However, the most erotic of the pain research trials involved a heating rod and a tincture of black ink, which the nurse would apply to my bared back, from my shoulders to the small of my back: Wearing a pair of latex gloves, she would spread the ink (or whatever it was) uniformly and gently along every inch of my skin, after which she would further smooth it down with a narrow camel-hair paintbrush, which, truth be told, had the texture of a slightly wet tongue. Taking a long black bulbous-headed device in hand, through whose head she could transmit increasing amounts of heat by turning a dial, the nurse would press it against my skin and slide it about in circles, the remotely pleasant warming sensations, which I hadn’t minded at all at first, gradually becoming more intrusive and searing, and this nurse, who must have been Irish, muttering with each increase of temperature, “Are you okay?” Interestingly enough, all that heat sent my blood rushing, and while it hurt an awful lot, it felt great at the same time. That heat, in fact, concentrating in my center, had an incredibly invigorating effect on my friskiness — and she knew that too. Later, while she’d clean off my back with paper towels soaked in rubbing alcohol, I had the impression that it wouldn’t have taken much at all to get something going with her, and I might have asked her out, except for the fact that I had stupidly blurted out something about having a girlfriend — but lord, that delicious tension came back any time I got near her.
Along the way, I’d drift back to some of my childhood fantasies of being cured of my illness by some caring nurse, even while the sex/ pain thing remained foremost in my mind — what else was there to think about? That strange job lasted only some three months, but it dropped me into a circumstance that, much like love, was both a torture and a pleasure at the same time.
Of my teachers in the City system, there were two whom I would credit the most with kindling my first interests in writing. The first happened to teach a basic literature course at Bronx Community, a certain professor Wertheim, who, receiving an essay I had written about one of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Magic Barrel,” whose atmosphere of immigrant melancholy sang to me like a siren perching on a rock, pointed out several instances in which I used easy alliteration in my sentences, crude as they were—frolicking freely. In the margin he, a wise guy, wrote something along the lines of “so here Hijuelos bellows.” When he gave me an A in the course, I felt exhilarated — but aside from doing well, even given my scattered nature, I had really enjoyed the stories, from beginning to end, that were included in the assigned textbook, a Norton anthology of fiction, which I absorbed very much like a sponge, and in that way I first began to fill in the rather huge gaps I had in my knowledge of literature. (Of course, being a sap for emotion, the authors I most cherished, aside from Malamud, included Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence; I still do today.)
Later, at City, a saintly professor, a certain Ernest Boynton, went out of his way to encourage my essay writing — in the afternoons, I’d spend an hour with him in his office as he’d carefully go over my work and explain how I might better develop some of my ideas, a line of other students always waiting outside his door. I grew attached to him; he was young enough, somewhere in his late thirties or early forties, to bridge our age gap. All the students loved him, and he, a nerdish recently married black fellow with thick black-framed eyeglasses and dark rippling hair, a high-domed forehead and pinched-in dimpled chin, had been ever so happy to share with anyone who cared to know news about his wife’s expecting a child. It was he who first spoke seriously to me about perhaps becoming an English teacher one day, maybe getting a job in a New York City high school, and he was the first adult who really made me feel that I could do something good — just by putting together a few more or less orderly sentences.
But though I never really took his bookish suggestions to heart, I liked to be around the man just the same, feeling attracted, as I guess I inevitably would, to fatherly sorts. He was such a nice fellow that God naturally blessed him, of course, striking him down not five years later with a heart attack — the man dying while all the pricks in the world seem to keep on going strong.
All the while, I had always been one of those pensive fucks who really enjoyed street jive, the selling of “wolf tickets” by way of outlandish storytelling among BS artists hanging out on the sidewalks. Junkies were the best — really funny in fact, when not falling off the edge of the world, during slow nods that sometimes went badly, as in the case of this good-natured black kid named Alvin, whose sunny disposition did not prevent him from becoming an addict, nor from slipping backward off a rooftop ledge in the midst of a dream. One of my favorite folks, strung out sometimes, sometimes not, was Tommy, whom I would see mainly on the weekends while hanging with his younger brother Richard, finally home from Vietnam and, incidentally, also attending City. Tommy and I would find ourselves just walking around the neighborhood scoping out the action: I don’t recall how he made money in those days — he was a college dropout and already a seasoned veteran of the Addicts’ Rehabilitation Center on 125th Street, where I had visited him on occasion (they’d give you a little room and several doses of methadone a day, which gave you a kind of high). I think he must have earned some money dealing in soft drugs, though he, when not using the heavy stuff, seemed quite content with just enough to buy a little reefer and the endless quantities of beer, drunk from cans out of paper bags, that he cherished. (Theft has also struck me as a possible source of his income, though I can’t imagine that he had that in his nature.) For his own amusement, he liked to concoct the most outlandish tales — of seeing, for example, flying saucers in Central Park, or of going to Harlem and encountering a famous movie star in search of drugs, of having sex with two or three women at a time, stories that were, though hard to buy, easy to enjoy.
I am mentioning this because Tommy, it seemed to me, was destined to parlay his folkloric excesses about city life into an eventual livelihood as a writer. It was the one ambition he had ever professed and spoke about it constantly — I think from the time he was a kid. A short story he had written, in fact, about a young addict recovering in a Harlem rehab much like the ARC (if I am remembering it correctly, he tries to clean up but is drawn back into drugs) made a paperback anthology of young black writers that came out sometime in the early 1970s. It was the only publication Tommy managed, that I know of, and the fact that he had been included in a black anthology didn’t bother him one bit. Since he spoke and acted, down to his every Soul Train dance move, pretty much like a black man, albeit one without much bitterness about anything, his white skin seemed just a technicality. Just where he had come from, an educated and erudite father and family (and with a brilliant younger brother), didn’t occur to him, and though he, with his swifter than swift mind, could have easily, in some other comfortably upper-middle-class setting, aspired to any number of other professions, such as a lawyer or a doctor or a college professor, Tommy just wanted to be himself — this down-home Harlem guy. His love of reading, by the way, never faded as long as I knew him and he is the only person I have ever seen who, losing himself in a narrative while in a state of physical ecstasy, could perk up suddenly to say, “You best believe I can write better shit than this”—about the works of someone like C. S. Lewis or Norman Mailer. “And I will one day, you’ll see” was the kind of the thing he’d tell me, his biggest admirer and a true believer in that future.