Thoughts Without Cigarettes (41 page)

Oddly enough, suddenly freed up, after an increasingly fallow period of writing, and without much of anything better to do with myself, and after hearing for so long the opinion that the last thing in the world I could ever be was a writer, I started finding my feet in that regard again.

It took me a while, though. Getting out from under the ghosts of what my mother referred to as that “
matrimonio loco
,” I ended up in a cheap first-floor studio apartment on West Eighty-first Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, a block that, as it happened, had the highest murder rate in Manhattan for a few years running.

I had seen the place, about two doors down from the northeast corner (there is a Korean shop there now), during the day, when I'd slipped off from one of my on-site inspection tours for the company. The block, lined with trees and nearly beatific with sunlight, couldn't have seemed more tranquil—at about one-fifty in rent for about twice as much in square footage, the studio itself seemed perfectly suitable to my modest needs. Only when I actually moved in did I discover that the street's underworld population came out of their hiding places come nightfall. Back from work, I'd have to make my way through a sidewalk jammed with drug dealers and petty thieves, and the entryway, where the mailboxes were kept, was often filled to capacity with some eight or nine enormous black men, not a one, I would guess, much older than twenty. I learned quickly to mind my own business. After a while, those men were actually quite polite to me, stepping aside as I'd come in—“Let the white dude through”—and on one occasion when I politely asked if they wouldn't mind keeping it down at two in the morning, they actually did. Though I got used to them (sort of), they always scared the hell out of anyone who turned up to visit me, except this one fellow I had known from City College, a self-styled poet who, now strung out on heroin, sometimes copped his stuff on that street. By midnight, with my bed just a few feet from the front window, I'd sometimes go crazy as they'd stand out in front talking, talking, talking and whooping it up, a boom box blaring. Only at about five in the morning did things finally quiet down a bit. Still, I rarely got a night's decent sleep, even when I'd resort to earplugs—they were, after all, the looming shadows gathered out in front, just beyond the bars of my window, not six feet away from me.

After I'd moved in with just a bed and a few other items, I got to know one of the prostitutes occupying the apartment across the way, and when I asked her if it was a safe building, she covered her mouth, feeling like she wanted to laugh so hard. “You remember reading last year 'bout that cop, you know the one that got caught by some drug dealers who cut off his head?”

“Yeah.”

“And they wrapped it all up in a plastic bag and put it in a garbage can?”

“Uh-huh.”

She pointed to one of the garbage cans chained to a railing in front of my window.

“Well, honey, that's the garbage can!”

Despite its criminal element, that street, with some dressing up, was used in several tenement scenes for the Sylvester Stallone movie
Paradise Alley
. That was something else I had to contend with for three nights running—huge generator trucks humming away, banks of lighting glaring away all night, voices squawking through megaphones, and, to top it all, coming home from work, I'd have to show my ID to some security guards just to get to my apartment (as if they, the prick genius moviemakers, owned the city). For all my annoyance, the faux turn-of-the-century streetlamps, much like the ones we had on my block, and other touches, like the old Model T's and carts that suddenly lined the curbs, as well as watching that Marlon Brando of B actors, Stallone, stomping around, amused me; but then, as quickly as all that had come, much like a dream, it too vanished.

Needless to say, I got zero writing done while I lived there and I was more than a little happy when I finally left after about six months.

Eventually hooked up with a new girlfriend, I headed back uptown, settling into a fifteenth-floor apartment on West 106th Street. Situated in the back of a 1920s high-rise, its windows looked north over West Harlem and the towers of St. John's Cathedral. (In essence, I had moved back into my old neighborhood.) I most loved the church bells that rang at about eleven every Sunday morning in unison, the clarion of St. John's, the Ascension, Notre Dame, Corpus Christi, and, at the greatest distance, Riverside Church casting an ecclesiastical spell over the world and, in the spring, set every bird for miles around to chirping, their songs inseparable from that chiming. (All right, so I'm going over the top, but New York City was so seedy in the 1970s that one came to appreciate anything that approached gentility.)

I also found myself taking an unexpected comfort in the Latino-ness of the neighborhood. (It was a surprise to me.) Not in the sleazy stretches along Columbus Avenue where the proprietary hoods, dominating the corners, bore holes into the back of my head every time I passed, or the sidewalk drug supermarkets of 107th and 108th streets and Amsterdam, which I'd always anxiously slip through to visit my mother, but, in a way I never had before, I became enthralled with the very stuff that hadn't made much of an impression on me while growing up: the mom-and-pop bodegas, the barbershop with its Spanish-speaking clientele, the
botánicas
with their holy statuary and magic candles, the record stores through whose doorways speakers blared (but congenially), the time-freezing music of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, which hadn't changed in thirty years. Just seeing the
abuelitas
perusing the curbside racks of clothing in front of a store, with their little granddaughters hanging on to their skirts, or some of the paunchy older gents sitting out on milk crates in front of a bodega and playing dominoes and watching life go by, seemed suddenly enchanting to me. I'd find myself standing in front of a shop window taking mental note of every Santa Barbara, Santo Lázaro, and Virgen de la Caridad, and spell-making unguent or curse-breaking candle or love potion in sight. The immense Dominican-owned
almacen
on my corner—a combination butcher shop and supermarket, where you could buy bags of pork chops and chicken legs for under a dollar a pound, and all the Café Pilon and breakaway nougat you could ever want to consume (my mother, knowing of it, used to make special trips there to get a deal)—seemed about as delightful a place to get my groceries as anywhere around. I liked hearing the Spanish spoken there and enjoyed that ambience, with its bins of mysterious Caribbean tubers and gourds, though occasionally, I'd get low whenever the butcher, after speaking a rapid-fire Spanish with all his other customers, finally came to me and said: “Jes, what can I do for you,
sir
.” (And just like that, I'd fall into depression, from the disturbing thought that when it came to the culture from which I had come, I would always remain an outsider looking in.)

Well, I guess such anxieties ran in the family. And yet, exasperated as I sometimes felt, a certain kind of creative energy became rekindled inside of me. Something about rediscovering myself and the culture that had formed me needed to be expressed, as did the story I had lingering, like a ghost, inside my head. How to write it, however, eluded me. Save for some enticing fragments, left over from my CUNY years, I really had very little to show for my past efforts. Working full-time and often enough earning a little extra money on the weekends or keeping later hours at the company, whenever I'd finally sit down to write, it was as if I were starting all over again. Sometimes a week or two would have passed before I'd get around again to what I'd come to regard as my “novel.” And even then, often under the sway of whatever I happened to be reading at the time—from Borges to Ishmael Reed to Edna O'Brien—the tone and voice changed from week to week. Though I know now (at least in my opinion) that voice comes down to conveying one's personality on paper, back then I didn't have the slightest clue as to what “I”—Oscar Hijuelos, the New Yorkized son of Cubans and former self-doubting acolyte of writers like Barthelme and Sontag—really sounded like. The closest thing I had, however, to an authentic voice in my head, which I often heard in Spanish but naturally translated into English, if the truth be told, came down to something similar to that of my mother.

I did not have a bad life, not at all like that of some of the people I'd see out in the street begging, or smelling like shit in the park, or the homeless guy I once saw, while on an inspection, lying on the subway platform, his head having been split open by an incoming train. I didn't have much money—think I earned just under eight thousand dollars annually my first few years at TDI (even then, that wasn't very much), but I had enough to do what I pleased, which came down to doing basically nothing. Still enjoying comic books, I'd make my monthly trips over to an East Side shop, Supersnipe, to look around—one day I had ventured inside just in time to catch Federico Fellini buying a stack of back-issue Marvels. (Sorry, folks, I can't help it.) More or less out of the music scene except for the occasional jam session with friends, I'd sometimes head downtown to the Lower East Side and to a venue like the Mercer Arts Center or Max's Kansas City, at the invitation of my former bass player Pete, then working as a roadie for the New York Dolls. (Later, he, knowing their songs inside out, would replace their bassist, who'd left the group.) I'd long since decided that I found the rock scene a bit repugnant (translation: I didn't have the overtly sexy chops or wild looks to fit into it) and really couldn't get why people went crazy over certain kinds of music. (The Dolls, for example, did nothing for me, though I could see why the ladies liked David Johansen—a hell of a good-looking guy and a
jamoncito
and a half onstage.) Though I had published essentially nothing, I can remember feeling superior to just about anyone I'd meet at such places, simply because I had kept that higher aspiration in the back of my mind. I even took some pages I had been fooling around with to Max's one night, and visiting my friend Pete backstage in the dressing room area—a row of curtained cubicles that didn't afford much privacy at all—I met the fly Deborah Harry, lead singer of Blondie (sorry again), also on the bill, and did my best to win her favor by offering to give her the pages I had written. She was very polite and kind, surprisingly respectful of me, even though I was slightly inebriated from having killed time after work in a bar with some of my fellow employees.

Slipping out in the evenings, I liked to listen to jazz at this dive on 106th Street (it's called Smoke now but back then was owned by a shady Colombian who, however, in booking his acts, sometimes displayed a haphazard good taste). I liked sitting by the bar smoking and trying my best to appear as Bohemian as possible, even if by then I had become a hardworking office clone. I'd nod at the most bullshit jazz—what I considered excremental honking, especially on saxophones—even if it drove me crazy. I'd go home late with a headache, usually feeling unimpressed by most of the musicians; but if a guitarist had shown up with some real chops, I'd tiptoe around my living room and pick at some chords on a sweet Brazilian nylonstring guitar I'd bought at an Odd Lot store on Fortieth, trying to figure out what the guy had played. Staying up until some ridiculous hour, I'd manage, as my pop used to, on just a few hours of sleep; then my workdays in the office would begin all over again.