Oscar Hijuelos-Thoughts Without Cigarettes a Memoir -Gotham
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Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication PART ONE - The Way Some Things Worked Out CHAPTER 1 - When I Was Still Cuban CHAPTER 2 - A Few Notes on My Past CHAPTER 3 - Some Moments of Freedom CHAPTER 4 - Childhood Ends PART TWO - What Happened Afterward CHAPTER 5 - Getting By CHAPTER 6 - My Two Selves CHAPTER 7 - My Life on Madison Avenue CHAPTER 8 - Our House in the Last World CHAPTER 9 - Roma CHAPTER 10 - Another Book 4/665 Acknowledgements GOTHAM BOOKS Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auck- land 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, Lon- don WC2R 0RL, England Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 7/665 First printing, June 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Cuban Ink, Inc. All rights reserved Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN- PUBLICATION DATA has been applied for. eISBN : 978-1-101-52882-2 Photos throughout courtesy of the author. Poem by Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos in the Introduction by Oscar Hijuelos (pp xix-xx), from Burnt Sugar: Con- temporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish, edited by Lori Marie Carlson and Oscar Hijuelos and translated by Lori Marie Carlson. Introduction, Copyright 2006 by Oscar Hijuelos. Reprinted with permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon and Schuster. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechan- ical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. 8/665 The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permis- sion of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. While the author has made every effort to provide accur- ate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author as- sumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any respons- ibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our read- ers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. This is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollec- tions of his experiences over a period of years. Dialogue and events have been re-created from memory. http://us.penguingroup.com To my family and the folks who have always looked out for me. The year is 1985 and Professor John D Swsinhnder [sic] is getting into his rocket. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, blast off! He was drifting in space at a speed of ten thousand miles an hour. In a short time he was on the moon. He is going there to prove that the moon is made of green cheese. He picked up a rock and bit it. He said, “If this is cheese than [sic] my teeth are not cracked.” But they were. In a minute not to lose he got in his rocket and went back to see his dentist. He did not prove that the moon was made of green cheese. But instead he proved never bite rock. —FROM “A TRIP TO THE MOON,” OSCAR HIJUELOS, AGE TEN A Prelude of Sorts Seems just like yesterday (an illusion) that I was sitting out front on my stoop on 118th Street, on an autumn day, in 1963 or so, feeling rather indig- nantly disposed and pissed off because my best friend from across the way, with a somewhat smug look in his eyes, kept blowing smoke into my face. He was thirteen, a year older than me, and had already been going through at least a carton of Win- stons a week for as long as I could remember—ci- garettes that his mother, the venerable Mrs. Muller- Thym, coming back from the A&P, gave, fair- mindedly, to each of her sons on Fridays. (Think he must have started smoking at the age of seven or eight.) We usually got along like pals, running through the backyards and basements together, or else hanging out in the book-laden clutter of his room, playing cards and chess or listening to jazz recordings by Art Blakey and Ahmed Jamal, while occasionally sneaking rum and whiskey from his father’s stash of high-class booze down the hall, which we’d mix into glasses of Coca-Cola, without 12/665 ice, and drink until the world went spinning and everything became beautiful in an exciting way. The guy was definitely head and shoulders smarter than just about anyone else in that neighborhood, includ- ing me, and generous to boot, for he was always giv- ing away his cigarettes and candy and loose change on the street. But on that particular afternoon, he had gotten some kind of hair up his ass. With a smirk on his face, and walking right up to me, he had blown, slowly and with great self-satisfied de- liberation, rings of that smoke at my mug. I don’t know why he did this—perhaps because he, like so many of the other kids on that street, sometimes thought me passively disposed on account of the fact that my mother, never forgetting my childhood illness, had always kept a tight leash on me. Or be- cause he just felt naughtily inclined or wanted to ex- press some notion of superiority that day. But whatever he may have been thinking in those mo- ments, I discovered that I had a fairly short fuse. So when I told him, “Come on, man, don’t do that!” in the manner that kids in those days talked, and maybe, “But hey, I’m not messing with ya,” and he kept blowing that smoke at me anyway, I yanked the cigarette out of his hand and put it out on his head. 13/665 Thankfully, its burning tip met with the thick matting of his slickened dark hair, but I can still re- member the crisp sound it made, like air being quickly released from a bicycle tire, and, of course, that strangely repellent smell of singed organic mat- ter, which foreshadowed, to my young Catholic mind, the possible punishments of hell. Perhaps I ended up chasing him around the block, but he was always too fast for me, or perhaps, I can’t exactly re- member, he ran down into a basement or the park, hiding out somewhere in the bushes along one of the terraced walkways that descended from Morn- ingside Drive into East Harlem, on tracks of cracked, glass-strewn pavement. If so, he might have waited until sometime near dark, while I, out of sorts and craving a cigarette of my own, went home to yet another one of those evenings in our Cuban household that tended to leave me feeling restless and confused. PART ONE The Way Some Things Worked Out 15/665 CHAPTER 1 When I Was Still Cuban Pretend it’s sometime in 1955 or 1956 and that you are hanging over the roof’s edge of my building, as I often did as a teenager, looking down at the street some six stories below. You would have seen, on certain mornings, my mother, Magdalena, formerly of Holguín, Cuba, and now a resident of the “United Stays,” pacing back and forth fitfully before our stoop, waiting for a car. She would have been eye- catching, even lovely, with her striking dark features and pretty face, her expression, however, somewhat gaunt. Muttering to herself, she would have had the jitters, not only from her inherently high-strung nature but also because she’d probably spent the night sitting up with my pop worrying about their youngest son—me. As green and white transit buses came forlornly chugging up the hill along Amsterdam from 125th Street, she would have stood there, perhaps with my older brother, José, by her side, watching the aven- ue for a car to turn onto the street, all the while 17/665 dreading what the day might hold for her. Some- times it would have rained or it would have been brutally cold. Sometimes it would be sunny, or snow would be falling so daintily everywhere around her. She might call out to a friend to come down from one of the buildings nearby, say my godmother, Carmen, mi madrina, a red-haired cubana, with her flamenco dancer’s face and intense dark eyes.