But as indifferently as I behaved (I had to be out of my mind), I also didn’t have a dime to my name, and I learned quickly enough that I didn’t have anyone in my life in the States (New York, at any rate) with the means or disposition to send me as much as the cost of my airfare back: In fact, I only managed to get home because of a deal I quickly made with a Hispanist professor at Swarthmore, who had written me in Rome earlier that spring requesting that I give a lecture to his students there—about what, I didn’t know—in exchange for my airline ticket and three hundred dollars, just enough to get me back on my feet when I’d arrive.

Still, aside from tearing myself away from Roma and the easy lifestyle there (except for rush hour, when every Italian raced home at two hundred miles an hour just so they could do nothing), I had hardly thought about New York or the people I’d left behind, and when I did, opening the door to my own memories, I’d sink into a profound You came from shit and to shit thou shalt return depression. Bingeing to get over it, I’d smoke and drink cheap, not bad, wine to the point that, yes, my kidneys would ache so deeply that I’d feel almost tempted to see a doctor; and then, feeling better, after a day of misery, the thought that I really had nothing to return to, after all, would lay me low again.

Sojin, at least, remained gracious to the end. The day I left, in early May, she drove me to the airport and we said our good-byes, promising, of course, to see each other again as soon as possible. As I crossed over into the passengers-only lounge, I could see her mascara running down her lovely face as if she already knew that getting back together, given my departure and mercurial temperament, was unlikely, if not impossible.

After I landed midafternoon in JFK and worked through the traveler’s usual rigmarole, I took a bus back into the city and nearly passed out from how gray and run-down Harlem looked: The same avenue that had so thrilled me as a child upon my release from the hospital, and where I had spent countless afternoons as a teenager shopping or hanging out here or there with my friends, seemed so hopelessly ugly that I quickly started to sink; I’d gotten so used to Roman aesthetics and the tropical colors of that city, the sun-baked crumbling walls and balcony gardens, as well as the Californian/ Mediterranean blueness of its sky, that for the first time in my life, I had some insight into the visual despair that Cubans of my parents’ generation—and for that matter, my exiled cousins—must have experienced as newcomers here. Whatever charms the city had always held for me—and however much I may have fed off the energies and variety of our citizens—would take me months to appreciate again. In the meantime, I felt so glumly disposed that I could hardly believe that not twenty-four hours before, I had been in bed with a remarkably beautiful woman whose spectacular looks, I quickly decided, not a single woman in New York could begin to touch.

It wasn’t just a matter of physicality but of spirit: So many of the faces I glimpsed that day seemed hardened and angry and so generally pissed off at life as to distort even the finest of their features grotesquely. Of course, I was under a spell, unexpectedly missing not just the woman I’d left behind but Italy itself: New York women seemed plain and mean in a way that I had never realized before, an impression that lasted for months, until, of course, I got used to the city again and, making my own inner adjustments, became more and more the dumb shit I had always been. I’d also arrived looking sharper and better-dressed than ever before—a fashion designer, Sojin had done everything in her power to break me of my badly wanting sartorial tastes (okay, if I told you how many people have since looked at me and declared: “But I thought Cubans were supposed to be sharp dressers,” you wouldn’t believe it), though the air of upgrade and refinement I now exuded—and my sudden discomfort over my old surroundings—left me, always the loner, feeling even more estranged, and probably too delicate for that world, as if, in a carryover from my childhood, I had reentered into my Lord Fauntleroy mode, albeit as an adult version.

But somehow I wasn’t angry or particularly disturbed: My friend, a quite laid-back fellow, seemed hardly bothered by those conditions, and while I felt less than happy to be back in New York, just stepping into my apartment, with its sweeping views of Harlem, seemed to make it easier. Besides, I’d almost learned to relax in Rome—why become an uptight, anxiety- and complaint-ridden New Yorker again, when I had a newly found sense of gusto and (so I thought) savoir faire? Once he’d explained that he had made plans to get everything out that next weekend, I somewhat settled down. He’d already found another place in the neighborhood and just hadn’t gotten his act together: So, everything was cool, right?

Not really. We were on our way out when I asked him if there’d been any mail beyond the occasional batch he’d sent to me in Rome. That’s when he hauled out a box filled with a number of thick TOP PRIORITY envelopes from the IRS and Department of New York State Taxation, some of which were well over a year old; I got a sick feeling seeing them, and maybe it was jet lag, but my stomach went into knots, as it always used to: “How come you didn’t send me these?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said. “I didn’t want you to feel hassled—I mean you were having a good time, right?”

Then I opened one of them: Apparently, I owed quite a lot of money in back taxes. How that happened, I can’t say, but I’d neglected reporting the few grants I’d received in the past, and, it seemed, they’d caught on to me. With penalties, the amount I hadn’t paid them, long since officially delinquent, came out to about eight thousand dollars, as of a month or two before. Having almost nothing to my name, and always stupid about money anyway, I suddenly saw the good deed I’d performed on behalf of my friend in a new light. As I put it to him, incredulously, “Man, I’m fucked,” to which he, no doubt placing my misfortune in the context of the fabulous time I’d probably had, just looked at me and shrugged: “Uh-huh.”

“I really hadn’t anything to do with what happened with those taxes—you see, I was living in Europe for the past year or so, in Rome, in a villa for a good part of that time—studying and writing, in a community of brilliant scholars and artists—and while I was away, I prevailed upon a friend of mine”—her blinking eye did a double take on my use of the word prevail—“to look after my affairs. But you see, my friend seemed to have not thought the papers you sent me too important, and because I had been working on a novel and of course traveling throughout Europe for much of that time, I hardly ever had the opportunity to inquire after such things and . . .”

As I went on, she wrote things down in pencil on a pad, occasionally looking up at me and uttering, “Uh-huh,” just as my friend had, her face betraying an opinion, so recently formed, that I was some kind of idiot trying to plead hardship to someone who had to spend her days in such a lifeless soul-destroying environment: I really didn’t have any excuse except that I had a friend who probably had his own problems or, without realizing it, had indeed fucked me—but I could have been kidnapped by aliens as far as that office’s directive about obtaining monies owed was concerned: It just didn’t matter. After listening to my excruciatingly banal excuse—in essence, that my life had been going too well for me to be bothered with such things—she put down her pencil and smiled, though not widely.

“Mr. Hidjewlos,” she told me, “I am very sympathetic to your circumstances, but if I were you, I’d go out as soon as possible and find a good accountant. We’ve got some restitution coming to us.”

It would take me over a year and a half to pay the IRS and New York State their back taxes, but while I’d remain mystified by how my good deed had backfired on me, at least one nice thing came of it: My downstairs neighbor, directly below my apartment, was a black psychiatrist who used to hate my guts and accuse me of being a racist because, having to turn up at TDI most days, I’d be forced to bang on the floor at three in the morning to get him to quiet down. A cool night owl with some kind of state-of-the-art stereo system, he loved to crank up his speakers when the whole rest of the world tried to sleep, while he listened to the cool jazz of WGBO, whose programming came through my floor so clearly I could make out the DJ’s words, and every riff, every drumbeat, every agitating sax regurgitation of forms and musical motifs I’d heard a million times before—to the point it would drive me crazy. I’d tap the floor with my knuckles, then pound at it with my fist, and he’d turn it down a little, but then, just as I’d be slipping back to sleep, it would get louder again, until finally I’d have to go downstairs and knock on his door.

Barely even looking at me, he’d say, “All right, all right.” But I’d have to do so every night. After a while, I’d get so agitated, I’d take my electric guitar and, turning my amp down against the floor, crank out the craziest and most irritating blues riffs you’ll ever hear: More than once, we’d have more than a few unkind words, his opinion coming down to this: “You are only complaining because you hate Negroes and are a racist.”

I’d pretty much forgotten about that, when, having returned from Italy, I heard the heavy bass of some moody Miles Davis tune coming through: This time, though, when I tapped (not banged) on the floor, he turned the volume down really low; guess he must have thought I was my friend. Eventually, he caught wind that my friend had moved out and when I ran into him a few days later, he told me: “At first, I couldn’t believe it was you who rented out the apartment to a black man.”

And with that he offered me his hand: That was the one good thing that happened.

I ended up working at three venues, as it were: One was a suicide ward at the Gracie Square Hospital, the other a terminal cancer ward at Payne Whitney. And I taught at the Amsterdam House, an old-age home up on 112th in my old neighborhood. For suicidal, seriously depressed, and troubled folks, I learned that you had to establish some very specific writing rules: “Please, no blood from orifices or from any acts of violence. No mention of the devil or the use of the color black.” That kind of thing. Among my students was an Ursuline nun, somewhere in her late fifties, who, descended from Italian nobility, had slashed her wrists simply because she woke up one day and realized that she did not believe in God and had therefore wasted her life. She wrote, however, remarkably spiritual poetry. The terminal cancer ward was more problematic. Whereas most crazy people, in my experience, enjoy being told that they are, indeed, crazy, there is nothing one can say to someone dying of cancer to relieve him of that ultimate disappointment and agony.

Falling back not on what I had learned from Sontag or Barthelme but from my own mother, whose poetic strivings over the decade or so since my pop’s death had grown more sophisticated, I had them write about the most important or happiest days of their lives—in prose or poetry—and for a short while, at least, I seemed to have lifted some of them out of their own bodies and miserable fates. And I found that it helped to adopt a tender, almost priestly manner with them: It helped that I do believe there is something (unimaginable) awaiting all of us (owed to my Catholic barbarity or, as some prick psychiatrist once said to me, to my lingering childhood fantasies of finding “Daddy” and therefore salvation). Mainly, I just tried to emulate the kindly people I knew, and that seemed to make a difference to them, though there is no amount of preaching or kindness that can take the place of morphine. The old-age home was the happier experience: Among my students was a 107-year-old woman, a former doctor from Missouri, who had maintained a lucid mind while her body had shriveled up to the size of a small, gnarl-limbed child’s. (Hers was the story of how she became the first female doctor in her state.) Though I never cared for the smell of musty death in such a place, nor the natural melancholy of the aged, I felt at least that I was easing their exits from this life in some little way. Heading home with a few dollars in my pocket and happily lighting up a smoke, I’d feel some sense of accomplishment until, at some later hour, I’d take stock of myself and realize that at my age, thirty-six, I really wasn’t anywhere at all.

Eventually, as well, it hit me that the only way I would ever be able to pay off my debts was to sell a book. That’s when my agent, Harriet Wasserman, came in: I’d known her since 1984, and though I’d never earned her a dime in commission, nor given her anything to shop around, she provided me, as had Barthelme, the kind of encouragement that folks starting out in the business need. From time to time, I’d have lunch with her or she’d send me off to meet an editor to whom she had talked up my talent. The two I recall meeting, before I went off to Italy, were much admired old-school publishing men, the likes of which no longer exist: Harvey Ginzburg and Corliss “Cork“ Smith, classy fellows either of whom I would have, in fact, been happy to work with. Though I had first been referred to Ms. Wasserman by my editor at Persea, she had no interest in my staying there. (Nor did I: One of their mantras, though most often true, but which a person from my background just didn’t want to believe, had it that I should never expect to make any money as a writer.) Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of anything going on in those days. As far as I was concerned, that novel about those two Cuban musicians, which I had been writing on and off for the past three years or so, and which I hadn’t bothered to show anyone, didn’t even begin to strike me as the kind of book that mainstream publishers would be interested in, mainly, I think, simply because its subject matter was Latino.

The newspaper of record certainly reflected that: As someone who can remember coming to The New York Times, which I used to deliver as a kid, only later while in college (when it seemed a distinctive step up in terms of syntax and vocabulary from the papers I had been raised with), the fact that I never saw any reviews of Latinoauthored books in its pages seemed to be a sad comment on how little publishing had changed since my first novel had come out. What Hispanic- or Latino-surnamed authors they did review, or that bookstores and publishing houses cared about, came out of the “Boom”—García Marquez on the top of a heap that, however wonderful, left little room in the public imagination for those writers, like an Edwin Vega, who, coming up the hard way, with nary a connection in the outer world, remained unknown to New York publishing and therefore to a mainstream audience in America.

My agent must have seen in me the potential for bridging that gap. I think a lot of it had to do with the way I looked: She was Jewish, and because I had been sometimes taken as so, I am sure she considered me more “sellable.” In such circumstances, my nondarkish /non-ethnic looks probably struck her as an asset, and the truth is that, whenever I met up with such editors, like a Harvey Ginzburg or a Cork Smith, the barely visible hesitation on the part of someone trying to reconcile my face with my name ultimately became an expression of relief. And that alone must have put them at ease. (Well, perhaps that all just happened in my head. At least on one occasion, I learned that the fact that I was Latino could be offputting. When my first novel came out, I gave a copy to my next-door neighbors, some five elderly Jewish sisters, who had, at first, been delighted, only to later knock on my door and return it, one of them saying, “Oh, but we thought you were Jewish. I’m sorry, but this is not for us.”) Nevertheless, even after the minor success of my first “immigrant” novel, a genre which, as I would learn, seemed to have very little to do with “real” literature, I still couldn’t muster much faith in myself as a writer nor, for that matter, in my novel about those cubano brothers who go on the Lucy show. Instead, I found myself longing to write something truly “literary.” (Translation: having nothing to do with my Cuban roots.) At a certain point, I decided that it was time for me to “shit or get off the pot,” as my older brother, with his fondness for blunt sayings, would put it. Either I would write a book or forget about the whole thing—maybe go back into advertising or follow that other nascent dream, of becoming a high school English teacher.

In any event, having put in a successful application for a residency at the MacDowell Colony some months before, I spent six weeks or so that autumn, in 1987, holed up in a cabin in the New Hampshire woods, working with all the sincerity I could muster on a “literary” novel. Under the influence of just about any writer I read or heard—poets swarming through that place and giving nearly nightly readings of some kind—my prose took on a delicacy and fineness of language that I had never thought possible. The story, some two hundred pages’ worth of it, tapped into some of the longings I must have felt as a kid in the hospital. In that novella, a group of terminally ill children (somehow) realize their situation and, though dying from unspecified causes, (somehow) manage to organize an escape from their home and into the woods, where they (somehow), as I recall, hook up with a magical entity, a witch who lives in a cottage, who restores them to health, but only briefly. (I remember hitting a wall and wondering how to get the hell around it.) I must have been thinking about Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the story “Hansel and Gretel” at the same time, but however I had constructed that story, I deliberately went out of my way to avoid mentioning my Cuban-ness, while aspiring to a style that was lyrical, erudite, and, so I thought, beautiful.

“That novella,” she later told me in some Lexington Avenue restaurant, “is about the worst and most pretentious thing I have ever read in my life.” Then, shaking her head, she said, “Look, just put it aside. Take my word for it.”

This may sound strange, given the previous buildup, but, though I had written the thing, it had not come from my heart (though I carried an eternal image of terminally ill children inside me) and the whole process had been torturous. While one part of my psyche, benumbed from an overexposure to too much lyrical poetry, had been persuaded that it was good, no matter what anybody might say, another side of me, the one whose skin had started to break out again into dry raw patches, suspected that it was a piece of treacle. Come what may, I felt a tremendous sense of relief at her appraisal. There was something else: I liked the fact that she could be so bluntly honest with me, which is to say that in those moments, I felt as if I could trust her, at least when it came my writing.

“So what else have you been working on?” she asked me.

A curious-looking woman, very plump and short, her visage a cross between that of Gertrude Stein and Queen Victoria in her later years, and with a florid style of dressing that, depending upon flowing scarves and ankle-hem dresses, harkened back to the fashions of the 1920s, she, in fact, conformed to what one might have fantasized a slightly eccentric agent to look like. Indeed, in the coming years (over almost two decades), I’d learn just how eccentric an agent like her could be, but at the time, I felt nothing but pure gratitude that someone who represented the likes of Saul Bellow could have taken so much interest in someone hardly known to anyone except back in my old neighborhood, and then only as the “guy who wrote that fuckin’ book.” Above all, however, it was her expertise that I needed.

“Didn’t you once tell me you had something else in the works?”

“Well, that other thing?” I said. “It’s about these musicians from Havana.” And I went on to fill her in on some aspects of my story, such as they were. She couldn’t have been happier to hear about it: Two Cuban brothers who end up as walk-on characters on the Lucy show? She loved the notion.

“But get me some of those pages as soon as possible,” she insisted. “And I’ll read them over and see what I can do.” Then, as I looked off, as I sometimes did in moments of discomfort, she tugged at my sleeve. “I mean it,” she told me. “Don’t forget.”

Living alone in those days, I could do whatever I pleased in my apartment: smoke, drink, and eat at any hour, get up at three in the morning if an idea hit me, go out when I felt like it, watch Bozo the clown on TV if I wanted to, jam with musician friends, put out cigarettes in the wall, turn on a bed light in the middle of the night to read, and, among so many other things, I could work at my own pace and never worry about having to clean up what someone else might call a mess. Not having outgrown the shopping-bag method of writing left over from Our House, once I had to actually come up with some pages from my book, which was then still entitled The Secrets of a Poor Man’s Life, I emptied several boxes of that manuscript out onto my living room floor, and, in the only aesthetic clue (aside from paying close attention to false sentiment and good language) I’d taken from Barthelme, a collagist at heart, I proceeded to arrange and rearrange them into various piles, aiming to achieve, as Cortázar had done in Hopscotch, a novel whose chapters and narratives, such as they were, flowed into one another as atmospheres, not so much in any order but through the associative power of what the characters’ emotions conveyed; or, if you like, almost musically, which was exactly the effect I’d wanted, though I’d never really thought of it as so until I actually laid it out. Without realizing it, I already had much of the novel’s supporting structure—its framework—including a number of short experimental sections that were written in the voice of a young boy, my stand-in, as it were, and who, for the sake of a potential narrator with an inside, highly subjective view of the story, happened to be Nestor Castillo’s son, Eugenio: I liked one particular bit in which he describes watching the I Love Lucy show with his uncle Cesar, a superintendent and former Mambo King, and that made for the opening. I followed that up with what I believed to be a pretty sound portraiture of Cubans in New York in the 1950s, the ins and outs, literally, of Cesar Castillo’s sex life, as well as the inner torments of his brother—perpetually pining away for a woman he’d left behind in Cuba, María. Somehow, so many little bits I’d written, with so casual a freedom—and therefore happily brimming with tons of life—fit together so perfectly that, at a certain moment, I suddenly understood how jazz musicians feel when, thanks to some clever arranging, all their crazy-shit riffing falls into place, to make something that you’ve never heard before.

Once I had put a couple hundred pages together, a lot of them with cigarette ash burns, wine and juice and who knows what else stains, I was almost tempted, because of my usual self-doubts, to rearrange everything again, but in some moment of practicality, I decided to say to hell with it and, catching a subway downtown, dropped the manuscript off at my agent’s office.

However, it wasn’t only about that: I seem to recall having a sense that writing books was a noble pursuit, akin to bringing some light into the world, and while I can’t begin to put myself in that idealistic place again, I’ll only say that, back then, it was my naïve faith in the value of literature that also kept me going. At the same time, I couldn’t begin to imagine an interest in my work. Who, after all, published Latinos? And what were they going to do with a name like Hijuelos, and who the fuck could care one bit about a lowly spic superintendent’s life and a bicultural world that, with links to the one I had been raised in, no one had ever written about, except me in that first book, Our House, which, to this day, has mainly remained forgotten? Of course, I wondered what sophisticated readers would make of the fact that my main character, Cesar Castillo, father of that universe, drank too much because of the woes of his life (Yes, of course, a cliché, I could imagine people thinking), or of the fragile Nestor Castillo, whose obsessions with a woman (and country) left behind, as well as his memories of nearly dying as a child, closely paralleled my own. Would those two seem pathetic? Or too emotionally blunt for any readers?

On the other hand, she could really rub the vanity of my situation in my face. Oh, she’d tell me about every son and daughter of a friend to have landed a good job, how many kids they had, where they lived, or conversely, perhaps in an attempt to make me feel better, go into some of the local tragedies—that my old friend Bobby Hannon went crazy; or that Philip Ricart, Belen’s son, who, once dapper and supremely well composed, took too much LSD and became a street person; and so on with one sorry story after the other, like the fire that had, the past winter, swept through a hotel in Quebec, in which one of the beautiful Haitian sisters from upstairs and her daughter, vacationing there, had perished, or that she’d just run into Mr. MacElvoy, whose sixteen-year-old son, on the brink of becoming a seminarian, had been murdered one Christmas some years back—and how shattered he remained over that—or that one of the priests at Corpus was a repressed homosexual, and that Frankie, from the pharmacy on 120th Street, still lived with his mother and drank too much . . . in her way, rightly reminding me that much worse could happen to a person than being out of work.

Sometimes, too, she’d spook me, staring at me strangely—especially if I’d made the mistake of lighting a cigarette: “So you’ve forgotten how you almost died, huh?” she’d say. “Go ahead, kill yourself.” Then she might lecture me about health food and vitamins—“When was the last time you went to a doctor?”—before going off into a momentary spell, fixated on my eyes, and coming out of it, she would say: “Sabes cuánto te pareces a tu papá?”—“Don’t you know how much you look like your father?” The kicker is that while growing up, I’d always wondered why, if I looked so much like my father, who in my eyes was muy muy cubano, no one ever took me as a Cuban.

One day, while pondering that long-standing mystery, I asked her, “If Pop was so Cuban and I look just like him, how come nobody ever takes me as so?” Laughing, she answered: “Tu papá? Why, he never looked Cuban at all!”

Seeing her was always wonderful and awful at the same time. Feeling both inspired and drained by my mother, once I’d finally get home to my apartment, the first thing I’d do was pour myself a hearty drink (usually wine, my other favorite, vodka, being a luxury) and light a cigarette—and if the right frame of mind hit me, I’d feel a momentary bliss and almost an optimism about my future as a writer. But just as often, depleted and my spirits low, I couldn’t even begin to muster the strength and will to imagine the things that would, shockingly, happen with that novel.

By the time my agent started sending the novel around, we’d decided, during the course of a telephone conversation, to change its title to the far more swinging and cheery The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which, if you know that book at all, was the name of a 33 LP album Cesar Castillo and his brother, Nestor, had recorded back in 1955 or so. There were several literary houses that my agent had considered sending it to, among them Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but she’d already been trying to interest one of their more upcoming young editors in my work, an Exeter/Ivy League sort with poetic credentials, Jonathan Galassi, who I had met briefly in her office, years before while working at TDI. Thin, intensely bookish in his looks, he dressed in the manner that one supposed certain editors did: button-down shirt, jacket and bow tie, loafers, and, I recall, wire-rim glasses. His handshake was neither here nor there, though his manner was never less than affable, if, however, a little too patrician for my taste—but then, in those days, most editors were. At the time, I hadn’t realized how lucky I was to be introduced to such an important fellow, that as a Latino, I was being afforded the unique opportunity to break through such a long-standing literary barrier into a world that, worshipping the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, had yet to give Latino writers a chance at all.

In fact, I was hardly able to remember his name when, one evening a few weeks after she’d started sending the book around, my agent called me with the rather startling news that this same Mr. Galassi had been ecstatic about the manuscript and wanted to make an offer. My reaction? You’re kidding me, right? By that same Friday, he did—for an amount that I initially turned down; I simply needed more money to finally settle up with the IRS, as well as to cover my expenses, agent, and further taxes. I didn’t expect them to come back so quickly, but that following Monday, they did. Within a few months, I received a check for half the advance, enough to settle my tax situation and to pay my expenses during that year when I’d actually get down to finishing the book.

And the editing? Despite his upper-class airs, Galassi, as it turned out, proved to be a superb editor for that book, allowing it to breathe in every way and urging only truly prudent changes. With a musical thing going on in my head, I treated word repetitions like beats—and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. Fortunately, as the author of a fine book of poetry, Morning Run, he was linguistically savvy enough to stanch my gushing use of certain words, like lumbering in reference to Cesar Castillo’s sexual attributes, which, early on, had occurred some fifty or so times. He was also splendidly judicious in other ways—I don’t think we had a single argument over anything at all. (It was just a different time altogether: Now everything is done over the Internet, manuscripts like this one electronically transmitted and much of the work done without actually speaking or spending much time with anyone—the impersonality of it all is staggering to old-school writers like me.) By contrast, meeting with Galassi, with my unruly, marked-up, held-together-by-chewing-gum rewrites in hand, was a joy. We’d work for a few hours in the morning, then head out for lunch somewhere near their offices by Union Square, to just relax and have a few drinks—at least I did—and later I’d take the subway back uptown feeling as good as anyone could over a professional relationship.

I also had a pleasant experience with the in-house copy editors, the sort of ladies who walked around with pencils tucked behind their ears and seemed to swarm, paper in hand, along the hall of that publishing house, whose walls were lined with books and shelving like library stacks, to check out their facts. I got along particularly well with a longtime employee, a Puerto Rican woman, Carmen, whose tender loving care in regards to that manuscript—and the capricious Spanish I employed—made a wonderful difference not just to my novel but to me. The fact that she so liked it made me feel good, as it represented its first success with a Latino reader. (And that left me happier than anything else: For once, with my writing as my own front man, as it were, I was being accepted.)

The final touches, at least at that stage, had to do with conceiving of a book jacket. A well-known cover designer, Fred Marcellino, had asked me, through Jonathan Galassi, if I had any ideas that might be of use to him. Since the novel’s title followed the style of a 1950s mambo record, I sent him about four record jackets from that time: He especially liked one of them, which featured a sultry-looking blond babe of the 1950s, whose image he lifted and put on the cover of my book. (The cover, incidentally, turned out great, though a few years later, the designer’s use of an actual image of a woman from one of those jackets, the model still being alive, would involve me in a lawsuit, in which I was held at fault.)

Along the way, other things seemed to be cooking. A friend from my Brooklyn days, an art scholar and entrepreneur, Jeffrey Hoffeld, had told me that the founder of a gallery in which he had once been a partner, Arne Glimcher, might be interested, as an aspiring movie producer, in taking a peek at The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love—even in its early uncorrected form. Since I had nothing to lose, I went along with the notion. A few months later, I met with Ms. Wasserman and we went over to Glimcher’s place on East Fifty-second, an opulently maintained art deco high-rise apartment building of 1930s vintage (so I would guess), across the street from where Greta Garbo supposedly lived. He occupied a duplex penthouse overlooking the East River, and the first thing that impressed the hell out of me as I walked in was the fact that his entryway floor was inlaid with an antique second-century Roman mosaic of a maritime theme; his walls were covered with paintings from his gallery, the Pace on West Fifty-seventh, all by famous artists—Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Chuck Close, and a portrait of him in broken pottery by one Julian Schnabel, among others; talk about money. I can remember trying to behave as if I were not already in over my head, though Glimcher, younger then by a decade than I am now, could not have been nicer, nor more accommodating, and seemingly humble.

I would imagine he, as a professional gallery owner, took an enormous pride in discovering new talent, and I suppose that same tendency had followed him into the movie business. I was apparently that new talent, and he did everything to charm and impress me. He spoke of spending a lot of time with “Sigourney” on the shoot for Gorillas in the Mist, of his many industry connections and his absolute determination to make my novel into a film—though it had yet to receive even a single review. With passion, he spoke about many of the novel’s themes—the close yet troubled relationship between the brothers really hitting him in a personal way—and of course, of how he, of a certain generation, had been raised on the mambo and the cha-cha-cha. And that song I had created on Nestor’s behalf, “Beautiful María of My Soul”—“Oh, you’ll see what I’ll end up doing with that. We’ll get a first-rate composer in, I promise you.”

He spoke of making my novel into a film with such confidence that, after a while, it started to feel like a foregone conclusion—such matters as an agreement for a movie option as a precursor to a contract, a necessary formality, would be forthcoming to my agent in no time at all.

That day, I got my first sense of why the man, as I’d learn, happened to be one of the most successful art dealers in the world: He was good at making you feel that his intentions were really your own. And he knew just which buttons to push. On our way out, while leaving it that I would meet him at some future point in his favorite restaurant, the Four Seasons, to talk over things further, he telephoned his chauffeur, a former cop named Bob, and gave him instructions to take us wherever we wanted to go in his limousine. I was startled. The only time I had ridden in a limousine before was for my pop’s burial out in Long Island. After dropping Ms. Wasserman off at her place on East Eighty-sixth, I found myself being shuttled uptown toward my old neighborhood like a pasha. I liked his driver—a real working-class man, of Sicilian roots, the sort with whom I always got along, a real salt-of-the-earth fellow. We talked, mainly about the Howard Beach area of Queens—my brother’s second wife had a lot of family out there, and that Italian connection opened Bob up as if he were an old-time chum and confidant. Eventually, he told me how much he thought Mr. Glimcher was worth—a stupendous amount. “And that’s not includin’ the value of his artwork, capiche?” I used to think that he was just confiding in me as one working-class guy to the other, but I can’t help wondering now if I was set up, those incredible numbers meant to further impress me.

I do know that riding in a limousine made me feel both well-off for the first time in my life and also somewhat embarrassed. Asked “Where to?” I had him stop at a picture frame shop on West Eighty-sixth, and then I went right next door into a comic shop to look around. My next destination in that fabulous limousine? Some exotic bar on the East Side or downtown in Soho? No: the Food Town supermarket on One hundredth Street and Broadway, where I bought some groceries. Afterward, when I came out with my bags (chicken, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes), I thanked Bob for his help and told him I didn’t mind walking for a bit. (It didn’t seem a healthy thing for me to be seen pulling up to my building on 106th Street in such a richlooking vehicle.) He just nodded, tipped his cap, and drove off, while I made my way those six or so blocks, my head spinning with a deepening wariness about the possible direction in which my life might be headed.

My teaching stint in Lake George came along at just the right time, during that nerve-racking prepublication stage when my manuscript was being turned into page proofs for a bound galley. My appointment as a resident writer, which was to last some six months, began in the autumn of 1988—think it was late October when I first arrived. There, in a meeting room in a former courthouse just off the lake, along Canada Street, I taught a weekly workshop in creative writing, free to the public. My students were a wonderful group of locals, consisting of both the well-heeled and well-educated country club folk—doctors, lawyers, and dentists among them—and struggling working-class mothers, along with a handful of normal middle-class people, with some quite interesting backwoods folks and retirees thrown in.

I lived in a mountainside house overlooking the Hudson River, about twenty miles north of town, with a couple who had kindly offered to put me up for practically nothing. The husband, an ex–Benedictine monk, taught art at a local college and made totemic sculptures that he sold throughout the Adirondack region, while his wife, who had tracked me down on behalf of the arts center in the first place, ran most of its public outreach programs. I won’t go much into my life there except to say that, as sojourns go, it was about as far removed from New York, or for that matter, Italy, as any place could be. I learned to drive a stick shift there, however, good for maneuvering a car over the mountains, and I made a lot of friends as well. It turned out that the art center’s director happened to be a singer with one of the best-known country rock groups in the region, the Stony Creek Band, with whom, in that latest incarnation, I began to perform as a sit-in guitar player, at local country clubs, barn-style dances, and in the kinds of Adirondack joints that would have found their New York City equivalents in the leave-your-guns-by-the-door discos in the South Bronx of 1982. That was yet another life, and brief as it had been, I loved being away from the buildup for the book, and that distance made dealing with such chores as correcting the manuscript a bit easier.

I also signed that option with Glimcher’s Pace Productions, having entrusted all the contractual business to my agent, who, as I would eventually learn, was also in over her head, having little practical knowledge of the movie business. But I much enjoyed the Lake George area while my stay lasted, and then, of course, as I’d received news that a bound galley of my book had been finally produced, and that there were things I’d have to do, I returned to New York.

Once home, I did my best to maintain a kind of cool among my old friends from the neighborhood. They tended to have a blasé attitude about my profession, as if anyone could do it, and when it came to the folks I’d meet while visiting my brother’s in-laws out in Howard Beach, where they’d hold backyard barbecues a few blocks from where John Gotti lived, I’d feel so out of touch with the writing world that, whenever someone asked me what I did, I hardly thought it worth mentioning, though I inevitably would. (“Oh, yeah, your brother told me you write stuff—like what, spy novels?”) Most people were nice, but among some of the strangers I’d meet, the writing profession seemed a bit on the scammy side, and more than once I’d hear something like, “So, okay—what do you do for real work?”

During that time, it seemed that I always had some duty to attend to in regards to the prepub biz of the book. Learning that Publishers Weekly felt strongly enough to request an interview with me, I found myself putting on another hat—as a self-believing writer who’d always had a vision for that novel, while, in reality, I’d hardly even figured out any way to talk about it. For that matter, as a publishing world “guinea pig” from the Latino community, I’d have to brace myself for any number of questions about the ethnicity of my writing and about the status of Latino writing in this country—but, so warned my agent and anyone else at the house I happened to talk to, I would have to be careful not to offend anyone by stating the obvious fact that, on the surface of things, no one, to that point, had seemed to give a shit for the intellectual and creative life of my/that community. Never claiming to be a spokesperson for anyone except myself and, so I thought, believing that my first novel Our House in the Last World had already presented my take on the issues pertaining to my Latino identity, I learned soon enough that, on just about every occasion, I had to explain myself all over again, even if jokingly so—“I know I don’t look or act particularly Cuban, but it’s just a disguise to find out what folks really think.” That alone was enough to make me dread the very notion of speaking to any journalists at all.

Still, I tried to look upon it as part of my job, though I couldn’t have begun to predict how much the baring of my soul (as in this book) over the years would become a part of my life.

That’s probably why I welcomed any opportunities to slip uptown, though returning to my neighborhood and spending time in the old apartment always provoked a melancholic detour into Memoryville—which, like religion, was good for creativity but bad for living. Or to put it differently, the same melancholy that bled through the Mambo Kings continued to pour through my veins. Though my agent told me that all kinds of good things were about to happen—“Just watch how your life will change!”—I’m not sure that it was anything I wanted to hear. Perhaps that’s why I went out of my way to keep my feet on the ground. Not once forgetting where I had come from, I allowed myself to become more deeply entangled with my family duties, and these mainly came down to looking after my mother (“As I once took care of you, now it’s your turn to take care of me,” she’d say). Every so often I’d take her to the hospital for her checkups (with which she had become obsessed) or to such and such an office for some document, or, as often was the case, out to visit with my brother in Staten Island (or the “Latin from Staten Island” as went the name of an old rumba of the 1930s).

As with earlier times, such trips required of me great patience, not only because my mother, as if trapped in a certain groove on a 78 RPM record that skipped, could not restrain herself from going over her life with my father, but because, in her mid-seventies and slowing up from the more typical maladies of advancing years (though her mind remained as sharp as ever), just getting her around—on foot to the subway, and then to the ferry boat—seemed interminable, a two-or-so-hour trek that felt like a day. Oddly, even back then, as I’d walk slowly across the flagstone promenade of Columbia, my mother holding on to me so tightly, the same feelings that dogged me as a sickly child—of wanting to break away and run off to some faraway place—came back to me, and I’d wish to God that I could have somehow managed to have stayed in Italy, or, at any rate, somewhere else. At the same time, I came up with the notion that my Cuban identity, however New Yorkized, required that I do the right thing and never, never turn my back on my family, no matter what other desires drove me. And why?

Even I didn’t have a clue, coño.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for the literary life, whatever that may have been, in the first place. From what I had observed of it, from my safe distance, it didn’t always treat people kindly. Over the past decade, Donald Barthelme’s reputation, for example, had seemed to sink and sink into a kind of near-oblivion. Where once his books were reviewed on the front page of the almighty New York Times Sunday Book Review and greeted as masterpieces, by 1989, his works had been relegated to a quarter page in the back of that publication. Where his experimental fictions had once been considered timely, relevant, brilliant, and cutting-edge, he had been most recently eclipsed by Raymond Carver, whose surgically precise but often maudlin prose had become the new standard of excellence. (And all the more so after the poor man, a reformed alcoholic who often wrote of those trials so transcendently, died of cancer in 1988.)

Surely this sea change affected Barthelme’s spirits. During my visits with him on Eleventh Street, just as I had returned from Rome and about a year and a half later, he had seemed, in terms of his own creativity, somewhat of a lost soul, a writer trapped by his self-imposed restrictions and obviously perplexed by his own disenchantment. Confessing to a writer’s block, he once told me that he would love to write an autobiographical novel but thought that he couldn’t, as it would be a betrayal of his aesthetic and of what people expected of him. (The closest he came to doing so was a lovely story called “Bishop.”) I didn’t quite understand his resistance to a bit of change, but what concerned me more was the horrific doubling-over cough he had developed by then. On those evenings, keeping up with him as a smoker seemed a stupidity—he had gotten to a point when his episodes became violent, his face turning such a deep red that the only way he could soothe his burning, nearly rupturing throat was to down, in one quick and continuous gulp, a full goblet of Scotch, and only then would that retching abate. Though he didn’t seem to flinch at my suggestion that he should write whatever the fuck he felt like writing, he blew up at me when I suggested that he see a doctor: “Mind your own business,” he snapped, lighting up another cigarette. “I know what I’m doing,” he told me. “Trust me.”

Then, feeling better, he poured me another Scotch and said: “Okay, one more, then you have to go.”

We did speak a few more times and remained on a friendly basis, and when I finally received a galley of the Mambo Kings I almost sent it to him. Despite all the work I’d already put into it, there were a few paragraphs in the novel, as well as some passages, that I just had to rewrite, and because I wanted to impress him, I decided to wait until I’d had a chance to put in my changes and planned to give him the finished version instead. In the meantime, Donald, through his friend and colleague at the University of Houston Ed Hirsch, a poet who had won the Rome Prize in Literature that year, 1989, traveled to Italy and took up a three-month residency at the American Academy, among the happiest and most carefree of Signor Barthelme’s professional life, he and the Eternal City having gotten quite well along. The only caveat is that when Donald finally returned to Houston, with worsening symptoms, he was found to be suffering from throat cancer, by then at an advanced stage. Shortly, the following happened: On a midsummer day in July, while in the hospital, with his wife Marion by his side, and, as I’ve been told, somewhat sedated on morphine, he was sitting up in his bed when, at a certain moment, he slipped into a coma from which he, lingering for two weeks, never awakened.

The craziest thing? When I first heard about it, I kicked myself for having held my novel back from him (as if my changes would have made much difference in his opinion), but beyond that, I kept thinking that he had been one the few people who had ever looked out for me, and that he was about my pop’s age at his passing.

(In fact, Donald passed away on July 23, my father July 26, twenty years before.)

And yet, come one Sunday—I do not recall the date; I think it was midmonth—my novel made it to the cover of the book review (the literary equivalent, in those days at least, of a musician getting on the cover of Rolling Stone). The female critic could not have been kinder, despite the book’s high content of macho shenanigans, lauding the work as a great literary immigrant novel, the review accompanied by a dandy pen-and-ink illustration depicting a swirl of Cuban musicians shaking maracas and playing drums in a lively jam. I could not have missed it. For even if I wanted to avoid the subject—and a part of me wanted to—I would have heard about it anyway, for my agent, publicist, and editor, among others, called me as soon as they received the news. That was quickly followed (or preceded, as the Times book review could be had a week in advance) by a Friday review in the daily Times by the star-making/career-withering Michiko Kakutani, who gave me a high-toned rave, though, once again, for my wonderful immigrant novel. I was so naïve as to write both reviewers thankyou notes—as I would have done at the ad agency, where if someone looked out for you, some gesture of appreciation followed. I never heard back from either one of them.

Wonderful reviews in just about every newspaper in the country soon followed—literally over a hundred of them (for it was before the Internet killed the newspapers) within a two-week span. (The fifteen or so reviews I received for Our House, by comparison, were a drop in the bucket, and that book remained so little known that for years after, people assumed that The Mambo Kings was my first novel.) As much as I’d swear those reviews made no difference to me, I still put each carefully away in a box and occasionally took one or the other out to read over again, especially if it had spoken of my book in outsize terms. (Some implied that it was a modern American classic, certainly a breakthrough in terms of Latino literature in this country, and sometimes they actually admired the writing!) To further stroke my ego, Vanity Fair did a piece about me (and a review), accompanied by a photograph in which I happened to look somewhat smug and dapper, a cigarette burning in my hand. (The shoot, complete with a willowy and beautiful photographer, took place on the green behind the article writer’s brownstone on Sullivan Street: half-Cuban, Wendy Gimbel was one of the great early supporters of that book and of my later work.) And since a British edition would be coming out that following spring, I interviewed with a number of their magazines, even posed for a photographer from British Vogue. That same week I went down to a Soho studio and did an international radio broadcast alongside the Panamanian singer Ruben Blades, who, of Dutch ancestry, had a Cuban mother. That, along with the Beatles—the group that had inspired him to first become a musician—was our point of connection, though he had done a double take when my mind went blank after he’d told me that su mamá had come from La Regla, across the bay from Havana, even if I’d mentioned it in The Mambo Kings.

Then a New York Times article on me came out in the daily arts section. A certain Peter Watrous had come by to talk with me about the musical elements in the book, but what I had been mainly interested in was the fact that he played some guitar. Though it was not mentioned in the piece that resulted, he ended up staying in my apartment until a late hour, and we jammed.

As I had been booked on several big-time television programs, the Today show and Good Morning America among them, I had been urged to get contact lenses, but I simply couldn’t. I was so used to seeing myself in a certain way that the thick drowning-in-water lenses I’d always lived with had become, in effect, my eyes. (Or as I have often since thought, a buffer between myself and the world.) Instead I compromised and spent a small fortune on a pair of thin, specially treated antireflection lenses, cased inside a fancy French frame. (They cost about two and a half weeks of my pop’s old salary—that’s how far gone I had become.) Nevertheless, as one who had ducked out of any speech class, appalled at the notion of seeing myself captured on a video camera at Brandeis High School, the prospect of going on live national television somewhat terrified me.

Once I got down to the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center, however, a kind of nostalgia for homey old-time TV hit me, and, thinking of Ralph Kramden and Desi Arnaz (and how my pop had liked them), I almost calmed down, though never completely. I’d never worn so much makeup in my life, and it surprised me to see how my black interviewer, Bryant Gumbel, a true gent, appeared absolutely gray under the normal light. (Seeing him in that makeup, I could only think of funeral parlor cadavers.)

In any event, though I would not say that my first appearance was a disaster, I did distinguish myself by rolling my eyes around like BBs whenever Mr. Gumble asked a question that either discomfited me or seemed stupid. (“Why Cubans?” . . . “Why Desi Arnaz?”) I also went through that broadcast with the feeling that my head was too big (“mi cabezon,” my mother sometimes called me) and, as I always have, felt a little jarred by the way some of the staff regarded me as I walked in, with an interior double take upon finding out that the balding, fair-skinned blond guy was the “Cuban-American” writer scheduled for the show. Sitting under the tremendously bright are lamps, I couldn’t help but check myself out in a monitor to my side. Accustomed to never really seeing my own eyes, I had no notion of just how well they would read through my new lenses—or how much I seemed a nervous beady-eyed jerk—but at least I could console myself with the fact that I had pupils that came across quite intensely on camera.

I went on a fifteen-or-so-city tour after that, reading at bookstores overflowing with people. The best of it was that I met some really nice Latinos and, among them (us) in every city, some Cubans, a long long way from home, Americanized exiles, professionals mainly, who, despite whatever bones they may have had to pick with that book—too much sex, or not anti-Castro enough, or too obsessed with the character’s pingas—appreciated my absolute love for Cuba. Though I met my share of dainty older Cuban women who thought parts of the book a little saucier than their conservative Catholic dispositions allowed them to enjoy, they too flooded me with something that I could never get enough of: affection—nothing too gushing but just enough to leave me with a tender feeling. And my American readers, if I may use the term? They were kind to me as well, no matter where I went traveling in the country. I found myself visiting many a fancy household, usually gatherings scheduled around my time off, in fairly opulent settings, local high society taking pride in hosting me as their guest. Occasionally, a musician, relating to my book for its insights about the profession, would turn up to make a gift of one of their recordings to me, or a beginner, wanting to break into the music scene, would ask my advice.

But I’d also encounter the sort of person who seemed disappointed when they met me. “I thought you would be swarthier, and more . . . Ricky Ricardo,” someone actually told me. Or else they wanted to hear something different from a New York accent, or to see something in my body language and manner that was more distinctly Cuban. (Perhaps they wanted me to come out dancing the mambo or smoking a cigar in a white panama hat.) Sometimes I’d get hit up by a Latin American scholar, who, addressing me in ethnographic terms from the audience, wanted to turn my reading into a symposium about his knowledge of Cuba. Sometimes, a lefty, usually a super-liberal who had traveled to Cuba as a political tourist, or had gone there as a college student to chop sugarcane, would denounce my novel for failing to sing the revolution’s praises. I did my best to be polite, but it often pissed me off: I’d thank God that I could slip out the back and have a smoke. All along, of course, what else could I be but myself?

And yet that was not enough for some folks who almost seemed angry that the face and personality behind the conception wasn’t what they wanted it to be. I knew them by the way they’d stare at me during my readings, or when they didn’t laugh at my jokes, and ultimately, more often than not, I could tell just which ones were bound to get up and leave in the middle of my reading.

Sometimes, at midnight, in a hotel room in Portland or Minneapolis or St. Louis—could be anywhere—I’d lie down on the bed, feeling fairly exhausted, and man, the first thing I’d wish I could be doing (besides smoking a cigarette) didn’t necessarily have anything to do with women (even though at every venue, there seemed to be someone interested in getting to know me) nor with the prospect of making some money (which was what my agent always talked about) but with the small ways I had of making myself happy—as when I’d sit down with a really good guitarist, like my old pal Nick or the best jazz player I knew, a fellow named John Tucker, whom I met years before on the steps of Columbia University’s Low Library, to jam for a few hours, leisurely and without a worry in the world, a glass of wine or two by our side, a cigarette burning in an ashtray—just like it happened sometimes in my novel, to my characters Cesar and Nestor Castillo.

That same autumn, once I’d come back from the tour, I started teaching creative writing at Hofstra University in Long Island at night, a job I had gotten through a writer friend, Julia Marcus, before the book came out, as a hedge against going broke. It required an hour-and-a-half commute each way (subway, train, bus), a real pain, but at least it got my mind off the hoopla and that constant feeling that something both wonderful and awful was happening to me. Though I had enjoyed meeting the majority of my readers, it didn’t take much of a curious expression, on the part of both Latinos and non-Latinos, to make me feel that, once again, I had become the receptacle into which people’s prejudices poured: Altogether it made me feel like some kind of lab specimen. Aside from escaping that scrutiny, however, I discovered that I simply enjoyed being around those Hofstra kids, most coming from what I would call a nouveau middle-class background—and, who, in most cases, seemed to be the first in their second- or third-generation post-immigrant families to make it to college. One of my classes started at eight, the other let out around six, as I recall. Coming home one evening, I found the very patient and affable writer Richard Price waiting outside my apartment on a stairwell. He had called me up out of the blue, having found my number in the telephone book, but I was so distracted in those days that the time of our meeting had completely slipped my mind. No matter—we ended up having a bite to eat, whereupon he asked me if I would ever be interested in writing scripts for Paramount, with whom he had some kind of arrangement as a scout: I was dense and provincial-minded enough to politely decline, though we remained friends thereafter.

In general, that whole period threw me. I met all kinds of people. George Plimpton invited me over to one of his famous Paris Review parties, where I found myself rubbing shoulders with Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gay Talese, among other authors of note. That same night, I had dinner with the writer Peter Maas and Mr. Plimpton—George, as he asked me to call him, offering to conduct an interview with me for his literary journal. Though I told him I would have to think it over, I had already made up my mind to avoid it, my own stupid modesty (infernal can’t really succeed too much reticence) getting in the way. But I also believed that it was something that should come later in one’s career: After all, what had I written at that point but only two books? (Later, he would publish an interview with me in Newsweek magazine entitled “The Reluctant Mambo King.”)

Around that time a well-known Latin musician, of the old New York school, invited me over to his place on the West Side, where he did his best to get me high on coke—think he saw it as a perverse test of character. I declined that as well. Later, though I had long before interviewed the great Afro-Cuban composer Chico O’Farrill for my novel, I became a regular at his parties, where my local success was greeted warmly by some, skeptically by others. (I met musicians like Johnny Pacheco, Paquito D’Rivera, Mario Bauzá, Graciela, and of all people, Desi Arnaz’s pianist and arranger, Marco Rizo, a truly sweet man.) Of those, Mario was my closest neighbor, literally living around the corner from me on 105th and Amsterdam: I’d go jogging in the mornings and find him sitting around on some milk crates with friends in front of a corner bodega Havana-style—he’d laugh at the sight of me, Mr. Slightly Chubby Four-Eyes, jogging by, his head shaking like Ray Charles’s, the man rapping his knees. Inviting me up to his apartment a few times, he wanted me to write a book about his life story—I proposed that we do it with a tape recorder, and it made him really happy, but it became one of those things that I kept putting off and off, as my career got busier, until Mario, coming down with a cancer that racked his entire body, died a few years later.

While teaching my classes at Hofstra, I attended numerous literary fetes where I first befriended Paul Auster and Francine Prose, and many other writers as well—I won’t bore you with such a list—but, after a while, as much as I enjoyed such an opportunity, I became somewhat befuddled by the fact that for as many events and literary gatherings as I attended, I rarely encountered another homegrown Latino author. A strange tale, however, about another “me.” I had gone to a party and, introducing myself to several people, received a frosty reception. A slightly tipsy young woman told me, “You can’t be him. I met him last night. He is dark haired and swarthy and nothing like you.” Apparently, I soon learned, there was someone going around town impersonating me: Later, when someone from FSG turned up and explained that I was indeed Oscar Hijuelos, several of those folks came up to me to apologize; a few days later, I even received a note from the same woman, profusely begging my pardon. I wrote her back a one-word reply: “Uh-huh.” And while I much appreciated my access to that world, and being that rare creature, a Latino writer suddenly in the spotlight, I felt put off by the fact that I seemed, for the most part, to be “it,” as if I had become a temporary member of an exclusive club that, unless you had connections, was nearly impossible to get into.

On another evening, a few weeks later, after the winner had been announced at an elaborate banquet we all headed uptown to the famous Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta’s apartment on Park Avenue, for a late-night party, and the main thing I can remember about that evening was my sense of relief at being away from all the photographers and reporters; at last it all seemed to be at an end. As a side note, however, I have to mention my mother’s reaction. News of my nomination naturally made it into the Spanish-language newspapers like El Nuevo Herald in Miami and, of course, El Diario here in New York, a Latino writer, the son of immigrants, rising to such heights, a first. She’d call me now and then to ask whether I’d heard any news about winning it. Explaining that it didn’t work that way, I’d hear a sigh on the other end. Nevertheless, it gave her bragging rights with her friends up and down Broadway and Amsterdam for the month or so while the selection process lasted, until all the excitement seemed to have ended as quickly as it had come. I took her out to dinner one evening with my brother, not long after the winner had been announced, and she was especially solemn, even moody.

Finally, I asked, “Pero, qué te pasa, mamá? What’s going on?”

“Ese premio, what happened with it?”

“What, the National Book Award?” I shrugged. “Let me tell you, with all the odds against me, it was a miracle that I was even one of the nominees. But it was still an honor.”

“Ah, sí , un honor,” she conceded. And then, thinking about something intensely, she turned to me, her expression one of severity and disappointment, and for a moment I could see balled up in her eyes everything that my pop had to contend with sometimes. Looking away, through the restaurant window, she said: “Yes, you were one of them,” and she shook her head, adding, “Pero no ganaste. But you didn’t win,” a failing on my part that I believe she took as a personal slight.

More wonderfully, however, while I was riding the number 11 bus uptown on my way to see my mother one evening, I ran into my family’s old friend Teddy Morgenbesser. I’d always wondered if he would be the sort to have read The Mambo Kings. If so, he might have recognized a bit of himself in the depiction of my character Bernardito Mandelbaum, a Jewish guy gone platanos—or Cubanized—through his chumming around with one Cesar Castillo. If he had, it worried me that Teddy might have felt offended or lampooned. So what happened? I had been sitting in the back when he, getting off, saw me. Smiling, he summed up his feelings with a wink and a single sentence: “Oscar—I just loved that book. It was beautiful.”

During that time, I had the strongest feeling of having pushed far off from the shore of who I had once been, though not a day passed when I did not have my share of memories and therefore my lingering depressions, no matter how wonderfully things were going for me professionally. I remember watching a version of A Christmas Carol that winter and feeling as if I were the ghost of myself destined to go through life dragging behind me my own apparently unshakeable memories, my life told in so many parts—illness, sheltered messed-up childhood, death of father, subsequent struggles with identity and just surviving, my sometime existence as a writer, etc. Until then, however, I really didn’t think anyone could give a damn about me anyway—as a cubano, as a New Yorker, as a pensive, occasionally funny, melancholic man nearly forty years old tasting for the first time in his life a bit of success—though a loneliness-making one. As I pushed off from that shore, followed about by an image of myself as a sick child, or by my pop’s very real and plaintive ghost, I hardly got through a week without being interviewed or photographed by someone—more and more often by foreign journalists, as The Mambo Kings sold all over Europe and the rest of the world (about thirty-six different foreign editions have been published to this day, discounting Britain and reissues).

Along the way, the attention I received led to some unexpected things. For one, the Cuban government’s minister of culture, Abel Prieto, sent me a letter through PEN inviting me to visit Cuba. (Unfortunately, and something I now regret, it was simply unthinkable to me at the time. Visiting Havana, years later, I learned from my cousins that this minister often mentioned my book on Cuban radio.) At Hofstra, among my newly won frills, my schedule for the following semester became one of my own choosing—and I got to share an office with a professor who was never around, a jealousy-making triumph in a department where twenty-year veterans were sometimes crowded, as I recall, three and four to a room. Mr. Mascetti, who had gone to California, possibly to hide out from some people to whom he owed money, or to begin a new life (I really don’t know), called me from Santa Monica after seeing some piece about me in the L.A. Times. With girls laughing wildly and music blaring happily in the background, he told me: “I’m so happy to heah that you’re doing so fuckin’ great, man!” My face eventually appeared in a very strange painting made for a calendar of “Famous Hispanics” sponsored by Budweiser beer: In it I, looking decades older, somewhat resemble, I am afraid to say, the former vice president Dick Cheney. I’d get invited to speak before public high school audiences as an example of a Latino who had come up without any advantages like them and made it, but the fact that I looked so white (or just like the enemy, in some of their eyes) confused the hell out of a lot of kids—I just didn’t seem like them or their parents, and no amount of splainin’, Lucy, about regressive familial genes or childhood illnesses or the kind of mixed neighborhood I had been raised in could make a difference. I would always accept such invitations, but I came to dread the actual moment when I would have to step onto an assembly stage at some rowdy school and hear, first thing, a rising murmur from the audience. If my schedule hadn’t become so busy, I might have happily turned into a recluse. I recall that I felt so stressed-out about my public image that by the New Year of 1990, I had gotten back up to smoking two packs of Kools a day.

Later, I went to Belfast in the north to appear on the Late Show (Channel Four), broadcast live at eleven P.M. As it was the time of the troubles, as they say, it was the only program I have ever appeared on where I had to go through a metal detector and submit to a pattingdown to get into the studio. There were also German shepherds being led through the place, sniffing around for bombs. The audience, of local townspeople, had to go through the same procedures: Once inside they could enjoy a large well-stocked horseshoe bar and were encouraged to drink to their hearts’ content, as were the guests. I’d later learn that one of the in-jokes between our congenial Irish host, a fellow with a name like Mulligan, and the audience was that, sooner or later, he’d put on an act or do an interview with someone so far gone as to be completely amusing. In my instance, we had absolutely no discussion whatsoever of what he might ask me, though he did say it would be something really easy. In the meantime, I drank vodka and tonics and smoked—just about everyone in the audience did too—and no sooner would I put an empty glass down than would some assistant rush over with another from the bar. They actually had someone keeping their eyes on me just for that purpose.

When I finally went on camera, after a completely inebriated Irish punk band had performed, I was having trouble feeling my gums. Suddenly, my host sat down beside me, a beam of light blazed over our table, a camera rolled in, and smiling affably, with a deep brogue, he said: “Well, here I am sitting with my friend from America, Oscar Heeejewlloss, and he has written a new book and a very interesting one at that.”

After a few congenial remarks he turned to me and said: “Now, may I ask you a simple question?”

“Sure.”

“Would you explain to the people of Ireland how Cuban music relates to them, okay?”

I recall making some blithering idiot explanations of the northern Spanish and southern Irish being related, some business about how the bagpipe scales performed on a gaeta in Spain influenced the notion of a Cuban jam—“What is sometimes called ‘una quemada’ ”—and otherwise dancing around the question with a logic that might have made some sense if everyone else were drunk, that Cubans and the Irish, having Spanish blood in common, were really distant cousins just like Ricky and Lucy. I can’t imagine what they made of seeing someone—who looked far more Irish than Cuban—explaining such things, but I suppose that even if I were Desi Arnaz himself, it would have been a difficult task anyway. In any event, how I answered didn’t matter—I’d gotten a picture of the book jacket shown all over Northern Ireland and though I was fairly hammered during that live broadcast, my publishers in London told me that of all my appearances thus far it had been my more “relaxed.”

About ten minutes later, when the telephone rang again, I could hear the unmistakably raspy and lively voice of my publisher himself, Roger Straus Jr.

“My boy,” he said. “You’ve done it!”

“Done what?”

“Why, you’ve been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—that’s what!”

“Say that again?” I recall asking him.

He did, and went on jovially: “I can’t begin to tell you how proudly I—all of us—feel over your accomplishment. Well, well done, young man!”

What does one feel in such moments? A kind of disbelief, and in my case, a hokey sentimentality, over its significance. The first thing I thought, even as I lit a cigarette, was, of course, that a kind of miracle had taken place, that God (or whatever rules the world) had, for a change, decidedly looked out for me; that I had passed through a glorious door into a future that neither I nor my mother or father could have imagined when I was growing up; and yes, I felt a tremendous gratitude to whomever had been out there to make such a decision—for I had never really thought I would ever win anything (even the National Book Award nomination seemed a lark).

“Thank you, sir,” I told him.

After some further niceties, Mr. Straus, explaining that there would be a great number of people waiting to speak to me, said good-bye. As he predicted, one reporter after the other, scheduled through my agent, called me from all over the country. Though I had a few breathers, I spent most of that afternoon and the next day talking about that which I had already been sick and tired of talking about—what else?—The Mambo Kings and myself, my destiny for the coming months, the coming years. In every conversation, these questions: Given my humble roots, how did I, as the son of Cuban immigrants, feel to be awarded a Pulitzer? And: Now that I had somehow scaled the Olympian heights of literature, how did I feel about becoming the first Hispanic to Win a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction?

The latter made me feel both proud and, at the same time, oddly singled out for the wrong reasons. Remember that back in 1990, my award had come on the heels of a period in America when the virtues of affirmative action were being debated: I couldn’t help but feel, as I know others did, as if my prize had something to do with the afterglow of that benevolence. Later, I’d encounter a lot of folks who would all but voice the opinion that it was time for some Hispanic to finally win a prize like that, as if I happened to be the lucky one.

Indeed I was fortunate to have been in the right place, with the right house, at the right time, with the right book, and though Mambo Kings, under whatever circumstances, remains a unique creation, it could have easily slipped through the cracks. Just look at the record: Aside from myself and, nearly twenty years later, Junot Díaz, no other Latino has been given a Pulitzer in fiction. As for the National Book Award? Despite its fifty-plus-year history, a Latino novel has yet to win a single one. (And, if I may, more sadly, remark: Though an array of wonderful books by gifted authors like Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Rosario Ferre, Virgil Suarez, Elena Castedo, and Patricia Engle, among others, has since been published, with a fair amount of attention paid to them, the balance in more recent years has tipped back to where it had once been, wherein the works of Latino authors are, so I have recently heard, considered old hat and of a category hardly deserving critical attention, as if Latino writing, once again, has fallen to the wayside in terms of critical appreciation as a form of authentically American literature.

In the weeks to follow, relatives I never even knew about suddenly came out of the woodwork, though, oddly enough, I never heard a word from my aunts Maya and Borja in Florida. (But at least I came into contact with my cousin Dalgis, my tio Oscar’s daughter, whom I would later meet in California.) Mas Canosa’s Cuban-American Freedom Foundation in Miami offered me a large sum of money to write an anti-Castro pamphlet on their behalf. (I refused, though not particularly for ideological reasons: I just didn’t want to be selling myself to anyone, on the left or right.) I met people like Sting and Lou Reed and David Byrne, and many Latin musicians and personalities like Tito Puente and Celia Cruz and Graciela from the epoch I had written about. (My greatest honor? Playing the chords to “Guantanamera” on the piano, while backing up Graciela as she sang at a party.) For at least a few years, I became one of the darlings of New York high society—at one dinner, I sat between Barbara Walters and Bill Blass, at another with Lauren Hutton. At Bill Clinton’s first formal dinner at the White House, shortly after he had come into office, I spent the night hanging out with the playwright August Wilson, an unrepentant chain-smoker, who remained my good friend until his recent death. A few years later, at a second White House dinner, a state affair in honor of the Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, I had the incredible thrill of meeting Gabriel García Márquez, who, finding out that I was the author of Mambo Kings, told me, “That’s a book I wish I had written.” (God bless you, maestro.) Around that time, I received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, City College, a Literary Lion medal from the New York Public Library, and other awards that, quite frankly, I can’t now recall, or that don’t seem to have really mattered to the world in the long run, but that made me feel somewhat proud back when, as if I had done something good for my community—los latinos—by opening some doors, at least in terms of publishing, for suddenly, New York houses were actively seeking out such authors, a feeling that would most strongly come to me when I would meet a young aspiring Latino writer who, looking to me as, yes, a role model, wanted to one day duplicate my success, though I would hope without having to smoke all those cigarettes.

But to go back to the day when I first received the news, it wasn’t until the later afternoon, with the gloom of that day finally lifting, that did I experience, while traipsing out into the emerging sunlight, a moment of true elation. I was in the front yard, relieved to be off the telephone, when I sensed in the shifting of light across the lawn my pop’s presence. I will swear that as the light swelled, blinking, around me, he was there, standing just behind me and, I like to think, smiling, his spirit aglow with pride over my sudden accomplishment—not just because I would have my name and picture in the newspapers (though I would be proud of the fact that millions of people would see the rare surname Hijuelos in print) or because Tom Brokaw would nearly mispronounce my apellido over the air that next evening, but perhaps because I had taken so many disparate energies and hard emotions from our lives and turned them into something that so many people, across these United States and, as well, the world (I wonder what my pop would have made of seeing a Spanish-language edition of my book published in Madrid, in the windows of shops near the Prado, or in Japanese, sold off a Tokyo kiosk), might well enjoy and appreciate. I remember feeling that although he had not lived long enough for me to really know him, my novel, The Mambo Kings, was my way of doing just that, of holding a conversation with him, though he had long since been dead. His spirit, for better and for worse, in its kindness and gentleness, in its melancholy and, alternately, exuberance, his love of life, fear of death, his passions and vices—down to the thousands of drinks he had consumed and cigarettes he smoked—were all there, transformed, in that book. Or to put it differently, he was alive again, if only as a momentary illusion—and that, ladies and gents, felt absolutely superb.