My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (42 page)

We made it back to the brothel/hotel, and after dinner, we settled in for the evening and I drank a couple of Bombay Sapphire airplane bottles while I sat her down and played a song for her, hoping she would get it.

“It's about where I'm from,” I said to her, as she leaned back in the bed, and I explained, line by line, how this song was awakening something in me.

It was a song about cowboys and border bandits. I explained, “See, he's at his end, when the song opens, and he's having a moment of existential crisis, as much as a borderland bank robber can have, and he tries prayer when he's backed into a corner with just four bullets left.”

“Uh hunh,” said Sarah, looking at me like she wasn't sure whether to giggle or encourage me.

“No, seriously,” I continued, “and he suddenly realizes the absurdity in hoping that things will change for him from an external source, and he instead decides to count on his own moxie. It's Texas, baby; no one's going to do it for you, you have to do it yourself, no matter how the odds are stacked against you. It's my people, from the border. This is who I am,” I said to her, weakly, mostly because I was trying to convince myself, too.

“Come back to bed and keep me warm,” she said, and I did.

She didn't try to tell me that every culture everywhere has a mythology of resilience, or that Texas in particular glamorized that “outlaw country” image with Willie Nelson and his contemporaries as an entirely commercial fabrication to sell country records in the '70s. She knew I needed to cling to something right now, besides her, so she let me cling to this, this idea of “my people,” from the border, being survivors, because I needed to survive this.

There was no other choice.

Later that night, I received a call from Steph's mother, asking if I'd be back in town later the next day to take Steph to an appointment she had at a specialist. “Oh, she's had a remarkable couple of days,” she told me. “She's talking and making sense now; it's amazing. She's even getting around on a walker.”

This was surprising; when I left, she had still been in that covered bed and appeared to be cognizant, but you could never be certain.

I had allowed the call to go to voice mail while I steeled myself to speak to Steph's mother, and I excused myself from Sarah so I could have some privacy, but she overheard everything. She heard the switch in my voice, baleful and subservient.

When I walked back into the bedroom, Sarah was shaking, putting her clothes back on.

“What's wrong?” I asked.

“I feel dirty,” she said. “I feel like we're having an affair.”

“No, it's not . . . I'm not . . . I'm sorry; I don't know what I'm doing. But I can't just leave her like that. They've been shitty and mean to me, but I can't just leave her,” I said.

We crawled back into bed, but the chemistry died out for that night, and we just talked in low voices until the morning.

The next morning, I was feeling like things might be changing when my car gave out on the way into Seattle. Just like that, my temperature gauge started spiking, and my car began smoking and spewing shit out from under the hood.

One more level descended.

De profundis.

I had just made it over the pass and was entering some unknown town on the outskirts of Seattle when the car gave up on me. Steph's mother was expecting me in an hour, and I summoned all the resolve I had and phoned her, and when I said my car had broken down on the highway—this little Jetta that had been very, very good to them for the last five months—she let loose a string of vitriol and anger directed at me and my car and then hung up, for emphasis.

I sat there, in my car, and shook, until I realized I was outside some roadside mechanic and managed to get the guy to look at my car and give me a quote on the thermostat, which was a month's rent. I called Sarah, who came and picked me up an hour later. I was quiet and spent as she took me back to her house and I sat on her couch with Jack County, who put his head on my lap as I cried into a glass of something very red, almost laughing as I saw a tear roll down my cheek and into the goblet of wine, thinking,
I bet the French have done this
, and I felt entirely defeated, and I tried tried tried to give up. Let go.

Her phone calls started that day, I remember.

It was like getting phone calls from the dead.

My iPhone lit up with Steph's ringtone, and I was taken aback at first, confused. Then I answered it and heard something that sounded like Steph's voice, except in a forced whisper; remember, her larynx had been crushed. But there was something else I couldn't immediately place.

“Hello, June, I love you. How are you?”

What?

“Hello, June, I love you, it's Steph. I'm back. I love you. Thank you for taking care of me and my parents.”

I thought,
Oh, dear fucking God, no; not this
.

“Steph? Is this you?”

Hi, June, I love you. Yes, it's me. You were supposed to take me to the specialist but it's been rescheduled for tomorrow. Can you come and see me?”

“I . . . I'm sorry, I can't,” I said. Then it hit me, what I was hearing: She was speaking with a British accent.

“Why not? I love you,” she said. “Please come. I love you.”

I had to think about it, but I finally said, “Because if I'm in the same room as your mother, I'm liable to take out her other eye,” probably because I was a bit drunk, but also because it was funny. The thing is, you probably shouldn't joke with someone freshly out of a coma.

“Oh, all right,” she said, then followed it with, “I love you. Come see me tomorrow,” and she hung up.

I was knocked on my heels, couldn't even explain this to anyone as I tried to take in what had just happened. About an hour later, my phone rang again and it was a number I didn't recognize, so I let it go to voice mail.

When I played the message, it was the Seattle Police Department, some desk sergeant asking for me, wondering about some threats I may have made to an ex-girlfriend and her family, and I started laughing and crying and I swear my face was exactly that sad Pagliacci clown, as I sat in Sarah's bedroom and giggled and cried and giggled some more as Sarah came in and thought I'd really lost it this time.

A few days later, I picked up my car and managed to get hired on by a small boutique pizza restaurant near my neighborhood as a delivery guy. No shit. I sublimated every feeling of indignation and shame and decided that this was the low, tough gear that I'd inherited from my Gramma, that this was what I needed to do in order to rebuild and recover, in the absence of health care and mental health professionals. I would have to work a shit job to process through my anguish and recovery. It somehow made sense to me.

Besides, finding addresses, folding boxes, and mopping was about all my mental bandwidth was capable of enduring, so I worked with three or four kids in their early twenties and I became the far-out old man who was fresh out of work, doing what he had to do, talking to these college kids younger than my little brother like I was Dennis Hopper, saying, “Yeah, man; I remember seeing Nirvana at the Vogue before they broke big.”

I'd encountered people like this before, in my own travels and odd jobs, older guys who took on these shit low-wage jobs while they were waiting for things to turn around. There was a dignity to it, I felt, and now it was my turn.

So I did it. I wore their T-shirts. I took my marching orders from kids younger than Derek, and I was kind and quiet and did everything I could to keep my dignity intact.

But, oh, dear God, did I hate it. Actually, that's not true. As a pizza delivery guy, you sort of slip by and through and no one really pays much mind to you once they diagnose you as “pizza delivery guy.” It's not like New York, where there's been a rash of break-ins and assaults, all done by opportunistic pizza guys. I can't answer to that. Here, in Seattle, these kids were just stoned all the time and somehow still managed to deliver their pizza products, usually intact.

My manager was a kind woman, and I managed to make friends with the kids and didn't come off as too weird, though I did find it quite difficult to talk small and keep conversations from getting heavy. I just don't own that particular grace.

For instance, when one of the younger drivers said she was taking a design course and was complaining about having to learn typography, I said, “Oh, you couldn't be further from the truth. Typography is fascinating, the semiotics and signifiers, down to the relationships between the characters—it's incredible. Do you know the history of the ampersand? It was actually supposed to be the twenty-seventh letter, though it's the French or Latin word
et
, if you look at it. And the name: It's a corruption of the phrase, ‘And, per se, and.' Get it? ‘Ampersand?' It's really quite smart,” and when I was done talking, I noticed everyone in the room was looking at me strangely, probably because they were stoned, so I stopped.

Stuff like that.

And it really wasn't so bad for the first month, because all I did was listen to audio books and drive around feeling pathetic, delivering pizza besotted with tears and feeling like the act of working was in itself, working, or rehabilitative. I was starting again, and so I didn't put pressure on it. I just did it. There wasn't anything else to do, so I just did as I was told.

At night, I'd go over to Sarah's when I could.

Eventually, I did as she had previously asked and polished up six of my best chapters, wrote a short introductory letter, and presented her with the printed versions she had requested.

After I gave her what she'd asked for, I sat around thinking,
Well, maybe I should send out some of my own, since it is, after all, a numbers game, when you don't know what you're doing
, and in my bookshelf, I found my old directory of literary journals that I had used when I first started sending things out for potential publishing and had little understanding of the codes or language used. I'd basically been sending my stuff to everyone listed, whether they published nonfiction, science fiction, or poetry, and hadn't realized my error until I was well into the E section.