Born With Monkey Asses. MC 900 ft. Jesus with DJ Zero. 1990. Nettwerk.

 The second or third person in my family that I can remember struggling with mental health issues was my father’s older brother Manuel. Born the fourth child of six, Manuel was the uncle who, at family gatherings, I gravitated from not towards. It wasn’t Manuel’s mental distress that frightened or intimidated me, but the permanent damage that distress had inflicted upon him, stranding him amid the religious obsessions that haunted his psyche, gave the grim impression that he was somehow capable of enveloping you in madness. He appeared stricken most acutely around the eyes, as if epistemology had given him the inability to distinguish between faith and doubt, and he could no longer see beyond the blur of his tortured mind.  His dark eyes were forever lost in a dramatic squint, and he spoke with the wounded rasp of a desert saint. Refusing to share the eschatological secrets of his spiritual investigations, he preferred instead to quiz his nephews on our banal childhood ambitions, even occasionally encouraging us to pursue the rigors of team sport, which he, somewhat ironically, claimed would improve our virtue. In short, he behaved like the majority, attempting to live calmly behind the face of normality’s assimilative grip. I have the memory of my mother explaining to me, because of my inquisitiveness, how Manuel suffered his mental collapse when he was still a draftsman at General Dynamics, which collapse, my mother assured me, was caused by his passion for interrogating religious dialectics. Mental exhaustion ensued. In the spirit of family gossip, my mother later verified what I knew to be true about why Manuel’s children—his daughter Debbie, around the same age as my sister Vicki, and son Manuel Ralph, a year older than me—both had blonde hair when no one else on either side of their extended families did. My feelings regarding my personal amount of blood from European derived sources being only a fraction of what coursed through Manuel Ralph’s veins were ambivalent; I’m still thrilled that, because of this, my American history begins only in the twentieth century, when my parents were born here. My outsider status remains complete. And I’ll never not consider the possibility of having been descended from indigenous trash so low on the human food chain that his flesh was openly consumed by elitist religious maniacs or, conversely, from pagan, power mad diet fetishists who ate beating hearts from the open chests of the freshly dead, exhilarating. Manuel’s wife Marie was a bird-like woman with the nervous disposition of a professional bureaucrat in an American comedy from the nineteen-fifties. She wore her eyeglasses on a chain around her neck, kept a pack of cigarettes at all times in a small, quilted clutch bag with a gold plated clasp, and played Bingo at least once a week; the time I went with her was one of the most exciting afternoons of my childhood. I won a set of dominoes. Marie, in the later years of her life, could no more control her dietary intake than could Aztec royalty; she developed diabetes but continued eating foods against which her doctors counseled, and eventually suffered renal failure. My mother invited the widowed Marie to live in her and Dad’s home while Marie underwent a dialysis regimen on a regular basis. One night, when both Manuel Ralph and I were visiting our respective parents, my mother took me aside and insisted I invite Manuel Ralph out to do something. It was spring or summer so I suggested we go hit golf balls at a driving range near the city’s southern limit with a set of clubs borrowed from my Dad. While we were there, the range lit dramatically by power lights placed on huge wooden poles around the range, and the outside darkness pressing against us from all sides, the noise from the traffic on Interstate 35 providing an unending sense of motion over our shoulders, Manuel Ralph confessed that his mother had once harangued him about not doing enough to save me. Quoting his mother, Manuel Ralph said, “Your primo tries to kill himself and you don’t do anything to try to stop him….” His affectation of arbitrarily peppering his speech with words in Spanish quietly infuriated me. I assured him that, around that time, while we were both in high school, I would probably have done anything within my power to drive away anyone attempting to come at me with help. Shortly after Marie died, Manuel Ralph moved his girlfriend into his parents’ home on West  Seminary Drive, the same house where, visiting once back in the early seventies, I saw an original Warner Bros. pressing of the debut Black Sabbath record in Debbie’s bedroom; its mysterious cover art depicting an occult reality that might easily have been entered. The girlfriend stayed in touch with my mother after presumably bonding with her during the time of Marie’s gradual death. She was worried about Manuel Ralph, fearing that he was in a state of depression and withdrawal. He had taken a job, working as an undercover security officer at a Macy’s department store. After Debbie arranged to have her parents’ former house sold from her home in Victoria, Texas, we never heard from Manuel Ralph again.