Thoughts Without Cigarettes (42 page)

In that time, I really didn't have much contact with writers—just on a very occasional basis, as when a friend would call me up and say that so-and-so had a reading somewhere. Otherwise, it was a rare thing for me to spend time with anyone talking shop. At work, the only well-read person there was my counterpart, David. As I recall, he had some literary aspirations of his own: A Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe aficionado, he also wanted to write a novel, perhaps about his upbringing in western Pennsylvania, though, working hard in the office and putting in a lot of overtime, as the sort of conscientious sort whom bosses loved, he never got around to the point of having anything to show me. I did spend the occasional evening hanging out with my friend Wesley Brown, who was then writing a great novel called
Tragic Magic
, and I'd bump into former colleagues on the street—all of them seemed to be getting wherever they were going much more quickly than I. While walking down Fifth Avenue one sunny autumn afternoon, I ran into Philip Graham. On his way to the offices of
The New Yorker
, where he was about to publish a story, he could not have been in a more ecstatic state, while all I could think about was what I would hopefully eat for dinner.

I had so few friends in my life who seriously read books, let alone writers, that I felt myself very much a loner. (The women in my office read on the subways and during lunch, but mainly Jackie Collins novels, though I noticed the occasional Robin Cook book in the mix, while the men read hardly anything but magazines and newspapers.) Still, I managed to find consolation in the libraries nearby on Fifth Avenue—I spent a lot of my lunchtimes haunting the stacks of the Forty-second Street and the Mid-Manhattan branches, rarely coming back to the office without some interesting tidbit by an author I'd never heard of, to help keep my head together and my hand upon the pulse of literature. (Yes, if you were about twenty or thirty years behind.)

In the nice weather, I'd sit out on the steps (daydreaming, looking off) while the most beautiful and shapely secretaries sunned themselves around me, or came sashaying along in their tight skirts and high heels—of course I noticed them, but I doubt if they noticed me. And what would they have seen anyway but a youngish bookworm wasting his youthful energies and time on something as ephemeral as reading? Occasionally, I'd head out with the office gang on a Friday after work to make the Upper East Side disco scene, partiers jamming the sidewalks at nine in the evening as densely as commuters did Grand Central Station at rush hour. On those nights, hundreds of folks swarmed into those clubs to do the “hustle” and show off their latest moves, while I, dragged along and never going anywhere without at least a paperback stashed in my pocket, stood off to the side, or huddled by one of our tables, sipping a four-dollar watered-down gin and tonic out of a plastic cup, taking everything in, and occasionally, to some of my more lively coworkers' dismay, actually flipping through some pages of a book. I did so even when it was nearly impossible to read anything but a girl's fly figure in a room whose main sources of light came from dim candles, cigarette tips, and a galaxy of disco stars, elongating like peacock eyes as they swirled across the walls.

Inevitably, there was always someone around to pull me out onto the dance floor and I'd sort of go along with the fun good-naturedly—in the same way I once did when it came to Latin dance parties—without much expertise or self-confidence. Though I'd occasionally remember some fancy flourishes that I'd picked up from watching my father and guys like Tommy, with his Motown dance steps, I never felt at ease. Still, I took solace in the fact that I knew of very few writers or, for that matter, musicians who danced much at all. Thinking that my guarded ways and introspective manner were understated and cool, I doubt if any of my office friends shared that opinion: No doubt about it, I probably came off to them as a bookish wallflower.

I'd also hang out at the Pierpont Morgan Library on Thirty-sixth Street, which, in those days, despite its fifty cents admission price, was hardly ever crowded. I liked the way that books, encased behind beehive glass, rose in great cabinets from the floor to the ceiling, and the old manuscript pages from the illuminated Bible they'd put on display. My favorite objet d'art in the joint, however, happened to be a reliquary, said to have been the property of Constantine's mother, Helena. It contained a piece of wood, a splinter really, that was said to have come from the “true cross,” and a fragmented nail said to have been used during the crucifixion of Jesus. I'd just stare at that for the longest time, feel that I was somehow communing with the past, like a Borges character, and then, I'd leave that ambience of the early twentieth century and reenter the madness that was midtown Manhattan at one thirty or two in the afternoon.

Altogether, in terms of keeping any sense of myself as a writer alive, books made a big difference, as did my occasional trips down to West Eleventh Street, where I would spend a few hours talking with Donald Barthelme, who, for whatever reasons and despite the fact that I was a nobody, always made time to see me. These visits entailed, from the very start, oddly familiar evenings that began no later nor sooner than five thirty. Donald, sitting across from me, an ashtray and a bottle of Scotch set out on a coffee table, chain-smoked and drank as quickly and as much as my pop used to, but with the difference that he did not speak a mangled Spanish nor go into sad meditations upon his mortality. (Thank you, Donald.) I wish I'd been more attentive to recording our conversations like so many literary sorts do—if I had felt that I were literary, I might have. What I do recall of those evenings came down to the manner in which he'd extract information from me about his other former students (“And Wesley, how is he?”) and make inquiries about my former wife (“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that it didn't work out”) and my current job (“You do what!” and “Are you sure you don't want me to put in a call to
The New Yorker
to see if they'd have something for you?”). In turn, I'd ask him about his stories, or mention something I'd noticed in one of his longer works, like
The Dead Father
, or, intending to butter him up, make him aware that I had noticed some new translation of one his works on the wall shelves behind us. On at least a few occasions, I offered to set up a jam session with some of my jazzier friends for him—though I had never seen the kit, he apparently played a high hat and snare drum (he always refused). Making him laugh, I'd come out of nowhere with an offer to provide him with the kinds of tickets that were readily available as freebies to the employees of TDI—for the Ringling Brothers circus and Friday-night boxing matches at the Felt Forum. (“No, thank you,” he'd say, stroking upon his beard.) Along the way (I'm compressing here), we'd speak about any number of things—injustice, as when an actor friend of his had been stabbed to death on the street for no good reason, and how lousy it was that his friend's widow, a Swede, as a consequence, had been deported; or the capricious habits of certain writers—he always talked about Thomas Pynchon (whose writing I found opaque) as having a penchant for hiding out in closets when he'd visit someone; or we'd slip into a civil discourse: The government, of course, charged too much in taxes, and as far as salaries were concerned, at least for writers trying to live honestly and without ostentation, we once arrived at the figure of one hundred thousand dollars a year as a reasonable wage. He'd ask me about Cuba—was I planning to go?—a question that always made me feel a little guilty, as if I should, though as soon as I'd leave his apartment, it would seem, as always, unthinkable. Much as I loved the guy and felt thrilled to be with him, I'd wonder how he would feel if he had to contend with censorship, or if he came home one day and found someone else living in his flat, or woke up to find that his bread and butter,
The New Yorker
, had been nationalized, his salary cut to a tenth of what it had been before. I do not recall, however, voicing these questions to him, though I wouldn't have put it past me.

Of course, we'd talk about books. Deeply opinionated, Donald, in essence, had little patience with forced sentimentalism and false profundity (paging John Irving), and always tried to steer me in a certain direction. And while I don't care to further elaborate on his tastes, those evenings, fueled by goblets of Scotch on the rocks, always arrived at a certain moment when he, growing impatient with making small talk, would cut to the chase: “And are you writing anything these days?” he'd ask me. And when I'd tell him, “Sure,” he'd simply say, “Okay, send it over and let me see what you're doing.”

It's quite incredible to me now that he would make such an offer (though I also think it was his way of winding up the night) and that I didn't take him seriously enough to follow through. I was too uncertain about my work to risk embarrassing myself—and I didn't want to waste his time. Nor did I want him to think I had regressed in terms of technique and progress. (I fantasized that my former classmates were advancing way beyond me at a dizzying rate.) Above all, though I didn't realize it, I obviously had a lot of my father, Pascual, in me: a fatalistic, nearly passive attitude about life that didn't allow me to take advantage of real opportunities. Even then, I believed that just hanging around someone like Barthelme was a kind of credential unto itself.

Inevitably, for the longest time, no matter how often Barthelme brought up the subject of my work—teaching part of the year in a new position at the University of Houston, he even telephoned me now and then over the years to see how I was progressing—I managed to put him off. And when he'd revisit the notion of my attending the University of Iowa—some three or four times over a six-year or so period—I never took that, or his other efforts to help me, seriously.

Still, I kept fooling around on a typewriter at night and on the weekends, while accumulating stacks of unfinished scenes, vignettes, and, I suppose, what might pass as chapters of something about the way I had come up in life, too raw in both content and style, I thought deep down, for anyone in the publishing world to really care about.

Besides, I had developed a new interest. Born of a flair that I had for gesture drawing and the fact that I had been a junkie for comic books, the children's literature of my urban youth, for a time I wanted to become a cartoonist like Charles Schultz or Mort Walker. To that point, however, my pursuit of that vocation, which I occasionally spiced up with nighttime life drawing sessions at the Art Students League and National Academy of Design, with the random gorgeous (or homely) model as my subject, had only yielded a few strange children's stories, an endless procession of birthday and Christmas cards that I made for friends and family (how I loved Christmas), and, given the recession-bound world of those years, some ridiculously obtuse ideas for syndicated strips.

The closest I came to breaking into the biz I owed to my guitar-playing buddy Ching, a zippy draftsman who would later gain momentary fame as the artist of
Krypto the Superdog
for DC Comics. During one of those weeks when the repetitious nature of my office job had been getting to me, it was Ching, then an inker for DC, who suggested that I go over to their offices during lunch one day and chat with an editor over there, a fellow named Paul Levitz, who might be able to help me with some work. Not as an artist, however—I just didn't have those chops—but as a scriptwriter. Though it wasn't anything I'd particularly wanted to do, I gave it a shot, coming up with a story some eight pages long, about two brothers, the first a vampire, á la Dracula, and the second a vampire hunter, á la Van Helsing; I thought it was pretty good, sensitively written, etc., but he called it, to my surprise, “too literary” and highbrow for the average DC reader.