One queer man’s approach to hardship in 21st-century America? Humor and optimism

When he was 16, Edgar Gomez had gleaming new veneers glued to his prime enamel. His freshly even smile was like a miracle: “I regarded like the true me,” he writes, “not that different, shame-filled model of me I’d been dwelling as earlier than.” Regardless of questioning how he would possibly pay for his or her maintenance, Gomez believed all of the sudden that “cash would by no means be an issue once more. … Photographs 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 end up 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 an emblem, 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 as if 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 recently, the expiration date for his false enamel has now handed, because the dentist foretold, and he’s scarcely higher outfitted to pay for brand spanking 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-Danger 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 would possibly greatest be understood as a sequence of makes an attempt: to seek out love and a spot on the planet, to outlive as a writer-activist and queer particular person 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-Danger 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. Firstly 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, through the pandemic, she’s nonetheless “risking all the pieces to serve drinks to vacationers.” Even because the guide ends, Gomez is launching a GoFundMe marketing campaign to assist her preserve her dwelling. 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 conduct when she reads about it in “Excessive-Danger 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 somewhat pat, however it’s additionally touching.

Gomez is very incisive on the American caste system, with which he, like his mother and father, is intimately acquainted. A system through 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 a daily 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.

Typically in tales like Gomez’s the conclusion 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 Prime Mannequin” will acknowledge Gomez’s concern of “the three-letter phrase which may smash all the pieces” and his description of lies and loneliness, of dwelling in a society that tolerates you someday and wonders the following if letting you marry would possibly result in individuals marrying their canines. Regardless of that, “Alligator Tears” doesn’t learn like a hardscrabble memoir. It’s nostalgia with a chunk, but additionally a wry sort of affection.

To turn out to be a memoirist, one should consider 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 techniques of oppression” have the airless high quality of liberal boilerplate.

However usually reality hides in absurdity. After one breakup, Gomez collapses on the ground of his condo and instructions Siri to play a tragic tune. “However she misheard me, and he or she performed Sisqó’s ‘Thong Track.’ ” 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 relies in New York and writes about books, movies and music.