Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

  The doctor snapping my arm into place with a sort of yoke in the crook of my elbow brought my attention back suddenly, and the pain was sharp, unbearable; I passed out.

  Some minutes later, I woke up, and the doctor was wrapping a wet cast on my wrist.

  I turned away and said, “Gramma.”

  The nurse asked, “Are you seeing things, honey? Are you hallucinating?”

  And I said, “Is there a squat woman clutching her purse to her stomach in the doorway?”

  The nurse said, “Yes.”

  I said, “Then, no.”

  I was totally disappointed. Gramma was the Devil. I thought maybe I was seeing the Devil.

  Dad was gone by the time Mom drove me and Dan back home from the hospital that night. He was gone for two weeks, and one morning I woke up to find him sitting on my bed, dressed in the same red plaid shirt but looking like he was going off to work, and he scuffed the top of my head and laughed, tried to make a joke out of the cast I was wearing and his behavior that other day. I didn’t look at him, couldn’t meet his eye. I was throughly disgusted with him.

  Dan and me, we were working through our own trouble. But Dan, in all his oafishness, I understood he was still just trying to save his little brother. Every fight he’s been in, gotten me into, he was just trying to save our honor. Save something. Save anything.

  In his own clumsy way, he was doing the best he could. He was like Stella, the unruly Shar-pei I used to have, defending his family.

  But tonight, when I remembered what my father and grandmother could have done to me—the way they could have disfigured me, and it took Dan to throw Dad against the wall when Dad hit me, my arm broken the way his leg now was. . . .I think me and Dan are even. Getting closer to even, if we were keeping accounts.

  And I said to him that night, “Thank you for protecting me from our father that day.”

  Dan started crying, over on his couch, in the dark.

  If it has to be like this for now, I thought to myself, I think we’re on our way to being even.

  Some months later, I begin to get blue. Dan doesn’t notice it because it’s summer, and it’s hard to be blue when it’s summer in Seattle, especially with the view that we have from that deck. We’re sitting outside one Sunday evening, lounging like real gentiles and looking east over the aft end of Queen Anne Hill, onto the Ballard Bridge, watching the boats sailing from Lake Washington into Puget Sound, or vice versa. Some evenings as the sun went down, we would sit outside and watch the planes directly above us on their final approach to SeaTac Airport, and we would plane spot, counting all the planes stacked up in the skies around Seattle as they lined up in tandem to land. It’s still the best view I’ve seen in my twenty years in Seattle.

  We’re drinking light beers that night—or at least I am—and he’s having a Shiner Bock, from Texas. Dan’s got an assortment of Texan hits on rotation on his CD player. The Old 97’s, Dwight Yoakum, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle. Drinking music. He’s telling me about his sciatic nerve, how painful it is, now that his cast is off. And I tell him how much I jogged yesterday at the Seattle Pacific University track, then walked around with a friend of mine and her dog, and how I talked and talked and probably said far too much. And he tells me how he called in yesterday and is having a three-day weekend, about the ribs he’s about to cook, boiling on the stove now, and we’re having a great night, on the deck.

  He gets on the phone with Alex, his Lilliputian friend from work, who is evangelical about his simple beliefs in a Latin American Jesus and sings Celine Dion songs at top volume, utterly without shame or irony as he wanders the halls of the nursing home. Dan is calling him and rattling off the opening bars of the Mexican Hat Dance when Alex answers because there’s a patient at the home with Alzheimer’s who belts it out in earnest every time she sees Alex, who is not Mexican, but Salvadoran. This makes Dan crack up, because Alex is a proud El Salvadoran who hates to be misdiagnosed as Mexican.

  They’ve got another patient who’s been circling the drain now for two days, circling like one of the planes we’re watching that night, and Dan wants to make sure she was still alive when Alex saw her last. The patient, Mary Ellen, was eighty-five years old, but as Dan liked to tell her, she didn’t look a day over seventy. She was a delusional alcoholic who thought she was in a bar and Dan was the bartender. Mary Ellen had drunk so much she was incapable of speaking most days and had been mostly reduced to autonomic function. She was the most difficult patient Dan and his group ever had. The rare moments she was lucid, she would claim to be Native American, though she was really Scots-Irish. Dan and Llambi, his Croatian nursing partner, call her “Dances with Whiskey.”

  Dan asks Alex if Mary Ellen has gone to the “Big Pow-Wow in the Sky” yet. You have to have a real sense of gallows humor when you deal with people dying on a weekly basis, Dan tells me when he’s on hold.

  “For some patients,” he corrects himself. “Not for all of them.” His eyes drift off at this point.

  Alex begins to yell at him for being callous, hysterically invoking the name of Jesus, so Dan breaks drunkenly into the opening bars of the Mexican Hat Dance and Alex, fuming, hangs up on him.

  We both sit there and laugh at Alex. Stupid Christians. Alex loves Dan.

  I’m feeling a big shift that night, can sense it, whether it’s happened already or if it’s in the mail or happening now, I don’t know. I feel like I am waking up after a year of the steadiest, most narcoleptic administration of morphines, opiates, and painkillers augmenting the regular booze outs. I’m headed for trouble, I can feel. I had made the decision to stop this lifestyle when I moved out in a couple months, since I had just started working at a trade publication, would soon be back on my feet. I am thirty-two at this point and need to steady myself, pull back from the edge, where my toes have felt the updraft of the plunge into an actual habit—my inheritance as an addictive personality.

  I had taken to spilling out the contents of the medicine cabinet and playing Hunter Thompson: “What Would Dr. Thompson Take?” was my motto. I wanted to make it into a bumper sticker. But that lifestyle didn’t have legs. Didn’t feel right, no matter how I tried to rationalize it, justify my associates. Fold it all into something acceptable. Denying loudly the predisposition to addiction.

  Then Kris Kristofferson comes on. Dan’s playing all the big Texan hits that night.

  There was one time some weeks previously when Dan and I had overdone it with the meds and beer, and we were having a loud, two in the morning debate about “Me and Bobby McGee” and whether it was homoerotic.

  “It was the 1960s,” Dan says. “Even Bob Dylan admitted to having sex with men and shit.”

  “He’s singing about a girl,” I yell back, from my impression in the couch. “Bobby’s a chick, a fuckin’ hippie chick he picked up in Montana.”

  “No, it’s a dude,” says Dan. “A dude that fuckin’ dies.”

  “No, it’s not, man,” I say. “What fuckin’ version are you listening to? You’re confused because Janis Joplin sang it, too. Bobby McGee’s a hippie chick he’s traveling with to California to be with all the other hippies. It’s the goddamn 1960s, man; they’re all out there. They’re all fuckin’ hippies. Anyhow, she doesn’t die, she just wanders off with another ‘old man,’ like. She trades her first old man for another old man, in like, Tucson or Arizona. Listen to the damn lyrics.”

  “No!” Dan insists. “It’s a guy, and he dies!”

  The next morning, Dan is incredibly sick, calls in to work. He lies on his bed, with a trashcan positioned readily nearby. The very memory of “Me and Bobby McGee” is making him nauseous, he tells me later. He’s kept from puking all night and all morning long, but then he sings the opening lines of the song, in his mind, as he’s lying there.

  Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train . . . he thinks to himself. Then he erupts in vomit.

  Hunh, he thinks to himself, afterward. Let me try that again.

  Busted flat i
n Baton Rouge, waiting for a train . . . Then he vomits again.

  “OK,” he decides. “That song goes off the playlist.”

  But this isn’t what is bugging Dan tonight. Someone at work had asked him if he considered himself “Tejano.”

  “We’re not ‘Tejano!’” Dan yells at me in his usual oversize animation. He had been offended.

  I say, “We’re Texican,” because I had just seen John Wayne in The Searchers and there had been a mention of that word, by the German or Norwegian couple who was carving out their livelihood in the middle of fucking nowhere. I’d been watching a lot of John Wayne lately.

  I sing the opening bars to the Mexican Hat Dance to make him laugh.

  Dan says, “No, no, no; we’re fucking Americans; Texans next, godammit. We like our barbecues and beers and the cowboys and boxing.” Hear, hear. And our drugs. I think Dan’s overdoing the Vicodin as well, but I’m not in charge of his life. And I don’t know it right now, but he’s also made the decision to change this around, but we haven’t talked about it yet. I’m on the verge of weeping because Kris Kristofferson is now singing about his “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and because it’s been lonely out here, in between our own lives, slipping in between the streams of other people’s lives, where I thought I really wanted to be.

  Later on, I find a bottle of something that looked suspiciously like liquor in the fridge, with a label written in a foreign form of Spanish. It was a gift from Alex, from his travels in El Salvador, something called aguardiente. It’s odorless, almost tasteless if it wasn’t for the flavor of your own soft palate dissolving while it strips away your tongue. Dan pours out a couple of shots and down the hatch they go: We drink a toast to Dances with Whiskey and another to Luther, Alex’s fictional black boyfriend.

  Maybe it’s a sort of withdrawal I’m feeling. It’s too beautiful an evening to feel this weepy. I can see north all the way to Crown Hill, see Mount Baker in the distance looking like a musky ice cube in the reddening dusk at ten o’clock that night. It took us a long time to adjust to the summers here, the eighteen-hour daylight around the solstice. Dan decides he wants to play the Guns and Roses album, Appetite for Destruction. I am nothing if not a sucker for nostalgia, so I say, “Sure,” and I giggle all the way through the first couple tracks, remembering the meteoric impact this album had when it hit Brownsville. Dan had enlisted in the army that next year, ended up in Korea, and he’d played this album nonstop while on duty guarding the demilitarized zone, he tells me. The idea of Dan in that position, of Dan listening to “Mr. Brownstone” with a loaded M16, staving off the yella horde, the idea scares me, frankly. Saving Texas from Tojo.

  The sun is finally going down, at nearly eleven o’clock. We’re going to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and yell out Harrison Ford’s lines before he says them, like we do.

  As we’re watching Indiana Jones, I begin to tell Dan how I had made our neighbor, Joe, play the role of Sapito when I was a kid, me pretending to be Indiana when I was twelve. I say, “Fuck. It must be a terrible thing to not be able to play the hero in your own imagination. Do you think it’s my fault he’s never left home and is managing the neighborhood Jack in the Box?” I feel really awful all of a sudden.

  The CD player is unexpectedly playing the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack, and Dan starts singing, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . . ” in the kitchen while he’s preparing the barbecue sauce. I can’t help it in the dark living room, and I start crying again, feeling hopelessly lost. Contaminated.

  Something’s over. Something’s changed again.

  By the time we moved out, after a full calendar year, Dan and I couldn’t stand to be in the same room alone with each other. We had exhausted our supplies of stories, thinned ourselves to translucence, robbed each other of any sort of mystery or truth.

  Any recollection or cleverness that got started out of one or the other’s mouth was immediately met with a sense of disgust, a transparent mask of disapproval: Oh, not that fucking story again? I’ve heard it ten fucking times. Get over it; it’s not that funny.

  We did this to one another often enough that we didn’t want to be in the same room together anymore.

  The division was severe, terminal. Our drive for mutual understanding drove us to hatred, alienation, as brothers.

  Instead of transparency, we started keeping secrets.

  There was a time when, if we needed comfort, reassurance, all we had to do was call each other, and we had a code: We would start out by saying, “OK, so check this out . . . ” and then one or the other would tell his brother a story about what he’d done, what he’d tried to get away with, and how he was caught, and how he was now in trouble at work, or with school, or with someone in temporary authority, but it was nothing: I can get out of it, and it will blow over, but I just kind of need for you to tell me that everything is going to be all right, you know? I just kind of need to hear you say, “Aw, fuck those guys, man. You didn’t do anything wrong; it will be fine.” You know?

  And so we would; we’d bolster one another’s doubts, transgressions, and trespasses with reassurances, absolutions, or sympathetic confessions, because we had no one else, no system of trust based outside of one another’s understanding of our animal compulsions, brought about by living with—and being raised by—Mingo, pater noster.

  Dan understood me as thoroughly as I understood him, and now, when we found we knew each other thoroughly, we were disgusted with ourselves, and with the other. No more could we call one another and say, “OK, so check this out . . . ”

  It was done. We had broken all that had tethered us together, by wanting more of it. And so I moved out. And we didn’t speak to one another for years.This is who Dan and I had been groomed to be, these two pillars of mutual disgust.

  I tried to break out of it by moving as far away from Brownsville as I could; I had one clubbed foot in that life and the other in this one that I’ve tried to create in Seattle. But you can’t run with two clubbed feet.

  Dan is still my own personal hero, still my biggest brother. And for years, when we needed it we gave each other the biggest place of comfort I could ever think of: the absolution, the warmth of home, the understanding that whatever we did, the other person just understood, nodded his head.

  That we became estranged after living together just makes sense now. It makes sense because we could always make sense of one another, but could not make sense of this conflict that was created within us by the twisted exaggeration of machismo that was my father’s first principle. And it is also a copout. I feel that very likely we will never forgive each other, and that it was really our father’s humiliation that divided us, the ghost of our Gramma’s construction, this conflict and competition they evoked in us as brothers, how Dad sabotaged our personalities to make himself the best and biggest among his two brave sons, made himself the strongest and the weakest, so that we had to grow up and take care of him, and quickly, because he couldn’t grow up or take care of us, let alone himself.

  So now, even today, my older brother Dan remains my most immediate, my most beloved of human beings on this planet (with all the hellish opposites that this relationship can create). That we could no longer be around one another is the very reason I cannot forgive my father for what he did to us, how he underactualized us, how he prematurely sexualized in us this competition. And how in our eventuality, Dan and I are utter offenders to one another’s good sense, disparate strangers on the street. How terribly sad. How terribly human. How pathetically biblical, and familial.

  My brother Dan fell on the Dad-grenade, as the oldest boy. Took most of the blast, shielded me with his suffering, as the person closest to Dad besides Mom. How do you repay that?

  In the end, I hope Dan knows how much I love him for that, love him still, and that he can still—even though we do not speak—hopefully carry that, in his heart; that however deep his resentment, misunderstanding, and hatred of me, how much his younger brother loves him, how I
align him high among the brutal songs of trumpeting angels, the gilded testaments of broken saints, that Dan is still our family’s hero. The caretaker of his and other people’s families. That his song of sadness is still sung, and still remembered fondly.

  And I have the hope that he will come to know that this debt, genetically imprinted, was deviously engineered so that it could never be paid back. That I could never even begin to reimburse him for what he suffered, except through witnessing and acknowledging it, as I have done here, and that—that—is what I tried to tell you, Dan, though you swatted it away dismissively like it was nothing. That? That’s nothing. Move in with me and Orlene. It will all be better. Come on in, move into that bedroom there, and have at the groceries. Just not the canned goods we keep under the bed, or my personal stash.

  And then you later hated me for it, when I tried to explain, and kept failing at reimbursement, kept failing at being a man in your eyes because you kept me as your little brother, constantly in the debt of your good graces and goodwill, protected by your generosity, at the expense of your respect.

  Please understand, Dan, that yours is a debt that could never be paid, by anyone.

  EPILOGUE

  On Dan’s first day on the job at Queen Anne Healthcare, a nursing home here in Seattle, he meets Phil Franzo, who becomes one of his patients. Phil just happens to be suffering from a bowel obstruction the size of a baseball that day. This is Dan’s first procedure at his new job.

  The nurse’s assistant is a wispy Filipino boychick who has already known Phil Franzo for a couple of years. “Now, Phil, this is Daniel. Daniel is going to help you, OK?”

  “Mister,” says Phil gruffly to Dan, lying on his back and holding his distended belly, “I’m full of shit, mister.” He’s a small man with black horn-rimmed glasses, vaguely Italian and diminutive, from the World War II era, with old man black hair peppered with gray. He’s adorable, except for this belly swollen like he was an African child with parasites. “I’m full of shit,” he repeats.