Drift: A Novel

By Manuel Luis Martinez

An explosive, fierce, and lyrical novel, set in the barrios of San Antonio and Los Angeles, from an electrifying new voice in American fiction

At sixteen, Robert Lomos has lost his family. His father, a Latin jazz musician, has left San Antonio for life on the road as a cool-hand playboy. His mother, shattered by a complete emotional and psychological breakdown, has moved to Los Angeles and taken Robert's little brother with her. Only his iron-willed grandmother, worn down by years of hard work, is left. But Robert's got a plan: Duck trouble, save his money, and head to California to put the family back together. Trouble is, no one believes a delinquent Mexican American kid has a chance—least of all, Robert himself.

Wrenching and wise, Drift by Manuel Luis Martinez gives an unflinching vision of the menace of adolescence, the hard edge of physical labor, and the debts we owe to family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jan 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781466889071

Manuel Luis Martinez

Manuel Luis Martinez is Assistant Professor of American literature at Indiana University. His novella, Crossing, was selected as one of the ten outstanding books by a writer of color by the PEN American Center. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Also by Manuel Luis Martinez

Copyright

For Eli, my brother and friend

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to thank the many friends who read this manuscript and gave me good, solid advice. The book is better for your input. I’d also like to thank my editor extraordinaire, Webster Younce, for his sharp eye and keen insight. Many thanks to my faithful and savvy agent, Matt Williams. I couldn’t have written this book without the assistance of the Ford Foundation, the MacDowell Artists Colony, and Breadloaf Writers Conference. Thanks to my family for the love and support. Lastly, thanks, Olivia, for being my inspiration and salvation during a raucous youth. You alone kept it from being misspent.

CHAPTER 1

I spend the whole day alone in this cube, having to raise the red, white, and blue Christian flag when I want to whizz or even just stretch. It’s a drag. But it’s my own fault since I just got kicked out of high school again. Twice in two years, and Grams decides she has to send me to a religious school, one of those Christian fundamentalist ones, the kind that keeps students in line by making them sit facing the wall and putting wood partitions between them. One thing Grams didn’t count on, though, was all the fuck-ups and caranchos ending up in the same place, and I know I’ll get into trouble I never would’ve found in public school if she hadn’t gotten scared that I was going to wind up dead. After eight hours of this place, I’m ready to roll out and do anything—fight, get high, look for girls—just to forget everything till tomorrow. This place is Sunnydale Christian Academy. I know—ridiculous name. Why not just call this motherfucker Happytown? It’s embarrassing to tell people when they ask where you go to school. But that’s what the place is called and it’s as bad as it sounds.

I’m sitting in Principal McNutt’s office wearing the baby-blue-and-gray ski sweater that belonged to my father. It’s sort of big, but it’s the nicest thing I’ve got and Grams wanted me to look decent my first day, como la gente, she says. Pops left it at the house the last time he split and hasn’t been by to pick it up. It’s been a while now.

I’m thinking about that when McNutt says, Oh, I don’t want to forget to give you the contract. She opens her desk, one of those mammoth World War II metal deals that looks like it wants to swallow you, and rummages around for a minute before pulling out a mimeographed sheet. Behind her, next to a big-assed American flag, is a picture of her grinning at ex-prez George Bush. There’s some bullshit written on a certificate about a thousand points of light. Here you go, she says, sliding a page over to me. It reads Sunnydale Academy Contract of Christian Conduct.

You got to meet Bush? I ask her.

Proudest day of my life.

Yeah? What was it for?

A wonderful ceremony in Houston where he recognized various Texans for civic contributions. He’s a wonderful man, a real Christian. Not like that Clinton. She frowns at me like I made her say something wrong. We’re not here to discuss politics. She taps on the paper she’s pushed over.

It’s a list of activities I’m to absolutely foreswear from taking part in and a dress code and list of rules I’m agreeing to abide by in order to enroll: No worldly music. No cursing. No association with unwholesome people. No smoking, drinking, or drugs. No unseemly conduct with the opposite sex. Dress code: no tennis shoes, denim jeans, or shirts without collars and buttons. Preferably, shirts should be white. No getting up from your desk without raising the flag and getting permission from your teacher. And a load of other shit.

How do you know what ‘worldly’ is? I ask her.

She taps on the contract again. Please sign.

I sign it and give her the check Grams wrote me this morning. Then she goes into the speech about the devil and how he’s everywhere. She’s got this big window in her bright white office where she can sit and watch the classroom but you can’t see her, like those kids out there might be shoplifting or like she’s on the watch out for Satan in case he’s stupid enough to roll in flashing horns and tail. And while she’s invoking the devil, this crazy-looking dude stands right in front of that one-way mirror and stares into the office like he can tell someone’s talking about him. He’s got crazy eyes trying to jump from his huge head like Ping-Pong balls ready to pop out of a mouth, black hair so thick and short it looks electrified. This bug-eyed freak just keeps looking in through his own reflection, but McNutt doesn’t skip a beat. She keeps talking while she stands and walks to her door, poking her head out. Ignacio, come in here. I have someone for you to meet.

Bug Eyes walks into the room still smiling insanely. I can tell that this is the guy, the guy who’s into everything. Ignacio, show Robert around a little. Be a peer counselor.

Nacho, he says to me and McNutt. I’m not sure what he means. Call me Nacho, he says, this time pointing to himself. He is thick, squat, and carries himself confidently, like a Mexican wrestler. I shake his hand, but before we can really start to talk, McNutt tells us we should move into the classroom.

She does her introduction bit while all the students stare at me. There’s about forty of them in the high school room. They look mostly like losers, all of them wearing the boring clothes the dress code calls for, boys on one side, girls on the other, in the long, narrow rectangular room. Above each of their cubicles is a stenciled Bible verse on yellow cardboard. This is the sunny part of Sunnydale, and McNutt tells me I have to pick out my favorite and do the same thing. The partitions between the desks are cheap wood and painted blue, making the place look almost bright. In the middle of the room, from the ceiling, hangs a three-foot cross. It marks the desk where the teacher sits.

Right away I notice that there are some cuties in the room. Loose, curly perms and all sorts of braids and twists catch my eye. Leave it to girls to figure out a way of looking different even in a place like this. That isn’t the case with the other side of the room, though. The guys all look nerdy as hell, all of them but Nacho, that is.

He’s different, and I can tell that this guy isn’t going to give me the kind of counsel McNutt has in mind. As he walks me to my partition at the end of the men’s side of the room, he sounds me out quick for my fuck-up potential. You party? he half-whispers to me on the way to my new desk. I nod as I look at the kids who are looking at me. They’re craning their necks because they’re supposed to be facing the wall. It’s a sad sight, all of them looking cowed like they’re afraid to peek, only they’re so bored they’re willing to take the risk.

After school Nacho and his weird brother, Pito, get me high on the way to their house. Pito’s got frizzy hair and he’s tall, rangy, looking nothing like Nacho except for the nutty grin. He gives me his hand, his sleepy brown eyes opening up for a second. Wha’s up?

Even though all we do is hang out, it’s great, hitting the bong and listening to Nine Inch Nails until their hairdressing mom gets home. She comes in tired looking, puffy red-dyed hair, and saggy, sad eyes. What’s that funny smell, Ignacio? she asks right off. He shrugs a Nothing, letting her know he doesn’t want to get into it. We split because his mom starts quoting scripture at her two sons. She wants me to understand that her sons’ sins aren’t her fault. I don’t mind her because she tells me that she’ll cut my hair whenever I want for free.

Older people always seem to like me pretty fast. What I got going for me is that I’m innocent looking. I’m a skinny motherfucker, and older women, mom-types, are always trying to feed me because my ribs stick out and I have long, gangly arms. They find out my moms is gone, give me a sad look like they want to hug me, and then bam, I’m hooked up for free food and other good shit. That conversation usually goes something like this:

So, Robert, what does your mother do?

My mom died eight years ago, when I was about to turn nine. She caught pneumonia in Mexico and they couldn’t do anything for her in the mountains.

Oh, that’s terrible. During this part they look embarrassed and sad at the same time, like it’s their fault or maybe they’re next. What was she doing there?

"She went down on a missions trip for her church. I think they were trying to convert the indios, and they didn’t have any medicine."

Well, who takes care of you? Your father?

Nah, he’s a musician and he’s always traveling, but he sends Grams money—that’s my grandmother—and she watches me.

"No wonder you’re so skinny. Puro huesito. Ignacio—or whoever the friend bringing me home is—you bring him over for dinner whenever he wants."

My moms isn’t really dead. I just prefer saying that because it’s easier than getting into the whole damned story about my pops leaving and her having a nervous breakdown and then splitting to Califas with my baby brother, Antony, and leaving me here to look after myself.

Before all that happened, I was sort of looking forward to everything. High school was supposed to be hype; me and my friends could hardly wait. We imagined that it was going to be off the hook with girls and parties. But when my pops left for the last time, things got so rough that I was looking for signs from God, not for sexual healing.

My uncle, a preacher, was always after my pops to quit the music business and come back to God. But my pops never even gave it a shot, even though as a kid he used to be religious. His father was a preacher, too. When pops split, I began to listen to my uncle a lot more carefully. Maybe God could keep my father from loving the road and women so much, from wanting to spend weeks away from home. From needing all that freedom. Freedom from us.

The night before my first day in high school, there was a church rally for the back-to-schoolers. My cousins Enrique and Juan were there, too. My Uncle Augustine, Enrique’s pops, put down a mean sermon. He told us about all the shit we’d face and that we were on a mission. He didn’t pray that night. He threatened God: I know you, Lord; I know that these young men and women will not put out prayers that will not be answered. They are yours and you are their Father. They are alone in a world of iniquity, a world of sin, a world of terrible violence and danger. Look on them now, Lord, and protect them—their minds, their bodies, their spirits—from the attacks they will face beginning tomorrow. It didn’t exactly make my heart race with anticipation. It sounded more like some hellish battle where a square kid like me was sure to get stomped.

My uncle wasn’t even half close. Crockett High was more fucked up than the school Michelle Pfeiffer tries to straighten out in Dangerous Minds. On the first day, I walked through the front door to stare up at a big white statue of a mustang on its hind legs, as if to say, Don’t even try it here. We don’t fuck around. The thing must have been twenty feet high, impressive until I noticed that he had no sack—no cock, no balls. He was all attitude. You gotta have equipment if you’re gonna front like that. The school was the same way. Lots of talk about this and that, but no action. Mostly people were worrying about getting out of that motherfucker without getting stabbed.

Early on I had this stupid notion that I wanted to be a musician like my pops. It’s pathetic now, but I wanted to try to impress the old man, show him we had something in common. Something that connected us, you know, father and son. So I tried band at Crockett, but within a week it was obvious that I had zero talent. But at least I could tell what sounded right and what sounded wrong. I couldn’t stand to be in that practice room with people who played even shittier than me. Most of those motherfuckers didn’t know which end of the horn to blow into. The music roiling around that hall made the band teacher clench from his ass to his scalp. Kids would pretend they were blowing notes when they weren’t doing shit; some of them didn’t even have reeds in the mouthpieces; others just played nonsensical notes, doing their own thing. The drummers were so off, you might’ve thought they were playing a completely different piece of music. Half the time, they were. Band dude would stop us in the middle of a piece and take a stroll, his face red with fury and disgust, to the back of the room and take a glance at the music stands. That’s not even the piece of music we’re playing! he’d scream. Jesus, can’t you people read? The friggin’ title is at the top! I got the hell out of there as soon as I could.

I decided to go it alone. I didn’t really want to talk to anyone around there, anyway. Everyone was either fucking stupid, acting crazy, or trying to be a roughneck. I started skipping my classes. I’d head straight for the library and look for books to read. I figured I’d learn better on my own.

In a couple of months, I went through a lot of Kurt Vonnegut after I picked up Slaughterhouse-Five by accident. The librarian, this guy named Mr. Crane who was pretty cool actually, told me that if I liked Vonnegut, I would like Joseph Heller. Catch-22 was so good, I read it over and over. Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was next. Those three kind of explained my life to me. Those guys see the world filled with monsters and freaks, and the scary shit is that it’s the monsters who run things and make life hard for the rest of us. They corrupt everything they touch. When you’re surrounded by crazy shit, just like Yossarian in Catch-22, you have to go with it, be just as crazy and absurd. I can relate to that. Life is completely unpredictable, but somehow you have to be able to find some way to deal.

Although I tried to stay out of everyone’s way, the teachers couldn’t leave me alone. They called my moms and told her I wasn’t coming to class. She tried to get tough with me and ask me where I was going, but she wasn’t very good at it. I’d promise that I was going to stop screwing around and go to school, but I just couldn’t do it. After a couple of months of this, they kicked me out. I didn’t care. I was relieved.

But my moms got sicker and my Aunt Naomi came and took her and my little brother, Antony, to L.A. He was still a baby, only a month away from being four. They left almost two years ago. I moved in with my grams because she was the only one who offered when no one else wanted me. I think she felt responsible because her son had split on us.

She lives on the Westside. It’s rough, but I’m no stranger to the barrio. I grew up here more than any other place.

Living with Grams meant that I had to go to Edgewood High. I’d go to school every day because Grams doesn’t play the way my moms did. After Moms fell apart, she didn’t have the strength to make sure I went. So I didn’t. But Grams has plenty of strength and she makes damn sure I get up. But she couldn’t be around at school with me. Every day something had to go down at that place. There was some crazy motherfuckers at that joint. It don’t take shit to get into trouble around a place like that. I got busted for having a quarter-ounce bag of weed in my locker and that was it for me. They have a zero-tolerance policy and that means I can’t go to high school anywhere in the Edgewood School District for a whole year. That’s when Grams called Sunnydale.

But here’s what nobody knows: I’ve decided to make it a go at Sunnydale. I have to keep my grams happy while I institute my plan. See, I’m not going to stick around this place too long. I’m L.A.-bound. I’m gonna get together some money, enough to get over there and lay some on the table in front of my moms. I turned sixteen and I can drive to work now, and I’m gonna show my moms that she needs me around to help her out. When she was here, I couldn’t do much. I almost wigged out myself. I know that all the shit I did contributed to her falling apart, but she needs to know that it isn’t like that anymore. My shit’s wired now. But I gotta bide my time around here until I’m ready.

*   *   *

Tonight Nacho and Pito take me to meet their old man. He runs this cool-assed bar called La Parranda. Pito explains on the drive that it’s a dump, but that his pops doesn’t care that we’re all underage. That makes it the number-one place to chill. The bar is on Zarzamora Street, just down the way from Church of the Little Flowers, where everyone tries to stage their daughter’s quinceañera, the Sweet Fifteen for teenage Mexican girls. Normally, I wouldn’t be creeping the streets in this area, but Nacho and Pito don’t seem worried. They come up here after midnight all the time. Still, Zarzamora is the kind of street even cops hate to patrol because there’s always some craziness going down. Stand there long enough and you’ll see somebody get their head busted and their shit taken—probably you if you’re stupid enough to be standing there. The locals keep clear when the sun sets because around this block Zarzamora is always dark. Not a great place for the city to be saving money on streetlights, but the bastards on the city council always screw the westside. Most of the businesses have left the neighborhood, too. Now there’s only a few bars, a Mexican bakery that closes early to avoid any trouble, and the occasional check-cashing place that’ll cash a check with somebody’s severed hand still attached to it.

La Parranda is one hundred percent pure dive. We go in through the back door. Nacho’s dad lets us hang out around the pool tables and smoke and drink beer. Ten or twelve alcoholic-type burnouts from around the block, harmless really, all of them looking to keep the buzz going no matter the cost, are on their usual seats around the bar. Lots of cowboy hats and flea-market Spurs T-shirts hurting to keep it together around huge beer bellies. There’s a few used-up-looking older women, all of them old enough to be my moms. Maybe my moms’s mom. The women are hanging out, looking for a free drink and maybe a little bleary-eyed attention even if it’s from a big, fat, sweaty, drunken slob. It’s enough to make you wonder if it wouldn’t be better—more merciful—for everybody involved if God didn’t just wipe the place out with a great big celestial bowling ball, one of those with the flames on it. But I guess everyone needs a place to hang out, and Nacho’s pops is kind of doing the neighborhood a favor by keeping these people from going outside. On the far end of the lounge, across from the bar, is an old jukebox that cranks out Mexican cornball, mostly cumbias and a few polkas. Good stuff when you’re drunk.

What’s coolest about Nacho’s father is his 1976 Monte Carlo. It’s way fucked up. The guy got it from this vato who owed him a couple of hundred bucks. It was all rusted and dented, but Nacho’s father went and bought some Krylon and spray-painted it black. He put this little Mexican flag on the antenna and he’s proud of it, too. That Monte looks like the Mexican batmobile, parked outside the bar ready for action should an emergency arise. You never know.

What’s your name? his father asks me from behind the bar. He’s standing in front of a big bar mirror that’s framed by dozens of liquor bottles and red chile pepper Christmas lights.

I’m Robert.

"That’s a good name. Roberto. He twirls it around a time or two, like he’s almost satisfied with it. He starts shortening it like old-timers always do. Roberto, Berto, Beto. I used to have a good buddy named Beto. He’s dead now. He lays it on thick, pausing a second before he says, Junkie. He gives me a straight look. You know him? I shake my head. Yeah, a stone-dead junkie. You don’t sell that shit, right? I shake my head again. Yeah, you better not. I don’t need the competition, and then he laughs. I can tell when I’m being fucked with and I laugh, too. You watch out for my boys. They’re motherfucking sons of bitches like their old man. He says it proud and pours me a beer. Yeah, you watch out. They’re the reason I had to leave their momma. Somebody be dead by now if I hadn’t." The two or three burnouts sitting closest to us laugh. It’s all good, though. Nacho’s old man is cool.

Nacho, Pito, and me sit down near the pool table and put down a couple of quarters. While we wait for the table to open, we try to get a good buzz going. We’re talking about Sunnydale and Nacho asks me who I think is hot. He wants a list. I haven’t been there but a couple of days, man, I say, not wanting to commit myself. Besides, they got a careful watch on us.

Man, sinners and saints all wind up in the same place, he says. All those pops think they can send their little girls off to be kept away from us dirties. That’s why they got us sitting with little walls between us. Like that’s going to keep us apart. Shit! McNutt’s—he pronounces it My-Nuts—got it set up so the only way to talk is to raise the little Christian flag. You need more than a little flag to keep me out of the pussy, dog. I get to them no matter what. He points down at his pecker and makes a few half-hearted gyrations. They need to be calling me Snatch-o instead of Nacho.

He goes on and on, giving me the list of Sunnydale chicks he’s pounded and how before he graduates he wants to do Sister McNutt. "She’s gonna raise her flag up my pole before it’s over." Finally we get our turn at the pool table and he turns his attention to trying to beat me out of my last four dollars, which he does because by that time I’m all the way plastered.

*   *   *

Sister McNutt’s watching. She’s on me about my not being in dress code, about my sneaks and sinfully baggy jeans. She also wants to know why I don’t put something more