“There’s pee on the toilet seat,” she said. “He says he lifts the seat, but it’s always there.”
I felt a compulsion to intervene but decided I didn’t want to take that on, as a part of my new boundaries. In the end, the Mexican man was moved to another room and the pee was still appearing on the toilet seat, and Steph realized the droplets on the toilet seat were caused by the cleaners emptying buckets into the toilet. I felt bad for the old man and his family, who were in Seattle from eastern Washington, alone downtown and frightened, and then accused of this humiliation, like he was a barn animal incapable of simple hygiene. But again, this was no longer my fight.
I came back a couple days later and there was a new family in Steph’s room, and this time I was getting dirty looks from a young Arab guy. Four generations of people gathered around a woman in a black hijab, covered head to toe and lying on the bed, and the guy, in his thirties, kept looking at me like I’d done something to insult him or his family.
“Let’s go sit,” Steph said to me, and we walked to the nook.
“I want to see other people,” she told me as we sat on the couch, and I nearly burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry; yes, by all means,” I said, after everyone at the nurse’s station looked my way.
“No, I mean it,” she said. “I think we need to split up, and stay friends. I’m seeing someone else already,” she told me.
“What?” I said, taken aback. You can’t really trust anything someone with a traumatic brain injury is telling you. But this was surprising, and I was concerned about her making these decisions much more than feeling any sort of jealousy. Any at all. I mean, I would have told her I was seeing Sarah, but I didn’t think she could process the jealousy and sense of betrayal a person feels when they discover an ex is seeing someone else.
“Steph, what are you doing? You’re not in a condition to start a relationship,” I said, and I was hoping she wasn’t taking that as me being jealous. She wasn’t capable of consent.
“I’m seeing that guy whose mother is in the bed next to mine,” she told me. “I gave him a blow job yesterday. I cheated on you all the time, by the way. I met people on Craigslist and had sex with them at Lisa’s house.”
I heard this and, oddly, didn’t care in the least. I could see that her intention was to hurt me, somehow, and it did nothing to wound or affect me, not my honor or sense of nostalgia, nothing. Or perhaps it was also, or more so, that I was relieved to hear that Steph wasn’t as dependent on me as I’d thought, that she, too, knew that the relationship was doomed. This revelation freed me further from my guilt.
But the idea that she was “seeing” someone right there in the hospital, in her condition, seemed like abuse of a patient, to me. It just didn’t seem right. I felt compelled to say something, but I couldn’t: I was done. I didn’t want to interfere any longer.
Plus, I was in love with Sarah in a way that I had never before felt with anyone, and I had made the transition to full devotional and physical love with her months earlier, so Steph telling me she was giving blowies now and had sex with other people while we were “together” only made me feel sorry for her, made me worry for her much more than anything else, but not like before: She wasn’t my responsibility.
During that year, Sarah miraculously understood the complexity around my relationship and sense of obligation with Steph. Sarah was exhausted by the demands of Steph’s accident and my responses, and she watched helplessly at the implosion of my health. She made the hard decision to compartmentalize me and our relationship, as a strategy of self-protection, while she navigated her own difficulties and dissolution of the life she had worked so hard to build with her now ex-husband.
It had been him that had left her, she told me, and right out of the blue.
While Sarah is a gentile, their child identifies with the paternal family’s line as Jewish, like only a West Coast Seattle liberal could. Their kid had a huge bar mitzvah one Saturday, and it was quite the shindig, with everyone from the karate school attending. Friends and family flew in from all over the country. Though I had been invited, I was incapable of leaving my apartment from depression that afternoon, so I didn’t make it. The next morning, Sarah was feeling a bit rough, so she slept in while her husband drove their kid to the airport to catch a flight to Los Angeles to stay with friends, as a birthday present.
When he returned, he woke up Sarah and told her they needed to talk.
She was about to apologize for sleeping in when he leveled his gaze at her and said, flatly, “I don’t want to be married to you any longer.” She was mid-coffee when she realized the conversation they were having, and she didn’t even get through the cup before he loaded his simple travel bag and left for his new rented house, about thirty minutes away and fully furnished. He’d been planning this for months.
Her fifteen-year marriage ended in less time than it took to drink that cup of coffee.
I was able to give Sarah a level of distraction and entertainment, in a way, as I unraveled around her in such large, dramatic, and loud catastrophes with huge emotional tsunamis and explosive, potentially life-threatening ways, but still she had her limits and boundaries. When this had started, Sarah had presented me with an oversize postcard she had purchased during her last trip to Spain, La Virgen Dolorosa, from one of the medieval cathedrals in the south. It was an image of the Virgin Mother’s anguish, and she had seven swords stabbing her heart.
It was, for me, a perfect image of grief, and it was like a signal directly to the soul of my anguish, how I was metabolizing all the pain and confusion and fear and helplessness. It was more than language, it was more than iconic: It was a subconscious, subcultural chorus of angels. I finally understood my grandmother and father, and how they surrounded themselves with these death images of Jesus and La Virgen de Guadalupe, the Virgin Mother. It’s how Catholics process grief, sharing it with others in order to process the anguish as a community.
Sarah was a descendant from Lutheran homesteaders, from Idaho, and so she firmed up her top lip, dug up her garden, and made gluten-free casseroles to exhibit her suffering. She spent weeks curled up in bed, her covers pulled up over her head, then went to her doctor, who prescribed lorazapam, trazadone, and other medications to help her endure.
I no longer had health insurance, so I turned to booze, which would give me a good one or two hours of deadened thoughts and tissue, and then come roaring back with blades and horror and keep me from sleeping. And I would bewilder and enthrall Sarah sometimes, with how self-destructive I could become, how utterly beyond redemption I could push myself when the mood took me. Once, we had to attend a funeral together for a former student at the karate school. It was a tragic story, and I won’t relay it here, but the funeral services were held in a megachurch in one of those outlying Washington towns full of trees and Starbucks, and I prepared for the funeral with a flask of gin and a due sense of conviction.
The services unfolded with a salesman in a business suit telling us how the girl was now a bride of Jesus, and images of her life in the church were projected onto a screen behind a huge fabricated cross with a cloth draped over it.
This just pissed me off from the start. Where was the body of Christ? Where were the wounds, the blood and the anguish? Where was the depiction of suffering? Where was the echo of compassion in the image of physical suffering? That simple, oversized geometry of a cross hanging center stage was too hygienic, too barren to inspire anything. You bastards are fucking salesmen, I kept thinking, and that’s all. Trying to scrub clean the human condition.
“I want chicken-bone Jesus!” I stage-whispered to Sarah, who was both horrified and stunned. “This is bullshit. They’re doing it wrong.” If they were still talking about faith, I felt, then they had obviously not suffered enough.
That’s the second born, when you have the faith beaten out of you. That’s actualization. Toast.
I remember the look on her face in the dark when she went past being d
isgusted by my antics and instead her clinical analysis kicked in, and she said, “Jesus Christ, Domingo; you really don’t care what people think of you, do you?”
“Fuck these people,” I said. “I’ll never see them again. They’re doing it wrong.” Then I pulled out my flask and took a long pull of straight gin. At a funeral. In a megachurch.
Take that, Saul of Tarsus.
Now, people who know me know that this is just a single part of my personality, and I have other, more endearing parts when I’m not in a self-destructive spiral. On my best days, I could hold up my end of the conversations like we did when we’d take those walks around Greenlake, and I could bring the creativity, passion, and insight to Sarah’s work and life that she craved. Perhaps it was because of my particular capacity to suffer that I could withstand and even receive Sarah’s anguish as well, could hold her as she grieved for her own suffering. Even though she had family, friends, and a therapist, no one else could receive her grief like I could, in the way she received mine. I threaded through her like a Leonard Cohen song.
What made this possible was that Sarah was able to shut me down and out of her life when she felt I was affecting her badly. There was much of my unraveling she would not watch, and she built a firewall. I was in a free-fall for most of that time, and she knew it, could do nothing some days but watch helplessly as my situation grew worse and worse.
And I would take the cue and focus my spraying elsewhere, because I loved her and respected her. That was the only way our relationship made it through the second act. When we moved into the physical relationship, there was still a solid and obsidian wall that kept me out of Sarah’s more personal life, away from her family and her child, but I was all right with that. In fact, I needed it. I wasn’t ready to be in a relationship and couldn’t shift what was left of my resources—as broken and desiccated as I was—to start another love affair.
But what we had was enough for both of us, for now. And it worked, because neither of us looked down.
At some point later on, I developed a curiosity as to how the “newspaper” that I had been working on in eastern Washington was doing, after I’d left, and I thought maybe I’d have a bit of schadenfreude in seeing how far down their design and image had deteriorated without my help. I downloaded the latest edition and was left thoroughly speechless when I read, on their front page, that one of the women who owned the company, wife to Alfred, had died unexpectedly of an aneurysm. Sweet, lovely person that she was, mother of two, and a genuinely good human being, just gone, just like that. Alfred had indeed suffered something similar to what I had cursed him, and I felt completely ashamed and horrible. I sent their family an e-mail, written as sincerely as I could, and hoped I would never hear back.
Back in Texas, my family had taken to calling me in relays; every day or two days, someone would make contact and try to keep me engaged and up to date on a family I had divorced some years ago to make my claim on the American promise, to reinvent myself like my sisters had done in their middle school years, except I had played it out in the long game, and had been trying to make it entirely on my own as a hard man, a rugged individualist of a sort, a macho, macho man. This turned out to be bullshit, and I found myself to be soft, like a bunny. Broken and damaged, wracked with regrets.
My mother’s mother died that winter, and in the fog of what I was enduring in Seattle, I missed her funeral, felt horrible about it a year later when I went back and looked at all my notes, all the writing I had done in my little moleskin notebooks I kept with me, most of them surprising me with flashbacks or mentions of things I don’t remember doing, people I don’t remember meeting. My whole family gathered in Brownsville to bury my maternal grandmother, and even my paternal grandmother, Gramma, made it to the graveside to pay her respects, after years of mutual silence. (Personally, I think Gramma went there to gloat: See? I told you I’d outlive you.) And my father, Mingo, in his continued run of surprising his children, had secretly hired a mariachi he knew from his days as a restaurateur and had him sing three of the most ridiculously heartbreaking songs, which had the whole crowd in tears by the time he was through. Well, everyone except for my uncle Abel, who was too incapacitated by his addictions to grieve his mother publicly. Our step-grandfather wouldn’t allow him to attend, in the condition he was in, and later, when Dan and Derek drove back to check on him, he was bare-chested and his face was covered in a golden spray paint, from huffing. He kept calling out in shrill, pain-filled agony: La jefa! La jefa! That’s what the kids called her, my grandmother: the boss lady.
It was a moment that stayed with Derek, and all of us, of course. We all metabolize grief in our way, sure, but when your addictions keep you from properly grieving your mother’s passing, that’s something else entirely. I felt horrible for Abel. And our other uncle, Johnny, who was in prison during his mother’s funeral.
Dan and I were back to talking and we were extraordinarily aware of the triggers that would instantaneously drop us into fighting posture, and we were at a point where we’d be able to stop, stop, stop, then articulate, “When you say this, it makes me want to say that,” sort of marriage counseling speak, but it was working, and we were becoming better friends, better brothers.
Derek had disappeared, once again, under his shame.
After his accident, he recovered in my mother’s house in Houston until her husband, Robert, had seen enough of his antics and asked him, point-blank, if he was serious about killing himself. Derek had taken to sleeping all day and then watching movies all night, and then doing it all over again after going through all of my mother’s pantries. Mom was allowing Derek to do this as a part of his “recovery,” but truthfully, Mom had PTSD from receiving that phone call from the hospital in Austin, and she woke up every night at 3:30 a.m., and hearing him downstairs flipping through cable reassured her. Between having this mess of a boy under her roof or not knowing where he was, behaving like a chemical repository in the slums of central Texas, Mom learned to be all right with having him stay downstairs all night, sleep all day while she was at work. Robert, though, he gave it a month or two and then pulled out his pistols, both literally and metaphorically.
The way Derek tells this story, Robert pulled a 9 mm pistol on him and said, “Get out.” But that’s not true. I know Robert, and he simply told Derek, “If you’re intent on killing yourself, take the gun in my closet upstairs and do it, because we’re sick of your shit.”
Derek instead called Dan and proceeded to do the same thing, except at Dan’s house. Ultimately, it seems like this was how Derek manipulated his family, as an addict: Look at me, I’m helpless! Wouldn’t you rather have me living with you, eating your food and drinking your booze, than be frightened of what I might be getting up to?
It was blackmail, whether he understood he was doing it or not, and it went on for far too long.
In the meantime, I was still struggling, pulling at ends and not making them meet, and my family was trying to help me break the surface and be on my own again. They rooted for me, and it was incredibly touching that they’d suddenly emerged as my only support network, besides Sarah, Amy, and Andy here in Seattle. I had pretty much rendered every other bridge to cinders and was looking at the world through a very tiny hole that showed me very little sunlight.
But still, I tarried on. I didn’t know what else to do. I was still waiting to find those final six gears that would get me through this time, awaiting the next level of absurdity the universe had in store for me.
I would still drink a bit too much on some days, but it was nothing like the ferocity of self-destruction I was hell-bent on putting myself through in those first months. That had been almost like another test of macho I had created for myself in my collapse of sense, in that I wanted to destroy myself the same way Steph had, in the same way Derek had done to himself. I wanted to climb on that cross, have those seven swords penetrating my heart. Instead I would come home and collapse on my couch and try to stop my monkey mind from
going apeshit, watching whatever series I could find on Netflix and drinking lite beer, and sometimes shooting the Hello Kitty stuffie that Steph’s mother had given me with an air pistol I had bought the year before in my war against the rats.
I’d sit there and wait, though I’m not entirely certain for what, maybe to hear from Sarah, who was the only one who could give me something to look forward to, and so I’d keep it cool for her while I shot BB after BB into the heart of the stupid little Kitty, like Elvis would have, as it sat in my bookshelf opposite.
Meanwhile, my pieces were in Epiphany, a small, underfunded but highly pedigreed little journal out of New York, and I couldn’t have been happier. Though I may have told most everyone I know about this, I don’t think many people fully understood what it actually meant, and in full transparency, neither could I, really. But I knew it was a really good step.
I was working at the desolation print shop at this time, and instead of pretending to work on nonexistent orders, I decided I would use my time to further pursue the idea of publishing, now that I had a writing credit. There was really little else I could do at the print shop anyhow, since the contention between Phil and his idea of what the shop should be doing was in direct conflict with what Nasir and Zahid wanted out of it, and I had learned by now that I’d been given a task to execute with no authority behind it. They had also hired this Bosnian kid from their mosque when we’d first started this abysmal enterprise, and while he had every level of enthusiasm and optimism, Adnan was a bit too spirited and easily distracted to keep a job in a small, defeated business like this and would instead bring in his laptop to watch soccer games and documentaries on the Bosnian War. I really liked that kid, who had fled to America with his family when he’d been three and was now so entirely and thoroughly American that he wore all the best Reeboks and backward baseball caps and spoke a little bit like Ali G while using a smattering of inshallahs and salaam alaikums. He was my last good entertainment that passed through those doors, after he squared off, chicken chested, with Phil one afternoon when they locked in a battle of wills over a closed door, and I chuckled as Adnan very nearly cleaned Phil’s sixty-five-year-old clock.
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 28
