Thoughts Without Cigarettes (19 page)

Besides, I came to think of that bulk, which made the doctors frown, as something that might protect me from
los microbios
, as if taking up more space in the world could make me stronger. (But believe me, even having said this, it had its down side: Now and then, when I'd go with my mother to shop at the cheapest department store in Manhattan, Klein's on 14th Street, or to Annie's on 125th, our inevitable search for trousers in the “husky” bins always left me a little low.)

And no, it's not that I thought about
los microbio
s constantly, but it always amazed me to see how other kids seemed so unconcerned about them. On my stoop one day with the deaf mute's son, Jerry, I watched a candy bar drop from his hand to the sidewalk. “No big deal,” he said nonchalantly. Picking it up, he made the sign of the cross over it, the way people did walking in front of a church, and said, “Hey, don't you know that's all you have to do to make it clean again?” I can remember being very impressed but couldn't help but wonder how that could possibly be true. (But then, at the same time, I suppose, I believed God could do anything.) Still, it wasn't a practice I'd ever subscribe to: I'd seen enough of the local hounds using that sidewalk to know better, and, in any case, some part of me—the part that looked in a mirror and always felt slightly disappointed—sort of believed that I was still susceptible to all kinds of things that other kids weren't, thanks to those Cuban-born
microbios
, which, despite all my doctors' visits, still seemed a part of me, lurking deep inside the way sins do, inside the soul.

During those years, the early 1960s—that period of pillbox hats, fifty-cent kids' movie tickets, chewing-gum-wrapper chains, and the Cold War—I was filled with contradictions. Thinking myself a basic nobody, I could behave smugly just the same; I often felt lonely but could be completely gregarious around others, even an occasional jokester, a tendency that would get out of hand sometimes. (Attending the 1964 World's Fair in Flushing, Queens, at thirteen, I brought along a theatrical prop knife that spurted fake blood, and in a souvenir shop outside the India pavilion, where I saw a sitar for the first time in my life, for some reason, I decided to pretend that I was stabbing myself in the heart, announcing to all who could hear, “I can't take it anymore!” An elderly woman, probably a nice tourist from Europe, seeing me slumped against a counter, with that fake blood dripping down my blue wash-and-wear shirt, fainted dead away. I felt a little bad but still ran the hell out of there.) Despite my sensitivity, I was no saint. Devoutly posturing around the nuns at school (as when I'd pray in the kids' balcony at Mass with the fiercest concentration), I'd try to secretly look up their habit skirts, their rosary beads dangling off their cinctures, as they'd climb the stairs. (They wore a kind of baggy black culotte over a large black undergarment; they did not rely upon brassieres but a wrapping of tightly bound white cotton fabric, about a hand's length wide, around their cloth-encumbered chests, the bandage of which I'd sometimes get a glimpse when they'd lift their arms to pray and there would appear a break in the tent of their coverings.) I always became nervous going to my biweekly Wednesday confession, not over what sins I might have committed, but because I felt, as I waited in a line with other kids, that I
had
to confess something: In the darkness of the confessional, the priest behind the grille, I'd make up sins—even claiming that I had “unpure thoughts” when I really hadn't; or I'd say that I had envied another kid for his nice shoes—anything just to hold up my end of the ritual—and having reported my lists, I'd finally confess that I had lied, but only to cover my earlier inventions.

I never consciously dwelled on what had happened to me in the hospital. Yet when I saw a girl at school that I liked, I'd fantasize that I was in a hospital bed, badly banged up and moaning from some crippling malady, while that girl took care of me, tenderly and mercifully, as would a nurse. (Cured and healthy, I'd end up, in my daydreams, marrying her.) But I was always too timid to approach any of them, even after one of the girls at school had given me a Valentine's card that read “
I'm 4 you: I think you're cute!
” That last word, incidentally, confused me so much that I, for some reason, asked my mother what it meant. (Since the word
cute
resembled the Spanish
“cutis,”
my mother, laughing, told me it meant that I had nice skin.) Naïve about many things, I was sneaky. Learning to write, with a loopy script, I took to composing letters—not just to Santa Claus at Christmas (years later, my mother would tell me that she always cherished them, without ever saving a single one), but to comic book companies, claiming I had sent in my subscription money, usually a dollar or so, but hadn't received any yet; most times my little ruse worked, and I used that same imploring tone of voice (“
I am an eleven-year-old boy from a poor family . . .
”) to get ahold of the kinds of toys that were advertised in the back of those comics, things like Hypno Discs and magic tricks and, most often, plastic sets of cheaply made (in Japan) and under-cast toy soldiers of the Civil War and D-day. I'd lie in that way because, until I got my own little jobs around the neighborhood, or had begun to scavenge in the basement for two-cent bottle returns, I had no money save the occasional quarter
mi madrina,
Carmen, would give me for simply being nice to her, or the pennies I would scrounge around for in my father's dresser drawer and in the deep silken recesses of my mother's purse when she was out visiting somewhere upstairs.

This led me, along with hearing so often that we were “poor,” to a nascent thievish state of mind: I'd often go to the corner pharmacy, where my parents, before we had a phone, used to get their important calls, and, when I thought the counter lady wasn't looking, I'd pocket a candy bar or two as quickly as possible. The afternoon she caught me stealing a Hershey bar, her back was turned, and as I started to make my way out, she grabbed my arm and reached into my pocket for the proof—a lecture, with some threats to call the police, followed, but what has most remained with me was her explanation that she had spotted my theft in an angled ceiling mirror—“Up there, you see it, smarty?” And while I felt much relieved that she, knowing my parents, let me go with only a warning, once I left that pharmacy—it was called Fregents—I took to heart a completely different notion from what she intended: to the contrary, instead of swearing off such things, I resolved to be more careful in the future and not to get caught again.

Once I hit the streets with the other kids, I doubt that my mother was happy about that transition. It just happened: My afternoons were soon spent prowling about up and down the block, climbing railings, hiding in basements, and learning how to play basic games like handball against the wall. Eventually, I joined in rougher activities, like a game called Cow in the Meadow, the source of whose pastoral name I haven't the faintest idea of, which involved a simple-enough premise. The “cow” (someone) stood out in the street (the “meadow”) and his task involved approaching the sidewalk on either side to pull a kid off the curb, into the meadow, which sounds easy enough except for the fact that once the cow left his meadow and ventured onto the sidewalk, the kids could beat the living hell out of him. What victories, of a Pyrrhic nature, one managed left arms and legs covered with bruises and cuts, and occasionally, as well, someone who didn't like you or thought that you were lame or just had it in for you would go after you for real, and in such instances, the ferocity escalated and what had begun with a good-natured beating intended to strengthen one's character (if there was any motivation at all) turned into an out-and-out fight between the cow and his assailant, though at a certain point, time might be called and the two would be pulled apart until tempers cooled, and the more earnestly intended beatings could begin again.

As distasteful as it might sound, that game, for all its potential for inflicting pain and damage—bruised limbs, cut lips, and boxed ears—always seemed fun: I particularly took to it, what with having so much pent-up
something
inside of me. I'm proud to say that I never went home crying afterward, even felt good that such a formerly sick wimp could hold his own, though I would get beaten with a belt by my mother if I came back with a broken pair of eyeglasses or a tornup and/or bloodied shirt.

Mainly, I will say this about my block: A lot of tough working-class kids lived on it, and while there were a few serious delinquents among them who spent time away in juvenile facilities for burglary, and in one instance, for dropping a tile off a tenement rooftop on a passerby, blinding him, the majority were merely mischievous, though a few were simply mean. I almost had my eyes put out by this older fellow named Michael Guiling, the kind of teenager capable of fastening what were called cherry bombs, a high explosive, to pigeons. (I know, it's hard to imagine the process, let alone the outcome, but I once saw him tying one of those bombs to a pigeon and lighting the fuse; he let that bird go, and, flying away, it blew up in midair.) He had a thing for fireworks and, for the hell of it, a happy smile on his face, once flung a cherry bomb at my face; if I hadn't stepped aside, who knows what would have happened. (He was just one of those cruel lost souls—years later, sometime in the early 1970s, he'd die of a heroin overdose in the men's room of a bar on 110th Street, most popular with Columbia University students, a dive called the Gold Rail.)

Down the street, toward the drive, lived a giant fellow—six feet five and probably weighing three hundred pounds, his nickname, naturally, was “Tiny”—who had some vague aspirations of becoming a football player. It was he who grabbed me by the back of my neck one lovely spring morning and, holding me there, dropped a dime onto the sidewalk, ordering me to pick it up. When I did, he stomped on my hand, crushing two of my fingers, the nail on one of them to this day oddly distended toward the digit. (Despite hating his guts for that, fifteen or so years later, I would be saddened to hear that Tiny, while having had some success with a second-tier football team in Pennsylvania, died prematurely in his early thirties of cancer.)

The Irish were everywhere in the neighborhood in those days (at least down to 108th Street, below which the streets became more Puerto Rican), but so were Hispanics and what census polls would now call “Other.” Unlike some neighborhoods, like around the West Sixties, where different ethnic groups were at one another's throats, waging block-to-block turf wars of the sort commemorated in B movies, the older kids around there seemed to get along. In earlier times, in fact the late 1950s, when I, still camped at home, could have hardly been aware of such things, there had been periods in which gangs like the Sinners and the Assassins occasionally ventured south from their uptown Harlem neighborhoods—north of City College—to stage “rumbles” against the local “whiteys.” These were fights born of grudges that began at high school dances with some insult, or a face-off between two tough guys getting out of hand, or because someone was banging someone else's girl, or quite simply out of pure poverty-driven anger and, as well, at a time when the word
spic
was in common usage in New York City, from the deep memory of old, bred-in-the-bone resentments. I'm not quite sure where the Latinos or, for that matter, the other ethnicities in my neighborhood placed their loyalties, but I'm fairly sure that in such instances they joined their white counterparts in these face-offs against that common enemy.

Over those years, blacks had also made incursions onto our block from the east, gangs of them climbing up the terraces of Morningside Park, intending to swarm over the neighborhood, though without much success. Down in the park on 118th, there was a “circle,” a kind of stone embattlement that looked out over Harlem, and it is from there, I've been told, that the locals fended off such attacks by raining down bottles, rocks, and garbage cans on whoever tried to race up to the drive by a stone stairway or to climb those walls.