The minute my mother disappeared around the corner, though, Tony would drive around the other corner and park right in front of the school, in front of everybody, to pick me up in order to carry on with our naughtiness.
My man. (Or perhaps, as I came to understand it later: my pimp.)
“Dude, you gotta come skipping with me today,” he’d say.
“Nah, Tony; I gotta go back to class today,” I’d protest. “It’s Thursday and I haven’t been since last week.” Some days, it’d be the other way around; I wasn’t always the bottom. Plus, by this time I’d already been branded; Tony’s company alone was enough to telegraph my ethical slips to any administrator watching, so they’d regard my documentation with suspicion.
“Look, I got two signed reentry slips; I can get you back in tomorrow or next week. It’s not a problem,” he’d say. “I found a place to get killer weed, and it’s pickup day in Wood Hollow.”
Since we didn’t have jobs or an allowance, we had to figure out a way to finance our junkets, or “skiving” as J.K. Rowling calls it. Tony had figured out that the local grocery stores would pay back a deposit on those five-gallon plastic water bottles at six bucks a pop. He had the Oasis truck’s delivery routes and schedules memorized, and we knew escape routes out of every posh neighborhood that could afford to have water delivered.
This was actually a lot of fun, walking up to houses, hoisting the bottles over your shoulder, and walking back to the car, only to drive up a few streets and do it again, utterly without interference because no one was around to stop you, or would have stopped you, if you waved at them and smiled. They’d smile and wave back and continue with what they were doing. It never failed.
The challenge was to keep from giggling, stoned as we were, in our trousers and cheap dressy shirts with wet stains growing down the front or back.
There were instances, of course, when we’d be caught red-handed, when a door would open or a home owner would unexpectedly emerge from the hedge. Then we’d sprint away as Tony, self-serving coward and bastard that he was, would drive off and leave us to fend for ourselves.
“Arr, dude! They could get my license plate!” he’d laugh as we’d breathlessly catch up to the car, many blocks later, and curse him.
He always kept the lion’s share of the day’s activities. Very Dickens. Most of it would go into buying five or ten dollars’ worth of pot and some beer, but it would never even out. And no single dealer would ever sell to him regularly. No one really liked or trusted Tony, and with good reason.
So when he said he’d found some place to buy pot, and it wasn’t the morons who hung out by the tennis courts before school, well, I have to admit I was intrigued. Besides, he was a friend, unsalvageable pariah though he was. But these things could turn out badly, so I went; I wasn’t really keen to own up to a three days’ AWOL at school anyway.
We first drove to the housing project east of school, where a woman sold $2 quarts of Budweiser out of her living room from a cooler to anyone with money—no questions asked—and we bought a couple of quarts, then smoked the half joint Tony had on our way to his new “supplier.”
I was getting a bit high when I began to recognize the route he was taking and was then thoroughly taken aback when he drove into my maternal grandmother’s driveway. I couldn’t understand why he had driven here, was confused by the context. This was the same driveway my family Pontiac would regularly pull into after church on Sundays when we were growing up in the late 1970s—my mother’s mother’s house, in downtown Brownsville.
I was . . . I think the term is “unnerved.”
My two uncles, Johnny and Abel, were working on a ’79 Camaro when Tony drove up and parked, hood to hood, with their Camaro that morning.
I sat frozen in the passenger seat, uncertain what to do next.
The hood on the Camaro was up and they were both leaning into the guts of the engine when we drove up. Their heads popped up like bearded, biker prairie dogs to look at the new development. Tony, taking my noticeable start into account, told me to be cool, to chill out; these guys look mean but they’re all right.
“Anyway,” he said as he was getting out the door, “they’re kinda dumb but they got great weed.”
Didn’t I know it. Abel and Johnny had a long history with local biker gangs, even a rumored affiliation with the Hell’s Angels. They could get drugs nobody else could in this town, and as a result they were total burnouts hardly capable of cogent speech patterns in either English or Spanish, landing in jail as often as other people attended church.
Though what they lacked in brain they certainly made up in brawn. Not that they’d tear apart a citizen like Tony, or me, not in the daylight, anyway. They had a code about that sort of thing. But if they felt cheated, they’d take a tire iron to my head long before they would recognize me as their nephew, or that I’d been there the month before with my mother, their sister.
They were that burned out.
So I sit there, paralyzed, in the front seat, side B of Houses of the Holy playing on Tony’s mother’s cassette deck over the deafening blast of the air-conditioning, watching this terrifying pantomime play out before me.
Tony, half-shaven in his preppy clothes, closes the door and hails his greeting. Abel, already brain-dead from years of sniffing paint, narrows his eyes in suspicion at first and then noiselessly says, Heyyyyy, while opening his arms in a wide accepting gesture, drawing Tony into their fold. Johnny looks up from under the hood of the Camaro.
Next is the sly, silent exchange of the malefactor. Tony looks servile, trying to charm, averting his eyes, looking anywhere but directly at Abel in the eye for fear that Abel might charge, like a gorilla. Abel, suspicious and cautious, gives a sharp, quick upward jutting of the chin that says, Did I sell to you before? Who told you I got weed?
Tony lowers his head in quiet confidence, talks to Abel, then includes Johnny. Johnny nods his head, then motions toward me in the car with his chin. They all turn to look at me. My eyes wide. Big smile, nodding. Tony says something, and they all laugh. Led Zeppelin playing loudly in the car. Abel slaps Tony on the back and leads him around to the back of the car. Johnny looks at me and smiles, then forms his index finger and thumb into a mock roach smoke and laughs. Me mimicking him. Johnny still not recognizing me, even now. Tony and Abel come around the other side of the car, Tony’s hand in his pocket, both of them laughing, like they’re suddenly old friends.
Tony turns and waves; both Johnny and Abel wave back.
The door opens and Tony says, “Dude, we got a big joint for two bucks,” as he gets in the driver’s seat.
He puts the car in gear and we drive away. This has freaked me out to no end. Abel and Johnny are both waving, making the universal roach-smoking signal as we drive off, and it leaves me feeling really, really conflicted.
The car slips up the southernmost terminus of Highway 77 and we head north from urban Brownsville, just to drive around as we smoke the joint. Tony lights it and it starts burning purple. “Purple Haze!” he says, and then follows it with his characteristic “Aaaa!” Making the obvious pun doesn’t bother him. I’m concerned that the joint is burning purple. Abel and Johnny are not known for their temperance.
“Hey, man,” I say, “I’m kinda scared about smoking this. I’ve never seen one burn this color.”
“Argh, dude!” says Tony. “Don’t worry about it. Those guys got killer weed, man, they’re like bikers or something. It’s probably laced with something. That’s why it was two bucks.”
This idea sounds appealing to Tony. It freaks me out. We are both getting incredibly high.
“Hey, man,” says Tony. “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if like, when you were high, your hair went into like a huge orange Afro? And the higher you were, the bigger your Afro got? You couldn’t go anywhere because people would be, like, ‘Man! That guy’s stoned!’”
I am busy thinking about having just bought weed from my Uncles Johnny and Abel. Johnny had been stabbed in
the back with a flat-headed screwdriver about a month earlier in a street fight. His lung had been punctured, and my grandmother said you could hear whistling every time he inhaled. He wouldn’t go to the hospital to get it treated for three days.
We are halfway done with the joint when I realize we’re headed south again, having turned around somewhere.
“Hey, man,” I say to Tony, “I don’t want to get stoned anymore.”
“Arr, well, put it out,” says Tony. He is nodding his head back and forth to Zeppelin. Tony fancies himself a guitarist. His left hand is fingering chords into the neck of an imaginary guitar. I watch his fingers moving for a few seconds, suspended and twisting around there like an overturned king crab, and I can find no concurrence with the chords in the song.
“Man, I mean I don’t want to smoke pot anymore,” I say to him. “I don’t want to skip class anymore. I want to get back to school. Not today, but like, in general. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. Like I’m doing something bad. I feel like this all the time now. Dirty. Look at that really fucking small house over there.”
We’re on an overpass, and I notice a house beneath us in the Brownsville Country Club about a quarter of the size of the houses surrounding it.
Tony finds this segue in my announcement hysterical. He starts laughing so hard that I have to make him focus back on the driving, but then I laugh along with him.
“You’re stoned,” he tells me.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m way stoned.”
“Hey, man,” I say a little later. We’re driving back to South Padre Island now. “You know those guys we bought weed from earlier today?”
“The bikers?” he asks.
“That was my grandmother’s house, man. Those were my uncles,” I say, even though I am really embarrassed by it.
Tony finds this befuddling. He can’t figure out what the bikers were doing at my grandmother’s house. “Those dudes were my mom’s brothers, man. My uncles,” I explain.
Tony laughs so hard he has to pull over to the side of the road. His laughing is infectious, and I find myself laughing right along with him, laughing harder than I’ve laughed in a really, really long time, but I’m feeling utterly beyond redemption on the inside, like I’ve done something today that I can’t take back.
Like my course is now set.
Chapter 19
ROOM 124
When I was seventeen years old, I ran away to Juarez, Mexico, with about seven bucks in my pocket, five of which I had borrowed that Saturday afternoon from my retarded neighbor, Lupíta Chiquita.
No one noticed I had gone, and I don’t think I ever got around to paying her back.
My friend Karsten had a father who lived down there, outside of Juarez. Karsten was a tall dorky white kid with black hair, and he would make the three-hour trip to Juarez whenever he needed to swindle his reluctant father out of “tuition” money or whatever was immediately needed in Karsten’s shiftless teenaged life.
Karsten’s father owned the only Holiday Inn in Brownsville and had Karsten set up to live alone in room 124 while Karsten presumably attended St. Mary’s Catholic School. Room 124 was immediately next door to the industrial-size air conditioner and was unrentable because of the thrum and vibration of the overburdened machine.
Karsten was eighteen but was still in high school, when he went to school. When I met him, Karsten usually found a way to cash his tuition check and blow the money just hanging around doing anything but going to class, playing video games on a first generation Nintendo, drinking warm tequilas and Mexican rums with no chaser, and trying to have sex with unwilling girls.
He lived utterly without any adult interference. For food, the Holiday Inn kitchen was obliged to feed him two meals a day, and it produced some of the most offensive combinations of food known to humankind, but it kept him alive, though not at all grateful.
Down in Juarez, Karsten’s father—who was Cuban and not Mexican—had bought a large horse ranch and was busy accumulating the adjoining land that surrounded his. Karsten’s mother had left them when he was ten, and he never said why. I never thought to ask. Karsten was tall and dark haired and had sharp European features you didn’t see in the white people around that part of Texas. French, almost. He also had strange, cultured manners, nearly Victorian, especially when he was around girls.
His nearly civilized manners made Karsten very awkward and lonely in Brownsville, and he was desperate for female attention. He was a very odd, very tall boy.
Karsten drove a retired mid-1980s Ford cop car painted totally white with a factory cassette-playing radio that didn’t eat cassette tapes. This was a rarity among the cars driven by my friends during this time. Both the front and back seats of the car were a deep plastic blue, eternally gritty. There was a constant stratum of beer cans, newspapers, old cassette tapes, and food wrappers crumpling underfoot.
I don’t remember where Karsten said he was from, originally; I think somewhere out east, and he spoke no Spanish. He was in Brownsville because it was the closest thing to a “city” in the United States, and his father had wanted him educated in America.
Karsten, on the other hand, had other ideas, and he resisted his education at every turn without consequence, which was fantastic to me. He was eighteen years old and alone.
We had a lot in common.
On the night I’m first introduced to Karsten, I’m driving around with my friend Henry and his best friend, John. They are unrepentant potheads, tirelessly listening to anything recorded by Metallica and rhythmically “banging” their heads in slow motion as we drive around Brownsville and Los Fresnos and South Padre Island in utter boredom searching for some sort of underage deliverance or entertainment in Henry’s 1986 Mustang LX, with his portable CD player wired into the tape player and playing very loudly but prone to skipping. I’m in the backseat, cowering from the volume surrounding me. I’m not much of a stoner anymore, not like them. I like beer. It feels more honest to be drunk, somehow. We keep the beer at the feet of the front passenger side, and I keep bugging whoever isn’t driving for another.
“Turn the music down,” I yell from the backseat.
“Give me another beer,” I yell from the backseat.
“Roll up your fuckin’ window,” I yell from the backseat.
“Wah, wah, wah,” says Henry, in the passenger’s seat. He’s letting John drive his car. John is a minister’s kid and fits the stereotype perfectly. Except he isn’t a slutty girl, which would be much more interesting.
“You’re like a baby back there, always needing something,” from Henry.
“Turn the music down; I can’t hear what you said,” I yell from the backseat, purposely.
They start giggling. Henry hands me a beer. I crack it open and take a long draught from it and do the dook dook dook imitation of a baby suckling from its bottle of baby formula and they both start laughing hysterically when John loses control of the car.
We happen to be on the Queen Isabella Causeway, coming back from South Padre Island around eight at night and eighty-five feet in the air when the Mustang cuts across three lanes of traffic and he over-corrects and we’re inches from hitting the side of the bridge and dropping into ten feet of a very shallow bay. He cuts back again and miraculously the Mustang steadies itself at seventy miles per hour and we’re all knuckle-white and not breathing.
Metallica is still blaring even though the moment feels totally silent. For a few seconds, I feel their fear mingling with mine, our sense of death at that moment tangible. I feel Henry and John’s elevated perception like we’re three soldiers on a frontline getting shelled, waiting for the next shell to hit our foxhole, and everything has suddenly gone quiet under the audial blanket of the Metallica.
I lean forward through the bucket seats and yank the power cord from the CD player. “What the fuck was that, John?” I say. I am totally sober now, riding the adrenaline into a rage.
“Nothing, man; it’s cool,” he says, attempting a g
iggle, continuing to drive.
“No, it’s not, man,” says Henry. “You almost lost it there. That’s not cool.”
“No, I didn’t,” says John. “I was totally in control.”
“You were not in control,” I say, now screaming like George C. Scott. I’m furious.
John has nearly managed to drive Henry’s car over the side of the only elevated bridge in five hundred miles, and I want to throttle him.
“You were not in control and you very fucking nearly killed all of us, you stupid piece of shit! Pull over in Port Isabel and let Henry drive,” I demand loudly, pointing my finger in the rear view mirror, trying to look him in the eye.
Henry is quiet. Henry is rarely quiet. Henry is small, lean and a great kid, but he’s not quiet. A soccer player. From way back. One of my favorite people during this time of my life. Henry has a future, will eventually move to Austin and marry this girl he loves, Carla. She gave him his first blow job. He was so happy about that. This is his car, so he’s captain.
“Hey, man,” says John. “Just chill out, all right? I mean, I didn’t do it on purpose, but, like, the car handled cool and I was all right and I had it together, you know? I mean, it’s not like anything happened, right?”
“Just shut up right now and at the next stop, you’re pulling over,” I say. The bridge is over two miles long and we’re coming into Port Isabel, a speed trap of a fishing town, like a pilot fish on the revenue-generating shark that is South Padre Island.
“Hey, you’re not, like, the owner of the car, all right?” says John. “Right, Henry? He can’t tell me what to do.”
“You fucked up, John!” I yell. “You lost control of the fucking car and you almost fucking killed us!” I’m really mad. “Admit it. Just fucking admit it, John.”
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