My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (19 page)

So, here we were, fourteen years later, and I was willing to try again.

It never really worked, because I was more in love with my slovenly lifestyle and watching movies than getting fit. So I didn't drop too much weight, but I did regain my balance, did recover some core strength, did eventually grow stronger and into better shape—more pineapple than pear, if you will—and the best thing about the place, really, was the new friends I had made.

In particular, I had met someone exceptional, the sort of person you don't really ever know exists until you meet them and think,
Hunh; I didn't think people like you ever really existed
, and that was Sarah, one of the blue belts and the mother of one of the younger wunderkinds in the kids' curriculum.

Sarah taught ethics and German and Greek philosophy to undergraduates at the Jesuit school here in Seattle, and she had a wicked sense of humor to boot. I was naturally drawn to her intelligence, of course, and would chat her up at every opportunity, catch her attention over group e-mails after I volunteered to help with the administration of the school, which needed all the help it could get.

On the days we weren't participating in classes at the school, we'd eventually take to walking a three-mile park a bit north from downtown called Greenlake, which is a central part of any true Seattleite's city living experience. We became good friends and I don't believe either of us had any flirtatious intentions; we just enjoyed our incredibly sprawling conversations about everything either one of us knew.

We never ran out of conversation, never reached the end of any topic, and after she returned from a three-month summer stay in Spain, we had even more to talk about.

“Did you eat a lot of chorizo growing up?” she asked.

“Why is it that food is always the entry point of any conversation when someone wants to ask me about my heritage? It's as if I'm a food critic.” There was a pause. Then I said, “I do actually own a
molcajete
. But I hardly use it.”

“Probably because it's more polite to ask you about food than it is to wonder aloud how deeply you identify with your ethnicity,” she said, after a moment of thinking about it.

“Hunh. Was there a lot of chorizo in Madrid? We mostly had it for breakfast, with eggs, growing up in South Texas. But it's an elastic term; like ‘sausage.' ”

“We didn't go to northern Spain; we stuck primarily to the south, around Andaluthia,” she said.

“Are you lithping for a reason or did you pick that up unconsciously?”

“It's how it's pronounced. The King of Spain had a lisp, so instead of having him live his life feeling embarrassed, the population adopted a lisp.”

“Hunh. Another reason why colonialism would never last in the New World. We would have pointed at him and laughed.”

“Are you guys stinkpots?”

“Well, in South Texas, we would have made fun of his lisp openly, as Texans or Tejanos. We're as unruly as the Irish. You know why the doors in Ireland are so brightly painted? During the colonialism of the British, some overseeing royalty died, and the colonies were told to paint their doors black, in mourning. Instead, the Irish went with blues, reds, yellows, and greens. Ornery.”

“Where did you read that?”

“Probably on the Internets, but it makes sense,” I said. “That sounds like something we'd do in Brownsville.”

That's how most of our conversations went. And while I considered the possibility that things might be “flirtish,” I quieted that desire, because at my age, I decided I wouldn't pursue that impulse every time it surfaced, and Sarah never really put that forward, as close as we were becoming. I respected that and knew that if we moved into romance, it would abbreviate the relationship quickly, and I liked her far too much to sleep with her, I decided.

Besides, I was with Steph, even if the chemistry there was inert. I had made a commitment, and I was going to abide by it. Love is more than sex, I told myself.

Further, I wasn't attracted to Sarah, I kept repeating to myself. Sarah dressed in a manner to deflect male attention when it was unnecessary, which corresponded well with the karate suits, or “do-backs,” as they're known in some Asian languages and martial arts schools.

Finally, Sarah was thirteen years older than I was, and I wasn't into another May-December romance, I told myself. I'd already had those.
We're just really good friends who enjoy the shit out of talking to one another, and that's that
.

Another time, Sarah asked what I was reading. I told her I was reading the maritime serial about the Napoleonic wars, by Patrick O'Brian.

“You like that Russell Crowe movie?” she asked, smiling.

“I like Peter Weir, yes. And Russell Crowe. But I absolutely love the books by O'Brian. They're a marvel of language, because while it's in English, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because of all the nautical terms, so I find myself skimming along, reading at speed, and my retention and comprehension actually increase if I don't stop and try to figure out what a ‘foc's'cle' or ‘mizzen mast' is, or where a quarterdeck is. It's like Anthony Burgess and
A Clockwork Orange
, and the made-up crypto-Russo language. If you just continue reading, you get the larger narrative by the context. It's really quite something else.”

“Hunh.”

“Yeah, and the most surprising thing is how funny he is. He has a great sense of humor. There's this one scene where the older, saltier seadogs feed grog to a ten-year-old kid, who mouths off to Captain Aubrey, calls him ‘Goldilocks.' It's hysterical. Then they have to tie him to his hammock overnight while he sobers up. I chortled.”

“And the . . . you know . . . buggering? Does he address that?”

“He does, actually, and said that while it did happen, it wasn't as rampant as people made it out to be. It's a total misnomer; the kids drew a wage and were expected to pull their own weight, so to speak. They usually had a chaperone in one of the officers. The British seamen weren't the buggering maniacs that Churchill made them out to be, in that speech, with the rum, sodomy, and the lash thing. They weren't child fuckers, like the Greeks.”

“That's a misnomer, too.”

“Really? None of that ‘bashing the shuttlecock from the feathered end,' as Wodehouse put it?”

“The Greeks weren't homosexual in the same sense, in the contemporary way we think of homosexuality. Older, bearded men had younger men under their care, for education and advancement, but there was no penetration. The Greeks had no concept of homosexuality; in fact, that term wasn't invented until the nineteenth century.”

“Hunh. So all the imagery and jokes about anal sex are wrong?”

“Well, they had sex, they just didn't carve their sexual identity into ‘homo' or ‘hetero.' The older men did this thing called ‘intercrural sex,' where they would rub their dicks into the younger men's thighs, using olive oil, and get off. There was no penetration, which they would have felt to be diminishing. And when the younger men had their beards grow in, then it was their turn to be the top. They had sex for different reasons, like bonding with a fellow soldier, and then they went home and had sex with their wives, to continue their family dynasty. It's all in
Phaedrus
, about the ‘lover' and the ‘beloved.' Though it's been toned down in the translation. In fact, there are whole volumes of Greek wisdom that were lost because the translators felt their nature was too immodest, so they just destroyed whole passages that didn't appeal to their virtuous standards.”

“That's just fascinating.”

“Does that surprise you? That it would be edited by white, Christian men like that?”

“I suppose it shouldn't, but it still upsets me to consider all that was lost.”

That was the nature of our conversations. They would go on and on and would stop only when we each had to return home to our obligations.

Of course, Steph was immediately jealous of my friendship with Sarah when I told her about it.

She was always really strange about sexuality and flirting. Once, when her mother sent her a couple of presents for her birthday, Steph opened the boxes and threw them across the room in disgust, as they housed a shawl of sorts and some bad hippie jewelry, very much in contradiction to how Steph dressed.

I tried to assuage things by joking with her, and then wrapped the colorful, gypsy-style shawl over my head and did a
Fiddler on the Roof
–type shimmy, worthy of Topol.

This gleam came into her eye, as if she was turned on, and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I looked like Harvey Fierstein, without makeup. How could this turn her on? But it did, and we ended up having lots of gins and tonic and we messed around dancing to music from our youth—New Order, Joy Division, Sinead O'Connor, and the like—and she really let go that night, really let herself loose and danced and became incredibly attractive and fun and charming, and I thought,
Finally, here you are. Thanks for coming up to the surface and playing
, as we swirled around and giggled and danced and fell sprawling on my bed, which collapsed under us. It started a golden few weeks of intimacy and reminded me why we were together, and why the trouble was worth it, in the end.

Or so I told myself. Passively.

After four months of training at Kinesis, I invited my mother to Seattle for my green belt test.

What made it a bit pathetic was that the green belt was, as a friend of mine back then called it, a “rank amateur” standing. We weren't friends very long after that.

Mostly, it was an excuse for my mother to fly up to Seattle and meet Steph, since we'd become engaged, so I asked my mother to come up and witness the test, as a way of passively giving me her blessing. “Just take a few days, meet my betrothed, and see what I'm doing, how I'm living. It's important to me,” I think I said.

And miraculously, Mom took some time off work to visit me, and not while I was laid up in a hospital or in a psych ward. It was touching.

There was a deep, sincere part of me that needed the validation from my mother, after all this time. The test was nothing, really, except the only sort of accomplishment I'd reached in the last ten years, with my “career” as a designer taking the swirly path down-sewer, and I remembered how phenomenally good it had felt way back when to do these tests, to mark your progress as a martial artist, and have your friends and family come to cheer you on, and watch as you plied yourself valiantly through exhaustion and had your face kicked in once in a while by an overzealous dickhead who didn't understand this wasn't really combat.

So it was set, and I had been really earnest in my preparations for this test, remembering how it had been fourteen years ago when I was twenty-five or so, and how badly reductive it had been to me, both physically and emotionally, and had actually broken my fascination with karate and all martial arts: I knew, after that test, that this wasn't for me. Going past green belt, in this system, required a level of subservience and compliance I was still incapable of giving anyone. And I will credit my instructor then with seeing that quite clearly, ten years ago, and how uncomfortable that test became to everyone watching because I wouldn't break, and she wouldn't stop trying to break me, barking commands at me like I was a proud recruit in a boot camp, or a dog in dire need of an alpha, or a shock collar.