Boy Kings of Texas

by Domingo Martinez

  There had been that period when she’d befriended her daughters, during their high school years, but had then become sorely disappointed at their collective betrayal when, after they’d reached college age, Mom had decided that it was her turn, and she had started college and started to leave Dad, and they turned on her, to her surprise. Her daughters had not been happy with this. Were not encouraging of their mother’s impending freedom. See, Mom picked up where she left off, at age sixteen, and began her life all over again.

  She didn’t come right out and ask for a divorce—it wasn’t something anyone in our family would even consider as an option—but Mom got a very clear idea of the displeasure and disapproval she would endure for years to come from her daughters, who couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t stay with her husband of twenty years. The idea of divorce had settled in the house like a layer of asbestos, and she and Derek would mostly come home at this time simply to sleep and eat, and then spend their days away from it entirely, now that it had grown dark and was the only other thing Gramma watched, besides her Univision, from across the driveway. With Dad doing long-haul driving, he was home maybe five days a month, and he liked it that way, until he heard from his mother that Velva wasn’t coming home so much anymore.

  Mom flew back to Texas, and my relationship with Karis continued to get more and more textbook, more and more Freudian.

  One night, with the ridiculous tension and anxiety in the air, I took a lot of LSD with Kip and Karis, but not Janine, who had to go to school the next morning. And while we sat in their apartment waiting for it to kick in, I was convinced that Kip and Karis were making freakishly animated “I love you” faces at each other when my back was turned. I started whipping my head around, trying to catch them at it, but I never did, or they were quicker than I was. Then the acid hit.

  I’d always taken LSD in copious amounts in the simple hopes for a hallucination. That was it: I wasn’t asking for much. I simply wanted to experience a hallucination like the hippies used to have and describe in their music and literature. It was what we were after, in high school, when Tony and Chris and Frank and I would spend all day taking whatever we could get our hands on.

  Hell, I was willing to settle for a simple understanding of Yellow Submarine, with LSD, the unusual amounts of it that I would take. I couldn’t get this stuff in Texas; the first time I ever took it was the first night I was in Seattle. I managed to put my fist through the hatchback of a Volkswagen Rabbit, but other than that, it had been a fantastic six or seven hours. I’d forgotten I’d actually taken it, come to that, because I’d been so happy to see Dan after a five-day bus ride—through fricken Idaho, of all places—and we had started in on the Henry Weinhards right away.

  “Look at this,” he’d said, and showed me a sugar cube he’d plucked from the open freezer door. Unremarkable.

  “It’s a sugar cube, from the freezer,” I said.

  “It’s a hit of liquid LSD,” he said. “There’s a guy who lives in the apartments next door to the store where I work, and he never has any money, so he comes in sometimes asking for like milk and eggs and bread, and all he has in trade are drugs. Usually acid, but sometimes pot. I’ve been saving them.”

  I looked in the freezer, and Dan had a bowl of sugar cubes in a covered plastic container, in the door. There are about fifteen of them, and some pot.

  “Holy shit, man,” I say, and take it from his hand and just pop it in my mouth.

  “Holy shit, man,” Dan said. “That’s quite a bit of acid you just took.” It would have been better had he quoted from Cheech and Chong: “You just took the most acid I’ve ever seen anyone take, man.”

  “Wish me luck,” I said, and then drank some more beer.

  Three hours later, I was in The Zoo tavern, having made it through the door with Dan’s military ID, and the dolphins in the floor tile started jumping, like animation. I looked more closely, and they kept doing it: splish, splish, splash.

  Hunh, I thought, and then remembered: the acid. I forgot about the acid, man.

  There was a wake in there, that night. A regular customer who’d committed suicide, and I ended up talking to a girl who was really sad. It was her ex-boyfriend, whom she really cared for, and then the back room started to glow, behind her, over the pool tables. I began to have very inappropriate thoughts, responses, to this wake. I wanted to make fun of her grief, make fun of his suicide, like it was a weakness. I was completely out of my mind, unprepared for the effects.

  Anyhow, by this time, I’d done LSD more than a few times, and knew what to expect, but I wasn’t prepared to enter that state of mind with the atmosphere so electrically charged with what was going on between those two apartments. I swear, our twenties are the times of sheer lunacy: children making grown-up decisions, creating terrible beds for themselves, and others.

  Karis sat at my feet, waiting for hers to kick in. Kip sat across from me, his feet touching my shins. It was like an early Bob Dylan song. We were listening to some organic college band, like Rusted Root or something. Janine was sitting on her sofa, looking over her schoolwork, when she said something, and Kip’s five-foot energy turned twelve feet tall out of the corner of my eye and he growled at her, in response, and she immediately shut down, like a beaten child, told to hold her tongue. Whoah, I thought. Did I just see that?

  I looked up and over, and Janine said something again, and he did it again: He grew large at her and growled violently, and she buckled underneath it, and it all happened in milliseconds.

  My perception had sped up, or time had slowed, and I started to watch people as they really interact, in microflashes and microexpressions. Kip, as a little guy, was hyperaggressive to Janine, who was taller than he was, and could be easily subdued.

  When he tried to talk to me and Karis, I saw him turn into a sort of mechanical doll, repeating things he’d learned—he was trying to be funny, trying to go into schtick—but it came off horribly, like a sick pantomime, like a coin-operated grotesque caught in the same repetitive five-word phrase repeated ad infinitum, and his eyes were glowing and sharklike, dead, and Karis, who had not moved, suddenly looked first like a child, and then an absent fetus, a dirty glow peeling off of her in cakes as she smoked a cigarette. Language suddenly became impossible, and broke down into simplified multimeaning sounds that meant a hundred other things, and I concentrated more on the origins of the meaning rather than what was being said, like I was looking for the root of intention because I could see the layers of distortion as the person tried to hide some things, emphasize others, and disguise meaning. I understood far more from the body language and facial expressions of the people in the room, much more than what they were actually saying, which made no sense, when out of nowhere the stereo started playing the Grateful Dead and began to glow red, menacing, and I stood up and said, “I have to go, you can’t talk about anything in here, you’re all unhealthy,” and then ran for the door, Karis following me, and I swear that in the panic and danger of the next few seconds, of me making it down to the lower floor and into my own space, I gave off a psychic charge that could have powered a car in that walk from their apartment to ours, just downstairs.

  For the next eight or so hours, my primary focus was not to lose my psychological ground. I was experiencing a collapse of logic and higher function, locked in a Hunter S. Thompson–worthy freak out of epic proportion. I was very close to complete psychosis, was very close to losing it, and probably did a few times, when I couldn’t remember my name, when I curled up like a baby and tried to write my name, so I could remember who I was, when I played an episode of The Simpsons to try to calm down, and the whole episode was written about me, when I could feel the moisture in the air, and then suddenly my body would suck it all in and become dry, cracked, like a lakebed in Arizona.

  It was the ninth gate; I was going through the ninth gate, and getting the awareness of crazy panicked jazz, baby, jazz: I was seeing the notes between the notes, and it was freaking me out considera
bly.

  But I came down from that, around eleven the next morning, in bed and looking out the window, while talking to Karis about a very uncertain future, and about all the things I saw, telling her in code that I had been aware of the affair she was about to have, or was having already.

  Chapter 32

  CHEATING

  In my defense, I was trying to do the opposite of what Dad had done with his wife. Actually, in all of his life, all of his choices. I was using him as a reverse compass.

  I think in my distorted thinking, if I didn’t “oppress” her by demanding that she didn’t cheat, perhaps she wouldn’t. Maybe, if I gave her the choice to make, and allowed it to happen, I wouldn’t be the asshole my dad was. That she would choose correctly, that she would stay.

  Karis had started having bad dreams, where she would be surrounded by her family and lying in a bed, and they had all gathered there to help her commit suicide, by taking a large black pill. Her mother fed it to her, and Karis would be crying, begging her to stop because she didn’t want to die, and they would force her to swallow it, and waited with her as she died, holding her and thanking her.

  One afternoon, when Karis was supposed to be visiting her mother and I was staying at home, because Meg and I didn’t get along—Meg blamed me when Karis told her she couldn’t move in with us in the one-bedroom apartment, and so she decided she’d remain homeless, couch surfing at the hospitality of the women from the Lesbian Resource Center in Seattle—and I was staying in on that off-deadline weekday, just getting mildly stoned and listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and scribbling in my notebook, Karis suddenly appeared at our door and closed the door behind her with a look of sheer panic and fear in her face and announced, “June, I lied to you. Instead of being with my mother, I was upstairs with Kip and then Janine came home, and I hid in the closet, and she caught me, in the closet.” She says all this without taking off her coat or dropping her purse.

  Being high, and being young and in love and unsettled by this abrupt forthcoming, I was knocked off-balance, and all I genuinely felt right then was a sincere sympathy for her state, not really taking in what she was telling me.

  I said, “Oh, you poor thing; you must be totally freaked out. Come here,” and I hugged her, asked her if she wanted some tea, clutching her to me. She was shaking, started crying into my shoulder, and I tried to calm her down, wondering if we had anymore chamomile.

  It took me about an hour to realize what exactly was happening, to become angry, and I did fuck all, because I didn’t want to react like my father would have, didn’t want to be seen by others as a dominating, patriarchal machismo Mexican man. So I just took it.

  Meanwhile, down in Texas, Dad had come back into town and was drunk.

  His first stop was with La Señora, the cúrandera, his witch doctor. He waited for an hour in the waiting room while the line of superstitious pilgrims in front of him got their medical results mystically diagnosed (no need for X-rays here) or were given useless assurances that their financial health would be guaranteed.

  Dad was here for a different reason this time. He wanted to know if his wife was fucking around behind his back.

  It made no difference that he was carrying on behind hers—that was none of her business, and he had been feeling guilty enough about it already, didn’t need anyone else telling him it was wrong—but if she was doing it, then there was hell to pay. But he needed to know for sure. Gramma had been on the phone with him and told him already that things were not normal over at his house. The other night, Velva had a woman over, and she spent the night there, of all things.

  Gramma had taken revenge on the lesbian affair by turning off the water so those two marimachas couldn’t shower in the morning. (It had been Mom’s friend and coworker from JC Penney, who had been afraid to go home because her live-in boyfriend had been beating her, and also another textbook case of projection, on Gramma’s part.)

  But Dad didn’t care about Mom being with another woman. It was another man that Dad was concerned about.

  Dad had suspected Mom was carrying on behind his back since she had started working at the JC Penney’s in Amigoland Mall, near the border across town, because she’d been acting all independent and paying her own bills and seriously crimping his manhood by doing what he was supposed to be doing, and well, things just weren’t the same anymore. And he suspected there was a man involved. So here he was, at his “spirit-counselor’s” and was asking her if his wife was cheating on him. And so she asked her spirits what they knew. Was Domingo Martinez’s wife cheating on him? She looked in the ball, and so on. Rang the glass of water and all that.

  Then she said, “Yes; your wife is seeing a man who’s short, wears a uniform, and she sees him when she’s supposed to be at work, when she’s supposed to be somewhere else. They think they love each other, and it’s a secret for him, too. She still loves you and the house, and she is conflicted, but she needs more. She wants more than what is at home. They make the love in secret.” Yada yada yada.

  Dad got his money’s worth. The information was vague enough to be specific, and when I heard all this about a week later from Dan, I found it fantastically perfect that all the information “mystically” divulged could have been describing my situation with Karis, and I wondered if the spirits had tapped into the wrong “Domingo Martinez,” sort of pulled up the wrong website when they Googled the name.

  Dad didn’t take the news well. To him, getting it from the cúrandera was the same as getting it from a police report, or an X-ray. He paid his fee and went to a bar and got more drunk, then drove across town to the Amigoland Mall when it was closing and caught Mom in flagrante delicto, as Dad sat in a borrowed car across from the employee’s exit in the JC Penney parking lot, and watched as a Border Patrol Jeep slowly crawled up and turned its lights off, waited. So had Dad, in his borrowed Cadillac, from across the parking lot.

  Mom eventually emerged from the door and walked around the Jeep, saying good-bye to her coworkers as she got in the passenger-side door, like it was something that happened regularly. The coworkers drove off and Dad took his moment, left the driver’s side of the car and the door hanging open, and walked across the parking lot to the Border Patrol Jeep. He opened the passenger-side door and surprised both Velva and the border patrolman, later identified by Mom as her “friend,” Felípe, and he pulled her from the back of her collar onto the parking lot.

  They had not been enclenched in a passionate kiss, but had been staring longingly into each other’s eyes, said Mom. “We were just talking!” she says.

  Dad didn’t say anything about this because he denied it could have happened, or didn’t remember specifics, or doing it.

  Mom was on the ground, outside the Jeep, and began yelling at Dad to stop, stop what he was doing. He then grabbed the Border Patrol agent—who was armed with a .9 mm sidearm, a shotgun, and an M4A1 carbine—and Dad started to pull him out through the passenger-side window as the door had swung back, when Mom fell to the ground.

  “Sir, don’t do that, sir!” he screamed, this “Felípe,” under his tiny little Mexican moustache. “Sir, please! We were just talking! Sir, please let go!”

  Dad pulled Felípe across the console and into the passenger side and had to step around Velva Jean to get him out. And when Dad let go to get a better grip on the man’s collar, the border patrolman took his own moment to force the door closed and scramble back into the driver’s side and drive away, leaving Velva on the ground with her enraged, drunk husband who had just caught her cheating.

  Felípe didn’t look back, or stop. The Border Patrol Jeep turned onto the main road and drove off, into the night.

  Had he, Felípe, looked back, he would have seen Dad backslapping my mother into the ground and kicking her before he walked back to his borrowed car and drove off somewhere else, to drink all this away, and Velva Jean was left in the empty parking lot of the JC Penney, crying to herself, under the sulfur lights and the moths flitting i
n crazy deranged circles underneath them.

  Chapter 33

  CHEATING II

  I hadn’t fared so well either.

  I got drunk at the bar across the street, what was then the Romper Room, and then I put on my combat boots. Karis drove up in her yellow Toyota pickup with the bed cover and the bad brakes and waited at the curb, where I had been sitting, smoking cigarettes, waiting for her to get home.

  I’d finally gotten mad. Said some things over the phone when she was at work at the PCC deli, making something with tofu.

  She pulled up to our assigned parking spot and didn’t get out, just sat there and smoked a cigarette out her window.

  And then I stood up and walked across the street and I kicked in the side of her truck, with my boots, my combat boots.

  I kicked the shit out of the side of that truck and a guy from across the street said, “Miss, miss, are you OK? Do you need help?”

  And I looked at him, and I stopped myself, because I was being the asshole, and Karis finished smoking her cigarette, and then drove off, with her truck now looking much the worse for wear, and I walked back upstairs to our empty apartment and listened to Kip and Janine thumping around upstairs, as she threw him out.

  When she did leave me, when we finally broke up about a month later, after I’d moved into that horrible karate studio and started taking classes every morning and afternoon like Remo Williams, when she would finally go, Karis left me for a woman who looked exactly like her mother, Meg.

  I had to sit down, when she told me. I had met this woman, one morning when I dropped Karis off at her job at Puget Consumer Co-op, in Ravenna. I forget the woman’s name, think it was something like Chris, but she was carrying vegetable crates from a delivery truck, and I made the comment to Karis that she looked like her mother’s brother: same hairy bowlegged walk, same plaid, same tool-belt, and same moustache. Karis had not laughed.