I should be talking to you while I'm flipping.
Maybe it will seem less fucked up.
[LAUGHTER]
I wanted to thank--
first, I wanted to thank--
I actually wanted to thank some people who made this possible.
So you have to excuse me for this little opening.
But I definitely wanted to thank David Penn, where's David at?
David.
David busted his ass.
He's over at the Poetry Center and he really busted his ass
to make this happen.
He kept on top of me so I didn't miss my plane flight
or anything.
I'm really happy.
And I also wanted to thank the Poetry Center as well
for bringing me out and the--
I don't-- I-- never sure how it works, who sponsors what.
But I also wanted to thank Bob Houston over
at the MFA program.
He's been like really hospitable.
And I know that I wouldn't have made
as much time for a visiting guest as you did.
So it's really, really kind.
And also some of the students who came out today.
They were just-- they were cool.
They weren't like a pain in the fucking ass.
So it's always nice.
And there were some people who were extremely helpful
and I know I'm not going to shout you all out.
And one of the pleasures of coming out--
I've never been in this area--
but a very good friend of mine that we came up together
as both writers, and students, and activists.
Irvin Morris is in the audience, and I
hear he's a professor here now.
So drive Irvin crazy and take his classes.
Yes.
I remember you Irvin.
So I'm just going to read a piece
and I'm going to read half of a story.
I decided to write this story.
It just came out of--
it came out of--
I don't know if some of you from depending
on where you are if you're like from an island
or for some place where there is too much tourism.
People always want to tell you their tourism stories.
I'm from the Caribbean and everybody thinks
like, oh, you're Dominican.
I've been to Santo Domingo, and I'm like I don't give a fuck.
So--
[LAUGHTER]
--it came up from having to put up
with listening to everybody's tourism stories which
are always like post-colonial nightmares.
And so I decided to write this story.
And I'm only going to read half of it.
So you'll know the ending when a moon shows up,
that's when the end is near.
And that's about it.
OK.
It's called "The Sun, The Moon, The Stars."
"I'm not a bad guy.
I know how that sounds, defensive, unscrupulous,
but it's true.
I'm like everybody else, weak, full of mistakes,
but basically good.
Magdalena disagrees though.
She considers me a typical Dominican man.
A sucio, an asshole.
Because you see many months ago when Magda was still
my girlfriend, when I didn't have to be careful about almost
anything, I cheated on her with this chick who
had tons of '80s freestyle hair, and I
didn't tell Magda about it either, you know how that is.
A smelly bone like that, it's better buried off
in the backyard of your life.
Magda only found out because home girl wrote her a fucking
letter, and the letter had details, shit you wouldn't even
tell your boys drunk.
The thing is that particular bit of stupidity
had been over for months.
Me and Magda were on an upswing.
We weren't as distant as we'd been the winter I was cheating.
The freeze was over.
She was coming over to my place and instead
of us hanging around with my knucklehead boys, me smoking,
and her bored out of her skull, we were seeing movies.
Driving out different places to eat.
We even caught a play at the crossroads,
and I took her picture with some big wig black playwrights.
Pictures where she's smiling so much you'd think her wide ass
mouth was going to unhinge.
We were a couple again.
Visiting each other's family on the weekends.
Eating breakfast at diners before anybody else was up.
Rummaging through the New Brunswick library together.
The one that Carnegie built with his guilt money.
A nice rhythm we had going.
But then the letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates
everything past, present, and future.
And suddenly her folks want to kill me.
And it doesn't matter that I helped them
with their taxes two years running
or that I mow their lawn.
Her father who used to treat me like his hijo
calls me an asshole on the phone and sounds
like he's strangling himself with the cord.
"You no deserve I speak Spanish to you," he says.
And I see one of Magda's girlfriends
at the Woodbridge Mall, Claribel,
the ecuatoriana with a biology degree and the chinita eyes,
and she treats me like I ate somebody's favorite kid.
And you don't even want to hear how it went down with Magda,
like a five train collision.
She threw Cassandra's letter at me
and then she sat down on the curb
and started hyperventilating.
"Oh my God," she wailed.
"Oh my God."
This is when my boys claim they would have
pulled a total fucking denial.
Cassandra who?
[LAUGHTER]
But I was too sick.
I was too sick to my stomach to even try it.
I sat down next to her and grabbed her flailing arms
and said some dumb shit like, you have to listen to me Magda
or you won't understand."