My musician pals were no different, and after holding a party in my place, where we just hung out smoking this and that, with lots of wine flowing, most took turns with their girlfriends in the spare bedroom. Having a soft heart, I’d lent my favorite in the band, a great guitar player named Sandro, an extra key, but once that got out — and it did, as he couldn’t help bragging about his special in with me — I’d find myself in the situation of having to use a coded door ring when I’d come home, for copies of the key had been made. But, even then, that didn’t always work: Poor Sojin once came in to find my bassist friend in bed with his girlfriend. After a while, with someone wanting to come over nearly every day, it became an impossible situation, especially in terms of my writing, and I found myself in the unfortunate position of having to dislodge my Italian friends from that apartment — at first they cooperated, though rather sullenly, a moratorium finally agreed upon — then that would fall apart, someone ringing my bell, which could be heard all through the building, at two in the morning. What else could I do but let him and his girlfriend in?
Oh, they were grateful all right, but between that and my discovery that after almost two years in Rome, I had run out of money, a check cashed at a local Banco Nazionale having bounced, it started occurring to me that sometime soon, I would have to leave that city and the wonderful, occasionally cantankerous people who inhabited it.
CHAPTER 10. Another Book
Not that I wanted to leave, however. That notion not only left me despairing, but my girlfriend, taking my sudden decision the wrong way, thought that I had made up my poor financial situation. After treating her so well, and playing the sport with just about everybody I had met in Rome, I’d gone through a good amount of money, and far more quickly than I ever thought possible. (Every so often I’d take the Sicilian and the beauty from upstairs in my apartment house to the toniest restaurant in the neighborhood for lunch, a joint called Il Cortile, where I once spied Marcello Mastroianni holding forth at a table.) Not that I even began wanting to abandon her — far from it — but the scene that took place when I told her about leaving ended rather badly. With tears in her eyes she claimed that if I really wanted to stay, we could find a way to scrape a living together, or, if I cared for her, I would bring her back to the States, a notion that scared me. Really, there wasn’t anything to be done. Stupidly, I had put a wall between myself and our future, shutting her out and never really giving any other possibilities much thought at all.
But as indifferently as I behaved (I had to be out of my mind), I also didn’t have a dime to my name, and I learned quickly enough that I didn’t have anyone in my life in the States (New York, at any rate) with the means or disposition to send me as much as the cost of my airfare back: In fact, I only managed to get home because of a deal I quickly made with a Hispanist professor at Swarthmore, who had written me in Rome earlier that spring requesting that I give a lecture to his students there — about what, I didn’t know — in exchange for my airline ticket and three hundred dollars, just enough to get me back on my feet when I’d arrive.
Still, aside from tearing myself away from Roma and the easy lifestyle there (except for rush hour, when every Italian raced home at two hundred miles an hour just so they could do nothing), I had hardly thought about New York or the people I’d left behind, and when I did, opening the door to my own memories, I’d sink into a profound You came from shit and to shit thou shalt return depression. Bingeing to get over it, I’d smoke and drink cheap, not bad, wine to the point that, yes, my kidneys would ache so deeply that I’d feel almost tempted to see a doctor; and then, feeling better, after a day of misery, the thought that I really had nothing to return to, after all, would lay me low again.
Sojin, at least, remained gracious to the end. The day I left, in early May, she drove me to the airport and we said our good-byes, promising, of course, to see each other again as soon as possible. As I crossed over into the passengers-only lounge, I could see her mascara running down her lovely face as if she already knew that getting back together, given my departure and mercurial temperament, was unlikely, if not impossible.
After I landed midafternoon in JFK and worked through the traveler’s usual rigmarole, I took a bus back into the city and nearly passed out from how gray and run-down Harlem looked: The same avenue that had so thrilled me as a child upon my release from the hospital, and where I had spent countless afternoons as a teenager shopping or hanging out here or there with my friends, seemed so hopelessly ugly that I quickly started to sink; I’d gotten so used to Roman aesthetics and the tropical colors of that city, the sun-baked crumbling walls and balcony gardens, as well as the Californian/ Mediterranean blueness of its sky, that for the first time in my life, I had some insight into the visual despair that Cubans of my parents’ generation — and for that matter, my exiled cousins — must have experienced as newcomers here. Whatever charms the city had always held for me — and however much I may have fed off the energies and variety of our citizens — would take me months to appreciate again. In the meantime, I felt so glumly disposed that I could hardly believe that not twenty-four hours before, I had been in bed with a remarkably beautiful woman whose spectacular looks, I quickly decided, not a single woman in New York could begin to touch.
It wasn’t just a matter of physicality but of spirit: So many of the faces I glimpsed that day seemed hardened and angry and so generally pissed off at life as to distort even the finest of their features grotesquely. Of course, I was under a spell, unexpectedly missing not just the woman I’d left behind but Italy itself: New York women seemed plain and mean in a way that I had never realized before, an impression that lasted for months, until, of course, I got used to the city again and, making my own inner adjustments, became more and more the dumb shit I had always been. I’d also arrived looking sharper and better-dressed than ever before — a fashion designer, Sojin had done everything in her power to break me of my badly wanting sartorial tastes (okay, if I told you how many people have since looked at me and declared: “But I thought Cubans were supposed to be sharp dressers,” you wouldn’t believe it), though the air of upgrade and refinement I now exuded — and my sudden discomfort over my old surroundings — left me, always the loner, feeling even more estranged, and probably too delicate for that world, as if, in a carryover from my childhood, I had reentered into my Lord Fauntleroy mode, albeit as an adult version.
In my absence, I had rented my apartment to a friend of mine from CCNY. I’d already hooked up with some yuppie willing to fork over almost twice my monthly payments to live there, but when my friend called me up, newly moved out from another place that he shared with a woman and his adopted son, with my own good fortune, I felt so bad for him that I bagged my agreement with the first fellow, throwing some ten or so thousand dollars away in the process. The problem, however, was this: Though I’d written him from Rome that I would be needing my place come the end of April, a date I had arbitrarily chosen and kept pushing forward, and he’d had plenty of notice to leave, when I finally got home, expecting to find my place vacated, I discovered that my friend had hardly packed a toothbrush. In fact, the apartment seemed in a state of chaos, with clothing, boxes, and books and magazines and newspapers strewn about everywhere, but among the things I hadn’t expected to come across were the Black Power and Elijah Muhammad posters he’d plastered on the walls. Additionally, his adopted son, then about six years old and a rather troubled kid, had done a fair job of increasing the local cockroach population by stuffing cookies and other foodstuffs he presumably had never wanted to eat inside my couch, which is to say that my apartment had become infested with them.