Richard continued to live a remarkably miserable life. He married an “elder sister” in the church he’d joined, who already had three kids, and he added two more.
Then he moved on, and married again, this time with two more kids added to the original assembly of the third wife. He became diminutive, shrunken, defeated. Absent of joy.
His one source of delight eventually became the love he rediscovered from his discarded boy, JP, the kid from his first wife who’d called that Father’s Day and I’d hung up on.
JP had learned all the mechanics of every sort of truck, from the gasoline engines of the 1970s to the thirteen-geared diesel engines of the long-haul tractors. School was never a problem because he just never went: JP’s life had always revolved around trucks, and by the time he was twenty years old, he was making a good living working as a long-haul driver. He could drive like a Minotaur, to hear everyone tell it, driving cross-country and making enough to keep his dad happy. He did this just to get the approval and attention of his father. With checks that big, he certainly got a lot of both.
JP had forgiven all and had spent his every waking hour hungry for the attention of his Pa; his real Pa, Richard.
And now, flush with cash and a shiny new pickup, JP managed to get back in Richard’s orbit, and things were going well for them. Richard had found a renewed joy in his abandoned son.
They would go out on the town like pals, like equals, and one night after they were out drinking late, JP dropped Richard off at the trailer park where his third or fourth family was housed, and as he was driving home drunk, JP fell asleep at the wheel of his shiny new pickup and was killed on a bare South Texas highway, had the good luck to run into the only tree for miles around.
“It’s sad,” my own father called to tell me.
I waited a moment before I answered.
I wanted to say, “No, it isn’t. Fuck him. I’m glad that Richard lived to see his abandoned son die.”
But I didn’t say it. At least, I hope I didn’t say it. It suddenly dawned on me that the reason JP called that day was because he had been reaching out to the father who had abandoned him, on Father’s Day. Richard’s response had not been about Gramma at all, but about his guilt, his failure at being a father.
Anyhow, Gramma had had a life insurance policy taken out on JP, like she had on all the young men of the barrio, myself and Dan and Derek included, without any one of us or our parents knowing. JP’s death was like winning the lottery. Again. She made $15,000 out of it, gave his family $1,000 to help bury him, and $2,000 to Richard, to help ease his suffering.
I tried to feel something after I ended the call with Dad. I tried to feel horror, pity, disgust. Satisfaction. Ran my tongue over the chip in my tooth.
I felt nothing.
Chapter 24
SLEEPING WITH MONSTERS
Dan had moved to Seattle because he had nothing going on in South Texas, after he’d been honorably discharged from the Army. He’d married and divorced some Georgian girl in a traditional Army romance for twenty-year-olds (over in three months), had defended South Korea from Kim Jong Il, and could order a beer and a blow job in flawless Korean. But he had nothing going on now and was feeling dislocated, wandering.
His best friend, Dennis, had also been in the Army, had been stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington, just south of Tacoma. As is usually the case, Dennis had met some provincial hussy, a woman named Mary, just like my sister who broke his heart, from a town an hour or so east of Seattle called Enumclaw, or perhaps White Horse . . . I don’t remember. It was one of those isolated redneck mountain towns in Washington that makes San Antonio look like Paris, and as a result, Dennis wanted to move to Seattle to be closer to her and other girls he could sleep with as a career waiter. Dennis, even in the Army, was a career waiter.
He needed Dan, though, in order to do it, so he convinced Dan to make the move north. This was about a year before the incident with Richard.
I had been in school at Texas A&I, having a tough time of it and wondering what the hell I was still doing in South Texas.
I had imagined that Texas A&I—being a certified “college”—might have been a bit more liberal, would have been populated with forward-minded hipsters, like-minded kids into music, film, and fashion. This was not the case; the “A&I” stood for “agriculture and industry,” and not “arts and industry,” as I somehow managed to convince myself. It was a small metropolis of rednecks, full of the sort of people to whom I’d already endured enough exposure, in the numerical isolation of Brownsville. These people were farmers, or the children of farmers, and were going to college to find a better way to manage their farms, tend to their livestock, and otherwise evolve their trade. Still, I tried.
Late one night during this debacle, Dan and Dennis drove into the campus and looked me up in my dorm, and I came down to the parking lot to say good-bye, glumly. Dennis had convinced Dan that starting over in Texas was a wash and that he needed to be in Seattle, with him, paying half the rent. I’d heard the word Seattle before but wouldn’t have been able to point to it on a map of the United States, so I had no idea what they were in for, how far they were driving, and therefore hadn’t made a fuss about saying good-bye. I probably thought he was just going to another part of Texas.
Dan, though, he had an idea of the geographical separation. His eyes welled up with tears as he hugged me and said a long good-bye, for the second time.
Dennis was eager to get moving, to drive west out of Texas in his used 1983 Mustang LX. He was never much for style. Or, rather, he had the style of a fatherless, nappy-headed misogynist kid in the 4-H Club.
Dennis had been my sister Mare’s high school boyfriend, and Dan’s best friend. Sort of. There was just something about Dennis that Dan never quite trusted. Dennis had, at one time, felt some very sincere feelings for Mare, but after a few years, she had decided to end it with him. She had her reasons, I’m sure. And something snapped in Dennis, after. He became icy, reptilian. Watched a lot of sports.
By this time, though, he had been brought into the Martinez fold and had been accepted thoroughly, being Dan’s best friend and Mare’s erstwhile boyfriend. Dennis knew all our secrets, many as there were. He had arranged for my ugliest.
During the time that Dan was stationed in Korea, my sisters were all in Kingsville, at Texas A&I themselves; Dad was doing long-haul trucking; and Mom was busy grooming her dreams of escape. Dennis, too, seemed to lose his navigation.
He wasn’t going to school, was living at home with his single mom, Necie (soubriquet of Denise), who was quite partial to dating the few black men who lived in Brownsville. Rather than being socially stigmatized by this predilection, it actually gave her some sort of raw appeal with the Mexican men of the area, like my father. It sexualized her thoroughly, I think because the prejudicial logic was, “Well, if she’ll sleep with black men, she’ll have no problem sleeping with me. . . .” So no one had a problem with Necie’s boyfriends, all four of them, who were the rhythm section of a local salsa band.
Anyhow, Dennis, at this time, was delivering pizza for Domino’s and feeling pretty lost. He still came by the nearly vacant house, still needed the anchoring of the large swarm of family we had once provided for him, being a single kid to a single mom, but by this point, all that was left was me, and he and I weren’t exactly simpatico. I didn’t mind Dennis anymore, had by this point learned to cope with people who had suspicions of bound books, who wouldn’t read anything larger than a sports page and felt that the atrocious music coming off the South Texas FM radio waves was for nothing more than getting girls to wobble their naughty bits. It was a survival mechanism, learning to coexist with people like him, because they outnumbered me greatly.
He had no more friends in Brownsville. I had no friends either. And so one Friday night, when he wanted some diversion, some chance at being out, Dennis had no one else to phone except for me.
He knew I’d be home at ten o’clock on a Friday night. He called
on Gramma’s line and I answered quickly so that it wouldn’t wake her, over at her house, and he demanded, “Hey, get dressed. Come with me to Matamoros.” He didn’t want to go alone; I was good for that.
I said, “Sure. I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d called like that. Another time he called quite late, came by, and picked me up in his Domino’s Pizza truck, said there was something he really wanted to show me. I was asleep, but I agreed. I was game. Let’s go.
He drove us at top speed through the midnight streets into Brownsville proper, into the old downtown area, and then steered us into neighborhoods I’d never before had reason to visit. He brought the truck right up to a large, unkempt and crumbling concrete cemetery gate, right smack in the middle of old Brownsville town. I’d never seen it before. I’d read about it. It was the oldest cemetery in the city, dating back to the Fort Brown period, from the origins of the area, and the city had grown around it.
“Get out and open the gate,” he told me.
“No fucking way.”
“Come on, don’t be a puss!” he said.
“It’s one in the morning! I’m not opening the gate!” I said.
“Junior, don’t be a puss all your life,” he repeated, something he’d say to me when I’d have misgivings about doing as he asked. He said it often, and with real venom when he said the word, Junior. “Open the fucking gate.”
With encouragement like that, at sixteen, I got out and opened the gate, then got back into the Domino’s Pizza truck, and then Dennis turned off the headlights and crawled the truck slowly down the main path, which descended narrowly through a vast, open graveyard, glowing eerily in the moonlight.
In the low glowing light, the cemetery looked like something out of a George Romero wank fantasy. It was wide open and rolling, with unusual aboveground crypts among the forgotten tombstones, uncommon in the area. Very likely, all this is made up in my reconstructing the memory of that night, because I can see everything clearly in my mind, though it would probably be impossible, unless it was a full moon, which I’m not saying it wasn’t.
Anyhow, I was expecting a scary scene, or Dennis getting very quiet, then shouting loudly, or maybe a fellow driver jumping out from behind a tree—asinine and unimaginative behavior, relevant to the limits of Dennis’s creativity.
But what I certainly didn’t expect was the impossible number of corpses climbing out of their graves, these huddled and dark shapes in the moonlight, groaning and yelping, hollering and moving unreasonably fast for dead people, all coming out of the fucking ground and chasing us down in the truck.
“Holy shit, Dennis, there’s something moving out there,” I said, starting to realize what I was seeing, and slowly going out of my mind with fear. “There’s lots of things moving out there, Dennis. Holy fucking shit, Dennis, are you seeing this? There’s fucking zombies! Fucking zombies! They’re behind us, Dennis! Get us out of here! It’s like a fucking movie! Get us out of here! What the fuck are you doing! Why aren’t you driving! Get us out of here! Now! Now! Fucking now!”
Dennis, meanwhile, had a wide smile on his face and was letting the truck crawl slowly with his foot hovering lightly on the brake pedal like a good sport, letting the idling engine pull us through the cemetery while the hollering zombies started to catch us, the brake lights illuminating in red a horde of bodies stumbling behind us.
“Roll up your window, at least!” I yelled to Dennis, who surprisingly complied, and locked his door. I was leaning on my door and making certain that the window was up and tight and locked down, and I could see in the moonlight that there was definitely a horde of zombies behind us, and many more from the surrounding hills lurching and stumbling down slowly to join in the human-eating fun.
My mind reeled: It wasn’t Halloween, it was way too large and coordinated to be a joke, it made no fucking sense whatsoever, no fucking sense at all, until I hear them yelling in Spanish, saying, “Píssa! Píssa! Tráen pissa!” and then I realize they were hobos, hanging out in the cemetery on a warm night, who had been trained to run after the Domino’s Pizza truck for free pizza.
They were hobos. Not zombies.
Dennis had been laughing enjoyably at my fear. “Isn’t that great?” he asked.
No, I thought. No, it wasn’t. But, yeah, kinda.
This was why Brownsville had no homeless population, I suddenly realized, because they all had a general delivery address: the open-air historical cemetery. No one would fuck with them there, on the bones of Davy Crockett. And they’d get regular pizza deliveries, conditioned by generations of Domino’s Pizza drivers who pulled this initiation trick on rookies, keeping the evening’s leftovers in the bed of the truck.
The homeless horde, looking very much their role, and like they’d had help from the costume and makeup department, all made their way down to the truck’s bed and helped themselves to the pizzas that Dennis had thrown back there before he had picked me up.
To this day, I’ve never had a more convincing trick played on me.
Anyhow, on the other Friday night that Dennis had called asking if I was up for a night in Mexico, I was up for it, but en guarde. He drove us to Matamoros and parked on the street, which was forebodingly empty. We visited the three clubs that the underage kids usually swarmed, and all of them were quiet this night. Mexico was empty, the party obviously elsewhere, and Dennis had not been invited.
Brownsville, back then, was like that. Every weekend night, there was only one place to be, one place that was happening. No two nightspots could coexist, let alone a third or fourth. There was only enough imagination and capital and mirth to sustain one address at a time. This was not a place that enjoyed unnecessary decision-making.
We ended up talking over beers in the quieter of the three bars that served minors, Los Sombrero’s. It had always been my favorite, because it promoted conversation, in its own way. More accurately, I ended up talking; Dennis ended up looking around shiftily, distracted. Endured my conversation that was designed to casually annoy him into a discussion with mild irritation, like a UTI.
I’d had about three Mexican beers and was finally able to sort of breach the station of little brother, had started engaging Dennis as an adult, and I was slowly realizing there was actually very little to bring out of this priapic, sports-betting professional waiter, when we both noticed that this Mexican woman kept walking by, her blouse exaggeratedly undone.
She eyed Dennis en route to the ladies’ room, and then eyed me on her return to her table, where sat, quite convincingly, a husband. We both watched her, uncertain from that amount of overt attention from a woman.
She sat down at the sidewalk table, overlooking the quiet street, and the man looked just like Tom Selleck as Magnum P.I., if he lived in Texas rather than Hawaii.
I couldn’t figure out the alchemy, so I just continued my attempts at getting a depth-reading of Dennis’ Neanderthal appetites, and he had finally admitted that Mare had broken his heart when the woman with the exposed tits sat down at our table, uninvited and unexpected.
She introduced herself. I forget her name. Tits Garcia, maybe. She asked Dennis how old he was.
“Twenty,” responded Dennis, adding a year.
“And you?” She looked at me.
“Seventeen,” I said, doing the same.
“Oh,” she said to me, a smile growing knowingly on her face. “I could get in trouble with you.”
She said, “You two guys want to come back to our hotel and party?”
Dennis says, “Absolutely.”
Personally, I was wary, not sure why I was so repulsed by this invitation, but also totally caught in the inescapable gravity of sex here. So I didn’t say anything. Besides, Dennis was driving.
She wrote her room number on the back of a receipt from her purse and handed it to Dennis.
“We’re at the Motel 6,” she purred with all the grace of a neck tattoo. “We’ll be there in about an hour.”
/> I started to say something, started to ask about Magnum P.I., when Dennis interrupted me and said to her, “We’ll be there.”
And there we were, in less than an hour. Sex was happening, Dennis could tell. Personally, I knew something was up but didn’t know it was sex. I had an idea, but it didn’t fit into any profile I could possibly imagine. And Dennis was driving, so there was really no chance of me not being there, either.
Both groups arrived at the same time, meeting awkwardly on the open-air gangway outside their room, as we were about to knock. They opened the door, and inside on a crude table was a full spread of Johnny Walker Red, wine coolers, and beer in a Styrofoam cooler. We had brought a six-pack of Budweiser, like gentlemen.
She sat us at the table, and faced the man, who introduced himself as, well, as her husband. He told us his name, but again, memory fails. Johnny Swinger. He sat on one of the two double beds and slowly sipped his Johnny Walker and chuckled lightly throughout the evening, as we began talking small, and then impossibly smaller still.
The atmosphere in that room was charged, scaring me to the point of shaking and I was talking ever smaller to her, talking in terms so minute, so atomic, so that they never could come close to describing the frothing, lubed-up sex-pounding elephant in the room, and I did this well, so well in fact that the man eventually left, making an excuse about getting more ice, maybe more beer, and left both Dennis and me alone with his wife, who lit up a Capri cigarette and took five milligrams of valium, giving another one to Dennis as her old man left the room at the Motel 6.
She was free and easy with her conversation now, telling us how she was reviled back in her native Houston, in her neighborhood, because all the women hated how she dressed, how she wore her shirts and walked around with her tits falling out, she laughed. She giggled at this and wiped at her mouth with her shoulder.
Boy Kings of Texas Page 26
