My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  “I made nearly $50,000 last year,” he had said to me, some years back.

  Aha, I thought. I know the pizza circuit; I’ll keep that particular bit of knowledge in my back pocket if ever I need it, methinks.

  Well, this was it, I decided. That’s what I’d do to make it through until my mind righted itself and I could figure out my next move.

  For now, though, I had to drive out east and deliver the company laptop and peripherals, make a trip of it.

  Steph was still in the nursing home, and it had taken a lot for me to see her parents again after feeling robbed like that, but after a few days, I stiffened my lip and returned to our rhythms, though I didn’t feel quite as generous as before. Steph’s mother had talked the nursing home manager into springing for an enclosed bed to keep Steph from falling again, and when I saw her after, she was now trying to speak, was now speaking in “word salad,” where she’d string a lot of nonsense words together, but with real intention behind them. It had been a surge forward in her recovery.

  What word she did say, and clearly, was “Daddy!” whenever she saw her father, or me. It was both entirely warming and creepy. One afternoon, after her mother had to fly back east to be fitted for her new prosthetic, Harold and I were alone in the nursing home with Steph, trying to feed her lunch. She had an uncanny resemblance to an itchy toddler in church, speaking in that husky, whispered word salad and refusing to eat. Harold handed her a chocolate-flavored Ensure with a straw, and she had a look flash across her face, decided to blow through the straw instead of sucking, and the Ensure blew up like a liquid hand grenade for the elderly. We were all covered in chocolate, the lunch ruined, and for a moment, Steph looked at the mess she had made and started smiling big. I thought, Yup; she’s still there.

  Prior to the check fiasco, I had noticed that she’d been trying to focus on people in the room and had this really unsettling habit of closing one eye to get anything into focus, and then I remembered how bad her vision was before the accident, so one day I drove out to her house up north and found her spare glasses.

  I brought them in that afternoon, thinking they were going to make all the difference in the world with her recovery (you tell yourself things like this, that there are these “miracle moments”), but they only made us wonder, “What happened to her contacts?”

  We asked around and there were no records anywhere of her contacts being removed, so they called an optometrist who gave her an exam, and the hospital finally realized that her contacts had rolled onto the back of her eyeballs and had been festering there for the last three months. They were removed before they could cause any serious damage, but we were all horrified and unsettled at how things that go overlooked can suddenly come around and bite you in the ass, like, say, not asking for a receipt when you pay someone cash for a plane ticket to fly across the country and help her family.

  CHAPTER 30 Queen of the Savages

  There was a pall in the air during those final months of agonal respiration for Kinesis, the karate school, as we had known it, oddly paralleling my situation with Stephanie in the ICU. Or perhaps that’s my solipsism once again, my memory restructuring the external world to fit my internal model, as memoir tends to do. But there was no denying that the glow and charm that I had found when I returned to the karate school of old was in some sort of danger of blighting itself out, and that corresponded entirely with Brenda’s participation as the lead black belt, which had become conflicted and erratic, due to personal issues with some of the senior students and the owner of the business, the head of the school, who was now in San Francisco, attempting to penetrate the market there with a new chapter of the school.

  At times it was more of a pong than a pall, but it was something that was circulating fast, like a bacterial infection, and building momentum as every elemental personality that consolidated the dynamic core of the school went through some independent personal drama that forced him or her further and further from the fission that kept all of us in love and sweating and participating with the program. And that’s what makes a karate school, I’ve realized: the people participating. It’s the personal expression, the unfolding of your real self in a safe re-creation of crisis, exposing your vulnerability and weakness, then feeling a sense of power as you fight your way through it, sometimes with fists and kicks, sometimes with defeat and tears, but you get through it, get off the mat, and shake the gloved hand of the person who just put you there, and you thank them, earnestly, even the stupid fuckers you don’t like.

  Personally, I couldn’t get it together to exercise because I hated going into my head, and exercising, even in a group environment, would put me deep into brain territory. It felt like a maggoty cabbage in there, something lugged about in Patricia Highsmith’s legendary handbag. And it’s bitter irony that exercise is sometimes the only thing that can help your mental health, but when you’re in the grips of something deep and dark, exercise is the last thing you want to do.

  The karate school had long been losing its magnetism, even before Steph’s accident. Divisions and loyalties were splintering the school and tearing it at its threadbare seams, a karate suit that had already seen more than a few years’ blushing long before I returned. Things came to an outright collision when Brenda Brown, as head black belt, rumbled a potential child predator at the school.

  He was a new member, some slender slip of a fellow from northern Texas named Dylan who was attending a shi-shi arts college nearby.

  He was pretty and twinkish, had studied or practiced extreme yoga or some such, pansexual, and didn’t mind flirting with both men and women; he was one of these people who slipped, unduly exhibitionist, through their lives banking on their looks and winning, mostly because of the idiots who fall for their cheap coin. Personally, I’m immune to their bewitchery because nothing turns my stomach more than wholesale, indiscriminate flirting as a means of navigating the world. Also, I didn’t overlap with this guy so much because he started at the school after I’d been processing out, losing my interest.

  He’d been immediately taken in by one of the older students who followed him around like a lovesick orphan, fell immediately and comprehensively under Dylan’s spell, and Dylan started showing a bit too much interest in one of the younger students from the kids’ classes. It seemed innocent enough at a cursory glance, but Brenda had noticed something, had a tingle of intuition that something wasn’t on the level, maybe heard someone say something who hadn’t quite put it together.

  Brenda approached the kid’s mother, who immediately confiscated the kid’s cell phone, then managed to get the full history of erased text messages, which clearly crossed the lines of acceptability and law. Dylan had been grooming this kid, who had grown up in the karate program and had Brenda as a friend, right in her school. It was like the moron had a death wish.

  It was an issue, and it really chafed Brenda’s sense of right and wrong, and her idea of the safety of this school. There was enough to charge Dylan through the Seattle Police Department, but the kid’s mother decided she didn’t want to put the child through it. Brenda came up with another solution.

  A few days later, on sparring Saturday, Dylan found himself, as a yellow belt, on Brenda’s mat.

  It was a full class, and a lot of frightened neophytes were present when Brenda bowed opposite Dylan, who couldn’t possibly understand what he was in for.

  I think I’ve mentioned before the level of ring generalship that Brenda had when she sparred someone; she was able to control your posture and position on the mat by moving herself, aiming herself at you. I’d never met anyone so willing to drop her guard and leave her head unprotected in order to draw you in, get you close so she could hit you. She was fearless this way. And she never looked at you in the eye, or in the face, just at a point directly above your sternum where she could watch all movement, intended or otherwise, emanating from that one spot on your body. You became a pattern of targets and mass to her, watching and waiting for your body to reassembl
e itself at a point she would be targeting, and before you knew it she would be there. It was magical to watch her, even better to match sparring wits with her.

  But Dylan would never reach such a degree where he would be able to appreciate the elegance of the assassin bowing him in that Saturday.

  She started slow, warming him up and circling him as a soft target, but then she started slapping him, hard, then harder still, across the face, across the head in three-shot combinations that ended each time with Brenda pulping the meat in his thighs with her big toe. She wore these battered, malleable Jeet Kune Do gloves that kept her fingers separated, allowed her to grab or grapple with an open hand, then close her fist for a solid punch, and she kept Dylan confused, battered with each hit going through his guard. She kept the abuse within the corresponding rules of high-belt/low-belt engagement, but she was hurting him, and making him hurt.

  Each time she’d give him a slap, she’d talk to him, whisper in his ear:

  “Do you feel outmatched?”

  Then she’d slap him with cupped hands over the ears before he could answer, until he finally whimpered, and loudly, “Yes!”

  She would also give him the opportunity to stop, bow out, but the concussion and impact of her hits had him flustered, muddled, confused, and perhaps even his sublimated gender politics kept him from bowing out, from stopping. He had the power to back out; all he had to do was agree, but he didn’t, and she kept hitting him, harder every time.

  He was in tears, at the end, after she’d dug the ball of her foot into his liver and kidneys through his slender little ribs repeatedly and mercilessly, and she called the round, then stepped up to him and said, “That’s how children feel when adults prey on them. These kids here are as dear to me as my own children. You’re done here. You’re never to come back here, and if you contact that kid again, I will hunt you down. Now grab your shit and go.”

  He didn’t even bother changing, just ran out of the front doors barefoot and down the steps into the cold Seattle night, leaving the whole room thunderstruck, except for Brenda and the kid’s mother, who looked at Brenda and nodded, satisfied that this had been justice.

  The other students, already squeamish and frightened of the sparring classes, looked at each other in terror, wondering if they would have to go through the same thing, rattled and addled at what they’d just seen, sensing also that something important had just happened.

  It had: They had witnessed the first convulsions of the dying magic in the karate school, the first bits of light leaving the school with Brenda making the choice to spank that guy, on her mat, on the safe place where he was grooming one of the favorite child students, and it launched a lot of dithering discussion, exposed ugliness and partisan politics, brought out longstanding divisions and dramas that had, up until that point, lacked the necessary oxygen for conflagration, a fire that would take Brenda’s beloved haven away from her, send her spiraling into a world that would consume the best parts of her for years to come.

  De profundis.

  CHAPTER 31 Northern Exposure

  I thought the drive east would do me good.

  In Texas, getting on the road and putting some miles under you is as therapeutic as life gets some days, makes you feel like you’ve done something right, can be regarded as self-care.

  I set out that morning across the Cascade Mountains pass, into the eastern part of the state, and told Steph’s parents I’d be gone for a day or two.

  I asked Sarah to meet me in Roslyn, Washington, on my way back, for an overnight stay, and she had agreed.

  The iPod was loaded with Texas outlaw traveling music, and I stretched the legs on my little Jetta as fast as they could go as I drove across the mountains and into the desert landscape of Washington State, past the vineyards of Yakima and the military installation that separates east from west, in this state. But instead of the music, I listened instead to podcasts and informational programs; I couldn’t listen to music, somehow.

  The only song I could listen to at the time was called “What Were the Chances?” and it’s the most gentle, heartbreaking little song about abandonment, alcoholism, and affairs. Both Sarah and I would listen to the lines and think of one another, and we’d just bawl, for one another, for ourselves, for what was happening in both our lives, clutch one another like rosaries.

  When I arrived at the media offices unexpectedly, I handed the equipment to the kid who had replaced me and with minimal fuss left inside of five minutes, deciding it was better to just slip out and not interact with anyone I knew. I climbed back in my car and headed out once more, after refueling.

  I traveled back west to Roslyn, where I would meet Sarah in a few hours, as we had agreed, and I drove at top speed, feeling like I was doing better for the first time in a long, long spell, like there might be some hope at the end of this, just because I was driving.

  During the last few weeks, I’d had another line from a song locked in my head and it had been driving me crazy. It was a line from a David Bowie song, and it repeated itself in my head at hyperspeed, at normal speed, and then super slowly, all at the same time, and it was tearing my mind apart from within, like a chant or a mantra: “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. We know Major Tom’s a junkie . . .” and I was simply incapable of turning it off.

  The drive seemed to help, had been meditative and healthy, and now I was turning off the highway and into the little former logging town that had served as the backdrop for some of Northern Exposure’s exterior filming.

  It was also the only trip Dan and I had ever taken when he lived here, and so I thought maybe there was something there, something yet to discover to help get me through this darkest period. I was in a spiritual search for something, and I needed some time alone with Sarah.

  We made plans to meet at the Brick Tavern, also a Northern Exposure icon.

  I asked her to pretend we didn’t know each other and I’d pretend to pick her up, and she laughed, said, “Fine; you’re feeling frisky, but sure, we can do that.”

  I waited for her and then became nervous, so I stepped outside to see if she was coming and suddenly, down the street, there she was, sauntering in a big-hipped swinging sort of way with a look of devilishness on her face as she walked by me and stepped into the Brick.

  I blushed and giggled and followed her in.

  All eyes were on her as she sat at the bar, a single, incredibly attractive woman sitting alone in a desolate mountain town. Yeah, it was going to draw attention.

  I gave it a second and then sat next to her, and while she tried to keep in character, I could not and broke and started to talk to her like we normally did, when this tiny little Mexican charro with a huge belt buckle walked up to us, ignored me, introduced himself to Sarah, and asked for her telephone number.

  I burst out laughing, which was probably not the best response, and explained that the lady was with me. I bought him a beer, and, a bit wounded, he took it and wandered off as Sarah and I went back to the place I’d rented, which had originally been the town brothel.

  Perfect, I thought, considering what we’re about to do.

  CHAPTER 32 Roslyn

  Some hours later, we woke up, cold and thin.

  Or I did. I woke her up.

  Nudged her to a place, and she came awake again.

  “I have to tell you this,” I said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “It’s different, between us, the hurt, the damage,” I said.

  “I know you have yours, and I have mine,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But mine, I mean . . . I don’t know what I want to say.”

  She was lying there, just extraordinarily beautiful, in the dark. . . .

  She was naked, with these lines back and forth, a geometry of beauty.

  She was angry at me.

  We fucked again, hostile, like fists swinging wide, and it was almost morning, we just did that.

  “I fucking love you,” I told her.

  “Shut t
he fuck up,” she said. “I know you think you do.”

  “But I do,” I insisted. “I think you’re the love of my life.”

  I can’t explain it, otherwise.

  She said, “I can’t be with you. We can’t be together.”

  I said, “We can make it if we don’t look down.”

  Just don’t look down.

  She turned over and cried.

  CHAPTER 33 Good-bye, Jack County

  We spent the next day playing like off-season tourists, driving a mountain road and visiting spots she knew from skiing. The day was brilliant blue, the sky a magnificent Pantone 292, and logging trucks were churning past on their usual workday and it felt the lightest, brightest sort of way that I had not experienced in an incredibly long time. Sarah was driving, and I was entertaining her, and I had a moment of realization that this was the complete opposite of what I felt back when I was with Stephanie and she was driving these same mountain roads.

  Sarah stopped by a large working ranch, pulled over to the side of the road, and walked over to a wire fence when a mangy, old, broken-down horse came over to see if she would feed it. I experienced a moment of anxiety—everything, at this point, gave me anxiety, even broken-down horses—and I yelled to her to come back, get inside the car.

  “There’s a bear hole!” I yelled and pointed, and she looked back at me in befuddlement.

  “Right there, next to you! A bear hole!” and she saw I was pointing at a culvert, under the roadway. I didn’t know what it was, but it could have been a bear hole, and that’s sort of how my mind worked at the time. I saw bear holes.

  We made it back to the brothel/hotel, and after dinner, we settled in for the evening and I drank a couple of Bombay Sapphire airplane bottles while I sat her down and played a song for her, hoping she would get it.