July 21, 2015
It's been awhile since I've had a double-entry day. Since only half of The Dark Tower series was available through the ebook service that my library uses, I'll need to have other ebooks going for my gym reading. Torres's autobiographical story was a very quick read. It's about his family, especially the shenanigans that he and his brothers got up to as kids in upstate New York while his parents struggled as young, working class parents.
Ma and Paps are certainly not bad parents. They really love their three boys, and want a better life for them. Paps is mostly around, though there is a period when he's gone and their mother slips into a deep depression, leaving the young boys to fend for themselves. Almost any boy with too much freedom or not enough supervision will get up to lots of hijinks. Even when Paps is there, the boys run wild.
Torres shows his parents as very human, flaws and all. Ma is described as fragile, and has some emotional issues. Paps drinks too much and can't hold a steady job, and often uses violence for discipline. The three brothers, Justin and his older brothers Manny and Joel, are very tight as young boys. They love their parents, and are protective of their mother, but they know their folks can be self-absorbed and it makes them angry.
The end of the book is jarring. Joel and Manny go the way of many wild young men: they drop out of school, drink, work in manual labor jobs. The author is different from his brothers. The least of it is that he's academically inclined. He's also confused about his sexuality, and develops the dangerous and unhealthy habit of looking for strange men to hook up with in the bus station bathroom. When his family learns of this, they have him institutionalized. The text says that after this, the five of them are never together again. Did Torres fall out with his brothers for good? Did one of the parents die or leave? Did he never go home again? The text does not say.
I feel for the child that the author was, that his "sexual awakening" was watching a perverted porn tape of a "Daddy" spanking a naked teenage boy. I imagine now that Torres has healthy relationships with men, though I doubt that his time being institutionalized helped with that. I'd want to know if he has a good relationship with anybody in his family now.
This was a brutally honest autobiographical work. I would read more by Torres in the future. I believe that this is his only full-length text to date, though he has had short works featured in major publications.
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