I had my first fistfight in those days, or to put it differently, I went crazy lunging after a pair of brothers who for the longest time had been picking on me as I’d sit on my stoop minding my own business. Knowing me as that round face framed in the window, that kid they most often saw with his mother, who seemed so timid and quiet (if not shell-shocked), these two brothers couldn’t help but torment me—“faggot” and “pussy” at first, and once I got glasses, a “four-eyed faggot/pussy” among the names they called me. Spitting at me or tossing dried turds (los microbios!) my way was the least of it, but what finally tipped the balance was a remark that the meaner of them, Bobby, said to me one afternoon: “Your mother’s a cocksucker,” a statement I tucked into my pocket without knowing just what that meant.

Later that same evening, while sitting by our kitchen table with my parents and brother, when I happened to repeat it to him, innocently enough, as if I were reporting on the weather—“Did you know that Ma’s a cocksucker?”—my brother, without as much as thinking about it, picked up a butter knife and jammed it into my right arm beneath the shoulder ( I still have the scar to this day).

“Don’t you ever fucking say that again,” he told me, his face burning red.

Of course, my mother started screaming at him—slapping him in the face and chasing him down the hall. But once a few days had passed and my gash had started to heal, José had a little talk with me: “Next time one of them as much as looks at you the wrong way, I want you to kick their asses,” he bluntly stated.

I suppose he wanted me to do this as a matter of family honor, and because he didn’t like the notion of anyone taking me for a chump. By then, he’d already started toughening me up; when my mother happened to be out, we’d go into the living room and take turns punching each other as hard as we could in the arm, until I could barely lift my own, and if he had confidence in me, when it came to going after those guys, it was because I never once cried or gave up—enduring as much as he could give. I never considered that kind of thing as mean-spirited: I supposed it was what older brothers did and never held that against him, though as I think about it now, he probably had reasons to resent me. For while my parents, to some extent, cut me a lot of slack when it came to my avoiding household duties—I had been sick after all, or perhaps I was still sick to them—and my mother, in those days at least, only slapped my face or used a belt on me when absolutely necessary, as when I’d try to venture far from the stoop and refused to answer her summons, my brother had an entirely different relationship with them, particularly with my father.

He hadn’t gotten along with him for a long time by then. Too much had gone on between him and my father that went far back to the way he had treated my mother in their early years in New York, and that led to their differences. Or as my mother would put it, my father, so gentle with me, would beat the hell out of him for no good reason.

But sometimes he did get out of line: One night—José must have been about sixteen—when he came home after hanging out with some friends uptown and staggered in, drunk, my mother, seeing his state—and doubtlessly thinking about my father—grabbed him by the hair and pushed him down onto our scruffy living room sofa and started beating him with a broom, and not just whacking him here and there but in his groin, sus huevos (she would always tell me that one should go for the balls if assaulted), my brother doubling over, his arms held up over his head, trying to fend her off. She did this while screaming at him at the top of her lungs and promising, as I watched from the living room doorway, that he had yet another punishment to come, for once my father, out somewhere too—and also probably getting a little torn up—walked in, she’d insist, as a kind of emphasis, that my pop also go after him with his own trusty belt.

But he also caught a lot of flak because of me: Years back, fresh out of the hospital, I’d smashed up a set of his prized Lionel trains that he’d paid for himself from his stationery store earnings, just because I could. Instead of punishing me, her poor pobrecito son who really didn’t know better, my mother took out his justifiable despair on him. (Another beating.) Then too, there had been a night when he limped in badly messed up after a bicycle accident, his leg yellow with a suppurating wound: I can remember standing near him and watching the pus oozing out as he dabbed it with a towel, and the mere fact that he was in such a state, carrying into the apartment the kind of microbios that could hurt me, my mother grew hysterical at the danger his injury posed to my health, screaming at him to keep his distance, as if he had done something wrong.

Altogether, he didn’t get any breaks at all. One morning after High Mass, when he’d sung a repertoire that consisted of Bach and Michael Praetorius and Monteverdi, thanks to the urbane taste of Mr. MacDonald, I’d gone downstairs to the choir room to meet him, so that we could walk home together. We left by a side door along a narrow passageway, where garbage bins were set out; as we were heading toward the stairway, a kitten started mewing from inside one of them, and my brother, rifling through it, pulled out a darling little creature that he fell in love with, happily cradling the gentle thing in his arms. Back in our apartment, he fashioned a cradle for it out of a box, and for a few hours, we had an adorable pet—that is, until my mother walked in from wherever she had been. Without a moment’s hestitation she declared it “sucio”—“filthy”—with germs and fleas. Complaining that all she needed was one more thing to worry about, she told my brother to return it from whence it had come; I don’t know what became of that little kitten, but I’ve always recalled the way my brother, a tough guy, almost came to tears over that matter.

Still, he had a hard side—how couldn’t he? José, or “Joe,” depending on whom he was talking to, got around and with whomever he pleased, doing everything that I couldn’t: roller-skating, bicycling, staying out till all hours, and, slick in his way, generally navigating away, with a few exceptions, from ethnic hassles. He did, however, come home one night badly beaten up: While riding a train out to the deepest reaches of Brooklyn with some Puerto Rican friends, he was on hand as a gang of white guys, some twenty or so, swarmed into the car, announcing they were going to kick some spic ass. José, off in the rear of the car, had been left alone, his appearance sparing him, but having his pride and a temper and a half, he had stood up and cried out, “I’m a spic too!” Which is to say that those thugs, brandishing baseball bats and chains, turned on him too: It was the kind of story that established his reputation as a noble tough guy in the neighborhood and made him seem heroic to me.

I’d only seen him fight once, rolling around on the sidewalk with a much bigger fellow—I don’t recall who won, think some cop broke it up—but in any event, he had a quick temper, and on that street, where just an attitude or a derisive glance—“What the fuck are you looking at?”—could instigate a confrontation, he always held his own and carried himself as someone not to be messed with.

So when it came to those brothers, he would not let me off the hook; not a week after he’d jammed that butter knife into my arm, while we were standing around on the stoop and they came walking up the other side of the block, my brother told me, “Now get over there and show me what you can do!” Then: “Vete!” With that came the implication, I knew, that he would take it out on me if I didn’t. I don’t exactly know what possessed me—adrenaline along with fear perhaps—but I ran charging across the street and in my gleeful madness, caught those brothers completely unaware, flailing at them with wild punches. I think they didn’t know what to make of me, and the meaner one, Bobby, whom I’d caught good on his jaw, his head thrown back, ran off crying, the other soon following. What was it but a few minutes of my life? And no big deal—I’m not even sure if I should bother mentioning it now—but the truth is that I kind of enjoyed it, and along the way, on that afternoon, so meaningless to the world, I discovered that I had, without knowing, a lot of pent-up rage inside of me, an anger over a lot of things I could have been aware of, that would continue to simmer under my benign surface, only to suddenly bloom, as it did with my brother, at a moment’s provocation.

Afterward, José seemed to feel quite proud of me, and those brothers never bothered me again and, to some cautious extent, eventually became my friends.

I can remember feeling, bit by bit, a release of my tensions as I crossed the campus toward Amsterdam, all the while swearing to myself that once I reached my block, I’d kiss the sidewalk.

Of course, when I finally came home to our hot apartment, and my mother asked me what the hell had happened, I just shrugged: I don’t recall what she made of the fact that I had come back alone, but by the time I ran into Angie the next day, though I had probably ruined the group outing—“You can’t believe how we went crazy looking all over the place for you!”—I had started to feel rather proud of myself, if not so tough or self-assured.

At home, when Cuban and Puerto Rican visitors I’d never seen before came into the apartment, there always seemed to come a moment when one of them would look at my father, his soft voice intoning a slangy, sometimes beer-slurred Spanish, and then at me, whose awkward Spanish was halting, at best, and ask incredulously, “He is really your son?” (“De verdad, es tu hijo?” My father, in those instances, always answered: “Of course”—“Cómo, no?”—but along the way, his eyes always met with mine, his pupils misting over with a contemplation of genetic mysteries and as well with an awareness of my own history within the family. Though we certainly looked alike, that seemed to make no difference to his friends, for whatever being Cuban was about, I just didn’t have it. I got used to that, but I always felt a little ashamed, and generally learned to nod and smile when questions were asked of me, more often than not looking for any excuse to leave the room. (Though some, I might add, became more understanding, especially once my mother said, “My son, el pobrecito, was sick.”)

I also had some bad luck. At Corpus, during my fifth year there, the school had decided to allow an hour out of the week for Spanish lessons. Our teacher was the school secretary, a certain Mrs. Rodríguez, and while she was a very pleasant lady, her classroom manner seemed hardly soothing, in my case at least. From pupil to pupil she’d go, asking each to repeat certain words and phrases, and while the other Spanish-speaking kids, mostly Puerto Ricans and Cubans, had no trouble at all, when it came to me, I simply froze, my throat tightening along with my gut, and the words I managed to squeeze out, particularly when rolling my rs, were so badly pronounced that Mrs. Rodríguez, out of the kindness of her heart, would go on and on about how I, as the son of Cubans, with a name like Hijuelos, should hang my head low for speaking Spanish so badly.

“Even the Irish kids, que no saben español, do better than you!” she’d say. Then: “Don’t you even want to try?”

I’d look down, shrug, and she would ignore me for the rest of the lesson, averting her eyes from my glance any time she’d pass along the aisle, each session ending with a coup de grâce, for as she’d leave the classroom, she’d cast a disappointed look my way and, shaking her head, disappear into the hall, mumbling to herself, I was certain, about me. I came to dread those lessons, and after a while, she simply carried on as if I were not there, as if I were somehow beneath her attentions and the worst kind of Latino, who didn’t care about his mother tongue, which is to say that at such a delicate time, when a different approach might have made some difference (I really don’t know) to my development along those lines, she quite simply made my own wariness about learning it even more intense.

Of course I understood Spanish completely, but for some reason, I felt paralyzed when it came to speaking it—how a bilingual class with a real teacher would have helped me—and with that failing, along with my looks, definitely setting me apart from the other Latino kids (a double whammy, as it were), I remained incapable of finding my way out of the dense wood of my confusions. Naturally, I gravitated to situations—and friends—in which Spanish was not required. By then, in my adolescence, my mother’s voice, which had nagged and ordered me around for so long, and my father’s, sometimes so calm and measured or else a morass of mumbled, anguished Spanish, had begun to sound to me like voices from a radio, especially when they’d go at each other at night, as if I were asleep again in my aunt’s house back in Cuba, eavesdropping on some overwrought and shrill melodrama from another place far away. When my pop’s pals came over in the late afternoon, I got pretty good at blocking out some of the dreary things I’d overhear them saying in Spanish—like Frankie the exterminator bawling away because his wife didn’t respect him as much as she used to, or about how some new tough boss, an efficiency-expert sort, had shown up suddenly at the Biltmore, making everyone nervous—or my mother’s diatribes, once they’d left, about the quality of some of my pop’s friends. I’d tune out, however, preferring to listen to anything else, the ambient sound of dinner utensils and plates, the faint hum of television sets, the murmur of more or less calm voices coming into the kitchen from the courtyard—normal life unfolding—which somehow always seemed so comforting to me.

But even before my mother had given up, I already had other respites as well: For some reason, these mostly took place out at my cousin Jimmy Haley’s place on Webster Avenue, where his gorgeous wife, María, keeping a tidy apartment with all new furnishings (I remember my mother seeming impressed by that), always cooked up a storm—of strictly Cuban fare. This ravishing lady, buxom and elegant, was always going through the hard labors of stripping the thick skin off green plantains and frying up enough of them to stack high on a platter, more than our little group could possibly ever eat (though I tried). I suppose because it would have been bad form for me not to partake of those meals, my mother looked the other way, though I don’t think she could have been too happy about it, since the doctors at the hospital were still scaring her to death about my potential to come down with various maladies. In any event, I liked going there. For one thing, my cousin Jimmy, who spoke perfect English, was someone I deeply admired. If I ever first formed an image of the earnest Cuban male, decent, hardworking, and responsible, it was back then: He had a son a few years younger than I, little Jimmy, and in those years when we would visit, this quiet boy became my friend. Besides, his household seemed always at peace. But if I most enjoyed those visits, it came down to the way my pop never felt the need to load up on booze around them, and my mother, admiring Jimmy and his wife, always seemed subdued and relaxed, commenting always on the appointments of the apartment—the nice linoleum, the newness of their couch—everything neat as a pin. Jimmy himself, handsome, even-tempered, with a laconic tendency toward understatement, seemed as ideal a father as any boy could ever want: He’d talk about his future plans for little Jimmy and seemed keen about sending his son, when of age, to a military school, teaching him how to drive, and perhaps, one day, returning to Cuba as a family, once Fidel left. Altogether, it seemed to me that little Jimmy and his family had it all, but you just never know—for the poor kid’s life eventually took a trajectory that almost resembled mine: He got sick in his early teens with leukemia and, instead of recovering, passed on; and his father, so straitlaced and decent, if I am remembering the situation correctly, left his wife for someone else—an outcome that now makes me sad.

The thing is that, after a while, once my mother started looking the other way, I’d devour just about anything I could. I’d join my brother in the consumption of thick ham and turkey sandwiches on rye bread with mayonnaise as a snack, filet mignon and onions or fried veal cutlets on oven-burnt toast for breakfast. On one occasion, we ate our way through what must have been a two-pound chunk of dark German chocolate, from the hotel, which we’d hacked apart bit by bit with a butter knife on the kitchen table. And just as memorably, sometime during a cold November night, when the world seemed endlessly bleak, we somehow managed to devour a box of twenty or so chocolate éclairs that my father had brought home from a wedding banquet, and the two of us later doubled over, guts aching, on a couch.

My brother, always managed to somehow stay slim, while I tended to go up and down in weight, depending on whether, for brief periods, some doctor at the hospital demanded that I resume a strict diet. But whatever diets I went on didn’t last long; losing weight over a three-month period, I’d just as quickly put it back on, a cycle I’ve often since repeated during my life. (Look in my closet now and you’ll see three sizes of clothes: in shape, getting out of shape, out of shape.) Actually, getting fat seemed a familial—or Cuban—thing to do. My father, with his devil-be-damned attitudes about food, and God knows how many calories he consumed by drinking beer and whiskey almost nightly, always carried an enormous number of extra pounds, and it didn’t bother me to become more like him; I suppose that on some level, it was my way of being more Cuban. (There is a picture taken of us along Broadway, outside Columbia, on the day, I believe, that I had received my First Communion; the suit I wore, incidentally, had been purchased for ten dollars, off a rack in some garment worker’s apartment, on 108th, where he sold clothes out of his living room; my father and I sport identical crew cuts, and at ten or so I seem to look very much like his son.)

Besides, I came to think of that bulk, which made the doctors frown, as something that might protect me from los microbios, as if taking up more space in the world could make me stronger. (But believe me, even having said this, it had its down side: Now and then, when I’d go with my mother to shop at the cheapest department store in Manhattan, Klein’s on 14th Street, or to Annie’s on 125th, our inevitable search for trousers in the “husky” bins always left me a little low.)

And no, it’s not that I thought about los microbios constantly, but it always amazed me to see how other kids seemed so unconcerned about them. On my stoop one day with the deaf mute’s son, Jerry, I watched a candy bar drop from his hand to the sidewalk. “No big deal,” he said nonchalantly. Picking it up, he made the sign of the cross over it, the way people did walking in front of a church, and said, “Hey, don’t you know that’s all you have to do to make it clean again?” I can remember being very impressed but couldn’t help but wonder how that could possibly be true. (But then, at the same time, I suppose, I believed God could do anything.) Still, it wasn’t a practice I’d ever subscribe to: I’d seen enough of the local hounds using that sidewalk to know better, and, in any case, some part of me—the part that looked in a mirror and always felt slightly disappointed—sort of believed that I was still susceptible to all kinds of things that other kids weren’t, thanks to those Cuban-born microbios, which, despite all my doctors’ visits, still seemed a part of me, lurking deep inside the way sins do, inside the soul.

I never consciously dwelled on what had happened to me in the hospital. Yet when I saw a girl at school that I liked, I’d fantasize that I was in a hospital bed, badly banged up and moaning from some crippling malady, while that girl took care of me, tenderly and mercifully, as would a nurse. (Cured and healthy, I’d end up, in my daydreams, marrying her.) But I was always too timid to approach any of them, even after one of the girls at school had given me a Valentine’s card that read “I’m 4 you: I think you’re cute!” That last word, incidentally, confused me so much that I, for some reason, asked my mother what it meant. (Since the word cute resembled the Spanish “cutis,” my mother, laughing, told me it meant that I had nice skin.) Naïve about many things, I was sneaky. Learning to write, with a loopy script, I took to composing letters—not just to Santa Claus at Christmas (years later, my mother would tell me that she always cherished them, without ever saving a single one), but to comic book companies, claiming I had sent in my subscription money, usually a dollar or so, but hadn’t received any yet; most times my little ruse worked, and I used that same imploring tone of voice (“I am an eleven-year-old boy from a poor family . . .”) to get ahold of the kinds of toys that were advertised in the back of those comics, things like Hypno Discs and magic tricks and, most often, plastic sets of cheaply made (in Japan) and under-cast toy soldiers of the Civil War and D-day. I’d lie in that way because, until I got my own little jobs around the neighborhood, or had begun to scavenge in the basement for two-cent bottle returns, I had no money save the occasional quarter mi madrina, Carmen, would give me for simply being nice to her, or the pennies I would scrounge around for in my father’s dresser drawer and in the deep silken recesses of my mother’s purse when she was out visiting somewhere upstairs.

This led me, along with hearing so often that we were “poor,” to a nascent thievish state of mind: I’d often go to the corner pharmacy, where my parents, before we had a phone, used to get their important calls, and, when I thought the counter lady wasn’t looking, I’d pocket a candy bar or two as quickly as possible. The afternoon she caught me stealing a Hershey bar, her back was turned, and as I started to make my way out, she grabbed my arm and reached into my pocket for the proof—a lecture, with some threats to call the police, followed, but what has most remained with me was her explanation that she had spotted my theft in an angled ceiling mirror—“Up there, you see it, smarty?” And while I felt much relieved that she, knowing my parents, let me go with only a warning, once I left that pharmacy—it was called Fregents—I took to heart a completely different notion from what she intended: to the contrary, instead of swearing off such things, I resolved to be more careful in the future and not to get caught again.

As distasteful as it might sound, that game, for all its potential for inflicting pain and damage—bruised limbs, cut lips, and boxed ears—always seemed fun: I particularly took to it, what with having so much pent-up something inside of me. I’m proud to say that I never went home crying afterward, even felt good that such a formerly sick wimp could hold his own, though I would get beaten with a belt by my mother if I came back with a broken pair of eyeglasses or a tornup and/or bloodied shirt.

Mainly, I will say this about my block: A lot of tough working-class kids lived on it, and while there were a few serious delinquents among them who spent time away in juvenile facilities for burglary, and in one instance, for dropping a tile off a tenement rooftop on a passerby, blinding him, the majority were merely mischievous, though a few were simply mean. I almost had my eyes put out by this older fellow named Michael Guiling, the kind of teenager capable of fastening what were called cherry bombs, a high explosive, to pigeons. (I know, it’s hard to imagine the process, let alone the outcome, but I once saw him tying one of those bombs to a pigeon and lighting the fuse; he let that bird go, and, flying away, it blew up in midair.) He had a thing for fireworks and, for the hell of it, a happy smile on his face, once flung a cherry bomb at my face; if I hadn’t stepped aside, who knows what would have happened. (He was just one of those cruel lost souls—years later, sometime in the early 1970s, he’d die of a heroin overdose in the men’s room of a bar on 110th Street, most popular with Columbia University students, a dive called the Gold Rail.)

Down the street, toward the drive, lived a giant fellow—six feet five and probably weighing three hundred pounds, his nickname, naturally, was “Tiny”—who had some vague aspirations of becoming a football player. It was he who grabbed me by the back of my neck one lovely spring morning and, holding me there, dropped a dime onto the sidewalk, ordering me to pick it up. When I did, he stomped on my hand, crushing two of my fingers, the nail on one of them to this day oddly distended toward the digit. (Despite hating his guts for that, fifteen or so years later, I would be saddened to hear that Tiny, while having had some success with a second-tier football team in Pennsylvania, died prematurely in his early thirties of cancer.)

The Irish were everywhere in the neighborhood in those days (at least down to 108th Street, below which the streets became more Puerto Rican), but so were Hispanics and what census polls would now call “Other.” Unlike some neighborhoods, like around the West Sixties, where different ethnic groups were at one another’s throats, waging block-to-block turf wars of the sort commemorated in B movies, the older kids around there seemed to get along. In earlier times, in fact the late 1950s, when I, still camped at home, could have hardly been aware of such things, there had been periods in which gangs like the Sinners and the Assassins occasionally ventured south from their uptown Harlem neighborhoods—north of City College—to stage “rumbles” against the local “whiteys.” These were fights born of grudges that began at high school dances with some insult, or a face-off between two tough guys getting out of hand, or because someone was banging someone else’s girl, or quite simply out of pure poverty-driven anger and, as well, at a time when the word spic was in common usage in New York City, from the deep memory of old, bred-in-the-bone resentments. I’m not quite sure where the Latinos or, for that matter, the other ethnicities in my neighborhood placed their loyalties, but I’m fairly sure that in such instances they joined their white counterparts in these face-offs against that common enemy.

Over those years, blacks had also made incursions onto our block from the east, gangs of them climbing up the terraces of Morningside Park, intending to swarm over the neighborhood, though without much success. Down in the park on 118th, there was a “circle,” a kind of stone embattlement that looked out over Harlem, and it is from there, I’ve been told, that the locals fended off such attacks by raining down bottles, rocks, and garbage cans on whoever tried to race up to the drive by a stone stairway or to climb those walls.

Nevertheless, though those days had passed, but not the prejudices, the possibility of such confrontations still hung in the air, and as a consequence, it was a common thing for the police to patrol Amsterdam Avenue regularly in their green and white squad cars, with an eye to breaking up any large groups gathered on a street corner, no matter what they were up to—usually just smoking cigarettes and bullshitting about girls. Still, the neighborhood definitely identified with that gang-era mythology. When a recording of the musical West Side Story first came out, my brother threw a party in our apartment for his friends, with my father, incidentally, stationed in the kitchen, allowing an endless supply of beer and other refreshments into the house, while in the living room, the lights turned low, couples danced to songs like “I Feel Pretty” and “Maria,” the record playing over and over again, along with other music—of the Shirelles and the Drifters—but repeating so often that, looking back now, I am sure there was a pride about it, as if, in a neighborhood where mixed couples were already as common as interethnic fights, its songs amounted to a kind of personal anthem for a lot of the older kids. (And to think that the musical itself had been put together by a group of theatrically brilliant middle-class Jewish folks, who, in all likelihood, had viewed such a world from a safe distance!)

Mr. Muller-Thym had first come to the neighborhood during the Second World War, when he taught swimming to naval recruits at the university. After the war, though armed with a Ph.D. dissertation in the mystical thinking of Meister Eckhart, he had drifted into the business world and, with a brood of growing children, had decided to stay on that block, presumably to save the money he would have spent in a better neighborhood. The aforementioned eccentricities included his tendencies to occasionally parade in front of his windows, which were visible from the street, in nothing but a shirt, sometimes less—and though one would think that his physically candid persona would have scandalized the neighbors, even my mother, crying out “Ay!” at the sight of him, at worst found him more amusing than offensive. Publicly, he was civil, always well dressed, and if he stood out in any way from the working-class fathers on that street, it was for both his reclusiveness—I think my father, coming home from work, would say hello to him from time to time, but little more—and the lofty company he kept. (He was actually quite a nice man, always seemed interested in what I had to say, asking about me in a manner that neither of my parents did. “What do you want to do with yourself one day?” “I don’t know.” “Well, you should start thinking about it soon enough.”) A former classmate of his from Saint Louis University, Marshall McLuhan, often frequented that apartment, well into the 1960s before the family moved away; and among the other figures who visited with Mr. Muller-Thym and sat for dinner at his table—doubtlessly on some of those evenings when my pop was sitting around with the likes of Martinez and Frankie the exterminator—happened to be Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist then with the fledgling organization of NASA, with whom Mr. Muller-Thym had a professional relation as a consultant. (It cracks me up now to imagine this haughty rocket scientist, with his Nazi pedigree and physicist’s brilliance, walking up my block to Richard’s while screaming kids, cursing their hearts out and jumping onto cars to make a catch, played stickball on the street; why do I see the legendary Von Braun, shaking his head in bemusement over the apparent decline of civilization?)

Once I’d gotten my wings, I’d often go over there, usually in the afternoons, simply because I wanted to get out of my house. They lived humbly enough—there was nothing fancy about the trappings of their apartment—though what first caught my eye, always caught my eye, was the abundance of books in their home. Richard’s older brother Tommy, an expansive sort with a bit of Brando about him and much street-inflected bonhomie for his fellow man, to say the least, had his own place with one of his other brothers, Johnny, next door, the floor beside his bed covered with dozens of novels, some of them science fiction but many, I suppose, culled from American classics: Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and yes, Iceberg Slim are names I recall. Richard himself, the sharpest kid around, had at some ridiculously young age become consumed with history and ancient literature, no doubt because of his father’s erudite influence. What can one say about a nicely featured kid, half-Italian and half-Dutch, who reads Gibbons and Thucydides, and the poetry of Catullus and Martial in the Loeb classical editions for his leisure? (At first in translation, and then later, once he had mastered them, in the original Greek and Latin.) His narrow room by the front door was always stacked with piles of such books, which sat atop his bunk bed and on his dresser, the floor, and anywhere else they might fit. He would get a kick out of reciting aloud some particularly grizzly account of a battle or, on the bawdier side, some risqué Roman couplets, a slight and naughty euphoria coming into his expression.

And while it might seem, given the calling I’ve unpredictably drifted toward, that this exposure to a household where books were so cherished and to a friend with such a voracious mind might have inspired in me some scholarly bent or an early love for reading, to the contrary, I regarded those books in the same manner I would while walking down Broadway with my father when we’d stop to quizzically peer into a bookstore window, never buying any, as if such volumes were intended only for others, like the college students through whose world we simply passed.

On that end, while I tended to dip into my school textbooks and always did well enough to pass from one grade to the next, I continued to read mostly comics, in which I would lose myself, and certainly nothing as complicated as the poems and narratives of the distant past, which, as far as I was concerned, may as well have been written on the planet Mars. In fact, that bookish world always seemed remote to me. During the few trips I’d made (with my mother) over to the 125th Street library, with its musty interior, I always found the sheer multitude of volumes intimidating and chose my books on the basis of whether they had ornate covers. (My mother, by the way, would wait in another aisle, perusing somewhat tentatively a few books that had caught her eye but never taking any out—I don’t think she had a card—and if anything, she always left that place annoyed over the way the librarian, a heavyset black woman who, as I recall, always wore a large collared sweater and a string of costumejewelry pearls around her neck, sometimes watched her, probably, in my mother’s view, with suspicion as if she “would take one without her knowing, que carajo!”) For the record, one of the books I can recall borrowing—well, the only one I recall—happened to be an old edition of Peter Pan. I can remember feeling very impressed by the clustered, floridly set words on its opening pages, entangling to me like the vines of a briar patch—a purely visual impression—into which I thought I might delve; but I never made much headway; accustomed to the easy leisure of comics, I found Mr. Barrie’s novel, however famous as a children’s classic, too strictly word-bound to hold my attention for long. (Or to put it differently, I was either too lazy or too distracted by my emotions to freely enter that world.)

Nevertheless, I liked the fact that my friend had so many books around, including an arcane collection of the writings of Aleister Crowley, in which his father was interested—all so incredibly far removed from my parents’ beginnings. On some level, I suppose, I developed a kind of respect and admiration for the intelligence one needed for such things. But if I did so, it was from the distance of someone looking in from the outside, with wonderment, or bemusement, in the same way that my mother, at that hospital in Connecticut, used to regard me.

But we’d also get out, spending quite a number of afternoons roving through the back courtyards behind his building, climbing fences and high walls, to make our way over to 117th Street, which in those days seemed one of the more elegant blocks in the neighborhood. It was a placid elm-tree-lined street whose Georgian edifices, owned by the university, were remarkably ornate, and as much as we felt that we were encroaching on alien territory, as it were, we occasionally managed, just by nicely asking, to play billiards in one of the sunny front brownstone fraternity house rooms (if that’s what they were.) And we’d go on the occasional excursion to a nearby park, though Morningside, even then a Harlem mugger’s paradise, remained far less inviting than its cousin by the Hudson, where we would go “exploring” through its winding, tree-laden trails as far north as Grant’s tomb.

Always fast on his feet, Richard, dark haired and of a slim and compact build, could run around the block, and quickly, without as much as taking a deep breath or working up a sweat, a remarkable thing, mainly given the fact that he smoked a carton of Winstons every week. I don’t know how—or why—his habit started; it was always just there. Of his three brothers, the eldest, Bernie, an army officer fresh out of West Point, probably didn’t smoke (I would never see him doing so, at any rate), but I think the next oldest, of my brother’s age and the most burly of them, Johnny, did, and Tommy certainly (Tareytons, as I recall). It simply wasn’t a big thing on my block—if it was illegal for adolescents to smoke, you wouldn’t have known that from checking out the street. Kids like Tommy, very much a fellow of this earth, could play three-sewer stickball games and go running the makeshift bases with a fuming butt between his lips, and, as a matter of course, a lot of the kids, having no trouble getting ahold of them, smoked while hanging out on the stoops, singing doo-wop, or in the midst of a poker game, on which they would wager either money or cigarettes. Some guys walked around with a pack stuffed up in the upper reaches of their T-shirt sleeve, by the shoulder, or with a cigarette tucked J.D.-style alongside their ear. Cigarettes were just everywhere, that’s all, a normal thing, which, however, I never found particularly inviting except when I’d get the occasional yearning to be like everyone else.

In any event, Richard’s household became a refuge to me: It was close by, and the family treated me well. His mother played the piano—I first heard Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” over there, and one Friday evening, in the days when Catholics still observed such rules, I consumed my first Italian-style red snapper dinner at their table. But I especially loved going there around Christmas, when they’d put up a crèche and a majestic nine-foot pine tree, their living room table always covered with Italian cold cuts from Manganaro’s downtown, and other seasonal niceties, like macaroons and brandy-drenched cherries, the holiday atmosphere so cheerful and strong, what with high piles of presents stacked under the evergreen and wreaths on the walls, that our own strictly budgeted Christmases suffered by comparison. We always had lots of food and booze around, of course, but my father wanted to spend only three dollars on a tree, which we’d get down on Amsterdam; and when it came to our presents, my brother and I received only one gift apiece. I don’t recall my mother or father ever having any presents of their own; nor did we celebrate El Día de los Reyes, Three Kings Day, the way other Latino families were said to—in fact, I only heard reference to that holiday many years later; and if anything, after the revolution, when my parents’ thoughts turned to their family in Cuba—my mother receiving her sisters’ plaintive letters with guilt and sadness—a kind of maudlin spirit became a part of the holiday. Having said this, I can’t complain, for even with a humble tree, there was something wonderful about the way the pine smelled in our house, so sweet that not even cigarette smoke overwhelmed it.

At Richard’s, the holiday remained the great event of the family calendar—certainly of his own—and while I suppose they were an affluent family relative to our street, they were quite generous and always allowed me to join in their festivities.

I probably envied my friend—he seemed to always receive the best gifts, purchased down at the old FAO Schwarz: hand puppets from Germany and train sets when he was younger, and, during my adolescence, military board games, like Tri-Tactics or Dover Patrol, and Risk, which we’d play on many an afternoon. On those occasions with Richard, whom I admired and respected, smoking away, it became inevitable that I would try one of those cigarettes myself. I was probably twelve at the time, if that, and while I can’t remember having any sense of elation at those first inhalations—did I cough or make faces?—smoking at least a few, mainly Richard’s, soon enough became part of my days, and the foundation of a habit that would hold on to me, on and off, for many years.

Did I like them? I seem to have gotten used to their bitter taste, and perhaps on some other level I was thinking about my father, of finding one more way of becoming a little more like him. Though I didn’t smoke many at first, they kind of grew on me, and a little weary of my lingering self-image as the frail sick son, it wasn’t long before, in addition to comiendo mucho—lots of food, tons of it—I began sneaking cigarettes out of the half-filled packs that my father would leave in one of his top dresser drawers. I’d sometimes go down into Morningside Park to smoke, where I was fairly certain that my mother wouldn’t see me, and while I never lingered long there, it happened that, on a certain afternoon as I stood along one of its glass-strewn passageways, a couple of stringy Latino teenagers, the sort to wear bandannas around their foreheads, coming out of nowhere, held me up at knifepoint. It was one of those occasions when I wished I had the presence of mind to muster up some Spanish, but I’m fairly certain that no matter what I might have said (“Pero soy latino como tú”—“I’m Latino like you”) it would have made no difference: They didn’t like the way I looked, my blond hair and fairness alone justification enough for them to hate me without even knowing just who I was; it would happen to me again and again over the years, if not with Latinos, then with blacks—prejudice, truthfully beginning and ending in those days with the color of your skin. I wasn’t stupid, however; I gave them what I had in my pockets—a few bucks from one of my jobs working at a laundry before school down on 121st for this nice man named Mr. Gordon, who’d make his morning deliveries while I watched his shop (and pilfered the loose change on his shelves), and two of my pop’s cigarettes, which I had in my shirt pocket.

Eventually, my pop figured me out. Not that he put it together by how many cigarettes were left in his packs—I’d never overdo it—but because I started feeling too slick for my own good. Coming back from some afternoon movie on 96th Street one day, I had lit up one of his Kents only to see my father, peering out a bus window at me as it passed along the avenue. First he whistled at me, a high low whistle that he’d call me by, and gesturing with his hand against his mouth as if her were drawing on a cigarette, he shook his head, mouthing the word no. Then he pointed his hand toward me—gesticulating the way Latinos do, his index finger stuck out, and going up and down, meaning I was going to get it. Later, at home, he took out his belt and reluctantly gave me a beating, as always on the legs but painful just the same. Then, hearing about what had happened, my mother got into the act, slapping my face that night and looking strangely at me, as if I were a criminal who had betrayed her, for weeks afterward. Naturally, it made no difference; I adjusted, telling myself that, as with other things, I would have to become far more careful.

Of the two of us, José was always the more gifted: Lacking a center, I had a basically infantile mind and no sense of order; I was lackadaisical in my mode of dress, while he, a more sartorial sort, had the kind of instincts that simply amazed me. He knew how to iron a shirt or a pair of trousers to a sharp crispness, and given the challenge of creating a costume for a Halloween party, he once fashioned a gaucho outfit out of some pieces of felt cloth from which he made a vest and, flattening an old hat, came up with a new one with jangles along the brim, the final touch a wrapping in velvet cloth around his waist. (He sort of looked like Zorro and was quite handsome in the mirror before which he posed.) He was sharp in a way I would never be, and effortlessly so, though I doubt that he didn’t secretly work hard at it. Above all, I’d always thought, even then, of him as being far more Cuban than I, the Spanish he would speak with some of our neighbors seemingly of a level that I, in those days, could not begin to approach. (“Tu hermano es mucho más cubano,” my mother would always say.)

Nevertheless, sharp as he could be, he went through some rough times. Going back a few years, once the Catholic high school he had attended closed down, he ended up at George Washington up on 187th Street, a high school where he always had to watch his back (which is to say, people were always kicking one another’s asses) and from which by his senior year he had dropped out. (For the record, my parents were not happy about that.) He worked delivering Sunday newspapers, starting at six in the morning, a job I benefited from, because, working for tips, I’d deliver the missed issues of the New York Herald, the New York Journal American, and The New York Times around the neighborhood once the calls came in at about nine. (There was also the Daily News, which most people also ordered, those Sunday editions with their fabulous four-color comic pages weighing three or four pounds apiece. However, I don’t recall ever seeing a Spanish-language newspaper like El Diario on those racks.) He’d apparently also worked for a gay mortician for a time, around Washington Heights, whose advances in those parlors of cadavers he fended off. Altogether, though he seemed always to have money in his pocket, my brother remained a restless sort, looking for some distant horizon better than what we seemingly had before us. (A pet peeve of his was to the fact that the name Basulto still adorned, as it had for decades, the mailbox and bell.)

Generally, he rarely stayed at home, spending more than a few nights away—where, I don’t know; wherever he had been hanging out, perhaps at the homes of friends like the Valez family on 122nd or up on a rooftop on a mat. There came a day when his girlfriend’s brothers, dressed in their New York City police officers’ blue uniforms, began knocking at our door. They knocked because my brother, in the process of painting their sister nude, or at some other point—perhaps during their teenage outings to the piers under Coney Island’s boardwalk—had, in the parlance of the day, “gotten her in trouble.” She was pregnant, and her family was not pleased.

My father, coming to the door and probably knowing much more than he let on, claimed, as he faced those burly officers, to have no awareness of my brother’s whereabouts. (He spoke a low-toned, generally unaccented English, maybe Spanish-inflected in some ways but always calm.) In any case, after several visits with their officers’ hats in hand, they stayed away. One of those nights, when my brother had come home with the air of a fugitive on the run, my father, despite their differences, sat him down in the kitchen and counseled him—an unusual thing in our family—as to his choices. Given the situation, I think it came down to the following: Either marry her or get lost. My brother would always say that my father, without a drink in his gut, rose to the occasion and, truly concerned, advised him well. Not so much to take the high road perhaps, but to consider what would be best for his future. For, as it turned out, my brother, eighteen at the time and with a pregnant girlfriend with a cop family to worry about tracking him down, decided to enlist in the air force, and within a few months, he was gone.