My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  More than common, it was expected for the men who worked for my father to start their drinking of the smaller, seven-ounce Budweiser pony bottles around 10:00 a.m., either at the sandpit or in the driveway where much of Dad’s broken-down trucking equipment was parked throughout the ’80s. Nothing was said to discourage it, and if the women disapproved, they weren’t allowed to voice their disapproval or send covert glowers in the direction of any of the men, regardless of their status, because except for my Gramma, who ran the place, women weren’t allowed near the trucking equipment or near the men, unless they were bringing food. Work was a boy’s club, though the work just got in the way of the drinking.

  But even among men, there were limits. Once in a while, someone would make a comment if someone started too early, allowed the beer to interfere with basic functionality, saying that so-and-so had awoken that morning “con la mano enchida,” meaning “his hand was already swollen, holding a beer bottle.”

  He’s a hard one for the drink, that one.

  The men drank slowly all day so that it wouldn’t interfere too badly with their driving of the large, barely operating 1950s- and ’60s-era GMC and Chevrolet dump trucks, with squishy brakes and suspect steering that argued rather than answered. And yet somehow they managed to get through my entire childhood without murdering a single person or family in a vehicular collision. In fact, the only driver who very nearly killed a pedestrian was actually me, driving an eighteen-wheeler when I was about fifteen. And, for the record, perfectly sober. Might get to that story later.

  Through their twenties and thirties, my father’s neighbors and cousins drank with no sense of mortality or health or consequences, destroying kidney and family both while sharing their bewilderment over breakfast ponies, wondering why a wife had packed up the kids and vacated, or why they felt so depleted and weak so often. It wasn’t denial: It was a deep, sincere cultural inability to understand the direct connection between alcoholism and their ongoing health and psychological issues. Beer, simply put, was the answer to all of life’s problems; how could it ever be the source?

  Their commitment and faith in alcohol was as absolute and religious as the Peruvian tribes have in the coca leaf: It’s manna, it’s relief, it’s life sustaining and ego enhancing, though admittedly, for some reason it can also be a bit illegal.

  And if it was so much good, how on earth could it be at all bad?

  Once, I remember watching a conversation between my father and one of his closer cousins, Raul Medrano. Raul was a small, rail-thin man with dark, nearly red skin, made much more amber by his flushed face and his body’s instant insulin reaction to alcohol, as the first and sometimes only thing he put down his throat every morning.

  “Mira, primo!” he claimed in exasperation and alarm, as he spat out a dry, cottony spume, seemingly devoid of any moisture. “Mira!”

  He’d eaten nothing for days and lived on Budweiser while he worked with Dad, but he’d become so broken down from alcoholism, his body had bloomed in huge, painful boils, and the minute he’d have his first beer, his liver would protest violently and he’d turn a hot crimson color with all the arteries in his neck and face dilating. He looked tortured that morning as he stood swaying in the glaring, primordial South Texas sun, standing there looking bewildered and uncertain as to what was happening to him, and no one had the presence of mind to say, “Jesus Christ, man, drink a glass of water and get some help with your drinking.”

  Instead, Dad would volunteer to drive him home, and Raul would smile around a huge lump in his cheek that should not have been there, and say, “No, no, that’s fine. I can walk,” and I’d watch as he stumbled down the dirt road toward his house a couple miles away in that blazing heat, and wonder at their inability to make the connection between the beer and the level of disease. He died in his mid-forties, left a widow and two boys with nothing but hospital bills, and that would have been my father’s fate as well, if my mother had not left him.

  Still, that didn’t keep Dan and me from glorifying the whole culture of drink, in the world of men and their secret clubs.

  We were boys constantly surrounded by drinking men and their war stories, watching them relish that delicious first beer as they drove out of the sandpit, overloaded with their first haul of the day and stopping at Mike’s Korner Store at the crossroads of Boca Chica and Indiana, or Route 511, to gas up on the company credit line: an account kept in a notebook and verified by invoking my father’s name. They’d buy that first eight-pack of ponies and a couple of bags of the dried Mexican shrimp with the lemon juice packet that I positively lived on at that time of my life, except I’d follow them down with tamarind-flavored soda instead of Budweiser.

  It was mystical, religious, that first cold beer of the morning, for my father and his people. It changed everything, made them better drivers and rewrote their stories as womankillers, long-shanked fighters, and respected machers of these rural country roads.

  And the more you drank, the more you could hold your beer, the tougher you were.

  More macho.

  And Dan and I wanted to be macho: We were told it was the most important thing we could be, for a man. So we swam in that water, believed in the same contradictions.

  Being born nearly a generation later, Derek didn’t see much of this. The trucking business was long gone, and with it went the secret club for men that met mysteriously under derelict dump trucks or at the back of backhoes, standing around saying nothing and knocking back beers while avoiding responsibilities and family, or telling stories of conquests in winding, euphemistic Spanish so that younger ears could not track the particulars, specificities, and details.

  What Derek did see was much of Dan and me as teenagers, awkward and clumsy and lost in various transitions of youth; he saw Dan transform from an angry, puffy teenager to a cockstrong private in the army at seventeen, taking an early release from school in order to get the hell away from Dad as soon as he could. Dan played football and then followed it with a devotional fervor from season to season on television, taught Derek how to talk to other men of the meaningless, manufactured importance of franchises, following an athlete’s career like men at betting tracks follow horses. And later on, when Dan moved in with my mother and Derek, after the divorce, it was Derek’s job at eight years old to keep Dan’s supply of beer replenished in his own swollen hand so that Dan didn’t have to leave the couch or miss a single frame of football, and Derek would leap up and run to the refrigerator to keep Dan supplied. Later on, he began popping the beer bottles open himself, covertly, inside the refrigerator door, and he’d take a quick gulp before he delivered one to Dan, who didn’t notice.

  This education, this exposure, taught Derek how to blend in as a man in bars, to talk sports, a skill I never quite developed, and have no interest in doing so now.

  And he saw me go from a lanky, scrawny adolescent with hair like Lyle Lovett to a lanky, scrawny teenager with hair like, well, Lyle Lovett with a haircut, and I taught him about music, and the usual moping, faux-artist adolescent agonizing in literature—the Salinger, the Camus, the James Joyce, and the soundtrack to wankerdom in The Cure, Joy Division, and The Smiths, peppered here and again with the punk energy of the ’70s. I looked vaguely Semitic at this time in my life, more Ashkenazi than Mexican farmhand. I wore thin cotton tees with a single totemic image center mass, walked everywhere with a pair of earbuds hooked up to my Walkman, which was clipped to my backpack and played an eternal loop of mixed tapes I made at home.

  In short, I was the prototype for today’s college wanker, having created the style before Steve Jobs spoon-fed it to your children. Parents can blame me for that. And yet I was still a Texan and, therefore, had some rough edges; you can’t live in Texas and become entirely artsy. You’re bound to have the hide of some endangered beast on your wall, or long-horns on your Cadillac—if not physically, then somewhere in metaphor.

  So this was the polarity in which Derek was raised, these were the two opposing tho
ughts held together in his young mind: Dan was the body, I was the heart.

  And I was tortured, of course. I was the image of “burning heart Jesus,” holding his heart in his palm, and I would take extraordinary pleasure in the exaltation that Derek and his friends accorded me, at this time the only audience I had, and I would also drink too much in front of the kid, regale him with stories of my misadventures and hearts left broken, mine among many. He’d listen and learn and take it all in, like I was his personal artsy swashbuckler, and I left my own dent, in his head.

  Though it wasn’t all terrible.

  Here, I’d take the poor, terrified kid on these calamitous nap-of-the-earth drives at fifty and sixty miles per hour on dirt roads in my pimpedout 1982 Buick LeSabre, low to the ground and windows rolled all the way down with Gibby Haynes and the Butthole Surfers just blaring out of my speakers. Derek, his eyes wide with ecstasy and terror, biting down hard on a pacifier, would be simply buckled in at age four, because fuck, this is rural Texas, and we don’t know about baby seats. We’d rocket by like low-flying aircraft, listening to “Who Was in My Room Last Night?,” down the flat, chalk-dusted farm roads, and make our own dilemmas and distractions because there was nothing, no one else, and this was ours, only ours and all that we had, for now. It wasn’t much, but it was there, and that was enough.

  That was the Sunday morning drive to get barbacoa at the house of some family that supplemented their income by throwing open their garage door and cooking a series of calves’ heads in a pit in their backyard on the Mexican holy days. That was the drive to get fresh tortillas from the other family that built their own tortilla maker in their living room. That was the drive to the corner store, five miles away if you went by the geometry of the grain fields, which we were forced to do because we lived in between two of them. That was the drive to the beach—not the beach itself, just the drive there, because the driving was the point, and the music, and scenery whipping past, because it felt like you were doing something, it felt like you were finally moving.

  That’s what I imprinted on Derek. Gave him a taste for the tragic and the terror and the need for oblivion, without realizing what I was doing.

  The morning we heard of his accident, when he was in the ICU at a hospital in Austin after falling and crushing his head when he was blacked-out drunk, this was all I could think about, how both Dan and I managed to provoke or elicit Thanatos, the death drive, l’appel du vide, in our younger brother, sort of bleeding through our own damage and letting it spill unknowingly onto the poor, stupid beautiful beast of a boy, now twenty-four years old and intent upon flinging himself off the nearest chemical cliff.

  Derek’s addictions, not in the least bit limited to boozing, had become unmanageable, and he couldn’t get close to anything resembling a cliff without wanting to jump off.

  And now, though it started recreationally, it was ending rather medically, and much too publicly to remain a secret family curse. There was no coming back from this cliff, and it had taken Derek, the last boy in line, to illustrate quite clearly a definition of cultural cliffsides in both my older brother and myself, leading off into either horizon, and certainly into both our futures.

  CHAPTER 4 Cain without Abel

  The morning Derek was laid up in the hospital in a coma, I was reluctant to get on a plane and fly to Texas, and it wasn’t simply because I was an underpaid magazine designer barely scratching a living in Seattle, though that was certainly a part of it. There were several complications to it, some that were sort of indiscernible until even now, as I’m writing about it.

  There was Dan. I hadn’t spoken to Dan for nearly three years at this point, after an estrangement that began from another one of our fights. I didn’t think the family needed another drama to play out in that waiting room.

  So I stayed in Seattle, alone, in isolation, and paced.

  Ironically, the argument between my older brother and me that caused the deepest division, and the longest we went without speaking, never really happened.

  Or, it happened, but he was having one argument, and I was having another.

  I remember it clearly, and I also remember being a bit mystified that morning, but the momentum to separate—for clear individuation from my older brother, after all those years—was there, so I went for it, for both his sake and mine, but mostly because we had both become incredibly fatigued by each other at this point.

  So this Sunday morning, Dan was planning a large barbecue, like he did when his damned Cowboys were playing, and he’d invited some friends over. I’d been out the night before with Dougherty and woke up terribly hungover, so I met Dough at that same hangover pick-up bar we’d been at the night previous and downed a couple Bloody Marys. Then I was off to Dan’s.

  One of his friends from the nursing home, Gabriel, was there early. He was from Central America and a devout evangelical, and I really didn’t like Gabriel because he reminded me far too much of everything that I hated about South Texas, even if he was from El Salvador. I looked down my freshly minted Seattle nose at the simplistic platitudes of his faith, his misogyny, and his repulsive attitudes toward non-Latin races. It was one of the first times I’d ever seen the competition and striations of hierarchy between immigrants up close, and it offended me completely. Also, he would “date” white women—meaning he’d sleep with them and take advantage of their generosity when they’d pay for a night out—but he had no intention of ever settling down with one; instead, he planned on flying back to his village in El Salvador and finding a teenager to bring back to Seattle to serve as his wife. He was nearing fifty.

  Gabriel and I were mistakenly left alone in Dan’s living room while Dan was showering and preparing for his big day, and Gabriel began his pitch to get me to talk about “real things.” “Real talk.” Jesus talk. How Jesus could help with my things. My anger, my problems with Dan.

  I could see by his preparations that my issues had been a topic of discussion previously.

  So I opened a beer and became angrier. I could see the machinations in his head, twisting with minimum sophistication, grinding like heavy stone wheels: Bronze Age farming tools churning out some leavened Jesus biscuits.

  “So, Domingo,” he said, in the flat, proper Latin pronunciation, “tell me, what do you think is the best way to—”

  “You do not want to be talking Jesus to me, Gabriel. I’m not like Dan: I do not suffer fools, and I don’t know what he sees in you that he invites you to his house.”

  I was not afraid of Gabriel. He was tiny. Played soccer. Called it “football.”

  “Yes, but, tell me—”

  “You need to be quiet now,” I said. I felt like Hannibal Lecter. “You don’t want to try and operate on my motivations and behavior with that blunt little Jesus scalpel. Do you really think you can make an incision into my mind with your faith? Compared to you, I’m a goddamned genius, you little—”

  Which was as far as I went in my drunken declaration of superiority, because Dan erupted from his bedroom in an offensive, forward fighting posture, and I immediately turned and faced him, as the velocity of the flung door startled me into high alert.

  I’m not sure what he thought he’d heard, but it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d heard me lamely declare myself an undiscovered genius; I mean, I’d do it at least once a month after I’d successfully insert words or phrases like obfuscate and erstwhile or insofar as into a conversation.

  But this was something different, I could tell. And I wasn’t sure why. I was too drunk to understand what we were fighting about now.

  Dan stood there, shoulders back and hands balled into fists at his sides, and he was breathing daggers and looking at me like he wanted to seriously injure me.

  Now, this occurred a few months after his knee had been rebuilt from his destroying it in a fight. He had actual bolts and plates holding together his tibia, and he wasn’t recovered by any stretch of medical theory. And he stood there, as if he was about to swing at me.
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  Over Jesus? This just didn’t make sense to me.

  His, girlfriend, Orlene, walked over and placed her hand on his shoulder and pulled him back gently.

  The idea of fighting him in this state—Dan on a reconstructed knee, me in perfect health, if a bit hungover—it just made me shudder, so I very obviously dropped any and all defensive posturing, lowering my shoulders, softening my face, even settling my hands in my pockets and stepping back, then softening my tone.

  I asked, “Why are you so mad, man?”

  His eyes became wild, bewildered, and crazy.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You think it’s a fucking joke? All these threats and goddamn times I’ve had to stitch you up and keep this all a secret from the rest of the family? Do you know how hard it’s been on Mom and me and everyone, and you’re just going to stand there and make light about it?”

  Now, this had me a little confused because it could certainly be the case that Dan was upset about me declaring myself a genius, and how it inadvertently affected both him and the rest of the family that no one else had managed to appreciate it, how it caused problems in personal relationships, et cetera, but somehow it didn’t feel quite right. I wasn’t convinced that was why he was this upset. There had to be something else.

  But I shrugged my shoulders and left anyway, made my way back to my apartment and figured either we’d clear it up later or it would resolve itself another way.

  Dan had heard the bits about “the blunt scalpel” and “incisions” and immediately leapt to the conclusion that I had been telling Gabriel—of all people—about my impulse toward self-harm when I was younger and crazier, as a potential yet-to-be-diagnosed borderline personality, and saying it in such a way that he felt I was bragging.

  Up until this time, only Dan had seen me in my worst moments, sitting on the floor in my apartment in the shadows, when I was in my darkest places, and using an X-Acto or a switchblade and tearing into the meat of my biceps or forearms, working for scarification. It wasn’t exactly Thanatos, but perhaps a kissing cousin. Something French, like l’appel du vide. I never understood it, and it would come upon me when I felt my most frightened—losing a girlfriend, a job, my apartment—and then suddenly Dan, as primogeniture, would be there, yelling, “What the fuck are you doing? Jesus fucking Christ, look at all this blood! I’m going to have to take you to the psych ward!”