A good-hearted man rumored to be a member of the genteel petit Mafia — his brother ran some kind of operation in Brooklyn — he might have kept a gun in the back and was probably someone not to be messed with, though he could not have been more kindly toward people — even threw me a couple of twenties when my pop died. Trusting me because of my quiet demeanor, he’d occasionally bring me along with him at night when he’d drive up to another bar uptown in Harlem to take care of some business transaction. In any event, when he heard that I had put together a group, he told me we could perform there any time we wanted to. For a period of a few years, we were to be the occasional “special entertainment” billed as “the 118th Street R&B band.” With people having nothing better to do jamming the place, at two dollars a head, on a Saturday night each of us musicians ended up with a nice piece of change.
On some weeks, I took home at least a few hundred dollars, twice as much as I think my father ever earned. But I can’t say I did anything meaningful with that money — in fact, I’m not quite sure what I did with it. Being of an age when other kids would go off on three-month summertime excursions to Europe on maybe nothing more than six hundred dollars — a figure I once heard — I never did anything quite so adventuresome, and not because I wouldn’t have wanted to, but because, as somewhat of a provincial, it simply didn’t enter my mind: At some level, for me, Europe did not quite exist.
We’d play from around nine at night until three in the morning, long gigs that sometimes became wild affairs, what with all the booze and drugs floating around. Among the things I learned on such nights was that you don’t have to give a particularly good performance (though we did sometimes) if your audience is stoned. When LSD inevitably entered the picture, and folks began to circle the earth, anything one played seemed to that segment of the audience exalted, serene, and profoundly deep. Most people danced well enough, though some went off into a kind of proto-Aztec hieroglyph frenzy, or else, as in the case of super-medicated Vietnam vets, subdued, very slow, zombie waltzes; and while our repertoire included a few numbers that had something of the Latin rhythm to them — like “Bang Bang” and “Oye Cómo Va”—we were probably the farthest from a Cuban band imaginable, and our audience a far cry from the sorts of dancers my parents once consorted with.
In fact, the closest the bar came to displaying a Latin flavor of a sort came down to the black and Latina hookers from around the Port Authority, whom someone would round up for the occasional bachelor party and bring uptown from Tenth Avenue by the carload. On some nights, these ladies would be out in the back taking care of one man after the other, and occasionally, some of these women blew their patrons in full view of the crowd. I had also seen one of the women splayed across a table and, with whipped cream from an aerosol can covering her privates, submit as one of the fellows, usually quite drunk, went down on her: There were other variations on these oral themes, and a few copulations as well, often enough in the somewhat funky bathroom. Altogether, it was the kind of scene that makes a show like The Sopranos seem sexually tame to me now, and it was so absurdly rank — and sleazy — on occasion as to make even the worst of my pop’s so-called dance-hall infidelities seem almost innocent by comparison. (And yet, why do I continue to remember that place with fondness?)
Tucked back into that period, some months after I had turned eighteen, I had ended up in yet another smoke-filled room, this one situated in the draft board offices downtown on Whitehall Street, where I’d gone to register. Though it’s possible that a few in that room were feeling a patriotic fervor about fighting in Vietnam, most of the young men gathered there seemed bent upon getting out on psychological deferments — which meant that one fellow dressed up like Batman, another as a Watusi warrior with bells tied about his ankles, and yet another in a pair of fluffy slippers and diapers; there were some overtly effeminate sorts in there as well, and a gleeful bunch of hippies who were being eyed by the plainclothes cops in the crowd, singing and carrying on, all the while quite apparently high on something powerful, probably LSD. A few others sat, in the manner of soldiers about to go to war, sucking on cigarettes — it was thick as shit in that room — an air of worry tending toward obligation or resignation on their faces. I mention them because, to be honest, when I turned up, I had frankly resigned myself to going to Vietnam, not out of any deep sense of moral obligation or patriotism — as did my friend Richard — but quite simply because I didn’t care what they did with me. I filled out forms, answered a few questions in pencil—“How would you feel about confronting an enemy of the United States?” and others that essentially inquired after my interest in self-preservation and soldiering. Strangely enough, my laconic responses to those questions, along with the pertinent bit of information that my father had died the year before, led one interviewing officer to assign me, without as much as blinking an eye, a temporary, six-month deferment — which is what most of the crazies in that room would have been grateful for; and while I had expected to be called back there soon enough, the draft lottery intervened, and in one of those caprices of rare good luck, I ended up with a number so high, in the three hundreds, that I never had to return.
CHAPTER 6. My Two Selves
In those years, I seemed to have vacillated between two versions of myself: One was musical and hip, somewhat sly, and occasionally wild, the other so completely solemn and conservative of demeanor as to be taken by Greenwich Village hippies as too straitlaced to trust. (When I cut my hair short, I was sometimes looked upon suspiciously by the bohemian sect as if I might be a cop — I suppose that had something to do with my overly preoccupied expression.) The hip Hijuelos smoked cigarettes and liked to get high; like black folks, who I never saw using any other brand, I preferred Kools, maybe a pack or two a night, not giving a damn about health issues. (I was convinced, however stupidly, that by the time I had smoked long enough to come down with cancer, they — the scientific world — would have developed a cure for it.) The other Hijuelos, the pensive shit who looked down on others’ self-indulgences and worried about his health, tended toward weight-induced high blood pressure and remained, despite the unpredictability of his mother’s moods, complacently disposed toward her. (“Sí, mamá.”) One did whatever the fuck he felt like doing, lived here and there, made out with the occasional girl, while the other demurely slipped into deep depressions, all the while craving not the escapes of sex or drugs, but eso de la comida—Cuban food especially — and the mental comfort foods of comic books and horror movies. That cooler version of myself trudged off one night through Central Park with the guitarist Duane Allman in search of a liquor store and later jammed with him in an uptown pad, while the other, completely insecure but having pretensions of musical grandeur, once boasted to his older brother that he had written the lyrics of a Beatles song called “When I’m Sixty-four.” (How on earth I thought I could get away with that is beyond me. I guess I believed they didn’t have radios in Brooklyn.)