Thoughts Without Cigarettes (20 page)

Nevertheless, though those days had passed, but not the prejudices, the possibility of such confrontations still hung in the air, and as a consequence, it was a common thing for the police to patrol Amsterdam Avenue regularly in their green and white squad cars, with an eye to breaking up any large groups gathered on a street corner, no matter what they were up to—usually just smoking cigarettes and bullshitting about girls. Still, the neighborhood definitely identified with that gang-era mythology. When a recording of the musical
West Side Story
first came out, my brother threw a party in our apartment for his friends, with my father, incidentally, stationed in the kitchen, allowing an endless supply of beer and other refreshments into the house, while in the living room, the lights turned low, couples danced to songs like “I Feel Pretty” and “Maria,” the record playing over and over again, along with other music—of the Shirelles and the Drifters—but repeating so often that, looking back now, I am sure there was a pride about it, as if, in a neighborhood where mixed couples were already as common as interethnic fights, its songs amounted to a kind of personal anthem for a lot of the older kids. (And to think that the musical itself had been put together by a group of theatrically brilliant middle-class Jewish folks, who, in all likelihood, had viewed such a world from a safe distance!)

Now, the first party I ever attended, at Halloween, took place in the basement apartment of my father's pal Mr. Martinez, who lived up the street. His son, Danny, later a sergeant in the NYC police department, decorated the place with candlelit jack-o'-lanterns and tried to make their basement digs seem scarily festive, but what I mainly remember is that he provided a plain old American diversion, something I had only seen on TV, a bowl filled with apples for which one would bob, as well as a game of blindfolded pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, which I had never played before. (Thank you, Danny.) One of their upstairs neighbors was a Mexican woman, Mrs. Flores, who seemed terrified of allowing her little boy, dressed always so nicely and wearing white patent leather shoes, to mix with the other kids. (In his daintiness he seemed another version of my younger self, darker, but just as bewildered as I had once been.) There also happened to be another Latino kid from that block, a diabetic who, sharing my name, was called Little Oscar. Having apparently narrowly escaped diabetes myself, it amazed me to watch him sitting on his stoop as he, with resignation, administered himself a shot of insulin with a syringe. While it fascinated some of the kids, his condition did not bring out pity in them. Unfortunately, so frail and truly weightless, he, just skin and bones, seemed an easy victim to the bullies, and those kids, to my horror, were always picking on him—and cruelly; on at least on one occasion, as he stood with his hand tied behind him to a signpost, they tried to force him to take a bite from a dried piece of dog turd stuck on a twig. “Come on, leave the guy alone,” I remember saying, but they didn't relent. (Whatever happened to Little Oscar, for his parents, catching wind of such things, soon got him the hell out of that neighborhood, I hope his future life went well, though I will never know.)

Slowly, in the years after my illness, I had made my own friends from around, among them Richard, the youngest smoker I would ever know. I can recall seeing him, a few months after I had returned from the hospital, standing outside my front window and showing off the snappy cowboy outfit and medallion-rimmed black hat that his father, often away, had just brought back from his travels. One of the few kids around who'd take the trouble to come visit me in the days when I couldn't really leave the apartment, he'd sometimes climb the rickety back stairway to my window from the courtyard, crawling inside to play and scrambling out when my mother heard us from down the hall. The youngest of a large family, the Muller-Thyms, who occupied two bustling first-floor apartments, one next to the other, across the street, he had four brothers and five sisters (though I knew hardly any of the older ones at all). As families went, they were locally famous for both the brightness of the children and the slight eccentricities of their genius father, Bernard, who had a high sloping forehead and a vaguely Hubert Humphrey pinched-in cast to his face, though with a Dutchman's side whiskers (the only thing missing would have been a meerschaum pipe).

Mr. Muller-Thym had first come to the neighborhood during the Second World War, when he taught swimming to naval recruits at the university. After the war, though armed with a Ph.D. dissertation in the mystical thinking of Meister Eckhart, he had drifted into the business world and, with a brood of growing children, had decided to stay on that block, presumably to save the money he would have spent in a better neighborhood. The aforementioned eccentricities included his tendencies to occasionally parade in front of his windows, which were visible from the street, in nothing but a shirt, sometimes less—and though one would think that his physically candid persona would have scandalized the neighbors, even my mother, crying out
“Ay!”
at the sight of him, at worst found him more amusing than offensive. Publicly, he was civil, always well dressed, and if he stood out in any way from the working-class fathers on that street, it was for both his reclusiveness—I think my father, coming home from work, would say hello to him from time to time, but little more—and the lofty company he kept. (He was actually quite a nice man, always seemed interested in what I had to say, asking about me in a manner that neither of my parents did. “What do you want to do with yourself one day?” “I don't know.” “Well, you should start thinking about it soon enough.”) A former classmate of his from Saint Louis University, Marshall McLuhan, often frequented that apartment, well into the 1960s before the family moved away; and among the other figures who visited with Mr. Muller-Thym and sat for dinner at his table—doubtlessly on some of those evenings when my pop was sitting around with the likes of Martinez and Frankie the exterminator—happened to be Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist then with the fledgling organization of NASA, with whom Mr. Muller-Thym had a professional relation as a consultant. (It cracks me up now to imagine this haughty rocket scientist, with his Nazi pedigree and physicist's brilliance, walking up my block to Richard's while screaming kids, cursing their hearts out and jumping onto cars to make a catch, played stickball on the street; why do I see the legendary Von Braun, shaking his head in bemusement over the apparent decline of civilization?)

Once I'd gotten my wings, I'd often go over there, usually in the afternoons, simply because I wanted to get out of my house. They lived humbly enough—there was nothing fancy about the trappings of their apartment—though what first caught my eye, always caught my eye, was the abundance of books in their home. Richard's older brother Tommy, an expansive sort with a bit of Brando about him and much street-inflected bonhomie for his fellow man, to say the least, had his own place with one of his other brothers, Johnny, next door, the floor beside his bed covered with dozens of novels, some of them science fiction but many, I suppose, culled from American classics: Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and yes, Iceberg Slim are names I recall. Richard himself, the sharpest kid around, had at some ridiculously young age become consumed with history and ancient literature, no doubt because of his father's erudite influence. What can one say about a nicely featured kid, half-Italian and half-Dutch, who reads Gibbons and Thucydides, and the poetry of Catullus and Martial in the Loeb classical editions for his leisure? (At first in translation, and then later, once he had mastered them, in the original Greek and Latin.) His narrow room by the front door was always stacked with piles of such books, which sat atop his bunk bed and on his dresser, the floor, and anywhere else they might fit. He would get a kick out of reciting aloud some particularly grizzly account of a battle or, on the bawdier side, some risqué Roman couplets, a slight and naughty euphoria coming into his expression.

And while it might seem, given the calling I've unpredictably drifted toward, that this exposure to a household where books were so cherished and to a friend with such a voracious mind might have inspired in me some scholarly bent or an early love for reading, to the contrary, I regarded those books in the same manner I would while walking down Broadway with my father when we'd stop to quizzically peer into a bookstore window, never buying any, as if such volumes were intended only for others, like the college students through whose world we simply passed.

On that end, while I tended to dip into my school textbooks and always did well enough to pass from one grade to the next, I continued to read mostly comics, in which I would lose myself, and certainly nothing as complicated as the poems and narratives of the distant past, which, as far as I was concerned, may as well have been written on the planet Mars. In fact, that bookish world always seemed remote to me. During the few trips I'd made (with my mother) over to the 125th Street library, with its musty interior, I always found the sheer multitude of volumes intimidating and chose my books on the basis of whether they had ornate covers. (My mother, by the way, would wait in another aisle, perusing somewhat tentatively a few books that had caught her eye but never taking any out—I don't think she had a card—and if anything, she always left that place annoyed over the way the librarian, a heavyset black woman who, as I recall, always wore a large collared sweater and a string of costumejewelry pearls around her neck, sometimes watched her, probably, in my mother's view, with suspicion as if she “would take one without her knowing,
que carajo!
”) For the record, one of the books I can recall borrowing—well, the only one I recall—happened to be an old edition of
Peter Pan
. I can remember feeling very impressed by the clustered, floridly set words on its opening pages, entangling to me like the vines of a briar patch—a purely visual impression—into which I thought I might delve; but I never made much headway; accustomed to the easy leisure of comics, I found Mr. Barrie's novel, however famous as a children's classic, too strictly word-bound to hold my attention for long. (Or to put it differently, I was either too lazy or too distracted by my emotions to freely enter that world.)

Nevertheless, I liked the fact that my friend had so many books around, including an arcane collection of the writings of Aleister Crowley, in which his father was interested—all so incredibly far removed from my parents' beginnings. On some level, I suppose, I developed a kind of respect and admiration for the intelligence one needed for such things. But if I did so, it was from the distance of someone looking in from the outside, with wonderment, or bemusement, in the same way that my mother, at that hospital in Connecticut, used to regard me.

But we'd also get out, spending quite a number of afternoons roving through the back courtyards behind his building, climbing fences and high walls, to make our way over to 117th Street, which in those days seemed one of the more elegant blocks in the neighborhood. It was a placid elm-tree-lined street whose Georgian edifices, owned by the university, were remarkably ornate, and as much as we felt that we were encroaching on alien territory, as it were, we occasionally managed, just by nicely asking, to play billiards in one of the sunny front brownstone fraternity house rooms (if that's what they were.) And we'd go on the occasional excursion to a nearby park, though Morningside, even then a Harlem mugger's paradise, remained far less inviting than its cousin by the Hudson, where we would go “exploring” through its winding, tree-laden trails as far north as Grant's tomb.

Always fast on his feet, Richard, dark haired and of a slim and compact build, could run around the block, and quickly, without as much as taking a deep breath or working up a sweat, a remarkable thing, mainly given the fact that he smoked a carton of Winstons every week. I don't know how—or why—his habit started; it was always just there. Of his three brothers, the eldest, Bernie, an army officer fresh out of West Point, probably didn't smoke (I would never see him doing so, at any rate), but I think the next oldest, of my brother's age and the most burly of them, Johnny, did, and Tommy certainly (Tareytons, as I recall). It simply wasn't a big thing on my block—if it was illegal for adolescents to smoke, you wouldn't have known that from checking out the street. Kids like Tommy, very much a fellow of this earth, could play three-sewer stickball games and go running the makeshift bases with a fuming butt between his lips, and, as a matter of course, a lot of the kids, having no trouble getting ahold of them, smoked while hanging out on the stoops, singing doo-wop, or in the midst of a poker game, on which they would wager either money or cigarettes. Some guys walked around with a pack stuffed up in the upper reaches of their T-shirt sleeve, by the shoulder, or with a cigarette tucked J.D.-style alongside their ear. Cigarettes were just everywhere, that's all, a normal thing, which, however, I never found particularly inviting except when I'd get the occasional yearning to be like everyone else.