Chapter 25

Dad’s Warning

When Dan moved to Seattle, he had done it in that sort of brazen, headlong sort of way you do things in your twenties, too stupid to know that you can’t do something, so you just go ahead and do it. Dan fell in love with the place.

We have to give Dennis, and the Army, that: They found Seattle for us.

At the time, about two years before MTV and FM radio had found Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, Seattle was a hidden, mountain-cloaked rural metropolis unbeknownst to the rest of America, and a perfect starter city for me. I hadn’t been invited, when Dennis asked Dan to come up, but that didn’t stop Dan from asking me along, after living there a few months.

I wasn’t ready, at the time, still reeling from the beating I got from Richard, still trying to disentangle myself from the mess I had made at school. Dan had been living in Seattle for nearly a year at that point and had become tremendously lonely, realized just how much my friendship and brotherhood had actually meant to him, after all those years as kids doing nothing but irritating and beating the hell out of each other. He would call me and tell me how clean and beautiful and cool and weird this place was; he absolutely drank in all the differences between this quiet Shangri-La and Texas, and all that we knew: the bitter heat, the entrenched racism, the limited possibilities, the large hair.

Seattle was subdued, a retreat for overeducated, liberal-minded people, a hideaway on the West Coast, with exceptional and fascinating drop-outs. It was a wet, quasi-British rain-soaked city full of promise and civility, where people judged you not by what you did or your race, but by your hobbies. It was the opposite of Texas. And beer. “Holy shit,” he said, “the beer! Stuff you’ve never heard of!”

“What, like Heineken?” I’d heard of Heineken.

“No,” he said, “microbrews. Beers that don’t get out of the state.”

“Micro-beers?” I repeated. “What, like, tiny bottles?”

“No, moron, just microbrewed—limited distribution.”

“Oh,” I said. I still didn’t know what he meant, but saying “Oh,” would get us to move on, give me more context. Maybe I could figure it out with more context.

Anyhow, it took me a week to find it on a map. Or rather, it took me a week just to find a map, and then find Seattle. It was up. Thing I always loved about living in Brownsville, Texas, was that the rest of the United States was always “up,” same as how going south always felt like you were going downhill. Brownsville was always at your navel, or at the point you were in relation to the rest of the map. Everything emanated from that point. Seattle was up and to the left, the very far left. Near Canada.

“Hunh,” I said to no one at all, in a library in Brownsville, looking at Seattle. “So that’s where Canada is. Maybe I can go to Canada.”

The incident with Richard was a few months behind me now, and my face had healed, but my tooth remained cracked, though it wasn’t giving me any problems. Things had settled down around me. I had begun working very closely with the good Dr. Blum at a small and terrible political newspaper, The Brownsville City Light. He was an academic from Mexico City who had taken me under his wing at the developing publication. We were still struggling with bad technology, first-generation laser printers and the like, but we had a good relationship, talked extensively about many things. He was my first father substitute, which I tended to collect throughout my young adulthood. Dr. Blum was Jewish: spoke elegant Spanish and exquisite, if halting, English; carried himself with crisp manners; and was a very kind, very patient man, who looked like Inspector Poirot, but with a less manicured mustache. It was he who began my fascination with the Great Tribe, had created a passion for what he called “being a ‘generalist,’ knowing a lot about a lot of things. “‘Specializing’ in something is quite boring, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do,” I said, though I only figured out what he meant some years later.

He’d republish many of his essays that he’d written for the Economist and other high-level publications that were far too complicated for the audience our publication was hitting. In the two years of printing the twelve-page tabloid weekly, the only response we’d gotten was a letter to the editor handwritten in a lengthy, sweaty, unpunctuated scrawl that went on and on about the horrors and consequences of drug use, which we had transcribed and printed, and then it turned out, in the end, to have been written by Segis’s mother, because she was convinced still that I had been making Segis take drugs.

By this time, I’d dropped out of college, was working on the newspaper with Dr. Blum, and was feeling rather claustrophobic. Dan’s invitation to move to Seattle was looking better and better. Things at home had settled down—Richard had moved north with that Christian cult he’d joined in a hurry, and Mom and Dad had been well on their way toward separation, with Derek lost somewhere in the middle.

Gramma had gone on like nothing had happened, like she hadn’t been a tremendous Judas goat the night of the beating, that she hadn’t taken Richard’s homicidal threats far too lightly. We avoided each other instinctively.

My only stimulation at this point had been Northern Exposure, I will admit with a degree of sheepishness. You might have called it a “boy crush” that I had on Rob Morrow, but I would call it all-out idolatry for Joel Fleischman. I wanted to be a nebbish Jewish doctor from Flushing, in the same way I had wanted to be Indiana Jones ten years earlier. The accoutrements would be different, sure, but I was certain I could carry it off. When I realized that Northern Exposure was filmed a couple hours outside of Seattle, the decision was clinched. I had been going a bit out of my mind, hanging around in a sort of illiterate limbo, knowing full well that there was a whole world of people with passions and interests just like mine right out there, and to get there, all I had to do was leave—just leave—and take that first fateful step out into the darkness. But it was frightening. Quite frightening. But I knew I had to do it; I was of age, but I had no money, nothing. I had saved about $500, that was about it.

I started to fester, in my own mind. Became very resentful of my situation, felt like the world outside of Texas was laughing, enjoying fantastic conversation about literature and art and coffee and . . . you know . . . things that mattered.

And I was stuck here, in Brownsville. Everyone I knew from high school had left, on their first leg of their eventual boomeranging, now off spending their surplus grants and loans in the bars of Austin. Everyone from Brownsville who felt themselves adventurous had moved to Austin. I didn’t want to go there; it seemed like high school in a different venue. Like pitching a tent in your parent’s backyard and pretending to camp.

I was hitting a level of desperation that would soon force my hand, force me to do something important, like a howling teakettle.

One Saturday morning, Mom and Dad both happened to be in the kitchen, in a rare breach of mutual distancing.

“I’m going to live with Dan, in Seattle,” I announced plainly. Loudly, too.

I was nineteen, expecting the same sort of response I’d had each time previous, which was normally utter denial, humiliation, or a command to stop talking nonsense.

Instead, they were quiet. Mom stood at the stove, Dad leaned his elbow on the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room, shirtless. He looked at me.

He nodded his head, faintly narrowed his eyes, and said, rather dramatically, “OK. But if I find out [heavy comma] that you are up there [heavy comma] selling your ass [heavy comma] I will come up there and shoot you in the head.”

Mom, in the kitchen, didn’t look our way.

I was surprised they let me go this easily.

Dad’s response hadn’t even registered. If it did, it was only that he’d had so little faith that I would have to resort to prostitution to make ends meet. Well, fronts and ends. (Ha.) But I’d lived with the man for nineteen years now and knew not to take anything he said like it was coming from a human adult, more like a psychotic, tyrannical toddler, never to be taken seriously or trusted. His edict, saying he’d come up to shoot me in the head if he found I was down to rough trade, could be translated—as I did then—to something akin to, “Wow! Really? Good for you! Man, that’s exciting stuff. I’m very pleased and happy for you! Good luck!”

To me, it was exactly the same thing. It was his way of blessing the enterprise.

A few days later, Mom asked me when I planned to make the trip. It was October when I made the declaration. I’d needed about another month or so of saving paychecks to get there comfortably. “Sometime in the coming year,” I told her.

“Alright,” she said. “Just as long as you plan for this.”

“Sure thing.”

But things weren’t going well at that point. I was boiling over with a sense of abandonment, like something was happening, and it just wasn’t happening to me. To make things worse, I’d stopped talking to everyone, all friends and acquaintances, after the beating from Richard, and the only contact I had with someone my age was the secretary at work, a cute girl a year older than me named Janie, from a neighborhood not a few miles from where I lived. Janie was a typical Brownsville girl, average, common, cute, and very Mexi-American. She was recently separated from the same boyfriend she’d had since kindergarten, was intending on marrying, the whole routine planned out for her by years of generational insulation and the unshakeable belief in the Virgin Mary. I had a crush on her, but she didn’t know what to make of me. She had been really gentle with me, when she had first seen me at the office, after Richard had bruised me up. She’d even cried. We’d “had a moment” in the office some days after, but then she had reconsidered, pretended nothing had happened.

Then something triggered it, one night in mid-November. Boom. Dad and Mom had a big fight at the house, and somehow I got involved. I grabbed my stuff and went to the Holiday Inn, where Karsten used to live, and checked into a room. I bought a twelve-pack of beer and found a knife, sat in the room and made parallel cuts on my arm, leading across the forearms, about four or five of them from the wrist to the elbow. I did it slowly, cowardly, pushing down hard to feel the blade in the skin, watching the blood well up, then pulling down sharply. Then I did it again, and again. I still don’t know why I did it. Dr. Blum and I had been discussing the various “sun dances” of the native tribes of the area, the evolved sensitivity toward anything that made one bleed, how the natives of the area had dramatic life-changing injuries happen to them every day, and they never reacted the way we would now, just sort of moved on, incorporated the new liability into their lives. How they would include this factor into their celebrations, draw hooks into their pectorals, under the armpits, string them out to a pole and run around the pole, stretching and bleeding and ripping their muscles out to ecstasy, is what they’ve written. I didn’t agree, I told the good doctor.

I said, “Maybe they just liked the punishment.”

Doctor Blum laughed. “That’s very Catholic of you,” he said. “No,” he said. “They were just letting out the dragons.”

“The dragons?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The dragons, all the demons that boil up in a person. The last of the dragons was let out in Durango, in 1967. Me and my two good friends, we had a ceremony, and we drank and smoked marijuana and shot off guns and let out all our dragons. That was the last of the dragons. We killed them, in ourselves.”

And that night, I was surfacing my own dragons, with a serrated knife, making those cuts, needing that pain. I was watching those dragons come to the surface. I was going out of my mind. I stayed in that room, lonely. I’d placed a call to Janie, but she never showed. I didn’t expect her to.

She wasn’t really who she was, in my mind. I had been in love with another girl, Gina, and Janie reminded me of her now, but more approachable. Gina had since left, on her way to school, following her dad’s career path, as a lawyer, likely a judge, eventually. She had a tremendous future ahead of her. Janie, Janie was here. Janie was staying here, not going anywhere.

The next day I showered, took care of the wounds, wore a long-sleeved shirt, and made my way to work.

At some point, I just left it all to hang and went home to pack. I drank a lot of beers while doing so, called and inquired as to when the next bus to Seattle was leaving.

“Where?”

“Seattle.”

“¿A donde es esso?” (“Where is that?”)

“Washington.”

“¿Donde?”

“Washington State. West Coast. Norte.”

“Oh. Hold on. Tonight, at 10:30.”

“Thanks,” I said. Click.

I got my things together, managed to sort and divide, cut ties to and shoved anything else I owned into two bags. I still hadn’t told anyone I was leaving, right then. About seven or eight that night, I was overcome with a need to explain to Dr. Blum what I’d decided, get his blessing. I drove to his house, across Brownsville, and very timidly, in the dark, rang his doorbell. His wife answered, and I sheepishly asked for the good doctor.

When he came to the door, I think I wept. I tried to explain to him what was happening, but I couldn’t. I was going crazy, I felt, like a top that was in the final stages of spinning, losing its center and wobbling out of control. And I couldn’t exactly explain that to him. “My dragons,” I said, and I pulled back my sleeves.

“Oh, Domingo,” he said. “The last of the dragons . . . ”

He was very kind to me.

I said good-bye to him.

I drove home, crying. It was still early, but I needed to get my car dropped off at the office—I had arranged for one of the owners of the newspaper to buy the car for $500 and send me the money later—and then figure out how to get to the bus station. When I got home, Derek was watching television, still unaware of what was happening. He was six years old and started following me around the house as I was gathering my things, preparing to go. He watched me finish packing.

“But why?” he asked.

“Because I’m going crazy, kiddo. It’s hard to explain,” I said.

“But why?”

“Because you’re not my age. It’s like, it’s like you have all your friends, right?”

“Right?”

“And they like stupid music. And you don’t like what they like.”

“I don’t like what they like. I like what you like.”

“I know you don’t, because you have good taste. You like the Beastie Boys. And the Butthole Surfers.”

“I like the Beastie Boys. And the Butthole Surfers.”

“Right, but your friends, they don’t like the Beastie Boys, so they make you listen to other stuff. Stuff they hear on the radio.”

“I don’t like the radio. They play bad music there.”

“Correct. And you want to listen to the Beastie Boys, with me, but they won’t let you.”

“Why don’t they let me?”

“Because they’re not as smart as me and you, Derek. We like things that are smart and funny.”

“Like the Beastie Boys?”

“Well, yes; sure. See, the Beastie Boys are funny and do things that are different, and interesting, so they can’t get on the radio down here. It’s hard to explain. But they’re smarter than the other stuff, because the Beastie Boys . . . that sort of music . . . that sort of art . . . they make you work for it. They make you think more. It’s not given to you over the radio, not spoon fed . . . and you don’t do it because everyone else is doing it. So yes; I mean, because the things you like are different from the things everyone else likes, that’s why we’re smarter. And you can either force yourself to like what they like or keep looking for the things you like, and keep finding them. But the thing is, if you stay around them too long, they start to win, Derek. And you start to like what they like, you start to be more like them, even though you didn’t at first, and parts of you start going quiet, and the quiet parts start getting bigger, and then eventually, you’re just quiet all over.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know, kiddo; but that’s just how it is. And right now, I feel like I’m dying, inside, and if I stay here any more, Derek, I’m going to die. Little pieces of me at first. I’m going to start dying, and people will beat me up more and more, until I start to help them in killing myself. Like Richard.”

“But why?”

“It’s just how it is, Derek. There’s no changing it.”

“But why?”

“Because they don’t like any one who is different from them. It’s evolution, sorta, I think. Can’t change the model too quickly. I’m a giraffe, born to a family of mules. Remember that, though, Derek. Remember that what you like, what makes you different, is that you are smarter than anyone here. If they were smarter, they wouldn’t be here. So by that rule, you’re smarter than everyone, get it? Don’t ever let anyone tell you different.”

“Because we like the Beastie Boys?”

“Well, yes. And no. Jesus, Derek, it’s not just about music. It’s about wanting more. Seeing more. There’s more. There’s so much more . . . and I . . . I just need it, Derek. Whatever it is, it just isn’t here. It isn’t in places like Brownsville.”

I’m finished packing at this point, and I’m standing in the door to the front driveway, where my car is ready, too.

This is it.

I’m leaving the nest.

The only people present are Derek and Gramma. Gramma, this whole time, has been running around behind me, trying to pack food into my bags, which I then remove.

She hands me five packs of chicken-flavored Ramen, begins to tell me just how miraculous it is—even has a bowl of it, in her hands, the noodles just about swollen to perfection—and she goes on, “Just ten pennies a pack! And you get a soup! And noodles! Look! Look! You’ll never have to worry about food!”

And it is in this moment that I finally see her clearly, like a figure standing in front of a lit-up doorway, outlined clearly, and because I’m about to leave, I’m breaking our definition, and I suddenly and forever understand my grandmother, her emotional and psychological development rusted shut at age ten, her one concern being food. I see her clearly at that moment as the young peasant Indian girl who had been farmed off because her family could not feed her.

Over a bowl of Ramen.

And it makes me cry for her, sort of. My eyes well up, seeing how poor this person really is, down in her soul, why she did the things she did. It hasn’t been money or power she has been hoarding all this time. It’s been food.

Gramma had brought all of us to America, but she could not enter. She was not allowed in. She had been our Moses, had made her covenant with America, for us, but it did not include her. This was as far as she could go. But here she was now, miraculously turning ten copper pennies into a bowl of noodle soup for me, showing me how I should never be hungry. Now, go.

Derek, on the other hand, cannot stop crying. He’s six years old at the retelling, but in my memory, he’s wearing diapers, and he sits down hard on the sidewalk leading to the car, and he cries, “June, please don’t go.”

I say, “Derek, I have to. I’m going to die here. I know it.”

“Please don’t leave. . . .”

“I’m sorry.”

“Please. . . .”

“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

He’s inconsolable, and Gramma—nanny that she’s been—sweeps him in, starts trying to feed him the Ramen, and my last image of my beautiful little brother is him on the ground, that night, crying, his face a mask of pain, of loss, as our hearts go pop, pop, pop with the disconnection of a time ended, of a change in circumstance, of one brother leaving another to fend for his little self.

And I never cried so much for Derek, not like that, not until the night fifteen years later when we thought he’d died. But that’s another story.

In the car, my heart is collapsing at the idea of leaving him in the maw of a family falling apart, a family no longer capable of taking care of its innocents. I am leaving Derek behind, sitting down hard on the sidewalk, as I drive away, crying.

Just writing this now, it tears me up. It’s one of my biggest regrets, in my life, how I hurt that beautiful little boy. In my wallet the only photo I carry is of him, one Easter, holding a rabbit with his pudgy little hands.

Before I leave Brownsville, I have to see my mother, who is working the late shift at the JC Penney, to pick up a bit of money we had previously agreed upon. The Penneys is near the bus station so I still have time. She takes an emergency break and follows me out to the parking lot, after I tell her my bus is leaving in forty-five minutes. I’m crying still, understanding what this means, and she isn’t at all sympathetic to my decision to leave so soon.

“June, what are you doing! You said you weren’t going for three months!” she says, when we get outside and are alone.

“I have to go now,” I say. “I have to leave, Mom; I’m going fucking crazy here.”

“June, just calm down; please, just calm down; what happened to your arms? Oh, Jesus, who did that to you?”

“Calm down; I did it yesterday, or the day before. You weren’t supposed to see it. It’s . . . it’s nothing. I just wanted the scars.”

“Aye, June; what is that? What are you doing? Just think about it. Just calm down. . . .”

“Mom, I can’t anymore: I just can’t. If I calm down, I’ll just stay another day, and it’ll happen again. And then maybe I won’t go that time. I just have to go now. Now. I bought the bus ticket already. It was $197. I need the money you promised me.”

“OK, I’ll get it to you, OK. Now. You make me so worried to see you like this.”

“It’s Brownsville, Mom. It’s this place. You don’t get it, and I don’t understand how you guys can just accept it, look at the same things I see and see something totally different. If I stay here, I know I’m going to kill myself soon. I know it. Really soon. Please let me go, Mom. Please, just help me this time. This last time. Please. I can’t be here anymore.”

There is a moment, and I see something in her eye, like a sadness, or an understanding. It may even be compassion, for the forgotten boy, at the end. “OK, June. OK. I’ll get you your money, like I said,” she says.

Motherhood, in the end, finally kicks in. And it’s sweet, special, because between us it’s rare.

“Yeah?” I say, unsure.

“Yeah. You need to be where you need to be,” she says. “You need to chase down your monsters, like Max.”

Here, I’m actually stunned into quiet, not even crying anymore. Some days before, I had pulled out Where the Wild Things Are, and showed her an image of Max, doing his Rumpus dance, and I had said to her and Derek that it would actually make a really cool tattoo. Mom, of course, had balked. (This was before tattoos had become so fashionably rampant.) But we had sat and looked at the book—Mom, Derek, and me, in a rare triumvirate of family that night, and we had discussed what Maurice Sendak had meant with the book, about the rage of childhood, the deep betrayals and painful shifts, and she listened to me talk, and Derek liked how I was drawing so much meaning from one of his books. We had been happy.

“You go and do what you need to do, June,” she says to me. “You go and find what you need. Your supper will be here, when you need it. Your supper will be warm. No matter where I am, that will be your home,” she says.

And I can’t believe it, watching her. That look on her face. It is all the love that I didn’t have growing up, making a face.