Thoughts Without Cigarettes: A Memoir by Oscar Hijuelos

Author:Oscar Hijuelos
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781101528822
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2011-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Tucked back into that period, some months after I had turned eighteen, I had ended up in yet another smoke-filled room, this one situated in the draft board offices downtown on Whitehall Street, where I’d gone to register. Though it’s possible that a few in that room were feeling a patriotic fervor about fighting in Vietnam, most of the young men gathered there seemed bent upon getting out on psychological deferments—which meant that one fellow dressed up like Batman, another as a Watusi warrior with bells tied about his ankles, and yet another in a pair of fluffy slippers and diapers; there were some overtly effeminate sorts in there as well, and a gleeful bunch of hippies who were being eyed by the plainclothes cops in the crowd, singing and carrying on, all the while quite apparently high on something powerful, probably LSD. A few others sat, in the manner of soldiers about to go to war, sucking on cigarettes—it was thick as shit in that room—an air of worry tending toward obligation or resignation on their faces. I mention them because, to be honest, when I turned up, I had frankly resigned myself to going to Vietnam, not out of any deep sense of moral obligation or patriotism—as did my friend Richard—but quite simply because I didn’t care what they did with me. I filled out forms, answered a few questions in pencil—“How would you feel about confronting an enemy of the United States?” and others that essentially inquired after my interest in self-preservation and soldiering. Strangely enough, my laconic responses to those questions, along with the pertinent bit of information that my father had died the year before, led one interviewing officer to assign me, without as much as blinking an eye, a temporary, six-month deferment—which is what most of the crazies in that room would have been grateful for; and while I had expected to be called back there soon enough, the draft lottery intervened, and in one of those caprices of rare good luck, I ended up with a number so high, in the three hundreds, that I never had to return.

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