I’ve always remembered him as a man who stoically engaged the mornings. As a kid I always awoke to the sound of his footsteps in the hall, for he’d leave around six for his early shift at the hotel. I’d hear the door opening carefully, the jangle of keys and the turn of the lock, then the door closing shut against the rickety frame; he made more noise than he should have. He’d step out into the absolute stillness of those New York mornings, the city silent and deserted at that hour; only the duration of Sundays, when hardly anything opened in those days, approached them in their quietude. He’d go down the hill of 118th Street to Amsterdam Avenue, a newspaper tucked under his arm, his ambling stride unmistakable, then head up a few blocks south to 116th ( the path ascended), where he would cross the Columbia University campus to the subway kiosk on Broadway, seeing few people along the way. Occasionally, he’d meet up with Mr. Hall from upstairs, who worked for the LIRR. They were good friends, though I don’t know what they might have talked about. Occasionally, a milk truck or a bus passed by on the street, but generally when he set out to work, he did so by himself.

Into the bowels of the subway he would go, with its dirty platforms and penny Chiclets and five-cent Hershey bar dispensers on the columns, and board his train downtown and eventually over to Grand Central, the seats in those days still often covered in lacquered cane. He’d make that journey, no matter how he might have been feeling, or the weather, even when snow had piled high on the streets and sidewalks. To miss work was unthinkable to him.

Given the way he’d spend many of his evenings, he was probably in a constant state of fatigue—cigarettes, it seemed, helped him keep going. He worked two jobs after 1960, at the Biltmore and at the Campus Faculty Club rooftop restaurant, on top of a high-rise Columbiaowned residential hotel, Butler Hall, a block over on 119th Street. For years he didn’t sleep much, and of course, his greatest pleasure remained the company of his friends. His warm manner, publicly, attracted smiles: Sitting out on the stoop, he conversed happily with anyone who happened by. Language was never a barrier. Though I’d grow up with the notion that my father was lucky enough to have mastered English as well as he did, he, in fact, also learned to speak serviceable amounts of German, Russian, Greek, and Italian at the hotel, where the staff consisted mainly of immigrants like himself—which is to say, it seems that he had a facility with language. It amazes me to think that had he been born twenty years sooner, around 1895 or so, he may well have spent his entire life on a farm in Cuba, riding a horse, perhaps alongside his brother, instead of passing his days in the kitchen of a midtown hotel preparing grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and grilled steaks for the usual Men’s Bar clientele of boozing business executives, errant college boys, and the occasional famed personality—like Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra and perhaps, in all his years there, Ernest Hemingway. (I will never know.)

A union man, local number 6, he paid his dollar dues weekly and kept a book, somewhat the size of a passport, in which each page, subdivided like a calendar, had a square by the date for each stamped payment. The squares were filled with slogans—“Buy the Union brand!” “Support your Union brothers!” He didn’t care for Fidel, of course, given what had transpired in Cuba since the revolution, though his sisters, save Borja and Maya, had remained there without complaint, apparently—none of them left or tried to leave, that I know of—and yet when Marcial García would show up, always with a jug of Spanish wine, to speak in defense of the revolution, my father and mother always heard him out without holding that stance against him. My father was a Democrat, always voted so, but he had his prejudices. He never blinked an eye when a Latino, dark as ebony, might come to the apartment, but when it came to American blacks, the sort who lived in the projects above 123rd Street, he would not go anywhere near them. (When I was about sixteen and had made a black friend, a guitar player I’d met from around, and invited him into the house, my father would not allow him inside. “No, you must leave, I’m sorry,” he told him bluntly by the door.) Nevertheless, he was quite friendly with our mailman, who was black, bald, and cheery, conversing with him often enough in the hall.

Remember that Cuban boxer Benny “Kid” Paret, who got beaten into a coma at the old Madison Square Garden by the champion, Emile Griffith, because he’d so pissed him off, calling Griffith a maricón? His manager, Olga’s husband, came by that same night in the aftermath of that brutal pummeling—Benny, after a few weeks, would die—and when Mr. Alfaro walked in, he carried the bucket containing both sponges and the bloody towels left over from that match and set it down by our kitchen table, where he sat for hours drinking with my father, who did his best to console him.

My father had a terribly distended right elbow, from a childhood fall out of a tree in Cuba, his bulbous ulna bone jutting out a few inches beyond the hinge. You couldn’t miss it, any more than you could help noticing how his hands were often covered with burns and cuts. As I sat by him one evening, watching him smoke cigarette after cigarette and pour himself another drink of rye whiskey, I found myself staring at his elbow and because I’d always search for something to say, I couldn’t help but ask him about why that bone stuck out so far.

“How’d you get that, Pop?” I asked him.

“I got it during the war,” he said after a moment, and he tapped at the bone in a way that made the ash of his cigarette drop off. “A German shot me,” he said.

“You were in the army?” It was a surprise to me.

“Yes,” he said, without equivocating. “I was a sergeant.”

“What did you do?”

He shrugged. “Yo era cocinero.” He sipped at his drink. “I cooked for all the soldiers and for the generals too.”

“Over there?”

“En Europa durante Segunda Guerra Mundial,” he added in Spanish for emphasis: “In Europe during the Second World War.”

Of course, it was a lie, though I didn’t know it at the time. I can only suppose that he made up that fabrication to impress me, his American son. Maybe he did so because war was in the air—Vietnam was just gearing up, and some of the older boys in the neighborhood were going there as soldiers (a few, like Charlie Soto, coming back in a box)—but, even if some moment of patriotic fervor hadn’t compelled that story, I don’t know if he really believed he had anything glorious to report about his life.

“That’s really true—you were a sergeant?”

“Te juro.” And he crossed his heart. “I swear it’s so.”

That excited me, of course, and it left me buoyant. Expecting to go into the army myself one day, I was learning Morse code: I’d sent away for a dime pamphlet about telegraphy and, myopically already half-gone, my lenses as dense and heavy as the bottoms of whiskey glasses, I would sit up late at night, studying those dot dash permutations off a card, without a thought as to how the system had probably become outdated. Nevertheless, that revelation so thrilled me that I actually bragged about my father’s service to my friend Richard, from across the way. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked me, his mouth pursed skeptically as he took a drag of a cigarette.

Still, for weeks, I walked around convinced that he’d told me the truth, and rather proudly so, though, after a while, I couldn’t help but ask my mother about it. The exchange, as I recall, went as follows:

“Hey, Ma, was Pascual in the army during the Second World War?”

“Was Pascual a soldier? You know . . .” And I made like I was firing off a rifle.

“Tu papá ? Un soldado? Nunca,” she said once she grasped what I was getting at. “Never!”

“But why would he tell me that?”

I mustered some Spanish, poor as it was. With her, I always felt like a boat out in some dark bay, sending signals out to a distant lighthouse, always waiting for the light to beam on.

“Fue mentira?” I ventured.

“Si, hijo,” she said sadly.

“But why?” I asked.

“Por qué?” Her face went somewhere else and then she settled down.

She shrugged and rolled her eyes, and, in the only time I’d ever seen her do so, my mother, smiling, tipped her head back and, with her fist closed and thumb sticking out, as if she might otherwise be hitchhiking, raised and lowered her hand toward her mouth.

“But, hijo, don’t you know,” she said, “that he drinks too much?”—“Que tu papá bebe desmasiado?”

Okay: While I knew it, at the same time, a part of me continued to believe him—I couldn’t help it.

The hotel allowed him three weeks for vacation, which he always took in the summer, often while still moonlighting at his other job but still having enough of his days free to do what he most liked, which was to go to the beach, usually Brighton, out in Brooklyn. He’d take me along, when I was eleven and twelve, but never my mother, who preferred to stay at home. (Whether she wanted time off from him or not, she had a belief that too much sunshine would be bad for her skin, and in any case, my few memories of her at the beach always find her mainly under an umbrella, her arms and legs and face slathered with lotion.) We’d ride the fan-aired subway down there, always unbelievably hot, of course, and for these outings, I recall, he’d pack a bag of his favorite sandwiches: salami with pickles and mayonnaise on seeded hard rolls, about a half dozen of them (how less Cuban can you get?). He’d put on a pair of trunks (always oversized) in one of those sandy-floored men’s rooms that reeked of salt water, urine, cigar smoke, and compromised stomachs. Then, once I’d changed, we’d find some spot close to the shoreline, where he’d spread out a blanket, wanting to be near the murky water. He drank beers, which he’d bring along in a shopping bag—and in a pinch, there was always some enterprising chap clopping along the sand in a pith helmet and sandals, selling beers out of a Styrofoam cooler. I seem to remember that he also brought along a thermos—probably filled with whiskey, though I can’t imagine anyone drinking whiskey in that hot sun—and for my refreshments, a bottle of orange juice. Not one for luxuries of any kind, he’d pull from his bag a little plastic, cutting-edge-technology, made-in-Japan transistor radio, hardly much of anything at all, on which he’d tune into a Spanish-language station, a tinny, thin mix of boleros and cha-chas along with an endless promotional patter punctuating the waterside cacophony, similar radios sounding off from hundreds of blankets around us. He liked women, that’s for sure, his eyes never missing a buxom lady’s figure, big hipped or big bottomed or not, as she’d pass by or go wading into the water. Occasionally, he’d strike up a conversation with a woman if she were on a blanket nearby, and somehow, despite his girth, he’d cajole all manner of information from her—“Where do you live?” “What do you do?” “Oh, you have kids—I like kids”—the kinds of things I’d overhear him saying in Spanish. Not that he went off with anyone, but looking back now, I’m fairly certain that he enjoyed the pursuit. He did not swim—rather made his way into the water and plopped down into it, falling back on his hands, or else splashed himself with that foamy rush, always keeping an eye on me to make sure that I kept watch over the plump wallet he’d stash inside his shoes, under his shirt and trousers, on the blanket.

The waters off Brighton were not like those blue, crystal clear waters off the coast of Oriente, Cuba, but now and then, I’d catch him as he, sitting up, would look over the horizon with a mostly dreaming expression in his eyes, the way he would sometimes in our kitchen, as if, indeed, Cuba was not far away. He didn’t have a whole lot to say to me—we were, on those days, as my mother might remark, just being “muy, muy tranquilito”—and after a few hours, maybe four at most, during which I took a few tentative dips in the sea or else examined the half-dead grayish crabs washed up in the auburn sand, it would be time to head back. We’d dress in the same bathrooms and stop for a frankfurter along the boardwalk—and sometimes my father might linger by a railing to have a smoke, the Eiffel Tower–looking parachute drop in Coney in the distance, before setting out for the hour-and-a-half ride home. And while it wasn’t much as far as vacation days go—and we’d often repeat the same thing the next day—I enjoyed those outings very much, and think of them nostalgically now.

As I’d get older, we’d go up to the Bronx, a different story entirely, where he’d hang out with his friends at gatherings that began at about three or four on a weekend afternoon. Nothing fancy, they always started out agreeably enough with folks sitting around talking amicably, food, and a lot of it, served on paper plates off a buffet table, and some music blasting out of a record player or radio. Gradually, however, what with the men drinking so much and my father becoming more and more deeply implanted on a plastic-covered couch, I dreaded the moment when we’d leave, usually late at night. The journey home at two in the morning, with nary a taxi or gypsy anywhere in sight along those desolate streets, involved a trek down a long hill, past a row of abandoned buildings, in a fairly crime-ridden neighborhood, maybe number two or three in the city. Uptight and vigilant, I’d hold on to my father’s arm, with my pop completely out of it, trusting, even if he’d been mugged a few times before, that we’d manage to slip through to the kiosk stairway of the 169th Street and Third Avenue station without incident (if he thought about it at all). Once on the platform, we sometimes waited half an hour before a number 8 train would finally show up, and even then, that ride back to the West Side, with another wait at 149th’ and Grand Concourse, could take just as long. Somehow we’d always make it home.

But during those vacations what I enjoyed more at that age were the days when he’d bring me down to the Biltmore, where he’d go to pick up his pay (always in cash and in a letter-size manila envelope, weighted with small change). There was a little office–really a kind of booth—at the far end of a freight dock on the Forty-fourth Street side of the hotel, midway between Vanderbilt Avenue and Madison, that could be entered from the sidewalk. And as my father would speak quietly with the payroll clerk—“This is my son, Oscar,” he’d say—I would watch the workers unloading vegetable crates and sides of white fatted beef from the backs of produce and butcher trucks, a process that somehow always enchanted me. Then we’d either go upstairs through a service entrance or make our way back around and walk in through the lobby, a busy place in those days; businessmen came flowing through its brass revolving doors, while bellboys in beige uniforms tended to opening taxi doors and to incoming luggage, groups of tourists and conventioneers milling about. The massive lobby’s carpeting was plush, and when you looked above, you saw on the ceiling an ornate Florentine-style fresco of gods flying through the heavens. Just beyond, behind an ornate grille, was a Havana-style palm court, and, of course, as that lobby’s centerpiece stood the famed Biltmore clock, with its banquette sitting area, much storied as a congenial spot for young couples to meet up for dates, or where college boys on the prowl might look for girls. (I didn’t know anything about the hotel’s history at the time—what could my father have told me?—but in conjunction with this writing, I found out that the hotel, some twenty-six stories high and taking up an entire block north of Grand Central, had been built by the Warren and Wetmore architectural firm in 1913, a few years before my father was born. Aside from being the kind of place where the Zionist Conference of 1942 convened and the World Center for Women’s Progress held its inaugural meeting, it was at the Biltmore where F. Scott Fitzgerald spent his honeymoon with Zelda.)

Inevitably, we’d end up inside the Men’s Bar or the Men’s Grill Room, which was entered a few steps down off the lobby through a door by which a sign was posted: NO WOMEN ALLOWED. I recall that it was an old-style oak-paneled room, quite dark and Edwardian in its motifs, its walls decorated with paintings of sporting scenes and nude women, a massive oak bar taking up much of the space, while off to the side were various booths. We’d go into the kitchen, at the back, where my father would say hello to his fellow workers, among them Díaz, the cubano. A plate-cluttered and steamy place with glaring overhead neon lights, that kitchen was filled with stainless steel counters, pots and pans hanging off racks, and fans set up here and there to offset the heat of ovens, grills, and deep fryer. A long banister divided the room. Among its appliances, which impressed me greatly, were a battery of six-slice toasters for the preparation of the bar’s famous BLT and club sandwiches. I can remember being treated quite well by the staff there—sitting on a stool in the back by a cutting board, watching them cook away, I’d have lunch, anything I wanted, though I distinctly recall always asking for the club sandwich, for we never ate bacon at home, and more than once, my father, a cigarette between his lips, officiated over the making of an ice cream sundae replete with hot fudge topping, whipped cream, and a maraschino cherry, which, placed before me, I devoured. Afterward, once he’d come back from the pantry, we’d head out—down into Grand Central to catch a shuttle to Times Square, and home.

Once, I found a twenty-five-dollar gold piece in the gutter. I have no idea how such a valuable thing happened onto the street, but when I brought it home to show my father, he told me, “Bien hecho”—“Well done”—and gave me a dollar for it. (For the record, I also found on the street a two-dollar Confederate bill, which, thinking it worth something, I kept for ages.)

We were always receiving visitors out of the blue—a lot of Cubans who’d recently turned up in the city, just like in the I Love Lucy show, which, by the way, my father liked to watch in the reruns. (With The Honeymooners, that was the only other show I remember his laughing aloud at.) One afternoon—I was about twelve—he received a few of these new guests: a plump dark-haired couple with an even plumper little girl, in from New Jersey, fresh up from Castro’s Cuba, who had heard about a Hijuelos living in New York City. My father was wearing checkered slacks, a short-sleeved shirt, and white tennis sneakers that day—he favored sneakers of any kind on his time off from the hotel, where he would have to stand constantly on his feet—and after bringing them some refreshments in the living room and conversing for a while, he, coming out into the hallway, called me in from my room, where I had been reading comics or doing whatever the hell it was that I would do. He didn’t often easily smile at me, but when I—in the midst of my early adolescent can’t-be-bothered-by-anythingelse stage—lumbered down the hall and the couple stood up as soon as they saw me, my pop, beside himself, bowed as if announcing some sixteenth-century courtier at the court of the Spanish king. In Spanish, he said, “Oscar Hijuelos, I am pleased to introduce you to Oscar Hijuelos,” for that was, indeed, the fellow’s name. Blinking affably, the other Oscar Hijuelos, who must have been about thirty at most, smiled and extended his hand to me for a shake. Then his wife by his side said, “Hola, pariente”—“Hello, relative”—and I shook her hand as well. We sat down for a while, the other Oscar Hijuelos (to this day I have no idea of the family connection) filling in my father on his doings in this country—I’d heard that kind of thing often, as if it were a drill: no job, no language, some help from Cuban friends, some from the government, the new world so strange, and yet, despite it all, somehow landing on one’s feet. That other Oscar Hijuelos, with his wife and daughter, stayed for about an hour. My mother never came home to meet them. And once they left, promising to return, they never did.

I remember nothing of that evening after he’d come home, except that he had gone to bed early. There he had lain all night, tossing and turning and gasping—according to my mother—and while a lovely snow continued to fall, come the next morning, at about five, when my father would usually awaken, he simply could not move. My mother, loving—and hating—him so much, prevailed upon our gentle across-the-hall neighbor, Mrs. Blair, on whose door she banged at that unearthly hour, begging to use her telephone to call Dr. Altchek in Harlem. That great old man, however disturbed from his sleep, turned up by six—I remember that under his topcoat, he wore pajamas—and within a few moments after making some examinations, he, as he had done with me those years before, declared that my father, having suffered a heart attack, should be rushed to the hospital.

That whole interlude of his initial recovery, during which my father spent some three weeks in a fifth-floor room of the Flower Memorial Hospital on Fifth Avenue and 105th Street (thank God for union insurance coverage) with a lovely view north over Central Park, I have to skirt. I will say this: He had his transistor radio to keep him company and, thinned down somewhat with the hospital diet, seemed to be extremely well. I sat by him on numerous afternoons, watching so many of his friends from the hotel and from around come by to greet him. After working more or less steadily at the hotel since 1945 or so, he seemed grateful for the time off, for the outpouring of visitors, and would sit up, smiling in his hospital pajamas, and somewhat optimistically, despite the IV line in his arm. My mother, at least when I was there, never came, not that I remember, though she surely must have. At one point he told me, “Whatever happens to me, take care of your mother.”

After he left the hospital, sticking to their diets and giving up smoking, he got even thinner and glowed, somewhat, from renewed health, the bad habits of those years left behind (his body must have been grateful). During that peaceful time, without any shouting in the house, my mother, though still worried about him, seemed far more content, and he, without taking a drink and not yet back working, acquired a more relaxed demeanor. Some things were tough, however—I can recall that we began to run a bigger tab than usual down at the corner grocery store, Whities, where he once used to send me to buy him cigarettes, and at Freddie’s Bodega, because he couldn’t bring his usual foodstuffs home from the hotel. And perhaps he went through a month or two without full pay (I don’t know). But even if we didn’t get a tree at Christmas that year, generally, things were good—we finally had a telephone installed, in case another emergency arose, a telephone to whose dial my mother affixed a cylinder lock. And my pop? At forty-seven, he was still young enough to look forward to years and years of life. He felt confident enough to buy the only new piece of furniture that I can recall ever coming into our house, an olive green leather easy chair with one of those extendable footrests, which he got on time payments from Macy’s. Nightly, instead of hanging around in the kitchen, he’d stretch out in luxury, watching our always flickering television set.

By spring, when I’d come home from school, we’d pass a few hours taking strolls over to Riverside Park, where he was content to sit on the lawn, watching college girls go by, boats gliding along the water. He didn’t need much, though, as I think about it now; he probably had too much time to reflect back on what had happened to him. Sometimes, out of nowhere, while looking around at the loveliness of the day, at the wisps of clouds in the fine blue sky, the sparrows hopping merrily on the grass, or at a lilting butterfly, he’d sigh, and with that, I swear, from him emanated a palpable melancholy—I would just feel it, almost like a shudder, rising from his body. In such moments, I am certain that he, trapped by some dark thoughts or emotions, probably wanted a nice drink. Probably, he felt nostalgic for the good old days when he could just take out a cigarette for a relaxing smoke—he was, after all, a creature of his generation.

“You think you’re going to live forever, drinking and smoking? What are you, stupid, Pascual? . . . Qué carajo, are you crazy?” She’d go on for hours and in such a manner that, if anything, he took to drinking even more. Worse, he didn’t seem able to hold it the same as he used to, for he’d slur his Spanish in ways that I hadn’t heard before, and, as well, he’d drink so much that just getting down the hall to the toilet, he sometimes staggered so badly that he would be propelled forward as if someone had picked up the building and tipped it onto its side, or as if he were suddenly shot out of a cannon, or on a listing ship in the stormy sea. He’d sometimes fly headlong so wildly that he’d tumble down and end up slumped over on the floor—I know this because I often tried to help him up, something that got harder as he began to get heavier again, those pounds coming back to him with a vengeance.

The evenings became something of a nightmare to me—to this day I feel a terrific melancholy when it begins to get dark. And not just because of my memories of all the shouting and arguments, but what they led to. No matter how much she tried to reform him, my poor mother, however well-intentioned, only managed in her strident ways to make things worse, while he, falling back on some macho pride, took her pleas (harangues) the only way he could, stubbornly and refusing to change: “Soy el hombre”—“I am the man”—was his only answer, “and if you don’t like it, divorce me.” I heard that word divorce night after night, shouted so loudly that everyone in the building did too. I can’t blame my mother for seeking her refuge with friends on those evenings, what with my father losing his self-control and falling apart in front of her; at a certain point, once she saw that he was getting a certain way—“muy borrachón”—she’d make herself scarce, for if she remained in the apartment, they’d spend half the night circling around the rooms, threatening each other.

But that was not the worst of it for me. Indeed, during those years, on many a night, in the crushingly lonely interludes after his pals, who always visited in the evenings, had left and my mother had gone out, I became his sole companion and, I’ve since come to think, his babysitter. He would insist that I keep him company (which was fine, even if I would have preferred to just watch our buzzing TV or go over to see my friend Richard) and if I hung in there with him, as an eleven- and twelve- and thirteen-year-old kid, it was because I felt constantly afraid of leaving him alone. So I’d remain by his side night after night in our little cramped kitchen as he’d drink himself into oblivion, until there came a certain point when he’d start staring at me intensely from across the table, his eyes squinting, as if to bring me into focus. A cigarette burning before him, my pop, as if forgetting who I was, would speak only in Spanish to me, and in such a mangled fashion that I wonder now how I understood him. (Years later, while sitting in a bar with a Puerto Rican poet friend, a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish, two incredibly drunk Latino men across from us were holding a conversation about life, but with such slurring that even the well-educated Hispanist beside me could not begin to understand them, though I could.) By then, my father had been dwelling on his mortality for so long that he often cried at the thought of his own passing, and far from concealing that fear—or conviction—he took to repeating a single phrase: “Voy a morirme”—“I’m going to die.” “Voy a morirme, hijo,” he’d tell me. Then: “Entiendes?”—“You understand?” his warm liquid eyes glazing over with bewilderment and tears.

I would just shrug or withdraw into myself—what else could I do?

Then he might say, “Pero sabes que eres mi sangre, y que te quiero”—“But you know that you are my blood and I love you.” And while I realize now just what he must have wanted to hear back—“And I love you too, Pop”—I could never say it, and so those nights went until, at some point, he gave up the good fight and dragged himself off to bed for a few hours of sleep before he’d get up for work for his early morning shift at the Biltmore Hotel, his words of prophesy staying with me long after.

In my way, I suppose, I took out whatever emotions I had from such evenings on other kids, such as the time when I put that cigarette out on my friend Richard’s head. (Sorry, man.) I had always gotten along with one of the French Haitian kids from upstairs, this burly, immense, unflappably cheerful boy about my age, Phillipe. It was he and his older brother John-John who once took me into the basement and, setting up a little projector in an abandoned room, showed me the first bawdy film I had ever seen, one of those grainy 16 mm movies you could get in one of the shops along sleazy Times Square, in which the women, by today’s standards, were too fat and too ruined looking, but who, with their bushy vaginas spread wide and their doughy flesh, seemed wildly exciting as well as wicked. We also played a lot on the street, and one afternoon, as I stepped out off the stoop, wearing a pair of new Hush Puppies, for some reason, though he didn’t have a mean bone in his body, Phillipe shot me a faggy kiss with his lips smacking and chippie-chippie sounds: He was sitting against the stoop’s columns and when he did it again as I walked on, I turned and punched him as hard as I could on the side of his face, and his head began bleeding from its impact against the stone. He never did it again.

At the same time, some need made me easily manipulated: I guess I wanted to please others, to have friends. A professor’s son, an affable, somewhat handsome fellow who lived around the corner, had brought me along to a party in the apartment of a well-off family whose son attended his prep school. He brought me not out of any intent to broaden my social horizons but because he wanted to beat up some foppish guy for no good reason. In the midst of this friendly occasion, my “friend” urged me, as a favor, to “put this guy straight,” and though I had nothing against him and hardly knew the fellow, I called him a faggot, and even when he begged me not to hit him, I did anyway, this professor’s son mirthfully looking on.

He also masterminded a confrontation between me and this fellow named Ralph, said to be the toughest guy at the Horace Mann high school. I was out on Broadway and 116th Street when the professor’s son persuaded me to fight him, and, man, his reputation had been earned out of real abilities, and what I can mainly remember about that idiotic circumstance is that he turned out to be so tough that I ended up admiring the guy. He had a pretty sister, by the way, who must have been in awe of the fact that I had gone after her tough-guy brother, and from time to time when I’d see her on the street or on the subway, she’d always smile at me, though I was incapable of imagining that she could have any interest in someone from my background. (The irony is that, years later, when I ran into this fellow Ralph, he couldn’t have been more friendly, though the professor’s son, whom I saw again years later during a period when I was having a lot of success, actually said to me, “Good things happen to bad people.”)

For a few years, during that time when my pop got worse, while playing softball in the Harlem league, we’d practice down on the Columbia athletic field near 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, on the very same property that would become a matter of contention during the campus upheavals of 1968. Out of laziness or because I might be late, I’d sometimes take a shortcut through the park, along its deserted paths and, inevitably more often than not, get jumped; I should have known better, but something about the danger thrilled me, or the punishment involved, for even if you’d handed over your change, someone just wanted to have it out with you anyway, and I’d find myself getting into more than a few fights that way. I was lucky not to get stabbed in the gut, like another friend of mine, Pete, did some years later, and I almost had my jaw broken once—or at least it felt like it—but I somehow kept making my way along those same trails, as if, indeed, I was asking for trouble.

But I found other, “safer” means of escape as well. I began to drink, sometimes my pop’s stuff, a swig or two out of one of the pint bottles of rum or whiskey he’d keep in a kitchen cabinet—like father, like son, right?—and just enough to lift my spirits slightly, though I never liked the taste. Still, I eventually graduated into absolute intoxication—I think I was twelve—one evening at my pal Richard’s across the street. That too was inevitable.

Mr. Muller-Thym, while attending to his paperwork at home, would sit by a table in his living room, sipping champagne, what he called “bubbly.” Starting in the mornings, he got through his days in a pleasantly hazy state of mind. Keeping a well-stocked liquor cabinet, he seemed absolutely unperturbed by the notion that his sons occasionally availed themselves of its contents. We’d sit around in Richard’s room, listening to jazz on a record player, sometimes to Latin-inflected cu-bop music, which for us, in the early sixties, came down to the vibraphone jazz of Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaria; again I think his father, an aficionado of Village clubs like the old Half Note on Spring Street, had influenced his son’s taste, which veered between the modern and baroque, Bach being another staple.

One night, while listening to jazz in his book-laden room, and smoking cigarettes, we embarked on what had started as a casual experiment involving Coca-Cola, some ice, two glasses, and a bottle of 151-proof Jamaican rum, which Richard had somehow gotten ahold of. I’m not exactly sure just how his mother, Mary, off in the living room watching television, remained oblivious to our doings, but that evening, over the course of several rapturous hours, we drank one potent glass of that sweet cocktail after the other—I found it a revelation that it tasted far better than the wine my father once had me try at Teddy’s, or my father’s whiskey—and in the madness of that high, we got somewhat carried away.

To confess, the very notion of literally lifting out of my own body as the world went spinning around me seemed a glorious relief. And I never felt so alive! At some hour, I can’t say when—I don’t remember—I staggered out of there, and getting home so obviously lit up, I received one of the more monumental beatings of my life. I really don’t remember a whole lot of what happened—but I do recall my mother dragging me down the hall and putting me in the shower. (“Cabrón!”she called me, slapping my face.) And my father? I’m not sure if he had gotten to that point himself—but I think on that night at least he hadn’t, because as soon as he saw me that way, he marched right over to the Muller-Thym apartment, where he pushed open their door (never locked), and finding Richard passed out in his room, made his way into the living room, where he had some unkind words with Richard’s mother, who for some time afterward did not want me coming to their house.

Nevertheless, just like that, life on my street changed for good. First we lived with the sight of so many of our neighbors packing their things up into trucks, rows of them sometimes lining the block, most leaving by the spring of 1965. Then, for a year we had to put up with the demolition of those buildings, huge cranes and tractors and dump trucks and generators and Quonsets and portable toilets and huge bins piled up with doors, commodes, and bathtubs taking up the sidewalk and street on the other side of the block. Gradually, they brought down those buildings, which had been around since the turn of the century, with demolition cranes. Afterward, they started excavating for what would be the foundation of Columbia’s School of International Affairs as well as a high-rise dormitory down the block, dynamite blasts, preceded by a whistle, going off every twenty minutes or so for months. (No wonder I can’t stand the clamor of large construction sites.) Nothing good came from it for those who had remained behind: We had to get used to the mess, the noise, and the sudden appearance of guards patrolling the street to keep kids like myself out of those buildings when they were still up—I can remember sneaking into Richard’s building not long after it had been abandoned and making my way through that darkness with a flashlight, pushing open his front door (all the locks had been removed) and prowling about the apartment’s ghostly empty rooms, where I had spent so much time, all the while feeling that yet another world had been yanked away from under my feet.

But the guards were there, as well, to keep away any junkies from scavenging for whatever they could carry away—copper wiring and light fixtures, for example. Heroin had begun to sweep through Harlem—a lot of drugs were being sold out of the projects along 124th Street and across the way in the projects of 125th Street and along the sidewalks below 110th, those blocks teeming with young addicts. I can recall accompanying one of the local junkies, a really nice guy, to cop his stuff, always a harrowing experience, what with those assignations held in dingy project hallways and with those dealers and their acquaintances, all of them black, frankly not liking whitey (me). On that end, things had been already changing for a few years; I won’t entertain any discussion of drugs here, or the ethos of getting high—poor and bored kids, without too many prospects, just liked doing it, and there were enough junkies around that the generally safe feeling one used to have about walking around that neighborhood vanished. (An older kid who lived across the way, addicted but a sharp fellow, used to knock on our door, asking my mother for a glass of water, and at first opportunity would manage to walk through the apartment, with its circular configuration, looking around for anything of value to conceivably take—fortunately, we had little worth taking.) Marijuana, by the way, seemed to have crept in on little cat’s feet a few years earlier—kids smoking joints while playing stickball on 120th Street were a common sight. (Most never bothered anyone, just wanting to have their fun, and reefers, at a dollar a stick, were always readily available, just like cigarettes.)

In any event, those demolitions sucked the life out of that street: So many of my neighbors, turned into air. Sure, kids still played out in front, doo-wop singers still managed to get together for their stoop sessions, and I managed to see my friend Richard—who’d moved with his family to a place on West End Avenue in the nineties—but, with so many familiar faces gone, the block often seemed deserted, especially at night, when you’d have to watch your back.

Naturally, during those demolitions, we developed a heightened animosity, as townies, toward the university. I can remember going over to the campus and tossing clumps of dirt and stones in through classroom windows as the students, who had nothing to do with what happened, were sitting for a lecture. (Sorry, my friends.) And sometime later, aside from sneering at any students who crossed our paths, while adopting tough-guy personas, we—I’m talking about myself and a few other local kids—made it a regular practice to head over to the wide street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, by Teachers College, where we’d pass the afternoon prying Volkswagen insignias off the countless Beetles parked in rows out in front: I collected dozens of those things, for no good reason, though sometimes one of us would head down to a pawnshop on 125th Street to sell the medallions for two dollars apiece.

Of course, within a year or so, they had put up the School of International Affairs, right across the street, where Richard’s building, 420, had once stood, and, a block south, Columbia’s law library, massive structures that to me, knowing nothing about modern architecture, seemed to lack charm. Spared were la casa italiana, with the grocers and a soda fountain left intact on that corner, as well as a few remaining buildings on the drive toward 117th Street. Suddenly, students came pouring in through the high glass doors of the new 420 (for that is its current address), and while that was something one came to accept, and even get used to, at night, when the institution closed down, that side of the block became eerily silent and dark. Our apartment, smothered by the shadows of that structure, saw less light during the day. (I’ve often wondered what my father thought about that building; oh, he still sat out on the stoop, smoking cigarettes in the afternoons, and looked out across the street, as those anonymous students made their way to their classes, and while I’m sure he had nothing against them, he probably missed seeing his friend Mr. Martinez, the superintendent, coming up the block, and the opportunity to invite him in.)

It was pretty lousy from our end, though at least we had a friend in the new housing manager that Columbia had appointed to look after the block. His name was Mr. Foley, a congenial older, white-haired Irish man who always spoke with a thick brogue and who, until then, had worked as a janitor for the Corpus Christi Church; we knew him from there and were always kind to him, and that was a good thing, because in the coming years, he’d look out for us and, most importantly, later on, for my mother.

On the other hand, despite our resentments, when the university held its annual spring fair, with its games of chance and food stands selling stuff like cotton candy, as well as an attraction in which one could pay to take a turn going at some wreck of a car with a sledgehammer, all of us flocked there, thrilled, as if a carnival had come to town. And some of the older guys did all right with the college girls, in local bars, though the thing that most impressed me about Columbia, as I’d cross the campus, predating the destruction of my street, were the students I’d see from time to time, sitting out on the steps of Butler Library, strumming folk tunes on guitars. I was probably twelve when I first stood enthralled watching a group that did covers of Beatles hits, performing on a makeshift stage in front of one of their student buildings—I think it was Ferris Booth Hall—and somewhere along the line, with all the crap going on at home, I decided that I would try to learn to play the guitar—a pursuit that turned out, in those years, to be one of my salvations.

But then, occasionally, I’d head over to the apartment of one of my school chums, this decent and quiet kid named Bobby Hannon. His mother was Polish, his father an Irish fireman, and they lived down on 122nd Street in one of those cluttered railroad flats that only exist today in the slums. Mr. Hannon, in some ways, with his close-cropped bristled-in-front haircut and etched face, resembled the actor Larry Storch, best known for the TV show F Troop. Like my father, he also liked to drink, but with a difference. He fancied himself a musician. On those afternoons when I’d hang around with his son, he’d occasionally take out his guitar, which, as I recall, was a left-handed F-holed jazz-style Gibson—a beautiful instrument, even to me. Before becoming a fireman, as a young man, he once had a radio show in Pennsylvania, in which people would call in and try to stump him by challenging him to play obscure tunes. So he knew everything of Gershwin, Porter, Rogers and Hart, etc., as well as any number of songs by polka musicians, both famous and lesser known. He had an ear and a half, and once, while reaching over to a table, his guitar on his lap, to get another glass of beer, told me that there was nothing he couldn’t play. “Try me.” Naturally, I was intrigued. But no matter what I came up with—not Cuban songs, but Top Forty hits—he’d figure anything out. Just after I’d whistle, say, the melody of a Beatles tune like “And I Love Her,” he’d not only figure out the chords but pick out the melody (somehow) with one of his fingers while holding on to his pick at the same time. “Kid’s stuff,” he called my choices. He smoked as much as my father, and his face had that same tendency to rawness at its edges. He was burly, most often liking to wear a T-shirt. With stacks and stacks of Les Paul and Mary Ford 78s clustered in the shelves above a console, he’d occasionally put one of them on so that I could hear “real music.”

One day I brought my ratty Stella down, and as I played him the four chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he threw a fit, telling me I didn’t know a damned thing about the guitar (“You play like you’re wearing mittens,” he said), and commenced, on that afternoon, to teach me—or at least try to—my first bar chords, and jazzy ones that made my fingers ache for days. Nevertheless, I’d go back there, wanting to learn more, and, in time, I could play the square (to me) turnarounds of pieces like “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Afterward, I’d sit in Bobby’s room and feel relieved to hear, off his record player, the zippier 45s of the day. But I’d pick up stuff all over the place. Once Marcial García and his family had moved in upstairs and I’d sometimes end up there with my mother, I learned that he too played the guitar, but in the classical style, with sheet music for studies by Tárrega, Fernando Sor, and others lying in stacks on a table by a stand in his living room. He had a beautiful Spanish guitar from Valencia, full toned and plump in sound, that, made by an angel, did all the work for you—that is, if you knew how to play. He taught me some études, which I never quite got right, and because of the craziness in my head and despite all the lessons he gave me about reading music, during which he would fill up blank staffs with the notes written out in pencil, I simply tuned out, in the same way I did when it came to Spanish—some busy emotions in my head preventing, as it were, my momentary concentration.

Still, I loved those lessons, and they brought me comfort, and especially so in that year when the explosions were going off, though I could hardly ever really feel good about what I was doing. If you own a guitar, however, as I learned, no matter how badly you play, you begin to acquire a self-nurturing attachment to it. Often when sitting with my father on those nights when he would go on and on about the perils of his mortality, I’d drift off, thinking about the chords of a song, and in my mind, no matter what the song happened to be, I’d run through its entirety, even some bullshit piece like “Hanky Panky,” and coming back, I’d catch him staring at me quizzically, as if I hadn’t been listening to him at all.

But I had other teachers as well. Remember Teddy Morganbesser, over on 119th Street, at whose apartment my father had tried to give me my first drink of wine? His squeeze, Belen, had two kids, the first being the fabulously beautiful and muy sexy Tanya, who would marry that gallant from my street, Napoleon, and a son, Philip, about one of the sharpest-dressed and most astute, forward-moving Latinos around. (I remember seeing him sitting on the stoop next to mine, studiously reading textbooks from his school.) He was outrageously handsome, with classic heartthrob looks—think of Ricardo Montalbán or, for more current generations, Julio Iglesias Jr., with a beautiful yet manly and effortlessly chiseled face. He was a scholarship student at Fordham and doing well, the kind of slick guy who’s conquering the world and I couldn’t help but admire. At an early point, he had taken up playing the guitar, and since he, so impeccable in his dress and manner, had set a high bar for his pursuits, his instrument turned out to be one of the most elegant and, I think, pricey guitars around, a curvaceous brass-knobbed Gretsch Anniversary guitar of a shining green luster with a tremolo bar and intricate inlay along the fret board. (Like the perfect woman—in fact, I think, the vast appeal of guitars has much to do with their female shape.)

It was Philip (may God bless his soul, for he, like so many people from my neighborhood, would end in ruin because of drugs) who first taught me how to play that Beatles riff for the song “I Feel Fine.” We’d spent a couple of weeks working on it—why he did so, I don’t know to this day, except to say he was a generous soul. He had a tender demeanor about him, nodding when you got something right, shaking his head wildly when you didn’t. In the half-light of his living room, while he, thin yet muscular, seemed to glow, I tried my best. The rock and roll fingerings were different from the classical, but in the end, I could play that riff, and once I started listening to other Beatles tunes, I figured them out as well, though what would some dumb fuck kid do with useless knowledge like that?

I went to Rolling Stones concerts on Fourteenth Street, at the old Academy of Music, when first-balcony tickets cost two dollars and fifty cents, and, with an empty guitar case in hand, I’d go running from one end of the line of miniskirted ticket holders to the other, hoping to meet some wildly screaming girl. (It sometimes worked, though I was too knuckle-brained to figure out what to do from there.) Over on La Salle Street, some ten blocks away from 118th, I’d hang outside the apartment building where Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist, lived, listening to him practicing his scales and tunes. On the same street, in a first-floor apartment, its windows facing the sidewalk, a Puerto Rican conjunto, the lead singer in coal-black sunglasses, rehearsed—their repertoire consisted of a few Latin tunes, but mainly they practiced Top Forty songs, a look of resignation and professional “let’s get this over with” on the lead’s face as he plucked away on his Telecaster. I remember thinking, I’d like to do this. And I’d go down to the Apollo when they had afternoon matinees featuring acts like James Brown and Wilson Pickett and the Cadillacs—and along the way, with my eyes always watching the guitar player in the band, I got some wild idea that I could become a musician.

At sixteen, I’d played guitar behind a neighborhood doo-wop group that auditioned before a hashish-stoned audience on an openmike afternoon, singing vamped-up, multi-harmonized versions of popular folk tunes like “When I Die” at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village. (We cleared out the place.) I’d played in a little band in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with my friend Jerry, who had long since moved away, performing simple rock tunes by groups like the Kinks and Them, as well as some of our own, in more than a few deadend bars and social clubs in the midafternoon. (I never liked to hang around there at night, for it was a neighborhood where you heard guns popping off in the distance.) And, often enough, while crossing the campus, I’d hear some guy fingerpicking a tune and sit down, just watching his every move. If he sang, that was fine, but mostly I watched the way he played.

Around the same time, a larcenous tendency arose in me. Or to put it differently, it suddenly blossomed. In 1966, a music shop, Levitt & Elrod, had just opened on Ninety-sixth Street, halfway down the block between Broadway and West End. (There’s a Salvation Army store there now.) I happened to walk by there one afternoon with a friend just as a delivery of instruments had been made. (My friend’s name was Peter, and I suppose we were on our way to Richard’s apartment, a few blocks over.) As I looked in, the owners were in the back trying to figure out how to situate things; there were a number of instruments piled inside by the front door, some in packing boxes and some not, among them a stellar four-pickup Kay guitar, which someone had just left leaning up against the front window, and seeing that no one seemed to be watching, I stepped inside and on an impulse grabbed it and began running with that instrument down the street toward West End Avenue. For the record, I was in my first year as a student at Cardinal Hayes High School up in the Bronx, which required that we wear a tie and jacket. Peter, attending a prep school—both his parents worked for Columbia in some bluecollar jobs but put their son in the best school they could afford—was dressed the same; and so, as we bounded down to the avenue, with that guitar bundled in my arms, it might have seemed, in a world of spoiled kids, which is what that neighborhood was to me, that we were just celebrating a recent purchase, even while the price tag—$187.50, as I remember—dangled, flapping, off its head. The crazy thing is that as we went around the corner, a police car was sitting there, two cops inside having coffee. I told Peter, “Pretend we’re rich kids,” and with that, we waved at the cops inside as we passed them by, and they, not even flinching, hardly paid any notice.

Now, I’m sure if I were a swarthy spic, some dark-skinned Latino, those cops would have perked up, and, chances are, I would have ended up at some detention center in the Bronx for the next year. But it didn’t happen that way, and on one of the more delicious afternoons of my life, I arrived at Richard’s new digs, feeling exhilarated.

I can recall envying the free spirits I saw around me, particularly on campus, those long-haired kids who seemed at the time to be about the future. I went through the same thing down in the Village, but however much I wanted to grow my hair long, my first two years at a Christian Brothers high school, with its strict rules about everything, made that impossible (and at any rate, in the summers when I tried to let my hair grow out, my usually taciturn father would take me over to Broadway to get a trim—“You don’t want to look like a marica, do you?” I recall him saying).

But I still pined away for that freedom. My idols, if I had any aside from the guys who wrote and drew the comic books I still read, were those icons of the British Invasion, from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, along with some very odd ones thrown in, like the girlish California band the Hullabaloos, whose records I must have listened to a thousand times over, along with those of Manfred Mann, on countless afternoons at Richard’s place downtown on West End Avenue, where the experience was heightened by the occasional drink or, if Tommy was around, by the offering of a joint to smoke. (But I had to be very cool whenever I’d come home.) Since I really had so little identity of my own—except as this “son of cubanos” who had once been sick and didn’t much identify with Latin culture in general, for when I’d hear any Spanish songs, they always sounded passé and locked in some perpetual, unchanging past, and I didn’t even consider my Spanish anything I should try to improve upon—I spent those years trying to become anything else but what I should have been, Oscar Hijuelos.

Despite my own slothful—or distracted—tendencies, I somehow became a good student, good enough that I seemed to have been viewed by some of the teachers as a special case, someone to be pushed along, no dummy, a kid with problems perhaps but with promise. Half-bludgeoned to do the work, I did pretty well on all the exams and in classes—but in the end, after two years in that school and longing for something different, once their tuition went up to a lordly fifteen dollars a month, I ended up leaving.

That increase in tuition was the excuse I came up with, at any rate. My father, having his pride, insisted on paying for it, but when that new invoice came along, and I saw his face screwing up a bit, I decided that leaving was the most decent thing I could do. Deep down, however, I simply wanted to attend a school without so many strict rules; and for another thing, always feeling lonely, I liked the notion of attending a school with girls. (Hayes had only male students—and the mix, while including blacks, Italians, and Latinos, my neighborhood friends Louie Cintron and Victor Cruz among them, was predominantly Irish.) My parents, by the way, weren’t too happy with my choice—my mother seemed puzzled—but I think that while they looked out for me, what with their own problems, they more or less accepted it. Altogether, I don’t recall my father having any opinion, one way or the other, about what would turn out to be a stupendous blunder on my part.

To put it succinctly, the educational institution I started attending instead, the Louis D. Brandeis High School, on West Eighty-fourth Street between Amsterdam and Columbus, with its state prison façade, had its problems. Its students were mostly black and Latino and, for the most part, not too inclined to accept the notion of authority. Transferring from Hayes, where respect toward the teacher was the number one thing, to a school in which students spit at and sometimes assaulted their teachers, in which most classrooms were overcrowded, and where just getting the kids to stop fucking around before every session was a daily challenge to its teachers, threw me for a loop. Some of the teachers were kind to me, as I must have seemed lost half the time, and while I did my best to seem interested in being there, not a day went by when I didn’t feel as if I had messed up. Without dwelling too much on how many drug users there were at Brandeis (some 80 percent, I later read) or how many of its students belonged to gangs or had juvenile records, or what it was like in the middle of the day to walk into a bathroom dense with pot and cigarette smoke, with guys shooting up in the stalls, or how one might occasionally encounter a used syringe in a stairwell, or hear about a rape, I will say this: While getting knocked around in those hallways on my way to class—as in some tough pissed-off black dude abruptly slamming his shoulder against mine to start something—I often wondered what I had gotten myself into.

Still, I managed to squeeze by and made my friends, mainly thanks to the hippies there. In that school, those longhairs, mostly white but with some Latinos thrown in, would gather outside after classes and jam. Some sold drugs, a service that was respected (the cops did not seem to notice), but mainly those kids—what were they but sixteen and seventeen years old?—held impromptu music sessions, in the spirit of the day, with flutes, bongos, and guitar. Bringing my guitar, an acoustic, I eventually joined in. For the record, my best friend from Brandeis was a kid of half-Argentine, half-American extraction, who would later play drums in a band with me, and in the aftermath of such sessions, on many of those afternoons, we’d drift off to someone’s apartment to play even more music and, often enough, to get high.

I was never good at getting high, by the way. I had such a self-consciousness about my body, and the microbios within, that the uplifting removals from one’s being that came along with smoking hashish or marijuana eluded me. (I was too uptight and felt more inwardly drawn than I liked; the only thing that worked for me would come with the introduction of a mild beverage like some sweet Gypsy Rose Wine.) In general, however, those were halcyon afternoons: I loved playing the electric guitar, if somebody had one, and while I had to put up with a lot of lead-guitar-playing egomaniacs who weren’t too inclined to listen to what other people were putting forth, I slowly began making up my own tunes and, in my way, became something of a songwriter.

Speaking of getting high: My friend Bobby, on 122nd Street, had a down-the-hall neighbor, an Irish kid named Jimmy, a completely slovenly lost soul of a fellow, a mess without a center who, however, taking some LSD in those years, underwent a miraculous transformation of personality. Suddenly suave and self-asserting, he became a drug dealer, of heroin, pot, and LSD. (Among his rumored clients, one of the Rolling Stones when they were in town.) How those business arrangements flourished, I can’t say, but despite that change, he continued to live in the same apartment with his mother. In any event, I had been asked by someone in the neighborhood if I knew of anyone who dealt LSD, and thinking about Jimmy, I arranged through my friend Bobby for him to bring me six doses—which cost about twenty dollars, as I recall. What happened amazed me: Bobby met me on a street corner, where we made the exchange, and while I soon passed it on to that someone from my neighborhood and went home afterward, Bobby, heading off on a date on 106th Street with his girlfriend, happened to drop several tabs of that drug and, that night as a good Catholic boy going crazy, swore that he had been possessed by the devil, and, in effect, he, once so docile, tried to take physical advantage of her.

The long and short of it? He ended up in Ward Eight of St. Luke’s Hospital, the psychiatric facility there, speaking in tongues.

Unfortunately, his father the fireman, who once taught me guitar, came knocking on our door the next day, frantically demanding of my pop that I confess to having been a part of his son taking that drug. Along the way, he insisted that we see for ourselves what I apparently had done. That same afternoon, as my father and I walked over to the hospital, he finally asked me: “Did you give that drug to that boy?” and because I hadn’t—maybe Jimmy had given or sold him those tabs—I told him, quite simply, no, and that was good enough for my pop. But once we got there, I regretted that whole business—never again, I told myself—for that same day, Bobby’s father suffered a heart attack, his anguish being so great, and my friend, as we encountered him in the ward, could only repeat a few words—“Nobody loves me,” over and over again.

Now, if you’re getting the impression that I had drifted into some inner life far removed from my Cuban roots, you’ve got that right. If I thought in Spanish at all, it was mostly in my sleep, and the gist of my exchanges with my parents usually came down to a laconic few words—“Okay, okay, te oigo” or “Sí mamá, vengo.” And when it came to Cuba, if anything, far from developing a curiosity for its history, for example, beyond what I already knew about Castro, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban missile crisis (when we were convinced there would be a nuclear war), and that we had family down there, I couldn’t be bothered to learn more. (My mother’s own histories were enough, and old to me by then.) I preferred my comics, and sometimes the occasional novel, thanks to Tommy, by someone like Ray Bradbury. (And I liked the randy humor of comedians like Redd Foxx and Lenny Bruce.)

If you’d talked to me in those days, you would have heard a kid who used the terms chick, man, and like, you know almost all the time. I loved Mad magazine but also dipped into the kind of arcane publications that one might find only in a neighborhood like my own: I can remember liking Lee Krasner’s Realist, which basically had an upyours attitude about the powers that be, and because of the Vietnam War, I could hardly walk across the campus or down Broadway without someone thrusting an antigovernment protest pamphlet into my hands. Because of Marcial García, who was always preaching in our kitchen about the values of the revolution, I had an awareness of both sides of the equation regarding Cuba. (On the other hand, I wasn’t the sort of kid to walk around wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt like so many others did.) But even when I had an exile friend like Victor, who’d come to the states in 1962 and knew just how cheated his family had felt leaving Cuba, and their desire to regresar—to go back—I remained detached enough to think that such concerns really didn’t touch me. I didn’t realize that their loss was really my own, a whole other possible life denied to me without my knowing it.

As far as I can tell about myself, back then, I hardly cared about anything except some vague notion of being a creative sort. Lord knows how much my mother had to put up with: When some family from down the street moved out and left an upright piano on the sidewalk, I somehow persuaded the superintendent of that building, Mr. Sullivan, and one of my sturdier friends, a certain Provinzano, to help me bring it up the hill and carry it into the apartment. (I don’t know how we managed, but at one point, the piano slipped and, coming down hard, cracked the lip of one of the marble stairs in the entryway—go check, it’s still there.) I began to play that piano (badly) and, at one point, putting thumbtacks into its felt hammers, and fooling around while plucking on its strings inside the harp, came up with strange compositions à la John Cage, which I would commemorate for posterity on a cassette recorder.

My pop didn’t seem to mind and seemed only vaguely aware of my aesthetic leanings, if they could be called that. On one of those nights when he was hanging around with one of his friends from the hotel, this Haitian fellow, as I recall, he asked me to play something for them (“algo en español, eh?”—“something in Spanish, huh? ”) and when all I could come up with were a few chords along the lines of “La Bamba,” he listened for a moment and, with a disappointed expression on his face, poured himself and his friend another drink, shrugging and moving on. I didn’t brood about it: If I’d played a Beatles tune for him, it wouldn’t have meant a thing; as far as I was concerned, both my parents were really from some other planet. (My brother, on the other hand, who had come home from his air force stint in England and had stayed briefly with us in 1966 while he studied for his GED diploma before he moved out to live in Queens with a young woman, later to become his wife, seemed interested in what I was doing: I think we sometimes talked about my showing him how to play a little guitar, and while, years later, we would often lament the fact that we hadn’t tried speaking Spanish with each other back when, it was nothing that ever occurred to us at the time.) No, sir, whatever I was about, a work in progress, as it were, I might have been aspiring to many things but none that had to do with Cuba.

That I was so American, or to put it in the way I prefer, so New Yorkish, didn’t bother me much at all, until, as it happened, my wonderful aunt Cheo arrived to live with us from Cuba. She and her daughters and their husbands had come in 1967, thanks to some arrangement that Lyndon Johnson had made with Fidel to allow more Cubans to leave the island legally, of course for money—with which my pop, working his extra job, had helped them out. They were exhausted, of course, after the ordeal, but the reunion between my mother and her sister, whom she had not seen since our visit to Holguín in the 1950s, was joyous. I am not sure what they made of our apartment—I think they were a little disappointed—but whatever might be said about the drabness of our digs, it was surely a big improvement over what they had been reduced to back in Cuba.

“No había comida,” I remember my gentle aunt saying, “y olvídate de trabajo—nos trataron como perritos.” (“There was no food, and forget about work—we were treated no better than little dogs.”)

Theirs was a story that is fairly common to most exiles. Mercita’s husband, Angel Tamayo, had run a car repair shop, which had been nationalized some years back during one of Fidel’s sweeping reforms, while Eduardo Arocena, married to Miriam, and a most quiet fellow, had been, as far as I know, in the trucking business and harassed by the government for his strong feelings against Fidel. Though it’s a cliché by now to mention that they arrived with only the clothes on their back and what they could manage to bring along in a few suitcases, it was, in fact, the truth. I can’t imagine how daunting it must have been for them. Still, all of us made do. We had a spare bedroom next to mine—that’s where I think Mercita and Angel stayed, while Cheo, Miriam, and Eduardo were settled into the living room, on cots, I believe. (Though now and then, coming into the apartment after school, I’d sometimes hear my mother and her sister whispering to each other as they lay, much as they probably did as children, alongside each other in bed.)

At first, they naturally assumed I could speak Spanish as well as my brother, who came to visit them often, though once it became clear that my repertoire mainly consisted of nods of assent and understanding as to what they were saying—“Remember, my love, when you stayed with us in Holguín?”—our methods of communication, harkening back to my mother and “la muda,” often came down to gestures, though Angel, who spoke some English, didn’t mind practicing it with me. (One of the first things he said, while noticing my guitar: “You know Elvis? I love Elvis Presley.”) Thank goodness, however, that Cheo, despite the displacement she must have been feeling, remained such a tolerant soul: She’d often sit next to me in the kitchen and, taking hold of my hand, recount those delicious days when we were together in Cuba, and in more than a few religious asides, always urged me not to lose my faith in God. (“Tienes que confiarte en Dios,” she’d say.) I recall my mother apologizing about my Spanish to my cousins—I think she made the effort to remind them about my year in the hospital, though given what they’d gone through, it was hardly a number one concern. What seemed to matter the most, at least to my aunt, was that we were together, and as far as I seemed to be turning out, it made no difference to her, for, as I will always say, she was nothing less than pure affection.

For his part, my father, despite the inconveniences, didn’t seem to feel any imposition on his comforts, such as they were. He happily provided them with whatever they needed—walking-around money, advice, got people to drive them to where they had to go, offered to get Angel and Eduardo jobs at the Biltmore, and, of course, fed them to death with that hotel food, and good stuff too. Oddly, he abandoned his bad habits during those three months or so—I don’t recall his having much to drink; I think having people around made him happy, and, if anything, when they finally got resettled over in Union City, New Jersey, where there was a big Cuban community, he seemed a little sad to see them go. For once they left, it was back to my mother and father’s old patterns; along the way my mother, hearing of how the government and exile agencies had helped them out—Angel, working odd jobs, was soon driving a Chevy, and it wasn’t long before they’d made a down payment on a house—couldn’t help but feel some jealousy, though I know she truly wished them well.

As for myself? I felt a little relieved to have some relative privacy again, and while I missed them, I welcomed a release from the daily strains—and perhaps shame—I had been feeling about not being Cuban enough to hold a conversation with my own cousins.

He’d turn up with the woman he’d married in a quiet civil ceremony, and she, of mixed Italian and Jewish descent, with her raven hair and dark eyes, hit it off famously with both my mother and my father, though from what I could observe, she had taken a particular liking to my father, who, doting on her, kept bringing up, and quite happily so, the notion that he would love to see them bring a bambino into the world. I can only recall one moment of awkwardness between them. She had just started working for the city of New York and, over dinner perhaps, the subject of her salary had somehow come up: I don’t remember any exact figures—perhaps it was something like seven thousand dollars a year—but that number threw my father for a loop and somewhat saddened him. After twenty-five years at the Biltmore, he had yet to earn as much himself. (His shoulders slumped, he smiled, nodding, but his eyes showed something else.)

That was the summer, of course, of the moon landing. Nightly, when the progress of that mission was broadcast, my mother and father and I would watch it, like most of the country, on television. As Neil Armstrong first alighted on the lunar terrain, uttering his famous speech, my pop, most comfortably situated on his reclining chair, seemed truly enchanted—to think that someone of his generation, who’d been raised on farms in rural Cuba, could live to witness such a monumental act of daring, must have gone through his mind. His lips, I recall, parted slightly at that moment, the way they would when he’d see a baby.

I mention this because it’s the only thing I can really remember about the days preceding another journey I’d make. When my aunt Maya in Miami, speaking to my father by telephone, brought up the notion that I go down there for the rest of the summer and work for my uncle Pedro, it seemed a good idea. I would get to spend some time with family and make some money along the way. I certainly didn’t object, and while it wasn’t the sort of adventure I might have been craving, it was something different for me to look forward to, though I can’t imagine that it made my mother happy.

A month or so short of my eighteenth birthday, I was so selfinvolved that on the day I left for Miami, and my father, sitting on our stoop, wanted to embrace me just before I got a lift down to Penn Station in a neighbor’s car, I sort of flinched and waved him off. Maybe I finally begrudgingly allowed him a kiss on my neck, but what I mainly remember is sitting in that car’s front seat with my little suitcase and a guitar set in back, and feeling slightly put-upon seeing him smiling—perhaps sadly—at me as he settled on that stoop again and reached for a cigarette. I can recall wondering if I’d been a little cold, but before I could change my mind, the car started up the hill and the last I saw of him was this: my Pop in a light blue short-sleeved shirt, a pair of checkered trousers, and sneakers. He had just gotten his dark wavy hair cut short for the summer, and without a doubt he, always liking to smell nice, had dabbed his face with cologne. Some girl was skipping rope a few steps away and as my mother, Magdalena, watched me leaving from our first-floor window, my father turned to say something to her. Then he stood up to say something to me, and waved again: I think the last words he mouthed to me were, “Pórtate bien”—“Behave yourself.” Not that I attached much importance to that, and if I said anything back to him, I don’t recall.

Of course now I wish I’d been more receptive to him in those moments, but the truth is, I didn’t know it would be the last time I’d see him alive.

This is what happened: I’d been down in Miami for a few days and put to work by my uncle on one of his sites, mainly hauling bags of cement around. My uncle, incidentally, as a former musician, took an interest in the fact that I’d brought along a guitar and, on my second or third night there, had me follow him into his garage, where he kept his old double bass, the very one he had played for years with the Cugat orchestra. Bringing it out, he spent a few hours trying to teach me some old Latin standards like “Perfidia” and “El Manicero,” my uncle, in Bermuda shorts, attaining such a look of fierce concentration on his face, even if only playing an alternating bass line, while I, trying to fathom the arrangements, did my best to keep up with him. We weren’t bad nor good together, but he was not discouraging of me, even if he had better things to do. Along those garage walls were numerous photographs of my uncle Pedro in his glory days, posed on bandstands with his fellow musicians, all in evening coats and tails, an air of glamour about them: Some found him seated in a posh club with celebrities the likes of Errol Flynn, and, as I recall, Desi Arnaz. What he must have made of me, with my longish hair and blue jeans, I can’t say, but he, who had once been quite dapper in his time, seemed to have decided that he would have to take me downtown at some point to get me better clothes. As things turned out, there wouldn’t be much time for that to happen.

My aunt Maya, by the way, of course, rebooted her efforts to lure me away from home. I won’t go into too many details about that—with Cubans, some things never change, and her old animosities and disparagements of my mother picked up where we had left them some ten years before, but mainly she kept to her old mantra that I would be much better off with them and that it was my mother at the heart of my father’s problems in life. (I suspect that once we had that telephone installed after my pop’s heart attack, she’d had some conversations with him when he could hardly get his words out straight.) But she also had some new tricks up her sleeve: Where before, she’d ply me with ice cream and toys and clothes, Maya, knowing that boys will be boys, did her best to fix me up with a neighborhood girl, a pretty Cuban who, if the truth be told, did not seem particularly thrilled by the notion. Her name I honestly do not recall, though I can tell you that she had longish auburn hair and a figure that in tight jeans was too luscious for me to bear. In any event, come the first Saturday after I’d arrived, we went out to a club near Miami Beach, this loud crazy place jammed to the rafters with young kids, where, at about nine that night as we were dancing—that is to say, while I, considering myself a musician, attempted to dance in that darkened room, its ceiling filled with twirling stars, and the music of Joe Cuba’s Latin boogaloo hit “Bang Bang” raging through enormous speakers—I felt this sudden and strange fluttering going up the right side of my body: It was so pronounced that I began shaking my arm wildly, and I must have had a strange expression on my face, for my date, if that’s what she was, looked at me oddly. Then, as quickly as it came, it went away.

Sometime later, perhaps an hour had passed, I heard my name announced over the loudspeaker system. It was muffled, the music was so blaring, and at first I ignored it, until, during an interlude between songs, I heard it clearly: It went, at first in English and then in Spanish, “Would Oscar Hijuelos please come to the front office.” When I reached that office, my aunt Borja was sitting inside, a look of utter bewilderment and exhaustion on her face. “Come on,” she told me. “We have to go home.”

Not once did anyone tell me what had happened, but I somehow knew. Back at my aunt Maya’s so late at night, I had to pack. My aunt Borja had called the airlines, trying to get us a flight to New York, but the best she could do was to book something quite early in the morning, which is why, I suppose, we spent that night not in Maya’s house but in a motel not far from the terminals. I honestly wish I could describe how Maya behaved throughout, except that I couldn’t look at her without seeing tears in her eyes, while Pedro, a stoic sort, shaking his head, had hung around by a kitchen table without saying a word—what could anyone say? We left well past midnight. At the motel itself, with my aunt Borja, who could have been my father’s female identical twin, in a bed across from me, sighing as she smoked cigarette after cigarette (she lived to be ninety, by the way), I passed the late hours kind of knowing what must have happened but without knowing anything at all—it was as if no one could say more than “Your papá has had an accident.” I watched TV, an old-time movie: Enchantment starring David Niven, one of those classy tearjerkers Hollywood used to make—now and then I’d look over and see Borja wiping a tear from her eyes—and I kept on watching that film until its elegiac conclusion, at which point the station went off the air. Though my journey home early the next morning remains dim, I can remember coming into an apartment crowded with neighbors, and my mother’s unbridled, chest-heaving bereavement; Borja’s kindness and composure throughout; and meeting up with my brother that next Monday. Sometime in the early afternoon, we went downtown to Bellevue Hospital. There, someone at a desk escorted us to a certain room. It was a simple room with curtains drawn closed. At a certain moment, as we stood there, the curtains opened to a large window, and from some floor below, we could hear a lift operating. A platform came up, and on it rested my father, covered in a dark hooded shroud.

A few days before, he had been working in the kitchen of Butler Hall’s rooftop restaurant as usual, but it seemed to everyone around him that he’d not been feeling well that evening. He had been sweating, his face was flushed, and he had trouble breathing. One of his fellow cooks in that place, a black man who by coincidence was also named Joe—my father sometimes went by that American shorthand—had even urged him to go home, and one of the waitresses there, a lady named Sally, would remember thinking to herself that my father had seemed rather exhausted and slow-moving, but when she’d asked him if everything was all right, he, in his quiet and self-effacing manner, perhaps worrying about holding on to the few extra dollars he’d make that night, just shrugged good-naturedly and told her that nothing was wrong. Perhaps getting a bit of air might help, he must have thought, and so, stepping out onto the terrace, which had a nice view over Morningside Park eastward to Harlem, he had pulled from his shirt pocket a package of Kent cigarettes in the soft wrapping and, lighting one, had taken a few drags, when, so Sally later reported, he had looked around in confusion, his right arm shaking, and the cigarette dropped from his lips, as he himself, his eyes turned to the sky, collapsed onto the roof tarpaulin.

This happened at nine thirty on July twenty-sixth, about a week after the first moon landing and some twenty-seven years since he’d first arrived in the United States from Cuba. He was fifty-five, and the outpourings of grief at his passing, from his fellow hotel workers and friends from around the city, seemed unending.

The apartment, in any case, breathed his memories: In the early mornings, at about five thirty, when he used to get up and head to the hotel, I’d awake swearing that I’d heard his quiet shuffle in the hallway, his keys fiddling with the lock. And sometimes, cigarette smoke, though no one smoked inside the apartment—I never did in front of my mother—seemed to linger particularly in the kitchen. (And it wasn’t just I who noticed: My godmother, Carmen, coming downstairs to check in on my mother, would sometimes shiver, shaking her head, saying: “He’s still here.”) It so spooked me that I almost found it impossible to fall asleep without keeping a light on: I’d lose myself in a few comic books or some science fiction novel, or Mad magazines, though hardly an hour went by on those fitful nights when I wouldn’t think about what had happened. At the same time, if I heard anything, even something as mundane as water humming through the pipes or the rumbling of the boiler beneath, I’d imagine him roaming through the basement, with its twisting passageways, on his way out to visit us. I always expected that, any moment, he’d push open the door to my room, and if I’d happened to finally doze, I would soon enough shoot up in fright. I got to the point that I could not turn off the lamp, nor make my way through the night without listening to a transistor radio: I always dialed past the Latin music stations, preferring the talk shows of Barry Farber, a conservative broadcaster, and Jean Shepherd, whose comical stories, along with Farber’s antihippie harangues, simply kept me company.

But the persistence of memory killed me: images of him, drifting in from the permanence of the past, much like the smoke one has blown from a cigarette, going off to the heavens.

The situation wasn’t helped by my mother’s state of mind. She hadn’t been so bad during the weeks that her sister Cheo, coming in from New Jersey, slept by her side, but once my aunt went back home and Borja, another angel, returned to Miami, she really started losing her grip. She went off the deep end—perhaps some old buttons regarding the loss of her father, from a stroke too, when she was a girl, had been pushed—and doubling over with grief, she wandered back and forth in the hallway muttering, despite all the shit they’d put each other through, “Ay pero, mi Pascual.” That was one thing, but at night, resting in bed, at first sighing, then tossing and turning, she tended toward talking to herself and, as it were, hosting both sides of a conversation with my father.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing, woman.”

“Then why are you looking at me that way?”

“Because you are so pretty.”

“Ah, hah, and that’s why you abandoned me!”

Then she would call the spirits and witches of her childhood into the apartment, praying to Santa Misericordia and, on her knees in the hallway in a cracking voice, offer her spirit up to God so that she might follow him to wherever he had gone.

I tended to find any excuse to stay out of the apartment, even if I’d just sit out on the stoop at night, where my pop used to, staring out at the lifeless street, where Columbia had put up its new institutional buildings, or I’d go upstairs and knock on Marcial’s door—he might show me a few new things on the guitar, and I’d sit watching his fingers work the fret board, all the while sipping a glass or two of dark Spanish wine. In general, folks were really kind to me, even the neighborhood pricks—at least for a while—but I’d have to come home sooner or later and then my mother, seeing my father in me, would start up with all kinds of crazy shit; she couldn’t resist letting me know that I was just like him—maybe nice in some ways, but only on the surface, and that deep down she knew I was up to no good and that I was a spoiled prince who’d treated her like a slave going back to the times of my illness, though occasionally she’d mess up and address me as Pascual, and what business did I have thinking that life might be easy, when we all should know that for some folks it will always be a hell. She’d go on as well about how I couldn’t have possibly really cared for him and that he knew it—why, I didn’t even let him embrace me on that day when I went to Miami and saw him for the last time; she saw that from the window. And for that matter, since when did I care for anybody else, particularly my own mother, who gave her life up for me, I was so obviously wrapped up in myself. Her tone was always indignant, often hysterical, and sometimes she’d yell out Pascual’s name in the middle of the night, doubtlessly waking everyone in the building up, but without a single neighbor saying a peep (I’d just hear some windows shutting), and while I couldn’t blame her—what a horrid grief she must have experienced—it seemed to me that we had, as a family, so little to hang on to that I resolved to bring us together, as those phone-in radio shows might put it.

But whenever I approached my mother tenderly and did my best to reach out, even speaking my half-assed Spanish and with my heart pricked by thorns; I’d say something sweet: “Pero, mamá, no sabes que yo te quiero”—“But, Mamá, don’t you know that I love you,” or I’d say, as she’d go into a trance, “Por favor, cálmate!”—“Please, calm yourself!” She’d not only come back to reality but take the occasion to dismiss my efforts. “What are you saying? Why, you can’t even speak Spanish! That’s how little you care.” And she would start in on me, the way she used to with my father, and that would be enough to drive me back out onto the street, where I’d smoke a few cigarettes, sometimes one of those stale things from the pack left on his dresser, and nursing each one, all the while thinking of him, my little way after all of communing with my pop, who, as it turned out, I would never really get to know.