Thoughts Without Cigarettes (38 page)

And while she had hardly ever been a reticent soul, with each new outing, her delivery, which she refined after readings for her friends—like Chaclita and Carmen and the women she knew from church—became more brazen, self-confident, and, in her manner, theatrical, as if indeed my mother, who believed in spiritualism, had channeled her father, to the point that she would tremble saying her own words. (Then she'd break out laughing over her own pompousness—“
Soy loca, sí?
” she'd ask.) Those visits were always interesting, if sometimes a little hard to take—even for my older brother, who, speaking Spanish, remained the closer of us to her, because, while José had his painterly aspirations and I had my occasional longings to make something of myself as a writer, it was she—not us—who held court and demanded that we pay her homage as an artist, perhaps the only real one in the family. (After all she had gone through back in the days when she first arrived in America, and for all the
miercoles
she had to endure ever since, I couldn't blame her.)

Here, for the record, is one of her poems:

Fine as her poetry could be, however, she still sometimes overstepped the limits of our patience. Never a shrinking violet, in her widowhood she had become something else, her personality, always charming and winsome, sometimes bordering on arrogance.
“Son bonitos, no?”
—“They're good, aren't they?” she'd inevitably ask about her poems, all the while expecting only one kind of answer.

But at heart we appreciated her creativity. In fact, in the years that have since passed, my brother, and I have come to agree that, however else our upbringing may have been fucked-up, we at least were given a sense that we came from creative roots—viz., our maternal
abuelo
and our mother. We've even joked about the fact that we are the “skipped” generation. It's the American dream, after all, for the first-generation children of immigrants to exceed their parents and go into certifiably venerated and practical professions like that of medicine or law or engineering, to name a few, with the expectation that their offspring, rebelliously prone, drift off into the impractical field of art. But we had somehow skipped over that, though, I must say, without once taking advantage of the few connections we had to further our progress. To put it differently, if it were not for my brother's practical decision to find a secure job in teaching, or my own eventual luck, we could have easily ended badly, without a pot to piss in or anyone on whose help we could fall back.

By graduate school, I'd actually gotten fairly serious about doing something with the story line that I had been given. Slowly, I began to write about my father—something that never came easily to me—and while on the one hand, I found that process somewhat fulfilling, in that I seemed to be finally writing something “real” for the first time, and felt soothed for a while, I inevitably paid for such indulgences in many ways. Bad nightmares, in which I would see the ghost of my father standing in a shroud in my living room, fire burning through me, and my old choking dreams returned, so that I would shoot up in bed, my heart beating so quickly. And in a new bodily reaction to that stress, horrific rashes, by way of a quickly and magically spreading eczema, would break out all over my chest and back and arms with such vehemence that I wouldn't dare write a word for days. (Ironically, however, having a few smokes and a good slug or two of vodka worked wonders as far as calming me down, or at least in putting me in the frame of mind to forget how my skin would turn into parchment just by contemplating certain things.)

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.

B
y 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.)