My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  “It’s about where I’m from,” I said to her, as she leaned back in the bed, and I explained, line by line, how this song was awakening something in me.

  It was a song about cowboys and border bandits. I explained, “See, he’s at his end, when the song opens, and he’s having a moment of existential crisis, as much as a borderland bank robber can have, and he tries prayer when he’s backed into a corner with just four bullets left.”

  “Uh hunh,” said Sarah, looking at me like she wasn’t sure whether to giggle or encourage me.

  “No, seriously,” I continued, “and he suddenly realizes the absurdity in hoping that things will change for him from an external source, and he instead decides to count on his own moxie. It’s Texas, baby; no one’s going to do it for you, you have to do it yourself, no matter how the odds are stacked against you. It’s my people, from the border. This is who I am,” I said to her, weakly, mostly because I was trying to convince myself, too.

  “Come back to bed and keep me warm,” she said, and I did.

  She didn’t try to tell me that every culture everywhere has a mythology of resilience, or that Texas in particular glamorized that “outlaw country” image with Willie Nelson and his contemporaries as an entirely commercial fabrication to sell country records in the ’70s. She knew I needed to cling to something right now, besides her, so she let me cling to this, this idea of “my people,” from the border, being survivors, because I needed to survive this.

  There was no other choice.

  Later that night, I received a call from Steph’s mother, asking if I’d be back in town later the next day to take Steph to an appointment she had at a specialist. “Oh, she’s had a remarkable couple of days,” she told me. “She’s talking and making sense now; it’s amazing. She’s even getting around on a walker.”

  This was surprising; when I left, she had still been in that covered bed and appeared to be cognizant, but you could never be certain.

  I had allowed the call to go to voice mail while I steeled myself to speak to Steph’s mother, and I excused myself from Sarah so I could have some privacy, but she overheard everything. She heard the switch in my voice, baleful and subservient.

  When I walked back into the bedroom, Sarah was shaking, putting her clothes back on.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I feel dirty,” she said. “I feel like we’re having an affair.”

  “No, it’s not . . . I’m not . . . I’m sorry; I don’t know what I’m doing. But I can’t just leave her like that. They’ve been shitty and mean to me, but I can’t just leave her,” I said.

  We crawled back into bed, but the chemistry died out for that night, and we just talked in low voices until the morning.

  The next morning, I was feeling like things might be changing when my car gave out on the way into Seattle. Just like that, my temperature gauge started spiking, and my car began smoking and spewing shit out from under the hood.

  One more level descended.

  De profundis.

  I had just made it over the pass and was entering some unknown town on the outskirts of Seattle when the car gave up on me. Steph’s mother was expecting me in an hour, and I summoned all the resolve I had and phoned her, and when I said my car had broken down on the highway—this little Jetta that had been very, very good to them for the last five months—she let loose a string of vitriol and anger directed at me and my car and then hung up, for emphasis.

  I sat there, in my car, and shook, until I realized I was outside some roadside mechanic and managed to get the guy to look at my car and give me a quote on the thermostat, which was a month’s rent. I called Sarah, who came and picked me up an hour later. I was quiet and spent as she took me back to her house and I sat on her couch with Jack County, who put his head on my lap as I cried into a glass of something very red, almost laughing as I saw a tear roll down my cheek and into the goblet of wine, thinking, I bet the French have done this, and I felt entirely defeated, and I tried tried tried to give up. Let go.

  Her phone calls started that day, I remember.

  It was like getting phone calls from the dead.

  My iPhone lit up with Steph’s ringtone, and I was taken aback at first, confused. Then I answered it and heard something that sounded like Steph’s voice, except in a forced whisper; remember, her larynx had been crushed. But there was something else I couldn’t immediately place.

  “Hello, June, I love you. How are you?”

  What?

  “Hello, June, I love you, it’s Steph. I’m back. I love you. Thank you for taking care of me and my parents.”

  I thought, Oh, dear fucking God, no; not this.

  “Steph? Is this you?”

  Hi, June, I love you. Yes, it’s me. You were supposed to take me to the specialist but it’s been rescheduled for tomorrow. Can you come and see me?”

  “I . . . I’m sorry, I can’t,” I said. Then it hit me, what I was hearing: She was speaking with a British accent.

  “Why not? I love you,” she said. “Please come. I love you.”

  I had to think about it, but I finally said, “Because if I’m in the same room as your mother, I’m liable to take out her other eye,” probably because I was a bit drunk, but also because it was funny. The thing is, you probably shouldn’t joke with someone freshly out of a coma.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, then followed it with, “I love you. Come see me tomorrow,” and she hung up.

  I was knocked on my heels, couldn’t even explain this to anyone as I tried to take in what had just happened. About an hour later, my phone rang again and it was a number I didn’t recognize, so I let it go to voice mail.

  When I played the message, it was the Seattle Police Department, some desk sergeant asking for me, wondering about some threats I may have made to an ex-girlfriend and her family, and I started laughing and crying and I swear my face was exactly that sad Pagliacci clown, as I sat in Sarah’s bedroom and giggled and cried and giggled some more as Sarah came in and thought I’d really lost it this time.

  A few days later, I picked up my car and managed to get hired on by a small boutique pizza restaurant near my neighborhood as a delivery guy. No shit. I sublimated every feeling of indignation and shame and decided that this was the low, tough gear that I’d inherited from my Gramma, that this was what I needed to do in order to rebuild and recover, in the absence of health care and mental health professionals. I would have to work a shit job to process through my anguish and recovery. It somehow made sense to me.

  Besides, finding addresses, folding boxes, and mopping was about all my mental bandwidth was capable of enduring, so I worked with three or four kids in their early twenties and I became the far-out old man who was fresh out of work, doing what he had to do, talking to these college kids younger than my little brother like I was Dennis Hopper, saying, “Yeah, man; I remember seeing Nirvana at the Vogue before they broke big.”

  I’d encountered people like this before, in my own travels and odd jobs, older guys who took on these shit low-wage jobs while they were waiting for things to turn around. There was a dignity to it, I felt, and now it was my turn.

  So I did it. I wore their T-shirts. I took my marching orders from kids younger than Derek, and I was kind and quiet and did everything I could to keep my dignity intact.

  But, oh, dear God, did I hate it. Actually, that’s not true. As a pizza delivery guy, you sort of slip by and through and no one really pays much mind to you once they diagnose you as “pizza delivery guy.” It’s not like New York, where there’s been a rash of break-ins and assaults, all done by opportunistic pizza guys. I can’t answer to that. Here, in Seattle, these kids were just stoned all the time and somehow still managed to deliver their pizza products, usually intact.

  My manager was a kind woman, and I managed to make friends with the kids and didn’t come off as too weird, though I did find it quite difficult to talk small and keep conversations from getting heavy. I just don’t own tha
t particular grace.

  For instance, when one of the younger drivers said she was taking a design course and was complaining about having to learn typography, I said, “Oh, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Typography is fascinating, the semiotics and signifiers, down to the relationships between the characters—it’s incredible. Do you know the history of the ampersand? It was actually supposed to be the twenty-seventh letter, though it’s the French or Latin word et, if you look at it. And the name: It’s a corruption of the phrase, ‘And, per se, and.’ Get it? ‘Ampersand?’ It’s really quite smart,” and when I was done talking, I noticed everyone in the room was looking at me strangely, probably because they were stoned, so I stopped.

  Stuff like that.

  And it really wasn’t so bad for the first month, because all I did was listen to audio books and drive around feeling pathetic, delivering pizza besotted with tears and feeling like the act of working was in itself, working, or rehabilitative. I was starting again, and so I didn’t put pressure on it. I just did it. There wasn’t anything else to do, so I just did as I was told.

  At night, I’d go over to Sarah’s when I could.

  Eventually, I did as she had previously asked and polished up six of my best chapters, wrote a short introductory letter, and presented her with the printed versions she had requested.

  After I gave her what she’d asked for, I sat around thinking, Well, maybe I should send out some of my own, since it is, after all, a numbers game, when you don’t know what you’re doing, and in my bookshelf, I found my old directory of literary journals that I had used when I first started sending things out for potential publishing and had little understanding of the codes or language used. I’d basically been sending my stuff to everyone listed, whether they published nonfiction, science fiction, or poetry, and hadn’t realized my error until I was well into the E section.

  So I began to refine my attempts, especially since postage was now quite dear.

  Every pay period I’d put aside twenty dollars or so for postage stamps, and I’d make a studied list of potential journals and began sending chapters out that way. I had divorced myself from any hope of publishing at this point and was doing this mostly out of an autonomic impulse. I just kept putting things in the mail and not thinking about them. Trudge, trudge, feet on the road, et cetera.

  Meanwhile, I reported for duty as a driver, as needed, at my little pizza place, and I watched the kids mingle and diagnosed them from my perch, at forty years old. (“Oh, honey; he doesn’t know he’s gay yet. Wow, that chick has issues. Jesus, that guy has some serious anger problems, from his mommy. Watch how he drinks.”) It was interesting to see all this from the clinical distance that comes with age and experience, and I wondered if when I was that age, my own pathologies and anxieties had been so clearly visible and surfaced when I worked in a similar situation, and why the fuck didn’t anyone tell me? Like I was about to do, with these kids.

  Kidding.

  No, actually, besides the driving and weeping bit, because I spent so much time alone in a car, I actually didn’t mind the pizza stuff so much, until one Sunday afternoon I received an order to deliver a pizza to an address that I knew very well. Ten years ago, they had been my archenemies. Back when I lived with someone else, these were our next-door neighbors.

  I had been living with someone in a house that shared a driveway, an easement. Being Seattle, this meant that neither household used it. You used it to unload your groceries or lawn-care products, but as soon as you were done, you backed out of it and cleared the way. You certainly didn’t park there or use it for anything else.

  When that original family moved, the house was purchased by a younger couple from Oklahoma who had purloined their senile grandmother’s retirement money—ostensibly, to be used for a retirement home—and used it to buy property in Seattle. They’d turn the garage into a mother-in-law apartment and she would live there until she died, they thought. Happy, happy. But building mother-in-law units in the city was illegal, and the garage was on the property line. They were ingratiating and loud, and had a young kid named Sam, and they took over the easement and the mornings with noise, which was an issue since both my girlfriend and I worked nights.

  It became horrible, angry, and uncomfortable. We eventually moved, and then split up, but of course the memories remained.

  And now I was delivering a pizza to that address.

  And I knew that they still lived there because that kid, Sam, as it turned out, had been my boss, at the pizza place, all along.

  And I had to deliver a pizza there.

  De profundis.

  I stood in the parking lot that Sunday morning just flooded with rage, cortisol, and anxiety.

  I know you’re there, God, and you’re doing this to me.

  I’m doing what I fucking can, God, and you keep piling this SHIT onto me, you motherfucker.

  If you were here, God, I would kick you in the dick, you fucking bastard.

  I stood there and fumed, then packed up the pizzas in my car and made the delivery. This was my job right now. I would do it.

  It turned out that I was off by a number and was instead delivering a pizza to the house I had lived in before, and a man with one arm answered the door, and he didn’t know why I was sweating the way that I was. I thanked him for the four-dollar tip and nearly had my own arm removed by his huge German shepherd, but I was grateful, then sat in my car and apologized to God, said maybe, I hope you can understand.

  We pals again, God?

  No?

  Well, fuck you, then, God.

  I couldn’t even explain that one to Sarah. It just went too deep, too far back, and I continued with what I was doing until I was going to do something else. I found out that my old friend, John, may have been embellishing his earnings back when I spoke to him about pizza delivery being something unexpectedly lucrative, and I was now burning through my savings rather quickly, as I perspired through that summer in a kitchen, prepping salads and folding boxes and talking to children about their pot use and making very little money in return.

  Throughout this, Sarah’s own situation was deteriorating, as her school had been downsized and she was teaching only part-time now, her divorce dragging on and taking a huge emotional toll. She had taken to watching every penny that she had, knew there were some real adjustments to her lifestyle headed her way, and was preparing as much as she could for the blow. She had even started going to the food bank, twice a week, to save on groceries. She did this without fuss, without talking about it, feeling that the hundred dollars she would save on groceries could go to Genevieve’s bills at the veterinarian. Vivie was getting older, needed lots of care, and it was expensive. When she told me this, admitted to it like it was something shameful, I was in awe of her resolve, her ability to suffer in silence, and wished, wished that I had even a shred of it; it made me love her even more.

  That’s about as much as I’m comfortable saying, as I want to shield her privacy, but she was enduring some hard moments, tough times, as she watched everything she had built dry up and flake away in sections, and we had only one another to cling to at this point, in the evenings. Then we’d wake up in the morning and face our deteriorations again, daily.

  And Brenda Brown had also started falling victim to her own personal demons and had quit the karate school in a miasma of drama after the incident with Dylan, forcing the students to choose between studying with her or staying with the school, and since karate is very much a vehicle of personal charisma, lots of people left when Brenda did, for their own reasons, and the sparkle seemed to go out of both the school and Brenda.

  Her health began deteriorating, and she became erratic, weird, and potentially harmful to herself and others.

  It didn’t help that Bill Brown had to be put down, and she hadn’t been prepared for that, would never have been prepared to let go of her own dogs, but it had been painful to watch this poor dog fall apart from age like he did, and so our friend from
the school, the veterinarian who was taking care of Cleo, too, was able to put Bill down, and Brenda fell apart further.

  Then Jack County was diagnosed with leukemia, and this just sent Brenda into a freefall, and it was then decided she had to move back home to Indiana.

  This destroyed me, too, as Jack County was my favorite dog at this time, as bonded as we were, and both Sarah and I held each other and cried the day he had to be put down.

  We had taken him out for a walk the day before, and he limped and moved gingerly because his hips and joints were killing him, and we walked him for a bit in the most scenic part of Queen Anne, my neighborhood, this lovely saunter at the very top of the hill that’s a part of historical Seattle called “the Crown Walk,” which I’d never realized was there, after all this time. I admitted to her just how frightened I really was, how terrifying these last months since I lost my job had been as we walked Jack County, and Sarah said, “Does it mean anything to you that what you’re experiencing is a part of a historical moment?” I think she meant the financial crisis from a few years back, and I thought of it as we walked with a lumbering Jack, and thought, Not at all. I couldn’t see past my personal penumbra.

  At the end of the walk, we watched Jack County come alive for the last time as he flirted with a female labradoodle, and you could, for a moment, see the spark come back in his eye and the spring come back in his step. We laughed at Old Jack County, but then when the girl dog left, his spark vanished and was gone, and Jack was no more, ever again.

  Sarah’s house was empty, and only the two of us remained some nights, clutching one another and trying to stay above water.

  CHAPTER 34 The Low Gear

  Nasir found me at the pizza place when he needed someone to help with his new enterprise. It had to be some sort of tax shelter, but the way he pitched it to me was that he and a friend from his mosque were opening a new print shop in a town north of Seattle, and he needed me to run it, as a manager.