The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

loveyou craziness. (You’re only scaring the poor girls, O.) Got him to start watching his diet and to stop talking crazy negative—I am ill fated, I am going to perish a virgin, I’m lacking in pulchritude —at least while I was around, I did. (Positive thoughts, I stressed, positive thoughts, motherfucker!) Even brought him out with me and the boys. Not anything serious—just out for a drink when it was a crowd of us and his monstro- ness wouldn’t show so much. (The boys hating—What’s next? We start inviting out the homeless?)

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 fiance 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, quien 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