My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (38 page)

When I spoke to Steph's mom next, asking about what was going on at the nursing home, I immediately heard an earful of shit.

“What the fuck were you doing here last night at 3:30 a.m.?” she yelled at me.

“I, uh, was dropping off ... the ... um ... what?”

“Did you know she fell off her bed? Why were you here at that time? Who called you?”

“No one called me; I just ... I know how these places work; I was feeling lonely and sad for Steph, so I brought her those framed photos. What's going on?”

“You were lonely and sad,” she repeated back to me in tones meant to humiliate.

“Yeah, I was sad and I brought over those photos. Why are you yelling at me?”

“She fell off the bed last night and hit her head! They were going to send her to the hospital for X-rays, but you showed up and said not to!”

“That's not at all what happened! When I arrived there, there were people in her room! No one asked me anything!”

“Just stay out of it, Domingo! You don't have the authority to determine her care, you hear me?”

“Whoa, whoa! Hold on! I never made any such fucking call! Who said that?”

“The nurses here! They said ‘Mr. Handsome' showed up with pictures and you told them not to send her out!”

“Not at all true! Nothing in the way of true. Nobody calls me that. Holy shit, that's just wrong.”

And then she hung up on me.

So I began drinking at 9:00 that morning. Refuge, in a box of wine.

I'd been watching all these series on Netflix to avoid thinking about what I was living, but strangely, in every instance, no matter what the subject matter, every fucking show somehow turned around and had a story arc about a brain injury.

No shit. I just couldn't get away from it.

And I had started really breaking down, making some horrible decisions and hurting every relationship I had in my life. I had a growing sense that I might really go mad if I recognized what was happening around me, if I turned too sharply to the left or right and caught it full in my scope.

That Christmas before, when I had lost the damned dog, Brenda Brown had come to find me while I stayed at Andrew's house, and we'd stayed down in Andrew's “man basement” because he had a drop-down cinema and projection booth. I had invited Brenda over to watch a series of war movies, and she'd shown up with “three bitches and a bag of blow,” after she brought over her drug dealer, dog, and girlfriend, and it had been a fantastic night of revelry, and then isolation when they left me alone. She had left me her necklace, this long chain fitted with trinkets and baubles that meant something to her, and she pulled it off her and put it around my neck, for strength, in an incredibly sweet gesture. Before she'd shown up, it had been the most miserable and isolated Christmas holiday I'd ever experienced—it was just another ordinary day at the ninth floor waiting room. Then I had driven home, picked up Chinese food with all the Jewish families, and settled in to watch the loudest, most gory movies I could think of, on Andrew's projection system. That somehow made sense to me then. Dan tried to reach me, as did Mom and my sisters, but I couldn't talk to anyone at this point. Didn't have it in me anymore. I was feeling mean, bitter. Even had turned on my closest friend, like a family pet turned vicious on a leash.

I'd harmed Dougherty after he expressed his concern and grief, and I used him as a scapegoat for my anguish when I zeroed him in my crazy target, said something to the effect of, “
YOU! You never thought we were good together and you hated that she was here for me! You hated that she took me away from you!
” Just all this nutso illogical crazy spasm directed at Dougherty, none of which I really believed, but the drugs and the alcoholism were making it easy to spin out these fabrications of fiction and go off the rails.

I did that about three times, damaged about four other deep friendships as I spun entirely out of control and headed toward what I thought was my new gravity, in craziness.

I wanted to get arrested, or committed, in some way, I thought. I'd lost everything—relationships, work, life—and I needed something else to ground me. Maybe institutionalization was the answer.

I woke up one morning with this line written in my notebook:

There comes a time when every damaged little boy has to dance in both directions.

I've looked for it in the books I was reading, searched for it online, the films and shows I was watching that night, and asked other people if they recognize it, but no one knows it. It sort of sounds like me, but I'm not entirely sure.

In the early days of flight, there was this man named Lincoln Beachey.

Lincoln Beachey solved the issue of the tailspin.

Beachey was a barnstormer and a pioneer aviator when avionics were a brand-new science, and the mortality rate for aviators was in the 90th percentile. In particular, they grappled with the issue of mid-flight stall, and the going logic at the time, based entirely on intuition, was to turn your propeller away from the plummet and try to restart the engine with friction.

This eventually happened to Beachey, and defying his own intuition and popular logic, he instead turned his plane
into
the dive,
into
the plummet, increasing his downward plunge and decreasing his response time to seconds. But it worked: The dive decreased the kinetic friction against the propeller to restart his engine, and suddenly, the stall was no longer an issue for flyers. Lincoln Beachey solved it by defying his impulses of self-preservation and diving headlong into what was a risk.

I had the same idea, in my mental health, I told myself. It hurt to fight it, so I was just going to let it take me on its path. Maybe I could get my propeller started again as I plummeted.

Sometime after Steph's mother yelled at me for interfering, I ended up in a tavern about two blocks from my apartment, drinking alone and sulking in a corner at the bar. I couldn't believe things had become this bad. And when I thought they'd been bad enough, they became worse, just kept falling out from under me.

There was no one there this night, except two other guys by the pool table and the hard-bitten Vietnam veteran bartender who hated his customers. It was one of the last remaining taverns in the neighborhood, and the clientele had definitely taken a turn for both the urban hipster and the unwashed equally, the unapologetically vulgar, as was evidenced this night, even with the limited patrons.

Somehow, it had suddenly neared closing time, and I decided that I needed to listen to Mexican music. They had one of those new electronic jukeboxes with the infinite library, right out of a Borges short story, so I knew it wouldn't be a problem to find Vicente Fernandez in the middle of Uptown, Seattle, and sure enough, there he was.

I played the saddest song in the world, “La Misma,” which is sung from the point of view of a brokenhearted man sitting in a Mexican tavern, begging the mariachis to play him that same old song that reaches down into his soul, and he's so goddamned sad, even the waiters are crying. It's a great fucking song, and I wanted to hear it, so I played it.

It was three lines in when I heard the two guys playing pool snickering, and as I marched over intent on starting some shit, I realized I was wearing possibly the worst, least combat-operative shoes this night, square-toed and fancy, but fuck it: I wanted to get into a fight.

I had a suitably deranged look about me as I marched right up to both these kids and said, “You have a fucking problem with my song choices?”

The kids, who were drinking their pints and holding pool cues, were startled, suddenly wide-eyed.

“Ah, um, no, man; no!” one of them stammered. “I was just telling my friend here how much of a surprise it is to hear this music here; I'm from South Texas, and I've never heard anyone play this in Seattle.”

I remained in fighting mode, but I was trying to figure out what I had just heard.

Did he just say he was from South Texas?

“Did you just say you're from South Texas?”

“Yeah, man. I'm from Brownsville. Do you know it?”

By the time the vet kicked us out about an hour later, we were arm over arm singing a playlist of Vicente Fernandez. I'd bought us all a couple pitchers of beer, and the only way the bartender could get us to shut up and leave was to sell me a “to-go” six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon because it was nearly 2:30 a.m. and he wanted us out. We exchanged numbers at the door, and my two new friends went one way and I went the other, went home and tried to kill myself, as I had been planning.

I stumbled into my apartment, disrobed and ran a hot bath, I remember.

I left a voice memo on my iPhone, saying I was sorry but I had finally broken.

Junebug vs. hurricane.

I might have called Sarah. Or maybe that was later. I found an old, double-sided razor and sank into the hot water, drinking from the six-pack of Pabst, and I put my wrist under the tap and started digging with the edge of the razor, and with each cut, I dug harder and faster so that I wouldn't lose my courage. I kept going and going while the water ran over it and the blood began gushing and right at the point where I nicked at the vein I was aiming for, something primal snapped in my mind once again and I realized what I was doing, and that there was no coming back from here, and I panicked, panicked, dropped the blade and pressed my thumb into the cut, now an inch or two long and welling uncontrollably with blood.