My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (49 page)

It's been all about family, after all. Derek was the lost sheep, and so was Steph. She was able to reintegrate and complete her family after her accident, which is what she always wanted, truly, under the bravado and fear, and this whole time I thought it was me that had left the orbit, left the family wounded, but it was Derek, really, that was the missing piece. I was trying to get back to the source all this time without even realizing it, and it was only through finally publishing my first book, sort of defining a core within my family, that I was able to do what no one had been able to do previously, and I gave our lost youngest brother a vehicle for redemption, and it's bewildered and amazed everyone.

Everyone except, of course, for Dan, whose feelings are still hurt, and hurt deeply by Derek, and Derek's inability to do there what he's doing here. But this one is not on me. I'm letting Derek take that one on himself, when he's ready, so that the club of three can finally be complete.

This will likely be the most difficult passage I think I'll ever write, sitting here and thinking about these last two memoirs and the stories I've told—sometimes implicitly, others maybe accidentally, or then without really understanding the consequences of what I was doing when I trudged blindly on, telling my own story, and accidentally braiding other people's life history along with mine. I didn't mean to biograph others, half the time, and I didn't mean to encapsulate their lives with one snapped frame where I just happened through. The thing is, when I met these people described in my books, and I wrote about them, I meant to capture who they were for me, for that time, in order to tell about that specific time. It had nothing to do with them, really; it was entirely, as all artists will tell you, solipsistic. For that moment, or that sequence. What they left, as an impression, on me, and how I report it.

This is what I've figured out about how life works: Shop at Trader Joe's for your basics, and sometimes you should visit the Goodwill, but not on weekends, and then when you're not looking, life is going to slam you in the back with something you weren't expecting—sometimes good, usually bad—but you get up, you just have to get up, dust off, shake the gravel from your palms, see if there's any blood on your knees when you pull away the fabric, and you just continue. You just do. You have to.

Just do that until you can't.

You try to find love in the moments in between, and sometimes you're the guy doing the knocking over to others, and you should
really
try to stop that if you can, but mostly, we're all in this together, trying to get to the same places, so be kind, be kinder, and when you realize you're being a dick, just stop.

It's easy, when you try. Just stop being a dick.

I was able to fix most of the damage I did to my family and friends during my implosion of reason and mental health. It took close to two years, but my friendships with Dougherty and others who witnessed my collapse finally circled around, and my friendships are stronger as a result now, held much more gently and closer to the heart. And I treasure, cherish every conversation with each member of my family, won't allow myself to fall into a passive role or take any exchange “for granted,” as the saying goes. Trying for fewer endings, more beginnings. I've taught myself how to hold onto and move through those moments now, and appreciate them as much as possible but then let them go like the quiet beats in a poem, like the last time I saw my mother, when I stayed with her overnight for a reading event in Houston, and how she stood outside in the cold morning in front of her house in order to watch me drive my rental back to Houston Hobby, clutching her robe at 5:00 a.m. in that weird Houston morning mist and waving a sad good-bye to her son, whom she trusts now, though she still looks at me in befuddlement and wonder as to who I am, at my core.

I'm reminded of a flight I was taking through the Midwest, flying into Michigan for an event, and my flight came in really late at night, a cloudy, snowing, cold night, and for the first time on a flight, I was actually scared. It was a small plane, smaller than an MD-80, not a Boeing manufacture but, mind you, I've met quite a few Boeing employees and let's just say they don't exactly inspire trust in the product. (I'm joking, of course.) Nevertheless, there I was, flying into a regional airport in Michigan, and when the plane finally broke cloud cover, all the stars of the universe conspired in the most majestic tapestry of light and wonder that I think I'd witnessed only once before, while out in an estuary on the Gulf Coast, with no lights around, and I could actually see the curvature of the earth, how it corresponded with the heavens. It was magical. Far too much to take in. Sublime. But that night, somewhere over Michigan, I was immediately under the Big Dipper, and it pointed directly at the North Star.

Now, this might not be a big deal to most people, but the wonder I felt at that moment, that the two stars in the Dipper were actually pointing at Polaris—and not slightly off to the left or right, like I've always seen from my vantages either in Texas or on the West Coast, informed by the Coriolis effect—this actually brought me to tears.

It wasn't a lie, after all. All those books I'd read, growing up, about how the Big Dipper actually points
directly
at Polaris, they were telling the truth.

I just needed to be in the right place to see it.

The stars, the compass points, were not, in fact, off a little this way or that; the universal compass was not, in fact, broken or drunken: It was true, and right, finally.

It was like what was happening in my life, at the time. Love was its own gravity that was now turning my compass to the true cardinal points. Love was elemental. Love was Polaris, and it was finally lining up, like the books had promised.

I keep telling people that my next book will be a cookbook, full of recipes, and maybe dick and fart jokes, as a way to break away from memoir.

But how can you, really? Even with fiction, your backstory seeps into your “imaginative” choices; your friends, associates, and coffee handlers inform your memory, your survivor's tale. I can try to come up with characters entirely foreign to the demands of my experiences and I will still see, when I close my eyes and try to come up with an absolute and pure hero, Brenda Brown, when I stung her on the hip and she popped me on the temple, and in that moment, in that zing of contact, she said, in our eye contact, nonverbally, “I know you; look at you. You're so goddamned cute. Give me more.”

And I miss her. So, so much. No one will ever meet anyone like her again.

Or Stephanie, broken in her commitment to playground purity and justice and what she determined was right, right above all else, entitled to her ferocity until the universe decided to beat it out of her, then gave her everything she ever wanted, and her family back.

And my older brother, Dan, when he was an absolute protector, twenty-four years old and 165 pounds, firm meat and fresh out of the army and assured of every threat coming at us with a left hook that could knock out Jesus. Just fucking stand behind him and stand your own ground: He was every solution, every right decision, if you trusted him. All you need to do is follow him, and fight. Fight like him. It's going to be all right. Just get behind him and hold your own.

Then maybe, Derek, struggling just to feel like he's doing something right.

Or Mom, with her epic melancholia, her sad, sad love for her family. Or Dad, bewildered and trying. Sober now, and just needing to know what he needs to do next, to make up for all that time. Sobriety changed him into a father, and he's been our father these last few years in a way we never thought possible.

And God: Sarah.

Sarah, my devoted, my beloved, my love.

Where did you come from?

She wanted to leave, for a while. “You were safer,” she told me one morning, “when you were more pathetic.”

Fearless Sarah who once skied like a Kennedy, climbed rock faces like a spider, ran a house of interesting broken people until she became broken herself, and let a sliver of light into her perfect world as the cracks started showing, where I was able to slip in and hold her up before she crumbled along with her upper-middle-class existence.

Sarah in the twilight on a weekend morning, her leg pulled over just so, and the wolf I just helped put at bay, with my love and adoration for her, as she sleeps, for now, for a few hours, and I look at her in that morning light, listening to her breathing, listening to her content, listening to her feeling safe—of all things, with me—and it's this bewildering moment that it's me, with her, now, sitting here, my witness to an incomprehensible beauty and the swirl of chaos in both our lives that has put me, here, sitting in her bedroom, as her lover, and her loved, and has me sitting in it still, as I watch her sleep.

What incredible fiction could have imagined that?

That's the magic of memoir, the impossibility of truth. A crystallization of all these lives, told over hundreds of pages, and you, as a reader, can now walk away.

If you thought reading this was exhausting, you should have heard me talking about it for the last three years. For that, I have to express my deepest gratitude to my immediate family: my brothers, Daniel Martinez and Derek Allen Martinez, both of whom are always a fountain of material without the legal complications. My sisters and their husbands: Mary and Mark Guess, Sylvia and Ruben de los Santos, and Margie and Corwin Moczygamba, and all my nieces and nephews, who are forbidden to read these books until they're at least thirty. My mother, Velva Jean Martinez, and her husband, Robert Swanagan. My fantastic father, Domingo Campos Martinez, who's evolved into a wonderful person and is as yet, for you ladies of a certain age, still single. Of course, my grandmother, Virginia Rubio, who is still at the time of this writing, kicking the shit out of life.

And also, in no particular order, cousins and dear friends who helped me through my travels in Texas: Chris Arteaga and his family, Leo and Delia Zuniga, Richard Alaniz and family, Orlene Ezequial, Erwin Ezequial, Tom and Janis, Orlando Castillo, Julie Hinojosa Collier, John Araujo, and Elva Castillo.

And I would not have made it through the darker parts of this story if it wasn't for my friends and their care as well: Amy Niedrich, Philippe Critot, Christopher Dougherty, Andrew McCarty, Bruce Reid, Camille Ball, Eric Lawson, Jana Pagaran, Kim McIver, and Robb Garner. With special recognition for my dear friend, Julia Sanders, who was there more than a few times when I couldn't even ask for help and let me crash on her couch when it was necessary. Thanks, Jules. Won't forget it. And lastly, and of course, Brenda Brown.

The completion of this book did not come without its heroes: Alice Martell, my super agent, Lara Asher, my good friend and editor, along with the support and encouragement of everyone I've met professionally in the last two years: Louise Erdrich, who pointed out the title in one of our exchanges and nudged the scope of the book into focus. Dave Eggers and everyone at 826 Seattle, including Teri Hein and Alicia Craven, and of course, my Breadloafian friends: Marcy Pomerance, Ted Conover, and Amy Holman—thank you for your calm words and encouragement. There's also Sergio Troncoso, Jennifer Lynne, Jane Hodges, Justin Ordoñez, Stephen Robinson, Brian Miller, Dr. Antonio Zavaleta, and Junot Díaz. And no self-identified Texan author can escape the orbit of Dagoberto Gilb, a strong voice and proponent for Mexican-American literature, and an even better friend.