No other evidence was needed at this time than the afternoon that Dad called home from one of his road trips, and I happened to answer. His voice was desperate, frightened. He was calling from Detroit.
“June? Aye, Junior! Aye míjo sánto!” he said. (“My holy son!”)
I was already bored, trying to get off the phone. “Yeah?”
He began to tell me this story, how he was just released from a hospital in Detroit, and he was finally able to call from the trucking office because he’d been in the hospital for three days, and he couldn’t figure out where he was in this fucking Detroit.
He said he’d bought a box of chicken wings from a KFC near his drop point, and after he had eaten them, he had started to get really sick, and the next thing he knew, he was convulsing and vomiting, fell out of the cab of his truck to the ground—which is a pretty hard fall—and as he was lying there, wretching and convulsing, trying to call for help, the first person to come over to help was a stringy black guy (I won’t use the word dad used, even in Spanish) who took his wallet while Dad lay there defenseless.
Dad, horribly poisoned, was prodded by the Detroit police, and he managed to explain in limited English who he was and what had happened by pointing at the cab of his truck. They understood, ambo’d him off to a hospital where he had his stomach pumped and was allowed to recover for two days in an alien, inner-urban American environment. Dad had been terrified.
And when he called, he was desperate for a bit of home, the warmth of something familiar, and it just wasn’t me anymore; I was unrelenting, as alien now as the hospital had been.
I said Mom wasn’t there, to try her at the JC Penney, where she spent most of her time now, working. I remember almost consciously making the decision to keep from being comforting, a sort of “Take that, you fucker,” response.
Dad, however, did not sound hurt, or that he was in any way dissatisfied with my response. His voice was thankful, hopeful, when he blessed me over and over again in Spanish for simply answering the phone, and then he hung up and tried his disappearing wife at her job.
I hung up and went back to my usual moping, not thinking about that episode again until that night in Segis’s driveway.
“Can you imagine how fuckin’ scared he must have been?” I said to no one in particular.
“Who?” asked Arnold, who fit the bill perfectly, as no one in particular.
“My dad, man. Being sick like that, falling out of his truck.”
“Your dad?” asked Segis, not tracking and not sober.
“Yeah, in Detroit. He got food poisoning and was so sick, he fell out of the truck,” I explained, the gravity of the moment finally dawning on me, just how scared Dad must have been.
“While he was driving?!” asked Arnold, incredulous. And he was sober, hardly every drank.
“No, you idiot fuck, at the KFC. In the parking lot. He got food poisoning and ended up in a hospital. He could hardly speak English, and his wallet got stolen by some crack head. They thought he was drunk and were gonna arrest him first, and they treated him like he was a drunk illegal.”
“Fuck,” said Segis.
“Yeah,” and here I started choking up. “And when he called home, man, I was a total prick and didn’t . . . you know . . . I wasn’t nice to him. I was a dick,” I said, sobbing. “He was trying to tell someone at home what had happened to him, just trying to get some comfort, and I was a total dick.”
“Man,” said Segis. “You’re a dick!” and he started laughing.
“Fuck this,” I said, and walked off into the night, making my way home.
Now, this might sound revisionist, or like absolute drivel, because it is, but a large part of my behavior that night came as a result of the fact that I was—in Texan terms—within walking distance from home. I was only about three or four miles from the house on Oklahoma Avenue.
Remember: In Texas everyone has a car and a car is necessary. In Texas you’re consistently ten to thirty miles between everywhere you are and where you want or need to be—school, home, work, friends’ houses, etc. I knew a family who had a Hyundai just to get to their bathroom. It’s a big fucking place, covers more square miles than France. Look it up.
Segis’s house was relatively close to our house, less than five miles. I could do that tonight, I thought, walking. I felt no obligation to anyone. I felt like I was in Manhattan.
More to the point, I felt I was no longer accountable to—or held hostage by—the people who held the keys. Which is, of course, terribly unfair to them, to Segis, who was always good to drive.
Segis was lonely, felt misunderstood by everyone, but especially his family. He believed himself to be an artist, a musician, an iconoclast of legendary scope. At some very fundamental level, he really believed himself to have the heart of a visionary, someone defiant and revolutionary, but he had very little chance to explore that, growing up how and where he did.
He felt he had large, universally important ideas, but he possessed very limited communication skills, and his ideas were painfully simple, but that did not keep him from attempting to write meaningful verse, and poetry. Lyrics to make you think, man. About the earth, man. And “society,” man.
On top of it all, he had incredibly limited musical tastes, for a musician. He listened to very little else that was not mediated through the local classic rock stations. I felt bad for him; no one took him seriously, except maybe his girlfriend du jour. Still, he was my friend. What are you gonna do?
Anyhow, so I stomped off.
I remember I was actually excited to walk home, through the booze haze. Seriously. This was as metropolitan as I’d felt up to then. Thing was, between Segis’s house and mine was El Jardin Elementary School.
Now, if you recall from back in chapter five, El Jardin was really quite the Garden of Eden for me, as a child. A garden of promise, of the best feelings I’d ever felt as a human being, from kindergarten to the fourth grade.
It was blissful there, nothing but fond memories. And to be this close to it now, as a tortured teenager with his options closing down around him, not to mention the sense of betrayal I had felt when I had been gerrymandered out of attending that place with the other English-speaking, upwardly mobile children of promise—well, there just wasn’t going to be a civilized outcome.
And here it came: I scaled a ten-foot gate—the same one my older brother Dan had impaled himself on, by the beef of his bicep, which was sizeable, even as a kid, during football practice, the scar still evident even today—and I leaped down on the inside of the abandoned school like a very drunken Spiderman. Or Venom, his evil alter ego.
I made my way to the wing that I had remembered to be mine, when I attended school here, and instead of the dark, 1940s brick building that had been there—possibly the only thing in Brownsville that had any sort of antiquity—I instead found those cheap, awful squat one-room buildings that the government likes to hand out to overburdened schools. Change had come to my idyll, and this infuriated me further.
I picked up a dislodged concrete block and shoved it through the shatterproof fiberglass window of the nearest building, and it just sort of “spelunked” into the room, the fiberglass unsurprisingly adhered to the aluminum framing simply with glue. I could have foregone the ambition of hostility and just pushed it through.
Not to be deterred in my rage fantasy, I hoisted myself up and in, and—weak from the intoxication—tumbled inside, then I risked turning on the light.
It was a beautiful room, with Lilliputian desks, children’s things left behind as if in an archaeological find, frozen in time, colorful, lovely, full of promise. Full of everything I was missing now.
So I set to destroy it, starting with the teacher’s desk. I raged. I sullied. I shattered. I destroyed. I uglied.
But I did not defile, I felt. There was still love in what I was doing there. Because I was trying to get this school’s attention again. Like I needed a parent’s attention again.
Eventuall
y I turned off the light and I sat down on the stoop, holding a tiny sweater from one of the kid’s desks I had thrown at the chalkboard, which had shattered, the place in pieces behind me in the dark. I sat and I whimpered quietly to myself, thinking that I didn’t have any more energy for the walk home. And then I heard sirens.
And then I booked it to the playing fields to the rear of the school, the alcohol thinning my blood so much that by the time I found a divot to hole up in from about one hundred yards away, in the dark of the football field, I was about to faint or throw up, panting horribly in the muggy night.
I slid into what was basically a ditch and kept down, using the kid’s sweater to keep my face from getting wet, and I sat there watching for the cops.
No one came. The sirens died away, and still I lay there, unsure of what to do next.
Eventually, I grew colder and bolder and wetter and decided it was time to risk walking home again, and I got up, crossed the field, left the school by climbing back over another fence—this one far more unexposed—and started walking toward the main road, Boca Chica, which is when I saw it. A telephone booth. It was like the TARDIS, in Dr. Who.
It just appeared magically.
It had not been there six hours before.
It appeared sometime after dark, out of nowhere, at a crossroads between Segis’s house and mine, a meeting place of two farm roads that went from nowhere to nowhere else. Our neighborhood was developing, apparently. Enough to warrant a full-standing, enclosable telephone booth, the sort that Superman would change in, in the middle of fucking nowhere.
Now, this made my mind tilt. I walked around it, the kid’s dampened sweater still in my hand. I was like the neo-hominids in 2001, walking around the monolith, circling, circling.
I could use this, I thought. But how?
Then I had an idea. I would blame someone else for what I did. Someone imaginary.
Fucking brilliant, I was. I dialed 911.
This is a rough but fairly accurate recreation of what followed:
911 Operator: “What’s your emergency?” (The voice is young, fey.)
“Hi, uh, hello: I’d like to, uh, report a crime.”
“Yes, sir. What kind of crime?”
“Um, a break in. At like, the school.”
“What school, sir?”
“Un, the, uh, El Jardin Elementary School. Right by here, by this phone. It was kids. On skateboards. They were throwing rocks. They threw rocks at me. But they broke in.”
“They threw rocks at you, sir?”
“Yeah, yeah. They threw rocks at me. And they broke into the school. I heard them talking about it. They were all like, ‘Yeah, bro! We really trashed that school room!’”
“They damaged the school, sir?”
“Yeah! I saw them! And they were skating! And they were talking about it!”
“Where is the school, sir?”
“It’s right here, on Boca Chica, man! It’s El Jardin! You know El Jardin. Everyone knows El Jardin. It’s a great place. If you get here quick, I bet you can catch them. They just left on Vermillion Road.”
Now, this whole time, the voice on the other end sounds amused, playing at being thick, like he was playing a game. And he was: He was keeping me on the line until a sheriff’s deputy rolled up next to the telephone booth and parked, turning on its lights.
“Oh, never mind!” I said. “There’s a cop here now; I’ll tell him. Good-bye!”
I hung up the phone and proceeded to tell my imagined story about the skateboarders (I always disliked skateboarders, quite possibly because I was jealous of their access to pavement) to the deputy, who, weighing nearly as much as a small moon, had by now managed to laboriously extract himself from the driver’s side of the cruiser with tremendous difficulty.
He was wordless as he lightly touched my shoulder and moved me to the hood of his cruiser as I kept describing the imaginary skateboarders and pointing into the direction I had now convinced myself they’d run, and he slowly insisted I splay out my arms and legs and I do, totally unrecognizing what was actually happening as he patted down my waist and legs, my thin shirt, and that’s all, as the purloined sweater had thankfully been left in the phone booth, on the phone. He grabbed at my right wrist and swung it back, and I think suddenly, Whoah, this fat fucker’s arresting me.
“Whoah,” I said, “Are you arresting me?”
When he spoke, it was slow and musical, full of the lilting pidgin elocution of the border. Sounded exactly like Pedro, from Napoleon Dynamite. (Hated that movie.)
“Please watch your head, sir,” he said.
Still it didn’t dawn on me that I was being arrested.
I was compliant and stepped happily into the back of the sheriff’s cruiser. I was chatty, happy to have someone new to talk to, all the way to the Justice Center in downtown Brownsville.
“Hey, did you read about that boy last week in the detention center who was killed? The guards who sat on him? And they broke his neck because he was being loud? Did you read that? I wrote that story! I wrote it. I work for the Brownsville Herald!”
This was actually embellishment. I didn’t actually “work” for the Herald; I was a stringer. I wrote stories through a program where high school students could contribute their raw material for about $5 an hour, and in return the publication got some local color and the kids got stuff for their portfolio. For me, I was pretty good, so I had been taken under the wing of one of their chief reporters, Basilio, one of the people who would help define my life. Basilio was a 1960s brown-proud radical from Colorado, very aware and in possession of an incredible command of language, had really impressive diction. And a nuclear reactor of hatred, both of self and in general, I would later see.
Anyhow, I was under Basilio’s spell and this episode would unknowingly make him much more fond of me. (He bought me my first copy of The Great Shark Hunt.)
The deputy, however, was unimpressed. He was obviously someone’s morbidly obese cousin who could be doing little else, if he wasn’t “doing law enforcement.” He drove us to the Justice Center, and I still didn’t understand what was happening, where I was.
It was when the cruiser entered a garage and the door closed behind me that I finally understood I was in real trouble.
The fat deputy managed to extract himself much more quickly this time, probably because he was in front of his peers, and he opened my door. I was suddenly surrounded by uniformed boys and one or two men with clipboards, looking simple, methodical, and bored, with an older man in his sixties watching from a bench a few feet away and smoking a cigarette. I found myself wondering about him fleetingly when suddenly, from the only door leading into the building, this wispy, fey Mexican boy erupted in laughter, hung on the doorknob, and said, “Is that him?! The drunk guy? Ha, ha! I kept him on the phone for you guys! Ha! Good night!” and, laughing further, went back to his business of answering 911 calls on a slow New Year’s Eve. All in a night’s work. Personally, I was starting to panic, realizing I was at the mercy of these government-funded Aztecs.
I was stripped down to my underwear and processed by the two bored Mexican kids with the clipboards, and when it came time for the cavity search, I cried foul murder. In no way was I going to allow these people access to my most private of places. I was suddenly in spitting, fighting posture. They will have to kill me, I was thinking.
And then, the second I started resisting, the whole processing group wordlessly flipped closed their clipboards, grabbed their gear and filed out, as if this had been expected, leaving me alone with the old man on the bench.
He was weathered and grandfatherly, reminding me very much of the old man on Karsten’s farm, the horse keeper. He had sat there through the operation, observing the intake ceremony quietly, smoking a cigarette, and when I started to make a fuss because they were expecting me to drop trou and “spread them,” it was his turn to do his job. The other men shuffled off, leaving us alone in the dark garage.
“Domíngo, Dom�
�ngo,” he said to me in a calming tone, in Spanish. “Pónte tranquílo.” (“Stay calm.”) “Necesítamos hacer esto.” (“We need to do this. It has to be done.”)
I understood what he was saying. This was my second chance at doing this calmly. It would get rougher if I refused again. His reassurance, which I don’t think was feigned, was in fact rather calming. There was something in his manner that neutralized the invasion of the impending cavity search, much like he was a veterinarian and I was cattle. It felt almost impersonal at that point. Like he was a drunk teenage whisperer.
I was calmed into courage, and I told the man, in Spanish, to be looking because I was going to do it, but it was going to be quick. He said, “Great.” So I said, “OK, here goes,” and before I finished saying it, I was done: down, turn, spread, and yanked back up went the Y-fronts.
“You see?” he said. “Nothing to it.”
I was allowed to dress and was led through the little fey boy’s door by the troop of silent clipboarded Aztecs, who’d watched all this from the other side of the garage, smoking borrowed cigarettes. The old man chuckled to himself behind me, shaking his head slowly as I turned and waved.
I was ushered into a newer, office like area with two large women in their late thirties and a guy about twenty, to finish my paperwork. It was their job to process me further and account for my belongings, flimsy as they were.
My outfit that night was my usual wardrobe: a thin concert T-shirt, a pair of denim trousers or shorts, and my oversize, untied stinking British Knights. I was never much into jewelry, but I was wearing a Swatch I had stolen from one of my sisters and a cheap lead pendant that my Gramma had recently given me. It was on a cheap metal chain, and the pendant was large and round, fit the center of my palm perfectly, and it had an image of St. Francis on it, with a prayer inscribed on the back. It was worthless, like everything else I owned, but it was mine.
So when I was instructed to hand it over, I finally revolted. I started arguing. I was finally scared—remembering the story I had helped Basilio write about the illegal Mexican boy with the broken neck that the jailers were trying to cover up because he was sat upon by a large jailer when the kid started making a fuss—and I had already begun making a fuss. I didn’t belong here.
Boy Kings of Texas Page 21