Thoughts Without Cigarettes (27 page)

The long and short of it? He ended up in Ward Eight of St. Luke's Hospital, the psychiatric facility there, speaking in tongues.

Unfortunately, his father the fireman, who once taught me guitar, came knocking on our door the next day, frantically demanding of my pop that I confess to having been a part of his son taking that drug. Along the way, he insisted that we see for ourselves what I apparently had done. That same afternoon, as my father and I walked over to the hospital, he finally asked me: “Did you give that drug to that boy?” and because I hadn't—maybe Jimmy had given or sold him those tabs—I told him, quite simply, no, and that was good enough for my pop. But once we got there, I regretted that whole business—never again, I told myself—for that same day, Bobby's father suffered a heart attack, his anguish being so great, and my friend, as we encountered him in the ward, could only repeat a few words—“Nobody loves me,” over and over again.

That same year, 1968, the Columbia riots took place, the buildings down the hill across Amsterdam occupied by the striking students. It struck us as a quite festive affair, what with TV reporters, and spotlights glaring against the walls at night, our block lit like a movie set. All our neighbors made it a habit to gather on the corner and watch the exciting doings, my mother and her friend Olga, as I recall, among them. I went inside the occupied buildings a few times—it was easy if you were a kid. Once I did so with one of the more affable junkies from the neighborhood, and mainly we traipsed about the back stairwells, on the prowl for things of value (I don't recall that we found any), and going into the salons of those buildings where the suffering and gallant students were holed up, it seemed to me, on the face of it, more of a bacchanal than a revolutionary movement. For one thing, they had tons of food, for sympathetic neighbors would fill their baskets, lowered to the sidewalk, with stuff; and they had tons of wine and pot, the rooms filled with smoke; in one place, we saw a rock band performing, and while I had mustered some interest in their movement, I mainly thought it a phony spoiled-kid kind of affair; in other words, like most of the guys from my neighborhood, I wasn't really very impressed, just a little envious of the girls the revolutionaries attracted.

Now, if you're getting the impression that I had drifted into some inner life far removed from my Cuban roots, you've got that right. If I thought in Spanish at all, it was mostly in my sleep, and the gist of my exchanges with my parents usually came down to a laconic few words—“Okay, okay,
te oigo
” or “
Sí mamá, vengo
.” And when it came to Cuba, if anything, far from developing a curiosity for its history, for example, beyond what I already knew about Castro, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban missile crisis (when we were convinced there would be a nuclear war), and that we had family down there, I couldn't be bothered to learn more. (My mother's own histories were enough, and old to me by then.) I preferred my comics, and sometimes the occasional novel, thanks to Tommy, by someone like Ray Bradbury. (And I liked the randy humor of comedians like Redd Foxx and Lenny Bruce.)

If you'd talked to me in those days, you would have heard a kid who used the terms
chick
,
man
, and
like, you know
almost all the time. I loved
Mad
magazine but also dipped into the kind of arcane publications that one might find only in a neighborhood like my own: I can remember liking Lee Krasner's
Realist,
which basically had an upyours attitude about the powers that be, and because of the Vietnam War, I could hardly walk across the campus or down Broadway without someone thrusting an antigovernment protest pamphlet into my hands. Because of Marcial García, who was always preaching in our kitchen about the values of the revolution, I had an awareness of both sides of the equation regarding Cuba. (On the other hand, I wasn't the sort of kid to walk around wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt like so many others did.) But even when I had an exile friend like Victor, who'd come to the states in 1962 and knew just how cheated his family had felt leaving Cuba, and their desire to
regresar
—to go back—I remained detached enough to think that such concerns really didn't touch me. I didn't realize that their loss was really my own, a whole other possible life denied to me without my knowing it.

As far as I can tell about myself, back then, I hardly cared about anything except some vague notion of being a creative sort. Lord knows how much my mother had to put up with: When some family from down the street moved out and left an upright piano on the sidewalk, I somehow persuaded the superintendent of that building, Mr. Sullivan, and one of my sturdier friends, a certain Provinzano, to help me bring it up the hill and carry it into the apartment. (I don't know how we managed, but at one point, the piano slipped and, coming down hard, cracked the lip of one of the marble stairs in the entryway—go check, it's still there.) I began to play that piano (badly) and, at one point, putting thumbtacks into its felt hammers, and fooling around while plucking on its strings inside the harp, came up with strange compositions à la John Cage, which I would commemorate for posterity on a cassette recorder.

My pop didn't seem to mind and seemed only vaguely aware of my aesthetic leanings, if they could be called that. On one of those nights when he was hanging around with one of his friends from the hotel, this Haitian fellow, as I recall, he asked me to play something for them (“
algo en español, eh?
”—“something in Spanish, huh? ”) and when all I could come up with were a few chords along the lines of “La Bamba,” he listened for a moment and, with a disappointed expression on his face, poured himself and his friend another drink, shrugging and moving on. I didn't brood about it: If I'd played a Beatles tune for him, it wouldn't have meant a thing; as far as I was concerned, both my parents were really from some other planet. (My brother, on the other hand, who had come home from his air force stint in England and had stayed briefly with us in 1966 while he studied for his GED diploma before he moved out to live in Queens with a young woman, later to become his wife, seemed interested in what I was doing: I think we sometimes talked about my showing him how to play a little guitar, and while, years later, we would often lament the fact that we hadn't tried speaking Spanish with each other back when, it was nothing that ever occurred to us at the time.) No, sir, whatever I was about, a work in progress, as it were, I might have been aspiring to many things but none that had to do with Cuba.

That I was so American, or to put it in the way I prefer, so New Yorkish, didn't bother me much at all, until, as it happened, my wonderful aunt Cheo arrived to live with us from Cuba. She and her daughters and their husbands had come in 1967, thanks to some arrangement that Lyndon Johnson had made with Fidel to allow more Cubans to leave the island legally, of course for money—with which my pop, working his extra job, had helped them out. They were exhausted, of course, after the ordeal, but the reunion between my mother and her sister, whom she had not seen since our visit to Holguín in the 1950s, was joyous. I am not sure what they made of our apartment—I think they were a little disappointed—but whatever might be said about the drabness of our digs, it was surely a big improvement over what they had been reduced to back in Cuba.

“
No había comida,
” I remember my gentle aunt saying, “
y olvídate de trabajo—nos trataron como perritos.
” (“There was no food, and forget about work—we were treated no better than little dogs.”)

Theirs was a story that is fairly common to most exiles. Mercita's husband, Angel Tamayo, had run a car repair shop, which had been nationalized some years back during one of Fidel's sweeping reforms, while Eduardo Arocena, married to Miriam, and a most quiet fellow, had been, as far as I know, in the trucking business and harassed by the government for his strong feelings against Fidel. Though it's a cliché by now to mention that they arrived with only the clothes on their back and what they could manage to bring along in a few suitcases, it was, in fact, the truth. I can't imagine how daunting it must have been for them. Still, all of us made do. We had a spare bedroom next to mine—that's where I think Mercita and Angel stayed, while Cheo, Miriam, and Eduardo were settled into the living room, on cots, I believe. (Though now and then, coming into the apartment after school, I'd sometimes hear my mother and her sister whispering to each other as they lay, much as they probably did as children, alongside each other in bed.)

At first, they naturally assumed I could speak Spanish as well as my brother, who came to visit them often, though once it became clear that my repertoire mainly consisted of nods of assent and understanding as to what they were saying—“Remember, my love, when you stayed with us in Holguín?”—our methods of communication, harkening back to my mother and “
la muda,
” often came down to gestures, though Angel, who spoke some English, didn't mind practicing it with me. (One of the first things he said, while noticing my guitar: “You know Elvis? I love Elvis Presley.”) Thank goodness, however, that Cheo, despite the displacement she must have been feeling, remained such a tolerant soul: She'd often sit next to me in the kitchen and, taking hold of my hand, recount those delicious days when we were together in Cuba, and in more than a few religious asides, always urged me not to lose my faith in God. (“
Tienes que confiarte en Dios
,” she'd say.) I recall my mother apologizing about my Spanish to my cousins—I think she made the effort to remind them about my year in the hospital, though given what they'd gone through, it was hardly a number one concern. What seemed to matter the most, at least to my aunt, was that we were together, and as far as I seemed to be turning out, it made no difference to her, for, as I will always say, she was nothing less than pure affection.

For his part, my father, despite the inconveniences, didn't seem to feel any imposition on his comforts, such as they were. He happily provided them with whatever they needed—walking-around money, advice, got people to drive them to where they had to go, offered to get Angel and Eduardo jobs at the Biltmore, and, of course, fed them to death with that hotel food, and good stuff too. Oddly, he abandoned his bad habits during those three months or so—I don't recall his having much to drink; I think having people around made him happy, and, if anything, when they finally got resettled over in Union City, New Jersey, where there was a big Cuban community, he seemed a little sad to see them go. For once they left, it was back to my mother and father's old patterns; along the way my mother, hearing of how the government and exile agencies had helped them out—Angel, working odd jobs, was soon driving a Chevy, and it wasn't long before they'd made a down payment on a house—couldn't help but feel some jealousy, though I know she truly wished them well.

As for myself? I felt a little relieved to have some relative privacy again, and while I missed them, I welcomed a release from the daily strains—and perhaps shame—I had been feeling about not being Cuban enough to hold a conversation with my own cousins.

Eventually, at Brandeis, disliking the atmosphere, I became a truant. For every day I attended, I missed another. I always made up excuses about being sick, while in reality, I would be either sitting in some remote spot in Riverside Park, brooding, or in someone's apartment, playing the guitar. The school authorities were perplexed, for when I would come into the principal's office to be counseled, I always seemed like some nice white kid who must have been, in some way, distracted from his higher calling. My grades on tests were always good, but I was always on the verge of flunking out because of my spotty attendance. I had no idea what I was doing there and blamed myself, though I always had an ace in the hole. Somewhere along the line, I had heard that if you passed your Regents Exams, that statewide test of scholastic competence, you could not be failed out of a class. Somehow (thanks, I think, to Hayes) I had gotten 100s in most every Regents exam I took; that is, English, American history, business math (!), and somehow, in lieu of actually sitting through the course, Spanish. Because of those exams, however, I was awarded an academic diploma upon graduation, though my grade-point average remained, based on attendance, abysmal. When Brandeis held the graduation ceremony, my parents did not turn up; nor, for that matter, did I.