To choose between the domestic and wild.
You’ll need to escalate war or declare peace.
I tell you this because I’m the kid, mother-stung,
Who became a terrible adult son.
And I’m to blame for that. I made that mess.
Because I am the Amateur of Forgiveness.
131.
The No
So we must forgive all those
Who trespass against us?
Fuck that shit.
I’m not some charitable trust.
There are people I will hate
Even after I’m ashes and dust.
132.
Jungian
Even as I deny the idea of God,
The idea of God interrogates me.
Even as I pretend that my love
For my mother is conflicted,
It’s my mother who, in my dreams,
Emerges from a door marked “adore”
An image so overtly self-subversive
That it drops me—laughing
And praying—to the floor.
133.
Side Effects
TEN MONTHS AFTER brain surgery, I realized that my unilateral hearing loss had worsened. While I could still hear normally out of my left ear, my impaired right ear seemed to be slightly more damaged. That made it difficult for me to understand speech in crowded and noisy environments. Even when my wife and sons and I talked during a relatively quiet dinner at home, I often missed or misheard words and phrases. A simple sentence like “Pass the potatoes” could turn into a mysterious and inexplicable stew of disconnected words.
But I also noticed that my brain, rather than accept the blank spots and lines of nonsense, would reach deep into its memory files and pull out a familiar word or phrase as a replacement. My brain was always working hard to make sense out of nonsense.
So, one day in a crowded restaurant, when a waiter recited the daily specials to me, I heard him say, “American woman, get away from me,” instead of whatever he said about the salad du jour.
Yes, in crowded rooms, my confused and hardworking brain works like a jukebox. Or maybe more like the shuffle on an iPod. My brain translates misheard language into song lyrics I know by heart. And like every pop culture addict, I can sing along with hundreds—perhaps thousands—of top-forty rock hits. I know my brain contains a vast data bank of lyrics, so I laugh at the possibilities. Which songwriter’s poetry will I hear the next time a stranger or friend or family member speaks to me in a crowded room?
I hope to hear Prince’s sexy lyrics more often than Air Supply’s sappy shit. But I won’t be in control of that process.
After neurosurgery, I have learned that my brain is a boardinghouse where my waking consciousness rents one room with a hot plate and a black-and-white TV while the rest of the rooms are occupied by a random assortment of banshees, ghosts, mimes wearing eagle feathers, and approximately twelve thousand strangers who look exactly like me.
And, oh, there’s an auditorium in my mind where Hank Williams is always singing. So, if I ever meet you in a crowded airport or bookstore, and you say something like “I love [or hate] your books, I’ve been reading [or ignoring] them for years,” I might think you said something like “I’m so lonesome I could cry.”
This auditory phenomenon is somewhat scary. But it also feels like a piece of magic.
And what’s the magic word? It is compensation.
134.
Hydrotherapy
I don’t know how to swim.
I can’t think of a much worse
Place to be than immersed
In water. But I live in a city
Surrounded by lakes
And canals and bays.
What can I say? You must bless
Your enemies lest they continually
Defeat you. My mother
Was terrified of the water
And never learned to swim either,
So did I inherit,
By nature and/or nurture,
My hydrophobia from her?
My sisters and brothers can swim
From one side
Of the river to the other.
So what happened to me? Well,
I was born hydrocephalic
And had brain surgery as an infant.
So, for years, my damaged head throbbed
And quaked
From any atmospheric pressure
Like driving into the mountains
Or into the valleys. So imagine how
Much it hurt to be underwater.
Imagine how much it hurt
To watch my siblings learn to swim
And then to swim freely
In the dozens of rivers, streams,
Lakes, and ponds
On our reservation or at some city pool.
My father swam, too,
With a stroke as lazy as he was.
But, on the shore, always removed
From the water,
My mother and I sat
And watched our family swimming
Away from us.
“Why are you afraid
To swim?” I asked her once
And she said something vague about
Drowning when she was a kid.
“You mean you almost drowned,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I drowned.
And then I came back.”
And, listen, my mother was a liar
So I don’t know how much of this is true.
But she never fully entered a body
Of water
And would only sometimes
Sit on a dock or shore or poolside
And soak her feet.
So I wonder: Will a person who has drowned,
Or almost drowned, always feel
Like they’re drowning,
Even after they’ve been saved?
Did my mother’s continual rages originate,
In some large or small way, from
Her drowning
Or near-drowning?
I don’t know. But I remain terrified
That I’ll die in a plane crash, but not
From striking the earth. No,
I’m afraid that my plane
Will plummet into water.
I’m terrified that I will drown
Inside an airplane.
And, as I say this fear aloud, I laugh
And laugh and laugh at death. Hell,
When death comes, I’ll laugh
And say, “Hey, Mr. Death,
It’s nice to meet you.
That sickle makes you look fat.”
Because you must mock your enemies
Lest they defeat you.
Because you must bless your enemies
Even if they don’t bless you.
So I bless the water, my provider
And my nemesis. And I bless
My mother, who gave birth to me
In water, by water, near water,
And in honor and fear of water.
135.
My Food Channel
My mother frying baloney. It curls
At the edges and rises
Off the cast-iron pan.
This is not acceptable. We are poor
But we do not deserve
Fried baloney that is crispy hot
In the middle of its circle
But cool and fleshy around its diameter.
Fried means fried.
Partially fried means it ain’t fried at all.
So my mother slices the meat
Incompletely,
Four cuts from rim halfway to midpoint,
Just enough to make the baloney go flat
In the pan and cook evenly.
This culinary display doesn’t take very long.
We children, hungry enough
To eat everybody’s sins, listen
To the sizzle, sizzle and realize, realize
It’s one of my mother
’s love songs.
136.
Triangle of Needs
Too poor in most winters
To afford cold-weather clothes,
I fought snowball battles
Using old socks for gloves.
Doesn’t sound so bad, I know,
But my jacket was thin cotton
And I also wore Kmart tennis shoes
That we called rez boots.
My cousins had uranium money
So they had warm stuff
To wear. I pretended to be
Okay when we fought
For hours in the freeze.
I suppose I could have stayed
Inside. But I was a kid,
And like all other kids,
I needed to play.
And I would keep playing
In the midwinter ice
Until I started to shake
Uncontrollably. I wonder
How often I was close
To hypothermia.
I wonder how near
I fell to dangerously
Low body temperatures.
In December 1974
Or 1975, I stumbled
Through two miles
Of slush and freezing rain
And arrived home
Only to discover
That we’d lost electricity.
We had no heat.
My mother, wrapped
In an old and thin quilt,
Was constructing
A new and thicker quilt.
“What happened
To the lights?” I asked.
“We had no money
To pay the bill,”
She said. “So I need
To finish this quilt
And sell it to this
White woman in Spokane
So I can pay the bill
And maybe get some
Tomato soup and Pepsi, too.”
Shivering, I cried
And said, “But I’m cold now.”
So my mother told me
To take off my wet clothes.
And then, wearing only
Underwear, I crawled beneath
The old and new quilts, next
To my mother’s legs
And eventually got warm.
And, yes, my mother finished
And sold that quilt
For less than it was worth,
But she paid the bill—
She moved the goddamn earth—
And got our electricity back.
137.
Artist Statement
ON OUR FIRST date, my future wife said she’d once broken up with a boyfriend because his favorite song was the Eagles’ “Desperado.”
Well, I remembered that my wife had revealed that goofy bit of information to me. But she always insisted that she’d never said it and that it wasn’t true. She’d never dated a man like that. And I insisted just as strongly that she had told me about her Eagles-loving former beau and was just retroactively embarrassed by that particular romantic partner.
We argued about it for years.
Then, one evening, my wife and I watched a Seinfeld rerun.
“Hey, Elaine,” Jerry said. “What happened to that guy?”
“Ah,” Elaine said. “I dumped him.”
“Why?”
“Because his favorite song is ‘Desperado.’”
I kept staring at the television as my wife stared at me. I had confused my real life with an episode of a classic situation comedy. So, yeah, I think you know by now that I am definitely going to conflate shit.
138.
Sonnet, with Fabric Softener
1. This is a poem about an epiphany. 2. This is also a poem about folding laundry. 3. It may have been Mark Twain who said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” 4. I live in Seattle, whose weather is much like San Francisco’s. 5. I believe it was Tom Robbins who said, in describing Seattle, “It wasn’t really raining, but everything was wet.” 6. I say, “Our laundry room, even in summer, used to be the fucking coldest place south of Alaska.” 7. I’m one of those husbands and fathers who love to do laundry but don’t fold the clean clothes with any regularity. This greatly irritates my wife. “You already did the laundry,” she often says. “Why can’t you go the extra step and fold it?” I never have an answer to that particular question. 8. Marriage is filled with, among many other things, laundry and unanswered questions. 9. For sixteen years, my wife and I cleaned and folded (or did not fold) laundry, and froze while doing so. 10. And yes, it was a minor annoyance—we weren’t risking hypothermia—but why shouldn’t one be comfortable in one’s home? 11. On a bright note, the cold room truly made us love wrapping ourselves in sheets hot from the dryer. 12. For sixteen years, I often thought of wrapping my fresh-out-of-the-shower wife in sheets hot from the dryer, but it was too damn cold to be naked anywhere near the laundry room. 13. Then, one day, I bought insulated curtains at Target and hung them in all the doorways of the basement, where our laundry room is located. This immediately made the laundry room at least fifteen degrees warmer. “That’s all it took?” my wife asked. “Yes,” I said. Technically speaking, this is called an epiphany. 14. Dear wife, I’m sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I’ll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.
139.
Complications
IN 2016, WHILE traveling to a Journey concert with my wife and older son, my brain crafted a mixtape of ballads.
Sad songs about unrequited love.
Minor chords.
One piano key.
The silence between notes. The silence between songs on the mixtape. The hiss of absence.
“You know,” I said to my wife as she drove us along. “I just realized that every Indian boy on my rez who ever punched me is dead.”
“They were all your age?” my wife asked.
“My age or older. A couple of them were eight or ten years older.”
“Are you sure they’re all dead?”
“Yeah, pretty sure,” I said. “None of them made it to fifty. Most of them didn’t make it to forty. A few didn’t make thirty.”
What is a person supposed to feel when they realize all of their physically violent childhood bullies are dead? And dead so young?
I felt like I didn’t have the right to mourn my tormentors’ deaths. I didn’t love them. They didn’t love me.
“Why am I so sad about them dying?” I asked.
“Maybe you believe in redemption,” my wife said. “Maybe you were always hoping for some reconciliation.”
“Maybe it’s survivor’s guilt,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
I remembered the day when one of my worst bullies caught me alone on the outdoor basketball court behind the school. He wrestled me to the pavement, sat on my chest, and spat in my face.
I closed my eyes and pressed my lips together.
But then he held my nostrils closed.
I tried to hold my breath.
I tried to hold my breath.
I tried to hold my breath.
But then I gasped for air.
And my bully spat in my mouth.
This happened almost forty years ago. I don’t think about it often. Maybe once or twice a year. Only once or twice a year. Only once or twice. Once or twice.
A friend asked me if I would trade some of my childhood trauma for some of my stories and poems.
“Straight-up trade,” my friend said. “God takes away one pain in exchange for one poem. Would you do it?”
“No way,” I said. But I think the real answer is “Yes, yes, of course I would, of course. Let me make a list. Let me trade away the worst three things—that Unholy Trinity—but I want to keep all the rest.”
140.
Photograph
ONE EVENING, NEAR midnight, I called my little sister and told her that I was going to re
veal, in this memoir, that our mother was the child of a rape. It was a family secret that I would not have publicly disclosed while my mother was alive. In order to write honestly about my mother—about her cruelty toward me—I knew I needed to reveal that she was conceived by a cruel act. There are reasons, justifiable or not, that my mother was so often vindictive toward me and the rest of the world. But she was also generous and kind to many people. She was generous and kind to me. She was contradictory. She was an unpredictable person—a random mother. And she was angry, yes, but she angrily provided for her children. She kept us mostly warm and mostly safe and mostly fed. And that was no small accomplishment for a woman who’d been hurt so much—who was the child of the greatest hurt. And I know you have read this story in this book a few times. But I must tell it again and again.
“But Mom wasn’t made by rape,” my sister said. “She was raped. And that’s where Mary came from.”
Mary was our half sister. Our big sister.
“But Mom told me she was conceived during a rape,” I said to my sister. “I was, like, twelve or thirteen, and she sat me down and told me her mother was raped. She told me who raped her mother. And that she is the daughter of that rape.”
“No,” my sister said. “Mom was raped when she lived in California when she was a teenager. In Sacramento. By the husband of the woman she was living with.”
“Mom told me she only spent a day in Sacramento,” I said. “She said she got off the bus, had a bowl of soup in the bus station, then got on the next bus heading back to Spokane.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” my sister said. “But Mom was sent to California because she was being so difficult on the rez, I guess. Then she was raped in Cali. But nobody believed her. They blamed her. Then she came back to the rez pregnant. Then, later, after she gave birth to Mary, she moved to Montana and married a Flathead Indian.”