This past week, I beat the apocalypse that is LA traffic and waited in a line for an hour, enduring a capacity crowd of almost 800 people to witness Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, speak.  It was well worth the time.  It was an inspiration.  And it made me want to go home and write and write and write—the sign of an uber-successful reading.

The reading was in my neighborhood, Highland Park, which occupies the Northeast corner of Los Angeles–an area so renowned for its gritty urban vibe that Richard Ramirez, the infamous serial killer known simply as The Night Stalker, was apprehended in this very barrio when he tried to steal a get-away car. (And by “apprehended,” I mean beat mercilessly until the police arrived).

Highland Park is also the home to one of the bastions of the white-washed ivory tower, Occidental College—a highly selective liberal arts college whose most recent claim to fame is that President Barrack Obama elected to transfer from it.

This is a long way of saying that I was surprised to see so many brown people at a reading—half coming from the community, half from the student body—who stood in line clutching their books to their chests as if they were waiting to see the Pope in his white robes among a sea of minions.

Junot Diaz appeared on stage in jeans and a dress shirt designed to be untucked.  He refused to stand behind the podium but preferred to pontificate full-frontal upon a wide range of topics from comic books to nerd culture, from feminism to postcolonial theory.  When it came time for him to read, he confessed that he forgot to bring his own books but borrowed them from the audience.

He did all this in a brilliantly funny way, speaking not so much as an authority but as a wise-cracking comedian.  And while almost all the audience came to bask in his knowledge, he was the first to say repeatedly, “Gang.  I don’t know anything.  I’m just a fucked up guy and you’re treating me like a guru.”

Diaz speaks like that, codeswitching in a vibrant display of language that makes him something of a linguistic sphinx:  he alternates between bits of Dominican-inflected Spanish and liberally sprinkles a layer of profanity throughout his speech, profanity that testifies to a rough childhood in rough neighborhoods.

And yet he doesn’t appear vulgar or flat or one-note in his “fucks” like the average guy at the bus stop with a potty mouth.  Rather, he appears surprisingly sincere and tender, as if he is whispering to you a very convoluted secret that requires the presence of profanity to make it meaningful (as became evident when a young child, accompanied by her mother, stepped up to the mike and asked if Diaz would ever write a children’s book, and the author kneeled down to get close to her height and told her that he was not a very good writer, that his one attempt at a children’s book was panned by his friends and, somehow, he let that word—“fuck”—insert itself into his speech and he clapped his hand to his mouth and his eyes became as large as saucers and everybody laughed and everybody forgave him, even the child and the mother, because he had said that “fuck” so sincerely).

Junot Diaz also sprinkles high theory into his speech, the language of Marxism and postocolonial philosophy—language that can often sound like gobbledygook and have the mouth-feel of thrice-warmed-over meat loaf.  So somewhere in his one-man comedy monologue are fancy words as crisp as two dollar bills:  hegemony, subaltern, ideology.

And yet it doesn’t come off unnatural.

To one student who asked advice on why her mother (a Dominican) didn’t claim her black identity (while the student did), Diaz gave a history lesson: he pointed out that back in the old country,  the years 1937 and 1938 were the staging ground for two major massacres that followed the rise of a maniac dictator who machete’d citizens who appeared to be black.  And that fact is something that hovers around the racial landscape for Dominicans, even if they have no awareness of this history.

“When you talk about the question of blackness to your mom, all she hears is the sound of the machete.  But I bet if you ask her the question in another way, you will get the response you want to hear.”  Then without missing a beat, he points out the elephant in the room:  that Dominicans who go off to college–prestigious colleges like Oxy–often return home with a lot of privilege; in trying to make a connection with their community, they can unwittingly be perceived to use the baseball bat of knowledge to beat up on their parents who are not so well-educated.  “But we would never think to treat our friends or our children that way. We don’t say ‘Hey Jose you don’t know what counterhegemonic means.  You’re one stupid motherfucker.’”

Junot Diaz was like a B-52, dropping knowledge bombs all night like that.  And I found myself fishing out a manila folder to write elaborate notes that were sprinting beside him like a fan-boy who is following a star marathoner during a small stretch of a long race.  “You spend your whole life surviving the fact that you survived”–this just one of the many epigrams he let loose like a rap star who’s spit out a choice line:  these word explosions, seemingly spontaneous but also highly choreographed.

I came home and couldn’t stop talking about the reading.  I couldn’t sleep–that reading was a raven perched on the branch of my mind.  I haven’t been able to stop pondering that manila folder, which is worn with my cursive graffiti.  So I’m writing this a week later, because writing stuff down, writing stuff of significance and interest, is the only way I know (the only way I have ever known) to make my racing thoughts stop.