Kid's Stuff

I was a late arriver at the book-reading party—at least compared to people I know who’ve been doing it since they were four, and still others who were being read Grimm’s fairy tales while they were in the womb, little embryos already being infused with all that dangerous lore. Yet before I voluntarily picked up that hardcover copy of Harry Potter, I had read other things. Just not books.

Sure, I often read bits from my father's copies of The Thousand and One Nights, The Book of Virtues, Aesop’s Fables, and the Bible. Then there was a book that was mine, La Flora y la Fauna del Yunque, a picture-book of the flora and fauna in El Yunque, a mountain and tropical rainforest in Puerto Rico, one of the island’s environmental and touristic landmarks. The Puerto Rican boa, a constrictive snake; the Puerto Rican parrot, in danger of extinction; the bamboos, in that festive firework formation… I would pore over all of these so many times every day. And then there were the picture cards of all the animals in the animal kingdom!!! They had come in a box, and that must have weighed at least a pound. Countless hours going over the eating habits of the cheetah, the nature of the dolphin, and trying to draw the baboon exactly as it appeared on the picture. Don’t even get me started on the dinosaur cards.

And then there are the multimedia influences: the notion of a mythological universe as expressed in RPG video games, the Super Mario universe, movies with sequels. And films, with the unavoidable way in which they make the viewer want to be a part of the filmed world: wanting to be ET’s friend, the shark hunter in Jaws, wanting to be in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

           I still feel like reading is a childish activity. The exhiliration, the intensity it produces, the way it just activates all these little mechanisms in the mind, that muscle, that ticking little muscle—it’s all like being a kid. And I wonder if that’s what I want, at the end of the day.

          And when I think of it that way, I feel it’s so strange how adults institutionalize the pleasure of reading. College professors of literature are overgrown kids who talk about what they love, the same way a kid will talk to you about Barney. The “English” Department is the Kiddie department. Whether one reads children’s literature or not, as a child or as an adult, the elemental reading muscle is childish. It’s awesome. It’s silly. And so many lives revolve around it. 

2009: Gay Panic in the San Juan Streets

            “She—or he, or whatever—just shouldn’t have taunted him.”
            That’s Victor. He’s been our official driver since high school. He had a Cadillac. We had feet. He's got issues with self-esteem and women and such. He's a midget.
            “What?” Collectively said by me, Carlos, Norbert, and René. Or to be less confusing, I’ll just say “we,” “us,” a big majority.
            We’re in Lola’s room, in my house. Lola is our seventeen-inch Apple computer, and the room is spacious and has a plasma TV, a set of game consoles, and an exercise machine. It’s on the second floor of my house, and large windows look out to the neighborhood and the mountains beyond. Here my brothers and I play Rock Band; we in the family watch The Sopranos, Law and Order, and Steven Spielberg movies; my friends and I watch YouTube videos from our megatronic Apple computer; and we have debates about everything in the comfort of the air-conditioner breeze. Today is one such occasion. 
            “I’m not saying what he did was right,” Victor continues, “but what I’m saying, just hear me out guys, is that if he or she would have told him that, you know, he was a man dressed as a woman—he, the guy who did it, wouldn’t have gotten angry.”
            We replied: “It was la avenida 15 on a weekday night, Victor. You don’t go there looking for women.”
           He countered: “Maybe he didn’t know that, man!”
            Who “he/she” was: a man dressed in drag, hair stylist by day and prostitute by night.
            What the other guy “did” that was not right but understandable: soliciting sex from said prostituto, taking her to his apartment, fucking her on his couch, proceeding then to dismember her and decapitate her. 
            To clean up his tracks, he burned the couch.
            “But you are justifying the act, though,” we say to Victor. “You’re defending his decision, you’re—”
            “Hey, man, like, I’m not saying it was right,” Victor stumbles, “All I’m saying is, if she wouldn’t have provoked him, he wouldn’t have killed her.”
            Gay Panic--the Laramie Defense. And then there's the Twinkie defense. What was that about, hamburgers? All kinds of shit makes you kill gay people, apparently. But never with such purpose, with such verve, as this man who kindled a fire. There's something maniacal about that, something that doesn't bespeak a "panic." It goes much deeper.
            “We’re not saying that you’re saying it’s right, we’re saying you’re defending him.”
            “All I’m sayin is it’s her fault! She provoked him! She should know--”
            “What the fuck? What do you mean ‘provoked’ him? It wasn’t like this guy was surgically operated or anything. He was a thin man wearing a wig, speaking in falsetto. You can tell, you know.”
            “Well, it was dark, the queen should’ve been clear about it.”
            “Dude, you can see the Adam’s apple.”
            “He could’ve been good at pretending to have a woman’s voice.”
            “You know, you’re defending machismo. You’re defending a culture that simply accepts as fact that some people should be more afraid of getting hurt than others: that if you’re gay, that means it’s okay for people to get angry at you for being gay. Would you like it--”
            I stop. I finish the sentence in my head: Would you like it if people killed you for being a midget?
            But since I don't finish the comment, Victor rolls his eyes.
            We debate for an hour and, the effort proving futile on both sides, we go out for drinks.
            As it turns out, the lead investigator of the case is on Victor’s side. Quoted in the newspaper and all: “People who lead this type of lifestyle need to be aware that this will happen.”
            Can't be any clearer than that.

Ecclesiastes 9:11

It came first as a black blur.

Only when I heard the thump on the front of my car and the chaotic scream from below did I realize that the blur had four legs and that the shriek resembled the panicked hiss of a  cat.

It was night and this particular street had little to no lighting, with condemned and graffiti-decorated buildings to boot. It was the kind of street populated only by the occasional junky sleeping on a stoop.

I had tried to swerve, and while I managed to get the wheel out of the cat’s way, the cat’s head bashed against my car’s bumper. My car’s underbelly must have knocked it around before releasing the animal again to the street.

In the rearview mirror, I saw the cat flopping its way to the gutter, like a fish out of water.

It was a one-way street, but I hit the reverse anyway. I went back half a block, and saw the cat there, lying on the gutter, misshapen, hissing in pain. I saw lights behind me. The street was narrow, and the person driving that car would not wait for me to perform heroics.

Besides, I didn’t want to. The cat blood would have made a mess in my car, and I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. I wish I could feel bad about this, but I don’t. But why else am I writing this?

I went around and drove back up to the spot. I looked down at the gutter and saw it. A small pool of blood had formed beside its face; one of its eyes had a crimson coat; its mouth lay agape. This was a street cat if there ever was one: squalor-thin, its fur black with grey patches all over—red smudges, too.

It was frozen.

I’d killed a sentient being.

But I guess everybody needs a first time.

Don’t get me wrong—this is not a “this is what real men do” thing. But I think this is the kind of episode you have to be prepared for when you live in a city. Just one of the many small gifts of urban Puerto Rico—the random misery that could hit you at any moment, regardless of how careful you are. The hoodlum might rob you and might be coked up enough to give you chrome to the head. The policeman, in a bad mood, might decide to shoot you to bits. The bullet thrown to the air may land on your beautiful daughter’s head.

Your decision to go to McDonalds suddenly takes on a cosmic importance.

And you think you’re lucky, but you’re just as susceptible as the cat.

People often use the meteorite cliché when talking about chance. But we don't need a meteor. A meteor can’t win against the man who puts a blowtorch unto his family. Or against the disgruntled man who decapitates and dismembers the queen. Or against that lost bullet in the sky, dipping its way from the stratosphere into a fallible human head.

Don’t talk to me about meteors. It’s the bullets that hang like a black mist over us, willingly plunging.

    

But what the fuck. I was just talking about a dead cat.

Why I Write

 “I read the first ten pages of my leisure reading career while taking a shit. It was the first Harry Potter book, and I must have been nine or ten. The house was busy with the incessant Latin American energy of a family planning a quinceañero: the women’s dresses fluttering about almost as persons themselves; fathers, daughters, cousins, brothers, grandmas, and friends invited over, parachuted down from 707’s hailing from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, landing finally in Maryland—all part of a family happy in its machinal effort to put up this event for the first girl of the family, while Chayanne’s voice echoed down the walls, emanating from the cheap radio that the waltzers used to practice the dance that would open the ceremony. The lucky girl with the crown was my cousin, always the center of attention. Especially then.

So I doubt anyone noticed that I spent a full twenty minutes in the bathroom, only five of which were actually dedicated to shitting.

I remember feeling at the end of it exhausted but pleased, like when you’re back from--

from a healthy morning run. You’re sweaty and your body’s sore, but it’s a welcome soreness. So did my imagination feel then: its book-cherry popped, a part of it otherwise unexplored suddenly excited, exhausted, exhilirated—”

Wait—it’s about writing. 

Ok:

“I guess I could wax Borges and tell you that I was a reader before I was a writer, or that I think that whatever a writer is, it’s the kind of person who besides dipping a blank page in his imagination—hoping to glean something more than a small anecdote from it—reads, reads, and then reads some more. And that, in this twofold process that is imagination-journeying, he arrives at a certain, oh, let’s just say it: a transcendence, building a bridge between his own experience and the experience of others.

“Which is why I’m not going to recant my Harry Potter anecdote. Because  that’s what it’s all about: sitting down and immersing yourself in your own imagination, hopefully interacting with something, a collective something that you’re in touch with beyond the words. And always yourself. Always yourself.

 “I love that word, by the way—imagination. It’s what the whole reading and writing gig is all about. About finding ways to gain access to the magical machine inside you, the particle accelerator that relentlessly likes to indulge in pure prettiness. When you read, you use the book in front of you as an excuse to create landscapes in your mind—to fill its silence with word-sounds, characters, all that jazz. And when you write, you’re scavenging your imagination for what it itself produces in between dreams. You’re picking up the pieces and playing; you’re the baby on the piano. The English language becomes a playground. And for a moment it seems endless. You’re in touch with something eternal.

“You put up a show. The curtains rise and you’re the thespian, so you don yourself with prose and quotation marks and you let it rip. And for a while, the energy of the quinceañero around you dissipates into nothingness, and you’re so absorbed, either in the writing or in the reading, that you can’t even smell the putrefied particles around you.”