Thoughts Without Cigarettes (34 page)

Of my teachers in the City system, there were two whom I would credit the most with kindling my first interests in writing. The first happened to teach a basic literature course at Bronx Community, a certain professor Wertheim, who, receiving an essay I had written about one of Bernard Malamud's stories, “The Magic Barrel,” whose atmosphere of immigrant melancholy sang to me like a siren perching on a rock, pointed out several instances in which I used easy alliteration in my sentences, crude as they were—
frolicking freely.
In the margin he, a wise guy, wrote something along the lines of “
so here Hijuelos bellows.
” When he gave me an A in the course, I felt exhilarated—but aside from doing well, even given my scattered nature, I had really enjoyed the stories, from beginning to end, that were included in the assigned textbook, a Norton anthology of fiction, which I absorbed very much like a sponge, and in that way I first began to fill in the rather huge gaps I had in my knowledge of literature. (Of course, being a sap for emotion, the authors I most cherished, aside from Malamud, included Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence; I still do today.)

Later, at City, a saintly professor, a certain Ernest Boynton, went out of his way to encourage my essay writing—in the afternoons, I'd spend an hour with him in his office as he'd carefully go over my work and explain how I might better develop some of my ideas, a line of other students always waiting outside his door. I grew attached to him; he was young enough, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, to bridge our age gap. All the students loved him, and he, a nerdish recently married black fellow with thick black-framed eyeglasses and dark rippling hair, a high-domed forehead and pinched-in dimpled chin, had been ever so happy to share with anyone who cared to know news about his wife's expecting a child. It was he who first spoke seriously to me about perhaps becoming an English teacher one day, maybe getting a job in a New York City high school, and he was the first adult who really made me feel that I could do something good—just by putting together a few more or less orderly sentences.

But though I never really took his bookish suggestions to heart, I liked to be around the man just the same, feeling attracted, as I guess I inevitably would, to fatherly sorts. He was such a nice fellow that God naturally blessed him, of course, striking him down not five years later with a heart attack—the man dying while all the pricks in the world seem to keep on going strong.

All the while, I had always been one of those pensive fucks who really enjoyed street jive, the selling of “wolf tickets” by way of outlandish storytelling among BS artists hanging out on the sidewalks. Junkies were the best—really funny in fact, when not falling off the edge of the world, during slow nods that sometimes went badly, as in the case of this good-natured black kid named Alvin, whose sunny disposition did not prevent him from becoming an addict, nor from slipping backward off a rooftop ledge in the midst of a dream. One of my favorite folks, strung out sometimes, sometimes not, was Tommy, whom I would see mainly on the weekends while hanging with his younger brother Richard, finally home from Vietnam and, incidentally, also attending City. Tommy and I would find ourselves just walking around the neighborhood scoping out the action: I don't recall how he made money in those days—he was a college dropout and already a seasoned veteran of the Addicts' Rehabilitation Center on 125th Street, where I had visited him on occasion (they'd give you a little room and several doses of methadone a day, which gave you a kind of high). I think he must have earned some money dealing in soft drugs, though he, when not using the heavy stuff, seemed quite content with just enough to buy a little reefer and the endless quantities of beer, drunk from cans out of paper bags, that he cherished. (Theft has also struck me as a possible source of his income, though I can't imagine that he had that in his nature.) For his own amusement, he liked to concoct the most outlandish tales—of seeing, for example, flying saucers in Central Park, or of going to Harlem and encountering a famous movie star in search of drugs, of having sex with two or three women at a time, stories that were, though hard to buy, easy to enjoy.

I am mentioning this because Tommy, it seemed to me, was destined to parlay his folkloric excesses about city life into an eventual livelihood as a writer. It was the one ambition he had ever professed and spoke about it constantly—I think from the time he was a kid. A short story he had written, in fact, about a young addict recovering in a Harlem rehab much like the ARC (if I am remembering it correctly, he tries to clean up but is drawn back into drugs) made a paperback anthology of young black writers that came out sometime in the early 1970s. It was the only publication Tommy managed, that I know of, and the fact that he had been included in a black anthology didn't bother him one bit. Since he spoke and acted, down to his every
Soul Train
dance move, pretty much like a black man, albeit one without much bitterness about anything, his white skin seemed just a technicality. Just where he had come from, an educated and erudite father and family (and with a brilliant younger brother), didn't occur to him, and though he, with his swifter than swift mind, could have easily, in some other comfortably upper-middle-class setting, aspired to any number of other professions, such as a lawyer or a doctor or a college professor, Tommy just wanted to be himself—this down-home Harlem guy. His love of reading, by the way, never faded as long as I knew him and he is the only person I have ever seen who, losing himself in a narrative while in a state of physical ecstasy, could perk up suddenly to say, “You best believe I can write better shit than this”—about the works of someone like C. S. Lewis or Norman Mailer. “And I will one day, you'll see” was the kind of the thing he'd tell me, his biggest admirer and a true believer in that future.

And myself? I liked the florid language of Shakespeare, though watching his plays performed in Central Park often put me half to sleep even when the casts included actors like Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep, among notable others. The blame would go to my short attention span and my own capacity for daydreaming: In the balmy night air, with a few persnickety stars managing to peek down at the world through the harsh New York–down-on-its-luck hazes, I would fantasize not about writing something like Shakespeare but about becoming an actor myself, or at least envying those sorts of folks, in the same way I secretly admired even the most outlandish of rock musicians for having the courage (balls) to get out there in a way that engaged the wider world.

Though there were some prose writers like Hubert Selby Jr. and Pietro di Donato whose work really spoke to me in school—I would see and hear their stories as if I were watching a movie—Tennessee Williams's plays were the first things I'd ever read that made me want to pick up a pen and try writing something myself. (It was that detail of the glowing portrait of the father on the wall in his play
The Glass Menagerie
that absolutely killed me, as if the man were coming back as a spirit from the beyond to revisit—and mutely comment upon—the scenes of a life he had left behind.) But I also loved Mr. Williams's lyric writing style, that tenderness that seemed to permeate all his scenes; and I liked him personally, brief as my meeting him had been. At an antiwar rally held in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he had come down from the pulpit after giving a short speech, and as a part of the crowd, I, having cojones and a half, had walked up to Mr. Williams and introduced myself: I'm sure that my being so young helped my cause, but he looked at me and smiled, and we spoke for a few moments. I can remember thinking that there was nothing sleazy about the man, just that his famous eyes, light blue, as I recall, and delicate in their shimmer, seemed lonely as hell.

So, having a few electives to fool around with, and wanting, based on my admiration for
The Glass Menagerie
, to eventually take up playwriting myself—if only as a lark—I ended up enrolling in a drama course. At the time, my teacher, Murray Schisgal, a warm, proletarian sort, was at work on a play,
An American Millionaire
, at the Circle in the Square, and it amazes me now that he was so generous to his students, bringing us down to the rehearsals. There I had the incredible luck of becoming, along with several others, a fly on the wall while the actors—Paul Sorvino, Bob Dishy, and Austin Pendleton—figured out their bits, and Schisgal tried to hammer the play's somewhat amorphous scenes into shape (the show, unfortunately, would end up a flop). He had us write three- and four-page scenes for the acting school students there, which was the first time I ever heard anything I had written read aloud by someone else. (If you are wondering what I wrote about, it was this, as I recall: A man and a woman are in a kitchen. The man is a little drunk, the woman complaining, they have an argument; I can't imagine where that came from.) But, in the end, at least in terms of writing dramatic scenes, I couldn't begin to put down on paper what I had in my head—of course this went back to the way I had grown up. I just circled around the dramatic possibilities, as if I would be disturbing the dead by writing about certain things, and at the same time, it seems that I couldn't quite own up to the fact that I was the son of Cubans, as if it were something I wanted to hide.

“You have some good stuff going on here,” Schisgal once told me in his kindly manner as he was reading something I had written. “But how come I'm not hearing any ethnic stuff in this? It's your family you're writing about, aren't you?”

“I guess I am,” I'd say.

“Then why don't you run with it?”

“I don't know.”

Whatever notions I might have entertained, however, it was Schisgal, puffing away on a cheery wood pipe, who, noticing how I would write inordinately long stage directions but with some panache and verbal intensity, suggested that I might better find my voice by trying another form altogether: “Ever try writing prose, kid?” he asked me that day. “If you haven't, it's something you should consider.”

I hadn't, but it was something that was to linger in the back of my head for a long time.