“Throw the first punch,” Stevie said as they squared off.
“No,” Randy said.
“Throw the first punch,” Stevie said again.
“No,” Randy said again.
“Throw the first punch!” Stevie said for the third time, and Randy reared back and pitched a knuckle fastball that broke Stevie’s nose.
We all stood there in silence, in awe.
That was Randy, my soon-to-be first and best friend, who taught me the most valuable lesson about living in the white world:
Always throw the first punch
.
Seventh Grade
I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl who would later be raped by her foster-parent father, who was also white. They both lived on the reservation, though, and when the headlines and stories filled the papers later, not one word was made of their color.
Just Indians being Indians,
someone must have said somewhere and they were wrong.
But on the day I leaned through the basement window of the HUD house and kissed the white girl, I felt the good-byes I was saying to my entire tribe. I held my lips tight against her lips, a dry, clumsy, and ultimately stupid kiss.
But I was saying good-bye to my tribe, to all the Indian girls and women I might have loved, to all the Indian men who might have called me cousin, even brother.
I kissed that white girl and when I opened my eyes, she was gone from the reservation, and when I opened my eyes, I was gone from the reservation, living in a farm town where a beautiful white girl asked my name.
“Junior Polatkin,” I said, and she laughed.
After that, no one spoke to me for another five hundred years.
Eighth Grade
At the farm town junior high, in the boys’ bathroom, I could hear voices from the girls’ bathroom, nervous whispers of anorexia and bulimia. I could hear the white girls’ forced vomiting, a sound so familiar and natural to me after years of listening to my father’s hangovers.
“Give me your lunch if you’re just going to throw it up,” I said to one of those girls once.
I sat back and watched them grow skinny from self-pity.
Back on the reservation, my mother stood in line to get us commodities. We carried them home, happy to have food, and opened the canned beef that even the dogs wouldn’t eat.
But we ate it day after day and grew skinny from self-pity.
There is more than one way to starve.
Ninth Grade
At the farm town high school dance, after a basketball game in an overheated gym where I had scored twenty-seven points and pulled down thirteen rebounds, I passed out during a slow song.
As my white friends revived me and prepared to take me to the emergency room where doctors would later diagnose my diabetes, the Chicano teacher ran up to us.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young.”
Sharing dark skin doesn’t necessarily make two men brothers.
Tenth Grade
I passed the written test easily and nearly flunked the driving, but still received my Washington State driver’s license on the same day that Wally Jim killed himself by driving his car into a pine tree.
No traces of alcohol in his blood, good job, wife and two kids.
“Why’d he do it?” asked a white Washington State trooper.
All the Indians shrugged their shoulders, looked down at the ground.
“Don’t know,” we all said, but when we look in the mirror, see the history of our tribe in our eyes, taste failure in the tap water, and shake with old tears, we understand completely.
Believe me, everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough.
Eleventh Grade
Last night I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the “Indians,” and I’m probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot.
This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline:
INDIANS LOSE AGAIN
.
Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.
Twelfth Grade
I walk down the aisle, valedictorian of this farm town high school, and my cap doesn’t fit because I’ve grown my hair longer than it’s ever been. Later, I stand as the school board chairman recites my awards, accomplishments, and scholarships.
I try to remain stoic for the photographers as I look toward the future.
Back home on the reservation, my former classmates graduate: a few can’t read, one or two are just given attendance diplomas, most look forward to the parties. The bright students are shaken frightened, because they don’t know what comes next.
They smile for the photographer as they look back toward tradition.
The tribal newspaper runs my photograph and the photograph of my former classmates side by side.
Postscript: Class Reunion
Victor said, “Why should we organize a reservation high school reunion? My graduating class has a reunion every weekend at the Powwow Tavern.”
GENTRIFICATION
A month ago, my next-door neighbors tossed a horribly stained mattress onto the curb in front of their house. I suppose they believed the mattress would be collected on our next regular garbage day. But the city charges thirty dollars to dispose of bulky items and you have to go online and schedule the pickup. Obviously, my neighbors had not bothered to schedule such an appointment. I’d thought the city, once they’d learned of the abandoned mattress, would have collected it anyway and automatically added the charge, plus a fine, to my neighbors’ utility bill.
But four garbage collection days passed and nothing happened. The mattress, dank and dirty to begin with, had begun to mold. There were new holes in the fabric that I assumed were made by rats. We live in a large waterfront city so there are millions of rodents. It’s an expected, if rather unwelcome, part of urban life. In every city in the world, there are more rats than people. But one doesn’t throw a potential home for them onto the curb in front of one’s house. That mattress was an apartment building for rats. Or at least a vacation home.
I’d thought to call the city and tell them about the mattress, but I doubted that I would have remained anonymous.
I am the only white man living on a block where all of my neighbors are black. Don’t get me wrong. My neighbors are like any other group of neighbors I’ve ever had. They are the same self-appointed guardians, social directors, friendly alcoholics, paranoid assholes, overburdened parents, sullen teenagers, flirty housewives, elderly misers, amateur comedians, and hermits that exist in every neighborhood of every city in the country. They are people, not black people; and I am a person, not a white person. And that is how we relate to one another, as people. I’m not treated as the white guy on the block, at least not overtly or rudely, and I do not treat my neighbors as if they are some kind of aliens. We live as people live, aware of racial dynamics but uninterested in their applications as it applies to our neighborhood.
My next-door neighbors, an older couple with two adult sons living at home, are kind. All four of them often sit on their front porch, sharing snacks and drinks, and greeting everybody who walks past. But they’d been sitting only a few feet away from the mattress they’d so haphazardly tossed onto the curb. How could they have continued to live as if creating such a mess were normal? I wanted to ask them what they planned to do about the mattress, though I wasn’t even sure of the older son’s name. It’s something ornately African-sounding that I hadn’t quite understood when I’d first met him, and it was too late, a year later, to ask for the proper pronunciation. And that made me feel racist. If his name were something more typical, like Ron or Eddie or Vlad or Pete or Carlos or Juan, then I would have remembered it later. The simple names are easier to remember. So, in this regard, perhaps I am racist.
And, frankly, it felt racist for me to look out my front window at that abandoned mattress and wonder about the cultural norms that allowed my neighbors, so considerate otherwise, to create a health hazard. And why hadn’t my other neighbors complained? Or maybe they had complained and the city had ignored the mattress because it was a black neighborhood? Who was the most racist in that situation? Was it the white man who was too terrified to confront his black neighbors on their rudeness? Was it the black folks who abandoned the mattress on their curb? Was it the black people who didn’t feel the need to judge the behavior of their black neighbors? Was it the city, which let a mattress molder on the street in full view of hundreds, if not thousands, of people? Or was it all of us, black and white, passively revealing that, despite our surface friendliness, we didn’t really care about one another?
In any case, after another garbage day had passed, I rented a U-Haul truck, a flatbed with enough room to carry the mattress, and parked it—hid it, really—two blocks away. I didn’t want to embarrass or anger my neighbors so I set my alarm for three
A.M
. I didn’t turn on the lights as I donned gloves, coveralls, and soft-soled shoes. Perhaps I was being overcautious. But it was fun, too, to be on a secret mission.
I slowly opened my front door, worried the hinges might creak, and took step after careful step on the porch, avoiding the loose boards. Then I walked across my lawn rather than on the sidewalk. A dog barked. It was slightly foggy. A bat swooped near a streetlight. For a moment, I felt like I’d walked into a werewolf movie. Then I wondered what the police would do if they discovered a clean-cut white man creeping through a black neighborhood.
“Buddy,” the cops would say. “You don’t fit the profile of the neighborhood.”
I almost laughed out loud at my joke. That would have been a stupid way to get caught.
Then I stood next to the mattress and realized that I hadn’t figured out how I was supposed to carry that heavy, awkward, waterlogged thing two blocks to the truck.
Given more time, I probably could have rigged up a pulley system or a Rube Goldberg contraption that would have worked. But all I had that night was brute strength, without the brute.
I kicked the mattress a few times to flush out any rats. Then I grabbed the mattress’s plastic handles—thank God they were still intact—and tried to lift the thing. It was heavier than I expected, and smelled and felt like a dead dolphin.
At first I tried to drag the mattress, but that made too much noise. Then I tried to carry it on my back, but it kept sliding from my grip. My only option was to carry the mattress on my head, like an African woman gracefully walking with a vase of water balanced on her head, except without her grace.
Of course, the mattress was too heavy and unbalanced to be carried that way for long. It kept slipping off my head onto the sidewalk. It didn’t make much noise when it fell; I was more worried that my lung-burning panting would wake everybody.
It took me twenty minutes to carry that mattress to the truck and another ten to slide it into the flatbed. Then I got behind the wheel and drove to the city’s waste disposal facility in the Fremont neighborhood. But it wouldn’t open for another two hours so I parked on the street, lay across the seat, and fell asleep in the truck.
I was awakened by the raw noise of recycling and garbage trucks. I wiped my mouth, ran my fingers through my hair, and hoped that I wouldn’t offend anybody with my breath. I also hoped that the facility workers wouldn’t think that filthy mattress was mine. But I shouldn’t have worried. The workers were too busy to notice one bad-breathed man with one rat-stained mattress.
They charged me forty bucks to dispose of the mattress, and it was worth it. Then I returned the truck to the U-Haul rental site and took a taxi back to my house.
I felt clean. I felt rich and modest, like an anonymous benefactor.
When I stepped out of the taxi I saw my neighbors—mother, father, and two adult sons—sitting in the usual places on their porch. They were drinking Folgers instant coffee, awful stuff they’d shared with me on many occasions.
I waved to them but they didn’t wave back. I pretended they hadn’t noticed me and waved again. They stared at me. They knew what I had done.
“You didn’t have to do that,” said the son with the African name. “We can take care of ourselves.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You think you’re better than us, don’t you?”
I wanted to say that, when it came to abandoned mattresses, I was better.
“Right now, I feel worse,” I said.
I knew I had done a good thing, so why did I hurt so bad? Why did I feel judged?
“You go home, white boy,” the son said. “And don’t you bother us anymore.”
I knew the entire block would now shun me. I felt pale and lost, like an American explorer in the wilderness.