Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

  Dan has seen this before. It’s a bowel obstruction, and it’s a messy procedure.

  Phil’s stomach is distended and firm, like he’s got a bowling ball growing in there. Dan removes his watch, straps on long gloves, and puts a bed pan along with a five-gallon bucket down by the bed, preps for what needs to happen. “Are you ready, Phil? This is going to hurt a little, but you’ll be fine. Here I go.”

  The assistant raises Phil’s legs, and Dan’s gloved fingers enter Phil through the tradesman’s entrance and grab hold of the hard, dried obstruction. Dan pulls it free, slowly, and then Phil’s lower GI tract begins the process of emptying.

  Not a pleasant thing, sure, but it helps Phil. He begins to feel relief, and the Manila boychick assistant says to Phil, “Now, Phil, you say thank you to Daniel; he just did a very nice thing for you. Say thank you, Phil.”

  Phil says, “Thanks, you prick.”

  Dan falls in love with Phil Franzo right there. He’s Phil Franzo’s primary nighttime caregiver, and they’ve both made a new best friend on Dan’s first day of work.

  After three years of not speaking to me, Dan and Orlene fly to Brownsville to visit family for the first time after nearly five years of living in Seattle and come back with the determination to move back to Texas, to pack it in and move back home.

  But once back he breaks the freeze between us and calls me unexpectedly one afternoon and invites me to a large Sunday dinner at his favorite seafood restaurant, later that week. I agree to meet him. I’ve missed my bigger brother. He tells me to meet him at the nursing home, after he’s off work at six o’clock, and I do.

  I’m nervous as I make the drive to the nursing home, and in my eagerness to see him, I’m terribly early, but Dan is overjoyed to see me, hugs me forcefully when I see him, and his bulk and strength are very reassuring, as he envelopes me in his nurse’s scrubs. He kisses me on the cheek, and I do the same, in return. I’m surprised at how much I missed him, how big the vacuum he left in my heart.

  He brings me to the nurses’ station and introduces me to his fellow nurses: his best friend Llambi, the Croatian kid who I’m surprised looks like he could be a surfer from Santa Cruz; and of course Alex, whom I knew from before; and then, one of his favorite patients, Helen Ellis. Helen Ellis is Dan’s other favorite patient because of the stories she tells him, as a former model from the 1960s and an ex-junkie who once dated Jim Brown of the Cleveland Browns, possibly the toughest man who ever lived and played football. He used to beat the crap out of her, she tells Dan. He used to beat the crap out of anybody who pissed him off, especially women, she says. She doesn’t seem conflicted about this, says it with a sort of antique awe, I notice.

  Dan’s not ready to leave yet, and he asks me to wheel Phil Franzo to his room while he does other nursing things, in preparation for his departure. Phil is in the lounge making a mess of his coffee and cold water, pouring coffee into the water, water back into the coffee, for no reason whatsoever.

  “Phil! Philippo! This is my younger brother, June. He’s going to take you to your room, OK? Say hello, Phil,” says Dan to Phil, then runs off to finish his shift.

  Phil says, “Hi, you prick.”

  I try not to laugh. I know all about Phil.

  I wheel Phil to his room, get him next to his bed.

  “Put me to bed, doll,” he says.

  “What did you say, Phil?” I ask, not sure I heard correctly.

  “Put me to bed, doll.”

  “Phil, I’m not going to put you to bed. You can do it yourself.”

  “Bah, you’re a prick, mister,” says Phil, clearly disgusted, and starts to move from his chair to his bed.

  A bit later, Dan and I are at the nurses’ station saying good-bye to Llambi and Alex when Phil wheels himself by in super slow motion. Apparently, he didn’t want to get into bed too badly and had shifted back to his wheelchair.

  Phil rolls directly in front of the nurses’ station and settles in next to a vegetative but still living Mary Ellen, aka Dances with Whiskey, who is now eighty-seven years old, though, as Dan continues to tell her, she doesn’t look a day over eighty.

  “Fire this prick,” Phil says to Dan and Llambi, pointing at me with his thumb.

  We all burst out laughing.

  “I want you to fire this prick,” he repeats himself.

  “Why do you want us to fire him?” asks Llambi, winking at me conspiratorially.

  “Because he’s a prick,” Phil says.

  I say, “Phil, your schtick’s getting old.”

  He says, “Fuck you, you prick. You’re fired.”

  Dan wants me to move back to Texas with him in a year, he tells me.

  Moaning over Alaskan king crab at a Magnolia restaurant, he tells me that it’s done here; that he’s felt it for a long time, for the both of us.

  “Look, I’ll never speak bad of this place. I love Seattle. But we’re getting older, and you don’t know how old you are until you see your parents again. Can’t believe how old they got,” he says while digging at the crab’s interiors with a tiny, double-pronged fork. There’s stringy meat all over our table. I have no argument. Things are coming down around my ears. My time is unstructured and I’ve been acting out like a borderline personality for months. But Dan doesn’t know about that.

  “Besides,” he says, “I don’t want to be here when Phil Franzo checks out. I love Philippo; I don’t think I can handle him dying.” Dan has served as a midwife to people’s deaths in that nursing home on an almost weekly basis. He’s like a death Sherpa now. He describes the process of death as similar to watching a ceiling fan wind itself down, as the body begins to shut down, until it just stops. To hear that he’s grown this attached to one of his patients is considerable indeed. Franzo, a Brooklynite, had a stroke twenty years ago and has been at Queen Anne Health Care for eighteen years. He was slipping into more of a vegetative state until Dan and Llambi came along and engaged him in schtick, as boys.

  “How’s Phil doing?” I ask, wondering if there is something to his condition that I haven’t been made aware of.

  “Oh, Phil’s doing great,” says Dan, and then pauses. “I just don’t want to see him go.”

  His face changes a bit, and he prepares to get into his Phil Franzo schtick mode: “You’re a prick, Phil,” Dan says in his regular voice.

  “I was born that way, mister. You’re a prick, too,” Dan replies to himself in Phil’s gravel pit voice, for my benefit.

  “What’s that make us, Phil?” says Dan as Dan.

  “A pair of pricks,” says Dan as Phil.

  Then Dan imitates Llambi from across the nursing home, and yells out, “I’m a prick, too!” waving his hand.

  “Triplets,” says Dan as Phil.

  Early on, when Dan was very new at this nursing home and he’d just met Phil, Phil would usually wheel himself into the smoking area and watch as people would come in and out of the nursing home at the three o’clock afternoon shift change.

  There had been this twenty-five-year-old Somalian nursing assistant who’d moved to America with dreams of becoming an NBA basketball player. He would dress every day in an NBA outfit like he was going to play in a professional game, for the Lakers. Every day.

  Phil would watch him walk in and out of work, and one day, Phil looked at him and said, as usual, “You’re a prick, mister.”

  The Somalian kid took umbrage at this, his American fantasy so delicate and fragile. He got angry, yelled something in Africani at Phil, and actually punched Phil in the stomach, which was lying flabby and exposed because his robe was open while he smoked his cigarette. The punch left an imprint on Phil’s stomach.

  “Ouch, you prick,” Phil yelled back.

  Dan and Llambi saw this happen from across the hall and grabbed the Somali kid by the back of the neck and slammed him to the ground, unnecessarily putting their knees and weight on his neck until the cops showed up and sent the idiot back to whatever shithole Somalian village he was from, rescinding
his work visa.

  Phil watched as the cops showed up and the guys wrote up the abuse report, and then he remembered his manners, as he continued to smoke.

  “Thanks, you pricks,” he said, to Dan and Llambi.

  “I can’t watch him go,” says Dan, in a moment of quiet, after we’re done laughing.

  “If you’d seen him when we got there . . . ” he trails off, his eyes water and he swallows, hard.

  This is significant. Dan has helped many patients that he loved to their end, helped their families endure the inevitable and painful reality of expiration, of death. Of dying. He’s charted all this on his own, with just his own personal navigational tools, his own love for their humanity and dignity. They can’t teach you that in nursing school.

  But Phil Franzo, he is different. He has imprinted upon Dan as something other than a patient he has to Sherpa through that final door. Dan loves Phil, like family. For the first time in his professional career, Dan cannot watch one of his patients die. Maybe it’s because Dan brought Phil back from the brink of a vegetative state, with the affection and the jokes exchanged between men, between them and Llambi and Alex.

  Maybe all this happened because I was out of his life, and that gave Dan the freedom to love others in the same way he loved his little brother, and it made his life richer. Spread that affection around, in a way he couldn’t before.

  And so now, here is Phil, at this point, aware, knows he’s making the boys laugh.

  They brought him back to life. And now Dan couldn’t watch him die.

  Phil died in 2008. I had posted some variation of these stories on some sort of online blog at some point when I was wooing some girl who turned out to be a polyamorist. Long story. I got a message from Phil’s grandson, out of the blue, who had been Googling his grandfather’s name. The kid was twenty-two, from New York state, and uncomfortable writing. He had been online, trying to find out more about his grandfather, before he shipped out to Afghanistan. Phil had been in World War II, and the kid was trying to find the courage that his grandfather once had, to do his duty. We exchanged email for a month before the kid shipped out. I shared all this with Dan, forwarded him every email exchanged, mediated questions and answers between Phil’s grandson and what was left of Dan’s memories of Phil. The kid loved all the stories about his grandfather, thanked me effusively for taking the time to write them and post them. I had no idea they were still online.

  Dan was noticeably saddened to be reminded of Phil. Llambi had kept him up-to-date, even though Dan had moved back to San Antonio, and had told him of Phil’s passing. Phil had been cremated and his ashes spread into the Stillaguamish River, about an hour north of Seattle, his grandson had written. Dan did not know that part. The kid said he and his mother, Phil’s estranged daughter, felt that Phil would have liked that, because he’d been locked indoors for the thirty years or so after his stroke. My stories of his grandfather made him laugh, he wrote me, and he said he’d print them out and carry them with him when he shipped out, he said.

  I did that—helped close the circuit for Dan and Phil, though it broke my heart to watch him grieve Phil’s passing.

  And I broke Dan’s, when I didn’t move back to Texas.

  But that is another book of its own.

  CLOSEDOWN

  Velva Jean got her divorce and moved out with Derek. She and Dad had been married for over twenty-five years, and it took a very long time for her to disentangle her furniture, her past, and make that move away from the house on Oklahoma Avenue.

  She moved with Derek to an apartment across the street from our old high school, and she continued working at the JC Penney, then finally graduated from the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2004, with a degree in business administration. Derek had a very difficult time adjusting, started acting out in strange, weird ways. Eventually, he had to move in with Mare and Mark, in Corpus Christi, where he bloomed through high school, then imploded in college.

  Mom never forgave herself for breaking up his home, and feels responsible for all of his weaknesses, his periods of self-harm, his struggle—like mine and Dan’s struggle—with alcoholism and drugs. For us, it’s our own fault, Mom felt. But Derek’s, that was her doing. Neither Dan nor I buy into that: We also both feel responsible for Derek’s faults as well, because we were not ideal models. I have a tendency now to collect little brothers, where once I was trying to collect fathers.

  Mom eventually remarried and now lives in and works for the City of Houston with her husband Robert, from La Porte, who is a salsa music fanatic, plays the bongos. We could not have asked for anyone better to share in Velva Jean’s life. He treats her very well, always pulls out her chair for her in restaurants. It makes my throat knot up, when I see him do that for her when I visit them. He never forgets, and Mom acknowledges it with terribly modest elegance, like it is the most natural thing in the world.

  Dad actually quit drinking, has been sober now for fifteen or so years. After the divorce, he met up with and married his high school sweetheart, who also tried taming his savagery, but Dad is not to be tamed; he is to be understood, he feels. Maybe studied. He divorced her after a few years, moved in with a waitress and her daughter next, and when that didn’t work out, he moved back in with his mother and was sleeping in the same bedroom he grew up in, at age sixty. We’re all strangely protective of Dad now, look upon him like someone who deserves special care, someone who was wounded terribly as a child, someone who’s been struggling tremendously with posttraumatic stress disorder his whole life, at the hands of his mother, whom he will not leave, and who we cannot blame.

  Gramma is still alive, at the time of this writing, and quite tiny. You could never imagine the Gorgon of old, in that tiny frame. At Mamí’s funeral in 2010, Gramma and Dad showed up unexpectedly, and Dad had secretly arranged for a mariachi band to play three of the most heartbreaking Spanish songs ever, and everyone—everyone—cried, Dan told me, and he had never been so proud of his old man. When Gramma arrived, she asked only for Dan, plucked her way through the crowd, pushing away well wishers, looking for her Denny. Dan had not seen Gramma in over twenty years, still regarded her as the Devil; but when this tiny, shriveled person came up to him and reminded him that she was, in fact, still his Gramma, Dan’s heart broke open and he hugged her, in front of the whole family, and it was a moment I wish I could have seen, but I was in Seattle, on the ninth floor of Harborview, with my fiancée in a coma, and dealing with her New England family whom I could neither understand nor ultimately join.

  I could not be there, for my mother’s mother’s funeral, and I have felt very terrible for that.

  Dad even hugged Robert, my mother’s husband, to everyone’s astonishment, especially Robert’s. When he told me about it later, I just laughed. “He’s full of surprises, that Mingo,” I said.

  They’re both very lonely, Dad and Gramma, because we all left, we all went forward into America, and it was as if they chose not to invite themselves along. So they’ve stayed there, on Oklahoma Avenue.

  Gramma raises chickens. In the place where the pigsty once stood now stands a multilevel retirement coop, for her chickens. She does not eat them or sell them to be eaten, as she considers them her pets, gives them names and takes their eggs every morning. I like to think it’s a sort of penance she’s paying, for all the hogs she’s killed, in that spot.

  And for other things she’s done.

  My sisters have prospered in unimaginable ways. They all married very well, and each have lovely children, live all over the state of Texas. Both Syl and Mare are administrators or teachers in the school system there, which is quite stable, and Marge, as mentioned, became a research scientist, finished her PhD at Stony Brook in New York, then came back to Texas to raise her family, with Corwin. Mare was married to Mark, and they have a delightful daughter, Madison; Syl and Ruben have three daughters of their own. Let’s see if I can get this straight, without calling my mother for help: There is . . . Danielle, Megan . . . and
Olivia. That’s right.

  Derek had a bad go of it for a while, but he seems to be getting his life together now, I hear tell from Mom. He’s not speaking to either Dan or me, or the rest of the family, really, and he depends on Mom more than anyone ever did, even more so than Dad. They’re sort of caught in a mutual agreement to drown one another, and neither can let the other go.

  The three of us boys can’t be in the same room together, oddly. We’ve spent so much time apart, when we see each other these unconscious alignments tend to exclude one of the three, and it ends up in an argument. I was the odd man out for the three or so years Dan and I were not speaking, and Derek had moved in with Dan, after his accident in Austin, when Derek had fallen after a night of drinking and cracked open the back of his skull on the sidewalk.

  That relationship turned into a simulacrum of the one Dan and I had in Seattle, except I was more clearly defined, didn’t bow under the pressure of Dan’s relentless conditions in the way Derek did, which bred a tremendous resentment on Derek’s part, and so now, the only power Derek feels he has is to keep us out, all of us, at once.

  Dan and Orlene are still in nursing, and Orlene has stuck with Dan through some very bad times, is very much a part of this family. While she has had every reason and opportunity to despise me, she does not, and that simply amazes me. I don’t think I could be as forgiving as she has been.

  Dan and I still go through periods where we cannot stand to speak to one another for years, but the love we have for one another is still there, always there. It just turns into sadness. From him, even though we don’t speak, I know he still loves me. It will always be the way I feel about him: I might not be able to talk to him for a long time, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love him. Quite the opposite. It’s simply that there is no one in the world that can drive me as absolutely bat-shit crazy as Dan can. No one who can make me so angry.