But, in general, it seemed that I behaved disastrously: Long after that rooftop terrace had been cleared out, around midnight, as I sat in some diner with my psychologist in-laws, who doubtlessly had many a reason for feeling annoyed with me (“Must you smoke?” the mother asked. “You realize that you drank too much!”), they reiterated the aforementioned plan for me as a demand: “You do realize that we expect our daughter to live in a certain way.” Never one to hide my feelings, the fact that my fair-skinned face turned a livid red could not have pleased them much at all. In any event, from that night onward, the days of that ill-advised marriage were already numbered.
For the sake of brevity and to get on with this story, sometime in December of 1976, on a cold and miserable day a few weeks before Christmas, I woke up in our apartment with an awful influenza. I was so sick I could barely get out of bed, but my wife thought I should go to my new job, which I’d held since September at that point, so that “we,” as she put it, could use any leftover sick days for a future vacation. Though I had the chills, felt like death, vomited my guts out a few times, and happened to be running a fever, I somehow dragged myself into the rawness of that day and caught a train from West Seventy-ninth Street to work.
On a good day without delays, it took ten minutes to get down to the Times Square station, and riding the front car, I’d get out through the Fashion Avenue exit and walk east along Fortieth toward Madison: There, taking up the southeast corner and right across from the Young & Rubicam agency, stood 275, one of those great old art deco office buildings, with marble pilasters and gilded ceilings in the lobby, that remind one (reminded me, at any rate) of a New York that perhaps only ever really existed in the movies. (Just walking in that neighborhood always brought to mind the films of Fred MacMurray — for I had caught the tail end of a time when a great number of male office workers, the older ones at least, streaming to and fro out of Grand Central Terminal, still wore hats.) Altogether, I just found that ambience — so 1940s–1950s — reassuring, in almost a supernatural, time-dissolving way.
Or at least that’s what the daydreamer in me would think, even in the midst of an awful illness. As I’d cut over eastward from the subway, I was always fooling with all kinds of tautologies — feeling, for example, that in the same way I happened to be thinking about what it must have been like back in the 1940s, someone far in the future was also thinking about what it must have been like in the 1970s, a kind of cubist (not Cuban) time thing going on in my head.
Often enough, as I’d zip past Bryant Park, I’d have a book, usually borrowed from the Forty-second Street library, opened in my hands, weather permitting. I’d pass anonymously through that perpetually bustling world in my tie and jacket and overcoat, without taking my eyes off a page except when I came to a light, cars and trucks and buses zooming by ruthlessly, or noticed a pretty girl with a nice figure sauntering along in high heels nearby. Rarely, I should add, did I daydream about writing in those days, at least as a priority, and if you had asked me what I did on the sly, I would have told you that I occasionally messed around with some of the crap I had written for school, in the same way I drew sometimes, or went downstairs to visit and play guitar with my friend Ching, or jammed uptown with my old pals — all my creative outlets being roughly equal in my estimation — just interesting ways of going through my days.
Ah, but my job: Apparently, after finally deciding to get “serious” about my life, I didn’t really care what I did with my precious time. I hadn’t been looking for work too long and, recession or not, should have been more discerning, but I considered myself lucky to find any job at all. When a certain Mr. Belsky, my interviewer, offered me an entry-level clerk’s position with the transit advertising company known as TDI (or Transportation Display Inc.), whose offices occupied the third and fourth floors at the aforementioned address, I, without giving much thought to my future, accepted. Even if it was the kind of work that I couldn’t have imagined for myself while a graduate student at City, and there were other things I could have been doing — like taking a gamble and hitting the road as a backpacker to see the world, or, for that matter, following in the paths of so many of my classmates by heading into the relatively serene haven of academia — I simply didn’t care how I earned my livelihood as long as I’d somehow remain faithful to “my true self.”
Without knowing it, I had become earthbound by certain loyalties — to my old neighborhood, to my friends, to New York, and, yes, even if it seemed contradictory, because she could so easily drive me crazy, to my mother. As a result, a more adventuresome existence just didn’t occur to me, as if on some level I believed that doing right by other people was the Cuban thing to do. (One of the few Cuban attributes — family loyalty — I seemed to still strongly identify with.)
At the same time, I can remember that, in those days, I often thought about one of my favorite Tennessee Williams lines, from The Glass Menagerie, “People go to the movies, instead of moving,” and, while doing so, felt a slight twinge of regret going through me. (Well, a twinge of something, but just a ripple against the much darker feelings that often seized me.) Nevertheless, I couldn’t have imagined, interviewing for that job, that I’d spend almost nine years there, in various capacities, while doing a pretty good imitation, for all my coolguy aspirations, of an ambitionless lower-middle-management ad agency schlub, to use that fine New Yorkism. (On the other hand, I’d recall that my father was almost thirty when he came to the States and ended up washing dishes for a time, and I’d console myself with the thought that, comparatively speaking, I was way ahead in the game.)
To give you an idea of the tight job market, I was hired along with a brilliant Yale graduate about my age, David Shinn, later the department head, and eventually, in a new professional incarnation, a lawyer writing judges’ opinions for the courts down on Centre Street. We both began work that same afternoon: Our immediate boss was a rough-hewn, bulbous-faced Jimmy Durante look-alike, Richard Bannier, who, as an ex — navy man and World War II veteran, shouted his instructions and stood so close to you that you could read the veins on his nose, the hair in his nostrils, all the while catching his spittle. It was he who first explained to us the rudiments of the outdoor advertising business while taking us around to the various departments in the company, and the folks we’d work with: sales was upstairs, art production in the back, accounting a partitioned-off area just off ours (in which every nervous bookkeeper, some twelve or so and all females, chain-smoked throughout the day, a perpetual fog drifting over them), and after a quick tour through the department that managed the national branches — for TDI had operations in just about every major city and airport in the country — to payroll (which consisted of only one employee, a self-possessed and ever so gentle cubana, Delores Perez, after whom, for what it’s worth, I would name a major character in one of my books). Lastly, we were introduced to our contracts manager, the man from whom we were to get our daily assignments. He was in his mid-thirties, a little paunchy, with an Elvis thing going on with his always well-lubricated hair, a constant smoker as well (Winstons, “which taste good like cigarettes should”), and a rosy bloom to his cheeks. Coming in at seven in the morning, he’d work his brains out until one, then go to a local gin mill and get pickled, afterward holing up in his office for the rest of the day, reading the Advertising Age newspaper. Occasionally, I’d catch him blowing his breath into his own palm to make sure he didn’t smell of alcohol, and he’d often spritz his mouth with Binaca spray. A jokester, except when higher-ups were around, he, like Bannier, was a very nice man, though somewhat of an acquired taste.