Boy Kings of Texas (19 page)

Tony turns and waves; both Johnny and Abel wave back.

The door opens and Tony says, “Dude, we got a big joint for two bucks,” as he gets in the driver's seat.

He puts the car in gear and we drive away. This has freaked me out to no end. Abel and Johnny are both waving, making the universal roach-smoking signal as we drive off, and it leaves me feeling really, really conflicted.

The car slips up the southernmost terminus of Highway 77 and we head north from urban Brownsville, just to drive around as we smoke the joint. Tony lights it and it starts burning purple. “Purple Haze!” he says, and then follows it with his characteristic “Aaaa!” Making the obvious pun doesn't bother him. I'm concerned that the joint is burning purple. Abel and Johnny are not known for their temperance.

“Hey, man,” I say, “I'm kinda scared about smoking this. I've never seen one burn this color.”

“Argh, dude!” says Tony. “Don't worry about it. Those guys got killer weed, man, they're like bikers or something. It's probably laced with something. That's why it was two bucks.”

This idea sounds appealing to Tony. It freaks me out. We are both getting incredibly high.

“Hey, man,” says Tony. “Wouldn't it be fucked up if like, when you were high, your hair went into like a huge orange Afro? And the higher you were, the bigger your Afro got? You couldn't go anywhere because people would be, like, ‘Man! That guy's
stoned
!
'”

I am busy thinking about having just bought weed from my Uncles Johnny and Abel. Johnny had been stabbed in the back with a flat-headed screwdriver about a month earlier in a street fight. His lung had been punctured, and my grandmother said you could hear whistling every time he inhaled. He wouldn't go to the hospital to get it treated for three days.

We are halfway done with the joint when I realize we're headed south again, having turned around somewhere.

“Hey, man,” I say to Tony, “I don't want to get stoned anymore.”

“Arr, well, put it out,” says Tony. He is nodding his head back and forth to Zeppelin. Tony fancies himself a guitarist. His left hand is fingering chords into the neck of an imaginary guitar. I watch his fingers moving for a few seconds, suspended and twisting around there like an overturned king crab, and I can find no concurrence with the chords in the song.

“Man, I mean I don't want to smoke pot anymore,” I say to him. “I don't want to skip class anymore. I want to get back to school. Not today, but like, in general. I don't want to feel like this anymore. Like I'm doing something bad. I feel like this all the time now. Dirty. Look at that really fucking small house over there.”

We're on an overpass, and I notice a house beneath us in the Brownsville Country Club about a quarter of the size of the houses surrounding it.

Tony finds this segue in my announcement hysterical. He starts laughing so hard that I have to make him focus back on the driving, but then I laugh along with him.

“You're stoned,” he tells me.

“Yeah,” I say. “I'm way stoned.”

“Hey, man,” I say a little later. We're driving back to South Padre Island now. “You know those guys we bought weed from earlier today?”

“The bikers?” he asks.

“That was my grandmother's house, man. Those were my uncles,” I say, even though I am really embarrassed by it.

Tony finds this befuddling. He can't figure out what the bikers were doing at my grandmother's house. “Those dudes were my mom's brothers, man. My uncles,” I explain.

Tony laughs so hard he has to pull over to the side of the road. His laughing is infectious, and I find myself laughing right along with him, laughing harder than I've laughed in a really, really long time, but I'm feeling utterly beyond redemption on the inside, like I've done something today that I can't take back.

Like my course is now set.

Chapter 19

Room 124

When I was seventeen years old, I ran away to Juarez, Mexico, with about seven bucks in my pocket, five of which I had borrowed that Saturday afternoon from my retarded neighbor, Lupíta Chiquita.

No one noticed I had gone, and I don't think I ever got around to paying her back.

My friend Karsten had a father who lived down there, outside of Juarez. Karsten was a tall dorky white kid with black hair, and he would make the three-hour trip to Juarez whenever he needed to swindle his reluctant father out of “tuition” money or whatever was immediately needed in Karsten's shiftless teenaged life.

Karsten's father owned the only Holiday Inn in Brownsville and had Karsten set up to live alone in room 124 while Karsten presumably attended St. Mary's Catholic School. Room 124 was immediately next door to the industrial-size air conditioner and was unrentable because of the thrum and vibration of the overburdened machine.

Karsten was eighteen but was still in high school, when he went to school. When I met him, Karsten usually found a way to cash his tuition check and blow the money just hanging around doing anything but going to class, playing video games on a first generation Nintendo, drinking warm tequilas and Mexican rums with no chaser, and trying to have sex with unwilling girls.

He lived utterly without any adult interference. For food, the Holiday Inn kitchen was obliged to feed him two meals a day, and it produced some of the most offensive combinations of food known to humankind, but it kept him alive, though not at all grateful.

Down in Juarez, Karsten's father—who was Cuban and not Mexican—had bought a large horse ranch and was busy accumulating the adjoining land that surrounded his. Karsten's mother had left them when he was ten, and he never said why. I never thought to ask. Karsten was tall and dark haired and had sharp European features you didn't see in the white people around that part of Texas. French, almost. He also had strange, cultured manners, nearly Victorian, especially when he was around girls.

His nearly civilized manners made Karsten very awkward and lonely in Brownsville, and he was desperate for female attention. He was a very odd, very tall boy.

Karsten drove a retired mid-1980s Ford cop car painted totally white with a factory cassette-playing radio that didn't eat cassette tapes. This was a rarity among the cars driven by my friends during this time. Both the front and back seats of the car were a deep plastic blue, eternally gritty. There was a constant stratum of beer cans, newspapers, old cassette tapes, and food wrappers crumpling underfoot.

I don't remember where Karsten said he was from, originally; I think somewhere out east, and he spoke no Spanish. He was in Brownsville because it was the closest thing to a “city” in the United States, and his father had wanted him educated in America.

Karsten, on the other hand, had other ideas, and he resisted his education at every turn without consequence, which was fantastic to me. He was eighteen years old and alone.

We had a lot in common.

On the night I'm first introduced to Karsten, I'm driving around with my friend Henry and his best friend, John. They are unrepentant potheads, tirelessly listening to anything recorded by Metallica and rhythmically “banging” their heads in slow motion as we drive around Brownsville and Los Fresnos and South Padre Island in utter boredom searching for some sort of underage deliverance or entertainment in Henry's 1986 Mustang LX, with his portable CD player wired into the tape player and playing very loudly but prone to skipping. I'm in the backseat, cowering from the volume surrounding me. I'm not much of a stoner anymore, not like them. I like beer. It feels more honest to be drunk, somehow. We keep the beer at the feet of the front passenger side, and I keep bugging whoever isn't driving for another.

“Turn the music down,” I yell from the backseat.

“Give me another beer,” I yell from the backseat.

“Roll up your fuckin' window,” I yell from the backseat.

“Wah, wah, wah,” says Henry, in the passenger's seat. He's letting John drive his car. John is a minister's kid and fits the stereotype perfectly. Except he isn't a slutty girl, which would be much more interesting.

“You're like a baby back there, always needing something,” from Henry.

“Turn the music down; I can't hear what you said,” I yell from the backseat, purposely.

They start giggling. Henry hands me a beer. I crack it open and take a long draught from it and do the
dook dook dook
imitation of a baby suckling from its bottle of baby formula and they both start laughing hysterically when John loses control of the car.

We happen to be on the Queen Isabella Causeway, coming back from South Padre Island around eight at night and eighty-five feet in the air when the Mustang cuts across three lanes of traffic and he over-corrects and we're inches from hitting the side of the bridge and dropping into ten feet of a very shallow bay. He cuts back again and miraculously the Mustang steadies itself at seventy miles per hour and we're all knuckle-white and not breathing.

Metallica is still blaring even though the moment feels totally silent. For a few seconds, I feel their fear mingling with mine, our sense of death at that moment tangible. I feel Henry and John's elevated perception like we're three soldiers on a frontline getting shelled, waiting for the next shell to hit our foxhole, and everything has suddenly gone quiet under the audial blanket of the Metallica.

I lean forward through the bucket seats and yank the power cord from the CD player. “What the fuck was that, John?” I say. I am totally sober now, riding the adrenaline into a rage.

“Nothing, man; it's cool,” he says, attempting a giggle, continuing to drive.

“No, it's not, man,” says Henry. “You almost lost it there. That's not cool.”

“No, I didn't,” says John. “I was totally in control.”

“You were
not
in control,” I say, now screaming like George C. Scott. I'm furious.

John has nearly managed to drive Henry's car over the side of the only elevated bridge in five hundred miles, and I want to throttle him.

“You were
not
in control and you very fucking nearly killed all of us, you stupid piece of shit! Pull over in Port Isabel and let Henry drive,” I demand loudly, pointing my finger in the rear view mirror, trying to look him in the eye.

Henry is quiet. Henry is rarely quiet. Henry is small, lean and a great kid, but he's not quiet. A soccer player. From way back. One of my favorite people during this time of my life. Henry has a future, will eventually move to Austin and marry this girl he loves, Carla. She gave him his first blow job. He was so happy about that. This is his car, so he's captain.

“Hey, man,” says John. “Just chill out, all right? I mean, I didn't do it on purpose, but, like, the car handled cool and I was all right and I had it together, you know? I mean, it's not like anything happened, right?”

“Just shut up right now and at the next stop, you're pulling over,” I say. The bridge is over two miles long and we're coming into Port Isabel, a speed trap of a fishing town, like a pilot fish on the revenue-generating shark that is South Padre Island.

“Hey, you're not, like, the owner of the car, all right?” says John. “Right, Henry? He can't tell me what to do.”

“You
fucked up,
John!” I yell. “You lost control of the fucking car and you almost fucking killed us!” I'm really mad. “Admit it. Just fucking admit it, John.”

It starts to become important that he admits it.

“No,” he says. “I didn't. I mean —”

This is where Henry loses it. “John, you lost control of the car, John. Admit it,” he says, the rise in his voice noticeable.

“No, I —”

“Admit it!” I say. Suddenly, it becomes very, very important that the idiot owns up to it.

“No, I —”

Henry: “Admit it, John.”

John: “Nah, man, I —”

Me: “John, admit it!”

Henry: “Yeah, John: Admit it.”

John: “Dude, I —”

Henry: “
Pull the fucking car over
!
”

This surprises the both of us; we've never seen Henry this mad. We're all startled at the outburst, I think even Henry. John instantly obeys, and he pulls into a restaurant parking lot right off the bridge.

We all exit the car in the empty parking lot, and John leaves it running. We do a sort of fire drill. He's a skinny kid at seventeen, John, with stringy blonde hair and an army jacket. I don't remember what I'm wearing but it can't be much. Cotton T-shirt with
The Cure
on it and jeans and a pair of cheap British Knights, usually, at that age. Henry and John cross paths at the back of the car and when he's coming by me John says something to the effect of . . . “Hey man, I
had
control of the car . . . ” and I attack him, swinging hard. I have the full can of Budweiser in my right hand and I smash it to his head, and it explodes on his head like a beer grenade, showering the three of us in the choicest hops and barley. I hit him so unexpectedly he jerks himself against the side of the car. I don't really know how to fight at this point and I also know this isn't right but I'm so mad I'm swinging at him, left right left right. He crumples, and I start to kick at him and I accidentally kick Henry's car, at which point Henry runs around and pushes me away from John, who is now on the ground covering his head, and when Henry pushes me away, John straightens up and punches me over Henry's shoulder, pops me square on the cheek. I push Henry aside and rush at John, ducking my head and I put my shoulder under his sternum like I've learned after hundreds of hours of football practice, and I shove him against the car and start punching him in the neck and face with my right hand over my head. John gets in a couple of weak, undercut punches in defense, until Henry grabs me by the waist and swings me around and throws me onto the ground.

I'm livid like I've never been in my life but I stop; I sit. Seventeen years I've lived my life in this outpost, alone, isolated and with an eroding sense of wonder about America at large. I can dream of nothing but getting out of here and exploring the rest of the country, watching leaves turn color and following the winter; I want out of this shit hole of a border town at the bottom of Texas, out of this racist, ignorant, locus-eating, lower Texas toxic hell pit. I've endured my father, my grandmother, years of pathetic education, beatings, berations, concentrations of shame, and this heat most hellish. All I have to do is graduate high school in a few weeks and I can leave, I've been told.
And I have listened
. I don't care what the means are. The military, a bus ticket, this “college” thing other people talked about, stowing away—I just want out. Out of here. Away from people like John. And he almost took that away from me tonight, on that bridge.

My mouth is salty and bloodied, and his eye is swelling from where I hit him with the Budweiser. “Just admit it, you stupid fucker,” I say and spit.

Henry tries to temper the moment. “Just be quiet. Just stop it,” he says to me, holding John against the car. John's body language is not in the least bit threatening. It is mostly that of a liar, uncertain how to lie next. I am sitting on the ground, disgusted.

“John, just admit you lost control of the fucking car and let's go,” Henry says.

John looks down at me, his eyes wide. He's not sure why I'm as angry I am. John understands anger, lives with it from his Baptist-revival fire-eating preacher father, but there's usually some sort of Yahweh logic and a way to get out of it. He doesn't know how to get out of this one, obvious as it is. He's scared at the density of my rage and does not know how to dilute or lie his way out of it. He's frightened of me, even though we're exactly the same sort of weak, wiry, and he could probably get the better of me next time.

Both Henry and I are feeding him the line out. But it's too obvious for John, too clear. Too honest, for the son of a Baptist.

“Alright, man,” he says finally. “I lost control of the car. I fucked up. We almost went over the side.”

I know he doesn't actually believe it, understand what it means.

But it calms me down. I stand up, knock the gravel from my palms and my thinly denimed knees.

John says, “I'm sorry, man.”

I say, “I'm sorry, too. I'm sorry I hit you with the beer.” I don't mean it. If I was sorry, writing from this distance so many years later, it's for the loss of that beer. Beer was hard to come by back then.

“Me, too,” he says, and we shake hands limply.

We get in the car, with Henry driving and John in the back seat, me in the front. We get on the dark highway back to Brownsville and after a while, I crack open a sweaty beer and then hand one to John. Before we drink, independent of one another we each put the cold can to our respective faces, him to his eye and me to my mouth, to knock down the swelling, but it's mostly because we'd seen it done in the movies.