145.
The End of a Half-Assed Basketball Career
As a teenager, I was a basketball star, I suppose,
But only on a dozen or so Indian reservations
And in twenty or thirty white farm towns.
I was good enough to be the ninth man
On an average community college team, if I’d chosen
That route, but I took the academic scholarships
To a Jesuit college instead, played intramural hoops,
And dominated fellow students who could’ve been
The tenth and eleventh men on a CC squad,
If they’d chosen that route instead of the books.
Then I drank myself away from the Catholics
To the public land grant university,
Where I learned how to write free verse poems.
I sobered up but never stopped playing ball.
And was probably better at age twenty-eight
Than I’d ever been. I helped my teams win
City league championships in Spokane
And Seattle. And once scored 55 in an all-Indian game
Where my team lost by 100 points. I played street ball
Against pro and college players and was humiliated
By my superiors only four or five hundred times.
I once blocked John Stockton’s fast break lay-in,
An impetuous play that enraged and energized him.
He guarded me so closely and scored on me so easily
For the next ten minutes that I had to surrender and walk
Off the court. I was always slow and unorthodox
And only scored because I learned how to take and make
Shots from ridiculous angles. I played an old man’s game
When I was twelve so I thought I would play forever.
But I hurt my back in 2002 and hurt it again and again and
Again for the next fourteen years. And then I broke my mouth
Playing hoops. And then I broke my hand. And then,
In December 2015, I had brain surgery to remove a benign tumor.
And then, in August 2016, I again collapsed to the floor
With a back spasm and wept with pain. When that spasm ended,
I stood and knew I would never play hoops again.
Chronic bad backs have ended the basketball careers
Of infinitely greater athletes than me (Tracy McGrady, for one),
So I didn’t feel bad about my body’s decline. Instead,
I shrugged and wondered what smaller sport I would learn
How to play. How strange to be fifty years old and still be
In search of a new game. A few months after my quiet
Retirement, I don’t miss playing much, if at all. Instead,
I realize that my basketball obsession had limited me
In certain ways. I see that certain friends were only
My friends because of basketball. So I’ve ended
Those friendships because they aren’t nurturing
Off the court. I want to say that I’ll have more
Free time for other friends and family but, in truth,
It means I will spend more time in solitude.
I played basketball like others practiced religion.
I was a single-minded monk. And now, I am
A basketball agnostic. I still love to watch LeBron
And Curry and Durant, but I don’t daydream
About when I will play next. I don’t need to pray
That I won’t get hurt. I don’t need to pray
That I will hit a few pretty shots, make a few prettier
Assists, grab a few rebounds, and maybe make one
Great defensive play. Better yet, I don’t have to lie
Awake in the night and rewind the three hours
Of shitty basketball I just played. I don’t carry around
The shame about my hoops decrepitude. I no longer
Have to uselessly flail against the younger friends who are
So much better than me. I no longer have to sit and sit
And sit and sit because the losers always sit.
I still shoot hoops by myself. I know, one day,
I’ll be the old man who surprises
His grandkids by hitting ten long set shots in a row.
And, hey, this is a poem less about basketball
And more about mortality. I will soon have to give up
Other things, like walking steep stairs, like driving
A car, like sex. And, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,
I will eventually look at a blank piece of paper
Or blank computer screen and realize that I’ve run out
Of words. I will smile, shed a tear, walk outside,
Sit on my porch, and misidentify the local birds.
146.
When I Die
Bury me in my city. Bury me
Near the hospitals where my sons were born.
Bury me near the parks, pools, and playgrounds
Where they learned to crawl, walk, run, swim, and climb.
Bury me near the rooms
Where my sons admired
And doubted me. Entomb
My body near the libraries and bookstores
Where folks listened to my stories and poems—
Where my words were mostly celebrated
And sometimes ignored. Bury me upright
Near a taxi stand, train stop, and bus line.
Bury me near one thousand restaurants,
Good and bad. Bury me close to my friends,
Alive, dying, and dead. Bury me where
I’ll get visited at least once a week—
Okay, once a month or bimonthly,
At least. Bury me facing north, east,
South, or west, I don’t have a preference,
Religious or otherwise. Bury me
Next to my wife. Oh, damn, it hurts and hurts
To say this, but if I’m the first to go
Then bury me within walking distance
Of my home, so that my wife, my widow,
Can stroll over and keep me company.
Maybe she’ll marry again. Maybe she won’t.
But whatever happens, bury me near her.
Please, please, let me be her favorite ghost.
147.
Filtered Ways
ON A WEDNESDAY in August 2016, Shelly Boyd texted me to ask if I might be part of a special tribute to her late husband, Jim Boyd, to be held at the Native American Music Awards in Buffalo, New York, that September.
Jim had died, at age sixty, of natural causes—of complications from preexisting health conditions—on June 21, 2016, two weeks short of a year after the death of my mother.
I called Shelly and said, “I want to do the tribute. I want to do this for Jim, but I have to take care of my brain. Let me talk to Diane.”
“Oh, Sherman,” Shelly said. “Your wife has veto power over everything, right? Especially when it comes to your health, right?”
Jim had ignored many warning signs in the days before his death. He’d run out of his high-blood-pressure medication and had delayed in getting it refilled. He was serving as the chairman of the Colville Tribal Business Council and was rushing from place to place, working too hard and not getting enough rest. He hadn’t played much music either after entering tribal politics. He’d often promised Shelly that he’d get to the doctor. That he would get more sleep. That he would play more music.
“Yes,” I said to Shelly on the phone. “I will talk to Diane. I will listen to her. I promise.”
Like many men—indigenous and not—I don’t always take good care of myself.
In December 2015, I’d had brain surgery to remove a benign tumor that had grown dangerously large and was intruding on vital areas of my brain. I’d first learned about the tumor in 2007 when I underwent an MRI scan while filming a documentary about my childhood hydrocephalus.
“It’s small,?
?? my neurologist had said about the meningioma. “The size of a pea. Come back in a year and we’ll look at it again.”
And then I ignored that tumor for eight years. And would likely have continued to ignore it if not for the death, by brain cancer, of a good friend in November 2015. Shortly after his funeral, I went in for another MRI and learned that my tumor was significantly larger—about ten times larger.
Three days later, I underwent successful brain surgery. But after five months of steady recovery, and the resumption of my hectic literary job, I started to suffer simple partial brain seizures. My neurologist put me on antiseizure meds and told me to make my life simpler. So I canceled all of my business travel for the next eight months. I vowed to gift myself more silence and solitude. And to spend more time with my closest friends and family. During my twenty-four-year literary career, I’d earned nearly two million frequent-flyer miles and had performed at more than three hundred colleges. I needed to stop. I needed to heal. I needed to step away from the applause, applause, applause. At least, one step away, maybe two.
“I want to do the tribute to Jim,” I said again to Shelly on the phone. “I will call you tomorrow and let you know after I’ve talked to Diane.”
Shelly and Jim and I became friends in 1992 when I met them at the Columbia Folk Festival, being held at a rustic outdoor performance space north of Spokane that was, I think, also a pumpkin patch, Christmas-tree farm, and kitschy country art vendor. My first book had been published only a few months earlier, so I was new to the spectacular randomness and oddness of live performance.
Jim was a Colville Indian musician who’d played for years in local cover bands and a few nationally famous Native American rock bands, including XIT and WinterHawk. But he’d recently gone solo and was playing a personal blend of folk, country, and blues mixed with traditional Native vocables, drums, and cedar flute. Of course, the white organizers put Jim and me, the Indians, back to back on the bill. Jim played first, and I was amazed by his music, especially a song called “Filtered Ways,” which turned an Interior Salish stick-game song into a nostalgic rock ballad about lost youth. Then I stood and shouted my angry and nostalgic poems about my lost youth.
Afterward, I sat at a picnic table, feeling that post-performance emotional letdown (that I would later, thanks to Brene Brown, be able to more accurately describe as a “vulnerability hangover”), and smiled when Jim sat across from me.
“Your poems are cool,” Jim said.
“Your music is awesome,” I said.
Jim smiled. He was so instantly kind and shy. He was certainly one of the kindest and shyest people I have ever known. And, aside from my late father, Jim was probably the most gentle and shy Indian man in my life. In fact, as I type this, I think I was so immediately drawn to Jim because he reminded me of my father.
As Indian strangers will do upon meeting for the first time, Jim and I tried to figure out which Indians—cousins and friends—we had in common. Jim had traveled the world as an air force brat, but he’d also spent many years living in Inchelium, Washington, on the Colville Indian Reservation, a much larger rez, which sat across the Columbia River from my reservation. Jim was an urban Indian who’d gone rez, and I was a rez boy who’d gone urban. Different directions but still the same journey. We knew a lot of the same people, including my mother and big brother.
Then Jim and I talked about music and poetry.
That was the first time I’d ever had a long and detailed discussion about art—and the creation of art—with another Indian man.
Jim and I were also alcoholics who’d recently made the decision to get and stay sober.
So, yes, pretty quickly, I realized that I had a new brother.
“Did you ever think about putting your poems to music?” Jim asked.
“I used to write lyrics in high school,” I said. “But they were like REO Speedwagon love songs.”
“You should write some lyrics,” he said. “Indian lyrics like in your poems. And I’ll put them to music.”
That night, I went back to my cheap apartment in Spokane and wrote these lyrics:
Sometimes, Father, you and I,
are like a three-legged horse
who can’t get across the finish line
no matter how hard he tries and tries and tries.
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like a warrior
who can only paint half of his face
while the other half cries and cries and cries and cries.
Now, can I ask you, Father,
if you know how much farther we need to go?
Now, can I ask you, Father,
if you know how much farther we have to go?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like two old drunks
who spend their whole lives in the bars
swallowing down all those lies and lies and lies.
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like dirty ghosts
who wear the same sheets every day
as one more piece of us just dies and dies and dies.
Now, can I ask you, Father,
if you know how much farther we need to go?
Now, can I ask you, Father,
If you know how much farther we have to go?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
Father and farther,
’til we know?
Father and farther,
yeah, how much farther
’til we know?
Sometimes, Father, you and I
are like a three-legged horse
who can’t get across the finish line
no matter how hard he tries and tries and tries...
That was two years before I owned a computer and three years before I had logged on to the Internet, so I wrote the first few rough drafts of those lyrics by hand, then typed a few more drafts on my Brother word processor, printed the final draft, folded it into an envelope, drove over to Jim and Shelly’s house on the other side of Spokane, and dropped it in their mailbox.
A week later, Jim called me.
“I finished the song,” he said. “Come over to my work. And we’ll listen.”
Jim was working as a counselor at a residential addiction treatment center for Native teenagers. At the front door, he handed me a cassette tape.
“There’s the song,” he said. “Listen to it and let me know what you think.”
I walked back to my car and slid the tape into the stereo and heard the first chords of “Father and Farther.” And, as I listened, I noticed that Jim was outside playing basketball with a few of the at-risk youth. Jim was a good athlete. He was funny. He and those boys laughed and laughed as they shot hoops. And I heard that sad and beautiful song for the first time.
Jim and I had created art together. It was the first time I had collaborated with another artist. It was the beginning of a personal and creative friendship that would lead Jim and me, along with Jerry Stensgar, bass player, and Alfonso Kolb, drummer, to share the stage with the Indigo Girls, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Dar Williams. We played dozens of shows at music venues in Spokane, Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, and at numerous colleges in big and small towns.
Jim, Jerry, and Alfonso would play the songs that Jim and I had written together. And they’d play Jim’s songs. And they would play music as I read my poems. And we’d perform songs where Jim sang as I read poetry.
When I first performed with Jim, I did it in character, as a Spokane Indian man named Lester FallsApart, a drunk and homeless Indian who wasn’t afraid to
be profane and brutally honest. As Lester FallsApart, I was able to break through my inhibitions and improvise stories. I learned how to be funny onstage.
“I don’t know how you do it,” Jim once said to me. “You get onstage and you’re not afraid of anything. I get onstage and I’m afraid of everything.”
“It’s because of you,” I said. “You and your music are like armor for me.”
Over the years, I dropped the Lester FallsApart character and performed only as myself.
Jim and I wrote songs together that appeared on the soundtracks of the two movies I wrote, Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing.
Jim and I self-released an album, Reservation Blues, to accompany my novel of the same name about an all-Indian Catholic rock ’n’ roll band.
At my wedding to Diane, my powerful Hidatsa wife, Jim played a cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and Shelly was our official photographer.
The years and events blend together. I cannot give you the exact chronology. Jim and I are artists. We are reservation-raised Indians. We are indigenous poets. Time works differently for us than it does for most other people.
But I do know that, somewhere during our separate and paired journeys, Jim and I lost the creative spark we had together. We stayed friends, but our artistic careers went in separate directions. He released many other albums, traveled the world with his music, and was inducted into the Native American Music Hall of Fame. I published many books, traveled the world, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Jerry Stensgar, the bass player, died.
Alfonso Kolb, the drummer, moved back to his reservation in California and serves on their Tribal Council.
Jim and Shelly lost a son to a sudden suicide.