Blackouts

by Justin Torres

The river was wide and rushing and indeed muddy, a milky chocolate color, which reminded me of Easter holidays, of bunnies wrapped in foil with lifeless, sugar-candy eyes.

Afterward, while we talked, he picked at the wallpaper by the side of the bed as carefully as his fingers allowed. “Just underneath, the paper is all the more beautiful,” he said. He’d uncovered a patch the size of a dinner plate, the pattern a circus scene drawn in a delicate, old-fashioned style: pink poodles leaping through a hoop; an elephant balanced on one leg atop a small stool; hobos clowning each other. “I’d like to excavate the entire wall before I die, but I won’t, will I?”

“The release of the want of the want of release. Though, as it turns out, libido was the last defense I had.” “I’m still not sure I understand. Defense against what?” “Well, your nothingness, I suppose.”

Such a gentle old man. Later, I would learn all manner of vocabulary to think about sex, and gender, but invoking any of those words would be anachronistic—I was a teenager from bumfuck nowhere; I saw only that Juan transcended what I thought I knew about sissies. When he spoke, he spoke in allusion, literarily, often pausing to check, with a look, whether I followed. I don’t think he expected me to understand directly, but rather wanted me to understand how little I knew about myself, that I was missing out on something grand: a subversive, variant culture; an inheritance.

I’d spent many years pretending: either to be younger and more innocent, more oblivious, than I was, or else to be unafraid, or sluttier, or more radical—a provocateur—and many times I’d be tripped up, or caught out, and burnt by the exposure.

“Darling, the only thing anyone should be embarrassed about is taking themselves too seriously.

More often … the urge to document and the urge to disappear, though contradictory, are fused. —HEATHER LOVE, Underdogs

“But I’m tired now, of speaking. I’d like to listen a bit.” “To me?” “To you. Dígame. One of your whore stories. Make me laugh.”

I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop as my friends joked that I should put down on my résumé, under past work, “Being a little bitch.”

“To be released of the want of the want of release.”

You know, I was just coming on that age where tolerance for the natural effeminacy of young boys rapidly wanes. It felt to me as if the whole neighborhood had come together in a great conspiracy to correct my deportment. Close family, distant relatives, the grocer, the schoolmistress, everyone would remind me that I was a boy and should behave thusly, how to walk and speak and play, or rather how not to walk and not to speak and not to play. They said these things not in a bullying way, not out of cruelty, but as a matter of fact.

Pearl says, She made no direct advances, but we danced together and something very terrific happened to me, a very electric thing. It made me know that I was lesbian.