One queer man’s method to hardship in Twenty first-century America? Humor and optimism

When he was 16, Edgar Gomez had gleaming new veneers glued to his high enamel. His freshly even smile was like a miracle: “I appeared like the actual me,” he writes, “not that different, shame-filled model of me I’d been dwelling as earlier than.” Regardless of questioning how he may pay for his or her repairs, Gomez believed instantly that “cash would by no means be an issue once more. … Photos of myself as a health care provider or a lawyer flashed behind my eyes, clinking wineglasses with my husband in our tasteful brownstone in Manhattan.”

This isn’t fairly how issues prove in “Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays,” Gomez’s entertaining second memoir. However the veneer story is a tidy fractal, delivering in miniature a lot of the guide’s message. The dazzling gnashers are a logo, maybe, of the humor and optimism with which Gomez faces hardship.

For a self-described queer “Nica-Rican mutt,” one thing concerning the veneers’ straightness and whiteness looks like a remark, as a lot of the guide is, on the world’s uneven distribution of privilege. Maybe his new smile will, just like the tales he tells potential boyfriends and employers, obscure his childhood disadvantages and result in ever-greater success. However for all this, typically a veneer is only a veneer. As Gomez wrote not too long ago, the expiration date for his false enamel has now handed, because the dentist foretold, and he’s scarcely higher outfitted to pay for brand new ones than he was as a highschool junior.

That is certainly one of many sad-funny vignettes in “Alligator Tears.” Like fellow memoirists Édouard Louis and Annie Ernaux, Gomez approaches life-writing as a method not simply to course of however to reprocess the previous. A handful of scenes recall his first memoir, “Excessive-Threat Gay”: rising up poor in Orlando, popping out, his discovery of his chosen household, the bloodbath on the Pulse nightclub in 2016. Readers might keep in mind his hard-working mom, taciturn brother and absent father; their tales are central once more right here. The guide’s subtitle, “A Memoir in Essays,” is much less concerning the discursive qualities of Gomez’s writing than a touch that the guide may greatest be understood as a collection of makes an attempt: to seek out love and a spot on the earth, to outlive as a writer-activist and queer individual of colour, to reencounter his mother and father on an equal footing.

Regardless of its title, there’s nothing insincere about “Alligator Tears.” Extra so even than “Excessive-Threat Gay,” it’s a guide about survival on the sharp finish of Twenty first century American life. That is illuminated by the lives of Gomez’s mother and father. Initially of the guide his mom suffers a stroke, introduced on by years of stress from elevating youngsters whereas working all hours at an airport Starbucks. Fifteen years later, throughout the pandemic, she’s nonetheless “risking all the things to serve drinks to vacationers.” Even because the guide ends, Gomez is launching a GoFundMe marketing campaign to assist her maintain her house. His father, in the meantime, is generally out of the image — dwelling in Miami after divorcing Gomez’s mom, and later in Puerto Rico, the place his addictions and geographic remoteness preclude correct parenting.

“I’m a memoirist,” Gomez writes. “There’s nothing I would like greater than a contented ending.” Therefore, maybe, the guide’s redemptive form, which embraces each mother and father. His mom, whose first response to Gomez’s popping out had been chilly and distant, remorsefully reappraises her habits when she reads about it in “Excessive-Threat Gay.” Across the identical time, Gomez reconnects along with his father — a visit to see him for the primary time in 15 years results in a rapprochement and a stint dwelling in San Juan. The picture of them paddling within the ocean collectively as they start to heal is a bit pat, however it’s additionally touching.

Gomez is particularly incisive on the American caste system, with which he, like his mother and father, is intimately acquainted. A system by which it’s normal for the brown child on the white faculty to be requested if he’s in a gang, the place it’s simpler for him to falsely confess to dealing weed than to disclaim it. There’s a darkish humor in his childhood desires: “In a single recurring fantasy of maturity, I labored an everyday nine-to-five at a cubicle in an workplace inputting numbers into spreadsheets.” In actuality he finds himself working at a name middle the place his lavatory breaks are queried; doing stints at Auntie Anne’s and J.C. Penney, the place he finds precise feces in a dressing room; and taking demeaning gigs at homosexual intercourse events.

Usually in tales like Gomez’s the belief of a inventive dream brings a sort of salvation. However whereas seeing himself in print is trigger for celebration — and, as famous, helps heal childhood wounds — he’s damningly frank concerning the labor economics of publishing. “Fifteen thousand {dollars}. Earlier than taxes and my agent’s fee, unfold out over two years. Fifteen thousand {dollars}. What I’d been working towards for years. Fifteen thousand {dollars}. Sufficient to fill my fridge a short while longer, to assist my mother.”

Any homosexual boy who grew up within the age of NSYNC and “America’s Subsequent High Mannequin” will acknowledge Gomez’s concern of “the three-letter phrase which may smash all the things” and his description of lies and loneliness, of dwelling in a society that tolerates you at some point and wonders the subsequent if letting you marry may result in folks marrying their canine. Regardless of that, “Alligator Tears” doesn’t learn like a hardscrabble memoir. It’s nostalgia with a chew, but in addition a wry sort of affection.

To turn into a memoirist, one should imagine your story will curiosity others. Fortunately, Gomez is nice firm. Often, the well-maintained persona of the “Sassy, Homosexual BFF” he knowingly adopts slides a contact and he dips into sententiousness — even when he’s proper, musings about “bigger programs of oppression” have the airless high quality of liberal boilerplate.

However typically fact hides in absurdity. After one breakup, Gomez collapses on the ground of his condominium and instructions Siri to play a tragic tune. “However she misheard me, and he or she performed Sisqó’s ‘Thong Music.’ ” It’s anecdotes like this, when the human particulars Gomez is so good at recognizing make his case for him, the place “Alligator Tears” sings.

Charles Arrowsmith is predicated in New York and writes about books, movies and music.