That next year, regressing into an anxious state of mind, and forced to hustle around for money, I became a voracious smoker again. Because I didn’t want to start up with another full-time job downtown, which I could have wrangled through connections — how could I become a copywriter after I’d won a Rome Prize? — I found myself taking on any kind of teaching job, though not at any university: I just never considered myself accomplished enough to teach writing on a college level. (There was more to this: I wasn’t in any loop — while most of my former classmates had, at that point, been teaching in different colleges for the past ten years or so, I, a latecomer, would have been lucky to land a few courses as an adjunct, but even then, as I always had, I felt as if I needed more experience as a writer before presuming to teach others — something that apparently hasn’t bothered entire generations of creative writing teachers.)
I ended up working at three venues, as it were: One was a suicide ward at the Gracie Square Hospital, the other a terminal cancer ward at Payne Whitney. And I taught at the Amsterdam House, an old-age home up on 112th in my old neighborhood. For suicidal, seriously depressed, and troubled folks, I learned that you had to establish some very specific writing rules: “Please, no blood from orifices or from any acts of violence. No mention of the devil or the use of the color black.” That kind of thing. Among my students was an Ursuline nun, somewhere in her late fifties, who, descended from Italian nobility, had slashed her wrists simply because she woke up one day and realized that she did not believe in God and had therefore wasted her life. She wrote, however, remarkably spiritual poetry. The terminal cancer ward was more problematic. Whereas most crazy people, in my experience, enjoy being told that they are, indeed, crazy, there is nothing one can say to someone dying of cancer to relieve him of that ultimate disappointment and agony.
Falling back not on what I had learned from Sontag or Barthelme but from my own mother, whose poetic strivings over the decade or so since my pop’s death had grown more sophisticated, I had them write about the most important or happiest days of their lives — in prose or poetry — and for a short while, at least, I seemed to have lifted some of them out of their own bodies and miserable fates. And I found that it helped to adopt a tender, almost priestly manner with them: It helped that I do believe there is something (unimaginable) awaiting all of us (owed to my Catholic barbarity or, as some prick psychiatrist once said to me, to my lingering childhood fantasies of finding “Daddy” and therefore salvation). Mainly, I just tried to emulate the kindly people I knew, and that seemed to make a difference to them, though there is no amount of preaching or kindness that can take the place of morphine. The old-age home was the happier experience: Among my students was a 107-year-old woman, a former doctor from Missouri, who had maintained a lucid mind while her body had shriveled up to the size of a small, gnarl-limbed child’s. (Hers was the story of how she became the first female doctor in her state.) Though I never cared for the smell of musty death in such a place, nor the natural melancholy of the aged, I felt at least that I was easing their exits from this life in some little way. Heading home with a few dollars in my pocket and happily lighting up a smoke, I’d feel some sense of accomplishment until, at some later hour, I’d take stock of myself and realize that at my age, thirty-six, I really wasn’t anywhere at all.
Yet, having to make quarterly payments to the IRS, I was hardly making ends meet — thank God one could pay such cheap rents back then. Once my grant-funded jobs ran out, however, I went back to working for Manpower as a file clerk — but it left me so depressed that I quickly gave up on it. One day, out of the blue, I received a letter from an upstate arts group located in the town of Lake George, offering me a teaching job for some six months, for which I would be paid the regal sum of five thousand dollars: It wouldn’t solve most of my problems, but it wouldn’t hurt.
Eventually, as well, it hit me that the only way I would ever be able to pay off my debts was to sell a book. That’s when my agent, Harriet Wasserman, came in: I’d known her since 1984, and though I’d never earned her a dime in commission, nor given her anything to shop around, she provided me, as had Barthelme, the kind of encouragement that folks starting out in the business need. From time to time, I’d have lunch with her or she’d send me off to meet an editor to whom she had talked up my talent. The two I recall meeting, before I went off to Italy, were much admired old-school publishing men, the likes of which no longer exist: Harvey Ginzburg and Corliss “Cork“ Smith, classy fellows either of whom I would have, in fact, been happy to work with. Though I had first been referred to Ms. Wasserman by my editor at Persea, she had no interest in my staying there. (Nor did I: One of their mantras, though most often true, but which a person from my background just didn’t want to believe, had it that I should never expect to make any money as a writer.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of anything going on in those days. As far as I was concerned, that novel about those two Cuban musicians, which I had been writing on and off for the past three years or so, and which I hadn’t bothered to show anyone, didn’t even begin to strike me as the kind of book that mainstream publishers would be interested in, mainly, I think, simply because its subject matter was Latino.
The newspaper of record certainly reflected that: As someone who can remember coming to The New York Times, which I used to deliver as a kid, only later while in college (when it seemed a distinctive step up in terms of syntax and vocabulary from the papers I had been raised with), the fact that I never saw any reviews of Latinoauthored books in its pages seemed to be a sad comment on how little publishing had changed since my first novel had come out. What Hispanic- or Latino-surnamed authors they did review, or that bookstores and publishing houses cared about, came out of the “Boom”—García Marquez on the top of a heap that, however wonderful, left little room in the public imagination for those writers, like an Edwin Vega, who, coming up the hard way, with nary a connection in the outer world, remained unknown to New York publishing and therefore to a mainstream audience in America.
My agent must have seen in me the potential for bridging that gap. I think a lot of it had to do with the way I looked: She was Jewish, and because I had been sometimes taken as so, I am sure she considered me more “sellable.” In such circumstances, my nondarkish /non-ethnic looks probably struck her as an asset, and the truth is that, whenever I met up with such editors, like a Harvey Ginzburg or a Cork Smith, the barely visible hesitation on the part of someone trying to reconcile my face with my name ultimately became an expression of relief. And that alone must have put them at ease. (Well, perhaps that all just happened in my head. At least on one occasion, I learned that the fact that I was Latino could be offputting. When my first novel came out, I gave a copy to my next-door neighbors, some five elderly Jewish sisters, who had, at first, been delighted, only to later knock on my door and return it, one of them saying, “Oh, but we thought you were Jewish. I’m sorry, but this is not for us.”) Nevertheless, even after the minor success of my first “immigrant” novel, a genre which, as I would learn, seemed to have very little to do with “real” literature, I still couldn’t muster much faith in myself as a writer nor, for that matter, in my novel about those cubano brothers who go on the Lucy show. Instead, I found myself longing to write something truly “literary.” (Translation: having nothing to do with my Cuban roots.) At a certain point, I decided that it was time for me to “shit or get off the pot,” as my older brother, with his fondness for blunt sayings, would put it. Either I would write a book or forget about the whole thing — maybe go back into advertising or follow that other nascent dream, of becoming a high school English teacher.