Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club

  That got the conversation going. My aunt Lucille shook her head. “Oh, you and your photograph. I should never have given it to you.”

  My uncle Louie nodded, “Martino’s or not, it was 1980.”

  “Perhaps,” my aunt said.

  My aunt Lucille wasn’t Mexican. She was a woman from a humble background with pretentions—and she had a penchant for the word perhaps.

  It annoyed my uncle who sometimes whispered to me that if I ever had any inclination to marry a gringa, I should go see a good therapist. “Te hacen sufrir porque así son. And don’t ever believe anything your uncle Hector says about anything. He couldn’t find his ass to take a dump.”

  I think I loved my two uncles and my aunts—I count Lucille here, an aunt by marriage only and a pain in the ass—because they provided comic relief. The fact that they didn’t provide that service to me on purpose did nothing to diminish my gratitude. They could always make me smile and I had a great affection for them in my own superior way. They were a strange lot. They had a loyalty toward each other that was truly remarkable—especially when you took into account the fact that they didn’t like each other very much. And even though they’d spent their lives on the border, they didn’t behave like Mexicans. For reasons I didn’t understand, they had abandoned their ethnic identities. There had been some money in the family, though I didn’t know anything about that. In the part of the world that we lived in, they were an island unto themselves. They were disconnected from the culture around them. Their lives seemed something of a comedy to me—a sort of counterpoint to the tragic lives my parents had led.

  I really didn’t remember all that much about my mother and father. There were scenes of them that were stuck in my head but it didn’t add up to a story. I remember my mother in a green satin dress and high heels as she was getting ready to go out one night. I must have been five. I remember her reaching down and placing her manicured fingers under my chin and whispering. “You’ll be better looking than your father.” She didn’t say I love you. She didn’t call me amor. She didn’t tell me to be a good boy. She didn’t tell me not to stay up too late. She didn’t say don’t fight with your sister. She didn’t offer any words of love or advice. She didn’t tell me what to do or not to do. She wasn’t affectionate. She wasn’t mean either—at least she wasn’t mean to me. And she wasn’t mean to Carmen either. She saved her meanness for my father. My mother handled us with a kindly and astounding indifference. I felt that she sometimes examined us with her eyes as if we were strange and foreign and even astonishing creatures. Most of the time, she lived in a dark, unreachable place, and even when she smiled or laughed, it always seemed to me that she didn’t have it in her to be happy. Carmen once told me that our mother was a statue. “She could have been carved by Michelangelo.” My sister hated my mother.

  “She’s not a statue,” I said.

  “I don’t see why you defend her,” she said. “She doesn’t love you. She doesn’t love anyone.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew she was right but I didn’t want her to be right. I wanted my mother to love me.

  I remember she didn’t speak for weeks before she killed herself. I touched her and tried to make her see me. But she just stared blankly out into the room as if she was trying to find something that wasn’t there. I took her hand. “Where does it hurt?” But it was as if I didn’t exist and I knew she didn’t hear my question.

  My sister pulled me away. “It hurts everywhere,” she said. “Can’t you see that?”

  I looked at Carmen and whispered, “I told you she wasn’t a statue.”

  We weren’t taken to my mother’s funeral. My father descended into a permanent state of drunkenness. I don’t remember how long it was after my mother died that my father took me in his arms and breathed me in. He kept smelling my neck. As I think back, I have the strangest idea that he was trying to find traces of my mother’s smell somewhere in me. He held me and wept and I didn’t know how to help him. My aunt Lucille gently pulled me away from him. My uncle Louie and my uncle Hector took me and Carmen to a movie. They always took us to movies. My uncle Louie said that even a bad movie could put you in a good mood.

  To this day, I hate movies. They remind of me of my parents who disappeared. No movie has ever been made that could heal the wound of a boy who was born to parents who never loved him. It wasn’t personal. My parents didn’t love me because they couldn’t. I didn’t grow up feeling sorry for myself. I also didn’t grow up lying to myself. I wasn’t like anybody in my family. I never pretended I was someone I wasn’t. I had no romantic versions of who and what I was. I saved that for Carmen. I think I also saved all my love for her without even knowing why. Maybe I did know something of the why. I loved her honesty and I loved her kindness. She raised me without pretending to be my mother. And she never resented my presence.

  She would read entire books to me, one chapter at a time. They weren’t literary books. They were books like Valley of the Dolls—Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins schlock. I loved her voice when she read to me and I got lost in the world of cheesy novels where the characters behaved more or less like my parents had behaved.

  When Carmen turned eighteen, she told my uncle Louie and my aunt Lucille—who raised her after my mother killed herself—that she was leaving.

  “But where will you go?”

  “I have a job,” she said. “And I’m going to school.”

  “You’ll starve out there,” my uncle Louie said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Carmen kissed my uncle on the cheek, looked straight into my aunt Lucille’s eyes, then looked back at my uncle Louie. “You really should leave her, you know.” She smiled and walked out the door.

  Lucille was rendered speechless. After Carmen left, she looked at my uncle and said, “I’ll never let her back into this house.”

  My uncle shrugged. “You really think she’ll ever want to come back?”

  My aunt Lucille, wearing her customary frigid expression, shook her head and said, “She’s just like her mother.”

  My aunt, who was wrong about most things, wasn’t wrong about that one thing. At least she wasn’t all wrong. I realized by then that my mother had been mentally ill. And I had a feeling that Carmen was moving in the same direction. But while my mother had been distant and sad, Carmen was kindhearted and affectionate. I think her mental illness was far worse than my mother’s.

  That night, when I was seventeen and after we’d eaten dinner at Martino’s, Carmen did introduce me to the man she was in love with. Only it wasn’t a man. It wasn’t a woman either. Marijuana. It was the first time I got high.

  She lived in an old apartment building near downtown. My uncle Hector owned it. He didn’t charge her rent. My uncle Louie and my aunt Lucille didn’t know anything about their arrangement. They had broken all ties with Carmen, not that Carmen cared. Uncle Hector had given her some of my mother’s furniture that he’d kept in a storage unit. They were antiques. And at least Uncle Hector wasn’t a slum lord. He was obsessed with history and part of that obsession was restoring old buildings.

  Entering Carmen’s apartment, with its high ceilings and wood floors, was like entering another era. She’d even acquired an old Victrola and liked to play Billie Holiday records—my mother’s favorite singer. She had black and white photographs on the walls. It might have been 1940.

  When we got to her apartment that night, she poured me a glass of wine and took out her stash. She rolled a joint and taught me how to roll one too. I was a quick study. I loved the high. I’d never been that relaxed in my life and it seemed that the possibility of happiness actually existed. We laughed. We talked.

  I confessed to her that I’d already had sex. “Sorry I lied,” I said.

  “I knew you were lying.”

  “How? I’m a pretty good liar.”

  “You are. It runs in the family. But you can’t lie to me. You just can’t.” She smiled, then laughed.

  I laughed too. “
Carmen, maybe it’s because I don’t want to lie to you. It’s nice, to tell the truth.”

  She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Don’t ever leave me,” she said.

  “Not ever,” I said.

  “So tell me about the girl you slept with.”

  “She’s in college.”

  “How’d you meet?”

  “Starbucks. Her name is Serena.”

  “Serena? That’s sweet. How was the sex?”

  I pointed my joint in her direction. “It was fucking great. Much better than this shit.”

  “So, are you in love?”

  “I might be.”

  “You’re seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? Shit. Seventeen in our family? That means I’m at least thirty.”

  Carmen just looked at me and shrugged.

  “We were taught to speak like adults who’d been to college when we were six. Kids used to make fun of me in middle school because I talked like a fucking English teacher. Fucking seventeen, Carmen? We’re old. We were never young, not ever.” My voice was cracking. I was crying. I’d been happy with that first hit, and now I was crying.

  “Don’t cry, Conrad. Don’t look back.” She smiled. “Take another hit.”

  I did. And I leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “I like this stuff,” I said.

  “Me too.” She just smiled at me. “You know what I think? I think you’re in love with the sex.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “I don’t know.” I loved her smile. I knew she wasn’t a happy person, but when she smiled I almost believed she’d have a good life. “You know, Conrad, maybe it’s better to love sex without having to love the person you’re having sex with. It’s less complicated.”

  “I’m not sure what to think about that,” I said.

  “My problem, Conrad, is that I fall in love. I always wind up falling in love. It hurts. I’ve decided against it.”

  “Is it something you can decide?”

  “There’s a lot of things you can decide. Me, I’ve decided to try every drug in the universe.”

  That scared me. That really scared me. I knew she meant it. “Why?”

  “I’m sad, Conrad.”

  “I know.”

  “I get depressed.”

  “Have you seen someone?”

  “I went to a therapist for awhile. She told me what I already knew. That I suffer from depression. She gave me pills.”

  “Do you take them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  She took a drag from her joint. She smiled. “What’s wrong with a little happiness?”

  Carmen was right. I was more in love with sex than with the people I slept with. I had sex with Serena for about six months. But then it got old with her. I wanted that high again. I broke up with her. She didn’t seem to mind all that much. She kissed me on the cheek and said, “It was fun, the sex part, anyway.” She looked at me. “Conrad, I like you. But you want to hear the truth?”

  The truth? What the hell. I could always use a little of that. “Sure,” I said.

  “You’re not a lot of fun, Conrad. You’re four years younger than me—”

  I interrupted her. “And already I act like an old man.”

  She nodded. “Well, not an old man, exactly—but serious, not, well, you know, you don’t know how to have fun.”

  “The sex was fun,” I said. I felt like an idiot even as I said it.

  “And that was about as far as it went.”

  “So how come you just didn’t, I mean, why didn’t you just come out and say it?”

  “You’re strange, different. You’re sophisticated and smart and articulate. But you’re aloof. I like you, Conrad. There’s something about you that’s real.” Then she laughed. “And, in case you hadn’t noticed, you’re beautiful to look at.”

  I thought of what Carmen had said about my mother. She’s a statue.

  I slept with another girl a week later. God, we did everything that night. She wasn’t really a girl. She was a woman, much older than me. She had some real experience behind her and I learned more than a few tricks that night. Not that I hadn’t imagined doing them. I also discovered one other thing: it was easy for me to get picked up, and I knew why. I remember what my mother told me as boy, You’ll be much better looking than your father. I was. I didn’t mistake my looks for virtue. But my face was going to be my co-conspirator in my obsession with sex. Or maybe it wasn’t an obsession. I had just turned eighteen. Maybe I was just normal. But normal didn’t really run in our family.

  I thought of Carmen, how she said she was going to experiment with every mood-altering substance in existence. Maybe I was just like her. Only my drug of choice was sex. Sex was all I thought of after that night in the hotel with a woman whose name I had already forgotten.

  I decided to stay home and go to college. I didn’t have money and a degree was a degree. And I had always liked living on the border. Unlike my uncles and aunts, I liked hearing all the Spanish and liked speaking it—even if I mangled half the words. I couldn’t see myself living anywhere else. Maybe it had something to do with my mother and my father—I don’t know. I sometimes analyzed myself—but I didn’t take it very far. It was Carmen who was the therapist in the family.

  I didn’t know what I was going to study. English probably, because of my obsession with language. Well, it wasn’t exactly an obsession. I was good at writing and terrible at math. So the decision was practical. And anyway, I wasn’t very ambitious. Who the hell knew what I was going to become? In the meantime, I had a new girlfriend. There weren’t girls at the high school I was graduating from because it was a Catholic school for boys. My aunt Lucille had insisted. “We’re sending you to Cathedral High and that’s the end of it.” I didn’t have any say in the matter. But one day after school I walked to the university and struck up a conversation with a girl named Liz. We started having sex a week later. I think she enjoyed the sex more than I did. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. After graduation, we saw more and more of each other. The sex got less exciting, but I really liked her. I thought maybe I could even fall in love with her. Why not? Except that I cheated on her.

  I informed Uncle Louie about my decision to attend the University of Texas at El Paso. He didn’t really say much. I was on my way out the door to spend the weekend at my sister’s apartment. She’d called me on my cell and told me, “I scored some good shit, and Antonio’s out of my life.” So I was off for a weekend of partying with my sister.

  When I got to her place, she said, “Okay, I’m going to bitch for five minutes and then I’m done, okay? Did you know Uncle Hector paid for my college? Did you know that?”

  “No. You never told me that.”

  She looked at me. “Are you mad?”

  “No. But, well, we’re supposed to tell each other the truth. I thought that’s how we played it.”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “You said you got loans.” I smiled. “I’m not mad. Why didn’t you just come out and tell me? What’s the big deal?”

  “Because I’m ashamed of myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I hate my fucking job. Uncle Hector bribed me.”

  “Bribed you?”

  “He made a deal with me. If I went to college and got a major in something practical, then he’d pay for all of my expenses. I mean already I live rent free. I didn’t know what to do and, well, here I am a fucking CPA.”

  “I thought it was because you were good at math.”

  “Yeah, well, I am. I don’t know how I made it through college. I was—I don’t want to talk about it. The thing is that I hate my fucking job. Look, Conrad, don’t make the same mistake I made. If Uncle Hector wants to make a deal with you, tell him to shove his money up his ass.”

  I smiled. “So far I’ve had no offers.”

  She laughed.

  “Quit,” I said. “Do something else. The arts. You’d be good at that.”

  She laughed. br />
  “You would be,” I said. “I’m serious.”

  I followed her into the kitchen where she opened a bottle of wine. She poured us both a glass. “Tonight, something special.” She had this look in her eyes. She took a couple of small plastic baggies out of her purse. I knew what it was right away. “A little something to brighten up your otherwise boring existence in Aunt Lucille’s spotless house.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just watched her put the powder on a plate. She divided it into straight little lines with a credit card. I studied her as she intently took out a twenty dollar bill and rolled it up tightly. Presto, it was a small straw. She snorted a line of coke up her nose in an instant. Then she did another line. She handed me the rolled-up bill. I didn’t really want to do this shit. But I was powerless in her presence. So I just went along for the ride. It wasn’t going to kill me.

  I have to say that it was great. I’d never felt anything like I was feeling right then. But this was the thought that passed through my head: I wonder what it would be like to have sex while I was on this shit.

  Saturday morning, Carmen and I slept in. Then we went to a movie. She knew I hated them. But she’d bought my uncles’ theory on movies making you happy. I stood in line to buy popcorn and Carmen disappeared into the women’s bathroom. I knew what she was up to. A moment of panic shot through me. I knew that drugs for Carmen were not simply recreational. Maybe she wasn’t an addict yet, but she would be. And I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

  On Saturday night, Carmen brought out the coke again. I got high with her. She wanted to do more. She said, “Let’s walk over to the bars.”

  “The bars?”

  “The gay bars down the street. I know someone who can hook us up for more.”