After about a week, there were afternoon sessions devoted to student works. One delicate-seeming young man, his voice trembling, read a too lyrical and tender narrative about a son following a broken-down drunk through a small midwestern town at night and its resolution and climax, at story’s end, is the narrator’s discovery that said broken-down drunk is his father; the audience, so seriously disposed, dissected its various elements quite thoroughly, though never too bluntly nor cruelly, and generally seemed to like it, while I, having lived with such a father (except my Midwest town happened to be situated in West Harlem), felt almost contemptuous of the way it ended, as if the guy didn’t really know what he was talking about—A pop like that is just there from the time you are old enough to become aware. In those moments, for whatever my reasons, I formed a notion that I have since, rightly or wrongly, usually clung to. This I shared with just about anyone I could that day: Stories often end just where they should begin. It wasn’t a particularly brilliant insight — a lot of writing is thinking aloud on paper, and necessary if only to discover the real heart of a story — but I can remember realizing it was the first opinion about craft or an approach to narrative I’d ever voiced aloud.
Though I found an infinite number of things that put me off about such a place, something about that kind of environment — which is also true with art colonies — in its wall-to-wall nature, as it were, tends to push you into the center of whatever creative dream you are pursuing (or avoiding), whether you want it to or not. Quite simply, there were enough people around who sincerely loved the notion of literature as to embolden someone like me to give a reading one evening from that longish narrative about Cuba.
I had to fortify myself with red wine, and, as I recall, I often paused to light a cigarette, which helped dampen my nerves. Still, I had a hard time of it: Even at City College, I had never read anything so directly hooked up (at least in my mind) with an abstracted, somewhat more vocabulary-wizened version of my mother’s voice, that is to say, her more charming Cuban, non-nagging side — a voice that I had cloaked in dazzling language. (The kind of language to impress novices, and to win literary prizes, if you have the right grad school provenance.) It tore my guts up just to read it aloud — at certain points, when I came to parts about the campesino who enters her life, I had to stop because my breathing became so halting. Later, a friend told me that I had turned a livid red, and then, alternately, as white as parchment. It was such an emotional experience that, finishing up, I had to take off alone. Wandering through a meadow, not far from where Robert Frost kept a cabin, I looked up at a brilliantly clear night sky, the Milky Way hanging low, and, strangely enough, felt my father’s presence all around me — or to put it differently, perhaps I felt his absence — but, in any event, I stayed out there for more than an hour, confounded by the whirl of emotions that was summoned up by what I had written; as it’s been said that all roads lead to Rome, anything I wrote eventually, however veiled, in some mystical way, led back to my pop.
I continued to think about him, at some point, every day, long after I returned from that conference. Hanging on to his coattails, everything else about my life, from my childhood illness and the sadness I felt growing up, followed behind the images I had of him. In fact, though I was haunted by his memory, it remained something I hadn’t been particularly aware of, until, like a thief, at some moment, it would come up behind me. Once while attending the play Da, about an Irish man’s tribulations with his father’s (often humorous) ghost, there came a scene in which the father stands atop the roof of a house, and because it brought back to me that image of my father standing on the rooftop of Butler Hall the night he died, I lost it completely, and would have broken down crying if it were not for the public nature of that place. (My girlfriend, by the way, without knowing it, once took me for a surprise birthday dinner at that restaurant. There I had tried to eat, without letting on that my father had died not ten yards from where we were sitting.) Oddly, for all the times I passed by the Biltmore Hotel, on Forty-third and Park, I never felt tempted to look inside its front lobby, which, I’ve been told, had remained largely unchanged from earlier years. (I don’t know if I was afraid to walk in there or if, in my mind, the old Biltmore of my childhood is the only one I wanted to see.) And at Christmas, despite all the frivolity and parties and drinking and screwing around that came with that season (oh, the things I would see in the office when people were really letting loose), I’d feel a special melancholy. Something about working downtown in what the kids in my neighborhood called the canyon, with the hawk — the wind — at my back, always seemed gratifying to me in a strangely ghostly way, as if, walking in a crowd along the avenue, I could picture my pop, back when he was alive, among them.
I knew he was dead, but memory is a bitch and, with a daydreamer like myself, could make the past seem imminent. And though his presence has faded in its power from my mind by now, back then, I had such a strong recollection of him physically, and of his manner, it wasn’t much of a stretch for me to wishfully impose him upon the anonymity of a crowd.
At night, I’d worry about falling asleep and seeing his ghost. Whereas I used to wake up with a jolt, inspired perhaps by the agitated emotions and repressed memories of my childhood, I’d now awaken, my heart beating wildly, from the impression that my pop was just outside in the hall waiting for me, as if he wanted to take me with him. One night I walked into the darkness of the living room, where I saw my father, or the shadow of him: He spoke to me, in Spanish of course, saying: “Soy ciego”—“I’m blind.” And then he said: “Por favor, abra la luz”—“Please, turn on the light.” When I did, he told me, “Thank you,” and simultaneously vanished. I swear this happened — dream or not, that’s what I saw and heard. After a while, it occurred to me that I had some demons to exorcize, but each time I sat down and tried to conjure the world I’d come from, and wrote about my father — honestly — the sensation that I was tampering with the dead left me feeling so anxious that by the time I’d get up from my desk, after scratching at my forearms and wrists while smoking cigarette after cigarette for hours, my skin was a bloody mess. This went on for a long time, each little fragment that I came up with (and threw into a box) bringing with it a price, by way of rashes and sores.