My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (4 page)

So when she asked for her divorce, taking eight-year-old Derek with her, it was interesting that her daughters, my sisters, out on their own paths, entirely successful and fulfilled as strong women in their own right, were thoroughly blindsided by Mom's decision, and were not shy about letting Velva know their displeasure.

There was a real sense of betrayal on both sides, primarily from my sisters, who had been kept from all of Mom and Dad's secrets growing up, and now, as adults, simply could not understand why Velva was leaving their father in his darkest, deepest time of need. And Dad played into this betrayal as well, offering up only a shrug of helplessness and bewildered innocence at Velva's decision to break up the family and rob Derek of growing up in the same stable, structured environment that the rest of us had supposedly experienced.

Mom bought this line of guilt wholesale and believed it thoroughly, felt despicable every time she'd come home to find Derek playing video games, miserably ensconced in his “urban” isolation away from Dad and Gramma, in a shitty two-bedroom apartment in a bad Brownsville neighborhood where he was exposed to an entirely different Brownsville than Dan and I had witnessed growing up, but never participated in. She wanted to keep Derek safely tucked away in his prelapsarian bliss.

Brownsville was very different, without the dirt of the farmyards under your feet.

As an outsider from my perch three thousand miles away, watching my mother's development during this period was fascinating, as if she was rooted temporally in both the shared timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly fabric of time and space as the rest of us but also exploding forward in growth, so that every year she spent in school and working for herself after her divorce, it was also about five more years of experience for her, lurching forward through all her growth stages. She was like Doctor Who.

Her biggest sacrifice in this hyperdriven development was Derek, as the youngest kid still dependent upon her spare time and affection, both of which were now limited resources that he had to share with her ambitions and her social life. His standard of living had become destabilized, and he had become listless, bored, drawn to the dangerous, which, in Brownsville, Texas, can become incredibly dangerous incredibly quick.

Dad tried to keep involved with Derek, would pick him up when he was in town so Derek could spend time with him and Gramma, who was suddenly feeling lonely and left behind in that empty spread out on Oklahoma Avenue, where once lived her son's huge sprawling family. Gramma was like Moses, who brought his people to the Promised Land, but could not, himself, enter.

Dad went through a tremendous heartbreak when my mother left him, and he decided also to quit drinking, to get sober after thirty years of unabashed debauchery. In one of the most impressive displays of self-control, and one that I would never have previously imagined my father capable of, when he made the decision to get sober, he never looked back, never touched another drop, never relapsed, not even once.

And he'd spend days crying, missing Velva.

Years later, he would tell me about his sobriety and those first few months when Mom left him, left the house on Oklahoma empty, and he would spend his days at Gramma's house instead, crying in her bedroom, only to emerge and find Gramma standing there, looking at him in disgust, and she actually laughed at him, once, for being so weak.

It was my Uncle Richard who humiliated her into being a mother after she had laughed at Dad, and he had growled at Gramma and then enfolded my father in a stepbrotherly embrace, metabolizing his hurt at losing the family, like Richard had also experienced, some years before.

Dad told me these stories a few years later, things he had shared only in AA meetings, thinking his family wouldn't understand.

He couldn't have been more wrong.

So when he had a chance to see Derek, he'd bring the little kid back to the house on Oklahoma, and he'd do with him things he never did with Dan and me. He would take Derek on a jog through the geometry of farmlands, buy him fancy slingshots and air rifles, take him exploring through the expanding city dump, which was now just a couple miles from our former house. Dad would drive Derek out to Boca Chica beach, just to look around, and then when no one was looking or around, he'd say, “Let's go in,” strip down to his Y-fronts and jump in the lukewarm beach, spend the afternoon swimming on the Texas Gulf Coast, with no towels or swimwear or preparation. This is how Dad did things.

Derek loved this time spent with his father, as weird as it sounds. The trips to the dump especially. I would do this on my own, when I was in my late teens and feeling listless sometimes, and I can report that it's quite fascinating being out there, like a postapocalyptic landscape of industrial abstraction. Once, I saw a huge unloaded field of doll heads, as far as the eye could see, every size and shape and hair color. I still have nightmares from that.

But back to Derek and Dad. Derek told me this story about one of their trips to the dump, and his new shiny slingshot. Out of nowhere, he said, this big fuckoff spider came out from under something and ran right at Dad.

“About the size of your hand,” he told me. “Big and black and brown, just shoots out from under, like, a shoe, right at Dad, who screams and jumps and runs.”

And not skipping a beat, Derek nailed the huge spider with his slingshot.

It was a wolf spider, we found out later, after a brief Internet search. He said he never felt more proud of himself after the way Dad was praising him and hugging him, saying, “Not even June was that good a shot!” which kind of pissed me off, since I was like Annie fucking Oakley when I was a kid, but I'll give him that.

When he wasn't with Dad back at the place on Oklahoma, it was a much harder time. It was no way for him to spend his adolescence, living with a single mother who wanted now what she had missed out on then, and she made a heartrending decision to have Derek live with our sister Mary and her husband, Mark, in Corpus Christi, and it was perhaps the best decision for everyone. Mare and Mark, in their incredible generosity, gave Derek the structure and home environment he was lacking throughout elementary school and into middle school, and they became a fantastically tight unit, with my mom's diametric gravities pulling her in opposite directions, leaving her with her heartbreak in the middle.

This is really where Derek became estranged, in a way. He felt disjointed, like an intruder into Mare and Mark's life, though they were as gracious and loving as anyone could ever be. Mark, as a coach at a tough Corpus Christi high school that was predominantly black and Hispanic, brought Derek into his orbit and Derek became a good athlete, played football on Mark's team and then tried competitive weightlifting, and Mare saw to his academics.

His first day at possibly the roughest school in Corpus Christi, a place called West Oso, Derek made his entrance as Mare's little brother dressed in wire-rim glasses, braces, and a cardigan thrown over his shoulders with the cuffs rolled into a ball at his chest while he shambled in on a pair of crutches, an injury sustained on the football field. The getup was, of course, Mare's doing, as a former Mimi, and Derek only succeeded in avoiding getting the shit beaten out of him because that day, inside the first ten minutes of him being there, there was a race riot in the cafeteria. A Mexican kid had stabbed a black kid in the side of the head with a pencil, and both sides erupted in a huge, police-involved brawl.

Eventually, Derek figured out how to dress so that he didn't look like a pretentious prick and wasn't targeted, excelled under Mark's tutelage in the sports program, and sonofabitch if that kid didn't graduate as valedictorian of his school, when the time came, and had a full ride to the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, choosing to take a career path like his older brother, June.

We were all very proud of him, very impressed. He was fulfilling his role in the idealized version of our family, like we all wanted.

Mom, of course, remained involved and carried her guilt as best as she could as she rebooted her vitality and libido, finished her own eight-year degree plan and kept her job at JC Penney, which was the closest thing to a social life as she'd ever had, and after a while none of us begrudged her anything: If anyone deserved a second act, it was Mom.

But still, her guilt over losing Derek permeated everything, and it would leave a mark.

He was a good kid, back then. I'm sure the burden of being the youngest of a sprawling, motivated family in the ascendency was crushing, with every one of his older siblings holding a degree of authority over him and exercising it in the vacuum of a family in partial disorder as our lives became untidy. And this time with Mark and Mare, this time being the perfect kid, after being shunted from our family home to a shit Brownsville apartment and then off to his sister's home, it spun him tight, and tighter still, and when he made it to college in Austin on that full scholarship, Derek spun out of control. It frightened and disappointed all of us, and I'm sure himself.

Personally, I had lost my ability to connect with him. I failed my younger brother as an older brother, I know. I carry some of that same guilt Mom feels, but in a different color.

Because I never spent more than a couple of days with him, as I had made my decision to live on the West Coast, I had no idea who he was, as a person, and treated him simply as a category, as the younger brother.

When he was a boy, I'd make my yearly hajj back home to report in and feel superior, reconnect with Dan and sometimes with Derek. I'd come home and I'd bring him gifts, give him some of my best T-shirts and comics and CDs, and Derek would devour these things, build his identity around most of it like an internalized shrine.

I'd show up wearing a cool T-shirt, looking thin and urban, and he'd look up to me in a sort of hero worship that I did nothing to discourage. I gave him his first “Yoda” T-shirt, something I'd bought from a street vendor who'd hand-made the shirt. Another of an M. C. Escher drawing that was all the rage at the time. And I brought back lots of music. Lots and lots of music. The latter moved him so much that once, for show-and-tell in his second-grade class, Derek did a one-man improvisation of a Beastie Boys song that had the teacher leaping over her chair in order to slam off the tape player because of all the cursing, which befuddled Derek because he didn't know these were “bad” words. Mostly just slang, he thought, as he rapped about getting “a girlie on his jimmy.”

But this all ended when he arrived at university. I mean, he still did the hero worship, but his idea of college and independence meant that he could do drugs and booze and sleep all day without having a single sibling or parent expect anything from him, and academics kept slipping down the ranks of his obligations and priorities, and he began to drown in his genetics and compulsions toward addiction, took to alcoholism like the Sheen family took to movies about the Vietnam War.

This is where we started to miss him.