It also happened that my father had been among a group of people gathered around Fidel in 1961 as he, having visited Columbia University fresh from addressing the UN, stood about on its campus, posing for photographs, shaking hands and holding forth with his quite adequate English — back in the early 1950s, he’d lived on West 84th Street or thereabouts for a few months — in one of his last public appearances in New York. What my father must have thought looking Fidel over or if he said something to him, I don’t know, but however much he would come to resent the revolution, some part of him must have been impressed by the worldwide attention that Castro, from the countryside of Oriente like himself, had attracted.
CHAPTER 3. Some Moments of Freedom
Now, if you had met me during my adolescence, when I’d finally started hanging around with the other kids, you probably wouldn’t have noticed any anguish in my face, and if anything, you might have judged me a pensive and bespectacled young man, prone to a somewhat nervous joviality. Still, I was an unsettled soul. Scared of heights, I’d go up to our rooftop, some six stories above, and hang over the edge, always clutching my glasses, to get over that fear. (It never took.) And because of the nature of our street, where kids were pissed off at other kids and often fighting, I had no choice but to finally step free from my mother’s constraints, for she never wanted me to wander far from the pavement in front of our building, and defend myself. As a kid living down the fact that for years I went out onto the street, it seemed, only with my mother, it was inevitable that certain collisions took place.
I had my first fistfight in those days, or to put it differently, I went crazy lunging after a pair of brothers who for the longest time had been picking on me as I’d sit on my stoop minding my own business. Knowing me as that round face framed in the window, that kid they most often saw with his mother, who seemed so timid and quiet (if not shell-shocked), these two brothers couldn’t help but torment me—“faggot” and “pussy” at first, and once I got glasses, a “four-eyed faggot/pussy” among the names they called me. Spitting at me or tossing dried turds (los microbios!) my way was the least of it, but what finally tipped the balance was a remark that the meaner of them, Bobby, said to me one afternoon: “Your mother’s a cocksucker,” a statement I tucked into my pocket without knowing just what that meant.
Later that same evening, while sitting by our kitchen table with my parents and brother, when I happened to repeat it to him, innocently enough, as if I were reporting on the weather—“Did you know that Ma’s a cocksucker?”—my brother, without as much as thinking about it, picked up a butter knife and jammed it into my right arm beneath the shoulder (I still have the scar to this day).
“Don’t you ever fucking say that again,” he told me, his face burning red.
Of course, my mother started screaming at him — slapping him in the face and chasing him down the hall. But once a few days had passed and my gash had started to heal, José had a little talk with me: “Next time one of them as much as looks at you the wrong way, I want you to kick their asses,” he bluntly stated.
I suppose he wanted me to do this as a matter of family honor, and because he didn’t like the notion of anyone taking me for a chump. By then, he’d already started toughening me up; when my mother happened to be out, we’d go into the living room and take turns punching each other as hard as we could in the arm, until I could barely lift my own, and if he had confidence in me, when it came to going after those guys, it was because I never once cried or gave up — enduring as much as he could give. I never considered that kind of thing as mean-spirited: I supposed it was what older brothers did and never held that against him, though as I think about it now, he probably had reasons to resent me. For while my parents, to some extent, cut me a lot of slack when it came to my avoiding household duties — I had been sick after all, or perhaps I was still sick to them — and my mother, in those days at least, only slapped my face or used a belt on me when absolutely necessary, as when I’d try to venture far from the stoop and refused to answer her summons, my brother had an entirely different relationship with them, particularly with my father.
He hadn’t gotten along with him for a long time by then. Too much had gone on between him and my father that went far back to the way he had treated my mother in their early years in New York, and that led to their differences. Or as my mother would put it, my father, so gentle with me, would beat the hell out of him for no good reason.
But sometimes he did get out of line: One night — José must have been about sixteen — when he came home after hanging out with some friends uptown and staggered in, drunk, my mother, seeing his state — and doubtlessly thinking about my father — grabbed him by the hair and pushed him down onto our scruffy living room sofa and started beating him with a broom, and not just whacking him here and there but in his groin, sus huevos (she would always tell me that one should go for the balls if assaulted), my brother doubling over, his arms held up over his head, trying to fend her off. She did this while screaming at him at the top of her lungs and promising, as I watched from the living room doorway, that he had yet another punishment to come, for once my father, out somewhere too — and also probably getting a little torn up — walked in, she’d insist, as a kind of emphasis, that my pop also go after him with his own trusty belt.
But he also caught a lot of flak because of me: Years back, fresh out of the hospital, I’d smashed up a set of his prized Lionel trains that he’d paid for himself from his stationery store earnings, just because I could. Instead of punishing me, her poor pobrecito son who really didn’t know better, my mother took out his justifiable despair on him. (Another beating.) Then too, there had been a night when he limped in badly messed up after a bicycle accident, his leg yellow with a suppurating wound: I can remember standing near him and watching the pus oozing out as he dabbed it with a towel, and the mere fact that he was in such a state, carrying into the apartment the kind of microbios that could hurt me, my mother grew hysterical at the danger his injury posed to my health, screaming at him to keep his distance, as if he had done something wrong.
Altogether, he didn’t get any breaks at all. One morning after High Mass, when he’d sung a repertoire that consisted of Bach and Michael Praetorius and Monteverdi, thanks to the urbane taste of Mr. MacDonald, I’d gone downstairs to the choir room to meet him, so that we could walk home together. We left by a side door along a narrow passageway, where garbage bins were set out; as we were heading toward the stairway, a kitten started mewing from inside one of them, and my brother, rifling through it, pulled out a darling little creature that he fell in love with, happily cradling the gentle thing in his arms. Back in our apartment, he fashioned a cradle for it out of a box, and for a few hours, we had an adorable pet — that is, until my mother walked in from wherever she had been. Without a moment’s hestitation she declared it “sucio”—“filthy”—with germs and fleas. Complaining that all she needed was one more thing to worry about, she told my brother to return it from whence it had come; I don’t know what became of that little kitten, but I’ve always recalled the way my brother, a tough guy, almost came to tears over that matter.
Still, he had a hard side — how couldn’t he? José, or “Joe,” depending on whom he was talking to, got around and with whomever he pleased, doing everything that I couldn’t: roller-skating, bicycling, staying out till all hours, and, slick in his way, generally navigating away, with a few exceptions, from ethnic hassles. He did, however, come home one night badly beaten up: While riding a train out to the deepest reaches of Brooklyn with some Puerto Rican friends, he was on hand as a gang of white guys, some twenty or so, swarmed into the car, announcing they were going to kick some spic ass. José, off in the rear of the car, had been left alone, his appearance sparing him, but having his pride and a temper and a half, he had stood up and cried out, “I’m a spic too!” Which is to say that those thugs, brandishing baseball bats and chains, turned on him too: It was the kind of story that established his reputation as a noble tough guy in the neighborhood and made him seem heroic to me.