Thoughts Without Cigarettes (22 page)

A union man, local number 6, he paid his dollar dues weekly and kept a book, somewhat the size of a passport, in which each page, subdivided like a calendar, had a square by the date for each stamped payment. The squares were filled with slogans
—“Buy the Union brand!” “Support your Union brothers!”
He didn't care for Fidel, of course, given what had transpired in Cuba since the revolution, though his sisters, save Borja and Maya, had remained there without complaint, apparently—none of them left or tried to leave, that I know of—and yet when Marcial García would show up, always with a jug of Spanish wine, to speak in defense of the revolution, my father and mother always heard him out without holding that stance against him. My father was a Democrat, always voted so, but he had his prejudices. He never blinked an eye when a Latino, dark as ebony, might come to the apartment, but when it came to American blacks, the sort who lived in the projects above 123rd Street, he would not go anywhere near them. (When I was about sixteen and had made a black friend, a guitar player I'd met from around, and invited him into the house, my father would not allow him inside. “No, you must leave, I'm sorry,” he told him bluntly by the door.) Nevertheless, he was quite friendly with our mailman, who was black, bald, and cheery, conversing with him often enough in the hall.

Remember that Cuban boxer Benny “Kid” Paret, who got beaten into a coma at the old Madison Square Garden by the champion, Emile Griffith, because he'd so pissed him off, calling Griffith a
maricón
? His manager, Olga's husband, came by that same night in the aftermath of that brutal pummeling—Benny, after a few weeks, would die—and when Mr. Alfaro walked in, he carried the bucket containing both sponges and the bloody towels left over from that match and set it down by our kitchen table, where he sat for hours drinking with my father, who did his best to console him.

My father had a terribly distended right elbow, from a childhood fall out of a tree in Cuba, his bulbous ulna bone jutting out a few inches beyond the hinge. You couldn't miss it, any more than you could help noticing how his hands were often covered with burns and cuts. As I sat by him one evening, watching him smoke cigarette after cigarette and pour himself another drink of rye whiskey, I found myself staring at his elbow and because I'd always search for something to say, I couldn't help but ask him about why that bone stuck out so far.

“How'd you get that, Pop?” I asked him.

“I got it during the war,” he said after a moment, and he tapped at the bone in a way that made the ash of his cigarette drop off. “A German shot me,” he said.

“You were in the army?” It was a surprise to me.

“Yes,” he said, without equivocating. “I was a sergeant.”

“What did you do?”

He shrugged. “
Yo era cocinero.
” He sipped at his drink. “I cooked for all the soldiers and for the generals too.”

“Over there?”

“
En Europa durante Segunda Guerra Mundial,
” he added in Spanish for emphasis: “In Europe during the Second World War.”

Of course, it was a lie, though I didn't know it at the time. I can only suppose that he made up that fabrication to impress me, his American son. Maybe he did so because war was in the air—Vietnam was just gearing up, and some of the older boys in the neighborhood were going there as soldiers (a few, like Charlie Soto, coming back in a box)—but, even if some moment of patriotic fervor hadn't compelled that story, I don't know if he really believed he had anything glorious to report about his life.

“That's really true—you were a sergeant?”

“
Te juro
.” And he crossed his heart. “I swear it's so.”

That excited me, of course, and it left me buoyant. Expecting to go into the army myself one day, I was learning Morse code: I'd sent away for a dime pamphlet about telegraphy and, myopically already half-gone, my lenses as dense and heavy as the bottoms of whiskey glasses, I would sit up late at night, studying those dot dash permutations off a card, without a thought as to how the system had probably become outdated. Nevertheless, that revelation so thrilled me that I actually bragged about my father's service to my friend Richard, from across the way. “You're kidding, right?” he asked me, his mouth pursed skeptically as he took a drag of a cigarette.

Still, for weeks, I walked around convinced that he'd told me the truth, and rather proudly so, though, after a while, I couldn't help but ask my mother about it. The exchange, as I recall, went as follows:

“Hey, Ma, was Pascual in the army during the Second World War?”

“Was Pascual a soldier? You know . . .” And I made like I was firing off a rifle.

“
Tu papá ? Un soldado? Nunca
,” she said once she grasped what I was getting at. “Never!”

“But why would he tell me that?”

I mustered some Spanish, poor as it was. With her, I always felt like a boat out in some dark bay, sending signals out to a distant lighthouse, always waiting for the light to beam on.

“Fue mentira?”
I ventured.

“Si, hijo,”
she said sadly.

“But why?” I asked.

“Por qué?”
Her face went somewhere else and then she settled down.

She shrugged and rolled her eyes, and, in the only time I'd ever seen her do so, my mother, smiling, tipped her head back and, with her fist closed and thumb sticking out, as if she might otherwise be hitchhiking, raised and lowered her hand toward her mouth.

“But,
hijo,
don't you know,” she said, “that he drinks too much?”—“
Que tu papá bebe desmasiado?
”

Okay: While I knew it, at the same time, a part of me continued to believe him—I couldn't help it.

The hotel allowed him three weeks for vacation, which he always took in the summer, often while still moonlighting at his other job but still having enough of his days free to do what he most liked, which was to go to the beach, usually Brighton, out in Brooklyn. He'd take me along, when I was eleven and twelve, but never my mother, who preferred to stay at home. (Whether she wanted time off from him or not, she had a belief that too much sunshine would be bad for her skin, and in any case, my few memories of her at the beach always find her mainly under an umbrella, her arms and legs and face slathered with lotion.) We'd ride the fan-aired subway down there, always unbelievably hot, of course, and for these outings, I recall, he'd pack a bag of his favorite sandwiches: salami with pickles and mayonnaise on seeded hard rolls, about a half dozen of them (how less Cuban can you get?). He'd put on a pair of trunks (always oversized) in one of those sandy-floored men's rooms that reeked of salt water, urine, cigar smoke, and compromised stomachs. Then, once I'd changed, we'd find some spot close to the shoreline, where he'd spread out a blanket, wanting to be near the murky water. He drank beers, which he'd bring along in a shopping bag—and in a pinch, there was always some enterprising chap clopping along the sand in a pith helmet and sandals, selling beers out of a Styrofoam cooler. I seem to remember that he also brought along a thermos—probably filled with whiskey, though I can't imagine anyone drinking whiskey in that hot sun—and for my refreshments, a bottle of orange juice. Not one for luxuries of any kind, he'd pull from his bag a little plastic, cutting-edge-technology, made-in-Japan transistor radio, hardly much of anything at all, on which he'd tune into a Spanish-language station, a tinny, thin mix of boleros and cha-chas along with an endless promotional patter punctuating the waterside cacophony, similar radios sounding off from hundreds of blankets around us. He liked women, that's for sure, his eyes never missing a buxom lady's figure, big hipped or big bottomed or not, as she'd pass by or go wading into the water. Occasionally, he'd strike up a conversation with a woman if she were on a blanket nearby, and somehow, despite his girth, he'd cajole all manner of information from her—“Where do you live?” “What do you do?” “Oh, you have kids—I like kids”—the kinds of things I'd overhear him saying in Spanish. Not that he went off with anyone, but looking back now, I'm fairly certain that he enjoyed the pursuit. He did not swim—rather made his way into the water and plopped down into it, falling back on his hands, or else splashed himself with that foamy rush, always keeping an eye on me to make sure that I kept watch over the plump wallet he'd stash inside his shoes, under his shirt and trousers, on the blanket.

The waters off Brighton were not like those blue, crystal clear waters off the coast of Oriente, Cuba, but now and then, I'd catch him as he, sitting up, would look over the horizon with a mostly dreaming expression in his eyes, the way he would sometimes in our kitchen, as if, indeed, Cuba was not far away. He didn't have a whole lot to say to me—we were, on those days, as my mother might remark, just being “
muy, muy tranquilito
”—and after a few hours, maybe four at most, during which I took a few tentative dips in the sea or else examined the half-dead grayish crabs washed up in the auburn sand, it would be time to head back. We'd dress in the same bathrooms and stop for a frankfurter along the boardwalk—and sometimes my father might linger by a railing to have a smoke, the Eiffel Tower–looking parachute drop in Coney in the distance, before setting out for the hour-and-a-half ride home. And while it wasn't much as far as vacation days go—and we'd often repeat the same thing the next day—I enjoyed those outings very much, and think of them nostalgically now.

As I'd get older, we'd go up to the Bronx, a different story entirely, where he'd hang out with his friends at gatherings that began at about three or four on a weekend afternoon. Nothing fancy, they always started out agreeably enough with folks sitting around talking amicably, food, and a lot of it, served on paper plates off a buffet table, and some music blasting out of a record player or radio. Gradually, however, what with the men drinking so much and my father becoming more and more deeply implanted on a plastic-covered couch, I dreaded the moment when we'd leave, usually late at night. The journey home at two in the morning, with nary a taxi or gypsy anywhere in sight along those desolate streets, involved a trek down a long hill, past a row of abandoned buildings, in a fairly crime-ridden neighborhood, maybe number two or three in the city. Uptight and vigilant, I'd hold on to my father's arm, with my pop completely out of it, trusting, even if he'd been mugged a few times before, that we'd manage to slip through to the kiosk stairway of the 169th Street and Third Avenue station without incident (if he thought about it at all). Once on the platform, we sometimes waited half an hour before a number 8 train would finally show up, and even then, that ride back to the West Side, with another wait at 149th' and Grand Concourse, could take just as long. Somehow we'd always make it home.

But during those vacations what I enjoyed more at that age were the days when he'd bring me down to the Biltmore, where he'd go to pick up his pay (always in cash and in a letter-size manila envelope, weighted with small change). There was a little office–really a kind of booth—at the far end of a freight dock on the Forty-fourth Street side of the hotel, midway between Vanderbilt Avenue and Madison, that could be entered from the sidewalk. And as my father would speak quietly with the payroll clerk—“This is my son, Oscar,” he'd say—I would watch the workers unloading vegetable crates and sides of white fatted beef from the backs of produce and butcher trucks, a process that somehow always enchanted me. Then we'd either go upstairs through a service entrance or make our way back around and walk in through the lobby, a busy place in those days; businessmen came flowing through its brass revolving doors, while bellboys in beige uniforms tended to opening taxi doors and to incoming luggage, groups of tourists and conventioneers milling about. The massive lobby's carpeting was plush, and when you looked above, you saw on the ceiling an ornate Florentine-style fresco of gods flying through the heavens. Just beyond, behind an ornate grille, was a Havana-style palm court, and, of course, as that lobby's centerpiece stood the famed Biltmore clock, with its banquette sitting area, much storied as a congenial spot for young couples to meet up for dates, or where college boys on the prowl might look for girls. (I didn't know anything about the hotel's history at the time—what could my father have told me?—but in conjunction with this writing, I found out that the hotel, some twenty-six stories high and taking up an entire block north of Grand Central, had been built by the Warren and Wetmore architectural firm in 1913, a few years before my father was born. Aside from being the kind of place where the Zionist Conference of 1942 convened and the World Center for Women's Progress held its inaugural meeting, it was at the Biltmore where F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his honeymoon with Zelda.)

Inevitably, we'd end up inside the Men's Bar or the Men's Grill Room, which was entered a few steps down off the lobby through a door by which a sign was posted: NO WOMEN ALLOWED
.
I recall that it was an old-style oak-paneled room, quite dark and Edwardian in its motifs, its walls decorated with paintings of sporting scenes and nude women, a massive oak bar taking up much of the space, while off to the side were various booths. We'd go into the kitchen, at the back, where my father would say hello to his fellow workers, among them Díaz, the
cubano
. A plate-cluttered and steamy place with glaring overhead neon lights, that kitchen was filled with stainless steel counters, pots and pans hanging off racks, and fans set up here and there to offset the heat of ovens, grills, and deep fryer. A long banister divided the room. Among its appliances, which impressed me greatly, were a battery of six-slice toasters for the preparation of the bar's famous BLT and club sandwiches. I can remember being treated quite well by the staff there—sitting on a stool in the back by a cutting board, watching them cook away, I'd have lunch, anything I wanted, though I distinctly recall always asking for the club sandwich, for we never ate bacon at home, and more than once, my father, a cigarette between his lips, officiated over the making of an ice cream sundae replete with hot fudge topping, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry, which, placed before me, I devoured. Afterward, once he'd come back from the pantry, we'd head out—down into Grand Central to catch a shuttle to Times Square, and home.