My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  She’d been there before, she told me, many times, and it was perfectly safe. Just a few hours northeast of Seattle.

  “That’s fine,” I probably said, when I meant, “Absolutely not, I hate camping.”

  Camping, as someone I trust implicitly once told me, is at its best definition an agreement to be uncomfortable.

  I was no longer willing to make that agreement, with anyone or anything, and yet, somehow, I found myself driving north and then east with Steph and her dog, Cleo, on a four-hour trip into the Cascade Mountains. Perhaps in my youth I’d have been much more engaged in this trip, in this destination of raw, untamed wilderness off switchbacks and logging roads, last traveled by men with huge fuckoff moustaches and sore bottoms, their knee-high leather boots squeaking from moisture. But I wasn’t that guy anymore, no longer into Indiana Jones–style adventures and risk taking. I wanted gravel paths and stepped ascenders and at least the insinuation of a fence between me and a plummet: I wanted assurances and rough-hewn guarantees, placards telling me about the pioneers and conservationists responsible for this lovely meadow view onto Puget Sound. But watch your step, in case of soil erosion.

  Lovely. Now, when’s drinks? I’d ask, in my best P. G. Wodehouse. Shall we repair to someplace warm? Capital.

  That was my renewed idea of camping; at worst, it was a motel room rented from a redneck.

  But for Steph, it was the unrefined, untamed wildness of the Northwest land that drew her, brought her closer to communion, called to her wild rumpus, fed her Max in Where the Wild Things Are.

  It was a Friday night, after we’d finished work, and her truck was loaded with the camping kit. We’d made it out through I-5 and the North Cascades Highway when Steph turned off after a bridge she knew well and started driving through these rustic, nearly reassumed logging roads. The battered old Jeep’s headlights were hardly better than a pair of weak flashlights, illuminating very close to nothing. She navigated this behemoth through some frightening isolated spots for an hour, drawing us deeper and deeper into the natural brush, and my anxieties and primal sense of de-escalation of the predatory ladder grew with each slipping minute.

  I really wanted a handgun, or at least a large-caliber rifle.

  Instead, I had Cleo, who was going apeshit with all the smells of deer and bear when she put her nose through the back window of the Jeep. I can only imagine what she was experiencing and what frightened her. What she knew.

  Steph arrived at the road’s terminus, and a path continued, so in the dark we shouldered our gear a half mile farther into the woods and found a clearing, made a fire, and set up a camp in the near pitch dark. I lay awake all night, wondering if a bear would be so kind as to eat the damned dog first, to give me time to persuade Steph to make it to the Jeep, and fell asleep about the time the sun was breaking over the mountains. When I awoke, it was to one of the most magnificent landscapes I’d ever seen, like a raised level cliffside surrounded by evergreens, protected on one side by a steeper cliff, with paths leading off in two directions, one to a raw, wildly dangerous waterfall gushing with primal ferocity from the thawing mountain snow, and the other to a wadi of a sort, with huge uprooted trees and pristine volcanic boulders worn smooth from all the winters and springs they’d seen, so that they were like buildings laid down on this riverbed on their sides, at the bottom of the waterfall.

  It was precarious and sublime. I’d never seen anything like it, in all my years of living in the Northwest, never taken a journey like this into the breathtaking wilderness.

  Still, I was starting a new job in a day, so I was kind of put off, I realized. If we stuck to this plan, I’d return to Seattle late Sunday night and begin my new job Monday morning, after traveling four more hours back to the western part of the state.

  I started unpacking our breakfasts and such, tied a bottle of warm chardonnay with a rope and immersed it in the runoff at the bottom of the waterfall, which was still icy and frigid from the melting snow from higher elevations, and then went back to tending the fire as Steph wandered off with the dog.

  A bit later, we took a hike through an adjacent logging trail and wound up bewilderingly lost in the most unrefined, oldest-growth forest, which I imagined was really Lewis and Clark–type shit, real monkey brain forest growth, for the planet, where we felt like large, ripe organic treats to either mammal or insect. Seriously, it was like a badger would have found us within its dinner purview. Or a beaver. Hell, never mind a bear, black or brown (I had no idea what neighborhood we were in, or if throwing gang signs would have helped).

  Sometime after noon, after we’d been trapped in another riverbed and had been hunted by the grandmother of all wasps, bigger than any I’d ever seen, we finally found a parallel logging road and were able to make our way back to camp. I broached the subject of leaving that night, when we made it back to camp, because, you see, I was kind of a passive dope and hadn’t realized that Steph intended on spending both nights out there, and I needed to rest before the big start of the new job.

  “So is that all right? Steph?” I asked.

  She didn’t let on what she was thinking as we reentered camp, and the dog was running this way and that, her nose in overload with information.

  I fetched the chardonnay from the waterfall and opened it, taking a swig directly from the bottle with our lunch as I built up the fire. Steph walked out of the tent, accepted the offered bottle, and took a heavy swipe from it, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and then took another, handing it back to me.

  I was impressed. Half of the wine was gone. I tried chugging from it but couldn’t compete. Hesitated. Bit into my cheese and summer sausage, then took another draught. Handed it back. Steph ate some of her lunch, then knocked back the rest of the bottle in two big, open-throated gulps and announced, “I’m going swimming.”

  “I’ll stay and mind the camp,” I said, unsure of her declaration.

  Bugs were everywhere, I began to realize. Little zippy black fuckers, getting all over. Sunlight, bright and crisp—different from the density and saturation value of the South Texas sun that I’m accustomed to—was hanging about, making things smell. I smelled the green, and the wet, and the bugs. Everything was completely still and quiet. I sat on a log, my ass bones aching. Was this camping? I built a bigger fire, tried to kill time by splitting logs with my blunted axe.

  An hour slipped by. Maybe half of another one before I decided, fuck this, and started packing up.

  I had packed up the whole camp and pointed the Jeep out by the time Steph returned, damp and bitten and itchy, her shoes in her hand, with the dog panting and soaked.

  “Thought it was time to call it quits,” I said, hoping for a response.

  I hadn’t realized she’d become so drunk from chugging the wine like she did, and she was angry. And she was even more furious when she returned and saw that I’d packed up the campsite.

  So she unloaded on me. Really let me have it for leading her on, telling her I was a camping sort of fella, that I’d want to willingly place myself in this situation with her on weekends.

  “Well, sure,” I said, “there was a time when I actually wanted to do this, but I see this less and less as recreation rather than a willing submission to potential threats and harm, never mind the discomfort.”

  She remained quiet, intense.

  “But it’s not that, exactly, it’s just that I hadn’t considered that I’d be tired for my first day at a new job, Steph. Come on; you can appreciate that, right?”

  No response from her, just passive seething.

  “I thought we’d just be out here for the day, but I can’t spend another night out here without sleep and then get back to my apartment and fall dead asleep for a few hours, then begin a new job the next day.”

  “You said you would!” she yelled. “You said you’d do this, and now you’re changing your mind!”

  “Yes,” I said. “I really have no idea why I would have agreed to this, knowing what was coming.
I really don’t have an explanation, but I can apologize; I’m sorry.”

  She cleaned up a little and then climbed into the passenger side, packed the dog in her position, and I drove us out of there since she was still pretty drunk.

  She ranted for half an hour more from the passenger seat, and I tried to remain calm and disengaged because I was losing my temper, until finally I did lose it altogether and instead of yelling, I just went quiet. Totally quiet.

  I didn’t speak to her for the entire four-hour trip back to my apartment. I drove straight to my building downtown, stopped outside my front door, exited as the Jeep kept running, and said, “You can keep all my camping shit,” then entered through my front door, ensuring that it clicked shut behind me. I went inside, turned off my phone, had a hot shower, and climbed into bed, trying to suppress the bad feeling I had in my heart and convince myself this girl was not for me; she was just not for me, so for both our sakes, just bugger off now. For both of us.

  This can’t end well, so let it end now.

  CHAPTER 13 Cannibal Hymns

  Steph insisted on calling me over and over again, and sending these dramatic, sad photos of her that really punched me in the heart. She had taken to curling up in her bed and playing the ringtone repeatedly that indicated a text message from me, she said, because she missed me so much. Missed us together.

  I had no capacity to reign in my compassion at the time, still felt raw and open from losing so many people in my life, and she had this power—no, I should own this: I had no way to move through my compassion and get to the other side of it, see that it was just sadness and that sadness ends.

  I was addicted to being sad, and sad was my new home—and there was a lot of sadness with Steph.

  Besides, I told myself, sadness generates good art. Sad is happy, for deep people, as Sally Sparrow said on Doctor Who.

  So we gave it another shot. I gave it another go.

  After I passively allowed Steph to inveigle herself back in my life, we oddly surged forward after another month or two of dating, deciding that I’d move into her shithole rental in North Seattle, right on the county line, in some terrible neighborhood called Lake City. She’d been having issues with her roommates (all of them, again, Craigslist finds: the pattern now clear), and in order to solve her roommate issues, like men do, I said, “Fuck it; let’s move in together.”

  If the cultural and neurotic obstacles weren’t insurmountable enough, moving in with Steph after only a few months of dating was probably the arsenic in our daily gruel.

  I had moved west and to a “posh” city to learn how to swim in an urban environment, how to dress like the kids on television, and which fork to use when. No, really: It wasn’t as if we read from Emily Post growing up the way I did in South Texas, squatting like caballeros around a fire at the end of the day, cooking slabs of personally slaughtered beef on homemade grills made from disused truck parts. Not much use for a teaspoon or a doily there. I was still trying to be a modern Frank Sinatra, didn’t wear denim, carried a cigarette case and a Zippo, and had been particular about my distressed metal cutlery and Fiestaware; I wasn’t quite up to the IKEA standards that Chuck Palahniuk describes in chapter five of Fight Club, mostly because I couldn’t afford it, but I was close, with the throw rugs, votives, and a wingback chair in my hardwood studio apartment in downtown Seattle. I was still in the process of reinventing myself, curious to see who I’d become.

  Steph, however, put little stock in her style, and her literature read accordingly. She simply refused to dress in a manner that was becoming or flattering, in retaliation to the possibility that she might draw unwanted male attention. Or signal to other lesbians that she was femme.

  She dressed in jeans and flannel, was utterly disinterested in television and popular film. Nothing annoyed her more than when I made references to films or television, would assume some posture of superiority because I had a sense of what was popular in the spectrum of televised entertainment, as if I was somehow personally responsible for the erosion of language and literature because I’d rented a DVD.

  She wrote and read in the abstract, was drawn to abstruse cadences and vague language and irregular constructions. I was the complete opposite: I wanted sharp, crisp, complicated sentences that painted a specific word picture, then did it again. I didn’t want pointillism in my language: I wanted a yarn, told well, with wordplay and methodology, nuanced structure that informed the construction of the narrative through skillful punctuation. Actually, the only place we really agreed was in our mutual hatred for Ayn Rand, not just her social theories but her pathetic writing style.

  “And she can’t even spell her name correctly,” I’d say.

  But still, we disagreed on almost everything else lit’ry.

  She wanted dithering, diffused colors and Rothko.

  I wanted blood spatter and Vermeer.

  “Tell me a story and tell it well,” I kept arguing, because it felt right.

  “That’s not what language is for,” she’d say. “It’s more for the insinuation of the story and letting the reader create the story in her mind— that’s the connection between the writer and the reader,” she argued back.

  “That’s just cowardice,” I said, being an asshole, like I could be. “I agree with Stoppard when he said that Virginia Woolf ’s greatest contribution to the English language was her suicide.” I felt clever, and mean, and she slammed shut her book and grabbed the dog, who by this time knew that raised voices meant Steph was going to get mad soon and they’d be on a walk if she just waited a minute.

  What was interesting was that after we argued, we each agreed to read the other’s favorite authors, and then realized we weren’t so fond of our heroes anymore. We were left more impressed by the other person’s favorites than we had been willing to acknowledge and were then able to laugh about it after.

  Maybe we just needed to argue first, like foreplay.

  We liked arguing with each other, would push one another to the verge of temper, then back down. We boxed, verbally, and sometimes one of us would be out of the other’s weight class, especially when the smell of blood was in the word water, and it would hurt.

  CHAPTER 14 The War of the Rats

  Literature wasn’t the only place we disagreed.

  Steph aspired to gardening and was wretched at it, but it would never stop her from trying.

  I despised any sort of yard work, and for obvious colloquial reasons. It wasn’t meditative for me, being in the sun and mowing lawns. It meant something entirely different for someone with my background to clear brush, pull weeds, clip through bracken.

  I preferred to spend Saturday afternoons sitting on a lawn chair, drinking light beer and shooting dandelions with my air pistol in the huge backyard. I found it intensely satisfying when I’d hit the bulb and the seeds would explode out, then get carried off in the wind. I was like John Milius in Los Angeles, shooting at actors.

  Steph would struggle valiantly in that earth, carve out a small, coffin-like rectangle and attempt to coax life from seeds and sprouts, but I think it was more for the practice than the product, like dirt yoga.

  She would use our dishes, too. More important, she would use my dishes, after I asked her repeatedly to desist from doing so. It made me uncomfortable, no matter how often or thoroughly I washed my Fiesta-ware bowls, to eat something out of them after I’d seen her blend her homemade compost with the store-bought nutrient-rich soil and use my dishes to stir it all up, blend it together, right out there on the back porch.

  So long, middle class. I guess I’m a Yankee redneck now.

  We even had a blue tarp, over the compost heap.

  And the compost heap, well, that drew the rats.

  At first, those rats kept to themselves, but when the winter came, they invaded the downstairs. When she ran the place like a boardinghouse, Steph had moved downstairs because it was the biggest area in the house, and she paid the majority of the rent for the privilege. But the downs
tairs was cut into the side of a hill, so it remained at an average temperature of about fifty-five degrees during the summer and ground frost during the winter, which I didn’t mind. What bothered me about the space was that it was forever stuck in 1973, and not the cool, Los Angeles pornography and cocaine 1973 but the Paducah, Kentucky, 1973 (sorry, Paducah) with the Formica tabletops and mostly matching green vinyl stool chairs, the wallpaper with the forest—you get the idea. It was dingy and mean and dank down there, and there were some monstrous rats that could not be bothered with our human refusal for things that once carried the bubonic plague.

  They could give a shit; they were cold. They wanted in.

  And in they came.

  I laid down traps to kill them, finally, instead of trying to keep them out. I had been reluctant to do this because I was afraid of the dog hurting herself. She wasn’t the smartest dog in the world, wagging her tail so vigorously at times she’d leave blood spatter on the doorframes, so sticking her nose into the cheese blocks on a rattrap was not beyond the imaginable, when it came to Cleo.

  But the rats left us no choice. They were colonizing our shitty rental, and so we had to do something.

  The first morning after the traps were in place, I found a huge rat caught dead in one of the more obvious traps, and it was a strange moment, looking at it lying there, like I was seeing a ghost, or a mythological creature, and then I noticed movement coming from another corner and saw that another rat hadn’t been so lucky.

  Just as large as the first one, this one had half of its head crushed, along with a shoulder and forearm. It was spinning in a circle with its back legs, trying to escape the wooden mauling, with severe neurological trauma beset upon him or her.