Boy Kings of Texas (20 page)

Henry doesn't play anything on his CD player with the tape extension.

We're approaching Brownsville from the rear when John remembers somewhere we can go.

“Hey, man,” he says. “My friend Val knows this dude, Karsten, who lives in the Holiday Inn. No shit. We can swing by and see if anything's up there. It's still early.” It was just after ten o'clock.

The idea neutralizes the tension in the car. For a full thirty minutes no one says anything while Henry drives us along the dark salt land that separates Port Isabel from Brownsville, where the Mexicans and the US fought the first battle of the US-Mexican War, on Palo Alto. Teenage ghosts gliding on a salt highway.

“That sounds like a good idea,” says Henry. “The Holiday Inn over by the expressway?” he asks.

“Is there another Holiday Inn in Brownsville?” I answer, genuinely curious.

In the Holiday Inn parking lot, John spots Val's car. I know this Val of whom he speaks. He is ordinary Brownsville fare, like
bistek
ranchero, popular on every menu. (A corruption of
beefsteak
, did you know? Fascinating.)

Valentín sits next to me in some classes because our surnames begin with an “M” and he is partial to saying, “Shit yeah, dude” to any question that requires a response in the affirmative. He wears a long black army trench coat in 100 degree heat, because he thinks it looks cool. He has a round pale moon face, dark hair, and flabby build. He eventually fell in love with the first girl that had sex with him at a graduation party, though he didn't graduate with his class. His mother took out a quarter page ad in the annual, saying, “Maybe next year, Val!” Ever the optimist, his mother.

John and I gingerly remove ourselves from Henry's car and bring what's left of the twelve-pack of Budweiser, neither of us looking at each other. We walk to the back of the Holiday Inn, by the big air conditioner, and find Room 124. There's music coming from inside, something radio pop and terrible, like Gloria Estefan. John bangs on the door loudly, disrespectfully. After a few seconds, it opens and reveals an odd little spectacle. Val, recognizable in his black trench coat, opens the door and leans in the doorframe, seemingly territorial.

Behind him is a curious scene. There's two twin beds unmade and rumpled, a bolted hotel television on a horribly littered dresser with Mario Bros. playing on it. It is the total catastrophe of a teenage boy's bedroom unveiled, except inside a regular Holiday Inn unit. The wet moldy cold of South Texas air-conditioning valiantly expending itself hits us in the face like a prop blast, and we all stand there for a brain-beat, taking each other in.

Thinking about it now, remembering that moment, I think I miss it, or moments like it. Because they get less frequent as you get older, don't they? The opportunity presenting itself so clearly. The escape unfolding itself before you. It just needs a bit of help to take form, needs someone to nudge it into focus. Because here, clearly, was God talking to me, this night we almost died.

Val, at the door, clearly thinks he is in charge.

Inside, there's a guy I do not recognize, a small tubby Mexican guy, sitting on one bed, and two fat Mexican girls sitting opposite him on the other with the bedside table between them. Both beds have their bedclothes bundled at either end, and the Mexican girls are drunk and leaning into their pile, laughing and whooping it up. Tubby Mexican guy thinks he's got a chance tonight. There's a stereo still playing something terrible near them, now discernable: Paula Abdul. The girls and the tubby guy are laughing, taking shots of cheap white rum and not registering us in the doorway. Playing a drinking game. Quarters, it looks like. I take all this in as I enter the room behind John, who immediately takes Val over to the bathroom to talk, probably about me.

At the foot of the bed closest to the bathroom sits a tall guy with a comforter wrapped over his head like a nun's habit, forcibly staring at the game on the TV. Val and John had to step over him to get to the bathroom, and he doesn't move, doesn't flinch. He's a white guy, looking a lot like David Schwimmer will look like in
Friends
some years from now, but thinner. He's playing Nintendo, which, at the time, is the hottest thing around. Mario Bros., a fairly high level, from the looks of it. He's ferociously ignoring what's going on around him, concentrating on the video game in full seethe. Resolved in keeping the people around him, who are obviously using him, foreign to him, away from him.

I love him, right then, somehow.

Several years from this moment, I'll be visiting a zoo in Seattle because my mind is coming apart at the seams and my then-girlfriend Rebecca and I think that maybe a stroll around the zoo, around controlled nature, might help with the panic attacks I've been having. My anxieties have become unhinged, and I've been experiencing these periodic bouts of terror, especially when I'm trying to sleep.

It did not actually help, the zoo.

But it did remind me of something, when we got to the monkey house.

The chief orangutan sat square in the middle of the display, on a hammock, holding a potato sack over his head like a nun's habit, and he tried to keep the constant stream of fat families and crying children in strollers away, tried to get some peace, some privacy, by hiding under that potato sack, and I saw that he desperately needed to be rescued, and he looked me in the eye, and we both held the stare, and I totally remembered this moment, from before. Room 124.

It put me back to that night, when I met Karsten, playing his little video game and forcibly ignoring the terrible human beings around him, in his own monkey house, and I thought I could rescue him. I would rescue Karsten from these people. Though, thinking about it now, maybe it was the other way around. That I was looking in the universal mirror in the reverse.

He would rescue me from being on the roads, the predatory roads of Texas, by sharing his loneliness, his autonomy, and giving me access to Room 124, when he wasn't there, which was often. And I would introduce him to better people.

We would rescue each other.

Karsten was the first person I ever met who was truly elitist, or maybe classist. I liked him right away. He saw himself as an intellectual, and apparently the drunken soul-searching conversations in which my small circle of friends would engage seemed to pass for intellect.

I introduced him to my friend Chris, another relic of the crowd that skipped with Tony and one of the stained myrmidons like myself who no longer held any credibility with teacher or administrator as to why we were not in school (too many dead grandmothers), and whose ethical slips could be marked by the resin stained fingertips and boozy ten in the morning hiccups.

Chris was literarily inclined, however, considered himself a poet and had adopted a middle name of “Hill.” He insisted that it had been given him at birth, but I suspected otherwise, until I met his father, who was of hippie age, and then it made sense. (I've always had an innate distrust and irrational hatred of people who rename themselves. Seriously—if I dealt with “Domingo,” then you can live with “Juan.”)

Chris rarely spoke of this, but he had lost a younger brother, a toddler, who had been killed by a car, and the few times when he did mention it, I was too insensitive to realize what sort of hurt something like that could bring to a family, and wasn't it any wonder that his parents divorced—what marriage really survives the death of a child? I personally only know of one, and what a toxic marriage that was—and his friendship is one I regret never having attended to more, understanding him more than I did, being a better friend. But there would be many more of these regrets to follow in my life.

With him and Karsten, we'd talk about books and authors and music that wasn't popular (or popular in Brownsville, Texas) and foreign films that became less foreign as we became developing cineastes, limited as the availability of good art films were to us.

But all of this was bosch, remember; we were teenagers in rural Texas with no map, no compass, nothing: just an underdeveloped instinct to guide us.

We were drawn to art, but art was nowhere to be found in Brownsville. If there was, we did not possess the right kind of vision to see it. There was nothing beautiful in Brownsville, Texas, we felt. And we would talk about that often.

That's what forged our friendship.

After one long, quiet sober Friday night spent driving around in Karsten's car, avoiding my house because Dad had come back from one of his trucking trips and had been lately unbearable, I finally relented and had Karsten drop me off at home late, because I was starving, though there was nothing to eat there anyway, except a large bag of Doritos. The house was dark, empty. Dad had already gone out, and Mom was still at work. Derek was probably over at Gramma's, miserably watching Mexican cartoons he couldn't understand.

As he left, Karsten leaned out the window and asked if I wanted to go down to Juarez with him the next day. Said he'd already invited Chris, who was in. I said, “Sure: I'm in.” I always wanted to see what Mexico really looked like. Besides, it was what Mark Twain would have done.

The next day, Karsten picked me up around eleven o'clock. Mom had already gone off to work, Dad was
in absentia
and I think Derek was ... I can't say I remember. But I had about $2 on me and knew I needed a little more, even in Mexico. I had tapped Gramma as a resource and she was always very reluctant to let go of $5, and I tried to disperse those terrible humiliations to a monthly minimum, so she was out of the question. A last resort? Gramma's cousins, our buggering neighbors to the west, the Guadalúpe Ramirezes. Joe's mother and company. I sucked up what humility I had and posed a very earnest argument (I forget what it was, but I remember it was slick), and I got $5 from it, from Joe's retarded older sister, Lupíta Chiquita. (Hunh. That's Spanish for “little Lupíta.” I just got that, typing it here. Meaning she was named “Guadalúpe” as well. So there were
three
people with a first name of “Guadalúpe” living there: her mother, father, and her. Mail call must have been very confusing.)

So when Karsten pulls up, I'm ready to go, dressed in my usual jeans,
The Cure
concert T-shirt, a camouflage outer shirt in case it got cold (never did), and loud white British Knights (not my choice; sale at JC Penney).

Chris is there, and we pool our cash together, and we have about a sawbuck each. No overnight bag, no change of clothes, nothing. But, Mexico: Here we come.

Karsten's car is something that should be explored at this point. As mentioned, it was a retired police cruiser, white with the blue plastic interior, and Karsten could not care less about its maintenance. Often he'd slam it into park before even coming to a complete stop. Other times he'd have no consternation rounding another car by actually going up on the sidewalk and then coming back down hard on the road, bending a part of his bumper upward. He didn't intend on destroying it or putting himself or others in danger while driving, but he was a typical teenager, though he looked thirty already. He'd be distracted in the middle of making a turn, and then turn too far, then overcorrect, and enter a street on the wrong side. Or he'd become frustrated and drive on the shoulder at top speed to get around a traffic jam. He never sped or swerved for the sake of the thrill, but his ordinary driving skills were enough to keep Darwin guessing: Someone was going to get eliminated. Either him or someone else.