(Breaking up with her, he would remember, hadn’t felt like anything even when she started crying, he hadn’t been moved. He broke up with Olga the next day on the playground, Maritza at his side, and how Olga cried! Snots pouring out of her nose and everything! In later years, when he and Olga had both turned into overweight freaks, Oscar could not resist feeling the occasional flash of guilt when he saw Olga loping across a street or staring blankly out near the New York bus stop, wondering how much his cold-as-balls breakup had contributed to her present fuckedupness. His logic as close to the yes/no math of insects as a nigger could get. Didn’t take him long to decide: after all, Maritza was beautiful, and Olga was not. Maritza, with her chocolate skin and gray eyes, already expressing the Ogún energy that would chop down obstacles for her the rest of her life. It’s either her or me! Oscar held Maritza’s hand and talked seriously and at great length about his love for her and suggested that maybe they could all share, but Maritza wasn’t having any of it. One day after school, Maritza cornered Oscar behind the swing set and laid down the law. With Maritza Chacón and Olga Polanca, two girls from his school. Ese muchacho está bueno! Once, he’d even had two girlfriends at the same time, his only ménage à trois ever. (Oscar was a stout kid, heading straight to fat, but his mother kept him nice in haircuts, and before the proportions of his head changed he’d had these lovely flashing eyes and these cute-ass cheeks.) The girls-his older sister’s friends, his mother’s friends, even his neighbor, a twenty-something postal employee who wore red on her lips and walked like she had a brass bell for an ass-all fell for him. You should have seen him, his mother sighed. During the parties-and there were many, many parties in those long-ago seventies days, before Washington Heights was Washington Heights, before the Bergenline became a straight shot of Spanish for almost a hundred blocks-some drunk relative inevitably pushed Oscar onto some little girl, and then everyone would howl as boy and girl approximated the hip-motism of the adults. Because he was a Dominican boy raised in a relatively “normal” Dominican family, his nascent pimpliness was encouraged by family and friends alike.

Always trying to kiss them, always coming up behind them during a merengue, the first nigger to learn the perrito and the one who danced it every chance he got.

It’s true: Oscar was a carajito who was into girls mad young.

Except for one time, he’d never had much luck with women. Oscar de León was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about.

Junot diaz the brief wondrous life