Boy Kings of Texas (44 page)

And I broke Dan's, when I didn't move back to Texas.

But that is another book of its own.

Closedown

Velva Jean got her divorce and moved out with Derek. She and Dad had been married for over twenty-five years, and it took a very long time for her to disentangle her furniture, her past, and make that move away from the house on Oklahoma Avenue.

She moved with Derek to an apartment across the street from our old high school, and she continued working at the JC Penney, then finally graduated from the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2004, with a degree in business administration. Derek had a very difficult time adjusting, started acting out in strange, weird ways. Eventually, he had to move in with Mare and Mark, in Corpus Christi, where he bloomed through high school, then imploded in college.

Mom never forgave herself for breaking up his home, and feels responsible for all of his weaknesses, his periods of self-harm, his struggle—like mine and Dan's struggle—with alcoholism and drugs. For us, it's our own fault, Mom felt. But Derek's, that was her doing. Neither Dan nor I buy into that: We also both feel responsible for Derek's faults as well, because we were not ideal models. I have a tendency now to collect little brothers, where once I was trying to collect fathers.

Mom eventually remarried and now lives in and works for the City of Houston with her husband Robert, from La Porte, who is a salsa music fanatic, plays the bongos. We could not have asked for anyone better to share in Velva Jean's life. He treats her very well, always pulls out her chair for her in restaurants. It makes my throat knot up, when I see him do that for her when I visit them. He never forgets, and Mom acknowledges it with terribly modest elegance, like it is the most natural thing in the world.

Dad actually quit drinking, has been sober now for fifteen or so years. After the divorce, he met up with and married his high school sweetheart, who also tried taming his savagery, but Dad is not to be tamed; he is to be understood, he feels. Maybe studied. He divorced her after a few years, moved in with a waitress and her daughter next, and when that didn't work out, he moved back in with his mother and was sleeping in the same bedroom he grew up in, at age sixty. We're all strangely protective of Dad now, look upon him like someone who deserves special care, someone who was wounded terribly as a child, someone who's been struggling tremendously with posttraumatic stress disorder his whole life, at the hands of his mother, whom he will not leave, and who we cannot blame.

Gramma is still alive, at the time of this writing, and quite tiny. You could never imagine the Gorgon of old, in that tiny frame. At Mamí's funeral in 2010, Gramma and Dad showed up unexpectedly, and Dad had secretly arranged for a mariachi band to play three of the most heartbreaking Spanish songs ever, and everyone—everyone—cried, Dan told me, and he had never been so proud of his old man. When Gramma arrived, she asked only for Dan, plucked her way through the crowd, pushing away well wishers, looking for her
Denny
. Dan had not seen Gramma in over twenty years, still regarded her as the Devil; but when this tiny, shriveled person came up to him and reminded him that she was, in fact, still his Gramma, Dan's heart broke open and he hugged her, in front of the whole family, and it was a moment I wish I could have seen, but I was in Seattle, on the ninth floor of Harborview, with my fiancée in a coma, and dealing with her New England family whom I could neither understand nor ultimately join.

I could not be there, for my mother's mother's funeral, and I have felt very terrible for that.

Dad even hugged Robert, my mother's husband, to everyone's astonishment, especially Robert's. When he told me about it later, I just laughed. “He's full of surprises, that Mingo,” I said.

They're both very lonely, Dad and Gramma, because we all left, we all went forward into America, and it was as if they chose not to invite themselves along. So they've stayed there, on Oklahoma Avenue.

Gramma raises chickens. In the place where the pigsty once stood now stands a multilevel retirement coop, for her chickens. She does not eat them or sell them to be eaten, as she considers them her pets, gives them names and takes their eggs every morning. I like to think it's a sort of penance she's paying, for all the hogs she's killed, in that spot.

And for other things she's done.

My sisters have prospered in unimaginable ways. They all married very well, and each have lovely children, live all over the state of Texas. Both Syl and Mare are administrators or teachers in the school system there, which is quite stable, and Marge, as mentioned, became a research scientist, finished her PhD at Stony Brook in New York, then came back to Texas to raise her family, with Corwin. Mare was married to Mark, and they have a delightful daughter, Madison; Syl and Ruben have three daughters of their own. Let's see if I can get this straight, without calling my mother for help: There is . . . Danielle, Megan . . . and Olivia. That's right.

Derek had a bad go of it for a while, but he seems to be getting his life together now, I hear tell from Mom. He's not speaking to either Dan or me, or the rest of the family, really, and he depends on Mom more than anyone ever did, even more so than Dad. They're sort of caught in a mutual agreement to drown one another, and neither can let the other go.

The three of us boys can't be in the same room together, oddly. We've spent so much time apart, when we see each other these unconscious alignments tend to exclude one of the three, and it ends up in an argument. I was the odd man out for the three or so years Dan and I were not speaking, and Derek had moved in with Dan, after his accident in Austin, when Derek had fallen after a night of drinking and cracked open the back of his skull on the sidewalk.

That relationship turned into a simulacrum of the one Dan and I had in Seattle, except I was more clearly defined, didn't bow under the pressure of Dan's relentless conditions in the way Derek did, which bred a tremendous resentment on Derek's part, and so now, the only power Derek feels he has is to keep us out, all of us, at once.

Dan and Orlene are still in nursing, and Orlene has stuck with Dan through some very bad times, is very much a part of this family. While she has had every reason and opportunity to despise me, she does not, and that simply amazes me. I don't think I could be as forgiving as she has been.

Dan and I still go through periods where we cannot stand to speak to one another for years, but the love we have for one another is still there, always there. It just turns into sadness. From him, even though we don't speak, I know he still loves me. It will always be the way I feel about him: I might not be able to talk to him for a long time, but it doesn't mean I don't love him. Quite the opposite. It's simply that there is no one in the world that can drive me as absolutely bat-shit crazy as Dan can. No one who can make me so angry.

Family has a way of doing that.

And for helping each other: I spent twenty years trying to get away from them, trying to deny my connection to my family, and it was this last year when I fell apart completely, was utterly dysfunctional, that they all lined up and kept me alive through the worst event in my life, when my fiancée had a seizure while driving on December 4 and plummeted off the side of an overpass in Seattle.

Acknowledgments

This book is the culmination of the support, abiding patience and dogged endurance of many, many people, especially my family: my older brother, Daniel Martinez, my younger brother, Derek A. Martinez, my sisters Mary (Mimi) Guess, Margie (Mimi) Moczygamba, and Sylvia de los Santos, my mother, Velva Jean Martinez, my father, Domingo C. Martinez, and especially my grandmother,
La Señora
Virginia Rubio. Partners and spouses are included in that, meaning Corwin Moczygamba, Mark Guess, Robert Swanagan, and Orlene Ezekiel. And whoever happens to be with Dad when this prints: you're special, too.

My friends who believed and encouraged me, and dealt with the prickly parts: Amy Niedrich, above all, then the McCartys, Andrew and Pam, of course, my dear friend Philippe Critot and the lovely Mrs. Critot (whom I've never met, but who yells at me when Philippe and I are talking on the phone). There's Kim McIver and her husband, John, who've been terribly encouraging since the late 1990s. And I owe a debt of gratitude for the following friendships: Camille Ball, Chris Arteaga, Eric Lawson, and Robb Garner.

Of course, there are the people who helped make this happen: Brianna Morgan, for helping with copy editing. Also, there's the best agent in the world, Alice Martell, who took me on as a completely unknown quantity: an author simply could not ask for a better champion, and my editors at Globe Pequot/Lyons Press, Lara Asher and Kristen Mellitt, and their keen sense of story and tenses. And I would not be writing this without the help of Jeffrey Gustavson, Odette Heidelman, Martin Rock, and Willard Cook at
Epiphany
Literary Magazine: thank you all, so, so very much for your vision and encouragement. Also, the staff at
This American Life
for bringing the Mimis to radio: Ira Glass, Robyn Seimyn, and Nancy Updike.

Finally, this book would not have been published if it weren't for Sarah J. Berry, who guided me through the darkest period of my life and brought me into the brightest. I can't imagine where I'd be if you hadn't been there, Sarah.

About the Author

Domingo Martinez lives in Seattle, Washington. His work has appeared in
Epiphany,
and he has worked as a journalist and designer in Texas and at virtually every periodical in Seattle, including the
Stranger, Seattle Weekly,
the
Seattle Times
, and the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, along with a number of other publications.