To put it succinctly, the educational institution I started attending instead, the Louis D. Brandeis High School, on West Eighty-fourth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, with its state prison façade, had its problems. Its students were mostly black and Latino and, for the most part, not too inclined to accept the notion of authority. Transferring from Hayes, where respect toward the teacher was the number one thing, to a school in which students spit at and sometimes assaulted their teachers, in which most classrooms were overcrowded, and where just getting the kids to stop fucking around before every session was a daily challenge to its teachers, threw me for a loop. Some of the teachers were kind to me, as I must have seemed lost half the time, and while I did my best to seem interested in being there, not a day went by when I didn’t feel as if I had messed up. Without dwelling too much on how many drug users there were at Brandeis (some 80 percent, I later read) or how many of its students belonged to gangs or had juvenile records, or what it was like in the middle of the day to walk into a bathroom dense with pot and cigarette smoke, with guys shooting up in the stalls, or how one might occasionally encounter a used syringe in a stairwell, or hear about a rape, I will say this: While getting knocked around in those hallways on my way to class — as in some tough pissed-off black dude abruptly slamming his shoulder against mine to start something — I often wondered what I had gotten myself into.
Still, I managed to squeeze by and made my friends, mainly thanks to the hippies there. In that school, those longhairs, mostly white but with some Latinos thrown in, would gather outside after classes and jam. Some sold drugs, a service that was respected (the cops did not seem to notice), but mainly those kids — what were they but sixteen and seventeen years old? — held impromptu music sessions, in the spirit of the day, with flutes, bongos, and guitar. Bringing my guitar, an acoustic, I eventually joined in. For the record, my best friend from Brandeis was a kid of half-Argentine, half-American extraction, who would later play drums in a band with me, and in the aftermath of such sessions, on many of those afternoons, we’d drift off to someone’s apartment to play even more music and, often enough, to get high.
I was never good at getting high, by the way. I had such a self-consciousness about my body, and the microbios within, that the uplifting removals from one’s being that came along with smoking hashish or marijuana eluded me. (I was too uptight and felt more inwardly drawn than I liked; the only thing that worked for me would come with the introduction of a mild beverage like some sweet Gypsy Rose Wine.) In general, however, those were halcyon afternoons: I loved playing the electric guitar, if somebody had one, and while I had to put up with a lot of lead-guitar-playing egomaniacs who weren’t too inclined to listen to what other people were putting forth, I slowly began making up my own tunes and, in my way, became something of a songwriter.
Speaking of getting high: My friend Bobby, on 122nd Street, had a down-the-hall neighbor, an Irish kid named Jimmy, a completely slovenly lost soul of a fellow, a mess without a center who, however, taking some LSD in those years, underwent a miraculous transformation of personality. Suddenly suave and self-asserting, he became a drug dealer, of heroin, pot, and LSD. (Among his rumored clients, one of the Rolling Stones when they were in town.) How those business arrangements flourished, I can’t say, but despite that change, he continued to live in the same apartment with his mother. In any event, I had been asked by someone in the neighborhood if I knew of anyone who dealt LSD, and thinking about Jimmy, I arranged through my friend Bobby for him to bring me six doses — which cost about twenty dollars, as I recall. What happened amazed me: Bobby met me on a street corner, where we made the exchange, and while I soon passed it on to that someone from my neighborhood and went home afterward, Bobby, heading off on a date on 106th Street with his girlfriend, happened to drop several tabs of that drug and, that night as a good Catholic boy going crazy, swore that he had been possessed by the devil, and, in effect, he, once so docile, tried to take physical advantage of her.
The long and short of it? He ended up in Ward Eight of St. Luke’s Hospital, the psychiatric facility there, speaking in tongues.
Unfortunately, his father the fireman, who once taught me guitar, came knocking on our door the next day, frantically demanding of my pop that I confess to having been a part of his son taking that drug. Along the way, he insisted that we see for ourselves what I apparently had done. That same afternoon, as my father and I walked over to the hospital, he finally asked me: “Did you give that drug to that boy?” and because I hadn’t — maybe Jimmy had given or sold him those tabs — I told him, quite simply, no, and that was good enough for my pop. But once we got there, I regretted that whole business — never again, I told myself — for that same day, Bobby’s father suffered a heart attack, his anguish being so great, and my friend, as we encountered him in the ward, could only repeat a few words—“Nobody loves me,” over and over again.
That same year, 1968, the Columbia riots took place, the buildings down the hill across Amsterdam occupied by the striking students. It struck us as a quite festive affair, what with TV reporters, and spotlights glaring against the walls at night, our block lit like a movie set. All our neighbors made it a habit to gather on the corner and watch the exciting doings, my mother and her friend Olga, as I recall, among them. I went inside the occupied buildings a few times — it was easy if you were a kid. Once I did so with one of the more affable junkies from the neighborhood, and mainly we traipsed about the back stairwells, on the prowl for things of value (I don’t recall that we found any), and going into the salons of those buildings where the suffering and gallant students were holed up, it seemed to me, on the face of it, more of a bacchanal than a revolutionary movement. For one thing, they had tons of food, for sympathetic neighbors would fill their baskets, lowered to the sidewalk, with stuff; and they had tons of wine and pot, the rooms filled with smoke; in one place, we saw a rock band performing, and while I had mustered some interest in their movement, I mainly thought it a phony spoiled-kid kind of affair; in other words, like most of the guys from my neighborhood, I wasn’t really very impressed, just a little envious of the girls the revolutionaries attracted.
Now, if you’re getting the impression that I had drifted into some inner life far removed from my Cuban roots, you’ve got that right. If I thought in Spanish at all, it was mostly in my sleep, and the gist of my exchanges with my parents usually came down to a laconic few words—“Okay, okay, te oigo” or “Sí mamá, vengo.” And when it came to Cuba, if anything, far from developing a curiosity for its history, for example, beyond what I already knew about Castro, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban missile crisis (when we were convinced there would be a nuclear war), and that we had family down there, I couldn’t be bothered to learn more. (My mother’s own histories were enough, and old to me by then.) I preferred my comics, and sometimes the occasional novel, thanks to Tommy, by someone like Ray Bradbury. (And I liked the randy humor of comedians like Redd Foxx and Lenny Bruce.)
If you’d talked to me in those days, you would have heard a kid who used the terms chick, man, and like, you know almost all the time. I loved Mad magazine but also dipped into the kind of arcane publications that one might find only in a neighborhood like my own: I can remember liking Lee Krasner’s Realist, which basically had an upyours attitude about the powers that be, and because of the Vietnam War, I could hardly walk across the campus or down Broadway without someone thrusting an antigovernment protest pamphlet into my hands. Because of Marcial García, who was always preaching in our kitchen about the values of the revolution, I had an awareness of both sides of the equation regarding Cuba. (On the other hand, I wasn’t the sort of kid to walk around wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt like so many others did.) But even when I had an exile friend like Victor, who’d come to the states in 1962 and knew just how cheated his family had felt leaving Cuba, and their desire to regresar—to go back — I remained detached enough to think that such concerns really didn’t touch me. I didn’t realize that their loss was really my own, a whole other possible life denied to me without my knowing it.