This random shopping made me feel better for a few minutes but then I stopped and walked to the toy aisle. My boys needed gifts: Lego cars or something, for a lift, a shot of capitalistic joy. But the selection of proper toys is art and science. I have been wrong as often as right and heard the sad song of a disappointed son.
Shit, if I died, I knew my sons would survive, even thrive, because of their graceful mother.
I thought of my father’s life: he was just six when his father was killed in World War II. Then his mother, ill with tuberculosis, died a few months later. Six years old, my father was cratered. In most ways, he never stopped being six. There was no religion, no magic tricks, and no song or dance that helped my father.
Jesus, I needed a drink of water, so I found the fountain and drank and drank until the pharmacist called my name.
“Have you taken these before?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “but they’re going to kick my ass, aren’t they?”
That made the pharmacist smile, so I felt sadly and briefly worthwhile. But another customer, some nosy hag, said, “You’ve got a lot of sleepless nights ahead of you.”
I was shocked. I stammered, glared at her, and said, “Miss, how is this any of your business? Please, just fuck all the way off, okay?”
She had no idea what to say, so she just turned and walked away and I pulled out my credit card and paid far too much for my goddamn steroids, and forgot to bring the toys home to my boys.
15. Exit Interview for My Father
• True or False?: when a reservation-raised Native American dies of alcoholism it should be considered death by natural causes.
• Do you understand the term
wanderlust,
and if you do, can you please tell us, in twenty-five words or less, what place gave you wanderlust the most?
• Did you, when drunk, ever get behind the tattered wheel of a ’76 Ford three-speed van and somehow drive your family one thousand miles on an empty tank of gas?
• Is it true that the only literary term that has any real meaning in the Native American world is
road movie
?
• During the last road movie you saw, how many times did the characters ask, “Are we there yet?”
• How many times, during any of your road trips, did your children ask, “Are we there yet?”
• In twenty-five words or less, please define
there
.
• Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent, you broke your children’s hearts, collectively and individually, 612 times and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?
• Without using the words
man
or
good,
can you please define what it means to be a good man?
• Do you think you will see angels before you die? Do you think angels will come to escort you to Heaven? As the angels are carrying you to Heaven, how many times will you ask, “Are we there yet?”
• Your son distinctly remembers stopping once or twice a month at that grocery store in Freeman, Washington, where you would buy him a red-white-and-blue Rocket Popsicle and purchase for yourself a pickled pig foot. Your son distinctly remembers the feet still had their toenails and little tufts of pig fur. Could this be true? Did you actually eat such horrendous food?
• Your son has often made the joke that you were the only Indian of your generation who went to Catholic school on purpose. This is, of course, a tasteless joke that makes light of the forced incarceration and subsequent physical, spiritual, cultural, and sexual abuse of tens of thousands of Native American children in Catholic and Protestant boarding schools. In consideration of your son’s questionable judgment in telling jokes, do you think there should be any moral limits placed on comedy?
• Your oldest son and your two daughters, all over thirty-six years of age, still live in your house. Do you think this is a lovely expression of tribal culture? Or is it a symptom of extreme familial codependence? Or is it both things at the same time?
• F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a superior mind “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.” Do you believe this is true? And is it also true that you once said, “The only time white people tell the truth is when they keep their mouths shut”?
• A poet once wrote, “Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.” Can you tell us, in twenty-five words or less, exactly how much we all hate mathematical blackmail?
• Your son, in defining you, wrote this poem to explain one of the most significant nights in his life:
Mutually Assured Destruction
When I was nine, my father sliced his knee
With a chain saw. But he let himself bleed
And finished cutting down one more tree
Before his boss drove him to EMERGENCY.
Late that night, stoned on morphine and beer,
My father needed my help to steer
His pickup into the woods. “Watch for deer,”
My father said. “Those things just appear
Like magic.” It was an Indian summer
And we drove through warm rain and thunder,
Until we found that chain saw, lying under
The fallen pine. Then I watched, with wonder,
As my father, shotgun-rich and impulse-poor,
Blasted that chain saw dead. “What was that for?”
I asked. “Son,” my father said, “here’s the score.
Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”
• Well, first of all, as you know, you did cut your knee with a chain saw, but in direct contradiction to your son’s poem:
A) You immediately went to the emergency room after injuring yourself.
B) Your boss called your wife, who drove you to the emergency room.
C) You were given morphine but even you were not alcoholically stupid enough to drink alcohol while on serious narcotics.
D) You and your son did not get into the pickup that night.
E) And even if you had driven the pickup, you were not injured seriously enough to need your son’s help with the pedals and/or steering wheel.
F) You never in your life used the word,
appear,
and certainly never used the phrase,
like magic
.
G) You also think that Indian summer is a fairly questionable seasonal reference for an Indian poet to use.
H) What the fuck is “warm rain and thunder”? Well, everybody knows what warm rain is, but what the fuck is warm thunder?
I) You never went looking for that chain saw because it belonged to the Spokane tribe of Indians and what kind of freak would want to reclaim the chain saw that had just cut the shit out of his knee?
J) You also think that the entire third stanza of this poem sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song and not necessarily one of the great ones.
K) And yet, “shotgun-rich and impulse-poor” is one of the greatest descriptions your son has ever written and probably redeems the entire poem.
L) You never owned a shotgun. You did own a few rifles during your lifetime, but did not own even so much as a pellet gun during the last thirty years of your life.
M) You never said, in any context, “Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”
N) But you, as you read it, know that it is absolutely true and does indeed sound suspiciously like your entire life philosophy.
O) Other summations of your life philosophy include: “I’ll be there before the next teardrop falls.”
P) And: “If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.”
Q) And: “Oscar Robertson should be the man on the NBA logo. They only put Jerry West on there because he’s a white guy.”
R) And: “A peanut butter sandwich with onions. Damn, that’s the way to go.”
S) And: “Why eat a pomegranate when you can eat a plain old apple. Or peach. Or orange. When it comes to fruit and vegetables, only eat the stuff you know how to grow.”
T) And: “If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don’t want to dance, then you’re going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango.”
U) And: “I really miss those cafeterias they use to have in Kmart. I don’t know why they stopped having those. If there is a Heaven then I firmly believe it’s a Kmart cafeteria.”
V) And: “A father always knows what his sons are doing. For instance, boys, I knew you were sneaking that
Hustler
magazine out of my bedroom. You remember that one? Where actors who looked like Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura were screwing on the bridge of the
Enterprise
. Yeah, that one. I know you kept borrowing it. I let you borrow it. Remember this: men and pornography are like plants and sunshine. To me, porn is photosynthesis.”
W) And: “Your mother is a better man than me. Mothers are almost always better men than men are.”
16. Reunion
After she returned from Italy, my wife climbed into bed with me. I felt like I had not slept comfortably in years.
I said, “There was a rumor that I’d grown a tumor but I killed it with humor.”
“How long have you been waiting to tell me that one?” she asked.
“Oh, probably since the first time some doctor put his fingers in my brain.”
We made love. We fell asleep. But I, agitated by the steroids, woke at two, three, four, and five a.m. The bed was killing my back so I lay flat on the floor. I wasn’t going to die anytime soon, at least not because of my little friend, Mr. Tumor, but that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable or comforted. I felt distant from the world—from my wife and sons, from my mother and siblings—from all of my friends. I felt closer to those who’ve always had fingers in their brains.
And I didn’t feel any closer to the world six months later when another MRI revealed that my meningioma had not grown in size or changed its shape.
“You’re looking good,” my doctor said. “How’s your hearing?”
“I think I’ve got about 90 percent of it back.”
“Well, then, the steroids worked. Good.”
And I didn’t feel any more intimate with God nine months later when one more MRI made my doctor hypothesize that my meningioma might only be more scar tissue from the hydrocephalus.
“Frankly,” my doctor said. “Your brain is beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I said, though it was the oddest compliment I’d ever received.
I wanted to call up my father and tell him that a white man thought my brain was beautiful. But I couldn’t tell him anything. He was dead. I told my wife and sons that I was okay. I told my mother and siblings. I told my friends. But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father would have. I miss him, the drunk bastard. I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me.
THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO SAY PHOENIX, ARIZONA
Just after Victor lost his job at the BIA, he also found out that his father had died of a heart attack in Phoenix, Arizona. Victor hadn’t seen his father in a few years, only talked to him on the telephone once or twice, but there still was a genetic pain, which was soon to be pain as real and immediate as a broken bone.
Victor didn’t have any money. Who does have money on a reservation, except the cigarette and fireworks salespeople? His father had a savings account waiting to be claimed, but Victor needed to find a way to get to Phoenix. Victor’s mother was just as poor as he was, and the rest of his family didn’t have any use at all for him. So Victor called the Tribal Council.
“Listen,” Victor said. “My father just died. I need some money to get to Phoenix to make arrangements.”
“Now, Victor,” the council said. “You know we’re having a difficult time financially.”
“But I thought the council had special funds set aside for stuff like this.”