My Heart Is a Drunken Compass Read Online Free PDF

a street vendor who’d hand-made the shirt. Another of an M. C. Escher drawing that was all the rage at the time. And I brought back lots of music. Lots and lots of music. The latter moved him so much that once, for show-and-tell in his second-grade class, Derek did a one-man improvisation of a Beastie Boys song that had the teacher leaping over her chair in order to slam off the tape player because of all the cursing, which befuddled Derek because he didn’t know these were “bad” words. Mostly just slang, he thought, as he rapped about getting “a girlie on his jimmy.”
    But this all ended when he arrived at university. I mean, he still did the hero worship, but his idea of college and independence meant that he could do drugs and booze and sleep all day without having a single sibling or parent expect anything from him, and academics kept slipping down the ranks of his obligations and priorities, and he began to drown in his genetics and compulsions toward addiction, took to alcoholism like the Sheen family took to movies about the Vietnam War.
    This is where we started to miss him.

    Ironically, I was fascinated by my younger brother, in a way, and continued to crave the sort of hero worship from him that I had once bestowed on Dan, even though Derek had become incapable of returning calls, was basically unfunctional as a human being. Living in Seattle, it became my role to seek out and find new and cool things that he would never find in Texas (after all, that was why I was living in Seattle, no?), and in order to keep myself firmly ensconced in the position of guru of good culture, I would still supply him with steady access to great music and recommendations and mailed gifts, discs, shirts, and videos.
    Which, in turn, would eventually lend themselves as a commodity in that shitheap of a college town, because it gave Derek a sort of social elevation, and people would then seek him out, want to “party” with him (possibly the most distasteful distortion of a verb in common usage) and ply him with booze, marijuana, and hardcore drugs, and Derek’s walls were never so willing to erode, so willing to come down, like the defenses of Jericho under a million chemical trumpet blasts.

    Mom’s guilt contributed tremendously. She’ll be the first to admit it, so it’s no shock if she reads it here. She was permissive and enabling and heartbroken, hoping his better angels would somehow rise from the ashes of the bridges he insisted on burning. Every semester, he’d beg the family for money to pay fees and fines to the university or the rubbish fraternity he was homesteading, just the minimums and just enough to squeak back in, and he’d beg for a reprieve, beg for that second chance, just $200 from this person, $800 from that family member, please please please: “I just need the chance,” he’d say. “Please.”
    He’d wear us down, make my brother-in-law crack his checkbook from fatigue and disgust, saying, “It’s not about the money, Derek. It’s just this lying. . . .”
    â€œPlease; it’ll be different this time.”
    â€œYou know what you’re going to do, if you go back.”
    â€œNo, I promise I won’t. I need to finish this.”
    â€œFine.”
    Once the check was signed, he’d disappear again for three or four months, communicating exclusively by text message, usually something garbled and nonsensical sent at 3:00 a.m.
    It was so painful, so terribly painful, that time.
    And I vacillated between a profound desire to beat him and six of his closest friends senseless, and to hold him down and just hug the broken homunculus inside him, and have him cry it all out, give him some sense of dignity and self-love, enough to say, “I’m better than this. This isn’t what I want for myself.”
    But he never made it to that stage, under the weight of his addictions.
    Which is incredibly