"KICKSTART" BEGINS

Those who hope I will eventually live a nice conventional comfortable life are just doomed to disappointment. I would collapse from boredom. But my current project is relatively risky without any danger to myself, my house or my cats. I’m writing a book by alternating chapters with Tim Barrus. You already know that if you’ve been paying attention to the samples.

This the beginning of the book, provisionally called “KICKSTART.” This is still in process so it’s likely to change in the coming months. What you need to know is that Tim was pilloried by the politically correct Indian crowd (including Sherman Alexie who is currently being raked over the coals for saying that teens masturbate) because he said he was “Navajo.” Navajo is the name of his dog.

If you are up for it, Barrus and the guyz post at le-too.blogspot.com. It's got a notice of adult content, but I think it is the adults who need to be warned. The kids know. We are all proceeding under the idea that this is at least one way "books" can go.

KickStart: Part One: Chasing Your Stubby Tail

TIM:

There were various endings.

One was, we would live and die together. It had reached the point where I could not envision myself without Navajo simply because she pulled me around. Pulled me around. And pulled me around. I needed her and she knew it. I was her job. Australian cattle dogs need a job.

The training that turns a dog into a service dog is intense. I thought the trainer was severe but I suppose that was necessary. Navajo had to be trained as to how to pull me out of traffic.

"I will never need her to do that," I said.

"You're wrong," The trainer was resolute.

One of the things Navajo had to be trained how to deal with was the loud noise from traffic, especially trucks. I had always protected her from almost everything. But that had to change to become a service dog. So the trainer and I had to expose her to heavy traffic on sidewalks in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is not the quaint little college/country town it once was. North Carolina is urban. Traffic in the Triangle is snarled on a good day. Navajo was terrified.

But we got through that. It was what we did.

The first time Navajo had to pull me out of traffic was downtown, San Francisco. The walk/do-not-walk at Fourth and Market turned red while we were in the middle of the intersection. Walking with forearm crutches and being pulled by a dog because my right hip refused to move at all was not a quick way to cross the street. We were quickly enveloped in traffic on both sides. The dog swallowed her fear and pulled hard. Tires screaming. We just made it.

"Essentially, your hips are both broken and your shoulders are riddled with hairline cracks," my doctor informed me at UNC Medical Center. He snapped the X-ray light off and pulled the X-ray off the clip. "You're going on a book tour. You are out of your mind."

There wasn't a lot of choice in it. Not if I wanted to keep publishing, and there was no way the surgery I needed was going to happen unless I could pay for it, and that meant publishing more books.

Avascular necrosis is a bitch. Essentially the blood bone needs to stay alive (and strong enough to support you) stops reaching the bone. No one seems to know why. In my case, I was told that prednisone, a drug given to me when I had had a bad pneumonia, had the side effect of causing avascular necrosis, and mine was the worst case my doctors had ever seen. Often, it can only be diagnosed on an MRI, but you could see my dead bone clearly on an X-ray.

Your bones break like China cups. Mine had started breaking in Santa Fe. I was there to receive a literary award.

Let's be real: I was there to receive the check from the literary award.

When the hips broke, I could hear them crack. This in an alleyway while I was walking to the awards ceremony at the La Fonda.

I gave an acceptance speech that night through a blinding white pain.

"You should have called an ambulance," my exasperated physician said. I knew it was bad. I had to idea how bad it was.

I am a writer. I had never made any money writing, and now I was winning awards. I would eventually need several hundred thousand dollars.

The idea of calling an ambulance is not something a desperately poor writer would do. The thought of how you would pay for it would have ended that fantasy. I was so used to thinking like a poor writer. Eating scraps. Sometimes out of restaurant dumpsters. The dumpster behind Winn Dixie. I could have taken a cab to the La Fonda.

A cab? But no. I walked.

It was not a good idea but I had never even heard of avascular necrosis. I have no idea what I said that night to the assembled literary crowd of New Mexico. The pain made it difficult to breathe. But I had been so poor for so long, there was no way I was not going to receive that check. In fact, it would get deposited in the ATM machine directly after the festivities. There's an ATM right outside the La Fonda. To hell with festivities. I wanted to eat. And not in a dumpster.

I thought it was raining on the drive back to Chapel Hill. But it was only the agony that has somehow concentrated in my eyes.

There was something I had to do. Life and death stuff. It will make no sense to anyone other than me. There were various endings.

The grave of Geronimo is on the Fort Sill Army Reservation in Oklahoma. Navajo and I sat under the huge oak tree that spreads its enormous branches out over Geronimo's grave. A thousand eye glasses had been tied to branches of the tree. I had never witnessed such a thing. They tinkled like music in the Apache wind.

I let Navajo off her leash and she went round and round gleefully chasing her stubby tail.

The surgery is elective. If you don't have it, you'll spend what time you have left in bed and in a wheelchair. I do not know why they say it's elective. But there it is.

I went to UNC's orthopedic clinic to check it out. I walked into the men's room. What I saw stopped me cold.

This was the filthiest bathroom I had ever seen. It was beyond the third world. Feces and piss and toilet paper were all over the floor. It stunk. It was disgusting.

And this was the place where I was going to recover from major surgery. This was a shit hole.

There had to be another way.

Finding that other way would take another year. The bones just kept breaking.

I ran a support group for boys with AIDS. I remember sitting there as they groped for words to describe pain.

They would go around the circle, each kid taking his turn, and then they'd look at me. My eyes staring at the floor.

"The blinding light of what sticks in your eye and then looking up -- eyeglasses but you cannot reach them. Thousands of eyeglasses making music in the wind."

They had no idea what I was talking about but I did.

The Apache old people bent and broken. I had worked with Mescalero Apache children in New Mexico. None of them had ever attended a literary event. I am told I talked about teaching them how to read.

The bones kept breaking. When Random House sends you on a tour, there is no real discussion about it. Your itinerary just gets spit out from a fax machine, and there you have it. If you want to publish your next book, you will get on that plane. Navajo pulled me onto the flight.

My publishers would claim later they had no idea as to who I really was. In order to get on any flight, you have to show photo ID. Your publicist makes the airplane and hotel reservations. You have to have a name. They knew mine. To make these kinds of tours you are always having to flash your driver's license and tickets. The tickets will have your name on them, too.

Navajo was thirty pounds of Australian cattle dog dripping wet. She had never been on a plane before. When the jet took off, she was terrified beyond anything she had ever experienced. She shook but she never left my side.

The tour was a nightmare. I left home at 4am. I arrived in Denver, did speaking gigs, and got deposited at the Brown Palace after midnight. All of this in that blinding light of agony. I had to get up at 3am to make the flight to California where I would be whisked to the next speaking gig.

People thought I was crazy because I wept through most of the gigs. I was just exhausted. No one asked me a single question about Indians. All the questions were about AIDS. Although the questions themselves were articulated differently, with different words, they were all the same question: Nasdijj, is there any hope of a cure.

I told them there is no hope and then I would cry and they would sit there in silence.

Then Navajo would pull me to the next gig.

We were on our way to one in Carmel. I asked the driver to stop the car. We were near the beach. The Pacific was sparking. The light that bounces off the blue. The tide was out. Navajo and I left the car.

Navajo pulled me to the water and then into it. We both just stood there staring out to sea. It was the most profound moment of my life.

There were various endings.

One would be to die together.

That blinding moment she died I was holding her in my arms. She did not want to go. She fought it all the way.

Time to let it go, girl.

It was not unlike standing there with the Pacific Ocean rolling in. I am told that death can be a silent thing. Navajo's was a thunder like the waves exploding on the land. She screamed until she left. And then she was gone.

I had never heard a sound like that from an animal before. She did not know how I was going to make it alone and either did I.

I had the surgery. I can walk today.

We turned in the surf and walked north along the glorious beach. My forearm crutches sunk into the sand. Navajo pulled hard. I was late for a radio reading but I didn't give a flying fuck. We didn't want to see the ocean. We wanted to be in it. I was dripping wet at the radio station and so was Navajo.

There were various endings. I had found her abandoned in a cave on the Pecos river. I took the puppy. Now, she belonged to me. Fourteen years of side-by-side. Pulling me around. Listening to the music of eyeglasses in Geronimo's tree. Wading out into the surf. Thirty pounds of courage. For me, following the branches of my life is the same as looking up through the strong, black branches of Geronimo's oak. The sun will reveal your real existence. You cannot put it with any accuracy in a book. In a movie. On a blog. In an interview on the radio. In a talk at a bookstore. On a university stage. At a writer's conference. Your real existence will catch you fleeing and chasing your stubby tail.

My body now is tightly nailed and not unlike a coffin. I am still exhausted. My work is in Europe now. They kicked me and my art out of America. Exile is okay. I will not replace my shoulders. Enough is enough. Walking is anticlimactic. I do not know how I am going to make it without Navajo Whenever I hear any pounding surf on any windswept beach, I get down on my broken knees and weep.

But I do not stay there. There is far too much to do. There is art to make, books to write, and films to film. So I stand up and know that she is still pulling my slow length along. The light is not quite so blinding, and it still bounces off the blue.


MARY:

This reader's dearest wish was always that the book in my hands would somehow come to life so that I could enter it and find an incredible, dangerous, yet somehow understandable life that I could never lead on my own, that was extraordinary in a way I felt intensely. I did not expect that book to be "The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping," which was the second in a trilogy written by Barrus under the nom de plume of Nasdijj. I confess that I ordered the book as a remainder, thinking I was adding it to my library of books by Native American authors.

I did not expect Nasdijj to be Tim Barrus, a person so entirely different and yet somehow like myself -- both of us gifted, childish, ambitious, anxious to please and yet defiant, wishing to be writers but at the same time to have real lives with real impact on the world. We want to be significant, to say meaningful things in vivid ways, to resist all efforts to make us conform. Both of us were imprinted, challenged, mystified by the high arid prairie deserts of the American West. It was clear to me that whether or not “Nasdijj” was genetically Navajo, he certainly knew reservations. Later I saw that “Navajo” had become a code word for him, meaning both the high windy freedom outside the usual constraints and also the small but effective force for protection represented by his dog.

Many times I’ve written fan letters to authors and gotten back a note of thanks. That was the end of it. This time I commented about Barrus on a blog and suddenly found myself corresponding directly with him. After two years of nearly daily emails, I became trusted enough to be able to post with him and his guyz on their blog. I had two younger brothers and my mother always said, “Take care of your little brothers.”

The book for which Barrus received the prize in Taos was “The Blood Runs Like a River Through my Dreams.” Originally it was a collection of essays about the SW reservations. It wouldn’t sell. He shifted the point of view to first person, slipping into the personas of the people he knew well, and suddenly it sold. Frankly, part of the reason for it selling was the “talking dog” principle: it was incredible but desirable to think that a person who had endured so much abuse and attended schools where he was lucky to learn to read could write at all -- much less that well.

I believe in “talking dogs” myself and have spent years trying to entice and coerce Blackfeet into writing. A few have. Fewer have published. There are many reasons, but one of the keys is fear of the bitter quarrels about Native American literature, and another is that if one is assimilated to mainstream American culture enough to attract publishers, one is not very Indian anymore.

I’m retired at the edge of the Blackfeet Reservation where I came to teach in 1961. Tim Barrus is self-exiled to Paris -- or maybe Tokyo -- or maybe Naples -- or some place back in the States. The book of his I read first was the second one in his Nasdijj trilogy, but it was the truest one. The facts were real and the events are the core of the Barrus inner dynamic: to save young men even if their death was imminent. He’s done this all his life. The journalists never explored this, partly because Tim was protecting those guyz.

This friendship with Tim is not about romance. Tim is married, has been for the past twenty years. He is no more gay than he is Navajo. He is like Walt Whitman: he contains multitudes. And so do I. This friendship is about words, images, stories. It's not that I want the truth, or that I even think that truth is knowable beyond a kind of Platonic understanding of paradigm. What I'm after is intimacy, but a sort of literary intimacy of expression and recognition, a dialogue, walking into the book to ask the author something.

When Tim suggested that we write a book together, I knew at once what he meant. It was totally preposterous for a retired old English teacher/Unitarian minister in Montana to write a book with a scandalous international bad boy who uses bad language and is accused of S/M black leather pornography. The very unlikelihood might uncover some truths, not the journalistic kind, but the human kind and maybe some of the literary kind.

I do not make assertions about books I have not read. So I ordered “Anywhere, Anywhere,” and “Genocide” and did not find them pornographic. Over and over Barrus writes about a big brother struggling to save a little brother/lover in the context of Apocalypse, prompted by the AIDS pandemic. It’s a story that goes back to Gilgamesh and the Old Testament. It was not a mistake that Pilgrimage, the Journal of Existential Psychology reprinted a piece by “Nasdijj.” They are sophisticated enough to look at the message without killing the messenger.

When Barrus says "kickstart," he means making a powerful motorcycle leap onto the asphalt at great speed, hurtling out and away, reaching for the horizon, getting the fuck out of Dodge again. When I say "kickstart," I mean sitting up high on my horse and signaling it to go through wet prairie grass early in the morning, not too fast and not too far away so we can be home for lunch. This book called “kickstart” is an exploration of journey, sometimes painful lurching and sometimes plunging through the night naked on a Harley and once in a while under a reading light with a book.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT

WHAT IS BELIEVABLE?

The answer is usually “whatever you expect to be real.” No child expects violence approaching murder to be real. No child expects his mother to sit wringing her hands while his father goes berzerk. The first time. By the second and third and fourth times, this is what they expect to be real. The problem then becomes how to persuade them to trust, to be intimate, to expect that to be returned.

If you tell about abuse and you are “low class,” a “mud person” as the Harry Potter crowd would say, then people believe it. If you are “working class” aspiring to “middle class,” then people will not believe it unless they have done emergency response or counseling or are a minister, one of those occupations that takes you through the curtain of “what you expect” to the reality of what happens. And even these people become so caught up in the immediate needs of their clients that they don’t look at the larger dynamics. Those are taken over by politicians and academics, people who presumably are never directly exposed to examples, only statistics.

There is another kind of people who try to look into the world more deeply than the categories society has defined, often because they themselves don’t fit. They are the artists, poets, actors, and writers -- the good ones are visionaries who see new worlds even as they confront the violence and selling-out of the old one. Which is worst, the wars or the constant erosion of the world caused by polluting factories? Which is worse, knowingly putting melamine in baby formula to increase profit (China) or letting melamine show up in baby formula through ignorance (USA)? Which is worse, a man like Maynard who beats up his son, drinks, and can’t quite just leave or the woman like Jean Ann who wants a family so badly that she will sacrifice its goal and essence in order to have the appearance? And what kind of salvific act of community and courage is it when the surviving son makes a new life based on love and protection, precisely by doing the most forbidden thing, being homosexual.

The people who are supposed to be looking out for children and intervening when necessary do not do their job. It is a great deal of work. When I turned in a case of suspected sexual abuse to my principal, he was enraged, because it would make a big hole in his budget, besides meaning a lot of paperwork. This boy constantly tucked himself in behind furniture, butt-down on the floor if he could. Now he had to be driven to an appointment with a shrink twice a week and the school counselor had to do it, which made hash of his schedule. The boy never spoke to me again and if he saw me coming, evaporated. His mother brought her brother in to threaten me. The principal set about firing me. It would have been much easier for me to not believe what I saw.

My own family seemed idyllic to my Chinese girl friend. She is appalled now when I tell her that it wasn’t. Our troubles were trivial compared to Tim’s family. My father didn’t take off like Maynard because he already had a job that kept him on the road, living in cheap motels. But he had a terrible temper and he was a spanker. I remember very well the morning I rebelled. I was maybe twelve, it was breakfast, and he was being a bully. I had toast with raspberry jam on it and I threw it at him. It lit jam-down on his white shirt and stuck there while I took off as fast as I could to the bathroom, the only door with a lock on it. He came after me, but my mother managed to talk him out of breaking down the door by arguing that he had to get to work and he’d have to change his shirt and he might be late. He was terrified of offending authority figures. My brothers were terrified by what I had done. My teachers would not have believed it. I never made trouble at school.

It was a milder situation than Tim’s. I didn’t have to live on a mattress in the basement, but rather had my own room. I thought about running away, but couldn’t get around the problem presented by my mother sleeping on a Hide-a-bed which opened across the bottom of the stairs. (She did that so I could have my own room.) It never occurred to me that I could run away in the daytime. My brothers would have been happy to help me pack. My rebellions were always slightly ridiculous.

The boys of Cinematheque have talked about how bossy girls are, how girls think they’re judge, jury and executor, and that does indeed seem to be the way our society sets things up. The American pattern, esp. in the West, is for the man to be as overpowering as he can manage to be (because that’s where the reckless energy for success comes from) and then for the woman to get him under control, because then if he fails, it's her fault. It’s kind of a game. (Bush is GREAT at it!) My ex- complained I just didn’t know how to play “chase,” meaning “come and get me, Big Boy!” and then pretending to enjoy being overcome. Ever seen a John Wayne/Maureen O’Hara film? Maybe “The Quiet Man?” Greatly admired in my childhood.

People don’t believe because they’re filtering for social and psychological reasons, because knowing would demand action (change), because they haven’t come to terms with their own hidden business or even admitted that there is any, and because they’re basically playing a game with an economic prize. I think the reason I like BBC’s “Cracker” so much is that he always sees through this stuff.

More than that, victims of abuse will usually hide the fact, lying and dodging anyone who tries to intervene. Sometimes there’s a kind of pride in suffering, the idea that one is Prometheus chained to a rock with an eagle tearing out one’s liver for what must have been a hugely significant crime, on the scale of bringing fire to mankind. The secretly grandiose sufferer may feel he’s compromised by disclosure, not so special anymore. Maybe has lost a part of his being based on being unique. If Jabba is just an ordinary welfare blob with a keyboard instead of a massively tragic sufferer with an Instrument of Punishment, then he won’t be able to stand it. He’s fatally diminished.

The American media seems to have invented a new version of “chase” that goes like this: “You pretend to be a big shot and I’ll come along and reveal that you’re not, and then you repent and I’ll get a second story out of how contrite you are.” It confirms to the public that the Media knows everything and never, never, no never lies. (Politicians either!) And pretends that Oprah is not really controlled by handlers, but speaking from a pure heart.

Beyond that, there is a level we all live on where we have to believe that we are sane, safe, and contained -- that we have NOT just been infected with anthrax, that terrorists are not preparing a bomb for our car, that our loved one is not turning away, and that an asteroid is not speeding toward the spot where we’ll be standing when it lands. We have to assume the ceiling will stay up and the walls will go on standing, or we won’t get a darn thing done. So we deny many possibilities to keep from obsessing about them.

I still reproach myself over a refusal to believe. The sturdy old Irish woman who lived across the street from me in Portland said that she thought the son in the family next door to me was molesting his sister. Had I heard anything? Could I supply evidence to put with hers and maybe get the girl out of there? I told her no. But I HAD heard something that might have been... No, I didn’t want to be involved. It wouldn’t have held up, just tempted them to do something to my little dog. So I said to myself.

None of us is above it. I guess in the end it comes down to fear of one sort or another. The fear in the audience, not in the actors.

KICKSTART: THE HOSTAGE

The twentieth century was hard on American men. It was hard on
everyone, but arguably -- because of the privilege and obligation of
being the head of a family -- it nearly crushed many men, did crush
many. Two world wars, the beginning of industrial war with gas,
machine guns and tanks, and then airplanes, holocaust and the atomic
bomb, wiped out entire generations of lovers, husbands and fathers.
The Thirties Depression generated so much despair in dust bowl country
that loving and responsible heads of families took their wives and
children into the cellars and killed them and then themselves rather
than watch their babies starve to death. Vietnam and assassinations
eviscerated hope, destroyed pride and security across America.

In the attempt to get back to their feet, knowing that what had seemed
so solid -- the nuclear family and the assembly line job -- were now
failing, the lid of the box came off. In San Francisco the box was
less Pandora's box than a Jack-in-the-Box. With cries of "why not?"
and "what do we have left to lose?" new social patterns that had
previously been firmly repressed burst out into the open. They've
been working through the larger society ever since. Perhaps because
of this new financial catastrophe -- or maybe just because it's about
time -- scholars are beginning to look with both nostalgia and
analysis on those reckless times when many men felt like kickstarting
a motorcycle and heading to California -- stark naked at top speed in
the dark night. Take me, Fate!

We know from research and simple observation that a percentage of
mammals of most kinds are homosexual: that is, behave sexually towards
their own gender. Cows mount cows and no one knows whether they are
"bull dykes" or "cowing" the others into submission, being bossy. Is
it desire or is it domination? A consistent proportion of rams will
only mount rams, though it would seem illogical, considering heredity.
We too often forget that heredity has more to do with whether the
whole group (herd) survives than whether any particular individual
passes on its genes. It appears to be advantageous for the group to
include bachelor rams in the herd, maybe more armament against
predators. At this point among humans increasing the number of babies
is hardly helpful in the long run. But social pressure or
self-deception might be enough to produce progeny from those not
normally interested in women. Human sexuality, having a large
component of culture and psychology, is quite plastic.

Our mental construct of gay men tends to be the "swish" pansies full
of camp and snark and no doubt wafting around a lavender feather boa
with a limp wrist. It has been less clear to the general public that
gays may be what Jack Fritscher dubbed homomasculine, that is, the
black leather and tight jeans crowd with brawny, hairy chests. Nearly
Hell's Angels, these guys are best left alone because, as Barrus has
described, threatening them with baseball bats will mean the bats will
be taken away and used first on the assailants and then on their
transportation.

These are the men photographed by Mapplethorpe. As for the
sado-masochistic dimension of the porn for this crowd, Michael Bronsky
("S/M: The New Romance" in Gay Community News, Vol 2, #30) points out
that it a short step from the broken hearts, fatal diseases, lost
babies, and redemptive suffering of heterosexual romances to the rough
and scarring fleshly pains of the black leather crowd, which in turn
are closely related to the noir Mickey Spillane man who can be beaten
nearly to death and still prevail. Weapons are phallic (guns, knives
and bats), potentially lethal. Tim Barrus, survivor of violence, was
exactly configured for this context. Sex was the smaller part of it.
But this was an urban kind of romance, at least until "Brokeback
Mountain."

The other male heritage in Barrus' family was more American, although
some would say nothing is so characteristic of the US of A as
violence. The dimension of "moving on" came from Maynard's father,
Mason, who had a ranch in the High Sierras among other temporary
frontiers. Though much of Tim's life has been in cities, Mason's
heritage was a love of open country. During the Aquarian Revolution,
especially if one were a member of the net-worked society of gay men,
who in the days of being underground had formed their own railways, a
man could move across the country and still be in the company of
friends and compatriots, like old-time fur traders and scouts. But
this modern adventuring type had a preference for warm climates and
good restaurants, so they went from San Francisco to Mexico to Florida
and on out into the Caribbean.

Maynard, Mason's son, never seemed able to break the tie of family
enough to either really light out alone or to take his family with
him. His solution was to pile his young son Tim into the car --
surprised and coat-less -- for a long flight to the wilderness, only
to return both exalted and traumatized after a period of forced
intimacy with a violent father. Maynard's motives seem mysterious and
painfully conflicting except when dosed with alcohol. He was far
beyond the comprehension of a child, though not the child's effort to
understand and heal him. Indeed, it was probably the same impulse
that held Barrus' mother hostage.

Much of Barrus' more formal "porn" is in actuality one more attempt to
come to terms with Maynard, to be an un-Maynard, anti-Maynard, focused
on an impossible salvation. Two males, related but one older and
stronger, cross a wasteland in a survival ordeal based on love and
pure determination to see it out. It is no more S/M leather porn than
Cormac McCarthy, though the theme of genocide/AIDS is just under the
surface. In life Barrus alternated trying to capture his quandaries
on paper with acting out the flights, the alcohol, the drugs, and
sometimes the partners. His efforts were muted and masked to spare
his family. When journalists found his parents and questioned his
family, the relatives denied that any of it was true, a final
violence. His father died in 2003 and his mother in 2008, setting
Barrus free to be more open. But these are wounds that break open
easily.

He has never rejected the part of the mix that will always be the
vigorous and glorious "glitter life" of the San Francisco scene,
though it has subsided now. To some who were there, it may seem a
betrayal that Tim finally married a woman, but he has never rejected
his brothers and never stopped mourning the losses of many beloved
men. They would have understood that his attempts to redeem
transgressive young men of talent is a revenge against those unable to
love.



>Hostage

Our games as kids were quite likely to involve the taking of hostages. Who would be held for one kind of ransom or another.

Keep your eye on the leader or leaders of the group. They're never held hostage. They assign those roles.

My dad would hold me hostage to whatever it was he wanted even when he had no idea what he wanted and I had no idea what he wanted. But I knew this: You tended to the issue of what he wanted because if you did not the price was always a violence breathtaking to behold. My dad would upturn the dinner table on you and all the food would end up on your lap. It would be hot. Then, he would pick up the table itself and throw that at you.

My mother would just sit there and look at her hands.

Dishes broken. Food everywhere. On the walls. On the floor.

The taking of hostages was far more complex than even this scene might suggest. He was, in fact, her hostage, and she wasn't going to settle for a ransom, any ransom. She wanted the hostage.

I don't know how she roped him in initially. I wasn't there. But I do know he never wanted kids. But he had them because she saw to it.

My mother's passivity was an illusion. Anyone authentically familiar with the dynamics of sadomasochism will tell you that it is almost always the bottom who controls the scene.

They would break up. Loud, noisy, screaming fights. One of them would leave.

My eyes to the sky.

I didn't care. I wished they would divorce and get it over with but they never did.

My dad had frequent affairs with other women and he would put it in my face, in her face. I did not know them, but I knew of them, and I would find their panties stuffed in hiding places all over the house, and I did hate him for that.

I was twelve when other men would pay me to let them fuck me. He followed me once and he did see that trick. I saw him sitting in his car fuming.

As those men were fucking me, I would pretend to be someone else. It wasn't me getting fucked.

One day my dad decided he wanted to go moose hunting up near Hudson Bay, Canada. There are no roads so you fly in and hire an Indian guide. It's not cheap. It costs a lot of money to do this. My dad had a pilot's license so he could fly the sea plane in but you had to lease the plane. He did not own one.

His father did.

This flying business was like an echo. It bounced back at you. At this same time, 1962, I wanted to learn to fly, and signed up for flying lessons at the Lansing Capitol City Airport. My teacher, Renee, was French so I could barely understand a word he ever said. But I could read the book.

My dad never once saw me fly. He refused to even drive to the airport. I had to hitch-hike there.

I flew a lot and got fucked a lot so I could pay for it.

Maynard went on a I am not going to pay for you parental strike.

He refused to buy me food.

He refused to buy me clothes. I was on my own.

The clothes part of it is what I remember the most acutely.

I was a little whore who had a thing for clothes but not in the way you might think. Clothes were not accouterment. They were armor.

They were always making us strip naked at school and I hated it. I wanted my clothes.

I don't know if schools do that anymore. I don't want to know. I would think that today it would be hard for them to get away with it but in 1962 they got away with it.

We were required to swim naked. I would skip that class. The truant officer was always looking for me.

I told him that the reason I didn't like being naked around those boys was because they were fucking me, too. I think rape is the more accurate term but I didn't know what rape was in 1962.

They did not believe me. I was told in no uncertain terms to keep my mouth shut if I wanted to live. I was not sure I did.

Today, those boys are getting to be old men and they still live in Lansing and I still really deeply most assuredly still hate their fucking guts.

Flying was my only escape then. Hunting was my dad's. My mother just wrung her hands raw.

Since my dad wasn't paying a single dime for me, he saved enough money to go moose hunting in Canada. I was glad to see him go. I didn't have to deal with him.

At school, the boys would form a ring around me and fuck me one at a time. They had lookouts. Even the boys who I thought were my friends.

School was about sex and rape. I do not recall a single moment of it being about anything academic. I had taught myself how to read. In Lansing, you were just a piece of meat and that is all you ever would be.

I hated all of them. Every last stinking person in that town. If it was up to me to push the atomic button to blow that town off the face of the planet, I would do it in a second.

I would run away to Florida to my grandfather's house. He always took me in and he never pried. He knew. We never talked about why I was there. There was no need.

I would sleep on my grandfather's boat. We would go fishing on the Gulf of Mexico.

We would have something rare called fun.

School. Left behind.

Parents. Left behind.

The only really bad thing about flying is that at some point everyone has to fucking land. The sky will not keep you hostage. -- Tim Barrus

NAT LIT IDENTITY POLITICS

(Note: Don’t read this if you are easily offended by the way kids talk, because when Barrus gets angry, he stops censoring. And I don’t like censoring Barrus. PM)

I know absolutely nothing about the small world of Native Lit other than the fact it has to be like any other dusty, poorly illuminated corner of publishing that gets scant attention because marketing people in Manhattan would have no idea what to do with it.

A lot of people might assume I brushed shoulders with Native Lit as Nasdijj but that would be a mistake to assume. Publishing actually didn't treat me any differently than they treated any other white writer -- they knew me as Tim Barrus -- just a guy with a pseudonym, and there are hundreds of them in their universe. Tim Barrus is white and that made me acceptable to deal with.

It was only when the public mask came off they put their tails between their legs.

The people in publishing would scream blood they deal with African-American writers all the time. Bullshit. They see "black books" as niche publishing as well and Tony Morrison is pretigous but she doesn't sell that many books. She's window-dressing for an institution in America that is as racist as any other institution in America where racism gets covered up and made nice by white liberals who do not wear sheets. The sheets are now suits. The racism is camouflaged but if it looks like a duck, it's a duck.

I knew in the beginning he was going to be a writer.

I was working in a well-endowed, rather chacha (pool and patio) group home for adolescent Native Americans whose families were in one kind of turmoil or another, and we were what amounts to respite care. The place was run by a tribe so let's dispell of the notion of the abusive Indian school run by abusive white people because this was not that in any way, shape, or form.

Okay, the boy was (is) gay. Who the fuck cares. It isn't relevant. Because I say so.

I know. I know. All of you fucking care.

But not any of you cared when he was growing up and struggling. So get out of my face with how you care. You didn't give a fuck then and you give a fuck now outside of provoking me and I'm a little on to you.

He was a writer.

He was failing in school (his school sucked as badly if not more so than he said it did) and yet he had the most extraordinary journals mainly because he wrote everything he ever saw down in them.

Like how he felt about other boys.

Who beat him up almost daily.

He loved them (strangely) and he hated them. How could it be any other way. This kind of conflict is what makes a writer none of whom live in vacuums even if they do, indeed, live alone in tiny rooms where they write. You figure.

I do not believe you can make writers. You can help some kids to be more literate than others. That's about it.

A writer is born. He or she just isn't made. Go ahead, pick a kid. Any kid. When you're done teaching him to write he'll become a computer geek or a plumber or a truck driver -- I will guarantee it.

This particular kid was already more of a writer than I could ever hope to be. I had no illusions about teaching him how to write. He could write circles around Shakespeare.

I could though teach him a few things about how to get published.

1.) Adopt a pseudonym. Make it white.

2.) Tell no one you are a racial minority.

3.) Do not tell anyone (this includes family or tribal members) what you do when the money starts rolling in.

4.) Get someone else to manage your money.

5.) Do not drink alcohol. Ever. One drink and the party is over.

6.) Do not settle for any of the stupid agents. Get an agent from Hollywood who is willing to deal with a writer. He won't make the money he makes from movie stars but he might like books.

7.) Sell to the movies THROUGH New York.

8.) Never ever ever ever deal with New York marketing. That is why you have an agent at ICM or CAA or William Morris.

9.) Do not write literate books and never write about Indians.

10.) Never tour (be above it as only the Little Writers tour). These things are done easily. You WILL meet with your agent but that will be about it. Your agent will be discreet and never ever ever ever tell them things they do not specifically ask to know and when they do ask be evasive. Most people have no clue that most writers never meet their editors, never meet a publisher, never actually see a publicist; none of these idiots have time to know you anyway. The CARE about sales figures. They're not selling vacuums door to door but close enough.

11.) Forget high school forget college. They have nothing to offer you (but grief and jealousy).

12). Go write your tits off. Always heterosexual. Not a hint of gay anything.

13.) Never visit Seattle (it is filled with vile and jealous people) and never never appear on a "panel."

He did. All of this and then some.

Today he is one of the top-selling writers in THE WORLD.

Why in heaven's name would he join the ranks of niche publishing.

His books are reviewed as if they were deep wells of literate thought nudging history's slow length along.

He lives in the Los Angeles area.

The chances of my naming him in this are not good. My dog and pony show. My way.

His books are turned into godzillion-dollar blockbusters.

Anything Indian he writes, he sends to me and I applaud like I have for years and then I burn those manuscripts.

This will not win me Mister Popularity among the Native Lit folks. Like I was in line for it anyway.

Not even Mister Runner-Up.

"But he should give something back to his community."

Why. They did nothing for him but beat him up.

I like him a LOT. I want to see someone who comes from where he comes from successful. It is MY revenge.

And I love seeing someone fuck publishing in the ass.

"Coming out" would ruin everything. Charlie Rose has begged but why go on Charlie Rose. Charlie Rose isn't dog shit.

Bend over, publishing. Bend over publicists. Bend over agents. Bend over marketing. Baby, you know you like it and so did your mama. -- Tim Barrus



The problem with Native American literature is not the writers, it is the publishing, publicity and distribution. People who think Native Lit is authentic writing by and about old-time Blackfeet ought to go to the Browning Public Schools website and order a short stack of the booklets they’ve published by and about local people. Or buy Percy Bull Child’s book “The Sun Came Down.” Do readers do this? No. They buy “Piegan” by Richard Lancaster, a self-serving and predatory white man from Texas who imposed on the Whitecalf family long enough to write his book, riddled with cliches and therefore “real.”. It’s not the readers’ fault -- their only yardstick in most cases is Hollywood films. The serious analysis of Native American literature is often so theoretical that no one can understand it without a Ph.D.

Not that Indians are always so inclined to help each other. One year Fishtrap Writer’s Conference, a high-grade workshop in the Wallowa Mountains, invited all the outstanding female Native American poets and novelists they could think of: about four. The result was a disaster as elbows and accusations flew. The Warrior Ethic survives among the women. In general, contentiousness and accusations, “identity politics” and “revelations,” have made Native American writing and movies so radioactive that business people don’t want to deal with them, the same as reservation disorder and corruption keep out business.

At the same time probably no one has done so much for Native American writers as the Bruchac family, part-Abenaki, whose careful scholarship and hard work in organizing conferences and touring schools is invaluable. For many years the family has run a press that publishes NA materials. (http://www.josephbruchac.com) They struggle. In Canada such efforts are subsidized. Another effective print warrior is Tim Giago, who comes through journalism , and the late Vine Deloria, Jr., who comes through the academic and church worlds. Adrian Louis has braided together journalism, academia, and Hollywood.

The kind of publishing Barrus is talking about pays little attention to such people. They did publish Adolph Hungry Wolf, a “volunteer” Indian (white) who lives in a cabin and runs his computer with a solar panel. Since the result was not a blockbuster, they dropped him. Adolph’s priceless collection of information and photographs, the work of fifty years of careful searching, is orphaned because no publisher or museum will acquire it and the tribe itself thinks it is entitled to have it for free. Luckily, Adolph’s publisher in Canada with whom Adolph has worked for many years to self-publish (as Bob Scriver did as well) went out on a limb to print four books that preserve the material. Anyone who doesn’t jump to get those four books is a fool, but the academics scoff. THEY didn’t think of it and didn’t acquire the material though they were on the scene. Nor are they anxious to help now, because Hungry Wolf is stigmatized by the identity politics game.

I also know an Indian writer who has kept a journal all his life. It fills suitcases. He is a deeply worthy man, closely connected to the Blackfeet past, indubitably full-blood. I urge him to edit those materials and get them published, but he’s reluctant. The social consequences for a full-blood who publishes can be catastrophic. I’m terrified that there might be a fire at his house or that someone might get the materials after his death and edit them clumsily. He's aging.

Most people could stand right next to an Indian and never realize they were alongside a full-blood. They might register dark skin and good hair, but unless there were beads and feathers, that’s about as far as it would go. So how could they recognize writing by Indians? What’s different about it? Nat Lit writers are more different from each other than they are from white writers. But best-selling, Manhattan-published white writers are pretty different from small publisher writers anyway. If they weren’t before, they are after. For one thing, they are more likely to have invented personas. For another, once a book sells well, they will be heavily pressured to write the same book over and over again because publishing operates on the Simple Simon principle, the same as all the major corporations in America that hate risk.

Barrus beat the system once with his three Nasdijj books. This will not hurt the prospects of NA writers in the future, since he is white. But will the NA writers of the future care to write books now that Manhattan best-sellers are revealed to be equivalent to bundling high-risk mortgages? "Cashing in" for writers is a myth. Publishers are middlemen, like bankers or lawyers or brokers. Writers are product. The only thing that counts is whether they sell. We need a whole new system.

Barrus’ solution is to change media: he has gone to video. Another solution is something like Kindle, a way to read books in eformat that costs much less to produce. Or a third way is Print On Demand which makes self-publishing feasible. (This is what I do.) Or a fourth route is Espresso, the machine that makes you a book while you have a cup of coffee nearby, drawing on efiles but producing a bound well-printed book. And a fifth route is the artist-made book, limited editions, possibly in unique formats or with etchings. Or there might be a hybrid product: imagine a Print On Demand book with a custom leather binding. Possibly a classic used book, re-bound with an artist’s cover.

The big excitement about Native American literature has pretty much passed on now, pushed aside by writers from India or the Middle East, but the contemporary American Indian scene is full of ferment and intrigue that deserves being written about, both as novels and as nonfiction. If they were written tomorrow, they might not be blockbusters, though I wouldn’t bet on that.

But if one has the appetite for those briefly published and often marvelous Native American Literary Renaissance books, bless the Internet for the used book websites. With a little archeological strategy and patience, one can build an excellent library. I wouldn’t tell others what to do, but in my own collection, I include both Hungry Wolf and Barrus. In the end it is life experience that counts towards good writing, not just genetics.

What we need are Native American publishers and distributors who know how to get books into the hands of reservation readers. And we need RESERVATION READERS because reading is what makes writers.

RESERVATION LIFE

To be white and living on one of the vast dry high-altitude reservations of the plains West was to step into almost a different dimension. It wasn't that people were different in the way that another country might be different, but that one's most basic assumptions about everything were challenged. Ordinary tribal society was a tissue of dreams, half-memories, secrets, superstition, and outright lies meant to baffle and deflect.

It is often as difficult for Native Americans to grasp as it is for white people to understand that not all tribes that are seen as tribes today were, in fact, formally tribes until the BIA starting requiring organized tribes to function in political versus historically matrilineal ways. The Navajo were a loosely-knit band of nomadic Indians who spoke a similar Athabaskan dialect of which there are over fifty variations on the Navajo Nation alone. Changing Woman is the chief deity of the Navajo whose mythology reflects their extraordinary migrations that hit the Southwest when Anasazi culture was ready to decline. But these migrations (from the North) were family-led, not tribal in nature.

When an anthropologist went to such a place, carefully taking down notes all day and transcribing them in the evening, he (almost always "he") was a dog watching a movie, picking out what seemed real to him, but not what might seem at all real to the people doing the acting. (This is no longer the case since most people have been assimilated more effectively by television than by any missionaries.) In the Sixties and Seventies the complex swirl of rez life included Aquarian pilgrims hoping to find a way to fit in.

At the point when my father-in-law came to Browning, 1903, the Blackfeet and their Cree/Metis adjunct had been refugees, staying in place while their culture was dismantled and suppressed around them, losing from their own sky the constellations of belief that had guided and protected them for millennia. One agent forbade beading as a savage and subversive preoccupation, though clearly glass beads were provided by Euro traders or maybe Asian trade. Mission teachers went after obvious things like braids and eye contact, while never noticing abuse to children. Today all that trauma -- major destruction and perversion of families, never enough food, the confusion from losing the stories that told them who they were -- is either suppressed by the Indians themselves, glossed over by whites wanting to look good, or inflated into monstrous exaggerations for the political ends of both categories.

Everywhere on the planet, the absence of money causes other economies to develop: trade in secrets, behind-the-scenes deals and contacts, and maybe sexual privileges. The reservations today are now no better or worse than their surrounding white towns, which they are rapidly moving into anyway, since reservation housing is never quite adequately funded. Nothing is ever quite adequately funded except expense accounts. But in 1903 the straightforward men who came to trade in Browning had been buffalo hunters and horseback warriors a few decades earlier. By 1961 when I came, there were still a few old people who were born in 1880 or maybe slightly earlier, but the main reservation treaties were signed in 1851, the buffalo had been gone since 1883 (Charlie Russell arrived in Montana in 1880), and only a few child survivors of the Baker Massacre in 1869 were still living. Since then, another half-century has passed and today's parent generation is tall, strong, prosperous and educated. Their grasp of history is based on classes and books and most are firmly Christian. One just became the head of the state Office of Public Instruction.

Tim Barrus and Tina Giovanni went to live and teach on the Navajo Nation in the 1990s, escaping the many AIDS deaths destroying what had been a brilliant renaissance and new creation in San Francisco, especially fueled by gay talent and energy. Tim was particularly struck by the Mariano Lake high-desert landscape of Hosta Butte. From their BIA house they could see for over a hundred miles -- a hundred miles and nothing man-made in sight. Mariano Lake was an awakening. BIA housing is not closed off from the community. It is very much a part of the community. The Pinedale Trading Post was groceries, post office, and laundry for everyone. You only made the trip off the reservation if you had to. There were children who only knew Mariano Lake. Like kids everywhere, when given a bit of educational support, they bloomed like the Navajo country after a rain.

Tim already had special feelings for kids, had worked for the United Nations Year of the Child by organizing art shows, painting a giant block-long mural on the building where he worked, and taking his own photographs. He had worked in special education in Taos and Santa Fe. In California, he had worked with deaf children. By this time he was carrying enormous guilt for not being able to somehow pull his small son, Tommy, out of his damaged brain into something like a normal life, but also constant joy in his daughter, Kree, born wise and tough, a survivor from the beginning.

Given that Tim and Tina's training and certification was special ed, which means adapting to the child, inventing methods, not getting stuck in issues of curriculum, life on the Navajo reservation was both shocking and transcendent, the kind of experience that marks a person for life. An old lady set up her loom in the front yard of their home. Sheep, horses, and goats were everywhere. The people gradually came to know them. It was a while before the corrosions and tragedies surfaced.

The difference between deaths and other losses on a reservation is that, like a small town, you know the victims by name. You help deal with the debris afterwards. You have to deal with your own grief, and one of those ways is by writing.

It's a strange phenomenon that often white people who have never been on a reservation except to drive through on a holiday are the ones who are most insistent about what the reality of reservation life truly is. They split into two groups: those who want to hear about the miserable and degraded things so that they can shake their heads at all that misery, and those who want Indians to be next to angels, noble and magic. The first of these groups was only too happy to accept Tim's stories so long as they appeared to be memoir, thus adding a little spice to the voyeurism while allowing them to feel that everything was all right in the end since he could write a famous book. The second of these groups, especially the members attempting to worm their way into what might seem to be a privileged career as an "expert" on Indians, attacked Tim once they found a way to discredit him. They seized on his participation in the San Francisco gay life -- defiant and transgressive and flamboyant as it was in those times -- and "revealed" it in sensational articles in men's magazines and the alternative press.

In the actual time of being "cloaked" as Nasdijj, Tim was in a wheelchair and then recovering from a double hip transplant, paid for by the three books. Barrus and his wife moved to North Carolina because Duke University Medical was the only place willing to try the then experimental surgery Tim needed to replace bone with ceramic (most hip surgery is still done with titanium). Tim still limps as one leg is now shorter than the other, a by-product of the surgery. The title "Geronimo's Bones" is clearly personal.

At this time of rabid right-wing fundamentalism, attacks on homosexuality mixed with a barely hidden racism. These righteous people wanted to be virtuous, prosperous, straight and white and were willing to use any means to enforce that idea. It was in their interest to vilify Tim Barrus.

Tim Barrus did not take it, so to speak, sitting down.

INDIAN TROUBLE: A DOUBLE CHAPTER

This is a set of the paired chapters that Tim Barrus and I are writing by alternating with each other. We don’t seem much alike on the surface, but often are in deep accord.

I WILL NOT NAME THE TRIBE BY TIM BARRUS

I do not have to name this tribe. Because I'm the one writing the story. And I already know who these people are.

What you know is incidental and not my fucking problem. I don't care what you know or don't know. You are only the reader and I am not responsible either for you or to you. I don't know you or want to know you. I will not be appearing in your local bookstore.

If you need something conventional to read, go read Sherman Alexie.

I assume he's conventional. But I really wouldn't know because I've never read one word by Sherman Alexie whoever he is. Sherman Alexie just doesn't interest me. I do not care about him.

This is not about him even if at some point he whines it is. It isn't.

I was working in a place that took in very damaged children who were from a variety of tribes. We gave them a safe place to live.

That was it.

No mumbojumbo. No Freud. It was a safe place where they didn't get beat up or murdered.

The various tribes themselves placed the children here.

I did mainly everything but one of the things I did was go get kids.

This could be a drive of thousands of miles.

If I named the tribe, all it would do would be to open up old wounds. Why would I do that. In the name of journalism. Please.

Get a life.

I drove an old jeep we had. I drove and drove and drove and drove.

Then, I got to the reservation.

Easy.

The children consisted of three brothers.

Mainly, they were three normal little boys who lived on a reservation with their mom and dad out in the country. End of story, right.

Not quite.

A few days before I arrived to pick them up and take then somewhere safe, they had all been sitting down to dinner one night.

Mom had a gun. Dad had a gun. Both guns hidden from sight under the table.

Mom brought out her gun and shot dad in the head.

Before dad died, he shot mom in the head.

This in front of three little boys who were simply sitting at the kitchen table.

Mom and dad were dead.

The three boys had to wade through snow in the dark to go find help. Now, they were traumatized. Severely.

The tribe wanted them off the reservation. Because families were beginning to take sides and it was feared that the brothers would become victims of one side or the other.

Like they weren't victims enough.

They were staying at Grandma's house and Grandma wanted them off the reservation, too, because people were driving by the house and taking pot shots at it. It was my normal pickup and delivery errand. It was not the first time this sort of errand had been stuck in my inbox.

I found grandma's house easily enough.

The word I would use to describe Grandma would be terrified.

She immediately helped me pack the brothers in the jeep and we were off. They didn't have shit. Not so much as a coat.

No lunchbox. No nothing.

Not even socks.

I'm a white guy. I had credit cards.

We drove and we drove and we drove and we drove.

We came to a large American city.

We went to a five star hotel and checked in. No big deal. I have spent half my life in hotels.

Secret. Don't tell anyone. I like them.

I want to live at the Brown Palace in Denver.

We had dinner. Room service.

Then, we went shopping.

We bought cowboy boots and coats and toys and clothes and Flintstones lunchboxes.

The brothers never said a word. Not one sound.

"They stopped speaking," Grandma told me. And she wept.

I don't know if it was a community decision but a decision had been made. They would never speak again. To anyone.

And they never have. They had made their decision. They stuck with it. Since leaving the house, to wade through that darkness and the snow, leaving behind the bodies of their parents, they have never said a solitary word. And the rest is history. Even if it's not a history you would know. History doesn't care what you know. History only is.

Their house was now splattered with blood. They reached a neighbor's house (about two miles away), and all they did was point.

That night we arrived in White people Town, they slept in their own hotel room. There was a connecting door to me in case they needed me.

I did not really care if they talked or not. They would talk when they were ready. or not.

Not speaking is a kind of power, too.

It was after midnight. They came into my room in the dark in their new pajamas. They crawled into the bed.

I could have left that out. It would have been the appropriate thing to do.

It wasn't sex.

It was tears and noses and snot and hugs. That is all it was. I do not give a fuck what you or what anyone thinks about it.

I took them to the safe place. Where they lived for a while. They never spoke.

They would eventually return to their reservation. Today, they are fine. They just never speak and the rest is not history -- it is silence. -- T


<span style="font-weight:bold;">A RESPONSE ABOUT SHERMAN ALEXIE

There has been twice in my life as an adult that I broke down and sobbed with a broken-heart -- I mean, big ugly ripping sobs. One was when I graduated from NU and realized that I would never again be part of that magical community in the theatre department. The other was after the superintendent (white) at Heart Butte forced me out because he couldn’t control me. I returned to Portland again. When my mother heard me sobbing, she went to the back of the yard and smoked to keep from hearing. She didn’t come to me. She didn’t think I should have been on the reservation anyway. She didn’t believe she could comfort me. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to say I couldn’t come back to what she considered my “home.”

No Blackfeet in Heart Butte tried to oppose that superintendent. They didn’t think I was a bad teacher. They were not happy to see me go. But they thought that white people were different from them and that white people had their own agendas and resources. It never occurred to them that I was leaving into the 1991 recession with no savings. It was one of my several Barrus-type falls to the bottom.

While I was there, living on a rollaway on my mother’s sun porch, I went job-hunting every day and haunted Powell’s every night. That’s when the Native American literature renaissance was just at the top of its arc and disillusioned publishers were dumping books by Indians into the remainder bins. They didn’t really know how to market them and didn’t have the patience to wait for word-of-mouth to get around. The Indian writers themselves came through to do readings and I spoke to many of them. One of my former students, Robey Clark, who is also an Indian writer, talked me into the internet bulletin boards where they discussed Indian literature. Every time I found a remaindered “Nat lit” book at Powells in the evening, I’d buy three: one for me, one for the Heart Butte school library (there is no other library there), and one for the Browning library.

The first of Barrus’ Nasdijj books didn’t come out until the year after I’d returned here to Valier at the edge of the rez, so I didn’t find them at Powell’s. Instead I ran across “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping” in the Daedalus remainder catalogue. Highly recommended, many prizes. Must have been about 2004. I read it and loved it, never thought much about whether it had been written by a Navajo but it sounded authentic. Identity politics were pretty worn out by then. But when I began to try to find out more about Nasdijj, I ran into the controversy. Not only was he not Navajo, it was declared, he wrote porn. Well, there’s porn and porn. Like, not “is it about spanking or leather” but is it well-done or just pulp truckstop porn? Porn can be highbrow, even literature.

On Abebooks I ordered some of the Barrus “porn,” which turned out to be about two men, one taking care of the other. I know now where that kernel-story comes from: a little boy trying mightily to save his father. Sometimes trying to save a beloved friend or brother. He writes it over and over. It’s not salacious and in-your-face so much as it’s flesh trying to real-life redeem much-loved flesh. But you have to listen for that. Then on my computer I was watching the melodramatic soap opera blog of the chase across the continent by Barrus and his boys, sending guerrilla messages -- often in shocking images -- on a war-correspondent’s cell phone parabolic satellite hookup. Suddenly it stopped.

Barrus had been so thoroughly vilified and indicted-without-trial that his books were off the market and his career was ended. He moved to Europe. What no one seemed to know was that he’d also suffered from avascular necrosis, had done much of his book promotion in a wheelchair, and used the proceeds to get his hips replaced. The third Nasdijj book, “Geronimo’s Bones” (2004), was written while he was recovering from both the surgery and the drugs necessary to survive it. When he was awarded the PEN prize for the best minority-written book, he was flattened in a borrowed cabin, trying to stay alive post-op with the help of Tina, his wife, and Navajo, the dog. His publisher (who knew he was not Indian and not named Nasdijj) had proposed him for the prize (authors can’t do it), and accepted the $1,000 award in his name. The publishers had made a great deal of money by promoting “Nasdijj,” but as soon as the jig was up, they abandoned him.

In 2006 Sherman Alexie, the only Native American writer many readers know -- usually because of his movies rather than his books -- wrote a nasty little attack essay in Time magazine. He said, “As a Native American writer and multiculturalist, I worried that Nasdijj was a talented and angry white man who was writing as a Native American in order to mock multicultural literature.” Sherman was right about the “talented and angry” and even the “white” but why can’t a white man be a “multiculturist?” Sherman was following the lead of a story in the LA Times “unmasking” Nasdijj. He’d evidently forgotten that in 2003 he participated in a Museum of Tolerance project. I’m sure he remembered that Oprah had him on her program in 2003 and I’m sure he thought he was following up on Oprah’s sensational witch hunt of James Frey, whose crime was not pretending to be Indian but pretending to be more wicked than he really was.

In 1999 I saw Sherman on the “Lehrer News Hour Dialogue on Race with President Clinton,” where Sherman was the soul of discretion and respect. I was on the early Nat Lit bulletin board when Sherman was on it and remember that he quit with hurt feelings because someone (might’ve been me) mocked his intention to write like a best selling author. I saw him speak in Portland and went backstage to meet him. He’s a great stand-up comedian.

Sherman is an assimilated Indian. Maybe he had it tough as a kid, but not anymore. He’s doubly ghettoized by being an “Indian writer” and by his Hollywood-style “Falls Apart” operations (see the website). At age 42 he has turned to “youth literature” to re-energize his career. “NA Lit” is said to be worn out, kaput. (It’s NOT really. Just out of sight.) Sherman always wanted to be mainstream anyway, but his Seattle noir novel mocking Hillerman went nowhere. I’m the only person I know who likes it, but then I have a very broad concept of what NA writers ought to write.

I could write rather a wicked little piece comparing some NA lit to pornography: voyeuristic, sensational, promising a world “never dreamt of,” forbidden to most, shamanic -- in short, “tomahawk sniffing.” People want the imagined privilege, and all that.

In my opinion Sherman’s best short story so far is one that got him into trouble. (Good writing will do that.) Called “The Toughest Indian in the World,” it seemed to be about an old prize fighter Indian who attaches himself to a young male Indian journalist and even goes to bed with him. He is “beautiful and scarred” and he wants to be “inside” the young man. But he can’t “cum” as Barrus would spell it. He leaves, walks down the highway, rises into the sky and becomes a constellation. He is the spirit of Indian, the 19th century glorified, impossible, poetic and still existent Indian that just won’t die. The barefoot young journalist follows up into the sky and the last sentence is one Sherman has used more than once: “If you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon.”

No feathers. No horses. Sherman is a fish Indian. I like him best when he’s not joking around. Everyone thought he’d gone homosexual. That will haunt him now for the rest of his life, though he’s married with two sons. He could tell Oprah about it. For sure Barrus doesn’t care to hear about it. And I’m only vaguely interested. I’m home again, just off the Blackfeet rez, which has come to join me. My neighbors next door, across the street and across the alley are Indians from Heart Butte. The woman who runs the Title 5 Indian program was a toddler when I taught there. She says they have now acquired the “entire works of Sherman Alexie.” She hasn’t read them. She has a baby who keeps her busy.