The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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, Tú 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 Muñóz. 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 jíbara 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!