My Heart Is a Drunken Compass: A Memoir
Domingo Martinez
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 149300140X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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Of the blue. While Sarah is a gentile, their child identifies with the paternal family’s line as Jewish, like only a West Coast Seattle liberal could. Their kid had a huge bar mitzvah one Saturday, and it was quite the shindig, with everyone from the karate school attending. Friends and family flew in from all over the country. Though I had been invited, I was incapable of leaving my apartment from depression that afternoon, so I didn’t make it. The next morning, Sarah was feeling a bit rough,.
Baby.” And because the old hens and men of the barrio thought that the position was something cherished, there was long-standing folklore and wisdoms about the potential for fratricide by the original youngest, an act almost biblical in its violence, culminating from envy and resentment, and this talk had frightened my mother. More than hurt, I was disgusted and offended by this revelation when Dan finally confessed it to me, if it had been true. It beleaguered me that it could even be.
Everyone else, I automatically slipped into sergeant major status and began barking orders as soon as I emerged from the Jeep. And cars continued whipping around that corner with no warning, the acoustics on that mountaintop that night giving no indication of the danger coming at us at seventy-five miles an hour. They just appeared ... and then they were gone—showing up with nothing nearing the indication that they’d even noticed the clusterfuck of cars on the blind side of that corner before.
Me for free, a woman standing at an intersection with the deepest, most tragic black eye I’ve ever seen on a living human holding a sign, “Battered Wife/Homeless, Please Help.” I gave her twenty dollars. “The way she said that thing about how I have no friends!” “She did? I didn’t catch that,” I’d say. Steph was in a state of constant vigilance for a double entendre or backhanded slights when she was around her mother, which must have been exhausting for both of them. And, truth be told, her.
Oklahoma, and he’d do with him things he never did with Dan and me. He would take Derek on a jog through the geometry of farmlands, buy him fancy slingshots and air rifles, take him exploring through the expanding city dump, which was now just a couple miles from our former house. Dad would drive Derek out to Boca Chica beach, just to look around, and then when no one was looking or around, he’d say, “Let’s go in,” strip down to his Y-fronts and jump in the lukewarm beach, spend the afternoon.