Thoughts Without Cigarettes (29 page)

A few days before, he had been working in the kitchen of Butler Hall's rooftop restaurant as usual, but it seemed to everyone around him that he'd not been feeling well that evening. He had been sweating, his face was flushed, and he had trouble breathing. One of his fellow cooks in that place, a black man who by coincidence was also named Joe—my father sometimes went by that American shorthand—had even urged him to go home, and one of the waitresses there, a lady named Sally, would remember thinking to herself that my father had seemed rather exhausted and slow-moving, but when she'd asked him if everything was all right, he, in his quiet and self-effacing manner, perhaps worrying about holding on to the few extra dollars he'd make that night, just shrugged good-naturedly and told her that nothing was wrong. Perhaps getting a bit of air might help, he must have thought, and so, stepping out onto the terrace, which had a nice view over Morningside Park eastward to Harlem, he had pulled from his shirt pocket a package of Kent cigarettes in the soft wrapping and, lighting one, had taken a few drags, when, so Sally later reported, he had looked around in confusion, his right arm shaking, and the cigarette dropped from his lips, as he himself, his eyes turned to the sky, collapsed onto the roof tarpaulin.

This happened at nine thirty on July twenty-sixth, about a week after the first moon landing and some twenty-seven years since he'd first arrived in the United States from Cuba. He was fifty-five, and the outpourings of grief at his passing, from his fellow hotel workers and friends from around the city, seemed unending.

It's hard to explain the supernatural things that happened after he was gone. It was hard to forget him, to put from one's mind that not so long ago, he had, in fact, been sitting by that same table: I couldn't go into the kitchen without thinking about him, and even when I managed to put him from my mind, some remembrance would hit me, just like that. Holed up in my room with the same pack of cigarettes he'd been smoking that final evening, for his belongings were delivered in a plastic bag, I'd leave them overnight in a drawer, then find them next morning sitting on the radiator or under my bed. I doubt that I sleepwalked and can't explain how they got there any more than I can find a reason for the way pictures, of my folks in Cuba mainly, fell off the walls at night, or find an explanation for why the front door would abruptly open at around three thirty or four in the afternoon, when he used to come home, even after we'd taken care to shut the lock.

The apartment, in any case, breathed his memories: In the early mornings, at about five thirty, when he used to get up and head to the hotel, I'd awake swearing that I'd heard his quiet shuffle in the hallway, his keys fiddling with the lock. And sometimes, cigarette smoke, though no one smoked inside the apartment—I never did in front of my mother—seemed to linger particularly in the kitchen. (And it wasn't just I who noticed: My godmother, Carmen, coming downstairs to check in on my mother, would sometimes shiver, shaking her head, saying: “He's still here.”) It so spooked me that I almost found it impossible to fall asleep without keeping a light on: I'd lose myself in a few comic books or some science fiction novel, or
Mad
magazines, though hardly an hour went by on those fitful nights when I wouldn't think about what had happened. At the same time, if I heard anything, even something as mundane as water humming through the pipes or the rumbling of the boiler beneath, I'd imagine him roaming through the basement, with its twisting passageways, on his way out to visit us. I always expected that, any moment, he'd push open the door to my room, and if I'd happened to finally doze, I would soon enough shoot up in fright. I got to the point that I could not turn off the lamp, nor make my way through the night without listening to a transistor radio: I always dialed past the Latin music stations, preferring the talk shows of Barry Farber, a conservative broadcaster, and Jean Shepherd, whose comical stories, along with Farber's antihippie harangues, simply kept me company.

But the persistence of memory killed me: images of him, drifting in from the permanence of the past, much like the smoke one has blown from a cigarette, going off to the heavens.

The situation wasn't helped by my mother's state of mind. She hadn't been so bad during the weeks that her sister Cheo, coming in from New Jersey, slept by her side, but once my aunt went back home and Borja, another angel, returned to Miami, she really started losing her grip. She went off the deep end—perhaps some old buttons regarding the loss of her father, from a stroke too, when she was a girl, had been pushed—and doubling over with grief, she wandered back and forth in the hallway muttering, despite all the shit they'd put each other through, “
Ay pero, mi Pascual.”
That was one thing, but at night, resting in bed, at first sighing, then tossing and turning, she tended toward talking to herself and, as it were, hosting both sides of a conversation with my father.

“What's wrong with you?”

“Nothing, woman.”

“Then why are you looking at me that way?”

“Because you are so pretty.”

“Ah, hah, and that's why you abandoned me!”

Then she would call the spirits and witches of her childhood into the apartment, praying to Santa Misericordia and, on her knees in the hallway in a cracking voice, offer her spirit up to God so that she might follow him to wherever he had gone.

I tended to find any excuse to stay out of the apartment, even if I'd just sit out on the stoop at night, where my pop used to, staring out at the lifeless street, where Columbia had put up its new institutional buildings, or I'd go upstairs and knock on Marcial's door—he might show me a few new things on the guitar, and I'd sit watching his fingers work the fret board, all the while sipping a glass or two of dark Spanish wine. In general, folks were really kind to me, even the neighborhood pricks—at least for a while—but I'd have to come home sooner or later and then my mother, seeing my father in me, would start up with all kinds of crazy shit; she couldn't resist letting me know that I was just like him—maybe nice in some ways, but only on the surface, and that deep down she knew I was up to no good and that I was a spoiled prince who'd treated her like a slave going back to the times of my illness, though occasionally she'd mess up and address me as Pascual, and what business did I have thinking that life might be easy, when we all should know that for some folks it will always be a hell. She'd go on as well about how I couldn't have possibly really cared for him and that he knew it—why, I didn't even let him embrace me on that day when I went to Miami and saw him for the last time; she saw that from the window. And for that matter, since when did I care for anybody else, particularly my own mother, who gave her life up for me, I was so obviously wrapped up in myself. Her tone was always indignant, often hysterical, and sometimes she'd yell out Pascual's name in the middle of the night, doubtlessly waking everyone in the building up, but without a single neighbor saying a peep (I'd just hear some windows shutting), and while I couldn't blame her—what a horrid grief she must have experienced—it seemed to me that we had, as a family, so little to hang on to that I resolved to bring us together, as those phone-in radio shows might put it.

But whenever I approached my mother tenderly and did my best to reach out, even speaking my half-assed Spanish and with my heart pricked by thorns; I'd say something sweet: “
Pero, mamá, no sabes que yo te quiero
”—“But, Mamá, don't you know that I love you,” or I'd say, as she'd go into a trance, “
Por favor, cálmate!
”—“Please, calm yourself!” She'd not only come back to reality but take the occasion to dismiss my efforts. “What are you saying? Why, you can't even speak Spanish! That's how little you care.” And she would start in on me, the way she used to with my father, and that would be enough to drive me back out onto the street, where I'd smoke a few cigarettes, sometimes one of those stale things from the pack left on his dresser, and nursing each one, all the while thinking of him, my little way after all of communing with my pop, who, as it turned out, I would never really get to know.

M
y pop's union had contributed a thousand dollars for his funeral expenses, his wake having been held over three long days at the Ecchevaría & Bros. funeral home on West Seventy-second and his farewell service at the church of Corpus Christi. I'll tell you that it was a delight, my brother and myself flanking his open coffin from ten in the morning until eight at night, with the occasional break for lunch, as if anyone could eat, or, as with me, slipping outside to smoke a cigarette. I remember having to buy a new pair of shoes for the occasion, and that my upstairs neighbor Marcial lent me the money for them. I remember that a lot of folks rapped my back in condolence. I shook hands with the mourners as they came by to pay their respects, a few of the fellows pausing to whisper—or sob—a few words into his ear, or someone commenting, “How handsome he looks,” or the occasional fellow, drunk out of his brains, with eyes like cracked glass, breaking down like a child—while I hardly showed very much emotion at all.

Afterward, one of his fellow workers from the hotel would occasionally turn up at our door to offer my mother an envelope filled with a few twenty-dollar bills, or in the mail we'd receive contributions from folks who addressed the envelopes to the family of Caridad or Charity. And neighbors, ringing our bell, came by with pots of cooked food or else left them with a note in front of our door. Sometimes an old friend from the hotel, like Díaz, would come by with a package of T-bone steaks. These we, of course, gratefully accepted. Along the way, one of the priests from church sometimes stopped by with an aluminum-wrapped package of something left over from a parish bingo, but no matter what, things were not the same with us as when my pop was alive and brought home that plentiful bounty from the cornucopia that was the Biltmore pantry.

I made a fairly reliable part-time salary (if to work twenty to thirty hours a week is “part-time”) in and around the neighborhood. I won't bore you with the details, but on and off for about three years, aside from working as a messenger, I spent my weekdays—and the occasional Saturday—working the afternoon–evening shift at a Columbia University library in Uris Hall, where the business school was located. I mainly tended the front desk or passed my time in the zombie tedium of shelving cartloads of books, all for the regal sum of about $1.35 an hour. We had two bosses, a sanguine and somewhat dissipated boozy gent of late middle age who, white haired, thin but possessing a goose's flaccid neck, liked to hire young boys, and below him, a former undergarment industry manager who, changing professions in midlife, became the subject of an article in
The New York Times,
though I mainly remember him for the fact that his daughter dated—later married—the actor Dustin Hoffman, who, in the wake of becoming known, dropped by the library to say hello to her father from time to time.

In those days, I also had hoped to make a few dollars by putting together a bar band, though my pop's death had turned my hands into lead and my knees so earthbound that it was enough, at least in the beginning, for me to muster the energy to get out of bed.

I'm not quite sure what I did with the money I earned. I suppose I gave some to my mother, though I think that stopped when both our Social Security benefits—which came to about four hundred dollars a month—started arriving, with half of that coming to me, until I'd turn twenty-one, as long as I went to college.

Living at the far end of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, my brother sometimes drove up to check in on us and help keep the peace, but he had, in any case, his own ongoing concerns, while I, as a newly graduated public high school student, had only some minimal ambitions about going to school—mainly to acquire the Social Security money, though I sometimes told myself that I was honoring my father's wish for me. (He seems to have once told me, in one of the few direct pieces of advice he ever gave me, “If you don't want to end up an elevator operator, go to college.”) Having barely graduated Brandeis with an academic diploma, I wouldn't have gotten into any college at all if not for the fact that the CUNY system had in those years begun to experiment with an open admissions policy, through which they hoped to draw in and improve the future prospects of even the dregs of the New York City public high school system and, as well, the latest generation of immigrant kids, their grades, at least at that point, not seeming to matter as much as their potential.