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

hypocritical for me to say, as I was languishing within the first stages of alcoholism my own self, but hey, I would tell myself, I’m holding down a job and my own place to live, taking care of myself otherwise. Mostly .
    I mean, at least my weaknesses aren’t public , I’d say, when I met myself in the mirror.
    I’m just a happy-go-lucky scamp.
    Then, of course, I’d meet my friend, Dough, short for Dougherty. Dough was also single and isolated, lived in the same neighborhood, had a hole in his heart he liked to drown out with booze sometimes as well. We’d terrorize our neighborhood bars for a weekend, making complete dicks out of ourselves after never-ending pitchers of stout beer and martinis, laughing like maniacs around conversations and jokes and this mania of the broken artist—we undiscovered geniuses holding down regular jobs—and so we rubbed alcohol into our wounded egos and drowned our delights in fried foods and pudgy barmaids who never threw us out, just overserved us because the tip would correspond accordingly, and, to be perfectly fair, we were actually rather entertaining. It was a rare evening indeed that we caused any real trouble for anyone, made anyone uncomfortable.
    We were just loud, funny drunks.
    Why couldn’t Derek do this, instead? Continue the tradition?
    What Derek was doing, well, Derek was into pure destruction, gripped firmly by ghosts of unreasonable rage.
    It made me terrifically sad that he and I were left unbonded, even in our addictions.

    He was eventually ejected from school and became one of those pathetic hang-about people who live near a campus just for the parties and the hepatitis. I’m not sure where he was living, or who he was living with. There are no records for this time in his life, like his life had been blasted over by a sandstorm of drugs and booze.
    Every few weeks, my mother would get a gripping sense of doom and drive from her home in Houston to Austin and spend an afternoon looking for him, a sort of scavenger hunt to find her youngest son. Some of his “friends” were actually good kids and would take pity on Mom because, even for their lifestyle, they saw how far Derek would push things.
    Eventually, Mom would find him holed up in some shanty UT rat hole and shake him awake, then pour him into her car and take him to a grocery store, buy him food, find his clothes and few meager possessions—most of which had been bought for him by my other sister, Marge, and her husband—and by this time Derek would be alert, fed, and ready to get Mom back on the road so he could trade some of his food for beer.
    That was who he was at this time.
    Completely without vergüenza , the Mexican Catholic depiction of pride and shame that forced oneself to have a sense of dignity enough to do better for oneself, for those who loved you, for your family. Derek, somehow, because he wasn’t raised on that farm in that barrio like the rest of us, had been raised with no sense of vergüenza ; that genome had never kicked in and developed, or at least remained dormant at this time, and it was killing my mother, and the rest of us.

    My sisters saw and understood what was happening, but they pulled back and established boundaries because they were building their own families, had their own lives to live. We were all deeply saddened by Derek, but none of us really knew what to do. We spoke of interventions, of hospitalization and rehab, but none of it ever took shape: It cost money, and Mom’s insurance, which was still covering him at twenty-two, would not cover that.
    We felt helpless, and could do nothing but watch, as his demons wrapped him in shrouds and took him away from us.
    Everyone tried to reach him. My father would also travel to Austin, try to find him, but Derek knew that as a sober man with little income, Dad would prove wearisome and Jesufied, try to talk to Derek about AA, and would get little from the