Afterward, one of his fellow workers from the hotel would occasionally turn up at our door to offer my mother an envelope filled with a few twenty-dollar bills, or in the mail we’d receive contributions from folks who addressed the envelopes to the family of Caridad or Charity. And neighbors, ringing our bell, came by with pots of cooked food or else left them with a note in front of our door. Sometimes an old friend from the hotel, like Díaz, would come by with a package of T-bone steaks. These we, of course, gratefully accepted. Along the way, one of the priests from church sometimes stopped by with an aluminum-wrapped package of something left over from a parish bingo, but no matter what, things were not the same with us as when my pop was alive and brought home that plentiful bounty from the cornucopia that was the Biltmore pantry.

I made a fairly reliable part-time salary (if to work twenty to thirty hours a week is “part-time”) in and around the neighborhood. I won’t bore you with the details, but on and off for about three years, aside from working as a messenger, I spent my weekdays—and the occasional Saturday—working the afternoon–evening shift at a Columbia University library in Uris Hall, where the business school was located. I mainly tended the front desk or passed my time in the zombie tedium of shelving cartloads of books, all for the regal sum of about $1.35 an hour. We had two bosses, a sanguine and somewhat dissipated boozy gent of late middle age who, white haired, thin but possessing a goose’s flaccid neck, liked to hire young boys, and below him, a former undergarment industry manager who, changing professions in midlife, became the subject of an article in The New York Times, though I mainly remember him for the fact that his daughter dated—later married—the actor Dustin Hoffman, who, in the wake of becoming known, dropped by the library to say hello to her father from time to time.

In those days, I also had hoped to make a few dollars by putting together a bar band, though my pop’s death had turned my hands into lead and my knees so earthbound that it was enough, at least in the beginning, for me to muster the energy to get out of bed.

I’m not quite sure what I did with the money I earned. I suppose I gave some to my mother, though I think that stopped when both our Social Security benefits—which came to about four hundred dollars a month—started arriving, with half of that coming to me, until I’d turn twenty-one, as long as I went to college.

Living at the far end of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, my brother sometimes drove up to check in on us and help keep the peace, but he had, in any case, his own ongoing concerns, while I, as a newly graduated public high school student, had only some minimal ambitions about going to school—mainly to acquire the Social Security money, though I sometimes told myself that I was honoring my father’s wish for me. (He seems to have once told me, in one of the few direct pieces of advice he ever gave me, “If you don’t want to end up an elevator operator, go to college.”) Having barely graduated Brandeis with an academic diploma, I wouldn’t have gotten into any college at all if not for the fact that the CUNY system had in those years begun to experiment with an open admissions policy, through which they hoped to draw in and improve the future prospects of even the dregs of the New York City public high school system and, as well, the latest generation of immigrant kids, their grades, at least at that point, not seeming to matter as much as their potential.

Thanks to its often criticized open admissions policy, I was accepted in my senior year at Brandeis into Bronx Community College, on 184th Street and Creston Avenue, near Jerome. That would be the beginning of my sojourns through the city system, for in the next six years, I’d also attend other subway schools: Manhattan Community College, Lehman College in the Bronx at night, and, eventually, the mecca of CUNY, City College, up on 137th Street.

I had, by that point, become quite careless with myself, as if, in some ways, I simply didn’t care about anything at all. A story: I sometimes did favors for friends—particularly my friend Richard’s older brother, Tommy. I’d cop five-dollar bags of marijuana for him when he happened to be in a pinch. Okay, it was not the smartest or most noble thing to do, but after I’d make my purchase in a hallway at the far end of those stone pathways leading into one or the other of those Grant Houses projects along 123rd Street and Amsterdam, I’d usually head back up the hill, safely enough, and catch a downtown train at 116th Street. One night, however, I’d gotten out late (because my mother, still as a statue, had refused to move from a chair in the kitchen for an hour or so, until I had finally kissed her cheek, at which point she magically awakened) and, copping the stuff, had left the housing projects on Amsterdam, and feeling lazy or out of plain stupidity, I crossed the street and took a shortcut through the housing projects playground on the other side of Amsterdam toward Broadway, where in the darkness, not even midway, a pack of black kids, about twenty or so, as I can remember, came swooping down upon me from behind their hiding places, the bushes ringing the lot, and, surrounding my sorry ass, proceeded to put a beating on me, all the while going through my pockets, tearing off the peace symbol amulet I wore around my neck, and, having taken my nickel bag and a pack of cigarettes, a few did their best to concuss my brain, kicking away at my temples with the full force of their Converse sneakers. It was as if they gleefully wanted to kill me and they might have were it not for one of them—I suppose you might say he was my counterpart in that crowd, the sensitive “nice” one, a somewhat stocky fellow with rolled-up cuffs on his jeans, which were too big for him—who urged his brothers to be cool and leave me alone (“Hey, we got what we need”), and just like that, as quickly as they appeared, they vanished off into what I conceived in my head as some urban Zululand deep within the winding hallways and basements of that maze of project buildings.

Somehow, I dragged myself up from the asphalt and, I think, somewhat in a daze, walked all the way downtown to Richard’s place on West End Avenue, where I found Tommy hanging out with some of his pals in a room down the hall from his brother. Rich had by then gone into the army, having been drafted by lottery. (He was probably the most brilliant soldier in Vietnam and probably the least recognized for his abilities—he should have been snapped up for an army intelligence unit but wound up instead tramping about the jungles there, as a foot soldier grunt in the First Cavalry, his memories of those firefights and other inequities to haunt him for the rest of his life.) The kicker: When I walked in, the room was thick with pot fumes, one of his pals having already brought some around. Aside from the fact that I felt as if I had gotten my brains beaten in for nothing, I discovered that I suddenly found the aroma of that burning hemp nauseating—in fact, I wanted to throw up, but as it happened, despite my messed-up state, Tommy and his friends were getting around to their usual nightly business, for after priming themselves on beer and pot, it was not at all unusual for some of the fellows to skin-pop, and later mainline, heroin, an act (finding and hitting the right veins) at which they were quite adept. Though I myself never indulged, I had assisted in the act dozens of times: I’d wrap a piece of black rubber tubing around the user’s arm until the vein bulged big, and then, once the eye of blood had seeped into the syringe, unwrap the tightened band. Eyes rolling up in his head, ecstasy following, “What a snap,” the user would say, “like coming all over.”

It’s so tawdry that I would rather not go further into the details except to say that Tommy, a sometime heroin user from about the age of sixteen, would, like many other of the guys in the neighborhood, continue to celebrate its virtues well into his thirties, when all kinds of things would catch up with him.

Though I developed a radar for takeoff artists, there was sometimes little that one could do, as on yet another evening when I got jumped, these three guys materializing behind me right across the street from where I lived, my cheekbone broken and my jaw aching for weeks from getting kicked in the face over and over again. I should have gone to the hospital, but when the cops arrived—someone from across the way had seen them ganging up on me—and asked if I wanted to go to the emergency room, I, detesting hospitals and the very smell of medicine, turned them down; and so they took me up to the precinct house on 126th Street (behind the meatpacking houses that used to be there and a few blocks from the nastiest cop bar in Manhattan, the 7-12), where they had rounded up three suspects—young black men, burly and tough—who sat waiting in a pen. The cops prompted me to identify them and although those young men were smirking and indignant, for the life of me, at that late hour—it was two in the morning—I honestly could not identify them as my attackers with any certainty, or I refused to, even when one of the officers took me aside and urged me to reconsider—“They’re cocksuckahs after all.”

But I didn’t give in, even though, having been picked up while running along Morningside Drive, they were probably the guys who’d jumped me, and as they were released, they could not have been more smug—they certainly acted like they deserved to be in jail. The cops themselves were none too happy with me. As I sort of looked more a hippie than a good working-class smart-aleck, they treated me rather disrespectfully, letting me out through a station house side door into the darkness, one of them, however, pissily advising me as follows: “Good luck, Einstein; next time you’ll end up in the morgue.”

And on one of my more careless nights, when I’d somehow hooked up with a Columbia student who was into some awfully strong psychotropic drugs, I ended up at his place on 116th off Amsterdam, not far from where my mother used to clean the nursery school, stupidly dragging too deeply on a white cheroot that contained pot, tobacco, and a massive dose of angel dust. He was a kind of mad-hatter sort and, as a decent musician, seemed friendly enough, but I soon regretted going there. That angel dust distorts things: turns a twenty-foot hallway into the Khyber Pass, raises the walls into canyons, turns your limbs into rubber, your muscles into liquid, and scrambles the brain in such a way that it is hard to know what is going on. At one point, while I was sitting across from this fellow, whose long red hair spilling from his top hat fell upon his shoulders, he took out a brown paper bag and, asking me, “Guess what’s inside?” pulled from it a .38 revolver whose muzzle he put against my head. Then, twirling its cylinders, and with a smile, he cocked its hammer before pressing the trigger. It clicked, no bullet exploded, and he fell back laughing, while I, struggling with that Martian atmosphere, got the hell out of there, leaving the bleakness of the apartment for the even greater bleakness of the street—dark, lifeless, foreboding, autumnal.

Occasionally, my mother and I went downtown to Centre Street to apply for food stamps, for which we, on a limited income, were eligible. I hated going, for we’d have to wait hours the way we used to at public clinics, and for the most part, the clerks handling the cases were late-middle-aged women who’d been forced into taking those positions in lieu of being on welfare. From the start, they gave my mother a hard time, especially when it came to documentation—she had to bring a Social Security card, a birth certificate, a death certificate for Pascual, and, as well, proof that we were “needy,” by way of a recent 1040 form (she had none) or a bank book—she had, as I recall, all of two hundred and forty-seven dollars in her “life savings.” It would have actually helped if we’d been on welfare, but my mother, despite her grief and shock, remained snooty enough as to swear that, no matter how bad things might turn out, she’d never sink so low as to go on “relief.” Those employees who were on welfare, however, sniffing out her haughtiness, gave her a hard time for it: They picked on her Spanish, sent us back to our seats for hours at a time while they looked for some hopelessly “lost” document relating to our case, and only finally came through when my mother or I, eating humble pie, approached them at their desk, politely asking if they might yet approve a new round of thirty forty-dollar-a-month books of food stamps.

Much as I disliked that whole business, I had to go with her as an intermediary—my mother always feeling intimidated by any official documentation in English, as if asking even for food stamps in the wrong manner might get her in trouble. We went, I should add, about once every three months or so, as new rules and glitches were always around the corner, my mother and me riding downtown on the subway together, as she’d go on endlessly about the indignities of having to deal with colored women just to save a few dollars, while I, looking at the subway columns flashing by through the windows, daydreamed, wondering if my father, on his way home from work when he was alive, had done the same.

We also became recipients of government-issue surplus food, like peanut butter, jelly, tuna fish, chipped beef, and condensed milk, which I’d pick up at a distribution center on 125th Street. Packed into large white cans the size of paint gallons, the words NOT FOR SALE in giant letters written on their labels, and boasting of outlandish expiration dates: GOOD UNTIL APRIL 1992, it seemed the kind of stuff one imagined would be found in the storage closets of nuclear bomb shelters. Hardest was finding out just which stores accepted the food stamps: We had no problems at the local A&P and bodega, where they knew my mother, but once you walked into a shop in a different neighborhood, say, some place near Alexander’s near 149th Street and Third Avenue, where there sometimes might be incredible deals—like “5 lbs. of pig’s feet for a dollar! ”—she’d have to present her food stamp user ID, which somehow always offended her, especially if she’d marched up to the counter, having put on one of her superior airs.

Though she almost became accepting of her terrible loss, my mother seemed anxious in new ways. Still in her mid-fifties, she looked at least a decade and a half younger, men eyeing her on the street—perhaps it was her air of haughtiness or a kind of fleshly indifference that did them in—but in any case, like her sister Cheo, she had turned out to be the kind of Catholic to never remarry, preferring to be reunited with her husband in the afterlife. She never got lonely in that way, though at night, overhearing her speaking aloud and sighing, I’d wish to God that someone else would come along to take care of her.

In the meantime, my mother, without any real marketable skills and still struggling with her English, began to so worry about how we’d manage to survive that she ended up taking classes in typewriting in some kind of downtown agency. (We had gotten hold of an ancient Smith Corona that someone had left behind under a stairwell, and she’d practice on this, for hours at a time, her click-clacking, tentative and never quickening, sounding through the house: I actually found her attempts at mastering a new skill at her age—she’d always seemed old to me, more like an abuela than a mother—rather touching, but though she came home with a “typing certificate” from the agency, her attempts to find a job as a secretary or typist were doomed, I believe, from the start. She just didn’t have it in her, and after a few months of desperate searching, with a few tryouts in outlying offices in the Bronx and Queens, she simply gave up.

To save money, she became as frugal as possible. For several years, she hardly ever bought any cuts of meat that were not in fact mostly gristle and bones: frozen turkey legs at a dollar for two, as well as threepound bags of chicken entrails—livers and gizzards and necks—with which she made her own tamped-down versions of arroz con pollo, became our staples.

One of the college students I used to jam with on the steps of Low Library, Steve, a saxophone player who also happened to be a premed student at Columbia, came home with me one evening. After we’d finished playing, driving our patient neighbors crazy, my mother, in a good mood that night, invited him to stay for dinner. However, once he had taken his place at the table, in the seat where my pop had passed evenings (and where, I swear, his ghost still did), and my mother set down before him a plate of yellow rice nicely cooked with tomatoes and peppers, carrots and onions and some garlic, with those chicken necks and gizzards stirred in, he, picking at them as if they were worms, could not bring himself to take a single bite. It was then it first really hit me that, with the absence of my father, no matter what else he might have meant to us, our lives, at least when it came to food, had certainly taken a turn for the worse.

If I’d sometimes felt vaguely curious about the way I’d look in the reflection of a car window or a store mirror—always washed out, nearly unreadable—in the months/years after my pop’s death, I couldn’t bear to look at myself, even passingly. I remember feeling that the world seemed grotesque to me, and that, as I’d go through my days, my knees were weak and my shoulders tight, as if bearing too great a weight on them. Needless to say, when I actually sat down to study at home, during one of those rare moments when my mother wasn’t going on and on about something in another room, I only seemed vaguely aware of what I happened to be reading—I’d stash that information away somewhere—but for the most part I felt like a stupidly wounded animal barely attached to the world and rather benumbed to life. There is something else: I couldn’t help myself from looking back over my shoulder, as if I would turn around and see my pop standing on some street corner smoking a cigarette.

The only things that lightened me up were the sight of a pretty female face and music, the latter of which, as you may by now have surmised, happened to be the central passion of my youth. Playing the guitar and writing songs kept me sane and helped me to make friends all over the city. And so I got into the habit of turning up at the school, at least a few times a week, with a beat-up Harmony guitar. There on the steps of Bronx Community, I’d befriended this wiry Italian guy from Co-op City, Nick, who knew his way around a fret board and loved to play bluesy tunes, mainly of his own composition. As the son of an Allerton Avenue barber, he, like me and so many of the others at that school, had been among the first in his family to try out that education thing, and loving music himself, it seemed natural that we put together a band.

This consisted of some kids from my high school, along with a Columbia University football player turned pianist, my old friend Pete on bass, and a hammy, weird-looking tone-deaf singer who could not hold a tune but performed fearlessly, as if lifting outside of himself. Our first gig was at a fashion show for oversize ladies at the Lane Bryant department store, but we mainly performed, if it can be called that, at a locally famous watering hole known simply as the CDR, which occupied the basement floor of a residential building on 119th Street.

I don’t recall ever once hearing about or seeing my father drinking there—if he walked into that place at all, it was to cash a check perhaps—and though he had known its affable owner, Larry Mascetti, if only casually, for over twenty years, he wouldn’t have had much use for the place otherwise. Aside from rarely spending his money in any bar except to leave a tip for the free drinks he came by at the Biltmore, he would not have felt too comfortable with the clientele, who were mainly Irish alcoholics—in the sense that just about every man above the age of eighteen in that neighborhood seemed to be one. A few black men hung out there, among them a well-known jazz violinist (he later died of cirrhosis of the liver), as well as a spattering of Japanese who’d grown up in the neighborhood, and the handful of Latinos who went into the place to drink would have hardly fit with my pop’s idea of what an authentic Cuban or Puerto Rican was about, except as Americanized versions. Most of the people who drank there were decent working-class stiffs, and yet among them were a few bigoted souls who, never taking me to be Latino, had on occasion blurted out within earshot a few references to some “spic” they’d seen around or, more blatantly, about how some “fuckin’ spic” had the nerve to give him a sly look—an atmosphere of derisiveness toward Latinos so prevalent that even I, as jaded and pissed off or distanced as I had begun to feel about my roots, took offense.

I felt like a spy moving through both ranks—Latinos I didn’t know sometimes gave me the evil eye, while, on the other end, loudmouthed white guys betrayed their own prejudices without as much as giving one damn about my feelings, if they thought of me as Latino at all.

And yet, on a social level, that place appealed to a lot of people: An oasis—literally the only watering hole for blocks and blocks—it was frequented by Columbia University and Teachers College people by day and, at night, by the locals who’d stop there to get tanked up on their way home from work, though there were the occasional dropins from the arty, hippie world. One of them lived just across the street, a quite interesting guitar player, Chris Donald, whose girlish dark hair hung down to his willowy waist. He’d always cash the big-time checks he’d receive for playing his white Telecaster guitar in a 1950s cover band quite famous in its time, Sha-Na-Na, that had originated at Columbia. I think the checks were for about fifteen hundred dollars—perhaps his weekly wage, I’m not sure, though I do know that Chris, with whom I had jammed on occasion in his one-room basement apartment, used a good part of that money to buy heroin. For that act, he’d wear period clothes and somehow tame his hair into a passable though wildly oversize Elvis-style pompadour and for at least a few years seemed to be on top of the world, when, of course, in the tradition of the very cool and uncautious, he went overboard one day and overdosed, throwing the universe away on a dime high. It was a jovially crowded, smoke-filled place that boasted a booming jukebox and had, given all the cops who dropped in, a rather laissez-faire policy about permitting certain things. Some of the regulars seemed to always have something shifty going on on the side, but the biggest heavies, it seemed to me, were the cops themselves. They’d sit around in their civilian outfits but always packing revolvers, sending out waves of suspicion, world-weariness, and menace. (As in “Do not fuck with me.”) They were famously depressed and sarcastic: “How’s law enforcement going?” “Fine, how’s crime?” With the rare exception, each seemed to me a prince of darkness.

On certain nights, huge amounts of money were openly wagered in the banquettes off to the side, wafts of marijuana and hashish smoke occasionally drifting through the air. For whatever the reason, anything seemed to go on those premises. One night while I was in there, the comedian George Carlin, who grew up on 121st Street a few doors up from my grammar school, which he’d also attended and commemorated in an album entitled Class Clown, happened to be sitting by such a table, with what must have been an ounce of some white powdery substance splayed across a piece of wax paper before him. Observing this, a ruddy-faced police officer dressed in plain clothes walked over, and while it seemed he had gone over to investigate the situation, it turned out that this cop, whose eyes had the expression of a man looking through a plate-glass store window as if at a curious hat in a corner, had gone over simply to express his admiration that a local boy had made it into the big time, and would he, please, Mr. Carlin, possibly do him the honor of signing an autograph. I know this, because I was there just hanging around.

The owner, Mr. Mascetti, by the way, was a burly and cheerful, bald-headed fellow of stout proportions who could have passed as a plump cousin to the musician David Crosby. In the 1950s, before moving on to this establishment, he ran a little bar on 123rd Street on Amsterdam, where, I’ve heard, the folksinger Burl Ives used to perform. When I first knew him, however, he managed the soda fountain of a pharmacy on 120th Street, where, running errands, I came into one of my first jobs. He had three kids, among them a spoiled son, Butch, who, as it happened, I always had fistfights with, though I owed him or his father my first excursion, at about the age of eleven, to Bear Mountain, something that has stuck in my mind ever since, not only because we had spent a beautiful day tranquilly walking that park’s wooded trails, but mainly because he had a car while my own family never made such journeys, not even once.

A good-hearted man rumored to be a member of the genteel petit Mafia—his brother ran some kind of operation in Brooklyn—he might have kept a gun in the back and was probably someone not to be messed with, though he could not have been more kindly toward people—even threw me a couple of twenties when my pop died. Trusting me because of my quiet demeanor, he’d occasionally bring me along with him at night when he’d drive up to another bar uptown in Harlem to take care of some business transaction. In any event, when he heard that I had put together a group, he told me we could perform there any time we wanted to. For a period of a few years, we were to be the occasional “special entertainment” billed as “the 118th Street R&B band.” With people having nothing better to do jamming the place, at two dollars a head, on a Saturday night each of us musicians ended up with a nice piece of change.

On some weeks, I took home at least a few hundred dollars, twice as much as I think my father ever earned. But I can’t say I did anything meaningful with that money—in fact, I’m not quite sure what I did with it. Being of an age when other kids would go off on three-month summertime excursions to Europe on maybe nothing more than six hundred dollars—a figure I once heard—I never did anything quite so adventuresome, and not because I wouldn’t have wanted to, but because, as somewhat of a provincial, it simply didn’t enter my mind: At some level, for me, Europe did not quite exist.

We’d play from around nine at night until three in the morning, long gigs that sometimes became wild affairs, what with all the booze and drugs floating around. Among the things I learned on such nights was that you don’t have to give a particularly good performance (though we did sometimes) if your audience is stoned. When LSD inevitably entered the picture, and folks began to circle the earth, anything one played seemed to that segment of the audience exalted, serene, and profoundly deep. Most people danced well enough, though some went off into a kind of proto-Aztec hieroglyph frenzy, or else, as in the case of super-medicated Vietnam vets, subdued, very slow, zombie waltzes; and while our repertoire included a few numbers that had something of the Latin rhythm to them—like “Bang Bang” and “Oye Cómo Va”—we were probably the farthest from a Cuban band imaginable, and our audience a far cry from the sorts of dancers my parents once consorted with.

In fact, the closest the bar came to displaying a Latin flavor of a sort came down to the black and Latina hookers from around the Port Authority, whom someone would round up for the occasional bachelor party and bring uptown from Tenth Avenue by the carload. On some nights, these ladies would be out in the back taking care of one man after the other, and occasionally, some of these women blew their patrons in full view of the crowd. I had also seen one of the women splayed across a table and, with whipped cream from an aerosol can covering her privates, submit as one of the fellows, usually quite drunk, went down on her: There were other variations on these oral themes, and a few copulations as well, often enough in the somewhat funky bathroom. Altogether, it was the kind of scene that makes a show like The Sopranos seem sexually tame to me now, and it was so absurdly rank—and sleazy—on occasion as to make even the worst of my pop’s so-called dance-hall infidelities seem almost innocent by comparison. (And yet, why do I continue to remember that place with fondness?)