Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

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