My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (48 page)

I remember lying in my bedroom, darkened and curtained off, my face pressed into the hard mattress, telling her, “You haven't seen what I can do. I've been expending all this energy and focus and grief on Steph and her family, keeping from falling apart, but I can do more, I can do much, much more, Sarah; please don't go yet, not yet, baby,” and I very nearly whimpered. I loved her, like I've never loved anyone else.

“You dear, sweet, man,” she said back to me. “You knew this wasn't going to extend into our futures. You need to let me go. I need to let you go. We have to go on our ways,” she said, and I think I lost that much more life and hope, once again, on that bed in that darkened room.

A few weeks later, I'd caught the attention of an agent, Alice, who has a standing policy of reading nearly everything that comes across her inbox: You just never know in this business.

She had been in my revolving database, had received my e-mail and six-chapter query and had decided, “Yeah, all right; this looks promising. Can you send me the manuscript?”

I was actually at Sarah's when I spoke to Alice for the first time. It was a Sunday, and I was sitting on her bed with Genevieve when my phone lit up with a 212 number. “Holy shit, Sarah!” I said. “It's from New York! I don't owe anybody money in New York! It has to be about the book!”

Indeed, it was Alice, my superagent.

We spoke, and everything in my instincts and guts told me she was the one, though I had every person around me—none of them in the arts or entertainment industry, mind you, all of them repeating wisdoms they'd heard on television and in movies—telling me that I should be suspicious about the first person to express interest, watch out for shysters, et cetera.

Alice completely undermined every sense of caution or suspicion; she was just wonderful and linear and no-bullshit whatsoever, a former lawyer from Philadelphia. I couldn't have imagined a better guide in the industry, and we launched into the business of publishing my first book, together. She believed in it.

It was difficult to place since I had no history in publishing, had never published anything before the few chapters in
Epiphany
, knew no one, had no professional affiliations or contacts, and had no idea what I was doing. But Alice found a way. She contacted my current editor, also gifted with incredible insight, and together they took a risk on what was going to be my first book.

After all this.

When we received word that my publisher had bought the book, Sarah and I celebrated like old times in her kitchen with two bottles of prosecco. She was toasting me, looking at me with delight and pleasure and exquisite happiness when suddenly this shadow crossed her face, and she became serious, frightened almost.

“What's wrong, darling?” I asked. “What just happened?”

“Do you remember how I asked you to fix up those chapters and I said I'd give them to those people?”

“Yeah?”

“They're still upstairs in my office, Domingo. I'm sorry. I never sent them along. I don't know why; I just didn't have it in me.”

There was a moment of pause where I had to take in what I was hearing, but then I burst out laughing and hugged her to me and kissed her hard, on the lips.

Sarah had tricked me into doing this, all on my own. She broke the elephant down into parts, gave me a manageable task, and I learned the rest on my own. It made me love her even more profoundly, especially now that I know the business the way I do, and there was nothing really any of those people would have been able to do to help me anyway. Nobody knows nothing, in this business.

And it was Amy who told me, much later, that if I had succeeded in killing myself, she would have published my manuscript at a vanity press with all the typos and mistakes that were in it, because she'd be so mad at me for doing it and she knew it would have made me furious with shame.

And Dougherty, when we would talk two years later, after my insistent barrage of apology e-mails, told me I had frightened him with my ferocity and insanity, that he'd look both ways every time he left his apartment, thinking I was coming after him. But we're friends again, sending stupid text messages and discussing the things we once discussed, before.

I'm not drinking anywhere near what I was drinking back then and have been wrangling with sobriety since April 2013, when I came home from a year-long promotion of my first book, after it was named a finalist for the National Book Award. I've been forced to learn this business from within and with very little room for error, though errors I have made, but thankfully, not like before, and not like I want to die. That first book vaulted me into a serious career as an author, has spoken to some universality for a profound number of people, and changed my life dramatically, and in the end, after all this damage and trouble, I finally managed to get what I wanted, as had Stephanie.

Happy endings. Impossible endings, sure, and yet, there they are.

I just had to learn to hold on to mine.

I tried to carry on in the manner and the mythos of the tortured writer at first—I figured I was allowed at the very least to try it on for size—the Raymonds (Chandler and Carver), Patricia Highsmith and Norman Mailer, Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams, but I knew it wasn't something for longevity. Certainly there's no space here to delineate between the alcoholism and the creative imperative, because it's up for debate and actually rather boring, but I will say that my decision came from figuring out finally what it was that I really wanted, above all else: I wanted to be a member of my family again, and I wanted to be with Sarah; that's the only thing that really mattered to me, and she was leaving me because of my drinking and bad health. The choice was clear.

I was in San Antonio late one night with both my brothers after there had been some kerfuffle at a bar, once again, and I was so wound up I'd put my fist through someone's windshield, and then later, when Dan and Derek and some of their friends were dropping me off at my hotel, I had that “road to Damascus” moment where I saw, quite clearly, the pull that my family and especially my brothers have on me, and something deep inside of me named it for the first time and declared it obsolete, and I knew I wanted to come back home to Seattle, back home to Sarah, and get sober, try for sobriety, or at the very least, learn to drink like I want to live, instead of drinking like I want to die.

It separates me from my brothers when I don't drink with them, and it gets awkward really quickly, but I try to maintain my boundaries. My father cried for joy when I told him about my decisions, and he doesn't press me to find out how I am, gives me the room to slip up every few weeks if I break down and have a few drinks at dinner with friends.

But I'm no longer drinking like I don't want to live, because I do want to live, and live with Sarah in my life. “Besides,” she said, “success has made you much less of an asshole.”

So we're still trying for it.

Like Sarah says, sobriety is not a straight line.

It took me more than twenty years, but I came back for him, kept my word after it had long been forgotten by the both of us.

Those years after crushing his head in that fall, Derek wandered lost in that same wilderness that nearly killed him the first time. He, too, had an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury, but it wasn't really obvious to anyone else besides him, when he couldn't concentrate when reading or remember simple nouns in conversation, couldn't perform simple repetitive tasks. Things like that.

I noticed it, those two times I saw him during this period. He would repeat questions asked just hours previously, look at you from a distance in one eye, squint at you with recognition in the other, and it was easy to dismiss it as him having had too much to drink, but there was something else in it, I could tell, and so could Dan.

It's amazing that Derek survived through that time, but survive he did, and it was actually mostly because of Dan, and Dan's insistence and sometimes abusive love and ferocious care. It was all Derek had left, after a while. He had taxed our mother beyond what even she was capable of, and everyone else in the family had noticed, became quietly resentful, because in spite of all the grandchildren and successful daughters and sons she had, Mom continued to focus her worry and care on Derek, only Derek, it felt, and we all just learned to live with it.

He depleted Dan, eventually, too. Broken bones, broken bank account, and a broken heart, Dan said to me once, were what Derek had left him with. Dan had tried to get Derek to independence, there in Texas; Dan forced him, yelled at him, kicked him in the large Texan ass that kept growing larger on Dan's couch, but somehow, Derek's next gear just wouldn't kick in.

Both Dan and I would treat Derek in the same way we treated one another, in our congeries of two, the club of brothers who had room only for one more, and that was Derek, when he'd finally grow up, take his lumps, and be a man.

We kept waiting. Derek kept going the other way.

We couldn't understand him.

Finally, it occurred to me to ask Derek for help. I was in Seattle, I was under some intense deadline stress, not simply with this book, but with a few other projects, and I had the idea to hire him, to bring him here, to Seattle, to coax him out of his comfort zone, which had turned extremely uncomfortable, for everyone.

He was petrified, he told me later. He was frightened of being so far from Texas, from the things he knew, from Mom and Dan.

“You just have to take the step,” I said to him, over the phone. “You'll see that it feels right, when you do it.”

He was terrified, it turned out, of me. He was frightened to spend so much time with me, scared of my temper and my shifting promises.

“Here's your return ticket,” I said to him when he arrived, “to be used whenever you want to go back home. In the meantime, you're to clean the apartment, get me out of the apartment for exercise at least three days a week, and generally keep me from spiraling out of control with stress or anxiety.”

In a matter of a week, we both realized that we didn't really know who the other person was. All my suspicions of him were unfounded, and all his fears of me were entirely out of proportion.

Derek immediately was able to see that I'm not the person I am when I'm in Texas, where I suddenly may become the resentful, frustrated twelve-year-old that the family dynamics bring out in me, that I'm not the abusive, angry person that lashed out at him and threatened to kick his ass because Derek was depending far too much on our mother, was too happy to eat and drink on other people's dime, seemingly without shame.

It was shame, it turned out, that was keeping him suffocated, keeping him under, keeping him from moving forward, because he felt so goddamned asphyxiated under all his bad choices and behaviors, his losing the scholarship to UT, and changing the way he did, almost overnight. Shame that he'd medicate with booze and any drugs available for ten years.

Derek was a noncombatant, was very different from Dan and me, I began to realize as he sat on my couch and we started to learn who the other person was, as a grown man. He's a really sweet person, incredibly kindhearted, and he found out that I can be as well, that I'm not only the swaggering asshole he'd meet in Texas when I'd fly down to do events for my book promotions. That we both have a streak of kindness and sentimentality a mile wide; the only difference, really, is that when he gets his feelings hurt, he doesn't immediately turn to lashing out the way Dan and I do, turn to swinging fists when our heart is wounded.

Dan and I were Mingo's sons, it turned out.

Derek was Mom's.

So, twenty years after I left him crying on the sidewalk that night I boarded a bus to Seattle, I invited Derek to fly out to me, stay with me like I promised I would avail to him the morning he made it through his surgery and I wrote him that letter when he was still in the coma. When he arrived here, carrying a red suitcase and a frightened look in his eye, my younger brother began to surface, and our friendship changed, or maybe even started that day, as I was finally able to do my part in helping the only member of our family who hadn't been able to get it together, who needed our mother the most for all of his life, and who had finally broken Dan down in tears and frustration.

When he arrived here in Seattle, I made a spontaneous decision to change our dynamic from “older brother and younger brother,” and instead treat him as if he was a cherished friend, make no assumptions, and try a different tactic in how we communicated as family. In other words, instead of the tacit domination that's inherent in the hierarchy of family, I would treat Derek like a friend, with clear and established boundaries and expectations. It started to work immediately. It was as if Mom's umbilical cord finally broke: the distance, the opportunity, the
tabula rasa
with some clean, clear boundaries. He began to individuate, began his life again, completely integrated into the family, all of us rooting for him and treating him the way Sarah treated me for a while: trust, but verify.

After three weeks, he asked if he could stay in Seattle, find work, and try to rebuild himself here. I, of course, agreed, and within a week's time, he was off and running, learning the city through its busing, coming home every day with new stories and wonder. It has been entirely gratifying.