Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  “Sometimes the rain, what? What, Neto?”

  “Just listen.”

  We stopped talking. It was pouring. It was beautiful and frightening, the power of a summer rain. I could feel the hot earth cooling down. I walked out from the protection of the front porch and held my hands up and smiled. “You see, Brian?”

  He laughed. God, he could laugh. No one could take that away from him. He stepped out into the rain with me. And I swear that as we stood there, both of us with our hands stretched out—I swear I could hear the beating of his heart. And I thought, Wouldn’t it be sweet if he reached over and kissed me and we could pretend we were in some goddamned Hollywood movie.

  I called in sick that night at the 7-Eleven. I took Brian to a drug store so he could pick up a razor and soap and toothpaste and all that other stuff he’d need. Then we went to a place called Surplus City. He bought a couple pairs of pants, a couple of shirts, underwear, some socks and a few things.

  It was raining like it had never rained before. I wanted the storm to go on forever. As I drove back home, I kept smiling. I didn’t love anything more than I loved the rain. Brian kept studying my face and I pretended not to notice. I gave him an old suitcase—and when he’d finished packing, he looked at me. He started to say something. But I stopped him. “Let’s get you to the bus station.”

  “I didn’t say goodbye to him,” he said.

  “You should call him,” I said.

  I went outside as he went to grab the phone. I didn’t want to hear what he and Jorge were saying to each other.

  After a while, Brian came outside. “He’s going to meet us at the bus station.”

  “Good,” I said.

  The bus station was quiet. The Greyhound bus for Denver was arriving from El Paso at nine thirty. The bus would be leaving for Denver at ten. We looked at the schedule and sat outside. The rain had stopped but there was thunder and lightning in the distance and the evening breeze was cool and carried the sweet smell of the desert. I thought I was going to cry.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Brian whispered.

  “Get yourself happy, Brian.”

  He nodded. “What about you?”

  “Oh,” I said, “I think I’ll get myself happy too.”

  When Jorge showed up at the bus depot, I decided it was a good time to make myself scarce. I waved at Jorge, then walked up to his car and shook his hand. “I’m sorry about your mom,” I said.

  Maybe I said the wrong thing. He looked like he was going to cry. Tears and rain. That’s the way it was for us that night. For Jorge and Brian. And me.

  I knew the bus from El Paso was coming at any moment. Jorge and Brian could have a little time to themselves before the bus left for Denver. I was awkward at goodbyes back then. I’m awkward even now, these many years later. I think I looked at Brian and said, “Good luck.” Or something idiotic like that. But Brian followed me to my car. He looked at me and said, “You’re a good guy, Neto.”

  I nodded.

  “You know, me and Jorge, we—”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “And you don’t care?”

  “Maybe I’m like you,” I said.

  We both looked at each other. I remember the way he looked at me. No one had ever looked at me that way.

  Me looking at him. Him looking at me. That’s how we left it.

  I went home. It was raining again.

  I let my tears get lost among the falling drops of rain. Becoming a man didn’t feel anything like I thought it was going to feel.

  About a year later, my mother forwarded me a letter from Brian Stillman. I saw the postmark. He’d joined the Army. I didn’t want to open it. I held it for a long time. There was a money order in the envelope for five hundred dollars and a short note that said:

  Dear Neto,

  I’m in Da Nang. I wanted to write and tell you that I joined up. Maybe I didn’t before because I know how you feel about the whole military thing. Maybe I wanted to feel like a real man. Maybe that’s why I joined up, to prove something to myself. I want you to understand, Neto, that I had to do this. I know that you hate this war. I think you’re the kind of guy who would hate any war. I just couldn’t find myself out there in the world. I don’t know how to put myself into words, Neto. I’m not like you.

  I think about you sometimes. I should have kissed you. But I was so afraid you wouldn’t kiss me back. When I go home again, will you be there? I promise to stop being afraid.

  Love, Brian

  So many things we don’t do because we’re afraid.

  His note made me sad. Crazy man. Crazy, crazy man. What are you doing in Vietnam?

  I bought some serious art supplies with that five hundred dollars. I was on my way to becoming an artist and nothing was going to stop me. Not even all my self-doubt. I wrote to Brian and told him I might love him as much as I loved the rain.

  I don’t know if he ever got the letter. He was killed trying to save one of his buddies in a village somewhere between Da Nang and the Cambodian border.

  My mother called and told me there was a picture of him in the newspaper. I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral. Someone would hand his father a flag and say, From a grateful nation. Finally, the sonofabitch would be proud of his son.

  For many days I woke with the bitter taste of regret in my mouth.

  I was home for a few weeks the summer after I graduated. I was on my way to art school at Columbia University. My father was dying so I came back to spend the summer. It didn’t feel like home anymore. It never had.

  One evening, I walked to the 7-Eleven to buy a pack of cigarettes. As I stood outside opening my pack of cigarettes, there he was. Just standing there. Jorge. It’s funny how people just appear in front of you sometimes. I was buying cigarettes and he was driving around and stopped to buy a coke. That’s how it happens.

  I wanted to hug him. I offered him a smile and a handshake instead. We had a beer at the river. He asked me how I knew about him and Brian. I told him the story of that night. He laughed. “Nothing is ever as private as you think it is.”

  I asked him if he’d gone to the funeral.

  “I had to.”

  “Did you see his father?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I would have gone to the funeral, I would have taken my fists to him.”

  Jorge smiled. “I wanted to tell him that I had once loved his son.”

  “And did you tell him?”

  “No. But he knew.”

  “Did you ever write to Brian?”

  “No. We talked on the phone before he left for ’Nam. We decided to go our own ways. It hurt too much to hang on—at least for me. We were boys together. I don’t think we knew how to be men together.” He sipped on his beer. “My mom died four months after we got back to Mexico. I moved to California. My father came back here. He said it was home now.”

  I nodded.

  He looked at me. “I think he fell in love with you.”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  “Don’t doubt it, Neto. I knew him.” He touched my shoulder. “Someday you’re going to stop beating up on yourself.”

  “Someday,” I said.

  I went home that night and thought of Brian Stillman. I dreamed about him. When I kissed his body, it tasted like the rain.

  My father died a few days later. As I sat on his deathbed, he looked up at me. “An artist?” he said. “You’ll never be anything.” He laughed. He was dying and he laughed. I suppose it’s true what they say—that you die the way you lived.

  I think it matters very much whether your father loves you or not. Jorge’s father had loved him, had never stopped loving him. It showed. Brian’s father hadn’t loved him. That showed too.

  And me? My father hadn’t loved me either.

  So why did I still cry at his funeral?

  I didn’t think I would ever return to the desert, but there was something of the landscape that lived in me and so I came back to live in New
Mexico. It was good for my painting.

  I hadn’t thought of Brian Stillman for many years. It was almost as if he’d disappeared from my memory.

  My boyhood had been a painful country. I rarely visited that place.

  But then one day there was that Louie Armstrong song on an old CD. And it was raining. The gun, the trigger, the finger.

  The rain was magnificent in its rage.

  I half-expected to turn and see Brian sitting next to me, inconsolable tears running down his face. I stopped the car on the side of the road and stepped out into the rain. I stuck my hands out like a thirsty boy trying to catch all the drops. I shouted out his name to the deaf and angry sky, Brian Stillman! Brian Stillman! Brian Stillman!

  It was almost like a song.

  CHASING THE DRAGON

  I have a black and white photograph of my mother and father sitting in a Juárez bar. My father looks like he’s drunk, his white shirt wrinkled, his striped tie loosened, his black hair tussled. It amazes me that even in a drunken state, my father retains a charm that could be captured by a camera. My mother, an ethereal beauty with piercing green eyes, is looking away, staring off into the distance. Neither of them appears to be happy.

  My parents—in and out of photographs—were an arresting couple. People envied them. They walked into rooms and turned heads. I suspect they enjoyed their public performances. The minute they stepped out into the public eye, they were celebrities, the center of the spinning world. Their physical beauty aside, they lived tortured, miserable lives.

  With an authority that only her voice could convey, my aunt Lucille once told me that the picture was taken at the Hawaiian. “Your mother loved that place. She loved the décor, the mai tais and the bartender. Your father hated that hellhole. He thought it was cheap and charmless.” Then she reluctantly handed me back the photograph. “Conrad, I don’t know what possesses you to keep that picture.” My uncle Louie, whose only regret in life was that he would never have the courage to divorce Lucille, the woman he married, pulled me aside and said, “Conrad, that picture was taken at the Kentucky Club. The Hawaiian closed years before that picture was taken.” My uncle Louie was addicted to pulling me aside and whispering his versions of family history into my ears. It was his way of making me his co-conspirator. Not that I ever trusted or believed him.

  My other uncle, Hector, who was as unreliable as all the rest of the adults in my family, informed me that the picture was taken after my mother caught my father with another woman. “After that, she refused to let him step foot into the Kentucky Club.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It was his favorite bar.”

  “Oh,” I said. I think it’s safe to say that everyone in my family was more interested in punitive measures than in forgiveness.

  “She had an affair of her own, you know.”

  “Was he at least a nice man?”

  “Conrad, I’m not saying this to be cruel, but your mother didn’t know any nice men.”

  “So they never forgave each other?”

  My uncle Hector scratched his head and smiled. “Let’s just say that in this family, forgiveness has a statute of limitations.”

  That made me laugh. “How long is the statute?”

  Uncle Hector gave me a look. He had a sense of irony but he had no sense of humor. “If you’re not on your knees within the week, it’s over.”

  “Then why isn’t anybody in this family divorced?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that.”

  I think my uncle Hector did have an answer for that. He just wasn’t going to tell me. My own theory was that everybody in our family had the same phobia: they were all afraid of being happy.

  Uncle Hector gently took the picture from my hands and stared at it. “It was taken in 1980, exactly one year and twelve days after your sister had been born. And it was taken at Martino’s. I should know—I joined them for dinner that night. Your father was drunk, as you can see. And,” he said as he pointed at the image of my mother, “Melissa was as untouchable and inscrutable as ever. She was always somewhere else—as if she was above being in the same room with anyone who resembled a human being. Just because she looked like an angel didn’t mean she was one.”

  My uncle was a disappointed writer who read books “that didn’t deserve to be published.” He also had a penchant for dictionaries. It was a habit I picked up from him. He used to sit me on his lap when I was a boy and we would look up words. And he liked using all the words he looked up. Words like inscrutable. Not that his description of my mother was inaccurate. She was the most inscrutable woman who ever lived. She was a mystery no one ever solved. She admitted it herself. When I was eight, I was caught in the middle of an argument between her and my father. My father raged at her: “Who in the fuck are you, Melissa? Just who the fuck are you?”

  My mother lit a cigarette and calmly whispered. “I am unknowable.” She spoke the words slowly and with certainty. She blew out the smoke from her cigarette and added, “I thought that was why you married me, Octavio. And anyway, you don’t like knowing women—you just like owning them.”

  My parents were theater. My sister Carmen and I were their audience. Even the photograph of the two of them that I am addicted to studying seems like a still from a movie.

  My aunt Susan—who loved a man once but never married—said the photograph was taken at the Copacabana. “Loved that place. It opened up in 1979,” she said. “Your parents went there a lot.”

  “Yes,” she said, “it was definitely taken at the Copa. 1981. I remember the dress.” My aunt Susan remembered dresses better than she remembered faces.

  I didn’t believe any of them. My uncles and aunts were the kind of people who liked to conceal more than they liked to reveal. I even took the photograph with me to Juárez one night and decided to venture into all the places that were still there. That was in 1999. I was seventeen and the violence hadn’t erupted yet, and people still trafficked back and forth to have a drink and eat dinner. By 1999, the Hawaiian was long gone. I went into the Copa, studied the place and decided the picture had definitely not been taken there. I went to the Florida, a place that hadn’t been mentioned but it definitely wasn’t where the photograph had been taken either. I had a drink at the Kentucky Club and thought it was a possibility. I met my sister Carmen for dinner at Martino’s that night and it was then that I decided that Martino’s was the place. Definitely Martino’s.

  “You’re probably right,” Carmen said. “I hate that picture.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at them, they’re miserable.”

  “Yes, but they’re beautiful too.”

  “You make a romance of them.”

  “They were beautiful,” I repeated.

  “Conrad, they were as fucked up as they were beautiful.”

  “I don’t need to be reminded of things I already know.” I smiled at her. We weren’t fighting. Carmen and I didn’t fight. “You have pictures of them too,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a picture of Dad with his shirt off, and he’s smiling into the camera. And I have a picture of Mom looking straight into the camera as if she’s daring the photographer to capture who she was. The camera lost the battle.”

  “I know those pictures,” I said. “And it’s Mom who told the truth about herself.”

  Carmen laughed. “I knew you were going to say something like that.”

  “I’m right. Dad’s all smiles in the photograph. Looks aside, he didn’t have anything inside him except anger and an insatiable sex drive. And Mom? She was Mom. She was exactly how she appears in the picture.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Okay, so you’re right. But being right about things doesn’t mean a damn thing in this world.”

  She laughed and said, “Have you fallen in love yet?”

  “I think I have,” I said.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl.”

&
nbsp; “Girl, really? I thought you’d settle for boys in the end.”

  “Well, I have time. And it’s not as if I have to choose.”

  She smiled. “No. No, you don’t, Conrad. So. Have you had sex?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  I wonder if she knew that I was lying to her.

  “You know what I think? I think you’re going to fall in love with sex. But I don’t think you’ll ever fall in love with a woman. With a man either. Sex. That’s going to be your great love.”

  We both laughed. Carmen was five years older than I was, and we had more or less raised each other. She’d protected me all my life, held me when I was sad, told me the hard truths about whatever was happening in our strange and truth-evading family. Our parents never thought of us as children—and they certainly didn’t treat us like children. They treated us like adults, spoke to us like adults. And they pretty much left us alone. I sometimes wonder if we didn’t potty train ourselves. My father wasn’t interested in being a father. And my mother wasn’t interested in playing the role of nurturer.

  I looked at Carmen sitting across from me. Beautiful Carmen. “And you?” I asked.

  “Me? What?”

  “Love. Any of that in your life?”

  “Yes. I’m in love,” she said.

  “Really? When are you going to introduce me to him?”

  “Tonight,” she said.

  I wondered why it mattered to me where that picture of my father and mother was taken. I think I wanted to know something factual about my parents. Most of what I knew about them was a lie—and even my own memories seemed unreliable to me. My mother suffered from depression and killed herself when I was ten. I didn’t know what method she chose. I wasn’t told the truth about the details of her death, but somehow the truth seeped into the air I breathed like a poison. My father killed a man with his bare fists in a drunken rage a couple of years later. He was killed while he was in prison. I’m certain he contributed to his own death with a rage he could never control.

  Because my favorite hobby was listening to my uncles and aunts argue about nothing that really mattered, I brought up the competing versions of where that picture of my parents had been taken as often as I could. Once, during a boring Thanksgiving dinner, I simply said, “I was looking at the photograph. Uncle Hector says it was definitely taken at Martino’s in 1980. I think I agree with him.”