Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

  In order to even the odds, I’m pitched forward, using only the strength in my jaws and shoulders, trying to keep it fair for the dog, but I still manage to pull it away from her, over and over again. Ha, ha! I think: Take that, silly thumbless animal!

  Stella is getting frustrated, making that “harrrooommmm” noise she makes when she wants out in the morning, or when she gets really upset. I do it once more and Stella barks at me, having reached the outer limits of her frustration.

  From the kitchen, I hear Rebecca say, “Domingo, would you let the damn dog win? Jesus fucking Christ already.”

  And it’s here, in this moment, that the whole theory of nature versus nurture suddenly freezes on me, and my whole psychological profile sort of snaps in to focus. I am immediately transported back in an emotional wormhole to the day I came home from the first grade and announced proudly to my father, Dad, that I was the fastest boy in the first grade.

  “And,” I say to him in Spanish, “I even beat Nicholas Gonzalez, who’s the fastest kid in the Special Ed classes.”

  Dad’s not impressed.

  “I bet I’m faster than you,” he says, finishing his beer under the truck he’s been working on.

  I get hot for a moment, mad, while I consider this.

  “No,” I say. “You’re not.”

  “OK, then,” says Dad, standing up, covered in grease and perspiration. “I’ll race you.”

  For this, he stops his business of trucking and mechanics, to establish his authority over his eight-year-old boy.

  He points to the end of the driveway, which ends at Oklahoma Avenue, and says, “First one to get to the street wins. Ready? Go!”

  And we charge down to the end of the street, the both of us, and I’m pumping my little eight-year-old legs as fast as I can—the race is in my heart, my legs, my face, and my arms—and Dad, who is about twenty-eight years old at this time, and has legs longer than the length of my body, is striding easily to the end of the road, standing over me as he’s doing it and laughing, all the while laughing, saying, “Ha, ha! Ha, ha! I’m faster than you! I’m faster than you! Who’s the fastest one now? Who’s the baby? Who’s the slow baby?” in Spanish, which, like German, makes everything sound far more humiliating than is absolutely necessary, and as we get to the end, I’m just fucking infuriated and exploding in tears and if I had had a gun I would have fucking shot him right in the fucking neck, right there. Bam. Who’s too slow now, you fucker? Like that.

  So I go back down on all fours and grab the rope toy in my mouth again, and Stella clamps down hard on her end, and so that she won’t feel like the whole thing is rigged, I fight back for a few seconds and then let her have the rope toy.

  I never learned to let Karis have the rope toy, not back then. I didn’t learn that particular bit of social currency until I was much older, and sometimes still have trouble with it, if I’m not paying attention.

  Doomed from the start.

  Chapter 29

  HOME

  After three months of living on South Padre Island, Karis and I decided it was time to get back to Seattle. We packed all our stuff into the van I used for the distribution run of the newspaper I was writing and producing and moved it into Mom’s house as we waited until we could meet the train in San Antonio. In the meantime, Karis would accompany me as I distributed the newspaper on a run from the top of the Rio Grande Valley to the South Padre Island office as part of my $300 a week negotiation. For the entire run, about four hours of driving, I would listen to the area’s pathetic public radio, which would occasionally pipe in Terry Gross and some other network PRI stuff, which would give me a lifelong love for essays and storytelling mediated over the radio. The rest of the programming left me convinced that I needed to run as far away from the lower Rio Grande Valley as I possibly could, when the pitiful, pidgin English–speaking students of the local technical college who ran the one station that far down the left side of the dial would get on and try to kill the minutes in between the nationally produced stuff with banter. Oh, it was dreadful. It was painful listening to them, with their ambition to be on the radio far exceeding their abilities, and it would make me squirm for hours at a time, but still I couldn’t turn it off.

  Anyhow, Karis seemed to enjoy it also, as a sort of rude theater. We packed up our stuff and moved into my mother’s house for a week, while we prepared to hike Amtrak to Seattle from San Antonio. Mom bought our tickets, out of unexpected benevolence.

  One quiet morning, when it was raining outside and the house was quiet, with Derek at school and Mom at work and Dad elsewhere, Karis and I were alone, in my mother’s room, with the air-conditioning droning, and the television turned all the way to quiet. We stayed in bed all morning long, and I made love to her in the way that I had hoped for from the moment I’d laid eyes on her, when her feet slipped off the stove and she had fallen, in that apartment in Seattle, and it was for me, the closest thing to perfect love as I’d ever come close to, in my mother’s bed, in that room where Richard had assaulted me a few years before. It had been perfect, delicate heaven, for both of us. Just a moment of it, before it shifted away from us entirely.

  On our last night in Texas, I drove us from Brownsville to San Antonio, in the dark, our car packed and a U-Haul trailer attached. Mom, Dad, and Derek slept in the backseat of my car, which had been overhauled at our mechanic’s and was now in great condition. I was begrudgingly leaving it behind, as it drove as smoothly as it ever had. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, on I-37, Karis tuned the radio to some midnight station and found old folk music, and she sang along with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan songs all the way to San Antonio, where we’d stay with Dan for the night. While she sang I fell completely in love with her, had capsized entirely, once again.

  Karis’s biggest problem in adapting to Texas life was food. She was accustomed to a much healthier diet, low fat and full of fruit and vegetables, and I hadn’t realized just how limited your choices were out where we were if you didn’t eat fast or fried or fast-fried food. She had lost a lot of weight, because we had taken to eating at home quite a bit, and then she had felt bad about cooking in my mother’s kitchen. Gramma had tried to feed us a few times, and Karis had broken out in hives each time. When we got to San Antonio, Dan had a huge fantastic dinner planned at his neighborhood TGIFriday’s, which Karis had never heard of, but was unable to order anything from the menu that wasn’t fried or full of mayonnaise. I was embarrassed into not eating, either. But I had a few beers with Dan, to make him feel better.

  Anyhow, we eventually boarded an Amtrak train headed west, and this was done in the dark, late that next night, and we climbed aboard with the lights off and were able to find a set of seats that were not occupied. When the sun rose the next day, we saw that the car was very nearly full and we were lucky to have found the seats, in the dark. The two day journey took a turn for the miserable as we both began to get horribly sick from the flu Derek had had in the car on the way up north, his last little gift to us.

  We moved in with her mother, Meg, in south Seattle, near the heavily gentrified neighborhood of Beacon Hill. Seattle was an odd place back then, where the upscale neighborhood abutted the less-costly neighborhood, the status depending on the view, one would presume. All we could see were electrical towers and a busy road, right in front, but we were perfectly satisfied with that.

  Meg didn’t work, as she suffered from the Epstein-Barr virus and carpal tunnel syndrome and was in a new relationship, and living with her didn’t last long, as it offset some sort of balance at home with her renter, a huge east coast lesbian named Ronata, who became quite displeased when I moved in for a couple months. Instead of renegotiating, Meg decided simply to move out on her own and abandon the home, and we all went our separate ways except for Meg, who suddenly found herself homeless.

  Karis and I moved into an apartment near downtown Seattle, and Meg wanted to move in with us. It was a one-bedroom box, little more than a large studio, and we were already goi
ng to take in Ben, Karis’s fourteen-year-old brother. Karis had to tell her mother no, for the first time in her life, and I think Karis blamed me for it.

  We made the best of our situation, both of us having grown up poor and stressed, and we tried to carry on like two kids in love, in desperate and clinging circumstances.

  One night Karis had insisted we go to the Indigo Girls concert, part of the Summer Nights at the Pier concert series in Seattle. It was July 1994. They had just performed Jesus Christ Superstar, and the one with the lighter hair played Jesus Christ, the other, Judas. Karis was electrified that night, walking in that long striding way she did when she was feeling really confident, really sure of herself.

  Her hair was cut short and she was still very pretty, vaguely tomboyish. I hadn’t figured out that she was gay yet; at this point, I thought she was just extremely codependent.

  Dusk was falling when the concert was over, and the sidewalks were filled with more than the usual numbers of lesbians in Seattle.

  We were moving with the crowd, closer to where we’d parked, and it took us past the aquarium. She was striding tall, smiling big, and I was happy for her; it was not often she was this sure of herself.

  Up ahead there was a homeless man with a sign, asking for money. The crowd carved itself around him, giving him the space to market his gloom. They sidestepped his rank possessions laid out around him at his feet: a dirty bag, a tin can, a sleeping bag, some garbage.

  Karis confidently marched up to him in an almost goose-stepping fashion, produced a crisp Washington State apple from her knapsack, and held it up in front of his face. “Here,” she demanded of him. “Take the apple.”

  “An apple!” he cried out for all to hear. “What the hell do I want with an apple? I got no teeth!” he yelled, and we all could certainly see he had little need for a toothbrush.

  Everyone within earshot burst out laughing, including me. This was the sort of thing that happened to Karis all the time.

  Standing behind her I felt her confidence wilt, and I put my arm at her waist and ushered her away from there, and the homeless man began to cackle. “No teeth!” he yelled at us in a moment of rare triumph, as we walked away.

  “You have to admit, that was kind of funny,” I said a bit later. She burst out laughing through her tears a few yards away, as I opened her door.

  Some months later, it was the building manager—an ex-girlfriend of Meg’s—who decided that Karis and I should make friends with the couple that lived in the apartment directly above us. They were our age from Florida, and had moved out here to be “outrageous,” as the girl, Janine, wanted to be a masseuse and felt that the holistic naturopathic school in Wallingford, Bastyr, was her best choice. And so she was a student, a tall Jewish girl with great hair, while her boyfriend, named Kip, who was bisexual and about a head shorter than her and was from Kansas, did nothing except sometimes imitate Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties.

  “No, seriously,” she told us, when we were high. “He used to dress like Alex Keaton and carried a briefcase, in Florida.” Kip looked down and pretended he didn’t hear her saying it, but he was fuming, I could see.

  They were all right people, Kip and Janine. Well, Janine was; Kip was a five-foot asshole, into martial arts, and had been going to a “naturalistic, holistic” martial arts school in some warehouse he’d found advertised while waiting for Janine one afternoon at Bastyr. Kip worked for a moving company, in one of the Seattle suburbs, under the table.

  Kip kept trying to get me to attend this secret dojo in a crappy industrial part of Seattle, and I’d never really thought about karate before, so I demurred, and just got more stoned, never fully realizing what was happening around me.

  We started to see each other most every day, and I watched helpless as Karis developed a crush on Kip and he developed a crush on both Karis and me, and I wasn’t certain about it all, never could prove anything for certain, and Janine and I started to develop a sort of charged friendship that was due mostly to the fact that we suspected our partners were either having an affair already or about to. The atmosphere was ionized and awkward, and besides his interest in my girlfriend, I couldn’t understand the little guy’s continued interest in massaging my “chi,” rubbing my palm or inner ear lobe.

  Then one day Kip suddenly came up with three pellets of mescaline. We took them one afternoon, me and him and Karis, in our apartment, and my mind was completely blown. I was flipping, freaking, with the anxiety of the situation, frightened by the very uncool atmosphere.

  Things started to get really tense and things were feeling wrong, wrong, wrong, and so I went into our kitchen, and Karis had been standing there, staring into the cupboards in the dark. When I flipped on the light, she was standing there and turned to me, except it’s not her anymore but my mother, Velva, and she’s looking really sad, smiling sadly at me. No shit.

  And I flip.

  It wasn’t so much a hallucination as a revelation that I had started to re-create, in an urban environment, Mom and Dad’s relationship, in all its disease and dominating behavior, just like all the literature had predicted, even though I’d fought so hard to prevent it. Except that Karis wasn’t living the role Mom did.

  Karis had been presented with an accelerated dose of the Martinez family love, telescopically formed in our one year together.

  I’m not sure how my sisters were faring; they all seemed to have their hooks into men who were “upwardly mobile” for Texas, and Dan . . . well, Dan was full of the same sort of hot-headed Texan rage that I had, which gave him his own sort of emotional density. He had met a Canadian nurse on South Padre Island and was currently getting his accreditation as a nurse, in San Antonio, well on his path.

  I felt I was suddenly alone, with my cheating mother in the kitchen of my apartment in Seattle, my mind a cocktail of Native American head cleaner.

  It was in the middle of this disastrous scenario that Mom and Derek, as an eight-year-old, decided to visit. And here’s where everything changed.

  They flew up to visit Karis and me in March 1995, and I took Derek on a tour of the Holy Grunge City because I knew it would impress upon him the reverence in which he actually saw Dan and me, as the coolest people he knew. I took him past downtown bars where Mudhoney, Soundgarden, and Nirvana had played, told him tall tales about seeing each band here and there, with fantastic embellishments about knocking back pints with singers and roadies and such, and then I drove him to a house on Lake Washington and told Derek that that was where Kurt Cobain died, even though some old couple drove out of the gates as we stood there, and I explained that those were his lawyers, and Derek bought it all, of course, because he trusted me and was eight. (In fairness, I was only about a mile off of the Cobain house. And I did actually get the Bruce Lee gravesite correct, which is always surrounded by people, usually Polynesian families on a hajj.)

  I had left Mom’s visit and entertainment to Karis, who had warmed to her considerably, and decided to befriend Mom and take her downtown to Pike Place Market, which was within walking distance from where we lived, on lowest Queen Anne.

  That evening, after we had eaten dinner and Mom and Derek were sleeping in the living room in an extendo-bed, Karis said, “Wow, your mom has seriously come from some bad situations.”

  “You mean with Dad, and all the kids?” I asked, not sure what she meant. It wasn’t easy, that life. But Mom came from the same place as me, and so I didn’t really think that it would have impacted her differently. It’s like being a part of the 4th Marines, 1st Division: You just naturally assume that the other person has been through the same boot camp and same torturous training, so you assume that the other person can hack what you can hack. Anyone else is a nonhacker.

  “Your mom was abducted as a young girl,” Karis said to me.

  “What?”

  “She told me her life story, June,” she said. Karis called me “June,” like my family does. “You never heard this?”

  “No,” I said, sle
epily, but getting interested, “Every time we talked about her family, my Dad would just say, ‘Her mother was a whore!’ and that kinda ended anything further.”

  “Well,” Karis says, “Your mother’s first memory as a kid is when she was separated from her twin Ricky, and given to her Aunt Hilly.”

  “Oh, I know that guy,” I say. I remembered her brother, Ricky. I mean, I knew that Mom had a twin brother, but he would visit randomly and get belligerent when he drank. I remembered his favorite drink: Crown Royal and milk. Yuck.

  “Then there’s much more to the story than you know,” she said, making the correct assumption.

  Chapter 30

  MOM’S STORY

  Here’s what we knew of Mom:

  Her mother, who was, in some cosmic joke, actually named Dominga—a fact that I would keep desperately hidden all during elementary school, especially when I was accidently given her personalized pencils as school supplies, which had her name printed on them from back when she briefly sold real estate, and so I had to spend a panicked hour at the pencil sharpener grinding each pencil down to where they read Doming—lived in the city, Brownsville proper, behind the KFC. As my grandmother, she wasn’t much of a presence in our lives. It was tradition that we would visit her house on Sundays, after church and lunch at Luby’s Cafeteria, and Mamí, as we called her, would always be home because she was a degenerate gambling bingo-loving heathen and her third husband, Arturo, or Deddy, as we knew him, could be relied upon to be working on a car in his driveway, as a mechanic, with some or all or one of his recently bailed boys helping.

  These were the guys who I had accidentally bought pot from way back when I was teenager, with Tony driving us to his new “secret biker hook-up.” I’d been going there all my life; it wasn’t too secret for me.