by Junot Díaz
But my biggest coup of all? I got dude to exercise with me. To fucking run.
Goes to show you: O really did look up to me. No one else could have gotten him to do that. The last time he’d tried running had been freshman year, when he’d been fifty pounds lighter. I can’t lie: first couple of times I almost laughed, seeing him huffing down George Street, those ashy black knees of his a-shaking. Keeping his head down so he wouldn’t have to hear or see all the reactions. Usually just some cackles and a stray Hey, fit-ass. The best one I heard? Look, Mom, that guy’s taking his planet out for a run.
Don’t worry about them jokers, I told him.
No worry, he heaved, dying.
Dude was not into it at all. As soon as we were through he’d be back at his desk in no time flat. Almost clinging to it. Tried everything he could to weasel out of our runs. Started getting up at five so when I got up he’d already be at his computer, could claim he was in the middle of this amazingly important chapter. Write it later, bitch. After about our fourth run he actually got down on his knees. Please, Yunior, he said, I can’t. I snorted. Just go get your fucking shoes.
I knew shit wasn’t easy for him. I was callous, but not that callous. I saw how it was. You think people hate a fat person? Try a fat person who’s trying to get thin. Brought out the mother-fucking balrog in niggers. Sweetest girls you’d ever see would say the vilest shit to him on the street, old ladies would jabber, You’re disgusting, disgusting, and even Harold, who’d never shown much in the way of anti-Oscar tendencies, started calling him Jabba the Butt, just because. It was straight-up nuts.
OK, people suck, but what were his options? O had to do something. Twenty-four/seven at a computer, writing sci-fi monsterpieces, darting out to the Student Center every now and then to play video games, talking about girls but never actually touching one — what kind of life was that? For fuck’s sake, we were at Rutgers — Rutgers was just girls everywhere, and there was Oscar, keeping me up at night talking about the Green Lantern. Wondering aloud, If we were orcs, wouldn’t we, at a racial level, imagine ourselves to look like elves?
Dude had to do something.
He did, too.
He quit.
It was a nutty thing really. Four days a week we were running. I put in five miles myself but with him it was just a little every day. Thought he was doing OK, all things considered. Building, you know? And then right in the middle of one of our jogs. Out on George Street, and I looked back over my shoulder, saw that he had stopped. Sweat running down everywhere. Are you having a heart attack? I am not, he said. Then why ain’t you running? I’ve decided to run no more. Why the fuck not? It’s not going to work, Yunior. It ain’t going to work if you don’t want it to work. I know it’s not going to work. Come on, Oscar, pick up your goddamn feet. But he shook his head. He tried to squeeze my hand and then walked to the Livingston Ave. stop, took the Double E home. The next morning I prodded him with my foot but he didn’t stir.
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 j
íbara 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.
I said, So, what’s up with you and Scarypants?
Nothing.
What the hell you two talk about?
Items of litle note. Something about his tone made me realize that he knew about her scorching me. The fucker. I said, Well, good luck, Wao. I just hope she doesn’t sacrifice you to Beelzebub or anything.
All March they hung out. I tried not to pay attention, but we were all in the same dorm so it was hard not to. Later, Lola would tell me that the two of them even started going to movies together. They saw Ghost and this other terrible piece of ass called Hardware. Went to Franklin Diner afterward, where Oscar tried his best not to eat for three. I wasn’t around for most of this nonsense; I was out chasing the pussy and delivering pool tables and out with the boys on the weekends. Did it kill me that he was spending time with such a fly bitch? Of course it did. I always thought of myself as the Kaneda of our dyad, but here I was playing Tetsuo.
Jenni really put it on for Oscar. Liked to walk arm in arm with him, and hug him every chance she got. Oscar’s adoration like the light of a new sun. Being the center of a universe something that suited her. She read him all her poetry (Thou art the muse of the muses, I heard him say) and showed him her little dumb sketches (which he fucking hung on our door) and told him all about her life (which he dutifully noted in his journal). Living with an aunt because her mom moved to Puerto Rico to be with her new husband when she was seven. Spent from eleven on up making runs into the Village. Lived in a squat the year before she came to college, the Crystal Palace, it was called.
Was I really reading my roommate’s journal behind his back? Of course I was.
Oh, but you should have seen the O. He was like I’d never seen him, love the transformer. Started dressing up more, ironing his shirts every morning. Dug this wooden samurai sword out of his closet and in the early morning stood out on the lawn of Demarest, bare-chested, slicing down a billion imaginary foes. Even started running again! Well, jogging. Oh, now you can run, I carped, and he saluted me with a brisk upsweep of his hand as he struggled past.
I should have been happy for the Wao. I mean, honestly, who was I to begrudge Oscar a little action? Me, who was fucking with not one, not two, but three fine-ass bitches at the same time and that wasn’t even counting the side-sluts I scooped at the parties and the clubs; me, who had pussy coming out my ears? But of course I begrudged the motherfucker. A heart like mine, which never got any kind of affection growing up, is terrible above all things. Was then, is now. Instead of encouraging him, I scowled when I saw him with La Jablesse; instead of sharing my women wisdom I told him to watch himself — in other words I was a player-hater.
Me, the biggest player of them all.
I shouldn’t have wasted the energy. Jenni always had boys after her. Oscar only a lull in the action, and one day I saw her out on the Demarest lawn talking to the tall punk kid who used to hang around Demarest, wasn’t a resident, crashed with whatever girl would let him. Thin as Lou Reed, and as arrogant. He was showing her a yoga thing and she was laughing. Not two days later I found Oscar in his bed crying. Yo, homes, I said, fingering my weight belt. What the hell is the matter with you?
Leave me alone, he lowed.
Did she diss you? She dissed you, didn’t she?
Leave me alone, he yelled. LEAVE. ME. ALONE.
Figured it would be like always. A week of mooning and then back to the writing. The thing that carried him. But it wasn’t like always. I knew something was wrong when he stopped writing. Oscar never stopped writing — loved writing the way I loved cheating — just lay in bed and stared at the SDF-I. Ten days of him all fucked up, of him saying shit like, I dream about oblivion like other people dream of good sex, got me a little worried. So I copied his sister’s number in Madrid and called her on the sly. Took me like a half-dozen tries and two million vales before I got through.
What do you want?
Don’t hang up, Lola. It’s about Oscar.
She called him that night, asked him what was going on, and of course he told her. Even though I was sitting right there.
Mister, she commanded, you need to let it go.
I can’t, he whimpered. My heart is overthrown.
You have to, and so on, until at the end of two hours he promised her that he would try. Come on, Oscar, I said after giving him twenty minutes to stew. Let’s go play some video games. He shook his head, unmoved. I will play Street Fighter no more.
Well? I said to Lola later on the phone.
I don’t know, she said. He gets like this sometimes.
What do you want me to do?
Just watch him for me, OK?
Never got the chance. Two weeks later, La Jablesse gave Oscar the coup de friendship: he walked in on her while she was ‘entertaining’ the punk, caught them both naked, probably covered with blood or so
mething, and before she could even say, Get out, he went berserk. Called her a whore and attacked her walls, tearing down her posters and throwing her books everywhere. I found out because some whitegirl ran up and said, Excuse me, but your stupid roommate is going insane, and I had to bolt upstairs and put him in a headlock. Oscar, I hollered, calm down, calm down. Leave me the fuck alone, he shrieked, trying to stomp down on my feet.
It was pretty horrible. As for punkboy, apparently dude jumped right out the window and ran all the way to George Street. Buttnaked.
That was Demarest for you. Never a dull fucking moment.
To make a long story short, he had to attend counseling to keep from losing his housing, couldn’t go to the second floor for nothing; but now everybody in the dorm thought he was some kind of major psycho. The girls especially stayed away from him. As for La Jablesse, she was graduating that year, so a month later they relocated her to the river dorms and called it even. I didn’t really see her again except once while I was on the bus and she was out on the street, walking into Scott Hall with these dominatrix boots.
And that’s how our year ended. Him vacated of hope and tapping at the computer, me being asked in the hall how I liked dorming with Mr. Crazyman, and me asking back how their ass would like dorming with my foot? A lame couple of weeks. When it came time to re-up at the dorm, me and O didn’t even talk about it. My boys were still stuck in their moms’ cribs so I had to take my chances with the lottery again and this time I hit the fucking jackpot, ended up with a single in Frelinghuysen. When I told Oscar that I was leaving Demarest he pulled himself out of his depression long enough to look astounded, like he was expecting something else. I figured — I stammered, but before I could say another word, he said, It’s OK, and then, as I was turning away he grabbed my hand and shook it very formally: Sir, it’s been an honor.
