My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  “I don’t really trust or take anyone else’s critiques as useful. I mean, I listen to what they have to say about my writing, and then I read their own writing, and if it’s inferior to mine, I don’t feel they have the authority to comment. And the wounded egos are just tiresome.”

  “You don’t play well with other children,” she said, smiling.

  “And I have to reserve my humiliation for these,” I said, and pulled open a drawer to show her a stack of rejection slips. I’d taken to sending a few, disjointed chapters and writing samples to agencies in New York, addresses culled from the Internet because that’s what I had seen on television and in movies as the first step in publishing, but what I was sending out was irregular and haphazard: I deserved the rejection notices. Still, Steph was duly impressed that I had taken that step, had pushed it even that far.

  And while she was a consistent journal writer, would spend an afternoon writing a thousand words about something she’d seen or experienced that day, she didn’t have a single project she was working on, would do her monthly writing group as an exercise, rather than for productivity.

  The more time we spent together, the more our differences began to emerge, and we tried valiantly to overcome them because we liked each other as much as we did.

  For our third date, she picked me up at work one Friday afternoon and we drove to a ferry and sat in line in the rain, while she pulled out a plate with a pork chop and asparagus and some mashed potatoes from a dinner party she had thrown the evening before. It felt odd to sit there, in the Jeep, and pick at the food while her dog, a weird, sometimes quite stupid lab mix she called Cleopatra, or Cleo for short, stared over my shoulder and drooled. I made as if to eat, was politely grateful, but then said I wasn’t very hungry.

  “Not a problem,” Steph said, and then absentmindedly handed the plate over to Cleo, who clamped down on it like a prisoner of war, licking the plate clean in a matter of seconds.

  We took the ferry over to the peninsula, drove into the old-growth forest, and rented a cabin for the weekend. On Saturday morning when I woke up, I couldn’t find her, had a moment of extreme panic because I thought she’d left, but then discovered her asleep in the Jeep. She had spent the night in the back with Cleo because I had been snoring far too loudly for her taste.

  I felt ashamed, but she was playful about it.

  “I’m a loud sleeper,” I said.

  “We’ll have to get that fixed,” she said, as she took the dog out for the morning ritual.

  That night, we sat in front of the fireplace and charted her family tree, her origins and relations, and then we did mine, and she listened to me as I told her about my own histories, my own family, how I’d started writing a book about it, mostly because I wanted to understand it myself. We sat down at a table and did a Venn diagram of my family, then hers, and we asked questions about one another and told stories about each member of our immediate families. While I was comfortable and open and transparent, I felt there was a lot that Steph was not saying, was leaving for the reader to imagine instead of trusting the author, so to speak, in much the same manner of the authors she loved best, who demurred and dithered and shifted with language and never told you outright what the truth of the moment might be, sort of the opposite of poetry.

  But that was Steph, I was beginning to understand, and I decided I really liked her. She was a bad fit for the world, in much the same manner that I felt I’d been, and she was this tidy little combination of Sinead O’Connor’s commitment to her beliefs cross-pollinated with Wolverine’s ferocity. Sort of a modern-day Patricia Highsmith, before the mental illness.

  It worked well for us, I thought, because once, before his event, Derek had told me I was a lot like the Hulk. “Except, maybe angrier,” he added, on second thought.

  And I admired her, as a person: She would work only for companies that had a cause, nonprofits. Would take a much lower wage than she could draw, if she felt committed to the larger cause. Currently, she said, she was tackling breast cancer.

  That impressed me, as someone who couldn’t think past my next paycheck.

  I found out she also loved camping, was very much into the rural Henry David Thoreau self-independence thing that Yankees actually take seriously, since she hailed from the land of H. P. Lovecraft. I knew she loved reading, I knew she wasn’t a fan of movies or television, and I knew she would go on mystic urban walkabouts with Cleo. I knew, eventually, that she’d been involved in a ten-year relationship with another woman and was now swinging back around to boys. I knew she wasn’t big on food or drinks or drinking, so that was going to be a mark against her, because I’d become quite the urban hipster, not a foodie exactly, but I’d dated a foodie, just enough to know how to navigate in that world, and I enjoyed it.

  I knew she began seeing me as the sort of eroticized “other,” because I was Mexican American, from Texas. And I felt the same, as she was the slim-hipped gentile goal of every immigrant story, as I’ve mentioned before.

  We ended the summer by driving a bit north to one of the many beachside parks that dot some of the water-view neighborhoods overlooking Puget Sound. Since it was a nice Saturday afternoon, it was fairly busy, so we took off our shoes and meandered in the hard, wet sand, walked along the shore and looked at all the beach art left behind by kids and hippies and the artistically inclined, using water-logged detritus as media.

  We stopped by an embedded labyrinth of shells, laid out large in a swirling conch pattern, and entered at the open end; we made it halfway around before I stopped and said, “I can’t go on; I’m afraid I’ll never make it back out,” and Steph laughed and thought I was speaking metaphorically about our relationship, and something flickered for a minute, and then vanished and was gone.

  Her phone chimed the Cole Porter song and it was her mother, calling from Steph’s hometown, and she decided to answer it. She sat on a log and made a kind of radio theater of her own with that conversation because she knew I was listening, and she helped paint a portrait of Rockwellian rhapsody, flared the phone out so I could hear her mother going on and on about how she and the other doyenne of their small town had banded together to keep a large “box store” out of the town square, and how happy they were in keeping the provincial integrity of the town. It was Arcadian, hearing them engage like that, and lit up every point on my compass; I wanted to be in, wanted to be a part of this bucolic idealization of Americana. It was something I thought I really wanted, back then.

  “What do they have against boxes?” I asked.

  “Not that kind of store,” Steph said, laughing, and if there had been the thin bat squeak of something big brewing earlier on, it was an all-out foghorn in that goofy grin she gave me, when she wrapped her arm over my neck and kissed me on the cheek, and we wandered back through the beach to her Jeep.

  CHAPTER 12 Stephanie of a Thousand Lives

  It had taken a month for Stephanie to come clean and tell me what drove her west, what drove her to put so much distance between herself and her family, in the way I had done with mine. We were on another of the long, woodsy walks she loved to take with her dog, and I started telling her about Derek, and the wound that event had left on all of my family.

  She was quiet for a while, and then somewhere in there she decided to tell me about her own reasons for moving to Seattle, her reasons for putting a whole country between her future and her past, but not until we were back at her house and in the safety of her basement bedroom, curled up in her huge sleigh bed.

  She was twenty-two, she said, and she’d been driving a small car, a compact two-door Mazda, with someone she’d been dating in the front seat and her younger brother in the backseat, when she was home for a weekend from college.

  An old man with a brain tumor, confused, in a large car, entered the highway going the opposite direction, came right at them, just on the opposite side of a rise in the road.

  “He was just there, out of nowhere,” she told me as we were lying quietly i
n bed.

  “Jesus, Steph; I’m so sorry.”

  “My little brother was killed, from the backseat. I wasn’t expected to survive. The other person wasn’t even bruised. Funny how car wrecks are.”

  I remained quiet, unsure what to say.

  “My skull was cracked in the impact. That’s why I call it ‘my dented head’ sometimes. I heard my little brother dying, in the wreck. I kept telling him to hang on, but he was already too far gone. I have epilepsy now, as a result. And a plate in my head. That’s why you can see that scar, going around.”

  I pulled her hair back a bit and noticed a small, thin line circling her scalp, like she said. I studied her face a little closer and saw that it was structurally unsound, like a Picasso painting.

  “You poor thing,” I said, not sure what else to do.

  “I take medication to control the epilepsy, but sometimes it makes my thinking too fuzzy.”

  I was concerned more for the plate in her head. How do you protect yourself from that?

  “And the plate, in your head, what’s that like?”

  “I can’t feel it,” she said. “It’s just there.”

  “Hunh.”

  Run away, I thought to myself. I can’t help here. This is much bigger than me.

  Still, I was drawn to her, for some reason. Drawn to the anguish, the brokenness, and more than anything else, the intelligence, and the misfit quality.

  She’s like me, I thought. And if there’s redemption for her, there’s redemption for me.

  We’ll do it together.

  I began to suspect something was seriously wrong with her on the way back from our drive to eastern Washington, after I’d had an interview with a small company, specializing in bilingual marketing, that intended on growing into a media firm. Currently the owners were responsible for products that were travesties to printed publication, at least in English, as they claimed their Spanish was sublime, but I wasn’t a good judge of that; I write in Spanish the way Irvine Welsh writes in English. I’d read about them in a business journal, seen an opportunity and leapt for it, offering to clean up their product and raise their profile so they could compete in larger, more sophisticated urban markets.

  Great, they’d said; come out to the eastern part of the state and let’s see if we can come to terms. Fantastic, I thought: This was the opportunity I’d been looking for, within my skill set and at my leisure. I could work from home, off a laptop. Freedom at last.

  So I rented a car and invited Steph, thought we could do with a stretch of the legs for a Saturday afternoon, since we were still getting to know one another.

  I had a meeting with the business owners, two families of second-generation Mexican-American heritage, who grew up in the agricultural stratums of eastern Washington, their parents pickers before them, and now, this generation of children graduated from state colleges and set to illuminate the world, or at least their corner of the state, with the power of the Hispanic dollar and the megachurch. But first, they needed a spell checker, an upgrade to their literacy, and corporate identity in their literature, which was currently being produced by two high school seniors on Photoshop. It was shockingly bad.

  Off we went, and the four-hour drive was not without its weirdness, as we had both made playlists for the trip. I began to notice that Steph was taking the lyrical insinuations from the songs I’d picked with just a bit too much sincerity, far too literally, and much too personally, to the point where she was becoming visibly upset at particular songs, which, to me, were an enduring liturgy of wordplay and the weary exhaustion of dying relationships—but certainly not a reflection on what was going on in that car, at that time. They were just good songs.

  But Steph felt I was telling her something, through the music, and she was getting angry.

  “Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That this relationship is not realistic?”

  “Steph, this is weird. It’s just a song. The lyrics are fantastic; I thought you’d like it because you like words so much. This writing is some of the best I’ve heard in the last ten years.”

  “Why does it have to be so cynical?”

  It was true, I began to notice: Everything she was playing was bordering on the coy, the optimistically naive and bubbly. Everything I was playing was musica verité, the deep complications and sharp-edged intricacies of relationships. I had none of her optimism, which, in all candor, I felt was put on and insincere. There was a sense of the forced, with her optimism, a desperation that I felt undermined any sense of calm or meditative guarantee of a positive outcome.

  The tension in that rental car exploded into an actual argument about an hour from our destination, when I played a song by Evan Dando, which was actually a song about, well, negotiating the hairpin turns in a relationship, and she lost her temper, from the passenger seat.

  “What does that mean? That I’m abusive?”

  “It’s just a song! I just like it! It’s not a message to you from him or me! What the hell, Steph?? Are we supposed to listen to your granola shit for an eight-hour drive and I can’t play what I like? I thought you’d like this, since he’s from your part of the world. Jesus fuck.”

  Pause. Quiet in the car for three minutes.

  “You know I have a job interview for something I’ve worked really hard to get in roughly an hour, right? And this is not going to help me interview?”

  Quiet, for ten more minutes. Then we were unexpectedly closer to the destination than we had anticipated, and I was at the strip mall offices of the “media company,” and I had to switch into interview mode with this tension hanging over me.

  They were in the parking lot, awaiting my arrival. Before I could change into more presentable clothing, I was put in front of both families, the four investors who owned the company, in my traveling clothes (shorts, nondescript T, and sandals). Behind me, Steph peeled out in the rental, making the introductions a bit awkward. I began my presentation, trying to block out the weirdness of the drive from Seattle with Steph and attempting to ignore the worry as to whether she’d already decided to drive back home in a huff.

  My presentation was spectacular. I was genuine, relaxed, and competent and showed everyone present how I could raise the image of their company with a few changes and uniformity and standardization of logos, branding, and, well, literacy, and with all this, I could get them in front of the big players, instead of the mom-and-pop bullshit they were currently stuck with. Then I pulled out reworkings I had done on their “newspaper” and brochures, whatever I could find online, materials I had rebuilt to standard.

  It went over like gangbusters.

  It helped that they reminded me entirely of the families and businesspeople of South Texas, spoke identically in that lilting bifurcation of Spanish and English of educated second-generation Mexican Americans, and yet, I felt very much that we were not cut from the same cloth. I was way too punk, and they were way too drunk on the blood of Christ, and not just the wine cooler/low-alcohol content of the Catholic Church, mind you. These were the sort of Christians who burned the Harry Potter books, I could tell right away. Still, their money spent.

  I was invited to lunch, and I demurred because I was tired from the performance and wanted to leave things on an “up” note, wasn’t certain in what mood I’d find Steph or whether I would encounter her again that afternoon. So I made some excuses and wondered if I was stuck in Kennewick for the weekend, when I was finally able to reach Steph on her phone, and she said she’d be right over.

  She was a different person than the one who had peeled off two hours before.

  She was bright and gushy and came around the vehicle and was introduced to the owners, who made an awkward, very un-white insistence on “welcoming everyone like family,” and I was nervous at what Steph’s reaction was going to be. And instead of embarrassing me, she was entirely likeable and receptive, though a bit too anthropological. But I could forgive her for that, because God knows if the situation had been reversed, I’d hav
e broken out my pad and pencil and started sketching her Yankee family and their habitat as well, but it still left me feeling unsettled and uncertain.

  What really set me on edge, as we headed back to Seattle, was that Steph insisted on playing only my playlist, and had memorized every song that had upset her before, and sang them without hesitation at full volume in a chirpy, optimistic enthusiasm that gave me the creeps for the full drive home.

  “Those people were nice,” she said.

  “Yeah, they totally remind me of the Mexican Americans of South Texas. Like my sisters used to be, which is weird,” I said.

  “Yes, them, too. But the people I met at the mall, they were nice as well,” she said.

  “You mingled at the mall? How very small-town of you. Whatever inspired you to do that?” This didn’t seem like her, for some reason.

  “Oh, they came up to the car to check up on me,” she said.

  “Hunh,” I said. Tingle, tingle. “Was there, did something happen?”

  “I just had my head against the window and they came up and knocked to see if I was all right,” she said, and then continued singing.

  Holy shit, I thought. This doesn’t feel right.

  What was she not saying?

  As I learned more about her, and upon reflection, it’s clear now that she was on the verge of some kind of episode in the hour leading up to the destination in Kennewick. Her anger and hostility at imagined slights was an indication of her traumatic brain injury, which very likely led to an epileptic fit, in the parking lot of the mall, when she was alone, and she wouldn’t tell me it happened, couldn’t allow herself to be considered “damaged goods,” so she hid it, tried to keep it under control.

  I was offered the job a week later, and Steph wanted to camp as a celebration. I can’t imagine why I would have agreed to this; I must have been thinking about something else and trying to assuage her when I said yes. It had to have been, because before I knew it, we were driving her Jeep to her favorite camping destination, a place called Bacon Creek that you could only find on those geosurvey maps. But I tried to get into the spirit, even went to a general store in a dodgy part of Seattle and bought “his and hers” machetes for thirty dollars.