Thoughts Without Cigarettes (35 page)

I am not quite sure how I made the transition from the kind of super naturalistic (but stiffly guarded) scenes I had put on paper into actually trying to write fiction, but I do recall that it was the writing department's chairman, an affable and dapper fellow by the name of Frederic Tuten (a future teacher and a friend of mine to this day), who suggested that I submit a piece to one of the several fiction writers then teaching under the humble auspices of the City College banner, a list that, in those days, was rather stellar (and serious) in a New York City way. Anxiously enough, and naïve about the difficulties of writing good prose, I spent several nights furiously typing up what I seemed to think might have qualified as a short story, of some twenty-five pages in often misspelled, nongrammatical sentences—a tale about a pretty blind girl, Celeste (a name I took from one of the lovely Parks sisters across the street from where I grew up), trapped in a miserable marriage, who, while having an affair with someone across town, takes the subway and, getting on the wrong train, ends up in a really bad neighborhood where she is jumped and taken sexual advantage of. (Not an iota of my Cuban roots could be found anywhere in it—think I made her cruel husband a Greek or an Italian, and as far as Celeste herself went, I never bothered to identify her origins, though I did have her feeling instinctually frightened by the strangeness of a South Bronx Latino neighborhood, her mugging taking place in an abandoned lot such as those I remembered seeing and playing in during my childhood.)

As for the actual quality of the writing in that piece, it was, I think, rather dense and, in its way, colorful. (I always loved details, though; with the way I thought and still think, order was never one of my fortes.) Joseph Heller, the author of
Catch-22
, taught at City at the time, and I had originally intended to submit my piece for his class—going so far as to scribble in pen
For Professor Heller
across the top of its first page—but it so happened that Donald Barthelme was also teaching there and while I had never read anything by him, my actress girlfriend, Carol, a longtime reader of
The New Yorker
, thought him quite funny and cutting-edge, and planted in my mind the notion I would do quite well with him if I were fortunate enough to be accepted into his class. (Thank you, Carol.)

So one afternoon, I went prowling around the halls of the writing department, which was housed in a long Quonset hut on the south campus, with my short story in hand, in search of Donald Barthelme. Inside the first office, whose doors were not always marked, I saw Joseph Heller, whose face I knew from his book jackets, white haired, regal, quite handsome, in a checkered shirt and blue jeans, sitting by his desk, eating what I think was a pastrami on rye with mustard sandwich (he looked up, asking, “Can I help you?”), and then moving on, I peered into another office, where sat the ethereally beautiful Francine du Plessix Gray in an elegant French-style dress, discussing some technicality intensely with some lucky student, and just beyond, I came to another doorway and saw someone who might have been Donald Barthelme: Behind a desk and typewriter sat a gray-haired man of late middle age, in a tie and rumpled jacket, with remarkably warm blue eyes and an incredibly florid complexion, who smiled at me gently as soon as he saw me.

“Excuse me, but are you Donald Barthelme?” I asked, to which he replied, “No, my name is William Burroughs.”

Of course, I'd heard of him—didn't he write something crazy about drugs? Oh, yeah, that
Naked Lunch
, which Tommy Muller-Thym liked? I recall thinking—and though I didn't have any business to take up with him, he was so friendly that when Mr. Burroughs, perhaps bored or feeling lonely at that moment, asked me if I wanted to sit and chat with him for a few minutes, I did. What we talked about were my doubts and hopes regarding what I had started to guardedly think of as a potential second vocation behind that of either becoming a musician (doubtful) or a high school teacher (far more probable). He was teaching at City as a special visitor, as was another Bohemian sort, Peter Orlovsky, also somewhere down the hall; of a congenial bent of mind, he listened to my plaintive musings patiently, saying things like “Oh, I'm sure you'll succeed at whatever you try, young man.” Later, after I'd snooped around about his past, I was surprised to learn that he had built a youthful reputation as a drug-crazed sexual deviant who had once shot his wife, a supposed wreck of a human being. But for those ten or so minutes that I passed with him, he seemed as genteel and kindly as any writer I'd ever meet, not a single bit of self-centeredness or meanness in his being—which is to say, he was an anomaly, though I did not know that at the time. (I didn't even know if he was gay—at least he did not check me over the way some men downtown in the Village did during my occasional excursions to see a show or check out music. Instead he seemed like he would have been perfectly at home in some midwestern high school counselor's office.)

Looking over the first page of my short story, he nodded with appreciation: “Very nice,” he said, rubbing his chin—what else could he say? Whether he meant it or not didn't really matter to me—not then, not now. Above all, his kindness was obviously something I would never forget.

Barthelme, it turned out, occupied a small and windowless office at the far end of the Quonset hut hall: I found him, with Burroughs pointing from his doorway and saying, “Just follow the smoke,” for, indeed, as I got down to that end, a few dense plains of filterless Pall Mall fumes, hanging magically in the air, seemed to lead inside: There I saw Donald Barthelme for the first time. He was wearing a blue denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and reading a
New York Post
with a pencil in hand (was he editing their prose?). He looked, with a longish beard and oval face, like a Dutch sea captain, or a little like a milder, less severe version of Solzhenitsyn. With sandy hair just dropping over his ears and broad shoulders, he seemed a sturdy man in his mid-forties, if that. Surely a writer, if only for his wire-rimmed glasses and nicotine-stained fingers (right hand). He barely looked up when I finally walked in and asked, “Professor Barthelme?” after which, hearing why I was there, he told me to sit down and offered me a smoke. (I happily accepted, puffing away anxiously.) Within a few minutes, however, he had read enough of my piece—which he'd already started marking up with a pencil, mainly correcting punctuation, but laughing a few times, over what I did not know—and without much deliberation gave me permission, by way of a signed note, to enroll in a class he was teaching for beginner's fiction.

I'd take two workshops with him as an undergraduate, and another while (somehow) advancing, on fellowship, into the MFA program at City. All his workshops were wonderfully intimate and easygoing, but, for the sake of brevity, I'll just summarize here my experiences. In my initial class with him, he had us work mainly on notions of form and voice. His first assignment required that we go out and interview someone, and transcribe it in a narrative way. My subject, whom I found along 125th Street, was a young black kid whose life story, already at the age of twelve, would have made many a Fieldston and Horace Mann student faint: addict mother, dead father, brothers in jail. I felt bad afterward—I had asked him too much, in effect hitting the poor kid over the head with the shittiness of his life. Another assignment involved writing a sestina, then a sonnet, after Shakespeare. At the same time, he had us reading crazy books like
Alphabetical Africa
by Walter Abish,
The Blood Oranges
by John Hawkes, and, among others,
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon, all of which, I have to confess, despite their sophistication, left me, cut from a primitive, emotionally blunt cloth, a little cold.

But I eagerly responded to the written assignments. No amount of work bothered me, as I seemed to have all the time and energy in the world, no matter how cluttered my schedule. For about fifteen hours a week, I helped recently arrived students, mainly from Eastern Europe, with their writing assignments as part of my SEEK work-study program duties—my guess is that my formal English grammar was far better than it is now—and working at that Columbia library, as well as showing up for band rehearsals on the weekends. I still had so much energy left over that at the end of the day, it was nothing for me to spend half the night up by a desk, smoking up a storm while delving into whatever tasks lay before me. (At that age, the early twenties, you can eat, romp with your girlfriend, run around Central Park, romp some more, watch TV for an hour, bullshit on the telephone with whomever for a half an hour, read a chapter out of a textbook, romp yet again, and still have enough juice left over to swim across the East River if you want to.)

Once we finally got around to our first attempts at fiction—though the use of that word
fiction
sounds overly lofty in connection with what I was doing in those days—we settled into a routine fairly common to writing workshops everywhere. Sitting at the head of a conference table (or classroom), Mr. Barthelme listened as his students, having passed out Xeroxed or mimeographed copies of their pieces (both kinds of now-archaic machines were in use in that always budget-challenged school), read from them aloud, while the others prepared themselves to make hopefully constructive comments, Barthelme presiding as if over a committee. (He must have done the same elsewhere, for he also taught occasionally at the much vaunted Valhalla of writing, Iowa, where the true and glorious future of American letters awaited the world.) I won't go into that process any further, except to say that Barthelme did the brunt of his more insightful work, mainly as an editor, during his office hours—though if a word or phrase caught his ear in class, he might say something complimentary or funny about it. And while he left most of everything else to his students, I will say that, as far as I could tell, he seemed to genuinely enjoy his role as a teacher.

My first pieces for him, incidentally, were either earthbound, leaden, and, given the influence of Hemingway, whose work I was then studying in another class, overly formal, or absolutely mad in the spirit of experimentation. Never writing about anything of importance to me, I seemed at my best inventing names—Charlie Lopso was one of them, and Opanio Santinio another, the latter being a stand-in for me. At the same time, I seemed to have somehow become, while reading ancient Egyptian history for yet another class, intent upon writing a humorous narrative about a scribe named Exetus lurking along the fringes of the pharaoh's court during the building of the Great Pyramid—later I became fixated on a bread maker in ancient Rome (which I've always warmed to—the baker reminding me of my father, though I wasn't aware of it at the time—and that setting, in ancient times, wonderful simply because it reminded me of how those New Testament texts always made me feel: hopeful, without really knowing just why). In other words, I drifted around like crazy, without much focus or serious intent. Nevertheless, Barthelme seemed most interested in improving whatever fledgling skills I had, which were not many, and though I finished that course feeling I had learned something about writing—perhaps that it really wasn't for me—I had liked the social aspect of it enough (where else did one commune with other students in so direct a fashion?) that I decided to continue on along those creative lines for the hell of it.

I have to say this about City: It was, and still is, about the most ethnically mixed university in the country, a true honeycomb of nationalities and cultural cliques. You couldn't walk down a hallway without hearing three or four languages being spoken—from Russian to Chinese to Urdu. In one of my classes, during the onset of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, as soon as news of it broke, several of my fellow students, Israelis, got up from their seats and, leaving the classroom immediately, disappeared for the next three weeks. There were Chinese social clubs and gangs around campus, more or less secretive societies whose members seemed to keep themselves out of sight. For the most part unobtrusive, they did have some friction with the black gangs. One afternoon, while walking back from class in one of the main buildings, Shepherd Hall, I came upon a scuffle in which some black guys were doing their best to put a beating on a scrawny Chinese fellow. All I did was to go forward—knowing one of them from a class; he was ex–Special Forces, of recent Vietnam vintage, but a very nice fellow in general, though scary-looking with his Mohawk Afro—asking what was going on, and that was enough, it seemed, to break up the attack, though not without getting my share of dirty looks from my black brethren. In any event, I helped the Chinese guy up, and it turned out that this scrawny fellow, who really wasn't worse for wear, happened to be the head of one of those gangs. Before running off to get his boys, I suppose for retribution, he told me: “Anyone messes with you, let me know.”