I have to say this about City: It was, and still is, about the most ethnically mixed university in the country, a true honeycomb of nationalities and cultural cliques. You couldn’t walk down a hallway without hearing three or four languages being spoken — from Russian to Chinese to Urdu. In one of my classes, during the onset of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, as soon as news of it broke, several of my fellow students, Israelis, got up from their seats and, leaving the classroom immediately, disappeared for the next three weeks. There were Chinese social clubs and gangs around campus, more or less secretive societies whose members seemed to keep themselves out of sight. For the most part unobtrusive, they did have some friction with the black gangs. One afternoon, while walking back from class in one of the main buildings, Shepherd Hall, I came upon a scuffle in which some black guys were doing their best to put a beating on a scrawny Chinese fellow. All I did was to go forward — knowing one of them from a class; he was ex — Special Forces, of recent Vietnam vintage, but a very nice fellow in general, though scary-looking with his Mohawk Afro — asking what was going on, and that was enough, it seemed, to break up the attack, though not without getting my share of dirty looks from my black brethren. In any event, I helped the Chinese guy up, and it turned out that this scrawny fellow, who really wasn’t worse for wear, happened to be the head of one of those gangs. Before running off to get his boys, I suppose for retribution, he told me: “Anyone messes with you, let me know.”
No one did, though one evening as I went heading down the long hill from City toward the subway on 137th Street, this big black guy came up to me and did this knife-in-a-pocket thing, asking for my money. That’s when I explained to him that he was in the wrong place, that the kids who attended City College were generally poor immigrants without much money at all and that if he wanted to go where the students were better off, Columbia University was the place to be. “Oh, yeah?” he asked me. “Where’s that?” And I told him—“Just take the train down to 116th Street. Or you can walk.” And I even advised him about where he should stand, in front of its entranceway gates along Broadway, and that since money didn’t mean much to them, because it came to them so easily, they wouldn’t give him any trouble at all. “Thanks, man,” he told me, before heading off on his noble mission.
Ironically enough, I had more contact with black folks and Eastern Europeans than I did with the Latinos of City. Yet there was one fellow, a very cool, bone-thin Chilean graduate student with a Fu Manchu mustache and ponytail, whom I’d see from time to time in the English Department. He knew that I was named Hijuelos and seemed quite amused by the fact that I’d turn a deep red when he’d speak to me in Spanish, and answer him with some kind of jive muttering under my breath. After a while, he gave up on that conversational route but noticing that I seemed to have an interest in writing, for I was always turning up with books and clumps of my own work to show around, he began to preach the bible of his own aesthetic preferences — Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Luis Borges. Of the three, I’d only heard of Borges and only because Barthelme, in trying to nudge me away from my purely naturalistic tendencies (and probably lumping all Latino nationalities together), thought he was putting me on to a writer I might consider a kind of kin. But I’d never bothered to check Borges out until the Chilean mentioned him as welclass="underline" I suppose the fact that he was Latino indeed made a difference to me, as far as taking his advice to heart. Soon enough I got ahold of some of Borges’s works (Labyrinths and The Aleph and Other Stories, I recall) from the Salter’s bookstore on Broadway. Sometime later, as well, I purchased a copy of Cortázar’s Hopscotch and, becoming drunk with those worlds, fell into a swoon that lasted months, as if a ray of light filled with warmth and pride-making energies had struck me from heaven. Soon enough, I went wading into a sea of phenomenal Latin American writers — the most prominent of them García Márquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude was amazing — but others as well, like Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa, whose equally wonderful novels were behind the boom in Latin American letters then sweeping the world.
I loved them all, could not get enough of their writings, and the fact those books were written by Latinos stirred up some crazy pride inside of me; and once I got on that trail, I discovered two Cuban writers — José Lezama Lima and Guillermo Cabrera Infante — whose works not only blew me away but left me feeling so good, as if I were back in Cuba or keeping company with Cubans, that I stepped back and, checking out my own work with a recently awakened eye, felt as if, in a way, I had been reborn. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel particularly ashamed of how and what I had come from and, thinking about my father and mother, began to conceive that perhaps, one day, I would be able to write something about them, and without the fears and shame that always entered me.
Of course, that epiphany, and the euphoria that followed it, having its moment, left as quickly as it had come, and the truth remained, that once all that glorious smoke had cleared and I looked over my shoulder and behind me, and felt the indifference of the world — who the fuck would care about anything I would say? — I settled back into the safety of the refuge I had constructed for myself as an americano with wavering ambitions.
However, by the time I’d returned to Barthelme’s classroom, he’d seemed to notice a marked improvement in my techniques and ear for language. I owed that not only to the wildly brilliant Latin Americans and Cubans I had been reading, but to the bookish influence of the aforementioned Frederic Tuten, who put me on to writers like Ferdinand Céline and Rabaleis and another of his favorites, Malamud, whom I had always liked but had not read extensively. (I even wrote a piece in his class that I still rather like to this day: an account — imaginary — of a boy’s outing to Coney Island with his father, which I read aloud, with my voice quavering with emotions I could not yet understand.)
Lest I put you to sleep, I will try to conclude this by mentioning a few other authors whose works I read carefully and whose techniques I tried to understand in those days: Carson McCullers, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Peter Handke, Günter Grass, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, John Berger, and yes, the short stories of Barthelme himself — among others — and if there is no seeming logic to that list, it is because I read everything I could get my hands on, without any overriding design, a kind of madness — or book lust — coming over me. (Speaking of lust, no matter what I happened to be doing in bed, I’d look forward to getting back to whatever I happened to be reading: That’s how far gone I had become.)