“I’m sorry, Fred,” Eva said. “I know how hard you’ve tried.” I was sorry, too, for my diminished status, but at least I was Eva’s busboy again, so I could brush against her from time to time and give a tug on her apron strings.
By the end of the summer we were spent. Our lovemaking had winnowed down to a few pecks on the cheek, a few tender caresses, before we fell into a dead sleep in our matchbox bed.
“We might as well be an old married couple,” I said.
“Speak for yourself. I know plenty of marrieds who have sex into their nineties.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but not with each other.” After Eva and I served our final Labor Day weekend meal, I said, “I’m dead.”
“I’m deader,” Eva said.
Ernest
Cuba, Havana, 1958
“Let’s run away before we return to school. Eva, let’s go wild and fly to Havana,” I said. I had stopped there for two or three days on the way over to Mexico City, in ’56.
I had loved Havana, so ripe with sex, so immensely seductive, if you never looked behind the façade. “All I want is a place where we can have breakfast in bed,” Eva said, “and where we never have to go out.” Eva and I were cash-rich with tips from two months of work, enough for us to live softly for our week in that passionate city.
We paid off-season rates at the Hotel Nacional overlooking the Malecón, the flat green bay of Havana. There, waiting for us, was a huge room with a slow-turning ceiling fan and an open window letting in the aroma of sea and cigars and a revolution brewing in the streets below.
I wanted that revolution. I wanted to see Batista’s dirty world turned over, flipped to its clean side, and rebuilt from scratch. I believed that Castro, the young bearded man in the mountains, and his band of idealistic revolutionaries were coming to sweep away Cuba’s gangsters and were going to build a true democracy.14
Gunfire crackled through the night. It was for us the music of revolt, and heightened our lovemaking. The revolution in the countryside had started to infiltrate the city, and the few times we left the hotel, we felt an electricity everywhere in the streets. The hotel bellhops and desk clerks and housekeepers seemed excited, as if in on a big cheerful secret. I was twenty-one, Eva twenty; for us, who believed in the revolution, what more was there to life?
“I love it here,” she said.
“Havana?”
“Everything.”
A few days after we arrived, and we finally thought it was time to leave our bed, I phoned Herman to show us around the city. Herman was an old German Jew who had fled the Nazis in time to save himself from the camps and death; his destination had been America, but his visa had gotten him no farther than Havana, where he remained alone but safe in the tropical heat. Herman chauffeured and guided tourists about the city in a worn-out Oldsmobile, but mostly he had a sideline in taking boys from the States, most still virgins, to the brothels.
Two summers earlier, Herman had driven me one night to my first and only brothel.
“Don’t worry, it’s a clean place. I’ve taken many boys like you from New York to get sex for the first time,” Herman said, like an obstetrician who had proudly delivered a thousand babies.
I was excited to have this new experience; as a writer-to-be, wasn’t experience everything? But I was so drunk and nervous and guilty with the thought that I was exploiting a woman’s body that I was not able to get it up. I was wearing the Saint Christopher’s medal my mother had given me to protect me on my travels, and, in a token of reparation for my failure, I gave it to the woman with whom I had gone so ineffectually to bed. She led me into a garden where women were sitting and sipping cafecito and she showed them the medal. They passed it around and kissed me and told me tender things and said I should come back soon, when I was not so tired.
But this time, as I was with Eva, it was not the brothel Herman offered.
“Ernest Hemingway. Do you know who he is?” he asked. “And would you like to meet him?”
Apart from Hemingway being the writer I admired most, and most imitated, his was the glamorous life I most dreamed of.
“Of course I want to meet Hemingway,” I said.
“I’ll come to the hotel in the morning and we’ll get to him by lunchtime.”
“Won’t we be interrupting his lunch?” I asked.
“Don’t worry. He’s an old friend of mine, that Hemingway.”
I hesitated, wondering how true all this was. Eva said, “Mr. Herman, we would like to meet him, as long as he knows we’re coming.”
“He will be happy to see you. He loves beautiful women.”
“How much will this trip cost, Herman?” I asked.
“I want you should be happy. I could see you happy for thirty dollars.”
That night in bed, I said, “You don’t seem too excited about meeting Hemingway.”
“Of course I want to meet him. But I don’t glamorize him the way you do.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I just admire him.”
“For his work?”
“For everything. For the way he was a great antifascist and went to Spain to fight for the Republic.”
“Well, many went to Spain.”
“Yes, sure,” I said, getting more and more defensive. “But he wrote a great novel about it.”
“Freddy,” she said, “he wrote one very good novel and several very good short stories. There are better writers than him, but you never fawn over them.”
“I don’t fawn.”
“I think you like Hemingway’s legend. The drinking and the bullfighting and the hunting. You don’t like any of that, so I’m surprised you’re attracted to him.”
“Who’s better than Hemingway?” I asked.
“Faulkner.”
“Faulkner’s unreadable. He’s just a swamp of piled-up, boozy words.”
“He’s not glamorous enough for you, that’s all.”
“What’s bothering you? Hemingway’s created his own, original life, an exciting one, and that’s more than most of us have done or will ever do.”
Eva laughed. “OK. He may win in the excitement category. But then, so did John Dillinger when he robbed all those banks.”
We arrived at San Francisco de Paula, a village of ugly dogs and mangy huts, at one o’clock in the heat of an already burning day. Within minutes we drove through it and were on a narrow dirt road ending at a low whitewashed wall with a large wooden gate.
Herman walked up to a small open shed where a hatless man was dozing, and he returned, smiling and holding up a large key. “To unlock the gate,” he said, which he then opened to a path surrounded by wavy, lush trees.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Eva asked.
“Hemingway has seen enough of me these past weeks. Just go up,” he said, pointing the way, as if we could miss the house and veranda standing on a small hill.
Eva and I started walking but stopped briefly to read a sign in French, German, Spanish, and English, advising us not to enter without an appointment. Obviously this did not apply to us, since our visit had been previously arranged, but I was uncomfortable that Herman had left us to make our own introductions. In only a few minutes we were standing on the veranda. I looked through the screen door and saw Hemingway seated with two younger men, clearly house servants. They were lunching, speaking softly in Spanish.
I called out, “Mr. Hemingway.”
The giant in shorts, the shirtless giant with a barrel chest, the giant bigger than anything I could have imagined from his photographs, rose from the table and opened the screen door a crack.
“What’re you doing here?” he said, in a voice packed with annoyance. It was a voice that told me what a mistake I had made and what a fool I was even before he added: “Didn’t you read that sign?”
“I did,” I said. “But we came to see you.”
“You just can’t walk into people’s houses like that.” He looked us over, focusing mostly on Eva.
“Herman said it wo
uld be all right,” Eva said. “I guess we should have known better.”
He laughed. “Oh! That Herman! Last week he brought over a van-load of Hassidic students.” Then, looking us over again, he said in a warmer voice: “Well, I understand, but I can’t have people barge in here every minute.”
“I just wanted to see you,” I said, ready to run and find a place to die. “I’m really sorry, Mr. Hemingway.”
“We apologize,” Eva said, in her beautiful voice, the one that stirred me at night even when I was exhausted. “Good-bye, Mr. Hemingway,” she said, with the dignity of a beautiful woman saying to an indifferent man. “You don’t know what you are missing.”
“Good luck, you two,” Hemingway said. Then he looked us over for a long moment and said very softly, “Would you like to come in for a few minutes?”
“We don’t want to bother you, sir,” I said.
“Only a few minutes”—he lowered his voice even more—“but don’t talk too loudly. Miss Mary is upstairs and I don’t want her to know I have people in the house who aren’t expected.”
I nodded.
“She gets angry when I do that.”
The notion that Hemingway would be fearful of his wife’s anger—that he would be fearful of anything—startled me. After all, wasn’t a hero self-contained and invulnerable? Hemingway conducted us through a room full of hunting trophies. Looking down from the wall were the head of a long-horned impala and that of a lion with its mouth open, fangs bared. We soon came into his airy, sun-filled studio. He pointed to a tall table.
“Best to write standing up—not to get too comfortable,” he said. Hemingway did not address Eva, only nodded her way.
He turned to me. “I suppose you’re a writer.”
“I want to be,” I said, feeling embarrassed by my declaration. Was I a writer or did I merely want to be?
“You have to write every day,” he said. “It is like being in the army: you have to get up every day and do the drill.”
I nodded. Was I agreeing on the basis of my experience? Or was I agreeing to acknowledge the wisdom of his advice?15
“I’m studying writing at City College,” I said. “The Proletarian Harvard,” I wanted to add, but I assumed that, as a man of the world, he would know the college’s proud epithet. “I’m working with Leonard Ehrlich,” I said, wondering why I had, since I was sure that no one had ever heard of him.
“Oh!” Hemingway said. “How is Lenny?”
“Fine,” I said, amazed. “He’s a wonderful man.”
“Did he ever write another novel?”
That was the question everyone who knew Ehrlich asked when his name came up.
“Not yet,” I said. “But he’s still writing,” I added, feeling the need to defend my teacher and my friend—a man who, in the world’s eyes, was a failure.
“Well, please send him my regards,” Hemingway said.
“I will,” I said. I wondered at that instant if I should not have said the more correct “I shall.” But what young man says “shall” unless he is working hard, pretentiously, to wash away the patina of his Bronx childhood?
I grew more and more uncomfortable, fearing that the longer we stayed, the less I had to offer, and feeling smaller and smaller beside him. Finally I said, “We should probably be going, Mr. Hemingway. Herman is waiting for us.”
“How do you commence working?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t really have any special way,” I said, thrown off by the question.
“I like to sharpen pencils,” he said, laughing.
“Thanks. I’ll try that,” I said.
“Look, you can stay longer if you want. There are bathing trunks in the pool cabana, and you kids could take a swim,” he said, walking us to the door.
It was hot, just after two o’clock in the wet heat of the semitropics. A plunge in the pool would have been a pleasure, and Hemingway was so welcoming and was so gentle, making leaving him all the harder for us. But something in me told me to leave and that any more time spent with him would strain his good mood.
We shook hands. “Your work means everything to me, Mr. Hemingway.” He smiled.
I hated what I heard myself say. I hated my sugary adulation, which I knew he also must have disliked. Wasn’t he the one who said it was bad form for writers to compliment one another to their faces, however sincerely the compliment had been meant? Somehow, hoping to redeem myself, I came up with a line fashioned after one of his hard-boiled characters: “You’re looking pretty good, Mr. Hemingway.”
He smiled and turned to Eva. “She’s looking pretty good, too.” He said that tenderly, and with sadness in his eyes.
Eva and I did not speak on the walk back. I was still amazed that I had met Ernest Hemingway and spoken to him. All that had really happened.
Herman was waiting for us, dozing in his car. “How did it go with Hemingway?”
“Very well,” I said. “He was very kind.”
“Did you mention me?”
“Of course.”
“See? I told you not to worry,” he said, beaming.
“Thank you for taking us, Herman,” Eva said. She was silent all the way to the hotel, but no sooner had we arrived and were back in the world of our room than she said, “That was depressing, Fred.”
“Was Hemingway depressing? I thought he was warm to us.”
“He was, but didn’t you see how lonely he is?”
“I wouldn’t say lonely.”
“He never wanted us to leave, and I’m sure his wife wasn’t home. He had his servants for company for lunch.”
“I like him for that,” I said. “He’s not a snob.”
“I’m not attacking him, Fred. I’m just saying he’s lonely—sad, too.”
“It’s not right to talk that way about him even if it’s true.”
“Why not?”
“It just isn’t,” I said.
“Oh, Fred, you’re sweeter than he is.”
That night we went to the dog races, where I lost four dollars on a greyhound that came in third. Eva won five on a race that was over in a few minutes. We had never been to a dog race or a horse race, and neither of us had ever placed a bet on anything before. We had been excited when we left the hotel, but we were both disappointed by how quickly the races were over, how silent the crowd remained throughout.
“It was more like a funeral parlor than a racetrack,” I said in the cab back to the hotel.
“Try not to think about him, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Eva said.
“I’m not.”
That night was somber, and even the two cuba libre nightcaps and the exciting sporadic gunfire did not change that. The following morning, over breakfast in bed, we remained somber, and we stayed somber in the cab to the airport and on the plane back to New York.
“We should send him a thank-you note,” Eva said.
“Yes, we should,” I said.
On the plane I slept and dreamed of Hemingway beside a spongy, greenish pond on an African plain. He was in hunting gear, a rifle by his side, squatting among four old lions, their manes dusty and frayed, their heads heavy, their gazes directed far away to some distant place where they had once been young. They had seen too much, lived too fully, knowing that nothing ahead could match the pure force of the living they had left behind, all of them knowing that, the lions and the man.16
* * *
14REVOLUTION/REVELATION
At the time, we did not know that this was not just a revolution to overthrow a thuggish regime embedded with American Mafiosi who ran the country like a casino and a brothel. We thought that Castro would bring a fresh social democracy to Cuba. Only some while later would we learn that Castro’s regime was to be socialist, and I welcomed that, thinking that the expropriation of vast areas of land and plantations owned by the Americans would be beneficial to the Cuban people. I believed that socialism in its most humanitarian form would now take root in the Americas—as it had not in the Sovi
et Union, its satellites, or China.
How predictable and how disillusioning to discover that slowly but surely, and under whatever pretext and justification, Castro’s socialism was just another power play no different from that of the legions of other dictators in Latin and South America and, in fact, was based on a Soviet-style system of political and social oppression. That kind of humanist socialism—which purported to liberate humans, body and soul—was perverted into a system that hunted and imprisoned dissidents, homosexuals, and transgender people and alienated even its earliest and most ardent supporters.
15A FAILURE AT TWENTY-ONE
At twenty-one I had written only a few chapters of a novel about a young man in a tequila-drenched Mexico, based on guess whose true-life experiences? The young man bore some resemblance to the drunken consul in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano but also to the Beat rebel Sal Paradise in On the Road.
If Hemingway had asked, I could have added to my résumé a few short stories, one praised by Paddy Chayefsky. Not to mention the one-act play “Tea Party,” which was wildly famous throughout the City College student cafeteria and at select Greenwich Village cafés, including the renowned Café Figaro. I also wrote some poems that I had sent at fifteen to New Directions publishers in the faraway and magical land of light and art that was Manhattan.
There was so little to show for my six years of writing because I worked in a totally undisciplined, desultory fashion, in fits and starts, in moods exultant and despairing. When I was alive in the work, I would write day after day—nighttime, too—and in between and during meals and even in my sleep when I eavesdropped on my characters’ conversations, which I reported in the morning with some coloration. I lived in the young man’s luxury of time’s seemingly endless bounty.
My Young Life Page 19