Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez

Author:Domingo Martinez
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2012-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

Cheering up Philippe

It must have been New Year’s Eve 1988, maybe 1989, and I was finishing high school, nearing graduation. All around Brownsville, preparations were being made to ring in the New Year joyfully, and I was stuck with Segis and his sidekick, Arnold, yet again. Segis had become my friend by default, because he lived out in the sticks near Oklahoma Avenue and had a car. He was also marginalized, strange in his conviction to reinventing the 1960s in his fashion and music. We had very little in common except that we both liked to drink beer and talk about “profound” topics that neither of us knew anything about. Arnold was Segis’s neighbor, and knew even less, but you couldn’t get one without the other, so I was stuck with both of them.

Somehow we managed to scrounge up enough money for a rack and a half of Busch beer, which is a dreadful fortified swill unfit for hobos, but perfectly appropriate for underage drinkers, with their livers of coal.

I forget how we got our hands on it. Buying the beer was never really much of an obstacle, but finding the cash for it always was. None of us worked, and our parents were close to indigent. But there we were: flush for the night. Segis and I were the juicers of the troop; the booze was for us. This overlap was fundamental to our friendship. Arnold was a sissy, but he was a faithful sissy, as all sidekicks should be, though his lackey personality annoyed me most of the time.

We started the evening out friendly enough, holed up in the parked single-wide trailer house Arnold’s sister lived in with her brand-new family, behind Arnold’s dad’s house. There was no running water, no plumbing yet, so in order to relieve ourselves, we had to go outside and find a shrub. This was all right, civilized, for Brownsville.

Something was troubling me this night. I was seventeen, had made a mess of things with high school, and I had no plans for the future after graduation, which was coming up soon. There was a palpable sense of despair everywhere that no one seemed to feel or want to talk about. Segis was going on and on about how he was going to “start a rock band, man,” and “make it really big, man” and “go on tours, man,” and I just wasn’t seeing a way out except through the military, through the Marines, like my brother Dan was doing, except in the Army. The despair was growing in me, but wasn’t as yet conscious.

I was moody, morose this night. Not the best frame of mind for a teenage piss up.

About ten o’clock, Arnold’s sister’s husband returned from his shift managing the nearby Pizza Hut. He brought home his spoils: two large, cold, and incomplete supremes, which Arnold and Segis set upon hungrily, relishing this perk of management.

I demurred, a few beers up. Rather, I took a moment alone with the husband.

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