Thoughts Without Cigarettes (39 page)

In any event, I remained far behind the pack: By comparison, one of my fellow students, Ted Mooney, had already published a rather remarkable and much-lauded story, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in the quite prestigious
North American Review
, while another of our first-rate talents, Philip Graham, had come out with a book of his own finely hewn experimental short stories. (Since I'm going there, some of the other students who were writing and publishing wonderful work were Wesley Brown, Linsey Abrams, and Myra Goldberg, among those I remember.) At the same time, I could not pick up a literary journal without seeing something by the Barthelme-esque T. Coraghessan Boyle, or Jayne Anne Phillips, author of the mysterious and fluid
Black Tickets
, or by the most radiantly successful Ann Beattie, another emerging star whose first novel,
Chilly Scenes of Winter
, came out shortly after I had left City, in 1976. That list of emerging talents could go on, but no matter where one looked in those days, I can't keep from adding, it was a very rare thing to see published work by any members of that primitive tribe from our urban jungles known as
los Latinos
.

And while I seemed to have acquired, through my own novice writings, a growing appreciation (or love/hate relationship) for my roots and their Cuban-ness, however skewered by the events that had formed me, I thought it would be years before I could write anything worthwhile. Even then, who out there would publish it? For, in those days at least, it was not as if publishing houses or literary magazines were knocking down doors to find what I would call homegrown Latino/Hispanic writers. As American letters stood, its Mount Rushmore would have been carved with the granite faces of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, with a descending pantheon of names from Barthelme to John Gardner forming the rushing funnel below, while even the greatest of black writers, like Ralph Ellison (whose work I also loved), would have hovered about those bodies like some distantly circling satellite. (Of course, behind earlier successes like James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones—later Amiri Baraka—there were younger black writers coming up, John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison being the most prominent. Now try to find a comparable list of Latinos in any discussion of American letters from that period—or earlier—and you won't find a single name to mention.)

Having said all this, I'm turning my own stomach with my selfrighteous and somewhat pedantic tone and would prefer to move on to a more exciting subject. And so I will leave it at this: If American readers thought about “Spanish” writing at all, it came down to the highly revered Latin Americans of that day, and even they were being appreciated only by the highbrow liberal intellectuals and some of the better-educated general public. For what it's worth, homegrown Latino writing—Cuban-American or otherwise—if it already existed, wasn't being noticed, nor celebrated to a degree that would have drawn out a somewhat reticent and self-doubting fellow like me: In that way, I was frightened to death of going onstage.

Any ambitions that I might have developed weren't helped by my then in-laws who thought me self-deluded for ever having wasted my time in graduate school. Even before I'd married their daughter, they sat me down as someone who wouldn't have much of a future without their assistance and offered to get me, through connections, into the University of Chicago Law School. Of course, once we were to move out there and I started attending classes, we'd need a car and a place to live, which they would most generously provide, as well as their active financial support. But, even without thinking seriously about my future, that whole notion about becoming a respectable lawyer son-in-law, living the middle-class life with all those strings attached, just wasn't for me. (And the mother could be condescending: While discussing seating arrangements for a wedding dinner that never happened, when someone suggested that it might be nice if she sat next to my mother, she quipped, “Then who would I have to talk to?”)

Deep down, that marriage wasn't anything I really wanted, which was probably why I got incredibly drunk at my own wedding reception. For the record, that was an easy thing to do: With tons of booze available, but little food, and while the band playing Top Forty stuff kept a lot of the attendees out on the dance floor, several of my friends, and my cousin by marriage Angel Tamayo, drinking on a canapé-filled stomach, got violently ill and, after throwing up all over a table, passed out. I did no better: The only part of the reception I remembered the next day was dancing with my aunt Cheo, to whom, prompted by my mother, I whispered a carefully prepared line: “
Estoy muy contento de que hayas venido a mi boda
”—“I am very happy that you have come to my wedding.” She, with her Cuban Edith Bunker sweetness, was delighted and pulled me close, saying: “
Te quiero mucho, nieto
”—“I love you very much, nephew.” And I would be able to recall running into some of my school friends and a few of my neighbors from Eighty-third Street, as well as pals from the old neighborhood, and sitting beside Barthelme and smoking a few cigarettes, all the while asking, “So what do you think?” (His answer? “How very interesting.”)

But, in general, it seemed that I behaved disastrously: Long after that rooftop terrace had been cleared out, around midnight, as I sat in some diner with my psychologist in-laws, who doubtlessly had many a reason for feeling annoyed with me (“Must you smoke?” the mother asked. “You realize that you drank too much!”), they reiterated the aforementioned plan for me as a demand: “You do realize that we expect our daughter to live in a certain way.” Never one to hide my feelings, the fact that my fair-skinned face turned a livid red could not have pleased them much at all. In any event, from that night onward, the days of that ill-advised marriage were already numbered.

For the sake of brevity and to get on with this story, sometime in December of 1976, on a cold and miserable day a few weeks before Christmas, I woke up in our apartment with an awful influenza. I was so sick I could barely get out of bed, but my wife thought I should go to my new job, which I'd held since September at that point, so that “we,” as she put it, could use any leftover sick days for a future vacation. Though I had the chills, felt like death, vomited my guts out a few times, and happened to be running a fever, I somehow dragged myself into the rawness of that day and caught a train from West Seventy-ninth Street to work.

On a good day without delays, it took ten minutes to get down to the Times Square station, and riding the front car, I'd get out through the Fashion Avenue exit and walk east along Fortieth toward Madison: There, taking up the southeast corner and right across from the Young & Rubicam agency, stood 275, one of those great old art deco office buildings, with marble pilasters and gilded ceilings in the lobby, that remind one (reminded me, at any rate) of a New York that perhaps only ever really existed in the movies. (Just walking in that neighborhood always brought to mind the films of Fred MacMurray—for I had caught the tail end of a time when a great number of male office workers, the older ones at least, streaming to and fro out of Grand Central Terminal, still wore hats.) Altogether, I just found that ambience—so 1940s–1950s—reassuring, in almost a supernatural, time-dissolving way.

Or at least that's what the daydreamer in me would think, even in the midst of an awful illness. As I'd cut over eastward from the subway, I was always fooling with all kinds of tautologies—feeling, for example, that in the same way I happened to be thinking about what it must have been like back in the 1940s, someone far in the future was also thinking about what it must have been like in the 1970s, a kind of cubist (not Cuban) time thing going on in my head.

Often enough, as I'd zip past Bryant Park, I'd have a book, usually borrowed from the Forty-second Street library, opened in my hands, weather permitting. I'd pass anonymously through that perpetually bustling world in my tie and jacket and overcoat, without taking my eyes off a page except when I came to a light, cars and trucks and buses zooming by ruthlessly, or noticed a pretty girl with a nice figure sauntering along in high heels nearby. Rarely, I should add, did I daydream about writing in those days, at least as a priority, and if you had asked me what I did on the sly, I would have told you that I occasionally messed around with some of the crap I had written for school, in the same way I drew sometimes, or went downstairs to visit and play guitar with my friend Ching, or jammed uptown with my old pals—all my creative outlets being roughly equal in my estimation—just interesting ways of going through my days.

Ah, but my job: Apparently, after finally deciding to get “serious” about my life, I didn't really care what I did with my precious time. I hadn't been looking for work too long and, recession or not, should have been more discerning, but I considered myself lucky to find any job at all. When a certain Mr. Belsky, my interviewer, offered me an entry-level clerk's position with the transit advertising company known as TDI (or Transportation Display Inc.), whose offices occupied the third and fourth floors at the aforementioned address, I, without giving much thought to my future, accepted. Even if it was the kind of work that I couldn't have imagined for myself while a graduate student at City, and there were other things I could have been doing—like taking a gamble and hitting the road as a backpacker to see the world, or, for that matter, following in the paths of so many of my classmates by heading into the relatively serene haven of academia—I simply didn't care how I earned my livelihood as long as I'd somehow remain faithful to “my true self.”

Without knowing it, I had become earthbound by certain loyalties—to my old neighborhood, to my friends, to New York, and, yes, even if it seemed contradictory, because she could so easily drive me crazy, to my mother. As a result, a more adventuresome existence just didn't occur to me, as if on some level I believed that doing right by other people was the Cuban thing to do. (One of the few Cuban attributes—family loyalty—I seemed to still strongly identify with.)

At the same time, I can remember that, in those days, I often thought about one of my favorite Tennessee Williams lines, from
The Glass Menagerie,
“People go to the movies, instead of moving,” and, while doing so, felt a slight twinge of regret going through me. (Well, a twinge of something, but just a ripple against the much darker feelings that often seized me.) Nevertheless, I couldn't have imagined, interviewing for that job, that I'd spend almost nine years there, in various capacities, while doing a pretty good imitation, for all my coolguy aspirations, of an ambitionless lower-middle-management ad agency schlub, to use that fine New Yorkism. (On the other hand, I'd recall that my father was almost thirty when he came to the States and ended up washing dishes for a time, and I'd console myself with the thought that, comparatively speaking, I was way ahead in the game.)

To give you an idea of the tight job market, I was hired along with a brilliant Yale graduate about my age, David Shinn, later the department head, and eventually, in a new professional incarnation, a lawyer writing judges' opinions for the courts down on Centre Street. We both began work that same afternoon: Our immediate boss was a rough-hewn, bulbous-faced Jimmy Durante look-alike, Richard Bannier, who, as an ex–navy man and World War II veteran, shouted his instructions and stood so close to you that you could read the veins on his nose, the hair in his nostrils, all the while catching his spittle. It was he who first explained to us the rudiments of the outdoor advertising business while taking us around to the various departments in the company, and the folks we'd work with: sales was upstairs, art production in the back, accounting a partitioned-off area just off ours (in which every nervous bookkeeper, some twelve or so and all females, chain-smoked throughout the day, a perpetual fog drifting over them), and after a quick tour through the department that managed the national branches—for TDI had operations in just about every major city and airport in the country—to payroll (which consisted of only one employee, a self-possessed and ever so gentle
cubana
, Delores Perez, after whom, for what it's worth, I would name a major character in one of my books). Lastly, we were introduced to our contracts manager, the man from whom we were to get our daily assignments. He was in his mid-thirties, a little paunchy, with an Elvis thing going on with his always well-lubricated hair, a constant smoker as well (Winstons, “
which taste good like cigarettes should
”), and a rosy bloom to his cheeks. Coming in at seven in the morning, he'd work his brains out until one, then go to a local gin mill and get pickled, afterward holing up in his office for the rest of the day, reading the
Advertising Age
newspaper. Occasionally, I'd catch him blowing his breath into his own palm to make sure he didn't smell of alcohol, and he'd often spritz his mouth with Binaca spray. A jokester, except when higher-ups were around, he, like Bannier, was a very nice man, though somewhat of an acquired taste.