Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Us, I thought? Us? I took a sip from my glass of wine. “I’m not twenty-one,” I said. I didn’t want to do any more shit.

  “Oh, you can just hang around outside. All the smokers, they hang around on the sidewalk. You can just hang there until I take care of business.”

  Even the way she was talking was changing.

  “Sure,” I said. I could never say no.

  She smiled as we walked out the door. “Besides, you just might get lucky and get picked up by some hunk.”

  The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. But I hung on to that thought. I’d thought about being with guys—and maybe this was my chance.

  It wasn’t a long walk to the bars. Carmen was happy and high. She asked about our uncles and aunts. “I only see Uncle Hector,” she said. “And even then, not very often. The others don’t contact me. They’re too afraid of Lucille to cross her.” She laughed. “What a fucked-up family.”

  “Well,” I said. “They’re more boring than fucked up.”

  “How much do you know about them?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing really. I mean they raised us. That’s what I know.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I have stories.” By then we’d reached the strip of bars on Stanton Street—and the bars were hopping. There was this look of euphoria on her face. She walked into one of the bars, a place called the Toolbox. Subtle. “Just hang out. This won’t take long.”

  I felt a little uncomfortable. I leaned against the wall and watched the scene. A guy came up to me. I guessed he was in his late twenties. He had dark eyes, thick wavy hair and a nice smile. He wore a tight T-shirt and it was obvious that he went to the gym. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Not old enough,” I said. I was always good at hiding my nervousness.

  “You don’t need an ID in my apartment.”

  I was definitely interested. “Can’t tonight. I’m with someone.”

  “I’m with someone too,” he said.

  “My sister. I’m just waiting for her.” I took my cell out of my pocket. I handed it to him. “Name and number,” I said.

  He smiled, took my cell phone and punched in his name and number. He handed my cell phone back to me. “Mark,” he said.

  “Conrad,” I said.

  “Call,” he said as he walked into the bar.

  “I promise,” I said.

  My sister stepped out into the street and we walked back to her place.

  She did more lines of coke, but I didn’t. I was tired. I stayed up with her. “C’mon,” she urged me, “just one more line.”

  She had some tequila on the table. I poured myself a shot and downed it. “That’s it for me. I’m going to bed.”

  As I was lying in the dark, I thought of the road my sister was taking. And then I thought of Mark. That was the road I was going to take.

  On Sunday afternoon, I was back at my aunt’s place. That was where I’d lived since my mother had “died.” Not that it had ever felt like home. It was my aunt Lucille’s home. Hers and hers alone. Even my uncle Louie was a visitor there. After having spent the weekend with Carmen, it was a relief to be in an environment that didn’t have dark and dangerous corners. Carmen had driven me home—but I knew she wasn’t going back to her place. She was all dressed up and I knew she was going out. I also knew what she was looking for.

  My uncles and aunts were gathered in the living room, having their traditional Sunday afternoon happy hour. The smell of my aunt Lucille’s roast permeated the house. The smell of her cooking gave me a sense of comfort. What I didn’t know was that they were all gathered to intervene. That’s exactly what it was—an intervention.

  My aunt Lucille took the lead. “I understand you’re going to this university in the fall.” I almost laughed at the disdain in the this university.

  “Yes,” I said. “I didn’t apply anywhere else.”

  “With your grades, you could have gotten in anywhere.”

  “And with my money, where would I have gotten in?”

  “You should have asked us. You should have consulted with us.”

  “What’s wrong with going to school here?”

  “You’re better than that. You’re smarter than that.”

  My aunt Susan, who was as quiet as she was lovely, put up her hand and motioned for my aunt Lucille to stop. “Don’t you want to experience anything else but this nothing of a town?”

  “I don’t feel that way about this town,” I said. “I like it here. I like the border. I like the people.”

  “And you don’t want to leave your sister,” Uncle Louie added.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “She’ll hold you back,” Lucille said.

  “Hold me back from what? Haven’t you noticed I’m not exactly the most ambitious young man on the planet?”

  “You’re smart, smart, smart,” Uncle Hector said. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”

  I wasn’t going to win this argument with them. I wanted to ask for a drink, but that wasn’t going to happen. “It’s too late anyway. School starts in six weeks.”

  “Well, next year you’re transferring to a better school like U.T. Austin. Getting you out of this town will do you a world of good—and that’s that.” Aunt Lucille was adamant. “We’ll all take care of the money. That’s not an issue.”

  I wanted to say, “Doesn’t it matter what I want?” But I didn’t. Lucille controlled the family. Control is how she loved. But it was true what they said. I couldn’t bear to leave Carmen. I knew her life was going to hell, and even if I couldn’t keep her from going there, I was willing to go to hell with her.

  I sat there quietly, my uncles’ and aunts’ eyes on me. “I know you love me,” I said. And it was true, they did love me. But their love was material and contained little or no affection. I don’t know why, but tears were rolling down my face. I wiped them away. “I’m hungry,” I said.

  Uncle Louie put his hand on my shoulder. “Let’s eat then.”

  Uncle Hector had bought an apartment complex not far from the university and let me have one of the apartments there. Rent free, of course. It wasn’t in Carmen’s neighborhood. He made sure of that. But it wasn’t far either. “You need to have your own place,” he said. “I think Lucille’s right that you should try to maintain a distance from your sister. But in my opinion, you also need to get away from Lucille.” He tossed me a set of keys—one was to my new apartment, the other was to the new car he’d bought for me.

  “So do you ever see Carmen?” I asked.

  “I used to stop by and see her. I don’t anymore.”

  I studied his face.

  “Don’t ask me why, Conrad. I think you already know.”

  My aunt Lucille and my uncle Louie took me shopping for furniture. A bed, kitchen utensils, pots, pans, sheets, towels, a dresser, curtains, coffee table, book shelves. Kitchen table and chairs, couch, reading chair and a new laptop computer. They, of course, chose everything for me. They never asked if I liked their choices. But then again, I didn’t really care. I smiled a lot, made small talk, behaved exactly like they had taught me to behave and the whole shopping-for-my-apartment thing was relatively painless. And what the hell, it wasn’t my money. My aunt Lucille cooked the first meal in my new place. I was allowed a glass of wine with dinner. The talk centered around the good grades I was going to get so that I could immediately transfer to Austin. “It’s such a nice town,” Aunt Susan said. “I’m sure you’ll find a beautiful girl there.”

  I smiled. But I wasn’t smiling at what she said. I was smiling at what I was thinking: There’s lots of beautiful girls here too. And lots of beautiful boys.

  The first night in my apartment, I called Mark.

  “It’s Conrad,” I said. “Remember me?”

  “I remember,” he said. “How could I forget?”

  “I’ve never been with a guy,” I said. “Willing to teach me?”

  It took him twenty minutes to arr
ive at my place. He had his tongue down my throat the minute he walked through the door. He undressed me. I undressed him.

  Sleeping with men became my new addiction. But I would go back to women sometimes. The problem was that women expected more. Men felt no remorse about one-night stands.

  I visited Carmen two or three times a week. She’d lost a little weight. She looked tired to me—but if you didn’t know her, you wouldn’t be able to tell. She knew how to wear makeup and she was a beautiful, beautiful woman. I knew she was doing all kinds of shit. “You’re not taking your meds, are you?”

  “Don’t judge, Conrad.”

  “I’m not judging. You know me better. I just worry.”

  She kissed me on the cheek. “You’re sweet.”

  “Don’t be condescending,” I said. She kissed me on the cheek again. “I’m not being condescending. I adore you.”

  “I adore you too,” I said.

  “Conrad, I’m not always depressed, you know? Look at me. Don’t I look good?”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “You worry too much.”

  I knew she went up and down. Right now she was up. When she was down, she didn’t call me. It had always been that way. When she was in high school, she’d spend hours, days, weeks in her room. And then she was fine again. I knew how it was with her. She didn’t particularly like talking about her mood swings. And she wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say about that subject.

  “How’s your sex life?” she asked. She was smirking. “Do you go a week without having sex with someone?”

  I shrugged.

  “Can you go two days without having sex with someone?”

  I wanted to ask her if she could go just one day without ingesting a mood-altering substance. It was true, I was afraid for her. But what I was really afraid of was losing her.

  College was fine. I studied. I was a good student and found my classes mildly interesting. I was particularly interested in two of my professors. One of them was a young professor who taught political science. She had thick brown hair and beautiful blue eyes. She didn’t try to be sexy or any of that. But I daydreamed of what it would be like to undress her. The other was a history professor, a man in his late thirties. He was handsome in a very intellectual way. He had dark eyes and wore very hip designer glasses. He sometimes didn’t shave for a few days and it made him look like he might be the kind of guy who liked to flirt with danger. He didn’t wear a wedding ring. There were two hundred students in his lecture class. I sat near the front of the class and made a list of the things I would have liked to do with him in bed.

  When I started school, I had applied for a student loan. I didn’t need it but I lied on the application. Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. My parents were deceased and I was on my own. I said nothing about my uncles and aunts and their income. Who would know? My uncles and aunts put money directly into my account. That money was to pay for my tuition and to live on. They were generous. I was their communal property. They had money and nothing much to spend it on. They didn’t want me to work. They wanted me to be a good student so I could move to Austin and make something of myself. I qualified for work study, worked twenty hours a week and put all the money away. There was a reason for this. I thought Carmen might be in trouble. I knew she was getting in deeper and deeper. I had this bad feeling. What if she needed my help? What was she going to do? Who would she turn to?

  I saved as much money as I could. Just in case.

  One night, I was lying in bed with a guy I’d met. His name was Rick and I liked him. We were actually having a conversation. I was wondering if maybe this would turn into something more than sex. My cell phone rang. It was Carmen. “I need you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I need to go home. I need to get home.” She was upset, and her voice was cracking and she sounded scared. “You have to come for me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Mesa Inn.”

  “What room?”

  She was standing outside her hotel room. I got out of the car and she fell into my arms. I held her. “Let’s get you home,” I said. She cried all the way back.

  When we got to her place, I gave her some hot tea. I put a blanket around her. She was trembling. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was going to get the story whether she wanted to tell me or not.

  We sat in the quiet of the room, not saying anything. Finally, her tears and trembling stopped and a kind of calmness washed over her. “Music?” she whispered, then smiled.

  I put on Billie Holiday, then changed my mind and put on Kurt Elling, her favorite jazz singer. I sat on the couch across from her as she sank into her leather chair. “I’d like a drink,” she said. I poured us both a glass of wine. I put hers on the coffee table, then leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  I sat down. “Talk,” I said.

  She reached for her wine. “I’m tired,” she said.

  “So am I. So talk today or talk tomorrow. I’m not going anywhere. Think I’ll spend the night.”

  “What? Afraid I’ll sneak out again?”

  “No, you don’t have wheels. Where’s your car?”

  “He took it.”

  “He?”

  “He tried to rape me.”

  “He?”

  “Okay,” she said. “There’s this guy. His name’s Freddy. Nice-looking guy. He’s a dealer. But he’s a user too. He scored some ice.”

  “Ice?”

  “Crystal meth.”

  “I’m listening.”

  She smiled at me. “You know, you just might make a good therapist.”

  I smiled back. “I’d rather pass a kidney stone.”

  She laughed. She seemed so herself at that moment. “What the fuck do you know about kidney stones?”

  “I had to take Uncle Louie to the hospital when he had them. He was writhing on the floor of the car as I drove to the emergency room.”

  “I think I would have liked to witness that.”

  “Don’t be mean.” We both smiled at each other.

  “So this sonofabitch Freddy. Well, we smoked. He taught me how to—”

  “Don’t need the details.”

  “Yeah, well, we got high. God, what a high. Euphoria. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced. So Freddy gets horny on this shit. Not that I wasn’t. But Freddy’s not for me. So he tries to rip off my clothes. And I push him away. But it doesn’t matter. So I grab my keys and he’s trying to keep me from opening the door. Lucky for me that Freddy’s five-six and weighs not too much over a hundred pounds. I belt him and I walk out into the parking lot. But I’m high, and even though I was a little scared, I still felt great. So Freddy follows me out, grabs my keys and takes off in my car. I don’t know what to do, but that stuff, I mean I felt like I could do anything, like I wanted to walk, just walk. So that’s what I did. And I was singing and I thought of calling Antonio and telling him to come over and maybe we could patch things up between us—and then I remembered my cell phone was in the hotel room and I didn’t have the key. But the room was in my name so I just went up to the desk and I got another key and walked back into the room. My cell phone was still there. So I was there, in the room, alone, just high. I called Antonio. He came by. We had sex. It was great. The high lasts so long.” She pulled her hair back. “But then, eventually, I came down. Antonio left. And I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, I found myself crying and shaking, and I don’t know, Conrad, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Finally I just said, “What’s Freddy’s number?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What’s his number?”

  She handed me her cell phone. I used mine instead of hers to call him. I knew he probably had her name in his phone and would refuse to answer. I heard his voice, “Yeah? You looking for something?” I took it he was used to getting phone calls from referrals.

  “I’ll tell you what. If you don’t return my sister’s car to the Mes
a Inn, I’m gonna call the fuckin’ cops. You got that, Freddy? If you don’t, your ass is gonna be in the fucking can. Twenty minutes, Mesa Inn.” I hung up the phone.

  “Trying to be my hero?”

  I nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  She didn’t say a word on the way back to the Mesa Inn. But finally, she said, “What makes you think he’ll be there?”

  “Because he’s not gonna take the chance. And you know what, I will call the cops if he’s not there. I fucking will, Carmen.”

  “What will you tell them?”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  “You should be afraid of guys like him, Conrad.”

  “So should you,” I said. “And besides, he’s five-six and a little over a hundred pounds. Isn’t that what you said?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m six-one and a hundred-and-eighty-five pounds.”

  When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw Carmen’s car. No one was in it. I opened the door and the keys were on the seat along with Carmen’s purse and a note that said, Bitch, you better keep away.

  I walked back to my car. “Can you drive?”

  She nodded.

  I drove her car back to her place. She drove mine.

  I handed her the note when we were back in her apartment. “Carmen,” I said. “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, it fucking scares me.”

  “Scared? You didn’t look too scared when you were on the phone with Freddy.”

  “Carmen, you don’t get it. I’m not scared for me. I’m scared for you.” I’m not much of a crier, but I was crying. I was sobbing actually. I felt her arms around me. “Shhh, baby,” she said. “Shhh.”

  I woke up at noon and found myself lying on Carmen’s couch. I walked into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. I heard the water running. Carmen was in the shower. I stared at the coffee dripping into the glass coffeepot. A scene ran through my head, my father sitting in the kitchen, pouring vodka into his coffee. He was pressing his finger to his lips and smiling at me, shhhhh. Scenes in my head and yet no real story. I realized I didn’t know if I loved or hated my father. It was as if he existed to be watched, but not to be known, not to be understood.