Blackouts

by Justin Torres

I liked you very much. I wanted to steal your style. You had this kind of sloppiness about you.” “I prefer the term corporeal disregard.” “Well, I wanted to steal that … disregard. And I wanted to steal, too, your cultured, gentle regard for others.” “A young hoodlum who let himself be taken by the pimps—in order to steal their ego. That’s Sartre, describing Jean Genet.” “That’s right. That’s exactly right, I wanted to steal your ego. God, I was miserable then. Mortified by my own body. I wanted to leap up out of my skin. I wanted to know things.”

More often … the urge to document and the urge to disappear, though contradictory, are fused.

They have me saying: I am the illegitimate daughter of a twelve-year-old mulatto nursemaid … but I tell you I never uttered such a sentence. Where is my father in that sentence? All that violence, disappeared.”