For the launch event of BONDS & BOUNDARIES, Michael Bullock, co-editor of I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT: THE 1979 DIARIES OF SEAN DELEAR from Semiotext(e) joined me at the Bureau to discuss the common themes of the two titles. I read excerpts from my review of ICNBI and from the short stories “Raunch Daddy,” and “The Marielito.”
We had an engaged crowd; the full video is on BGSQD’s YouTube channel. “Raunch Daddy” is epistolary in sections–it includes diary entries of the earnest young hustler Nick–so in that regard, it complements the Sean DeLear document. But the final diary entry belongs to Benito, the titular raunch daddy:
Nueva York, 16 de Septiembre del 2004
Querido, it’s Benito. Of course you know from my pedantic handwrit- ing. I beg forgiveness for sticking my nose (jaja) in your diary. I haven’t told you something about your bounty of pleasures. Your body somehow brings back remembrances of the lost idyll of my youth. Your musky ass an overripe melón chino snapped off the vine, dew glistening on its skin, cracked open on the metate. Your underarms the neighbors’ brick chimneys, commingling and thickening flavors of fruit and legume and pepita on their hearths, an alchemy of passion and earth. The touch of your pampered fingers that of my tutor, a boy just a few years older than me, who was later murdered by Los Halcones. Of course, your cum is my own tepache de piña. How I long for our unholy acts from my patio in Coyoacán. All is illusion except for your odor, gringuito. Let me also remind you that it is quite inconvenient–given my populist and anti-imperialist leanings–to be so enraptured by your capitalist body.
