Then one of them started playing “Ghostbusters.”
Not the movie, but the song, by Ray Parker Jr., loud, and in earnest. Coming out of his room from the front. Like he meant it. Like it was his “jams.”
I stopped in the hallway, my aggression halted, bewildered.
“Is . . . is he Russian?” I asked. That was the only thing that could explain this.
Derek looked at me.
“How . . . yes; how did you know?” The kid was Hungarian, but Derek thought that was close enough.
“It’s ‘Ghostbusters,’ Derek! Who else is going to listen to ‘Ghost-busters’ like it’s a real song in 2007?”
And we burst out laughing, which neutralized the air that night.
That kid would be the one who would later save Derek’s life. Mogyorodi, with the very bad dress sense and bad taste in popular American music. Mogyorodi, who stood with Derek as Derek blacked out and fell, and who immediately called 911, had the ambulance there in minutes and saved Derek’s life. For a year or two after, Derek carried a Polaroid photo of Mogyorodi in his jacket pocket, never explained to anyone who he was, or why he had a photo of a really hairy guy wearing a Nirvana Nevermind T-shirt tucked into tricolored sweatpants pulled up to his belly button, and holding a can of fortified lager and smiling at whomever was taking the photo.
The night I spent with Derek in his fraternity house, after picking up on some deeply sublimated homoeroticism and some horrible, horrible lapses of sanitation (Christ! What do they feed these boys? I had bowel envy, from the shared bathroom), I went back and hid in the rear corner of the house and decided I wouldn’t cause trouble because I was seeing Elise the next evening, and this was Derek’s choice now. These were his decisions.
Derek kept drinking, even after we had called it quits around 2:00 a.m. and I had elected to retire. He wandered off and left me alone in that foreign, horrible place, and I sat there, counting the minutes until daylight came and I could get a lift to my hotel, as I had planned.
Around 4:00 a.m. he finally wandered back, and I didn’t recognize this boy.
He stood in the darkened room, holding a bag full of Taco Bell that he’d either pinched or had someone bring to him, and he stared out the window and made a horrible show of himself as I watched from atop the platform, hidden by the hepatitic futon, and he breathed slowly and deeply through his nose, like someone in scuba gear, and smooshed these terrible tacos into his mouth and chewed noisily, the food falling apart and smearing on his face. I could see his eyes in the reflection of the window glass, and it looked, to me, like he had no idea where he was, or who he was, at all.
There was no one home behind his glasses. His eyes were empty, his balance a slow orbit, his body a shell of the person that I was related to, the kid I helped to raise, but this wasn’t him. I was witnessing firsthand what I had only heretofore suspected, that Derek drank into nonsense, into utter corruption of identity. It was almost like a possession, or maybe the opposite of a possession—a vacuity, an absence, an ejection of self. Derek was gone. This was just walking booze.
I’d never seen anything like it, not sure I’d ever been there myself, and believe me, I’d put on some pretty good drunks in my day. And I had met some other serious drunks, too, but nothing like this.
I was completely destroyed, looking at him like that, felt entirely at a loss, and helpless, hopeless.
This was my younger brother, and he was gone.
It took me most of the next day to recover from the shock of seeing Derek in that form, and he slept all day, reviving his strength so he could do a repeat performance of that same self-destruction the following night, as an encore. It amazed me that he managed to get that fucked up, that often, with no money. And yet, here he was, doing it daily.
My own bad choices kept pointing me into the ridiculous as well, kept collaborating with my drunken compass.
My friend Philippe monitored me at the time from his home in Los Angeles, questioning every decision I made on this trip and, I’m sure, telling his wife that I was having a midlife crisis at thirty-six.
It was the only thing it could look like, from without.
From within, it was a continuation of what the universal signal was telling me. If I pricked my ear just right, what should have happened fifteen years previously, in following these musical bread crumbs to Austin, Texas, where I was continuing my wooing of a girl I knew back in high school, could happen now. Perhaps I needed to follow Dan’s example and move back to Texas, with a girl.
Anyhow, I had a date with destiny that following night. Or destiny’s second cousin.
And destiny’s second cousin showed up wearing about forty pounds more than her photo had indicated.
Now, I know this sounds like I’m being a judgmental asshole, but the reason I felt it was an indicator of something larger was simply because every photo she sent during our exchanges was, let’s just say, a kinder, younger, gentler representation of her definitions and relationship with physicality, if not outright photoshopped. And I was very much of the cinema verité school of thought, sending her updated images of my own declension into middle age, with the thinning hair, the love handles lovingly cultured over hours of beer drinking, the slow deterioration of knees and lungs, and a forthright insistence that I was not, in the least, misrepresenting myself. I didn’t have time for that. We didn’t have time for that, now that we were in our late thirties: No time for love, Dr. Jones. It’s time to make a choice, and I’m thinking my choice is you, if you’re being honest and real.
So here is me, being real, is where I was.
And here she was, playing this game.
After all these hours of foreplay and flirting and exchanges, I arrived in Texas and she had presented a more, let’s call it a “stylized,” image of herself, and still, I thought, I’m going to give this a shot.
My passive sense, once again.
I heard Philippe’s voice in my head, telling me to back out, call it quits, and get back home, schnell, schnell, or whatever the French is for schnell.
We would often talk about millenials and the sort of people who’d bewilder us, kids who live their entire lives on the Internet, develop their full range of emotional entanglements and nourishment through the fabrication of electronic relationships and then find themselves feeling hollow, emotionally desiccated because the relationships are all false, impressions or echoes of reality. They put up a good face, a good front as professionals, but when you really get them talking, get them open to the gooey middle, there’s a land of tears, if they’re programmed correctly.
And this is what Philippe was telling me I was headed into.
“No!” I said. “I’m taking the dive. I want to see where this goes,” I told him.
“Domingo, this isn’t you. This isn’t healthy or smart. Obviously, there’s something going on with this girl and she’s projecting it out on you, and you’re projecting it back.”
Elise wasn’t a successful producer in Los Angeles.
Elise was a false bottom.
I saw her as a trapdoor underneath my feet, and the answer I was looking for at the time.
She’d been a good-looking young girl, if perhaps a bit forlorn and melancholic, as she would eventually tell me.
From what I could gather, she’d married some palfrey accountant-type several years her senior and pretended to work at his office, much to the displeasure of the other actual employees. I was able to determine her “office” habits as our interaction developed, which changed considerably as our contact became more involved, with her getting online and on her e-mail earlier and earlier and working through a full business day, two-hour time zone adjustment included.
But then she would go completely quiet: the chief indicator of an affair, as I knew from a few before.
And we had a great time, flirting and writing and exchanging Internet media at the time, talking about bands and other things, her telling me about Austin, me telling her about Seattle, and the
more we talked, the more clear it became that she did, really, nothing. She was a wife, I would eventually figure out, who visited her husband’s office, and she only admitted she was married after about three weeks of concentrated flirting when I called her out on her circumstances: Either she was a trust fund baby or a married woman hiding a brace of children.
“Jesus, Domingo,” said Philippe. “Her husband’s going to come after you with a shotgun. It’s Texas, remember. Look at what they did to JFK.”
“That was Dallas! This is Austin. It’s supposed to be a bit more worldly. I’ll report back to you if it’s true.”
It wasn’t.
I eventually made it to the hotel and met Elise, had my little “catfish” surprise, and went on with the evening nevertheless. She showed me her Austin, showed me her record store and her coffee shop and things she thought I might like, and was entirely too invested in showing off her car, some kind of Audi, and then I remembered that she grew up lower middle class, somewhat deprived of resources, and had a level of shame around her vehicle, as we had been taught to do in Brownsville. The car was a coup for her, bought entirely by her sexiness in snagging a duffer of a husband who bankrolled this leisurely lifestyle where she ostensibly did nothing, or very little indeed, except pursue whatever next whinging musical indication caught her fancy.
We drove to some storage facility where she had a box of memorabilia, and she found all the letters I’d written her, kept for these last twenty-odd years, along with the original cassette tapes. Clearly, I’d left a mark. I sat and giggled over what I’d written to her back in high school, noting the emerging sensibility and sensationalism, and felt a bit saddened for the kid who wrote them, asked if I could have them, but she said, no, the letters belonged to her, and I thought, Fine. You keep them. And we spent the whole night driving around and wandering the streets of Austin, which left nothing of an impression on me.
We continued driving and listening to music all night, and then when she dropped me off at my hotel and came up to say good night, I couldn’t tell if she understood the signals that she was sending. Here it was, nearing 4:00 a.m., and she was in my hotel room, saying good night. Was it me?
“I’ll come get you for breakfast,” she said. “There’s a place I’d like to take you.”
“Sure; what time?” I asked, not sure what she was indicating.
“How does 7:00 sound?”
“That’s in three hours. Why even go home?”
“I have to feed the dogs,” she said.
Then we hugged, awkwardly, for two people who had spent the last two months opening up the way we had.
Three hours later, she returned to the hotel, and I was up, bleary eyed and ready for more, having convinced myself again that this was the right track, this was the right path, and I heard Philippe’s voice in my head asking, “Christ, Domingo, what are you doing here? She’s clearly deluding herself into something that you’re actively refusing to acknowledge.”
“Shaddup, Philippe!”
“What?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I replied. “These are fantastic tortillas.”
“Yeah, this is my favorite breakfast spot. They play good music here,” she said.
Also she kept saying, “What are you on about?” in full reproduction from some of my favorite British films, and it just didn’t work with her, made me think, Fuck; is THAT what I sound like? That’s horrible.
I was too tired and too weary from the trip to bring the Pygmalion in the room into focus, at this point, so I let it go for the moment.
Austin, in the morning, looked identical to how I remembered every other Texas town, with a bit more mesquite. I just didn’t understand what people saw in it, couldn’t wait to get some distance between me and this city.
My mother picked me up for the drive back to Houston from the hotel, and I introduced her briefly to Elise before we drove to the fraternity to resuscitate Derek to say good-bye. That was more for her sake, as I couldn’t look at him the same way after the other night, needed to get away from the proximity of his self-destruction, so I could take it all in. In the meantime, I had two martinis with lunch because I needed the anesthetizing, and I once again tried to broach Derek’s self-destruction, but Mom just shook her head and these nearly tangible emanations of fatigue and defeat cascaded off of her, and I just couldn’t really press that point either.
I flew home the next day, feeling defeated and beaten, my own self, and like something was in the mail, following me home.
I called Philippe and uttered the sentence he enjoys hearing above all else: You were right, my friend.
You were right.
CHAPTER 7 Bread Thou Art
Back to March 17, 2007, with Derek in the ICU.
I think those few minutes on the phone that morning with my sister Mary changed the deepest chemistry in my mind and reintroduced me to my family in a way that therapy and thinking and years of distance could never reconcile, never clear the corrosion and adolescent convictions that protect the deep, deep traumas.
Sitting there, with Mare on the line, hearing her sniffle and absorb this new information about our younger brother’s casualty, just holding on and saying nothing, sparked a regeneration of love, and a tethering back to my family that grew in that silence, in that need for her presence, and the presence of my other family at the moment when we, as a cognitive whole, took in the idea of our mortality with the possible loss of the youngest brother.
For years after my mother’s divorce, we’d each traveled our own paths in a diaspora of personal enterprise and, at least for me, never once considered the idea that one of us could just, you know, actually die. We were like the lower animal kingdom, as cognitive psychologists and French poststructuralists accuse them of having no concept of their own mortality, allowing them to live without personal accounting, or too much ennui, experiencing only “the moment.” And then suddenly we found ourselves here, the idea of death interrupting an ordinary Saturday morning in March, and all of us clutching to cell phones like crucifixes, the possibility of death now a very real thing.
All we could do was wait, and cling to our phones.
In my apartment, in Seattle, I began pacing.
I started walking to the window, then back to the bedroom, in a straight line, at first counting my footsteps in one direction (eight) and then back in the other (oddly, six; I think I took longer, more determined strides, like I was going home). Eventually, I learned I could stop the warfare in my head by counting steps, but I couldn’t concentrate past the first hundred or so, and then I thought of saying the Lord’s Prayer, the real one, without the Lutheran addendum, and the Hail Mary. These were the first passages I’d ever memorized as a good Catholic boy, so it was like UNIX or C++ programming and should have undermined all the shouting and racing geometry of images exploding in my head—images of a funeral, images of Derek gone, Derek missing, Derek erased, flashes of life-crushing guilt and Dan, and Mom, and Dad, and Mare—but it all became a sort of broken-up chant with a mishmashed word-gruel of early Catholic images and errant bits of Shakespeare. Our Father/Wherefore Art Thou/Holy Mary Mother of God/Hallowed Be Thy Name/Give Us Thy Bread/Forgive Us Our Fruit/Blessed Are You As It Is in Heaven/In Thy Orisons May All My Sins Be Remembered/Pray for Us Sinners. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t even complete a single phrasing of prayer, because I kept losing the thread and couldn’t concentrate, not until the phone would ring, and someone would reach out with an update. Nothing ever completely reassuring, in the way that updates are when you’re not there at the hospital, in person, looking for signs, looking for behavior that’s out of the ordinary for the people in the scrubs, waiting for the signals betraying their loss of control, betraying their panic, and listening to their chatter, eavesdropping on the nurses’ phone calls and hoping, just hoping it comes out well, and wishing you had Jesus to cling to, or who could come around the waiting room and bring you an Americano and biscotti, saying, “I just heard; I’m so sorry; I
’ll text my dad and see what He can do,” either that or that maybe he would send a priest to swing round, or, at the very least, you still had the knees and the depleted sense of irony that could once again handle prayer, if it didn’t feel so goddamned dishonest.
CHAPTER 8 Bread Thou Shalt Remain
That first morning, at 4:30 a.m. in Seattle, sitting on the edge of my bed after Robert’s phone call, the idea was growing in my head that my younger brother was dead.
My mind was lacerating my soul. Derek was dead. Dying. Hovering somewhere in between.
– No, came another voice. We don’t know that yet.
– An unguarded moment, and he slips by.
– No, he hasn’t. He hasn’t slipped by.
– When was the last time you talked to him? Was that the last time you’ll ever talk to him?
– No. Don’t think like that.
– A gin-soaked boy. Dead on his feet.
– Stop it. Stop thinking like that.
– That poor kid. We did this to him. You, me, and Dan.
– No, he made his own choices. He would never listen to you or Dan. He was a pigheaded little prick after he went to college. You couldn’t stop this. So stop this.
– Hardheaded. Hah. Hope that helped him.
– He’s a Martinez boy. He can take more than most. Even him.
It was my reptile brain and my higher functions engaged in spiritual warfare, in a competition to make it somehow my fault, my responsibility that Derek was in the hospital with his brain pan crushed in. It was hand-to-hand combat, from the deepest Catholic catacombs and programming, and totally biological: Your basest impulses fighting their governors as two independent voices, in vicious disagreement, one determined to make you carry the guilt of the consequences of the actions of others, and the other trying to maintain your sanity, your social function.
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 7
