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?
The analogy to "Sonny's Blues" is striking on a number of levels, but in particular it makes me think of the lipstick art you mention, which always strikes me as one of the saddest details in a sad story. We see the narrator admiring her art, a glimmer of human expression in this most inhumane setting, and we get a glimpse of the alternate life Aurora could maybe have, under different circumstances. Her drug abuse isn't connected to creativity and "getting by" as strongly as Sonny's is, but there is this suggestive glimmer of a young woman with potential to say something with her life, degraded by circumstance to drawing pornographic caricatures on a crack-house wall.
ReplyDeleteThe narrator of this story is not Yunior, though: it's subtle, but his name is Lucero (there's the section where she talks about naming the baby after him). He's alluded to in "Drown" by the other drug dealer who narrates that story, so we know they live in the same neighborhood. But the self-conscious would-be "player" Yunior we see in "How to Date . . ." is not this guy; he's not anxious about *Aurora* stopping over for a "date." Lucero and Aurora's dates go much differently, from what we see in this story.