Boy Kings of Texas Page 15

  Tony believed himself to be the school guru of pot. By the time he invited me to go skipping, he was living in a hippie fantasy that only ended when he had to report to his parents, who knew that the only time Tony ever lied was when his mouth moved.

  At the Wall, I was sniffed over with more disdain than I felt necessary, but not because I seemed a narc. It was because I was terribly uncool, in a striped collared shirt borrowed from my father, fading blue Levis, and white Reeboks. I was a dork, sure, but come on: Who isn’t at fifteen?

  Tony bought three joints for the two dollars and lit one up right in front of the guy from whom he bought it, giving him the ritualistic second hit before passing it to me, letting the guy know I was cool. There were a lot of unspoken rules to pot smoking. Many of them, I still don’t know, and quite frankly, don’t care to know anymore.

  We stood there, the three of us, in that concrete alleyway and smoked the entire thing.

  “’Ere,” said Tony, holding in his breath and passing me the toxic little joint burned down to a nub.

  “Hey, man; I can’t smoke anymore. I think I’m high. I don’t think I’ve ever been this high before. I’m afraid to go to class.”

  The other guy studied me for a moment, his thoughts registering clearly on his face. Suspicion, realization, ridicule.

  “Ha, ha,” he said slowly. “You’re stoned.” Pointed at me.

  “A ha ha!” said Tony, studying my scared eyes. “Dude, you’ll be fine,” he said, and kept the remaining two joints for himself.

  I wasn’t fine. In my first period, I tried reading but my eyes kept jumping back every three words. I smelled of pot. The guy behind me said in the voice of a forty-year-old, “Hey man. You stink of smoke.” It made me really nervous.

  My cousin Dora heard this and said, “Domingo, did you start smoking?”

  “Cigarettes,” I said. “It was cigarettes. I gotta go.” So I got up and left class without asking permission and without any excuse and walked around the campus until I came down. I wasn’t missed. Our teacher was an ex-hippie and she understood my abrupt exit, I think. Mostly she was pissed off and hated her job and hated her students, but she liked me in her own acid way, so when I had to report back the next day, she didn’t question it. But it wasn’t an auspicious beginning to my hanging around with Tony. Or rather, it was exactly the sort of thing that he and I had imagined high school to be. Tony and I both had fantasies about what high school was supposed to be like; the only problem was that no one else played along, and they were determined to make it difficult for us, with like, grades and attendance and stuff like that. But Tony said he had a way around it. So I went with it, and my path, already bent, became properly crooked.

  I don’t think I ever thanked him for that.

  Chapter 17

  DAN’S SECOND FIGHT

  Dan had been big for his age his entire life. As such, he considered himself protector of his loved ones, especially because Dad kept insisting on the idea, because Dad knew himself to be incapable of that role.

  It was rare for Dan to be much of a bully, though the mood did sometimes strike when we were kids, as will happen with someone who is exploring the boundaries of his strength, of his compassion.

  He was actually a really sensitive kid. I remember one year Dad had moved ten hours north to Dallas to find work, and Mom had insisted that the whole family would travel the vertical length of Texas in the 1980 Bonneville—highways 77 to 37 to 35—in order to have Christmas as a family. Dad had been fairly unconcerned with the idea of having the family together for the holidays, but Mom was obstinate. Dad had liked the new solitude, liked being functionally single. He’d go to church on Sunday morning, sure, but then he’d hit a porno movie before he had to make it back to the dismal two-room rental he was sharing with Richard. Having the family around in Dallas made him claustrophobic. Or maybe he didn’t want anyone seeing how he was living, especially his family.

  Anyhow, it was when we were on our way there, or on our way back at some point during those ten painful hours when we were all tired, cramped, hot, and cranky, that Mom had the radio tuned to a parochial country radio station.

  All the kids were singing tunelessly along to Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning to pass the time, when something about the plight of the scorned woman at the center of Juice Newton’s song really plucked at Dan’s ten-year-old heart, and he cried for that woman’s pain, looking off into the dusty, uninterrupted Texas horizon. Mare was the first to notice the tears on his cheek and she brought it mercilessly to the attention of the brood, delicious and full of tangy spite, and we all turned on him like sharks attacking one of their own.

  We pointed and laughed loudly, humiliated him for what seemed like an hour, like we knew how. God it was heavenly, how we had him crying, this time out of a deep, painful shame at showing compassion. It’s what passed for love in that Bonneville.

  When I relayed the story in therapy years later, my therapist, Sally, asked, “Do you think maybe he was crying for your mother, in the role of that scorned woman?”

  I winced, bit down hard: I preferred to hold on to the idea of humiliating Dan for being a wuss. I suppose I should ask him about that.

  This isn’t to say Dan was free and loose with his compassion, not to me, at least. I was his little brother, and as such, I needed a certain amount of domination, both physically and emotionally. Though Dan did have his moments, as a leader or teacher.

  One day, we were left alone in the house, which was a rarity when we were kids, and Dan had been poking around in the one shared bathroom. He’d found a box of maxi-pads and decided right then that I could use a lesson in the menstrual cycle.

  I should say here that all dealings with female plumbing were absolutely verboten, kept secret from us boys, so we had no idea what these things were for. Well, I had no idea: Dan had apparently received some information about their use, from somewhere outside the home. So he was going to teach me what he knew.

  “They put it in their underwear, with these,” he says, and begins to peel off the adhesive strips.

  “For what?” I ask, confused.

  “Because once a month, they bleed. They go ‘on the rag,’” he tells me, like I should know what he’s talking about.

  “Oh,” I say, completely bewildered. I’d heard the phrase, but I did not understand what it meant. “Is that the rag?” I pointed at the pad.

  “Yeah,” he says. “It goes like this,” and he pulls down his Y-fronts and inserts the maxi-pad under his tackle with the adhesive side up, then slaps the elastic band back into place.

  “See?” he says, and begins walking about, pretending he’s a girl with an unusually large basket.

  I’m laughing at his pantomime, and when he’s done, he pulls down his underwear once again to end the lesson and suddenly realizes his mistake. He starts pulling the pad out of his underwear, and with it comes the skin of his teenaged testicles and penis, and he makes the most comic, twisted face I will ever see him make in all the years I’ve known him, as his penis and scrotum are stretched out to nearly the length of his arm, and I am on the floor exhausted with laughter, tears running down my cheeks and incapable of catching my breath, nearing an asthma attack.

  “Boy,” I said, when I could catch my breath and he was doubled over in agony, “I bet they don’t have that problem.”

  Anyhow, like in all pack-animal hierarchies, Dan had a role to play, as did I. I wanted what he had, would always want what the leader had. He was my hero. Still is, in a lot of ways, actually.

  He played football all his schooling, and he liked it, unlike me, who played football all my schooling and hated it. I played football because he expected it of me. In this way Dan was more influential to my upbringing than Dad ever was.

  Dan was solid, had a good relationship to the earth, and had natural, bracing foot placement, always. A cock-strong kid who was also quick on his feet, he was a perfect pulling guard on the offensive line and a tackle on the defens
e. He would be in every single play in a game, never had a chance to sit on the bench, and made varsity when he was a sophomore. I never really left the bench, would go to games just for the trip to Whataburger we got afterward. That was my reward for five days of practice and enduring the Neanderthal coaching staff.

  I grew up small, lean, intimidated. I accepted early that I could not naturally pull off alpha male aggression, that I would have to train at it, like a sport, if I was ever going to be able to defend myself. Richard had taught me that.

  But that wouldn’t come until a few years later.

  Dan, on the other hand, was naturally burly, could hit like a mule on the field.

  But Dan never had training in boxing, never really learned how to throw a punch. And in our barrio, well, no one ever really liked to admit that they didn’t know how to throw a real punch, wouldn’t pay or put in the repetitive hours to throw a legitimate jab/reverse combination because somehow, in the land of machismo, it seemed elitist to enter into any type of program for self-improvement. In a stressed community, any sort of elevation is looked down upon, felt as a judgment on the rest of the people.

  What? They seemed to say. We’re not good enough as we are now?

  We were expected to be chíngon in the barrio, and without any instruction. On top of that, we were also expected never to shy away from an opportunity to show our inability to do so.

  “Tírar chingásos,” we’d call it. (“Throw down. Throw some fuckers.”)

  I dunno. It confuses me, too.

  Anyhow, Dan, in high school, never had too many reasons to fight, or dominate any more than was necessary. He was a likeable enough kid, had gotten into one or two scraps as a younger teen, but had gone through his teenage years mostly untested. When I started high school, Dan was a senior, a varsity football player, and did what he wanted around school. He was already enlisted at seventeen, shipping out at the end of the school year. Dad was working long-haul trucking at this point, which had left my older, larger brother to enjoy a bit of unexpected independence like a regular, normal high school teenager. He was happy; he had his little forays with the blonde Baptists and Mormon fauna—the “slim-hipped gentiles” all new immigrants are unconsciously promised upon becoming an American—and he was feeling pretty good at being the boy king.

  Then one day, in the halls of Hanna High—alum to the likes of Kris Kristofferson, thank you very much—I happen to walk by Dan’s third-period class, as it’s letting out.

  One of the only two or so black students at Hanna, this guy named Ted, comes out of the classroom first, shuffling in a way that seems light, joking, as the rest of the students begin to swarm into the hallway. I notice next that Dan has emerged from the same room, slow, serious, with a strange look on his face that I’ve never seen before.

  Dan has been challenged, threatened.

  I hadn’t clocked it.

  Ted, halfway down the hall, turns on his heel and flicks his hands like flippers, says, “Come on, man. Come on . . . ”

  I suddenly realize he’s saying this to Dan. I think he’s joking, because he seems to be smiling, happy. I don’t get there’s a fight developing because I’m fourteen years old, and Dan and Ted have been, up to this point, friends.

  In my innocent understanding of the world at fourteen, friends didn’t fight. They argued, they said mean things about each other, and they parlayed loyalties, but they never actually fought.

  Fighting came from enemies, who were marked as clearly as Draco Malfoy, Darth Vader, Alan Rickman in “Die Hard,” or, closer to home, guys named “Paco” or “El Smiley.” So I think they’re kidding.

  “Kick his ass, Ted!” I yell like a pre-teen girl squealing at a concert.

  It was in good fun, right?

  I turn and face Dan, who has stopped now, in the hall, the look on his face suddenly recognizable to me. It says, “You disloyal shit.” It says, “I’m being called out. I’m scared. I have to do this, and I don’t want to do this. I have to do this. Not for anyone else, not to prove anything, but for myself. I’m going to do this, you disloyal little fuck.”

  I see his face drain of blood, and he hands me the single red folder he’s carrying. He’s wearing black denim jeans with vertical striping (it’s 1987) and a collared shirt, also with thin vertical black and red stripes. I had been with him when he had asked Mom to buy it for him, at JC Penney. And he’s wearing his contact lenses, which Mom had finally consented to buy for him, after he had enlisted in the army and had his first-ever vision test the summer before. Mom had been horrified, guilt ridden, when she realized he had long suffered with -5 vision, had gone without glasses his entire life while his sisters had bought vanity glasses. So she’d bought him the contact lenses just a few months before. They had been quite dear.

  I remember all this because at the flash point of realization—that Dan is in a fight—it’s like a Polaroid of that moment and all its minutiae.

  Dan is in a fight, and there’s no feeling in the world more isolating. He’s in a fight, on his own, and backing down is just not an option. You can’t, as a boy king.

  See, Ted is well-known in the school, and not just because he’s one of the two black kids. Well, that certainly helped, but Ted was from Chicago, the popular lore went, and had a reputation of being a gang-fighting bad ass.

  He had a cult of kids in my grade who followed him around like flunkies. The only other black kid in the school, Marlon, had been the quarterback on my freshman team and had been a “friend” of mine, back in junior high school, but now he’s here, cheering Ted on, in fighting my older brother.

  All this helps my ideas of friendship mature instantaneously. I realize at this moment that your friends can turn into fighting enemies, and that you can never really trust anyone, ever.

  I take Dan’s folder and hold it, follow him dumbly as he follows Ted out to where Ted, flashy and ghetto-inspired, is making a lot of noise, drawing as much attention as possible, like Cassius Clay had done to Joe Louis before their first fight.

  Thing is, the next period is my Latin class, fourth period.

  Lunchtime at Hanna happened on fourth and fifth period, and I had been quite loose with the times I’d squandered my fourth period previously, with the people who’d had fourth-period lunches. I’d taken the “three martini” lunch once too often and was at the point where, should I miss one more class, I’d lose the credit and would be held back for the year. I was walking a fine, tender line.

  The horde of spectators—now immense, with the noise Ted is making—is walking past my Latin class, which is held outside the school in one of those square mobile classrooms that had been established all around the campus to help with the overflow of students. Hanna was, at the time I think, the second largest high school in the nation.

  My Latin teacher, Mr. Jacobs, stands at the doorway to the classroom, his interest piqued by the volume of the crowd. Mr. Jacobs is a tall, gangly blonde-haired fella who wears bowties and at the time was a ringer for Ed Begley Jr. I have no idea what he was doing in Brownsville, other than missionary work, because he often said his life’s goal was to become a monk.

  He stands on the doorstep and watches as the crowd of students swarms to the alley behind the Wall, behind the tennis courts, which are adjacent to his classroom. He understands what’s happening immediately, and catches sight of me, becoming relentless in his higher-minded teaching:

  “Domingo, you’re coming to Latin class today.”

  “But that’s my brother. I have to be there.”

  “I can’t make the choice for you, Domingo, but you know what’s at stake here.”

  “Mr. Jacobs, please; it’s my family; I have to be there.”

  “Domingo, you know the situation. I can’t protect you. You have to make the choice yourself. Forward or backward, Domingo. Forward or backward.”

  With that, he goes back inside and closes the door, as the few other students in Latin class step in behind him and the tardy bell rings.
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br />   I have never been more twisted inside, and I hate Mr. Jacobs at that moment and don’t understand what he meant by “forward or backward.” What kind of shit is that? Dan is fighting the unchallenged titan of Hanna High School, and I’m forced to attend my Latin class, or else I’ll be held back a year and won’t graduate with my class.

  Glumly, I climb the steps into Mr. Jacobs’s class and sit down, with absolutely no hope of absorbing what will be taught. Mr. Jacobs sees this and teaches accordingly, a light day. He drops his curriculum and decides instead to explain to us Latin students the difference between obscenity and profanity, since he himself had been recently taken to task by an associate principal for saying “a profanity.”

  “No,” Mr. Jacobs had corrected her. “What I said to you was ‘obscene,’ and not ‘profane.’” He had told her to go fuck herself, I think he was saying; not for God to go fuck Himself.

  He didn’t make many friends in Brownsville, either.

  To make the time go by faster, I open Dan’s notebook and flip through his academics. It isn’t exactly convincing, as a student’s notebook. It’s more of a prop, with empty line-ruled paper and half-hearted attempts at note-taking, indiscernible scribbles and the lyrics to Knocking at Your Back Door, a song by Deep Purple that had much more double entendre than I was capable of understanding at the time.

  It’s a terrible fifty minutes, spent in that Latin classroom, and I don’t think I ever managed to thank Mr. Jacobs for forcing me to make the choice that day. (Except by getting horribly drunk at one of his summer parties and frightening a girl I liked named Kathy, but that’s another story.)

  When the bell rings, I erupt from that classroom and run down anyone I can find for news, news, news of the event.

  Certainly it is on everyone’s mind, on everyone’s lips . . . ?

  And it is: The first familiar person I see is an old friend of Dan’s, Israel, from way back.

  “Oh, man,” he tells me, “Dan got his ass kicked, man. You should have been there, man. They fought for like, an hour. Dan’s all messed up.”