Thoughts Without Cigarettes (45 page)

Still, it took me a long time to trust his judgment enough to allow him inside, as it were. But eventually, he became of use to me, at least in the way a priest can be when you go to confession. During those sessions, I learned a few things. It was the first time anyone had ever told me that the kind of year I spent away from my family as a four- and five-year-old would have produced an acute sense of anxiety and depression, insecurity, nightmares, mood swings, and melancholy in anyone (oh, thank you!). But it was all the more traumatic in my case, he reasoned, not only because of the nature of my illness but because of the way my circumstances had, in effect, severed me from my roots (no big news). My darkness had been further aggravated by my sense of guilt related to watching my father, or “
tu papá
,” descending into a purgatory of self-injury and, the big payoff, his death—something that I, experiencing a survivor's sense of helplessness, had obviously not yet come to accept. (The flip side came when this psychoanalyst, being a
cubano
and naturally superstitious, and as someone who had, in reality, almost become a priest, cast doubts on whether anyone could be
truly dead
. He—the antiscientist and a hater of
ese comermierda
Fidel, who had outlawed the open practice of Christianity on the island—simply believed in God, and in ghosts, and in spirit transmissions. In other words, bless his soul, he was not your typical psychoanalyst.)

Though I left many of those sessions feeling better, I also wondered if I had turned into some kind of faggot. (Go to my old neighborhood bar and tell one of those wasted guys that you felt depressed and he'd look you over and say: “What you need is a drink and a fine piece of ass.”) Sometimes, I felt so stupid about that therapy that I'd stop for months at a time, only to go back. Most sessions I treaded water, though; once, in what must have been a case of transference (or time travel), the interior of his office somehow became that of a rustic house in Cuba, down to its deeply green smell of palm leaves and dampened earth (swear to God). Somehow, he came to represent for me some paternal Cuban archetype, as if my father and the
abuelos
I had never known had been magically combined in him. For a few minutes, I had a sense of belonging. On the heels of that experience, which was like a waking dream, he told me, in a voice that sounded just then so much like my father's, “But don't you know,
eres cubano
. You are Cuban, after all.”

While I am a little embarrassed to have disclosed such a thing, those sessions, despite the formality of the circumstance, offered me the kind of internal encouragement that I could never get anywhere else, not from my family nor any of my friends. And the process of talking about my dreams, which, in any case, always had either a terrifying or mystical aspect to them, really got the gears in my subconscious working, and even helped me come by the title of my novel one night. It was on the spine of a book, along one of the shelves, the
H
's, in the used bookstore around the corner from my mother's apartment, where I had gone walking in a dream. Noticing my name on the spine of a book, I pulled it out and saw my novel's title for the first time:
Our House in the Last World.

For what it's worth, I simply don't know where else that title could have come from, except my subconscious. It was just there. Having said that, I can't help but point out that were it not for two missing letters—
c
and
j
—one could spell my name, Oscar Hijuelos, from it. I know it's not much, but at the time that little coincidence, even if it is a bit forced, imbued the book with a magical glow.

Good things happened: Sending off the first chapter to a foundation, I received a grant. It paid three thousand dollars, before taxes, a fortune to me at the time, not enough to live on but an encouragement. (I do not remember what I did with that money.) The best part of receiving such a grant, the CAPS, came down to some of the folks I met through it. One of the judges, a Puerto Rican living on 115th Street in East Harlem, Edwin Vega Yunque, or Ed Vega, called me up. He was a novelist, and a fine one at that, who, however, in that climate when no major New York houses published Latinos, had gone critically unnoticed in his own city. (Or to put it differently, completely ignored by the major newspapers.) He treated me well, however, invited me over to his apartment, where, as it happened, I got to know his daughter, Suzanne, an aspiring guitar-strumming singer back then, who, I recall, often performed downtown at a place called Folk City. Ed was a Buddhist, married to an American wife, and as a writer knew just about every Latino author in the city, among them a Puerto Rican poet, Julio Marzan, and the Guatemalan David Unger, both of whom became my friends.

It was just a happy time: Through Vega, I made my debut as a writer, reading from my own work before a Latino audience at a poet's hutch up in the South Bronx—just a storefront with some folding chairs and a podium on Jerome Avenue. That initiation took place before the kind of down-home crowd you only find in the ghetto, with kids, mothers, pregnant women, old
abuelitas
, teenagers, and your rank-and-file local poets and teachers responding to your work with both seriousness and enthusiasm. (Afterward, tons of food was served from tinfoil-covered plates, along with beer.)

I also did a reading back then in an East Harlem apartment—think it was at Quincy Troupe's home: I don't recall just how long I read from my work—mostly black folks were in attendance, and while I stuck out (as always) and met one hell of a grouchy poet in Amiri Baraka, I felt really good to be hanging out with that crowd. (In a way, outside the office, I had started to lead a secret life.) And yet the reading that made the most difference, with Wesley Brown, took place up at City, where I filled in as a last-second replacement.

It turned out that the audience included one of my former classmates at City, Karen Braziller, who had published my short story in her review, and her husband: They ran a small downtown press—Persea Books, whose offices were on Delancey Street in the same building that once housed
Mad
magazine (I remember those kinds of things). Having read from a portion of my manuscript, I think it was the husband who inquired whether I had anything else along those lines. Not long afterward, I turned up at their door in their building off Gramercy Park East with a couple of shopping bags filled with the fragments and longer narratives I'd been fooling around with over the past few years: These represented what would become, after intense amounts of work on both our parts, my first novel.

Taking a few years, the actual process went more or less smoothly, and at a far less hectic pace than what publishers would demand today. About the writing itself: typewriters, ribbons, pen and pencil, notepads, white-out, scissors, erasers, Scotch tape, and rubber cement were the tools I used to produce the final manuscript.

As for the editing, I benefited from the expertise acquired by my former colleague at CCNY, Karen Braziller, then a senior editor at E. P. Dutton but assuming those same duties for their press. Spanish proofreading was done by my friend Ed Vega, with whose corrections the novel passed muster. Finally, when it came to a cover, we settled on a painting, found in a book in the New York public library (I think), an early work, circa 1945, by Philip Guston entitled
If this be not I
? It included so many elements that figured in my novel—columns, a stoop, a figure in what looked like a chef's toque, and distant tenements—that it seemed the only choice. Over the title, a generous quote from Barthelme, while on the back one found a fairly stern picture of me, going through what I guess was a “Russian author” phase, in a beard.

But until it was actually published, even as I continued my weekly routine at TDI, that book seemed an abstraction, whose eventual quite public nature I hardly even thought about at the time. I doubt, in fact, if I could have written that book were it not for the feeling that it would somehow remain an intimate and private affair: How else could one go ahead and dive into certain personal ordeals and write about them unself-consciously? Somehow, it hadn't occurred to me that the novel would be read by some of the people it was actually about.

But it wasn't just that: I agonized over parts of
Our House
in a way that few people could ever imagine. And while I've since learned that it's not really worth draining yourself emotionally (like I am doing now in this memoir) for what some cooler-hearted folks might categorize as quaintly visceral, as a younger person, I couldn't help myself from striving to establish, through a book, some sense of just what I had experienced. Even when the catharsis you go through can leave you feeling euphoric or incredibly sad, the fact that you've allowed some fairly deep and personal secrets to escape into the world doesn't hit you until it actually gets out there,
coño
!

As the date of release approached, I had been told that one can never know about reviews, but bit by bit, over a period of a few months both before and after publication, a number of newspaper reviews, around fifteen in all (which seemed a colossal validation of my work), came out, and all favorably, about the novel. This crop included the
New York Times
Sunday book section: A certain Edith Milton reviewed
Our House
along with a novel by a Korean writer, Wendy Law-Yone,
The Coffin Tree
. And though I didn't realize it at the time, as kindly as she spoke of my writing, she was the first to pigeonhole me as an “immigrant” writer (translation: “ethnic” spokesman for the primitive people known as Hispanics in those days).

Strangely enough, when Ed Vega reviewed the novel in a literary magazine, Vega, though he really liked it, he pointed out that while it had been quite professionally produced, it was badly lacking in Spanish copyediting. (“Hey, man, uh, you remember that you proofed it?”) Nevertheless, I felt so buoyed by these attentions and rich—I'd made four thousand dollars for my five years of work!—that for the first time in my life, I actually believed I had a writing future.

As it happened, so did the kindly people I worked alongside at TDI, who offered me a fairly large amount of car-card advertising space on the New York city buses at a rate that even I could afford. What's more, my art director and our production department came up with the artwork for me, while I provided the written copy, which, for the record, went: “
A family
'
s journey through three worlds: Cuba . . . America . . . and the Unknown!
” Afterward, a friend of mine, Eddie Egan, head of Bristol-Myers's production, prevailed upon some of his Chambers Street acquaintances, who operated some of the bigger presses in the city, to do him a favor by printing those ads up for free.

In short order, not a month after the book had come out (on little cat's feet), some several thousand car-card ads for
Our House
were gracing some of the more primo bus lines in New York City, among them the much-coveted Fifth Avenue route. And so it wasn't long before a shopper heading down to Saks or Lord & Taylor on the number 5 line could look up and notice a deeply processed advertisement for
Our House
right next to one for Marlboro cigarettes. In fact, each bus would have had four or five of them. Other lines, covering Manhattan from east to west, with some extending into the Bronx and Brooklyn, on buses otherwise advertising the likes of
The Mists of Avalon
, also conveyed the not too spectacular news that a writer named Hijuelos had apparently arrived. Entertaining visions of popular success, I soon learned, however, that no matter how many buses ran ads about a novel, the books had to be in the stores. Only a few that I checked—think Scribner's and some others downtown, as well Salters on 113th and the Book Forum in my neighborhood—had copies. Now and then, someone from the office would come over to my desk with a copy of
Our House
for me to sign. And what I usually heard was this: “Oh, but I had to look all ovah the place, just to find it.” (This, before the days of Amazon and ebooks and iPads.)

But people couldn't have been nicer. I got bottles of booze in the interoffice mail, with notes of congratulations, and one of my partners, Charlie, in subway clocks even took me out to lunch: “So you really fuckin' did it, didn't you, kid?” Folks from my neighborhood also appreciated the effort, given that I had captured something of the way they came up. And while very few of them bought my book—I can count those who did on one hand—my pal Richard purchased two, for himself and his brother Tommy, who, as I soon learned, had formed his own opinion about it.

I bumped into Tommy in the park one afternoon, and the first thing he did was to slap me five.

“Good for you, my man,” he told me. “I read your book, and I liked it, though I would have done a lot of things differently.” Tommy took a drag of a cigarette. “And better, you hear?”

“If you say so.” I looked off, leaves whisked up by the wind in pinwheels along the cracked park pavement.

“But the thing is, that novel doesn't really count 'cause, like, it's your story, and real books are about other shit, you know?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

That day, I made sure not to seem at all above him in any way: In fact, I told him that I couldn't wait to see what he was writing himself—even offered to help him in whatever fashion I could. But it was as if it didn't matter. Lighting one of his Tareytons with the butt of another, and offering me a sip from his can of beer, he said, “Nah, I'm all right—don't even think about it, man.” Then we talked about hanging out again, and, parting, we kind of embraced. Leaving him, I hadn't the slightest notion that I'd never see that beautiful and rambunctious dude again.