[APPLAUSE]
It's great to be here.
It really is, and I really want to thank Manuel Muñoz
for putting all of my visits together.
He did a lot of work and I really appreciate him.
I really appreciate him as a younger colleague,
and as a writer, and for the work he does as a teacher.
Being a teacher is a beautiful thing.
And I have been teaching for 23 years,
and it's great to win the PEN/Faulkner,
but it's much nicer to walk into a classroom every other day
with students.
Because that feels very real.
I'm going to read you a story called "The Rule Maker"
but since all of my stories are so long, and all of my stories,
they all want to be novels.
They really do.
And so, I'm just going to set it up for you,
and then I'm going to read the second half of it.
And I'm going to read you just the first section,
and then I'm going to talk a little about the story
to set it up for you, and then end it,
because I think it's important to get
a whole experience of a story but if I read it all,
I'm afraid it would put you all to sleep,
and I don't want to do that to you because you're very nice
people, I'm sure.
So this is "The Rule Maker," and it
is about a young man who grows up in Juarez and winds
up in El Paso, which is not an uncommon thing, by the way.
It's just people come back and forth and they live over there,
and they live over here, and all of that.
We're not very respectful of borders in that way.
I think Arizona always understands that.
"The Rule Maker."
There are things I still remember
about growing up in Juarez.
I remember the name of my school, Escuela Carlos Amaya.
I remember my first grade teacher's name,
Laura Servillos.
I wanted her to be my mother, not because she was pretty,
but because she was so nice and she smelled like flowers.
I remember the playground-- cement and dirt and grass
that never really grew up to become lawn
because it was never watered and because we stomped the ground
until it was fine powder.
We couldn't pound anything else, but we could pound the dirt.
I remember the fence around the school, a fence that
was there to make us feel safe.
I remember the first time I got into a fight.
I wasn't any good at it.
I was 8, and Marcos Manriquez punched me right in the stomach
and I writhe on the ground in pain.
Later on that day he screamed, but I just
lay there on the ground and refused to get up.
Everyone laughed at me and called me a joto
all the other mean names kids call each other.
I don't think I cared that they called me names.
It didn't bother me because I didn't
think it was a good thing to know how to fight, to use
your fists on other people.
I never liked the idea of hurting other people.
And if that made me a joto, then I guess that's what I was.
Not that I knew what a joto meant at the time.
And so this young man, and this little boy grows up in Juarez
and his mother is quite absent.
He really grows up alone with his friends,
families that lived in the neighborhood.
And we get the idea in the story,
although it's never really explicitly stated,
that she's a prostitute.
But we don't really know that.
And he grows up alone.
So they always go back and forth into El Paso,
and he's a US citizen.
His mother's always made sure that he knows English,
because she's from the United States,
but she lives in Juarez, and she makes
him read books in English, and he knows English.
His mother makes sure, and she tests him.
One day, they go to El Paso, which is not unusual,
because she has her family there, her sisters, aunts,
and she leaves him.
He doesn't know this, but she leaves him
at the steps of a father he doesn't know.
she just leaves him there.
He tells her that--
as she's leaving, that he hates her,
but he confesses that he doesn't hate her.
He can't hate her, and he gets obsessed with--
he has a picture of her and he draws it, he sketches.
When he gets to his father's house whom he doesn't know,
his father just looks at him.
His father had no idea he had a son, and he just--
he's there, there's this boy, and he's got to raise this boy.
So they're these strangers that have to get to know each other.
The story picks up from there because the boy is really--
he's a sweet kid.
And he worries about-- his father disappears sometimes,
and he worries about him, and he doesn't
know where his father is.
His father doesn't really have a job.
Then he discovers, actually in the story
that his father a drug dealer, and that's
how he makes a living.
But there he is.
His name is Max.
So the story picks up from there.
That Sunday night, I texted him, "You OK?"
A few minutes later, he texted me back.
"I like women.
Do your homework."
I like women, I like women, I like women.
Bullshit, I thought.
It's not just women.
It's women who like to party.
By then I knew from being around my dad's customers
that partying meant drugs plus sex.
I knew what he was up to.
I tried not to let it upset me, but it did upset me.
But what the fuck was I supposed to do about it anyway?
I would never rat him out and I would never run away from home.
Those were things I didn't have in me.
I wondered if that made me a good boy, or a bad boy.
Maybe I was just an afraid boy.
A couple of guys came over one evening.
I knew what was happening.
My father went into his room.
The two guys were smoking cigarettes on the porch,
and I could hear what they were saying.
This connect has good shit.
So that's what my father was--
a connect.
After a few months, I realized that my father
had what other businessmen would call a diversified portfolio.
He dealt in marijuana, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, heroin,
and crystal meth.
I looked up all the drugs on the internet.
I knew all about them.
My father came into my room one night.
All he said was, If you ever come into--
if you ever do drugs, I'll beat the holy shit out of you
and kick your ass out on the street.
When he left my room, I sort of laughed.
He was like fucking Moses writing down
the Ten Commandments.
I put the new rule on the top of the list.
My father got a credit card in my name.
My allowance increased from $50 a month to $100 a month.
But I was supposed to make the payments on my own credit card.
He opened a bank account for me.
How much money have you saved?
He asked me.
About $400, I said.
He nodded.
Good.
You have to learn how to handle your finances.
Another rule.
These are the things my father bought me that year.
One, driving lessons.
Two, an Apple computer.
Three, an iPhone.
Four, a brand new Volkswagen. It's
not as if I didn't know where the money came from.
I did wonder how he laundered his money,
but I found some lawyer's name on a business card
on the coffee table one day.
I didn't know many things about my father.
I knew he didn't like to talk, and I also
knew that he was a very smart man.
I guess he was a real businessman.
I had a habit of riding on the bus on weekends.
I would get on a bus and ride around and think.
One Sunday, two women, I guess they
made a living by cleaning houses were having a conversation.
I like listening to their Spanish
and it reminded me of Juarez and of my boyhood.
Everything had become so much more complicated since then.
I just kept listening to them.
One of the women was telling the other woman
that the streets of Juarez were becoming rivers of blood.
She spoke about a young woman the soldiers took away,
and who was never seen again.
And they spoke of the kidnappings,
and beheadings, and houses where people were found tortured.
They talked about all the women who had disappeared.
I drifted away from their conversation,
wondering what it would be like to take
a gun to someone's head, to kidnap someone,
to torture a man.
What would it be like to cut someone's hands off?
I knew there was a listserv that counted the bodies.
I had just joined that listserv.
It was all about the dead bodies.
The thing was, that the bodies didn't have names.
Sometimes, I made up names for them.
I had a whole list of names.
This whole thing, I thought, this whole thing
was because of men like my father.
I went out with some friends that night.
I got drunk and I woke up the next day
and discovered I was in Pete's house.
I had never felt that bad.
Pete walked into the living room and laughed.
"You really let loose last night."
Oh shit, I thought.
Had I said something about my father?
I don't remember.
What did I do?
What did I say?
"You kissed Sandra."
What?
"No worries, dude.
She kissed you back."
Really?
That sort of made me a little happy.
"Yeah.
You sort of made out all night."
"That's nice," I said.
"You were really drunk.
But what have you got against 420?"
Why?
"They've offered you a joint and I
thought you were going to cut his fucking head off.
We had to pull you away and cool you off."
I shrugged.
"I just don't do drugs," I said 420's cool.
I don't do weed.
I don't do drugs.
End of story.
"Straight edger, huh?"
Pretty much.
"Well that's cool," Pete laughed,
"but you really did let loose on that liquor, dude."
I looked at my phone.
I had a text from my father.
"You OK?"
That made me happy that he was wondering where I was.
I smiled and texted him back.
"I like women."
[LAUGHTER]
And there's a smiley face.
[LAUGHTER]