Boy Kings of Texas (26 page)

“What happens now?” I said to the auntie woman.

“Now you come before the
jutch
!
” she cackled. “We send you a notice and you have to come to
cort
!
”

She yells this loud enough for everyone in the cage to hear. She was back in charge. Even the old man in the solitary drunk tank managed to express a mildly cross look across his silent face that his favorite potential bride of the night before was being given his papers.

All these things were stuffed into an A-9 envelope and handed over to me with a sort of delighted satisfaction this woman rarely experienced, it seemed.

I was shown to a side door that coincidentally emerged into the same corridor and past a dismal cafe that I'd visited not a week before, triumphant as a junior reporter and flush from a journalistic mission, feeling terribly superior to all the people needing to be here, because of work, because of misdeeds, because they wanted nothing else, because they were in Brownsville fucking Texas.

And now, clutching my legal papers to myself, cold in my T-shirt and denim jeans and humbled horribly, I walked this hallway like a beaten kid. The cafe was in its opening groans, and as I left through the front doors, I saw the sweetest sight I think angels and soldiers see, when all gets lost and then gets found again, and it's Mom, in her beat-up silver Taurus, too many years too old but still her reliable car. And Derek, standing in the front seat in his pajamas, and looking through the windshield, pulled his pacifier out of his mouth and waved at me, and I waved back, and Mom gave me a sad smile, waving back, and I walked toward them, got in the back seat without saying a word, and Mom drove us to McDonalds, a huge cleft in my brain waiting for the crack detectives of the BPD to make the connection between my arrest and El Jardin.

Mom was gentle, left me to myself. No longer the mother of a child, she felt, somehow. Derek was a great comfort to me in his innocence, and for the next two weeks or so, as I worried, worried and slowly began to recover from the horrible anticipation of my foul, foul deed, and the shoe that never dropped, well, it just never dropped.

The citations and orders to see a judge never visited our mailbox. My record, when revisited a few months later by the Marine Corps recruiting officer, had no mention of a P.I.

(Point of fact: I didn't go into the Marine Corps, though I had done all the processing, went through all the preparations. Mare led me through the maze of Pell Grant applications and enrolling into college at A&I, where she was attending after I graduated high school, and instead of getting on that bus headed out to San Diego, at the very last minute, I ended up going to college. For a while.)

“You didn't even have to go to court?” asked Segis some time later, when I was finally able to talk about that night. He was the only other person who knew I'd been picked up for P.I. I didn't tell him about the school.

“No,” I said. “It just sorta disappeared.”

“You lucky fucker,” he said.

I'm assuming that either I was still considered a juvenile, and it didn't stick after I turned eighteen—however Segis was sixteen when he was picked up, and duly processed—it was either that, or the paperwork was too embarrassing to bring before a judge and was ditched in a trash can by someone unwilling to point out his illiteracy to the court system.

Either way, I never owned up to what I did at El Jardin. I never told anyone about it, either. I never told Mom that the reason why I looked so dark for weeks after was not from the shame she thought I was experiencing from the things she'd known I did, but from the secret things that grew much further down in a person, things that have no explanation when they blossom virulently in the dark. Things that are not for a mother to forgive.

I never told anyone that story, or what had happened inside that jail. I was too ashamed. But somehow, the night I saw my very French friend, Philippe, worrying over a bad day at work, I just blurted it out over dinner at a Seattle bistro, where he was disgusted by the food. I didn't see him very often, as he lives in Los Angeles, and did remote work for the publishing company where we both worked, him as a publisher and me as a designer.

Somehow, I thought the
Sturm und Drang
of the tale would take his mind off things, if only for a bit. When I finished, he seemed puzzled, bemused as to why I was telling him that story.

“I dunno,” I said, shrugging it off. “It was both horrifying and quite funny, I thought.”

Philippe thought about that for a moment.

“That's certainly a stone in your garden,” he said, as he picked something distasteful off his plate.

Philippe said things like that, things translated literally from the French, phrases that make much more sense in the places they originate.

Chapter 22

Crying Uncle

It was Father's Day when Mom and Dad were invited to Kingsville to be with my three sisters and their respective boyfriends for the weekend, at their college, to legitimize further nuptials.

I wasn't invited along, but I preferred it that way, as I was accustomed to being alone and I'd have the place to myself without having to wonder when they'd be coming home, what they'd see if they did. Not that it mattered at this time, since I was producing a crap local political publication and making enough money so that I no longer depended on them for much. I was nineteen years old and had just dropped out of college, though not consciously. I just didn't go back, for now, until I figured out what the hell it meant.

Mom and Dad would be gone, and I thought I'd invite my friends over, have a small, respectable party. It made me feel quite the adult.

Gramma, as usual, was across the driveway in her brick hovel dissolving further into her sweat-soaked velour easy chair, probably fresh from a shower and wrapped in a terry cloth robe, and dutifully working on her cigarette-butt sculpture of a porcupine, which is what she did when she watched Spanish
telenovelas
. She'd stopped being so hysterical about work at this point, stopped pressing others into service, a combination of her old age and the absence of work in the barrio. Dad was working long-haul trucking now, and I was the only one press-gang age left at home.

The publication I was producing had an ulterior function that was superior to muckraking the dirty local politics, but only I knew it. Its primary purpose was to score the owner, Alfredo, free breakfasts at his favorite “coffee shops” around town, in exchange for running the business cards of the coffee shops throughout the twelve-page tabloid. There was hardly any advertising besides that. Alfredo was nearly seventy, a bail-bondsman who specialized in springing Mexican prostitutes. He'd throw their bail, get a little something in return, then drive them to the border and they'd disappear. More often than not, he'd never see them again. I don't know how he made his money.

He would, however, pay me $200 a week to compose his “newspaper,” which is what I was doing in high school and college for free. I was happy to do it, at nineteen. We had crap in the way of equipment, crap in the way of editorial content, crap in the way of printing and design, but somehow, we managed to get a twelve-page publication out every week. I was a production department in a pair of trousers, and I was happy.

So I was feeling flush for the moment, not too disappointed at catastrophically failing so many classes at A&I the semester before.

Segis and company were invited over that Saturday night, as a result. I was even making dinner—a tremendous leap forward in sophistication.

All afternoon, I was fielding phone calls on Gramma's remote line, installed in our house long before, back when the trucking business was booming and we had to receive calls on both her line and ours, and Dad had been concerned because he thought we were missing too much business when her line would go unanswered. The remote line, in our kitchen, was to keep us from having to run back and forth between the two houses.

Eventually, it would become our single means of communication because Dan had adventurously discovered he could dial out to the 976 numbers we'd found in the back pages of the skin magazines under Richard's bed. We spent a lot of our free time under that bed, reading every part of the magazines and then ensuring that they were sorted in exactly the same way, when we left them, in case Richard had left them in a particular order.

Dan had taken things further by dialing up these numbers with no regard for consequences. In a complete absence of sense, he wanked off a $500 phone bill and then just hid the bills, when they were delivered in the mail, sort of how I managed my manufactured report cards in high school.

One afternoon, while looking for a fresh magazine in our customary exchanging ground under the spare bed's mattress, I found three portentous phone bills from Southwestern Bell, the last one threatening disconnection.

This was way too big for me to hide, under the code of brotherhood secrets. There was a lot that I kept secret, things that I won't even divulge here. (Like the time he . . . no; sorry. Too gross. Too humiliating. Even for Dan.) Thing was, I had just started high school, and I lived by the telephone and getting calls, and the thought of losing that one metric of social standing frightened me—how do you explain something like that away, at that age?—and more than anything else, we lived ten miles outside of town. The telephone was
necessary
.

This was far too much.

So I timidly gave the bill to Mom, who raged at me for not coming to her sooner, who then gave the bill to Dad, who raged at both of us, and then gave Dan a tremendous beating while Dan was working at the sand pit, loading trucks after school. (Is it any wonder then, the pathology of our sex?)

When Dan drove the tractor home from the sandpit that night, awaiting a further beating at home away from the prying eyes of the hired truck drivers, Dan gave me a murderously silent look that told me what I already knew, that he wasn't the only one who would be bloodied that day.

Our phone line was eventually cut, and we were left to sharing Gramma's line. Plan B always had a way of becoming plan A, back then. Still.

That Saturday afternoon, in 1991, I drive to a mom and pop store to buy beer, and then over to the H.E.B. to buy the makings for spaghetti, and not from a can, which would be that evening's dinner. Quite sophisticated.

Segis calls around five, excited. So does Didi, a mutual friend, a bit later, both on Gramma's line. Gramma picks up her extension each time so I talk over her, and she realizes it's for me and then hangs up. This is the arrangement we've come to, in sharing the line.

I ask Didi if she can pick up Segis and Arnold, and she agrees. She's been the girl Smurf for a while now, having just turned twenty. She'd been knocked up by some bloke named Ricki, who'd gone off to Nebraska to work on some farm job and promised he'd send for her in a few months. In the meantime, she's developed a crush on both Segis and me, but mostly me. She has a lisp, which makes her endearing, but mostly I avoid her; the embryo growing in her freaks me out, especially if it's going to be anything like Ricki—farmer chav.

Gramma's phone rings again and I answer quickly, saying, “Hello?” because if it's anyone important, I want to make sure they don't hear Gramma asking, “
Bueno?
” The further away from speaking Spanish you are, the whiter you could be, and I wanted to be white. So white I was Jewish, actually, like Joel Fleischman, from
Northern Exposure
. It had been my only intellectual nourishment at this time. So I would leap on the phone when it rang, tried to beat out her old, tired woman reflexes.

This time, when I answer, I hear a kid's voice abruptly demand, “
Quien es
?” It's obviously not for me. The phrase, as a telephonic hailing, is a rude demand for the person who answered to identify himself, immediately. There's no protocol or good manners here. It's vulgar, rude. Farmhand rough. Makes me angry. So I respond curtly in English, thinking the caller wouldn't understand, and say, “No one who wants to talk to you,” and hang up, get back to my spaghetti.

I'm feeling quite advanced, feeling like quite the urbanite. I'm making a crap salad and thin noodles with Ragu and serving it on paper plates, but I'm immensely proud of myself.

Half an hour later, Didi's car pulls into our driveway, the northern one facing onto Oklahoma Avenue. I look out the front window and see Didi, Segis, and his sidekick, Arnold.

Segis is dressed in his usual black concert T-shirt, a heat-pressed image of Jim Morrison leaning drunkenly on a microphone on the front; ripped and faded blue jeans with dirty white tennis shoes, the laces undone. At this age, we had each identified with a particular band, like a totemic emblem to grow around, and Segis's signifier of choice was The Doors. He ate, breathed, and drank Jim Morrison. Arnold was in the middle of deciding between two other unremarkable bands from the 1980s, I forget which.

Personally I regarded myself to be far more stylish, so my totemic band of choice was obviously the Cure. Maybe the Smiths. But definitely the Cure. But you couldn't get the Cure or the Smiths paraphernalia in Texas during this time, so I had to be content with dressing as much like Robert Smith as I could, which wasn't much, since he wore cardigans and lipstick and his hair like Elizabeth Taylor after a hard night with Richard Burton. Couldn't exactly get there, from here.

Anyhow, Arnold is lugging about his usual charge: a boom box with the duo cassette player/recorder. Segis and Arnold take it everywhere they go, and as sidekick, it's Arnold's responsibility to lug it about, like a radio operator in a Vietnam war movie. The boom box comes up to Arnold's knee, and he wobbles when he walks with it.

Didi is taller than all of them, and she's got her hair pulled back. It's permed, basically in the same style as Arnold's, in the traditional lesbian cut, except Didi has clawlike bangs. She's wearing acid-washed jeans tucked into knee-high black velvet boots and a frilly denim jacket. Think Bon Jovi here.

Lined up together, we are like a rolling trip across the FM dial that Saturday night. I am, of course, public radio, over in the low 80s, while Segis and Arnold are both classic rock stations, in the high 90s and 100s, while Didi is a pop or R&B station, in the high 100s, in her New Jersey–ness.

We have beers with dinner, the Coors I had bought at the store, and Segis had brought his own case of Budweiser. Fantastic. Dinner is simplistically short, abrupt, because they, as guests, feel as awkward as I do as host, so we get through that part of the night hastily and get down to the drinking beer and talking, which is something we are all far more accustomed to doing.

Sometime during our fifth or so beer, we hear an engine roaring from the shared driveway, between Gramma's house and ours, tires spinning out violently and gravel showering and skittering over concrete. We all look up at once from our conversation and see my Uncle Richard's truck, the high beams blaring through the dust cloud, as the source of this disturbance. I have no fear or cause for alarm as I walk out the front door to see what the trouble is.

Though he had the reputation of a ruffian and brigand in the neighborhood, Richard had never shown any of that ugly, violent behavior to our family. He had always been respectful to Dad's family, to us. He was, after all, Dad's stepbrother, and he had been a sort of older brother to us all.

Richard, dislocated as a baby and made younger brother to my father, had somehow become everyone's older brother, in the barrio.

He kept order, as kids. He was always the largest, the toughest, the guy who organized the scrapping matches between us smaller kids and jumped in when things got heated. He defended us against any unruly or unjustly aggressive neighborhood non-relations. Around him, we felt protected. He was, like I said, our oldest brother.

That would all change tonight.

In return, Dad had always kept him working, kept him hired as his first
leftenant,
kept him well rewarded and flush, until the work dried out and Dad had to take on long distance hauling for a corporate company. Richard had to go his own way at this point; leaving Brownsville wasn't in Richard's comfort zone, and so he eventually did what came natural to everyone else in the barrio, and he became muscle for a drug smuggler, one of Dad's best friends, a cousin, from way back.

For a few years after making the career change, it wasn't unusual for me to find the trappings of the smuggling trade when I'd poke around in Richard's bedroom, still looking for that mythical, Brigadoon-like collection of pornography (now sold off in a pawn shop). Once, he caught me in his room while he was sleeping, and rather than scold me for it, he had grabbed a black trash bag that recently held twenty pounds of Mexican pot from under his bed, and then shook it so that it all fell into a single corner of the bag, and then he twisted it off and told me quick, get it out of there, go smoke it with my friends. It was about $100 worth of free shake. My friends Alex and Henry and I got tired of it after a while, and tried to find out what were the largest-sized joints we could roll, since we couldn't afford Zig-Zags. We tried all sorts of different types of paper—newspaper, toilet paper, paper bags—with horrible, throat-scorching results. We eventually ended up with an unintended and clinical fascination with Pink Floyd. Good times.

The thing was, I had no idea how bad Richard's cocaine habit had become, until one afternoon when we were having an impromptu cookout on our concrete veranda. I was cutting up, making Richard and Dad laugh, and Richard was on his way out for the evening in his dressy denim, when out of nowhere his left nostril hemorrhaged horribly and a torrent of blood cascaded over his mouth, just letting loose and pouring over. Even then he was so high that I had to point it out to him because he hadn't noticed. I felt very sad for him.