Always fast on his feet, Richard, dark haired and of a slim and compact build, could run around the block, and quickly, without as much as taking a deep breath or working up a sweat, a remarkable thing, mainly given the fact that he smoked a carton of Winstons every week. I don’t know how — or why — his habit started; it was always just there. Of his three brothers, the eldest, Bernie, an army officer fresh out of West Point, probably didn’t smoke (I would never see him doing so, at any rate), but I think the next oldest, of my brother’s age and the most burly of them, Johnny, did, and Tommy certainly (Tareytons, as I recall). It simply wasn’t a big thing on my block — if it was illegal for adolescents to smoke, you wouldn’t have known that from checking out the street. Kids like Tommy, very much a fellow of this earth, could play three-sewer stickball games and go running the makeshift bases with a fuming butt between his lips, and, as a matter of course, a lot of the kids, having no trouble getting ahold of them, smoked while hanging out on the stoops, singing doo-wop, or in the midst of a poker game, on which they would wager either money or cigarettes. Some guys walked around with a pack stuffed up in the upper reaches of their T-shirt sleeve, by the shoulder, or with a cigarette tucked J.D.-style alongside their ear. Cigarettes were just everywhere, that’s all, a normal thing, which, however, I never found particularly inviting except when I’d get the occasional yearning to be like everyone else.
In any event, Richard’s household became a refuge to me: It was close by, and the family treated me well. His mother played the piano — I first heard Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” over there, and one Friday evening, in the days when Catholics still observed such rules, I consumed my first Italian-style red snapper dinner at their table. But I especially loved going there around Christmas, when they’d put up a crèche and a majestic nine-foot pine tree, their living room table always covered with Italian cold cuts from Manganaro’s downtown, and other seasonal niceties, like macaroons and brandy-drenched cherries, the holiday atmosphere so cheerful and strong, what with high piles of presents stacked under the evergreen and wreaths on the walls, that our own strictly budgeted Christmases suffered by comparison. We always had lots of food and booze around, of course, but my father wanted to spend only three dollars on a tree, which we’d get down on Amsterdam; and when it came to our presents, my brother and I received only one gift apiece. I don’t recall my mother or father ever having any presents of their own; nor did we celebrate El Día de los Reyes, Three Kings Day, the way other Latino families were said to — in fact, I only heard reference to that holiday many years later; and if anything, after the revolution, when my parents’ thoughts turned to their family in Cuba — my mother receiving her sisters’ plaintive letters with guilt and sadness — a kind of maudlin spirit became a part of the holiday. Having said this, I can’t complain, for even with a humble tree, there was something wonderful about the way the pine smelled in our house, so sweet that not even cigarette smoke overwhelmed it.
At Richard’s, the holiday remained the great event of the family calendar — certainly of his own — and while I suppose they were an affluent family relative to our street, they were quite generous and always allowed me to join in their festivities.
I probably envied my friend — he seemed to always receive the best gifts, purchased down at the old FAO Schwarz: hand puppets from Germany and train sets when he was younger, and, during my adolescence, military board games, like Tri-Tactics or Dover Patrol, and Risk, which we’d play on many an afternoon. On those occasions with Richard, whom I admired and respected, smoking away, it became inevitable that I would try one of those cigarettes myself. I was probably twelve at the time, if that, and while I can’t remember having any sense of elation at those first inhalations — did I cough or make faces? — smoking at least a few, mainly Richard’s, soon enough became part of my days, and the foundation of a habit that would hold on to me, on and off, for many years.
Did I like them? I seem to have gotten used to their bitter taste, and perhaps on some other level I was thinking about my father, of finding one more way of becoming a little more like him. Though I didn’t smoke many at first, they kind of grew on me, and a little weary of my lingering self-image as the frail sick son, it wasn’t long before, in addition to comiendo mucho—lots of food, tons of it — I began sneaking cigarettes out of the half-filled packs that my father would leave in one of his top dresser drawers. I’d sometimes go down into Morningside Park to smoke, where I was fairly certain that my mother wouldn’t see me, and while I never lingered long there, it happened that, on a certain afternoon as I stood along one of its glass-strewn passageways, a couple of stringy Latino teenagers, the sort to wear bandannas around their foreheads, coming out of nowhere, held me up at knifepoint. It was one of those occasions when I wished I had the presence of mind to muster up some Spanish, but I’m fairly certain that no matter what I might have said (“Pero soy latino como tú”—“I’m Latino like you”) it would have made no difference: They didn’t like the way I looked, my blond hair and fairness alone justification enough for them to hate me without even knowing just who I was; it would happen to me again and again over the years, if not with Latinos, then with blacks — prejudice, truthfully beginning and ending in those days with the color of your skin. I wasn’t stupid, however; I gave them what I had in my pockets — a few bucks from one of my jobs working at a laundry before school down on 121st for this nice man named Mr. Gordon, who’d make his morning deliveries while I watched his shop (and pilfered the loose change on his shelves), and two of my pop’s cigarettes, which I had in my shirt pocket.
Eventually, my pop figured me out. Not that he put it together by how many cigarettes were left in his packs — I’d never overdo it — but because I started feeling too slick for my own good. Coming back from some afternoon movie on 96th Street one day, I had lit up one of his Kents only to see my father, peering out a bus window at me as it passed along the avenue. First he whistled at me, a high low whistle that he’d call me by, and gesturing with his hand against his mouth as if her were drawing on a cigarette, he shook his head, mouthing the word no. Then he pointed his hand toward me — gesticulating the way Latinos do, his index finger stuck out, and going up and down, meaning I was going to get it. Later, at home, he took out his belt and reluctantly gave me a beating, as always on the legs but painful just the same. Then, hearing about what had happened, my mother got into the act, slapping my face that night and looking strangely at me, as if I were a criminal who had betrayed her, for weeks afterward. Naturally, it made no difference; I adjusted, telling myself that, as with other things, I would have to become far more careful.
Around the same time, a picture began to hang over the living room couch. My brother had painted it. Having creative aspirations, at seventeen or so, he had started to make paintings somewhere — not in our apartment, at any rate. Amazingly enough, he had talked his Irish girlfriend from uptown, whose brothers and father happened to be cops, into posing nude for him, that portrait of her, with her burst of dark hair and nice body reclining against a bluish background, going up on the wall. No one objected, and my mother, while probably bemused by his rakish ways, seemed to take a great pride in his talent; in fact, that painting would remain there for the rest of my mother’s life — for among other reasons, I think it spoke to her memories of her own cultured father back in Cuba, whose creative blood, she would always say, flowed in my brother’s veins.