Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

  It starts to become important that he admits it.

  “No,” he says. “I didn’t. I mean —”

  This is where Henry loses it. “John, you lost control of the car, John. Admit it,” he says, the rise in his voice noticeable.

  “No, I —”

  “Admit it!” I say. Suddenly, it becomes very, very important that the idiot owns up to it.

  “No, I —”

  Henry: “Admit it, John.”

  John: “Nah, man, I —”

  Me: “John, admit it!”

  Henry: “Yeah, John: Admit it.”

  John: “Dude, I —”

  Henry: “Pull the fucking car over!”

  This surprises the both of us; we’ve never seen Henry this mad. We’re all startled at the outburst, I think even Henry. John instantly obeys, and he pulls into a restaurant parking lot right off the bridge.

  We all exit the car in the empty parking lot, and John leaves it running. We do a sort of fire drill. He’s a skinny kid at seventeen, John, with stringy blonde hair and an army jacket. I don’t remember what I’m wearing but it can’t be much. Cotton T-shirt with THE CURE on it and jeans and a pair of cheap British Knights, usually, at that age. Henry and John cross paths at the back of the car and when he’s coming by me John says something to the effect of . . . “Hey man, I had control of the car . . . ” and I attack him, swinging hard. I have the full can of Budweiser in my right hand and I smash it to his head, and it explodes on his head like a beer grenade, showering the three of us in the choicest hops and barley. I hit him so unexpectedly he jerks himself against the side of the car. I don’t really know how to fight at this point and I also know this isn’t right but I’m so mad I’m swinging at him, left right left right. He crumples, and I start to kick at him and I accidentally kick Henry’s car, at which point Henry runs around and pushes me away from John, who is now on the ground covering his head, and when Henry pushes me away, John straightens up and punches me over Henry’s shoulder, pops me square on the cheek. I push Henry aside and rush at John, ducking my head and I put my shoulder under his sternum like I’ve learned after hundreds of hours of football practice, and I shove him against the car and start punching him in the neck and face with my right hand over my head. John gets in a couple of weak, undercut punches in defense, until Henry grabs me by the waist and swings me around and throws me onto the ground.

  I’m livid like I’ve never been in my life but I stop; I sit. Seventeen years I’ve lived my life in this outpost, alone, isolated and with an eroding sense of wonder about America at large. I can dream of nothing but getting out of here and exploring the rest of the country, watching leaves turn color and following the winter; I want out of this shit hole of a border town at the bottom of Texas, out of this racist, ignorant, locus-eating, lower Texas toxic hell pit. I’ve endured my father, my grandmother, years of pathetic education, beatings, berations, concentrations of shame, and this heat most hellish. All I have to do is graduate high school in a few weeks and I can leave, I’ve been told. And I have listened. I don’t care what the means are. The military, a bus ticket, this “college” thing other people talked about, stowing away—I just want out. Out of here. Away from people like John. And he almost took that away from me tonight, on that bridge.

  My mouth is salty and bloodied, and his eye is swelling from where I hit him with the Budweiser. “Just admit it, you stupid fucker,” I say and spit.

  Henry tries to temper the moment. “Just be quiet. Just stop it,” he says to me, holding John against the car. John’s body language is not in the least bit threatening. It is mostly that of a liar, uncertain how to lie next. I am sitting on the ground, disgusted.

  “John, just admit you lost control of the fucking car and let’s go,” Henry says.

  John looks down at me, his eyes wide. He’s not sure why I’m as angry I am. John understands anger, lives with it from his Baptist-revival fire-eating preacher father, but there’s usually some sort of Yahweh logic and a way to get out of it. He doesn’t know how to get out of this one, obvious as it is. He’s scared at the density of my rage and does not know how to dilute or lie his way out of it. He’s frightened of me, even though we’re exactly the same sort of weak, wiry, and he could probably get the better of me next time.

  Both Henry and I are feeding him the line out. But it’s too obvious for John, too clear. Too honest, for the son of a Baptist.

  “Alright, man,” he says finally. “I lost control of the car. I fucked up. We almost went over the side.”

  I know he doesn’t actually believe it, understand what it means.

  But it calms me down. I stand up, knock the gravel from my palms and my thinly denimed knees.

  John says, “I’m sorry, man.”

  I say, “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I hit you with the beer.” I don’t mean it. If I was sorry, writing from this distance so many years later, it’s for the loss of that beer. Beer was hard to come by back then.

  “Me, too,” he says, and we shake hands limply.

  We get in the car, with Henry driving and John in the back seat, me in the front. We get on the dark highway back to Brownsville and after a while, I crack open a sweaty beer and then hand one to John. Before we drink, independent of one another we each put the cold can to our respective faces, him to his eye and me to my mouth, to knock down the swelling, but it’s mostly because we’d seen it done in the movies.

  Henry doesn’t play anything on his CD player with the tape extension.

  We’re approaching Brownsville from the rear when John remembers somewhere we can go.

  “Hey, man,” he says. “My friend Val knows this dude, Karsten, who lives in the Holiday Inn. No shit. We can swing by and see if anything’s up there. It’s still early.” It was just after ten o’clock.

  The idea neutralizes the tension in the car. For a full thirty minutes no one says anything while Henry drives us along the dark salt land that separates Port Isabel from Brownsville, where the Mexicans and the US fought the first battle of the US-Mexican War, on Palo Alto. Teenage ghosts gliding on a salt highway.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” says Henry. “The Holiday Inn over by the expressway?” he asks.

  “Is there another Holiday Inn in Brownsville?” I answer, genuinely curious.

  In the Holiday Inn parking lot, John spots Val’s car. I know this Val of whom he speaks. He is ordinary Brownsville fare, like bistek ranchero, popular on every menu. (A corruption of beefsteak, did you know? Fascinating.)

  Valentín sits next to me in some classes because our surnames begin with an “M” and he is partial to saying, “Shit yeah, dude” to any question that requires a response in the affirmative. He wears a long black army trench coat in 100 degree heat, because he thinks it looks cool. He has a round pale moon face, dark hair, and flabby build. He eventually fell in love with the first girl that had sex with him at a graduation party, though he didn’t graduate with his class. His mother took out a quarter page ad in the annual, saying, “Maybe next year, Val!” Ever the optimist, his mother.

  John and I gingerly remove ourselves from Henry’s car and bring what’s left of the twelve-pack of Budweiser, neither of us looking at each other. We walk to the back of the Holiday Inn, by the big air conditioner, and find Room 124. There’s music coming from inside, something radio pop and terrible, like Gloria Estefan. John bangs on the door loudly, disrespectfully. After a few seconds, it opens and reveals an odd little spectacle. Val, recognizable in his black trench coat, opens the door and leans in the doorframe, seemingly territorial.

  Behind him is a curious scene. There’s two twin beds unmade and rumpled, a bolted hotel television on a horribly littered dresser with Mario Bros. playing on it. It is the total catastrophe of a teenage boy’s bedroom unveiled, except inside a regular Holiday Inn unit. The wet moldy cold of South Texas air-conditioning valiantly expending itself hits us in the face like a prop blast, and we all stand there for a brain-beat, taking each othe
r in.

  Thinking about it now, remembering that moment, I think I miss it, or moments like it. Because they get less frequent as you get older, don’t they? The opportunity presenting itself so clearly. The escape unfolding itself before you. It just needs a bit of help to take form, needs someone to nudge it into focus. Because here, clearly, was God talking to me, this night we almost died.

  Val, at the door, clearly thinks he is in charge.

  Inside, there’s a guy I do not recognize, a small tubby Mexican guy, sitting on one bed, and two fat Mexican girls sitting opposite him on the other with the bedside table between them. Both beds have their bedclothes bundled at either end, and the Mexican girls are drunk and leaning into their pile, laughing and whooping it up. Tubby Mexican guy thinks he’s got a chance tonight. There’s a stereo still playing something terrible near them, now discernable: Paula Abdul. The girls and the tubby guy are laughing, taking shots of cheap white rum and not registering us in the doorway. Playing a drinking game. Quarters, it looks like. I take all this in as I enter the room behind John, who immediately takes Val over to the bathroom to talk, probably about me.

  At the foot of the bed closest to the bathroom sits a tall guy with a comforter wrapped over his head like a nun’s habit, forcibly staring at the game on the TV. Val and John had to step over him to get to the bathroom, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch. He’s a white guy, looking a lot like David Schwimmer will look like in Friends some years from now, but thinner. He’s playing Nintendo, which, at the time, is the hottest thing around. Mario Bros., a fairly high level, from the looks of it. He’s ferociously ignoring what’s going on around him, concentrating on the video game in full seethe. Resolved in keeping the people around him, who are obviously using him, foreign to him, away from him.

  I love him, right then, somehow.

  Several years from this moment, I’ll be visiting a zoo in Seattle because my mind is coming apart at the seams and my then-girlfriend Rebecca and I think that maybe a stroll around the zoo, around controlled nature, might help with the panic attacks I’ve been having. My anxieties have become unhinged, and I’ve been experiencing these periodic bouts of terror, especially when I’m trying to sleep.

  It did not actually help, the zoo.

  But it did remind me of something, when we got to the monkey house.

  The chief orangutan sat square in the middle of the display, on a hammock, holding a potato sack over his head like a nun’s habit, and he tried to keep the constant stream of fat families and crying children in strollers away, tried to get some peace, some privacy, by hiding under that potato sack, and I saw that he desperately needed to be rescued, and he looked me in the eye, and we both held the stare, and I totally remembered this moment, from before. Room 124.

  It put me back to that night, when I met Karsten, playing his little video game and forcibly ignoring the terrible human beings around him, in his own monkey house, and I thought I could rescue him. I would rescue Karsten from these people. Though, thinking about it now, maybe it was the other way around. That I was looking in the universal mirror in the reverse.

  He would rescue me from being on the roads, the predatory roads of Texas, by sharing his loneliness, his autonomy, and giving me access to Room 124, when he wasn’t there, which was often. And I would introduce him to better people.

  We would rescue each other.

  Karsten was the first person I ever met who was truly elitist, or maybe classist. I liked him right away. He saw himself as an intellectual, and apparently the drunken soul-searching conversations in which my small circle of friends would engage seemed to pass for intellect.

  I introduced him to my friend Chris, another relic of the crowd that skipped with Tony and one of the stained myrmidons like myself who no longer held any credibility with teacher or administrator as to why we were not in school (too many dead grandmothers), and whose ethical slips could be marked by the resin stained fingertips and boozy ten in the morning hiccups.

  Chris was literarily inclined, however, considered himself a poet and had adopted a middle name of “Hill.” He insisted that it had been given him at birth, but I suspected otherwise, until I met his father, who was of hippie age, and then it made sense. (I’ve always had an innate distrust and irrational hatred of people who rename themselves. Seriously—if I dealt with “Domingo,” then you can live with “Juan.”)

  Chris rarely spoke of this, but he had lost a younger brother, a toddler, who had been killed by a car, and the few times when he did mention it, I was too insensitive to realize what sort of hurt something like that could bring to a family, and wasn’t it any wonder that his parents divorced—what marriage really survives the death of a child? I personally only know of one, and what a toxic marriage that was—and his friendship is one I regret never having attended to more, understanding him more than I did, being a better friend. But there would be many more of these regrets to follow in my life.

  With him and Karsten, we’d talk about books and authors and music that wasn’t popular (or popular in Brownsville, Texas) and foreign films that became less foreign as we became developing cineastes, limited as the availability of good art films were to us.

  But all of this was bosch, remember; we were teenagers in rural Texas with no map, no compass, nothing: just an underdeveloped instinct to guide us.

  We were drawn to art, but art was nowhere to be found in Brownsville. If there was, we did not possess the right kind of vision to see it. There was nothing beautiful in Brownsville, Texas, we felt. And we would talk about that often.

  That’s what forged our friendship.

  After one long, quiet sober Friday night spent driving around in Karsten’s car, avoiding my house because Dad had come back from one of his trucking trips and had been lately unbearable, I finally relented and had Karsten drop me off at home late, because I was starving, though there was nothing to eat there anyway, except a large bag of Doritos. The house was dark, empty. Dad had already gone out, and Mom was still at work. Derek was probably over at Gramma’s, miserably watching Mexican cartoons he couldn’t understand.

  As he left, Karsten leaned out the window and asked if I wanted to go down to Juarez with him the next day. Said he’d already invited Chris, who was in. I said, “Sure: I’m in.” I always wanted to see what Mexico really looked like. Besides, it was what Mark Twain would have done.

  The next day, Karsten picked me up around eleven o’clock. Mom had already gone off to work, Dad was in absentia and I think Derek was ... I can’t say I remember. But I had about $2 on me and knew I needed a little more, even in Mexico. I had tapped Gramma as a resource and she was always very reluctant to let go of $5, and I tried to disperse those terrible humiliations to a monthly minimum, so she was out of the question. A last resort? Gramma’s cousins, our buggering neighbors to the west, the Guadalúpe Ramirezes. Joe’s mother and company. I sucked up what humility I had and posed a very earnest argument (I forget what it was, but I remember it was slick), and I got $5 from it, from Joe’s retarded older sister, Lupíta Chiquita. (Hunh. That’s Spanish for “little Lupíta.” I just got that, typing it here. Meaning she was named “Guadalúpe” as well. So there were three people with a first name of “Guadalúpe” living there: her mother, father, and her. Mail call must have been very confusing.)

  So when Karsten pulls up, I’m ready to go, dressed in my usual jeans, THE CURE concert T-shirt, a camouflage outer shirt in case it got cold (never did), and loud white British Knights (not my choice; sale at JC Penney).

  Chris is there, and we pool our cash together, and we have about a sawbuck each. No overnight bag, no change of clothes, nothing. But, Mexico: Here we come.

  Karsten’s car is something that should be explored at this point. As mentioned, it was a retired police cruiser, white with the blue plastic interior, and Karsten could not care less about its maintenance. Often he’d slam it into park before even coming to a complete stop. Other times he’d have no consternation rounding ano
ther car by actually going up on the sidewalk and then coming back down hard on the road, bending a part of his bumper upward. He didn’t intend on destroying it or putting himself or others in danger while driving, but he was a typical teenager, though he looked thirty already. He’d be distracted in the middle of making a turn, and then turn too far, then overcorrect, and enter a street on the wrong side. Or he’d become frustrated and drive on the shoulder at top speed to get around a traffic jam. He never sped or swerved for the sake of the thrill, but his ordinary driving skills were enough to keep Darwin guessing: Someone was going to get eliminated. Either him or someone else.

  If you remember, I had a thing about irresponsible drivers. Ever since I was an adolescent, I was convinced that I was going to die in a car wreck in Brownsville, before I could get to a city where I didn’t have to depend on a vehicle and could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Every year in Brownsville there was a natural culling of teenagers at every high school, an average of about five to ten students dying from vehicular accidents. Drunk driving, irresponsible driving, the usual stuff. The highway connecting South Padre Island and Brownsville at the time turned into a two lane death trap about midway in the salt marsh during spring break, when easily 90 percent of all drivers were officially DUI. It was just understood. Friends, football associates, people you knew by sight, we all dropped like flies. I had grown so terrified that I would die in a traffic accident, I had taken to pulling over on the side of roads and counting to one hundred, even if I was late somewhere, so that I could cheat the fates, not be there for the moment of the impact for which I was destined.

  Anyhow, the combination of Karsten’s kamikaze driving and the notoriously lacking Mexican driving “system” doesn’t occur to me until we’re well away from Matamoros and driving dusty urethra-thin back highways headed south to Juarez, and I am catatonic with fear in the backseat. Karsten is gunning his engine around festively decorated pink and blue buses, sombreroed men on mules, and decrepit farm trucks with no operating lights or brakes (all looking far too familiar).