Thoughts Without Cigarettes (30 page)

Thanks to its often criticized open admissions policy, I was accepted in my senior year at Brandeis into Bronx Community College, on 184th Street and Creston Avenue, near Jerome. That would be the beginning of my sojourns through the city system, for in the next six years, I'd also attend other subway schools: Manhattan Community College, Lehman College in the Bronx at night, and, eventually, the mecca of CUNY, City College, up on 137th Street.

I had, by that point, become quite careless with myself, as if, in some ways, I simply didn't care about anything at all. A story: I sometimes did favors for friends—particularly my friend Richard's older brother, Tommy. I'd cop five-dollar bags of marijuana for him when he happened to be in a pinch. Okay, it was not the smartest or most noble thing to do, but after I'd make my purchase in a hallway at the far end of those stone pathways leading into one or the other of those Grant Houses projects along 123rd Street and Amsterdam, I'd usually head back up the hill, safely enough, and catch a downtown train at 116th Street. One night, however, I'd gotten out late (because my mother, still as a statue, had refused to move from a chair in the kitchen for an hour or so, until I had finally kissed her cheek, at which point she magically awakened) and, copping the stuff, had left the housing projects on Amsterdam, and feeling lazy or out of plain stupidity, I crossed the street and took a shortcut through the housing projects playground on the other side of Amsterdam toward Broadway, where in the darkness, not even midway, a pack of black kids, about twenty or so, as I can remember, came swooping down upon me from behind their hiding places, the bushes ringing the lot, and, surrounding my sorry ass, proceeded to put a beating on me, all the while going through my pockets, tearing off the peace symbol amulet I wore around my neck, and, having taken my nickel bag and a pack of cigarettes, a few did their best to concuss my brain, kicking away at my temples with the full force of their Converse sneakers. It was as if they gleefully wanted to kill me and they might have were it not for one of them—I suppose you might say he was my counterpart in that crowd, the sensitive “nice” one, a somewhat stocky fellow with rolled-up cuffs on his jeans, which were too big for him—who urged his brothers to be cool and leave me alone (“Hey, we got what we need”), and just like that, as quickly as they appeared, they vanished off into what I conceived in my head as some urban Zululand deep within the winding hallways and basements of that maze of project buildings.

Somehow, I dragged myself up from the asphalt and, I think, somewhat in a daze, walked all the way downtown to Richard's place on West End Avenue, where I found Tommy hanging out with some of his pals in a room down the hall from his brother. Rich had by then gone into the army, having been drafted by lottery. (He was probably the most brilliant soldier in Vietnam and probably the least recognized for his abilities—he should have been snapped up for an army intelligence unit but wound up instead tramping about the jungles there, as a foot soldier grunt in the First Cavalry, his memories of those firefights and other inequities to haunt him for the rest of his life.) The kicker: When I walked in, the room was thick with pot fumes, one of his pals having already brought some around. Aside from the fact that I felt as if I had gotten my brains beaten in for nothing, I discovered that I suddenly found the aroma of that burning hemp nauseating—in fact, I wanted to throw up, but as it happened, despite my messed-up state, Tommy and his friends were getting around to their usual nightly business, for after priming themselves on beer and pot, it was not at all unusual for some of the fellows to skin-pop, and later mainline, heroin, an act (finding and hitting the right veins) at which they were quite adept. Though I myself never indulged, I had assisted in the act dozens of times: I'd wrap a piece of black rubber tubing around the user's arm until the vein bulged big, and then, once the eye of blood had seeped into the syringe, unwrap the tightened band. Eyes rolling up in his head, ecstasy following, “What a snap,” the user would say, “like coming all over.”

It's so tawdry that I would rather not go further into the details except to say that Tommy, a sometime heroin user from about the age of sixteen, would, like many other of the guys in the neighborhood, continue to celebrate its virtues well into his thirties, when all kinds of things would catch up with him.

Though I developed a radar for takeoff artists, there was sometimes little that one could do, as on yet another evening when I got jumped, these three guys materializing behind me right across the street from where I lived, my cheekbone broken and my jaw aching for weeks from getting kicked in the face over and over again. I should have gone to the hospital, but when the cops arrived—someone from across the way had seen them ganging up on me—and asked if I wanted to go to the emergency room, I, detesting hospitals and the very smell of medicine, turned them down; and so they took me up to the precinct house on 126th Street (behind the meatpacking houses that used to be there and a few blocks from the nastiest cop bar in Manhattan, the 7-12), where they had rounded up three suspects—young black men, burly and tough—who sat waiting in a pen. The cops prompted me to identify them and although those young men were smirking and indignant, for the life of me, at that late hour—it was two in the morning—I honestly could not identify them as my attackers with any certainty, or I refused to, even when one of the officers took me aside and urged me to reconsider—“They're
cocksuckahs
after all.”

But I didn't give in, even though, having been picked up while running along Morningside Drive, they were probably the guys who'd jumped me, and as they were released, they could not have been more smug—they certainly acted like they deserved to be in jail. The cops themselves were none too happy with me. As I sort of looked more a hippie than a good working-class smart-aleck, they treated me rather disrespectfully, letting me out through a station house side door into the darkness, one of them, however, pissily advising me as follows: “Good luck, Einstein; next time you'll end up in the morgue.”

And on one of my more careless nights, when I'd somehow hooked up with a Columbia student who was into some awfully strong psychotropic drugs, I ended up at his place on 116th off Amsterdam, not far from where my mother used to clean the nursery school, stupidly dragging too deeply on a white cheroot that contained pot, tobacco, and a massive dose of angel dust. He was a kind of mad-hatter sort and, as a decent musician, seemed friendly enough, but I soon regretted going there. That angel dust distorts things: turns a twenty-foot hallway into the Khyber Pass, raises the walls into canyons, turns your limbs into rubber, your muscles into liquid, and scrambles the brain in such a way that it is hard to know what is going on. At one point, while I was sitting across from this fellow, whose long red hair spilling from his top hat fell upon his shoulders, he took out a brown paper bag and, asking me, “Guess what's inside?” pulled from it a .38 revolver whose muzzle he put against my head. Then, twirling its cylinders, and with a smile, he cocked its hammer before pressing the trigger. It clicked, no bullet exploded, and he fell back laughing, while I, struggling with that Martian atmosphere, got the hell out of there, leaving the bleakness of the apartment for the even greater bleakness of the street—dark, lifeless, foreboding, autumnal.

Occasionally, my mother and I went downtown to Centre Street to apply for food stamps, for which we, on a limited income, were eligible. I hated going, for we'd have to wait hours the way we used to at public clinics, and for the most part, the clerks handling the cases were late-middle-aged women who'd been forced into taking those positions in lieu of being on welfare. From the start, they gave my mother a hard time, especially when it came to documentation—she had to bring a Social Security card, a birth certificate, a death certificate for Pascual, and, as well, proof that we were “needy,” by way of a recent 1040 form (she had none) or a bank book—she had, as I recall, all of two hundred and forty-seven dollars in her “life savings.” It would have actually helped if we'd been on welfare, but my mother, despite her grief and shock, remained snooty enough as to swear that, no matter how bad things might turn out, she'd never sink so low as to go on “relief.” Those employees who were on welfare, however, sniffing out her haughtiness, gave her a hard time for it: They picked on her Spanish, sent us back to our seats for hours at a time while they looked for some hopelessly “lost” document relating to our case, and only finally came through when my mother or I, eating humble pie, approached them at their desk, politely asking if they might yet approve a new round of thirty forty-dollar-a-month books of food stamps.

Much as I disliked that whole business, I had to go with her as an intermediary—my mother always feeling intimidated by any official documentation in English, as if asking even for food stamps in the wrong manner might get her in trouble. We went, I should add, about once every three months or so, as new rules and glitches were always around the corner, my mother and me riding downtown on the subway together, as she'd go on endlessly about the indignities of having to deal with colored women just to save a few dollars, while I, looking at the subway columns flashing by through the windows, daydreamed, wondering if my father, on his way home from work when he was alive, had done the same.

We also became recipients of government-issue surplus food, like peanut butter, jelly, tuna fish, chipped beef, and condensed milk, which I'd pick up at a distribution center on 125th Street. Packed into large white cans the size of paint gallons, the words NOT FOR SALE in giant letters written on their labels, and boasting of outlandish expiration dates: GOOD UNTIL APRIL 1992, it seemed the kind of stuff one imagined would be found in the storage closets of nuclear bomb shelters. Hardest was finding out just which stores accepted the food stamps: We had no problems at the local A&P and bodega, where they knew my mother, but once you walked into a shop in a different neighborhood, say, some place near Alexander's near 149th Street and Third Avenue, where there sometimes might be incredible deals—like “5 lbs. of pig's feet for a dollar! ”—she'd have to present her food stamp user ID, which somehow always offended her, especially if she'd marched up to the counter, having put on one of her superior airs.

Though she almost became accepting of her terrible loss, my mother seemed anxious in new ways. Still in her mid-fifties, she looked at least a decade and a half younger, men eyeing her on the street—perhaps it was her air of haughtiness or a kind of fleshly indifference that did them in—but in any case, like her sister Cheo, she had turned out to be the kind of Catholic to never remarry, preferring to be reunited with her husband in the afterlife. She never got lonely in that way, though at night, overhearing her speaking aloud and sighing, I'd wish to God that someone else would come along to take care of her.

In the meantime, my mother, without any real marketable skills and still struggling with her English, began to
so
worry about how we'd manage to survive that she ended up taking classes in typewriting in some kind of downtown agency. (We had gotten hold of an ancient Smith Corona that someone had left behind under a stairwell, and she'd practice on this, for hours at a time, her click-clacking, tentative and never quickening, sounding through the house: I actually found her attempts at mastering a new skill at her age—she'd always seemed old to me, more like an
abuela
than a mother—rather touching, but though she came home with a “typing certificate” from the agency, her attempts to find a job as a secretary or typist were doomed, I believe, from the start. She just didn't have it in her, and after a few months of desperate searching, with a few tryouts in outlying offices in the Bronx and Queens, she simply gave up.

To save money, she became as frugal as possible. For several years, she hardly ever bought any cuts of meat that were not in fact mostly gristle and bones: frozen turkey legs at a dollar for two, as well as threepound bags of chicken entrails—livers and gizzards and necks—with which she made her own tamped-down versions of
arroz con pollo,
became our staples.

One of the college students I used to jam with on the steps of Low Library, Steve, a saxophone player who also happened to be a premed student at Columbia, came home with me one evening. After we'd finished playing, driving our patient neighbors crazy, my mother, in a good mood that night, invited him to stay for dinner. However, once he had taken his place at the table, in the seat where my pop had passed evenings (and where, I swear, his ghost still did), and my mother set down before him a plate of yellow rice nicely cooked with tomatoes and peppers, carrots and onions and some garlic, with those chicken necks and gizzards stirred in, he, picking at them as if they were worms, could not bring himself to take a single bite. It was then it first really hit me that, with the absence of my father, no matter what else he might have meant to us, our lives, at least when it came to food, had certainly taken a turn for the worse.

If I'd sometimes felt vaguely curious about the way I'd look in the reflection of a car window or a store mirror—always washed out, nearly unreadable—in the months/years after my pop's death, I couldn't bear to look at myself, even passingly. I remember feeling that the world seemed grotesque to me, and that, as I'd go through my days, my knees were weak and my shoulders tight, as if bearing too great a weight on them. Needless to say, when I actually sat down to study at home, during one of those rare moments when my mother wasn't going on and on about something in another room, I only seemed vaguely aware of what I happened to be reading—I'd stash that information away somewhere—but for the most part I felt like a stupidly wounded animal barely attached to the world and rather benumbed to life. There is something else: I couldn't help myself from looking back over my shoulder, as if I would turn around and see my pop standing on some street corner smoking a cigarette.