Junot Díaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I will run again no more, he intoned from under his pillow.

I guess I shouldn’t have gotten mad. Should have been patient with the herb. But I was pissed . Here I was, going the fuck out of my way to help this fucking idiot out, and he was pissing it back in my face. Took this shit real personal.

Three days straight I badgered him about the running and he kept saying, I’d rather not, I’d rather not. For his part he tried to smooth it over. Tried to share his movies and his comic books and to keep up the nerdly banter, tried to go back to how it was before I started the Oscar Redemption Program. But I wasn’t having it. Finally dropped the ultimatum. You either run or that’s it.

I don’t want to do it anymore! I don’t! Voice rising.

Stubborn. Like his sister.

Last chance, I said. I was sneakered up and ready to roll, and he was at his desk, pretending not to notice. He didn’t move. I put my hands on him. Get up! And that was when he yelled. You leave me alone! Actually shoved me. I don’t think he meant it, but there it was. Both of us astounded. Him trembling, scared sick, me with my fists out, ready to kill. For a second I almost let it go, just a mistake, a mistake, but then I remembered myself.

I pushed him. With both hands. He flew into the wall. Hard.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. Two days later Lola calls from Spain, five o’clock in the morning. What the fuck is your problem , Yunior? Tired of the whole thing. I said, without thinking, Oh, fuck off: Lola. Fuckoff? The silence of Death. Fuck you , Yunior. Don’t ever speak to me again. Say hi to your fiancé for me, I tried to jeer, but she’d already hung up. Motherfucker , I screamed, throwing the phone into the closet.

And that was that was that was that. The end of our big experiment. He actually did try to apologize a couple of times, in his Oscar way, but I didn’t reciprocate. Where before I’d been cool with him, now I just iced him out. No more invitations to dinner or a drink. Acted like roommates act when they’re beefing. We were polite and stiff: and where before we would jaw about writing and shit, now I didn’t have nothing to say to him. Went back to my own life, back to being the ill sucio. Had this crazy burst of toto-energy. Was being spiteful, I guess. He went back to eating pizzas by the eight-slice and throwing himself kamikaze-style at the girls.

The boys, of course, sensed what was up, that I wasn’t protecting the gordo anymore, and swarmed.

I like to think it wasn’t too bad. The boys didn’t slap him around or nothing, didn’t steal his shit. But I guess it was pretty heartless any way you slice it. You ever eat toto? Melvin would ask, and Oscar would shake his head, answer decently, no matter how many times Mel asked. Probably the only thing you ain’t eaten, right? Harold would say, Tu no eres nada de dominicano, but Oscar would insist unhappily, I am Dominican, I am. It didn’t matter what he said. Who the hell, I ask you, had ever met a Domo like him? Halloween he made the mistake of dressing up as Doctor Who, was real proud of his outfit too. When I saw him on Easton, with two other writing-section clowns, I couldn’t believe how much he looked like that fat homo Oscar Wilde, and I told him so. You look just like him, which was bad news for Oscar, because Melvin said, Oscar Wao, quién es Oscar Wao, and that was it, all of us started calling him that: Hey, Wao, what you doing? Wao, you want to get your feet off my chair?

And the tragedy? After a couple of weeks dude started answering to it.

Fool never got mad when we gave him shit. Just sat there with a confused grin on his face. Made a brother feel bad. A couple times after the others left, I’d say, You know we was just kidding, right, Wao? I know, he said wearily. We cool, I said, thumping him on the shoulder. We cool.

On the days his sister called and I answered the phone I tried to be cheerful, but she wasn’t buying. Is my brother there? was all she ever said. Cold as Saturn.

These days I have to ask myself: What made me angrier? That Oscar, the fat loser, quit, or that Oscar, the fat loser, defied me? And I wonder: What hurt him more? That I was never really his friend, or that I pretended to be?

That’s all it should have been. Just some fat kid I roomed with my junior year. Nothing more, nothing more. But then Oscar, the dumb-ass, decided to fall in love. And instead of getting him for a year, I got the motherfucker for the rest of my life.

You ever seen that Sargent portrait, Madame X? Of course you have. Oscar had that one up on his wall—along with a Robotech poster and the original Akira one-sheet, the one with Tetsuo on it and the words NEO TOKYO IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE. She was drop-dead like that. But she was also fucking crazy.

If you’d lived in Demarest that year, you would have known her: Jenni Munoz. She was this boricua chick from East Brick City who lived up in the Spanish section. First hardcore goth I’d ever met—in 1990 us niggers were having trouble wrapping our heads around goths, period—but a Puerto Rican goth, that was as strange to us as a black Nazi. Jenni was her real name, but all her little goth buddies called her La Jablesse, and every standard a dude like me had, this diabla short-circuited. Girl was luminous . Beautiful jíbara skin, diamond-sharp features, wore her hair in this super-black Egypto-cut, her eyes caked in eyeliner, her lips painted black, had the biggest roundest tits you’ve ever seen. Every day Halloween for this girl, and on actual Halloween she dressed up as—you guessed it—a dominatrix, had one of the gay guys in the music section on a leash. Never seen a body like that, though. Even I was hot for Jenni first semester, but the one time I’d tried to mack on her at the Douglass Library she laughed at me, and when I said, Don’t laugh at me, she asked: Why not?

Fucking bitch.

So, anyway, guess who decided that she was the love of his life? Who fell head over heels for her because he heard her playing Joy Division up in her room and, surprise, he loved Joy Division too? Oscar, of course. At first, dude just stared at her from afar and moaned about her ‘ineffable perfection’. Out of your league, I snarked, but he shrugged, talked to the computer screen: Everybody’s out of my league. Didn’t think nothing of it until a week later when I caught him putting a move on her in Brower Commons! I was with the boys, listening to them grouse about the Knicks, watching Oscar and La Jablesse on the hot-food line, waiting for the moment she told him off, figured if I’d gotten roasted she was going to vaporize his ass. Of course he was full on, doing his usual Battle of the Planets routine, talking a mile a minute, sweat running down his face, and homegirl was holding her tray and looking at him askance—not many girls can do askance and keep their cheese fries from plunging off their trays, but this was why niggers were crazy about La Jablesse. She started walking away and Oscar yelled out superloud, We’ll talk anon! And she shot back a Sure , all larded with sarcasm.

I waved him over. So how’d it go, Romeo?

He looked down at his hands. I think I may be in love.

How can you be in love? You just met the bitch.

Don’t call her a bitch, he said darkly.

Yeah, Melvin imitated, don’t call her a bitch.

You have to give it to Oscar. He didn’t let up. He just kept hitting on her with absolutely no regard for self. In the halls, in front of the bathroom door, in the dining hall, on the buses, dude became ubiquitous . Pinned comic books to her door, for Christ’s sake.

In my universe, when a dork like Oscar pushes up on a girl like Jenni, he usually gets bounced faster than your tía Daisy’s rent checks, but Jenni must have had brain damage or been really into fat loser nerdboys, because by the end of February she was actually treating him all civil and shit. Before I could wrap my brain around that one I saw them hanging out together! In public! I couldn’t believe my fucking eyes. And then came the day when I returned from my creative-writing class and found La Jablesse and Oscar sitting in our room. They were just talking, about Alice Walker, but still. Oscar looking like he’d just been asked to join the Jedi Order; Jenni smiling beautiful. And me? I was speechless. Jenni remembered me, all right. Looked at me with her cute smirking eyes and said, You want me to get off your bed? Her Jersey accent enough to knock the guff clean out of me. Nah, I said. Picked up my gym bag and bolted like a bitch. When I got back from the weight room Oscar was at his computer—on page a billion of his new novel.