“It’s broken—is the bone sticking out? Is there blood on the blue jeans?”
“No, come on, let’s get out of here, your truck is open.”
“June, I can’t get up.”
“Dan, get up; come on, put your arm around me. Let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t stand on it; you’re going to have to call 911.”
“No way.”
“Call the fucking ambulance.”
“No fucking way, come on.”
“Please call the ambulance.”
I couldn’t lift him. He weighed 260 pounds. He was in shock. He actually blacked out from the pain of the fracture while the guy sat on him and hit him. He didn’t remember that.
I dragged him to a curb. This is my brother. I dragged him to the curb and had to run to the AM/PM and call an ambulance. This was my brother.
The ambulance and cops got there, and I tried to answer questions, tried to keep Dan calm. He told me I had to get Orlene, tell her what happened.
“No,” I said.
I don’t want to write about that.
That was the most awful thing I’ve ever had to do, was explain this to Orlene. That poor girl.
I was so terribly tired of this Latin macho bullshit. This was not me.
This was Dan’s last fight. I hoped to God it was mine, too. I’d been crying all day. I hope those stupid fishermen fuckers know the sort of restraint I took from really hurting them, because they were soft. They were like afternoon butter. I simply don’t have it in me when I don’t feel the cause, and this wasn’t the cause.
I have never put Dan in a situation where he had to fight my fights. I have taken my beatings growing up, and I spent all that time and money learning how to defend myself because I felt it was critical to my psychological architecture to have that sort of confidence. And now that I had, I felt so dirty.
Dan will tell you the same thing. I never asked him or did that “Chihuahua” thing Dad accused me of. That was so totally unfair, so completely wrong, and so fucking Dad. Anybody who really knows me knows this. Also why I can’t forgive Dad for who he is. What he thinks of me.
This is not the life I want to lead. This is why I left Texas. I think Dan has finally learned the whys behind that, the way he saw Orlene last night. How she’s dealing with this today.
For my part, I am so totally sorry. I didn’t do this. I did my best to help him out of a really stupid decision. And he’s apologized to me, so you know. Dan’s acknowledged how incredibly stupid he was not to have walked away. He needs his mother. I need my mother. Thank you for getting her to me. To us. I’m sorry for all this. This isn’t who I am. This isn’t what I’m building here.
Your little brother,
June
Chapter 37
SETTLING ACCOUNTS
Dan and I had made the mistake of taking an apartment together after he moved back to Seattle with his girlfriend, Orlene. He’d met Orlene in Brownsville, where she’d been a certified nursing assistant at one of the many long-term care/nursing homes he’d finally decided were better suited for a man of his particular demeanor. Dan had a habit of becoming emotionally attached to his patients, couldn’t see them just coming and going, like in hospital care, or clinics. He wanted to help, make sure they were comfortable, safe. This required him to have more control over their destiny, and them to be either disabled or old.
His patients responded, as did their families. Dan is a very good and conscientious nurse. As such, he has a treasure chest of things given to him by the families of his patients who have died after he’d watched over them for years at a time. When it came a patient’s time to expire, he was there for them, and for the family, and the family would leave him with a memento of the patient: a favorite baseball cap, a Mickey Mouse watch, something.
That grown men who aren’t fucking should not live together is something neither he nor I had learned at this point, when we decided to rent the largest apartment I’d ever seen in Seattle.
Dan and Orlene and I had moved into the topmost “suite,” on the fifth floor, for an exorbitant $1,500 a month, which was a considerable sum, since I was out of work and responsible for half the rent. That the even 50/50 split on the rent was fundamentally an unfair determination since there were two of them and one of me didn’t even occur to Dan: He would take care of the cable and the groceries, so it would even out, he explained.
We had a tremendous view looking east over Seattle, over the north end of Queen Anne Hill and the boat channel and the three or four bridges that crossed it, and of flight paths and the Cascade Mountains—a sight that was heavenly to us, having grown up on the salted flats of Texas, where you could only see to the end of a street, or a dusty horizon, and the world felt flat, fell flat, ended flatly right over there.
There was a strong, clear pull to throw ourselves into this housing situation that neither of us would identify for months to come. Dan and I were subconsciously re-creating our “Saturday morning cartoons” hour, the few times as children we were allowed to wake up and sit in front of a television and watch cartoons from six to ten o’clock with a bowl of cereal, and the rest of the house sleeping in. More often than not, even this little gem of childhood was interrupted by Gramma or Dad’s hangover and we were forbidden to watch television. Something needed doing. Get dressed and get outside. There’s a tire needing changing, a truck needing a jump-start, a radiator needing radiating.
So, with each of us silently raging and wishing hellfire to take either Dad or Gramma or both and not sharing these thoughts with the other, we’d slink into our shared bedroom, get dressed for dirty, sweaty work, and sometimes, because he couldn’t take it out on anyone else, Dan would shove me in to the closet or to the floor to make himself feel better. I would get back up and then add him to my list of people I wanted God to kill that day, and we’d get on with our Saturday morning.
Now, more or less as adults, as men in our thirties, Dan and I were re-creating a scenario where we could sit in front of the television as much as we wanted, and if Gramma or Dad would try to tell us different, well, there would be hell to pay. We were big fuckers now, Dan and me, and beholden to no one.
Since I was out of work and living on a small stipend of about $275 a week, and Dan had broken his knee in that fight on the very first night we had moved in together, well, we had a considerable amount of downtime, time to reflect on what an awful and emotionally wrenching experience that had been, when I had to come home alone from the brief visit to the pub down the end of our new street, enter the apartment without Dan, covered in his blood, and find Orlene sitting in their new bedroom folding and organizing clothes while watching QVC. Then had to tell her that Dan was in the hospital with a broken leg. And her response, so appropriate and deserved, was to throw her dolphin figurines at me and curse me, curse him, for being stupid boys, for hurting ourselves in fights, hurting the people who loved us. And all I could do was just stand there, staring at the floor, staring at my brother’s blood on my hands from wiping it off of his face, his nose, his eyes while we waited for the ambulance to get him. She cried. God, how she cried.
I drove her to the hospital where they had taken Dan. And, well, it had been more than a few weeks after that, with his leg in a cast and him on crutches, that we eventually settled into something resembling normality, routine. Orlene would wake up in the morning and get to work around ten or eleven. Dan, even on crutches, would drive her. Orlene did not, does not drive. I would sleep in and listen to all this from my end of the very large apartment.
They would leave, and I would maybe drift off or wake up and cruise the want-ads online and send out more meaningless résumés. Dan would return about forty-five minutes later with a twelve-pack or two and that evening’s dinner. I would get out of bed, wash up, and we’d greet each other as we sat down to watch cable and drink beers, tinged with whatever painkillers Dan had available that day: Vicodin, Percocet, some opiates, whatever was around. Remember: Dan was a nurse fresh out of kn
ee surgery; he had a fantastic medicinal tool kit.
We lived together like that for a year, plumbing the shared depth of a missing childhood and hoping to chart the bathymetry so we could start the swim back up to the surface, as human adults.
I could watch between four and six movies a day. Dan liked to intermingle his fantasy movie watching with ESPN, which was my cue to head back to my room and watch something a bit more BBC on my own, until he’d begin to make dinner, which he still loves doing, and then my job was to sit on a stool and entertain him with stories and conversation until dinner was on low heat. Then we would have a few more beers and wait for Orlene.
When Orlene came home, she was usually in a snit—Why is there a mess in the hall? Who didn’t take out the trash? But when Orlene was upset she’d mostly yell in Spanish so we usually ignored her, or giggled, just ducked our heads. Then we’d have dinner, and she’d retreat into their bedroom and watch QVC or the Home Shopping Channel and talk for hours with her sister, back in Brownsville. Dan and I would serve up the final entertainment for the evening, drop a couple Vicodins or Percocets each to enhance the last three or so beers and off we’d go, reliving those stolen Saturday mornings with pharmaceutical encouragement.
Dan’s favorite movies at the time were the first two Lord of the Rings installations, and in order to set the mood, we’d build huge conflagrations in the small fireplace, and because the undersize fireplace was incapable of housing so large a holocaust so often, we ended up melting the metal grate by the time we moved out. We watched the LOTR series endlessly, blending formlessly into the couch with narcotics, and we would discuss the movies, the books, and Peter Jackson’s impossibly perfect special effects so often and repetitively that we became like Jews in a Talmudic exercise, so much so that Orlene started referring to our movie watching as “Bible study.”
It wouldn’t last, of course. No shared psychodramatic constructions ever do, and especially not one that began with Dan starting a fight with stoned fishermen who had snickered at our expensive leather coats and Doc Martens, ending with Dan getting knocked out and beaten severely and falling in such a way that crushed the tibial plane on his right leg.
This is when we really had the chance to talk about growing up, about our horribly complicated feelings about Dad, Gramma, and Mom, and our sisters, who were thriving and lovely and were having lovely children. Dan and I never used the word sacrificed, but it was the picture that we reluctantly painted as adults, inherently adverse to the idea of victimhood. We turned our noses up at people who claimed to be “victims.” It was unmacho. And yet as we continued talking about what had happened to us, how we had been raised in the typical barrio mentality, that, as boys, as the indentured children of Mexican peasants, it was evident that Dan and I had been sacrificed so our sisters could marry upward. And it had worked: Our sisters were doing well, thriving with good husbands, and we struggled with being happy for them, excited for them. Our hearts were twisted with resentment, as he and I dug in and embraced fully the addiction and alcoholism and crap machismo that would be the only thing we would ever inherit from our father. Mazel tov.
We had successfully constructed a situation where we could, Dan and I, talk for hours and days without end about what we’d seen, felt, experienced, in a way that an extended weekend of me visiting him in San Antonio or Brownsville, or him visiting me and a girlfriend in Seattle for a week simply could not afford us. Dan and I wanted to talk, talk freely about what we had endured as kids and did not want anyone else to restrict that. And we wanted our cartoons and Fruity Pebbles, godammit.
As such, some evenings would get downright maudlin. There was one night when Dan was cooking something seafood in the halogeneous kitchen and things had been happy enough that day that I was comfortable enough entertaining him, chatting idly and telling stories while drinking beer and rolling an occasional joint. There had already been some days when the emotional rot had started squelching through, and we’d become terrifically hostile to one another, Dan and me. He’d clamber upright onto his cast, grab his crutches and make like he wanted to hit me. I would look at him, bewildered, bemused, backpedaling and taken aback: Dan and I had never—would never—get violent with one another. It was code. It just wouldn’t happen. But neither Dan nor I could ever back down from a fight. And yet, there he was, scrambling to punch me. He never did. And I never would.
Those days, the apartment would glow with resentment and tension, ready to burst in conflagration at the first available oxygen.
But this evening, things were great. I had done my due diligence earlier that day: sent out résumés, jogged my five miles, filled out the requisite unemployment forms, belayed the banking. Orlene got home and she was OK, we were not too blasted drunk, and Dan had made her favorite dinner, so after she went off to bed and we were watching HBO, there was something on the TV that reminded us of the time I broke my arm when I was fifteen, in high school.
“Oh, yeah,” Dan said, “It was a Sunday.” I snapped right into the memory: It was indeed a Sunday. Street ball, with all the boys from Hannah High School varsity and junior varsity. and I was the only freshman allowed to play, because Dan was my older brother. It was a stupid, unstructured game on the front lawn of the high school. Just some boys playing ball.
But the star blonde quarterback named Shawn was taking it too seriously, and at the end of some dumb tumbling and fumbling about, he dropped the ball and I jumped on it, from the opposing team, and recovered the fumble. This didn’t sit well with Shawn. (His parents couldn’t spell “Sean.”) My arm was broken quickly, at the end of his knee. I heard it crack loudly, right in front of my face.
Dan said: “Get up, come on; it’s our ball.”
I said, “Shit. My arm is broken.”
Dan said, “No, it’s not. Let’s go.”
I said, “I can’t move it. Look.”
Dan saw it was in the shape of a Z.
I stood up and said, “Fuck! Thanks a lot, Shawn!” to the guy who did it.
Shawn said, “No problem,” and walked away, and there was murder in Dan’s eyes.
Dan’s best friend, Victor, has an older brother, Carlos, who happened to be there. He drove us home, my left hand closed in a fist over the sharp angles of my right forearm. Carlos drove a black mid-1980s Thunderbird, just a couple years old. I’m in shock, I thought. Dan was panicked, in the back seat. I heard Dan talking to Carlos, directing him to our house that was very, very much outside the city limits and into farmland. Carlos drove his sleek car over the muddy roads and into our driveway. Dad was waiting in the doorway at the end of the concrete sidewalk leading from the parking spot, because Dan had called ahead.
I got out of the car; I think someone opened the door for me . . . I stepped out and my left hand was still on the Z of my right arm—both bones, radius and ulna, in a straight break, forced down where they shouldn’t have been. I walked the length of the sidewalk to my father, who hadn’t left the house in three weeks, unemployed, out of options, stinking of a cheap, recent drunk, fuming inaudibly but very noticeably—his dark black hair flaring this mask of hatred. He was unwashed, dressed in a T-shirt under a thin, red-lined flannel shirt, screaming curses and profanities at me in Spanish, his runted son who had to get hurt, had to break something, putting him in a position where he couldn’t pay anything, pay nothing. And then, right there, as I walked to the top of the stairs, drawn magnetically to the open door to my house, where everything was going to be safe, my father punched me on the side of the head, yelling horrible things, and he was about to hit me again, and I fell into the doorway, onto my broken arm, and my brother, Dan, who is only two years older than I am, Dan rushed my father and slammed him against the wall, pinned both of Dad’s shoulders to the weak plaster board and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” and Dad stopped, scared, speechless, his eyes wide and white.
Dan kept him pinned, panting. Gramma rushed forward, studying my adolescent arm, goosenecked. Dan let pater noster go, pace
d behind him like an animal, ready to protect his broken little brother again.
Dad, Gramma, and some other cousin looked, whispering in their pidgin ghetto Spanish: “Felípe. Felípe can fix it. Felípe has birthed breached calves. He knows what he’s doing, medically.”
So I remembered this just then, a little while ago, watching Dan as he was back in the kitchen, his kitchen, on his crutch, adding spices to whatever it was he was making, with his right eye changed a little—nerve damage from that last fight we just had a few months ago. I kind of started to cry, but of course I didn’t tell Dan, who was sitting in the dark room across from me, but couldn’t see me in the flickering gloom of the television.
In my memory, my mother rushed forward at this point. It might not be true. She was screaming and yelling that none of her children will be disfigured, if she has to work to the end of her days. I think that part is true. I woke up in the hospital a few hours later, when the pain had died down. The three middle fingers of my right hand were locked in a sort of Chinese finger prison, dangling from a metallic bedside stem. I was in a hospital. I finally felt safe. I was an American again, not livestock on a Mexican farm. That’s how close a line I walked that day, where my brother and mother kept me.
An oddly attractive nurse with a two-pack-a-day voice told me, “Honey, it’s gonna feel a little hot in your ass for a while, but then you’re gonna feel real good after that, is that OK? Do you understand me?” and I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me like that because she wasn’t sure if I was conscious or capable of understanding her English, and then the Demoral sears this lightning path from my right ass cheek to my soul—and for the very first and only time in my life I hallucinated. It was fantastic. There were these figures fighting with swords and words and lines, in the sky, right outside the window. Geometric shapes, all of it. Language. Absolute communication. Undiluted violence. Purest redemption. Kindness in its most poisonous form. It all made so much sense to me. Right outside the window. Right out there.
Boy Kings of Texas Page 36