My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  Turn your back, and he would be gone for weeks without checking in, drinking with dangerous people, doing illicit drugs or any sort of prescription medication that happened to be blooming in the subterranean culture in Austin at the moment, and Derek was always able to get a free line in there, always ready to be a party in a pair of trousers, because he was funny, smart, and charismatic, and people were naturally drawn to him, wanted him around.

  For the first two years he was “going to college,” I’d reach out to him and feel absolutely crushed when I received nothing in response, something that I didn’t know Mom and Dan were experiencing as well. We never talked about it.

  But then he’d surface, back in orbit with a text message, the electric dart in every parent’s heart.

  I just hated it when he’d pop back up and pretend everything was all right, that he hadn’t squandered the full ride he’d won to the University of Texas, and tell us all he was still in school, just needed another $500 for this and $200 for that, maybe $600 for this other thing, and we’d all somehow allow ourselves to get bamboozled, and we’d work together as a family and generate what he needed, because that’s what you do, even for addicts, when they’re lying to you.

  His lies and Mom’s dedication to them were written on the back of her hands, sun damaged from driving in Texas, positioned at 11:00 and 2:00 on the steering wheel and baking in the hot equatorial sunlight as she drove monthly from Houston to Austin. She’d put another mortgage on her house, find another way to help him back into class and believe in him, in what she felt was unconditional love and not enabling. She’d take him shopping at the start of every semester, take him to the H-E-B (the Texas grocery chain) and load up on spicy ramen soups and sandwich fixings, then set him free and hope, eternally, for the best.

  I had the chance to witness this once, when I happened to fly down to Austin on my own business. Watching the two of them together at the grocery store, their interactions and insinuated history as mother and son, it was clear to me that they’d never achieved their own individuation, never broken free as two complete organisms, two minds, two souls, two fully developed people.

  Their communication was entrenched into years of backstory and inside knowledge, long-ago arguments and stunted grunts of information. No. Get that. Stop. Then a look: Yes, that one. Most of this went unspoken. They were the opposite of a married couple. They’d never separated, made it to mitosis. You see it sometimes, when people shift personalities in front of you, become completely different humans when they interact with their children.

  That day, at H-E-B, readying Derek for another failed semester of druggie school, Mom was loading up her placenta with nutrients again, instead of stocking his nonexistent fraternity pantry, which is what she thought she was doing.

  See, when he was born, Derek couldn’t make it out of the birth canal because he’d had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and it would choke him when he tried to emerge. Eventually, he evacuated through a cesarean.

  I walked behind them, watching as they shopped together, and thought to myself, “Jesus fuck. What a perfect metaphor.”

  Mom’s umbilical, which started out choking this kid, was now stretched across half the state of Texas.

  So here he was now, in intubation in this ICU in a hospital in Austin, post–brain surgery, barely surviving.

  Because of his alcohol and drug problem.

  Which demeaned the event. An unspoken Catholic response: He was being bad, therefore he should be punished. Or, he deserved this. He received what was coming to him.

  Back in Seattle, I kept wondering: Should I fly down there, disrupt my routine, for this addict, who routinely lies, keeps from talking to his family and continues this lifestyle—does this SHAMEFUL moment need addressing?

  My brother-in-law, Corwin, had more air miles than most countries have highway miles; the ticket would not have been an issue. But I felt a level of shame for Derek that I couldn’t describe then. Oh, no. Well, you’ve gone and done it. Cat’s out of the bag now, mister. Everyone knows our little secret. Everyone knows we’re drunks now. You had to go and fuck up. Had to fuck it up for all of us.

  There was that.

  CHAPTER 6 Pygmalion, Texas

  I made a number of terrible decisions around this time, my own self, searching for signals from the universe as to what steps I should take next, where I needed to be, what I could do after I found myself alone and isolated in Seattle, right before Derek’s accident.

  Growing up Mexican Catholic, and in particular with my old-world grandmother and father, I wound up tinged with an intricacy of superstitions, adapted to my neo-rebellious West Coast sensibilities. Combining that vulnerability with the advent of a burgeoning social media, it took Myspace to put me exactly in a position that I had not expected.

  That’s when Elise broke through.

  She was a girl I knew growing up in Brownsville, Texas, in high school, and had not thought of twice in twenty years. She had sought me out during the heyday of Myspace, and I took it as a sign that someone I knew from way back when was calling me back to Texas, like a raspy siren with a two-packs-a-day habit and a penchant for barbecue.

  Not that she was a smoker, or a barbecuist. Or rather, she may have been, for all I knew: As I said, I hadn’t thought of her since before I barely graduated high school. She wasn’t that significant, just another target of written letters and mixed tapes back in high school, but really, that could have been any number of girls.

  My heart was a drunken compass even then, before I was a drunk.

  I remembered her as an awkward, lean girl with a laugh to make you reconsider your stream of jokes, if I’m to remain kind. Actually, that is a bit mean, since she was just a teenage kid, seemed a bit morose and a bad fit for South Texas, which is what I think drew me to her. And that she was a sort of echo of another girl with whom I was smitten, but too frightened to make it obvious. Bit of a placeholder, if that’s not revisionist. So I gave her the full Pablo Neruda treatment with a daily letter and a few moody Mancunian tunes for a while, made no progress, and when it came time for me to leave high school and Brownsville, I genuinely never thought about her again.

  Then she reached out, all these years later, when I was at my most vulnerable, transitioning chapters without Dan or a partner in Seattle, living entirely unto my own and eking out a living three thousand miles from a home that was no longer there, and, being who I was, I took it as a sign: You’ll do.

  She sent a photo, of course, and I was knocked back on my heels: She looked fantastic, like a Latin Winona Ryder, which isn’t a stretch. Remember, this was the early days of the Internet, when social customs and etiquette had not yet been established and curiosity led you down some fairly dangerous catfish holes.

  The mixed tapes I’d left behind like preverbal suggestions of romantic idealizations had left their marks, and here she was now, years later, wondering who I’d become, what I was doing, and most important to her, what I was listening to. This became clear after a few exchanges of e-mail, which immediately turned into full running daily electronic dialogues interrupted only by the two-hour time difference and picked up again later for six-hour telephone conversations that racked up $300 in cell phone bills, held nightly after I’d come home from work.

  She’d taken to pursuing and obsessing on every band I’d left behind on the tapes I’d made for her, researching and indulging and spending her husband’s money on rare pressings and taking pilgrimages to Manchester or stalking, when he toured America, Morrissey, of all people, to whom I’d introduced her years before on more than a few compilations, as he was one of my favorite artists back then. And I knew it was her husband’s money only later, after weeks of talking, when she finally admitted she was married.

  To anyone with an appreciation of absurdity, what was clearly unfolding here was a relationship long in the making, the sort of John Hughes fantasy story that drove the box office in the ’90s. I thought, Finally, here’s the current
that should be sweeping me along. I’ll just let it take me where it wants to go.

  To indicate things further, it just so happened I’d scheduled a trip to Houston and Austin for later that month . . . so what are you doing for dinner, say, on the 19th? Everything seemed to be pointing toward the rightness of this, the universal correction in the vacuum of signifiers.

  And it was with that idea that I traveled to Austin, Texas, that summer.

  Derek was there, at this time, and he was excited to see me.

  I wasn’t so excited to see him.

  I had an idea of the sort of life he was living at UT, and I had become so cross with his decision to join a fraternity that I didn’t even try to speak to him for over a year.

  Dan described Derek as a chemical toilet. That’s better than what I had come up with: a dust bin. Derek did anything anyone threw at him, and if excess went beyond, he did a bit more. There was simply no stopping how much he would drink, how much he’d snort or take: He could consume triple or quadruple what you thought was too much.

  He had our Martinez peasant stamina, our crazy Mexican strength. He was Dumbo, made out of rubber. He still had our Gramma’s strength in him, with his developed sense of the optimistic stupidity that made him love and trust everyone around him, who actually loved and liked him back, because he was nothing if not an incredibly likeable kid.

  That was the problem: You combine this pastiche of personality with his penchant for addiction, and it points you toward the cliff edge.

  And personally, because I loved the kid as much as I did, and I wanted always to impress him and for him to keep me firmly locked in as his hero, as his older brother and idol, I was always on the hunt for something that he’d find amusing, something that would keep me on the cusp of the most interesting and the finder of the coolest things.

  I was Gryffindor; Derek was Hufflepuff. Hufflepuffs are good finders, and Derek always found drugs.

  So all the things I would find for him to share in would inadvertently leverage him with a social currency that went well beyond anything his loose constellation of friends had previously been exposed to: I provided this credit of identity that proved incredibly lucrative in the lateral currency of “cool” in shit places like universities; by trying to win over my younger brother’s affections, I was actually giving him the freedom to kill himself because his friends and peers and compatriots, who were all eager to learn more and more and more about what was cool and next and big and smart, were plying him with booze and blow and ecstasy and anything they had their hands on so that Derek could continue talking and talking and telling them about all that he knew, which is what I knew, and what Dan and I were giving him while he disappeared further into the miasma of addiction and a dither of definition and blurred boundaries and a declension to a level we never thought possible for one of our own family.

  “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky,” as David Bowie sang.

  He was so happy to see me that afternoon I drove into Austin.

  Derek ran out of the fraternity house and hugged me while I grabbed my bag, and I didn’t hug him back, exiting our mother’s car. A hot day, a shitty Texas campus, dicks in trucks, girls wearing excessively short shorts. I was pissed off. Turned on, of course, with the girls in shorts, but still pissed off.

  He failed to notice my resistance; maybe he was high on something. But I wasn’t relenting, and I was irritated that he was making me spend time in a fraternity house in Austin.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t know that both Dan and I had stood and fought a Hellenic “stand your ground” fight against an entire fraternity in Kingsville, Texas, ten years before, and that the whole idea of fraternities goes against my core principles, but he was lining up his friends like dwarves and hobbits in an adventure—Dimly, Wimly, Simpy, and so on—and attempting to introduce them to me like I was his own Yoda, and they all lined up, stupid and uninteresting and . . . well, dimwitted.

  Or maybe I’m just his older brother, and I was being a complete dick about this.

  But no; they were just younger kids and “friends” of my brother, helping him along in his unmonitored and unscheduled self-destruction. Encouraging, allowing, permitting, supplying his destructive tendencies—can’t you see what’s happening here?

  Echoes of my own choices, and effects. Affects.

  And Dan’s. And Derek’s helplessness.

  And these fucks were resonating it back to Derek, in amplification, for their own fun.

  And my mother, her umbilical throttling her hearing, chauffeuring him along.

  I was angry at all of us, not just Derek.

  The only night I was at the fraternity house, Derek paraded me around, and I was surrounded by these drinking children and maybe one or two glimmers of intelligence. The only kid I felt any sort of draw toward was Derek’s best friend, oddly named Orlando, a tall, stringy Mexican-American kid with long straight hair and a keen sense in seeing the larger, more cosmic sensibility and the stupidity of this enterprise. He’s from Del Rio, Texas, a border town similar to Brownsville, and a kooky family of artists, musicians, and cockfighters. The first time Derek visited Orlando’s house, within minutes of parking, and the moment he entered, Orlando’s dad appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Derek by his wrist, pulled him into a spare bedroom where Derek had a moment’s pause and uncertainty, until the old man handed him a Bud Light and then produced a battered guitar upon which he began to pluck that one song Antonio Banderas sings in Desperado. That was his initiation to Orlando’s family.

  The second time Derek was at Orlando’s home, he was awoken on Orlando’s couch after an all-night drive from Austin to Del Rio to find an old man—Orlando’s uncle—rubbing an ice-cold Budweiser on his neck, inviting him to sit for a drinking breakfast at 7:00 a.m. because the cockfights started around 9:00 or 10:00 that Saturday. They sat eating GBCs—tacos with carne guisada, beans, and cheese, which are such a staple in Del Rio, they’re known by their initials—and the old man pulled out a magazine that displayed fighting roosters, and cooed and petted at the image of his favorite, which was way over his pay grade, and choked up with tears. Their house was on a hill that looked directly down onto the Rio Grande. Derek said it was like a Mexican version of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, with the multigenerational family all minding their own quirkiness and the doors left always unlocked.

  Orlando and Derek shared a room at the end of the hall in the fraternity, and it reminded me of a squat I lived in when I was roughly his age, but in Seattle. Mine was an unregistered and illegal karate school in an abandoned warehouse, but I saw the parallel. It was a square room, nothing exceptional; an elevated platform stood five feet off the ground with a plywood bunk supported by four-by-fours and bolted into the wall. On top of this rested a smelly, moldy futon. This was where Derek slept. It was unhygienic, disgusting. My billet, for the night.

  Still, he tried to throw a party for me, show me what he did now, as if he were a grown-up.

  He invited everyone he knew, and most of them were morons.

  I couldn’t move for having a throng of college students following me around, and a particularly large Southern brute took to following me, even into the men’s room, when someone started passing around a pipe full of marijuana and I thought, Yup, that’s the end of the night, and they became high and whatever conversation might have been no longer had any possibility of being evinced. I crawled up to the futon and hid while the party continued throughout the frat house, and I was relegated to the back corner while emanations of scorn and unbridled resentment poured continuously from the older, professional frat guys up front.

  And it built up to a moment when an Asian kid in a pressed pink collared shirt called down the hall to Derek and challenged him about his owed dues to the fraternity.

  I heard how he was talking to my little brother, and I climbed down from the futon and came out into the hallway angry. I said, “I’m sorry, but who the fuck are you?” I stood up and expanded, chick
en chested, elbows touching both hallways and my spine expanding about a foot.

  “June, don’t . . . don’t; it won’t help,” said either Derek or Orlando, when these other dickhead yuppies in similar pastel collared shirts made some under-breath comments. I genuinely did not hear what they said, but I registered the scorn.

  Derek and Orlando and their friends were, apparently, the punk fringe of the frat house. If there could be such a thing. They were months behind on dues, rent, et cetera, and way submerged beneath their academic minimums. They were now the fraternity equivalent of homesteaders, or homeless squatters, only there for the free booze and parties, seamless introductions to the sorority girls. And what I had walked into was the passive-aggressive hostility of their fraternity “supervisors,” children pretending at social management and finding themselves lacking.

  And I wanted to start a fight.

  “June, please don’t,” repeated Derek.

  I was brimming with self-righteous hostility. I knew this was ridiculous, and I knew Derek was an idiot for getting himself into this, but who the fuck do you think you are, you mid-Texan fraternity nobody, to be judging my goddamned little brother?

  I was going to start some shit. I was pissed, and I was pissed.

  I could take at least three of these fuckers, I thought. I’d done it before, and that was before I’d trained to fight. I didn’t need Dan here. But Derek was trying to get me to stand down: Don’t do this, don’t start a fight here, and I said, “I’m not saying I’m not going to or that I am, but motherfucker. . . .”