1.Georgetown
2.University of Texas
3.University of Chicago
4.Stanford
5.UCLA
6.Brown
7.Washington University
8.Berkeley
9.Northwestern
10.Harvard
I didn’t want to go to Harvard, but if it hadn’t been on the list, it would have made my father mad. So I made another list and put Harvard as number one—even though in my world it was number ten. I don’t know what I had against Harvard. And anyway, it was just an assignment for my father. I doubted any of these schools would take me.
My father came home from his business trip on the last day of school of my junior year. I was happy to see him. That was the first time my father ever hugged me. And it was the first time that he seemed really happy. “Everything’s going to be just fine,” he said.
He was smiling and he looked so young to me and I thought that maybe now he would quit the business. He had money now. Real money, so maybe he would quit. But I was just fantasizing. Something inside me knew that this is what he knew. This is what he loved. I loved reading and drawing and music and writing. And my father, well, he loved his business. Everyone had to love something.
“Maybe,” he said, “we should think about getting you an apartment. You know, so you could live on your own. So you could get used to it. You know, like a practice run before you go away to college.”
“I don’t need to practice,” I said.
“I hear that tone,” he said. “You don’t get mad much—but when you get mad, you really get pissed off.”
“I must get that from someone,” I said. “Look, Dad, I follow your rules. I follow every fucking rule—and so now you’re throwing me out?”
“It’s not like that. Look, there’s a lot of shit that goes down here. I don’t want you in the middle of it.”
“I am in the middle of it, Dad.”
I sat down and put my face in my hands. I took a breath. And then another. I walked into my room and took out my list. I walked back into the living room and handed my list to my father. “I did my homework.” I handed him the list. “And how am I going to get the money to go to any of these schools, Dad?”
“Don’t worry about the money.”
“Like I said, Dad, I am in the middle of all this. I’m in the middle of all the shit that goes down in this house. And I’m not moving. Not unless you’re fucking throwing me out.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“Is that another rule?”
He was quiet. He bit the side of his mouth. He was in too good a mood to fight me. He studied my list. “Harvard,” he whispered. “Get dressed. Let’s go to a nice place.”
My father wanted to know my reasoning for picking the schools I put on my list. So I did all the talking at dinner. He asked questions. I answered them. It was the longest conversation we’d ever had. I guess it was because we didn’t have to talk about ourselves. He was going to put some money into my education and he wanted to know what he was getting himself into. He was an investor. It was more like a business transaction than a conversation.
16.
Harvard said no. My dad was pissed. “Fuck Harvard,” he said. My sentiments exactly. The day I got an acceptance letter from Georgetown, my father was out. His addictions were getting worse and I couldn’t talk to him about it. I told him I was worried. He said, “People who worry never change.” I wanted to tell him that addicts never change either. But I said nothing.
I left my father a note: GOT INTO GEORGETOWN! I went out with my friends to celebrate. I had fun. I was happy. I was so, so happy. When I walked into the living room that night, the house was full of people. Some guy was snorting coke. My father must have been in the kitchen or in his room. I recognized some of his guests. I suppose some of them were more than just clients.
Some guy came up to me. He smiled. He sort of scared me, but I relaxed. Hell, I was really drunk. The guy offered me a glass pipe. It was just a little straight glass tube. I’d seen them before. I knew what those little glass tubes were used for. “You ever smoke?”
I shook my head.
“Try it,” he said.
And I wanted to—I wanted to try it, to see what it was like. To know, to really know what it was all about.
He handed me the pipe.
I took it.
He reached into his pocket and unfolded a piece of tin foil. He took out a little piece of white rock. “You’re gonna like this, kid,” he said. And then I saw my father standing next to him. It all happened so fast. “Motherfucker!” My father’s face was grotesque and contorted. He was pounding the shit out of him, pounding and pounding—and when the guy was on the floor, my father was kicking him and kicking him and I thought, for a moment, that my father was going to kill this man. Some of my father’s friends were yelling for him to stop but he wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, and finally some men had to pull him away.
My father stared down at the man, just stared down at him. “Get that motherfucker out of here.”
The man that had offered me the pipe was all bloody—but he was alive and moaning. A few guys dragged him out of the house.
My father looked at me said, “Give me that pipe.”
I handed it to him.
“I’ll kill you if you ever come near one of those pipes again. I will fucking kill you.”
I nodded. I was so ashamed. I walked into my room. I’d never felt so empty in all of my life.
17.
My father never mentioned what happened that night. I always wondered if he thought about it. I always thought about it.
18.
My father and I flew to Washington in July. It was hard for him to do without his drugs, so he drank a lot and I suppose that helped. We were there for a week. At night, he would disappear. I knew he’d found what he was looking for. During the day, we took in the sights, father and son. My father knew a man who’d died in Vietnam and we looked for his name on the wall—and we found it. My father traced his finger on the letters that formed the name of his friend. He didn’t tell me about the man, didn’t say a word about him.
My father seemed so normal that day.
We found an apartment for me. I knew it was expensive. But my father sent me away when he made the arrangements.
On the plane ride back to El Paso, I asked my father, “Are you sure you can afford that apartment, Dad?”
“Remember that trip when my ship came in?”
“Yes,” I said.
That’s when the conversation ended.
19.
I was sitting in the backyard, pad in hand. I was making a list of the things I needed to take with me when I drove to Washington. Me and my lists. I was drinking a beer and I was trying to imagine what my life was going to look like as a student at Georgetown University. I wondered if I would miss my father. And it was odd, but the thought occurred to me that I had stopped missing my mother. It was as if she had never existed and there was a blank piece in my heart that would live there permanently. Not a wound, not a hurt, but a blank piece.
My father stumbled into the backyard. He looked like shit and I could tell he was coming down from his last high. He sat down on the lawn chair next to mine. He lit a cigarette and his hands were shaking. “Can you bring me a beer?”
I walked into the kitchen, grabbed a beer, walked back into the backyard and handed it to him.
“Dad, you have to stop.”
He just looked at me. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“You have to stop, Dad.”
I was standing above him. He took a drink from his beer. He got up, looked me straight in the eye. “Say it again. Go on, say it again.”
I looked right back at him. I never took my eyes off him. “You have to stop.”
And then I felt his fist on my jaw and I fell back on the ground. I took a breath and closed my eyes. I just lay for a while, feeling the pain in my jaw. My lip was bleeding. My
father looked down at me. “Get up,” he said.
I got up slowly. Then I heard his voice. “You haven’t earned the right to tell your father what to do.”
I nodded. I wanted to hide my tears from him but I wasn’t strong enough. I sat there and cried, tears falling from my face. I wanted to howl, but I kept the howl inside me. I don’t know how long I sat there. I heard my father’s voice. “Here,” he said as he handed me a beer. “Have a beer with your old man.”
20.
After a week, there wasn’t much of a sign of my father’s fist on my jaw or my lip. I would not wear the scar of that afternoon on my face. That’s not where I would keep it.
21.
The day before I left for Georgetown, my father bought me a new car. It was practical, a Prius, not my father’s style, but the kind of car he imagined his son should have. I thanked him. I think we even hugged. Yes, I hugged him. And he hugged me back. He was on something, I knew. By then, he was almost always on something. We went to dinner and he was shaking. He ordered a nice bottle of red wine and we drank together and I wanted to cry, but I didn’t.
I don’t remember what we talked about, but my father wasn’t in any hurry that night to get anywhere. He wanted to be with me that last night. And I wanted to be with him.
After dinner, he looked at me, smiled and said, “Let’s go get our passports.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“Let’s go have a drink at the Kentucky Club.”
“In Juárez?”
“Yeah.”
“But, you said—”
“It’s where you were raised. Don’t you want to have a drink with your old man where it all started?”
“Where it all started?”
“It’s where your mother and I used to go.”
He smiled. I’ll always remember that smile.
22.
The only thing I remember about having a drink with my father at the Kentucky Club was my father telling me that he’d loved my mother. “I loved her.” And then I knew. She was the one. She hadn’t loved him back.
23.
The morning I left the house where I became a man, my father helped me put my things in the car. I didn’t have much. My father was wordless. And I was too. “Bye, Dad,” I said.
“Bye, son,” he said.
He looked sad. He just stood there as I drove away.
24.
I’m sitting here in my Georgetown apartment and I’m thinking about my dad.
I’m packing a few things and I’m going back home. He’s on a respirator. He overdosed. Heroin, meth, I don’t know. It all seems so predictable, so inevitable. His attorney called me. “You need to come home and see to your dad,” he said. I’m going back to take him off the respirator. I know that’s what he would have wanted. At last, I can give him something. Something that matters.
I just finished reading the journal I kept when I lived with him, my father. Every rule he ever made me follow is in my journal. I can almost hear his voice. I’m holding the rosary he gave me for my first communion, the one that belonged to his father. I’m staring at the picture of us in front of the cathedral, taken at my first communion.
I always told myself I didn’t know my father. I sometimes told myself that I hated him. I always told myself that he didn’t know me. But that wasn’t true. It wasn’t true at all. I knew him. I really knew him. My girlfriend Emma, she asked me what kind of man my father was. “Who was he, Max?” she asked. “You never talk about him.”
“No, I never do.”
She wiped the tears from my face.
“He punched me out once,” I said. And then I laughed. “My father,” I whispered. “His name was Eddie. Not Edward, but Eddie. He was the man who saved my life. That’s who he was.”
BROTHER IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE
1.
Instead of winding up dead, I wound up in a therapist’s office. The therapist’s name was David, a blue-eyed man, beautiful, in his forties, a hint of some of his own wounds in the way he spoke, in the way he looked out at the punishing world. He possessed a kind voice, not too soft and not overly masculine, and he had a pair of incredible hands that reminded me of the figures in a Michelangelo fresco.
I liked looking into his nearly flawless face.
I’m not the kind of guy who falls in love—but those first few months after my failed attempt at suicide, I fell in love with just about anybody who offered me anything that resembled empathy. I remember looking into the face of the nurse at the hospital and begging her to make love to me.
Her response was kind but firm, “I don’t make love to my patients. And I don’t make love to boys.”
I was desperate and prideless. “Make me feel alive.”
She stared into my pleading eyes and smiled. “Silly boy, you are alive.” She combed my hair with her fingers in a way my mother never had.
When she left the room, I could still feel her fingers in my hair.
I was in the psych ward for five days. Since my parents were too devastated to come and visit me, my aunt volunteered to be their emissary. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to them?” She handed me a card with a therapist’s name on it and told me to be a good boy. She spoke to me in the same tone of voice that she used when she talked to her dog. In her defense, she loved her dog.
No one was more surprised than me when I found myself sitting across from David. The whole scene hangs like a still life in the back of my mind, forever in the present tense. David is sitting in a comfortable leather chair. I am sitting stiffly on a couch that is threatening to chew me up and spit me out. He is offering me a bottle of water. I shake my head no. My eyes search the room for an ashtray. David looks at the bandages on my wrists and smiles softly, “I’d have gone for a tattoo instead.”
I try not to smile. I want to joke back. But there is no joke inside me and I don’t say anything at all.
He is utterly comfortable in his own skin and there isn’t anything formal in the way he presents himself. “What would you like to talk about, Charlie?”
“Birds.”
“What is it about birds that you like?”
“They make sure their young can fly before they throw them out of the nest.”
He nods. I study his face and wonder where he learned to wear empathy as comfortably as my father wore his ties. “I take it you don’t like your parents.”
“It’s mutual.”
“Well, they’re paying for these sessions.”
“My mother’s paying for these sessions.”
“Does your mother work?”
“No. She’s above all that.”
“Then it’s your father’s money.”
“She has plenty of her own.” I am tapping my finger on my bottom lip. “Paying for these sessions? They have serious money. It’s like handing a panhandler a nickel.”
I see David nodding. “But it might mean they love you.”
“It might.”
He studies my face. “But you have other ideas about that.”
“I think paying for a therapist after—” I pause, displaying my wrists. “How would it look to let their son go without a therapist when he slits his wrists in their bedroom?”
“Their bedroom?” He doesn’t nod but his face says something—though I’m not sure what. “That’s an interesting choice.”
“I must have thought so at the time.”
“Must have?”
“I don’t really remember.”
“Any idea why you chose that particular site?”
“Is this the part where I get to really talk?”
“Something like that.”
“We were never allowed in their bedroom—not even when we were small.”
“We?”
“I had a brother.”
“Had?”
“We lost him.”
“Did he die?”
“No. We just lost him.”
“Just lost him?”
“My
mom and dad are careless people. They misplaced him.”
He looks at me, wants me to say more.
So this is what I say: “He left. He never came back.”
I see that he is mentally placing a note in a file in his brain labeled Charlie. That much I can tell. “Do you want to talk about your brother?”
“No.”
“Do you want to talk about your parents?”
“Yeah, sure, that’s who I want to talk about.”
He smiles at my sarcasm.
“I think your parents are trying to help you.”
“Sure they are. They’re going to pay for my sessions so they can pretend they’re teaching me how to fly.” I offer him a smirk. “You know, like the birds.”
“Yes. The birds. We’re back to that.”
“I told you that’s what I wanted to talk about.”
“Let’s talk about the nest you came from.”
“I hate my father.” The words come out without rage and without regret. It’s not difficult for me to tell David how I feel about my father.
David is studying my face. He repeats my words. “You hate your father.” It almost seems like he is staring at the letters that make up that word, examining the h, the a, the t and then the e. He is trying to understand what it means to hate your own father. “Is that really true, Charlie?”
“Yes, that’s really true.”
“You’ve thought about this?”
“I’m not sure that thinking is the right word.”
“Charlie? You’re sure?”
“Do I sound unsure?”
He looks at me with that puzzled look. I understand he wants me to explain. No longer wanting to have this particular conversation, I just look back at him. I want to get back to the subject of birds. Or Icarus, how he flew too close to the sun.