Los enlaces peligrosos

Zigzagger
Manuel Muñoz
Northwestern University Press

The young men in Zigzagger, Manuel Muñoz’s first collection of stories, emerge from California’s Central Valley as if they are a new species, evolved from their specific circumstances of being new Americans, Mexican American, and gay. It is as if they find no others ahead of them who have walked the earth as they walk it. Though these young men are the descendants of their parents, they move out from their boyhoods, their homes, their towns and into the larger world as distinct beings. In “Good as Yesterday,” we see how a teenage boy formed his desire to touch his lover’s “broad shoulders and the tight chest peeking through his white muscle shirt” by watching his mother “holding their father’s thick shoulder.” A motel owner in ‘The Unimportant Lila Parr” connects a father and son “because of the resemblance, the rich, broad face,” “the dark complexion and the height,” “the same powerful build.” In ”By the Time You Get There, by the Time You Get Back,” a father hears that “his son’s voice is like his, younger but sharper in its command of language.” This father “wishes his son could speak Spanish so that they could both make it plain. He could tell his son, in Spanish, to be a man and make his own decisions.” 
     Made plain in the stories is how urgent these family connections are. The most painful stories in Zigzagger are those in which the connections have worn down to a fragile thread—a telephoned plea for money after months of nothing. In “Anchorage,” an old man put out to pasture from his itinerant circus job bitterly mourns his lack of family. He has nothing but jazz albums and half-concerned neighbors who have their own old father to care for. When the neighbors go away for a week, the old man loses the will even to nourish himself 
     The older sister, Vero, in ‘‘Good as Yesterday” sees her brother making a dramatic hand gesture and “hates to see his hand extended out like that, his exaggerations, his boldness at sixteen.” Vero recognizes what her brother is and, because she loves him, wants him to be that less. Her protective urge is to tame him: “She hopes that Nicky will be quiet for his own sake.” “She wants to tell him to shape up .... She wants to tell Nicky to tone everything down .... ”
     The dangers these young men face are both real and unreal, superstitious. They suffer beatings, bashings rape, disease, and, formidably, being cast out from their families. In “Monkey, Sí,” we are told that if we follow Nestor home where he will tell his family that he has been raped, “we will hear the fury that boils over in this house when Nestor tells the truth (he will be kicked out that very night; it happens, even though we think we’ve heard it over and over).” In ‘‘Waiting to Be Dangerous,” we hear about the boyhood friend who now ‘‘takes seven pills with every meal.” In ‘The Third Myth,” teenage Ricardo worries that the sex he has with Drino will cause their deformation. “Do you think something’s going to happen to you?” Drino asks. “[Y]es,” Ricardo thinks, “maybe something will. To me. And that for [Drino], his back might not widen, that he might remain small, and his body might become not-right.” The town children in “Tiburón” wear oily shark tooth necklaces to ward off the evil that threatens children whose necks are bare: ‘This tooth is simple—we can’t take it off now. We must search for it in the morning when we open our eyes, and if it isn’t there, then we know it has gathered with the other teeth around the neck of a child who doesn’t wear one. It has gathered with its brothers and sisters to ring tight and push through a sleeping neck till the skin breaks.” 
     In the face of these dangers, the young men vary in their quantity of courage, so much so that the courage seems not something that can be mustered, but almost a genetic endowment. The bold ones, the petulant ones, are endangered by the world but are so strengthened by their passions, loves, friendships, and latches onto identity that they act as if they are fearless. The cowards risk even more; their fear buries any capacity for self-love.
     Then there are the white men, white boys, for whom Munoz’s brown boys fall. Self-love comes so easily for them and is displayed in a romantic description of a hometown “where it snows until April sometimes,” in a photo album that documents a fetish for Latin lovers, in a history told with shoes: “Brown suede shoes that he keeps brushed. Sneakers and sandals. Shoes he bought in Paris. Shoes that are still shiny in their boxes. Riding boots from his summers in Vermont. Black shoes with squared toes and thick heels.”
     The white boys assume the brown boys are interested in their lives. Of course the poor want to hear about the rich, about how good life can be. Of course the poor want to forget about their deprived or even squalid pasts. But this is where the white boys fail, or err. The brown boys curate their own details—their lack of shoes is remembered as walking “barefoot and tiptoeing with painful grimaces across the hot asphalt” or in “fifty-cent flip-flops.” They remember “a ranchera being sung by a tiny girl in a green dress,” “an old airstrip where crop dusters rise up to cloud the fields with fine mists,” and “a suitcase plastered with stickers of world buildings and the names of cities written in funny letters .... sold at the discount store, the stickers not really stickers, just a pattern on the grainy plastic.”
     Muñoz is inventive in his use of voice, and his often bold choices arrest the reader’s attention. The narrator in “Everything the White Boy Told You” begins with a provocation: ‘‘Tell us, Celio, what the white boy told you that day.” This plural narrator is the fused voice of the new generation—giants in the valley, jeans rolled up, greeting cards of love tucked into the waistband, gold cross tight on a muscling neck, thick sculpted black hair, long beautiful fingers, giggles and camp, crushes, love. 
One short-short story, “The Wooden Boat,” is less powerful, making its revelation too neatly when a little brother sees blood on the knife of his older brother, who had supposedly straightened up. The stories achieve more when the darkness remains a mystery, intangible yet fully experienced, as in the title story. Here, all witnesses—the friends, the parents, the reader—are left to wonder what happened; what was it that made the boy, seduced, lose his mind temporarily in an aftermath that is then lulled, healed by parental watchfulness, cool breezes through the house, a homemade balm, and the strength found in self-discovery. There is a long opening scene of the boy asleep, unclothed, in his bed. He is as if dead, and then, like Lazarus, he rises to his new life as a man who can be seduced by men or who can, by his own power, seduce them. Earlier in the evening, the boy had wanted to differentiate himself from the group, breathing on the ladies who worked the door at the dance to show them that he did not drink. When he rises in the doorway to meet his friends and parents, he has done just that, but with a depth and impact far beyond what he would have dared to think. 
     The younger generation in Zigzagger, who may or may not speak Spanish, are cut off from the previous generation to some extent. The stories survey that extent: where the connections to family and heritage stand and where they are broken down—by force, by necessity, by erosion, by evolution—just as old Loco Billy’s house is razed to make way for the future, just as a family’s Chevy Impala, once kept so fine, is allowed to deteriorate. Along with Vero, we wonder, “how long can the Impala run without her father fixing it as he used to?”