Dark Blue Suit is not “about” sex. It is much more a memoir of sorts, telling detailed stories from the life of “Buddy” a 2nd generation Filipino-American growing up in the heart of urban Seattle. Buddy lives in a community made up of mostly poor racial minorities, who have a hard time finding jobs often because of their skin color. Opportunity among his friends and relatives for upward mobility is scarce and families are often broken and scattered across the west coast. Buddy himself grows up knowing, even at the age of five, that he has other siblings that he may not be aware of due to his father’s almost openly promiscuous behavior. This seems to be the case for almost all of Buddy’s older male role models; most haven’t formerly “settled down” with a mate but even those that have carry on affairs on a regular basis, and are aware that they have far more biological children than the ones that actually live under their roofs.

Many of Buddy’s contemporaries in the book are told that they have no future other than the military or manual labor by teachers and counselors in the high schools they attend. Often times this bleak counsel is internalized and so the youth of Buddy’s community seek means of escape which often come in the form of fighting, drinking, drugs, and sex. Throughout the book women are discussed in regards to how many of them a man has been capable of sleeping with and how capable they are of using their sex as a means of survival. One of Buddy’s half sisters, Sonia, for example survives on the streets as a hooker and a stripper having been run out of the house by Buddy’s parents decades prior.

The young men obviously look up to their older role models, Buddy’s dad in particular is noted as having a lot of influence among the members of the community, and so in turn the young men begin to follow the pattern set before them by the previous generation. The men hunt women, sleep with as many as possible, and inevitably end up having many children and a string of broken relationships that one could argue damage their sexuality and ability to maintain healthy relationships. In Buddy’s own life we see his inability to hold a steady long-term relationship, he’s had at least two divorces by the end of the book with hints that he’s had several other relationships that ended poorly as well.

It’s unclear what Buddy’s romantic goals are, it almost seems as if he’s just going with the flow, but I’d hazard a guess that because his father modeled a pattern of womanizing to him Buddy has normalized his dad’s promiscuous behavior and it has now crippled him. I wonder if Buddy’s dad had been faithful to his mother how much of the pain in these short stories could have been avoided, I think that it goes to show how big of a role our parents play in our lives and the price of poor leadership.