My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  Later on, when things started getting really serious for my mental health, I was much more destructive, much more in need of professional health care, much more dangerous.

  I’d gone for more than four days without sleep. I just couldn’t fall off, couldn’t stay down. When I’d lie down to sleep, lie on my side and curl up with a pillow, I’d get these violent hypnic jerks, the long muscle twitches, short muscle spasms. Nothing would help. I’d chug a bottle of wine and take ten Benadryl. I’d drink most of a bottle of NyQuil. I’d drink a six-pack and gin, then take sleeping pills. I’d be groggy, chemical sludge in my veins, but dead awake. I’d watch horror movies on Netflix, or romcoms, or a full series, but nothing stopped my brain from exploding like fireworks. I was finally going completely crazy, and when I realized how far down my mental health was, it was almost reassuring: At least I knew what to call it. Like when an exorcist gets the demon’s name.

  One day, Sarah came by to tell me that I needed an intervention. It was 10:00 a.m. and she’d made her way through my building, had knocked on my door, and I was sitting talking to her while my body was blooming in sweat. I had a towel and I’d wipe down my head and back—I’d removed my shirt to show her what I was going through—and I sat there, opposite her, while my body blossomed from the top of my head to my knees in a sweat flower, in eight-minute cycles, and she was at once repulsed and fascinated, and asked how long that had been happening.

  “Three days,” I said. “I can’t sleep.”

  She helped me make a number of emergency appointments and even drove me to an emergency room to have my blood pressure checked. It was through the roof: 210/160. I saw the nurse actually blanch when she took it again, to make sure she had it right the first time, and I thought, Fuck, I’m going to have that stroke after all, and I waited for them to give me something to get it down, but instead they just had me sit and talk with Sarah for a half hour, and sonofabitch if it didn’t decrease considerably, just with us talking quietly.

  When she left, I took a long shower and tried to get it together so I could visit Steph once again.

  At this point Steph had been moved to a long-term care place, a nursing home in West Seattle, and they were not managing her very well. There had been no “magic moment” where her eyes fluttered open and she regained consciousness. She had simply started moving around more, and it looked as if she was trying to focus her attention on you, and then something else would catch her eye, and she’d spend all her time looking at that. It was unnerving, watching her focus like that. She never stopped squirming. They had her in an ordinary bed, and she shifted and moved and squirmed so much that she was in constant danger of falling off the side. Also, she never slept. Neither of us was sleeping; we had that in common.

  These types of facilities, nursing homes, were very common to me because of Dan’s career. I knew how they operated, and I knew the characters and nurses and people to talk to there, how to navigate them. I actually felt a bit safer in this environment than I had at the ICU, and I was both encouraged that she’d been released there and also frightened: I had this image of Steph recovering only so far as the sad, shattered patients I’d seen who lived in nursing homes the remainder of their lives, medicated and broken, the light in their eyes a soft glimmer of the person they once were, smoking in the restricted areas and wearing pajamas, their hands clutching a newspaper or dog-eared paperback, looking at you sadly as you left from your visit, remembering who you were together, and it just tore my heart apart, imagining that this could possibly be in her future.

  She’d begun therapy there, was developing enough cognitive ability that the therapists had started her on small rehabilitative programs. She still hadn’t slept, that I remember, never stopped looking and shifting and writhing in her bed, not so far. This was now late January, early February, and I’d missed my fortieth birthday, like in The Great Gatsby. It was also my writing deadline: I had made it a point to decide whether I was going to continue writing, keeping alive my secret wish to publish as an author, or give it up entirely and start really sharpening my skills as a designer and learning web design in earnest—basically, the “I give up my dreams” point. I still took my notebooks with me everywhere I went at this time, would cite notes and make little observations and comments while I sat in waiting rooms, sat at hospital bedsides, bars near my home.

  But that day just slipped past, like every other.

  Instead of any celebration, I went home and lay in bed, about my sixth night without sleep, and I lay there thinking about Steph and feeling horrible and guilty, decided that I would frame photos of her and bring them to the home and place them all around to warm up the place. Her mother had made all these posters and lurid banners, used Tibetan prayer flags as decorations, and created these placards with an entirely fictionalized depiction of Steph as a human being and had posted them all around the bedside. Steph would have been insane with anger at the sight of them, at their failure to describe who she really was, and I was equally upset with the inaccuracy of the description, for some reason. I’m not sure why.

  Her mother listed a number of authors as “Steph’s Favorites,” which Steph had at one point or another made clear she despised. Her mother recorded a number of “favorite movies” that Steph had never seen, music, painters, and so on. It was awful, and a reproduction of the daughter her mother wanted, not the daughter she had.

  All this was creating an atmosphere of tension and growing menace.

  I drove to the nursing home around 2:30 that morning with my stack of framed photos and saw that her room was lit up and a number of people were already there. “Oh,” I said, “Nice to see everyone here.”

  They looked happy to see me and welcomed me in, not telling me anything at all, and I came in with the photos and placed them all about. I didn’t think anything about the fact that Steph was on the floor on a series of mats, because that made much more sense to me, given that she had been shifting and moving and in constant danger of falling off the bed since she had arrived. Around 3:30 a.m., they turned off the lights and I lay there next to her, with her not sleeping or making any sort of acknowledgement that she saw me even when she looked right at me. I kept whispering to her, “Sleep, Stephanie; go to sleep, sweetheart; stop moving, please. Come on, you can sleep, just close your eyes, just close your eyes and sleep,” but she wouldn’t; she’d just keep staring at me and through me, and I couldn’t sleep either, because my body was doing the same thing, shifting and twitching and moving, and I couldn’t stop, not for longer than three seconds or so because of the Xanax, as I lay there on the mat next to her in my karate jumper, trying to keep warm and keep her safe. We spent the night lying next to one another like that, until about 7:00 a.m., when breakfast time came, and I had to go home because I had to work that day.

  CHAPTER 27 People Ain’t No Good

  I could hear it in his voice that morning, when I first spoke to him. Alfred was the publisher of the bilingual “newspaper” I was producing and the owner of the Hispanic media company out of eastern Washington and was my boss, and he was never any good at diplomacy. I heard the switch in his voice when we were talking about that issue’s content, and I knew my number was up. He didn’t have the business sophistication to disguise or massage the message that he’d made the choice to let me go, as a contract employee, and in order to delay the news I changed the subject and said that I had to take another call.

  But I knew it was in the mail. I just knew it. Unbelievable, that he’d do this to me, after his whole, “As Hispanics, we’re all a big family and should look out for one another” speech, that while Steph was in a fucking coma, he’d let my contract end and refused to renew it for the next year. I was making decent money for a print designer, but obviously, the Republican side of Alfred’s “Mexican Businessman” thing saw this as too large an expense, and I knew I was out. Also, I had no benefits to speak of, since I was on contract.

  I couldn’t fucking believe it. Another bottom falling out
from under.

  Alfred and his wife were second-generation Mexican Americans living here in Washington State, the children of fruit pickers and farm laborers, and they reminded me entirely of the people I knew back home. That’s why it had all worked so well, when we’d started. But this—he knew what I was going through, he knew about Steph—for him to cut me out like this at this time, my head was just exploding.

  Un-fucking-believable.

  Everyone fucks you. Here’s the trick: When it comes right down to it, when you’re down, everyone fucks you. It’s better if you just accept it.

  It’s entirely biological: When your luck turns bad, the herd wants you out, subconsciously.

  I didn’t give Alfred the opportunity to introduce the topic of my penury that morning so I was able to ingest it myself, first. I didn’t want to attack him and needed a chance to center myself. I knew his speech would be pathetic and bilingual and Christianly and Republican—he was like Reagan, in the ’80s, who conspicuously gave veterans awards for service, then cut VA benefits left and right.

  And I wasn’t sure I couldn’t keep from yelling and cursing him, though I had started cursing him, deeply and profoundly, in my heart, cursing his kids and his wife and his family, hoping the most horrible fucking things would befall him, that he’d know what I’d been living, would eventually face what I was facing, but I knew that I had to keep this quiet.

  So I made an excuse and cut off the call, and he sounded relieved that he hadn’t had to have that conversation with me just yet.

  When I spoke to Steph’s mom next, asking about what was going on at the nursing home, I immediately heard an earful of shit.

  “What the fuck were you doing here last night at 3:30 a.m.?” she yelled at me.

  “I, uh, was dropping off ... the ... um ... what?”

  “Did you know she fell off her bed? Why were you here at that time? Who called you?”

  “No one called me; I just ... I know how these places work; I was feeling lonely and sad for Steph, so I brought her those framed photos. What’s going on?”

  “You were lonely and sad,” she repeated back to me in tones meant to humiliate.

  “Yeah, I was sad and I brought over those photos. Why are you yelling at me?”

  “She fell off the bed last night and hit her head! They were going to send her to the hospital for X-rays, but you showed up and said not to!”

  “That’s not at all what happened! When I arrived there, there were people in her room! No one asked me anything!”

  “Just stay out of it, Domingo! You don’t have the authority to determine her care, you hear me?”

  “Whoa, whoa! Hold on! I never made any such fucking call! Who said that?”

  “The nurses here! They said ‘Mr. Handsome’ showed up with pictures and you told them not to send her out!”

  “Not at all true! Nothing in the way of true. Nobody calls me that. Holy shit, that’s just wrong.”

  And then she hung up on me.

  So I began drinking at 9:00 that morning. Refuge, in a box of wine.

  I’d been watching all these series on Netflix to avoid thinking about what I was living, but strangely, in every instance, no matter what the subject matter, every fucking show somehow turned around and had a story arc about a brain injury.

  No shit. I just couldn’t get away from it.

  And I had started really breaking down, making some horrible decisions and hurting every relationship I had in my life. I had a growing sense that I might really go mad if I recognized what was happening around me, if I turned too sharply to the left or right and caught it full in my scope.

  That Christmas before, when I had lost the damned dog, Brenda Brown had come to find me while I stayed at Andrew’s house, and we’d stayed down in Andrew’s “man basement” because he had a drop-down cinema and projection booth. I had invited Brenda over to watch a series of war movies, and she’d shown up with “three bitches and a bag of blow,” after she brought over her drug dealer, dog, and girlfriend, and it had been a fantastic night of revelry, and then isolation when they left me alone. She had left me her necklace, this long chain fitted with trinkets and baubles that meant something to her, and she pulled it off her and put it around my neck, for strength, in an incredibly sweet gesture. Before she’d shown up, it had been the most miserable and isolated Christmas holiday I’d ever experienced—it was just another ordinary day at the ninth floor waiting room. Then I had driven home, picked up Chinese food with all the Jewish families, and settled in to watch the loudest, most gory movies I could think of, on Andrew’s projection system. That somehow made sense to me then. Dan tried to reach me, as did Mom and my sisters, but I couldn’t talk to anyone at this point. Didn’t have it in me anymore. I was feeling mean, bitter. Even had turned on my closest friend, like a family pet turned vicious on a leash.

  I’d harmed Dougherty after he expressed his concern and grief, and I used him as a scapegoat for my anguish when I zeroed him in my crazy target, said something to the effect of, “YOU! You never thought we were good together and you hated that she was here for me! You hated that she took me away from you!” Just all this nutso illogical crazy spasm directed at Dougherty, none of which I really believed, but the drugs and the alcoholism were making it easy to spin out these fabrications of fiction and go off the rails.

  I did that about three times, damaged about four other deep friendships as I spun entirely out of control and headed toward what I thought was my new gravity, in craziness.

  I wanted to get arrested, or committed, in some way, I thought. I’d lost everything—relationships, work, life—and I needed something else to ground me. Maybe institutionalization was the answer.

  CHAPTER 28 Stalling

  I woke up one morning with this line written in my notebook:

  There comes a time when every damaged little boy has to dance in both directions.

  I’ve looked for it in the books I was reading, searched for it online, the films and shows I was watching that night, and asked other people if they recognize it, but no one knows it. It sort of sounds like me, but I’m not entirely sure.

  In the early days of flight, there was this man named Lincoln Beachey.

  Lincoln Beachey solved the issue of the tailspin.

  Beachey was a barnstormer and a pioneer aviator when avionics were a brand-new science, and the mortality rate for aviators was in the 90th percentile. In particular, they grappled with the issue of mid-flight stall, and the going logic at the time, based entirely on intuition, was to turn your propeller away from the plummet and try to restart the engine with friction.

  This eventually happened to Beachey, and defying his own intuition and popular logic, he instead turned his plane into the dive, into the plummet, increasing his downward plunge and decreasing his response time to seconds. But it worked: The dive decreased the kinetic friction against the propeller to restart his engine, and suddenly, the stall was no longer an issue for flyers. Lincoln Beachey solved it by defying his impulses of self-preservation and diving headlong into what was a risk.

  I had the same idea, in my mental health, I told myself. It hurt to fight it, so I was just going to let it take me on its path. Maybe I could get my propeller started again as I plummeted.

  Sometime after Steph’s mother yelled at me for interfering, I ended up in a tavern about two blocks from my apartment, drinking alone and sulking in a corner at the bar. I couldn’t believe things had become this bad. And when I thought they’d been bad enough, they became worse, just kept falling out from under me.

  There was no one there this night, except two other guys by the pool table and the hard-bitten Vietnam veteran bartender who hated his customers. It was one of the last remaining taverns in the neighborhood, and the clientele had definitely taken a turn for both the urban hipster and the unwashed equally, the unapologetically vulgar, as was evidenced this night, even with the limited patrons.

  Somehow, it had suddenly neared closing time, an
d I decided that I needed to listen to Mexican music. They had one of those new electronic jukeboxes with the infinite library, right out of a Borges short story, so I knew it wouldn’t be a problem to find Vicente Fernandez in the middle of Uptown, Seattle, and sure enough, there he was.

  I played the saddest song in the world, “La Misma,” which is sung from the point of view of a brokenhearted man sitting in a Mexican tavern, begging the mariachis to play him that same old song that reaches down into his soul, and he’s so goddamned sad, even the waiters are crying. It’s a great fucking song, and I wanted to hear it, so I played it.

  It was three lines in when I heard the two guys playing pool snickering, and as I marched over intent on starting some shit, I realized I was wearing possibly the worst, least combat-operative shoes this night, square-toed and fancy, but fuck it: I wanted to get into a fight.

  I had a suitably deranged look about me as I marched right up to both these kids and said, “You have a fucking problem with my song choices?”

  The kids, who were drinking their pints and holding pool cues, were startled, suddenly wide-eyed.

  “Ah, um, no, man; no!” one of them stammered. “I was just telling my friend here how much of a surprise it is to hear this music here; I’m from South Texas, and I’ve never heard anyone play this in Seattle.”