Boy Kings of Texas (18 page)

“He could have been coming here,” he had said with a sort of sadness, looking at Mom and Derek arguing in the kitchen. His voice betrayed a complicated regret, like his feelings were hurt, with the implication.

Big hearted to the end, Dan even attended Ted's funeral, which I could not understand then, either. Ted's mother, who knew who Dan was, spotted him in the crowd and clutched Dan to her, as she broke down crying. Dan held her, and wept openly as well.

Chapter 18

Delta City Repeat

By age sixteen, my foremost ambition in attending high school was to get clear away from it before nine o'clock in the morning. Not consciously, of course, not for the first few hundred times.

School, I had noticed, was considered “my time,” which meant I couldn't be pressed into labor by my father or grandmother for fear of government involvement. So I learned to take advantage of this.

Either by school bus or by my mother's Taurus, I'd make it to school before seven thirty and wait out options for escape. By my sophomore year, Tony had become my principal friend, or veteran pimp. He was by this point a grizzled imitation of the artful dodger, but with seemingly good parents and an even better little brother who was about to lap Tony at high school graduation.

Together Tony and I would find ways to while away the hours by doing anything other than attending class before we had to report home again.

We were big fans of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and I think we even tried believing we were continuing a long-celebrated American tradition by ditching class and getting stoned, a fantasy combination of Mark Twain by way of Hunter S. Thompson, but in full disclosure, we were just lazy and looking for a good time, not fully understanding how we were handicapping our future.

The skipping itself was not a problem, I would eventually come to learn; the problem was being allowed back into school, when we wanted to go back. Tony halfway convinced me that he had long ago mastered this obstacle, with a bit of bronze-age technology. Admittedly, I never did question why he was still held back all this time if his chicanery was so foolproof.

To his credit, Tony actually initiated me into the trade that I'd eventually pursue, graphic design. But in this early stage, it was plain and simple forgery: There was no “design” in what we were doing. It was Tony who placed the first X-Acto knife I ever held in my hands, and immediately, I felt an overwhelming sense of possibility, holding that little penknife.

He showed me how to use the X-Acto to surgically remove and rearrange grades and absences on a report card before it got to our parents. We'd intercept the report card and make our alterations, photocopy the doctored product and slip the manufactured version into the school district's envelope to cover our trespasses, and then lay it nonchalantly on the dining room table before our parents got home from work.

Tony took careful pains to explain this whole process to me, his flunky—a term that came uncomfortably close to becoming literal—over the photocopier in the library, feeding dimes into the machine like he was playing slots, in search of a copy that didn't blur or show the incisions in the original.

We were stoned and forcibly schoolbound because he couldn't get his mother's car that spring day.

“Look, man,” he said through his trendy and tinted John Lennon glasses, a wanker style, even then, “You just gotta remove the 2 from in front of the 23 absences, then lighten the reproduction, and you got three absences in first period instead of twenty-three. Now take the 8 from the 48, move the 4 over and put the 8 in front of it, and now you have a B in Spanish instead of an F.”

“Ho,” I said, in total understanding, a big smile growing on my face, conveying how thoroughly I understood. Give a man a ride, he skips for a day.
Teach him how to forge. . . .

Oh, it was ridiculously shortsighted, sure, but at that age, I never thought further than the immediate threat. Simply convincing my mother everything was quiet at school was enough for me; dealing with school records and the larger consequences of robbing myself of even
that
low-shelf an education—all that I would face at a later date. And certainly have.

That first year, Tony would usually borrow his mother's car, a blue Oldsmobile Delta 88, which was my own mother's dream car but totally unaffordable to us, and he would use it for our expeditions.

It was with complicated disquiet that I rode in this car on almost a daily basis to South Padre Island and back, a resort town at the end of a twenty-eight-mile highway that somehow felt much more cosmopolitan than Brownsville ever could, possibly because people from all over the United States vacationed there.

We'd drive there three or four times a day, listening to Led Zeppelin, as was Tony's unwavering musical proclivity, and I'd nod my head in unison and in rhythm with whomever else was stoned or drunk in the car.

There was a revolving cast of extras, but me, Tony, and Chris were the standards. I didn't trust Chris at the time because he reminded me too much of myself, and I felt threatened by him, somehow. But I didn't know that then.

Most of the other transient guys were idiots, even before they were stoned, so there was very little discovery or anything of interest ever said when others were in the car. Collectively, we just wanted to feel better than sobriety, not understanding that we were feeding what would become addictive personalities.

Among Chris, Tony, and me, though, we were capable of telling good stories, appreciating smart things, and Chris had really good taste in music, when he was allowed to take over the radio.

Once, Tony blew us all away by narrating a story he made up against the wordless musical theater piece, “On the Run,” on the
Dark Side of the Moon
album by Pink Floyd, while we were high and parked at the country club. He just stopped the car, turned up the volume, and narrated this fantasy piece he'd written while the “song” played on the radio. We were all enraptured by this. I've always loved radio plays, and this was among some of the best I've heard.

He'd never top that, all his life. That was his crowning artistic achievement, the poor bastard.

My junior year—and his third senior year—Tony's parents bought him a Dodge Laser. It was the year he would most assuredly graduate, they felt, and it was a chance for him to develop responsibility. The car was a dopey silver four-seater, about which we would eventually become quite fond.

By that year, I'd be dropped off in front of the school as early in the morning as possible because I was embarrassed to be seen in the aging Taurus. Among the poor and working class in Texas, an automobile is as telling as a tax return, and I had been taught by the Mimis long before to pretend that one was
rich
and
white
. And a 1986 Taurus in 1990, well, that wasn't quite well-to-do in Brownsville. It wasn't quite
Dallas
enough.

The minute my mother disappeared around the corner, though, Tony would drive around the other corner and park right in front of the school, in front of everybody, to pick me up in order to carry on with our naughtiness.

My man. (Or perhaps, as I came to understand it later: my pimp.)

“Dude, you gotta come skipping with me today,” he'd say.

“Nah, Tony; I gotta go back to class today,” I'd protest. “It's Thursday and I haven't been since last week.” Some days, it'd be the other way around; I wasn't always the bottom. Plus, by this time I'd already been branded; Tony's company alone was enough to telegraph my ethical slips to any administrator watching, so they'd regard my documentation with suspicion.

“Look, I got two signed reentry slips; I can get you back in tomorrow or next week. It's not a problem,” he'd say. “I found a place to get killer weed, and it's pickup day in Wood Hollow.”

Since we didn't have jobs or an allowance, we had to figure out a way to finance our junkets, or “skiving” as J.K. Rowling calls it. Tony had figured out that the local grocery stores would pay back a deposit on those five-gallon plastic water bottles at six bucks a pop. He had the Oasis truck's delivery routes and schedules memorized, and we knew escape routes out of every posh neighborhood that could afford to have water delivered.

This was actually a lot of fun, walking up to houses, hoisting the bottles over your shoulder, and walking back to the car, only to drive up a few streets and do it again, utterly without interference because no one was around to stop you, or would have stopped you, if you waved at them and smiled. They'd smile and wave back and continue with what they were doing. It never failed.

The challenge was to keep from giggling, stoned as we were, in our trousers and cheap dressy shirts with wet stains growing down the front or back.

There were instances, of course, when we'd be caught red-handed, when a door would open or a home owner would unexpectedly emerge from the hedge. Then we'd sprint away as Tony, self-serving coward and bastard that he was, would drive off and leave us to fend for ourselves.

“Arr, dude! They could get my license plate!” he'd laugh as we'd breathlessly catch up to the car, many blocks later, and curse him.

He always kept the lion's share of the day's activities. Very Dickens. Most of it would go into buying five or ten dollars' worth of pot and some beer, but it would never even out. And no single dealer would ever sell to him regularly. No one really liked or trusted Tony, and with good reason.

So when he said he'd found some place to buy pot, and it wasn't the morons who hung out by the tennis courts before school, well, I have to admit I was intrigued. Besides, he was a friend, unsalvageable pariah though he was. But these things could turn out badly, so I went; I wasn't really keen to own up to a three days' AWOL at school anyway.

We first drove to the housing project east of school, where a woman sold $2 quarts of Budweiser out of her living room from a cooler to anyone with money—no questions asked—and we bought a couple of quarts, then smoked the half joint Tony had on our way to his new “supplier.”

I was getting a bit high when I began to recognize the route he was taking and was then thoroughly taken aback when he drove into my maternal grandmother's driveway. I couldn't understand why he had driven here, was confused by the context. This was the same driveway my family Pontiac would regularly pull into after church on Sundays when we were growing up in the late 1970s—my mother's mother's house, in downtown Brownsville.

I was . . . I think the term is “unnerved.”

My two uncles, Johnny and Abel, were working on a '79 Camaro when Tony drove up and parked, hood to hood, with their Camaro that morning.

I sat frozen in the passenger seat, uncertain what to do next.

The hood on the Camaro was up and they were both leaning into the guts of the engine when we drove up. Their heads popped up like bearded, biker prairie dogs to look at the new development. Tony, taking my noticeable start into account, told me to be cool, to chill out; these guys look mean but they're all right.

“Anyway,” he said as he was getting out the door, “they're kinda dumb but they got great weed.”

Didn't I know it. Abel and Johnny had a long history with local biker gangs, even a rumored affiliation with the Hell's Angels. They could get drugs nobody else could in this town, and as a result they were total burnouts hardly capable of cogent speech patterns in either English or Spanish, landing in jail as often as other people attended church.

Though what they lacked in brain they certainly made up in brawn. Not that they'd tear apart a citizen like Tony, or me, not in the daylight, anyway. They had a code about that sort of thing. But if they felt cheated, they'd take a tire iron to my head long before they would recognize me as their nephew, or that I'd been there the month before with my mother, their sister.

They were that burned out.

So I sit there, paralyzed, in the front seat, side B of
Houses of the Holy
playing on Tony's mother's cassette deck over the deafening blast of the air-conditioning, watching this terrifying pantomime play out before me.

Tony, half-shaven in his preppy clothes, closes the door and hails his greeting. Abel, already brain-dead from years of sniffing paint, narrows his eyes in suspicion at first and then noiselessly says,
Heyyyyy,
while opening his arms in a wide accepting gesture, drawing Tony into their fold. Johnny looks up from under the hood of the Camaro.

Next is the sly, silent exchange of the malefactor. Tony looks servile, trying to charm, averting his eyes, looking anywhere but directly at Abel in the eye for fear that Abel might charge, like a gorilla. Abel, suspicious and cautious, gives a sharp, quick upward jutting of the chin that says,
Did I sell to you before? Who told you I got weed?

Tony lowers his head in quiet confidence, talks to Abel, then includes Johnny. Johnny nods his head, then motions toward me in the car with his chin. They all turn to look at me. My eyes wide. Big smile, nodding. Tony says something, and they all laugh. Led Zeppelin playing loudly in the car. Abel slaps Tony on the back and leads him around to the back of the car. Johnny looks at me and smiles, then forms his index finger and thumb into a mock roach smoke and laughs. Me mimicking him. Johnny still not recognizing me, even now. Tony and Abel come around the other side of the car, Tony's hand in his pocket, both of them laughing, like they're suddenly old friends.