Thoughts Without Cigarettes (26 page)

At sixteen, I'd played guitar behind a neighborhood doo-wop group that auditioned before a hashish-stoned audience on an openmike afternoon, singing vamped-up, multi-harmonized versions of popular folk tunes like “When I Die” at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village. (We cleared out the place.) I'd played in a little band in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with my friend Jerry, who had long since moved away, performing simple rock tunes by groups like the Kinks and Them, as well as some of our own, in more than a few deadend bars and social clubs in the midafternoon. (I never liked to hang around there at night, for it was a neighborhood where you heard guns popping off in the distance.) And, often enough, while crossing the campus, I'd hear some guy fingerpicking a tune and sit down, just watching his every move. If he sang, that was fine, but mostly I watched the way he played.

Around the same time, a larcenous tendency arose in me. Or to put it differently, it suddenly blossomed. In 1966, a music shop, Levitt & Elrod, had just opened on Ninety-sixth Street, halfway down the block between Broadway and West End. (There's a Salvation Army store there now.) I happened to walk by there one afternoon with a friend just as a delivery of instruments had been made. (My friend's name was Peter, and I suppose we were on our way to Richard's apartment, a few blocks over.) As I looked in, the owners were in the back trying to figure out how to situate things; there were a number of instruments piled inside by the front door, some in packing boxes and some not, among them a stellar four-pickup Kay guitar, which someone had just left leaning up against the front window, and seeing that no one seemed to be watching, I stepped inside and on an impulse grabbed it and began running with that instrument down the street toward West End Avenue. For the record, I was in my first year as a student at Cardinal Hayes High School up in the Bronx, which required that we wear a tie and jacket. Peter, attending a prep school—both his parents worked for Columbia in some bluecollar jobs but put their son in the best school they could afford—was dressed the same; and so, as we bounded down to the avenue, with that guitar bundled in my arms, it might have seemed, in a world of spoiled kids, which is what that neighborhood was to me, that we were just celebrating a recent purchase, even while the price tag—$187.50, as I remember—dangled, flapping, off its head. The crazy thing is that as we went around the corner, a police car was sitting there, two cops inside having coffee. I told Peter, “Pretend we're rich kids,” and with that, we waved at the cops inside as we passed them by, and they, not even flinching, hardly paid any notice.

Now, I'm sure if I were a swarthy spic, some dark-skinned Latino, those cops would have perked up, and, chances are, I would have ended up at some detention center in the Bronx for the next year. But it didn't happen that way, and on one of the more delicious afternoons of my life, I arrived at Richard's new digs, feeling exhilarated.

I'd also been something of a vagabond performer in Washington Square on the weekends, going down there to Travis-pick on a guitar with a neighborhood friend who played the harmonica, the two of us wailing away for befuddled tourists who didn't always quite know what to make of our “music.” Or I'd go to Central Park, where “be-ins”—impromptu gatherings of music and dance put together by aspiring hippies—took up the lawn of the Sheep Meadow. I'd bring my guitar and sit in with anyone, as long as they would let me. A lot of those kids were middle-class or rich, but playing guitar gave me an entrée, which I wouldn't have had otherwise, into those circles. That's how I met that guitar player Nick Katz, and because he had some good social connections, our little band, whose song lists consisted of covers of famous blues tunes as well as standards by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, got jobs performing at private parties, some in swanky Park Avenue brownstones—where I got a good notion of how people with money live—the best, however, in my opinion, taking place in one of those immense, high-ceilinged apartments in the Dakota apartment house on Seventy-second Street, in whose marijuana-sweetened rooms, with all kinds of well-dressed folks in Nehru jackets and Carnaby Street gear dancing away enthusiastically, I briefly suffered from the delusion that I was someone cool.

I can recall envying the free spirits I saw around me, particularly on campus, those long-haired kids who seemed at the time to be about the future. I went through the same thing down in the Village, but however much I wanted to grow my hair long, my first two years at a Christian Brothers high school, with its strict rules about everything, made that impossible (and at any rate, in the summers when I tried to let my hair grow out, my usually taciturn father would take me over to Broadway to get a trim—“You don't want to look like a
marica
, do you?” I recall him saying).

But I still pined away for that freedom. My idols, if I had any aside from the guys who wrote and drew the comic books I still read, were those icons of the British Invasion, from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, along with some very odd ones thrown in, like the girlish California band the Hullabaloos, whose records I must have listened to a thousand times over, along with those of Manfred Mann, on countless afternoons at Richard's place downtown on West End Avenue, where the experience was heightened by the occasional drink or, if Tommy was around, by the offering of a joint to smoke. (But I had to be very cool whenever I'd come home.) Since I really had so little identity of my own—except as this “son of
cubanos
” who had once been sick and didn't much identify with Latin culture in general, for when I'd hear any Spanish songs, they always sounded passé and locked in some perpetual, unchanging past, and I didn't even consider my Spanish anything I should try to improve upon—I spent those years trying to become anything else but what I should have been, Oscar Hijuelos.

While at Hayes, on those mornings when I'd leave my job without a prayer of making all the connections on time to the Bronx, I was often late coming to classes and spent most afternoons in detention. Altogether, it was the kind of school where the teachers, if they thought you were smirking or expressing a less than reverent attitude in class, made you pay for it. Getting slapped, being rapped in the knuckles with a ruler, or having someone squeezing the back of your neck with all his strength until you would finally say, “Yes, sir”—or worse, teachers who were known to take smart-ass kids into the gym and have it out with them in boxing matches—became a part of the daily experience. A good number of those Christian brothers seemed so certifiably gay and effeminate as to become the brunt of jokes, but most were pretty tough Irish guys who, coming up the hard way but taking the righteous path earlier in their lives, would brook no disrespect. If you as much as missed a homework assignment, you were sent into detention for a week and saddled with even more work than you could have dreamed up. I say this fondly because Hayes was good for someone like me, whose attention easily wandered.

Despite my own slothful—or distracted—tendencies, I somehow became a good student, good enough that I seemed to have been viewed by some of the teachers as a special case, someone to be pushed along, no dummy, a kid with problems perhaps but with promise. Half-bludgeoned to do the work, I did pretty well on all the exams and in classes—but in the end, after two years in that school and longing for something different, once their tuition went up to a lordly fifteen dollars a month, I ended up leaving.

That increase in tuition was the excuse I came up with, at any rate. My father, having his pride, insisted on paying for it, but when that new invoice came along, and I saw his face screwing up a bit, I decided that leaving was the most decent thing I could do. Deep down, however, I simply wanted to attend a school without so many strict rules; and for another thing, always feeling lonely, I liked the notion of attending a school with girls. (Hayes had only male students—and the mix, while including blacks, Italians, and Latinos, my neighborhood friends Louie Cintron and Victor Cruz among them, was predominantly Irish.) My parents, by the way, weren't too happy with my choice—my mother seemed puzzled—but I think that while they looked out for me, what with their own problems, they more or less accepted it. Altogether, I don't recall my father having any opinion, one way or the other, about what would turn out to be a stupendous blunder on my part.

To put it succinctly, the educational institution I started attending instead, the Louis D. Brandeis High School, on West Eighty-fourth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, with its state prison façade, had its problems. Its students were mostly black and Latino and, for the most part, not too inclined to accept the notion of authority. Transferring from Hayes, where respect toward the teacher was the number one thing, to a school in which students spit at and sometimes assaulted their teachers, in which most classrooms were overcrowded, and where just getting the kids to stop fucking around before every session was a daily challenge to its teachers, threw me for a loop. Some of the teachers were kind to me, as I must have seemed lost half the time, and while I did my best to seem interested in being there, not a day went by when I didn't feel as if I had messed up. Without dwelling too much on how many drug users there were at Brandeis (some 80 percent, I later read) or how many of its students belonged to gangs or had juvenile records, or what it was like in the middle of the day to walk into a bathroom dense with pot and cigarette smoke, with guys shooting up in the stalls, or how one might occasionally encounter a used syringe in a stairwell, or hear about a rape, I will say this: While getting knocked around in those hallways on my way to class—as in some tough pissed-off black dude abruptly slamming his shoulder against mine to start something—I often wondered what I had gotten myself into.

Still, I managed to squeeze by and made my friends, mainly thanks to the hippies there. In that school, those longhairs, mostly white but with some Latinos thrown in, would gather outside after classes and jam. Some sold drugs, a service that was respected (the cops did not seem to notice), but mainly those kids—what were they but sixteen and seventeen years old?—held impromptu music sessions, in the spirit of the day, with flutes, bongos, and guitar. Bringing my guitar, an acoustic, I eventually joined in. For the record, my best friend from Brandeis was a kid of half-Argentine, half-American extraction, who would later play drums in a band with me, and in the aftermath of such sessions, on many of those afternoons, we'd drift off to someone's apartment to play even more music and, often enough, to get high.

I was never good at getting high, by the way. I had such a self-consciousness about my body, and the
microbios
within, that the uplifting removals from one's being that came along with smoking hashish or marijuana eluded me. (I was too uptight and felt more inwardly drawn than I liked; the only thing that worked for me would come with the introduction of a mild beverage like some sweet Gypsy Rose Wine.) In general, however, those were halcyon afternoons: I loved playing the electric guitar, if somebody had one, and while I had to put up with a lot of lead-guitar-playing egomaniacs who weren't too inclined to listen to what other people were putting forth, I slowly began making up my own tunes and, in my way, became something of a songwriter.

Speaking of getting high: My friend Bobby, on 122nd Street, had a down-the-hall neighbor, an Irish kid named Jimmy, a completely slovenly lost soul of a fellow, a mess without a center who, however, taking some LSD in those years, underwent a miraculous transformation of personality. Suddenly suave and self-asserting, he became a drug dealer, of heroin, pot, and LSD. (Among his rumored clients, one of the Rolling Stones when they were in town.) How those business arrangements flourished, I can't say, but despite that change, he continued to live in the same apartment with his mother. In any event, I had been asked by someone in the neighborhood if I knew of anyone who dealt LSD, and thinking about Jimmy, I arranged through my friend Bobby for him to bring me six doses—which cost about twenty dollars, as I recall. What happened amazed me: Bobby met me on a street corner, where we made the exchange, and while I soon passed it on to that someone from my neighborhood and went home afterward, Bobby, heading off on a date on 106th Street with his girlfriend, happened to drop several tabs of that drug and, that night as a good Catholic boy going crazy, swore that he had been possessed by the devil, and, in effect, he, once so docile, tried to take physical advantage of her.