Boy Kings of Texas (31 page)

She sat us at the table, and faced the man, who introduced himself as, well, as her husband. He told us his name, but again, memory fails. Johnny Swinger. He sat on one of the two double beds and slowly sipped his Johnny Walker and chuckled lightly throughout the evening, as we began talking small, and then impossibly smaller still.

The atmosphere in that room was charged, scaring me to the point of shaking and I was talking ever smaller to her, talking in terms so minute, so atomic, so that they never could come close to describing the frothing, lubed-up sex-pounding elephant in the room, and I did this well, so well in fact that the man eventually left, making an excuse about getting more ice, maybe more beer, and left both Dennis and me alone with his wife, who lit up a Capri cigarette and took five milligrams of valium, giving another one to Dennis as her old man left the room at the Motel 6.

She was free and easy with her conversation now, telling us how she was reviled back in her native Houston, in her neighborhood, because all the women hated how she dressed, how she wore her shirts and walked around with her tits falling out, she laughed. She giggled at this and wiped at her mouth with her shoulder.

The man was gone a long time, and things did not progress sexually, mostly because I was still talking about nonsense, about sense, about anything except sex, and then she excused herself to the bathroom, and while she was in there, the man returned with a bag of ice and more wine coolers for her, and as he closed the door to the room, the door to the bathroom opened and she appeared, dressed in red lingerie that was not at all flattering and far too tight. She looked like the carotid artery of a hypertensive blue whale.

This was the break they were looking for, and my delaying tactics were locked out: The sex was on.

She sat back on the bed and Dennis leaned forward, laughing, and kissed her, like he was a swinger from the porn movies his mother kept readily accessible. They smiled while kissing like teenagers, and I felt graciously excluded from this. But then she pulled me to her from my chair by the belt and she thought she was sexy as she undid my pants. I was drawn by the horrible irresistible vulgarity of the availability of first sex. The stolen skin magazines under Richard's bed, the jokes and insinuation my father made at my expense, the stories of his fuckings and goings, the drainage-ditch muddlings I've grown up around shoved me into this scenario, made me defenseless, crushed down on me as I let myself go to her, even through my repulsion.

But I still had my standards: I would not engage with Dennis there. I made the decision to get to her first, if this is how it was going to happen: At the very least, I was going to be first to mount her, and I took off my shirt while she pealed with delight and her husband grunted satisfied encouragement from his position on the opposite bed, feeding another Lay's potato chip into his mouth, watching as his wife's hand went down to Dennis' clothes.

The next ten or fifteen minutes I hardly remember, would need tremendous shock therapy and LSD or lots of booze to have the courage to revisit those synaptic streams.

I mounted this stranger in bad lingerie, her stout body convulsing violently in forced pleasure under me as I awkwardly imitated the miasma of pornographic movies I'd seen since I was eight.

I thrust forward from the hip, skinnily, hard, and noiselessly, feeling, upon entering her, a sort of déjà vu, and then nothing else as I sweatily worked atop her, disgusted at what I was doing.

At some point, I became hyperconscious of the fact that Dennis had become bored, had pulled his knees to his chin while sitting by the bed, and was distractedly looking around the room. The husband was happily crunching away on the potato crisps, watching his wife play porno star under a stringy, frightened underage boy.

I had the good sense at this point to pretend to orgasm, to end this horrible theater macabre, and with a fairly . . . anticlimactic . . . thrust, I got up, moved away from her, and immediately went to the bathroom, into the shower. I stepped in there with the hot water turned to its fullest setting and stood beneath it, scalding myself, for punishment, like a good Catholic. It was like the shower scene in
Silkwood
, and I wished I had a way to remove my skin.

I had the vague sense that Dennis had moved into position, had mounted her freshly as I had closed the door behind me.

The bathroom steamed up around me and I scrubbed with the sort of fervor you would see after an incident at a nuclear reactor. I wanted to scrub down with napalm, with razor blades and fire and then bleach.

I stayed in there about a half an hour, could not bear to come out, with the awful feeling that everything had now changed for the terrible. Finally, Dennis knocked on the door, asked me to get out, because they needed to get in.

I did finally emerge, pink and raw like a piglet and frightened to death that I now had heptatitis, gonorrhea, and syphilis, and was due for an outburst of explosive AIDS within the month.

She entered the bathroom as I dressed, Dennis behind her, seemingly happy, like this hadn't been the most horrific moment of his life, too.

She was still in her crumbling, bad lingerie, her sagging breasts now utterly ignorable, and she just wanted to know that we all had had a good time, she said, coyly. She put her arms around me, and I caught a look at myself in the mirror, the look on my face, absent, but disgusted. No longer there, like I passed a test, and had moved on already, about a year ago.

On the way home, Dennis talked excitedly about what happened when I had been in the shower. He had been second, as I had seen, and after he had his turn, the husband had mounted her next, and after a few quick lunges, he had finished his own business, then gone to sleep as the wife showed us out. How peculiar, I thought, feeling even more disgusted.

I couldn't think of anything near the idea of sex for months after this. The girl I had a crush on in school was suddenly abhorrent to me, and I did something horrible to make her and all her friends angry, and so they all stopped talking to me.

For weeks I waited to see if the sores of various Venusian-type troubles would surface, but nothing ever did. When I had my physical for the Marine Corps a few months later, they gave me an STD test at MEPS processing in San Antonio, and I came up clean, totally clean.

Dennis never spoke to me about that night again, but he did tell Dad and Dan, which was further humiliating. Dan wasn't exactly encouraging, or insensitive about it. In fact, I don't think he ever mentioned it to me; knowing Dan, he saw it in purely developmental terms, like it was bound to happen, like it was going to happen anyhow—it certainly didn't happen under optimum circumstances—but it taught me something, so just get past it and move on; you had sex for the first time. Mazel tov. Now get over it.

I did get one round of ribbing some days later from Dad and Richard, after the fact, but I think the circumstances were horrific enough to be evident even to their deadened sense of right and wrong, and it was never brought up again.

This was the other secret that I kept to myself and told no one, no one ever.

And it took me about a year before I even told my therapist, Sally, in my mid-thirties, and I did it on a day when I did not want to talk about my catastrophic relationship with my then girlfriend. I suddenly realized that the story, to a strict Freudian, would be like hoisting a half pound of
foie gras
before the nose of a true, unapologetic Frenchman. (Sorry, Philippe.)

And I was right: She seized upon it and held on to it, right to the end of that and about two other sessions like a great white.

Later, if ever I became uncomfortable during our therapy, I'd just make a reference to that night, and she'd follow it there deliberately, away from where I didn't want her poking about. But maybe Sally was smarter than that, and I wasn't really putting her off the trail, because lot of things emanated from that night. Maybe I'm not as smart as I thought I was, and I didn't come out as clean as I had hoped, from that shower.

Chapter 25

Dad's Warning

When Dan moved to Seattle, he had done it in that sort of brazen, headlong sort of way you do things in your twenties, too stupid to know that you can't do something, so you just go ahead and do it. Dan fell in love with the place.

We have to give Dennis, and the Army, that: They found Seattle for us.

At the time, about two years before MTV and FM radio had found Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Seattle was a hidden, mountain-cloaked rural metropolis unbeknownst to the rest of America, and a perfect starter city for me. I hadn't been invited, when Dennis asked Dan to come up, but that didn't stop Dan from asking me along, after living there a few months.

I wasn't ready, at the time, still reeling from the beating I got from Richard, still trying to disentangle myself from the mess I had made at school. Dan had been living in Seattle for nearly a year at that point and had become tremendously lonely, realized just how much my friendship and brotherhood had actually meant to him, after all those years as kids doing nothing but irritating and beating the hell out of each other. He would call me and tell me how clean and beautiful and cool and weird this place was; he absolutely drank in all the differences between this quiet Shangri-La and Texas, and all that we knew: the bitter heat, the entrenched racism, the limited possibilities, the large hair.

Seattle was subdued, a retreat for overeducated, liberal-minded people, a hideaway on the West Coast, with exceptional and fascinating drop-outs. It was a wet, quasi-British rain-soaked city full of promise and civility, where people judged you not by what you did or your race, but by your hobbies. It was the opposite of Texas. And beer. “Holy shit,” he said, “the beer! Stuff you've never heard of!”

“What, like Heineken?” I'd heard of Heineken.

“No,” he said, “microbrews. Beers that don't get out of the state.”

“Micro-beers?” I repeated. “What, like, tiny bottles?”

“No, moron, just microbrewed—limited distribution.”

“Oh,” I said. I still didn't know what he meant, but saying “Oh,” would get us to move on, give me more context. Maybe I could figure it out with more context.

Anyhow, it took me a week to find it on a map. Or rather, it took me a week just to find a map, and then find Seattle. It was up. Thing I always loved about living in Brownsville, Texas, was that the rest of the United States was always “up,” same as how going south always felt like you were going downhill. Brownsville was always at your navel, or at the point you were in relation to the rest of the map. Everything emanated from that point. Seattle was up and to the left, the very far left. Near Canada.

“Hunh,” I said to no one at all, in a library in Brownsville, looking at Seattle. “So that's where Canada is. Maybe I can go to Canada.”

The incident with Richard was a few months behind me now, and my face had healed, but my tooth remained cracked, though it wasn't giving me any problems. Things had settled down around me. I had begun working very closely with the good Dr. Blum at a small and terrible political newspaper,
The
Brownsville City Light
. He was an academic from Mexico City who had taken me under his wing at the developing publication. We were still struggling with bad technology, first-generation laser printers and the like, but we had a good relationship, talked extensively about many things. He was my first father substitute, which I tended to collect throughout my young adulthood. Dr. Blum was Jewish: spoke elegant Spanish and exquisite, if halting, English; carried himself with crisp manners; and was a very kind, very patient man, who looked like Inspector Poirot, but with a less manicured mustache. It was he who began my fascination with the Great Tribe, had created a passion for what he called “being a ‘generalist,' knowing a lot about a lot of things. “‘Specializing' in something is quite boring, don't you think?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, though I only figured out what he meant some years later.

He'd republish many of his essays that he'd written for the
Economist
and other high-level publications that were far too complicated for the audience our publication was hitting. In the two years of printing the twelve-page tabloid weekly, the only response we'd gotten was a letter to the editor handwritten in a lengthy, sweaty, unpunctuated scrawl that went on and on about the horrors and consequences of drug use, which we had transcribed and printed, and then it turned out, in the end, to have been written by Segis's mother, because she was convinced still that I had been making Segis take drugs.

By this time, I'd dropped out of college, was working on the newspaper with Dr. Blum, and was feeling rather claustrophobic. Dan's invitation to move to Seattle was looking better and better. Things at home had settled down—Richard had moved north with that Christian cult he'd joined in a hurry, and Mom and Dad had been well on their way toward separation, with Derek lost somewhere in the middle.

Gramma had gone on like nothing had happened, like she hadn't been a tremendous Judas goat the night of the beating, that she hadn't taken Richard's homicidal threats far too lightly. We avoided each other instinctively.

My only stimulation at this point had been
Northern Exposure,
I will admit with a degree of sheepishness. You might have called it a “boy crush” that I had on Rob Morrow, but I would call it all-out idolatry for Joel Fleischman. I wanted to be a nebbish Jewish doctor from Flushing, in the same way I had wanted to be Indiana Jones ten years earlier. The accoutrements would be different, sure, but I was certain I could carry it off. When I realized that
Northern Exposure
was filmed a couple hours outside of Seattle, the decision was clinched. I had been going a bit out of my mind, hanging around in a sort of illiterate limbo, knowing full well that there was a whole world of people with passions and interests just like mine right out there, and to get there, all I had to do was leave—just
leave
—and take that first fateful step out into the darkness. But it was frightening. Quite frightening. But I knew I had to do it; I was of age, but I had no money, nothing. I had saved about $500, that was about it.

I started to fester, in my own mind. Became very resentful of my situation, felt like the world outside of Texas was laughing, enjoying fantastic conversation about literature and art and coffee and . . . you know . . . things that mattered.

And I was stuck here, in Brownsville. Everyone I knew from high school had left, on their first leg of their eventual boomeranging, now off spending their surplus grants and loans in the bars of Austin. Everyone from Brownsville who felt themselves adventurous had moved to Austin. I didn't want to go there; it seemed like high school in a different venue. Like pitching a tent in your parent's backyard and pretending to camp.

I was hitting a level of desperation that would soon force my hand, force me to do something important, like a howling teakettle.

One Saturday morning, Mom and Dad both happened to be in the kitchen, in a rare breach of mutual distancing.

“I'm going to live with Dan, in Seattle,” I announced plainly. Loudly, too.

I was nineteen, expecting the same sort of response I'd had each time previous, which was normally utter denial, humiliation, or a command to stop talking nonsense.

Instead, they were quiet. Mom stood at the stove, Dad leaned his elbow on the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room, shirtless. He looked at me.

He nodded his head, faintly narrowed his eyes, and said, rather dramatically, “OK. But if I find out [heavy comma] that you are up there [heavy comma] selling your ass [heavy comma] I will come up there and shoot you in the head.”

Mom, in the kitchen, didn't look our way.

I was surprised they let me go this easily.

Dad's response hadn't even registered. If it did, it was only that he'd had so little faith that I would have to resort to prostitution to make ends meet. Well, fronts and ends. (Ha.) But I'd lived with the man for nineteen years now and knew not to take anything he said like it was coming from a human adult, more like a psychotic, tyrannical toddler, never to be taken seriously or trusted. His edict, saying he'd come up to shoot me in the head if he found I was down to rough trade, could be translated—as I did then—to something akin to, “Wow! Really? Good for you! Man, that's exciting stuff. I'm very pleased and happy for you! Good luck!”

To me, it was exactly the same thing. It was his way of blessing the enterprise.

A few days later, Mom asked me when I planned to make the trip. It was October when I made the declaration. I'd needed about another month or so of saving paychecks to get there comfortably. “Sometime in the coming year,” I told her.

“Alright,” she said. “Just as long as you plan for this.”

“Sure thing.”

But things weren't going well at that point. I was boiling over with a sense of abandonment, like something was happening, and it just wasn't happening
to me.
To make things worse, I'd stopped talking to everyone, all friends and acquaintances, after the beating from Richard, and the only contact I had with someone my age was the secretary at work, a cute girl a year older than me named Janie, from a neighborhood not a few miles from where I lived. Janie was a typical Brownsville girl, average, common, cute, and very Mexi-American. She was recently separated from the same boyfriend she'd had since kindergarten, was intending on marrying, the whole routine planned out for her by years of generational insulation and the unshakeable belief in the Virgin Mary. I had a crush on her, but she didn't know what to make of me. She had been really gentle with me, when she had first seen me at the office, after Richard had bruised me up. She'd even cried. We'd “had a moment” in the office some days after, but then she had reconsidered, pretended nothing had happened.

Then something triggered it, one night in mid-November. Boom. Dad and Mom had a big fight at the house, and somehow I got involved. I grabbed my stuff and went to the Holiday Inn, where Karsten used to live, and checked into a room. I bought a twelve-pack of beer and found a knife, sat in the room and made parallel cuts on my arm, leading across the forearms, about four or five of them from the wrist to the elbow. I did it slowly, cowardly, pushing down hard to feel the blade in the skin, watching the blood well up, then pulling down sharply. Then I did it again, and again. I still don't know why I did it. Dr. Blum and I had been discussing the various “sun dances” of the native tribes of the area, the evolved sensitivity toward anything that made one bleed, how the natives of the area had dramatic life-changing injuries happen to them every day, and they never reacted the way we would now, just sort of moved on, incorporated the new liability into their lives. How they would include this factor into their celebrations, draw hooks into their pectorals, under the armpits, string them out to a pole and run around the pole, stretching and bleeding and ripping their muscles out to ecstasy, is what they've written. I didn't agree, I told the good doctor.

I said, “Maybe they just liked the punishment.”

Doctor Blum laughed. “That's very Catholic of you,” he said. “No,” he said. “They were just letting out the dragons.”

“The dragons?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The dragons, all the demons that boil up in a person. The last of the dragons was let out in Durango, in 1967. Me and my two good friends, we had a ceremony, and we drank and smoked marijuana and shot off guns and let out all our dragons. That was the last of the dragons. We killed them, in ourselves.”

And that night, I was surfacing my own dragons, with a serrated knife, making those cuts, needing that pain. I was watching those dragons come to the surface. I was going out of my mind. I stayed in that room, lonely. I'd placed a call to Janie, but she never showed. I didn't expect her to.

She wasn't really who she was, in my mind. I had been in love with another girl, Gina, and Janie reminded me of her now, but more approachable. Gina had since left, on her way to school, following her dad's career path, as a lawyer, likely a judge, eventually. She had a tremendous future ahead of her. Janie, Janie was here. Janie was staying here, not going anywhere.

The next day I showered, took care of the wounds, wore a long-sleeved shirt, and made my way to work.

At some point, I just left it all to hang and went home to pack. I drank a lot of beers while doing so, called and inquired as to when the next bus to Seattle was leaving.

“Where?”

“Seattle.”

“¿A donde es esso?”
(
“Where is that?
”
)

“Washington.”

“¿Donde?”

“Washington State. West Coast.
Norte.”

“Oh. Hold on. Tonight, at 10:30.”

“Thanks,” I said. Click.

I got my things together, managed to sort and divide, cut ties to and shoved anything else I owned into two bags. I still hadn't told anyone I was leaving, right then. About seven or eight that night, I was overcome with a need to explain to Dr. Blum what I'd decided, get his blessing. I drove to his house, across Brownsville, and very timidly, in the dark, rang his doorbell. His wife answered, and I sheepishly asked for the good doctor.

When he came to the door, I think I wept. I tried to explain to him what was happening, but I couldn't. I was going crazy, I felt, like a top that was in the final stages of spinning, losing its center and wobbling out of control. And I couldn't exactly explain that to him. “My dragons,” I said, and I pulled back my sleeves.

“Oh, Domingo,” he said. “The last of the dragons . . . ”

He was very kind to me.

I said good-bye to him.

I drove home, crying. It was still early, but I needed to get my car dropped off at the office—I had arranged for one of the owners of the newspaper to buy the car for $500 and send me the money later—and then figure out how to get to the bus station. When I got home, Derek was watching television, still unaware of what was happening. He was six years old and started following me around the house as I was gathering my things, preparing to go. He watched me finish packing.