After Carlos discovered his roots and exposed his illegitimate birth, he went to Mexico to try to find his father. All he knew about him was that he worked at a mask shop, which kind--Dia de los Muertos, luchadore, or generic tourista--he didn't know. Of course, Carlos was already a middle-aged man at this time and had only recently begun to study Spanish. To the Mexicans, he was just another tourist, but to Carlos, his first trip to Mexico opened his heart. He felt for the first time that he was home.
This was a good thing as well as not so good thing. He had a wife and family in Minnesota, so "feeling at home," alone, in Mexico, made him conflicted about what it was he wanted to do with his life. He suddenly felt for the first time sympathy for the myriad men his age to go AWOL on their wives and children. One doesn't have to go far to see examples of this. Rarely is the phenomenon seen as a logical solution to the inherent contradictions of "modern life" where a man often feels burdened by responsibility, limited in his ability to play (i.e., hang with buddies, drink, and, yes, whore around). This playless man is often a God-less man and even a community-less man as many of the traditional ways men used to get out (deer shack hunting/drinking; ice house fishing/drinking; men's clubs, Elks, Freemasons, even men's auxiliary at the church). The combination of "gentility" (Carlos began to see this more and more as "feminization") and the increasingly loud and demanding gay "lifestyle" crowd cut into what used to be an unquestioned need for men to get together. Suddenly the Old Style (hunting and drinking) was crass, and the new style defined men who wanted to be with men as gay, still anathema as a label if neutral as a behavior. So men dropped out and Carlos for the first time looked at his two teenage sons and wife as they sat down to dinner and felt like crying. He wanted to disappear.
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