Drown

“I’m from around here, [Ysrael] said. The mask twitched. I realized he was smiling and then my brother brought his arm around and smashed the bottle on top of his head. It exploded, the thick bottom spinning away like a crazed eyeglass and I said, Holy fucking shit. Ysrael stumbled once and slammed into a fence post that had been sunk into the side of the road. Glass crumbled off [Ysrael’s] mask. He spun towards me, then fell down on his stomach. Rafa kicked him in his side. Ysrael seemed not to notice. He had his hands flat in the dirt and was concentrating on pushing himself up. Roll him on his back, my brother said and we did, pushing like crazy. Rafa took off his mask and threw it spinning into the grass.” 

In this quote, Yunior is in the middle of a friendly conversation with Ysrael when Rafa suddenly and savagely attacks Ysrael, which he had been planning to do all along. This climactic point of the story brings both Ysrael’s status as the community scapegoat and Yunior’s outsider status into sharp relief. The two boys have easily slipped into momentary and natural camaraderie, due not only to their outsider status but their mutual innocence and desire for connection. This quietly and subtly tender moment is brutally interrupted by Rafa’s senseless violence and the herd/mob mentality which guides his desire to irrationally hurt Ysrael, who has been made an outcast due to his physical deformity. At this very early point in the narrative, we see Yunior, the innocent and sensitive younger sibling, foiled by Rafa’s brute, normative, and normalized hypermasculinity. 

“I didn’t mind these summers, wouldn’t forget them the way Rafa would. Back home in the Capital, Rafa had his own friends, a bunch of tígueres who liked to knock down or neighbors who scrawled chocha and toto on walls and curbs. Back in the Capital he rarely said anything to me except Shut up, pendejo. Unless, of course, he was mad and then he had about five hundred routines he liked to lay on me. Most of them had to do with my complexion, my hair, the size of my lips. It’s the Haitian, he’d say to his buddies. Hey Señor Haitian, Mami found you on the border and only took you in because she felt sorry for you.” 

In this quote, Díaz fleshes out the way Yunior and Rafa foil each other. Yunior directly states he is much more emotionally aware and invested in his relationship with his brother than Rafa is. Yunior appreciates the summers spent in the campo, and won’t forget them the way Rafa will, because they afford him the opportunity to be close to his brother, who, in an enactment of masculinity, acts like a delinquent thug while they are in their normal home. Importantly, Díaz hints at the anti-black racism that animates the political conflict between the Dominican Republic and the predominantly black nation of Haiti. By giving Rafa a line in which he baldly insults Yunior’s phenotypically black characteristics and utilizes “Haitian” as virtually a racial slur, he invokes the casual anti-black racism that is par for the course in Dominican parlance. 

“Rafa had already started inching away from me. I’d once told him I considered him a low-down chicken-shit for moving out of the way every time Papi was going to smack me. Collateral damage, Rafa had said. Ever heard of it?

“Chickenshit or not, I didn’t dare glance at him. Papi was old-fashioned; he expected your undivided attention when you were getting your ass whupped. You couldn’t look him in the eye either—that wasn’t allowed. Better to stare at his belly button, which was perfectly round and immaculate.”

In this quote, Díaz brings into sharp relief the way in which Ramón’s brutal enforcement of hypermasculinity drives a wedge between Yunior and Rafa. Yunior, the brother who is singled out for his abuse due to his failure to meet standards of masculinity, is abandoned by Rafa, who fears the wrath of his father and is more naturally adept at performing a masculine identity. 

“About two hours later the women laid out the food and like always nobody but the kids thanked them. It must be some Dominican tradition or something.” 

With his characteristic ability to compound social commentary, bitterly sarcastic humor, and the rendering of an authentic voice, Díaz here mounts a biting critique of Dominican patriarchy. The women, who have worked very hard to make a delicious meal for the party, are not acknowledged or thanked by anyone but the children. Yunior, sardonically observing this as a part of Dominican culture, articulates that to him, patriarchal abuse of women is an ingrained and accepted part of Dominican culture.

“In the darkness, I saw that Papi had a hand on Mami’s knee and that the two of them were quiet and still. They weren’t slumped back or anything; they were both wide awake, bolted into their seats. I couldn’t see either of their faces and no matter how hard I tried I could not imagine their expressions. Neither of them moved. Every now and then the van was filled with the bright rush of somebody else’s headlights. Finally I said, Mami, and they both looked back, already knowing what was happening.” 

In this quote, Díaz crystallizes one of the central themes of the story. He hints that Yunior’s propensity to vomit in his father’s van is not only a physical ailment, but is also a manifestation of the child’s confusion and internal conflict. Ramón has, very unfairly, saddled Yunior with the responsibility of keeping his affair a secret. At an earlier point in the story, Yunior confesses that he himself is unsure of why he keeps his father’s secret, and says that he is perhaps partially motivated by protectiveness of his mother. The image of the two adults, restrained and with inscrutable or obscured facial expressions, is a symbol of Yunior’s inability to fully comprehend the world of adults, despite the way he is mercilessly thrown into it by his father. The simple physical contact that the two engage in is a poignant image that speaks to Yunior’s desire to keep his family intact. Its minimalism also communicates a kind of fragility that speaks to Yunior’s apprehension of the disintegration of his family. The final image of him asking for his mother, and then vomiting, represents the culmination of Yunior’s anxiety and poses the vomiting as a result of all of the emotional burdens that have been unfairly and prematurely placed upon him. 

“She looked at her drawings. I made up this whole new life in there. You should have seen it. The two of us had kids, a big blue house, hobbies, the whole fucking thing. She ran her nails over my side. A week from then she would be asking me again, begging actually, telling me all the good things we’d do and after a while I hit her and made blood come out of her ear like a worm but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was fine.”

In this quote, Aurora speaks to Lucero about her time in what is euphemistically called the Quiet Room, but is, in reality, a solitary confinement ward in a juvenile detention center. She has drawn vulgar images on the wall of an apartment in which the two are momentarily squatting. These are the “drawings” that she is looking at in the beginning of the quote. She articulates a decidedly middle-class fantasy here—a nuclear family and white picket fence Americana image. This fantasy sharply contrasts with their day-to-day reality—they are, after all, squatting. She is a drug addict and possible sex worker, and their relationship is full of dysfunction and physical abuse. Here, Díaz highlights the two characters’ poverty and the inaccessibility of the American Dream. Lucero finds himself mired in a cycle of addiction and abuse. His love for Aurora is tethered to an idealized, middle-class American fantasy that remains completely out of reach. Through this depiction, Díaz highlights the insidiousness of the pervasive American narrative of success, and the way that this narrow conception of family and stability invades the lives of both Aurora and Lucero. Here, the primary function of the American Dream is not as aspirational and attainable goal, but as bitterly unreachable and taunting delusion. 

“I would see him coming from my trees. A man with swinging hands and eyes like mine. He’d have gold on his fingers, cologne on his neck, a silk shirt, good leather shoes. The whole barrio would come out to greet him. He’d kiss Mami and Rafa and shake Abuelo’s reluctant hand and then he’d see me behind everyone else. What’s wrong with that one? He’d ask and Mami would say, He doesn’t know you. Squatting down so that his pale yellow dress socks showed, he’d trace the scars on my arms and on my head. Yunior, he’d finally say, his stubbled face in front of mine, his thumb tracing a circle on my cheek.” 

In this final passage of the story, Yunior pictures himself watching his father arrive at his home while Yunior is perched in the trees he is fond of climbing. The careful, precise detail with which Yunior renders a father that he does not know speaks to the deep longing the child feels for his absent father. It communicates that Yunior’s fantasies about reunion with his father are dearly imagined. The small, tender power of Ramón saying Yunior’s name in this fantasy speaks to Yunior’s simple-yet-profound longing to be claimed by his father. And the fact, again, that all of this is an imagined reverie drives home Yunior’s sense of loss. The absence of his father is a deeply-felt wound. 

“I remember that when the rent-a-cop tapped his nightstick against the fender and said, You little shits better come out here real slow, I started to cry. Beto didn’t say a word, his face stretched out and gray, his hand squeezing mine, the bones in our fingers pressing together.” 

In this passage, the narrator of “Drown” recounts the moment in which he and Beto are apprehended by a mall cop for shoplifting. The fact that the narrator is crying in this moment poses a crucial break in the young man’s masculine posturing, and demonstrates Díaz’s commitment, throughout the collection, to depicting young men’s’ struggles with their own vulnerability, in the manner those struggles relate to the societal pressure to perform machismo. The simple yet emotionally-intense image of the two boys’ bones pressing together here both demonstrates the deep emotional intimacy of their connection and foreshadows the physical intimacy which occurs later in the story. 

“After I was done, he laid his head in my lap. I wasn’t asleep or awake, but caught somewhere in between, rocked slowly back and forth the way surf holds junk against the shore, rolling it over and over. In three weeks he was leaving. Nobody can touch me, he kept saying. We’d visited the school and I’d seen how beautiful the campus was, with all the students drifting from dorm to class. I thought of how in high school our teachers loved to crowd us into their lounge every time a space shuttle took off from Florida. One teacher, whose family had two grammar schools named after it, compared us to the shuttles. A few of you are going to make it. Those are the orbiters. But the majority of you are just going to burn out. Going nowhere. He dropped his hand onto his desk. I could already see myself losing altitude, fading, the earth spread out beneath me, hard and bright.” 

In this quote, the narrator hovers in semi-consciousness after being with Beto. His choice to liken himself to junk held captive by the surf speaks to the way the young man feels swallowed and trapped by at least two things. For one, he feels pinned and overwhelmed by his homosexual desire, which he will spend much of the narrative burying and denying. Secondly, as the rest of the quote demonstrates, he feels constrained and limited by a life in which he is essentially told he is nothing. Beto has a beautiful campus which he will run to in order to escape this life. The narrator, having spent much of his high school career truant, will stay mired in the poverty and hopelessness of his life. Too, the image of the condescending teachers, here, raises the question of injustice. Díaz seems to be posing a question: how is the narrator supposed to have felt any sense of motivation when his teachers essentially told him that he was bound for failure?

“Homegirl was too beautiful, too high-class for a couple of knuckleheads like us. Never saw her in a t-shirt or without jewelry. And her boyfriend, olvídate. That nigger could have been a model; hell, they both could have been models, which was what they probably were; considering that I never heard one word pass between them about a job or a fucking boss. People like these were untouchables to me, raised on some other planet and then transplanted into my general vicinity to remind me how bad I was living.” 

In this quote, the narrator explicitly communicates his sense of inadequacy and nakedly reveals the motivation for his voyeuristic engagement with his downstairs neighbor. The couples’ beauty and their glamour make him feel ugly and small, by comparison. His decision to spy on “Girlfriend” is thus a convenient outlet for his lack of self-esteem and a way for him to displace and project his general feeling that his own life is shabby and not enough. 

“These two had a thing about the bathroom. Each one of his visits ended up there. Which was fine by me, it was where I could hear them best. I don’t know why I started following her life, but it seemed like a good thing to do. Most of the time I thought people, even at their worst, were pretty fucking boring. I guess I wasn’t busy with anything else. Especially not women. I was taking time off, waiting for the last of my Loretta wreckage to drift out of sight.” 

Moving from a generalized sense of failure, the narrator here explicitly ties his spying on Girlfriend and Boyfriend to his own romantic failure. Clearly, his own breakup has created feelings of failure and inadequacy inside of him. Instead of facing his breakup and its resulting emotional fallout head-on, he finds another situation in which to wallow in his displaced and projected feelings of shortcoming. Although he explicitly states he was not busy with women, and that he was instead taking time off, these are white lies that the narrator uses to cover the fact that he was torn apart by his breakup. Tellingly, he passively waits for “the last of [his] Loretta wreckage to drift out of sight,” meaning that instead of directly engaging with the emotional labor needed to resolve his feelings and heal himself, he is taking the more cowardly route of projecting his unresolved feelings onto Girlfriend and Boyfriend. Given the sustained engagement with masculinity in this collection of stories, Díaz is clearly depicting the emotional cravenness of toxic masculinity. The propensity of the narrator to evade and project his emotions onto others is a prototypically-masculine behavior that speaks to the dysfunction of the notion that society expects men to be stoic and strong. 

“You should see our customers. Doctors, diplomats, surgeons, presidents of universities, ladies in slacks and silk tops who sport thin watches you could trade in for a car, who wear comfortable leather shoes. Most of them prepare for us by laying down a path of yesterday’s Washington Post from the front door to the game room. I make them pick it all up. I say: Carajo, what if we slip? Do you know what two hundred pounds of slate could do to a floor? The threat of property damage puts the chip-chop in their step.” 

In this quote, the narrator signals his intelligent, observant perceptions of his class contexts. He understands that his customers have more money than he can ever hope to have, and he depicts the careless disregard that these customers display for his own physical safety. The only thing that truly moves them is concern for their own property. 

“A hundred-buck haul’s not unusual for me and back in the day, when the girlfriend used to pick me up, I’d buy her anything she wanted, dresses, silver rings, lingerie. Sometimes I blew it all on her. She didn’t like the stealing but hell, we weren’t made out of loot and I liked going into a place and saying, Jeva, pick out anything, it’s yours. This is the closest I’ve come to feeling rich.” 

In this quote, the narrator reminisces about his lost relationship. He tells us that he used to steal from the cash register, which afforded him the only opportunity he ever had to feel like a wealthy man. Here, Díaz crystallizes the class conflict that quietly percolates throughout the story, asserting that class mobility is directly tied to hypermasculinity. The narrator understands that his manhood is diminished by his poverty. So, he overcompensates for his perceived lack by letting his then-girlfriend engage in the only material excess that he can—the spending of stolen money. 

“A month before the zángano, I went to her house, a friend visiting a friend, and her parents asked me how business was, as if I balanced the books or something. Business is outstanding, I said. That’s really wonderful to hear, the father said. You betcha.” 

Here, Díaz showcases his ear for bitingly sarcastic humor. “Zángano” is the narrator’s insult for his ex-girlfriend’s new, more financially-successful, white boyfriend. In this scene, the narrator uses sarcasm to underscore the sense of inadequacy that he feels while being questioned by his ex-girlfriend’s father. He works a manual-labor, working-class job, and acutely feels that the language the man uses to discuss his job is more befitting to a white-collar position. Consequently, he hams it up by using sardonically white-collar language in his reply—“Business is outstanding” and “You betcha”. Although it is shrouded in humor, the language choices capture the narrator’s class anxiety and speak to his sense of failure. 

“Most of our customers have names like this, court case names: Wooley, Maynard, Gass, Binder, but the people from my town, our names, you see on convicts or coupled together on boxing cards.”

Here, Díaz continues to develop the depiction of class conflict that serves as the central theme of this particular story. Through the simple comparison of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant names that emblazon the delivery slips with the ethnic names that populate his own community, the narrator speaks volumes about the cultural and economic contexts in which he finds himself. He acutely understands that within the economic and cultural world of America, the white names on his delivery slips speak to privilege and wealth, while names like his own speak to neither of those things. The subtle image of names like his own being paired on boxing cards also implies that, on a certain level, the narrator understands that people like him—working class people of color—are pitted against each other in the cultural and economic system of America. 

“Take down any embarrassing photos of your family in the campo, especially the one with the half-naked kids dragging a goat on a rope leash. The kids are your cousins and by now they’re old enough to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. Hide the pictures of yourself with an Afro.”

In this passage, Yunior issues himself instructions for prepping the house for the arrival of a girl. He coaches himself to hide any pictures of himself and his family in the Dominican countryside, as well as any pictures of himself with an Afro. He is issuing these instructions to himself because he feels that these photos will stigmatize him, marking him as black, and, therefore, other.

Here, Díaz crystallizes the central conflict of the story. Yunior feels that idealized masculinity is inextricably linked to an assimilated American identity. He feels this almost subconsciously, and he feels it so acutely that it is more powerful than his loyalty to his cousins. It is more powerful than the guilt that he clearly feels for being ashamed of them. It is more powerful than any sense of self he might glean from his true personal history and ancestry. 

“Don’t panic. Say, Hey, no problem Run a hand through your hair like the whiteboys do even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.”

This quote represents a repeated assertion of many of the things the previous quote communicates. Here, Yunior baldly articulates that white masculinity is the standard to aspire to. He humorously points out that his own phenotype (here, African hair) sharply precludes him from accessing standardized and idealized masculinity. 

“You have nice eyes, she might say. Tell her that you love her hair, that you love her skin, her lips, because, in truth, you love them more than you love our own.” 

In this quote, Yunior hypothetically addresses a white girl. Yunior’s internal monologue is profoundly influenced by a society which tells him that he is inadequate, that his racial phenotype marks him as undesirable and less masculine, and that he should aspire to both in order to obtain attain whiteness in his own appearance, and possess it through his sexual/romantic partners. 

“Today he buys Kaliman, who takes no shit and wears a turban. If his face were covered he’d be perfect. He watches for opportunities from corners, away from people. He has his power of INVISIBILITY and no one can touch him. Even his tío, the one who guards the dams, strolls past and says nothing.” 

This quote exemplifies the way that Ysrael’s narrative is formatted to mimic a comic-book, superhero aesthetic. It portrays Ysrael looking for himself in comic books, and seeing himself in Kaliman. The images of powerful, vengeful underdogs that proliferate in comic books provide a cathartic image for Ysrael to grasp onto. The “invisibility” that he is forced to adopt as a matter of survival in a society in which he is relentlessly targeted for harassment and abuse here morphs into what at least Ysrael perceives as a superpower. 

“He says STRENGTH and the fat boy flies off him and he’s running down the street and the others are following. You better leave him alone, the owner of the beauty shop says but no one ever listens to her, not since her husband left her for a Haitian. He makes it back to the church and slips inside and hides. The boys throw rocks against the door of the church but then Eliseo, the groundskeeper says, Boys, prepare for hell, and runs his machete on the sidewalk.” 

This quote crystallizes the contradictions and tensions that provide the psychosocial backdrop of the story. Again, we see Ysrael finding solace by picturing himself as the epic hero of his very own superhero story—a reversal of his material reality. We also see the cruelty that is enacted upon a person who is trying to defend him—the owner of the beauty shop. Ysrael’s lofty fantasies about himself thus come into direct conflict with the very banal and inescapable cruelty of the society that surrounds him. Eliseo the groundskeeper bringing “hell” to a house of God also plays into the topsy-turvy conceit of Ysrael escaping his life in the shadows as an outcast by imagining himself as a larger-than-life superhero. 

“He arrived in Miami at four in the morning in a roaring poorly booked plane. He passed easily through customs, having brought nothing but some clothes, a towel, a bar of soap, a razor, his money and a box of Chiclets in his pocket. The ticket to Miami had saved him money but he intended to continue on to Nueva York as soon as he could. Nueva York was the city of jobs, the city that had first called the Cubanos and their cigar industry, then the Bootstrap Puerto Ricans and now him.”

Here, Díaz provides an image of Ramón heavily inflected by vulnerability and pathos. The depiction of him arriving on a cheap red-eye flight with minimal belongings adds dimension to his character, which before this story was mostly composed of oppressive and domineering toxic masculinity. Here, too, Díaz articulates the allure and mythology of the American Dream in the manner it is peddled to immigrants of color. It is the pursuit of this dream that animates Ramón during this moment in the story, before the bitter realities of impoverished immigrant life have assailed him.

“With the radio tuned in and incoherent, he trimmed his mustache. No photos exist of his mustache days but it is easily imagined. Within an hour he was asleep. He was twenty-four. He didn’t dream about his familia and wouldn’t for many years. He dreamed instead of gold coins, like the ones that had been salvaged from the many wrecks about our island, stacked high as sugar cane.” 

Here, Yunior presents a richly-imagined portrait of his father, speaking to both his deep, innate compassion for his father and his own sensitive imagination. He demonstrates his love for his father, his understanding of his father’s youth, and his father’s vulnerability as a very young, non-English speaking immigrant who has been lured to America by the promise of untold riches.

“These men were federal marshals. Papi recognized them immediately as police; he knew the type. He studied their car and considered running into the woods behind him. His visa had expired five weeks earlier and if caught, he’d go home in chains. He’d heard plenty of tales about the North American police from other illegals, how they liked to beat you before they turned you over to la migra and how sometimes they just took your money and tossed you out toothless and on an abandoned road.” 

Yunior reflects on the brutal on-the-ground realities of racist policing that affect Ramón, disrupting the gilded fantasy visions of America that brought him to the country. This moment adds more dimension and depth to Ramón as a character.