My Heart Is a Drunken Compass by Domingo Martinez Page A

Oklahoma Avenue and we had an improvisational karate riot, right there in the front yard. I was Hercules, if he had taken tae kwon do, and I was wrestling and kicking and taking down these five little fuckers to the grass, without ever hurting a single one of them, as I “kapowed” and “hiyahed!” and made every Bruce Li noise possible for like an hour, and they’d climb low-hanging branches and jump on my back, get mildly punched in the gut or head, and we were all laughing and sweating and yelling, like puppies at a puppy mill. It was fantastic, and he talked about it for years after.
    Another time I taught him how to climb the tree outside Gramma’s house in order to break in through the bathroom window, so he could look for any porn our previous Uncle Richard might have left behind, and I went through every single hiding place in that creepy, old house that Dan and I had figured out, and sure enough, there were still strong echoes of a 1970s porn habit, lingering in the darker little corners Gramma had yet to rumble.
    As he grew older, I’d bring him up to Seattle, and it was here that he saw snow for the first time (a watershed moment in every South Texan’s life), and he actually engaged and played with some kids from Montana one crisp spring morning when I drove him to Hurricane Ridge, and he took a photo with that family, who had built a slide into the hillside and were taking turns. Derek was a bit older than the kids, around fourteen, but he was no less enthusiastic and joyful. It was really sweet to see.

    With Dan, our bonding was a bit more complicated, as adults. Since we grew up together, there was little that we didn’t know about the other, but still, we were able to surprise each other sometimes. For instance, one Friday night back in Dallas, Texas, after I’d accidently moved there (long story, and not interesting—I was back in Seattle after nine months), Dan had been staying with me while establishing himself as a nurse in a long-term care facility, and neither of us knew anyone among the Dallas population, so we decided to stay in and watch cable.
    My apartment’s interior design had a kind of midcentury feel, since most of my furniture had been donated by the crustier echelon of desk editors and reporters at the Seattle Times , thanks to an ex-girlfriend who worked there and had put out a call for donations.
    Immediately, that generation of Seattleites who were putting their parents out on the proverbial ice floe and airing out their inherited properties, which now tripled in the booming real estate market, started offering up kitschy lamps and uselessly tiered coffee tables, rattan chairs and strange wall art and the like.
    I didn’t care: I took everything that was offered, packed it into a U-Haul, and drove it across the country to Dallas, Texas. Figured I’d pare it down when I arrived.
    When I finished decorating my new apartment, it looked like a Boeing-era thrift store had vomited in my living room after a hard night of drinking bourgin.
    I didn’t care; it was “shabby chic,” I thought.
    Dan was taken aback when he first saw it, though; it didn’t compute with his sense of interior design for a single guy. I could tell he was questioning my heterosexuality, and I was making no case for it.
    Dan’s idea of a single man’s interior design, as illustrated by the one time I ever visited him and he lived alone, was a television sitting atop a hefty wooden table and a love seat directly across from it, with a shadeless lamp sitting on the floor next to it. And lots of beer cans. Lots and lots of beer cans.
    So the look of consternation that flickered across his face when he saw my walls draped with Indian fabrics, dried grass stalks in mismatched standing vases, and two recliners sitting opposite a small television and separated by a tall reading lamp, well, Dan had to question what I’d been up to, and with whom,