My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BOY KINGS OF TEXAS

  “With The Boy Kings of Texas, a new and important truth about those Rio Grande Valley border towns like Brownsville and McAllen has finally emerged, one that takes into account the brainy boys of the barrio who read Cyrano de Bergerac between waiting tables at the Olive Garden, and play hooky at the Holiday Inn in order to discuss foreign films. Sure, there have always been stories about smart kids who want to leave town or risk going nowhere in life. In the Valley, where there is also a high chance of succumbing to border violence, Martinez unveils the lives of smart kids who feel they need to leave town or else simply die of boredom.”

  —DALLAS NEWS

  “The Boy Kings of Texas is a spirited confession in the tradition of smart, self-deprecating comedies about young manhood like Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That and early Philip Roth. Martinez weaves artful comic asides with anecdotes about poverty so crushing that it leads to the death of his friends.”

  —TEXAS OBSERVER

  “This compelling, often heartwarming book explores how Martinez and his family tried to find their place in Brownsville. . . . The Boy Kings of Texas alternates between serious, often violent stories, such as the uncle who beats up Martinez in a cocaine-fueled rage, and humorous stories showing his family’s softer, loving side. Often, the most moving chapters combine humor with a dark undertone. For example, Martinez writes about how his sisters dealt with their own feelings of inferiority by creating two blonde, Anglo alter-egos.”

  —SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS

  “There is no easy resolution to this personal journey told through a series of anecdotes that range from hilarious to heartbreaking. Martinez simply splays out the different chapters of his life with a raw honesty that dispels the myth of the big happy Hispanic family and critiques the codes of machismo that lead to reckless choices. An incredibly engaging read and full of colorful characters that keep the writing vibrant. . . .”

  —EL PASO TIMES

  “Martinez’s story is heartrending and uncomfortable, but he maintains a surprising sense of humor that keeps his reader cringing and rooting for him. A starkly honest memoir of growing up on the Texas-Mexican border in the 1970s and ’80s, with a wry twist.”

  —SHELF AWARENESS

  “. . . offers experiences that readers will find informative and emotionally engaging.”

  —ALA BOOKLIST

  MY HEART IS A DRUNKEN COMPASS

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Boy Kings of Texas

  MY HEART IS A DRUNKEN COMPASS

  A Memoir

  DOMINGO MARTINEZ

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  Helena, Montana

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2014 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.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0140-8 (hardcover)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  This book is a combination of both memoir and creative nonfiction where the privacy of some of the characters needed protecting. It reflects the author’s recollections of his experiences over several years; certain names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed or modified to remain as true to the form as possible while telling the larger story within the approximation of memory. Dialogue has been re-created from memory and, in some cases, has been compressed to convey the substance of what was said or what occurred through what was remembered.

  For Sarah, with love everlasting

  Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

  —AESCHYLUS, AGAMEMNON

  In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.

  —DANTE ALIGHIERI, INFERNO

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part I: Songs of His People

  CHAPTER 1: The Oops! Baby

  CHAPTER 2: Mom Leaves Derek

  CHAPTER 3: Drinking with Dad

  CHAPTER 4: Cain without Abel

  CHAPTER 5: Epiphanies

  CHAPTER 6: Pygmalion, Texas

  CHAPTER 7: Bread Thou Art

  CHAPTER 8: Bread Thou Shalt Remain

  CHAPTER 9: Caramelization

  CHAPTER 10: Toast

  Part II: The Unwedded

  CHAPTER 11: It Was Just One of Those Things

  CHAPTER 12: Stephanie of a Thousand Lives

  CHAPTER 13: Cannibal Hymns

  CHAPTER 14: The War of the Rats

  CHAPTER 15: Cleopatra

  CHAPTER 16: Beating Up Lesbians

  CHAPTER 17: The Wrong Side of the Fork

  CHAPTER 18: Showering Blows

  CHAPTER 19: Every Exit an Entrance, Someplace Else

  CHAPTER 20: What the Morning Brings

  CHAPTER 21: Neon Crosses

  Part III: Looking Down

  CHAPTER 22: Sarah’s Place

  CHAPTER 23: Buying Goblin Fruit

  CHAPTER 24: The Hurricane

  CHAPTER 25: The Third Place

  CHAPTER 26: Now the Wolf

  CHAPTER 27: People Ain’t No Good

  CHAPTER 28: Stalling

  CHAPTER 29: Easy Money

  CHAPTER 30: Queen of the Savages

  CHAPTER 31: Northern Exposure

  CHAPTER 32: Roslyn

  CHAPTER 33: Good-bye, Jack County

  CHAPTER 34: The Low Gear

  CHAPTER 35: Dining with Cannibals

  CHAPTER 36: The Way to Say Good-bye

  Epilogue

  Coda

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I.

  Sarah is holding me by the elbow as I’m trudging slowly to the busier part of my neighborhood, an intersection of Asian-fusion restaurants and the hangover hook-up bar that seems to be in constant operation. She’s convinced me to wrap my neck in a scarf, put my coat over my decaying cashmere sweater, which I’ve been wearing for three days now, and encouraged me to leave my apartment for the first time in five days. I listen to Sarah, and do all this with a sense of catatonic disengagement.

  It’s the longest I’ve been away from the hospital. Well, the longest I’ve been away from the ninth floor at Harborview, where Steph is in a coma, sitting upright with a tiny silver spike sticking out of her forehead, an image of a medical unicorn, the spike measuring her cranial pressure. I’ve kept guard at her bedside and in the waiting room with her family for over three months now, sometimes defending her even against her family, as an intruder or interloper into their family’s pain, because I am no longer Steph’s intended, had no connection to her when she’d driven her Jeep over the side of an overpass except for “recent ex-boyfriend.” And yet, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her side, couldn’t walk away just yet, not like this. But it was tearing me apart to stay.

  I’d been in another hospital myself three days earlier, after ripping one of my arms to shreds in a psychotic break at 3:00
a.m., alone in my own bathroom. A combination of Xanax, some SSRI that had kept me awake for four days, and a steady intake of gin—gin to quiet the shouting in my head, gin to thicken my terror to a sludge, gin to drown out the crushing sense of guilt I felt the moment I awoke during those rare times I could actually get about twenty continuous minutes of sleep—gin, which turned the Xanax and the serotonin inhibitors into assassins, and I finally gave up, found an old-fashioned double-sided razor blade and went at my left wrist, working for the one deep cut that would end it, end all of this, in a bathtub, alone in darkest, wettest February, as I sucked down one last Pabst Blue Ribbon for courage, or self-pity.

  It was Sarah who had found me at the emergency room that morning, told them she was my mother, and they let her through. Sarah is thirteen years older than me and should not be able to pass for my mother, but this is an emergency room in downtown Seattle in the middle of the night, so they’re accustomed to odd family engagements, even the blatantly incestuous, as would have been our case.

  “Can you do this?” she asks me now, as I’m stumbling along and beginning to breathe shallowly, quickly, in fear. More fear. People are going about their business, crossing the street against the light, drivers avoiding them and making abrupt turns, people meandering on an otherwise unexceptional February weekday, and my blood is pumping with cortisol, stress hormones, and anxiety, and I am feeling very much like I want to run again, and hide again, and get underground again, and pull the door shut behind me. Feeling that I don’t belong here, and that they will all find that out at once, point at me and burn me out in a “scorched earth” policy, where the herd weeds out the weakest, the one who broke and gave up, and they all turn on that one, and offer him up for the survival of the whole.

  “No,” I say to Sarah. “I don’t feel like I’m a part of this anymore.” How do these people function, day to day? How do they step up onto a bus, ride a bike to work, shop for groceries when at any minute their foundation could be pulled out from under? They slip through life like people who have not experienced horror, move around like their closest loved one did not die horribly just a few days ago, like their children are not at the mercy of the closest maniac with a rifle and low self-esteem, like nature is not out to kill them and their families and they have many layers of protection between abject terror and their lattes.

  “You feel ‘other’ to yourself,” Sarah says, in the way that she has. Sarah can be both wholly sympathetic and the detached observer. I couldn’t understand or trust this about her when we first started our twice-weekly walks around Greenlake, when we’d simply talk the whole length and blather on, like new mothers in the mother’s ghetto that the three-mile park tends to be. It was a friendship like I had never before experienced. I’d met her at a time when Steph and I were having trouble, but there was no chemistry between Sarah and me, we told ourselves. I told myself. We weren’t age-appropriate; I didn’t want to do that anymore. We’d both found the other incredibly interesting and talked ourselves into thinking it was only friendship. That was all.

  Sarah was quoting a sentiment from Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher. She was a professor of philosophy at the Jesuit university here, in Seattle, and had become my one guiding star in this darkest night, an Archimedean point of truth, when all the craziness was swirling around it. She was the one thing I believed to be consistently right, and I’m not sure why, or why I was convinced of it. I needed someone to trust and she happened to be there, had been there a few times previously.

  Sarah was also fond of repeating, “Everything changes in the instant,” from Joan Didion’s seminal work, The Year of Magical Thinking, which Didion wrote after she lost her husband and her daughter in the same year, and catalogued her recovery in a sort of autonomic function of writing. Everything had changed, for Steph and me, in the instant, and I was slow to understand how comprehensive that term everything really was. Sarah had purchased a copy of the book for me, a week after Steph’s accident. I couldn’t get past the first hundred pages, couldn’t concentrate anymore, focus on words. I couldn’t put three thoughts together. But Didion’s pain had been akin to my pain: We had both suffered profoundly. Though Didion had not nicked at her soul, like I had. Didion had support, had people around her. Didion had not given up, acted out in desperation, decided she could take no more.

  I did. And that’s why Sarah found me that morning in the dark emergency unit, alone, sitting upright like Steph, with stitches in my wrist, a deadened feeling up through my left arm and into my heart, wondering how the hell I ended up there, with security guards standing outside my door.

  II.

  When they wake you, those early morning calls never really tell you they’re about to change your life.

  Cell phones have changed the late night phone call; it was once far more dramatic when your bedside telephone started clamoring for attention at 2:00 a.m. You were naturally alarmed, not simply because of the volume but because the decorum was different. Now, when your phone buzzes in the dead of night, it can be anything from an errant dial or a text message from someone who expects you to have your phone on silent, to your kid letting you know he or she will be late: Don’t worry.

  I’ve had two of these phone calls that changed my life.

  “Flashbulb memories,” they’re called. What’s interesting about both is that neither raised any particular alarm when I received them, when they made my cell phone glow blue in the dark of my bedroom. I was alone each time, the first at 4:25 a.m. on March 17, 2007, the night my younger brother, Derek, an ostensible student at the University of Texas at Austin, drank so much liquor he blacked out and collapsed backward, like a felled pine, and broke his fall with the back of his head.

  The call came some hours later from Robert, my mother’s second husband, his voice teeming with controlled hysteria as he drove my catatonic mother west from Houston at top speed. I began to comprehend, as I was coming awake, what he was telling me, as he yelled over the cell line as if he was declaring testimony in a courtroom, at 4:25 a.m. in Seattle, 6:25 a.m. in Texas.

  “June, this is Robert,” he said. “I’m calling for your mother, Velva. Derek had an accident in Austin. He’s in the hospital there, and we’re on our way now. I’ve called your sisters and Dan, and we’re all going to meet at the hospital in Austin. He’s still alive but they say it’s serious and they want your mother there. He’s going to have surgery in the next hour. That’s all we know right now. We should be there in two hours.”

  I remember hearing his voice, him shouting over the sound of a stressed engine and calling me “June,” my nickname within the family, and in my memory of this moment, I felt like I could hear the sound of the Texas wind roaring by, but that’s likely false since there hasn’t been an open automobile window in Texas since the late 1980s. But I do know that I didn’t hear a word from my mother, who I imagined was in a collapsed bundle in the passenger seat, crying. I know my mother, and I know she was crying.

  And so I didn’t ask Robert anything. I didn’t have a reaction, because what I was hearing was impossible.

  It had never occurred to me that anyone in my family could die. Never. Or, not yet.

  I know how that sounds, but until that moment, it was true. Certainly not the youngest, certainly not Derek. And it was that line, that tone in Robert’s voice when he said, “He’s still alive, but they say it’s serious . . .” How that means so much more than what it says, even then.

  I think my response to Robert was, “All right, call me when you know more.” I shouted it over the cell phone, like tin cans attached with string over five states.

  And then I was alone, in my apartment three thousand miles away, sitting on the edge of my bed, the light around me already changing and my mind going nova with the idea that I would never again speak to my lost little brother, who died without redemption.

  III.

  The second early morning phone call that changed my life came about two and a half years later, at 2:24 a.
m. on a Saturday morning.

  It’s funny how you remember specifics: Your awareness opens up to twice its size to absorb detail when mortality is in the air. It was mid-December, 2009.

  For this one, I was awake. I had developed a habit of playing fifteen or twenty minutes of Jim Dale reading one of the Harry Potter series every night before I went to sleep, and then also when I’d awaken during the night, which happened often, as I suffered from a severe case of apnea. Three minutes of Harry Potter and I’d be under with no problem, and it was helping me sleep. Better than anything over the counter.

  I was awake for this call, though, with my iPhone in my hand as I was making my way back to bed after a groggy bathroom visit.

  I’d become a fat man at this point, after I’d been dating and breaking up with a woman named Stephanie, who preferred “Steph,” for over a year and had gained about twenty-five or thirty pounds, which made it hard to move around. Hence the apnea. That night, I’d had three slices of pizza and a six-pack of Miller Lite while watching a movie before I felt the food coma and went to bed, alone in my studio apartment near downtown Seattle.

  Steph, as my . . . ex-girlfriend? Ex-fiancée? Girl I was having trouble with? She was busy, had been at work all night, as she was behind during her busiest time of year, and I was free to go to “zero.” That’s what I called it, when I had an evening free and I could spend it alone, doors and curtains closed, phone off, and I could idle watching films or documentaries or TV and have some beers and keep out all stimulation that would otherwise annoy me. We were, after all, child-free, and at this time, free of one another, while we figured out what we were going to do next, independent of one another.

  And she was at work, safe: Even though we were split up, I was still concerned for her.

  So it was a bit of a surprise that her father was calling me that morning, as I was setting the Jim Dale reading back to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.