My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I remember smiling as I saw her father’s name light up my iPhone, immediately concluding that he’d accidentally made what’s affectionately called a “butt dial,” or meant to ring up someone else at 5:24 out east, as Steph’s family were Yankees, from New England. The sort of people who fought off the British way back.

  “Hello, Harold,” I said, upon answering. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  Harold and I were on good terms, in a sort of collusion that conspired around the idea that we both knew Steph was quite the handful. In a manner of speaking. When we met, or were around one another, Harold would give me looks on the sly when Steph had one of her “moments,” like, “See? I told ya.”

  But this morning, I heard the panic in his voice as soon as he heard me answer my phone.

  “Domingo, what the hell’s going on?” he asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “I just had a call from the Washington State Highway Patrol. They said Steph was in an accident and she’s downtown in a hospital.”

  My first response was that of betrayal, because this was an emergency, and Steph had never changed her emergency contact numbers. Meaning that she never trusted me enough to change her information. I made a mental note to bring this up, if we ever argued again about “trust.”

  My second response was, “What?” It was nearly 3:00 a.m.; what was she doing up that late?

  “I’m not sure what you’re saying here, Harold; I haven’t heard anything . . .”

  “The deputy said she’s in . . . hold on a sec,” and here, I heard Steph’s mother shuffling papers and shouting to Harold, “Harborview Hospital,” and this was where I came fully awake and frightened: Harborview is the shock trauma specialist on the West Coast.

  This was really serious. Holy fuck.

  I was dressed and waiting at the front desk, in the freezing cold, in less than thirty minutes.

  Harborview Hospital is built into the side of First Hill, deep in the labyrinth of the downtown Seattle grid, possibly one of the only sections of the city that is laid out in right angles, a predicament endemic to most Pacific Northwest cities, due to all the damned nature.

  There are lakes and hills and mountains to plan a city around, so logic took a hit with early urban planning. Harborview is one of the oldest hospitals in the city, and has been built upon with modern extensions added yearly like a half-hearted Lego project, byzantine. It takes a tour guide and the friendliness of the doctors and nurses who work there to guide you through the buildings, some of which are connected by an underground tunnel. It’s possibly the most disorienting building I’ve ever seen, in the densest part of the city. But after this night, I would know it very well. Or rather, I was going to start knowing it very well.

  The drive to Harborview that morning through the dark and empty streets felt ominous, with the radio off, felt like everything was about to change in an instant, and for the serious.

  I drove my car straight to the front steps, parked right in the emergency zone, figuring no one would mind at 3:00 a.m.: I had no idea what I was doing, or where I was. A feeling of utter helplessness radiated down my limbs, and I’m sure, settled quite telegraphically on my features.

  I parked the car and forced myself to stride purposefully to the front desk, careful not to betray that sense of powerlessness.

  A homeless man sat in the chair opposite the one receptionist, stuttering out a perceived or fabricated ailment so he could spend the night indoors. Ten other homeless people waited behind him.

  I gave him a full three minutes before I kept myself from physically lifting him out of the chair and shoving him aside, and when the receptionist could finally sense my mounting anxiety and eroding self-control, she acknowledged me and bade me forward, asked why I was there.

  I elbowed the smelly little man to the side and started with what I knew—name, car accident, emergency call from the state patrol, her parents were back east . . . how big is this fucking hospital? How do you not keep track of the intake of people?

  “Here she is,” she said finally.

  “She’s headed to ICU on the ninth floor soon, but she’s been kept in the emergency room.”

  “Why was she there so long? What’s happened to her? No one’s told me anything and the highway patrol called her parents, back east. They don’t know anything, either,” I said, in a panic.

  “She was in some sort of single-vehicle accident,” the receptionist replied. “There aren’t any notes other than no one else was hurt, and that her car fell off an embankment. It says she was hypothermic because it took so long to cut her out of the vehicle. That’s all it says here. You can see her in ICU in a little while. Just take the elevators to your right, down the hall. I’ll call the social worker to meet with you and see if she can get any more information to her parents. Just calm down; it’s going to be all right,” she said.

  So she’s not dead, I thought to myself as I walked with mounting dread past all the freezing homeless people. That’s a start. And they’re letting me see her, so that’s probably a good sign, too.

  I started feeling something familiar and realized this was how I felt when Derek was in the hospital, that morning we found out he was in a coma. And I recognized that my mind once again started doing the same thing as it did then, praying but not praying, hoping but afraid to hope, bargaining and looking for clues, cues, or indications that things would be all right. Tea leaves, unintended meanings, divination—the mind becomes haruspicate in moments like these, and as the elevator door closed, I began to shake, a cold feeling carving its way up my spine from my center back, feeling like ginger ale bubbling up toward my medulla oblongata, on its heels the idea that I would never speak to Steph again, that she was no longer here, ferociously denying another idea that the conversation we had earlier that day would be the last time I ever spoke to her.

  PART I SONGS OF HIS PEOPLE

  CHAPTER 1 The Oops! Baby

  My parents had Derek when I was nearing fourteen years old, and he usurped my position of the youngest in my family, a station I was happy to see filled by someone else. Being “the baby” of a Mexican Catholic family was, to others, something to be venerated and enjoyed, like an office of leisure and grift, but I was always uncomfortable in it, felt diminished, suffocated.

  Still today there remains speculation among my siblings that our parents had decided on the pregnancy in order to save a marriage crippled with rot, but I personally do not adhere to this conclusion because it would involve a degree of foresight and planning, stratagems that I knew neither parent to adequately possess, not at that time.

  I’m still convinced Derek was an “Oops!” baby, but a welcomed one at that.

  He was an adorable kid, and we all loved the shit out of him, both figuratively and literally, as everyone pitched in raising and caring for our fifth sibling, living in Brownsville, Texas, during the 1980s and ’90s.

  None of us really understood what we were doing to this poor boy, how we were affecting him, in his confusion of having a forum of seven parents, like he’d been raised in a hippie commune in Michigan. We all learned to feed him, change him, nurture him, coddle him when he cried, nurse his wounds when he fell, and surrounded him with the sort of love no individual one of us had ever experienced, growing up poor and stressed and in direct competition with four other siblings, all vying for the same resources and affections.

  Certainly there were complications. In fact, one night, much later on in our lives, my older brother, Dan, was drunk and decided to tell me that when she first brought Derek home, Mom sat sentry by his crib side for the first few nights because she was concerned I would smother him as the envious, competitive sibling dislodged from my supposedly coveted position at the bottom of the totem, as “the baby.” And because the old hens and men of the barrio thought that the position was something cherished, there was long-standing folklore and wisdoms about the potential for fratricide by the original youngest, an act almost biblical in its violence, culminatin
g from envy and resentment, and this talk had frightened my mother.

  More than hurt, I was disgusted and offended by this revelation when Dan finally confessed it to me, if it had been true. It beleaguered me that it could even be considered by my mother, that I’d somehow try to smother the new baby, and for that reason. How primal, animal, that response would have been, like a mother cat eating her kittens. Or Greek mythology, in the way the Titans ate their children, too.

  “There’s no way that happened,” I said to Dan. I’d been drinking, too, but I was more clearheaded than my stupid older brother.

  “Yes, it did! You ask her! Just go ahead and fuckin’ ask her! She’ll tell you, she was scared you were gonna kill him because you were the baby!” he yelled back.

  Of course, I couldn’t wait to ask her—and have her deny it.

  Instead, when I was next able to gather both my mother and Dan in the same room and levy the charge, for a moment I caught a microexpression of shame and sadness cross her face, right before she vehemently denied the accusation. I wasn’t sure which to believe—the betraying signal of guilt or the firm denial—and it confirmed for me, once more yet, that I would never be reconciled with this family, forever the outlier.

  Dan had sense enough to be ashamed of what he’d said and then made some sort of awkward admonition, hid behind a Glomar response that neither confirmed nor denied his position in relaying that bit of information, and that toxic mix of shame sort of hung in the room for a few minutes after that, as uncomfortable family revelations tend to do.

  That conversation has stayed with me all my days. Obviously.

  Two of my sisters named our youngest brother, back in 1985. My sisters wielded a type of “will to power by fashion” over my mother, Velva, and she would do much of what they asked from her. Mom had been far too young when she married my father and started her family, and she had also felt isolated herself, during her adolescence, and as a mother found herself overly bonded to her daughters as they matured, as if they had all, in fact, been born as sisters in the same family.

  So it wasn’t exactly outrageous when the Mimis (as they liked to call themselves) came up with “Derek Allen,” as another signal of their unrelenting and sublimated desire for assimilation and comprehensive need to shed every evidence of their indigenous Mexican origins, primarily by anglicizing the Christian name of the third generation; it wasn’t entirely ridiculous or out of place that Margarita Martinez and Maria de los Angeles Martinez and Domingo Martinez had a brother named Derek Allen, in 1985, in Brownsville, Texas.

  Last I heard, this was still ’Merica, buddy.

  For a few years after Derek was born, we really enjoyed being a family. Things were good, it seemed. We were happy, and the photos from this time prove it. In fact, a photo of Derek at this time as a toddler holding an Easter bunny in his puffy little toddler hands is the only photo I carry with me, and when I dream of him, he’s eternally this age, which is another indication of our idealization of the youngest brother.

  There was this weird flicker of prosperity in my memory of this time, when everything seemed to be going right, and even Mom and Dad looked like they were going to cowboy through the tough times, like they always had before.

  And yet, this is the point when all the older siblings struck out to make their fortunes, my sisters off to college and Dan and I moving west, to Seattle, and we left Derek and Mom alone in Brownsville, in that house on Oklahoma Avenue. Dad, meanwhile, was living the gypsy life of a long-distance trucker, and it was here that Mom had sprung her plan of independence, hit Dad with the divorce he never knew she had in her that would, in her later assessment of things, create a wound inside that perfect little boy that would never be healed or drowned out, not by all the drugs in Austin nor all the liquor in Texas.

  While we were growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, my mother, Velva Jean, was a quiet, calculating—if entirely intimidated—force in her role as the mother to five children, born in a barrio system in South Texas. My father and she had married far too young—he was seventeen, freshly graduated, and had a big 1A target on his back for the draft, and Mom was sixteen, trying to escape a terrible life at home. They did as he knew and had a litter of children in a Mexican barrio on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, what his mother would have done, what was all around them at the time, and together they managed to graduate five kids through high school and into the state university system without ever having been to college themselves.

  They suffered greatly, did terrible, questionable things to survive and keep the family from ruin, and Mom, for the most part, kept all the grim realities and harsh truths from my three older sisters, Sylvia, Marge, and Mary. My sisters were never exposed to Dad’s ferocity and feral, male Mexican nature: all the inappropriate, oversexualized commentary he shared with me and Dan, the inexplicable anger that could go off with no warning, the whippings, the unpaid, long labor hours spent either idling in fields or doing horrific manual labor—my sisters endured none of this. My mother shielded them from that life, took them shopping, or at worst, had them doing regular, normal “girl” chores, like dishes and sorting laundry. Meanwhile, Dan and I were doing the sort of labor expected from convicts at medium-security prisons, or the illegal Mexican guys that hang out in front of Home Depot, hoping for ten dollars an hour, from age ten until we were in our late teens.

  Velva Jean—again, strategically playing her long game—didn’t take on this fight, didn’t get between Dad and the damage he was doing to Dan and me, because she had her daughters, and this is how our family had been cleanly delineated: The girls were my mother’s property and were safe, protected, guarded, and reassured. Dan and I were labor, treated like men as soon as we could drive, at age ten. Exposed, brutalized, used, and discarded, expected to continue the cycle as soon as we hit eighteen.

  Mom had no choice but to accept this. But she had another strategy in mind, but I don’t think she knew she had it in her until she started her education once again, and quietly, without any fuss, studied for and passed her GED one night, when no one was looking. From there, she began classes at the local community college and would, eventually, obtain a degree in business.

  Dad, on the other hand, would give up on his local trucking business and begin that long-haul driving, and it was in that vacuum where the family really began showing the diaspora, the flight of the children—all of us headed north on our own adventures and progress—and Mom, keeping Derek as close as possible, was growing well beyond the control of her old-world obligations and Gramma’s dominion. And Dad, now capable of misadventures much more to his liking, set loose upon the unsuspecting United States behind the large, overgrown wheel of an eighteen-wheeler and, staying away from home for three weeks out of every month, was content.

  It was here that Velva created her chance for escape, filed for her freedom after twenty-five years and finally falling out of love with my father, who pushed it way too far, fell behind in his own development, and realized far too late that he had been married to a Titan all this time, who had been silently incubating like that Greek myth, eating some of her children so that others might spring from her forehead.

  So when she asked for her divorce, taking eight-year-old Derek with her, it was interesting that her daughters, my sisters, out on their own paths, entirely successful and fulfilled as strong women in their own right, were thoroughly blindsided by Mom’s decision, and were not shy about letting Velva know their displeasure.

  There was a real sense of betrayal on both sides, primarily from my sisters, who had been kept from all of Mom and Dad’s secrets growing up, and now, as adults, simply could not understand why Velva was leaving their father in his darkest, deepest time of need. And Dad played into this betrayal as well, offering up only a shrug of helplessness and bewildered innocence at Velva’s decision to break up the family and rob Derek of growing up in the same stable, structured environment that the rest of us had supposedly experienced.

  Mom bought this
line of guilt wholesale and believed it thoroughly, felt despicable every time she’d come home to find Derek playing video games, miserably ensconced in his “urban” isolation away from Dad and Gramma, in a shitty two-bedroom apartment in a bad Brownsville neighborhood where he was exposed to an entirely different Brownsville than Dan and I had witnessed growing up, but never participated in. She wanted to keep Derek safely tucked away in his prelapsarian bliss.

  Brownsville was very different, without the dirt of the farmyards under your feet.

  CHAPTER 2 Mom Leaves Derek

  As an outsider from my perch three thousand miles away, watching my mother’s development during this period was fascinating, as if she was rooted temporally in both the shared timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly fabric of time and space as the rest of us but also exploding forward in growth, so that every year she spent in school and working for herself after her divorce, it was also about five more years of experience for her, lurching forward through all her growth stages. She was like Doctor Who.

  Her biggest sacrifice in this hyperdriven development was Derek, as the youngest kid still dependent upon her spare time and affection, both of which were now limited resources that he had to share with her ambitions and her social life. His standard of living had become destabilized, and he had become listless, bored, drawn to the dangerous, which, in Brownsville, Texas, can become incredibly dangerous incredibly quick.

  Dad tried to keep involved with Derek, would pick him up when he was in town so Derek could spend time with him and Gramma, who was suddenly feeling lonely and left behind in that empty spread out on Oklahoma Avenue, where once lived her son’s huge sprawling family. Gramma was like Moses, who brought his people to the Promised Land, but could not, himself, enter.