And myself? I liked the florid language of Shakespeare, though watching his plays performed in Central Park often put me half to sleep even when the casts included actors like Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep, among notable others. The blame would go to my short attention span and my own capacity for daydreaming: In the balmy night air, with a few persnickety stars managing to peek down at the world through the harsh New York — down-on-its-luck hazes, I would fantasize not about writing something like Shakespeare but about becoming an actor myself, or at least envying those sorts of folks, in the same way I secretly admired even the most outlandish of rock musicians for having the courage (balls) to get out there in a way that engaged the wider world.
Though there were some prose writers like Hubert Selby Jr. and Pietro di Donato whose work really spoke to me in school — I would see and hear their stories as if I were watching a movie — Tennessee Williams’s plays were the first things I’d ever read that made me want to pick up a pen and try writing something myself. (It was that detail of the glowing portrait of the father on the wall in his play The Glass Menagerie that absolutely killed me, as if the man were coming back as a spirit from the beyond to revisit — and mutely comment upon — the scenes of a life he had left behind.) But I also loved Mr. Williams’s lyric writing style, that tenderness that seemed to permeate all his scenes; and I liked him personally, brief as my meeting him had been. At an antiwar rally held in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he had come down from the pulpit after giving a short speech, and as a part of the crowd, I, having cojones and a half, had walked up to Mr. Williams and introduced myself: I’m sure that my being so young helped my cause, but he looked at me and smiled, and we spoke for a few moments. I can remember thinking that there was nothing sleazy about the man, just that his famous eyes, light blue, as I recall, and delicate in their shimmer, seemed lonely as hell.
So, having a few electives to fool around with, and wanting, based on my admiration for The Glass Menagerie, to eventually take up playwriting myself — if only as a lark — I ended up enrolling in a drama course. At the time, my teacher, Murray Schisgal, a warm, proletarian sort, was at work on a play, An American Millionaire, at the Circle in the Square, and it amazes me now that he was so generous to his students, bringing us down to the rehearsals. There I had the incredible luck of becoming, along with several others, a fly on the wall while the actors — Paul Sorvino, Bob Dishy, and Austin Pendleton — figured out their bits, and Schisgal tried to hammer the play’s somewhat amorphous scenes into shape (the show, unfortunately, would end up a flop). He had us write three- and four-page scenes for the acting school students there, which was the first time I ever heard anything I had written read aloud by someone else. (If you are wondering what I wrote about, it was this, as I recalclass="underline" A man and a woman are in a kitchen. The man is a little drunk, the woman complaining, they have an argument; I can’t imagine where that came from.) But, in the end, at least in terms of writing dramatic scenes, I couldn’t begin to put down on paper what I had in my head — of course this went back to the way I had grown up. I just circled around the dramatic possibilities, as if I would be disturbing the dead by writing about certain things, and at the same time, it seems that I couldn’t quite own up to the fact that I was the son of Cubans, as if it were something I wanted to hide.
“You have some good stuff going on here,” Schisgal once told me in his kindly manner as he was reading something I had written. “But how come I’m not hearing any ethnic stuff in this? It’s your family you’re writing about, aren’t you?”
“I guess I am,” I’d say.
“Then why don’t you run with it?”
“I don’t know.”
Whatever notions I might have entertained, however, it was Schisgal, puffing away on a cheery wood pipe, who, noticing how I would write inordinately long stage directions but with some panache and verbal intensity, suggested that I might better find my voice by trying another form altogether: “Ever try writing prose, kid?” he asked me that day. “If you haven’t, it’s something you should consider.”
I hadn’t, but it was something that was to linger in the back of my head for a long time.
I am not quite sure how I made the transition from the kind of super naturalistic (but stiffly guarded) scenes I had put on paper into actually trying to write fiction, but I do recall that it was the writing department’s chairman, an affable and dapper fellow by the name of Frederic Tuten (a future teacher and a friend of mine to this day), who suggested that I submit a piece to one of the several fiction writers then teaching under the humble auspices of the City College banner, a list that, in those days, was rather stellar (and serious) in a New York City way. Anxiously enough, and naïve about the difficulties of writing good prose, I spent several nights furiously typing up what I seemed to think might have qualified as a short story, of some twenty-five pages in often misspelled, nongrammatical sentences — a tale about a pretty blind girl, Celeste (a name I took from one of the lovely Parks sisters across the street from where I grew up), trapped in a miserable marriage, who, while having an affair with someone across town, takes the subway and, getting on the wrong train, ends up in a really bad neighborhood where she is jumped and taken sexual advantage of. (Not an iota of my Cuban roots could be found anywhere in it — think I made her cruel husband a Greek or an Italian, and as far as Celeste herself went, I never bothered to identify her origins, though I did have her feeling instinctually frightened by the strangeness of a South Bronx Latino neighborhood, her mugging taking place in an abandoned lot such as those I remembered seeing and playing in during my childhood.)
As for the actual quality of the writing in that piece, it was, I think, rather dense and, in its way, colorful. (I always loved details, though; with the way I thought and still think, order was never one of my fortes.) Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, taught at City at the time, and I had originally intended to submit my piece for his class — going so far as to scribble in pen For Professor Heller across the top of its first page — but it so happened that Donald Barthelme was also teaching there and while I had never read anything by him, my actress girlfriend, Carol, a longtime reader of The New Yorker, thought him quite funny and cutting-edge, and planted in my mind the notion I would do quite well with him if I were fortunate enough to be accepted into his class. (Thank you, Carol.)
So one afternoon, I went prowling around the halls of the writing department, which was housed in a long Quonset hut on the south campus, with my short story in hand, in search of Donald Barthelme. Inside the first office, whose doors were not always marked, I saw Joseph Heller, whose face I knew from his book jackets, white haired, regal, quite handsome, in a checkered shirt and blue jeans, sitting by his desk, eating what I think was a pastrami on rye with mustard sandwich (he looked up, asking, “Can I help you?”), and then moving on, I peered into another office, where sat the ethereally beautiful Francine du Plessix Gray in an elegant French-style dress, discussing some technicality intensely with some lucky student, and just beyond, I came to another doorway and saw someone who might have been Donald Barthelme: Behind a desk and typewriter sat a gray-haired man of late middle age, in a tie and rumpled jacket, with remarkably warm blue eyes and an incredibly florid complexion, who smiled at me gently as soon as he saw me.