It was one of those evenings when just about everything seemed off, faces elongating in crazy animal ways; the pizzeria guy, stout and sturdy, looking to me like a bull through the glare of his window; the panhandlers coming off like jackals and seeming more devious than usual as I’d just walk on (“Hey, baldy, I’m talking to you!”); the subway stairwells, gutters, and sidewalks smelling pissier (and shittier) than before, and when not even the notion of buying myself a few dollar bottles of wine and smoking half a pack of cigarettes, while watching some bad horror flick on TV, cheered me up. One of those what-on-earth-are-you-doing-with-your-life evenings. I was in the kind of mood where just to hear español spoken on the street irritated me — as in “What the fuck did you all ever do for me?” When I walked into the dollar shop to buy some toilet paper, even the gossiping sweet-natured old Latina ladies by the counter, whom I generally felt charmed by, got on my nerves. (So maybe I was a white motherfucker after all.) Just a lousy night altogether, and on top of it all, I couldn’t believe that I’d have to get up and start all over again the next morning. (I’d leave at eight thirty-five; somehow I’d always get to the office, hustling, by nine.)
In this lousy frame of mind, I walked into my building entranceway and got my mail. Occasionally I’d receive a “fan” letter — in the same way I kept every review for that book, so I did the letters, maybe ten in all, which I’d answer with as much grace and gratitude as I could muster. Mainly I’d contend with the same roster of bills—“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit,” I would say to myself while flipping through them.
That evening the mail included a creamy envelope of some thickness, whose return addressee was an organization I had only just recently heard about, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it might say. I was sitting in my living room, smoking a cigarette, when I tore it open, and even as I reread the thing, I could hardly believe its contents. I must have read it a half dozen times when I finally realized its significance. That letter, quite simply, offered me an extraordinary opportunity: Would I, the recipient, be willing and available to accept, if so offered to him, a paid year’s residence as a writing fellow at the American Academy in Rome? The fellowship would come with a monthly stipend, a travel allowance, living quarters in a villa, all my meals, and a studio. It was to begin in the autumn of 1985. Among the things that hit me in those moments was my recollection of a photograph I had once seen of Ralph Ellison, taken in the sunny courtyard — or cortile—of the academy’s villa. I had always thought that going to a place like that would be a dream, and you know what? I didn’t even have to think twice about it. Would I be available? Who were they kidding?
At the awards ceremony itself, in May, which was held in the institute’s amphitheater, after a rather tony luncheon with various other artists and award recipients on the institute’s stately grounds on 155th Street and Audubon Terrace, I received my Rome Prize. The presenter was a rather plastered, towering, and hunched-over John Galbraith. Beforehand, I’d been told that he would first read a citation about my work and then shake my hand, but either he forgot about it or they had changed their minds. “Oh, to be a young man again, going to Rome,” he told me, with a handshake. “How enviable.” And that was it.
Still I waited for him to say something else, and when he gestured for me to leave the stage, with a shoving motion of his upraised palms, I looked out at the audience and shrugged, cocking my head about, as if he were some kind of nut, and brought down the house. I also remember Jerome Robbins smiling warmly and winking at me as I proceeded offstage, and hearing my mother occasionally, sitting out somewhere in the audience with her friend Chaclita, emoting—“Ay! Ay!”—during the ceremonies. I recall urinating in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mark Twain — era urinals downstairs between Harold Bloom and Robert Penn Warren and feeling as if I had finally arrived!
It was quite a pleasant affair, really the high point of my life to that point, and the first “graduation” ceremony in which I was involved that my mother ever attended. (They even had a photograph of me, along with some samples of my manuscript in a display case, which impressed her very much.) I am not quite sure what my mother made of that rather haughty crowd, but she enjoyed the hors d’oeuvres and wine (unusual for her to drink at all) and nearly fainted at the sight of Jacqueline Onassis, whom, at one point during the reception afterward, she discovered standing just next to her.
“Ay, pero por Dios,” she exclaimed, patting her chest while holding her gold neck chain crucifix in hand. “If only your papá was alive to see this!” Ms. Onassis, for her part, was gracious enough to notice my mother’s genuine excitement and smiled at her. For months, all my mother talked about “Jackie y yo” with whomever she bumped into, and years later, having decided to try her hand at writing a novel, she came up with a wild scenario about time travel, in which Onassis figured as the reincarnation of Marie Antoinette, or something crazy like that.
That next summer before my thirty-fourth birthday, after a heartbreaking farewell to my friends at TDI — after nearly nine years with that company, I was too sentimental for my own good and may have broken down at the party they had thrown for me — I went off to Europe for the first time in my life.
Flying to Madrid and lugging a valise that I’d stupidly filled with books, few clothes, and, among other things, a passport holder stuck under my shirt, I didn’t have the vaguest idea of what I was doing. But arriving in the land of my forebears, I felt surprised by just how much my Spanish blood meant to me. It just hadn’t occurred to me before. (These were sentiments that the Spaniards, in their atheism, their newly digested post-Franco freedom, and their hard-nosed somberness probably found quaintly bemusing.) I was stunned to see so many fair-skinned and blond Spaniards, especially in the north (“They look like us,” I wrote my brother.) I lived happily, ineptly on occasion. It thrilled me to hear castellano as only the Spaniards could speak it, with all their Arabic flourishes, the theta and rrrrrrrs rolling like a waterfall (yes, I know I’m pushing things.) While thinking that I couldn’t really speak much Spanish, I found myself forced to use what I knew, and after about two weeks there, while staying in pensions and having to navigate the markets and shops and museums of that city, I started speaking and writing it — even sent my mother a postcard entirely composed in Spanish, detailing my “adventures,” such as they were. The younger women in Spain, it seemed to me, were either femmes fatales, like some of the shapely Guardia Civil ladies I saw standing on the corners in their tight khaki uniforms, holding machine guns, or intellectual, schoolteacherly sorts — at least the ones who spoke to me. It took me a while to let go of certain images in my head — like the electric dusted air of the subways, sleazy Times Square, the projects, the shit of certain neighborhoods, and, of course, that other something that I’d always carried around with me, the baggage I had from my upbringing. I liked it that life in Spain went a certain way, that I didn’t ever have to worry about getting jumped and that I didn’t have to keep my radar turned on or go through all the endless nonsense of seeming perfectly calm when finding myself in a lousy neighborhood, as often happened to me in New York, though once I went south, I couldn’t help but feel a distrust for the inordinately friendly and aggressive Moroccans, who always seemed to be on the make. (I was right, at least about the younger ones, whom I’d encounter hanging around the bus stations or following me down a street, calling out, “You speak English?. . Etes-vous Français? Esperate, Aleman!”) After years of adhering to an early schedule, I didn’t have to worry about getting up at any particular hour, and when I finally got around to breakfast, I’d usually end up in a bar, where I’d smoke a few cigarettes, eat a buttered roll, and drink brandy with my coffee. (God bless any nation where the workers begin their day in that manner.) For lunch, living off tourist-menu specials, I ate more rosemary grilled merluza and olive-oil-drenched potatoes and drank more cheap red Spanish wine than I ever would again in my life. Along the way, I became grateful for any opportunity to engage with the Spaniards. Once when two young (and very fine) girls came up to me in their school uniforms on the street selling lottery tickets to raise money for some orphanage, I didn’t even hesitate to buy them, so thrilled did I feel that they looked me in the eyes and presumed that I was a Spaniard. In the Prado, where Picasso’s Guernica hung behind a massive plate of glass, protected by two machine gun — bearing soldiers (I’d never seen so many weapons being held out in plain sight before), and where, in the pretentious manner of the daydreaming young, I decided that Velazquez’s Las Meninas had to be my favorite painting of all time, I’d sit around for hours in the overheated rooms, feeling as if I’d won a million dollars in some contest.