A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State—from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual
“Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.”—Today
“Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace.” —James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Today, The Millions, Paste
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.
Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
“Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.”—Today
“Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace.” —James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Today, The Millions, Paste
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.
Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
1
Orlando Royalty
It happened on a weekday, around eight-thirty p.m. I remember because America’s Next Top Model was on. My older brother, Hector, stormed into the living room and yanked me up by the arm without saying a word. Seconds later we were in Mom’s room, standing at the foot of her bed, where she lay shivering and twisting her head from side to side, strands of her copper-tinted hair glued to her sweaty forehead, dark roots growing like weeds along the edges. “¿Dónde están? I want to go. I don’t understand,” she kept saying. Her eyelids fluttered open and closed, as if she were coming in and out of a bad dream. “I can’t feel anything. Where are they? I’m cold.”
My stepdad, Omar, was seated next to her. “Go to your mother,” he told me.
Seeing the panic in Omar’s eyes, how small and scared he looked in his boxers and an old, baggy tank top, I had to stop myself from laughing at him. Since marrying Mom, the only times he’d acknowledged I existed were when he was telling her how soft I was, that she’d better put me in sports with other boys before she ended up raising a little girl. Now look who was acting like a “little girl.” And for what? It’s not like Mom was dying. People didn’t die out of nowhere. She was just . . . having a nightmare. Or okay, maybe she was sick, but give her some ginger tea and VapoRú and she’d be back to normal in no time. Come on, didn’t he know her at all?
Annoyed with Hector for dragging me away from the TV for whatever this was, I tried to revive the excitement I’d felt moments earlier watching Top Model. My favorite contestant, Eva, had performed well in the week’s challenge. Despite her fear of spiders, she’d remained not only calm but beautiful while modeling diamonds with a live tarantula crawling on her face. I wanted to see her reaction when she won. I imagined Tyra revealing her photo as the week’s top contestant, a scene I could’ve been watching back in the living room, when suddenly Mom began to groan. It was in response to Hector, who’d climbed into the bed to shake her by the shoulders, his round, pudgy cheeks streaked with tears. The sight of him threw me.
My brother never cried.
He was fifteen. I was twelve.
“Levantese,” Hector pleaded at Mom. “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!”
With each word that spilled out of my brother’s mouth, the reality that something might actually be wrong became harder to avoid. Writhing on top of her sweat-soaked bedsheets, Mom muttered more gibberish. “It’s . . . okay,” she insisted. “I can’t feel my legs.” She turned abruptly to Omar. “Who are you?”
The color drained out of his dark brown face. He bowed his head in prayer.
“Diosito, por favor no dejes que esta . . .”
I took a step back toward the door. I had to get back to Eva. I needed to be there when she won. Whatever was going on here wasn’t real. Mom couldn’t be dying . . . because no . . . because then, who would cut our hair? Or yell at us to close the windows when the AC was on? Who would burst into my room at 2:02 in the morning of my birthday every year, jump onto my bed, and shout, “Guess what your mamá was doing at this exact minute?”
“Should we call an ambulance?” Hector cried out.
No one answered him. Not me, or Omar, or my cousin Dante. He’d been so quiet, I hadn’t noticed he was in the room with us, held hostage by a portrait of Jesus nailed to the wall. Dante shifted his eyes from Hector’s terrified face to Omar’s to mine, waiting for one of us to move.
It horrifies me to admit it now, but right then, what I was standing there thinking was:
How much does an ambulance cost?
“No.” Omar’s voice cut through the silence. “She said she’s okay.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. Mom did say she was okay, but that couldn’t possibly be true, could it? I suspect we were both hoping the same thing: that all of a sudden she would sit up, yawn, and stretch her arms wide, then look at us crowded around her and say, “What’s going on? Why is everyone in here? An ambulance? ¡Están locos! You know how expensive those are? I was just sleeping! ¡No lo puedo creer! Who was going to pay for that? I can’t even close my eyes for five seconds without this house falling apart!”
Caught between worrying she’d get mad at me if I called for help that she didn’t need and seeing her struggle to stay awake as Hector wept over her body, I held on to the edge of her bed, my knees crumbling under the weight of me.
Please, I begged the universe, God, anyone who might be listening. It’s just a fever, right? It’s just pneumonia? I’d had it a few years before and had similarly lain awake all night shivering and stringing senseless words together. I vaguely remembered Mom hovering over me, pressing a cool cloth to my burning forehead. No one said anything about taking me to a hospital then. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I had understood she needed me to fight it on my own. “I’m okay,” I’d said too. I wasn’t, but a few days later I was fine.
Mom would be fine. She had to be.
Hours passed, though it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
Then, in a flash, Dante barged out of the room, returning moments later with the announcement that he’d called an ambulance. Instantly, Hector, Omar, and I jumped into action: packing an overnight bag, clearing the way for a gurney, assuring Mom that everything was going to be all right. One second there was only us, the next there were sirens, a fire truck, dirty boots scuffing up the tile floor. Men carried Mom into an ambulance. Omar climbed in after her. Hector, Dante, and I stood alone in the yard, watching the blue-red lights trail off down the block. And that was it. She was gone, and it was dark again.
Dante pressed his palm onto my shoulder. “Let’s go, primo.”
The three of us walked back into the house, where Top Model was still stupidly playing on the TV. I shut it off, went to my room, and waited in bed all night for her to come home.
Just a few years earlier, we were living in Miami.
It was a simpler time then. In the early 2000s, N*Sync and Destiny’s Child had new songs out on the radio. All the movies were about aliens, robots, and skinny white ladies fighting for their equal rights. The Taco Bell mascot was a chihuahua with a Mexican accent.
My mother waited tables at a café in the Miami airport, and my father worked as a line cook at a hotel restaurant. In their wedding pictures, Mom is wearing a cream-colored dress with pointy shoulder pads, Papi’s hair is picked out into a short ’fro. They look tan and scared and happy. Papi had immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1980s as part of the latest wave of natives pushed out of the island due to rising costs of living, and Mom had come from Nicaragua fleeing the political unrest spreading through Central America. After Hector and I were born, Mom begged my grandma to come from Nica to help take care of us. Abuela probably wasn’t the best babysitter, but she was fun. Every morning she slathered me with cocoa butter from head to toe, served us each a big, steaming cup of café con leche, then lifted me up and placed me inside the little metal shopping cart she pulled behind her everywhere, and we’d walk through the noisy Miami streets picking up aluminum cans to sell at the city’s recycling center by the pound. Sometimes, to make extra money, we filled a couple of the cans with rocks to make them weigh more, the two of us giggling like it was a game.
Us against the world.
Simple.
At least for a little while. I mean, this was Florida after all, and though I’d loved our life there so far, some bullshit was bound to happen. Practically overnight, Papi got fired from the restaurant, then the whispers began about him being addicted to crack, maxing out the credit cards.
Orlando Royalty
It happened on a weekday, around eight-thirty p.m. I remember because America’s Next Top Model was on. My older brother, Hector, stormed into the living room and yanked me up by the arm without saying a word. Seconds later we were in Mom’s room, standing at the foot of her bed, where she lay shivering and twisting her head from side to side, strands of her copper-tinted hair glued to her sweaty forehead, dark roots growing like weeds along the edges. “¿Dónde están? I want to go. I don’t understand,” she kept saying. Her eyelids fluttered open and closed, as if she were coming in and out of a bad dream. “I can’t feel anything. Where are they? I’m cold.”
My stepdad, Omar, was seated next to her. “Go to your mother,” he told me.
Seeing the panic in Omar’s eyes, how small and scared he looked in his boxers and an old, baggy tank top, I had to stop myself from laughing at him. Since marrying Mom, the only times he’d acknowledged I existed were when he was telling her how soft I was, that she’d better put me in sports with other boys before she ended up raising a little girl. Now look who was acting like a “little girl.” And for what? It’s not like Mom was dying. People didn’t die out of nowhere. She was just . . . having a nightmare. Or okay, maybe she was sick, but give her some ginger tea and VapoRú and she’d be back to normal in no time. Come on, didn’t he know her at all?
Annoyed with Hector for dragging me away from the TV for whatever this was, I tried to revive the excitement I’d felt moments earlier watching Top Model. My favorite contestant, Eva, had performed well in the week’s challenge. Despite her fear of spiders, she’d remained not only calm but beautiful while modeling diamonds with a live tarantula crawling on her face. I wanted to see her reaction when she won. I imagined Tyra revealing her photo as the week’s top contestant, a scene I could’ve been watching back in the living room, when suddenly Mom began to groan. It was in response to Hector, who’d climbed into the bed to shake her by the shoulders, his round, pudgy cheeks streaked with tears. The sight of him threw me.
My brother never cried.
He was fifteen. I was twelve.
“Levantese,” Hector pleaded at Mom. “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!”
With each word that spilled out of my brother’s mouth, the reality that something might actually be wrong became harder to avoid. Writhing on top of her sweat-soaked bedsheets, Mom muttered more gibberish. “It’s . . . okay,” she insisted. “I can’t feel my legs.” She turned abruptly to Omar. “Who are you?”
The color drained out of his dark brown face. He bowed his head in prayer.
“Diosito, por favor no dejes que esta . . .”
I took a step back toward the door. I had to get back to Eva. I needed to be there when she won. Whatever was going on here wasn’t real. Mom couldn’t be dying . . . because no . . . because then, who would cut our hair? Or yell at us to close the windows when the AC was on? Who would burst into my room at 2:02 in the morning of my birthday every year, jump onto my bed, and shout, “Guess what your mamá was doing at this exact minute?”
“Should we call an ambulance?” Hector cried out.
No one answered him. Not me, or Omar, or my cousin Dante. He’d been so quiet, I hadn’t noticed he was in the room with us, held hostage by a portrait of Jesus nailed to the wall. Dante shifted his eyes from Hector’s terrified face to Omar’s to mine, waiting for one of us to move.
It horrifies me to admit it now, but right then, what I was standing there thinking was:
How much does an ambulance cost?
“No.” Omar’s voice cut through the silence. “She said she’s okay.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. Mom did say she was okay, but that couldn’t possibly be true, could it? I suspect we were both hoping the same thing: that all of a sudden she would sit up, yawn, and stretch her arms wide, then look at us crowded around her and say, “What’s going on? Why is everyone in here? An ambulance? ¡Están locos! You know how expensive those are? I was just sleeping! ¡No lo puedo creer! Who was going to pay for that? I can’t even close my eyes for five seconds without this house falling apart!”
Caught between worrying she’d get mad at me if I called for help that she didn’t need and seeing her struggle to stay awake as Hector wept over her body, I held on to the edge of her bed, my knees crumbling under the weight of me.
Please, I begged the universe, God, anyone who might be listening. It’s just a fever, right? It’s just pneumonia? I’d had it a few years before and had similarly lain awake all night shivering and stringing senseless words together. I vaguely remembered Mom hovering over me, pressing a cool cloth to my burning forehead. No one said anything about taking me to a hospital then. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I had understood she needed me to fight it on my own. “I’m okay,” I’d said too. I wasn’t, but a few days later I was fine.
Mom would be fine. She had to be.
Hours passed, though it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
Then, in a flash, Dante barged out of the room, returning moments later with the announcement that he’d called an ambulance. Instantly, Hector, Omar, and I jumped into action: packing an overnight bag, clearing the way for a gurney, assuring Mom that everything was going to be all right. One second there was only us, the next there were sirens, a fire truck, dirty boots scuffing up the tile floor. Men carried Mom into an ambulance. Omar climbed in after her. Hector, Dante, and I stood alone in the yard, watching the blue-red lights trail off down the block. And that was it. She was gone, and it was dark again.
Dante pressed his palm onto my shoulder. “Let’s go, primo.”
The three of us walked back into the house, where Top Model was still stupidly playing on the TV. I shut it off, went to my room, and waited in bed all night for her to come home.
Just a few years earlier, we were living in Miami.
It was a simpler time then. In the early 2000s, N*Sync and Destiny’s Child had new songs out on the radio. All the movies were about aliens, robots, and skinny white ladies fighting for their equal rights. The Taco Bell mascot was a chihuahua with a Mexican accent.
My mother waited tables at a café in the Miami airport, and my father worked as a line cook at a hotel restaurant. In their wedding pictures, Mom is wearing a cream-colored dress with pointy shoulder pads, Papi’s hair is picked out into a short ’fro. They look tan and scared and happy. Papi had immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1980s as part of the latest wave of natives pushed out of the island due to rising costs of living, and Mom had come from Nicaragua fleeing the political unrest spreading through Central America. After Hector and I were born, Mom begged my grandma to come from Nica to help take care of us. Abuela probably wasn’t the best babysitter, but she was fun. Every morning she slathered me with cocoa butter from head to toe, served us each a big, steaming cup of café con leche, then lifted me up and placed me inside the little metal shopping cart she pulled behind her everywhere, and we’d walk through the noisy Miami streets picking up aluminum cans to sell at the city’s recycling center by the pound. Sometimes, to make extra money, we filled a couple of the cans with rocks to make them weigh more, the two of us giggling like it was a game.
Us against the world.
Simple.
At least for a little while. I mean, this was Florida after all, and though I’d loved our life there so far, some bullshit was bound to happen. Practically overnight, Papi got fired from the restaurant, then the whispers began about him being addicted to crack, maxing out the credit cards.
Copyright © 2025 by Edgar Gomez. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
“Like fellow memoirists Édouard Louis and Annie Ernaux, Gomez approaches life-writing as a way not just to process but to reprocess the past. . . . Gomez is especially incisive on the American caste system, with which he, like his parents, is intimately familiar. . . . It doesn’t read like a hardscrabble memoir. It’s nostalgia with a bite, but also a wry kind of affection. . . . Alligator Tears sings.”—Los Angeles Times
“A big-hearted, humorous portrait of a queer coming-of-age in Central Florida.”—USA Today
“Wildly original . . . The existence of this book shows the power of the written word, the need for stories to be shared not as a trauma at which to gawk but for the power of voice that cannot be erased.”—Southern Review of Books
“Humorous, heartfelt, and refreshingly sincere, Alligator Tears is a meta-level how-to guide for putting words down on the page when the world would rather you not, and a raw and energetic account of coming of age as a queer Latino man on the periphery of the happiest place on Earth.”—Paste magazine
“An arresting memoir-in-essays . . . A skillful analysis vital for examining one’s life on the page . . . Gomez transports his readers on a journey that will have them laughing through their tears.”—The Coachella Review
“Squirmishly honest . . . Gomez dismantles the American Dream one harrowing and humorous experience at a time.”—Queerty
“Gomez writes essays that are by turns wacky and poignant (occasionally both at the same time), but always deeply personal and perspicacious.”—San Francisco Bay Times
“Vivid, absorbing . . . Alligator Tears gifts us with lessons on remembering how to float, how to keep breathing, despite all of the forces that would have it otherwise.”—Xtra
“With tender vulnerability and laugh-out-loud humor, Alligator Tears invites readers into the lives of America’s invisible caste: the working-class immigrants who are knocked down by systemic barrier after systemic barrier but who each day rise with pride to claim our right to exist. I laughed; I cried; I read and reread beautiful wisdom that I will never forget. Edgar Gomez’s voice is one for us all.”—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“Alligator Tears is gorgeous, poignant, and raw, chock-full of hope and want and irrepressible, aching beauty. This is the kind of Florida writing that I love most: a daring, swampy slick of a collection where the humidity hangs like a hug. Edgar Gomez is a tremendous talent. I’ll read anything he writes.”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
“No one writes about the terrors of late-stage capitalism with such humor, candor, and aplomb. In every sentence, Gomez elucidates the unnecessary horrors of suffering in the American context. To our benefit (and relief), he accomplishes this feat with the wonder of a child and the wit of a satirist. Affecting and inspiring, Alligator Tears is more proof that Gomez is a writer who deserves our attention.”—Alejandro Varela, author of National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon
“Triumphant . . . dazzling . . . Even as he offers a pitiless, self-aware view of life on the margins, Gomez remains funny, candid, and unfailingly stylish. This delivers a welcome jolt to the coming-of-age memoir formula.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Meticulously evoked and darkly comic. . . . Heartening. . . . This portrait of the artist as a young flip-flop salesman will inspire, amuse, and empower its audience.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A big-hearted, humorous portrait of a queer coming-of-age in Central Florida.”—USA Today
“Wildly original . . . The existence of this book shows the power of the written word, the need for stories to be shared not as a trauma at which to gawk but for the power of voice that cannot be erased.”—Southern Review of Books
“Humorous, heartfelt, and refreshingly sincere, Alligator Tears is a meta-level how-to guide for putting words down on the page when the world would rather you not, and a raw and energetic account of coming of age as a queer Latino man on the periphery of the happiest place on Earth.”—Paste magazine
“An arresting memoir-in-essays . . . A skillful analysis vital for examining one’s life on the page . . . Gomez transports his readers on a journey that will have them laughing through their tears.”—The Coachella Review
“Squirmishly honest . . . Gomez dismantles the American Dream one harrowing and humorous experience at a time.”—Queerty
“Gomez writes essays that are by turns wacky and poignant (occasionally both at the same time), but always deeply personal and perspicacious.”—San Francisco Bay Times
“Vivid, absorbing . . . Alligator Tears gifts us with lessons on remembering how to float, how to keep breathing, despite all of the forces that would have it otherwise.”—Xtra
“With tender vulnerability and laugh-out-loud humor, Alligator Tears invites readers into the lives of America’s invisible caste: the working-class immigrants who are knocked down by systemic barrier after systemic barrier but who each day rise with pride to claim our right to exist. I laughed; I cried; I read and reread beautiful wisdom that I will never forget. Edgar Gomez’s voice is one for us all.”—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“Alligator Tears is gorgeous, poignant, and raw, chock-full of hope and want and irrepressible, aching beauty. This is the kind of Florida writing that I love most: a daring, swampy slick of a collection where the humidity hangs like a hug. Edgar Gomez is a tremendous talent. I’ll read anything he writes.”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
“No one writes about the terrors of late-stage capitalism with such humor, candor, and aplomb. In every sentence, Gomez elucidates the unnecessary horrors of suffering in the American context. To our benefit (and relief), he accomplishes this feat with the wonder of a child and the wit of a satirist. Affecting and inspiring, Alligator Tears is more proof that Gomez is a writer who deserves our attention.”—Alejandro Varela, author of National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon
“Triumphant . . . dazzling . . . Even as he offers a pitiless, self-aware view of life on the margins, Gomez remains funny, candid, and unfailingly stylish. This delivers a welcome jolt to the coming-of-age memoir formula.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Meticulously evoked and darkly comic. . . . Heartening. . . . This portrait of the artist as a young flip-flop salesman will inspire, amuse, and empower its audience.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
About
A darkly comic memoir-in-essays about the scam of the American Dream and doing whatever it takes to survive in the Sunshine State—from the award-winning author of High-Risk Homosexual
“Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.”—Today
“Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace.” —James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Today, The Millions, Paste
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.
Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
“Relatable, funny and deeply heartfelt, this memoir is one not to miss.”—Today
“Edgar Gomez is a young writer of deep talent and enormous grace.” —James McBride, New York Times bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: Today, The Millions, Paste
In Florida, one of the first things you’re taught as a child is that if you’re ever chased by a wild alligator, the only way to save yourself is to run away in zigzags. It’s a lesson on survival that has guided much of Edgar Gomez’s life.
Like the night his mother had a stroke while he and his brother stood frozen at the foot of her bed, afraid she’d be angry if they called for an ambulance they couldn’t afford. Gomez escaped into his mind, where he could tell himself nothing was wrong with his family. Zig. Or years later, as a broke college student, he got on his knees to put sandals on tourists’ smelly, swollen feet for minimum wage at the Flip Flop Shop. After clocking out, his crew of working-class, queer, Latinx friends changed out of their uniforms in the passenger seats of each other’s cars, speeding toward the relief they found at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Zag. From committing a little bankruptcy fraud for the money for veneers to those days he paid his phone bill by giving massages to closeted men on vacation, back when he and his friends would Venmo each other the same emergency twenty dollars over and over. Zig. Zag. Gomez survived this way as long as his legs would carry him.
Alligator Tears is a fiercely defiant memoir-in-essays charting Gomez’s quest to claw his family out of poverty by any means necessary and exposing the archetype of the humble poor person for what it is: a scam that insists we remain quiet and servile while we wait for a prize that will always be out of reach. For those chasing the American Dream and those jaded by it, Gomez’s unforgettable story is a testament to finding love, purpose, and community on your own terms, smiling with all your fake teeth.
Excerpt
1
Orlando Royalty
It happened on a weekday, around eight-thirty p.m. I remember because America’s Next Top Model was on. My older brother, Hector, stormed into the living room and yanked me up by the arm without saying a word. Seconds later we were in Mom’s room, standing at the foot of her bed, where she lay shivering and twisting her head from side to side, strands of her copper-tinted hair glued to her sweaty forehead, dark roots growing like weeds along the edges. “¿Dónde están? I want to go. I don’t understand,” she kept saying. Her eyelids fluttered open and closed, as if she were coming in and out of a bad dream. “I can’t feel anything. Where are they? I’m cold.”
My stepdad, Omar, was seated next to her. “Go to your mother,” he told me.
Seeing the panic in Omar’s eyes, how small and scared he looked in his boxers and an old, baggy tank top, I had to stop myself from laughing at him. Since marrying Mom, the only times he’d acknowledged I existed were when he was telling her how soft I was, that she’d better put me in sports with other boys before she ended up raising a little girl. Now look who was acting like a “little girl.” And for what? It’s not like Mom was dying. People didn’t die out of nowhere. She was just . . . having a nightmare. Or okay, maybe she was sick, but give her some ginger tea and VapoRú and she’d be back to normal in no time. Come on, didn’t he know her at all?
Annoyed with Hector for dragging me away from the TV for whatever this was, I tried to revive the excitement I’d felt moments earlier watching Top Model. My favorite contestant, Eva, had performed well in the week’s challenge. Despite her fear of spiders, she’d remained not only calm but beautiful while modeling diamonds with a live tarantula crawling on her face. I wanted to see her reaction when she won. I imagined Tyra revealing her photo as the week’s top contestant, a scene I could’ve been watching back in the living room, when suddenly Mom began to groan. It was in response to Hector, who’d climbed into the bed to shake her by the shoulders, his round, pudgy cheeks streaked with tears. The sight of him threw me.
My brother never cried.
He was fifteen. I was twelve.
“Levantese,” Hector pleaded at Mom. “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!”
With each word that spilled out of my brother’s mouth, the reality that something might actually be wrong became harder to avoid. Writhing on top of her sweat-soaked bedsheets, Mom muttered more gibberish. “It’s . . . okay,” she insisted. “I can’t feel my legs.” She turned abruptly to Omar. “Who are you?”
The color drained out of his dark brown face. He bowed his head in prayer.
“Diosito, por favor no dejes que esta . . .”
I took a step back toward the door. I had to get back to Eva. I needed to be there when she won. Whatever was going on here wasn’t real. Mom couldn’t be dying . . . because no . . . because then, who would cut our hair? Or yell at us to close the windows when the AC was on? Who would burst into my room at 2:02 in the morning of my birthday every year, jump onto my bed, and shout, “Guess what your mamá was doing at this exact minute?”
“Should we call an ambulance?” Hector cried out.
No one answered him. Not me, or Omar, or my cousin Dante. He’d been so quiet, I hadn’t noticed he was in the room with us, held hostage by a portrait of Jesus nailed to the wall. Dante shifted his eyes from Hector’s terrified face to Omar’s to mine, waiting for one of us to move.
It horrifies me to admit it now, but right then, what I was standing there thinking was:
How much does an ambulance cost?
“No.” Omar’s voice cut through the silence. “She said she’s okay.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. Mom did say she was okay, but that couldn’t possibly be true, could it? I suspect we were both hoping the same thing: that all of a sudden she would sit up, yawn, and stretch her arms wide, then look at us crowded around her and say, “What’s going on? Why is everyone in here? An ambulance? ¡Están locos! You know how expensive those are? I was just sleeping! ¡No lo puedo creer! Who was going to pay for that? I can’t even close my eyes for five seconds without this house falling apart!”
Caught between worrying she’d get mad at me if I called for help that she didn’t need and seeing her struggle to stay awake as Hector wept over her body, I held on to the edge of her bed, my knees crumbling under the weight of me.
Please, I begged the universe, God, anyone who might be listening. It’s just a fever, right? It’s just pneumonia? I’d had it a few years before and had similarly lain awake all night shivering and stringing senseless words together. I vaguely remembered Mom hovering over me, pressing a cool cloth to my burning forehead. No one said anything about taking me to a hospital then. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I had understood she needed me to fight it on my own. “I’m okay,” I’d said too. I wasn’t, but a few days later I was fine.
Mom would be fine. She had to be.
Hours passed, though it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
Then, in a flash, Dante barged out of the room, returning moments later with the announcement that he’d called an ambulance. Instantly, Hector, Omar, and I jumped into action: packing an overnight bag, clearing the way for a gurney, assuring Mom that everything was going to be all right. One second there was only us, the next there were sirens, a fire truck, dirty boots scuffing up the tile floor. Men carried Mom into an ambulance. Omar climbed in after her. Hector, Dante, and I stood alone in the yard, watching the blue-red lights trail off down the block. And that was it. She was gone, and it was dark again.
Dante pressed his palm onto my shoulder. “Let’s go, primo.”
The three of us walked back into the house, where Top Model was still stupidly playing on the TV. I shut it off, went to my room, and waited in bed all night for her to come home.
Just a few years earlier, we were living in Miami.
It was a simpler time then. In the early 2000s, N*Sync and Destiny’s Child had new songs out on the radio. All the movies were about aliens, robots, and skinny white ladies fighting for their equal rights. The Taco Bell mascot was a chihuahua with a Mexican accent.
My mother waited tables at a café in the Miami airport, and my father worked as a line cook at a hotel restaurant. In their wedding pictures, Mom is wearing a cream-colored dress with pointy shoulder pads, Papi’s hair is picked out into a short ’fro. They look tan and scared and happy. Papi had immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1980s as part of the latest wave of natives pushed out of the island due to rising costs of living, and Mom had come from Nicaragua fleeing the political unrest spreading through Central America. After Hector and I were born, Mom begged my grandma to come from Nica to help take care of us. Abuela probably wasn’t the best babysitter, but she was fun. Every morning she slathered me with cocoa butter from head to toe, served us each a big, steaming cup of café con leche, then lifted me up and placed me inside the little metal shopping cart she pulled behind her everywhere, and we’d walk through the noisy Miami streets picking up aluminum cans to sell at the city’s recycling center by the pound. Sometimes, to make extra money, we filled a couple of the cans with rocks to make them weigh more, the two of us giggling like it was a game.
Us against the world.
Simple.
At least for a little while. I mean, this was Florida after all, and though I’d loved our life there so far, some bullshit was bound to happen. Practically overnight, Papi got fired from the restaurant, then the whispers began about him being addicted to crack, maxing out the credit cards.
Orlando Royalty
It happened on a weekday, around eight-thirty p.m. I remember because America’s Next Top Model was on. My older brother, Hector, stormed into the living room and yanked me up by the arm without saying a word. Seconds later we were in Mom’s room, standing at the foot of her bed, where she lay shivering and twisting her head from side to side, strands of her copper-tinted hair glued to her sweaty forehead, dark roots growing like weeds along the edges. “¿Dónde están? I want to go. I don’t understand,” she kept saying. Her eyelids fluttered open and closed, as if she were coming in and out of a bad dream. “I can’t feel anything. Where are they? I’m cold.”
My stepdad, Omar, was seated next to her. “Go to your mother,” he told me.
Seeing the panic in Omar’s eyes, how small and scared he looked in his boxers and an old, baggy tank top, I had to stop myself from laughing at him. Since marrying Mom, the only times he’d acknowledged I existed were when he was telling her how soft I was, that she’d better put me in sports with other boys before she ended up raising a little girl. Now look who was acting like a “little girl.” And for what? It’s not like Mom was dying. People didn’t die out of nowhere. She was just . . . having a nightmare. Or okay, maybe she was sick, but give her some ginger tea and VapoRú and she’d be back to normal in no time. Come on, didn’t he know her at all?
Annoyed with Hector for dragging me away from the TV for whatever this was, I tried to revive the excitement I’d felt moments earlier watching Top Model. My favorite contestant, Eva, had performed well in the week’s challenge. Despite her fear of spiders, she’d remained not only calm but beautiful while modeling diamonds with a live tarantula crawling on her face. I wanted to see her reaction when she won. I imagined Tyra revealing her photo as the week’s top contestant, a scene I could’ve been watching back in the living room, when suddenly Mom began to groan. It was in response to Hector, who’d climbed into the bed to shake her by the shoulders, his round, pudgy cheeks streaked with tears. The sight of him threw me.
My brother never cried.
He was fifteen. I was twelve.
“Levantese,” Hector pleaded at Mom. “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!”
With each word that spilled out of my brother’s mouth, the reality that something might actually be wrong became harder to avoid. Writhing on top of her sweat-soaked bedsheets, Mom muttered more gibberish. “It’s . . . okay,” she insisted. “I can’t feel my legs.” She turned abruptly to Omar. “Who are you?”
The color drained out of his dark brown face. He bowed his head in prayer.
“Diosito, por favor no dejes que esta . . .”
I took a step back toward the door. I had to get back to Eva. I needed to be there when she won. Whatever was going on here wasn’t real. Mom couldn’t be dying . . . because no . . . because then, who would cut our hair? Or yell at us to close the windows when the AC was on? Who would burst into my room at 2:02 in the morning of my birthday every year, jump onto my bed, and shout, “Guess what your mamá was doing at this exact minute?”
“Should we call an ambulance?” Hector cried out.
No one answered him. Not me, or Omar, or my cousin Dante. He’d been so quiet, I hadn’t noticed he was in the room with us, held hostage by a portrait of Jesus nailed to the wall. Dante shifted his eyes from Hector’s terrified face to Omar’s to mine, waiting for one of us to move.
It horrifies me to admit it now, but right then, what I was standing there thinking was:
How much does an ambulance cost?
“No.” Omar’s voice cut through the silence. “She said she’s okay.”
I didn’t know whether to believe him. Mom did say she was okay, but that couldn’t possibly be true, could it? I suspect we were both hoping the same thing: that all of a sudden she would sit up, yawn, and stretch her arms wide, then look at us crowded around her and say, “What’s going on? Why is everyone in here? An ambulance? ¡Están locos! You know how expensive those are? I was just sleeping! ¡No lo puedo creer! Who was going to pay for that? I can’t even close my eyes for five seconds without this house falling apart!”
Caught between worrying she’d get mad at me if I called for help that she didn’t need and seeing her struggle to stay awake as Hector wept over her body, I held on to the edge of her bed, my knees crumbling under the weight of me.
Please, I begged the universe, God, anyone who might be listening. It’s just a fever, right? It’s just pneumonia? I’d had it a few years before and had similarly lain awake all night shivering and stringing senseless words together. I vaguely remembered Mom hovering over me, pressing a cool cloth to my burning forehead. No one said anything about taking me to a hospital then. Somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I had understood she needed me to fight it on my own. “I’m okay,” I’d said too. I wasn’t, but a few days later I was fine.
Mom would be fine. She had to be.
Hours passed, though it couldn’t have been more than a minute.
Then, in a flash, Dante barged out of the room, returning moments later with the announcement that he’d called an ambulance. Instantly, Hector, Omar, and I jumped into action: packing an overnight bag, clearing the way for a gurney, assuring Mom that everything was going to be all right. One second there was only us, the next there were sirens, a fire truck, dirty boots scuffing up the tile floor. Men carried Mom into an ambulance. Omar climbed in after her. Hector, Dante, and I stood alone in the yard, watching the blue-red lights trail off down the block. And that was it. She was gone, and it was dark again.
Dante pressed his palm onto my shoulder. “Let’s go, primo.”
The three of us walked back into the house, where Top Model was still stupidly playing on the TV. I shut it off, went to my room, and waited in bed all night for her to come home.
Just a few years earlier, we were living in Miami.
It was a simpler time then. In the early 2000s, N*Sync and Destiny’s Child had new songs out on the radio. All the movies were about aliens, robots, and skinny white ladies fighting for their equal rights. The Taco Bell mascot was a chihuahua with a Mexican accent.
My mother waited tables at a café in the Miami airport, and my father worked as a line cook at a hotel restaurant. In their wedding pictures, Mom is wearing a cream-colored dress with pointy shoulder pads, Papi’s hair is picked out into a short ’fro. They look tan and scared and happy. Papi had immigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico in the 1980s as part of the latest wave of natives pushed out of the island due to rising costs of living, and Mom had come from Nicaragua fleeing the political unrest spreading through Central America. After Hector and I were born, Mom begged my grandma to come from Nica to help take care of us. Abuela probably wasn’t the best babysitter, but she was fun. Every morning she slathered me with cocoa butter from head to toe, served us each a big, steaming cup of café con leche, then lifted me up and placed me inside the little metal shopping cart she pulled behind her everywhere, and we’d walk through the noisy Miami streets picking up aluminum cans to sell at the city’s recycling center by the pound. Sometimes, to make extra money, we filled a couple of the cans with rocks to make them weigh more, the two of us giggling like it was a game.
Us against the world.
Simple.
At least for a little while. I mean, this was Florida after all, and though I’d loved our life there so far, some bullshit was bound to happen. Practically overnight, Papi got fired from the restaurant, then the whispers began about him being addicted to crack, maxing out the credit cards.
Copyright © 2025 by Edgar Gomez. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Reviews
“Like fellow memoirists Édouard Louis and Annie Ernaux, Gomez approaches life-writing as a way not just to process but to reprocess the past. . . . Gomez is especially incisive on the American caste system, with which he, like his parents, is intimately familiar. . . . It doesn’t read like a hardscrabble memoir. It’s nostalgia with a bite, but also a wry kind of affection. . . . Alligator Tears sings.”—Los Angeles Times
“A big-hearted, humorous portrait of a queer coming-of-age in Central Florida.”—USA Today
“Wildly original . . . The existence of this book shows the power of the written word, the need for stories to be shared not as a trauma at which to gawk but for the power of voice that cannot be erased.”—Southern Review of Books
“Humorous, heartfelt, and refreshingly sincere, Alligator Tears is a meta-level how-to guide for putting words down on the page when the world would rather you not, and a raw and energetic account of coming of age as a queer Latino man on the periphery of the happiest place on Earth.”—Paste magazine
“An arresting memoir-in-essays . . . A skillful analysis vital for examining one’s life on the page . . . Gomez transports his readers on a journey that will have them laughing through their tears.”—The Coachella Review
“Squirmishly honest . . . Gomez dismantles the American Dream one harrowing and humorous experience at a time.”—Queerty
“Gomez writes essays that are by turns wacky and poignant (occasionally both at the same time), but always deeply personal and perspicacious.”—San Francisco Bay Times
“Vivid, absorbing . . . Alligator Tears gifts us with lessons on remembering how to float, how to keep breathing, despite all of the forces that would have it otherwise.”—Xtra
“With tender vulnerability and laugh-out-loud humor, Alligator Tears invites readers into the lives of America’s invisible caste: the working-class immigrants who are knocked down by systemic barrier after systemic barrier but who each day rise with pride to claim our right to exist. I laughed; I cried; I read and reread beautiful wisdom that I will never forget. Edgar Gomez’s voice is one for us all.”—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“Alligator Tears is gorgeous, poignant, and raw, chock-full of hope and want and irrepressible, aching beauty. This is the kind of Florida writing that I love most: a daring, swampy slick of a collection where the humidity hangs like a hug. Edgar Gomez is a tremendous talent. I’ll read anything he writes.”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
“No one writes about the terrors of late-stage capitalism with such humor, candor, and aplomb. In every sentence, Gomez elucidates the unnecessary horrors of suffering in the American context. To our benefit (and relief), he accomplishes this feat with the wonder of a child and the wit of a satirist. Affecting and inspiring, Alligator Tears is more proof that Gomez is a writer who deserves our attention.”—Alejandro Varela, author of National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon
“Triumphant . . . dazzling . . . Even as he offers a pitiless, self-aware view of life on the margins, Gomez remains funny, candid, and unfailingly stylish. This delivers a welcome jolt to the coming-of-age memoir formula.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Meticulously evoked and darkly comic. . . . Heartening. . . . This portrait of the artist as a young flip-flop salesman will inspire, amuse, and empower its audience.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A big-hearted, humorous portrait of a queer coming-of-age in Central Florida.”—USA Today
“Wildly original . . . The existence of this book shows the power of the written word, the need for stories to be shared not as a trauma at which to gawk but for the power of voice that cannot be erased.”—Southern Review of Books
“Humorous, heartfelt, and refreshingly sincere, Alligator Tears is a meta-level how-to guide for putting words down on the page when the world would rather you not, and a raw and energetic account of coming of age as a queer Latino man on the periphery of the happiest place on Earth.”—Paste magazine
“An arresting memoir-in-essays . . . A skillful analysis vital for examining one’s life on the page . . . Gomez transports his readers on a journey that will have them laughing through their tears.”—The Coachella Review
“Squirmishly honest . . . Gomez dismantles the American Dream one harrowing and humorous experience at a time.”—Queerty
“Gomez writes essays that are by turns wacky and poignant (occasionally both at the same time), but always deeply personal and perspicacious.”—San Francisco Bay Times
“Vivid, absorbing . . . Alligator Tears gifts us with lessons on remembering how to float, how to keep breathing, despite all of the forces that would have it otherwise.”—Xtra
“With tender vulnerability and laugh-out-loud humor, Alligator Tears invites readers into the lives of America’s invisible caste: the working-class immigrants who are knocked down by systemic barrier after systemic barrier but who each day rise with pride to claim our right to exist. I laughed; I cried; I read and reread beautiful wisdom that I will never forget. Edgar Gomez’s voice is one for us all.”—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“Alligator Tears is gorgeous, poignant, and raw, chock-full of hope and want and irrepressible, aching beauty. This is the kind of Florida writing that I love most: a daring, swampy slick of a collection where the humidity hangs like a hug. Edgar Gomez is a tremendous talent. I’ll read anything he writes.”—Kristen Arnett, author of With Teeth
“No one writes about the terrors of late-stage capitalism with such humor, candor, and aplomb. In every sentence, Gomez elucidates the unnecessary horrors of suffering in the American context. To our benefit (and relief), he accomplishes this feat with the wonder of a child and the wit of a satirist. Affecting and inspiring, Alligator Tears is more proof that Gomez is a writer who deserves our attention.”—Alejandro Varela, author of National Book Award finalist The Town of Babylon
“Triumphant . . . dazzling . . . Even as he offers a pitiless, self-aware view of life on the margins, Gomez remains funny, candid, and unfailingly stylish. This delivers a welcome jolt to the coming-of-age memoir formula.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Meticulously evoked and darkly comic. . . . Heartening. . . . This portrait of the artist as a young flip-flop salesman will inspire, amuse, and empower its audience.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
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