My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I would not have allowed it to happen, as my head was the coolest one nearby and intended to prevail, which is saying something, but I would certainly have liked to see it happen. Old Phil was that much of a prick and deserved it, but Adnan was a young, damaged boy with a civil war background, and it was not right to let him yell at the mean old bastard, so I stepped in, told Adnan to go home and let Phil sputter at the idea that he was about to get his block knocked off by a twenty-three-year-old Bosnian kid. “That’s just un-American,” I said, and made him even more upset.

  By this point, Adnan had decided to quit, and in his place they’d hired this dirty mountain kid who lived in his car, completely illiterate as a result of being “home schooled” by his “Christian mother,” and he’d come in some mornings looking like he had pulled his shirt from a pile at the bottom of his backseat. I was taken aback at the poverty. I mean, I grew up around kids taking baths in buckets, but this was something else. This was raw, pioneer poverty, in modern America—well, as much as Snohomish could pass for modern America. I tried to befriend him but felt like it was hopeless, didn’t have it in me. He would sit in front of our production computer for an hour in order to write a painful, three-line response to a customer query, and it would be ridiculously broken, pathetically unpunctuated, but I just couldn’t take that on. Not anymore. No more room for little brothers.

  At any rate, most days I had a lot of free time in the afternoons, and I decided to use that for my benefit. I had the idea to develop my own database of agents to get my book published—I mean, I had a credit now, didn’t I? The next step was to get an agent, right? Like they do in the movies. So that’s what I would do.

  I culled a directory of agents in New York City (nothing else felt like it would do) from Google searches, downloaded a tremendous amount of contacts and numbers, and then set about cleaning the data and writing a script using an Excel spreadsheet (I was doing it for other small businesses—why not do it for me?). I wrote a cover letter, updated the information, created a few variable data fields, made PDFs, and then had a production machine send what were, unbeknownst to me at the time, book queries to agents in New York City with an automated script. Then I sat back and waited for the responses.

  They were overwhelmingly obstinate, this little club of book publishers and industry people, and entirely unwilling to let me in their front doors, it seemed. From my gray perch in Snohomish, it felt like I’d never make it past their gargoyles and security guards or interns, but still I kept on because it was all I had left, and Sarah had said this was going to be my only way out. And I had presented her with the five packages of the six best chapters that she said she’d deliver to all those people, so I was doing my own due diligence.

  I just had to keep going.

  I’d finally found the bottom gears.

  CHAPTER 36 The Way to Say Good-bye

  The very last time I saw Steph, she asked me to bring her a key.

  She had locked herself out of her house, was waiting back at Harborview for more of her outpatient therapy, and as I drove around to find parking, I saw her quite clearly sitting in one of the glass bridges that connected new constructions to older ones across the city streets. She was staring out the window wearing a sky-blue dress, a large, floppy spring hat, and long white gloves, in winter. I parked, then found her, and it was indeed Steph, dressed like a crazy person. She cried and thanked me, saying she’d accidentally locked herself out of the house up north where she was now living alone, had left her handbag inside. She had to beg a bus driver to allow her on and give her a transfer in order to make it to Harborview, downtown. My throat knotted up, listening to this, but I couldn’t give her any more, not any longer.

  I drove her home and retrieved her bag after she was done with her outpatient therapy, and Steph showed me a chart she had filled out some weeks earlier where she documented her recovery at 100 percent, even though her handwriting and spelling were entirely distorted and wrong. More artifacts of anguish. But she was now telling me, “Can you believe I thought that? I mean, I’m nowhere near how smart I was,” and that hurt to hear, too.

  Some days earlier, when her parents were still in town, she had asked me to take her to the house of the two veterinarians who were dog-sitting Cleo, and I picked her up around the corner because I didn’t want to see Harold or her mother. I saw Steph from a distance and she was still moving the same way, slowly, as if underwater, and she seemed dust-boned fragile, like a shivering bird in someone’s hands. I wasn’t able to police my compassion from changing immediately to sorrow and grief. That was my problem with Steph: When I felt anything for her, I would move instantly to sadness and nostalgia and sorrow. And it was like that until she finally declared to me, “I’m seeing someone else,” when she sat in my car and put on her seatbelt.

  I said, “I know, you’re seeing that Arab guy,” and she said, “No, I’m seeing someone else. He’s white. My parents are much happier about that because when I was with you they didn’t want a half-Mexican baby.”

  Now, I could have been upset or hurt by this, and I think there may have been a tinge of something quite fundamental there, but no: That’s the traumatic brain injury, I told myself. Harold and her mother might have their issues with me, but I don’t believe them to be that reprehensible. So I just nodded my head and said, “That’s fine, Steph. I hope you’re happy and I wish you all the best. I’m with Sarah. You met her briefly once at the karate school.”

  “Oh, good,” she said.

  “And they won’t have to call the cops on the baby, like they did with me,” I said, because I’m like that. Cabrón.

  “Oh, that wasn’t my mother; that was me. I thought you were coming to hurt her so I called the police department. Can you take me to the store? I need to buy some things for Cleo.”

  That was news to me, but it made sense, in the end.

  At the store, we had a bag of dog food at the cashier when Steph opened her wallet and showed me a clump of hundred dollar bills, something over $1,000.

  I immediately pushed her hand down to cover the display of raw cash and asked, “What the hell are you doing with so much fucking money?”

  “I need it to impress someone’s family,” she said.

  I had half a mind to say, Well, why don’t you pay me back the money your parents jacked from me first? but I thought, Fuck it, let’s just get out of this one. But I was definitely curious about her new boyfriend, felt oddly protective, after all this time.

  It turned out, Stephanie 3.0 was doing all sorts of things that Stephanies 1.0 and 2.0 would never have been caught doing, like mingling at poetry readings and watching films in the afternoon at film festivals. And during one such afternoon, she sat directly next to a man in a Prince Valiant haircut who had been updating his blog or Facebook post as the previews had started, and so Steph, having very little regulation from the TBI, proceeded to chastise the guy, and by the end of the movie, they had planned a date to see other films.

  In one of the more perfect moments of providence lending a hand, this man turned out to be an autistic software programmer, deeply in the red on the spectrum, and was sitting quite comfortably after selling some sort of search engine plug-in to Amazon back in the ’90s, and he was now rather well off. His previous girlfriend, a soul songstress from the Caribbean, had bilked him of something like $200,000 in order to self-produce a vanity album, as Steph told the story, and so Steph felt she was now in charge of protecting him and his interests. It was a perfect match: She wanted someone to push around, and he was willing to be pushed around.

  When Steph told me this, I said, “All right, you’re safe now. I think it’s time for me to go.”

  “But I want to stay friends,” she said.

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “Your voice takes me right back to the grief, puts me right back to that time.” She had at least lost the British inflections by this point, but still.

  She looked at me a bit sideways, then said, “My God, I real
ly hurt you, didn’t I?”

  “I helped,” I said, and hugged her good-bye when I dropped her off at the corner of her street.

  As I drove away, I noticed I’d been playing a song on my car stereo, which was a change because for months, I could not listen to music—any kind of music—at all.

  It was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds reminding me, in the way that only he can, that if you’re going to dine with a cannibal, sooner or later, you, too, are going to get eaten.

  They married on a yacht on Lake Washington, and her parents and extended family flew out from the east, this time for something far better than an extended stay in an ICU, and by all accounts, they seem entirely well and fulfilled and good, an ending that was almost preposterously happy for her. And reports from other people who wander across her Facebook page say that even her relationship with her mother is the best that anyone can imagine, and of course Harold is delighted to see his daughter content, after all this.

  Steph made it back home, and her mother has her daughter back.

  Thank God, I think every time someone asks me about this, and I mean it: Thank you, God, for giving her that. For giving her family that. They deserve it, after everything.

  Steph’s accident had broken me down, in commiseration, and had reconnected me to my own family in the same way she had reconnected to hers. But I was still in the process of building my life back into something salvageable and worthwhile, as I worked from the final, exhausted reserves that I had left in my soul.

  But even Sarah was trying to leave me now. She was the only guiding star left on my compass, the one true north I could count on, and she wanted to leave me. She struggled to withstand my level of exhaustion after so many months of the hospital drama, and she began to see that there would be nothing left over between us if I kept up this level of attention to Steph. And she anguished further at the age difference, which I insisted was not an issue for me. And it wasn’t. Isn’t.

  Still, she thought our affair had run its course, though she really did love me, thoroughly. I worried about it because she exhibited it through compassion and strategy and boundaries—all concepts I’d never really understood.

  “You know there’s no happily-ever-after for us,” she told me one night, and I thought I would lose my mind with panic. I felt like it would really be the end, if she and I were to separate. I wouldn’t be able to handle seeing her with someone else. I just couldn’t.

  I remember lying in my bedroom, darkened and curtained off, my face pressed into the hard mattress, telling her, “You haven’t seen what I can do. I’ve been expending all this energy and focus and grief on Steph and her family, keeping from falling apart, but I can do more, I can do much, much more, Sarah; please don’t go yet, not yet, baby,” and I very nearly whimpered. I loved her, like I’ve never loved anyone else.

  “You dear, sweet, man,” she said back to me. “You knew this wasn’t going to extend into our futures. You need to let me go. I need to let you go. We have to go on our ways,” she said, and I think I lost that much more life and hope, once again, on that bed in that darkened room.

  A few weeks later, I’d caught the attention of an agent, Alice, who has a standing policy of reading nearly everything that comes across her inbox: You just never know in this business.

  She had been in my revolving database, had received my e-mail and six-chapter query and had decided, “Yeah, all right; this looks promising. Can you send me the manuscript?”

  I was actually at Sarah’s when I spoke to Alice for the first time. It was a Sunday, and I was sitting on her bed with Genevieve when my phone lit up with a 212 number. “Holy shit, Sarah!” I said. “It’s from New York! I don’t owe anybody money in New York! It has to be about the book!”

  Indeed, it was Alice, my superagent.

  We spoke, and everything in my instincts and guts told me she was the one, though I had every person around me—none of them in the arts or entertainment industry, mind you, all of them repeating wisdoms they’d heard on television and in movies—telling me that I should be suspicious about the first person to express interest, watch out for shysters, et cetera.

  Alice completely undermined every sense of caution or suspicion; she was just wonderful and linear and no-bullshit whatsoever, a former lawyer from Philadelphia. I couldn’t have imagined a better guide in the industry, and we launched into the business of publishing my first book, together. She believed in it.

  It was difficult to place since I had no history in publishing, had never published anything before the few chapters in Epiphany, knew no one, had no professional affiliations or contacts, and had no idea what I was doing. But Alice found a way. She contacted my current editor, also gifted with incredible insight, and together they took a risk on what was going to be my first book.

  After all this.

  When we received word that my publisher had bought the book, Sarah and I celebrated like old times in her kitchen with two bottles of prosecco. She was toasting me, looking at me with delight and pleasure and exquisite happiness when suddenly this shadow crossed her face, and she became serious, frightened almost.

  “What’s wrong, darling?” I asked. “What just happened?”

  “Do you remember how I asked you to fix up those chapters and I said I’d give them to those people?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re still upstairs in my office, Domingo. I’m sorry. I never sent them along. I don’t know why; I just didn’t have it in me.”

  There was a moment of pause where I had to take in what I was hearing, but then I burst out laughing and hugged her to me and kissed her hard, on the lips.

  Sarah had tricked me into doing this, all on my own. She broke the elephant down into parts, gave me a manageable task, and I learned the rest on my own. It made me love her even more profoundly, especially now that I know the business the way I do, and there was nothing really any of those people would have been able to do to help me anyway. Nobody knows nothing, in this business.

  And it was Amy who told me, much later, that if I had succeeded in killing myself, she would have published my manuscript at a vanity press with all the typos and mistakes that were in it, because she’d be so mad at me for doing it and she knew it would have made me furious with shame.

  And Dougherty, when we would talk two years later, after my insistent barrage of apology e-mails, told me I had frightened him with my ferocity and insanity, that he’d look both ways every time he left his apartment, thinking I was coming after him. But we’re friends again, sending stupid text messages and discussing the things we once discussed, before.

  I’m not drinking anywhere near what I was drinking back then and have been wrangling with sobriety since April 2013, when I came home from a year-long promotion of my first book, after it was named a finalist for the National Book Award. I’ve been forced to learn this business from within and with very little room for error, though errors I have made, but thankfully, not like before, and not like I want to die. That first book vaulted me into a serious career as an author, has spoken to some universality for a profound number of people, and changed my life dramatically, and in the end, after all this damage and trouble, I finally managed to get what I wanted, as had Stephanie.

  Happy endings. Impossible endings, sure, and yet, there they are.

  I just had to learn to hold on to mine.

  I tried to carry on in the manner and the mythos of the tortured writer at first—I figured I was allowed at the very least to try it on for size—the Raymonds (Chandler and Carver), Patricia Highsmith and Norman Mailer, Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams, but I knew it wasn’t something for longevity. Certainly there’s no space here to delineate between the alcoholism and the creative imperative, because it’s up for debate and actually rather boring, but I will say that my decision came from figuring out finally what it was that I really wanted, above all else: I wanted to be a member of my family again, and I wanted to be with Sarah; that’s the only thing that really
mattered to me, and she was leaving me because of my drinking and bad health. The choice was clear.

  I was in San Antonio late one night with both my brothers after there had been some kerfuffle at a bar, once again, and I was so wound up I’d put my fist through someone’s windshield, and then later, when Dan and Derek and some of their friends were dropping me off at my hotel, I had that “road to Damascus” moment where I saw, quite clearly, the pull that my family and especially my brothers have on me, and something deep inside of me named it for the first time and declared it obsolete, and I knew I wanted to come back home to Seattle, back home to Sarah, and get sober, try for sobriety, or at the very least, learn to drink like I want to live, instead of drinking like I want to die.

  It separates me from my brothers when I don’t drink with them, and it gets awkward really quickly, but I try to maintain my boundaries. My father cried for joy when I told him about my decisions, and he doesn’t press me to find out how I am, gives me the room to slip up every few weeks if I break down and have a few drinks at dinner with friends.

  But I’m no longer drinking like I don’t want to live, because I do want to live, and live with Sarah in my life. “Besides,” she said, “success has made you much less of an asshole.”