Thoughts Without Cigarettes

by Oscar Hijuelos

  His response? Shook his head, sucked his cigarette deeply, and, with considerable understatement, told me, “Aw, man, what a drag.” Somehow, he had it in him to forgive her—his bride of only a few hours had gotten so drunk that she soon passed out and, in any case, wouldn’t remember a thing about what happened, while the lucky fellow, who, I’m happy to report, was a good-looking Latino—and yes, I was a little envious of his swarthy, well-muscled handsomeness—swaggered about with his plump, recently-worked-to-death dick hanging out for all to see, until he learned just who the lady happened to be and, putting on a pair of trousers, duly apologized to the bridegroom. He was so humble as to be likable, and that paid off when later, even more enviously, I watched him going off with another woman. I ended up passing the night, rather uncomfortably, inside a low-hanging tent pitched in a field, swatting away at mosquitoes and unable to sleep, not just because of the heat but because I often had those awful dreams.

  That same summer, I was at home one August evening trying to watch television, while my mother, sitting on the couch behind me, went on and on in Spanish about the fact that my life would end up a useless mess. It didn’t matter to me. By then I did whatever I pleased in front of her. Smoking openly, I dropped my ashes into the same standing tray that my father used to (“You’ll kill yourself with those cigarettes, like your father!” she’d scream), and now and then I’d stretch out in his green recliner, having oddly pleasant memories of him—like when I was little and he’d make a muscle and let me feel it, or my pop, in from the wintry day, setting his snow-dappled black-brimmed hat on the kitchen table and rubbing his hands happily to warm them up and patting me on the head, and how he used to somehow have a calming effect on babies, who always stopped their bawling around him. Such nice memories kept coming to me until, in that reclining position, I’d remember him stretched out in his coffin, and whatever nostalgia I may have been feeling for those earlier times turned into a kind of muted despair, which, of course, I had gotten used to by then.

  On that night, I was watching an episode of Bewitched or perhaps I Dream of Jeannie, a cheery sitcom in any case, when the telephone rang. My mother answered it, called me over: “Es pa tí,” she said. It was Mr. Mascetti calling from his bar.

  “Hey, Oscah,” he said. “Can ya do me a favor?”

  “What sort of favor?” I asked him.

  “Well, it seems that my son Butch has got it into his head that he wants to take a morning flight out of Kennedy to Denver.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “The thing is that he’s—how can I put it to ya—he’s been kind of high as a kite lately, if you know what I mean. He’s been dropping a lot of something on the strong side—you following me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The thing is, I don’t want him going alone with his mind so wacked—capiche?—and I was wondering if you could do me the very big favor of looking out for him, for me. There’s two bills in it for your trouble.”

  “You mean you want me to go with him to Colorado?”

  “Yessir—I’m only asking because I trust you. Just make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy, that’s all.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I finally told him, not having much else going on.

  The next morning, Mr. Mascetti drove us to JFK in his Cadillac, got us there around nine A.M., paid for our tickets at the counter, and then, wishing me well with a slap to my back, took off for Manhattan. We had to wait about an hour before boarding, a very long hour. Having been high all night, on speed and LSD perhaps—who knew—Butch Mascetti had signed on for the duration. Somewhere in outer space, Butch kept pointing his finger at me and laughing wildly, going on about how the interior of the terminal had begun to glow like gold before melting like ice all around him; he’d make whooshing noises with his mouth and scoot around in circles, his hands held out like Superman’s, flying, babbling incoherently about the cosmic winds in that place. Not wanting any hassles, I kept bringing him back to his seat; “Be cool,” I’d say, only to watch him get up again. The airline staff, mostly young female flight attendants, must have noticed his strange behavior, but I think they were either inured to such doings or simply didn’t care enough to boot us off that flight. Finally, we started boarding: I thanked God for that, because he seemed to quiet down.

  I took it in stride; when I’d left the house that morning, my mother had been confounded: I had been stupid enough to tell her where and with whom I was going. Her last words to me as I left were “Are you crazy?” for even she knew about Butch’s reputation for liking the wild side of things. Well, I was doing it for the two hundred dollars, and because Larry and Butch were my friends, in that order. (Unlike his two lovely sisters, Butch always had a smugness about him, and, as kids, our fights always started out with his making some blunt remark about how I dressed in cheap clothes, or how my “moms” couldn’t speak English too well, or how he never liked to go into my apartment because it “smelled funny.” The thing is no matter how friendly I tried to be with him, he hadn’t changed one bit.) But even if I looked at it as a job, I still couldn’t understand how anyone would take a huge dose of LSD and decide to get on a jet plane the next day. (Eventually, of course, I’d find out why. Butch had already dropped the drug at the bar when, out of some idiocy, he decided to call up his on-and-off girlfriend, a girl named Ellie, in Colorado Springs, where he attended college. She had apparently dumped him that very night—hence his sudden decision to fly there, though I couldn’t imagine anyone, high or not, going through the trouble just because of a telephone call.)

  Once the plane had become airborne, however, Butch seemed to become more contemplative, hardly saying a word, coming down from his high, which was fine with me. To calm my own nerves, I ordered a few glasses of vodka and orange juice from a stewardess, which I sipped slowly, until I began to doze off; then I had a very strange dream. First the wispy threads I always saw inside the rims of my eyes—“floaters”—seemed to become extravagantly beautiful, curling into arabesque flows of script that implied, without using any language, something awfully profound and mystical; and then after feeling completely fascinated by some melodies that I had started to make up in my head, it all hit me: Lurching forward, I opened my eyes to a cabin that had begun bursting with florid colors and seemed padded with an expanding, nearly breathing, foam. Looking my way gleefully and pointing his index finger at me, Butch could not contain himself, laughing, “Got you, sport!”

  A general note: I would not recommend flying anywhere with someone who, out of a controlling motive, would slip into your drink a drug like LSD; I can also assure you that a jet plane—reeking of fuel, carpet-cleaning chemicals, recycled oxygen, bodily gases, perfumes and colognes, airplane food, and, in those days of yore, cigarette smoke, which even for a smoker on that drug smells and tastes exactly like all its ghastly chemical components (from benzene to formaldehyde)—is about the least pleasant place on earth to be. And it hits you that you are locked inside an unimaginably heavy metallic projectile flying through the air, somehow held up in the sky. In that contained, inescapable, and claustrophobic space, I got the jitters so badly that I made it a ritual to go to the toilet about every ten minutes (or however much time) to wash my face and urinate, though at a certain point, with Butch really getting on my nerves, I locked myself inside for so long the flight attendants began knocking on the door to make sure I was all right. (I wasn’t and they knew it—from our blabbering and distorted expressions and strange reactions to simple questions, as when a flight attendant would offer a meal, and I’d answer incredulously, “Why?” Later, when we’d finally landed, one of them, a chirpy southern sort, remarked, “It’s not every day we get passengers like you.”

  I suppose this all leads to a certain moment: sitting out in a field in Colorado Springs, perhaps that same evening of the day of our arrival and still feeling the effects of that drug, watching the Pleiades meteor showers with Butch’s ex-paramour, Ellie, by my side. I am not sure if that wonderfu
l evening really took place a few days after we arrived, but she, who, as it happens, had also been sick as a child (a very bad heart) warmed to me almost immediately. (I am not sure which Hijuelos showed up, or to which side of me she was attracted, but we spent our nights for the next few weeks together, much to Butch’s exasperation—he and I were never the same sort of friends after that again.) What I do remember about her is this: She had long hair; wore wire-rim glasses; had a plain Danish milkmaid’s face; had a thin, not full, body; had a father who ran Rocky Mountain Bell; had some poetic aspirations; and had a former boyfriend who had taken his own life after she had rejected him (think she cried in my arms after telling me that tale). Her favorite musical was Camelot, her favorite group (unfortunately) the Eagles, and whatever she once had with Butch had lasted only for a few days, if that (and even then I don’t know if they ever “made” it—he had the kind of personality that was very hard to get next to). No startling beauty, she had a way of being that really touched me and left me aching over the notion of having to leave her. (I had after all, re-upped for school in the fall: Lehman College at night.)

  Parting from each other turned out to be harder than either of us had expected, though Butch, despite having had to put up with the torture of seeing her with someone I think he secretly, or not so secretly, looked down on—me—seemed almost mirthful over the thought of her suffering. It really didn’t matter: I never saw her again, and if the truth be told, once again I am at a loss for coming up with a happy ending to yet another of my tales.

  We wrote each other for a few years, then that stopped, and I really didn’t know anything more about her until about a decade later, when Butch told me, as he tended bar in his father’s place, that Ellie, for whatever reasons, had committed suicide—and as casually, with a smirk on his face in fact, as if he were reporting a baseball score. Sometime thereafter, Butch himself died in a car wreck, hitting an overpass on the Jersey turnpike while driving his father’s Cadillac at over one hundred miles an hour, possibly, as neighborhood gossip speculated, on LSD. That news was broadcast widely, incidentally, on both radio and TV because among his passengers was one of his former classmates at Colorado, Frank Gifford’s son, Kyle, who was badly injured.

  On the other hand, despite my occasional sorry attempt at fitting in with the hippies, all of twenty-two, I passed a year working in one of the more incredibly sophisticated literature-nurturing jobs of all time: as a salesclerk at Macy’s department store. It was actually far better than it sounds, though the pay stank and the store had been going through a decline in those days. I have no idea why I turned up in their second-floor employment office one morning, but I do recall telling the interviewer that I had an aunt, Maya, who had once worked for them in the 1940s, and I suppose that gave me a slight edge. I must have seemed respectable enough, having cut my hair short for my job hunt, and going to college at night also didn’t hurt my chances, and so they hired me.

  I’ve since looked back, dreaming about writing the great department store novel, though composing anything else but songs wouldn’t have occurred to me back then. My on-the-job training, which came down to learning about “send” and “take” orders and the working of an archaic cash register, lasted for a few weeks, if that, whereupon my floor manager, a certain tall and regal Sicilian, Mr. Trampani, whom I rather liked, put me to work selling curtain rods and window shades, among other household items.

  I also had a stint up on the seventh floor selling trendy new items like antigravity pens and neon dial clocks for a department they named Design Seven, where, wearing a blue frock one afternoon, I had the embarrassment of encountering some of my Brandeis hippie schoolmates, who thought finding me in such a straitlaced job the funniest thing in the world. Then, too, I occasionally worked as a flyer, filling in at different departments—shoes, electronics, furniture—a fun rotation since it broke the monotony and repetitious nature of those days, and most spectacularly so during the holiday season, when whatever low morale plagued the employees vanished in the overwhelmingly magical onslaught of Christmas cheer, as the mostly gay display-window staff went crazy decorating the store. That old-time movie Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, which is set in Macy’s, inevitably came into all of our heads—you couldn’t avoid it. In the employees’ dining room on the ninth floor, stills from it hung on the walls, and a pianist wearing a Santa Claus cap played carols on an upright set off in the corner, next to a little tree: In such an ambience, I couldn’t help but daydream about meeting Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle in the corridors; also, if you ever wonder where those sidewalk Santas, ringing their bells and going ho-ho-ho for the Salvation Army, come from, in those days at least, you would have only had to look in the Macy’s basement employees’ locker rooms, where some twenty or so of those volunteers gathered to get into costume in the mornings.

  Actually, I never really had much to complain about working there and I did a good enough job, being fluent not in Spanish but in numbers. Mr. Trampani thought enough of my performance to actually tell me one afternoon, “I’ve had my eye on you for some time, young man,” as if delivering a line from a movie, and went on to offer me the opportunity to study, at the company’s expense, at their management training school in, of all places, Denver, Colorado. According to him, I would have a wonderful future in retail if I wanted one. But even back then, while I really appreciated the fact that he was looking out for me, I couldn’t see myself committing to anything for long.

  At so young an age, I had, despite my tendency to go off the deep end emotionally, endless reserves of energy. After working all day, about three nights a week, I’d take a series of subway trains and end up at the far northwest Bronx, where I took some fill-in courses at Lehman College. My big goal was to matriculate to City College, where, in the event that I did not make it as a musician, I believed, I’d end up studying to become a schoolteacher of some kind. I became one of those fellows you’d see hunched over a history or math textbook on the number 4 train heading uptown, at around seven at night, later making my way off that El and walking the six or so blocks to the school, as if it were nothing at all. (I couldn’t begin to do that now, night after night.) I’m not sure how I managed to stay alert during the unavoidable torpor of those classes—most of the students, many of them older, had full-time jobs and were often low of energy—but we were allowed to drink coffee and to smoke in the classrooms. Some teachers even kept ashtrays handy, but I’d also bring along one of my own (cheap, metallic, the kind sold in a John’s Bargain Store for a dime apiece), and if no transit cops were around later, on my way home, I’d have a smoke on the platform, during those endless waits for the train, inevitably thinking, at some point of the night, about my poor father.

  In those years, I had a girlfriend who happened to be into acting, Carol, a lady I met while babysitting my friend Tommy Muller-Thym on one of those nights when he had gotten too high on LSD for his own good. (As when he, a rambunctious soul, would speak of wanting to toss a brick through a police car window.) We were in the Gold Rail bar, where Tommy, in the midst of stunning hallucinations, had attempted to pick up her across-the-hall neighbor, a staunch feminist of a patrician upbringing, as they were sitting by a grubby initialincised table next to us. According to Tommy, her feminist friend needed a good screwing to get rid of her haughty attitude, and told her so. While that remark did not bode well for his amorous chances, I made Carol’s acquaintance, as a sort of equally bemused and neutral party witnessing their verbal parrying.

  A brunette, buxom and attractive, she was a very nice woman of some not inconsiderable talents, from a fairly affluent family in Chicago, whose parents, both shrinks, would come to view me, with my street ways of talking and lack of polish (breeding), as something of a Neanderthal whose Cuban roots seemed to surprise them: If I can pick out one incident that would have predicted our eventual demise—and the prevalent attitude toward me on their part—it would be the fact that when I, having hitchhiked to Chicago, first met them, the
first thing her father did was to sit me down in their kitchen and administer a Rorschach test, her mother looking attentively on.

  (But, hell, what did I know?)

  My Macy’s job overlapped our meeting, but once I had matriculated to CCNY full-time as a student enrolled in the SEEK program—that anagram for Search for Elevation Education and Knowledge—and I left that store, disappointing Mr. Trampani, a real gent, it was she who hooked me up with one of the strangest jobs I ever had, one of those crazy gigs actors passed around among one another on the grapevine. The job, which paid phenomenally well—some fifteen dollars an hour—involved the kind of placebo versus real-drug testing, a few afternoons a week, for which I happened to be temperamentally suited: pain research. Turning up at the facility, in one of those vast and forebodingly dark buildings that were part of the Bellevue complex on the East Side—I would be given a cup of water and two white pills to swallow, at which point I would wait in an adjoining room for about an hour or so, while they took (or didn’t) effect, and pass the time reading. Then into the testing room I would go, led inside by a nurse whose long blond hair reached her waist, and for whom, despite her awful acne-ravaged complexion, I seemed to have developed my usual wounded-animal attraction.