Thoughts Without Cigarettes (18 page)

But was I a tough guy myself? That same summer, when I accompanied some kids from my block on an outing to the Steeplechase Amusement Park in the Far Rockaways of Brooklyn, no sooner did we arrive than I, riding some dinky roller coaster, somehow got separated from the group. Once I realized that I couldn't spot anyone I knew, like the nice older girl, Angie Martinez, who had persuaded my mother to let me come along, I began to feel an awful despair, as if roaming through those crowds, something bad would happen to me. The longer I walked up and down that park, teeming with people, the more I felt my guts tightening and a heaviness gathering in my legs, my knees going weak—eleven years old, I felt like crying. I remember thinking that as much as my family seemed overbearing (well, my mother), I might never see them again, and just the notion of not being able to make it back home left me feeling miserable. At the time, I didn't even have a token with me, just one of those circular Steeplechase punch-hole cards good for about ten rides; after about half an hour, I became so desperate that I approached a gang of black kids, all of them towering over me, to whom I offered my card in exchange for my fare home. And while they could have easily taken me off, they flipped me a fifteen cent token anyway, and I soon found myself standing on the platform of the Brighton Beach station, about four blocks away, asking people how to get back into Manhattan; no matter what they told me, I still remained anxious; on the D train for Manhattan, I sat on the edge of my seat, looking at every station sign, until that subway finally rolled into the Columbus Circle stop. Years later, when I'd work in a job involving the MTA, I could never walk through that station without remembering that day. Finally, catching another train, I rode up to 116th Street and Broadway, thrilled to see that its station tiles read COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

I can remember feeling, bit by bit, a release of my tensions as I crossed the campus toward Amsterdam, all the while swearing to myself that once I reached my block, I'd kiss the sidewalk.

Of course, when I finally came home to our hot apartment, and my mother asked me what the hell had happened, I just shrugged: I don't recall what she made of the fact that I had come back alone, but by the time I ran into Angie the next day, though I had probably ruined the group outing—“You can't believe how we went crazy looking all over the place for you!”—I had started to feel rather proud of myself, if not so tough or self-assured.

In those days I remained a reticent soul, especially with Spanish-speaking folks, around whom, fearing the inevitable exchanges, I always piped down. Whenever I went into a bodega other than Freddie's, and my pop and I would head over into Harlem, I had to put up with people—young tough kids mainly—checking me out, and with suspicion (though old ladies were always nice to me). I'd try to shrink into the walls in such places, always felt like I stood out like a leper.

At home, when Cuban and Puerto Rican visitors I'd never seen before came into the apartment, there always seemed to come a moment when one of them would look at my father, his soft voice intoning a slangy, sometimes beer-slurred Spanish, and then at me, whose awkward Spanish was halting, at best, and ask incredulously, “He is really your son?” (
“De verdad, es tu hijo?”
My father, in those instances, always answered: “Of course”—“
Cómo, no?”—
but along the way, his eyes always met with mine, his pupils misting over with a contemplation of genetic mysteries and as well with an awareness of my own history within the family. Though we certainly looked alike, that seemed to make no difference to his friends, for whatever being Cuban was about, I just didn't have it. I got used to that, but I always felt a little ashamed, and generally learned to nod and smile when questions were asked of me, more often than not looking for any excuse to leave the room. (Though some, I might add, became more understanding, especially once my mother said, “My son,
el pobrecito
, was sick.”)

I also had some bad luck. At Corpus, during my fifth year there, the school had decided to allow an hour out of the week for Spanish lessons. Our teacher was the school secretary, a certain Mrs. Rodríguez, and while she was a very pleasant lady, her classroom manner seemed hardly soothing, in my case at least. From pupil to pupil she'd go, asking each to repeat certain words and phrases, and while the other Spanish-speaking kids, mostly Puerto Ricans and Cubans, had no trouble at all, when it came to me, I simply froze, my throat tightening along with my gut, and the words I managed to squeeze out, particularly when rolling my rs, were so badly pronounced that Mrs. Rodríguez, out of the kindness of her heart, would go on and on about how I, as the son of Cubans, with a name like Hijuelos, should hang my head low for speaking Spanish so badly.

“Even the Irish kids,
que no saben español
, do better than you!” she'd say. Then: “Don't you even want to try?”

I'd look down, shrug, and she would ignore me for the rest of the lesson, averting her eyes from my glance any time she'd pass along the aisle, each session ending with a coup de grâce, for as she'd leave the classroom, she'd cast a disappointed look my way and, shaking her head, disappear into the hall, mumbling to herself, I was certain, about me. I came to dread those lessons, and after a while, she simply carried on as if I were not there, as if I were somehow beneath her attentions and the worst kind of Latino, who didn't care about his mother tongue, which is to say that at such a delicate time, when a different approach might have made some difference (I really don't know) to my development along those lines, she quite simply made my own wariness about learning it even more intense.

Of course I understood Spanish completely, but for some reason, I felt paralyzed when it came to speaking it—how a bilingual class with a real teacher would have helped me—and with that failing, along with my looks, definitely setting me apart from the other Latino kids (a double whammy, as it were), I remained incapable of finding my way out of the dense wood of my confusions. Naturally, I gravitated to situations—and friends—in which Spanish was not required. By then, in my adolescence, my mother's voice, which had nagged and ordered me around for so long, and my father's, sometimes so calm and measured or else a morass of mumbled, anguished Spanish, had begun to sound to me like voices from a radio, especially when they'd go at each other at night, as if I were asleep again in my aunt's house back in Cuba, eavesdropping on some overwrought and shrill melodrama from another place far away. When my pop's pals came over in the late afternoon, I got pretty good at blocking out some of the dreary things I'd overhear them saying in Spanish—like Frankie the exterminator bawling away because his wife didn't respect him as much as she used to, or about how some new tough boss, an efficiency-expert sort, had shown up suddenly at the Biltmore, making everyone nervous—or my mother's diatribes, once they'd left, about the quality of some of my pop's friends. I'd tune out, however, preferring to listen to anything else, the ambient sound of dinner utensils and plates, the faint hum of television sets, the murmur of more or less calm voices coming into the kitchen from the courtyard—normal life unfolding—which somehow always seemed so comforting to me.

Not to say, however, that I didn't appreciate certain things about our family's life, like the food, which I began to eat with abandon once my mother, worn down from her years of vigilance and of taking me to clinics and local doctors like Altchek in Harlem or a certain Dr. Hinkle, a woman, on 119th Street, had given up on my diets. (“If you want to get diabetes, then fine with me,” she'd say in Spanish. “And go ahead, become
un gordito:
Get fat!”) I think that dam had first burst open down in Miami, during my trip there, when, coddled by my aunt, I could eat anything I wanted. It would have become inevitable anyway, what with my pop and brother always passing me some tender morsels on the sly, fried sweet plantains sending me to heaven. And on the holidays, it became my habit to scoff down pieces of crispy
lechón
, or ham, or roasted turkey and some
boniato
—butter-and-sugar-smothered sweet potatoes, when my mother wasn't looking.

But even before my mother had given up, I already had other respites as well: For some reason, these mostly took place out at my cousin Jimmy Haley's place on Webster Avenue, where his gorgeous wife, María, keeping a tidy apartment with all new furnishings (I remember my mother seeming impressed by that), always cooked up a storm—of strictly Cuban fare. This ravishing lady, buxom and elegant, was always going through the hard labors of stripping the thick skin off green plantains and frying up enough of them to stack high on a platter, more than our little group could possibly ever eat (though I tried). I suppose because it would have been bad form for me not to partake of those meals, my mother looked the other way, though I don't think she could have been too happy about it, since the doctors at the hospital were still scaring her to death about my potential to come down with various maladies. In any event, I liked going there. For one thing, my cousin Jimmy, who spoke perfect English, was someone I deeply admired. If I ever first formed an image of the earnest Cuban male, decent, hardworking, and responsible, it was back then: He had a son a few years younger than I, little Jimmy, and in those years when we would visit, this quiet boy became my friend. Besides, his household seemed always at peace. But if I most enjoyed those visits, it came down to the way my pop never felt the need to load up on booze around them, and my mother, admiring Jimmy and his wife, always seemed subdued and relaxed, commenting always on the appointments of the apartment—the nice linoleum, the newness of their couch—everything neat as a pin. Jimmy himself, handsome, even-tempered, with a laconic tendency toward understatement, seemed as ideal a father as any boy could ever want: He'd talk about his future plans for little Jimmy and seemed keen about sending his son, when of age, to a military school, teaching him how to drive, and perhaps, one day, returning to Cuba as a family, once Fidel left. Altogether, it seemed to me that little Jimmy and his family had it all, but you just never know—for the poor kid's life eventually took a trajectory that almost resembled mine: He got sick in his early teens with leukemia and, instead of recovering, passed on; and his father, so straitlaced and decent, if I am remembering the situation correctly, left his wife for someone else—an outcome that now makes me sad.

The thing is that, after a while, once my mother started looking the other way, I'd devour just about anything I could. I'd join my brother in the consumption of thick ham and turkey sandwiches on rye bread with mayonnaise as a snack, filet mignon and onions or fried veal cutlets on oven-burnt toast for breakfast. On one occasion, we ate our way through what must have been a two-pound chunk of dark German chocolate, from the hotel, which we'd hacked apart bit by bit with a butter knife on the kitchen table. And just as memorably, sometime during a cold November night, when the world seemed endlessly bleak, we somehow managed to devour a box of twenty or so chocolate éclairs that my father had brought home from a wedding banquet, and the two of us later doubled over, guts aching, on a couch.

My brother, always managed to somehow stay slim, while I tended to go up and down in weight, depending on whether, for brief periods, some doctor at the hospital demanded that I resume a strict diet. But whatever diets I went on didn't last long; losing weight over a three-month period, I'd just as quickly put it back on, a cycle I've often since repeated during my life. (Look in my closet now and you'll see three sizes of clothes: in shape, getting out of shape, out of shape.) Actually, getting fat seemed a familial—or Cuban—thing to do. My father, with his devil-be-damned attitudes about food, and God knows how many calories he consumed by drinking beer and whiskey almost nightly, always carried an enormous number of extra pounds, and it didn't bother me to become more like him; I suppose that on some level, it was my way of being more Cuban. (There is a picture taken of us along Broadway, outside Columbia, on the day, I believe, that I had received my First Communion; the suit I wore, incidentally, had been purchased for ten dollars, off a rack in some garment worker's apartment, on 108th, where he sold clothes out of his living room; my father and I sport identical crew cuts, and at ten or so I seem to look very much like his son.)