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

all of us, not just Derek.

    The only night I was at the fraternity house, Derek paraded me around, and I was surrounded by these drinking children and maybe one or two glimmers of intelligence. The only kid I felt any sort of draw toward was Derek’s best friend, oddly named Orlando, a tall, stringy Mexican-American kid with long straight hair and a keen sense in seeing the larger, more cosmic sensibility and the stupidity of this enterprise. He’s from Del Rio, Texas, a border town similar to Brownsville, and a kooky family of artists, musicians, and cockfighters. The first time Derek visited Orlando’s house, within minutes of parking, and the moment he entered, Orlando’s dad appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Derek by his wrist, pulled him into a spare bedroom where Derek had a moment’s pause and uncertainty, until the old man handed him a Bud Light and then produced a battered guitar upon which he began to pluck that one song Antonio Banderas sings in Desperado . That was his initiation to Orlando’s family.
    The second time Derek was at Orlando’s home, he was awoken on Orlando’s couch after an all-night drive from Austin to Del Rio to find an old man—Orlando’s uncle—rubbing an ice-cold Budweiser on his neck, inviting him to sit for a drinking breakfast at 7:00 a.m. because the cockfights started around 9:00 or 10:00 that Saturday. They sat eating GBCs—tacos with carne guisada, beans, and cheese, which are such a staple in Del Rio, they’re known by their initials—and the old man pulled out a magazine that displayed fighting roosters, and cooed and petted at the image of his favorite, which was way over his pay grade, and choked up with tears. Their house was on a hill that looked directly down onto the Rio Grande. Derek said it was like a Mexican version of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits , with the multigenerational family all minding their own quirkiness and the doors left always unlocked.
    Orlando and Derek shared a room at the end of the hall in the fraternity, and it reminded me of a squat I lived in when I was roughly his age, but in Seattle. Mine was an unregistered and illegal karate school in an abandoned warehouse, but I saw the parallel. It was a square room, nothing exceptional; an elevated platform stood five feet off the ground with a plywood bunk supported by four-by-fours and bolted into the wall. On top of this rested a smelly, moldy futon. This was where Derek slept. It was unhygienic, disgusting. My billet, for the night.
    Still, he tried to throw a party for me, show me what he did now, as if he were a grown-up.
    He invited everyone he knew, and most of them were morons.
    I couldn’t move for having a throng of college students following me around, and a particularly large Southern brute took to following me, even into the men’s room, when someone started passing around a pipe full of marijuana and I thought, Yup, that’s the end of the night , and they became high and whatever conversation might have been no longer had any possibility of being evinced. I crawled up to the futon and hid while the party continued throughout the frat house, and I was relegated to the back corner while emanations of scorn and unbridled resentment poured continuously from the older, professional frat guys up front.
    And it built up to a moment when an Asian kid in a pressed pink collared shirt called down the hall to Derek and challenged him about his owed dues to the fraternity.
    I heard how he was talking to my little brother, and I climbed down from the futon and came out into the hallway angry. I said, “I’m sorry, but who the fuck are you?” I stood up and expanded, chicken chested, elbows touching both hallways and my spine expanding about a foot.
    â€œJune, don’t . . . don’t; it won’t help,” said either Derek or Orlando, when these other dickhead yuppies in similar pastel collared shirts