My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Read Online Free PDF Page A

tight unit, with my mom’s diametric gravities pulling her in opposite directions, leaving her with her heartbreak in the middle.

    This is really where Derek became estranged, in a way. He felt disjointed, like an intruder into Mare and Mark’s life, though they were as gracious and loving as anyone could ever be. Mark, as a coach at a tough Corpus Christi high school that was predominantly black and Hispanic, brought Derek into his orbit and Derek became a good athlete, played football on Mark’s team and then tried competitive weightlifting, and Mare saw to his academics.
    His first day at possibly the roughest school in Corpus Christi, a place called West Oso, Derek made his entrance as Mare’s little brother dressed in wire-rim glasses, braces, and a cardigan thrown over his shoulders with the cuffs rolled into a ball at his chest while he shambled in on a pair of crutches, an injury sustained on the football field. The getup was, of course, Mare’s doing, as a former Mimi, and Derek only succeeded in avoiding getting the shit beaten out of him because that day, inside the first ten minutes of him being there, there was a race riot in the cafeteria. A Mexican kid had stabbed a black kid in the side of the head with a pencil, and both sides erupted in a huge, police-involved brawl.
    Eventually, Derek figured out how to dress so that he didn’t look like a pretentious prick and wasn’t targeted, excelled under Mark’s tutelage in the sports program, and sonofabitch if that kid didn’t graduate as valedictorian of his school, when the time came, and had a full ride to the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, choosing to take a career path like his older brother, June.
    We were all very proud of him, very impressed. He was fulfilling his role in the idealized version of our family, like we all wanted.
    Mom, of course, remained involved and carried her guilt as best as she could as she rebooted her vitality and libido, finished her own eight-year degree plan and kept her job at JC Penney, which was the closest thing to a social life as she’d ever had, and after a while none of us begrudged her anything: If anyone deserved a second act, it was Mom.
    But still, her guilt over losing Derek permeated everything, and it would leave a mark.

    He was a good kid, back then. I’m sure the burden of being the youngest of a sprawling, motivated family in the ascendency was crushing, with every one of his older siblings holding a degree of authority over him and exercising it in the vacuum of a family in partial disorder as our lives became untidy. And this time with Mark and Mare, this time being the perfect kid, after being shunted from our family home to a shit Brownsville apartment and then off to his sister’s home, it spun him tight, and tighter still, and when he made it to college in Austin on that full scholarship, Derek spun out of control. It frightened and disappointed all of us, and I’m sure himself.
    Personally, I had lost my ability to connect with him. I failed my younger brother as an older brother, I know. I carry some of that same guilt Mom feels, but in a different color.
    Because I never spent more than a couple of days with him, as I had made my decision to live on the West Coast, I had no idea who he was, as a person, and treated him simply as a category, as the younger brother.
    When he was a boy, I’d make my yearly hajj back home to report in and feel superior, reconnect with Dan and sometimes with Derek. I’d come home and I’d bring him gifts, give him some of my best T-shirts and comics and CDs, and Derek would devour these things, build his identity around most of it like an internalized shrine.
    I’d show up wearing a cool T-shirt, looking thin and urban, and he’d look up to me in a sort of hero worship that I did nothing to discourage. I gave him his first “Yoda” T-shirt, something I’d bought from