Chapter 17

Dan’s Second Fight

Dan had been big for his age his entire life. As such, he considered himself protector of his loved ones, especially because Dad kept insisting on the idea, because Dad knew himself to be incapable of that role.

It was rare for Dan to be much of a bully, though the mood did sometimes strike when we were kids, as will happen with someone who is exploring the boundaries of his strength, of his compassion.

He was actually a really sensitive kid. I remember one year Dad had moved ten hours north to Dallas to find work, and Mom had insisted that the whole family would travel the vertical length of Texas in the 1980 Bonneville—highways 77 to 37 to 35—in order to have Christmas as a family. Dad had been fairly unconcerned with the idea of having the family together for the holidays, but Mom was obstinate. Dad had liked the new solitude, liked being functionally single. He’d go to church on Sunday morning, sure, but then he’d hit a porno movie before he had to make it back to the dismal two-room rental he was sharing with Richard. Having the family around in Dallas made him claustrophobic. Or maybe he didn’t want anyone seeing how he was living, especially his family.

Anyhow, it was when we were on our way there, or on our way back at some point during those ten painful hours when we were all tired, cramped, hot, and cranky, that Mom had the radio tuned to a parochial country radio station.

All the kids were singing tunelessly along to Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning to pass the time, when something about the plight of the scorned woman at the center of Juice Newton’s song really plucked at Dan’s ten-year-old heart, and he cried for that woman’s pain, looking off into the dusty, uninterrupted Texas horizon. Mare was the first to notice the tears on his cheek and she brought it mercilessly to the attention of the brood, delicious and full of tangy spite, and we all turned on him like sharks attacking one of their own.

We pointed and laughed loudly, humiliated him for what seemed like an hour, like we knew how. God it was heavenly, how we had him crying, this time out of a deep, painful shame at showing compassion. It’s what passed for love in that Bonneville.

When I relayed the story in therapy years later, my therapist, Sally, asked, “Do you think maybe he was crying for your mother, in the role of that scorned woman?”

I winced, bit down hard: I preferred to hold on to the idea of humiliating Dan for being a wuss. I suppose I should ask him about that.

This isn’t to say Dan was free and loose with his compassion, not to me, at least. I was his little brother, and as such, I needed a certain amount of domination, both physically and emotionally. Though Dan did have his moments, as a leader or teacher.

One day, we were left alone in the house, which was a rarity when we were kids, and Dan had been poking around in the one shared bathroom. He’d found a box of maxi-pads and decided right then that I could use a lesson in the menstrual cycle.

I should say here that all dealings with female plumbing were absolutely verboten, kept secret from us boys, so we had no idea what these things were for. Well, I had no idea: Dan had apparently received some information about their use, from somewhere outside the home. So he was going to teach me what he knew.

“They put it in their underwear, with these,” he says, and begins to peel off the adhesive strips.

“For what?” I ask, confused.

“Because once a month, they bleed. They go ‘on the rag,’” he tells me, like I should know what he’s talking about.

“Oh,” I say, completely bewildered. I’d heard the phrase, but I did not understand what it meant. “Is that the rag?” I pointed at the pad.

“Yeah,” he says. “It goes like this,” and he pulls down his Y-fronts and inserts the maxi-pad under his tackle with the adhesive side up, then slaps the elastic band back into place.

“See?” he says, and begins walking about, pretending he’s a girl with an unusually large basket.

I’m laughing at his pantomime, and when he’s done, he pulls down his underwear once again to end the lesson and suddenly realizes his mistake. He starts pulling the pad out of his underwear, and with it comes the skin of his teenaged testicles and penis, and he makes the most comic, twisted face I will ever see him make in all the years I’ve known him, as his penis and scrotum are stretched out to nearly the length of his arm, and I am on the floor exhausted with laughter, tears running down my cheeks and incapable of catching my breath, nearing an asthma attack.

“Boy,” I said, when I could catch my breath and he was doubled over in agony, “I bet they don’t have that problem.”

Anyhow, like in all pack-animal hierarchies, Dan had a role to play, as did I. I wanted what he had, would always want what the leader had. He was my hero. Still is, in a lot of ways, actually.

He played football all his schooling, and he liked it, unlike me, who played football all my schooling and hated it. I played football because he expected it of me. In this way Dan was more influential to my upbringing than Dad ever was.

Dan was solid, had a good relationship to the earth, and had natural, bracing foot placement, always. A cock-strong kid who was also quick on his feet, he was a perfect pulling guard on the offensive line and a tackle on the defense. He would be in every single play in a game, never had a chance to sit on the bench, and made varsity when he was a sophomore. I never really left the bench, would go to games just for the trip to Whataburger we got afterward. That was my reward for five days of practice and enduring the Neanderthal coaching staff.

I grew up small, lean, intimidated. I accepted early that I could not naturally pull off alpha male aggression, that I would have to train at it, like a sport, if I was ever going to be able to defend myself. Richard had taught me that.

But that wouldn’t come until a few years later.

Dan, on the other hand, was naturally burly, could hit like a mule on the field.

But Dan never had training in boxing, never really learned how to throw a punch. And in our barrio, well, no one ever really liked to admit that they didn’t know how to throw a real punch, wouldn’t pay or put in the repetitive hours to throw a legitimate jab/reverse combination because somehow, in the land of machismo, it seemed elitist to enter into any type of program for self-improvement. In a stressed community, any sort of elevation is looked down upon, felt as a judgment on the rest of the people.

What? They seemed to say. We’re not good enough as we are now?

We were expected to be chíngon in the barrio, and without any instruction. On top of that, we were also expected never to shy away from an opportunity to show our inability to do so.

“Tírar chingásos,” we’d call it. (“Throw down. Throw some fuckers.”)

I dunno. It confuses me, too.

Anyhow, Dan, in high school, never had too many reasons to fight, or dominate any more than was necessary. He was a likeable enough kid, had gotten into one or two scraps as a younger teen, but had gone through his teenage years mostly untested. When I started high school, Dan was a senior, a varsity football player, and did what he wanted around school. He was already enlisted at seventeen, shipping out at the end of the school year. Dad was working long-haul trucking at this point, which had left my older, larger brother to enjoy a bit of unexpected independence like a regular, normal high school teenager. He was happy; he had his little forays with the blonde Baptists and Mormon fauna—the “slim-hipped gentiles” all new immigrants are unconsciously promised upon becoming an American—and he was feeling pretty good at being the boy king.

Then one day, in the halls of Hanna High—alum to the likes of Kris Kristofferson, thank you very much—I happen to walk by Dan’s third-period class, as it’s letting out.

One of the only two or so black students at Hanna, this guy named Ted, comes out of the classroom first, shuffling in a way that seems light, joking, as the rest of the students begin to swarm into the hallway. I notice next that Dan has emerged from the same room, slow, serious, with a strange look on his face that I’ve never seen before.

Dan has been challenged, threatened.

I hadn’t clocked it.

Ted, halfway down the hall, turns on his heel and flicks his hands like flippers, says, “Come on, man. Come on . . . ”

I suddenly realize he’s saying this to Dan. I think he’s joking, because he seems to be smiling, happy. I don’t get there’s a fight developing because I’m fourteen years old, and Dan and Ted have been, up to this point, friends.

In my innocent understanding of the world at fourteen, friends didn’t fight. They argued, they said mean things about each other, and they parlayed loyalties, but they never actually fought.

Fighting came from enemies, who were marked as clearly as Draco Malfoy, Darth Vader, Alan Rickman in “Die Hard,” or, closer to home, guys named “Paco” or “El Smiley.” So I think they’re kidding.

“Kick his ass, Ted!” I yell like a pre-teen girl squealing at a concert.

It was in good fun, right?

I turn and face Dan, who has stopped now, in the hall, the look on his face suddenly recognizable to me. It says, “You disloyal shit.” It says, “I’m being called out. I’m scared. I have to do this, and I don’t want to do this. I have to do this. Not for anyone else, not to prove anything, but for myself. I’m going to do this, you disloyal little fuck.”

I see his face drain of blood, and he hands me the single red folder he’s carrying. He’s wearing black denim jeans with vertical striping (it’s 1987) and a collared shirt, also with thin vertical black and red stripes. I had been with him when he had asked Mom to buy it for him, at JC Penney. And he’s wearing his contact lenses, which Mom had finally consented to buy for him, after he had enlisted in the army and had his first-ever vision test the summer before. Mom had been horrified, guilt ridden, when she realized he had long suffered with -5 vision, had gone without glasses his entire life while his sisters had bought vanity glasses. So she’d bought him the contact lenses just a few months before. They had been quite dear.

I remember all this because at the flash point of realization—that Dan is in a fight—it’s like a Polaroid of that moment and all its minutiae.

Dan is in a fight, and there’s no feeling in the world more isolating. He’s in a fight, on his own, and backing down is just not an option. You can’t, as a boy king.

See, Ted is well-known in the school, and not just because he’s one of the two black kids. Well, that certainly helped, but Ted was from Chicago, the popular lore went, and had a reputation of being a gang-fighting bad ass.

He had a cult of kids in my grade who followed him around like flunkies. The only other black kid in the school, Marlon, had been the quarterback on my freshman team and had been a “friend” of mine, back in junior high school, but now he’s here, cheering Ted on, in fighting my older brother.

All this helps my ideas of friendship mature instantaneously. I realize at this moment that your friends can turn into fighting enemies, and that you can never really trust anyone, ever.

I take Dan’s folder and hold it, follow him dumbly as he follows Ted out to where Ted, flashy and ghetto-inspired, is making a lot of noise, drawing as much attention as possible, like Cassius Clay had done to Joe Louis before their first fight.

Thing is, the next period is my Latin class, fourth period.

Lunchtime at Hanna happened on fourth and fifth period, and I had been quite loose with the times I’d squandered my fourth period previously, with the people who’d had fourth-period lunches. I’d taken the “three martini” lunch once too often and was at the point where, should I miss one more class, I’d lose the credit and would be held back for the year. I was walking a fine, tender line.

The horde of spectators—now immense, with the noise Ted is making—is walking past my Latin class, which is held outside the school in one of those square mobile classrooms that had been established all around the campus to help with the overflow of students. Hanna was, at the time I think, the second largest high school in the nation.

My Latin teacher, Mr. Jacobs, stands at the doorway to the classroom, his interest piqued by the volume of the crowd. Mr. Jacobs is a tall, gangly blonde-haired fella who wears bowties and at the time was a ringer for Ed Begley Jr. I have no idea what he was doing in Brownsville, other than missionary work, because he often said his life’s goal was to become a monk.

He stands on the doorstep and watches as the crowd of students swarms to the alley behind the Wall, behind the tennis courts, which are adjacent to his classroom. He understands what’s happening immediately, and catches sight of me, becoming relentless in his higher-minded teaching:

“Domingo, you’re coming to Latin class today.”

“But that’s my brother. I have to be there.”

“I can’t make the choice for you, Domingo, but you know what’s at stake here.”

“Mr. Jacobs, please; it’s my family; I have to be there.”

“Domingo, you know the situation. I can’t protect you. You have to make the choice yourself. Forward or backward, Domingo. Forward or backward.”

With that, he goes back inside and closes the door, as the few other students in Latin class step in behind him and the tardy bell rings.

I have never been more twisted inside, and I hate Mr. Jacobs at that moment and don’t understand what he meant by “forward or backward.” What kind of shit is that? Dan is fighting the unchallenged titan of Hanna High School, and I’m forced to attend my Latin class, or else I’ll be held back a year and won’t graduate with my class.

Glumly, I climb the steps into Mr. Jacobs’s class and sit down, with absolutely no hope of absorbing what will be taught. Mr. Jacobs sees this and teaches accordingly, a light day. He drops his curriculum and decides instead to explain to us Latin students the difference between obscenity and profanity, since he himself had been recently taken to task by an associate principal for saying “a profanity.”

“No,” Mr. Jacobs had corrected her. “What I said to you was ‘obscene,’ and not ‘profane.’” He had told her to go fuck herself, I think he was saying; not for God to go fuck Himself.

He didn’t make many friends in Brownsville, either.

To make the time go by faster, I open Dan’s notebook and flip through his academics. It isn’t exactly convincing, as a student’s notebook. It’s more of a prop, with empty line-ruled paper and half-hearted attempts at note-taking, indiscernible scribbles and the lyrics to Knocking at Your Back Door, a song by Deep Purple that had much more double entendre than I was capable of understanding at the time.

It’s a terrible fifty minutes, spent in that Latin classroom, and I don’t think I ever managed to thank Mr. Jacobs for forcing me to make the choice that day. (Except by getting horribly drunk at one of his summer parties and frightening a girl I liked named Kathy, but that’s another story.)

When the bell rings, I erupt from that classroom and run down anyone I can find for news, news, news of the event.

Certainly it is on everyone’s mind, on everyone’s lips . . . ?

And it is: The first familiar person I see is an old friend of Dan’s, Israel, from way back.

“Oh, man,” he tells me, “Dan got his ass kicked, man. You should have been there, man. They fought for like, an hour. Dan’s all messed up.”

This news is like telling me that Jesus had been shot, in church: just not possible, in the cosmology of how I understand the universe.

“Where is he?” I demand. “Where is everyone?”

“He went to Dennis’s, I think,” Israel says.

I bolt: Dennis lives near the school, around the track and over the golf course, in an apartment spread that was, I suppose, middle class, for Brownsville. I sprint the whole way, Dan’s notebook developing a sweat-shaped image of my palm by the time I get there. I hit the doorway running and don’t bother with the doorbell or a knock, just sorta yank it open and burst through, and am completely embarrassed to see Dennis’s mother on the phone just stop midconversation and look at me, the boy who has just disrespected her house. She is on the phone with my parents, I think.

I fumble through an apology, and she nods in the direction of Dennis’s bedroom, continuing with her conversation with her back turned to me.

Timidly, I make my way there, and this time, I knock on the door and immediately see Dan sitting on the bed, holding an ice pack to his eye, with Victor playing cut man, his best friend. Victor and Dan go way back.

Victor’s family has a lot of money, are upper middle-class Mexican and own a chain of jewelry stores in Brownsville and Matamoros. Victor has been incredibly loyal to Dan since they were in junior high. Victor is a good friend, will eventually become my good friend.

Every Christmas since I was able to drive, I was charged with bringing four or five dozen of Gramma’s freshly made tamales over to Victor’s house, and they’d receive me like a state visitor, which would make me uncomfortable with the attention, and entirely bewildered at their good manners. They would call every member of their family to the dining room table and have me join them, and everyone would take a tamale and eat it, claiming they were the best thing they’d eaten that Christmas. I would blush and squirm and say, “Uh, gee, thank you?” It was just tamales, for Christ’s sake; we had a warehouse full of them, back at Gramma’s. I shot the pig myself, this time.

Noblesse oblige, though the class dynamics had been lost on me.

I always loved Victor’s family, who were very kind to me and Dan all our teenaged lives. Things began falling apart for them after Dan had left to join the army, and I was in my senior year later on, as Victor’s father had been under investigation for some anomalies in his taxes, accusations of smuggling and other federal stuff, but never did we think any less of the family, of the man. Everyone in Brownsville is dirty, works the angles. Politicians at every level are laughably crooked. Law enforcement is openly in bed with criminals—not only in bed, but in like, gay and lesbian pornos—the federal agencies are corrupt to a toxic level. It’s endemic with the area, the culture. Victor’s father simply managed to draw the attention of federal thugs; he did nothing any other family in Brownsville had not done at one point or another. He just managed to be good enough at whatever he did to get caught. I don’t know how they managed the cheek to focus on Victor’s dad.

Anyhow, it was during those troubles that Victor had phoned me, out of the blue, because he’d taken a weekend off from college to help his mother move out of their house, which had been seized by the feds, and they were desperate to get out of there because once the Feds locked the doors, they’d lose anything that was still inside, and would I please help them tomorrow?

Sure, I said. I had something planned, but no problem: I’d be there at nine. I’ll bring someone to help.

The next day, I showed up with my friend Alex. We were the only people Victor had called who showed up; we worked all day and got his mother completely moved out of her house and into storage. She was so grateful that it was terribly satisfying to be able to repay her kindness after all those years, when she needed it. It was like a circuit closing, and it felt good, though she cried all day, from losing her house, and then from gratitude to me and Alex for helping her and Victor when no one else did.

Sidenote: It had been Victor’s mother, actually, who had spurred me on to do something with myself in one of those throwaway moments, to promise her that I wouldn’t allow myself to settle in Brownsville. I had found a pathetic job as a waiter at the newly opened Olive Garden in Harlingen, Texas, when I had first moved back to Brownsville from Seattle. (People in South Texas don’t tip, and by that I mean: nothing. They simply do not tip. Once or twice an hour, a couple might be feeling worldly and leave behind a single dollar after finishing their lunch. I could work an entire ten-hour shift and make less than $5 in tips. That job lasted about a month. But the humiliation of knowing that “birthday song” lingers still.)

Anyhow, I was on a lunch shift when Victor and his mother happened to stop in at the Olive Garden, and they sat, thankfully, in someone else’s section. I was on break when I noticed them, and I was putting away my pocket copy of Cyrano de Bergerac, when Victor’s mother said, “Domingo, niño,” in her perfect melting and lispy Galithian Spanish, “You simply do not belong here, in this area, in this job. You need to be where people will appreciate you more, or you will end up as a waiter all your life, because you’re too smart for anything else here.”

I was more befuddled at the fact that she had recognized Cyrano de Bergerac and mentioned that she had read it in the original French (it was available in French?) and had drawn her conclusions from the fact that I was reading it on my break to fully understand what she was telling me. I knew I hated South Texas, but what did Cyrano de Bergerac have to do with it? I just identified with the nose thing.

That was Victor, and his family. It’s not surprising to see him there, nursing Dan, holding the ice pack to his eye. The blood vessels in one eye had burst, from a punch that had caused the contact lens—one of the early large, hard glass models—to scrape his cornea. Dan had continued to fight, even though he had nearly been blinded, and while Dan sits there quietly sniffling, Victor proceeds to tell me how it went.

They had met in the alley behind the tennis courts, with half the school assembled to see the fight. Most of the crowd was there for the simple pleasure of watching the pugilistics, but others were there to support either Dan or Ted.

Ted had been loud and mouthy, talking shit loud and ghetto, while Dan had been quiet, reserved, angry. Frightened.

Ted’s little entourage of freshmen kids had been there, too, Victor says, leaping and howling and picking fights with others in the crowd, pulling up their shirts in a threatening manner.

Ted half-pretended to talk to someone in the crowd and then tried to sucker punch Dan to start it off, but Dan had expected it and saw it coming, stepped forward into the swing and caught Ted in a grapple. It was on, and their styles couldn’t have been more different.

Ted tried to keep Dan at bay, pushed off and defended himself at a distance, then charged forward throwing overhead punches. Dan would deflect and swing wide haymakers, grabbing at anything Ted threw his way, and locking them into a pinch, which Dan would win, but then he would let go.

In the tussle Ted would connect and Dan would too, and then grab or smother Ted, keep him pinned in a submission hold, and then Ted would say, “OK, OK, I’m done,” then would get up, say something to the crowd, and then lunge at Dan again.

Dan would win every single exchange, would pin Ted down at the end of every scuffle, but in the end he looked like he got the worst of it, which is how teenage fights are scored.

Ted, being black, looked as if he had not bruised, had not been hit once, except for the swelling around both his eyes.

Our sister, Mare, had been there, in the crowd, and when Marlon and the rest of Ted’s entourage had threatened to get involved, she came at them with her tennis racket, beating them back into the crowd. Mare wasn’t alone in this; Dan’s friends—both Victor and Dennis—had been behind her, and had calmed her back down, and made certain it had stayed a one-on-one fight.

And it was a one-on-one fight that Dan had won ten times over, but his sense of fair play and being a good guy allowed Ted to keep rearing up every time he’d cry uncle, and then Dan would let him up, even help him up, at times, as Victor told it. Then Ted would try something else, something dirty. The burst eye, in fact, came from the time Dan helped Ted get to his feet: Ted was sitting on the ground, beaten again, grabbed Dan’s offered hand, and then used it as leverage as Ted swung to hit Dan, from the ground, after he had said it was over. This finally pissed Dan off, and he hit Ted back so hard, he didn’t come back up, just rolled over on his stomach and said, “Oh, good hit, good hit . . . ”

And that’s how it ended. That fight lasted nearly forty-five minutes.

In the final analysis Dan did not have a hardened heart, after all that we’d been through with Dad; he would not do anything to someone else he felt was too damaging or too unfair. Like I said, Dan was a good kid. Ted, on the other hand, was trying every trick he knew to hurt Dan, right down to imitating karate movies, doing reverse mule kicks that never connected, or grabbing Dan’s head and trying to slam it against the tennis court wall. Dan wouldn’t fall for it, used the training he’d learned from football to keep Ted from marshalling the grapple, determining his balance. Dan was just better at it, but he wasn’t a finisher; he didn’t have it in him to hurt Ted. In the end, what ended the fight was exhaustion, and the lunch bell.

But Dan had survived. Not only survived, but outmatched the Titan of Hanna High, if you really knew how to score.

Though sitting in Dennis’s bedroom, you wouldn’t have known it, funereal as it was. Fights do that to you, make your soul feel dirty afterward. Make you feel ashamed of yourself, if your moral compass is intact.

This fight had been city versus farm, and the city had repeatedly conned its way out of a sound beating at the hands of the farm.

Dennis’s mother had called Dad, had explained what happened, and Dad said he would be right over. Since both Dan and I have been the victims of Dad’s explosive and illogical temper, we both expect and dread the further punishment headed our way, when he gets there. I think he’ll have a fit over Dan losing the contact lenses, for not winning decisively, for the potential trouble from the school, the cops, anything that would occur to Dad, but it doesn’t happen.

Dad is uncharacteristically understanding, comforting even, and he and Richard had dropped all they were doing that afternoon and drove to Dennis’s to pick Dan up and take him to the emergency room.

They x-ray his nose (no fracture) and his wrist (hairline fracture) and his thumb (clearly fractured). Then they take Dan to dinner and buy him a beer.

Dan had fought, and survived, like a man. He was in the club. The club that Dad and Richard had never been able to enter. Maybe make deliveries there, through the tradesman’s entrance, but certainly never enter through the front door.

An uneasy peace settled in the school after the fight.

Dan showed up to school the next day, with his red notebook stage prop intact. Ted didn’t.

Ted was last seen down the alleyway, after the fight, smoking a joint with Marlon and putting a handkerchief to his nose. He dropped out of school and wasn’t heard from again until we read a story in the Brownsville Herald about three months later, when he accidentally shot himself in the thigh, trying to remove a .357 revolver from his waistband as he sat in a car, late at night, across the street from the house of a girl he once briefly dated. That girl lived on a road that led straight to our house, out on Oklahoma Avenue, about five miles away. I didn’t see the threat, until Dan pointed it out.

“He could have been coming here,” he had said with a sort of sadness, looking at Mom and Derek arguing in the kitchen. His voice betrayed a complicated regret, like his feelings were hurt, with the implication.

Big hearted to the end, Dan even attended Ted’s funeral, which I could not understand then, either. Ted’s mother, who knew who Dan was, spotted him in the crowd and clutched Dan to her, as she broke down crying. Dan held her, and wept openly as well.