My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I started thudding her—thump thump!—with big-mitted left jabs right at her face, keeping her from gauging where I was and then bringing the big right straight down the middle and hitting her square in the mouth, to get the conversation started on the right foot. So to speak.

  BAM.

  She responded with nothing in return.

  Now, I should emphasize, this is all perfectly acceptable and legal on the mat, in this “conversation” with a student of her status as a red belt and as an opponent of mine at high yellow: I was doing nothing wrong here.

  Duck, dodge right, and a low right hook to her ribs.

  Step back and wait for her to recover her breath.

  Shift stance, lead with two right jabs—fump fump—and a left hook to the head, and the support I had been hearing from my mother and Andy and Kim went totally quiet, off to my right.

  I didn’t care, at this point. I was too exhausted for higher functions, like sympathy.

  I was locked in, like a terrier who’s noticed a squirrel scampering up a tree.

  And still, there was this thought in my head: This is all perfectly legal. This is the fight game. She’s a red belt.

  She kicked, responded with a “fancy” quick turn, and I saw it coming and moved just off to her left, where I would be just out of reach, and I dug the ball of my right toe just under her ribs. And I followed it with another combination to her face that went right through unanswered.

  I started pummeling this sixty-year-old woman at about 10 percent more than I should have. Maybe 12 percent. Here and again, a 15 percenter would slip out. And this was all taking place not ten feet from my mother, my girlfriend, and my two best friends.

  And I didn’t care.

  I was telling her, nonverbally, You’re a fraud. Stop pretending.

  Then I’d hit her again.

  I was asking her, nonverbally, Where the fuck have you been, in helping this school? You wear this school’s red belt, and this is the first time I meet you, in five months? How do you like your patches?

  Some more hits.

  It went on for about two more minutes.

  I was a real asshole.

  And that’s why I never made it past green belt.

  I just couldn’t play at that level.

  My mother never really looked at me the same way again, after seeing me for who I really was.

  I realized I was much more like my brother Dan than I admitted to myself, had been trying to deny, and that I only liked a good boxing match where I was winning. I saw that, at a fundamental level, I was competitive and unyielding, unwilling to compromise when it meant something to the other person who was creating a fiction of him or herself. I wanted to be the one who pointed out where they were wrong, when it meant something. I saw that I needed to be, quietly, right. Correct. I was stripped down once again, and I didn’t like who I saw there. And I thanked the karate school, much later when I was able to think about the experience honestly, for showing me that. And that I needed to change, if I was going to grow up and be an adult. That sometimes, I needed to let the other person win, in tug of war.

  CHAPTER 17 The Wrong Side of the Fork

  I know we tried, but in the end we were just too polarized.

  There was too much of ourselves in the way.

  I remember, for example, one time when Steph and I were having dinner at a Thai restaurant near the rental house, and she caught me tracking the slim-hipped Thai waitress but misread what I was thinking. Sorta. I was quietly wondering if I would be willing to consider an extreme conclusion and admit I was gay if I was attracted to slim-hipped Thai chicks, because this girl was quite attractive, but she looked like a teenage boy, which is how my mind works sometimes. I figured I’d have to think about this one later.

  But Steph was not upset, not in the way she could get when we first met. I’d never been with anyone with such a short fuse, when it came to jealousy.

  We’d been neglected at our table for some time, and I looked over her shoulder in search of that waitress, then muttered something about “Halley’s waitress,” under my breath.

  It took her less than a microsecond, but then Steph realized the joke—the waitress that returned every seventy-six years—and a mixed expression seized her face.

  “Did . . . did you just make that up?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she was impressed or annoyed, competitive.

  I was caught short, halfway tempted to take credit, but instead I said, “No, no; it’s a song title from an album I just bought,” and her expression changed again, this time comforted, perhaps even relieved.

  We started talking about something or other, and I quietly brought up that I’d like to, eventually, eat that #11 Shark Steak on the menu.

  “You want to eat shark?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I have this thing where I’d like to eat anything that might potentially eat me. Like worms, lions, hippos, crocodiles, Monte Cristo sandwiches. Establishing my position at the head of the food chain and the like,” I said.

  I continued: “Did you happen to read about that shark in Virginia last year, the one that spontaneously generated a fetus, with no males around, ever? It was in the top stories of the last year.”

  “Seriously?” she asked, looking up from her menu. “A shark just up and developed a virgin sort of birth?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “It’s called ‘parthenogenesis,’ I think, but I’ve always liked ‘spontaneous generation,’ since I read the phrase when I was a teenager. It’s how I tried to disavow my parents. I wanted to do a skin graft over my belly button. Anyway, apparently it happens a lot more often than previously thought, during periods when males and females aren’t around each other and the conditions are correct, then—BAM—the womens knock theyselves up.”

  Steph listened to this, now fairly accustomed to my random impersonations after two years of being together. A year ago, she’d still have asked me why I needed to slip into my 1970s Philadelphia ghetto junkyard impersonations, Redd Foxx from Sanford and Son. Not so much anymore. Sometimes she asked me to “bust up her chiffarobe for a lemonade,” if you know what I mean. But in public, she just listened and ignored it, because it was better that way, she’d decided.

  Let Shecky be Shecky. But don’t encourage him.

  Anyway, the impersonations and jokes are for me, and for no one else, I told her.

  “But I like making you laugh,” I said. “I like pushing your limits of the acceptable. It’s there that we’ll really meet each other,” I told her, like I knew what I meant.

  “Hunh,” she said. “You think they can draw that leap back to humans, and the ‘virgin birth’ of Jesus?”

  “Nah,” I said. “That would be far too . . . I dunno . . . easy. It would have to happen far too many times in humans to categorically discount the idea of divine fertilization.”

  “You think? I mean, couldn’t it explain away the virgin birth thing? If it happened enough?” she asked.

  “No, I’m not entirely convinced it could happen with humans. My favorite explanation of that whole mythos to date comes from that Guy Ritchie movie where they posit that it’s far more likely that the myth of the virgin came from a typo in a translation rather than the sort of conditions in a Virginia aquarium. I think a lot of the world’s mysteries can be solved by understanding the nature of typos. Like with the difference between ‘whiskey’ with an e and ‘whisky’ without. My guess is that the Scots probably couldn’t afford the ink for the extra character.”

  No response from Steph. I took this as a challenge.

  “As someone who works in publishing,” I continued, “this makes much more sense to me than a spontaneous virgin birth in a female-only culture, even if it happened periodically in other species.”

  We were both quiet for moment, and I was thinking a little more on the topic, sipping a crappy Sapporo beer.

  “Anyhow, the real reason you know it didn’t happen by ‘divine insemination’ is because Joseph didn’t kill Mary. Stone her
to death in an honor killing, back in those days.”

  I’m sure my reading of Talmudic law left much to be desired, but I was on a tear.

  I noticed that this suggestion of misogyny and violence tweaked her, but I couldn’t help it: I had to nudge at her. It was how we poked at one another, called it “love.” Instead of sex.

  “I mean, think about it. Do you think a man could live with a wife that would go, ‘Oh, Joseph; do it like God did it that night. Not like that, Joseph! God didn’t do it like that! He was much better at that!’ and ‘Ouch! Joseph! God never tried to do that!’ ”

  Here Steph gave me a hard stare. I saw her upbringing fighting to surface and give me a stern, corrective, change-the-subject look, but there were no shock collars for me: I was smiling now and couldn’t help myself. I was still too punk rock. Steph had very strict rules regarding what constituted “proper” dinner conversation, she once told me. This was a girl who said she was taught never to use the side of the fork, though I’d seen what she was capable of doing to my expensive pans and good dishes.

  I could almost hear her thoughts running, Don’t encourage him. Don’t encourage him. Don’t encourage him. . . .

  And then she couldn’t help but smile, because I was trying so hard to make her laugh, though she hated how I was doing it because it conflicted directly with her programming of what was appropriate, and I was being terribly inappropriate, but I knew she found it funny. I was eroding her disciplines, and she hated me for it.

  She’d come a long way from the humorless suffragette with the Georgia O’Keefe prints in her bedroom when we met just a year ago, now able to laugh at the things she once found sacrosanct.

  So this encouraged me. I slipped back into my Shecky Greene.

  “And then Joseph would be all like, ‘That’s IT! I’ve had it to here already! God did this, and God did that! One time God comes down and gives you a good schtupping, and I have to hear about it for the rest of my life? There are no worse things for a husband!!’ ”

  Actually, that was delivered a bit more like Topol doing Tevye.

  “‘Well, Joseph,’ says Mary, ‘Truth be told, it wasn’t just the one time.’ ” (I was doing Mary’s voice here, too.)

  Steph looked at me hard, her hands clenched on her silverware on either side of her dinner plate.

  I took this as a cue to continue, and a punch line revealed itself to me.

  “‘What blasphemy is this? It wasn’t just the one time?!’”

  “So then Mary says, ‘Well, the first time, He wanted to do something He saw in a porno once.’ ”

  Steph threw her cutlery down noisily, loud enough to draw attention from fellow diners as I was choking on my own laughter, and she stood up, dumped her linen napkin, and made for the door. I was laughing too hard into my hand to watch her leave, but I flagged down the waitress, who looked at me with pity as I asked for the check and the dinner to be packaged in containers. I wasn’t in the least bit embarrassed. This was not uncommon for us.

  I found Steph a block down the street, leaning against my car, smoking a shaky cigarette.

  Her mouth was pursed, frozen in a half smile before she let it go entirely and started laughing hysterically, which turned into a sob as she put her face in my shoulder.

  I was with her at the laughing part, and I understood the sobbing.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing with you,” she said into my shoulder.

  “I was just trying to make you laugh,” I said, which was partially true. The rest of the truth was, there was a joke in the air, and I locked onto it with my prey drive, the way a terrier would lock onto a squirrel and chase it into a tree. It’s just what I did, and I couldn’t control it.

  Her cigarette was dangling from her fingers at my hip as she sobbed once again, and I was afraid she was going to burn the elbow of my leather coat.

  I placed her in the car and handed her the food, and I drove us home. I decided to take a roundabout route for no reason other than to cool things off, and the next day I read in the paper that a teenager some two streets down from where we lived had been standing in the dark, firing a 9 mm pistol at passing cars, randomly and just for the sake of doing it. He’d put five rounds in five cars that police knew about until he had shattered the back window of a passing car and the driver had stopped, seen the kid running, figured out what was happening, and called the cops. They caught him inside, thirty minutes later, playing video games.

  It was a street we might have taken, headed home from the restaurant that night, and I showed it to Steph, who didn’t think as much of it as I did, realizing once again that as much as you can try, you just can’t insure yourself against chance, and random lunacy.

  “I can’t protect you,” I said. “I don’t know if I can keep us safe.”

  “I’m not asking you to protect me,” she said in return. “I can protect myself.”

  I had started to keep a catalogue of potential catastrophes that could harm us, up to date and constantly refreshed, in order that they might not be a surprise, thinking that if I could think of them first, they wouldn’t happen. It’s the surprise that gets you, after all.

  I couldn’t keep up with Steph and her potential for harm, not anymore.

  CHAPTER 18 Showering Blows

  At this time, my new job had given me much more liberty than what I was previously accustomed to, and I had far too much unregulated time, but I was also writing more and more, developing my unstructured project in a way that I hadn’t expected, and my book was actually taking some sort of open-ended narrative track. I had been writing one-off short stories about growing up in Brownsville, and my family’s history, but I began to see a through-line that would culminate in many of the choices my brother and I would make in our lives, and it began to feel important, like something real. So I continued writing and was excited, annoyed when real life interfered with my writing jags.

  On the days I wasn’t working for the now struggling “bilingual media company,” I would wake up, send Steph on her way in the morning commute to her office, and then walk the mile down to the horrible bar in that terrible northern neighborhood and sit among the retired derelict drunks who’d been drinking since 6:00 a.m. That the bar opened this early, and daily, I was eternally grateful and disconcerted; it certainly knew its regulars. I had always found people who read in bars to be a bit pretentious, somehow, but to write a book in a bar—that was downright contentious, and I planned on doing just that, in longhand. Just to be able to say that I did. Dough would understand that.

  At around noon, I would position myself at the end of the bar with a pint of something domestic and cheap, a glass of water, and my headphones, then begin scribbling stories into my small moleskin notebook, and write, write, write the day away. Some eight beers later, I’d realize I’d been gone all that time, and all the old duffers and laborers and nonurbanites would have swirled and commented and snickered at my hulking, leather-framed mass lost in my headphones and my notebook, but no one would mess with me, no one would challenge or accost me, as I was clearly, evidently, not one of them: I wasn’t white, I wasn’t broken down yet, I wasn’t smoking low-shelf cigarettes, spending a controlled income on pull tabs, I wasn’t ... that stratum of America, in this crap neighborhood just thirty minutes north of Seattle but feeling like I was in deep redneck country.

  So what was I?

  I’m just visiting, I’d think to myself, as I closed my notebook, put away my pen, and shook out the cramp from my hand to pay my bill.

  And the bill was always small. I could never believe it. Around a sawbuck.

  I’d sit and sip thin beers for three or four hours while writing, and my bill would be about twelve bucks. God bless America. Or at least, these shitty redneck bars.

  The productivity and the creative hangover would usually leave me in a great mood, and I’d wander the evergreened, pine-needley, no-sidewalk-having neighborhood back to the grimy rental just in time to meet Steph, who was more often than no
t in an abysmal mood from her return commute. She was growing taciturn, resented that I no longer had to show up to an office, or present myself anywhere, really, and had two days a week free, plus weekends. I was good at what I did and could consolidate other people’s forty-hour week into about ten good hours if I was left alone, and that’s what I did, and that’s what I felt was appropriate to what I was doing.

  I wasn’t about to apologize or negotiate my way out of it; if I was to remain labor, then my labor was to be dear. It was art, and they were lucky to have me.

  In the meantime, I was writing this damned book.

  Steph fumed. Threw an odd assortment of outfits together and managed to get to work and be superior at what she did in her field, as she was incredibly intelligent, which is what drew me to her in the beginning. But my trouble with her was that I could never catch up to which of her insecurities was running the roost at the time. She was never with others who she was with me, and I had not the stamina to keep running after her and figuring out what she needed, which is another component of love I couldn’t deliver for her. I just didn’t know it at the time, and I’m not sure I had the energy. I was fat now. Maybe if we were both still twenty-five, but not at thirty-nine.

  And so every time she returned home and found me beaming and tipsy and maybe cooking dinner or playing with the dog, or just going on and on about what I’d written that day, she would settle into a funk.

  One night, I wandered off from the local swill dump without my credit card, and I noticed it only after Steph and I had been in a particularly bitter argument.

  The wine was in, I suppose, and I decided to make the drive back to the bar, which was less than a mile away and without stop signs, just the one turn.

  “No!” Steph said. “You’re drunk!”

  “I am,” I agreed, “but I have to get my card back. Otherwise that bartendress, Old Beryl, puts another 15 percent charge on it or something. Anyhow, I need it. For credit cardy stuff. Stand aside.”