Thoughts Without Cigarettes

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

GOTHAM BOOKS

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.);

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd);

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd);

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,

Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India;

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632,

New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd);

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

First printing, June 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Cuban Ink, Inc.

All rights reserved

 

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

has been applied for.

eISBN : 978-1-101-52882-2

 

Photos throughout courtesy of the author.

 

Poem by Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos in the Introduction by Oscar Hijuelos (pp xix-xx), from
Burnt Sugar: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish
, edited by Lori Marie Carlson and Oscar Hijuelos and translated by Lori Marie Carlson. Introduction, Copyright 2006 by Oscar Hijuelos. Reprinted with permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon and Schuster.

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

 

 

This is a memoir. It reflects the author's present recollections of his experiences over a period of years. Dialogue and events have been re-created from memory.

S
eems just like yesterday
(an illusion) that I was sitting out front on my stoop on 118th Street, on an autumn day, in 1963 or so, feeling rather indignantly disposed and pissed off because my best friend from across the way, with a somewhat smug look in his eyes, kept blowing smoke into my face. He was thirteen, a year older than me, and had already been going through at least a carton of Winstons a week for as long as I could remember—cigarettes that his mother, the venerable Mrs. Muller-Thym, coming back from the A&P, gave, fair-mindedly, to each of her sons on Fridays. (Think he must have started smoking at the age of seven or eight.) We usually got along like pals, running through the backyards and basements together, or else hanging out in the book-laden clutter of his room, playing cards and chess or listening to jazz recordings by Art Blakey and Ahmed Jamal, while occasionally sneaking rum and whiskey from his father's stash of high-class booze down the hall, which we'd mix into glasses of Coca-Cola, without ice, and drink until the world went spinning and everything became beautiful in an exciting way. The guy was definitely head and shoulders smarter than just about anyone else in that neighborhood, including me, and generous to boot, for he was always giving away his cigarettes and candy and loose change on the street. But on that particular afternoon, he had gotten some kind of hair up his ass. With a smirk on his face, and walking right up to me, he had blown, slowly and with great self-satisfied deliberation, rings of that smoke at my mug. I don't know why he did this—perhaps because he, like so many of the other kids on that street, sometimes thought me passively disposed on account of the fact that my mother, never forgetting my childhood illness, had always kept a tight leash on me. Or because he just felt naughtily inclined or wanted to express some notion of superiority that day. But whatever he may have been thinking in those moments, I discovered that I had a fairly short fuse. So when I told him, “Come on, man, don't do that!” in the manner that kids in those days talked, and maybe, “But hey, I'm not messing with ya,” and he kept blowing that smoke at me anyway, I yanked the cigarette out of his hand and put it out on his head.

Thankfully, its burning tip met with the thick matting of his slickened dark hair, but I can still remember the crisp sound it made, like air being quickly released from a bicycle tire, and, of course, that strangely repellent smell of singed organic matter, which foreshadowed, to my young Catholic mind, the possible punishments of hell. Perhaps I ended up chasing him around the block, but he was always too fast for me, or perhaps, I can't exactly remember, he ran down into a basement or the park, hiding out somewhere in the bushes along one of the terraced walkways that descended from Morningside Drive into East Harlem, on tracks of cracked, glass-strewn pavement. If so, he might have waited until sometime near dark, while I, out of sorts and craving a cigarette of my own, went home to yet another one of those evenings in our Cuban household that tended to leave me feeling restless and confused.