Eventually, at Brandeis, disliking the atmosphere, I became a truant. For every day I attended, I missed another. I always made up excuses about being sick, while in reality, I would be either sitting in some remote spot in Riverside Park, brooding, or in someone’s apartment, playing the guitar. The school authorities were perplexed, for when I would come into the principal’s office to be counseled, I always seemed like some nice white kid who must have been, in some way, distracted from his higher calling. My grades on tests were always good, but I was always on the verge of flunking out because of my spotty attendance. I had no idea what I was doing there and blamed myself, though I always had an ace in the hole. Somewhere along the line, I had heard that if you passed your Regents Exams, that statewide test of scholastic competence, you could not be failed out of a class. Somehow (thanks, I think, to Hayes) I had gotten 100s in most every Regents exam I took; that is, English, American history, business math (!), and somehow, in lieu of actually sitting through the course, Spanish. Because of those exams, however, I was awarded an academic diploma upon graduation, though my grade-point average remained, based on attendance, abysmal. When Brandeis held the graduation ceremony, my parents did not turn up; nor, for that matter, did I.
Still, I had enough gumption to demand a graduation present from my hardworking father. For some reason, I had the figure of one hundred dollars in my head, and my pop, wanting to please me, somewhat reluctantly came up with the cash. (“Eres loco?” I remember my mother saying. She had good reason — it was well more than a week’s pay at the hotel.) I don’t know why it mattered so much to me; I always had other ways of making money. I suppose I did so because some of the tonier kids I knew were sent off to Europe or given checks for what to me were unimaginable amounts, thousands of dollars. Or because I wanted some recognition for the fact that I’d dragged myself through school, or simply, perhaps, because I was sick and tired of hearing that we were poor (mainly from my mother). And no doubt something of the spoiled brat in me still lingered. What did I do with it? I pissed it away one night, taking a girl named Diane, whom I knew from Brandeis, to a cool night of jazz, to hear Red Prysock performing at the Half Note, which had by then moved uptown to the fifties. I’d heard it was the kind of club that asked no questions if you had enough money to pay for their five-dollar drinks, and in any case, even as a teenager, I had the kind of serious expression on my face that aged me by a few years. With a bad crush on this tall and pretty girl, I’d hoped that alcohol would make a difference with her. We’d dated a few times, and I even got the chance to meet her mother, in their apartment on Central Park West and 101st Street, and we got along well enough, though I could never get anywhere with her, my biggest secret, which inhibited our conversations, coming down to the fact that I felt too ashamed to tell her much about my family at home; and she was guarded with me as well, though I learned that her father, who was never around, worked as an editor in the film industry. That night I played the big sport, throwing my pop’s money away. Red Prysock was good, and we had a table near the stage, but my notion of plying her with rumloaded tropical drinks came to nothing. She seemed, in fact, annoyed that I was trying to get her drunk, and while she had very little to drink, I, feeling the fool, did my best to get wired myself, which did not go down well with her at alclass="underline" You see, her own pop, as I would find out one day, had his own problems with alcohol too.
In general, however, as much as I might have been a brooding presence, my pop seemed happier than ever in those days. He seemed especially pleased by how my older brother had fared: Since coming back from his stint in the air force, as a Beau Brummel, the sartorial style of Europe having rubbed off on him, he not only made up the credits he needed for his high school diploma but had gotten into Brooklyn College, where he studied art with some fairly well-known painters, who were encouraging of him. Graduating, with that profession in mind, he began teaching art in a Brooklyn high school. Best of all, whatever differences he may have once had with my father seemed to be forgotten.
He’d turn up with the woman he’d married in a quiet civil ceremony, and she, of mixed Italian and Jewish descent, with her raven hair and dark eyes, hit it off famously with both my mother and my father, though from what I could observe, she had taken a particular liking to my father, who, doting on her, kept bringing up, and quite happily so, the notion that he would love to see them bring a bambino into the world. I can only recall one moment of awkwardness between them. She had just started working for the city of New York and, over dinner perhaps, the subject of her salary had somehow come up: I don’t remember any exact figures — perhaps it was something like seven thousand dollars a year — but that number threw my father for a loop and somewhat saddened him. After twenty-five years at the Biltmore, he had yet to earn as much himself. (His shoulders slumped, he smiled, nodding, but his eyes showed something else.)
That was the summer, of course, of the moon landing. Nightly, when the progress of that mission was broadcast, my mother and father and I would watch it, like most of the country, on television. As Neil Armstrong first alighted on the lunar terrain, uttering his famous speech, my pop, most comfortably situated on his reclining chair, seemed truly enchanted — to think that someone of his generation, who’d been raised on farms in rural Cuba, could live to witness such a monumental act of daring, must have gone through his mind. His lips, I recall, parted slightly at that moment, the way they would when he’d see a baby.
I mention this because it’s the only thing I can really remember about the days preceding another journey I’d make. When my aunt Maya in Miami, speaking to my father by telephone, brought up the notion that I go down there for the rest of the summer and work for my uncle Pedro, it seemed a good idea. I would get to spend some time with family and make some money along the way. I certainly didn’t object, and while it wasn’t the sort of adventure I might have been craving, it was something different for me to look forward to, though I can’t imagine that it made my mother happy.
A month or so short of my eighteenth birthday, I was so selfinvolved that on the day I left for Miami, and my father, sitting on our stoop, wanted to embrace me just before I got a lift down to Penn Station in a neighbor’s car, I sort of flinched and waved him off. Maybe I finally begrudgingly allowed him a kiss on my neck, but what I mainly remember is sitting in that car’s front seat with my little suitcase and a guitar set in back, and feeling slightly put-upon seeing him smiling — perhaps sadly — at me as he settled on that stoop again and reached for a cigarette. I can recall wondering if I’d been a little cold, but before I could change my mind, the car started up the hill and the last I saw of him was this: my Pop in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, a pair of checkered trousers, and sneakers. He had just gotten his dark wavy hair cut short for the summer, and without a doubt he, always liking to smell nice, had dabbed his face with cologne. Some girl was skipping rope a few steps away and as my mother, Magdalena, watched me leaving from our first-floor window, my father turned to say something to her. Then he stood up to say something to me, and waved again: I think the last words he mouthed to me were, “Pórtate bien”—“Behave yourself.” Not that I attached much importance to that, and if I said anything back to him, I don’t recall.