A Prelude of Sorts
Seems just like yesterday (an
illusion) that I was sitting out front on my stoop on 118th Street,
on an autumn day, in 1963 or so, feeling rather indignantly
disposed and pissed off because my best friend from across the way,
with a somewhat smug look in his eyes, kept blowing smoke into my
face. He was thirteen, a year older than me, and had already been
going through at least a carton of Winstons a week for as long as I
could remember—cigarettes that his mother, the venerable Mrs.
Muller-Thym, coming back from the A&P, gave, fair-mindedly, to
each of her sons on Fridays. (Think he must have started smoking at
the age of seven or eight.) We usually got along like pals, running
through the backyards and basements together, or else hanging out
in the book-laden clutter of his room, playing cards and chess or
listening to jazz recordings by Art Blakey and Ahmed Jamal, while
occasionally sneaking rum and whiskey from his father’s stash of
high-class booze down the hall, which we’d mix into glasses of
Coca-Cola, without ice, and drink until the world went spinning and
everything became beautiful in an exciting way. The guy was
definitely head and shoulders smarter than just about anyone else
in that neighborhood, including me, and generous to boot, for he
was always giving away his cigarettes and candy and loose change on
the street. But on that particular afternoon, he had gotten some
kind of hair up his ass. With a smirk on his face, and walking
right up to me, he had blown, slowly and with great self-satisfied
deliberation, rings of that smoke at my mug. I don’t know why he
did this—perhaps because he, like so many of the other kids on that
street, sometimes thought me passively disposed on account of the
fact that my mother, never forgetting my childhood illness, had
always kept a tight leash on me. Or because he just felt naughtily
inclined or wanted to express some notion of superiority that day.
But whatever he may have been thinking in those moments, I
discovered that I had a fairly short fuse. So when I told him,
“Come on, man, don’t do that!” in the manner that kids in those
days talked, and maybe, “But hey, I’m not messing with ya,” and he
kept blowing that smoke at me anyway, I yanked the cigarette out of
his hand and put it out on his head.
Thankfully, its burning tip met with the thick
matting of his slickened dark hair, but I can still remember the
crisp sound it made, like air being quickly released from a bicycle
tire, and, of course, that strangely repellent smell of singed
organic matter, which foreshadowed, to my young Catholic mind, the
possible punishments of hell. Perhaps I ended up chasing him around
the block, but he was always too fast for me, or perhaps, I can’t
exactly remember, he ran down into a basement or the park, hiding
out somewhere in the bushes along one of the terraced walkways that
descended from Morningside Drive into East Harlem, on tracks of
cracked, glass-strewn pavement. If so, he might have waited until
sometime near dark, while I, out of sorts and craving a cigarette
of my own, went home to yet another one of those evenings in our
Cuban household that tended to leave me feeling restless and
confused.