Boy Kings of Texas (23 page)

Chapter 21

Cheering up Philippe

It must have been New Year's Eve 1988, maybe 1989, and I was finishing high school, nearing graduation. All around Brownsville, preparations were being made to ring in the New Year joyfully, and I was stuck with Segis and his sidekick, Arnold, yet again. Segis had become my friend by default, because he lived out in the sticks near Oklahoma Avenue and had a car. He was also marginalized, strange in his conviction to reinventing the 1960s in his fashion and music. We had very little in common except that we both liked to drink beer and talk about “profound” topics that neither of us knew anything about. Arnold was Segis's neighbor, and knew even less, but you couldn't get one without the other, so I was stuck with both of them.

Somehow we managed to scrounge up enough money for a rack and a half of Busch beer, which is a dreadful fortified swill unfit for hobos, but perfectly appropriate for underage drinkers, with their livers of coal.

I forget how we got our hands on it. Buying the beer was never really much of an obstacle, but finding the cash for it always was. None of us worked, and our parents were close to indigent. But there we were: flush for the night. Segis and I were the juicers of the troop; the booze was for us. This overlap was fundamental to our friendship. Arnold was a sissy, but he was a faithful sissy, as all sidekicks should be, though his lackey personality annoyed me most of the time.

We started the evening out friendly enough, holed up in the parked single-wide trailer house Arnold's sister lived in with her brand-new family, behind Arnold's dad's house. There was no running water, no plumbing yet, so in order to relieve ourselves, we had to go outside and find a shrub. This was all right, civilized, for Brownsville.

Something was troubling me this night. I was seventeen, had made a mess of things with high school, and I had no plans for the future after graduation, which was coming up soon. There was a palpable sense of despair everywhere that no one seemed to feel or want to talk about. Segis was going on and on about how he was going to “start a rock band, man,” and “make it really big, man” and “go on tours, man,” and I just wasn't seeing a way out except through the military, through the Marines, like my brother Dan was doing, except in the Army. The despair was growing in me, but wasn't as yet conscious.

I was moody, morose this night. Not the best frame of mind for a teenage piss up.

About ten o'clock, Arnold's sister's husband returned from his shift managing the nearby Pizza Hut. He brought home his spoils: two large, cold, and incomplete supremes, which Arnold and Segis set upon hungrily, relishing this perk of management.

I demurred, a few beers up. Rather, I took a moment alone with the husband. I cornered him in an unused room, full of yet to be sorted boxes. I sat down with my beer in hand, and he stood, obviously uncomfortable, holding his latest baby and bouncing it on his hip.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked.

“Well . . .” [this is in Spanish].

“I don't mean to be . . . I mean . . . ”

“
Mira,
” he says. (“Listen.”)

“No; wait . . . I mean . . . Is this all there is?”

I think he relaxed there. He didn't know what to make of me, and I'm sure he had no idea what I meant, because he certainly did not take offense. In fact, he seemed visibly relieved all I was up to was soul-searching and rhetoric. This, he could get out of easy, as there was none of it for him. For a minute there, he thought I might have been getting frisky, in front of his wife and child.

He didn't even take offense at the implied judgment, or insult. “Is this
really
all there is? Work at a Pizza Hut and come home to your wife and kids?” I think I started to weep.

“
Pos, es lo que pasa,
” he said, bouncing his newborn up and away from me. (“Well, that's just what happens.”)

And that's what was bugging me, I remember. This was one of two possible outcomes in the Brownsville I knew—falling in with some local hussy and having your first kid before you turn twenty-one, and thanking your lucky stars when you can pilfer some extra product from a franchise restaurant after the other help has gone home, or, if you're luckier, enter the unexceptional redneck low-literacy state university system, like my sisters had managed, and work for the city or state of Texas later.

Now, this was my problem with that: For all my advanced wit, I genuinely had no idea what college was. My entire life, I had been told my responsibility and goal was to graduate from high school. Then it was over. I would get a job with Dad or something similar. When others talked about college, or I would see it on TV, I would pretend to know what they were talking about and that I was going along with the program, but I had no clue what the hell it all meant. I certainly didn't think it was more schooling. I sincerely couldn't conceptualize what it was. Labs, and people sitting on lawns, talking about Aristotle, smoking pot with professors who looked like Donald Sutherland, like in
Animal House
. I had no idea what it was for. Seriously. No one told me. I didn't think to ask.

This is the reason I was so blasé about just skimming through high school. I had no idea there was more beyond it. College was not spoken of in relation to me or Dan. Though I can't really speak for Dan, but I do know he joined the Army a year earlier than was allowed, because he couldn't wait to get away from Dad, and I can attest that when it
was
spoken of, college was—at least for me—something vague and reserved for privileged white people, in places like Connecticut.

Meaning that, besides blowing it academically, I was fairly guaranteed that I couldn't continue my education past public high school because I wouldn't have the grades, not to mention
any
sort of financing. I had blown my chance at escape, I was beginning to understand. I was getting scared that I might be stuck in Texas.

So my only other option was now in the room across from me that night, holding a sweaty, milk-caked infant, uncomfortable in the presence of the darkly introspective drunken teenager.

It was going to be this or the military, it was slowly dawning on me, and the military was looking really, really good. Maybe the Marines. No babies in the Marines.

I drank far many more of the Busch beers than was really necessary. At some point, Segis's father joined the party. He was a diminutive carpenter, slow to anger, quite loveable. He was low to the earth and dark skinned, humorously bitter. It was from him that Segis inherited a certain gentleness that made the high school girls buckle at the knee and belt. He picked up one of Segis's guitars and took the piss up outside, brought it out into the driveway, presumably to watch the fireworks way off in town, but Texas is flat: no curvature of the earth here, and as such, no fireworks to watch from a distance. Well, not in the sky.

Segis's father's guitar playing and joking around made our having beers in the cooler acceptable, in a way. When he wasn't playing, sidekick Arnold marshaled the boom box and cued up some Led Zeppelin or Motorhead, and we set to bring in the New Year, Texas-style.

A while later, something else started to bubble up, watching Segis's dad and his family enjoying themselves like that. The atmosphere was nevertheless tense, with Segis's mother bemoaning the fact that we'd bought beer. (Not so much that we were drinking it, but that we had spent money on it, though she was convinced we were doing every drug under the sun as well. Truth be told, had we access and the money, we probably would have been guilty of that, but alas: We were innocent of the charge. No, she was upset because we'd spent the $20 on the beer, when we could have bought a nice shirt, or a pair of shoes. Obviously she did her shopping outside the mall system.)

Actually, that's not altogether accurate. She blamed all of Segis's misdeeds—his drinking especially—on me. I was the bastard that made him drink. The year prior, or perhaps the year before that one, when Segis had been one of the regulars who skipped with Tony, he had been picked up in the parking lot of Sunrise Mall, pissing against a Buick. The mall cops caught him in mid-stream, while Tony and his other group were watching from the safety of a car, getting stoned. They laughed, and left, as the Brownsville Police Department came around to arrest Segis and book him in the city jail.

His mother had been called, and when she'd sprung him and started to read him the riot act, he did something he'd never before done, and raged right back to her in an adolescent fury, yelling and throwing things and otherwise acting out like a drunken teenaged kid would, against an oppressive mother. He said terrible things to her that she now liked to wear like jewelry, to keep him guiltily obligated to her. And she'd never forgiven me, though I wasn't involved.

So things might have been uncomfortable if I'd have paid her any mind, but I didn't: Segis's parents were more peasant-minded than even Gramma, and if I didn't have to answer to my own family, there was very little chance I'd answer to his. But this was, in fact, the problem.

This is what was bubbling up: The house on Oklahoma Avenue had been functionally vacant for months now, with Mom and me communicating exclusively by scribbled messages left on the kitchen counter, or on the answering machine, when I needed $5. When Derek was home from kindergarten, he'd have to suffer Gramma's daycare, which meant his watching her watch Spanish television and smoking menthol cigarettes while she blended sweatily into her easy chair. My sisters were off in school, and Dan was defending South Korea.

And Dad, well, Dad was doing long-distance hauling now, driving 18-wheelers from Brownsville to Detroit, moving GM parts from their cheaply manufactured origins on the Mexican border to the dying rust belt.

The isolation was finally settling into me, into my heart, after being left alone for so long, and I was becoming a real son of a bitch.

No other evidence was needed at this time than the afternoon that Dad called home from one of his road trips, and I happened to answer. His voice was desperate, frightened. He was calling from Detroit.

“June? Aye, Junior!
Aye míjo sánto
!
” he said. (“My holy son!”)

I was already bored, trying to get off the phone. “Yeah?”

He began to tell me this story, how he was just released from a hospital in Detroit, and he was finally able to call from the trucking office because he'd been in the hospital for three days, and he couldn't figure out where he was in this fucking Detroit.

He said he'd bought a box of chicken wings from a KFC near his drop point, and after he had eaten them, he had started to get really sick, and the next thing he knew, he was convulsing and vomiting, fell out of the cab of his truck to the ground—which is a pretty hard fall—and as he was lying there, wretching and convulsing, trying to call for help, the first person to come over to help was a stringy black guy (I won't use the word dad used, even in Spanish) who took his wallet while Dad lay there defenseless.

Dad, horribly poisoned, was prodded by the Detroit police, and he managed to explain in limited English who he was and what had happened by pointing at the cab of his truck. They understood, ambo'd him off to a hospital where he had his stomach pumped and was allowed to recover for two days in an alien, inner-urban American environment. Dad had been terrified.

And when he called, he was desperate for a bit of home, the warmth of something familiar, and it just wasn't me anymore; I was unrelenting, as alien now as the hospital had been.

I said Mom wasn't there, to try her at the JC Penney, where she spent most of her time now, working. I remember almost consciously making the decision to keep from being comforting, a sort of “Take
that
, you fucker,” response.

Dad, however, did not sound hurt, or that he was in any way dissatisfied with my response. His voice was thankful, hopeful, when he blessed me over and over again in Spanish for simply answering the phone, and then he hung up and tried his disappearing wife at her job.

I hung up and went back to my usual moping, not thinking about that episode again until that night in Segis's driveway.

“Can you imagine how fuckin' scared he must have been?” I said to no one in particular.

“Who?” asked Arnold, who fit the bill perfectly, as no one in particular.

“My dad, man. Being sick like that, falling out of his truck.”

“Your dad?” asked Segis, not tracking and not sober.

“Yeah, in Detroit. He got food poisoning and was so sick, he fell out of the truck,” I explained, the gravity of the moment finally dawning on me, just how scared Dad must have been.

“While he was driving?!” asked Arnold, incredulous. And
he
was sober, hardly every drank.

“No, you idiot fuck, at the KFC. In the parking lot. He got food poisoning and ended up in a hospital. He could hardly speak English, and his wallet got stolen by some crack head. They thought he was drunk and were gonna arrest him first, and they treated him like he was a drunk illegal.”

“Fuck,” said Segis.

“Yeah,” and here I started choking up. “And when he called home, man, I was a total prick and didn't . . . you know . . . I wasn't nice to him. I was a dick,” I said, sobbing. “He was trying to tell someone at home what had happened to him, just trying to get some comfort, and I was a total dick.”

“Man,” said Segis. “You're a dick!” and he started laughing.

“Fuck this,” I said, and walked off into the night, making my way home.