Thoughts Without Cigarettes (60 page)

On tour in England, during my spring break, where I smoked pack after pack of pungent Dunhills, I discovered that the promotional approach my publisher had taken for the book was one of supreme hipness: Hamish & Hamilton held the launch party at the jazz club Ronnie Scott's, and, as I recall, in addition to some straightforward news venues, I did countless interviews with print and radio music journalists, to the point that, talking constantly about the musical aspects of the book, I soon began to feel a little punchy. During one radio show for the BBC, my hostess, a very tall and aristocratic dame of the old school, made some comment about my height—at five feet eight—along the lines of, “Well, I hadn't realized that you Cubans were of such short stature,” to which I answered, “Depends on whether you are speaking vertically or horizontally.” (A long icy silence followed; then she cleared her throat and said, “Now, where were we?”)

Later, I went to Belfast in the north to appear on the
Late Show
(Channel Four), broadcast live at eleven P.M. As it was the time of the troubles, as they say, it was the only program I have ever appeared on where I had to go through a metal detector and submit to a pattingdown to get into the studio. There were also German shepherds being led through the place, sniffing around for bombs. The audience, of local townspeople, had to go through the same procedures: Once inside they could enjoy a large well-stocked horseshoe bar and were encouraged to drink to their hearts' content, as were the guests. I'd later learn that one of the in-jokes between our congenial Irish host, a fellow with a name like Mulligan, and the audience was that, sooner or later, he'd put on an act or do an interview with someone so far gone as to be completely amusing. In my instance, we had absolutely no discussion whatsoever of what he might ask me, though he did say it would be something really easy. In the meantime, I drank vodka and tonics and smoked—just about everyone in the audience did too—and no sooner would I put an empty glass down than would some assistant rush over with another from the bar. They actually had someone keeping their eyes on me just for that purpose.

When I finally went on camera, after a completely inebriated Irish punk band had performed, I was having trouble feeling my gums. Suddenly, my host sat down beside me, a beam of light blazed over our table, a camera rolled in, and smiling affably, with a deep brogue, he said: “Well, here I am sitting with my friend from America, Oscar Heeejewlloss, and he has written a new book and a very interesting one at that.”

After a few congenial remarks he turned to me and said: “Now, may I ask you a simple question?”

“Sure.”

“Would you explain to the people of Ireland how Cuban music relates to them, okay?”

I recall making some blithering idiot explanations of the northern Spanish and southern Irish being related, some business about how the bagpipe scales performed on a
gaeta
in Spain influenced the notion of a Cuban jam—“What is sometimes called ‘
una quemada
' ”—and otherwise dancing around the question with a logic that might have made some sense if everyone else were drunk, that Cubans and the Irish, having Spanish blood in common, were really distant cousins just like Ricky and Lucy. I can't imagine what they made of seeing someone—who looked far more Irish than Cuban—explaining such things, but I suppose that even if I were Desi Arnaz himself, it would have been a difficult task anyway. In any event, how I answered didn't matter—I'd gotten a picture of the book jacket shown all over Northern Ireland and though I was fairly hammered during that live broadcast, my publishers in London told me that of all my appearances thus far it had been my more “relaxed.”

By the time I was done touring the States and UK, I had gotten so sick and tired of talking about
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
that I found myself thinking that were I never to mention a word of that book again, it would be fine with me. And so, with a few days left before resuming my duties at Hofstra, I had taken up Francine Prose's generous offer to spend a weekend in her upstate home: I'd gone off one overcast morning with my girlfriend to prowl about the local antique shops and had come back with an iconic painting of the Holy Mother, which a Greek friend has since defined as a “black Madonna,” when the phone rang. It could only have been my agent—no one else had that number. Excitedly, she told me: “Don't go anywhere—someone important is going to call you.”

About ten minutes later, when the telephone rang again, I could hear the unmistakably raspy and lively voice of my publisher himself, Roger Straus Jr.

“My boy,” he said. “You've done it!”

“Done what?”

“Why, you've been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—that's what!”

“Say that again?” I recall asking him.

He did, and went on jovially: “I can't begin to tell you how proudly I—all of us—feel over your accomplishment. Well, well done, young man!”

What does one feel in such moments? A kind of disbelief, and in my case, a hokey sentimentality, over its significance. The first thing I thought, even as I lit a cigarette, was, of course, that a kind of miracle had taken place, that God (or whatever rules the world) had, for a change, decidedly looked out for me; that I had passed through a glorious door into a future that neither I nor my mother or father could have imagined when I was growing up; and yes, I felt a tremendous gratitude to whomever had been out there to make such a decision—for I had never really thought I would ever win anything (even the National Book Award nomination seemed a lark).

“Thank you, sir,” I told him.

After some further niceties, Mr. Straus, explaining that there would be a great number of people waiting to speak to me, said good-bye. As he predicted, one reporter after the other, scheduled through my agent, called me from all over the country. Though I had a few breathers, I spent most of that afternoon and the next day talking about that which I had already been sick and tired of talking about—what else?—
The Mambo Kings
and myself, my destiny for the coming months, the coming years. In every conversation, these questions: Given my humble roots, how did I, as the son of Cuban immigrants, feel to be awarded a Pulitzer? And: Now that I had somehow scaled the Olympian heights of literature, how did I feel about becoming the
first Hispanic
to Win a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction?

The latter made me feel both proud and, at the same time, oddly singled out for the wrong reasons. Remember that back in 1990, my award had come on the heels of a period in America when the virtues of affirmative action were being debated: I couldn't help but feel, as I know others did, as if my prize had something to do with the afterglow of that benevolence. Later, I'd encounter a lot of folks who would all but voice the opinion that it was time for
some Hispanic
to finally win a prize like that, as if I happened to be the lucky one.

Indeed I was fortunate to have been in the right place, with the right house, at the right time, with the right book, and though
Mambo Kings
, under whatever circumstances, remains a unique creation, it could have easily slipped through the cracks. Just look at the record: Aside from myself and, nearly twenty years later, Junot Díaz, no other Latino has been given a Pulitzer in fiction. As for the National Book Award? Despite its fifty-plus-year history, a Latino novel has yet to win a single one. (And, if I may, more sadly, remark: Though an array of wonderful books by gifted authors like Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Rosario Ferre, Virgil Suarez, Elena Castedo, and Patricia Engle, among others, has since been published, with a fair amount of attention paid to them, the balance in more recent years has tipped back to where it had once been, wherein the works of Latino authors are, so I have recently heard, considered old hat and of a category hardly deserving critical attention, as if Latino writing, once again, has fallen to the wayside in terms of critical appreciation as a form of authentically American literature.

In the weeks to follow, relatives I never even knew about suddenly came out of the woodwork, though, oddly enough, I never heard a word from my aunts Maya and Borja in Florida. (But at least I came into contact with my cousin Dalgis, my
tio
Oscar's daughter, whom I would later meet in California.) Mas Canosa's Cuban-American Freedom Foundation in Miami offered me a large sum of money to write an anti-Castro pamphlet on their behalf. (I refused, though not particularly for ideological reasons: I just didn't want to be selling myself to anyone, on the left or right.) I met people like Sting and Lou Reed and David Byrne, and many Latin musicians and personalities like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz and Graciela from the epoch I had written about. (My greatest honor? Playing the chords to “Guantanamera” on the piano, while backing up Graciela as she sang at a party.) For at least a few years, I became one of the darlings of New York high society—at one dinner, I sat between Barbara Walters and Bill Blass, at another with Lauren Hutton. At Bill Clinton's first formal dinner at the White House, shortly after he had come into office, I spent the night hanging out with the playwright August Wilson, an unrepentant chain-smoker, who remained my good friend until his recent death. A few years later, at a second White House dinner, a state affair in honor of the Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, I had the incredible thrill of meeting Gabriel García Márquez, who, finding out that I was the author of
Mambo Kings
, told me, “That's a book I wish I had written.” (God bless you, maestro.) Around that time, I received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, City College, a Literary Lion medal from the New York Public Library, and other awards that, quite frankly, I can't now recall, or that don't seem to have really mattered to the world in the long run, but that made me feel somewhat proud back when, as if I had done something good for my community—
los latinos
—by opening some doors, at least in terms of publishing, for suddenly, New York houses were actively seeking out such authors, a feeling that would most strongly come to me when I would meet a young aspiring Latino writer who, looking to me as, yes, a role model, wanted to one day duplicate my success, though I would hope without having to smoke all those cigarettes.

My mother, for what it's worth, would live off my Pulitzer distinction for years. Walking around the neighborhood like a grand dame, she took to wearing oversize sun hats with florid bands so that no one could miss her, and, as with my first book, carried the
New York Times
announcement of my prize tucked in a transparent plastic sleeve inside her purse, anxious to show it to anyone who expressed even the slightest interest. Calling out to shop-owner friends along Broadway, as we'd walk along, she'd say, “This is my boy,
el escritor
!” Then ask, laughing: “Have you something you'd like him to write for you?” (After all, I was her suddenly famous son, and as a result, we got along better after that, but the flip side? She could not look at me without suggesting that I buy myself a wig, the kind that true artists wear, like Liberace did.)