Boy Kings of Texas (34 page)

Larry turns over on all fours, about five yards in front of me. Dan immediately rushes forward and starts pushing and punching off all the guys who are trying to take a cheap shot at me. He runs up to guys and swings with big rights and lefts, and these guys run away. Larry is trying to shake off that left Dan gave him, still on all fours, and I lower my voice, speak in an unpanicking, unemotional tone, and I say to both bouncers holding me, “Let me go and this can all be over. If you just let me go, this can be over.” I remind myself of the Bene Gesserit witch voice in
Dune.

The bouncer, unbelievably responds by asking, “You promise?”

I say, under all the noise from the crowd, “I give you my word.”

And they let me go. Then there's a small second when I think to myself,
Please, God, let me use all the strength I have in this leg to kick this motherfucker's nose in
. Then I step forward, and with my combat boot I swing with all that I'm capable and kick that fucker Larry square in the eye. He flops on his back like a fish and I am immediately attacked on all sides by all the guys who had been standing there watching, waiting their turn to take their swing at me, to prove their dedication to Delta Tau Delta during rush week.

And I fall forward onto my knees, my fingers interlaced on the back of my neck, elbows tucked in to protect my ribs, and I contract my whole body and wait for them to finish. Last I see Dan, he's just reached up on his toes and punched a seven-foot retarded farm boy who looks back at him in astonishment, doesn't drop his beer, and asks Dan, “
What'd you do that for?
” like his feelings have been hurt.

Suddenly, while I am still on the ground, this large Cadillac drives up, all four doors fling open, and six huge, fuck-off black guys from the black militant fraternity erupt from the car, shouting, “What's the problem here?”
And the farm boys scatter.

The last glimpse we get of Larry, he's being helped up and carted off by two of his frat brothers, his hands covering his face. I hope I blinded the fucker.

Three of the black guys get between me and the mass of people trying to get in one last shot, and another guy helps me up. He's huge, nearly six and a half feet. He asks me if I'm OK. “My brother,” I say. “Find my brother.” I spit out a mouthful of blood and grass. The taste is familiar, from football practice.

“Your brother's right here,” the guy says as he points me in Dan's direction. Dan has stopped fighting off the frat boys, started explaining our position to the new black frat. But they are not listening to him, they are establishing their dominance and perimeter around the Cadillac.

They put us into the car and ask what we're driving. “We can take you to your car, or home,” they tell us, while we're inside, panting, looking over each other's wounds.

“Our car is right over there,” says Dan, pointing just down the street. They drive us over, stick around for a second, watch us get in, and then peel away.

I never got to thank them, never knew who they were. They were like Batman, all of them, just appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared.

In the car, the radio is turned off and we drive quickly away, silently, feeling horrible, terrible things. Feeling shame. A stomach full of bile and humiliation at what we'd just done.

Dan endures his wounds from the fight alone, in a long cold shower, telling no one. Involving no one. He just takes it.

I can't do that. I'm made of softer stuff. I call Karis, after Dan has showered and I can soak in the tub. I'm able to get her on the phone, and we talk long into the night. I cry and tell her what happened, try to explain it, and Dan continues to bang on the door of the bathroom and yell at me, disgusted because I can't keep my mouth shut, am involving other people and talking about something that you can't do anything about.

Everybody hears about this fight. It goes down in Kingsville lore. If this had been fifty years prior, there would have been a
corrido
written about Dan and me that night, except the fight would have happened at three in the afternoon, instead of at eleven at night.

When she gets back the next day, Mare isn't finished with the Delts or the bar or the A&I campus police. She spends most of the day reading everyone the riot act for allowing this to happen, for standing by and watching as it did, and even comes home victorious with Mark's 9 iron, after the bouncers and campus security had been thoroughly shamed. This is why she's a teacher in some of the toughest schools in South Texas: Mare has never known fear, when she's feeling self-righteous. How I will always love and admire her for that.

Mare still has the power of the Mimis in her.

Chapter 27

The House that
Rock 'n' Roll Built

Dan had stayed valiantly behind in Kingsville, continued with his schooling, but more to prove that the Martinez boys had not been beaten, had not buckled that night we fought Delta Tau Delta and their false champion and fifty-odd men.

I was more of the “Feets, don't fail me now!”
philosophy and had split the next day, because I had never before in my life felt more helpless and weak and ineffective than I did that night, on that flat practice playing field, with swarms of rednecks trying to get their one punch in on the uppity Mexicans. My fight was over. Done.

The fantasy of college was shut solidly behind me, after the fight. I packed all my stuff and drove back home to Brownsville, trying to figure out what my next move would be. A&I was a small school, and I knew I would be seeing every one of those people who tried to take a shot at me every day, in every class I would take. There was no safety in this school, anymore. It was done.

I drove the two hours back to Brownsville in silence, in pain. I withdrew into myself and counted the minutes until I was back on my own again, and I don't remember even speaking to anyone during this time, after the fight. I was in a fugue and didn't trust any family with what was going on in my mind or heart. Couldn't trust these people anymore, I felt. Anyone.

The desperation of my circumstances thrummed loudly in my ears, my head hot with panic, and on my way home that evening, I decided to stop by a house I knew, where Georgina Haley lived. She was the daughter of Bill Haley, of the “ . . . and the Comets” fame.

I had met her through one of Segis's friends, some idiot kid named Ronnie who thought of himself as a guitarist, the summer previous. Everyone in Brownsville thought they were a guitarist. Segis and Ronnie had put together an album of thrash music and had called it
The Abandon Church.

“You mean,
The Abandoned Church
,” I attempted to correct.

“It's a church for the abandon, man,” Segis and Ronnie had both said, like I was the moron in the trio.

“Wait; so people go there to
get
abandoned, or does the church abandon
them?
Or would you go to the church in a sort of . . . reckless abandon?” We had been drinking, and I thought I was the one making sense. But instead, they just broke out in hysterics at how complicated they thought I was making it, so I dropped it. I think I still have a copy of it somewhere. It's just absolute crap.

Ronnie had somehow managed to hook onto Georgina Haley in some dramatic lapse of good taste on her part, and he had fallen hard.

Georgina was a spitfire of a red head, well schooled, well heeled, and quite attractive. Bill Haley had met Georgina's mother in Mexico, and when his career had begun to wind down, she had convinced him to move to Harlingen, in a sort of retirement where he faded quietly away, suffering through his final years with alcoholism and mental illness, outside the public eye. It was here that she decided to raise Georgina, at land's end, in South Texas.

Ronnie had already been talking marriage, while Georgina was enrolled in some arts college around Dallas and would be leaving eventually. I saw their situation already coming apart, so I moved in. Georgina was smart, sexy, pedigree notwithstanding.

One night she and I went for a beer run before the stores closed, and I leaned over and kissed her in my car.

“You know, I'm dating your friend,” she said.

“He's not really my friend,” I said, lustily reassembling logic. “He's more Segis's friend than my friend.”

“He's my boyfriend, though,” she said.

“Well, for now. You can break up with him when we get back home,” I said, my eyes closed.

“It's a party, and he's staying over,” she said.

“Alright, well, I'll give you a couple days,” I said, suddenly realizing I was driving.

She looked at me in a way that didn't exactly mean no, and just kind of shook her head, smiling quietly. I would get that a lot in my life.

Still, I felt bad. I'd never done anything like that before, but Georgina was exceptional, had called for exceptional measures. Her dad had invented radio-friendly rock 'n' roll, for fuck's sake. He was Elvis's dad.

Though she hardly remembered her father, Georgina was really close to her mother, Martha, who was very religious, very Catholic, and a really good person.

Georgina's mother had endured the birth of rock 'n' roll—and all that this implied—and she was secluding herself in South Texas these last long years in her quiet isolation of raising Georgina, like a rock 'n' roll nun. Georgina's mother was wholesome. She was safe. And she had once liked me.

I think that's why I drove there, on my way back from Kingsville the day after the fight.

Georgina's mother, Martha, showed me in that night, showed me into her drawing room with the TV turned on but turned all the way down, where she had been meditating over her well-worn Bible and made us an awful herbal tea, this mongrel boy who knew her daughter, bruised and worried and incapable of trusting his own family.

The place was quiet now, with Georgina gone, and I was left with my demons in the house that rock 'n' roll built. I'll never forget the kindness she showed me, letting this monster of a boy into her house that dark night.

See, it was unusual for the time, this sort of kindness. People were never kind to one another, as I remember Texas then, so that when they were, when any sort of kindness was demonstrated, it was glaringly evident. Kindness slapped you in the face, kicked you in the kidneys, in Texas. Made you realize it was there. At least, that's how it was for me.

Very likely kindness was everywhere like a pollen, but I had not as yet developed the appropriate allergies to notice it.

Driving to Martha Haley's house that night, I hadn't expected to be welcomed in, nursed. But I was pulled there for a reason.

I'm sure I unsettled her, maybe even frightened her, but she would never know how her simple kindness for those few minutes had meant more to me than anything that would be waiting for me at home ever could. I should have told her so, but I couldn't really open my mouth to speak.

Chapter 28

Bioluminescence

I spent close to two years recovering from that incident. I moved to South Padre Island, where I would end up writing and producing their weekly thirty-two-page tabloid newspaper and working as a bartender at a tiki club.

After a while, it was time to call on Karis, I felt.

Things were going well enough to call on the girl I had somehow managed to burden with the painful, twisted poison I mistook for love at the time, unregulated and torturous, the sort of suffocating peasant obsession that drives the tragic plots of early Russian novels.

Back then my heart was still capable of falling horribly in love with no intellectual administration, no real consideration for the other person. My love was selfish and existed entirely in my own body and head. It was an onerous munition fired without mercy from the impenetrable dark, and it asked its victim for help, as it killed her. Figuratively speaking, of course.

It was a hot, crude thing, destructive and jealous and petty, lucid out of hell and hell bent on being tragic, so all the songs that I loved could have more meaning, make them more real. Tragedy was the only song of love I knew. Couldn't sing in any other key. (By the time I was in my mid-thirties, I had assigned a girl to almost every one of the Old 97s's songs of heartbreak.)

I'd met Karis when she'd visited our apartment in Seattle in a mix of people who'd just gotten off shift from a dinner cruise on Puget Sound. I fell for her the minute I saw her in our doorway, as I let the group in, and she came in last, dressed in a man's shirt and tie, her hostess costume from the cruise.

One of Dan's friends, Ryan, worked on the ship and was dating Karis's best friend. I didn't know it, but Karis was just sixteen years old. When I found out, I thought that perhaps that was the reason she'd been so shy, quiet, but it didn't keep me from falling for her.

The group assembled in the living room, drinking and talking into the night, playing Trivial Pursuit and Karis became the target of my affection when she knew A.A. Milne as the author of
Winnie the Pooh,
especially in that tight sweater she was wearing when she got out of her work uniform.

She hung back in the kitchen on her own and was poking around quietly when I decided to make an excuse and look in after her. She decided to lean back into the stove and hold herself up with her feet pressed against the counter across, and she hung there for a split second, and then she fell sprawling onto the floor; I knew I was in love. It was too endearing, and today, I would identify it as the behavior of a child, but back then, I didn't know any better or any more than how she looked in that sweater and skirt and I wanted to have terrible, unfulfilling for the both of us sex right there, get all that other stuff out of the way.

What followed instead was a long and protracted wooing that lasted over the course of the next two years, and all the states between Washington and Texas, each coming day a crushing reminder of this girl I had felt was perfect for me—whose whole personality I had created out of the first few minutes of polite and awkward conversation.

It would turn out, obviously, that I knew nothing of this being, could never have drawn the person from those first impressions and had nothing in common with her except that I had the perfectly corresponding ability to ply her decision making with guilt like I knew her from birth. Every other assumption was wildly inaccurate, even the most basic ones.

Our first date established a theme for the rest of the relationship.

Dan and I had been in Seattle long enough to be a little hard to reach by people calling from Brownsville, which was kind of the point. We had a phone, obviously, but we disregarded all incoming calls from Dad and the rest of the family except for Mom. We talked to Mom, when we could. But Mom never spoke of herself, not usually, so when we found out that she was going in for emergency thyroid surgery, it threw us for a loop.

We were stuck in the U-District, in Seattle, while the rest of the family was rallying for her in the hospital waiting room. The reality of it caught me and Dan off guard.

I was horribly nervous about my first date with Karis, scheduled for later that evening, and Dan and I had started knocking back beers at noon. It had become an early and premature wake for mater noster, who survived the surgery with panache and is still with us at this writing; but for the first time in our lives, Dan and I had to face our parents' mortality. More than that, it was our mother's mortality—for whom we each shared an equally twisted, near-Freudian regard, sentimental and deadly.

Latins, I've come to diagnose, are capable of only one type of love, and all other forms of love are subvariants, or gradients of that one original imprinting, learned from the semi-erotic maternal handling of our children as babies, who are usually nursed and kept swaddled for far too long.

We don't
exactly
want to sleep with our mothers, but we can see why other men would want to. We don't
exactly
want to have sex with our same-gender friends, but hey, it's love, right? Love has no boundaries and all that. Like in the Marines. Every other type of love falls in between those two, from how we love our new iPhone (
way
sexy) to how much we love a television show (worth a wank.)

Love, as a means of communication, is eroticized too early, and it sort of fries our brain chemistry into a binary sort of “all or nothing” question, which, if it goes unanswered, and unquestioned and unexplored, then fosters the ground for the sort of relationship that's a bit too close to be healthy.

At any rate, this was the day Mom was going under the knife, and Dan and I got drunk at noon in order to cope with the grim possibilities. But then I had to get dressed for my first date with Karis. We were double-dating, with Ryan and her best friend, Julie. We were going to see
Naked Lunch
at a small theater nearby.

It didn't turn out well.

I wanted to talk to her all through the movie, resenting the fact that after two months of missed phone calls, communicating exclusively by voice mail and gossip, now that she was here, in front of me, I'd have to sit quietly and let the movie play. Plus, Mom was getting her thyroid removed.

So I whispered and annoyed her all through the movie, misbehaved and basically ruined the Cronenberg movie like a four-year-old, because that's how small I was feeling.

Meanwhile, during the whole playing of the woo, Karis had resisted heavily, her will a crumbling jetty to the inevitable persuasion of my tide, and again, if you forgive the further nautical metaphor, she was a lost ship caught in a typhoon that had centered itself directly over her.

I'd fallen in love with a sixteen-year-old girl with absolutely no idea who she was, her whole personality created in my own head, and the only overlap with reality was that she was cute, awkward, and a tomboy.

Mom came through the surgery just fine. Dad called Dan while I was on that date, and they had a long conversation that resulted in Dan freezing out Dad for a few years afterward.

“
Denny
, can I talk to you,
Denny
?” Dad started out the conversation, as Dan related to me later.

“Of course, Dad,” he'd said. “You can talk to me. What is it?” I don't know what Dan was thinking this man was going to divulge.

“No, I mean like a man,
Denny
,” Dad said. “Can I talk to you like a
man
?”

Dad had been talking to Dan like a man since Dan was six years old, but this, Dan suddenly knew, meant that Dad was about to divulge some ugly extramarital misdeeds, yet once more.

If Dad had a conscience, it was only this topic that gave him pause, made him want to relieve himself of it. Not the guilt, mind you, but the conscience itself. Dad wanted the relief of conscience, not the burden of guilt. To him, those were two very separate things.

“
Denny
, you know that I fuck a lot of women,
Denny
,” Dad admitted to Dan. This wasn't news to anyone.

“
¡
Peró no póngo nada en la ríata!”
he says. (“But I never cover my cock.”)

“And your mother is going to get all those tests,
Denny
.
What if I have the AIDS, Denny?
What if I gave her something, Denny? What am I going to do?”

“You mean for mom?” Dan asked, not sure he was tracking what Dad was saying.

“
¡
N'ombre!
For me! I don't want to know if I have the AIDS!” Dad replied, and then thinking about it a minute, added “ . . .
Peró para ella, tambíen.
” (“But, yeah; for her, too.”)

Dan was disgusted and hung up on Dad after cursing him for his selfishness, and Dad later confessed to me that he was confused, unsure as to why Dan had a reaction like “ . . . a little girl” about man things, after Dad had so clearly prefaced that the conversation they would be having would be between men about the things men do.

Personally, it was getting time for the long drive back home, and on my last night in Seattle (that first time), I put on my best jeans, shined my combat boots, borrowed a shirt from Dan, and wore a light jacket as I made my way down to Karis's work and waited for two hours until the dinner cruise docked down on the waterfront. When we finally had a moment alone, I gave her a bouquet of flowers I'd bought at a grocery store and a lengthy letter I'd written. We went to a diner and sat while she smoked and we talked. We said good-bye, and I promised her that she'd see me again. Then I ran off into the cold, clear night, the first time I'd been in that part of Seattle, just a twenty-minute bus ride from the neighborhood in which I lived and worked, but had been frightened to leave because I was scared I'd get lost.

A year spent on South Padre Island did little to offset the heartache I woke up with every day, and served mostly to make my fantasy of the girl more richly detailed, if utterly absent of reality. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy the spoils of vacationing young tourists who dotted the afternoons and evenings on the Island. Wounds fare better when licked with others, I found. But it wasn't the sort of “free-love” market one might imagine here; I think I mentioned that during spring break, visiting sorority girls are not interested in the local male population. They mate with their fraternal counterparts, and it was impressive to watch. Both sides of the female-to-male equation were fantastically identical, took an immense amount of care to dress in uniformity, wear their hair and their ball caps in exactly the same way. It was like watching penguins mate, from the sidelines. Hard to distinguish one from another. And penguins just aren't sexy. Cute, but not sexy.

But there would be the occasional cool chick who wandered down, amenable to a weekend fling, and that was good and right, in the logic of Jimmy Buffet.

At any rate, working both the bar and at the newspaper, I finally managed to save enough to buy Karis a round-trip ticket to South Padre Island, and after some tortured telephone exchanges, she agreed to fly out.

She said she'd had some flashbacks of her own, now that she was eighteen and had dropped out of high school. She had been thinking about all that she had left behind in Iowa. She wanted to go back and settle some scores about the way she had left things there when her family had left five years ago, she had been saying.

“Whatever,” I said. “Are you coming to Texas?”

“Yes, I'll visit you in Texas,” she said.

Even Dan moved to the Island, after a while. He finished his semester at A&I, had run into guys he'd fought that night every so often, but otherwise made it through those three months without further interference. He had proved his point, again. But he'd become bored. He had even begun listening to “tejano” music, and was very close to going “injun” in South Texas. Then he came down for a weekend visit and fell right into step with the lifestyle. I got him a job at the bar, and even had a best friend waiting for him, my boss and friend, Christian. They hit it off immediately (they could talk “sports,” while I couldn't), and Dan was set to make the move.

It so happened there was a regular bloke at the bar who needed roommates; he had a huge place and wanted two guys to sublet, so Dan and I offered, and it came together in one afternoon. The new housemate, whose name I don't remember, was missing an eye. He lost it in an accident, where some chick he was walking behind was swinging her purse and he made as if to tickle her and she had swung it at him. He had paid for it with his eye. “A freak accident,” he said. He got stoned at night when he watched TV, and his real eye would shrink and redden in the typical stoned fashion, and it would make for a weird moment, if you were stoned, too, and happened to look at him, with that one large, glaringly perfect and unmoving eye staring back at you, and the other one small and squinty red.

So the new apartment was set, and I was ready for Karis to visit. She had asked for the ticket, and I had sent it.

Her flight was due one Friday night, and I had her whole trip planned. Dan was gone somewhere, and I had his Town Car for the week, so I drove the hour to the Harlingen Airport in controlled delirium to pick her up and waited nervously at the airport bar. Against my better judgment, I started talking to the bartender, and the more questions he asked, the more I told him about what was happening, about this girl, about her visiting, about buying the ticket, about how excited I was that it had all come together after a year of planning. He seemed genuinely pleased for me. The bar at the time sat facing the two or three gates, so when her flight had emptied, and I stood there, right by the bar, and she didn't show, I slowly sank back onto my barstool. The guy, well, language wasn't his foremost strength, let's just say, and even if it had been, what do you say to a complete schmuck who just had his heart broken, except “This next one's on the house? I know you got a long drive ahead of you . . . ”