My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (7 page)

Gabriel and I were mistakenly left alone in Dan's living room while Dan was showering and preparing for his big day, and Gabriel began his pitch to get me to talk about “real things.” “Real talk.” Jesus talk. How Jesus could help with
my
things.
My
anger, my problems with Dan.

I could see by his preparations that my issues had been a topic of discussion previously.

So I opened a beer and became angrier. I could see the machinations in his head, twisting with minimum sophistication, grinding like heavy stone wheels: Bronze Age farming tools churning out some leavened Jesus biscuits.

“So, Domingo,” he said, in the flat, proper Latin pronunciation, “tell me, what do you think is the best way to—”

“You do not want to be talking Jesus to me, Gabriel. I'm not like Dan: I do not suffer fools, and I don't know what he sees in you that he invites you to his house.”

I was not afraid of Gabriel. He was tiny. Played soccer. Called it “football.”

“Yes, but, tell me—”

“You need to be quiet now,” I said. I felt like Hannibal Lecter. “You don't want to try and operate on my motivations and behavior with that blunt little Jesus scalpel. Do you really think you can make an incision into my mind with your faith? Compared to you, I'm a goddamned genius, you little—”

Which was as far as I went in my drunken declaration of superiority, because Dan erupted from his bedroom in an offensive, forward fighting posture, and I immediately turned and faced him, as the velocity of the flung door startled me into high alert.

I'm not sure what he thought he'd heard, but it wouldn't have been the first time he'd heard me lamely declare myself an undiscovered genius; I mean, I'd do it at least once a month after I'd successfully insert words or phrases like
obfuscate
and
erstwhile
or
insofar as
into a conversation.

But this was something different, I could tell. And I wasn't sure why. I was too drunk to understand what we were fighting about
now
.

Dan stood there, shoulders back and hands balled into fists at his sides, and he was breathing daggers and looking at me like he wanted to seriously injure me.

Now, this occurred a few months after his knee had been rebuilt from his destroying it in a fight. He had actual bolts and plates holding together his tibia, and he wasn't recovered by any stretch of medical theory. And he stood there, as if he was about to swing at me.

Over
Jesus?
This just didn't make sense to me.

His, girlfriend, Orlene, walked over and placed her hand on his shoulder and pulled him back gently.

The idea of fighting him in this state—Dan on a reconstructed knee, me in perfect health, if a bit hungover—it just made me shudder, so I very obviously dropped any and all defensive posturing, lowering my shoulders, softening my face, even settling my hands in my pockets and stepping back, then softening my tone.

I asked, “Why are you so mad, man?”

His eyes became wild, bewildered, and crazy.

“Are you fucking kidding me? You think it's a fucking joke? All these threats and goddamn times I've had to stitch you up and keep this all a secret from the rest of the family? Do you know how hard it's been on Mom and me and everyone, and you're just going to stand there and make light about it?”

Now, this had me a little confused because it could
certainly
be the case that Dan was upset about me declaring myself a genius, and how it inadvertently affected both him and the rest of the family that no one else had managed to appreciate it, how it caused problems in personal relationships, et cetera, but somehow it didn't feel quite right. I wasn't convinced that was why he was this upset. There had to be something else.

But I shrugged my shoulders and left anyway, made my way back to my apartment and figured either we'd clear it up later or it would resolve itself another way.

Dan had heard the bits about “the blunt scalpel” and “incisions” and immediately leapt to the conclusion that I had been telling Gabriel—of all people—about my impulse toward self-harm when I was younger and crazier, as a potential yet-to-be-diagnosed borderline personality, and saying it in such a way that he felt I was bragging.

Up until this time, only Dan had seen me in my worst moments, sitting on the floor in my apartment in the shadows, when I was in my darkest places, and using an X-Acto or a switchblade and tearing into the meat of my biceps or forearms, working for scarification. It wasn't exactly Thanatos, but perhaps a kissing cousin. Something French, like
l'appel du vide
. I never understood it, and it would come upon me when I felt my most frightened—losing a girlfriend, a job, my apartment—and then suddenly Dan, as primogeniture, would be there, yelling, “What the fuck are you doing? Jesus fucking Christ, look at all this blood! I'm going to have to take you to the psych ward!”

And I'd stare at him like I didn't know who he was, until the idea of “home” began surfacing once again and I'd come to, with him cleaning all the open cuts and stitching up the bad ones.

I have no explanation for it, except that it felt like some sort of blood sacrifice to a low saint, in a time of pain. Low economy of self. I was feeling something primitive and inexpressible, so it needed venting. No more wars to fight, horses to steal, or counting coup. Just a sense of aggression, unyielding rage, shame, and fear. Or maybe I was just checking that the trapdoor was still there.

That's what it felt like, back then, when it would surface. It doesn't anymore.

We didn't speak for months, and before I knew it, Dan had moved away from Seattle, deciding that he'd had enough and it was time to be closer to family in Texas. That drunken Sunday argument began the longest estrangement of our lives, which kept me from flying to Austin, to Derek's bedside while he lay intubated.

I never knew how difficult it was to be brothers, never understood how it would overwhelm and inform every other relationship in my life as an adult, or how I'd have to constantly reevaluate Dan every time I'd see him, how much more complicated he'd become as what was basically a life-partner relationship in which I had no choice but to participate. We had unknowingly become overbonded from our childhood, both hating and needing one another in a cyclic rotation rooted deeply in the sort of love only POWs who help one another through death marches and the building of Burmese railroads can fathom. And we had no idea about the commitment; we ripped one another to shreds constantly as kids—then knew we had to make a reparative effort after, because neither one was going anywhere.

It's the hardest club, and the only club, in which I've had membership, and perhaps the reason why I find artificial associations like unions or fraternal orders calling one another “brothers” distasteful, even offensive.

It is a marriage, from birth to death, and it takes years to figure it out, to stop hurting one another and say, “We have only a few years left, considering how we've been living, and I'm exhausted from fighting. Please, let's get along better and enjoy only the love.”

You're not going to get that by “pledging” at a Greek house. You're not going to experience that by standing next to Bob at the plant for twenty years, working the swing shift, and sneaking off at 10:00 p.m. to slug down a six-pack of Milwaukee's Best in thirty minutes for lunch. You might get something very close to that in combat, as I've understood it, but it's still not biologically imperative, still not the common threading of DNA, still not family.

Brotherhood, at its most elemental, is a shared psychosis, a
folie à deux
, an intimate social obligation based on genetics, overlapping damage and testosterone, and you do not have a choice except to participate. Even running away is a participation, as I experienced.

And by the time I figured out how to be a brother to Dan, when we had figured out how to de-escalate arguments and opinions, knew how to step wide, stay out of the mud and let the other person spray and be an asshole, knowing he'd be back around in a bit, and we finally figured out how to navigate our club of two, then we had Derek to deal with, who knew none of the codes, had none of our neurological wiring, had nothing in the way of potential to join, except that Dad was his father (we were pretty sure) and Mom was his mother, and he knew most of the same people we did. Knew a really good corn tortilla from a microwaveable one, so to speak.

This might actually explain why I went through a period where instead of collecting father figures, I switched to collecting little brothers. I would meet them at work or from my neighborhood, or at my old karate school, and I would adopt them for a while, then feel uncomfortable and weird, and then just leave them, never to talk again.

I missed Dan and Derek so much sometimes that it ached, profoundly, in my core sense of self, sense of family.

We had some great stories, as brothers.

With Derek, I remember visiting him on a vacation from Seattle, after I'd started karate, and one perfect summer Saturday, three or four of his friends were visiting at our old house on Oklahoma Avenue and we had an improvisational karate riot, right there in the front yard. I was Hercules, if he had taken tae kwon do, and I was wrestling and kicking and taking down these five little fuckers to the grass, without ever hurting a single one of them, as I “kapowed” and “hiyahed!” and made every Bruce Li noise possible for like an hour, and they'd climb low-hanging branches and jump on my back, get mildly punched in the gut or head, and we were all laughing and sweating and yelling, like puppies at a puppy mill. It was fantastic, and he talked about it for years after.

Another time I taught him how to climb the tree outside Gramma's house in order to break in through the bathroom window, so he could look for any porn our previous Uncle Richard might have left behind, and I went through every single hiding place in that creepy, old house that Dan and I had figured out, and sure enough, there were still strong echoes of a 1970s porn habit, lingering in the darker little corners Gramma had yet to rumble.

As he grew older, I'd bring him up to Seattle, and it was here that he saw snow for the first time (a watershed moment in every South Texan's life), and he actually engaged and played with some kids from Montana one crisp spring morning when I drove him to Hurricane Ridge, and he took a photo with that family, who had built a slide into the hillside and were taking turns. Derek was a bit older than the kids, around fourteen, but he was no less enthusiastic and joyful. It was really sweet to see.

With Dan, our bonding was a bit more complicated, as adults. Since we grew up together, there was little that we didn't know about the other, but still, we were able to surprise each other sometimes. For instance, one Friday night back in Dallas, Texas, after I'd accidently moved there (long story, and not interesting—I was back in Seattle after nine months), Dan had been staying with me while establishing himself as a nurse in a long-term care facility, and neither of us knew anyone among the Dallas population, so we decided to stay in and watch cable.