By spring, when I’d come home from school, we’d pass a few hours taking strolls over to Riverside Park, where he was content to sit on the lawn, watching college girls go by, boats gliding along the water. He didn’t need much, though, as I think about it now; he probably had too much time to reflect back on what had happened to him. Sometimes, out of nowhere, while looking around at the loveliness of the day, at the wisps of clouds in the fine blue sky, the sparrows hopping merrily on the grass, or at a lilting butterfly, he’d sigh, and with that, I swear, from him emanated a palpable melancholy — I would just feel it, almost like a shudder, rising from his body. In such moments, I am certain that he, trapped by some dark thoughts or emotions, probably wanted a nice drink. Probably, he felt nostalgic for the good old days when he could just take out a cigarette for a relaxing smoke — he was, after all, a creature of his generation.
He must have started back up with his bad habits, slowly at first, at the hotel, when, after some three months away, he’d returned to work. Down there, hidden from my mother’s eyes, there came the moment, during a midafternoon lull at the Men’s Bar, that he’d probably taken his first drink in a long time, and that warming elation, coming over him again, became something he could not continue to resist. And what would go more nicely with a belt of whiskey than a cigarette? After a while, he’d walk into our apartment with his face slightly flushed and think nothing of sitting down and, well, having a smoke. Just as often, coming home, in his trousers pocket, he’d have a pint bottle of whiskey stashed in a paper bag, and soon enough, once his friends started coming over again, the refrigerator began to fill with those sweating quart bottles of beer. My mother, beside herself with worry, became hysterical, and those nights, once his friends had left, of my mother scolding him continually in the kitchen also resumed, but with a difference: Where in times past she had reminded him of his old abuses, my mother now went at his carelessness in the wake of his heart attack — what she called “un ataque del corazón.”
“You think you’re going to live forever, drinking and smoking? What are you, stupid, Pascual?. . Qué carajo, are you crazy?” She’d go on for hours and in such a manner that, if anything, he took to drinking even more. Worse, he didn’t seem able to hold it the same as he used to, for he’d slur his Spanish in ways that I hadn’t heard before, and, as well, he’d drink so much that just getting down the hall to the toilet, he sometimes staggered so badly that he would be propelled forward as if someone had picked up the building and tipped it onto its side, or as if he were suddenly shot out of a cannon, or on a listing ship in the stormy sea. He’d sometimes fly headlong so wildly that he’d tumble down and end up slumped over on the floor — I know this because I often tried to help him up, something that got harder as he began to get heavier again, those pounds coming back to him with a vengeance.
The evenings became something of a nightmare to me — to this day I feel a terrific melancholy when it begins to get dark. And not just because of my memories of all the shouting and arguments, but what they led to. No matter how much she tried to reform him, my poor mother, however well-intentioned, only managed in her strident ways to make things worse, while he, falling back on some macho pride, took her pleas (harangues) the only way he could, stubbornly and refusing to change: “Soy el hombre”—“I am the man”—was his only answer, “and if you don’t like it, divorce me.” I heard that word divorce night after night, shouted so loudly that everyone in the building did too. I can’t blame my mother for seeking her refuge with friends on those evenings, what with my father losing his self-control and falling apart in front of her; at a certain point, once she saw that he was getting a certain way—“muy borrachón”—she’d make herself scarce, for if she remained in the apartment, they’d spend half the night circling around the rooms, threatening each other.
But that was not the worst of it for me. Indeed, during those years, on many a night, in the crushingly lonely interludes after his pals, who always visited in the evenings, had left and my mother had gone out, I became his sole companion and, I’ve since come to think, his babysitter. He would insist that I keep him company (which was fine, even if I would have preferred to just watch our buzzing TV or go over to see my friend Richard) and if I hung in there with him, as an eleven- and twelve- and thirteen-year-old kid, it was because I felt constantly afraid of leaving him alone. So I’d remain by his side night after night in our little cramped kitchen as he’d drink himself into oblivion, until there came a certain point when he’d start staring at me intensely from across the table, his eyes squinting, as if to bring me into focus. A cigarette burning before him, my pop, as if forgetting who I was, would speak only in Spanish to me, and in such a mangled fashion that I wonder now how I understood him. (Years later, while sitting in a bar with a Puerto Rican poet friend, a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish, two incredibly drunk Latino men across from us were holding a conversation about life, but with such slurring that even the well-educated Hispanist beside me could not begin to understand them, though I could.) By then, my father had been dwelling on his mortality for so long that he often cried at the thought of his own passing, and far from concealing that fear — or conviction — he took to repeating a single phrase: “Voy a morirme”—“I’m going to die.” “Voy a morirme, hijo,” he’d tell me. Then: “Entiendes?”—“You understand?” his warm liquid eyes glazing over with bewilderment and tears.
I would just shrug or withdraw into myself — what else could I do?
Then he might say, “Pero sabes que eres mi sangre, y que te quiero”—“But you know that you are my blood and I love you.” And while I realize now just what he must have wanted to hear back—“And I love you too, Pop”—I could never say it, and so those nights went until, at some point, he gave up the good fight and dragged himself off to bed for a few hours of sleep before he’d get up for work for his early morning shift at the Biltmore Hotel, his words of prophesy staying with me long after.
In my way, I suppose, I took out whatever emotions I had from such evenings on other kids, such as the time when I put that cigarette out on my friend Richard’s head. (Sorry, man.) I had always gotten along with one of the French Haitian kids from upstairs, this burly, immense, unflappably cheerful boy about my age, Phillipe. It was he and his older brother John-John who once took me into the basement and, setting up a little projector in an abandoned room, showed me the first bawdy film I had ever seen, one of those grainy 16 mm movies you could get in one of the shops along sleazy Times Square, in which the women, by today’s standards, were too fat and too ruined looking, but who, with their bushy vaginas spread wide and their doughy flesh, seemed wildly exciting as well as wicked. We also played a lot on the street, and one afternoon, as I stepped out off the stoop, wearing a pair of new Hush Puppies, for some reason, though he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, Phillipe shot me a faggy kiss with his lips smacking and chippie-chippie sounds: He was sitting against the stoop’s columns and when he did it again as I walked on, I turned and punched him as hard as I could on the side of his face, and his head began bleeding from its impact against the stone. He never did it again.