In those years, I seemed to have vacillated between two versions of myself: One was musical and hip, somewhat sly, and occasionally wild, the other so completely solemn and conservative of demeanor as to be taken by Greenwich Village hippies as too straitlaced to trust. (When I cut my hair short, I was sometimes looked upon suspiciously by the bohemian sect as if I might be a cop—I suppose that had something to do with my overly preoccupied expression.) The hip Hijuelos smoked cigarettes and liked to get high; like black folks, who I never saw using any other brand, I preferred Kools, maybe a pack or two a night, not giving a damn about health issues. (I was convinced, however stupidly, that by the time I had smoked long enough to come down with cancer, they—the scientific world—would have developed a cure for it.) The other Hijuelos, the pensive shit who looked down on others’ self-indulgences and worried about his health, tended toward weight-induced high blood pressure and remained, despite the unpredictability of his mother’s moods, complacently disposed toward her. (“Sí, mamá.”) One did whatever the fuck he felt like doing, lived here and there, made out with the occasional girl, while the other demurely slipped into deep depressions, all the while craving not the escapes of sex or drugs, but eso de la comida—Cuban food especially—and the mental comfort foods of comic books and horror movies. That cooler version of myself trudged off one night through Central Park with the guitarist Duane Allman in search of a liquor store and later jammed with him in an uptown pad, while the other, completely insecure but having pretensions of musical grandeur, once boasted to his older brother that he had written the lyrics of a Beatles song called “When I’m Sixty-four.” (How on earth I thought I could get away with that is beyond me. I guess I believed they didn’t have radios in Brooklyn.)

The next morning, Mr. Mascetti drove us to JFK in his Cadillac, got us there around nine A.M., paid for our tickets at the counter, and then, wishing me well with a slap to my back, took off for Manhattan. We had to wait about an hour before boarding, a very long hour. Having been high all night, on speed and LSD perhaps—who knew—Butch Mascetti had signed on for the duration. Somewhere in outer space, Butch kept pointing his finger at me and laughing wildly, going on about how the interior of the terminal had begun to glow like gold before melting like ice all around him; he’d make whooshing noises with his mouth and scoot around in circles, his hands held out like Superman’s, flying, babbling incoherently about the cosmic winds in that place. Not wanting any hassles, I kept bringing him back to his seat; “Be cool,” I’d say, only to watch him get up again. The airline staff, mostly young female flight attendants, must have noticed his strange behavior, but I think they were either inured to such doings or simply didn’t care enough to boot us off that flight. Finally, we started boarding: I thanked God for that, because he seemed to quiet down.

A general note: I would not recommend flying anywhere with someone who, out of a controlling motive, would slip into your drink a drug like LSD; I can also assure you that a jet plane—reeking of fuel, carpet-cleaning chemicals, recycled oxygen, bodily gases, perfumes and colognes, airplane food, and, in those days of yore, cigarette smoke, which even for a smoker on that drug smells and tastes exactly like all its ghastly chemical components (from benzene to formaldehyde)—is about the least pleasant place on earth to be. And it hits you that you are locked inside an unimaginably heavy metallic projectile flying through the air, somehow held up in the sky. In that contained, inescapable, and claustrophobic space, I got the jitters so badly that I made it a ritual to go to the toilet about every ten minutes (or however much time) to wash my face and urinate, though at a certain point, with Butch really getting on my nerves, I locked myself inside for so long the flight attendants began knocking on the door to make sure I was all right. (I wasn’t and they knew it—from our blabbering and distorted expressions and strange reactions to simple questions, as when a flight attendant would offer a meal, and I’d answer incredulously, “Why?” Later, when we’d finally landed, one of them, a chirpy southern sort, remarked, “It’s not every day we get passengers like you.”

At so young an age, I had, despite my tendency to go off the deep end emotionally, endless reserves of energy. After working all day, about three nights a week, I’d take a series of subway trains and end up at the far northwest Bronx, where I took some fill-in courses at Lehman College. My big goal was to matriculate to City College, where, in the event that I did not make it as a musician, I believed, I’d end up studying to become a schoolteacher of some kind. I became one of those fellows you’d see hunched over a history or math textbook on the number 4 train heading uptown, at around seven at night, later making my way off that El and walking the six or so blocks to the school, as if it were nothing at all. (I couldn’t begin to do that now, night after night.) I’m not sure how I managed to stay alert during the unavoidable torpor of those classes—most of the students, many of them older, had full-time jobs and were often low of energy—but we were allowed to drink coffee and to smoke in the classrooms. Some teachers even kept ashtrays handy, but I’d also bring along one of my own (cheap, metallic, the kind sold in a John’s Bargain Store for a dime apiece), and if no transit cops were around later, on my way home, I’d have a smoke on the platform, during those endless waits for the train, inevitably thinking, at some point of the night, about my poor father.

In those years, I had a girlfriend who happened to be into acting, Carol, a lady I met while babysitting my friend Tommy Muller-Thym on one of those nights when he had gotten too high on LSD for his own good. (As when he, a rambunctious soul, would speak of wanting to toss a brick through a police car window.) We were in the Gold Rail bar, where Tommy, in the midst of stunning hallucinations, had attempted to pick up her across-the-hall neighbor, a staunch feminist of a patrician upbringing, as they were sitting by a grubby initialincised table next to us. According to Tommy, her feminist friend needed a good screwing to get rid of her haughty attitude, and told her so. While that remark did not bode well for his amorous chances, I made Carol’s acquaintance, as a sort of equally bemused and neutral party witnessing their verbal parrying.

Of my teachers in the City system, there were two whom I would credit the most with kindling my first interests in writing. The first happened to teach a basic literature course at Bronx Community, a certain professor Wertheim, who, receiving an essay I had written about one of Bernard Malamud’s stories, “The Magic Barrel,” whose atmosphere of immigrant melancholy sang to me like a siren perching on a rock, pointed out several instances in which I used easy alliteration in my sentences, crude as they were—frolicking freely. In the margin he, a wise guy, wrote something along the lines of “so here Hijuelos bellows.” When he gave me an A in the course, I felt exhilarated—but aside from doing well, even given my scattered nature, I had really enjoyed the stories, from beginning to end, that were included in the assigned textbook, a Norton anthology of fiction, which I absorbed very much like a sponge, and in that way I first began to fill in the rather huge gaps I had in my knowledge of literature. (Of course, being a sap for emotion, the authors I most cherished, aside from Malamud, included Chekhov and D. H. Lawrence; I still do today.)

All the while, I had always been one of those pensive fucks who really enjoyed street jive, the selling of “wolf tickets” by way of outlandish storytelling among BS artists hanging out on the sidewalks. Junkies were the best—really funny in fact, when not falling off the edge of the world, during slow nods that sometimes went badly, as in the case of this good-natured black kid named Alvin, whose sunny disposition did not prevent him from becoming an addict, nor from slipping backward off a rooftop ledge in the midst of a dream. One of my favorite folks, strung out sometimes, sometimes not, was Tommy, whom I would see mainly on the weekends while hanging with his younger brother Richard, finally home from Vietnam and, incidentally, also attending City. Tommy and I would find ourselves just walking around the neighborhood scoping out the action: I don’t recall how he made money in those days—he was a college dropout and already a seasoned veteran of the Addicts’ Rehabilitation Center on 125th Street, where I had visited him on occasion (they’d give you a little room and several doses of methadone a day, which gave you a kind of high). I think he must have earned some money dealing in soft drugs, though he, when not using the heavy stuff, seemed quite content with just enough to buy a little reefer and the endless quantities of beer, drunk from cans out of paper bags, that he cherished. (Theft has also struck me as a possible source of his income, though I can’t imagine that he had that in his nature.) For his own amusement, he liked to concoct the most outlandish tales—of seeing, for example, flying saucers in Central Park, or of going to Harlem and encountering a famous movie star in search of drugs, of having sex with two or three women at a time, stories that were, though hard to buy, easy to enjoy.

And myself? I liked the florid language of Shakespeare, though watching his plays performed in Central Park often put me half to sleep even when the casts included actors like Kevin Kline and Meryl Streep, among notable others. The blame would go to my short attention span and my own capacity for daydreaming: In the balmy night air, with a few persnickety stars managing to peek down at the world through the harsh New York–down-on-its-luck hazes, I would fantasize not about writing something like Shakespeare but about becoming an actor myself, or at least envying those sorts of folks, in the same way I secretly admired even the most outlandish of rock musicians for having the courage (balls) to get out there in a way that engaged the wider world.

I am not quite sure how I made the transition from the kind of super naturalistic (but stiffly guarded) scenes I had put on paper into actually trying to write fiction, but I do recall that it was the writing department’s chairman, an affable and dapper fellow by the name of Frederic Tuten (a future teacher and a friend of mine to this day), who suggested that I submit a piece to one of the several fiction writers then teaching under the humble auspices of the City College banner, a list that, in those days, was rather stellar (and serious) in a New York City way. Anxiously enough, and naïve about the difficulties of writing good prose, I spent several nights furiously typing up what I seemed to think might have qualified as a short story, of some twenty-five pages in often misspelled, nongrammatical sentences—a tale about a pretty blind girl, Celeste (a name I took from one of the lovely Parks sisters across the street from where I grew up), trapped in a miserable marriage, who, while having an affair with someone across town, takes the subway and, getting on the wrong train, ends up in a really bad neighborhood where she is jumped and taken sexual advantage of. (Not an iota of my Cuban roots could be found anywhere in it—think I made her cruel husband a Greek or an Italian, and as far as Celeste herself went, I never bothered to identify her origins, though I did have her feeling instinctually frightened by the strangeness of a South Bronx Latino neighborhood, her mugging taking place in an abandoned lot such as those I remembered seeing and playing in during my childhood.)

Barthelme, it turned out, occupied a small and windowless office at the far end of the Quonset hut hall: I found him, with Burroughs pointing from his doorway and saying, “Just follow the smoke,” for, indeed, as I got down to that end, a few dense plains of filterless Pall Mall fumes, hanging magically in the air, seemed to lead inside: There I saw Donald Barthelme for the first time. He was wearing a blue denim shirt, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and reading a New York Post with a pencil in hand (was he editing their prose?). He looked, with a longish beard and oval face, like a Dutch sea captain, or a little like a milder, less severe version of Solzhenitsyn. With sandy hair just dropping over his ears and broad shoulders, he seemed a sturdy man in his mid-forties, if that. Surely a writer, if only for his wire-rimmed glasses and nicotine-stained fingers (right hand). He barely looked up when I finally walked in and asked, “Professor Barthelme?” after which, hearing why I was there, he told me to sit down and offered me a smoke. (I happily accepted, puffing away anxiously.) Within a few minutes, however, he had read enough of my piece—which he’d already started marking up with a pencil, mainly correcting punctuation, but laughing a few times, over what I did not know—and without much deliberation gave me permission, by way of a signed note, to enroll in a class he was teaching for beginner’s fiction.

With Barthelme again, I began wanting to write more and more about Cuba. It simply possessed me. Reawakened memories, perhaps inspired by the likes of Lima and Infante (later Arenas and Severo Sarduy), came flowing into me. (And there was something else happening at the time: Hanging around my mother and her friends when they started up with their stories, the details of their lives, and the hardships they’d gone through as newcomers to this country, which had so bored me before, seemed suddenly so interesting. Coming back to my place on Eighty-third Street, I would be sitting by my desk—a fifteen-dollar beauty that I’d hauled up from a junk shop on Amsterdam—smoking cigarette after cigarette and trying to recall, however remotely time had placed it, the little journey I had once made down to Cuba with my mother and brother. There was something life-affirming about that summoning up of images—what was there to see? What did the house look like? What did we do? The smell of things, the taste, the feelings that the night sky seemed to bring out in me. (I’ll admit that when it came to Cuba, I had already become a hopeless romantic, an idealizer of that which I would never really know, but which, just the same, seemed a part of me.) And yet, in the midst of such warm feelings, I felt a little queasy at the same time (sucking harder on a cigarette, girlfriend walking in and asking, “Are you still up? And why are you smoking so much?”) because the more I wrote about my little corner of Cuba, the more I drifted inexorably into yet another story that was not as comforting: the time I spent in the hospital, that puzzling nightmare that was a part of my life, which I never liked to think about. Once I got to that place, it seemed that I was on the verge of opening yet another door, the stuff of my upbringing that, banging on the walls and screaming, I really didn’t have any interest in pursuing because out of a corner of my eye, whenever I looked inside, there were just too many things I didn’t particularly want to see again. That sensation shooting up through me had a curious effect on my body—my arms and back would burn up, my skin covering with welts, and a fierce itching such as I had never known before would overwhelm me, and I would swear, no way would I write about that time, which I’d rather forget.

Still, there seemed something so wonderful about the very notion of writing. I liked it because, quite simply, I could hide behind the pages. No one could see my fair complexion, my non-Cuban countenance. At first I wrote a few strange stories but set them in Cuba—one I called “Invasion of the Star Creatures” or the “Aliens,” about this spaceship that lands in Cuba, and whose occupants take on the appearance of Rudolph Valentinos roaming the countryside, finding Cuban women to marry and, eventually, immigrating to the States and becoming “aliens” again. Without realizing it, while scrambling about the CCNY library stacks, as well as those of my local public library, and foraging through the sale racks in Columbia’s bookstores, anything even vaguely pertaining to Cuba became a source of inspiration to me, and out of the blue, while writing down every bit of interesting lore and fact and legend I could find about Cuba’s history—and feeling nourished by just the fact of coming across the names I’d grown up hearing about, in the elegant and uplifting setting of a book, Jiguaní, Holguín, Girona, and Santiago, among so many others—such discoveries so uplifted my spirits that I couldn’t help myself from working into the late hours of the night. Back then, I felt so strongly about entering Cuba, as it were, through the dimension of paper that while slipping inside the very dream I had always carried around with me, I was rarely even aware of the time.

As I sat in his office in the Quonset hut one afternoon going over something, Barthelme surprised me by suggesting that I might consider the University of Iowa writing program as a possibility for my future. He apparently had quite a bit of pull there and seemed to imply that if I so wanted to, he could get me in.

Well, once again, I led a double life. Coming uptown to visit with my mother, I did my best to become a dutiful son, though my mother never had any idea of what I was doing with myself. (When I graduated from City with a B.A., with the distinction of becoming the first SEEK student to have done so, and my mother asked me, “Qué hay de nuevo?”—“What’s new?” and I answered, “I just graduated from college,” she seemed genuinely bemused.) In the meantime, the period of our troubles, which had followed my father’s death, when his ghost filled the house, had slipped away. Oddly enough, through death he had become somewhat sanctified in her mind. With his presence lingering in the halls—as if both his struggles and, more pleasantly, his peaceful, stoic quietude in the mornings had left aftertraces that one could literally still feel—the reality that he was gone had finally set in. “I now realize how much he loved me, el pobre,” she would say. For my part, I couldn’t disagree: Better to have her speak of my pop kindly than not, though she had, in the meantime, made that apartment a museum to their life together and it would always feel frozen in time.