Alice never knew her father. Her parents had separated before her first birthday and she just assumed he never knew she was even born. But one day she made a discovery while helping her mother move to their new home in Chevy Chase.
Mother Corona and her ex-husband had immigrated to New Jersey from the Dominican 30 years ago. They eventually moved to Washington D.C. Mr. Corona was a diplomat’s driver. After the divorce was final (about 18 months into Alice Corona’s life), he left to New York to drive a taxi. Alice discovered all this that day as she riffled through an unmarked box she was packing into her car.
In it, she found some divorce papers and some old photographs. Alice was furious but she didn’t want to tell her mother, afraid it would ruin her recent marriage and subsequent honeymoon with her new step dad, a real estate mogul from Maryland. Later she would track her father down in New York City and confront her life-long issues. But today wasn’t either one of those days.
“Tell me a story, baby.”
She always had trouble sleeping. Some nights when I was on the road, she would call me so I could talk her to sleep. Years after we broke up, I would still often talk to her until the wee hours of the nights. I never really slept so it was no problem for me. In fact, sometimes knowing she had fallen to sleep on the other end of the line helped me a little with the insomnia.
Eventually, I guess she found someone else to help her sleep or maybe she just gave up sleep as a regular practice, much like I had years before.
Maybe it was her daddy issues that kept her up all night, but Alice’s daddy issues weren’t messy, sexual ones that made her look for dear old dad in every man she dated.
They did however make her very curious about fathers and paternal relationships.
“A story, huh? About what?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about your dad,” she said through a grin that made her seem as sinister as she was vulnerable.
“My dad? Okay.”
It was pouring rain outside, almost cold enough for snow. Early Sunday morning rain was my ninth favorite thing in D.C., right below the pizza and right above the free wine.
“Let me see. Did I ever tell you about the time I found my dad drinking with his gun in one hand?”
“Wow. No?” She exaggerated the “oh” sound on both words.
“One day as I was getting ready to leave for work — this is when I worked at the mall part-time — I went into my dad’s room to say bye. See I used to have this idea that I could die at any moment…”
“Like you’ve really gotten over that problem,” Alice interjected slyly. I covered her face with a pillow.
“It could happen any moment, see.”
“Okay. I get it,” she laughed and pushed me away with a slap to the eyeballs. “Now get to the point. I’m getting sleepy.”
“The point is that it made me obsessed with proper goodbyes.” I looked at Alice. Her eyes grew heavy but she fought against it.
She was an exotic creature. She was dark and deep, but with this amazing lightness in her eyes. And her smile … holy shit, what a smile.
It was a fixture on my retinas long after she was gone for good — disappeared into a memory or shallow portion of the sub-conscious. But her beauty just burned its image on my frontal lobe.
See, Alice was genuinely happy most days, which broke through her darkened soul. It especially broke through these dreary days on East Capitol.
A winner of the Hollywood Book Festival, So Go On and Live poignantly and bitingly captures the angst and restlessness of modern American youth. Pedro "Pete" Salcedo, a young but worn down journalist, is on a figurative and metaphorical journey through the absurdity of life, America and beautiful women.
After accepting a prestigious job in Washington, D.C. and subsequently losing the love of his life, Pedro loses himself, first to his work, then to the road and eventually to the apathy, alcohol and cynicism that permeates through youth culture. Pedro struggles, like many of his generation, to get his life in order and hang on to love, sanity and pathos in this modern world, where women, relationships and sexuality are constantly evolving.
So Go On and Live is a wild and emotional expedition into the existential and farcical perspective of a drunken, Mexican-Irish, would-be poet offering a new breed of optimism that comes with a nihilistic twist.
After accepting a prestigious job in Washington, D.C. and subsequently losing the love of his life, Pedro loses himself, first to his work, then to the road and eventually to the apathy, alcohol and cynicism that permeates through youth culture. Pedro struggles, like many of his generation, to get his life in order and hang on to love, sanity and pathos in this modern world, where women, relationships and sexuality are constantly evolving.
So Go On and Live is a wild and emotional expedition into the existential and farcical perspective of a drunken, Mexican-Irish, would-be poet offering a new breed of optimism that comes with a nihilistic twist.
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Genre - Literary Fiction
Rating – PG-13
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