Another Spaniard in the Works Read Free

ways, a gentleness that inspired the protection of the strong—among them my older brother, Manny.
    And gentle people attracted me. That’s why I first befriended Max in a Central Park meadow, as he sang beatifically of butterflies and river rats on a spring afternoon, some years before.
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    In my own bubble, I had almost reached Max’s building, when something else hit me, something I had forgotten: that in my back pocket I had a cassette of our songs—not a great cassette—just a rehearsal tape, featuring a few of our “greatest hits.” Suddenly I stopped dead, wondering why I hadn’t had the presence of mind to think of that cassette when, face to face with John Lennon, a nice guy, I could have just fished it out and handed it to him. Who knows what John Lennon might have made of our songs? If he liked them, I daydreamed, it could have been the beginning of something wonderful for me and Max. It hit me so hard that I immediately backtracked, but by the time I reached that corner of 79th Street again, Mr. Lennon and Yoko had long since gone; the kiosk guy, puffing on a cigar, seemed hardly aware that anything so traumatic had happened to me.
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    Later, I finally got to Max’s building and up to his rambling fourth-floor apartment. I always liked going there. It did not matter to me if Max’s living room—well, it was his grandmother’s place—was a chaos of dumped clothing, jacketless record albums, leftover food and dying plants, a stinking kitty-litter box, and piles and piles of underground comics. Nor if Max himself, in his continued and quite nostalgic experimentation with drugs, often seemed out of sorts or kept strange company. (Among them, two conk-haired middle-aged Cuban lesbians from down the hall, ladies I liked, just because they were Cuban.) As usual, Max, bearded, in a bathrobe, his hair all wild and straggly, greeted me at the door. We had our rituals: I’d find a space on a couch, while he, toting a gallon jug of red Gallo wine, lit up a water pipe filled with hash-tinged pot or, on the best of days, opium, the only thing I ever really liked. Usually as Max finished up the business of getting high—or even higher than he had been—we rarely ever talked about anything pertinent to us. I don’t think he ever had much of a notion about my interests in art or in history, or even of my family life; that I was Cuban rarely occurred to him, since my musical syntax, once I picked up a guitar, covered a whole range of styles. He thought me the meanest of blues players even when I hardly thought much about those licks.
    The only book he ever talked about was Carlos Casteneda’s A Yaqui Way of Knowledge , and he could go on about it for hours at a time. Musically, his favorite prop was a drone machine from Katmandu, which drove me crazy. He’d say, “I have a new tune.” And, putting on the drone, which was like a deep sitar hum that went on endlessly, he’d fiddle with some scales on his guitar and play the same things over and over again.
    Somehow, because he always seemed to be wanting, I once brought him home to my folks’ apartment on Tiemann Place, just off 124th Street and Broadway, for dinner. In my Cuban household the stylistic caprices of hippie youth had never been particularly appreciated. And yet, when faced with Max in his unwashed splendor, my mother, staring at him for a long time, had decided that, deep down, he was a decent lost soul—or, in the parlance of Cubans, un pobrecito , a fellow who, like me, had been thrown, through no fault of his own, from the happy parade of life. To this day I have no idea how Max won my mother over, since he had passed out after dinner, but I imagine it had to do with the one thing I told her about him: “His father was a psychiatrist who committed suicide.” After hearing that, my mother, hard as she could be, forgave his every folly and, sending him home with a pot full of leftover arroz con pollo , always spoke of him