty years before.)
By the time The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love came out that August of 1989, it was already a fairly well-known entity within the industry: FSG, a house so brilliant at creating a buzz about a book—and in a way I have never since encountered—had practically started a riot at the American Booksellers Association meeting that spring by giving out their advance reading copies along with a canvas bag bearing an image of that book’s cover. I’m told that people had swamped the FSG tables and that within a few hours, every last one had been scooped up. Prepub reviews were as good as could be hoped for, and several foreign publishers bought the rights early on. It also seemed that some important newspaper reviews, among them one in The New York Times, were imminent, though the official word within the house was not to expect too much, a notion that they held on to until at a certain point, the Times requested that I meet with one of their staff writers for the Sunday Book Review—I did so in a bar around the corner from where I lived. (Mainly we discussed how I had come up with certain notions behind the book, the I Love Lucy angle, a bridge between American and Cuban cultures, most intriguing him.) Once FSG learned that a little interview would be included with the review, they began to think The Mambo Kings would be given a fair amount of space, though to what extent, they could not predict. (They were already on a roll; two of their books, one by Carlos Fuentes and the other by Mario Vargas Llosa, had landed spectacular front-page reviews, but they did not expect anything like that for me: They were Latin American Boom writers after all, while I, as a homegrown Latino—and therefore of far less interest to the general American public—could hardly expect the same stellar respect.)
And yet, come one Sunday—I do not recall the date; I think it was midmonth—my novel made it to the cover of the book review (the literary equivalent, in those days at least, of a musician getting on the cover of Rolling Stone). The femal
e critic could not have been kinder, despite the book’s high content of macho shenanigans, lauding the work as a great literary immigrant novel, the review accompanied by a dandy pen-and-ink illustration depicting a swirl of Cuban musicians shaking maracas and playing drums in a lively jam. I could not have missed it. For even if I wanted to avoid the subject—and a part of me wanted to—I would have heard about it anyway, for my agent, publicist, and editor, among others, called me as soon as they received the news. That was quickly followed (or preceded, as the Times book review could be had a week in advance) by a Friday review in the daily Times by the star-making/career-withering Michiko Kakutani, who gave me a high-toned rave, though, once again, for my wonderful immigrant novel. I was so naïve as to write both reviewers thankyou notes—as I would have done at the ad agency, where if someone looked out for you, some gesture of appreciation followed. I never heard back from either one of them.
Wonderful reviews in just about every newspaper in the country soon followed—literally over a hundred of them (for it was before the Internet killed the newspapers) within a two-week span. (The fifteen or so reviews I received for Our House, by comparison, were a drop in the bucket, and that book remained so little known that for years after, people assumed that The Mambo Kings was my first novel.) As much as I’d swear those reviews made no difference to me, I still put each carefully away in a box and occasionally took one or the other out to read over again, especially if it had spoken of my book in outsize terms. (Some implied that it was a modern American classic, certainly a breakthrough in terms of Latino literature in this country, and sometimes they actually admired the writing!) To further stroke my ego, Vanity Fair did a piece about me (and a review), accompanied by a photograph in which I happened to look somewhat smug and dapper, a cigarette burning in my hand. (The shoot, complete with a willowy and beautiful photographer, took place on the green behind the article writer’s brownstone on Sullivan Street: half-Cuban, Wendy Gimbel was one of the great early supporters of that book and of my later work.) And since a British edition would be coming out that following spring, I interviewed with a number of their magazines, even posed for a photographer from British Vogue. That same week I went down to a Soho studio and did an international radio broadcast alongside the Panamanian singer Ruben Blades, who, of Dutch ancestry, had a Cuban mother. That, along with the Beatles—the group that had inspired him to first become a musician—was our point of connection, though he had done a double take when my mind went blank after he’d told me that su mamá had come from La Regla, across the bay from Havana, even if I’d mentioned it in The Mambo Kings.
Then a New York Times article on me came out in the daily arts section. A certain Peter Watrous had come by to talk with me about the musical elements in the book, but what I had been mainly interested in was the fact that he played some guitar. Though it was not mentioned in the piece that resulted, he ended up staying in my apartment until a late hour, and we jammed.
As I had been booked on several big-time television programs, the Today show and Good Morning America among them, I had been urged to get contact lenses, but I simply couldn’t. I was so used to seeing myself in a certain way that the thick drowning-in-water lenses I’d always lived with had become, in effect, my eyes. (Or as I have often since thought, a buffer between myself and the world.) Instead I compromised and spent a small fortune on a pair of thin, specially treated antireflection lenses, cased inside a fancy French frame. (They cost about two and a half weeks of my pop’s old salary—that’s how far gone I had become.) Nevertheless, as one who had ducked out of any speech class, appalled at the notion of seeing myself captured on a video camera at Brandeis High School, the prospect of going on live national television somewhat terrified me.
Once I got down to the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center, however, a kind of nostalgia for homey old-time TV hit me, and, thinking of Ralph Kramden and Desi Arnaz (and how my pop had liked them), I almost calmed down, though never completely. I’d never worn so much makeup in my life, and it surprised me to see how my black interviewer, Bryant Gumbel, a true gent, appeared absolutely gray under the normal light. (Seeing him in that makeup, I could only think of funeral parlor cadavers.)
In any event, though I would not say that my first appearance was a disaster, I did distinguish myself by rolling my eyes around like BBs whenever Mr. Gumble asked a question that either discomfited me or seemed stupid. (“Why Cubans?” . . . “Why Desi Arnaz?”) I also went through that broadcast with the feeling that my head was too big (“mi cabezon,” my mother sometimes called me) and, as I always have, felt a little jarred by the way some of the staff regarded me as I walked in, with an interior double take upon finding out that the balding, fair-skinned blond guy was the “Cuban-American” writer scheduled for the show. Sitting under the tremendously bright are lamps, I couldn’t help but check myself out in a monitor to my side. Accustomed to never really seeing my own eyes, I had no notion of just how well they would read through my new lenses—or how much I seemed a nervous beady-eyed jerk—but at least I could console myself with the fact that I had pupils that came across quite intensely on camera.
I went on a fifteen-or-so-city tour after that, reading at bookstores overflowing with people. The best of it was that I met some really nice Latinos and, among them (us) in every city, some Cubans, a long long way from home, Americanized exiles, professionals mainly, who, despite whatever bones they may have had to pick with that book—too much sex, or not anti-Castro enough, or too obsessed with the character’s pingas—appreciated my absolute love for Cuba. Though I met my share of dainty older Cuban women who thought parts of the book a little saucier than their conservative Catholic dispositions allowed them to enjoy, they too flooded me with something that I could never get enough of: affection—nothing too gushing but just enough to leave me with a tender feeling. And my American readers, if I may use the term? They were kind to me as well, no matter where I went traveling in the country. I found myself visiting many a fancy household, usually gatherings scheduled around my time off, in fairly opulent settings, local high society taking pride in hosting me as their guest. Occasionally, a musician, relating to my book for its insights about the profession, would turn up to make a gift of one of their recordings to me, or a beginner, wanting to break into the music scene, would ask my advice.
But I’d also encounter the sort of person who seemed disappointed when they met me. “I thought you would be swarthier, and more . . . Ricky Ricardo,” someone actually told me. Or else they wanted to hear something different from a New York accent, or to see something in my body language and manner that was more distinctly Cuban. (Perhaps they wanted me to come out dancing the mambo or smoking a cigar in a white panama hat.) Sometimes I’d get hit up by a Latin American scholar, who, addressing me in ethnographic terms from the audience, wanted to turn my reading into a symposium about his knowledge of Cuba. Sometimes, a lefty, usually a super-liberal who had traveled to Cuba as a political tourist, or had gone there as a college student to chop sugarcane, would denounce my novel for failing to sing the revolution’s praises. I did my best to be polite, but it often pissed me off: I’d thank God that I could slip out the back and have a smoke. All along, of course, what else could I be but myself?
And yet that was not enough for some folks who almost seemed angry that the face and personality behind the conception wasn’t what they wanted it to be. I knew them by the way they’d stare at me during my readings, or when they didn’t laugh at my jokes, and ultimately, more often than not, I could tell just which ones were bound to get up and leave in the middle of my reading.
Sometimes, at midnight, in a hotel room in Portland or Minneapolis or St. Louis—could be anywhere—I’d lie down on the bed, feeling fairly exhausted, and man, the first thing I’d wish I could be doing (besides smoking a cigarette) didn’t necessarily have anything to do with women (even though at every venue, there seemed to be someone interested in getting to know me) nor with the prospect of making
some money (which was what my agent always talked about) but with the small ways I had of making myself happy—as when I’d sit down with a really good guitarist, like my old pal Nick or the best jazz player I knew, a fellow named John Tucker, whom I met years before on the steps of Columbia University’s Low Library, to jam for a few hours, leisurely and without a worry in the world, a glass of wine or two by our side, a cigarette burning in an ashtray—just like it happened sometimes in my novel, to my characters Cesar and Nestor Castillo.
That same autumn, once I’d come back from the tour, I started teaching creative writing at Hofstra University in Long Island at night, a job I had gotten through a writer friend, Julia Marcus, before the book came out, as a hedge against going broke. It required an hour-and-a-half commute each way (subway, train, bus), a real pain, but at least it got my mind off the hoopla and that constant feeling that something both wonderful and awful was happening to me. Though I had enjoyed meeting the majority of my readers, it didn’t take much of a curious expression, on the part of both Latinos and non-Latinos, to make me feel that, once again, I had become the receptacle into which people’s prejudices poured: Altogether it made me feel like some kind of lab specimen. Aside from escaping that scrutiny, however, I discovered that I simply enjoyed being around those Hofstra kids, most coming from what I would call a nouveau middle-class background—and, who, in most cases, seemed to be the first in their second- or third-generation post-immigrant families to make it to college. One of my classes started at eight, the other let out around six, as I recall. Coming home one evening, I found the very patient and affable writer Richard Price waiting outside my apartment on a stairwell. He had called me up out of the blue, having found my number in the telephone book, but I was so distracted in those days that the time of our meeting had completely slipped my mind. No matter—we ended up having a bite to eat, whereupon he asked me if I would ever be interested in writing scripts for Paramount, with whom he had some kind of arrangement as a scout: I was dense and provincial-minded enough to politely decline, though we remained friends thereafter.