“I can’t deal with your dumb shit anymore,” Oswaldo said. “You do dumb shit and you know it’s dumb shit but it’s the same dumb shit you grew up around so you do it anyway. I’m done.” Oswaldo was dealing with his own shit, in fact, shit that would land him in a white room in Yale’s Psychiatric Institute a few weeks later. His brain had begun to crumple under the weight it had to bear: his spiraling family in Newark; his affluent, oblivious classmates whose constant whining about how hard their lives were made him want to turn a gun on them; the daily financial planning involved in keeping up
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I remember once driving around Newark with Oswaldo during the research for this story. He was showing me around some places that had been important to Rob. I was sort of gratuitously blathering about my own struggles with writing this book, wondering aloud whether I had any right to despite the support of his mother and so many others, questioning whether or not Rob himself would want his story told: some pretty heavy and unanswerable questions.
Oswaldo grew a little irritated with me and, while stopped at a red light, said, "Jeff, I can't give you permission to write this book, and I can't give you absolution. What I CAN do, if you would shut up for a minute, is help you UNDERSTAND."
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