My Heart Is a Drunken Compass (5 page)

Ironically, I was fascinated by my younger brother, in a way, and continued to crave the sort of hero worship from him that I had once bestowed on Dan, even though Derek had become incapable of returning calls, was basically unfunctional as a human being. Living in Seattle, it became my role to seek out and find new and cool things that he would never find in Texas (after all, that was why I was living in Seattle, no?), and in order to keep myself firmly ensconced in the position of guru of good culture, I would still supply him with steady access to great music and recommendations and mailed gifts, discs, shirts, and videos.

Which, in turn, would eventually lend themselves as a commodity in that shitheap of a college town, because it gave Derek a sort of social elevation, and people would then seek him out, want to “party” with him (possibly the most distasteful distortion of a verb in common usage) and ply him with booze, marijuana, and hardcore drugs, and Derek's walls were never so willing to erode, so willing to come down, like the defenses of Jericho under a million chemical trumpet blasts.

Mom's guilt contributed tremendously. She'll be the first to admit it, so it's no shock if she reads it here. She was permissive and enabling and heartbroken, hoping his better angels would somehow rise from the ashes of the bridges he insisted on burning. Every semester, he'd beg the family for money to pay fees and fines to the university or the rubbish fraternity he was homesteading, just the minimums and just enough to squeak back in, and he'd beg for a reprieve, beg for that second chance, just $200 from this person, $800 from that family member, please please please: “I just need the chance,” he'd say. “Please.”

He'd wear us down, make my brother-in-law crack his checkbook from fatigue and disgust, saying, “It's not about the money, Derek. It's just this lying. . . .”

“Please; it'll be different this time.”

“You know what you're going to do, if you go back.”

“No, I promise I won't. I need to finish this.”

“Fine.”

Once the check was signed, he'd disappear again for three or four months, communicating exclusively by text message, usually something garbled and nonsensical sent at 3:00 a.m.

It was so painful, so terribly painful, that time.

And I vacillated between a profound desire to beat him and six of his closest friends senseless, and to hold him down and just hug the broken homunculus inside him, and have him cry it all out, give him some sense of dignity and self-love, enough to say, “I'm better than this. This isn't what I want for myself.”

But he never made it to that stage, under the weight of his addictions.

Which is incredibly hypocritical for me to say, as I was languishing within the first stages of alcoholism my own self, but hey, I would tell myself,
I'm holding down a job and my own place to live, taking care of myself otherwise. Mostly
.

I mean, at least my weaknesses aren't public
, I'd say, when I met myself in the mirror.

I'm just a happy-go-lucky scamp.

Then, of course, I'd meet my friend, Dough, short for Dougherty. Dough was also single and isolated, lived in the same neighborhood, had a hole in his heart he liked to drown out with booze sometimes as well. We'd terrorize our neighborhood bars for a weekend, making complete dicks out of ourselves after never-ending pitchers of stout beer and martinis, laughing like maniacs around conversations and jokes and this mania of the broken artist—we undiscovered geniuses holding down regular jobs—and so we rubbed alcohol into our wounded egos and drowned our delights in fried foods and pudgy barmaids who never threw us out, just overserved us because the tip would correspond accordingly, and, to be perfectly fair, we were actually rather entertaining. It was a rare evening indeed that we caused any real trouble for anyone, made anyone uncomfortable.

We were just loud, funny drunks.

Why couldn't Derek do this, instead? Continue the tradition?

What Derek was doing, well, Derek was into pure destruction, gripped firmly by ghosts of unreasonable rage.

It made me terrifically sad that he and I were left unbonded, even in our addictions.

He was eventually ejected from school and became one of those pathetic hang-about people who live near a campus just for the parties and the hepatitis. I'm not sure where he was living, or who he was living with. There are no records for this time in his life, like his life had been blasted over by a sandstorm of drugs and booze.

Every few weeks, my mother would get a gripping sense of doom and drive from her home in Houston to Austin and spend an afternoon looking for him, a sort of scavenger hunt to find her youngest son. Some of his “friends” were actually good kids and would take pity on Mom because, even for their lifestyle, they saw how far Derek would push things.

Eventually, Mom would find him holed up in some shanty UT rat hole and shake him awake, then pour him into her car and take him to a grocery store, buy him food, find his clothes and few meager possessions—most of which had been bought for him by my other sister, Marge, and her husband—and by this time Derek would be alert, fed, and ready to get Mom back on the road so he could trade some of his food for beer.

That was who he was at this time.

Completely without
vergüenza
, the Mexican Catholic depiction of pride and shame that forced oneself to have a sense of dignity enough to do better for oneself, for those who loved you, for your family. Derek, somehow, because he wasn't raised on that farm in that barrio like the rest of us, had been raised with no sense of
vergüenza
; that genome had never kicked in and developed, or at least remained dormant at this time, and it was killing my mother, and the rest of us.

My sisters saw and understood what was happening, but they pulled back and established boundaries because they were building their own families, had their own lives to live. We were all deeply saddened by Derek, but none of us really knew what to do. We spoke of interventions, of hospitalization and rehab, but none of it ever took shape: It cost money, and Mom's insurance, which was still covering him at twenty-two, would not cover that.

We felt helpless, and could do nothing but watch, as his demons wrapped him in shrouds and took him away from us.

Everyone tried to reach him. My father would also travel to Austin, try to find him, but Derek knew that as a sober man with little income, Dad would prove wearisome and Jesufied, try to talk to Derek about AA, and would get little from the interaction, so Derek managed to avoid him most times, which wounded my father greatly.

Dan tried, too, driving from San Antonio to Austin to find him sometimes, and he'd take Derek out to dinner, buy him a few beers and try to talk sense to him, but at some point Dan would call an end to the evening and either head home or stay at a hotel, and Derek would launch, once again, and disappear. This was when our club was disbanded, and Dan and I were estranged, so Dan was chasing after that same frequency of communion, needing the familiarity of his brothers' warmth, was as lonely as I was, but not ready to talk to me.

And I could never reach Derek, on the phone, from Seattle, could never get a returned text. I deleted his number out of anger and frustration so often I eventually had it committed to memory because I'd feel shitty a day or two after writing him off, and then ask Mom for it once more. It was her number, actually, her bill, since he was on her family plan, and Mom refused to cancel the line because it was the one method of communication that he used.

I wanted to grab him by the ears and head-butt him, bring him to Seattle, kick his awkward, large Hank Hill Texas ass and just . . . I don't know. Dealing with addicts is a wormhole to nowhere.

I wanted to yell at him, “Why can't you be a functional drunk like me and Dan? Hold down a job, be miserable like the rest of us and stop worrying Mom?? Jesus, Derek! You're making it a choice between you and her, and I
will
kick your ass, Derek! I
will
fucking do it, and I'm not talking in metaphor, motherfucker: I will beat the shit out of you and all your fucking friends!” I actually did say that to him, and often. It's probably why he didn't like talking to me. But he always accepted my care packages, the swine.

In the end, it was following my lead that nearly killed him.

He did, finally, get a job, working as a stock boy at the Gap, or Old Navy. Either which.

He worked a little over two weeks, through the end of a February and into a March, and when he received his first paycheck, he took that money and went out with his friends—it was the most money he'd had in a very long time—and he drank far too many Bombay Sapphire martinis, which was my drink of choice at this time, but he drank them like beer, one right after the other to the point where he became a walking corpse, his cognitive processes drowned and his eyes gone out, and as he stood in a road by a bar in Austin, Texas, in some side neighborhood street during that dreadful SXSW convention, Derek blacked out while standing straight up, right in front of his Hungarian friend named Mogyorodi, and he fell backward, like an evergreen, and he cracked his skull on the sidewalk, his body finally giving up on his bad choices and desire for oblivion, drawn heavily to a conclusion.

And he broke every one of our hearts, finally.

It's in the moments that slip quietly by when we affect those closest to us most, moments unnoticed and unintended, when you think no one is looking: We leave the deepest marks when we least mean it.

Dan and I left a serious indentation on our youngest brother, Derek, without noticing or caring when we were growing up with him, in the way our father left the mark of Cain on both Dan and me when Dad was fully cognizant of what he was doing, what we were seeing, as his boys under his care.

More than common, it was expected for the men who worked for my father to start their drinking of the smaller, seven-ounce Budweiser pony bottles around 10:00 a.m., either at the sandpit or in the driveway where much of Dad's broken-down trucking equipment was parked throughout the '80s. Nothing was said to discourage it, and if the women disapproved, they weren't allowed to voice their disapproval or send covert glowers in the direction of any of the men, regardless of their status, because except for my Gramma, who ran the place, women weren't allowed near the trucking equipment or near the men, unless they were bringing food. Work was a boy's club, though the work just got in the way of the drinking.