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Oscar Hijuelos - Thoughts Without Cigarettes

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Oscar Hijuelos Thoughts Without Cigarettes
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Thoughts Without Cigarettes: summary, description and annotation

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The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist turns his pen to the real people and places that have influenced his life and, in turn, his literature. Growing up in 1950s working-class New York City to Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos journey to literary acclaim is the evolution of an unlikely writer. Oscar Hijuelos has enchanted readers with vibrant characters who hunger for success, love, and self-acceptance. In his first work of nonfiction, Hijuelos writes from the heart about the people and places that inspired his international bestselling novels. Born in Manhattans Morningside Heights to Cuban immigrants in 1951, Hijuelos introduces readers to the colorful circumstances of his upbringing. The son of a Cuban hotel worker and exuberant poetry- writing mother, his story, played out against the backdrop of an often prejudiced working-class neighborhood, takes on an even richer dimension when his relationship to his family and culture changes forever. During a sojourn in pre-Castro Cuba with his mother, he catches a disease that sends him into a Dickensian home for terminally ill children. The yearlong stay estranges him from the very language and people he had so loved. With a cast of characters whose stories are both funny and tragic, follows Hijueloss subsequent quest for his true identity into adulthood, through college and beyond-a mystery whose resolution he eventually discovers hidden away in the trappings of his fiction, and which finds its most glorious expression in his best-known book, . Illuminating the most dazzling scenes from his novels, reveals the true stories and indelible memories that shaped a literary genius.

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Oscar Hijuelos

Thoughts Without Cigarettes

~ ~ ~

GOTHAM BOOKS Published by Penguin Group USA Inc 375 Hudson Street New - photo 1

GOTHAM BOOKS

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.);

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2,

Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd);

Penguin Group (Australia), 25 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd);

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New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd);

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, June 2011

Copyright 2011 by Cuban Ink, Inc.

All rights reserved

Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

has been applied for.

eISBN: 978-1-101-52882-2

Photos throughout courtesy of the author.

Poem by Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos in the Introduction by Oscar Hijuelos (pp xix-xx), from Burnt Sugar: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish, edited by Lori Marie Carlson and Oscar Hijuelos and translated by Lori Marie Carlson. Introduction, Copyright 2006 by Oscar Hijuelos. Reprinted with permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon and Schuster.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

This is a memoir. It reflects the authors present recollections of his experiences over a period of years. Dialogue and events have been re-created from memory.

http://us.penguingroup.com

THOUGHTS WITHOUT CIGARETTES

To my family and the folks who have always looked out for me.

The year is 1985 and Professor John D Swsinhnder [sic] is getting into his rocket. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, blast off! He was drifting in space at a speed of ten thousand miles an hour. In a short time he was on the moon. He is going there to prove that the moon is made of green cheese. He picked up a rock and bit it.

He said, If this is cheese than [sic] my teeth are not cracked. But they were.

In a minute not to lose he got in his rocket and went back to see his dentist. He did not prove that the moon was made of green cheese. But instead he proved never bite rock.

FROM A TRIP TO THE MOON, OSCAR HIJUELOS, AGE TEN

A Prelude of Sorts

Thoughts Without Cigarettes - image 2

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 fathers stash of high-class booze down the hall, which wed 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 dont 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, dont do that! in the manner that kids in those days talked, and maybe, But hey, Im 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 cant 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.

PART ONE. The Way Some Things Worked Out

CHAPTER 1. When I Was Still Cuban

P retend its sometime in 1955 or 1956 and that you are hanging over the roofs - photo 3

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