Love is living, living love

Love is real, real is love

Is Aurora a story of love, or addiction? Or both? Or neither? Or, or, or...

I take her hand and kiss it / 
Come on, I say
You aint said nothing about the last time
I can't remember no last time. I just remember you. 

Taken out of context, I'd say that's pretty romantic. It's deeply embedded in our cultural sense of romance that the concept involves sacrifice, forgiveness, traces of clemency. What was "the last time", though? The last time was bruised chests and scratched arms. Is this loving clemency, throwing memories of mutual (and highly personal) abuse overboard to service a very real and tangible love, or is this the cutter breaking into another pack of razors, a fresh page in a very old and trodden cyclical path of abuse?

Love is feeling, feeling love

Like many of the other stories in this collection, Aurora deals heavily with the feelings of nostalgia. Has there been a more powerful picture in Drown than the picture of Aurora painting lipstick figures on the walls of abandoned  houses with Yunior? It encapsulates "getting by"--the necessity to express oneself no matter the situation context, the randomness of youth, the intimacy of four walls and two individuals. It's something they shared together. It's deeply embedded in our cultural sense of romance that the concept involves the sharing of intimacy and expression with each other. Isn't that what this is?

Is the feeling of love that Yunior claims to have simply his mistaking "love" with fond recollection? Is there much of a difference?

I think the answer largely lays in how much Aurora has evolved. Is the post-juvie Aurora different from the lipstick artist? I got the sense that she has progressively fallen deeper into the pit of addiction and transience, and that Yunior is holding on to the past. Fond recollection of shared experience may be an important part of Love, but it is dependent on current-stability, which Yunior's/Aurora's relationship seems to lack.

Love is wanting to be loved

She comes around on Fridays. When they get stock.

She checks his pockets, breaks out the pipe when he sleeps.

He thinks about the other girls: The college girl with her own car, who came over right over after her games, in her uniform, mad at some other school for a bad layup or an elbow in the chin.

But then she wants him to promise her a love.

The other girls complain about the other team, Aurora complains about Yunior. Is Yunior addicted to the ridicule? To finger slamming? The property damage? It might not be what we consider love, but it IS attention. What's so different about Aurora's addiction to heroin versus Yunior addiction to a girl who breaks his shit, screams at him, and steals his money and drugs? Is there a difference?

Yunior insists that he loves her.

But how much can we trust someone who says "They're yelling because they're in love"?

How much can we trust someone who has to punch his nose to clear his head? Who wakes up bleeding in the tub after a night of Heroin and Beer in front of the TV with her, and then goes out immediately to find her again?

How much can we trust a relationship that convenes twice-a-month?

Let's think back to Sonny's Blues. Sonny says that the Heroin is just SOME PEOPLE'S way to kill the pain. The brother is against it because it's not HIS way. Am I blowing off this "love" because it's not my concept of love?

Or is making everything subjective total BS, and is this cycle of abuse a damaging addiction, and in no way "love"?

What the hell is love anyways?

Touch of Grey

A common thread that ties together various short stories in Junot Diaz's Drown is the socioeconomic position of the various narrators/main characters (excluding the scenes in the Dominican Republic which seem to be decidedly worse in regards to character wealth/income... "the only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo or to have been Haitian immigrants" and "it was only by skimping on our dinners that Mami could afford to purchase the Verminox" [Aguantando]). This general economic position is somewhere between absolute poverty and middle class... somewhere firmly settled into the lower class of socioeconomic society. Characters can afford new cars (Pathfinders, Volkswagens), drugs (weed/cigarettes), college (in some cases), "a new Zenith in the living room", televisions (that the kids watched Bruce Wayne on), clothes (the narrator in Edison, New Jersey says that he used to just walk into a store with his girlfriend and tell her to buy whatever she wants), drinks/food, etc. But they still have to use a dingy bulb-lit utility rooms as intimate spaces, don't or can't transport their families to the United States for years (I'm unsure whether the father couldn't or just didn't move his family earlier), and can't realistically hope to save up for even a pool table. As the narrator of Edison says, "two and a half years if I give up buying underwear and eat only pasta but even this figure's bogus. Money's never stuck to me, ever." This economic position makes sense when we consider the various jobs in the book: chocolate factory work, drug selling, 

This financial ambiguity might be said to give rise to, or at least associate itself with, other factors/aspects of the collection. For example, financial ambiguity (along with the repeated cycle of teaching abuse) might have a heavy impact on the instability of romantic relationships in the novel. To me, it seems like a web... you can't ignore the disconnectedness of it all.

If I had to describe Drown in one phrase, though, I would say the book is about "getting by". It doesn't seem like any of the main characters have grand dreams or any realistic possibility of advancing themselves. The height of many of the main character's dreaming is over lost girls. Despite this lack of mobility (and the lack of possibility for mobility), the characters in Drown find enjoyment in their work. They take pride in the very jobs that they're practically consigned too. The narrator of cut describes his weed dealing as such: "We're reliable and easygoing and that keeps us good with the older people... We work all hours of the day... I'm good for solo work...", and the narrator of Edison, New Jersey compares his construction of pool tables to Inca Roads, Medieval Cathedrals, and Roman Bathhouses. This pride in work is in effect a way to cope and "get by". This pride has the same place in many of the main characters' lives as Christian Orthodoxy had in the lives of Russian Peasants or spirituals had in the lives of slaves. At the end of the day, at the end of the day, every silver lining has a Touch of Grey:

I know the rent is in arrears
The dog has not been fed in years
It's even worse than it appears
But it's all right

The cow is giving kerosene
Kid can't read at seventeen
The words he knows are all obscene
But it's all right

I will get by
I will get by
I will get by
I will survive