Boy Kings of Texas

  THE BOY KINGS

  OF TEXAS

  THE BOY KINGS

  OF TEXAS

  A MEMOIR

  DOMINGO MARTINEZ

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Domingo Martinez

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Text design: Sheryl Kober

  Project editor: Kristen Mellitt

  Layout artist: Justin Marciano

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-7919-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-8681-7

  For Velva Jean

  and because of Sarah

  Gramma in Matamaros, late 1950s

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Border Justice

  Chapter 2: His Favorite Place

  Chapter 3: Grampa

  Chapter 4: Curses

  Chapter 5: Vulgaria

  Chapter 6: ¡Oklahoma!

  Chapter 7: Gramma and the Snakes

  Chapter 8: Poo and Piglets

  Chapter 9: Christmas with Grandma

  Chapter 10: The Mimis

  Chapter 11: Dan’s First Fight

  Chapter 12: The Oklahoma Joneses

  Chapter 13: In Which Mom Is Introduced to the Barrio

  Chapter 14: Faith

  Chapter 15: Football

  Chapter 16: The Artless Dodger

  Chapter 17: Dan’s Second Fight

  Chapter 18: Delta City Repeat

  Chapter 19: Room 124

  Chapter 20: Neighborhood Heroes

  Chapter 21: Cheering up Philippe

  Chapter 22: Crying Uncle

  Chapter 23: Afterward

  Chapter 24: Sleeping with Monsters

  Chapter 25: Dad’s Warning

  Chapter 26: Dan’s Second to Last Fight

  Chapter 27: The House that Rock ’n’ Roll Built

  Chapter 28: Bioluminescence

  Chapter 29: Home

  Chapter 30: Mom’s Story

  Chapter 31: Origins

  Chapter 32: Cheating

  Chapter 33: Cheating II

  Chapter 34: Keep on Truckin’

  Chapter 35: Ten Years Later

  Chapter 36: Dan’s Last Fight

  Chapter 37: Settling Accounts

  Epilogue

  Closedown

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  It began as a joke, when I was in my late twenties.

  I thought I’d make my older brother Dan laugh by learning a song in the long-forgotten Spanish from our youth, then belt it out unexpectedly some afternoon when we were having beers.

  The song was by Vicente Fernandez and was an unofficial anthem for the Mexican farming class, back when Dan and I were growing up on the border of Texas and Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. When it came on the radio, it would make anyone listening stop what they were doing and sing along at top volume with Mr. Fernandez in pure, animal joy, like an overemotional call to arms.

  The song was, or is, rather, “El Rey,” (“The King”), and was originally written by José Alfredo Jiménez, a near-illiterate troubadour who wrote over one thousand songs, it is reported, even though he never learned to play an instrument.

  The song was so popular on the border that even my grandmother, who was not known for her joie de vivre, would bounce along happily in a mock waltz and sing out as the spirit overtook her, in uncharacteristic glee:

  Con dínero, o sín dínero . . .(If I’m rich, or if I’m poor . . . )

  One afternoon, after blaring the song repeatedly on my stereo in order to retrace those disused paths of language—much to the confusion of my neighbors in Seattle, I’m sure—I made one of the most startling discoveries of my early adulthood.

  Vicente Fernandez, I was told by my friend, David Saldana, who grew up in the Chicano movement of 1960s California, was sort of a farmer’s Frank Sinatra, and sang the rancheros and corrídos traditional to that class. (David, who grew up in urban areas, was more partial to Juan Gabriel, who was considered “posh.”)

  What I could not have known growing up and hearing Vicente Fernandez all around me in South Texas was that he was singing the paean of machismo, the topographical map of the rural Mexican male’s emotional processing.

  Right in front me, after a quick online search, was the lyrical genome for machismo. José Alfredo Jiménez had mapped the emotional DNA of the border male, had illustrated clearly what had so viciously plagued my father, and, well, his mother, who was as butch as they come.

  Here was the source code for everything I was trying to escape: the generational compulsions and impulses of alienation, narcissism, self-destruction, emotional blackmail, and a profound conviction that everyone else in the world is wrong—wrong!—wrapped in a deep, all-consuming appeal to be accepted, protected by an ever-ready defensive, fighting posture, perfectly captured in a song. I was stunned at the accuracy; Jiménez, in his illiteracy, was nothing short of brilliant.

  This is the song, and my bad rendering to the right1:

  El Rey

  Yo sé bien que estoy afuera

  pero el dia en que yo me muera

  sé que tendras que llorar

  Llorar y llorar

  llorar y llorar

  Diras que no me quisiste

  pero vas a estar muy triste

  y asi te vas a quedar

  Con dinero y sin dinero

  hago siempre lo que quiero

  y mi palabra es la ley

  no tengo trono ni reina

  ni nadie que me comprenda

  pero sigo siendo el rey

  Una piedra del camino

  me enseñó que mi destino

  era rodar y rodar

  Rodar y rodar

  rodar y rodar

  Después me dijo un arriero

  que no hay que llegar primero

  pero hay que saber llegar

  Con dinero y sin dinero

  hago siempre lo que quiero

  y mi palabra es la ley

  no tengo trono ni reina

  ni nadie que me comprenda

  pero sigo siendo el rey

  The King

  I know very well that I’m on the outside

  but on the day I die

  I know that you’ll have to cry

  to cry and to cry

  to cry and to cry

  You say you never loved me

  but you’re going to be really sad

  and that’s how I demand you stay

  If I’m rich or if I’m poor

  I will always get my way

  and my word is law

  I have neither a throne nor a queen

  nor anyone that understands me

  but I will keep on being the king

  A stone in the journey

  taught me that my destiny

  was to roll and roll

  to roll and to roll

  to roll and to roll

  Then a mule-driver once told me

  that you don’t have to be the first

  to arrive,

  but you have to know how to arrive

  If I’m rich or if I’m poor


  I will always get my way

  and my word is law

  I’m without throne or a queen

  nor anyone that understands me

  but I will keep on being the king

  It loses quite a bit in the translation, but dear God, this is really what they felt. This was truth, and it was the water Dan and I swam in, growing up.

  We were the sons of kings.

  1 Music and lyrics by José Alfredo Jiménez; translation by Domingo Martinez.

  Chapter 1

  BORDER JUSTICE

  They were children themselves, my mother and father, when they started having children in 1967 on the border of South Texas. Dad had just graduated from high school and in a panic asked my mother to marry him because he wanted to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Mom had eagerly agreed, in order to escape something even worse.

  They had three girls in three successive summers, and were then happily surprised by a boy the following year. Having done her duty in producing a son for her husband, Mom was allowed some ten months off from incubating yet another child. Or maybe Dad had finally discovered condoms. Perhaps they’d bought a television. Whatever the reason, there was a full eighteen months before I was born, the fifth child and a second son, at least for a while.

  Most of the kids had been born in August or September, roughly nine months after Thanksgiving, when the Dallas Cowboys traditionally played. Dad had been a Cowboys fan since their inception, and their winning streak in the late 1960s coincided with the conception of most of his children. The year I was next to be born, the Cowboys didn’t win, so I was conceived sometime during grain season, when he was maybe flush with cash and had come home drunk, which is possibly the reason I hate sports and am very fond of bread.

  Collectively, we have vague and dreamlike memories from those early days of the burgeoning family, but one stands out for all of us. In it, Dad surprises us one afternoon by bringing home the smallest puppy we had ever seen. We stand around him and watch him feeding it with a bottle, and after a while he cups it in the palms of his hands and offers it to one of my sisters while the rest of us watched this and cooed enviously: There was no way she was going to keep this dog to herself, we had all subconsciously decided.

  The puppy was black, with tiny brown feet, and as we had only recently been introduced to English when the oldest kids entered kindergarten, we were limited on possibilities when it came time to name it. The name “Blackie” caught on quickly, and we were immensely satisfied with our creativity at giving the dog a name in English.

  We were big on names back then. We each went by a nom de guerre as kids. The eldest, Sylvia, was called la flaca, or “the skinny girl.” Margarita, the second oldest, was Tata, or Títa when we were feeling kinder to her, because as toddlers, Sylvia would look at her and yell, “Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta! Ta!”—in Spanish, of course.

  The third girl, Maria de los Angeles, was called la guera, or “blondie,” in a way, because she was fair skinned and born with light hair. My older brother Daniel was called ¡Denny!, always with that exclamation point. Dan grew up startled. And I was, as Domingo Martinez, Jr., called Yuñior, eventually to be called “June,” when we made the switch to English.

  I was a boy named “June.”

  This must have been about 1976, maybe 1977. When we got him, Blackie, a Chihuahua blend mixed with something equally rodentian, was still just a few weeks old. I remember we tried our best as a family to be as good to the dog as possible, even though I was just four or five years old. The dog was a new project; the pack of children had never quite come together like that before, and we tried to outdo one another showing kindness to the new family pet.

  The dog, on the other hand, very likely would have disagreed, because in a family with five children under nine years of age, and parents who were no more than children themselves, Blackie must have thought he was a victim of relentless torment. But such was the love we knew.

  Margarita, or Marge, as she was eventually renamed, had previously insisted on a dog, as she developed an early fixation with lap dogs that would last her whole life. I think Mom gave in to her as a way of an apology after Dan threw a large D-sized battery at Marge while they were playing under the laundry shack. It split her forehead open. Dan threw the battery out of jealousy, as he felt Mom was giving Marge far too much attention. Dan has always been a bit too protective of the things he loved.

  So we were all surprised when Dad brought the tiny puppy home in a blanket, coddled it as it fed adorably on a disproportionately gigantic bottle of warmed milk, and then ceremoniously handed him over to Marge, who murmured lovingly at the dog and quickly forgot the huge cut on her forehead, though I don’t believe Mom really ever did. Mom was also quite overprotective of her favorite things.

  Meanwhile, Blackie began his adjustment to the loud, large family. He was molecular in size—perfect for children—and we loved him to death. We doted on him constantly: We fed him and pet him until he was so annoyed at our attention that he snapped at us, yapped at us.

  We didn’t care.

  Marge made sure Blackie slept with her at night on her thin, yellow cotton blanket. He would curl up in the ribbed crook between her knees and growled every time she moved, so she’d wake up with a stiff back but she would never tell anyone about it. I would force a bowl of leftovers at Blackie when everyone else was gone, lying on the floor on my stomach so I could see eye-to-eye with this black and chocolate rat with the cold nose. He’d get annoyed with me and snap at my hand and face with his vicious, tiny teeth, but I didn’t care, because we all loved him, this yappy puppy with the heart of a wolf.

  Mare, the third oldest and youngest of the girls, had always been a bit sickly and asthmatic. She had been delivered at home by a midwife, and it had been a difficult birth. She had come through with a caul, and because her umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, she was blue and had to be resuscitated. Now at age six, she had developed allergies to almost anything with dander, and as such, she wasn’t very close to the dog, but Mare and Marge were best friends, so Mare loved the dog by proxy. Sylvia, as the oldest, joined in on the care and feeding and tormenting of the dog, but from a distance. Syl had the burden of being the oldest child, and that took up most of her focus, pushing the uncertain and undetermined boundaries.

  Dan took care of the dog, too. He put Blackie in a big basket and carried him around the front yard and through the pervasive junk field from Grampa’s trucking business that perpetually surrounded our house. There were bits and parts of derelict dump trucks, machinery, backhoes and axles, open barrels of spent oil and split tires that wound in a trail through the back of our property. Somehow, every morning, Dad and Grampa would manage to put eight ailing dump trucks and a front-end loader/backhoe to work, out of the dismal lot. Dan would carry the dog in the basket on a tour of this, the only path we knew as kids with absolute certainty.

  As he walked by with the dog in the basket, the oily Mexican mechanics and drivers who worked for Grampa would look up from their greasy business and snicker at Dan, because they saw him as a developing pansy. A young man showing affection—any sort of affection, even to a puppy—was not macho, even at six. His tight shorts didn’t help, either. But hey: It was hot, and the kid grew fast.

  Some months later we couldn’t find Blackie one morning. We happily orchestrated a search party like we’d seen in cartoons and then spent the better part of the morning searching loudly around our house and in the native, still-wild property across Oklahoma Avenue. It was Gramma who finally found him, ripped to shreds behind her pigsty, bleeding from his eyes and ears, his tail chewed off completely. Dad was the first to respond to Gramma’s screams, the first to cry out, which immediately gave those of us who weren’t already doing it the cue to wail uncontrollably. None of us knew the dog had meant so much even to him, and though it came as an unsettling surprise to us in our collective horror to see our father crying, we each continued to anguish independently at the foul murder of our beloved Black
ie.

  But then Dad became quiet, uncharacteristically composed, as he dug a hole behind the pigsty where we would bury Blackie with the minimum pathetic honor a family of children could summon.

  None of us questioned who’d been responsible. We all knew who had done it, who had been the villains behind such terrible violence. It was the dog pack that lived with Elogio, Dad’s stepuncle, a few houses to our west. We all knew this without evidence or even discussion, and needed neither for our conclusion. Elogio’s dogs, about five or six of them, terrified the dusty length of Oklahoma Avenue.

  Elogio and his four sons clearly felt that Dad and his family did not belong in the Rubio barrio, since Gramma had married into the barrio when Dad was already four years old, a child from another man. Elogio was our Grampa’s usurping younger brother, and he wanted control of the family trucking business that Grampa had built. As Grampa’s stepson, Dad challenged Elogio’s succession. It was a Mexican parody of Shakespeare, in the barrio, with sweat-soaked sombreros and antiquated dump trucks.

  Elogio’s near-feral dogs made it unsafe for anyone to walk on that dirt road. They would charge full speed at cars driving by. They were fearless and dangerous. Somehow, Blackie had managed to escape our house, and the dogs found him and tore him to shreds.

  “Lo reventáron,” Dad had said to my mother when she showed up, describing in Spanish what had happened to Blackie. “Reventáron” is a difficult word to translate into English, and the very thought of that word gave me anxiety attacks in my adolescence, when the word would bubble to the surface of my thinking, after this experience. It’s a combination of sensations, actually: It’s part ripping, part tearing, but with an elastic resistance, like pulling apart a rubbery, living membrane—an image like bleeding rubber. When I would remember the word later, I thought the same thing was going to happen to my mind.