I also did a reading back then in an East Harlem apartment — think it was at Quincy Troupe’s home: I don’t recall just how long I read from my work — mostly black folks were in attendance, and while I stuck out (as always) and met one hell of a grouchy poet in Amiri Baraka, I felt really good to be hanging out with that crowd. (In a way, outside the office, I had started to lead a secret life.) And yet the reading that made the most difference, with Wesley Brown, took place up at City, where I filled in as a last-second replacement.
It turned out that the audience included one of my former classmates at City, Karen Braziller, who had published my short story in her review, and her husband: They ran a small downtown press — Persea Books, whose offices were on Delancey Street in the same building that once housed Mad magazine (I remember those kinds of things). Having read from a portion of my manuscript, I think it was the husband who inquired whether I had anything else along those lines. Not long afterward, I turned up at their door in their building off Gramercy Park East with a couple of shopping bags filled with the fragments and longer narratives I’d been fooling around with over the past few years: These represented what would become, after intense amounts of work on both our parts, my first novel.
Taking a few years, the actual process went more or less smoothly, and at a far less hectic pace than what publishers would demand today. About the writing itself: typewriters, ribbons, pen and pencil, notepads, white-out, scissors, erasers, Scotch tape, and rubber cement were the tools I used to produce the final manuscript.
As for the editing, I benefited from the expertise acquired by my former colleague at CCNY, Karen Braziller, then a senior editor at E. P. Dutton but assuming those same duties for their press. Spanish proofreading was done by my friend Ed Vega, with whose corrections the novel passed muster. Finally, when it came to a cover, we settled on a painting, found in a book in the New York public library (I think), an early work, circa 1945, by Philip Guston entitled If this be not I? It included so many elements that figured in my novel — columns, a stoop, a figure in what looked like a chef’s toque, and distant tenements — that it seemed the only choice. Over the title, a generous quote from Barthelme, while on the back one found a fairly stern picture of me, going through what I guess was a “Russian author” phase, in a beard.
But until it was actually published, even as I continued my weekly routine at TDI, that book seemed an abstraction, whose eventual quite public nature I hardly even thought about at the time. I doubt, in fact, if I could have written that book were it not for the feeling that it would somehow remain an intimate and private affair: How else could one go ahead and dive into certain personal ordeals and write about them unself-consciously? Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that the novel would be read by some of the people it was actually about.
But it wasn’t just that: I agonized over parts of Our House in a way that few people could ever imagine. And while I’ve since learned that it’s not really worth draining yourself emotionally (like I am doing now in this memoir) for what some cooler-hearted folks might categorize as quaintly visceral, as a younger person, I couldn’t help myself from striving to establish, through a book, some sense of just what I had experienced. Even when the catharsis you go through can leave you feeling euphoric or incredibly sad, the fact that you’ve allowed some fairly deep and personal secrets to escape into the world doesn’t hit you until it actually gets out there, coño!
As the date of release approached, I had been told that one can never know about reviews, but bit by bit, over a period of a few months both before and after publication, a number of newspaper reviews, around fifteen in all (which seemed a colossal validation of my work), came out, and all favorably, about the novel. This crop included the New York Times Sunday book section: A certain Edith Milton reviewed Our House along with a novel by a Korean writer, Wendy Law-Yone, The Coffin Tree. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, as kindly as she spoke of my writing, she was the first to pigeonhole me as an “immigrant” writer (translation: “ethnic” spokesman for the primitive people known as Hispanics in those days).
Strangely enough, when Ed Vega reviewed the novel in a literary magazine, Vega, though he really liked it, he pointed out that while it had been quite professionally produced, it was badly lacking in Spanish copyediting. (“Hey, man, uh, you remember that you proofed it?”) Nevertheless, I felt so buoyed by these attentions and rich — I’d made four thousand dollars for my five years of work! — that for the first time in my life, I actually believed I had a writing future.
As it happened, so did the kindly people I worked alongside at TDI, who offered me a fairly large amount of car-card advertising space on the New York city buses at a rate that even I could afford. What’s more, my art director and our production department came up with the artwork for me, while I provided the written copy, which, for the record, went: “A family’s journey through three worlds: Cuba. . America. . and the Unknown!” Afterward, a friend of mine, Eddie Egan, head of Bristol-Myers’s production, prevailed upon some of his Chambers Street acquaintances, who operated some of the bigger presses in the city, to do him a favor by printing those ads up for free.
In short order, not a month after the book had come out (on little cat’s feet), some several thousand car-card ads for Our House were gracing some of the more primo bus lines in New York City, among them the much-coveted Fifth Avenue route. And so it wasn’t long before a shopper heading down to Saks or Lord & Taylor on the number 5 line could look up and notice a deeply processed advertisement for Our House right next to one for Marlboro cigarettes. In fact, each bus would have had four or five of them. Other lines, covering Manhattan from east to west, with some extending into the Bronx and Brooklyn, on buses otherwise advertising the likes of The Mists of Avalon, also conveyed the not too spectacular news that a writer named Hijuelos had apparently arrived. Entertaining visions of popular success, I soon learned, however, that no matter how many buses ran ads about a novel, the books had to be in the stores. Only a few that I checked — think Scribner’s and some others downtown, as well Salters on 113th and the Book Forum in my neighborhood — had copies. Now and then, someone from the office would come over to my desk with a copy of Our House for me to sign. And what I usually heard was this: “Oh, but I had to look all ovah the place, just to find it.” (This, before the days of Amazon and ebooks and iPads.)
But people couldn’t have been nicer. I got bottles of booze in the interoffice mail, with notes of congratulations, and one of my partners, Charlie, in subway clocks even took me out to lunch: “So you really fuckin’ did it, didn’t you, kid?” Folks from my neighborhood also appreciated the effort, given that I had captured something of the way they came up. And while very few of them bought my book — I can count those who did on one hand — my pal Richard purchased two, for himself and his brother Tommy, who, as I soon learned, had formed his own opinion about it.