And I’d hang around with her after class sometimes. She liked the company. I got to meet her son, David Rieff — he owned a red F-hole hollow-body electric guitar and seemed to enjoy playing country music. (We talked about “jamming, man” once — but it never happened.) On one of those afternoons, she told me that she had always wanted to learn how to play tennis and asked if, when she got better, I would ever be interested in hitting a few balls with her — from her windows, one could see the courts of 122nd Street in the park. She’d also confess that fame was tiring, that the best part of writing came during the actual conception of an idea. She’d talk about going downtown to have dinner sometime — and once when she dropped me off in a taxi on her way to Union Square, she seemed sincere in expressing her disappointment that she couldn’t spend more time with me and had to see her publisher at FSG, Roger Straus Jr., instead.
In Sontag’s class, as with Barthelme’s and every literature course I took as a graduate student, with some real first-rate scholars like Frederick Karl, I received an A — a grade, from one of the leading intellectuals of the day, which, in retrospect, I should have taken as an enormous encouragement about my future prospects as a writer. But you know what? Even when I felt this immediate jolt of elation and truly happy for a few days at such a recognition, once I slipped back into feeling like my real self — not the smart guy who had impressed even such a brilliant writer as Sontag (or Barthelme), but the crude and undereducated snooker artist who still felt like shoplifting every time he walked into a store — all that faded. It would hit me the hardest when I’d go up and visit my mother, bring her some takeout Chinese food, doing my best to hang in there with her, and I’d want to tell her that some big-shot lady, mi maestra, really thought I had something going with my work. But it would have meant nothing to her anyway — what would she have known of Sontag or Barthelme — and, you know, once I’d sit down by that kitchen table, where my pop had passed so many nights, I’d remember that I had a certain place in the world, and I’d be stupid to try to exceed it: I’d be better off leaving all that writing business to the real talents in those classes.
CHAPTER 7. My Life on Madison Avenue
By the time I left that program, with the writing of my MFA thesis deferred for the future, I had packed in the notion of becoming a schoolteacher, along with my musical aspirations, leaving them to molder in that realm of passed-over possibilities. At the same time, I did not think of myself as a writer by any stretch of the imagination. Instead I considered myself an appreciator of writing with some hands-on experience of it, some three or so years’ worth, though without a thing to show for myself by way of publishing, save a single Barthelme-like short story, which appeared in an issue of a literary magazine called Persea. (Perhaps only because it had happened to be edited by one of my fellow students at City, a certain Karen Braziller.)
In any event, I remained far behind the pack: By comparison, one of my fellow students, Ted Mooney, had already published a rather remarkable and much-lauded story, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” in the quite prestigious North American Review, while another of our first-rate talents, Philip Graham, had come out with a book of his own finely hewn experimental short stories. (Since I’m going there, some of the other students who were writing and publishing wonderful work were Wesley Brown, Linsey Abrams, and Myra Goldberg, among those I remember.) At the same time, I could not pick up a literary journal without seeing something by the Barthelme-esque T. Coraghessan Boyle, or Jayne Anne Phillips, author of the mysterious and fluid Black Tickets, or by the most radiantly successful Ann Beattie, another emerging star whose first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, came out shortly after I had left City, in 1976. That list of emerging talents could go on, but no matter where one looked in those days, I can’t keep from adding, it was a very rare thing to see published work by any members of that primitive tribe from our urban jungles known as los Latinos.
And while I seemed to have acquired, through my own novice writings, a growing appreciation (or love/hate relationship) for my roots and their Cuban-ness, however skewered by the events that had formed me, I thought it would be years before I could write anything worthwhile. Even then, who out there would publish it? For, in those days at least, it was not as if publishing houses or literary magazines were knocking down doors to find what I would call homegrown Latino/Hispanic writers. As American letters stood, its Mount Rushmore would have been carved with the granite faces of Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer, with a descending pantheon of names from Barthelme to John Gardner forming the rushing funnel below, while even the greatest of black writers, like Ralph Ellison (whose work I also loved), would have hovered about those bodies like some distantly circling satellite. (Of course, behind earlier successes like James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones — later Amiri Baraka — there were younger black writers coming up, John Edgar Wideman and Toni Morrison being the most prominent. Now try to find a comparable list of Latinos in any discussion of American letters from that period — or earlier — and you won’t find a single name to mention.)
Having said all this, I’m turning my own stomach with my selfrighteous and somewhat pedantic tone and would prefer to move on to a more exciting subject. And so I will leave it at this: If American readers thought about “Spanish” writing at all, it came down to the highly revered Latin Americans of that day, and even they were being appreciated only by the highbrow liberal intellectuals and some of the better-educated general public. For what it’s worth, homegrown Latino writing — Cuban-American or otherwise — if it already existed, wasn’t being noticed, nor celebrated to a degree that would have drawn out a somewhat reticent and self-doubting fellow like me: In that way, I was frightened to death of going onstage.
Any ambitions that I might have developed weren’t helped by my then in-laws who thought me self-deluded for ever having wasted my time in graduate school. Even before I’d married their daughter, they sat me down as someone who wouldn’t have much of a future without their assistance and offered to get me, through connections, into the University of Chicago Law School. Of course, once we were to move out there and I started attending classes, we’d need a car and a place to live, which they would most generously provide, as well as their active financial support. But, even without thinking seriously about my future, that whole notion about becoming a respectable lawyer son-in-law, living the middle-class life with all those strings attached, just wasn’t for me. (And the mother could be condescending: While discussing seating arrangements for a wedding dinner that never happened, when someone suggested that it might be nice if she sat next to my mother, she quipped, “Then who would I have to talk to?”)
Deep down, that marriage wasn’t anything I really wanted, which was probably why I got incredibly drunk at my own wedding reception. For the record, that was an easy thing to do: With tons of booze available, but little food, and while the band playing Top Forty stuff kept a lot of the attendees out on the dance floor, several of my friends, and my cousin by marriage Angel Tamayo, drinking on a canapé-filled stomach, got violently ill and, after throwing up all over a table, passed out. I did no better: The only part of the reception I remembered the next day was dancing with my aunt Cheo, to whom, prompted by my mother, I whispered a carefully prepared line: “Estoy muy contento de que hayas venido a mi boda ”—“I am very happy that you have come to my wedding.” She, with her Cuban Edith Bunker sweetness, was delighted and pulled me close, saying: “Te quiero mucho, nieto”—“I love you very much, nephew.” And I would be able to recall running into some of my school friends and a few of my neighbors from Eighty-third Street, as well as pals from the old neighborhood, and sitting beside Barthelme and smoking a few cigarettes, all the while asking, “So what do you think?” (His answer? “How very interesting.”)