Thoughts Without Cigarettes (14 page)

In fact, I'm pretty sure that, with my protected, coddled, and shell-shocked air, I gave off a somewhat otherworldly and “good” impression, the sort that, later, as I got a little older, provoked certain of the nuns to invite me up to their convent above the school, where I was given simple chores, like sweeping the floors or cleaning their long kitchen's cabinets, in exchange for a handful of candies and fifteen cents or so in pennies. Despite the endless stories I've since heard about cruel nuns, and aside from having the back of my head slapped and my knuckles rapped by a ruler, and yes, my earlobes tugged painfully when, getting older and more pent up, I turned into a classroom wise guy, I have always thought only fondly of those women, who, in their black-and-white wimpled habits and ascetically appointed rooms—narrow, with just a bed, a table, a washbasin on a stand, and a crucifix hanging on the wall—seem now to have been nothing less than sincerely devout throwbacks to some other time.

Along the way, in the church rectory, the Irish priests must have had some kind of discussion about the changing demographics of the neighborhood, for they began to give Hispanic-flavored sermons. At those nine A.M. Masses when the children filled the galleys, from the pulpit came little parables about a boy and girl, José and María. Typically, these were simple moral tales: María finds a wallet with money in it: Should she return the wallet, even if she has her eye on a dress or her mother could use the money? What should she do? This was the kind of thing she'd ask José. Righteous and good at coming up with answers, he'd advise her to do the right thing. Or they'd feel troubled over some hardship in the family and were thinking resentful thoughts toward others, only to learn that was not the right way to behave. The devil would come to them in disguise and advise them to do whatever they wanted but then they'd meet a gentle and quiet man with the most saintly face, and he would tell José and María to take the high road, never to sin, and in that way they would find their happiness. Sometimes he would tell them his name: Jesus; or it would turn out to be a guardian angel—but in any case, the point of those sermons always came to the triumph of good over evil. And so it went; I would sit listening, surrounded by real-life Josés and Marías in the pews, fascinated and rapt by the telling of such simple tales.

Unavoidably, in those years of my childhood, we'd go to the clinic at St. Luke's. I went once a month, sometimes more, for tests mainly. But I hated going. I was already sick of doctors, or at least the anonymity of them, kindly though some may have been. (I didn't like to be touched, palpated, or examined by strangers.) For the longest time, just the prospect of a hospital visit made me gloomy—and I would become so reluctant about those appointments that I could barely raise my head sometimes as I'd amble down the hall, to the point where my mother would call me, as she sometimes did my pop, “
un trastornado
”—or schlemiel loser, to translate it loosely.

Inevitably, I always went, however, my mother tugging at my hands, indignant over what she thought of as my ingratitude. She seemed to believe that I never appreciated the stuff she'd gone through for me—“What do you think I am, a witch?” Now, when I had to abandon my comic books or when she'd disrupted my reveries, which were mainly about becoming like the other kids, and I wasn't in the right mood, I sometimes fled down the hall from her. I'm pretty sure that she first slapped me in the face on one of those days, when, cornering me and fed up with having to chase me around, she really let me have it, the ritual of punishment, or the threat of it, becoming a part of those outings. While heading out for our clinic visits, she didn't help matters by telling me, “Don't forget,
hijo
, that you almost died.”

One winter, I was about nine, it was snowing, and just that short trek to the pediatric ward of St. Luke's Hospital on 114th Street required that I get bundled up in a hundred layers as if we were on an outing to the Siberian tundra. I felt manhandled as my mother pulled tight my coat and out we went, down the block, and, as we'd round the corner, heaven forbid I'd stop, enchanted by the soda shop window, where some new cheap toys had been put on display. “We don't have time for that, nor the money,” she told me. “One day, when you get better, you can look at whatever you want, but you're still sick and weak—
muy débil y enfermo
—and whether you like it or not, we're going to the hospital.”

On any given day, it was jammed full with row after row of mothers and their kids, mostly black and Latino from the projects and Spanish Harlem and even farther uptown, folks who seemed far poorer than ourselves. (My father, after all, had a job.) There just weren't too many white kids around, and, turning heads as we walked in, as if I gave off some bad smell or perhaps because my mother, without realizing it, tended to look upon people of color in a somewhat aloof way, I felt a distinct discomfort every time we had to go there. Aside from that, however, I just never liked having a thermometer stuck up my ass, nor blood taken, nor peeing into a little paper cup behind a curtain while a nurse looked on.

And there were the hours we spent before we'd see any doctors. In those pre-Medicaid days, hospitals like St. Luke's operated on a sliding scale and were in effect, with their steep discounting, much like public health and union-sponsored clinics when it came to treating the more financially disadvantaged folks who had no doctors of their own. The visits cost two dollars, the medicines and tests somewhat more, though not much, but the price for such a good deal—and, believe me, there were mothers in those crowds who couldn't pay even those cheap fees—required that one wait and wait and wait. An eleven o'clock appointment could mean that you might get seen at four, and, as the cutoff seemed to be around five, I can recall more than a few occasions when, after so long a wait, we were told to come back the next day.

C'est la vie, at least with some.

Nevertheless, during those waits, my mother always managed to find some kindred Latina spirit to sit next to, so that they might talk about life and, often enough, the health issues affecting their children. “My son is a diabetic,” one might say, or “My daughter has a murmur in her heart,” but for whatever reason, my mother, loving any modicum of sympathy, and quite charming when she wanted to be, took a particular pride in trumping the others when it came to me: “
Mi hijo, casi se murío de una infección de los riñones
”—“My son nearly died from an infection of the kidneys,” she'd say, a nearly penitent and saintly manner coming over her.
“Fue muy muy grave
[He was very grave]—it's a miracle that he's even alive.” And she'd make the sign of the cross, glory be to God in the highest. I tended to feel embarrassed by such remarks, perhaps even more so because they were rendered in Spanish, and that embarrassment deepened when, suddenly, one of these ladies whom my mother inevitably befriended, while noticing how I seemed to have tuned out, leaned close to her, quizzically asking,
“Pero habla español?”—
“He speaks Spanish, doesn't he?” a query to which she usually replied, “
Un poquito
,” her eyes looking afar, her head shaking.

“He spent too much time in a hospital when he was little.” And confiding more, she'd add: “
Es más americano.
”

For my part, I'd either fidget around, wondering why, if that was so, it seemed something that I should be ashamed about, or, even given that it happened to be true, how I had become so. Though it defined me in those days, that Cuban illness seemed, by my lights, to have always been there, this black hole from which, as if out of a fairy tale, I had crawled into as a little
cubano
and, after a deep sleep, had emerged as something else: a young prince in the making turned into a freak.

When the nurse, usually Irish, finally called us to the front desk for our appointment, we often suffered from the slight indignity of hearing the pronunciation of our last name mangled: Hijuelos, a rare enough Spanish appellation, came out as
Hidgewellos
,
Hidgejewloos
, and worse. One thing about my mother, having her pride, she took personal offense at the error, often making a point of pronouncing the name properly over and over again for the nurse, so that she might not repeat it the same way (“Okay, okay, lady, what do you want from me?”—as if she, or anyone else, could not care less).

And off we would go, to sit in yet another room, in the pediatric wing up on the next floor. Its waiting room walls, as I recall, were cheerfully decorated with large flowers and suns and bumblebees, and, depending on the time of the year, the nurses would put up cutouts of Halloween pumpkins, of witches on brooms, and pictures of Santa Claus, snowflakes, and holiday trees at Christmas. That room seemed nicer than the one below: At least they had piles of comics and Golden Book fairy tales for me to look at, and I always felt intruded upon when we would be finally called in for my examination.

Our appointments always began with an interview. None of the doctors spoke Spanish, but there always seemed to be a Puerto Rican nurse around to help things along.

“Anything unusual going on with him?” she'd ask my mother in Spanish.

“No,” my mother answered, looking down chastely.

“Is he sleeping well?”

“Yes,” she would answer, which wasn't quite true, but since I suffered regularly from nightmares, I suppose it wasn't anything my mother cared to share.

“And did you bring along the sample?”

“
Ah, sí
.” And my mother would pull out this plastic container from a paper bag, which she, waiting outside the bathroom door, had me fill the morning or evening before. I could never bear to look at it and felt anxious and ashamed as hell when my mother handed it over to the nurse, as, aside from my sense of violated privacy, the sample might contain enough
microbios
to put me back in the hospital.

The doctors were always brisk: They'd examine me all over, and on one of those visits, it was discovered that I suffered from psoriasis, just like my father did. Then I'd get on a scale. I always weighed too much, a mystery since I was supposed to be on a strict diet. The hematology tests were the worst, however—I hated the tube tied around my forearm, the deep pricking that followed, and the sight of my blood filling up the hypodermic, but at least that aversion to needles would one day keep me from becoming a heroin addict like so many of the kids in my neighborhood. Sometimes, a more arcane series of tests, taking up much of the day, required that I go to the nephrology ward. That usually took up another hour or two, and we'd sit around in that room, facing other children, their worried-looking parents beside them, while my mother, hopeful that another Latina might be among them, carefully sized them up. More than once I'd seen her lean forward and, smiling at a “swarthy”-looking Italian or Greek woman, say something to her in Spanish, only to sit back, sucking in air through her lips, in disappointment.