My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (10 page)

He failed to notice my resistance; maybe he was high on something. But I wasn't relenting, and I was irritated that he was making me spend time in a fraternity house in Austin.

It wasn't as if he didn't know that both Dan and I had stood and fought a Hellenic “stand your ground” fight against an entire fraternity in Kingsville, Texas, ten years before, and that the whole idea of fraternities goes against my core principles, but he was lining up his friends like dwarves and hobbits in an adventure—Dimly, Wimly, Simpy, and so on—and attempting to introduce them to me like I was his own Yoda, and they all lined up, stupid and uninteresting and . . . well, dimwitted.

Or maybe I'm just his older brother, and I was being a complete dick about this.

But no; they were just younger kids and “friends” of my brother, helping him along in his unmonitored and unscheduled self-destruction. Encouraging, allowing, permitting, supplying his destructive tendencies—
can't you see what's happening here?

Echoes of my own choices, and effects. Affects.

And Dan's. And Derek's helplessness.

And these fucks were resonating it back to Derek, in amplification, for their own fun.

And my mother, her umbilical throttling her hearing, chauffeuring him along.

I was angry at all of us, not just Derek.

The only night I was at the fraternity house, Derek paraded me around, and I was surrounded by these drinking children and maybe one or two glimmers of intelligence. The only kid I felt any sort of draw toward was Derek's best friend, oddly named Orlando, a tall, stringy Mexican-American kid with long straight hair and a keen sense in seeing the larger, more cosmic sensibility and the stupidity of this enterprise. He's from Del Rio, Texas, a border town similar to Brownsville, and a kooky family of artists, musicians, and cockfighters. The first time Derek visited Orlando's house, within minutes of parking, and the moment he entered, Orlando's dad appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Derek by his wrist, pulled him into a spare bedroom where Derek had a moment's pause and uncertainty, until the old man handed him a Bud Light and then produced a battered guitar upon which he began to pluck that one song Antonio Banderas sings in
Desperado
. That was his initiation to Orlando's family.

The second time Derek was at Orlando's home, he was awoken on Orlando's couch after an all-night drive from Austin to Del Rio to find an old man—Orlando's uncle—rubbing an ice-cold Budweiser on his neck, inviting him to sit for a drinking breakfast at 7:00 a.m. because the cockfights started around 9:00 or 10:00 that Saturday. They sat eating GBCs—tacos with carne guisada, beans, and cheese, which are such a staple in Del Rio, they're known by their initials—and the old man pulled out a magazine that displayed fighting roosters, and cooed and petted at the image of his favorite, which was way over his pay grade, and choked up with tears. Their house was on a hill that looked directly down onto the Rio Grande. Derek said it was like a Mexican version of Isabel Allende's
The House of the Spirits
, with the multigenerational family all minding their own quirkiness and the doors left always unlocked.

Orlando and Derek shared a room at the end of the hall in the fraternity, and it reminded me of a squat I lived in when I was roughly his age, but in Seattle. Mine was an unregistered and illegal karate school in an abandoned warehouse, but I saw the parallel. It was a square room, nothing exceptional; an elevated platform stood five feet off the ground with a plywood bunk supported by four-by-fours and bolted into the wall. On top of this rested a smelly, moldy futon. This was where Derek slept. It was unhygienic, disgusting. My billet, for the night.

Still, he tried to throw a party for me, show me what he did now, as if he were a grown-up.

He invited everyone he knew, and most of them were morons.

I couldn't move for having a throng of college students following me around, and a particularly large Southern brute took to following me, even into the men's room, when someone started passing around a pipe full of marijuana and I thought,
Yup, that's the end of the night
, and they became high and whatever conversation might have been no longer had any possibility of being evinced. I crawled up to the futon and hid while the party continued throughout the frat house, and I was relegated to the back corner while emanations of scorn and unbridled resentment poured continuously from the older, professional frat guys up front.

And it built up to a moment when an Asian kid in a pressed pink collared shirt called down the hall to Derek and challenged him about his owed dues to the fraternity.

I heard how he was talking to my little brother, and I climbed down from the futon and came out into the hallway angry. I said, “I'm sorry, but who the fuck are you?” I stood up and expanded, chicken chested, elbows touching both hallways and my spine expanding about a foot.

“June, don't . . . don't; it won't help,” said either Derek or Orlando, when these other dickhead yuppies in similar pastel collared shirts made some under-breath comments. I genuinely did not hear what they said, but I registered the scorn.

Derek and Orlando and their friends were, apparently, the punk fringe of the frat house. If there could be such a thing. They were months behind on dues, rent, et cetera, and way submerged beneath their academic minimums. They were now the fraternity equivalent of homesteaders, or homeless squatters, only there for the free booze and parties, seamless introductions to the sorority girls. And what I had walked into was the passive-aggressive hostility of their fraternity “supervisors,” children pretending at social management and finding themselves lacking.

And I wanted to start a fight.

“June, please don't,” repeated Derek.

I was brimming with self-righteous hostility. I knew this was ridiculous, and I knew Derek was an idiot for getting himself into this, but
who the fuck do you think you are, you mid-Texan fraternity nobody, to be judging my goddamned little brother?

I was going to start some shit. I was pissed, and I was pissed.

I could take at least three of these fuckers, I thought. I'd done it before, and that was before I'd trained to fight. I didn't need Dan here. But Derek was trying to get me to stand down: Don't do this, don't start a fight here, and I said, “I'm not saying I'm not going to or that I am, but
motherfucker
. . . .”

Then one of them started playing “Ghostbusters.”

Not the movie, but the song, by Ray Parker Jr., loud, and in earnest. Coming out of his room from the front. Like he meant it. Like it was his “jams.”

I stopped in the hallway, my aggression halted, bewildered.

“Is . . . is he Russian?” I asked. That was the only thing that could explain this.

Derek looked at me.

“How . . . yes; how did you know?” The kid was Hungarian, but Derek thought that was close enough.

“It's ‘Ghostbusters,' Derek! Who else is going to listen to ‘Ghost-busters' like it's a real song in 2007?”

And we burst out laughing, which neutralized the air that night.

That kid would be the one who would later save Derek's life. Mogyorodi, with the very bad dress sense and bad taste in popular American music. Mogyorodi, who stood with Derek as Derek blacked out and fell, and who immediately called 911, had the ambulance there in minutes and saved Derek's life. For a year or two after, Derek carried a Polaroid photo of Mogyorodi in his jacket pocket, never explained to anyone who he was, or why he had a photo of a really hairy guy wearing a Nirvana
Nevermind
T-shirt tucked into tricolored sweatpants pulled up to his belly button, and holding a can of fortified lager and smiling at whomever was taking the photo.

The night I spent with Derek in his fraternity house, after picking up on some deeply sublimated homoeroticism and some horrible, horrible lapses of sanitation (Christ! What do they feed these boys? I had bowel envy, from the shared bathroom), I went back and hid in the rear corner of the house and decided I wouldn't cause trouble because I was seeing Elise the next evening, and this was Derek's choice now. These were his decisions.

Derek kept drinking, even after we had called it quits around 2:00 a.m. and I had elected to retire. He wandered off and left me alone in that foreign, horrible place, and I sat there, counting the minutes until daylight came and I could get a lift to my hotel, as I had planned.

Around 4:00 a.m. he finally wandered back, and I didn't recognize this boy.

He stood in the darkened room, holding a bag full of Taco Bell that he'd either pinched or had someone bring to him, and he stared out the window and made a horrible show of himself as I watched from atop the platform, hidden by the hepatitic futon, and he breathed slowly and deeply through his nose, like someone in scuba gear, and smooshed these terrible tacos into his mouth and chewed noisily, the food falling apart and smearing on his face. I could see his eyes in the reflection of the window glass, and it looked, to me, like he had no idea where he was, or who he was, at all.

There was no one home behind his glasses. His eyes were empty, his balance a slow orbit, his body a shell of the person that I was related to, the kid I helped to raise, but this wasn't him. I was witnessing firsthand what I had only heretofore suspected, that Derek drank into nonsense, into utter corruption of identity. It was almost like a possession, or maybe the opposite of a possession—a vacuity, an absence, an ejection of self. Derek was gone. This was just walking booze.

I'd never seen anything like it, not sure I'd ever been there myself, and believe me, I'd put on some pretty good drunks in my day. And I had met some other serious drunks, too, but nothing like this.

I was completely destroyed, looking at him like that, felt entirely at a loss, and helpless, hopeless.

This was my younger brother, and he was gone.

It took me most of the next day to recover from the shock of seeing Derek in that form, and he slept all day, reviving his strength so he could do a repeat performance of that same self-destruction the following night, as an encore. It amazed me that he managed to get that fucked up, that often, with no money. And yet, here he was, doing it daily.

My own bad choices kept pointing me into the ridiculous as well, kept collaborating with my drunken compass.

My friend Philippe monitored me at the time from his home in Los Angeles, questioning every decision I made on this trip and, I'm sure, telling his wife that I was having a midlife crisis at thirty-six.

It was the only thing it could look like, from without.

From within, it was a continuation of what the universal signal was telling me. If I pricked my ear just right, what should have happened fifteen years previously, in following these musical bread crumbs to Austin, Texas, where I was continuing my wooing of a girl I knew back in high school, could happen now. Perhaps I needed to follow Dan's example and move back to Texas, with a girl.