Although not everyone in an audience can identify with the particular life and childhood of a Dominican growing up in urban New Jersey, there is no question that the experiences written by Junot Diaz in his short story collection, Drown, resonate with young people even without direct connection. Although the stories retain their specificity to the culture that Diaz is clearly familiar with, the experiences transcend culture and because of their nature, are something that every young adult has their own version of. Prominently in stories surrounding relationships; whether those are boyfriend and girlfriend, mother and father, father and son etc. This is the importance of an audience, to immerse themselves fully in a work until it becomes significant to a whole rather than a specific person or racial group. It’s undeniably imposing, but if our collective unconscious exists as Carl Jung suggested, it’s a natural thing. Maybe we don’t know anything about Edison, New Jersey, or how to date a browngirl, blackgirl, whitegirl, or halfie, but we do have our own set of knowledge on similar subject matters.
How to Fuck Around with an Eighteen Year-Old, a Twenty One Year-Old, or Twenty Four Year-Old.
Dating isn’t something that has ever been discussed at your house, so when one of them wants to ‘hang out’, a kind of panic sets in. Your older brother is almost completely asexual so you don’t have any previous reactions to go by, and you’re fairly sure your happily married, upper-middle class parents and their respective masters degree brains wouldn’t actually mind if you had a boyfriend, but your fear of disapproval is overwhelming. Not to mention you don’t really have an interest in having a steady boyfriend; you’d much rather live out every parents’ inherent fear and just fuck around with every boy that smiles at you. Maybe it’s the low self-esteem, the memory of the seventeen years you spent as the ugly un-fuckable kid, but that’s irrelevant for now. You need to get out of the house, or get him in, completely unnoticed.
You’re eighteen now, so whatever you do, it’s legal, but you’re fairly sure that you would be imprisoned and waterboarded for life by the snoring tyrants upstairs if your mom has one of her common bouts of insomnia and comes downstairs while you’re naked on the basement futon with a guy they’ve never previously seen or heard of, so it’s vital if he’s coming over to your place that the arrival happens between the hours of one-thirty and two-forty five a.m. The eighteen year old won’t like this as much because he doesn’t have his own place to go back to yet, and like you, needs to worry about curfews and noticing parents. Although, as he is a boy and unable to get pregnant, his non-psychotic parents are much more lenient when it comes to these rules. The twenty four year old will also have a problem because he has been working all day and needs to work his second job tomorrow afternoon, so he’d much rather spend a Friday night at the bars mellowing out with his coworkers and be in his own bed by two or three, ready for sleep. The twenty one year old will most likely agree to come over, despite that fact that he enjoys his newfound ability to drink where or whenever he pleases, but as it is a recent freedom, he is sympathetic to your predicament.
Unlocking the back door is an art; it needs to occur as your parents are going to bed so that it’s after their routine door-lock check, but before they are asleep, because the creaking sound echoes through twisty staircase and almost directly into their room, potentially causing them to wake up. Unlocking the door must occur before the arrival of any boy, so that noise at your allotted time slot is minimal. Your staircase is essentially built to catch you in the act; it creaks, it echoes, and as mentioned before, leads almost directly to your parents’ room. There’s a door at the top which you can close to lessen any noise, but you can’t close it completely because your cat has the same sleeping schedule as your parents, but if he needs to go to his litter box in the middle of the night, he needs to push the door open with his paw and get through that way.
Once you’ve successfully completed the task of unlocking the back door and closing the door at the top of the staircase, you jump into the shower. This serves two purposes: first, the obvious need to freshen up (no matter how clean, soft, and hairless you already are), but secondly to avoid any blame from a door found unlocked. You were in the shower, it wasn’t your fault. The shower also wastes time between the falling-asleep period and the arrival period, so that you don’t drive yourself insane obsessing over what your house smells like to other people, because you’re aware that every house has its own smell, and your mom is a slob and you assume the worst; that your house smells like cat litter and decaying vegetable chow mein.
The shower is excruciatingly thorough, usually lasting an average of forty-five minutes, when the water is cold by the final rinse of your artificially colored hair. You hate body hair more than anyone you know, and you assume that all men are the same way, so shaving or plucking nearly every surface including your forearms takes a good chunk of time. You get mildly annoyed when you realize that your shampoo and conditioner aren’t the same brand or scent, but you get over this after realizing that your lotion and perfume will override any olfactory confusion caused by your hair. Once you are dried off, it goes in order; volumizing hair mousse, unscented lotion for sensitive skin, and perfume. In terms of scent, it’s between Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani; Britney’s Curious is much more feminine, and Gwen’s L is a little more indie/artsy smelling. You wear Britney for the eighteen year old, because he’s not quite as mature and probably has an idea of how girls should smell. You wear Gwen for the twenty one year old, because you met him at the café where he worked and know he digs the art college chick vibe. For the twenty four year old you rely on your shampoo and hair mousse, because that’s just natural and he’ll probably still be slightly buzzed, so he’s less likely to notice or care. Clothing choice goes along the same lines as perfume smell, so it’s much easier than you’d think. For underwear, age is irrelevant. Bra and panties don’t have to match, but it’s better if they at least compliment each other (and, of course, your body) aesthetically. Black is always in.
From that point on, preparation is not too difficult. Hair must be blow-dried and straightened as far away from sleeping parents as possible, as noise level is an issue throughout the experience. You could do your makeup in your sleep, although shade of eye shadow varies slightly depending on what color your hair is that week. Tinted lip balm is ideal as it tastes good, does not smudge, and you remember when the twenty one year old complimented you on the softness of your lips. You remember that sometimes the twenty four year old calls you ‘fish eyes’ and thus decide to wear slightly less eyeliner to avoid this, although he’ll probably call you that regardless.
If there is time in between the end of your routine and the ETA, you spend it silently in the basement rec room, reading celebrity gossip blogs and listening to that day’s favorite song, while your phone set to vibrate sits sleepily on your chest, so you’ll be aware of it the second you are contacted.
Finally your phone buzzes and arrival is near, but there is speculation whether to go out or stay in. All of them are most likely to want to simply hang out and “watch a movie,” rather than go out and do anything, but the twenty one year old is more apt to wanting to get something to eat, in which case you will go to the shitty Denny’s ten minutes away where you watch him eat his jalapeno cheddar burger with extra fiesta ranch sauce as you sip coyly on the sub-par coffee.
Aside from the slight chance that the Denny’s will be involved in the night’s events, there will no doubt be a movie involved. Your selection is limited because your brother took most of the guy-friendly movies with him when he went back to college early, so your collection consists predominantly of guilty pleasure romantic comedies, episodes of PeeWee’s Playhouse, and Zodiac, which you have an almost creepy obsession with. Naturally, they’re all bound to pick Zodiac, except for the twenty four year old, who will inexplicably want to get in touch with his inner child and pick your copy of Disney’s Aladdin.
There is an awkwardness between the time you put in the movie and when you get down to business, no matter who you are dealing with. The twenty four year old will try to enlighten you with his knowledge of politics and atheism. You nod uncomfortably, but it is clear you are much less educated on these subjects than he is, and there is a moment when he recognizes your age and makes a crack about it. You crack your knuckles out of habit, and he asks you if it was a threat. You tell him no, and wonder when he’ll cut the shit and start kissing you. Eventually you give up waiting for him and cuddle up next to him, when he’ll put his forehead on yours and go from there.
What you watch and what you chose to wear will soon become meaningless as they are ignored completely and quickly turn into background noise and a twisted pile next to your couch, respectively. What happens next is essentially the same, and none of them are ridiculously disappointed when you tell them that you don’t actually fuck on the first date, probably because the eighteen year old is still unsure of his abilities, the twenty four year old thinks it’s a little creepy that you’re six years younger than him anyway, and the twenty one year old is content with emotional pillow talk about his ex-girlfriend who broke his heart (you’re pretty sure you’re just a rebound, but you’re not looking for anything serious, so you’re content). Each of them will ask you what you’re thinking about, but you don’t respond honestly because they would all make fun of you for realizing that burps are like farts coming out of your mouth.
As the sun rises and it’s getting time for the departure, you stand up, half re-clothed, kissing each other for a while longer. The eighteen year old will probably allude to the fact that he knows you’re not really the relationship type, but he thinks that he could change that. You smile and politely say “Maybe,” but for now your brain and its finely tuned senses are focused entirely on the footsteps you swear you just heard upstairs.
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