In general, that whole period threw me. I met all kinds of people. George Plimpton invited me over to one of his famous Paris Review parties, where I found myself rubbing shoulders with Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gay Talese, among other authors of note. That same night, I had dinner with the writer Peter Maas and Mr. Plimpton—George, as he asked me to call him, offering to conduct an interview with me for his literary journal. Though I told him I would have to think it over, I had already made up my mind to avoid it, my own stupid modesty (infernal can’t really succeed too much reticence) getting in the way. But I also believed that it was something that should come later in one’s career: After all, what had I written at that point but only two books? (Later, he would publish an interview with me in Newsweek magazine entitled “The Reluctant Mambo King.”)
Around that time a well-known Latin musician, of the old New York school, invited me over to his place on the West Side, where he did his best to get me high on coke—think he saw it as a perverse test of character. I declined that as well. Later, though I had long before interviewed the great Afro-Cuban composer Chico O’Farrill for my novel, I became a regular at his parties, where my local success was greeted warmly by some, skeptically by others. (I met musicians like Johnny Pacheco, Paquito D’Rivera, Mario Bauzá, Graciela, and of all people, Desi Arnaz’s pianist and arranger, Marco Rizo, a truly sweet man.) Of those, Mario was my closest neighbor, literally living around the corner from me on 105th and Amsterdam: I’d go jogging in the mornings and find him sitting around on some milk crates with friends in front of a corner bodega Havana-style—he’d laugh at the sight of me, Mr. Slightly Chubby Four-Eyes, jogging by, his head shaking like Ray Charles’s, the man rapping his knees. Inviting me up to his apartment a few times, he wanted me to write a book about his life story—I proposed that we do it with a tape recorder, and it made him really happy, but it became one of those things that I kept putting off and off, as my career got busier, until Mario, coming down with a cancer that racked his entire body, died a few years later.
While teaching my classes at Hofstra, I attended numerous literary fetes where I first befriended Paul Auster and Francine Prose, and many other writers as well—I won’t bore you with such a list—but, after a while, as much as I enjoyed such an opportunity, I became somewhat befuddled by the fact that for as many events and literary gatherings as I attended, I rarely encountered another homegrown Latino author. A strange tale, however, about another “me.” I had gone to a party and, introducing myself to several people, received a frosty reception. A slightly tipsy young woman told me, “You can’t be him. I met him last night. He is dark haired and swarthy and nothing like you.” Apparently, I soon learned, there was someone going around town impersonating me: Later, when someone from FSG turned up and explained that I was indeed Oscar Hijuelos, several of those folks came up to me to apologize; a few days later, I even received a note from the same woman, profusely begging my pardon. I wrote her back a one-word reply: “Uh-huh.” And while I much appreciated my access to that world, and being that rare creature, a Latino writer suddenly in the spotlight, I felt put off by the fact that I seemed, for the most part, to be “it,” as if I had become a temporary member of an exclusive club that, unless you had connections, was nearly impossible to get into.
Part of me wanted to step away; the other, my public persona, had no choice about the matter, especially after my novel had been nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle and National Book awards. Part of the process, involving the latter, entailed a public reading at the National Arts Club. My fellow nominees included Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club), Katherine Dunn (Geek Love), and John Casey (Spartina). Introductions made, each of the authors read from their books, though as I listened I felt somewhat annoyed by the general propriety of the selections, and while I had originally selected a section in which the Castillo brothers meet Desi Arnaz and his wife at the club Tropicana, in the spirit of livening things up, I made a last-moment change, choosing instead to quote from a monologue in Cesar’s voice about all the women he’d deflowered in Cuba back in the 1940s, and—who knows what I was thinking—while Mr. Casey, I recall, read a description of a man whitewashing the hull of his boat in his backyard, I lingered on a passage wherein Cesar Castillo, in quite wonderful language, I thought, describes his methods for preserving a woman’s virginity while entering another of her, uh, most intimate places (which, by the way, I first conceived in Italy, where they are obsessed with anal sex). I should have known better, but then I am fairly certain that winning the award was one of the last things on my mind. Needless to say, I think I shocked most of that rather conservative audience, which seemed to consist to a large extent of genteel white-haired New York society ladies, and in the end, my book did not receive the award—the genteel John Casey with his whitewashed hull and prose did.
On another evening, a few weeks later, after the winner had been announced at an elaborate banquet we all headed uptown to the famous Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta’s apartment on Park Avenue, for a late-night party, and the main thing I can remember about that evening was my sense of relief at being away from all the photographers and reporters; at last it all seemed to be at an end. As a side note, however, I have to mention my mother’s reaction. News of my nomination naturally made it into the Spanish-language newspapers like El Nuevo Herald in Miami and, of course, El Diario here in New York, a Latino writer, the son of immigrants, rising to such heights, a first. She’d call me now and then to ask whether I’d heard any news about winning it. Explaining that it didn’t work that way, I’d hear a sigh on the other end. Nevertheless, it gave her bragging rights with her friends up and down Broadway and Amsterdam for the month or so while the selection process lasted, until all the excitement seemed to have ended as quickly as it had come. I took her out to dinner one evening with my brother, not long after the winner had been announced, and she was especially solemn, even moody.
Finally, I asked, “Pero, qué te pasa, mamá? What’s going on?”
“Ese premio, what happened with it?”
“What, the National Book Award?” I shrugged. “Let me tell you, with all the odds against me, it was a miracle that I was even one of the nominees. But it was still an honor.”
“Ah, sí , un honor,” she conceded. And then, thinking about something intensely, she turned to me, her expression one of severity and disappointment, and for a moment I could see balled up in her eyes everything that my pop had to contend with sometimes. Looking away, through the restaurant window, she said: “Yes, you were one of them,” and she shook her head, adding, “Pero no ganaste. But you didn’t win,” a failing on my part that I believe she took as a personal slight.
Oh, but it wasn’t all so contrary an experience: I spent an evening with William Gaddis and his lady companion, Muriel, eating Chinese takeout food and talking about literature in his East Side apartment. And once Mr. Glimcher’s good taste in books had been verified by all my good press, he brought me more closely into his circle. Invited to dinner, I was to meet him on a certain corner on the East Side—and there, as I stood waiting one autumnal night, I saw the apparition of Pablo Picasso from his Braque period, with his thick dark hair combed in a half-moon crest over his brow, his eyes intense, demeanor solemn, standing alongside a column. He turned out to be Claude Picasso, the great painter’s son, somewhere in his early forties, one of my dinner companions. Also to join us, another of Mr. Glimcher’s friends, Sigourney Weaver. Of course, I enjoyed meeting them, but at no moment did I feel relaxed or that I fit in with such people, though they were perfectly open and friendly—Claude, a photographer, even offered to translate my work into French. Besides, with certain kinds of people, I would become more the listener—I’ve always hated small talk—and though I’d walk away from such an occasion feeling as if I had acquitted myself—for, as I recall, Ms. Weaver offered to fix me up with one of her actress friends—Mr. Glimcher, a keen observer of humanity, as an aside told me, “You really don’
t get just who you are, do you?” (That was his version of something my mother would cryptically tell me one day: “Your problem, hijo, is that you are too much like your father.”) Whatever the reason, after such heady occasions, the sort that any number of other people would have embraced completely as a verification of their own worth—achievement through association, as it were—I was always happy to get home to my apartment.
More wonderfully, however, while I was riding the number 11 bus uptown on my way to see my mother one evening, I ran into my family’s old friend Teddy Morgenbesser. I’d always wondered if he would be the sort to have read The Mambo Kings. If so, he might have recognized a bit of himself in the depiction of my character Bernardito Mandelbaum, a Jewish guy gone platanos—or Cubanized—through his chumming around with one Cesar Castillo. If he had, it worried me that Teddy might have felt offended or lampooned. So what happened? I had been sitting in the back when he, getting off, saw me. Smiling, he summed up his feelings with a wink and a single sentence: “Oscar—I just loved that book. It was beautiful.”
During that time, I had the strongest feeling of having pushed far off from the shore of who I had once been, though not a day passed when I did not have my share of memories and therefore my lingering depressions, no matter how wonderfully things were going for me professionally. I remember watching a version of A Christmas Carol that winter and feeling as if I were the ghost of myself destined to go through life dragging behind me my own apparently unshakeable memories, my life told in so many parts—illness, sheltered messed-up childhood, death of father, subsequent struggles with identity and just surviving, my sometime existence as a writer, etc. Until then, however, I really didn’t think anyone could give a damn about me anyway—as a cubano, as a New Yorker, as a pensive, occasionally funny, melancholic man nearly forty years old tasting for the first time in his life a bit of success—though a loneliness-making one. As I pushed off from that shore, followed about by an image of myself as a sick child, or by my pop’s very real and plaintive ghost, I hardly got through a week without being interviewed or photographed by someone—more and more often by foreign journalists, as The Mambo Kings sold all over Europe and the rest of the world (about thirty-six different foreign editions have been published to this day, discounting Britain and reissues).
Along the way, the attention I received led to some unexpected things. For one, the Cuban government’s minister of culture, Abel Prieto, sent me a letter through PEN inviting me to visit Cuba. (Unfortunately, and something I now regret, it was simply unthinkable to me at the time. Visiting Havana, years later, I learned from my cousins that this minister often mentioned my book on Cuban radio.) At Hofstra, among my newly won frills, my schedule for the following semester became one of my own choosing—and I got to share an office with a professor who was never around, a jealousy-making triumph in a department where twenty-year veterans were sometimes crowded, as I recall, three and four to a room. Mr. Mascetti, who had gone to California, possibly to hide out from some people to whom he owed money, or to begin a new life (I really don’t know), called me from Santa Monica after seeing some piece about me in the L.A. Times. With girls laughing wildly and music blaring happily in the background, he told me: “I’m so happy to heah that you’re doing so fuckin’ great, man!” My face eventually appeared in a very strange painting made for a calendar of “Famous Hispanics” sponsored by Budweiser beer: In it I, looking decades older, somewhat resemble, I am afraid to say, the former vice president Dick Cheney. I’d get invited to speak before public high school audiences as an example of a Latino who had come up without any advantages like them and made it, but the fact that I looked so white (or just like the enemy, in some of their eyes) confused the hell out of a lot of kids—I just didn’t seem like them or their parents, and no amount of splainin’, Lucy, about regressive familial genes or childhood illnesses or the kind of mixed neighborhood I had been raised in could make a difference. I would always accept such invitations, but I came to dread the actual moment when I would have to step onto an assembly stage at some rowdy school and hear, first thing, a rising murmur from the audience. If my schedule hadn’t become so busy, I might have happily turned into a recluse. I recall that I felt so stressed-out about my public image that by the New Year of 1990, I had gotten back up to smoking two packs of Kools a day.
On tour in England, during my spring break, where I smoked pack after pack of pungent Dunhills, I discovered that the promotional approach my publisher had taken for the book was one of supreme hipness: Hamish & Hamilton held the launch party at the jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, and, as I recall, in addition to some straightforward news venues, I did countless interviews with print and radio music journalists, to the point that, talking constantly about the musical aspects of the book, I soon began to feel a little punchy. During one radio show for the BBC, my hostess, a very tall and aristocratic dame of the old school, made some comment about my height—at five feet eight—along the lines of, “Well, I hadn’t realized that you Cubans were of such short stature,” to which I answered, “Depends on whether you are speaking vertically or horizontally.” (A long icy silence followed; then she cleared her throat and said, “Now, where were we?”)
Later, I went to Belfast in the north to appear on the Late Show (Channel Four), broadcast live at eleven P.M. As it was the time of the troubles, as they say, it was the only program I have ever appeared on where I had to go through a metal detector and submit to a pattingdown to get into the studio. There were also German shepherds being led through the place, sniffing around for bombs. The audience, of local townspeople, had to go through the same procedures: Once inside they could enjoy a large well-stocked horseshoe bar and were encouraged to drink to their hearts’ content, as were the guests. I’d later learn that one of the in-jokes between our congenial Irish host, a fellow with a name like Mulligan, and the audience was that, sooner or later, he’d put on an act or do an interview with someone so far gone as to be completely amusing. In my instance, we had absolutely no discussion whatsoever of what he might ask me, though he did say it would be something really easy. In the meantime, I drank vodka and tonics and smoked—just about everyone in the audience did too—and no sooner would I put an empty glass down than would some assistant rush over with another from the bar. They actually had someone keeping their eyes on me just for that purpose.
When I finally went on camera, after a completely inebriated Irish punk band had performed, I was having trouble feeling my gums. Suddenly, my host sat down beside me, a beam of light blazed over our table, a camera rolled in, and smiling affably, with a deep brogue, he said: “Well, here I am sitting with my friend from America, Oscar Heeejewlloss, and he has written a new book and a very interesting one at that.”
After a few congenial remarks he turned to me and said: “Now, may I ask you a simple question?”
“Sure.”
“Would you explain to the people of Ireland how Cuban music relates to them, okay?”
I recall making some blithering idiot explanations of the northern Spanish and southern Irish being related, some business about how the bagpipe scales performed on a gaeta in Spain influenced the notion of a Cuban jam—“What is sometimes called ‘una quemada’ ”—and otherwise dancing around the question with a logic that might have made some sense if everyone else were drunk, that Cubans and the Irish, having Spanish blood in common, were really distant cousins just like Ricky and Lucy. I can’t imagine what they made of seeing someone—who looked far more Irish than Cuban—explaining such things, but I suppose that even if I were Desi Arnaz himself, it would have been a difficult task anyway. In any event, how I answered didn’t matter—I’d gotten a picture of the book jacket shown all over Northern Ireland and though I was fairly hammered during that live broadcast, my publishers in London told me that of all my appearances thus far it had been my more “relaxed.”
By the time I was done touring the States and UK, I had gotten so sick and tired of talking about The M
ambo Kings Play Songs of Love that I found myself thinking that were I never to mention a word of that book again, it would be fine with me. And so, with a few days left before resuming my duties at Hofstra, I had taken up Francine Prose’s generous offer to spend a weekend in her upstate home: I’d gone off one overcast morning with my girlfriend to prowl about the local antique shops and had come back with an iconic painting of the Holy Mother, which a Greek friend has since defined as a “black Madonna,” when the phone rang. It could only have been my agent—no one else had that number. Excitedly, she told me: “Don’t go anywhere—someone important is going to call you.”
About ten minutes later, when the telephone rang again, I could hear the unmistakably raspy and lively voice of my publisher himself, Roger Straus Jr.
“My boy,” he said. “You’ve done it!”
“Done what?”
“Why, you’ve been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—that’s what!”
“Say that again?” I recall asking him.
He did, and went on jovially: “I can’t begin to tell you how proudly I—all of us—feel over your accomplishment. Well, well done, young man!”
What does one feel in such moments? A kind of disbelief, and in my case, a hokey sentimentality, over its significance. The first thing I thought, even as I lit a cigarette, was, of course, that a kind of miracle had taken place, that God (or whatever rules the world) had, for a change, decidedly looked out for me; that I had passed through a glorious door into a future that neither I nor my mother or father could have imagined when I was growing up; and yes, I felt a tremendous gratitude to whomever had been out there to make such a decision—for I had never really thought I would ever win anything (even the National Book Award nomination seemed a lark).
Thoughts Without Cigarettes Page 41