Best African American Fiction by E. Lynn Harris

Author:E. Lynn Harris [Harris, E. Lynn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-553-90605-9
Publisher: Bantam Books
Published: 2009-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE BRIEF WONDROUS

LIFE OF OSCAR WAO

Junot Díaz

GHETTONERD AT THE END OF THE WORLD 1974-1987

THE GOLDEN AGE

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody's always going on about—he wasn't no home- run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.

And except for one period early in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very un-Dominican of him).

He was seven then.

In those blessed days of his youth, Oscar was something of a Casanova. One of those preschool loverboys who was always trying to kiss the girls, always coming up behind them during a merengue and giving them the pelvic pump, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it any chance he got. Because in those days he was (still) a “normal” Dominican boy raised in a “typical” Dominican family, his nascent pimp- liness was encouraged by blood and friends alike. During parties—and there were many many parties in those long- ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks—some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip- motism of the adults.

You should have seen him, his mother sighed in her Last Days. He was our little Porfirio Rubirosa.1*

All the other boys his age avoided the girls like they were a bad case of Captain Trips. Not Oscar. The little guy loved himself the females, had “girlfriends” galore. (He was a stout kid, heading straight to fat, but his mother kept him nice in haircuts and clothes, and before the proportions of his head changed he ‘d had these lovely flashing eyes and these cute- ass cheeks, visible in all his pictures.) The girls—his sister Lola's friends, his mother's friends, even their neighbor, Mari Colón, a thirtysomething postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a bell for an ass—all purportedly fell for him. Ese muchacho está bueno! (Did it hurt that he was earnest and clearly attention- deprived? Not at all!) In the DR during summer visits to his family digs in Baní he was the worst, would stand in front of Nena Inca's house and call out to passing women—Tú eres guapa! Tú eres guapa!—until a Seventh- day Adventist complained to his grandmother and she shut down the hit parade lickety- split. Muchacho del diablo! This is not a cabaret!

It truly was a Golden Age for Oscar, one that reached its apotheosis in the fall of his seventh year, when he had two little girlfriends at the same time, his first and only ménage à trois. With Maritza Chacón and Olga Polanco.

Maritza was Lola's friend. Long- haired and prissy and so pretty she could have played young Dejah Thoris. Olga, on the other hand, was no friend of the family. She lived in the house at the end of the block

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