My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I began panicking, looking for something to help ease its passage, having lived in Seattle far too long to take in the suffering of an animal of any kind, even the plague-carrying sort. I scampered about for an edged weapon, a blunt force instrument—anything, really—but there was nothing in the laundry room except a bucket and a mop.

  And my axe! cried the badly timed Gimli in my head. (I had read that joke on the Internet, but it was appropriate here.)

  It’ll have to do, I thought, so I managed to get the door open and the rat and trap out the door, onto the back porch, and for some reason, I freed it from the trap and it began to flop around, every twitch and reflex muscle in its body in full fear and flight mode, but it couldn’t see straight, couldn’t work its broken body, so it just flopped around. I finally had my shoe on it and tried to maneuver the axe so that I could just end this horror, and I brought it down hard—the damned thing was as dull as a spoon—and I managed to sever the rat’s head, partially, and I swear, it looked at me, looked me right in the eye, and I could see it cursing me, could feel it cursing me, as I sensed real anger and hatred emanating from this animal as it looked at me and finally stilled. A halo of blood began to form behind its head, right out of a movie, and, again, I swear I could hear its little voice in my head, telegraphing that last moment, Fuck you, you bastard. I curse you, I curse you to hurt as much as I just did.

  Something in me believed it.

  CHAPTER 15 Cleopatra

  The one thing I couldn’t reconcile, ever, about Steph, and still can’t, after all this time, was her dog.

  Cleopatra wasn’t really stupid, but I liked to pretend she was. She was a rescue, an odd mix of Labrador and Labrador poop. Maybe that’s not fair. She was just a weird dog that I believe had never been socialized among other dogs, so she was a bad fit in the canine world, much like Steph and I were in the human.

  She had strange habits, like orienting herself in a north/south direction when she needed to poo, and she wouldn’t go if you were looking at her, from shame. But the north/south thing worked for me because it meant she usually pooped in a matrix, so it was easy to clean up in the backyard.

  She was actually quite well trained for the walk and would immediately understand that her leash would tangle if she walked around, say, a signpost, and with a brief pluck of the line, she’d know to stop what she was doing and turn about, and walk around the obstacle.

  I was impressed. Quite impressed, when I first saw this.

  I had owned dogs that would have pulled and yanked forward and choked themselves to death without understanding the physics of the collar and line, easily, especially if there was a SQUIRREL! at the end of their prey focus. And I considered them to be smart dogs.

  When we first started dating, Cleo saw me as a contender to her place in the pack order, and would, when all three of us were walking in a park or on a beach, swing around and try to place herself between Steph and me. She would run up at a clip and stick her nose through our denimed legs and push me to one side, make sure she was next in line to Steph. Fucking brilliant, I thought.

  “And she’s so damned quiet,” I said to Steph.

  “Yep,” Steph agreed.

  “Was she like this always?” I asked.

  “Nope,” said Steph.

  “Hunh,” I said. “And you trained her to be this quiet. I’m impressed.”

  “Yep,” she said, and smiled.

  Later, she revealed how: electroshock therapy. Or rather, the shock collar, and my estimation of Steph dropped to near unredeemable levels. That’s fucked up, I thought.

  That’s just abuse.

  And the dog looked at me, with a smile, from the couch, and her tail started to thump.

  Can we go for a walk? I need to poop. Which way’s north?

  Later on, after living together and having a few spats, I could see the look in Steph’s eyes and I swear to God, she was measuring my neck for a shock collar.

  I wouldn’t do what she wanted, and we argued.

  “No!” she kept saying. “You’re not doing it right!”

  And after I considered it, I decided that no, I wouldn’t wear her collar. I wouldn’t wear anyone’s collar, thus far. Why start with a shock collar?

  “No,” I would answer her. “It’s you that’s doing it incorrectly.”

  At any rate, after a few more months of living together, Steph arrived home one evening in an uncharacteristic desperation and said, quite timidly and with an expression nearing on vulnerability, “All right. Will you marry me?” She hadn’t even dropped her handbag or her cardigan, keys still in her hand. I had been working on my first book that night, I think. (Or skimming through porn. Either which; it’s the same thing, when you get down to it.) But I looked at her, saw how much she meant it, and said, “Finally. Yes; I’ve been telling you for weeks that we should.”

  Not your traditional proposal, sure, but it was how she and I did things.

  After I’d met Steph, our relationship had been hurried, on a timetable of desperation: We were both in our late thirties, feeling an unspoken, nearly conscious pressure to marry and “settle down.” Maybe even just “settle.” Settle down or up, but just settle. And things fell apart, as they were certain to do. Boy, did they ever.

  For two days after her proposal, I couldn’t look at her, not in the eye. I would study her when she was looking away, trying to imagine a future with both of us in it, five, ten, fifteen years from now. What we’d look like, how we’d be together, and I never managed the read. I never saw it. And when she turned back around and looked at me, I became bashful and shy, and smiled big. We were like two home-schooled Christian teenagers left alone in a hayloft. We were in love, and totally awkward.

  Because we were engaged.

  Because we were going to be married.

  And that’s when things really started to break down.

  CHAPTER 16 Beating Up Lesbians

  After being with Steph for a year, I realized I had let myself go a bit too much this time, as I passed age thirty-nine with a size 38 waist and wanted to regain the slenderness of my youth, but my habits and debilitating laziness were proving an obstacle. It was with some reluctance that I turned to the only place and exercise that I had ever truly enjoyed, that had ever truly moved me to conviction, and that was karate, but not just any karate, a particular karate school that had been, when I was attending, the coolest and toughest LGBT-friendly school operating in the gay-friendly neighborhood that happened to be on the same block as the start-up alternative newspaper I was helping produce at the time.

  But then again, I was young and slim and strong and stupid: perfect genotype for a karate geek, in my mid-twenties.

  At thirty-nine, I was thick through the middle. Roomy. I’d taken the Andrew Sullivan path, went from a slender twink to a bear, if my affections were that way bent. (Mind the British pun.)

  So I started back at my old karate school, which had moved a few times and was in the throes of its own Cheyne-Stokes death knell, as most independently owned karate schools always seemed to be, underfinanced and undernourished.

  When I returned, most of the original magic seemed to be gone, but I was still quite keen on coming back, and I called the owner and patched things up because we had left things on a weird note when I didn’t return after an incredibly difficult green belt test, my first. I wouldn’t break, back then. I was petulant and not ready to submit to anyone, not even for a karate instructor I exalted.

  It didn’t seem right. Wasn’t American.

  Kinesis back then was a show. Kinesis was exceptional. Kinesis was theater. Kinesis was the answer, and Kinesis was a question you never wanted asked. Kinesis was physicality. Kinesis was an education in domination and learned submission—and by God, were you ever submitting, slowly, with each class, with every strained muscle, every call and every answer—and you didn’t even know you were doing it when you started, but the physical regimen (the fire hydrants, the push-ups, the diamond push-ups, the tri
cep push-ups, the crunches and crossovers and the constant leg overs) broke you down into a perfect receptacle, put you in a place where you could begin to see who you were, what your body could do, if you were perfect.

  If you were willing to see yourself how you wanted to be.

  Kinesis could put you into that range, within distance. Within sight of your own personal perfection.

  But the deception was that you’d never get there. You just kept coming back for more, seeing your perfection shift, once again, just out of focus.

  The school drew students who contributed their own magic, their own charismatic energies, and together the experience and the workouts were electrifying. And finally, our instructor, Brenda Brown, was simply mesmerizing, absolutely gorgeous, epicene and hard. Androgynous and better than a goddamned Jedi, an actual living superhero. Many of the students were there just to be around her.

  When I first started, Kinesis was two blocks west of the Stranger, the alternative paper where I began my life in Seattle and where I was working as a graphic artist, and barely scraping by. Even so, I decided I could afford seventy dollars a month at this fancy place down the street. I don’t remember much about Brenda from the first time I attended Kinesis, as she wasn’t in my orbit and I had my own early dramas unfolding. I recognized her from photos at the time, just a belt rank or two ahead of me, a pudgy lesbian girl from the Midwest, Indiana, I think, who would turn into the hardest, fastest, strongest, most attractive woman this side of cinema imaginable, when I would return to the school fourteen years and forty pounds later.

  I had fallen in love with karate that first time, because of that school, and my whole social orbit centered directly over it, right up until I was asked to submit my will at the green belt test, and I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t wear the shock collar, so to speak, and so I quit, and regretted that decision ever since. It was exactly what happened with college: I couldn’t submit to doing what I didn’t want to do.

  So, here we were, fourteen years later, and I was willing to try again.

  It never really worked, because I was more in love with my slovenly lifestyle and watching movies than getting fit. So I didn’t drop too much weight, but I did regain my balance, did recover some core strength, did eventually grow stronger and into better shape—more pineapple than pear, if you will—and the best thing about the place, really, was the new friends I had made.

  In particular, I had met someone exceptional, the sort of person you don’t really ever know exists until you meet them and think, Hunh; I didn’t think people like you ever really existed, and that was Sarah, one of the blue belts and the mother of one of the younger wunderkinds in the kids’ curriculum.

  Sarah taught ethics and German and Greek philosophy to undergraduates at the Jesuit school here in Seattle, and she had a wicked sense of humor to boot. I was naturally drawn to her intelligence, of course, and would chat her up at every opportunity, catch her attention over group e-mails after I volunteered to help with the administration of the school, which needed all the help it could get.

  On the days we weren’t participating in classes at the school, we’d eventually take to walking a three-mile park a bit north from downtown called Greenlake, which is a central part of any true Seattleite’s city living experience. We became good friends and I don’t believe either of us had any flirtatious intentions; we just enjoyed our incredibly sprawling conversations about everything either one of us knew.

  We never ran out of conversation, never reached the end of any topic, and after she returned from a three-month summer stay in Spain, we had even more to talk about.

  “Did you eat a lot of chorizo growing up?” she asked.

  “Why is it that food is always the entry point of any conversation when someone wants to ask me about my heritage? It’s as if I’m a food critic.” There was a pause. Then I said, “I do actually own a molcajete. But I hardly use it.”

  “Probably because it’s more polite to ask you about food than it is to wonder aloud how deeply you identify with your ethnicity,” she said, after a moment of thinking about it.

  “Hunh. Was there a lot of chorizo in Madrid? We mostly had it for breakfast, with eggs, growing up in South Texas. But it’s an elastic term; like ‘sausage.’ ”

  “We didn’t go to northern Spain; we stuck primarily to the south, around Andaluthia,” she said.

  “Are you lithping for a reason or did you pick that up unconsciously?”

  “It’s how it’s pronounced. The King of Spain had a lisp, so instead of having him live his life feeling embarrassed, the population adopted a lisp.”

  “Hunh. Another reason why colonialism would never last in the New World. We would have pointed at him and laughed.”

  “Are you guys stinkpots?”

  “Well, in South Texas, we would have made fun of his lisp openly, as Texans or Tejanos. We’re as unruly as the Irish. You know why the doors in Ireland are so brightly painted? During the colonialism of the British, some overseeing royalty died, and the colonies were told to paint their doors black, in mourning. Instead, the Irish went with blues, reds, yellows, and greens. Ornery.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “Probably on the Internets, but it makes sense,” I said. “That sounds like something we’d do in Brownsville.”

  That’s how most of our conversations went. And while I considered the possibility that things might be “flirtish,” I quieted that desire, because at my age, I decided I wouldn’t pursue that impulse every time it surfaced, and Sarah never really put that forward, as close as we were becoming. I respected that and knew that if we moved into romance, it would abbreviate the relationship quickly, and I liked her far too much to sleep with her, I decided.

  Besides, I was with Steph, even if the chemistry there was inert. I had made a commitment, and I was going to abide by it. Love is more than sex, I told myself.

  Further, I wasn’t attracted to Sarah, I kept repeating to myself. Sarah dressed in a manner to deflect male attention when it was unnecessary, which corresponded well with the karate suits, or “do-backs,” as they’re known in some Asian languages and martial arts schools.

  Finally, Sarah was thirteen years older than I was, and I wasn’t into another May-December romance, I told myself. I’d already had those. We’re just really good friends who enjoy the shit out of talking to one another, and that’s that.

  Another time, Sarah asked what I was reading. I told her I was reading the maritime serial about the Napoleonic wars, by Patrick O’Brian.

  “You like that Russell Crowe movie?” she asked, smiling.

  “I like Peter Weir, yes. And Russell Crowe. But I absolutely love the books by O’Brian. They’re a marvel of language, because while it’s in English, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because of all the nautical terms, so I find myself skimming along, reading at speed, and my retention and comprehension actually increase if I don’t stop and try to figure out what a ‘foc’s’cle’ or ‘mizzen mast’ is, or where a quarterdeck is. It’s like Anthony Burgess and A Clockwork Orange, and the made-up crypto-Russo language. If you just continue reading, you get the larger narrative by the context. It’s really quite something else.”

  “Hunh.”

  “Yeah, and the most surprising thing is how funny he is. He has a great sense of humor. There’s this one scene where the older, saltier seadogs feed grog to a ten-year-old kid, who mouths off to Captain Aubrey, calls him ‘Goldilocks.’ It’s hysterical. Then they have to tie him to his hammock overnight while he sobers up. I chortled.”

  “And the . . . you know . . . buggering? Does he address that?”

  “He does, actually, and said that while it did happen, it wasn’t as rampant as people made it out to be. It’s a total misnomer; the kids drew a wage and were expected to pull their own weight, so to speak. They usually had a chaperone in one of the officers. The British seamen weren’t the buggering maniacs that Churchill made them out to be, in that speech, with the
rum, sodomy, and the lash thing. They weren’t child fuckers, like the Greeks.”

  “That’s a misnomer, too.”

  “Really? None of that ‘bashing the shuttlecock from the feathered end,’ as Wodehouse put it?”

  “The Greeks weren’t homosexual in the same sense, in the contemporary way we think of homosexuality. Older, bearded men had younger men under their care, for education and advancement, but there was no penetration. The Greeks had no concept of homosexuality; in fact, that term wasn’t invented until the nineteenth century.”

  “Hunh. So all the imagery and jokes about anal sex are wrong?”

  “Well, they had sex, they just didn’t carve their sexual identity into ‘homo’ or ‘hetero.’ The older men did this thing called ‘intercrural sex,’ where they would rub their dicks into the younger men’s thighs, using olive oil, and get off. There was no penetration, which they would have felt to be diminishing. And when the younger men had their beards grow in, then it was their turn to be the top. They had sex for different reasons, like bonding with a fellow soldier, and then they went home and had sex with their wives, to continue their family dynasty. It’s all in Phaedrus, about the ‘lover’ and the ‘beloved.’ Though it’s been toned down in the translation. In fact, there are whole volumes of Greek wisdom that were lost because the translators felt their nature was too immodest, so they just destroyed whole passages that didn’t appeal to their virtuous standards.”

  “That’s just fascinating.”

  “Does that surprise you? That it would be edited by white, Christian men like that?”

  “I suppose it shouldn’t, but it still upsets me to consider all that was lost.”

  That was the nature of our conversations. They would go on and on and would stop only when we each had to return home to our obligations.