My Heart Is a Drunken Compass

by Domingo Martinez

  I remained in fighting mode, but I was trying to figure out what I had just heard.

  Did he just say he was from South Texas?

  “Did you just say you’re from South Texas?”

  “Yeah, man. I’m from Brownsville. Do you know it?”

  By the time the vet kicked us out about an hour later, we were arm over arm singing a playlist of Vicente Fernandez. I’d bought us all a couple pitchers of beer, and the only way the bartender could get us to shut up and leave was to sell me a “to-go” six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon because it was nearly 2:30 a.m. and he wanted us out. We exchanged numbers at the door, and my two new friends went one way and I went the other, went home and tried to kill myself, as I had been planning.

  I stumbled into my apartment, disrobed and ran a hot bath, I remember.

  I left a voice memo on my iPhone, saying I was sorry but I had finally broken.

  Junebug vs. hurricane.

  I might have called Sarah. Or maybe that was later. I found an old, double-sided razor and sank into the hot water, drinking from the six-pack of Pabst, and I put my wrist under the tap and started digging with the edge of the razor, and with each cut, I dug harder and faster so that I wouldn’t lose my courage. I kept going and going while the water ran over it and the blood began gushing and right at the point where I nicked at the vein I was aiming for, something primal snapped in my mind once again and I realized what I was doing, and that there was no coming back from here, and I panicked, panicked, dropped the blade and pressed my thumb into the cut, now an inch or two long and welling uncontrollably with blood.

  I managed to slosh my way out of the tub and call 911 with my pinky, then sit in the hallway and wait in my robe for the cops, who called an ambulance and carted me away to an emergency room downtown. I hardly remember any of this, and I don’t know how it was that my neighbors never knew, but it’s a testament to the tacit isolation and privacy agreement that Seattle neighbors have with one another that we’d never involve ourselves in one another’s business, which, in times like this, is a godsend because you’re able to suffer your indignations privately, but it can also harm you entirely, when you’re begging for help and don’t know how to ask for it.

  At the hospital, I wasn’t a model patient, and I had two overweight security guards standing by me when the surgeon came in and numbed my arm, wrist to shoulder, in order to stitch up my wound. I’m not sure why I was still mouthy and shitty, but when the social worker came in and asked me her standard “suicide attempt” questions, I looked at her like, “How dare you think you can assess me with your mindless optimism, Night School? Do you know what I’ve been through? Do you know what broke me down so bad that I’ve ended up here?” I just wasn’t having it. I needed help, and I wasn’t going to find it in the Swedish ER.

  I was still a bit out of my mind when I demanded my phone, felt entirely lost without it, somehow, since no one knew where I was, and I was finally able to convince the desk nurse that I’d calm and quiet down if they allowed me my phone, so I could leave someone a message, and they agreed.

  Of course, I called Sarah. Then I called and left a sobbing, apologetic message to my mother and sister Marge, and gave them Sarah’s number. I don’t remember calling Dan, or Philippe.

  A few minutes later, the one nurse I’d listen to stepped in my room with a tray of food and told me to eat, sit quietly, or else they’d have to send me to a psych ward, and she could tell I was just being difficult. “You don’t have to make this worse than it is,” she said. “Just eat and get some sleep.” It was typical hospital cafeteria food, with a little milk carton, and I didn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, so the food felt innocent and like manna. For a moment, before I nodded off, I realized fully what I had done and I was deeply ashamed.

  Some three hours later, Sarah appeared.

  She had told the ER nurse she was my mother, which was a stretch, but it worked. She would have had to have had me at age thirteen, and I don’t think they allow that, even in Idaho. I was sitting up and feeling miserable, memories of everything I’d done and said the night previous flooding my conscience, and I tried to remember who I’d called, who would be worried, who knew I’d broken down this far.

  Sarah stood there and looked at me with pity and anger.

  I couldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, I asked her, “Are you wearing a bra?”

  She looked stunned at first, then grinned mischievously, but still seemed aggravated.

  I smiled and thought, Maybe I’m not in so much trouble after all.

  She drove me to her house an hour or so later, dressed in my bathrobe and pajamas, looking like either a hobo or a postsuicidal Arthur Dent. I’d always imagined I’d be better dressed for my suicide, but I didn’t have much choice at that time in the morning. I was hurting, and not only from a multiple-day binge. Still, I attempted a patrician bearing as I walked past all the real hobos waiting outside the ER. My psyche hurt, my soul felt damaged, imperiled, and I don’t buy into the whole “suicide sends you to hell” argument from the church.

  I’d read often about suicides, had a real sadness for people who went through with it, felt a twisted sort of bond with them because it was a shadow that had followed me throughout my adulthood. I felt a kindred spirit with people who suffered with that sort of depression, wrestled with that decision as an actual possibility.

  That I had swung so far into nearly doing it scared the hell out of me. Certainly it was a cry for help, from that bathroom, doing my imitation of Dorothy Parker, but the intent was there, and it frightened me.

  Most survivors of suicide attempts will tell you that the minute they jump from building or bridge, the minute they’ve committed to the gravity, there’s the moment of regret, and it goes deep.

  I knew exactly what that feeling was now, that deep-blue tethering to the world and life and your people when you think, Oh, shit; what did I just do? How am I going to fix it? And I had the chance to fix it.

  Many people don’t get that chance.

  I rested in Sarah’s house for a day or two, as I recovered. I was finally able to sleep, and I curled up with Jack County, who found me asleep on Sarah’s bed and put his paw on my hand and kept me company as I lay there weeping, feeling awful, feeling like I had soiled twenty years of independence, my reinvention of self, of work, and feeling like this event had indeed killed both Steph and me, and I didn’t have enough emotional capital to pull out of this stall.

  I was able to reassure my family that it was a one-time thing, that I had just lost control and was, more than anything, really, asking for help, but couldn’t do it somehow. Marge asked if she could fly out to sit with me and I said, “No; no, please; I’m all right. Will be all right. Please don’t worry: I really learned my lesson here,” and then I did as best as I could to keep this secret from Steph’s parents, keep my weakness hidden from my compatriotic enemies.

  Sarah, from her point of view, felt the same, watched me with clinical fascination as I finally slept with the dog’s paw in my hand.

  CHAPTER 29 Easy Money

  There was no time to recover.

  My boss finally mustered the courage in the days following to let me know he couldn’t budget my salary in the coming year after the company went public and the new investors were unconvinced they needed someone who rated at my pay grade doing my job; they could hire a recent college graduate with minimal literacy.

  “This wasn’t a performance-based decision,” he kept repeating, while I had images of his family curling up in a house fire.

  Everyone fucks you when you’re down.

  I managed to get to the nursing home wearing a long-sleeved sweater, checked in, and tried to talk about the other night, but when I brought it up, Steph’s mother pretended it had never happened and changed the subject, walked out of the room. Avoidance behavior; how Lutheran. Not even the chance for discussion. I suppose that’s too Catholic.

  They had taken to singing to Steph during the after
noon, after Harold had found Steph’s acoustic guitar at her house and decided it would help pass the time. They’d leap up and sing like the former flower children they were, making me incredibly uncomfortable, especially when they’d launch into Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” which was a knife in my heart, and I would wonder if they were that short on songs they knew or if they were simply that insensitive.

  One day, Harold asked me to help him move into the rental property Steph was still paying for because her landlord was a massive prick, he had insisted they continue paying rent or he’d move her stuff out, so I drove him out there. It was about a two-hour bus ride to the nursing home, but Harold was determined to move in there, he said, so I said, “Fine; I can help,” still wearing my long-sleeved sweatshirts and hoodies.

  We moved Steph’s bed up from the basement room she preferred into the top part of the rental, which she usually reserved for fly-by-night Craigslist roommates, who were always awful or meth addicts, and we secured the lower portion of the house. I went through, looking to preserve some of Steph’s dignity by collecting her journals and “secret stashes,” and found that the rats we had been warring against had moved in during all this time of nonoccupancy and had taken to eating her more intimate toys and oils, and I quietly gathered up all these items and threw them out, so her parents didn’t have to face their daughter’s personal humanity.

  When we were finished moving the bed and some of the other furniture and then winterizing the bottom half of the house, Harold asked to speak to me. Steph’s mother immediately ran out of the room.

  “Sure thing,” I said. He told me he’d been going through Steph’s credit card statements, especially the trip we had taken east when Harold had been in the hospital, and both he and her mother felt that I owed Steph $750 for the trip.

  It’s how men deal with crisis, I’ve come to find out, doing things pecuniary and vehicular. They’ll review bills, get things in order, and park your car, maybe wash it. Anything to avoid feelings, or talking about feelings.

  “What?” I said, uncertain I’d heard correctly.

  “She paid for all the hotels and flights and rental cars,” he said. “It’s right here,” and he produced the statement.

  “I gave her cash. I paid for my ticket and all meals—that was our agreement, Harold. This is just . . . wow; look, if you need money, I can see what I can manage, but I just lost my job, and now you’re asking for this? This is unbelievable. I don’t owe her any money.”

  “Then why did she pay for the tickets?”

  “I gave her the cash for my plane ticket,” I said. “In fact, while you were laid up in the hospital, I saw Steph give most of that money to your wife because she didn’t know how to use the ATM. Believe me, something like that stays with you. This is just fucked up, Harold,” I said, as I produced my checkbook, mostly to see how far he’d go before he’d stop me, and then wrote him a check for the money, and sonofabitch if he didn’t just reach over and take it, with no shred of embarrassment or dignity.

  I’d been “jacked,” like “real rappers.”

  I had a couple thousand saved up, minus the money that Steph’s parents had just stolen from me, but I knew I had to find work, and soon. I had one final pay cycle coming from my former job, and Alfred had asked me to return all the company equipment—the laptop, the archives, the external drive, that sort of stuff—so I thought driving the four hours to eastern Washington was in order, though I knew I had to get back and get busy, posthaste.

  I was forty years old and in a young person’s industry that was becoming less and less “specialized,” and I was competing against recent college grads who had none of my background or competency, but who would take a position at “labor surplus” salaries. And I hadn’t taken my opportunity to shift my skill set like I had been planning because of all the calamity of the last five months.

  It was the darkest, worst period of my life: unemployed, no health insurance, nearing indigence, recently hospitalized, in near isolation and walking around in a haunted, spiritually desiccated husk. I thought maybe my great West Coast experiment was over and I’d have to move back to Texas, and the idea frightened me more than being homeless here, in Seattle.

  There was this artist some years back, whose memory haunted me for reasons that are difficult to explain. He’d been a member of an arts collective here in Seattle, and he was a bright, smart guy, and one day on some nationally recognized holiday for labor unions, he and some others had arranged to attach a huge cardboard ball and chain to the Hammering Man, the big silhouette on the Seattle waterfront. It was brilliant, very clever. The following year, he’d driven an old pickup truck to the city retail center and parked it, flattened the tires, then walked away.

  The whole city shut down that afternoon, thinking it was a bomb threat.

  He owned up to it, said it was a part of their art piece, but the courts weren’t lenient and jailed him for a few months. He was too smart, too soft a guy to endure that, and when he came out, his nerves were shot, his spirit broken, and he could no longer support himself, went home to Michigan.

  Inside a year, he stepped in front of a freight train, though his parents cling to the idea it was an accident.

  I knew better, and I knew that’s where I would be headed if I had to move back home. That’s what frightened me the most. L’appel du vide.

  One early evening at Sarah’s house, I was recounting my fears while she listened and told me hers.

  It was dark out, and she decided to take the dog horde down to the park for their evening pee: Betty Brown, Jack County, Genevieve, and I think I had Cleo for the weekend. The dogs were delighted to be out, and we walked down the street that ran parallel to Sarah’s house, the leg of the triangle that pointed directly to the Christian college campus at the vertex. Dogs trotted and sniffed all around us, and then in front of Jonathan Raban’s house, her neighbor a couple doors to her north, and after a bit of quiet, apropos of nothing, Sarah said, “You know what’s going to get you out of this, don’t you?”

  If she had a magic bullet, I was ready for it, because I certainly had no idea what was going to bring up the sunrise on this longest night of my life.

  “Nope,” I said, as I tch-tched for Jack County, who was wandering behind us now, lifting his long, silky Tom Selleck–looking leg on a shrub. A modest dog, he’d then tuck his tail to hide his pongy bits.

  “If you have any ideas, now’s the time,” I said.

  “You’re going to have to write your way out of this,” she said, in that distancing, clinical way she has, and then wandered off with the dogs to allow me to think this one through.

  My immediate response was, “Pfft. Do you KNOW how difficult it is to get ANY sort of attention in publishing on the West Coast? In Seattle, of all places? And then make enough to live off of?” Seattle, I figured out a bit too late, was not an easy place to launch a literary career. It’s where you settle after you’ve proven yourself in real cities, like Los Angeles or New York or Chicago.

  Before all this happened, I would often strut around like a rooster in her kitchen, saying how I wouldn’t waste my time with regional workshops and writers’ groups or attempt to make a presence known or felt with the local alternative presses and the subsidized “writer’s support network” and that sort of shit—NO! I told her, “Fuck that amateur shit! I’m going big first. I’m going to fail UP, not DOWN! Or wait . . . is it the other way around?”

  And Sarah would look at me like, “Oh, honey, you’re so interesting to watch in the safety of your unpublished bravado.”

  If Sarah felt that this was my only lifeline out of this miasma, then I was in trouble, because I knew the odds against and the impossibility of publishing.

  My heart, already sunk, disappeared altogether, hearing this.

  “I want you,” she said, continuing her hip-swaying saunter down the dark street, “to go home, clean up your five or six best chapters that illustrate your material, your
themes, your writing style, and your wit, and print them out for me.”

  “All right,” I responded. “I’ll have them, tickety-boo.” I couldn’t argue. I didn’t have enough energy to pose an argument.

  “When you do,” she said, “give me five copies and I will send your samples in an interoffice memo to Mary Karr, buy a bottle of something dark and red for Jonathan Raban here, and send another copy to the chair of the English department at Seattle U.” Mary Karr was in the Jesuit system, Sarah said to me, and would receive her mail. (This actually wasn’t correct, we found out later. She’s at Syracuse, which is not even Catholic. Sarah blames her mistake on red wine and Buspar.)

  As a fellow Texan, and memoirist, I had a deep fondness for Mary Karr. But it was the night that I lay in Sarah’s bed, deep one early morning, suffering from a particularly bad spell of anxiety, when Sarah woke up, reached over, and turned on a lamp and then began reading to me from The Liar’s Club, as I lay on my side and shivered, and she read for hours while Mary Karr and her own family pulled me out of my stall, just for a second, and I was, will be, forever grateful for that moment. So when Sarah said she could get my stuff in front of her, I was hopeful: Mary would understand.

  “Hunh,” I said. “You have a deal.”

  In the meantime, though, I had a plan to find work.

  I couldn’t, at all, find the fight in me to compete for a job in my market as a graphic designer. So I resorted to something an old friend once told me, about a secret means to make a stable income that wasn’t too competitive: the boutique pizza delivery network.

  My old friend, John, who had been my manager at Pagliacci Pizza here in Seattle back when I was nineteen, had since stayed with the company but had become a satellite delivery station manager, then realized he could make much more just delivering the pizza, instead of being a wage earner.