If Dad had a conscience, it was only this topic that gave him pause, made him want to relieve himself of it. Not the guilt, mind you, but the conscience itself. Dad wanted the relief of conscience, not the burden of guilt. To him, those were two very separate things.
“Denny, you know that I fuck a lot of women, Denny,” Dad admitted to Dan. This wasn’t news to anyone.
“¡Peró no póngo nada en la ríata!” he says. (“But I never cover my cock.”)
“And your mother is going to get all those tests, Denny. What if I have the AIDS, Denny? What if I gave her something, Denny? What am I going to do?”
“You mean for mom?” Dan asked, not sure he was tracking what Dad was saying.
“¡N’ombre! For me! I don’t want to know if I have the AIDS!” Dad replied, and then thinking about it a minute, added “ . . . Peró para ella, tambíen.” (“But, yeah; for her, too.”)
Dan was disgusted and hung up on Dad after cursing him for his selfishness, and Dad later confessed to me that he was confused, unsure as to why Dan had a reaction like “ . . . a little girl” about man things, after Dad had so clearly prefaced that the conversation they would be having would be between men about the things men do.
Personally, it was getting time for the long drive back home, and on my last night in Seattle (that first time), I put on my best jeans, shined my combat boots, borrowed a shirt from Dan, and wore a light jacket as I made my way down to Karis’s work and waited for two hours until the dinner cruise docked down on the waterfront. When we finally had a moment alone, I gave her a bouquet of flowers I’d bought at a grocery store and a lengthy letter I’d written. We went to a diner and sat while she smoked and we talked. We said good-bye, and I promised her that she’d see me again. Then I ran off into the cold, clear night, the first time I’d been in that part of Seattle, just a twenty-minute bus ride from the neighborhood in which I lived and worked, but had been frightened to leave because I was scared I’d get lost.
A year spent on South Padre Island did little to offset the heartache I woke up with every day, and served mostly to make my fantasy of the girl more richly detailed, if utterly absent of reality. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the spoils of vacationing young tourists who dotted the afternoons and evenings on the Island. Wounds fare better when licked with others, I found. But it wasn’t the sort of “free-love” market one might imagine here; I think I mentioned that during spring break, visiting sorority girls are not interested in the local male population. They mate with their fraternal counterparts, and it was impressive to watch. Both sides of the female-to-male equation were fantastically identical, took an immense amount of care to dress in uniformity, wear their hair and their ball caps in exactly the same way. It was like watching penguins mate, from the sidelines. Hard to distinguish one from another. And penguins just aren’t sexy. Cute, but not sexy.
But there would be the occasional cool chick who wandered down, amenable to a weekend fling, and that was good and right, in the logic of Jimmy Buffet.
At any rate, working both the bar and at the newspaper, I finally managed to save enough to buy Karis a round-trip ticket to South Padre Island, and after some tortured telephone exchanges, she agreed to fly out.
She said she’d had some flashbacks of her own, now that she was eighteen and had dropped out of high school. She had been thinking about all that she had left behind in Iowa. She wanted to go back and settle some scores about the way she had left things there when her family had left five years ago, she had been saying.
“Whatever,” I said. “Are you coming to Texas?”
“Yes, I’ll visit you in Texas,” she said.
Even Dan moved to the Island, after a while. He finished his semester at A&I, had run into guys he’d fought that night every so often, but otherwise made it through those three months without further interference. He had proved his point, again. But he’d become bored. He had even begun listening to “tejano” music, and was very close to going “injun” in South Texas. Then he came down for a weekend visit and fell right into step with the lifestyle. I got him a job at the bar, and even had a best friend waiting for him, my boss and friend, Christian. They hit it off immediately (they could talk “sports,” while I couldn’t), and Dan was set to make the move.
It so happened there was a regular bloke at the bar who needed roommates; he had a huge place and wanted two guys to sublet, so Dan and I offered, and it came together in one afternoon. The new housemate, whose name I don’t remember, was missing an eye. He lost it in an accident, where some chick he was walking behind was swinging her purse and he made as if to tickle her and she had swung it at him. He had paid for it with his eye. “A freak accident,” he said. He got stoned at night when he watched TV, and his real eye would shrink and redden in the typical stoned fashion, and it would make for a weird moment, if you were stoned, too, and happened to look at him, with that one large, glaringly perfect and unmoving eye staring back at you, and the other one small and squinty red.
So the new apartment was set, and I was ready for Karis to visit. She had asked for the ticket, and I had sent it.
Her flight was due one Friday night, and I had her whole trip planned. Dan was gone somewhere, and I had his Town Car for the week, so I drove the hour to the Harlingen Airport in controlled delirium to pick her up and waited nervously at the airport bar. Against my better judgment, I started talking to the bartender, and the more questions he asked, the more I told him about what was happening, about this girl, about her visiting, about buying the ticket, about how excited I was that it had all come together after a year of planning. He seemed genuinely pleased for me. The bar at the time sat facing the two or three gates, so when her flight had emptied, and I stood there, right by the bar, and she didn’t show, I slowly sank back onto my barstool. The guy, well, language wasn’t his foremost strength, let’s just say, and even if it had been, what do you say to a complete schmuck who just had his heart broken, except “This next one’s on the house? I know you got a long drive ahead of you . . . ”
Now, if I tell you here that Karis had cashed in that ticket I had sent her and booked another flight out to Iowa to see her old boyfriend and “settle things there,” you might get the wrong impression of Karis.
In the end, her doing that—horribly deceitful as it was—brought us closer together, insists the revisionist schmegeggie in me, because she traveled that route, realized the dead-end, and then swung back around back to me. This is how I squared this all away, in my adolescent accounting, distorted by the twisted love I had for her. Well, for someone I had convinced myself was her. But see, because my emotional hold on her was mostly based on guilt, when she pulled this maneuver, I was—at some level—assured that our future was guaranteed. Horrible as it would be, but guaranteed nonetheless, because she would feel horribly guilty that she had done something so underhanded, and I would be there to press down on that lever as needed. It was how I knew how to love.
In the end, about a month later, she decided to move to Texas, and she bought her own ticket this time and moved in with me on South Padre Island.
Thankfully there was a different bartender this time, and I learned my lesson and kept my mouth shut while I waited for her at the gate. Bar. Bargate. Whatever.
She was on the plane this time. (Though, admittedly, when she walked through the gate, there was a thin bat squeak of a concealed good-bye to some khaki-trousered guy in his thirties to whom she’d been talking on the plane, and I wasn’t supposed to see it, and I thought better than to point it out, though I had the sudden impulse to bash in his short, smug head right there.)
I’d borrowed a pickup truck to collect her, as she had packed large boxes for her three-month stay, and I didn’t think the boxes would fit in my Oldsmobile, nor that it would have made the trip to Harlingen and back. It had become an island car: would run perfectly from one end of the island to the other, just about three or four miles in length, and about half a mile in width, but would b
egin to overheat if I tried to drive it any farther than that.
The minute I laid eyes on her again, this feeling of unease started glowing inside of me. It felt very much like the dog who had been chasing cars his whole life until the day he caught one and thought, “OK, now what?” I began to realize that above all else, I had no idea who this person was, and that the girl I’d fallen in love with did not exist anywhere outside of my own mind, and I had to do some serious readjustment to the “Madonna” fantasy that had been the drive of the last two years.
It was October already, in Texas. I’m not sure what month it was elsewhere. It was colder than usual, and the island was empty. I couldn’t wait to show her this place, to see if she found the place as interesting as I did, in the off-season. I drove her to the end of the lengths of the roads, took her around and introduced her to my people there, and she was catatonic with fear, would hardly speak to anyone, entirely unsure of herself.
The second or third night, after dinner, I drove us to the southernmost end of the island, where the jetty system separated the island from the Brownsville Ship Channel, which headed all the way back to the Port of Brownsville, near my old house.
It was cold, and the night was deep at that end of the Island because of the absence of hotels, bars, and streetlights. This was Isla Blanca Park, and it was devoid of ambient light, so the night was raw out here, natural. It just so happened Karis had arrived during a red tide, when all the shellfish that have been saving up their toxins as a defense against larger predators suddenly purge it out all at once. The fish breathe it in and become too poisonous for human consumption, and the fishermen take their cue to just, you know, get drunk, instead of pretend to fish and get drunk.
I hadn’t thought past the term red tide and hadn’t really wondered where it had originated, until that night when I was out walking with Karis in the pitch dark and the waves on the beach lit up beautifully in a blue iridescence, while the water beneath it glowed a dingy but definite red. It was the biotoxins and algae in the water, glowing when the waves crashed on the beach. It was otherworldly, or this worldly, in my own backyard, and I had never seen anything like it. It would have been spooky if it hadn’t been so lovely, and I couldn’t believe there was no one around to witness what was perhaps the most beautiful thing on the island except for me and Karis.
She was equally captivated. In the crisp darkness of that night, the stars glowed like daylight above and around us, and the earth suddenly felt like a snow globe. We stood close to each other, but I couldn’t make out her features. I could see the outline of her head, her hair, her shoulders against the starlight, but the detail within was gone, just not there.
She started telling me what she thought I needed to know, right there, as we were entering this relationship and the magic of the moment overtook her, too. Her biggest secret, she said, was that she grew up poor. And that. . . .
“Well, shit,” I started to say, “so did. . . .”
“No, she interrupted, you don’t get just how poor. Beyond poor. Hippie poor.” Her mother, she gasped, was a lesbian. Going on for years now, all of Karis’s life.
Her mother, Meg, had been molested by her father—Karis’s grandfather—or maybe just abused. I forget which, in the retelling.
Meg married to escape the nest, like you do, and married a hippie carpenter in Iowa at the end of the 1960s and then moved around the Midwest in the 1970s until she realized she had been gay all that time and that was why she had never enjoyed or trusted men ever. Karis’s absent father had come from a long generational line of hippies, so hippie they were like hobbits: Her father, she told me, never wore shoes. One time, they were walking home from the grocery store and they kept hearing a “tick, tick, tick,” sound they couldn’t quite pin down. When they got home, her dad realized he’d had a thumbtack stuck all the way into his heel, and he had not felt it, such was the derma on his underfoot.
Anyway, Meg had Karis and her two brothers, and they would have to come with her as she began her new life as an out-and-proud lesbian. She stole away with them one night and moved to a hippie lesbian commune, somewhere in Indiana, where Karis and her two brothers grew up on a perpetual camping trip where everyone was topless. They tried to assimilate into the public schools there, with very little luck.
Then they moved to Iowa, where Meg and her partner, Sue, had lodged themselves somehow as squatters in a house with no running water, no electricity. They lived there for at least a year, Karis said, now sort of crying.
They had moved to Seattle some years before because Meg had heard that the lesbian community and the social services were very good in Washington State, and then Meg and Sue broke up, which was hard on the kids. They had known Sue for most of their lives. On a couple of occasions, Meg had tried to commit suicide, and Karis had to wrestle a bottle of pills from her hand, dig a mouthful of pills out of her mouth with her fingers. And then Meg had begun speaking in tongues. Telling Karis that Karis was meant for bigger things, for great things, for . . . you know, big things. Stuff like that. In a sort of Exorcist-style voice, of course, which is great encouragement to do great things.
“Also,” she said, after a while, when we were both sitting on a bench in the park, watching the waves break in blue, “there was a time when her and Sue were convinced that she had become pregnant.”
“Your mom or Sue?” I asked, not tracking.
“Mom.”
“Without, you know, help?” I asked, not sure if I understood correctly.
“No,” said Karis, a spectral figure in the dark. “Just by the power of their love.”
“This went on for about four months,” she continued. “They even bought baby clothes and prepared a room in that house with no electricity or water.”
Now this knocked me back a little. Why would two grown women believe that they could conceivably . . . well, conceive. . . outside the usual course of nature? I thought, If a woman, who’s had sex with a male believes she’s been pregnant, it’s usually because she’s stopped menstruating. But if an older woman stops menstruating. . . .
“How old was your mother?”
“When?”
“When she thought she was pregnant.”
“She was about . . . forty-five, forty-six, maybe,” said Karis.
“Early onset menopause, you think?” Leave it to someone prone to hysterics to leap to the conclusion of a spontaneous pregnancy at that age, when they stopped menstruating.
“Maybe,” she said, bordering on defensive, and then fell quiet. The noise of the beach in the dark did wonders to dramatize this conversation, and I was on edge, waiting for the next development.
“Well, so what happened?” I asked after a while.
“She lost the baby.”
“What, like misplaced it? After she had it?” I couldn’t help myself.
“No, she lost the baby!”
“Her period came back?”
“Don’t be a jerk!” she said. “You’re not taking this seriously! I’m trying to tell you something that nobody knows, something that really . . . you know . . . changed our lives, and you’re being a jerk!” she said.
I couldn’t help it, at the time, but I managed to rein it in, my jerkiness. I had compassion for Karis, for being put through that, but I couldn’t develop anything for her mother, couldn’t understand why she’d put her kids through something so fictionalized as a virgin birth. Like the Catholic Church, except with a mullet and a pickup. And plaid flannel. And a tool belt. I could go on. . . .
The confessional download went on for about two days; I think she meant to give me full transparency, or else I was cheap therapy on that island. And it served to obfuscate our circumstances further, to doom an already futureless enterprise.
At that age, with my narrow, if precocious, understanding of the emotional mechanics of the world, of the interactions between people, I had the stubborn thought that we still had a fighting chance. Just by the power of our love, like that fictional fetus.
We had as much chance as her mother’s fictional fetus, I should say. We would prevail, I felt, because Kari was cute, and I was cute, and the world loves a cute couple. But our period, late though it would be, would certainly spot the lovely new trousers of our relationship.
Very early I began to realize that my ability to integrate emotionally and respectfully with other people wasn’t what you would call at a healthy stage. Nothing magnifies your immaturity and inadequacies like that first relationship. How I related to people who were closest to me, after the initial charming, how I communicated was through humiliation and threat, through dominance and the threat of violence, and most of all, guilt. This was the Latin basis of my language. And I had no idea.
It was what I knew, growing up. It was how Dan and I talked to each other, more than in English or Spanish. It was the language that was booming out of our windows, and out of our neighbor’s windows, and out of the towering speakers rattling out of Gramma’s house, like the calls to prayer for the Muslims. It was our method of civilization, or colonialization, how we conquered one another.
Karis, Karis had no idea about this; her family spoke in some hippie lesbian gluten-free granola Chinese sign language, and I was yelling at her with a 1963 Chevy Impala and a sharpened taco.
All I could do, with Karis, was shout louder than her, in this language. All I could do was win at the shouting.
I’m reminded of something that happened much later on, around the time I was twenty-eight.
I’m in Seattle, playing with my dog, Stella, a horrible and rambunctious Shar-pei. It’s actually Rebecca’s dog, but you don’t know her yet. Rebecca is in the kitchen, making martinis. (Bombay sapphire, like I’m having now . . . Oh, sweet heaven.)
So I’m messing with the dog, who’s enjoying the interaction. We’re playing tug-of-war with a rope toy, and—hailing back to my Moglai sort of ancestry—I have little compunction in taking this awful diseased toy fully into my mouth and chomping down hard on the thing, while Stella has a hold of the other end. (The martini will sanitize anything too diseased, I figure.)
Boy Kings of Texas Page 31