CHAPTER 9. Roma
In the autumn of 1984, when I had become a member of PEN — a big deal to me — I was recruited to partake in a gala reading with some two dozen other authors, commemorating their first International Writers for Peace day, held downtown in that organization’s West Broadway headquarters. For the program itself, each writer read some statement or poem or bit of prose relating to the notion of peace; and while I had huddled with my friend Richard, from my neighborhood, coming up with a selection of quotes from the ancient world, of the “Thou shall beat thy sword into a ploughshare” variety, and had worked hard to put together what I had hoped would be an interesting presentation, I soon decided that I had perhaps put in too much effort, when walking into that jammed room, I overheard the poet Jane Cooper, gravely intoning, and with a quivering voice, the lyrics to “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
I turned heads there, mainly because, of all the writers on hand that day, I had been the only one to show up wearing a suit and tie. (Norman Mailer, for example, appeared at the podium looking quite hungover and wearing what seemed to be a wine-stained turtleneck sweater.) Sitting down next to Allen Ginsberg, he had nodded, smiling, at me. When his turn came, he got up and read some crazy-sounding poem of easy beatnik rhyme — something that had phrasing along the Nagasaki, Kill the Nazi, Kamikazi line which the audience of diehard lefty aesthetes deeply appreciated, but which I, as usual, didn’t get. (No offense to Allen Ginsberg fans, but I essentially thought the guy had a racket, though I will admit I was about as uptight as any young author could be.) I remember, however, feeling that I had made a connection with Ginsberg, and in what I considered a friendly Cuban manner, I patted him on the shoulder when he came down from the stage and took a seat beside me again.
When my turn came, I threw everyone in that room by reading from my selection of quotes about war and peace from antiquity. And while it was probably not the most exciting thing I could have done, at least it was brief, which, I’ve since learned, crowds really like; Ginsberg himself seemed to appreciate the effort. In fact, if anyone had seemed to have watched me carefully, it was he, with whom I made bespectacled eye contact quite often from the podium, Ginsberg nodding repeatedly at my words. Later, when I returned to my seat, he even tapped me on the knee. Afterward, however, when I got a chance to speak directly to Mr. Ginsberg at the cocktail party, he seemed puzzled that I had even approached him. He asked me two questions: “Which magazine are you with?” To which I answered, “None.” And then, more surprisingly, he asked, “What are you doing here?” which really threw me, since I had been sitting next to him, had been introduced as the Cuban-American author of Our House, and had thought him rather attentive during my little discourse. It was in that moment that I first learned that a lot of pretending went on at such events, and that even writers, not to be confused with anyone else, were required to first and foremost wear the appropriate Bohemian apparel.
And another moment I still cherish today? Through my publisher, I believe, I had been paired to give a reading with Bernard Malamud at a Presbyterian church fund-raiser on the West Side; I am not even sure of the exact occasion, think it might have been for the Columbia Literary Review, but I felt so honored to be sharing the podium with Malamud that it has remained one of my favorite readings to this day. The poor man, I should mention, was then dying from cancer, and so far gone as to be nearly unable to communicate, so deep was his depression. But he was thoroughly professional and, with some difficulty, read from a new work in progress, his age-mottled hands trembling and his voice wavering and low. Somehow he soldiered through. Afterward, when I had the chance to speak with him, he seemed half-dead to the world, until, taken by the devastating smile of a female friend who had come along with me, he found a momentary resurrection. Looking into her eyes, Malamud, buoyed by her presence, seemed to have slipped out from his suffering frame of mind, his posture straightening, his voice, though still delicate, more lively, his eyes for the first time that evening losing their melancholy. I have no idea of what they spoke about, something about old movies perhaps, but once she left him, he underwent a transformation back to the Malamud beside me, the writer who, like his characters, lived in a universe that always spoke to me, of pain and longings and grief. It was probably his last public reading.
And perhaps you’re wondering whether any Cubans ever showed up to my readings. They sometimes did. Even back then, I had a little Cuban fan base, word getting around, mainly among the females, longtime New Yorkers mostly, who, like my parents and aunts, had come here long before the revolution (they were the Cubans I mainly knew). But every so often, as I’d give a reading, I’d look out and spot someone, arms folded severely across his chest and with a no-nonsense seriousness upon his face, a man affiliated with some anti-Castro organization, on hand to check me out: I could always tell — and for years afterward I’d know them from their severe disappointment that my writing rarely commented on or openly attacked Fidel Castro or his regime; my work just wasn’t that way, and as a consequence, I have sometimes seen these kinds of cubanos get up, disgusted, and leave the room while I happened to be in midsentence.
For all of that, however, once the luster of my debut faded, I fell back into the routine of my days at the agency — living for the weekends, occasionally plodding off to the library at lunchtime (I will forever feel grateful to the nice Puerto Rican librarian who had ordered seven copies of Our House for the Mid-Manhattan branch.) Only occasionally did I feel as if my life had changed, as when some creative chief from another agency, knowing me from around and remembering that Times review, would call me up to offer me a job as a copywriter. In fact, for a brief time, I was tempted to move over to Y&R — which was just across the street — but somehow couldn’t bring myself to do it. By then, I had slipped into what I suppose might be called a postpartum depression, and while I had started to fool around with a new novel, something about a Cuban building superintendent named Cesar Castillo, lingering in the perpetual underworld of a basement (la ánima del Pascual?), I began to feel that my book’s publication had been a fluke, viz., thinking that had I not known the editor from CCNY, nothing would have happened in the first place. And, without realizing it, I still strongly identified with my pop.
Mainly, I’d become melancholic like him, out of the blue. I have the distinct memory of riding the subway home and thinking, as I held on to one of those poles in the center of the car, that I was probably hanging on to the same one that my pop did as he’d ride back, in a forlorn state of his own, with his scent of meat, cigarettes, and booze, from work. (Same line, same cars, the same passing rush of tunnel girders in the darkness; why not?) And it would hit me that perhaps my life would never really be different from his, and all at once, I’d wish to God that I could become someone else.
I had been feeling especially awful one October night in 1984, another of those cold miserable New York evenings, when the black slickened streets, runny with distending lights and misery (now I’m thinking like Ginsberg, carajo!) seemed to define the world. I’d always found blue Mondays hard to take — like just about everyone else who worked downtown — but after I’d turned thirty-three, an age that held a lot of symbolic weight for me as a Catholic, and my life, after the publication of that book, had seemed to flatten out again, I didn’t really know what the hell to do with myself, except to continue on in a job from which I would never be fired — for they knew they had someone smart on the cheap. With that realization, the prospect of trudging through yet another workweek on automatic pilot, as it were, became more and more of a burden. At thirty-three, I was old enough to feel that I hadn’t a whole lot of time to piss away, and though I thought about quitting nearly every week, the company’s generosity with those transit ads (and well-wishes for my career, such as it was), and the fact that I really didn’t have anything to fall back on, nor the nerve to just say “fuck it,” kept me there, though on some days I’d feel like I was going out of my mind with boredom.