It was past 10 p.m. as I walked by Angie and her family’s booth for the first time. I stopped and stared. She was a very skinny and pale girl with brown hair. Rather plain, I guess, but a confident and loud salesperson.
“What are you staring at?” she asked me.
“Your shirt,” I said.
She looked down as if she’d forgotten what she was wearing. On the front of her shirt, on her flattish chest, was the image of an old radio with two anatomical-looking dials. Below that radio was the printed command DON’T TOUCH THESE KNOBS! THEY’RE WELL ADJUSTED!
Angie laughed at her sexually suggestive shirt, then turned around. On the back of her shirt was the message FROM BEHIND, IT’S ALL THE SAME.
At that time, I was too young and damaged to understand the explicit pedophilia of that shirt. I was only twelve. But there were hundreds of adults who must have seen the young girl wearing that shirt. What did they think when they saw it?
“T-shirts are five dollars each,” Angie said. “Or three for ten bucks.”
“I don’t have any money,” I said.
“Then why are you here?” she asked.
I didn’t have an answer.
“Do you like me?” she asked.
I think I took a step back because she took two steps toward me.
“Come back in an hour,” she said. “I have my bathroom break. We can walk. In the dark.”
She was only fourteen, but she was as brash as her shirt. I was terrified and intrigued.
“Okay,” I said.
I didn’t have any clue what to do for that next hour. So I reverted to habit and kept walking the circle and walked by Angie eight or ten times. I would smile at her: she’d smile at me. I didn’t know a thing about romance, so I didn’t realize that my aimless circles had become courtship.
Finally, after an hour, Angie ran to me, grabbed my hand, and pulled me away into the dark parking lot near the darker and unused rodeo arena. She sat on a truck bumper, and I leaned against a light pole.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Junior,” I said.
“I’m Angie. Some people call me Annie or AJ. My dad says I shouldn’t be chasing after Indian boys.”
She leaned toward me and whispered, “My dad hates Indians.”
I wasn’t surprised by the racism. I’ve rarely been surprised to encounter racism.
“Do you like Indians?” I asked.
“I like you,” she said. “Do you want to kiss me?”
I couldn’t talk. But I could move. So I sat on the bumper next to her. I leaned in for the kiss, but she leaned away. I leaned toward her again, and she leaned away again. To and fro. To and fro. Almost a kiss. Not a kiss. Almost a kiss. Not a kiss. I worried that Angie was making fun of me, but then I realized she was having fun. She was enjoying me. I was having fun, too, but I was confused, and obviously not as experienced as she was. And it troubles me now to think about why she was expertly flirtatious.
Then I heard a mocking voice.
“Hey, Junior, who’s your girlfriend?”
It was one of my regular bullies, a muscular Spokane Indian boy who would die young.
“Junior,” he said again. “Who’s your girlfriend?”
My bully was drunk. His two friends, also drunk, laughed. I sensed real danger.
“Run!” I yelled.
So Angie ran. She was the fastest sprinter I had ever seen. She disappeared into the dark before I could take a few steps. I have always been slow. And slow is not a good thing to be when you’re a reservation prey animal.
My three drunk bullies quickly caught me. But they didn’t hurt me too badly. They slapped me in the balls a few times, made fun of my speech impediments, and let me go.
I thought about looking for Angie, but I was scared my bullies would hunt me down again. So I ran the two miles home, crawled into my bed, and did not return to the powwow that year. I skipped the 1980 powwow entirely because I was publicly preparing to leave the rez school for the white high school.
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
While working on this chapter, I texted my sister, “If I stayed on the rez, who do you think I would have married?”
“Ah, you would have met some girl at an all-Indian basketball tourney,” my sister texted back. “Probably some urban Indian from Portland or Seattle. You would have married some Coastal Salish college girl and moved to the city. You woulda got a tattoo of a killer whale.”
“But do you think anybody from our rez would have married me?”
“Doesn’t matter,” my sister texted. “You were always going to leave. You were always going to end up urban.”
In 1981, after my first year among the white folks of Reardan, I returned to our tribe’s Memorial Day powwow. I thought I might get bullied, but I’d grown physically and emotionally stronger in a short time. I was no longer an easy mark. I’d become a popular and admired kid in Reardan, as a scholar and basketball player and, yes, as a potential boyfriend. The girls in Reardan paid attention to me. They asked me questions. I asked them questions. We listened to each other’s answers. I had kissed one girl on a school bus and another in a hayloft.
So, at that powwow, my new and overt self-esteem must have shone like knight’s armor.
One Spokane boy looked at me and said, “Damn, you’re growing like a weed.”
And his friend, another Spokane, said, “His skull is growing even bigger now. It’s a fucking planet.”
I was ready to throw punches, but they kept laughing and walked past.
Both of those Indian boys died before they turned forty. I don’t remember them with anger. Well, I still feel residual anger. But, mostly, I think about how lonely and desperate they must have felt in their short and tragic lives. How much pain had they suffered? How many dark secrets did they have to keep? Why had they always felt the need to pick on me?
That was the last time I felt physically threatened by a bully on my reservation. After that, my reservation enemies and detractors would only gossip about me. And rarely in my presence.
Alone, I walked the powwow circle of vendors. And then stopped when I saw Angie again. Of course, I remembered the white girl I had almost kissed at the powwow two years earlier. I was now almost fifteen. She was sixteen. And she was obviously pregnant and ready to give birth at any moment.
She was working at an ice cream truck, scooping out freezer-burned chocolate and vanilla (“Two flavors is better than one!”) for rez kids. Her big belly—the T-shirt stretched taut over her belly—was smeared with ice cream.
I was stunned by her pregnancy. I remember thinking, “Shit, if things had happened differently two years earlier, maybe I would have gotten her pregnant. Maybe I would be a teen father.”
Then I felt irrationally jealous and possessive, as if Angie and I had been seriously involved, as if we had real-world ties to each other. But, damn, we’d only held hands. Our brief powwow date had lasted maybe fifteen minutes. I didn’t know her last name or where she lived. She lived somewhere that wasn’t the reservation. That was her full address: Pregnant Angie, Not the Reservation, USA.
I was also scared for her. Even then, I knew that, by getting pregnant so young, she had made her life infinitely more difficult. And I kept imagining that other difficult world where I was the father of her child. And then I had to talk to her. I needed to talk to her. So I stood in line and made my slow way toward her.
“What flavor you want?” she asked me when it was finally my turn. She didn’t recognize me. She barely looked at me.
“Chocolate in a plain cone,” I said.
She must have recognized my voice—my lispy, stammering tenor—because she studied my face.
“I know you,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt suddenly embarrassed and shy.
“I know you,” she said again.
/> I can’t explain why I felt so much shame at that moment. It almost felt like I was the father of her child and I had abandoned her. And I suspect there’s something patriarchal and narcissistic about feeling that way, but I can’t exactly explain that either. I think perhaps I had never been so clearly reminded of the nonfatal ways in which I could have trapped myself on the rez.
“Your name is Junior,” Angie said. She didn’t smile. She didn’t look upset. She had remembered my name, which should have been flattering, I suppose.
“You’re Junior, right?” Angie asked.
At that moment, I thought about who I had become in the two years since I had last seen her.
“My name isn’t Junior,” I said. “I’m Sherman.”
She knew I was lying. But she didn’t challenge me. She didn’t say anything as I turned and walked away.
I allowed my wife—who’d seen me naked and touched me thousands of times—to finally touch me in those places where I had hoarded so much of my pain and shame.
A few years ago, I wrote a poem based on my extremely brief relationship with Angie, but I wrote it as if our relationship had been far more substantial, as if she and I had been older and more desperate, as if the worst things I feared about her life and my life had come true:
White Girl Powwow Love
She was skinny and buttermilk-pale.
She wore her hair with a rattail.
And I knew I’d two-step to jail
For her love, which was the no-fail
Pickup line that year. “I’m in jail,”
I said. “And only you got the bail
To rescue me.” She smelled like stale
Everything, and though I was frail,
I talked her into chucking the bale
And disobeying her dad, a whale
Who thought everything was for sale,
Especially the sacred. So we sailed,
Her and me, on the powwow trail,
Until my dirty joke splat-failed—
The porno punch line was “Snails.”
White Girl Angry, she dug her nails
Into my skin and said, “Why you males
Have to heave and hove and dog wail
Such awful shit?” She was a gale—
A storm through a trailer park vale—
An F5 on the tornado scale—
And I wanted to push aside her veil
And touch and memorize her pale
Skin like a blind man touches Braille,
And so I did. Virgin-clumsy, I flailed
At her buttons, and that tough rail
Of a girl went all weakness and quail.
I thought I was all rez-prevail,
But then she put on her chain-mail
Armor and golf-ball-sized-hailed
Me with this confessional tale:
“My daddy is a goddamn Whale
Killer,” she said. “Ain’t no scale
To weigh his evil. His devil pail
Is filled to the brim.” She wailed
Tears like anvils and then bailed
On me. She ran back down the trail,
And I ran after her, but I failed
To catch her. Her pain felt like nails.
And though I never saw her pale
Self again, I pray, without fail,
When I think of her stuck in jail,
Or maybe still walking powwow trail—
A white girl, skinny, hard, and frail—
And likely wed to a killer of whales.
After reading an early draft of this chapter, my friend, a white woman, asked me, “Why didn’t those Spokane Indian girls like you?”
“Most of them liked me,” I said. “But only as a goofy geek. I didn’t possess any of those qualities deemed sexually attractive to the women of my reservation. I still don’t have any of those qualities.”
“And what were those qualities?” my friend asked.
“I didn’t dance or sing powwow,” I said. “I didn’t stick-game. I wasn’t a church kid. I didn’t become a good basketball player until I left the rez. I had speech impediments. I was bookish and shy. I cried all the time. I hardly ever left my basement bedroom. I was ugly.”
“You weren’t ugly,” my friend said. “I have known you for thirty years. And I have seen the photos of you when you were a kid. You were always cute. And you wore purple striped shirts.”
“Nobody thought I was cute until I left the rez.”
“The Indian Ugly Duckling syndrome.”
“That sounds so corny,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s inaccurate. There might be some truth to it.”
“You’re trying to write the truth, aren’t you?” my friend asked.
“My highly flawed version of the truth,” I said.
“Then why don’t you call up those Indian women you grew up with? Why don’t you ask them why they never fell in love with you?”
I laughed and laughed.
“Oh, God,” I said. “That feels like the most dangerous thing I could ever do.”
“That makes it sound like it’s something you need to do,” my friend said.
“I am married to an amazing Native woman,” I said. “I know she loves me.”
“Is your wife the first Indian woman who ever loved you?”
“Yes,” I said, and thought about that first moment—whose details I will not share—when I realized that my wife adored me. I remember that her adoration made me tremble. I remember that I felt healed and challenged at the same time, I remember hoping that I would continue to deserve that adoration and that I would always adore her in return.
To be so romantically loved by a Native American woman was a revelation.
My late father loved my wife.
“Is she really as nice as she seems?” he asked me when Diane I were first dating.
“Yes, she is,” I said.
My late mother loved my wife, too.
“She seems tough enough to deal with you,” my mother said when Diane and I were first dating.
“Yes, she is,” I said.
Monosonnet for the Matriarchy, Interrupted
When
A
Woman
Asks
You
To
Owl
Dance
(O, O, O, O, the owl dance, two steps forward, one step back, O, O, O, O, listen to the drummers attack that drum, O, O, O, O, if a woman asks you to owl dance, you have to accept her offer, O, O, O, O, but if you still have the nerve to decline, then you must pay her what she wants, O, O, O, O, give her some money, honey, fill her coffers, O, O, O, O, and then you have to stand in front of the entire powwow and tell everybody exactly why and how you refused her, O, O, O, O, and if you refuse to detail your refusal, you will be named and shamed out of the powwow, O, O, O, O, but, mister, why would you want to say no to your sister, O, O, O, O, but, brother, why would you want to say no to your mother, O, O, O, O, all of these women are your sisters and mothers, O, O, O, O, they’re somebody’s sisters and mothers, so, mister, so, brother, dance with the women, mister, brother, dance with the women, mister, brother, dance with the women, mister, brother, dance with the women, mister, brother, they’re everybody’s sisters and mothers)
You
Should
Always
Honor
The
Chance.
I was joined in my sophomore year at Reardan by my sisters, Kim and Arlene, twins who are a year younger.
I was also shocked to see one of my childhood bullies from the rez. She was one of those beautiful Spokane Indian girls who had called me ugly, who had called me Junior High Honky. And now she was standing in the hallway of Reardan, my school, my school, my school.
She saw me, smiled, and said, “Hello, Sherrrrrrrman,” stretching out my name in a mocking fashion. I’d been known only as Junior on the rez, and now she was already giving me shit for my new name, my new identity.
My sister saw it happen
.
“What are you going to do about her?” she asked me.
“She better learn quick,” I said. “This is not Wellpinit.”
I was enormously popular in Reardan, with kids and adults, and I enjoyed the corresponding social power. But I also made a conscious effort to be egalitarian, to be friends with every social group. I was surrounded by kind people—and more than a few small-farm-town racists—and I was scared my bully would ruin all the good stuff.
“If she tries to fuck with me,” I said to my sister, “I will crush her. If she leaves me alone, then I will leave her alone.”
Because my bully was smart, funny, charismatic, and gorgeous, she quickly made friends with a few of her classmates. She was a year younger than me, so we didn’t have any classes together. For a few weeks, it seemed like our social lives would be separate. I was on guard, vigilant, ready to defend myself against any social attack she might launch. If we’d been in a bigger school, we probably could have avoided each other, but our high school had one hallway and ten classrooms. So we were constantly in each other’s sight lines. I found myself cast in a weird-ass John Hughes movie where two Indians were the leads.
I don’t know what my bully was thinking during those few weeks. I imagine she was afraid. I imagine she felt lost. I imagine she felt powerless. She was the new kid, and that’s always stressful. And, of course, she must have been puzzled by my popularity. How had I, the rez peon, become a white-high-school superstar? How could Junior Alexie, the omega dog, now be Sherman Alexie, the young man who was loved and respected? Hell, I started the drama club in that farm town and got thirty people to join.