Free My Heart Is a Drunken Compass by Domingo Martinez Page A

did anything anyone threw at him, and if excess went beyond, he did a bit more. There was simply no stopping how much he would drink, how much he’d snort or take: He could consume triple or quadruple what you thought was too much.
    He had our Martinez peasant stamina, our crazy Mexican strength. He was Dumbo, made out of rubber. He still had our Gramma’s strength in him, with his developed sense of the optimistic stupidity that made him love and trust everyone around him, who actually loved and liked him back, because he was nothing if not an incredibly likeable kid.
    That was the problem: You combine this pastiche of personality with his penchant for addiction, and it points you toward the cliff edge.
    And personally, because I loved the kid as much as I did, and I wanted always to impress him and for him to keep me firmly locked in as his hero, as his older brother and idol, I was always on the hunt for something that he’d find amusing, something that would keep me on the cusp of the most interesting and the finder of the coolest things.
    I was Gryffindor; Derek was Hufflepuff. Hufflepuffs are good finders, and Derek always found drugs.
    So all the things I would find for him to share in would inadvertently leverage him with a social currency that went well beyond anything his loose constellation of friends had previously been exposed to: I provided this credit of identity that proved incredibly lucrative in the lateral currency of “cool” in shit places like universities; by trying to win over my younger brother’s affections, I was actually giving him the freedom to kill himself because his friends and peers and compatriots, who were all eager to learn more and more and more about what was cool and next and big and smart, were plying him with booze and blow and ecstasy and anything they had their hands on so that Derek could continue talking and talking and telling them about all that he knew, which is what I knew, and what Dan and I were giving him while he disappeared further into the miasma of addiction and a dither of definition and blurred boundaries and a declension to a level we never thought possible for one of our own family.
    â€œAshes to ashes, funk to funky,” as David Bowie sang.

    He was so happy to see me that afternoon I drove into Austin.
    Derek ran out of the fraternity house and hugged me while I grabbed my bag, and I didn’t hug him back, exiting our mother’s car. A hot day, a shitty Texas campus, dicks in trucks, girls wearing excessively short shorts. I was pissed off. Turned on, of course, with the girls in shorts, but still pissed off.
    He failed to notice my resistance; maybe he was high on something. But I wasn’t relenting, and I was irritated that he was making me spend time in a fraternity house in Austin.
    It wasn’t as if he didn’t know that both Dan and I had stood and fought a Hellenic “stand your ground” fight against an entire fraternity in Kingsville, Texas, ten years before, and that the whole idea of fraternities goes against my core principles, but he was lining up his friends like dwarves and hobbits in an adventure—Dimly, Wimly, Simpy, and so on—and attempting to introduce them to me like I was his own Yoda, and they all lined up, stupid and uninteresting and . . . well, dimwitted.
    Or maybe I’m just his older brother, and I was being a complete dick about this.
    But no; they were just younger kids and “friends” of my brother, helping him along in his unmonitored and unscheduled self-destruction. Encouraging, allowing, permitting, supplying his destructive tendencies— can’t you see what’s happening here?
    Echoes of my own choices, and effects. Affects.
    And Dan’s. And Derek’s helplessness.
    And these fucks were resonating it back to Derek, in amplification, for their own fun.
    And my mother, her umbilical throttling her hearing, chauffeuring him along.
    I was angry at