SO TIM BARRUS IS NASDIJJ -- GET OVER IT!

Years have passed.  Nasdijj is long over, the shadow of a first-person story informed by an author who had lived on the Navajo rez and whose ancestry went back to the Delaware tribal complex generations ago.  It was publishers, publicists, media mongers, who pushed the Navajo identity and then the accusation of misrepresentation based on the nom de plume.  

What’s important now -- after Trump and Covid-19 -- is seeing that Barrus was already living out a previous and still unresolved pandemic when Covid-19 struck.  Sitting by gay friends as they died of AIDS sharpened his determination to do as much good as he could.  He did that until the money ran out.  First was boys in Paris as HIV took hold of them before any effective drugs.  Then Appalachia.

Here’s the strategy.  Choose boys who can respond.  Unite them into a brotherhood.  Let them fall in love with each other and argue all night.  Teach them to read.  Do not criticize their morals but try to convert them to cleanliness and proper eating.  Give them something worth doing:  making videos (the Paris boys already knew), taking photos, becoming computer adept.  Be for them the adult who can fend off other adults.  Be WITH them, even if they hate.  Even if they die.  Even after.

Every pandemic is rooted in poverty, stigma, family breakdown, authoritarian oppression.  Drugs and alcohol are as much results as causes.

Some details in this following essay are wrong.  Barrus may have been born in an East Lansing hospital, but he grew up in a little farm town not far away.  His maternal grandmother's maiden name was Frost.  Not Scandinavian.  There are several wheelchairs in this story and a lot of "Mama Religion."

Barrus had been an editor himself. He published Geoff Mains' novel barely in time for Mains to hold it before he died.  I should probably just delete much of the rest of this post, but there are copies out there, I'm sure.

Barrus publishes now in comments on The New York Times articles and on other websites.  He says that if I tell what I know about him he will send the CIA, FBI, WHO, and the Dogs of War to shut me up.

____________________________________________________________

Okay, reader, see if you can follow this chain of logic.

Timothy Patrick Barrus was clearly an exceptional child -- very intense. He was born in East Lansing (which is different from Lansing) in 1950 before cities were surrounded by suburbs. There were still undeveloped spaces full of brush. His maternal grandparents lived on a farm not far away, near a town called Portland. Other members of his maternal family ran a local theatre and as a child he acted in plays there. Sometimes he played girl’s parts. I’ve seen a photo of him as a miniature Captain Hook. He had dimples.

He had a younger sister. She won’t be mentioned here again.

His father was a shift foreman for electrical engineering for the City of Lansing, a handsome, brilliant, powerful man who was violently abusive, esp. towards his son. He was also seductive, competent, and daring. (Tim’s account -- I believe him.) He was an avid outdoorsman. Working class, which could probably be called lower middle class. Think "The Deerslayer," knotty pine rumpus rooms, "tapestries" of elk. I've seen photos.

In 1978 Tim’s parents moved to Pentwater and his father bought a fishing boat. Maynard was 47. He died of alcoholism and diabetes in 2003. I read the obituary. His mother was a master gardener, worked in a library (not a degreed librarian), died in 2006 of multiple sclerosis. She had been confined to a wheelchair. I read that obituary, too.

As a teenager Tim attempted suicide by blowing his guts out with a shotgun. (It was a “Western” household full of long guns.) He was saved but you can see the scar in photos, at least the frontal one. They say the exit wound is worse. He worked at a grocery store, as a nude model for art classes at the university, doing stoop labor, cooking, cleaning cages in the biology lab, and as an aide in a special ed school. (He says so and I believe him.) With the money he bought a motorcycle and hit the road.

He married young and worked for Headstart, which in Lansing in those days included many Chippewa kids. In Florida he and his wife adopted a foundling, a boy, who was damaged but manageable until a younger sister was born. I’ve seen the photos. He was blonde, much like Tim, and clearly devoted to his father, but eventually went totally out of control. The marriage died. Tim gave the boy back to institutional care, took his daughter, and fled to San Francisco.

He had a Ford Foundation grant in the Year of the Child (1979) to organize and present children’s art for the United Nations. He became part of the counterculture: artist, poet, photographer, activist, performance artist, and writer. Digger, Act Up parades, communes -- he was there. Bought his film from Harvey Milk.

He did write all kinds of pornography/erotics as well as editing magazines and running the Knights Press. He is the founder of the “Leather Lit” category of gay writing, part of the Eighties wave of increasingly sophisticated and skillful gay writing. Leather lit is considered S/M. I can document all this. He wrote a great deal of other stuff under pseudonyms, which is customary among writers of all sorts as well as actors.

Tim married for a second time in San Francisco to a co-worker at a program for autistic boys. His daughter was by now a teenager. I’ve seen the photos. She is married and has a daughter. She teaches overseas for her own safety since both Barrus' wife and daughter have been threatened. I've seen photos of her with a llama and with a penguin.

When the great AIDS plague hit San Francisco, Tim, Tina and Kree went to New Mexico where Tina taught kindergarten and first grade on the reservarion. I’ve seen videos of her teaching, probably among the earliest videos Tim Barrus ever made. I have a book bag from the school and a Navajo rug with a bit of hair shed by Navajo, the dog. Come by the house and I’ll show you. These two years are at the heart of “The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams.” This book contains twenty chapters. Only ONE is the story of the son who died, the Esquire story. (The one right after it, “And The Dreams Came Down Like Thunder in the Rain,” is about Tim’s father.) You’ll be happy to know that the real Tom grew up in special homes and is now middle-aged. Tim is EXTREMELY protective of him. Recently Tom was pursued by paparazzi so that to keep him safe he had to be removed from the place and people he knew.

This one-chapter story is not at all like Sherman Alexie’s story, “What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” Sherman Alexie’s writing is NOTHING like Tim Barrus’ writing. Sherman writes jokey stand-up comedian tales while Barrus writes Zane Grey Purple High Drama. Sherman’s plots and characters are like “Pow-Wow Highway” or “Stay Away, Joe.” The former was written by a guy whose Indian credentials were challenged and the latter was written by a white man. As an English teacher who has been on Native American lit internet groups since the Nineties, I cite myself. Sherman badly wanted to write a best-seller.

Interestingly, the story unmasking Tim Barrus in the LA Times Weekly was printed in 2006 at the same time as Sherman Alexie’s essay in Time magazine, almost to the day. Alexie’s movie “Smoke Signals,” based loosely on “What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona,” was just being released. Sherman Alexie had been asked to comment on Barrus' first book when it was first in galleys in 1999. You can verify this online.

Actually, the content of the Barrus story was closer to the memoir by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich called “The Broken Cord.” But Dorris was a far more polite and conventional writer. Dorris committed suicide while Barrus was in Navajo country and people there were shocked and very much saddened. If you know Indian reservations, you know that suicide haunts everyone there.

In 2000 when “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams” was published, it was hailed as brilliant and authentic. If you read
through the reviews (I’ve been through hundreds of them), you see very few of the reviewers have done more than skim the book, or they would have noticed that some chapters are simply essays, occasionally history. When the book was so roundly condemned, it was clear that only the one chapter was referred to, and it was not read -- simply described from other descriptions. It is the second and third books that are presented as memoir. They ARE memoir, but disguised.

IMHO the whole issue of hoaxy memoirs was trumped up to feed an appetite for scandal and misery, like the old True Romance Stories magazines my mother wouldn’t let me read. There have ALWAYS been memoirs of dubious factuality. There have ALWAYS been white people who wanted to be Indians. Since the post-colonial political correctness theories, there have ALWAYS been writers who were attacked by Indians in online flame wars, usually by Indians who were of low-quantum, off-rez, urban origins, striving to make reputations for themselves. Often female. I’ve saved the emails (some people -- including Alexie -- will be chagrined to know) of many of those flame wars. Sherman Alexie was stooping or listening to bad advice from groupies, who included the author of the LA Weekly piece. (I’m guessing now.)

The issue of invented memoirs got mixed up with journalists who were inventing “facts” for the sake of their stories. Journalists do not write memoir. Journalists are supposed to be investigators and are supposed to stick to the facts, like lawyers. Memoir is not journalism. Memoir is an art form. Got that?

Journalism has turned yellow in the last years, pursuing personality above all else. Today in the laundromat I flipped through a stack of that were all about tats, pecs, sex, detox, more sex, babies and whose they were, etc. It’s our norm now. We force everything into that mold.

So all the reviewers who had said the book was brilliant (but secretly hadn’t really read it) now said that the same writing was worthless because it wasn’t written by an ethnic minority. This means that the whole edifice of publishers -- who are supposed to filter what they publish; reviewers -- who are supposed to be able to tell good writing when they see it; professors -- who are supposed to be experts on writing styles; Indians -- who are supposed to be able to tell other Indian writing; PEN -- which is an organization of writers (duh); and post-modern critics who said that writing should be interpreted and judged only on the basis of the writing itself and not the biography of the writer -- all that came crashing down. It was a fantasy.

The several publishers involved all wrote checks, ordered plane tickets, and looked at the passport of Tim Barrus (not Nasdijj). They knew better than he did that memoirs make more money for them than essay collections. The silver lining is that Barrus’ hips had been destroyed by avascular necrosis so he was doing publicity in a wheelchair, but the money from the books paid for his hips to be replaced. I’ve seen photos of him after the surgery. He’s shockingly gaunt. He says the surgery was easy compared to kicking the necessary anesthetic drugs.

Of course, he went right on writing. He can’t help it. That’s one thing he and I have in common. But he switched to videos in addition to print. I’m going to stick to print. Tim is okay now. So is the rest of the family, but the dog Navajo has "gone on ahead." Tim’s new helper dog is Isabella, also a Blue Heeler.