Blackouts

Young Juan becomes a model for Zhenya’s illustrations, often posing at her and Jan’s home.

Nene asks about a chair in which young Juan posed, and Juan teases him about his “strange little fetish” about chairs (132). Juan calls Zhenya and Jan both strange and familiar, being two of the few who accepted his femininity.

A photograph labeled “Zhenya Gay [redacted] with the original ‘Manuelito’” (134) shows Zhenya, a young boy, and a woman with her face blacked out standing in front of an overgrown garden wall.

Young Juan encounters Zhenya imitating his habit of walking on his heels while humming to himself; Jan laughs at the display. Juan is uncertain if he is being mocked until Jan joins the walking and the three laugh together.

Juan goes to the rainforest with Zhenya and Jan. He admires the “regal” posture of Zhenya’s toad sketches.

A clipping describes dissociation as a “pattern of reaction” of Puerto Rican Syndrome (137).

While Juan sleeps, Nene feels for his missing golden crucifix necklace, which he uncharacteristically kept for nearly 10 years. He frequently loses objects, which he attributes to being a “chronic loser” after reading a book by Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalyst daughter), recommended by Juan. He recalls his lost objects and concludes “a life itself might be misplaced” (138).

Juan frames Nene’s attachment to the crucifix as a fetish, likening it to his obsession with unusual chairs and the policeman who helped his mother.

Nene recalls how his father’s promotion to state trooper (narcotics) necessitated him performing the role of a gangster, meditating on the rare, uncanny experience of seeing him don this “costume.” Young Nene longs to know his mercurial father and is fascinated by his father’s crucifix, which he is forbidden from touching.

Juan interrupts to posit that “something happened,” then insists Nene tell the story in the “present tense.”

In Nene’s present-tense flashback, his family drives for six hours to visit extended family in Brooklyn. He is self-conscious, desiring to play with his younger cousins but feeling too old to do so. A “beautiful” man arrives, wearing a t-shirt that spoofs the Trix cereal slogan using an anti-gay slur. Though he doesn’t know how to articulate the thought, Nene knows anti-gay sentiment affects him personally. He stares at a crucifix to avoid looking at the beautiful man.

A photograph, with the handwritten caption “over,” shows two men on a beach. One wears a speedo and a crucifix. He bends one knee against a boulder, against which the second man, wearing a t-shirt and a camera, leans. Their eyes are blacked out.

In the present, Juan claims fetishization helps organize diametric emotions surrounding something. Nene is uncertain; his past self focused on his parents’ divorce and growing alienation. He later moved to the city and was mugged.

Nene flashbacks to September 1998, when a young mugger with a knife accosted him and a friend. He doesn’t recall how they got away, aside from showing the mugger that they had nothing worth stealing.

Days after the mugging, Nene finds the crucifix in his belongings and pushes away memories of Juan to focus on post-psychiatric hospital life. He dons the necklace and doesn’t remove it for years, wearing clothing to accentuate it. He begins finding sexual partners.

In the present, a tired Juan struggles to remember a biblical quote, then asks Nene to continue his story the following day. Nene counters that Juan promised to tell a “proper story.”

Nene sorts through Juan’s books, finding those illustrated by Zhenya. He reads Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and Juan urges him to find Zhenya’s Who’s Afraid? while considering “an underground queer bar, pre-Stonewall” (150). They banter about the nursery rhyme “Cock Robin.”

A two-page illustrated spread shows a young boy at a watering hole, covering his face. From behind trees and in a river, various animals peek out to watch him.

In Who’s Afraid?, animals at a local watering hole tease Lion, who insists he fears nothing.

Juan interprets the animals as different figures at an underground gay bar, where any new arrival is feared to be an undercover policeman. He traces the term “coming out” to debutante culture, highlighting its relevance to both Black and Southern white high society. He quotes the Karl Marx slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (153) to describe the sociality of the animals welcoming the human boy.

An illustration shows a giraffe peering around a tree to look at the boy.

The animals help return the boy to his family, who believe he was stolen. Fearing punishment, the animals eventually send the boy alone. When he returns home, he signals his arrival with a hyena’s laugh, which is linked to a stereotypically gay laugh.