Free My Heart Is a Drunken Compass by Domingo Martinez

raspy siren with a two-packs-a-day habit and a penchant for barbecue.
    Not that she was a smoker, or a barbecuist. Or rather, she may have been, for all I knew: As I said, I hadn’t thought of her since before I barely graduated high school. She wasn’t that significant, just another target of written letters and mixed tapes back in high school, but really, that could have been any number of girls.
    My heart was a drunken compass even then, before I was a drunk.
    I remembered her as an awkward, lean girl with a laugh to make you reconsider your stream of jokes, if I’m to remain kind. Actually, that is a bit mean, since she was just a teenage kid, seemed a bit morose and a bad fit for South Texas, which is what I think drew me to her. And that she was a sort of echo of another girl with whom I was smitten, but too frightened to make it obvious. Bit of a placeholder, if that’s not revisionist. So I gave her the full Pablo Neruda treatment with a daily letter and a few moody Mancunian tunes for a while, made no progress, and when it came time for me to leave high school and Brownsville, I genuinely never thought about her again.
    Then she reached out, all these years later, when I was at my most vulnerable, transitioning chapters without Dan or a partner in Seattle, living entirely unto my own and eking out a living three thousand miles from a home that was no longer there, and, being who I was, I took it as a sign: You’ll do .
    She sent a photo, of course, and I was knocked back on my heels: She looked fantastic, like a Latin Winona Ryder, which isn’t a stretch. Remember, this was the early days of the Internet, when social customs and etiquette had not yet been established and curiosity led you down some fairly dangerous catfish holes.
    The mixed tapes I’d left behind like preverbal suggestions of romantic idealizations had left their marks, and here she was now, years later, wondering who I’d become, what I was doing, and most important to her, what I was listening to. This became clear after a few exchanges of e-mail, which immediately turned into full running daily electronic dialogues interrupted only by the two-hour time difference and picked up again later for six-hour telephone conversations that racked up $300 in cell phone bills, held nightly after I’d come home from work.
    She’d taken to pursuing and obsessing on every band I’d left behind on the tapes I’d made for her, researching and indulging and spending her husband’s money on rare pressings and taking pilgrimages to Manchester or stalking, when he toured America, Morrissey, of all people, to whom I’d introduced her years before on more than a few compilations, as he was one of my favorite artists back then. And I knew it was her husband’s money only later, after weeks of talking, when she finally admitted she was married.
    To anyone with an appreciation of absurdity, what was clearly unfolding here was a relationship long in the making, the sort of John Hughes fantasy story that drove the box office in the ’90s. I thought, Finally, here’s the current that should be sweeping me along. I’ll just let it take me where it wants to go .
    To indicate things further, it just so happened I’d scheduled a trip to Houston and Austin for later that month . . . so what are you doing for dinner, say, on the 19th? Everything seemed to be pointing toward the rightness of this, the universal correction in the vacuum of signifiers.
    And it was with that idea that I traveled to Austin, Texas, that summer.

    Derek was there, at this time, and he was excited to see me.
    I wasn’t so excited to see him.
    I had an idea of the sort of life he was living at UT, and I had become so cross with his decision to join a fraternity that I didn’t even try to speak to him for over a year.
    Dan described Derek as a chemical toilet. That’s better than what I had come up with: a dust bin. Derek