My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (8 page)

My apartment's interior design had a kind of midcentury feel, since most of my furniture had been donated by the crustier echelon of desk editors and reporters at the
Seattle Times
, thanks to an ex-girlfriend who worked there and had put out a call for donations.

Immediately, that generation of Seattleites who were putting their parents out on the proverbial ice floe and airing out their inherited properties, which now tripled in the booming real estate market, started offering up kitschy lamps and uselessly tiered coffee tables, rattan chairs and strange wall art and the like.

I didn't care: I took everything that was offered, packed it into a U-Haul, and drove it across the country to Dallas, Texas. Figured I'd pare it down when I arrived.

When I finished decorating my new apartment, it looked like a Boeing-era thrift store had vomited in my living room after a hard night of drinking bourgin.

I didn't care; it was “shabby chic,” I thought.

Dan was taken aback when he first saw it, though; it didn't compute with his sense of interior design for a single guy. I could tell he was questioning my heterosexuality, and I was making no case for it.

Dan's idea of a single man's interior design, as illustrated by the one time I ever visited him and he lived alone, was a television sitting atop a hefty wooden table and a love seat directly across from it, with a shadeless lamp sitting on the floor next to it. And lots of beer cans. Lots and lots of beer cans.

So the look of consternation that flickered across his face when he saw my walls draped with Indian fabrics, dried grass stalks in mismatched standing vases, and two recliners sitting opposite a small television and separated by a tall reading lamp, well, Dan had to question what I'd been up to, and with whom, while he'd left me alone in Seattle for a couple years.

Nevertheless, there we were, two large Latin men that Friday night, sitting in midcentury recliners opposite my twenty-inch television (large enough to be allowed in Texas, but certainly not something to be proud of), looking like the very image of Edith and Archie Bunker, drinking Lone Star Beer, the National Beer of Texas.

And because this was my place, it was my discretion as to what we'd be watching for that evening's entertainment. After some considerable channel surfing, I had lit upon a small, independent Australian film called
Flirting
, by John Duigan.

To this day, it remains one of my favorite small films, and I forced Dan to endure it with me.

We sat, that night, watching this film on the Romance Channel, its logo popping up translucently every twenty minutes or so in the lower right-hand corner to remind us how nonmacho we were being by watching a “love movie” at 10:00 p.m. on a Friday night.

By midnight, and the final scene when our hero finally receives a letter from his beloved, who had survived the overthrow of Idi Amin. Dan and I were sobbing, both our faces wet with tears rolling down our puffy cheeks, and saying, “He loves her so much! And she loves him, too!”

It was one for the brotherly scrapbook, and one of my favorite memories of my brother Dan.

The big galoot.

Much later, there was one story that Dan liked to repeat about his drinking days with Derek, before Derek's accident in 2007. Some friends of Dan's from his time in Seattle had flown to San Antonio to visit him, and they spent an entire day on the River Walk, hopping bars and hotels from one end to the other and drinking, drinking, drinking.

Dan, of course, was responsible for Derek's tab because Derek was, as a false student, insolvent, and so when the final tally came to Dan the next day, he blearily counted up all his receipts and discovered he had spent just under $600 for a monumental drunk, worthy of a Kris Kristofferson song.

Very little was said about most of that day, except for a particular moment witnessed at closing time, when Derek was woozily standing at the end of a bar and was unexpectedly chatted up by a San Antonio cougar: big hair, large golden chains, shining nails, and lots of makeup. Derek, unburdened by standards or morals even on his best days, allowed himself to be chatted up thoroughly, thinking he might either have sex or a few free drinks. Such were my younger brother's priorities.

Dan witnessed this from the bar opposite and was immediately on high alert, for some reason, and decided to interfere on the older woman's interfering with his younger brother.

“Whattaya doing to my little brother?” he said, a bit too aggressively.

“Nothing!” replied the older woman, making a face full of disgust. “Have at him, if you're so damned protective.”

Derek, at this point bewildered and confused, managed to follow Dan as Dan led him away and safely off to home.

Now, Dan liked to tell this story. And Dan liked to increase the age of the older woman every time he told the story.

By the time I heard it, she was in her eighties, in a wheelchair, and carried an oxygen tank while smoking a cigarette through a hole in her throat. She also said, “Dahr-wick,” instead of “Derek.” It was hysterical.

“Dahr-wick, come help me with my colostomy bag,” Dan said, while pretending to inhale from a hole in his neck as he was driving and telling me the story for the first time.

“Shut up, she wasn't that old,” said Derek, from the backseat.

“Dahr-wick, can you change my oxygen tank, Dahr-wick?” said Dan.

“Come on, man; stop being mean. You know she wasn't that bad.”

“Dahr-wick, if you come back to my room at the home, you can meet my daughter on Sunday, when she visits. She's old enough to be your muddah.”

“Jesus, Dan.”

Personally, I was taken aback by Dan's routine. The years we spent apart, he'd been sharpening his material, it seemed. He was getting funnier. I was feeling a bit threatened, too: I was the Shecky Greene of the troupe. I was the Borscht Belt comedian. After thirty goddamned years, I was still competing for the same resources as my older brother, the bastard.

But I also noticed how Derek had taken to wincing when he was the butt of our jokes. Once he'd been very willing to be hazed, or initiated in the manner that brothers do with insensitive ribbing or outright humiliation, because any attention from us was in its own way nourishing to him—even the mean stuff—but in the years that I hadn't seen them, I was noticing that this sort of engagement had begun to leave an impression. And Dan either refused to notice or refused to care.

Derek was wincing, making faces when we said shitty things to him, or about him. He had hit a limit, but I wasn't there when it started. Our comments were unconsciously barbed now, surprisingly sharp and unintentionally demeaning, when they were once just brotherly teasing.

My father tells the story of the first time he realized he had a problem with drinking, and oddly enough he cites me as the vehicle of his clarity. Remarkably, I remember the exact same moment standing opposite him as a child, as it served for me as a lesson in the power of language and thinking your way out of a volatile situation, disengaging from the river of cortisol and adrenaline that would—sometimes—help me out of violent moments.

During the incident he talks about, my father was raging and spewing, spitting mad, caught in one of the endocrinal bursts of anxiety and impossible anger that would punctuate his youth, just explosive and unreasonable and, for some reason, directed at me that mythological morning. I do not remember what I might have said or failed to do in order to trigger it, but I was roughly eight or ten years old, and he was billowing around me like a bunker buster and I was standing in the vortex, his arms and curses and gesticulation flying around me like shrapnel.

But this particular morning, it was the sting emanating from his breath that really hurt me.

Jesus God, was it acute, piercing from alcohol, like needles in my nose and eyes, and I had to squeeze my own eyes shut and turn my face in a wince to get out of the immediate proximity. It was so bad that I was able to ignore the imminent physical violence of his anger and instead had to protect myself simply from his breath.

He'd been drinking through the entire night before, probably had a few more beers that morning, and there he was, trying to get to work and yelling at me for failing to be helpful.

And take it any longer I could not: I said, calmly, and in a manner unusual in that barrio, likely in English, “Dad, my nose hurts from your breath. It really stings.”

And my father just stopped, as if I'd reached back and popped him square on the nose.

I remember the look on his face, too, and I'm not making that up from here.

It was pure astonishment. Out of the mouth of babes, and all that.

His frenzy came to an instantaneous halt, frozen as if in amber, and my remark did what nothing or no one else could do then and broke through my father's delirium, or addictive denial.

His drinking no longer a tertiary or passive issue. He couldn't even yell at his kid now without the fucking drinking getting in the way.

He was floored, he tells the other broken members of his AA meetings, when he repeats the anecdote about this revelation. And after twenty-odd years of sobriety, he was able to tell us, his family, about this crystallization, the first in a long series of realizations that would eventually line up and spell his sobriety, in something other than an unusual hieroglyph or a vague, abstract reading of tea leaves. It had spoken to him in a manner much clearer than an interpretation of raw eggs suspended in a glass of water, like he was accustomed to after a visit to his
curandera
.

That morning was the first point of a Latin character that would, in time, spell out “ENOUGH” for my father, perhaps in Latin or Spanish, but enough is enough in whatever language you think or feel in, and he credits me, as that boy, who started to draw the sounds for him. Gave him words to make that life-changing decision.

Of course, I took something different from that moment. Obviously, I did not realize that my father was having that moment of clarity through his addiction; for me it was more the idea that I could, using something other than reflected hysteria, step out of the torrent of emotion and, by using regulated tones, talk someone out of their fight, or their flight.

Step out of the way of the pain, using language.

But it's hardest to step out of the way of your own pain, step out of your own torrent. In my adolescence and youth, when I began noticing that my father had left that same impression, that same curse and same need to explode like a hand grenade in me, when I was drinking or not, I didn't have the resources or cultural cues to point me toward seeking help—mental, medical, or psychological—and I would instead simply point the nose of my stalled emotional engine right into the dive and plummet. I never even considered that I could turn out of the tailspin like Lincoln Beachey, the barnstormer who figured out that instead of going against the tailspin to restart your propeller, as the intuition of many dead pilots had previously told them to do, you should not fight it, but turn into the plummet and then restart the engine, and maybe once again regain control.

Instead, it was explosion after explosion. Casualty after casualty.

It was what I knew, though I knew better.

In a fall from grace, you get to play both roles, the victim and the savior, the self-redeemer.

Derek hadn't figured out the second part before he fell, didn't get to turn into his stall and regain control. As a family, we were all well aware of Derek's secret corruptions. It was the most inexplicable, contradictory thing about him: When he was in front of you, when he was at family gatherings, when he had an internship or a job, when someone was in charge of him, he was the brightest, smartest, most agreeable person, the most competent employee, most enjoyable human in the room.

Turn your back, and he would be gone for weeks without checking in, drinking with dangerous people, doing illicit drugs or any sort of prescription medication that happened to be blooming in the subterranean culture in Austin at the moment, and Derek was always able to get a free line in there, always ready to be a party in a pair of trousers, because he was funny, smart, and charismatic, and people were naturally drawn to him, wanted him around.