If I’d sometimes felt vaguely curious about the way I’d look in the reflection of a car window or a store mirror — always washed out, nearly unreadable — in the months/years after my pop’s death, I couldn’t bear to look at myself, even passingly. I remember feeling that the world seemed grotesque to me, and that, as I’d go through my days, my knees were weak and my shoulders tight, as if bearing too great a weight on them. Needless to say, when I actually sat down to study at home, during one of those rare moments when my mother wasn’t going on and on about something in another room, I only seemed vaguely aware of what I happened to be reading — I’d stash that information away somewhere — but for the most part I felt like a stupidly wounded animal barely attached to the world and rather benumbed to life. There is something else: I couldn’t help myself from looking back over my shoulder, as if I would turn around and see my pop standing on some street corner smoking a cigarette.
The only things that lightened me up were the sight of a pretty female face and music, the latter of which, as you may by now have surmised, happened to be the central passion of my youth. Playing the guitar and writing songs kept me sane and helped me to make friends all over the city. And so I got into the habit of turning up at the school, at least a few times a week, with a beat-up Harmony guitar. There on the steps of Bronx Community, I’d befriended this wiry Italian guy from Co-op City, Nick, who knew his way around a fret board and loved to play bluesy tunes, mainly of his own composition. As the son of an Allerton Avenue barber, he, like me and so many of the others at that school, had been among the first in his family to try out that education thing, and loving music himself, it seemed natural that we put together a band.
This consisted of some kids from my high school, along with a Columbia University football player turned pianist, my old friend Pete on bass, and a hammy, weird-looking tone-deaf singer who could not hold a tune but performed fearlessly, as if lifting outside of himself. Our first gig was at a fashion show for oversize ladies at the Lane Bryant department store, but we mainly performed, if it can be called that, at a locally famous watering hole known simply as the CDR, which occupied the basement floor of a residential building on 119th Street.
I don’t recall ever once hearing about or seeing my father drinking there — if he walked into that place at all, it was to cash a check perhaps — and though he had known its affable owner, Larry Mascetti, if only casually, for over twenty years, he wouldn’t have had much use for the place otherwise. Aside from rarely spending his money in any bar except to leave a tip for the free drinks he came by at the Biltmore, he would not have felt too comfortable with the clientele, who were mainly Irish alcoholics — in the sense that just about every man above the age of eighteen in that neighborhood seemed to be one. A few black men hung out there, among them a well-known jazz violinist (he later died of cirrhosis of the liver), as well as a spattering of Japanese who’d grown up in the neighborhood, and the handful of Latinos who went into the place to drink would have hardly fit with my pop’s idea of what an authentic Cuban or Puerto Rican was about, except as Americanized versions. Most of the people who drank there were decent working-class stiffs, and yet among them were a few bigoted souls who, never taking me to be Latino, had on occasion blurted out within earshot a few references to some “spic” they’d seen around or, more blatantly, about how some “fuckin’ spic” had the nerve to give him a sly look — an atmosphere of derisiveness toward Latinos so prevalent that even I, as jaded and pissed off or distanced as I had begun to feel about my roots, took offense.
I felt like a spy moving through both ranks — Latinos I didn’t know sometimes gave me the evil eye, while, on the other end, loudmouthed white guys betrayed their own prejudices without as much as giving one damn about my feelings, if they thought of me as Latino at all.
And yet, on a social level, that place appealed to a lot of people: An oasis — literally the only watering hole for blocks and blocks — it was frequented by Columbia University and Teachers College people by day and, at night, by the locals who’d stop there to get tanked up on their way home from work, though there were the occasional dropins from the arty, hippie world. One of them lived just across the street, a quite interesting guitar player, Chris Donald, whose girlish dark hair hung down to his willowy waist. He’d always cash the big-time checks he’d receive for playing his white Telecaster guitar in a 1950s cover band quite famous in its time, Sha-Na-Na, that had originated at Columbia. I think the checks were for about fifteen hundred dollars — perhaps his weekly wage, I’m not sure, though I do know that Chris, with whom I had jammed on occasion in his one-room basement apartment, used a good part of that money to buy heroin. For that act, he’d wear period clothes and somehow tame his hair into a passable though wildly oversize Elvis-style pompadour and for at least a few years seemed to be on top of the world, when, of course, in the tradition of the very cool and uncautious, he went overboard one day and overdosed, throwing the universe away on a dime high. It was a jovially crowded, smoke-filled place that boasted a booming jukebox and had, given all the cops who dropped in, a rather laissez-faire policy about permitting certain things. Some of the regulars seemed to always have something shifty going on on the side, but the biggest heavies, it seemed to me, were the cops themselves. They’d sit around in their civilian outfits but always packing revolvers, sending out waves of suspicion, world-weariness, and menace. (As in “Do not fuck with me.”) They were famously depressed and sarcastic: “How’s law enforcement going?” “Fine, how’s crime?” With the rare exception, each seemed to me a prince of darkness.
On certain nights, huge amounts of money were openly wagered in the banquettes off to the side, wafts of marijuana and hashish smoke occasionally drifting through the air. For whatever the reason, anything seemed to go on those premises. One night while I was in there, the comedian George Carlin, who grew up on 121st Street a few doors up from my grammar school, which he’d also attended and commemorated in an album entitled Class Clown, happened to be sitting by such a table, with what must have been an ounce of some white powdery substance splayed across a piece of wax paper before him. Observing this, a ruddy-faced police officer dressed in plain clothes walked over, and while it seemed he had gone over to investigate the situation, it turned out that this cop, whose eyes had the expression of a man looking through a plate-glass store window as if at a curious hat in a corner, had gone over simply to express his admiration that a local boy had made it into the big time, and would he, please, Mr. Carlin, possibly do him the honor of signing an autograph. I know this, because I was there just hanging around.
The owner, Mr. Mascetti, by the way, was a burly and cheerful, bald-headed fellow of stout proportions who could have passed as a plump cousin to the musician David Crosby. In the 1950s, before moving on to this establishment, he ran a little bar on 123rd Street on Amsterdam, where, I’ve heard, the folksinger Burl Ives used to perform. When I first knew him, however, he managed the soda fountain of a pharmacy on 120th Street, where, running errands, I came into one of my first jobs. He had three kids, among them a spoiled son, Butch, who, as it happened, I always had fistfights with, though I owed him or his father my first excursion, at about the age of eleven, to Bear Mountain, something that has stuck in my mind ever since, not only because we had spent a beautiful day tranquilly walking that park’s wooded trails, but mainly because he had a car while my own family never made such journeys, not even once.