The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Page 2
He doesn't believe in physical punishment; he believes in staring so cold at me that I turn into a ice-covered ice cube with an icy filling.
My house is a safe place, so Rowdy spends most of his time with us. It's like he's a family member, an extra brother and son.
"You want to head down to the powwow?" Rowdy asked.
"Nah," I said.
The Spokane Tribe holds their annual powwow celebration over the Labor Day weekend.
This was the 127th annual one, and there would be singing, war dancing, gambling, storytelling, laughter, fry bread, hamburgers, hot dogs, arts and crafts, and plenty of alcoholic brawling.
I wanted no part of it.
Oh, the dancing and singing are great. Beautiful, in fact, but I'm afraid of all the Indians who aren't dancers and singers. Those rhythmless, talentless, tuneless Indians are most likely going to get drunk and beat the shit out of any available losers.
And I am always the most available loser.
"Come on," Rowdy said. "I'll protect you."
He knew that I was afraid of getting beat up. And he also knew that he'd probably have to fight for me.
Rowdy has protected me since we were born.
Both of us were pushed into the world on November 5, 1992, at Sacred Heart Hospital in
Spokane. I'm two hours older than Rowdy. I was born all broken and twisted, and he was born mad.
He was always crying and screaming and kicking and punching.
He bit his mother's breast when she tried to nurse him. He kept biting her, so she gave up and fed him formula.
He really hasn't changed much since then.
Well, at fourteen years old, it's not like he runs around biting women's breasts, but he does punch and kick and spit.
He got into his first fistfight in kindergarten. He took on three first graders during a snowball fight because one of them had thrown a piece of ice. Rowdy punched them out pretty quickly.
And then he punched the teacher who came to stop the fight.
He didn't hurt the teacher, not at all, but man, let me tell you, that teacher was angry.
"What's wrong with you?" he yelled.
"Everything!" Rowdy yelled back.
Rowdy fought everybody.
He fought boys and girls.
Men and women.
He fought stray dogs.
Hell, he fought the weather.
He'd throw wild punches at rain.
Honestly.
"Come on, you wuss," Rowdy said. "Let's go to powwow. You can't hide in your house forever. You'll turn into some kind of troll or something."
"What if somebody picks on me?" I asked.
"Then I'll pick on them."
"What if somebody picks my nose?" I asked.
"Then I'll pick your nose, too," Rowdy said.
"You're my hero," I said.
"Come to the powwow," Rowdy said. "Please."
It's a big deal when Rowdy is polite.
"Okay, okay," I said.
So Rowdy and I walked the three miles to the powwow grounds. It was dark, maybe eight
o'clock or so, and the drummers and singers were loud and wonderful.
I was excited. But I was getting hypothermic, too.
The Spokane Powwow is wicked hot during the day and freezing cold at night.
"I should have worn my coat," I said.
"Lighten up," Rowdy said.
"Let's go watch the chicken dancers," I said.
I think the chicken dancers are cool because, well, they dance like chickens. And you
already know how much I love chicken.
"This crap is boring," Rowdy said.
"We'll just watch for a little while," I said. "And then we'll go gamble or something."
"Okay," Rowdy said. He is the only person who listens to me.
We weaved our way through the parked cars, vans, SUVs, RVs, plastic tents, and deer-
hide tepees.
"Hey, let's go buy some bootleg whiskey," Rowdy said. "I got five bucks."
"Don't get drunk," I said. "You'll just get ugly."
"I'm already ugly," Rowdy said.
He laughed, tripped over a tent pole, and stumbled into a minivan. He bumped his face
against a window and jammed his shoulder against the rearview mirror.
It was pretty funny, so I laughed.
That was a mistake.
Rowdy got mad.
He shoved me to the ground and almost kicked me. He swung his leg at me, but pulled it
back at the last second. I could tell he wanted to hurt me for laughing. But I am his friend, his best friend, his only friend. He couldn't hurt me. So he grabbed a garbage sack filled with empty beer bottles and hucked it at the minivan.
Glass broke everywhere.
Then Rowdy grabbed a shovel that somebody had been using to dig barbecue holes and
went after that van. Just beat the crap out of it.
Smash! Boom! Bam!
He dented the doors and smashed the windows and knocked off the mirrors.
I was scared of Rowdy and I was scared of getting thrown in jail for vandalism, so I ran.
That was a mistake.
I ran right into the Andruss brothers' camp. The Andrusses—John, Jim, and Joe—are the
crudest triplets in the history of the world.
"Hey, look," one of them said. "It's Hydro Head."
Yep, those bastards were making fun of my brain disorder. Charming, huh?
"Nah, he ain't Hydro," said another one of the brothers. "He's Hydrogen."
I don't know which one said that. I couldn't tell them apart. I decided to run again, but one of them grabbed me, and shoved me toward another brother. All three of them shoved me to and fro. They were playing catch with me.
"Hydromatic."
"Hydrocarbon."
"Hydrocrack."
"Hydrodynamic."
"Hydroelectric."
"Hydro-and-Low."
"Hydro-and-Seek."
I fell down. One of the brothers picked me up, dusted me off, and then kneed me in the
balls.
I fell down again, holding my tender crotch, and tried not scream.
The Andruss brothers laughed and walked away.
Oh, by the way, did I mention that the Andruss triplets are thirty years old?
What kind of men beat up a fourteen-year-old boy?
Major-league assholes.
I was lying on the ground, holding my nuts as tenderly as a squirrel holds his nuts, when Rowdy walked up.
"Who did this to you?" he asked.
"The Andruss brothers," I said.
"Did they hit you in the head?" Rowdy asked. He knows that my brain is fragile. If those Andruss brothers had punched a hole in the aquarium of my skull, I might have flooded out the entire powwow.
"My brain is fine," I said. "But my balls are dying."
"I'm going to kill those bastards," Rowdy said.
Of course, Rowdy didn't kill them, but we hid near the Andruss brothers' camp until three in the morning. They staggered back and passed out in their tent. Then Rowdy snuck in, shaved off their eyebrows, and cut off their braids.
That's about the worst thing you can do to an Indian guy. It had taken them years to grow their hair. And Rowdy cut that away in five seconds.
I loved Rowdy for doing that. I felt guilty for loving him for that. But revenge also feels pretty good.
The Andruss brothers never did figure out who cut their eyebrows and hair. Rowdy
started a rumor that it was a bunch of Makah Indians from the coast who did it.
"You can't trust them whale hunters," Rowdy said. "They'll do anything."
But before you think Rowdy is only good for revenge, and kicking the shit out of
minivans, raindrops, and people, let me tell you something sweet about him: he loves comic books.
But not the cool superhero ones like Daredevil or X-Men. No, he reads the goofy old ones, like Richie Rich and Archi
e and Casper the Friendly Ghost. Kid stuff. He keeps them hidden in a hole in the wall of his bedroom closet. Almost every day, I'll head over to his house and we'll read those comics together.
Rowdy isn't a fast reader, but he's persistent. And he'll just laugh and laugh at the dumb jokes, no matter how many times he's read the same comic.
I like the sound of Rowdy's laughter. I don't hear it very often, but it's always sort of this avalanche of ha-ha and ho-ho and hee-hee.
I like to make him laugh. He loves my cartoons.
He's a big, goofy dreamer, too, just like me. He likes to pretend he lives inside the comic books. I guess a fake life inside a cartoon is a lot better than his real life.
So I draw cartoons to make him happy, to give him other worlds to live inside.
I draw his dreams.
And he only talks about his dreams with me. And I only talk about my dreams with him.
I tell him about my fears.
I think Rowdy might be the most important person in my life. Maybe more important
than my family. Can your best friend be more important than your family?
I think so.
I mean, after all, I spend a lot more time with Rowdy than I do with anyone else.
Let's do the math.
I figure Rowdy and I have spent an average of eight hours a day together for the last
fourteen years.
That's eight hours times 365 days times fourteen years.
So that means Rowdy and I have spent 40,880 hours in each other's company.
Nobody else comes anywhere close to that.
Trust me.
Rowdy and I are inseparable.
Because Geometry Is Not a Country Somewhere Near France
I was fourteen and it was my first day of high school. I was happy about that. And I was most especially excited about my first geometry class.
Yep, I have to admit that isosceles triangles make me feel hormonal.
Most guys, no matter what age, get excited about curves and circles, but not me. Don't
get me wrong. I like girls and their curves. And I really like women and their curvier curves.
I spend hours in the bathroom with a magazine that has one thousand pictures of naked movie stars:
Naked woman + right hand = happy happy joy joy
Yep, that's right, I admit that I masturbate.
I'm proud of it.
I'm good at it.
I'm ambidextrous.
If there were a Professional Masturbators League, I'd get drafted number one and make
millions of dollars.
And maybe you're thinking, "Well, you really shouldn't be talking about masturbation in public."
Well, tough, I'm going to talk about it because EVERYBODY does it. And
EVERYBODY likes it.
And if God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn't have given us thumbs.
So I thank God for my thumbs.
But, the thing is, no matter how much time my thumbs and I spend with the curves of
imaginary women, I am much more in love with the right angles of buildings.
When I was a baby, I'd crawl under my bed and snuggle into a corner to sleep. I just felt warm and safe leaning into two walls at the same time.
When I was eight, nine, and ten, I slept in my bedroom closet with the door closed. I only stopped doing that because my big sister, Mary, told me that I was just trying to find my way back into my mother's womb.
That ruined the whole closet thing.
Don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against my mother's womb. I was built in there, after all. So I have to say that I am pro-womb. But I have zero interest in moving back home, so to speak.
My sister is good at ruining things.
After high school, my sister just froze. Didn't go to college, didn't get a job. Didn't do anything. Kind of sad, I guess.
But she is also beautiful and strong and funny. She is the prettiest and strongest and
funniest person who ever spent twenty-three hours a day alone in a basement.
She is so crazy and random that we call her Mary Runs Away. I'm not like her at all. I am steady. I'm excited about life.
I'm excited about school.
Rowdy and I are planning on playing high school basketball.
Last year, Rowdy and I were the best players on the eighth-grade team. But I don't think I'll be a very good high school player.
Rowdy is probably going to start varsity as a freshman, but I figure the bigger and better kids will crush me. It's one thing to hit jumpers over other eighth graders; it's a whole other thing to score on high school monsters.
I'll probably be a benchwarmer on the C squad while Rowdy goes on to all-state glory
and fame.
I am a little worried that Rowdy will start to hang around with the older guys and leave me behind.
I'm also worried that hell start to pick on me, too.
I'm scared he might start hating me as much as all of the others do.
But I am more happy than scared.
And I know that the other kids are going to give me crap for being so excited about
school. But I don't care.
I was sitting in a freshman classroom at Wellpinit High School when Mr. P strolled in
with a box full of geometry textbooks.
And let me tell you, Mr. P is a weird-looking dude.
But no matter how weird he looks, the absolutely weirdest thing about Mr. P is that
sometimes he forgets to come to school.
Let me repeat that: MR. P SOMETIMES FORGETS TO COME TO SCHOOL!
Yep, we have to send a kid down to the teachers' housing compound behind the school to
wake Mr. P, who is always conking out in front of his TV.
That's right. Mr. P sometimes teaches class in his pajamas.
He is a weird old coot, but most of the kids dig him because he doesn't ask too much of us. I mean, how can you expect your students to work hard if you show up in your pajamas and slippers?
And yeah, I know it's weird, but the tribe actually houses all of the teachers in one-
bedroom cottages and musty, old trailer houses behind the school. You can't teach at our school if you don't live in the compound. It was like some kind of prison-work farm for our liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders and conservative, white missionary saviors.
Some of our teachers make us eat birdseed so we'll feel closer to the earth, and other
teachers hate birds because they are supposedly minions of the Devil. It is like being taught by Jekyll and Hyde.
But Mr. P isn't a Democratic-, Republican-, Christian-, or Devil-worshipping freak. He is just sleepy.
But some folks are absolutely convinced he is, like, this Sicilian accountant who testified against the Mafia, and had to be hidden by that secret Witness Relocation Program.
It makes some goofy sort of sense, I suppose.
If the government wants to hide somebody, there's probably no place more isolated than
my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy. But jeez, I think people pay way too much attention to The Sopranos.
Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And
for some reason I don't understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.
"All right, kids, let's get cracking," Mr. P said as he passed out the geometry books. "How about we do something strange and start on page one?"
I grabbed my book and opened it up.
I wanted to smell it.
Heck, I wanted to kiss it.
Yes, kiss it.
That's right, I am a book kisser.
Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.
But my lips and I stopped short when I saw this written on the inside front cover:
THIS BOOK BELONGS TO AGNES ADAMS
Weill, let me tell you. Agnes Adams is my mother. MY MOTHER! And Adams is her
maiden name.
So that means my mother was born an Adams and she was still an Adams when she
wrote her name in that book. And she was thirty when she gave birth to me. Yep, so that means I was staring at a geometry book that was at least thirty years older than I was.
I couldn't believe it.
How horrible is that?
My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang
books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.
And let me tell you, that old, old, old, decrepit geometry book hit my heart with the force of a nuclear bomb. My hopes and dreams floated up in a mushroom cloud. What do you do when the world has declared nuclear war on you?
Hope Against Hope
Of course, I was suspended from school after I smashed Mr. P in the face, even though it was a complete accident.
Okay, so it wasn't exactly an accident.
After all, I wanted to hit something when I threw that ancient book. But I didn't want to hit somebody, and I certainly didn't plan on breaking the nose of a mafioso math teacher.
"That's the first time you've ever hit anything you aimed at," my big sister said.
"We are so disappointed," my mother said.
"We are so disappointed in you," my father said.
My grandmother just sat in her rocking chair and cried and cried.
I was ashamed. I'd never really been in trouble before.
A week into my suspension, I was sitting on our front porch, thinking about stuff,
contemplating, when old Mr. P walked up our driveway. He had a big bandage on his face.
"I'm sorry about your face," I said.
"I'm sorry they suspended you," he said. "I hope you know it wasn't my idea."
After I smashed him in the face, I figured Mr. P wanted to hire a hit man. Well, maybe
that's taking it too far. Mr. P didn't want me dead, but I don't think he would have minded if I'd been the only survivor of a plane that crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
At the very least, I thought they were going to send me to jail.