Dad went through a tremendous heartbreak when my mother left him, and he decided also to quit drinking, to get sober after thirty years of unabashed debauchery. In one of the most impressive displays of self-control, and one that I would never have previously imagined my father capable of, when he made the decision to get sober, he never looked back, never touched another drop, never relapsed, not even once.
And he’d spend days crying, missing Velva.
Years later, he would tell me about his sobriety and those first few months when Mom left him, left the house on Oklahoma empty, and he would spend his days at Gramma’s house instead, crying in her bedroom, only to emerge and find Gramma standing there, looking at him in disgust, and she actually laughed at him, once, for being so weak.
It was my Uncle Richard who humiliated her into being a mother after she had laughed at Dad, and he had growled at Gramma and then enfolded my father in a stepbrotherly embrace, metabolizing his hurt at losing the family, like Richard had also experienced, some years before.
Dad told me these stories a few years later, things he had shared only in AA meetings, thinking his family wouldn’t understand.
He couldn’t have been more wrong.
So when he had a chance to see Derek, he’d bring the little kid back to the house on Oklahoma, and he’d do with him things he never did with Dan and me. He would take Derek on a jog through the geometry of farmlands, buy him fancy slingshots and air rifles, take him exploring through the expanding city dump, which was now just a couple miles from our former house. Dad would drive Derek out to Boca Chica beach, just to look around, and then when no one was looking or around, he’d say, “Let’s go in,” strip down to his Y-fronts and jump in the lukewarm beach, spend the afternoon swimming on the Texas Gulf Coast, with no towels or swimwear or preparation. This is how Dad did things.
Derek loved this time spent with his father, as weird as it sounds. The trips to the dump especially. I would do this on my own, when I was in my late teens and feeling listless sometimes, and I can report that it’s quite fascinating being out there, like a postapocalyptic landscape of industrial abstraction. Once, I saw a huge unloaded field of doll heads, as far as the eye could see, every size and shape and hair color. I still have nightmares from that.
But back to Derek and Dad. Derek told me this story about one of their trips to the dump, and his new shiny slingshot. Out of nowhere, he said, this big fuckoff spider came out from under something and ran right at Dad.
“About the size of your hand,” he told me. “Big and black and brown, just shoots out from under, like, a shoe, right at Dad, who screams and jumps and runs.”
And not skipping a beat, Derek nailed the huge spider with his slingshot.
It was a wolf spider, we found out later, after a brief Internet search. He said he never felt more proud of himself after the way Dad was praising him and hugging him, saying, “Not even June was that good a shot!” which kind of pissed me off, since I was like Annie fucking Oakley when I was a kid, but I’ll give him that.
When he wasn’t with Dad back at the place on Oklahoma, it was a much harder time. It was no way for him to spend his adolescence, living with a single mother who wanted now what she had missed out on then, and she made a heartrending decision to have Derek live with our sister Mary and her husband, Mark, in Corpus Christi, and it was perhaps the best decision for everyone. Mare and Mark, in their incredible generosity, gave Derek the structure and home environment he was lacking throughout elementary school and into middle school, and they became a fantastically tight unit, with my mom’s diametric gravities pulling her in opposite directions, leaving her with her heartbreak in the middle.
This is really where Derek became estranged, in a way. He felt disjointed, like an intruder into Mare and Mark’s life, though they were as gracious and loving as anyone could ever be. Mark, as a coach at a tough Corpus Christi high school that was predominantly black and Hispanic, brought Derek into his orbit and Derek became a good athlete, played football on Mark’s team and then tried competitive weightlifting, and Mare saw to his academics.
His first day at possibly the roughest school in Corpus Christi, a place called West Oso, Derek made his entrance as Mare’s little brother dressed in wire-rim glasses, braces, and a cardigan thrown over his shoulders with the cuffs rolled into a ball at his chest while he shambled in on a pair of crutches, an injury sustained on the football field. The getup was, of course, Mare’s doing, as a former Mimi, and Derek only succeeded in avoiding getting the shit beaten out of him because that day, inside the first ten minutes of him being there, there was a race riot in the cafeteria. A Mexican kid had stabbed a black kid in the side of the head with a pencil, and both sides erupted in a huge, police-involved brawl.
Eventually, Derek figured out how to dress so that he didn’t look like a pretentious prick and wasn’t targeted, excelled under Mark’s tutelage in the sports program, and sonofabitch if that kid didn’t graduate as valedictorian of his school, when the time came, and had a full ride to the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, choosing to take a career path like his older brother, June.
We were all very proud of him, very impressed. He was fulfilling his role in the idealized version of our family, like we all wanted.
Mom, of course, remained involved and carried her guilt as best as she could as she rebooted her vitality and libido, finished her own eight-year degree plan and kept her job at JC Penney, which was the closest thing to a social life as she’d ever had, and after a while none of us begrudged her anything: If anyone deserved a second act, it was Mom.
But still, her guilt over losing Derek permeated everything, and it would leave a mark.
He was a good kid, back then. I’m sure the burden of being the youngest of a sprawling, motivated family in the ascendency was crushing, with every one of his older siblings holding a degree of authority over him and exercising it in the vacuum of a family in partial disorder as our lives became untidy. And this time with Mark and Mare, this time being the perfect kid, after being shunted from our family home to a shit Brownsville apartment and then off to his sister’s home, it spun him tight, and tighter still, and when he made it to college in Austin on that full scholarship, Derek spun out of control. It frightened and disappointed all of us, and I’m sure himself.
Personally, I had lost my ability to connect with him. I failed my younger brother as an older brother, I know. I carry some of that same guilt Mom feels, but in a different color.
Because I never spent more than a couple of days with him, as I had made my decision to live on the West Coast, I had no idea who he was, as a person, and treated him simply as a category, as the younger brother.
When he was a boy, I’d make my yearly hajj back home to report in and feel superior, reconnect with Dan and sometimes with Derek. I’d come home and I’d bring him gifts, give him some of my best T-shirts and comics and CDs, and Derek would devour these things, build his identity around most of it like an internalized shrine.
I’d show up wearing a cool T-shirt, looking thin and urban, and he’d look up to me in a sort of hero worship that I did nothing to discourage. I gave him his first “Yoda” T-shirt, something I’d bought from a street vendor who’d hand-made the shirt. Another of an M. C. Escher drawing that was all the rage at the time. And I brought back lots of music. Lots and lots of music. The latter moved him so much that once, for show-and-tell in his second-grade class, Derek did a one-man improvisation of a Beastie Boys song that had the teacher leaping over her chair in order to slam off the tape player because of all the cursing, which befuddled Derek because he didn’t know these were “bad” words. Mostly just slang, he thought, as he rapped about getting “a girlie on his jimmy.”
But this all ended when he arrived at university. I mean, he still did the hero worship, but his idea of college and independence meant that he could do drugs and booze and sleep all day without having a single sibling or parent expect anything from
him, and academics kept slipping down the ranks of his obligations and priorities, and he began to drown in his genetics and compulsions toward addiction, took to alcoholism like the Sheen family took to movies about the Vietnam War.
This is where we started to miss him.
Ironically, I was fascinated by my younger brother, in a way, and continued to crave the sort of hero worship from him that I had once bestowed on Dan, even though Derek had become incapable of returning calls, was basically unfunctional as a human being. Living in Seattle, it became my role to seek out and find new and cool things that he would never find in Texas (after all, that was why I was living in Seattle, no?), and in order to keep myself firmly ensconced in the position of guru of good culture, I would still supply him with steady access to great music and recommendations and mailed gifts, discs, shirts, and videos.
Which, in turn, would eventually lend themselves as a commodity in that shitheap of a college town, because it gave Derek a sort of social elevation, and people would then seek him out, want to “party” with him (possibly the most distasteful distortion of a verb in common usage) and ply him with booze, marijuana, and hardcore drugs, and Derek’s walls were never so willing to erode, so willing to come down, like the defenses of Jericho under a million chemical trumpet blasts.
Mom’s guilt contributed tremendously. She’ll be the first to admit it, so it’s no shock if she reads it here. She was permissive and enabling and heartbroken, hoping his better angels would somehow rise from the ashes of the bridges he insisted on burning. Every semester, he’d beg the family for money to pay fees and fines to the university or the rubbish fraternity he was homesteading, just the minimums and just enough to squeak back in, and he’d beg for a reprieve, beg for that second chance, just $200 from this person, $800 from that family member, please please please: “I just need the chance,” he’d say. “Please.”
He’d wear us down, make my brother-in-law crack his checkbook from fatigue and disgust, saying, “It’s not about the money, Derek. It’s just this lying. . . .”
“Please; it’ll be different this time.”
“You know what you’re going to do, if you go back.”
“No, I promise I won’t. I need to finish this.”
“Fine.”
Once the check was signed, he’d disappear again for three or four months, communicating exclusively by text message, usually something garbled and nonsensical sent at 3:00 a.m.
It was so painful, so terribly painful, that time.
And I vacillated between a profound desire to beat him and six of his closest friends senseless, and to hold him down and just hug the broken homunculus inside him, and have him cry it all out, give him some sense of dignity and self-love, enough to say, “I’m better than this. This isn’t what I want for myself.”
But he never made it to that stage, under the weight of his addictions.
Which is incredibly hypocritical for me to say, as I was languishing within the first stages of alcoholism my own self, but hey, I would tell myself, I’m holding down a job and my own place to live, taking care of myself otherwise. Mostly.
I mean, at least my weaknesses aren’t public, I’d say, when I met myself in the mirror.
I’m just a happy-go-lucky scamp.
Then, of course, I’d meet my friend, Dough, short for Dougherty. Dough was also single and isolated, lived in the same neighborhood, had a hole in his heart he liked to drown out with booze sometimes as well. We’d terrorize our neighborhood bars for a weekend, making complete dicks out of ourselves after never-ending pitchers of stout beer and martinis, laughing like maniacs around conversations and jokes and this mania of the broken artist—we undiscovered geniuses holding down regular jobs—and so we rubbed alcohol into our wounded egos and drowned our delights in fried foods and pudgy barmaids who never threw us out, just overserved us because the tip would correspond accordingly, and, to be perfectly fair, we were actually rather entertaining. It was a rare evening indeed that we caused any real trouble for anyone, made anyone uncomfortable.
We were just loud, funny drunks.
Why couldn’t Derek do this, instead? Continue the tradition?
What Derek was doing, well, Derek was into pure destruction, gripped firmly by ghosts of unreasonable rage.
It made me terrifically sad that he and I were left unbonded, even in our addictions.
He was eventually ejected from school and became one of those pathetic hang-about people who live near a campus just for the parties and the hepatitis. I’m not sure where he was living, or who he was living with. There are no records for this time in his life, like his life had been blasted over by a sandstorm of drugs and booze.
Every few weeks, my mother would get a gripping sense of doom and drive from her home in Houston to Austin and spend an afternoon looking for him, a sort of scavenger hunt to find her youngest son. Some of his “friends” were actually good kids and would take pity on Mom because, even for their lifestyle, they saw how far Derek would push things.
Eventually, Mom would find him holed up in some shanty UT rat hole and shake him awake, then pour him into her car and take him to a grocery store, buy him food, find his clothes and few meager possessions—most of which had been bought for him by my other sister, Marge, and her husband—and by this time Derek would be alert, fed, and ready to get Mom back on the road so he could trade some of his food for beer.
That was who he was at this time.
Completely without vergüenza, the Mexican Catholic depiction of pride and shame that forced oneself to have a sense of dignity enough to do better for oneself, for those who loved you, for your family. Derek, somehow, because he wasn’t raised on that farm in that barrio like the rest of us, had been raised with no sense of vergüenza; that genome had never kicked in and developed, or at least remained dormant at this time, and it was killing my mother, and the rest of us.
My sisters saw and understood what was happening, but they pulled back and established boundaries because they were building their own families, had their own lives to live. We were all deeply saddened by Derek, but none of us really knew what to do. We spoke of interventions, of hospitalization and rehab, but none of it ever took shape: It cost money, and Mom’s insurance, which was still covering him at twenty-two, would not cover that.
We felt helpless, and could do nothing but watch, as his demons wrapped him in shrouds and took him away from us.
Everyone tried to reach him. My father would also travel to Austin, try to find him, but Derek knew that as a sober man with little income, Dad would prove wearisome and Jesufied, try to talk to Derek about AA, and would get little from the interaction, so Derek managed to avoid him most times, which wounded my father greatly.
Dan tried, too, driving from San Antonio to Austin to find him sometimes, and he’d take Derek out to dinner, buy him a few beers and try to talk sense to him, but at some point Dan would call an end to the evening and either head home or stay at a hotel, and Derek would launch, once again, and disappear. This was when our club was disbanded, and Dan and I were estranged, so Dan was chasing after that same frequency of communion, needing the familiarity of his brothers’ warmth, was as lonely as I was, but not ready to talk to me.
And I could never reach Derek, on the phone, from Seattle, could never get a returned text. I deleted his number out of anger and frustration so often I eventually had it committed to memory because I’d feel shitty a day or two after writing him off, and then ask Mom for it once more. It was her number, actually, her bill, since he was on her family plan, and Mom refused to cancel the line because it was the one method of communication that he used.
I wanted to grab him by the ears and head-butt him, bring him to Seattle, kick his awkward, large Hank Hill Texas ass and just . . . I don’t know. Dealing with addicts is a wormhole to nowhere.
I wanted to yell at him, “Why can’t you be a functional drunk like me and Dan? Hold down a job, be miserable like the rest of us and stop worrying M
om?? Jesus, Derek! You’re making it a choice between you and her, and I will kick your ass, Derek! I will fucking do it, and I’m not talking in metaphor, motherfucker: I will beat the shit out of you and all your fucking friends!” I actually did say that to him, and often. It’s probably why he didn’t like talking to me. But he always accepted my care packages, the swine.
In the end, it was following my lead that nearly killed him.
He did, finally, get a job, working as a stock boy at the Gap, or Old Navy. Either which.
He worked a little over two weeks, through the end of a February and into a March, and when he received his first paycheck, he took that money and went out with his friends—it was the most money he’d had in a very long time—and he drank far too many Bombay Sapphire martinis, which was my drink of choice at this time, but he drank them like beer, one right after the other to the point where he became a walking corpse, his cognitive processes drowned and his eyes gone out, and as he stood in a road by a bar in Austin, Texas, in some side neighborhood street during that dreadful SXSW convention, Derek blacked out while standing straight up, right in front of his Hungarian friend named Mogyorodi, and he fell backward, like an evergreen, and he cracked his skull on the sidewalk, his body finally giving up on his bad choices and desire for oblivion, drawn heavily to a conclusion.
And he broke every one of our hearts, finally.
CHAPTER 3 Drinking with Dad
It’s in the moments that slip quietly by when we affect those closest to us most, moments unnoticed and unintended, when you think no one is looking: We leave the deepest marks when we least mean it.
Dan and I left a serious indentation on our youngest brother, Derek, without noticing or caring when we were growing up with him, in the way our father left the mark of Cain on both Dan and me when Dad was fully cognizant of what he was doing, what we were seeing, as his boys under his care.
My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Page 3