Boy Kings of Texas (42 page)

So I remembered this just then, a little while ago, watching Dan as he was back in the kitchen, his kitchen, on his crutch, adding spices to whatever it was he was making, with his right eye changed a little—nerve damage from that last fight we just had a few months ago. I kind of started to cry, but of course I didn't tell Dan, who was sitting in the dark room across from me, but couldn't see me in the flickering gloom of the television.

In my memory, my mother rushed forward at this point. It might not be true. She was screaming and yelling that none of her children will be disfigured, if she has to work to the end of her days. I think that part is true. I woke up in the hospital a few hours later, when the pain had died down. The three middle fingers of my right hand were locked in a sort of Chinese finger prison, dangling from a metallic bedside stem. I was in a hospital. I finally felt safe. I was an American again, not livestock on a Mexican farm. That's how close a line I walked that day, where my brother and mother kept me.

An oddly attractive nurse with a two-pack-a-day voice told me, “Honey, it's gonna feel a little hot in your ass for a while, but then you're gonna feel real good after that, is that OK? Do you understand me?” and I wasn't sure if she was talking to me like that because she wasn't sure if I was conscious or capable of understanding her English, and then the Demoral sears this lightning path from my right ass cheek to my soul—and for the very first and only time in my life I hallucinated. It was fantastic. There were these figures fighting with swords and words and lines, in the sky, right outside the window. Geometric shapes, all of it. Language. Absolute communication. Undiluted violence. Purest redemption. Kindness in its most poisonous form. It all made so much sense to me. Right outside the window. Right out there.

The doctor snapping my arm into place with a sort of yoke in the crook of my elbow brought my attention back suddenly, and the pain was sharp, unbearable; I passed out.

Some minutes later, I woke up, and the doctor was wrapping a wet cast on my wrist.

I turned away and said, “Gramma.”

The nurse asked, “Are you seeing things, honey? Are you hallucinating?”

And I said, “Is there a squat woman clutching her purse to her stomach in the doorway?”

The nurse said, “Yes.”

I said, “Then, no.”

I was totally disappointed. Gramma was the Devil. I thought maybe I was seeing the Devil.

Dad was gone by the time Mom drove me and Dan back home from the hospital that night. He was gone for two weeks, and one morning I woke up to find him sitting on my bed, dressed in the same red plaid shirt but looking like he was going off to work, and he scuffed the top of my head and laughed, tried to make a joke out of the cast I was wearing and his behavior that other day. I didn't look at him, couldn't meet his eye. I was throughly disgusted with him.

Dan and me, we were working through our own trouble. But Dan, in all his oafishness, I understood he was still just trying to save his little brother. Every fight he's been in, gotten me into, he was just trying to save our honor. Save something. Save anything.

In his own clumsy way, he was doing the best he could. He was like Stella, the unruly Shar-pei I used to have, defending his family.

But tonight, when I remembered what my father and grandmother could have done to me—the way they could have disfigured me, and it took Dan to throw Dad against the wall when Dad hit me, my arm broken the way his leg now was. . . .I think me and Dan are even. Getting closer to even, if we were keeping accounts.

And I said to him that night, “Thank you for protecting me from our father that day.”

Dan started crying, over on his couch, in the dark.

If it has to be like this for now,
I thought to myself,
I think we're on our way to being even.

Some months later, I begin to get blue. Dan doesn't notice it because it's summer, and it's hard to be blue when it's summer in Seattle, especially with the view that we have from that deck. We're sitting outside one Sunday evening, lounging like real gentiles and looking east over the aft end of Queen Anne Hill, onto the Ballard Bridge, watching the boats sailing from Lake Washington into Puget Sound, or vice versa. Some evenings as the sun went down, we would sit outside and watch the planes directly above us on their final approach to SeaTac Airport, and we would plane spot, counting all the planes stacked up in the skies around Seattle as they lined up in tandem to land. It's still the best view I've seen in my twenty years in Seattle.

We're drinking light beers that night—or at least I am—and he's having a Shiner Bock, from Texas. Dan's got an assortment of Texan hits on rotation on his CD player. The Old 97's, Dwight Yoakum, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle. Drinking music. He's telling me about his sciatic nerve, how painful it is, now that his cast is off. And I tell him how much I jogged yesterday at the Seattle Pacific University track, then walked around with a friend of mine and her dog, and how I talked and talked and probably said far too much. And he tells me how he called in yesterday and is having a three-day weekend, about the ribs he's about to cook, boiling on the stove now, and we're having a great night, on the deck.

He gets on the phone with Alex, his Lilliputian friend from work, who is evangelical about his simple beliefs in a Latin American Jesus and sings Celine Dion songs at top volume, utterly without shame or irony as he wanders the halls of the nursing home. Dan is calling him and rattling off the opening bars of the
Mexican Hat Dance
when Alex answers because there's a patient at the home with Alzheimer's who belts it out in earnest every time she sees Alex, who is not Mexican, but Salvadoran. This makes Dan crack up, because Alex is a proud El Salvadoran who hates to be misdiagnosed as Mexican.

They've got another patient who's been circling the drain now for two days, circling like one of the planes we're watching that night, and Dan wants to make sure she was still alive when Alex saw her last. The patient, Mary Ellen, was eighty-five years old, but as Dan liked to tell her, she didn't look a day over seventy. She was a delusional alcoholic who thought she was in a bar and Dan was the bartender. Mary Ellen had drunk so much she was incapable of speaking most days and had been mostly reduced to autonomic function. She was the most difficult patient Dan and his group ever had. The rare moments she was lucid, she would claim to be Native American, though she was really Scots-Irish. Dan and Llambi, his Croatian nursing partner, call her “Dances with Whiskey.”

Dan asks Alex if Mary Ellen has gone to the “Big Pow-Wow in the Sky” yet. You have to have a real sense of gallows humor when you deal with people dying on a weekly basis, Dan tells me when he's on hold.

“For some patients,” he corrects himself. “Not for all of them.” His eyes drift off at this point.

Alex begins to yell at him for being callous, hysterically invoking the name of Jesus, so Dan breaks drunkenly into the opening bars of the
Mexican Hat Dance
and Alex, fuming, hangs up on him.

We both sit there and laugh at Alex. Stupid Christians. Alex loves Dan.

I'm feeling a big shift that night, can sense it, whether it's happened already or if it's in the mail or happening now, I don't know. I feel like I am waking up after a year of the steadiest, most narcoleptic administration of morphines, opiates, and painkillers augmenting the regular booze outs. I'm headed for trouble, I can feel. I had made the decision to stop this lifestyle when I moved out in a couple months, since I had just started working at a trade publication, would soon be back on my feet. I am thirty-two at this point and need to steady myself, pull back from the edge, where my toes have felt the updraft of the plunge into an actual habit—my inheritance as an addictive personality.

I had taken to spilling out the contents of the medicine cabinet and playing Hunter Thompson: “What Would Dr. Thompson Take?” was my motto. I wanted to make it into a bumper sticker. But that lifestyle didn't have legs. Didn't feel right, no matter how I tried to rationalize it, justify my associates. Fold it all into something acceptable. Denying loudly the predisposition to addiction.

Then Kris Kristofferson comes on. Dan's playing all the big Texan hits that night.

There was one time some weeks previously when Dan and I had overdone it with the meds and beer, and we were having a loud, two in the morning debate about “Me and Bobby McGee” and whether it was homoerotic.

“It was the 1960s,” Dan says. “Even Bob Dylan admitted to having sex with men and shit.”

“He's singing about a girl,” I yell back, from my impression in the couch. “Bobby's a chick, a fuckin' hippie chick he picked up in Montana.”

“No, it's a dude,” says Dan. “A dude that fuckin' dies.”

“No, it's not, man,” I say. “What fuckin' version are you listening to? You're confused because Janis Joplin sang it, too. Bobby McGee's a hippie chick he's traveling with to California to be with all the other hippies. It's the goddamn 1960s, man; they're all out there. They're all fuckin' hippies. Anyhow, she doesn't die, she just wanders off with another ‘old man,' like. She trades her first old man for another old man, in like, Tucson or Arizona. Listen to the damn lyrics.”

“
No
!
” Dan insists. “It's a guy, and he
dies
!
”

The next morning, Dan is incredibly sick, calls in to work. He lies on his bed, with a trashcan positioned readily nearby. The very memory of “Me and Bobby McGee” is making him nauseous, he tells me later. He's kept from puking all night and all morning long, but then he sings the opening lines of the song, in his mind, as he's lying there.

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train
. . . he thinks to himself. Then he erupts in vomit.

Hunh,
he thinks to himself, afterward.
Let me try that again.

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, waiting for a train . . .
Then he vomits again.

“OK,” he decides. “That song goes off the playlist.”

But this isn't what is bugging Dan tonight. Someone at work had asked him if he considered himself “Tejano.”

“We're not ‘Tejano!'” Dan yells at me in his usual oversize animation. He had been offended.

I say, “We're Texican,” because I had just seen John Wayne in
The Searchers
and there had been a mention of that word, by the German or Norwegian couple who was carving out their livelihood in the middle of fucking nowhere. I'd been watching a lot of John Wayne lately.

I sing the opening bars to the
Mexican Hat Dance
to make him laugh.

Dan says, “No, no, no; we're fucking Americans; Texans next, godammit. We like our barbecues and beers and the cowboys and boxing.” Hear, hear. And our drugs. I think Dan's overdoing the Vicodin as well, but I'm not in charge of his life. And I don't know it right now, but he's also made the decision to change this around, but we haven't talked about it yet. I'm on the verge of weeping because Kris Kristofferson is now singing about his “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” and because it's been lonely out here, in between our own lives, slipping in between the streams of other people's lives, where I thought I really wanted to be.

Later on, I find a bottle of something that looked suspiciously like liquor in the fridge, with a label written in a foreign form of Spanish. It was a gift from Alex, from his travels in El Salvador, something called
aguardiente
. It's odorless, almost tasteless if it wasn't for the flavor of your own soft palate dissolving while it strips away your tongue. Dan pours out a couple of shots and down the hatch they go: We drink a toast to
Dances with Whiskey
and another to Luther, Alex's fictional black boyfriend.

Maybe it's a sort of withdrawal I'm feeling. It's too beautiful an evening to feel this weepy. I can see north all the way to Crown Hill, see Mount Baker in the distance looking like a musky ice cube in the reddening dusk at ten o'clock that night. It took us a long time to adjust to the summers here, the eighteen-hour daylight around the solstice. Dan decides he wants to play the Guns and Roses album,
Appetite for Destruction
. I am nothing if not a sucker for nostalgia, so I say, “Sure,” and I giggle all the way through the first couple tracks, remembering the meteoric impact this album had when it hit Brownsville. Dan had enlisted in the army that next year, ended up in Korea, and he'd played this album nonstop while on duty guarding the demilitarized zone, he tells me. The idea of Dan in that position, of Dan listening to “Mr. Brownstone” with a loaded M16, staving off the yella horde, the idea scares me, frankly. Saving Texas from Tojo.

The sun is finally going down, at nearly eleven o'clock. We're going to watch
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and yell out Harrison Ford's lines before he says them, like we do.