Thoughts Without Cigarettes (21 page)

In any event, Richard's household became a refuge to me: It was close by, and the family treated me well. His mother played the piano—I first heard Debussy's “Clair de Lune” over there, and one Friday evening, in the days when Catholics still observed such rules, I consumed my first Italian-style red snapper dinner at their table. But I especially loved going there around Christmas, when they'd put up a crèche and a majestic nine-foot pine tree, their living room table always covered with Italian cold cuts from Manganaro's downtown, and other seasonal niceties, like macaroons and brandy-drenched cherries, the holiday atmosphere so cheerful and strong, what with high piles of presents stacked under the evergreen and wreaths on the walls, that our own strictly budgeted Christmases suffered by comparison. We always had lots of food and booze around, of course, but my father wanted to spend only three dollars on a tree, which we'd get down on Amsterdam; and when it came to our presents, my brother and I received only one gift apiece. I don't recall my mother or father ever having any presents of their own; nor did we celebrate El Día de los Reyes, Three Kings Day, the way other Latino families were said to—in fact, I only heard reference to that holiday many years later; and if anything, after the revolution, when my parents' thoughts turned to their family in Cuba—my mother receiving her sisters' plaintive letters with guilt and sadness—a kind of maudlin spirit became a part of the holiday. Having said this, I can't complain, for even with a humble tree, there was something wonderful about the way the pine smelled in our house, so sweet that not even cigarette smoke overwhelmed it.

At Richard's, the holiday remained the great event of the family calendar—certainly of his own—and while I suppose they were an affluent family relative to our street, they were quite generous and always allowed me to join in their festivities.

I probably envied my friend—he seemed to always receive the best gifts, purchased down at the old FAO Schwarz: hand puppets from Germany and train sets when he was younger, and, during my adolescence, military board games, like Tri-Tactics or Dover Patrol, and Risk, which we'd play on many an afternoon. On those occasions with Richard, whom I admired and respected, smoking away, it became inevitable that I would try one of those cigarettes myself. I was probably twelve at the time, if that, and while I can't remember having any sense of elation at those first inhalations—did I cough or make faces?—smoking at least a few, mainly Richard's, soon enough became part of my days, and the foundation of a habit that would hold on to me, on and off, for many years.

Did I like them? I seem to have gotten used to their bitter taste, and perhaps on some other level I was thinking about my father, of finding one more way of becoming a little more like him. Though I didn't smoke many at first, they kind of grew on me, and a little weary of my lingering self-image as the frail sick son, it wasn't long before, in addition to
comiendo mucho
—lots of food, tons of it—I began sneaking cigarettes out of the half-filled packs that my father would leave in one of his top dresser drawers. I'd sometimes go down into Morningside Park to smoke, where I was fairly certain that my mother wouldn't see me, and while I never lingered long there, it happened that, on a certain afternoon as I stood along one of its glass-strewn passageways, a couple of stringy Latino teenagers, the sort to wear bandannas around their foreheads, coming out of nowhere, held me up at knifepoint. It was one of those occasions when I wished I had the presence of mind to muster up some Spanish, but I'm fairly certain that no matter what I might have said (“
Pero soy latino como tú
”—“I'm Latino like you”) it would have made no difference: They didn't like the way I looked, my blond hair and fairness alone justification enough for them to hate me without even knowing just who I was; it would happen to me again and again over the years, if not with Latinos, then with blacks—prejudice, truthfully beginning and ending in those days with the color of your skin. I wasn't stupid, however; I gave them what I had in my pockets—a few bucks from one of my jobs working at a laundry before school down on 121st for this nice man named Mr. Gordon, who'd make his morning deliveries while I watched his shop (and pilfered the loose change on his shelves), and two of my pop's cigarettes, which I had in my shirt pocket.

Eventually, my pop figured me out. Not that he put it together by how many cigarettes were left in his packs—I'd never overdo it—but because I started feeling too slick for my own good. Coming back from some afternoon movie on 96th Street one day, I had lit up one of his Kents only to see my father, peering out a bus window at me as it passed along the avenue. First he whistled at me, a high low whistle that he'd call me by, and gesturing with his hand against his mouth as if her were drawing on a cigarette, he shook his head, mouthing the word
no
. Then he pointed his hand toward me—gesticulating the way Latinos do, his index finger stuck out, and going up and down, meaning I was going to get it. Later, at home, he took out his belt and reluctantly gave me a beating, as always on the legs but painful just the same. Then, hearing about what had happened, my mother got into the act, slapping my face that night and looking strangely at me, as if I were a criminal who had betrayed her, for weeks afterward. Naturally, it made no difference; I adjusted, telling myself that, as with other things, I would have to become far more careful.

Around the same time, a picture began to hang over the living room couch. My brother had painted it. Having creative aspirations, at seventeen or so, he had started to make paintings somewhere—not in our apartment, at any rate. Amazingly enough, he had talked his Irish girlfriend from uptown, whose brothers and father happened to be cops, into posing nude for him, that portrait of her, with her burst of dark hair and nice body reclining against a bluish background, going up on the wall. No one objected, and my mother, while probably bemused by his rakish ways, seemed to take a great pride in his talent; in fact, that painting would remain there for the rest of my mother's life—for among other reasons, I think it spoke to her memories of her own cultured father back in Cuba, whose creative blood, she would always say, flowed in my brother's veins.

Of the two of us, José was always the more gifted: Lacking a center, I had a basically infantile mind and no sense of order; I was lackadaisical in my mode of dress, while he, a more sartorial sort, had the kind of instincts that simply amazed me. He knew how to iron a shirt or a pair of trousers to a sharp crispness, and given the challenge of creating a costume for a Halloween party, he once fashioned a gaucho outfit out of some pieces of felt cloth from which he made a vest and, flattening an old hat, came up with a new one with jangles along the brim, the final touch a wrapping in velvet cloth around his waist. (He sort of looked like Zorro and was quite handsome in the mirror before which he posed.) He was sharp in a way I would never be, and effortlessly so, though I doubt that he didn't secretly work hard at it. Above all, I'd always thought, even then, of him as being far more Cuban than I, the Spanish he would speak with some of our neighbors seemingly of a level that I, in those days, could not begin to approach. (“
Tu hermano es mucho más cubano,
” my mother would always say.)

Nevertheless, sharp as he could be, he went through some rough times. Going back a few years, once the Catholic high school he had attended closed down, he ended up at George Washington up on 187th Street, a high school where he always had to watch his back (which is to say, people were always kicking one another's asses) and from which by his senior year he had dropped out. (For the record, my parents were not happy about that.) He worked delivering Sunday newspapers, starting at six in the morning, a job I benefited from, because, working for tips, I'd deliver the missed issues of the
New York Herald
, the
New York Journal American
, and
The New York Times
around the neighborhood once the calls came in at about nine. (There was also the
Daily News
, which most people also ordered, those Sunday editions with their fabulous four-color comic pages weighing three or four pounds apiece. However, I don't recall ever seeing a Spanish-language newspaper like
El Diario
on those racks.) He'd apparently also worked for a gay mortician for a time, around Washington Heights, whose advances in those parlors of cadavers he fended off. Altogether, though he seemed always to have money in his pocket, my brother remained a restless sort, looking for some distant horizon better than what we seemingly had before us. (A pet peeve of his was to the fact that the name
Basulto
still adorned, as it had for decades, the mailbox and bell.)

Generally, he rarely stayed at home, spending more than a few nights away—where, I don't know; wherever he had been hanging out, perhaps at the homes of friends like the Valez family on 122nd or up on a rooftop on a mat. There came a day when his girlfriend's brothers, dressed in their New York City police officers' blue uniforms, began knocking at our door. They knocked because my brother, in the process of painting their sister nude, or at some other point—perhaps during their teenage outings to the piers under Coney Island's boardwalk—had, in the parlance of the day, “gotten her in trouble.” She was pregnant, and her family was not pleased.

My father, coming to the door and probably knowing much more than he let on, claimed, as he faced those burly officers, to have no awareness of my brother's whereabouts. (He spoke a low-toned, generally unaccented English, maybe Spanish-inflected in some ways but always calm.) In any case, after several visits with their officers' hats in hand, they stayed away. One of those nights, when my brother had come home with the air of a fugitive on the run, my father, despite their differences, sat him down in the kitchen and counseled him—an unusual thing in our family—as to his choices. Given the situation, I think it came down to the following: Either marry her or get lost. My brother would always say that my father, without a drink in his gut, rose to the occasion and, truly concerned, advised him well. Not so much to take the high road perhaps, but to consider what would be best for his future. For, as it turned out, my brother, eighteen at the time and with a pregnant girlfriend with a cop family to worry about tracking him down, decided to enlist in the air force, and within a few months, he was gone.

T
he thing about my pop is that he never wanted to hurt anyone. Not consciously at least. He'd always have something of that
güajiro
quietude about him, and while he had his vices, he never sloughed off his responsibilities when it came to work and supporting the household. Much liked at the Biltmore, his nickname was
Caridad,
or Charity, for his giving nature. And while he underwent his occasional metamorphosis from a gentle Jekyll into an oblivion-seeking Hyde, for the most part, people liked him.

I've always remembered him as a man who stoically engaged the mornings. As a kid I always awoke to the sound of his footsteps in the hall, for he'd leave around six for his early shift at the hotel. I'd hear the door opening carefully, the jangle of keys and the turn of the lock, then the door closing shut against the rickety frame; he made more noise than he should have. He'd step out into the absolute stillness of those New York mornings, the city silent and deserted at that hour; only the duration of Sundays, when hardly anything opened in those days, approached them in their quietude. He'd go down the hill of 118th Street to Amsterdam Avenue, a newspaper tucked under his arm, his ambling stride unmistakable, then head up a few blocks south to 116th ( the path ascended), where he would cross the Columbia University campus to the subway kiosk on Broadway, seeing few people along the way. Occasionally, he'd meet up with Mr. Hall from upstairs, who worked for the LIRR. They were good friends, though I don't know what they might have talked about. Occasionally, a milk truck or a bus passed by on the street, but generally when he set out to work, he did so by himself.

Into the bowels of the subway he would go, with its dirty platforms and penny Chiclets and five-cent Hershey bar dispensers on the columns, and board his train downtown and eventually over to Grand Central, the seats in those days still often covered in lacquered cane. He'd make that journey, no matter how he might have been feeling, or the weather, even when snow had piled high on the streets and sidewalks. To miss work was unthinkable to him.

Given the way he'd spend many of his evenings, he was probably in a constant state of fatigue—cigarettes, it seemed, helped him keep going. He worked two jobs after 1960, at the Biltmore and at the Campus Faculty Club rooftop restaurant, on top of a high-rise Columbiaowned residential hotel, Butler Hall, a block over on 119th Street. For years he didn't sleep much, and of course, his greatest pleasure remained the company of his friends. His warm manner, publicly, attracted smiles: Sitting out on the stoop, he conversed happily with anyone who happened by. Language was never a barrier. Though I'd grow up with the notion that my father was lucky enough to have mastered English as well as he did, he, in fact, also learned to speak serviceable amounts of German, Russian, Greek, and Italian at the hotel, where the staff consisted mainly of immigrants like himself—which is to say, it seems that he had a facility with language. It amazes me to think that had he been born twenty years sooner, around 1895 or so, he may well have spent his entire life on a farm in Cuba, riding a horse, perhaps alongside his brother, instead of passing his days in the kitchen of a midtown hotel preparing grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and grilled steaks for the usual Men's Bar clientele of boozing business executives, errant college boys, and the occasional famed personality—like Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra and perhaps, in all his years there, Ernest Hemingway. (I will never know.)