Sometimes, too, she’d spook me, staring at me strangely—especially if I’d made the mistake of lighting a cigarette: “So you’ve forgotten how you almost died, huh?” she’d say. “Go ahead, kill yourself.” Then she might lecture me about health food and vitamins—“When was the last time you went to a doctor?”—before going off into a momentary spell, fixated on my eyes, and coming out of it, she would say: “Sabes cuánto te pareces a tu papá?”—“Don’t you know how much you look like your father?” The kicker is that while growing up, I’d always wondered why, if I looked so much like my father, who in my eyes was muy muy cubano, no one ever took me as a Cuban.
One day, while pondering that long-standing mystery, I asked her, “If Pop was so Cuban and I look just like him, how come nobody ever takes me as so?” Laughing, she answered: “Tu papá? Why, he never looked Cuban at all!”
Seeing her was always wonderful and awful at the same time. Feeling both inspired and drained by my mother, once I’d finally get home to my apartment, the first thing I’d do was pour myself a hearty drink (usually wine, my other favorite, vodka, being a luxury) and light a cigarette—and if the right frame of mind hit me, I’d feel a momentary bliss and almost an optimism about my future as a writer. But just as often, depleted and my spirits low, I couldn’t even begin to muster the strength and will to imagine the things that would, shockingly, happen with that novel.
By the time my agent started sending the novel around, we’d decided, during the course of a telephone conversation, to change its title to the far more swinging and cheery The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which, if you know that book at all, was the name of a 33 LP album Cesar Castillo and his brother, Nestor, had recorded back in 1955 or so. There were several literary houses that my agent had considered sending it to, among them Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but she’d already been trying to interest one of their more upcoming young editors in my work, an Exeter/Ivy League sort with poetic credentials, Jonathan Galassi, who I had met briefly in her office, years before while working at TDI. Thin, intensely bookish in his looks, he dressed in the manner that one supposed certain editors did: button-down shirt, jacket and bow tie, loafers, and, I recall, wire-rim glasses. His handshake was neither here nor there, though his manner was never less than affable, if, however, a little too patrician for my taste—but then, in those days, most editors were. At the time, I hadn’t realized how lucky I was to be introduced to such an important fellow, that as a Latino, I was being afforded the unique opportunity to break through such a long-standing literary barrier into a world that, worshipping the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, had yet to give Latino writers a chance at all.
In fact, I was hardly able to remember his name when, one evening a few weeks after she’d started sending the book around, my agent called me with the rather startling news that this same Mr. Galassi had been ecstatic about the manuscript and wanted to make an offer. My reaction? You’re kidding me, right? By that same Friday, he did—for an amount that I initially turned down; I simply needed more money to finally settle up with the IRS, as well as to cover my expenses, agent, and further taxes. I didn’t expect them to come back so quickly, but that following Monday, they did. Within a few months, I received a check for half the advance, enough to settle my tax situation and to pay my expenses during that year when I’d actually get down to finishing the book.
I worked on most of that manuscript on 106th Street. It was a rhapsodic time. Relieved of my financial burdens and having nothing to lose, I “filled in” the life and histories of the Castillo brothers, whose musicality I wore like an inherited glove. Along the way, I drowned in mambo music, my KLH record player running from the earliest part of the day, when I’d come back from jogging around Central Park (nothing like a smoke afterward, by the way, when you’re feeling all oxygenated), until the evenings, sometimes even past midnight. But did I care? I was still young enough to possess an endless-seeming energy, and though I had never thought in a thousand years that I could end up at a publisher like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the very notion that I was possibly on my way inspired me further. I worked tirelessly, chain-smoking like a motherfucker and only rarely taking time off to hang around with some of my musician friends. After a while, the ordinary business of going out on errands, to shop for groceries or to buy cigarettes, became an imposition. I don’t recall just when I handed in a “completed” manuscript or how long afterward it was returned to me with suggestions, but the process went smoothly, nearly effortlessly, as everyone over at Farrar, Straus & Giroux had seemed to have fallen in love with that book, even if they were uncertain as to how it might go over with the critics and public. (It had tremendous amounts of sex in it—why wouldn’t it? I had enough naughty schoolboy Catholicism left in me to fill a cathedral, and my hyperawareness of bodily functions and of the body itself spilled over into the book in ways that left me, once so frail and sick, cracking up over its sexual possibilities.)
And the editing? Despite his upper-class airs, Galassi, as it turned out, proved to be a superb editor for that book, allowing it to breathe in every way and urging only truly prudent changes. With a musical thing going on in my head, I treated word repetitions like beats—and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Fortunately, as the author of a fine book of poetry, Morning Run, he was linguistically savvy enough to stanch my gushing use of certain words, like lumbering in reference to Cesar Castillo’s sexual attributes, which, early on, had occurred some fifty or so times. He was also splendidly judicious in other ways—I don’t think we had a single argument over anything at all. (It was just a different time altogether: Now everything is done over the Internet, manuscripts like this one electronically transmitted and much of the work done without actually speaking or spending much time with anyone—the impersonality of it all is staggering to old-school writers like me.) By contrast, meeting with Galassi, with my unruly, marked-up, held-together-by-chewing-gum rewrites in hand, was a joy. We’d work for a few hours in the morning, then head out for lunch somewhere near their offices by Union Square, to just relax and have a few drinks—at least I did—and later I’d take the subway back uptown feeling as good as anyone could over a professional relationship.
I also had a pleasant experience with the in-house copy editors, the sort of ladies who walked around with pencils tucked behind their ears and seemed to swarm, paper in hand, along the hall of that publishing house, whose walls were lined with books and shelving like library stacks, to check out their facts. I got along particularly well with a longtime employee, a Puerto Rican woman, Carmen, whose tender loving care in regards to that manuscript—and the capricious Spanish I employed—made a wonderful difference not just to my novel but to me. The fact that she so liked it made me feel good, as it represented its first success with a Latino reader. (And that left me happier than anything else: For once, with my writing as my own front man, as it were, I was being accepted.)
The final touches, at least at that stage, had to do with conceiving of a book jacket. A well-known cover designer, Fred Marcellino, had asked me, through Jonathan Galassi, if I had any ideas that might be of use to him. Since the novel’s title followed the style of a 1950s mambo record, I sent him about four record jackets from that time: He especially liked one of them, which featured a sultry-looking blond babe of the 1950s, whose image he lifted and put on the cover of my book. (The cover, incidentally, turned out great, though a few years later, the designer’s use of an actual image of a woman from one of those jackets, the model still being alive, would involve me in a lawsuit, in which I was held at fault.)
Along the way, other things seemed to be cooking. A friend from my Brooklyn days, an art scholar and entrepreneur, Jeffrey Hoffeld, had told me that the founder of a gallery in which he had once been a partner, Arne Glimcher, might be interested, as an aspiring movie producer, in taking a peek at The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love—even in its early uncorrected form. Since I had nothing to lose, I went along with the notion. A
few months later, I met with Ms. Wasserman and we went over to Glimcher’s place on East Fifty-second, an opulently maintained art deco high-rise apartment building of 1930s vintage (so I would guess), across the street from where Greta Garbo supposedly lived. He occupied a duplex penthouse overlooking the East River, and the first thing that impressed the hell out of me as I walked in was the fact that his entryway floor was inlaid with an antique second-century Roman mosaic of a maritime theme; his walls were covered with paintings from his gallery, the Pace on West Fifty-seventh, all by famous artists—Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and a portrait of him in broken pottery by one Julian Schnabel, among others; talk about money. I can remember trying to behave as if I were not already in over my head, though Glimcher, younger then by a decade than I am now, could not have been nicer, nor more accommodating, and seemingly humble.
I would imagine he, as a professional gallery owner, took an enormous pride in discovering new talent, and I suppose that same tendency had followed him into the movie business. I was apparently that new talent, and he did everything to charm and impress me. He spoke of spending a lot of time with “Sigourney” on the shoot for Gorillas in the Mist, of his many industry connections and his absolute determination to make my novel into a film—though it had yet to receive even a single review. With passion, he spoke about many of the novel’s themes—the close yet troubled relationship between the brothers really hitting him in a personal way—and of course, of how he, of a certain generation, had been raised on the mambo and the cha-cha-cha. And that song I had created on Nestor’s behalf, “Beautiful María of My Soul”—“Oh, you’ll see what I’ll end up doing with that. We’ll get a first-rate composer in, I promise you.”
He spoke of making my novel into a film with such confidence that, after a while, it started to feel like a foregone conclusion—such matters as an agreement for a movie option as a precursor to a contract, a necessary formality, would be forthcoming to my agent in no time at all.
That day, I got my first sense of why the man, as I’d learn, happened to be one of the most successful art dealers in the world: He was good at making you feel that his intentions were really your own. And he knew just which buttons to push. On our way out, while leaving it that I would meet him at some future point in his favorite restaurant, the Four Seasons, to talk over things further, he telephoned his chauffeur, a former cop named Bob, and gave him instructions to take us wherever we wanted to go in his limousine. I was startled. The only time I had ridden in a limousine before was for my pop’s burial out in Long Island. After dropping Ms. Wasserman off at her place on East Eighty-sixth, I found myself being shuttled uptown toward my old neighborhood like a pasha. I liked his driver—a real working-class man, of Sicilian roots, the sort with whom I always got along, a real salt-of-the-earth fellow. We talked, mainly about the Howard Beach area of Queens—my brother’s second wife had a lot of family out there, and that Italian connection opened Bob up as if he were an old-time chum and confidant. Eventually, he told me how much he thought Mr. Glimcher was worth—a stupendous amount. “And that’s not includin’ the value of his artwork, capiche?” I used to think that he was just confiding in me as one working-class guy to the other, but I can’t help wondering now if I was set up, those incredible numbers meant to further impress me.
I do know that riding in a limousine made me feel both well-off for the first time in my life and also somewhat embarrassed. Asked “Where to?” I had him stop at a picture frame shop on West Eighty-sixth, and then I went right next door into a comic shop to look around. My next destination in that fabulous limousine? Some exotic bar on the East Side or downtown in Soho? No: the Food Town supermarket on One hundredth Street and Broadway, where I bought some groceries. Afterward, when I came out with my bags (chicken, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes), I thanked Bob for his help and told him I didn’t mind walking for a bit. (It didn’t seem a healthy thing for me to be seen pulling up to my building on 106th Street in such a richlooking vehicle.) He just nodded, tipped his cap, and drove off, while I made my way those six or so blocks, my head spinning with a deepening wariness about the possible direction in which my life might be headed.
You see, I was no budding Jay McInerney, a novelist famed for zestfully embracing the bounties of his success. I simply didn’t trust that world. And while I appreciated the attention I seemed to be getting from the likes of someone like Mr. Glimcher (who at a different point took me into the inner sanctum of his gallery and had his assistant bring in one Picasso oil after the other for me to view and even touch if I wanted to—Unbelievable, if only my pop could see me, is what I actually thought), I felt tremendously grateful for the opportunity to get out of New York when the occasion arrived.
My teaching stint in Lake George came along at just the right time, during that nerve-racking prepublication stage when my manuscript was being turned into page proofs for a bound galley. My appointment as a resident writer, which was to last some six months, began in the autumn of 1988—think it was late October when I first arrived. There, in a meeting room in a former courthouse just off the lake, along Canada Street, I taught a weekly workshop in creative writing, free to the public. My students were a wonderful group of locals, consisting of both the well-heeled and well-educated country club folk—doctors, lawyers, and dentists among them—and struggling working-class mothers, along with a handful of normal middle-class people, with some quite interesting backwoods folks and retirees thrown in.
I lived in a mountainside house overlooking the Hudson River, about twenty miles north of town, with a couple who had kindly offered to put me up for practically nothing. The husband, an ex–Benedictine monk, taught art at a local college and made totemic sculptures that he sold throughout the Adirondack region, while his wife, who had tracked me down on behalf of the arts center in the first place, ran most of its public outreach programs. I won’t go much into my life there except to say that, as sojourns go, it was about as far removed from New York, or for that matter, Italy, as any place could be. I learned to drive a stick shift there, however, good for maneuvering a car over the mountains, and I made a lot of friends as well. It turned out that the art center’s director happened to be a singer with one of the best-known country rock groups in the region, the Stony Creek Band, with whom, in that latest incarnation, I began to perform as a sit-in guitar player, at local country clubs, barn-style dances, and in the kinds of Adirondack joints that would have found their New York City equivalents in the leave-your-guns-by-the-door discos in the South Bronx of 1982. That was yet another life, and brief as it had been, I loved being away from the buildup for the book, and that distance made dealing with such chores as correcting the manuscript a bit easier.
I also signed that option with Glimcher’s Pace Productions, having entrusted all the contractual business to my agent, who, as I would eventually learn, was also in over her head, having little practical knowledge of the movie business. But I much enjoyed the Lake George area while my stay lasted, and then, of course, as I’d received news that a bound galley of my book had been finally produced, and that there were things I’d have to do, I returned to New York.
Once home, I did my best to maintain a kind of cool among my old friends from the neighborhood. They tended to have a blasé attitude about my profession, as if anyone could do it, and when it came to the folks I’d meet while visiting my brother’s in-laws out in Howard Beach, where they’d hold backyard barbecues a few blocks from where John Gotti lived, I’d feel so out of touch with the writing world that, whenever someone asked me what I did, I hardly thought it worth mentioning, though I inevitably would. (“Oh, yeah, your brother told me you write stuff—like what, spy novels?”) Most people were nice, but among some of the strangers I’d meet, the writing profession seemed a bit on the scammy side, and more than once I’d hear something like, “So, okay—what do you do for real work?”
During that time, it seemed that I always had some duty to attend to in regards to the p
repub biz of the book. Learning that Publishers Weekly felt strongly enough to request an interview with me, I found myself putting on another hat—as a self-believing writer who’d always had a vision for that novel, while, in reality, I’d hardly even figured out any way to talk about it. For that matter, as a publishing world “guinea pig” from the Latino community, I’d have to brace myself for any number of questions about the ethnicity of my writing and about the status of Latino writing in this country—but, so warned my agent and anyone else at the house I happened to talk to, I would have to be careful not to offend anyone by stating the obvious fact that, on the surface of things, no one, to that point, had seemed to give a shit for the intellectual and creative life of my/that community. Never claiming to be a spokesperson for anyone except myself and, so I thought, believing that my first novel Our House in the Last World had already presented my take on the issues pertaining to my Latino identity, I learned soon enough that, on just about every occasion, I had to explain myself all over again, even if jokingly so—“I know I don’t look or act particularly Cuban, but it’s just a disguise to find out what folks really think.” That alone was enough to make me dread the very notion of speaking to any journalists at all.
Thoughts Without Cigarettes Page 39