And I’d stare at him like I didn’t know who he was, until the idea of “home” began surfacing once again and I’d come to, with him cleaning all the open cuts and stitching up the bad ones.
I have no explanation for it, except that it felt like some sort of blood sacrifice to a low saint, in a time of pain. Low economy of self. I was feeling something primitive and inexpressible, so it needed venting. No more wars to fight, horses to steal, or counting coup. Just a sense of aggression, unyielding rage, shame, and fear. Or maybe I was just checking that the trapdoor was still there.
That’s what it felt like, back then, when it would surface. It doesn’t anymore.
We didn’t speak for months, and before I knew it, Dan had moved away from Seattle, deciding that he’d had enough and it was time to be closer to family in Texas. That drunken Sunday argument began the longest estrangement of our lives, which kept me from flying to Austin, to Derek’s bedside while he lay intubated.
I never knew how difficult it was to be brothers, never understood how it would overwhelm and inform every other relationship in my life as an adult, or how I’d have to constantly reevaluate Dan every time I’d see him, how much more complicated he’d become as what was basically a life-partner relationship in which I had no choice but to participate. We had unknowingly become overbonded from our childhood, both hating and needing one another in a cyclic rotation rooted deeply in the sort of love only POWs who help one another through death marches and the building of Burmese railroads can fathom. And we had no idea about the commitment; we ripped one another to shreds constantly as kids—then knew we had to make a reparative effort after, because neither one was going anywhere.
It’s the hardest club, and the only club, in which I’ve had membership, and perhaps the reason why I find artificial associations like unions or fraternal orders calling one another “brothers” distasteful, even offensive.
It is a marriage, from birth to death, and it takes years to figure it out, to stop hurting one another and say, “We have only a few years left, considering how we’ve been living, and I’m exhausted from fighting. Please, let’s get along better and enjoy only the love.”
You’re not going to get that by “pledging” at a Greek house. You’re not going to experience that by standing next to Bob at the plant for twenty years, working the swing shift, and sneaking off at 10:00 p.m. to slug down a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best in thirty minutes for lunch. You might get something very close to that in combat, as I’ve understood it, but it’s still not biologically imperative, still not the common threading of DNA, still not family.
Brotherhood, at its most elemental, is a shared psychosis, a folie à deux, an intimate social obligation based on genetics, overlapping damage and testosterone, and you do not have a choice except to participate. Even running away is a participation, as I experienced.
And by the time I figured out how to be a brother to Dan, when we had figured out how to de-escalate arguments and opinions, knew how to step wide, stay out of the mud and let the other person spray and be an asshole, knowing he’d be back around in a bit, and we finally figured out how to navigate our club of two, then we had Derek to deal with, who knew none of the codes, had none of our neurological wiring, had nothing in the way of potential to join, except that Dad was his father (we were pretty sure) and Mom was his mother, and he knew most of the same people we did. Knew a really good corn tortilla from a microwaveable one, so to speak.
This might actually explain why I went through a period where instead of collecting father figures, I switched to collecting little brothers. I would meet them at work or from my neighborhood, or at my old karate school, and I would adopt them for a while, then feel uncomfortable and weird, and then just leave them, never to talk again.
I missed Dan and Derek so much sometimes that it ached, profoundly, in my core sense of self, sense of family.
We had some great stories, as brothers.
With Derek, I remember visiting him on a vacation from Seattle, after I’d started karate, and one perfect summer Saturday, three or four of his friends were visiting at our old house on Oklahoma Avenue and we had an improvisational karate riot, right there in the front yard. I was Hercules, if he had taken tae kwon do, and I was wrestling and kicking and taking down these five little fuckers to the grass, without ever hurting a single one of them, as I “kapowed” and “hiyahed!” and made every Bruce Li noise possible for like an hour, and they’d climb low-hanging branches and jump on my back, get mildly punched in the gut or head, and we were all laughing and sweating and yelling, like puppies at a puppy mill. It was fantastic, and he talked about it for years after.
Another time I taught him how to climb the tree outside Gramma’s house in order to break in through the bathroom window, so he could look for any porn our previous Uncle Richard might have left behind, and I went through every single hiding place in that creepy, old house that Dan and I had figured out, and sure enough, there were still strong echoes of a 1970s porn habit, lingering in the darker little corners Gramma had yet to rumble.
As he grew older, I’d bring him up to Seattle, and it was here that he saw snow for the first time (a watershed moment in every South Texan’s life), and he actually engaged and played with some kids from Montana one crisp spring morning when I drove him to Hurricane Ridge, and he took a photo with that family, who had built a slide into the hillside and were taking turns. Derek was a bit older than the kids, around fourteen, but he was no less enthusiastic and joyful. It was really sweet to see.
With Dan, our bonding was a bit more complicated, as adults. Since we grew up together, there was little that we didn’t know about the other, but still, we were able to surprise each other sometimes. For instance, one Friday night back in Dallas, Texas, after I’d accidently moved there (long story, and not interesting—I was back in Seattle after nine months), Dan had been staying with me while establishing himself as a nurse in a long-term care facility, and neither of us knew anyone among the Dallas population, so we decided to stay in and watch cable.
My apartment’s interior design had a kind of midcentury feel, since most of my furniture had been donated by the crustier echelon of desk editors and reporters at the Seattle Times, thanks to an ex-girlfriend who worked there and had put out a call for donations.
Immediately, that generation of Seattleites who were putting their parents out on the proverbial ice floe and airing out their inherited properties, which now tripled in the booming real estate market, started offering up kitschy lamps and uselessly tiered coffee tables, rattan chairs and strange wall art and the like.
I didn’t care: I took everything that was offered, packed it into a U-Haul, and drove it across the country to Dallas, Texas. Figured I’d pare it down when I arrived.
When I finished decorating my new apartment, it looked like a Boeing-era thrift store had vomited in my living room after a hard night of drinking bourgin.
I didn’t care; it was “shabby chic,” I thought.
Dan was taken aback when he first saw it, though; it didn’t compute with his sense of interior design for a single guy. I could tell he was questioning my heterosexuality, and I was making no case for it.
Dan’s idea of a single man’s interior design, as illustrated by the one time I ever visited him and he lived alone, was a television sitting atop a hefty wooden table and a love seat directly across from it, with a shadeless lamp sitting on the floor next to it. And lots of beer cans. Lots and lots of beer cans.
So the look of consternation that flickered across his face when he saw my walls draped with Indian fabrics, dried grass stalks in mismatched standing vases, and two recliners sitting opposite a small television and separated by a tall reading lamp, well, Dan had to question what I’d been up to, and with whom, while he’d left me alone in Seattle for a couple years.
Nevertheless, there we were, two large Latin men that Friday night, sitting in midcentury recliners opposite my twenty-inch television (large en
ough to be allowed in Texas, but certainly not something to be proud of), looking like the very image of Edith and Archie Bunker, drinking Lone Star Beer, the National Beer of Texas.
And because this was my place, it was my discretion as to what we’d be watching for that evening’s entertainment. After some considerable channel surfing, I had lit upon a small, independent Australian film called Flirting, by John Duigan.
To this day, it remains one of my favorite small films, and I forced Dan to endure it with me.
We sat, that night, watching this film on the Romance Channel, its logo popping up translucently every twenty minutes or so in the lower right-hand corner to remind us how nonmacho we were being by watching a “love movie” at 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night.
By midnight, and the final scene when our hero finally receives a letter from his beloved, who had survived the overthrow of Idi Amin. Dan and I were sobbing, both our faces wet with tears rolling down our puffy cheeks, and saying, “He loves her so much! And she loves him, too!”
It was one for the brotherly scrapbook, and one of my favorite memories of my brother Dan.
The big galoot.
Much later, there was one story that Dan liked to repeat about his drinking days with Derek, before Derek’s accident in 2007. Some friends of Dan’s from his time in Seattle had flown to San Antonio to visit him, and they spent an entire day on the River Walk, hopping bars and hotels from one end to the other and drinking, drinking, drinking.
Dan, of course, was responsible for Derek’s tab because Derek was, as a false student, insolvent, and so when the final tally came to Dan the next day, he blearily counted up all his receipts and discovered he had spent just under $600 for a monumental drunk, worthy of a Kris Kristofferson song.
Very little was said about most of that day, except for a particular moment witnessed at closing time, when Derek was woozily standing at the end of a bar and was unexpectedly chatted up by a San Antonio cougar: big hair, large golden chains, shining nails, and lots of makeup. Derek, unburdened by standards or morals even on his best days, allowed himself to be chatted up thoroughly, thinking he might either have sex or a few free drinks. Such were my younger brother’s priorities.
Dan witnessed this from the bar opposite and was immediately on high alert, for some reason, and decided to interfere on the older woman’s interfering with his younger brother.
“Whattaya doing to my little brother?” he said, a bit too aggressively.
“Nothing!” replied the older woman, making a face full of disgust. “Have at him, if you’re so damned protective.”
Derek, at this point bewildered and confused, managed to follow Dan as Dan led him away and safely off to home.
Now, Dan liked to tell this story. And Dan liked to increase the age of the older woman every time he told the story.
By the time I heard it, she was in her eighties, in a wheelchair, and carried an oxygen tank while smoking a cigarette through a hole in her throat. She also said, “Dahr-wick,” instead of “Derek.” It was hysterical.
“Dahr-wick, come help me with my colostomy bag,” Dan said, while pretending to inhale from a hole in his neck as he was driving and telling me the story for the first time.
“Shut up, she wasn’t that old,” said Derek, from the backseat.
“Dahr-wick, can you change my oxygen tank, Dahr-wick?” said Dan.
“Come on, man; stop being mean. You know she wasn’t that bad.”
“Dahr-wick, if you come back to my room at the home, you can meet my daughter on Sunday, when she visits. She’s old enough to be your muddah.”
“Jesus, Dan.”
Personally, I was taken aback by Dan’s routine. The years we spent apart, he’d been sharpening his material, it seemed. He was getting funnier. I was feeling a bit threatened, too: I was the Shecky Greene of the troupe. I was the Borscht Belt comedian. After thirty goddamned years, I was still competing for the same resources as my older brother, the bastard.
But I also noticed how Derek had taken to wincing when he was the butt of our jokes. Once he’d been very willing to be hazed, or initiated in the manner that brothers do with insensitive ribbing or outright humiliation, because any attention from us was in its own way nourishing to him—even the mean stuff—but in the years that I hadn’t seen them, I was noticing that this sort of engagement had begun to leave an impression. And Dan either refused to notice or refused to care.
Derek was wincing, making faces when we said shitty things to him, or about him. He had hit a limit, but I wasn’t there when it started. Our comments were unconsciously barbed now, surprisingly sharp and unintentionally demeaning, when they were once just brotherly teasing.
CHAPTER 5 Epiphanies
My father tells the story of the first time he realized he had a problem with drinking, and oddly enough he cites me as the vehicle of his clarity. Remarkably, I remember the exact same moment standing opposite him as a child, as it served for me as a lesson in the power of language and thinking your way out of a volatile situation, disengaging from the river of cortisol and adrenaline that would—sometimes—help me out of violent moments.
During the incident he talks about, my father was raging and spewing, spitting mad, caught in one of the endocrinal bursts of anxiety and impossible anger that would punctuate his youth, just explosive and unreasonable and, for some reason, directed at me that mythological morning. I do not remember what I might have said or failed to do in order to trigger it, but I was roughly eight or ten years old, and he was billowing around me like a bunker buster and I was standing in the vortex, his arms and curses and gesticulation flying around me like shrapnel.
But this particular morning, it was the sting emanating from his breath that really hurt me.
Jesus God, was it acute, piercing from alcohol, like needles in my nose and eyes, and I had to squeeze my own eyes shut and turn my face in a wince to get out of the immediate proximity. It was so bad that I was able to ignore the imminent physical violence of his anger and instead had to protect myself simply from his breath.
He’d been drinking through the entire night before, probably had a few more beers that morning, and there he was, trying to get to work and yelling at me for failing to be helpful.
And take it any longer I could not: I said, calmly, and in a manner unusual in that barrio, likely in English, “Dad, my nose hurts from your breath. It really stings.”
And my father just stopped, as if I’d reached back and popped him square on the nose.
I remember the look on his face, too, and I’m not making that up from here.
It was pure astonishment. Out of the mouth of babes, and all that.
His frenzy came to an instantaneous halt, frozen as if in amber, and my remark did what nothing or no one else could do then and broke through my father’s delirium, or addictive denial.
His drinking no longer a tertiary or passive issue. He couldn’t even yell at his kid now without the fucking drinking getting in the way.
He was floored, he tells the other broken members of his AA meetings, when he repeats the anecdote about this revelation. And after twenty-odd years of sobriety, he was able to tell us, his family, about this crystallization, the first in a long series of realizations that would eventually line up and spell his sobriety, in something other than an unusual hieroglyph or a vague, abstract reading of tea leaves. It had spoken to him in a manner much clearer than an interpretation of raw eggs suspended in a glass of water, like he was accustomed to after a visit to his curandera.
That morning was the first point of a Latin character that would, in time, spell out “ENOUGH” for my father, perhaps in Latin or Spanish, but enough is enough in whatever language you think or feel in, and he credits me, as that boy, who started to draw the sounds for him. Gave him words to make that life-changing decision.
Of course, I took something different from that moment. Obviously, I did not realize that my father was having that moment of clarity through his addiction;
for me it was more the idea that I could, using something other than reflected hysteria, step out of the torrent of emotion and, by using regulated tones, talk someone out of their fight, or their flight.
Step out of the way of the pain, using language.
But it’s hardest to step out of the way of your own pain, step out of your own torrent. In my adolescence and youth, when I began noticing that my father had left that same impression, that same curse and same need to explode like a hand grenade in me, when I was drinking or not, I didn’t have the resources or cultural cues to point me toward seeking help—mental, medical, or psychological—and I would instead simply point the nose of my stalled emotional engine right into the dive and plummet. I never even considered that I could turn out of the tailspin like Lincoln Beachey, the barnstormer who figured out that instead of going against the tailspin to restart your propeller, as the intuition of many dead pilots had previously told them to do, you should not fight it, but turn into the plummet and then restart the engine, and maybe once again regain control.
Instead, it was explosion after explosion. Casualty after casualty.
It was what I knew, though I knew better.
In a fall from grace, you get to play both roles, the victim and the savior, the self-redeemer.
Derek hadn’t figured out the second part before he fell, didn’t get to turn into his stall and regain control. As a family, we were all well aware of Derek’s secret corruptions. It was the most inexplicable, contradictory thing about him: When he was in front of you, when he was at family gatherings, when he had an internship or a job, when someone was in charge of him, he was the brightest, smartest, most agreeable person, the most competent employee, most enjoyable human in the room.
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 5
