Chapter 19

Room 124

When I was seventeen years old, I ran away to Juarez, Mexico, with about seven bucks in my pocket, five of which I had borrowed that Saturday afternoon from my retarded neighbor, Lupíta Chiquita.

No one noticed I had gone, and I don’t think I ever got around to paying her back.

My friend Karsten had a father who lived down there, outside of Juarez. Karsten was a tall dorky white kid with black hair, and he would make the three-hour trip to Juarez whenever he needed to swindle his reluctant father out of “tuition” money or whatever was immediately needed in Karsten’s shiftless teenaged life.

Karsten’s father owned the only Holiday Inn in Brownsville and had Karsten set up to live alone in room 124 while Karsten presumably attended St. Mary’s Catholic School. Room 124 was immediately next door to the industrial-size air conditioner and was unrentable because of the thrum and vibration of the overburdened machine.

Karsten was eighteen but was still in high school, when he went to school. When I met him, Karsten usually found a way to cash his tuition check and blow the money just hanging around doing anything but going to class, playing video games on a first generation Nintendo, drinking warm tequilas and Mexican rums with no chaser, and trying to have sex with unwilling girls.

He lived utterly without any adult interference. For food, the Holiday Inn kitchen was obliged to feed him two meals a day, and it produced some of the most offensive combinations of food known to humankind, but it kept him alive, though not at all grateful.

Down in Juarez, Karsten’s father—who was Cuban and not Mexican—had bought a large horse ranch and was busy accumulating the adjoining land that surrounded his. Karsten’s mother had left them when he was ten, and he never said why. I never thought to ask. Karsten was tall and dark haired and had sharp European features you didn’t see in the white people around that part of Texas. French, almost. He also had strange, cultured manners, nearly Victorian, especially when he was around girls.

His nearly civilized manners made Karsten very awkward and lonely in Brownsville, and he was desperate for female attention. He was a very odd, very tall boy.

Karsten drove a retired mid-1980s Ford cop car painted totally white with a factory cassette-playing radio that didn’t eat cassette tapes. This was a rarity among the cars driven by my friends during this time. Both the front and back seats of the car were a deep plastic blue, eternally gritty. There was a constant stratum of beer cans, newspapers, old cassette tapes, and food wrappers crumpling underfoot.

I don’t remember where Karsten said he was from, originally; I think somewhere out east, and he spoke no Spanish. He was in Brownsville because it was the closest thing to a “city” in the United States, and his father had wanted him educated in America.

Karsten, on the other hand, had other ideas, and he resisted his education at every turn without consequence, which was fantastic to me. He was eighteen years old and alone.

We had a lot in common.

On the night I’m first introduced to Karsten, I’m driving around with my friend Henry and his best friend, John. They are unrepentant potheads, tirelessly listening to anything recorded by Metallica and rhythmically “banging” their heads in slow motion as we drive around Brownsville and Los Fresnos and South Padre Island in utter boredom searching for some sort of underage deliverance or entertainment in Henry’s 1986 Mustang LX, with his portable CD player wired into the tape player and playing very loudly but prone to skipping. I’m in the backseat, cowering from the volume surrounding me. I’m not much of a stoner anymore, not like them. I like beer. It feels more honest to be drunk, somehow. We keep the beer at the feet of the front passenger side, and I keep bugging whoever isn’t driving for another.

“Turn the music down,” I yell from the backseat.

“Give me another beer,” I yell from the backseat.

“Roll up your fuckin’ window,” I yell from the backseat.

“Wah, wah, wah,” says Henry, in the passenger’s seat. He’s letting John drive his car. John is a minister’s kid and fits the stereotype perfectly. Except he isn’t a slutty girl, which would be much more interesting.

“You’re like a baby back there, always needing something,” from Henry.

“Turn the music down; I can’t hear what you said,” I yell from the backseat, purposely.

They start giggling. Henry hands me a beer. I crack it open and take a long draught from it and do the dook dook dook imitation of a baby suckling from its bottle of baby formula and they both start laughing hysterically when John loses control of the car.

We happen to be on the Queen Isabella Causeway, coming back from South Padre Island around eight at night and eighty-five feet in the air when the Mustang cuts across three lanes of traffic and he over-corrects and we’re inches from hitting the side of the bridge and dropping into ten feet of a very shallow bay. He cuts back again and miraculously the Mustang steadies itself at seventy miles per hour and we’re all knuckle-white and not breathing.

Metallica is still blaring even though the moment feels totally silent. For a few seconds, I feel their fear mingling with mine, our sense of death at that moment tangible. I feel Henry and John’s elevated perception like we’re three soldiers on a frontline getting shelled, waiting for the next shell to hit our foxhole, and everything has suddenly gone quiet under the audial blanket of the Metallica.

I lean forward through the bucket seats and yank the power cord from the CD player. “What the fuck was that, John?” I say. I am totally sober now, riding the adrenaline into a rage.

“Nothing, man; it’s cool,” he says, attempting a giggle, continuing to drive.

“No, it’s not, man,” says Henry. “You almost lost it there. That’s not cool.”

“No, I didn’t,” says John. “I was totally in control.”

“You were not in control,” I say, now screaming like George C. Scott. I’m furious.

John has nearly managed to drive Henry’s car over the side of the only elevated bridge in five hundred miles, and I want to throttle him.

“You were not in control and you very fucking nearly killed all of us, you stupid piece of shit! Pull over in Port Isabel and let Henry drive,” I demand loudly, pointing my finger in the rear view mirror, trying to look him in the eye.

Henry is quiet. Henry is rarely quiet. Henry is small, lean and a great kid, but he’s not quiet. A soccer player. From way back. One of my favorite people during this time of my life. Henry has a future, will eventually move to Austin and marry this girl he loves, Carla. She gave him his first blow job. He was so happy about that. This is his car, so he’s captain.

“Hey, man,” says John. “Just chill out, all right? I mean, I didn’t do it on purpose, but, like, the car handled cool and I was all right and I had it together, you know? I mean, it’s not like anything happened, right?”

“Just shut up right now and at the next stop, you’re pulling over,” I say. The bridge is over two miles long and we’re coming into Port Isabel, a speed trap of a fishing town, like a pilot fish on the revenue-generating shark that is South Padre Island.

“Hey, you’re not, like, the owner of the car, all right?” says John. “Right, Henry? He can’t tell me what to do.”

“You fucked up, John!” I yell. “You lost control of the fucking car and you almost fucking killed us!” I’m really mad. “Admit it. Just fucking admit it, John.”

It starts to become important that he admits it.

“No,” he says. “I didn’t. I mean —”

This is where Henry loses it. “John, you lost control of the car, John. Admit it,” he says, the rise in his voice noticeable.

“No, I —”

“Admit it!” I say. Suddenly, it becomes very, very important that the idiot owns up to it.

“No, I —”

Henry: “Admit it, John.”

John: “Nah, man, I —”

Me: “John, admit it!”

Henry: “Yeah, John: Admit it.”

John: “Dude, I —”

Henry: “Pull the fucking car over!”

This surprises the both of us; we’ve never seen Henry this mad. We’re all startled at the outburst, I think even Henry. John instantly obeys, and he pulls into a restaurant parking lot right off the bridge.

We all exit the car in the empty parking lot, and John leaves it running. We do a sort of fire drill. He’s a skinny kid at seventeen, John, with stringy blonde hair and an army jacket. I don’t remember what I’m wearing but it can’t be much. Cotton T-shirt with The Cure on it and jeans and a pair of cheap British Knights, usually, at that age. Henry and John cross paths at the back of the car and when he’s coming by me John says something to the effect of . . . “Hey man, I had control of the car . . . ” and I attack him, swinging hard. I have the full can of Budweiser in my right hand and I smash it to his head, and it explodes on his head like a beer grenade, showering the three of us in the choicest hops and barley. I hit him so unexpectedly he jerks himself against the side of the car. I don’t really know how to fight at this point and I also know this isn’t right but I’m so mad I’m swinging at him, left right left right. He crumples, and I start to kick at him and I accidentally kick Henry’s car, at which point Henry runs around and pushes me away from John, who is now on the ground covering his head, and when Henry pushes me away, John straightens up and punches me over Henry’s shoulder, pops me square on the cheek. I push Henry aside and rush at John, ducking my head and I put my shoulder under his sternum like I’ve learned after hundreds of hours of football practice, and I shove him against the car and start punching him in the neck and face with my right hand over my head. John gets in a couple of weak, undercut punches in defense, until Henry grabs me by the waist and swings me around and throws me onto the ground.

I’m livid like I’ve never been in my life but I stop; I sit. Seventeen years I’ve lived my life in this outpost, alone, isolated and with an eroding sense of wonder about America at large. I can dream of nothing but getting out of here and exploring the rest of the country, watching leaves turn color and following the winter; I want out of this shit hole of a border town at the bottom of Texas, out of this racist, ignorant, locus-eating, lower Texas toxic hell pit. I’ve endured my father, my grandmother, years of pathetic education, beatings, berations, concentrations of shame, and this heat most hellish. All I have to do is graduate high school in a few weeks and I can leave, I’ve been told. And I have listened. I don’t care what the means are. The military, a bus ticket, this “college” thing other people talked about, stowing away—I just want out. Out of here. Away from people like John. And he almost took that away from me tonight, on that bridge.

My mouth is salty and bloodied, and his eye is swelling from where I hit him with the Budweiser. “Just admit it, you stupid fucker,” I say and spit.

Henry tries to temper the moment. “Just be quiet. Just stop it,” he says to me, holding John against the car. John’s body language is not in the least bit threatening. It is mostly that of a liar, uncertain how to lie next. I am sitting on the ground, disgusted.

“John, just admit you lost control of the fucking car and let’s go,” Henry says.

John looks down at me, his eyes wide. He’s not sure why I’m as angry I am. John understands anger, lives with it from his Baptist-revival fire-eating preacher father, but there’s usually some sort of Yahweh logic and a way to get out of it. He doesn’t know how to get out of this one, obvious as it is. He’s scared at the density of my rage and does not know how to dilute or lie his way out of it. He’s frightened of me, even though we’re exactly the same sort of weak, wiry, and he could probably get the better of me next time.

Both Henry and I are feeding him the line out. But it’s too obvious for John, too clear. Too honest, for the son of a Baptist.

“Alright, man,” he says finally. “I lost control of the car. I fucked up. We almost went over the side.”

I know he doesn’t actually believe it, understand what it means.

But it calms me down. I stand up, knock the gravel from my palms and my thinly denimed knees.

John says, “I’m sorry, man.”

I say, “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I hit you with the beer.” I don’t mean it. If I was sorry, writing from this distance so many years later, it’s for the loss of that beer. Beer was hard to come by back then.

“Me, too,” he says, and we shake hands limply.

We get in the car, with Henry driving and John in the back seat, me in the front. We get on the dark highway back to Brownsville and after a while, I crack open a sweaty beer and then hand one to John. Before we drink, independent of one another we each put the cold can to our respective faces, him to his eye and me to my mouth, to knock down the swelling, but it’s mostly because we’d seen it done in the movies.

Henry doesn’t play anything on his CD player with the tape extension.

We’re approaching Brownsville from the rear when John remembers somewhere we can go.

“Hey, man,” he says. “My friend Val knows this dude, Karsten, who lives in the Holiday Inn. No shit. We can swing by and see if anything’s up there. It’s still early.” It was just after ten o’clock.

The idea neutralizes the tension in the car. For a full thirty minutes no one says anything while Henry drives us along the dark salt land that separates Port Isabel from Brownsville, where the Mexicans and the US fought the first battle of the US-Mexican War, on Palo Alto. Teenage ghosts gliding on a salt highway.

“That sounds like a good idea,” says Henry. “The Holiday Inn over by the expressway?” he asks.

“Is there another Holiday Inn in Brownsville?” I answer, genuinely curious.

In the Holiday Inn parking lot, John spots Val’s car. I know this Val of whom he speaks. He is ordinary Brownsville fare, like bistek ranchero, popular on every menu. (A corruption of beefsteak, did you know? Fascinating.)

Valentín sits next to me in some classes because our surnames begin with an “M” and he is partial to saying, “Shit yeah, dude” to any question that requires a response in the affirmative. He wears a long black army trench coat in 100 degree heat, because he thinks it looks cool. He has a round pale moon face, dark hair, and flabby build. He eventually fell in love with the first girl that had sex with him at a graduation party, though he didn’t graduate with his class. His mother took out a quarter page ad in the annual, saying, “Maybe next year, Val!” Ever the optimist, his mother.

John and I gingerly remove ourselves from Henry’s car and bring what’s left of the twelve-pack of Budweiser, neither of us looking at each other. We walk to the back of the Holiday Inn, by the big air conditioner, and find Room 124. There’s music coming from inside, something radio pop and terrible, like Gloria Estefan. John bangs on the door loudly, disrespectfully. After a few seconds, it opens and reveals an odd little spectacle. Val, recognizable in his black trench coat, opens the door and leans in the doorframe, seemingly territorial.

Behind him is a curious scene. There’s two twin beds unmade and rumpled, a bolted hotel television on a horribly littered dresser with Mario Bros. playing on it. It is the total catastrophe of a teenage boy’s bedroom unveiled, except inside a regular Holiday Inn unit. The wet moldy cold of South Texas air-conditioning valiantly expending itself hits us in the face like a prop blast, and we all stand there for a brain-beat, taking each other in.

Thinking about it now, remembering that moment, I think I miss it, or moments like it. Because they get less frequent as you get older, don’t they? The opportunity presenting itself so clearly. The escape unfolding itself before you. It just needs a bit of help to take form, needs someone to nudge it into focus. Because here, clearly, was God talking to me, this night we almost died.

Val, at the door, clearly thinks he is in charge.

Inside, there’s a guy I do not recognize, a small tubby Mexican guy, sitting on one bed, and two fat Mexican girls sitting opposite him on the other with the bedside table between them. Both beds have their bedclothes bundled at either end, and the Mexican girls are drunk and leaning into their pile, laughing and whooping it up. Tubby Mexican guy thinks he’s got a chance tonight. There’s a stereo still playing something terrible near them, now discernable: Paula Abdul. The girls and the tubby guy are laughing, taking shots of cheap white rum and not registering us in the doorway. Playing a drinking game. Quarters, it looks like. I take all this in as I enter the room behind John, who immediately takes Val over to the bathroom to talk, probably about me.

At the foot of the bed closest to the bathroom sits a tall guy with a comforter wrapped over his head like a nun’s habit, forcibly staring at the game on the TV. Val and John had to step over him to get to the bathroom, and he doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch. He’s a white guy, looking a lot like David Schwimmer will look like in Friends some years from now, but thinner. He’s playing Nintendo, which, at the time, is the hottest thing around. Mario Bros., a fairly high level, from the looks of it. He’s ferociously ignoring what’s going on around him, concentrating on the video game in full seethe. Resolved in keeping the people around him, who are obviously using him, foreign to him, away from him.

I love him, right then, somehow.

Several years from this moment, I’ll be visiting a zoo in Seattle because my mind is coming apart at the seams and my then-girlfriend Rebecca and I think that maybe a stroll around the zoo, around controlled nature, might help with the panic attacks I’ve been having. My anxieties have become unhinged, and I’ve been experiencing these periodic bouts of terror, especially when I’m trying to sleep.

It did not actually help, the zoo.

But it did remind me of something, when we got to the monkey house.

The chief orangutan sat square in the middle of the display, on a hammock, holding a potato sack over his head like a nun’s habit, and he tried to keep the constant stream of fat families and crying children in strollers away, tried to get some peace, some privacy, by hiding under that potato sack, and I saw that he desperately needed to be rescued, and he looked me in the eye, and we both held the stare, and I totally remembered this moment, from before. Room 124.

It put me back to that night, when I met Karsten, playing his little video game and forcibly ignoring the terrible human beings around him, in his own monkey house, and I thought I could rescue him. I would rescue Karsten from these people. Though, thinking about it now, maybe it was the other way around. That I was looking in the universal mirror in the reverse.

He would rescue me from being on the roads, the predatory roads of Texas, by sharing his loneliness, his autonomy, and giving me access to Room 124, when he wasn’t there, which was often. And I would introduce him to better people.

We would rescue each other.

Karsten was the first person I ever met who was truly elitist, or maybe classist. I liked him right away. He saw himself as an intellectual, and apparently the drunken soul-searching conversations in which my small circle of friends would engage seemed to pass for intellect.

I introduced him to my friend Chris, another relic of the crowd that skipped with Tony and one of the stained myrmidons like myself who no longer held any credibility with teacher or administrator as to why we were not in school (too many dead grandmothers), and whose ethical slips could be marked by the resin stained fingertips and boozy ten in the morning hiccups.

Chris was literarily inclined, however, considered himself a poet and had adopted a middle name of “Hill.” He insisted that it had been given him at birth, but I suspected otherwise, until I met his father, who was of hippie age, and then it made sense. (I’ve always had an innate distrust and irrational hatred of people who rename themselves. Seriously—if I dealt with “Domingo,” then you can live with “Juan.”)

Chris rarely spoke of this, but he had lost a younger brother, a toddler, who had been killed by a car, and the few times when he did mention it, I was too insensitive to realize what sort of hurt something like that could bring to a family, and wasn’t it any wonder that his parents divorced—what marriage really survives the death of a child? I personally only know of one, and what a toxic marriage that was—and his friendship is one I regret never having attended to more, understanding him more than I did, being a better friend. But there would be many more of these regrets to follow in my life.

With him and Karsten, we’d talk about books and authors and music that wasn’t popular (or popular in Brownsville, Texas) and foreign films that became less foreign as we became developing cineastes, limited as the availability of good art films were to us.

But all of this was bosch, remember; we were teenagers in rural Texas with no map, no compass, nothing: just an underdeveloped instinct to guide us.

We were drawn to art, but art was nowhere to be found in Brownsville. If there was, we did not possess the right kind of vision to see it. There was nothing beautiful in Brownsville, Texas, we felt. And we would talk about that often.

That’s what forged our friendship.

After one long, quiet sober Friday night spent driving around in Karsten’s car, avoiding my house because Dad had come back from one of his trucking trips and had been lately unbearable, I finally relented and had Karsten drop me off at home late, because I was starving, though there was nothing to eat there anyway, except a large bag of Doritos. The house was dark, empty. Dad had already gone out, and Mom was still at work. Derek was probably over at Gramma’s, miserably watching Mexican cartoons he couldn’t understand.

As he left, Karsten leaned out the window and asked if I wanted to go down to Juarez with him the next day. Said he’d already invited Chris, who was in. I said, “Sure: I’m in.” I always wanted to see what Mexico really looked like. Besides, it was what Mark Twain would have done.

The next day, Karsten picked me up around eleven o’clock. Mom had already gone off to work, Dad was in absentia and I think Derek was ... I can’t say I remember. But I had about $2 on me and knew I needed a little more, even in Mexico. I had tapped Gramma as a resource and she was always very reluctant to let go of $5, and I tried to disperse those terrible humiliations to a monthly minimum, so she was out of the question. A last resort? Gramma’s cousins, our buggering neighbors to the west, the Guadalúpe Ramirezes. Joe’s mother and company. I sucked up what humility I had and posed a very earnest argument (I forget what it was, but I remember it was slick), and I got $5 from it, from Joe’s retarded older sister, Lupíta Chiquita. (Hunh. That’s Spanish for “little Lupíta.” I just got that, typing it here. Meaning she was named “Guadalúpe” as well. So there were three people with a first name of “Guadalúpe” living there: her mother, father, and her. Mail call must have been very confusing.)

So when Karsten pulls up, I’m ready to go, dressed in my usual jeans, The Cure concert T-shirt, a camouflage outer shirt in case it got cold (never did), and loud white British Knights (not my choice; sale at JC Penney).

Chris is there, and we pool our cash together, and we have about a sawbuck each. No overnight bag, no change of clothes, nothing. But, Mexico: Here we come.

Karsten’s car is something that should be explored at this point. As mentioned, it was a retired police cruiser, white with the blue plastic interior, and Karsten could not care less about its maintenance. Often he’d slam it into park before even coming to a complete stop. Other times he’d have no consternation rounding another car by actually going up on the sidewalk and then coming back down hard on the road, bending a part of his bumper upward. He didn’t intend on destroying it or putting himself or others in danger while driving, but he was a typical teenager, though he looked thirty already. He’d be distracted in the middle of making a turn, and then turn too far, then overcorrect, and enter a street on the wrong side. Or he’d become frustrated and drive on the shoulder at top speed to get around a traffic jam. He never sped or swerved for the sake of the thrill, but his ordinary driving skills were enough to keep Darwin guessing: Someone was going to get eliminated. Either him or someone else.

If you remember, I had a thing about irresponsible drivers. Ever since I was an adolescent, I was convinced that I was going to die in a car wreck in Brownsville, before I could get to a city where I didn’t have to depend on a vehicle and could finally breathe a sigh of relief. Every year in Brownsville there was a natural culling of teenagers at every high school, an average of about five to ten students dying from vehicular accidents. Drunk driving, irresponsible driving, the usual stuff. The highway connecting South Padre Island and Brownsville at the time turned into a two lane death trap about midway in the salt marsh during spring break, when easily 90 percent of all drivers were officially DUI. It was just understood. Friends, football associates, people you knew by sight, we all dropped like flies. I had grown so terrified that I would die in a traffic accident, I had taken to pulling over on the side of roads and counting to one hundred, even if I was late somewhere, so that I could cheat the fates, not be there for the moment of the impact for which I was destined.

Anyhow, the combination of Karsten’s kamikaze driving and the notoriously lacking Mexican driving “system” doesn’t occur to me until we’re well away from Matamoros and driving dusty urethra-thin back highways headed south to Juarez, and I am catatonic with fear in the backseat. Karsten is gunning his engine around festively decorated pink and blue buses, sombreroed men on mules, and decrepit farm trucks with no operating lights or brakes (all looking far too familiar).

I gave up shouting out potential threats of impact, collisions coming from all sides. It was like a Blitzkrieg dogfight over London skies. Catholic buses full of peasants would veer out of roads that were not there a second ago; an oncoming Volkswagen Bug would suddenly appear in your lane, materializing right out of the choking dust cloud of the Nissan Maxima that was ahead of you not fifty feet away, pumping sickly black exhaust in poisonous concentrations from the unrefined Mexican gas.

I am so sick with fear, I actually crumple into a fetal position in the backseat and simply let my fate go into the hands of whoever is listening. I actually go limp and, if you remember your Watership Down, I go “tharn.” I just curl up into a ball and let destiny take over, like a trapped rabbit.

Three hours later, when we round a hillside and look out into a valley below and see the lights of a city, I realize we might actually live through this.

We get to the Mexican town after dusk and the town is blinking sulfur pink and white below us in erratic geometry, carved into a valley between slow rolling hills, and I have a fleeting sense of disappointment that they have electricity, somehow. Hadn’t thought out my Mexican Huckleberry Finn fantasy all the way through, with this running away.

We descend into the valley and Karsten makes an abrupt right turn, suddenly parks his car against a pink stucco wall with broken beer bottles cemented into the top as a form of security, to prevent people from climbing over it.

“We’re here,” he says, and leaps from the driver’s side door, leaving us alone and bewildered as he disappears through a metal and intimidating gate, leaving us to wait for half an hour in the car without even the keys.

Chris and I are eventually shown inside, and I’m further disappointed to find out that Karsten’s father’s Mexican mansion is an exact duplicate of every other newly built construction in Brownsville: poured, solid concrete for a floor with tile laid indecorously atop, ceiling fans propelling themselves in dangerously unbalanced elliptical rotations, central air ducts added as an afterthought, exposed throughout. I could be at Anthony’s house, a mile from where I live.

The lord of the manor is no more welcoming than the ride in: We are banished to a single, sterile room with a JC Penney bed with scratchy sheets and a thin polyester comforter to comfort us from the stale, dreadfully cold, and mildewy air. It is like sucking air from the bottom of a well, breathing in that house.

Karsten and Chris take the bed, and I figure it will be best for all of us if I stretch out on the oval rug with a pillow and a similar comforter Karsten nicked from another, unmade room. I shiver the cold night away, feeling thankful that we made the drive there in one piece, at the very least.

That three teenage boys would sleep together in the same room didn’t bother anyone, or make anyone draw any sort of conclusions. This was something I always thought strange about Mexicans and machismo: They don’t immediately leap to a conclusion of homosexuality, or get hostile with true, honest homosexuals.

It’s a holdover from preconquest times, before the Catholic Church began its native programming. Mexicans innately consider homosexuals to be a third sex, leave them to exist on their own: Go on, do your thing; have fun.

Where they get weird and violent is when there is a question of a straight man who might be gay; I think it’s the self-deception that gets at them, because they’re caught in the same conflict. Does that make sense, the clarification? If you’re gay and you know it: Clap your hands. Enjoy it. If you’re straight and are acting gay, with the potential to be gay, then the other men will take umbrage.

Meaning that, if you’re gay and pretending to be straight in Texas, you’re far more of a threat, because that’s what macho men are struggling with, while the fantastically out gay men are not a threat, because, well, they’re gay, right? They know who they are. And we’re not gay. We’re men. Sexy hetero men. Who like women. Until, you know, we like … men, in a moment of drunken sincerity. And we make up sub-groups: you’re only gay if you get penetrated. If you do the penetrating, you’re not gay. That’s just pleasure, right?

I saw this happen many times, growing up in Brownsville. Totally out gay men were left entirely unharmed and unto themselves. Very prelapsarian bliss.

But svelte boys that didn’t fit any particular macho prototype were subjected to horrible things, punishment, for not being a model of macho masculinity.

So, if you were nominally straight and wispy and had predilections for all things British, like me, then you’d have trouble from the dicks in football. Try listening to Morrissey and The Smiths while playing football in Brownsville, then. But, that’s another story altogether.

The fact that Karsten, Chris, and I sleep in the same room provokes nothing from Karsten’s dad or the help in the house, other than ignoring us to our discomfort.

The next morning, after an uncomfortable breakfast opposite a silent father, Karsten herds us into the bed of a Ford F-150: white, dirty, and raised vulgarly in 4 x 4 fashion. Chris and I sit in shorts and the veneer of a T-shirt on an unfastened spare tire and sing Smiths songs aloud and in joking unison, because neither of us can carry a tune, not even in a tune bucket. Also, I think we are both quite frightened.

We drive farther into what can only be assumed was south, and then eventually west for the better part of the morning, and soon we come to a queue of tractors, buses, and Volkswagens—all the usual characters on the Mexican roads back then.

Teenage gendarmes, not much older than Chris and me, dressed in dark blue military fatigues point Vietnam-surplus M16s at every car, and then at us, and the ancient Mexican driver who speaks for us somehow calms their minds and we are let through with no problem, but Chris and I are shaken. This also didn’t figure into Huckleberry Finn.

In the shifting bed of the F-150, Chris and I pass the time further by singing tunelessly and talking about girls, or rather, the same girl (Mishell) in whom we are both stupidly interested because she’s the only girl who likes music from Manchester in our school, and we are both trying to keep the other disinterested therein.

If things ever got uncomfortable, I don’t remember, or I didn’t realize it, because we just kept screeching outward into the dry Mexican air as it whipped up around us as the countryside sped past, unusually verdant, at least for me.

Eventually we turn down a dusty brown country road headed—I think now for a good reason—west. West just somehow feels “deeper” into the Mexican wild.

During this whole ride, a good two hours, Chris and I are taking turns swigging water from a green one-gallon thermos with the little white pour thing that had been in the bed of the truck when we had jumped in. The water, after drinking it, had somehow made us thirstier, tasted dusty. Still, we drink more. Pass it back and forth the way hobos would pass a bottle of hooch, and then eventually the truck is brought up short to a shallow ford of a largish creek, and the driver, whom we see now for the first time fully standing—a lean, tough and leathery old man in his sixties—throws the truck into park and comes around, looks at us sideways in an odd dismissal, wordlessly grabs the thermos out of Chris’ hands and begins to refill it, right from the creek.

About ten minutes later after fording the creek in the Ford F-150 at high 4x4 speed, Chris is convinced he’s picked up some sort of bacteria from the raw creek water we’ve been unwittingly drinking and is curled up in a fetal roll as the truck lumbers deeper into Mexican lumber.

I’m not so sure I haven’t contracted something either, but I manage to keep from hysterical vomiting as Chris is doing, in a ball at the end of the truck bed.

Eventually, I notice the truck slowing—and it isn’t my fanciful imagination this time—because the low, gnarled mesquite trees begin giving way and we slowly crest a small, shallow hill into what is essentially a long ranch road. A lone, ramshackle building made of cracking white stone with a low, flat roof appears out of nowhere at the end of the lane, and we stop. We’re suddenly surrounded by horses, and the smell of horses.

It’s a small ranch outpost, atop a minor hill, and more hills roll away to the horizon as far as I can see. It’s still one of the most beautiful things I remember, in its uncomplicated, unassuming simplicity.

“This is one of my dad’s ranches,” Karsten says as he gets out of the passenger side and sees me staring off into the north. (It felt like the north. Felt like I was looking at the underside of Texas.) I can imagine Karsten, from this distance, probably talking in his monosyllabic Spanish to the old man for the first few minutes of the drive, and then saying nothing for the rest of the drive, which probably drove Karsten crazy, but was perfectly all right with the old guy. “We’re supposed to help take down the fences,” he says, absently pointing with an oblique nod to a long barbed-wire fence that trailed off into the distance. His attention is acutely fixed upon a .9mm pistol he suddenly pulls from under his seat, making a show of chambering a round, replacing the hammer, and then checking the safety and putting it in the small of his back. He wore no belt, so for the next few minutes, the gun kept tilting forward precariously, like it wanted to slip into the seat of his trousers and disappear down into his ass, and Karsten, unwilling to divorce his own fantasy, refused to remove it from there. Instead, he chases off after the horses, while Chris and I hop off the truck and attempt to ingratiate ourselves with the old man and the remaining horses, both of whom are visibly repulsed by our advances. We’re unsure of what to do, and what’s expected of us, Chris and me.

The old man disappears into his home, and then reappears soon after with a boy who looks very much his simile, except reduced to 30 percent. They both stand there, taking us in.

We stare back. Fidget awkwardly. The horses and their horse smell are swirling at a safe distance around us. Very, very un–Mark Twain, I’m thinking, when suddenly Karsten comes shooting past us riding a large, speckled horse that seems terribly upset at having a rider on its back, making the point very clear by running at full tilt down the length of the road and throwing its head violently around. Karsten, while Chris and I had stood there gaping and wondering what to do, had disappeared into a stable and managed to expertly festoon the fastest horse with saddle and bridle and then put the thing into gear. And then, off he went, like he was on a Ferrari, charging the length of the road, whipping the flanks of the poor beast with malicious glee, and the horse could do little but run faster, and then faster than that. Still, Chris and I stand there.

The old man says something to the boy and the boy slowly dissolves back into their shack, and then emerges holding a bag of tools.

Karsten shoots around behind us and I approach the old man, attempting to say something to him in our native tongue, and realize, all of a sudden, that I can no longer speak Spanish.

All these years of pretending, of cultural snobbery, of emphasizing English and feeling that Spanish was the language of the poor and conquered peasants had suddenly crystalized, and my one chance to engage in a wholly authentic moment, to talk to a human being who lived simply, who needed nothing other than what he had around him, woke with the sun and slept with the moon and the horses and the mesquite and the rattlesnakes, that my chance to talk to my father’s people was lost, right there.

So I point. At the bag of tools.

And he points back. At the fence, the one to which Karsten had vaguely alluded, some distance down the dirt road.

And I get what he means. “Get to work, tourist.”

Chris and I take the bag and wander down the road to where the fence has been under deconstruction.

It is barbed wire, three tiers of it, held up every ten or so feet by some wood stake driven into the earth about a foot or so down. One of those “u” shaped nails holds the line to. Remarkable that it has stayed up, in this cracked earth. Most of the stakes are just mesquite branches, given a minimum effort at whacking it into something resembling a vertical stake, then pounded into the earth, before the next one was done, and so on, until the perimeter was created, extending into either horizon and obscured by the shrubby trees.

I look in the bag that the old man had given me. It has two pairs of pliers and a flat-headed screw driver and a hammer, along with a hot plastic bottle of Coca-Cola that is filled with what now is clearly creek water, tinged with particles.

I think we get about four stakes done before we quit, Chris and me. That was our contribution to the great acquisition of Karsten’s dad’s ranch barony.

Come to think of it now, I think I was the only one who attempted to help. I think Chris was off writing his meandering, nonmetered poetry, and who knew what sort of malfeasance Karsten had gotten himself into, and then out of. Then into again.

My own sense of Gramma’s peasant work ethic had driven me to help, but my sissy idleness and a small gash on my thumb had allowed me to give in after only a few minutes, which perfectly captured my psychological profile at the time.

It is getting into the late afternoon, and I decide that I wanted to ride a horse in order to have something to remember the experience with, before we leave. Maybe not the dangerous one Karsten is riding, but another, slower, maybe crippled one, like at a children’s hospital.

After cooing and fumbling through a few old Americanized Spanish phrases and a lot of pointing, I’m able to ask the old man about the horse. His look is suspicious, uncertain.

Finally, he relents and enters the horse pen to catch a lazy, marelike creature and begin to harness it with saddle and bridle, which is an amazing amount of work. I hadn’t realized what I had been asking of him. But he helps me climb aboard the sedate and pliable mare, who, out of nowhere, turns into a hell-borne, meth-crazed hot rod and sprints toward the low trees to knock me from her back.

I hear the old man and the kid shouting instructions to me from their perch at the stoop of the old man’s house, but their shouts are drowned out by my hysterical and unending cries of “Whoah! Whoah! Whoah!” and the horse starts bucking, bucking me up and kicking out her back legs, trying really hard to catch me on a branch by darting for the trees, and then I have a clear idea of what she is attempting to do, that she has it in for me, and so I try to think of the best thing to do in this situation and I come to the conclusion that I will lie flat on her back, wrap the bridle and my arms around her dinosaur neck, and choke the animal to death, because I’m like that when someone threatens me.

So I do, or at least I try, and in doing so, I yank the bridle quite hard to the right and she rockets off in a steady, ridable pace back to the house.

It was more frightening than riding with Karsten, being on that horse’s back and it charging out of control with the intention of knocking me off. I dream of that short ride still, when things are not going so well.

The mare, under the stern direction of the yank, gallops right up to the old man who catches her by the bridle, and by now, Chris and Karsten have come out to see what all the shouting has been about, and they laugh, hoot and point at me and my near-death experience at the hooves of an old mare.

I climb off the horse shaking, and she turns away and refuses to look at me, wanders off to join the rest of her people and do what horses do when they’re not trying to kill the unhooved. The old man, quietly tickled, can tell I’ve had a considerable fright and is sympathetic. “Estas asustádo,” he says, which is a kind of low-frequency shock, and he takes me inside the house and sits me in the only chair available—an old, unsteady wooden thing—and pours me a drink of water from the jug. I drink it with my hands shaking, no longer concerned about the bacteria in the water.

His house, like him, is lean and simple. He has a cot along the wall with a rough cut window above it, with no glass, screen, or bars, just a hole into the outside. Tools and rope are hung on the walls, all of them obviously for use and not decoration. Every part of this house is put to use, intentional, functional. I think he is the richest and happiest person I’ve met until then. Even then, as an idiotic teenager, I could understand that.

The drive back to Brownsville the next day was every bit as treacherous and aging as the drive to Juarez had been three days before. That morning, Karsten’s dad had been no warmer over breakfast—fried egg soup and fried plantains: Remember, these were Cubans, not Mexicans—and so I preoccupied myself with the paper while Karsten tried to bridge the gap between friends and reluctant family, before we took up the gauntlet of the drive back to Texas.

Chris rode in the passenger seat up front and shouted out potential threats while Karsten gleefully gunned his engine on the dusty highways back north. I was exhausted by this point, incapable of sustaining that level of alarm, so I laid back down on the back seat and slept, the cries and shouts of the two idiots driving in the front of the retired police car seemingly far enough away so that they didn’t pertain to me, could not possibly harm me, and so I slept. I slept.

When I got home, two days later, the house was dark, and I ate a half a bag of Doritos for dinner, as I had gone unmissed, except by maybe Lupíta Chiquita, to whom I still owe those five bucks.

Karsten disappeared a few months after that, when his father “made a donation” to St. Mary’s Catholic School and they allowed Karsten to graduate finally, though he had not been to school for close to two years. He called me about a year later from a naval academy somewhere on the east coast, asking me for the telephone number of some girl he had dated twice, said he’d call me right back, but never did.

That crazy Karsten.