Ten Little Indians (17 page)

“I figure if we’re going to give my kid a narcotic,” she said, “then we both should know how it will make him feel.”

The Wolff-Man never mentioned pills again. And my mother never told anybody (not even me) her lithium pills were only aspirin. I discovered it only when I took one of the pills and expected to see a life-altering vision but felt nothing except pain relief.

That was my mother: fierce and protective, open and permissive (
No, don’t call it your wang-doodle, it’s your penis
), and a total embarrassment.

“Ma,” I yelled at her. “Why can’t you ignore me sometimes, like all of the other moms and dads? Why can’t you just give me a pair of scissors and tell me to run, boy, run?”

She sat me down once a week and gave me sex advice:

1. “Condoms make you less sensitive, and you’ll last much longer, thereby giving your partner a much more pleasurable experience.”
   
2. “If you spend an hour kissing every part of your lover’s body while purposefully ignoring her orifices, then she will feel more like a holy woman and less like a pincushion.”
   
3. “Make her laugh while making love, and she will love you forever.”
   

Yes, I admit my mother’s sexual advice was outstanding, but what son wants to hear these things from his mother?

“Ma, you’re going to kill me,” I shouted.

“I understand your anger,” she said.

She “understood” everything because she bought self-help books that taught her how to understand the teenage male ego. She understood my rage, my volcanic need to kick holes in every interior door of the house.

“I understand your need to physically express yourself,” she said, “so I won’t fix these doors until you find an alternative means of communicating.”

Man oh man, she talked exactly like that. She negotiated with me as if I were holding twelve hostages at gunpoint.

But she really started to fall apart when she decided to become a “progressive and whole woman.” I have nothing against progressive and whole women—

Q: What kinds of men could resent those kinds of women?

A: Almost all of them.

—but I was a reflexive and cracked teenage boy. If Estelle had pursued her wholeness by herself, I would have supported her gladly: “Go get whole, Ma, rah, rah, rah, sis, boom, bah, go get whole, Ma!” But since she was my new best friend, I was forced to attend every single one of her wholeness seminars, consciousness-raising workshops, and spiritual discussion groups. Don’t misunderstand me. Even at thirteen years of age, I knew I was a liberal with socialistic leanings and would vote for socialistic liberals my entire adult life (my spouse, Mary, is the information officer for the local chapter of the Green Party), but there’s no boy or man alive who could have survived that summer without serious emotional repercussions.

At first, the women who pursued wholeness alongside my mother would be uncomfortable with my maleness, even though I was only a boy (nits make lice). But eventually they would forget I was there. My penis and scrotum would become irrelevant (a redundancy?), and I’d listen to women tell their stories for hours; I’d hear their secrets. I was afraid of female secrets then, and I’m even more afraid of them now.

“Ma, those woman secrets are killing me,” I said.

“You’re a good listener,” she said, a compliment meant to distract me from the real issue; my mother was a politician; politicians love secrets!

“But Ma, listen to me,” I said. “I heard this woman today, the one with the bad perm, she said she thinks about sex as often as any guy does.”

“That was a very honest thing for Betty to say. The whole woman embraces and celebrates her sexuality.”

“But Ma, what am I supposed to do with that information? If Betty thinks about sex that much, and you think about sex that much, and all women think about sex that much, then girls my age must think about sex a whole bunch, right?”

“I certainly did when I was your age.”

“Okay, I’m going to be walking around school looking at all these girls, and I’m going to be thinking about having sex with them. And trust me, Ma, I think about sex all the time. I’m always beating off; I’m like the Denny’s of masturbation, Ma. I’m open twenty-four hours a day, and I can get the Grand Slam special anytime I want. I got bruises on it; I got calluses. And now, when I’m thinking about sex with those girls, when I’m running off to the bathroom to do my business, you’re telling me they’re all thinking about sex with me?”

“Well, not all of them, son. You’re not that cute. But I would imagine a very healthy percentage of your female peers think about sex with you.”

“Ma, I’m not supposed to know that! Do you have any idea how dangerous that is to know right now? When I’m thirty years old, I’m supposed to look back at the teen years and say, ‘Man, if I only knew then what I know now.’ Ma, because of you, I know all of it now, so what am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?”

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: My early sexual education did not turn me into a sexually precocious teen or promiscuous man. I have slept with seven women, a shockingly average number of lovers.

Now, I’m no Oedipus, at least not Oedipal enough to warrant an epic poem, but I have to admit that my mother was pretty dang sexy herself (so maybe I could write an Oedipal haiku). She was Spokane Indian and looked the part: cheekbones stretching from there to here, big black hair hanging halfway down her back, a big brown face with spelunkable eyes, a big bosom, wide hips, and a flat ass. I looked exactly like her, except for the big bosom. If we lived on the reservation, we’d be only two more Indians. But we lived in the city, so naturally, we had a lot of white friends. Most of our friends were white, in fact, but it wasn’t like I spent much time worrying about it. Who cares, right? But my mother started hanging around these white women who were so white I could see through them. They weren’t literally translucent, but they engaged in activities that were so damn foreign to me (so dang Caucasian) that it made me feel lonely as hell. The Title IX legislation was beginning to gain real momentum, and these women knew it, so they were voracious, ambitious, and ready to beat the crap out of the patriarchy. They were in training for the upcoming war! Good for them! I love and respect women! Given the chance, I’ll vote for the Equal Rights Amendment! I’ll be in the Gentlemen’s Auxiliary! If asked, I’ll donate 30 percent of my income to NOW to make up for the 30 percent difference in salary between men and women working the same jobs:

1. Community-college history teacher’s salary = $32,525
   
2. $32,525 × 30% = $9,757.50
   
3. Amount of charitable contribution to NOW = $9,758
   

My mother’s friends were religious fundamentalists that summer. As women, they’d been “saved” by other women, and now they were preaching and witnessing: “Hear me roar, I am woman!”

To this day, I rarely look in the mirror and think, I’m an Indian. I don’t necessarily know what an Indian is supposed to be. After all, I don’t speak my tribal language, and I’m allergic to the earth. If it grows, it makes me sneeze. In Salish, “Spokane” means “Children of the Sun,” but I’m slightly allergic to the sun. If I spend too much time outside, I get a nasty rash. I doubt Crazy Horse needed talcum powder to get through a hot summer day. Can you imagine Sacajawea sniffling her way across the Continental Divide? I’m hardly the poster boy for aboriginal pride. I don’t even think about my tribal heritage until some white person reminds me of it:

Q: Hey, man, you’re an Indian, right?

A: Uh, yeah.

Don’t get me wrong; I like being Indian. I love the way Indian men often wear their hair long, cry too easily, wear florid clothes—all reds and pinks and lavenders and turquoises—and sing and dance most every day of their lives. If you think about it, Indian men are probably the most feminized males on the planet (and I mean that as a compliment), despite how ridiculously macho we pretend to be: “I am an Indian man, with your prior approval, hear me roar!”

Yes, I’m an Indian man trying to hold on to the best of Indian:

1. The cheerful acceptance of eccentricity
   
2. The loving embrace of artistic expression
   
3. The communistic sense of community
   

I’m also an Indian man trying to let go of the worst of Indian:

1. Low self-esteem
   
2. Alcoholism
   
3. Misogyny
   
4. Lateral violence
   

So, okay, in the end, maybe I am proud to be an Indian. But I don’t want to wear a T-shirt with my tribal enrollment number printed on the front and a photograph of Sitting Bull ironed on the back. On the long list of things that I am, I’d put Indian at number three, behind “bitterly funny” at number two and “horny bastard” at number one for the last twenty-seven years running.

But oh, my mother’s whole white friends loved how Indian we were, and my mother became more Indian in their presence. My mother’s
name
became more Indian.

“Oh, Estelle Walks Above,” said Ginger, the militant vegan. “That’s such a beautiful Indian name. What does it mean?”

“Oh, well,” my mother said, “I guess it means I walk above …
stuff.
”

She didn’t have the guts to tell her that Walks Above wasn’t her real name. Her real last name was Miller, but that wasn’t so romantic.

“Oh, Estelle Miller, that’s such a beautiful Indian name. What does it mean?”

“Oh, well, I guess it means I mill …
stuff.
”

Growing up on the reservation, my mother was cousin to Indians who had authentic Indian names, like Builds-the-Fire, FallsApart, Morning Owl, and Black Bird. She was jealous of those poetic names and felt shortchanged by her own colonized moniker, so she simply changed her name when she left the reservation. Like many of the other immigrants into the United States (and leaving the rez for Seattle is immigration), my mother reinvented herself when she landed on these democratic shores.

On the rez, she was that smart and strange girl who was always preparing to leave, and was loved by many and respected by most (and hated by a few), but she became a wise woman in the presence of her white friends. They asked her for advice about their love lives, spiritual directions, political positions, and fashion styles. Her white friends wanted to be my mother, so they started to dress and talk like her. Imagine a dozen white women running around Seattle, speaking with singsong reservation accents. How confusing! Homeless Indians had no idea what to make of these blondes who sounded like they’d just gotten off a bus from Crow Agency, Montana.

“Are you Indian?” asked the homeless men.

“No,” said my mother’s disciples. “But we know an amazing Indian woman named Estelle. Do you know her?”

“Where I come from, every Indian woman is named Estelle.”

Ha, ha! How can Indians laugh so much? How can they make so many jokes? I don’t know. Ask my mother!

My mother both loved and resented the attention she received from her white-women friends.

“How can these women become whole if they’re trying so hard to be wholly like me?” she asked me.

“I don’t know, Ma, I’m just a manual laborer.”

All that summer, I worked for my mother in the basements of Unitarian churches:

1. I folded and unfolded chairs and arranged them in sacred circles.
   
2. I brewed and poured coffee.
   
3. I lit cigarettes and dumped ashtrays.
   
4. I ran to the store for sandwiches and drinks.
   
5. I swept and mopped the floors.
   

I worked for free, but I worked for women who at first tolerated and then loved me. I was the son of their saint! In their lives away from my mother, these women were lawyers, doctors, teachers, parole officers, chefs, and social workers, but they turned into children in her presence. I resented their immaturity; I was supposed to be the immature one; I was the child!

Those women surrounded my mother and pushed me into the corners of the meeting rooms. These women competed with me for my mother’s attention, and they often won.

“What should I do, Estelle, what should I do?”

“I don’t know, Erin, what do you think you should do?”

Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.

“It makes me sound Zen,” she had said to me on the bus ride home after one of those meetings.

“How do you do it, Ma?” I asked. “These women are killing me. They want you to do everything for them.”

“No, they don’t. They just want somebody to listen.”

“Ma, they think you’re magic.”

“Don’t you think I’m magic?” she asked and laughed. Of course she wasn’t a magician. She was a mess! She failed parenting quizzes! She’d raised a son who would grow up to break the hearts of 67 percent of the women who’d loved him! How could a powerful woman raise a fragile man like that?

Q: How do you find out the true nature and character of a hero?

A: Ask his or her children.

Ask me about my mother’s relationship with her women’s group, and I’ll tell you my version of the truth. I was thirteen and should have been running the streets with other thirteen-year-old boys, not making sure there was one pitcher of ice water for Lucy and one pitcher of lukewarm water for Abigail. I was supposed to be engaged in rough play with a father. He was supposed to grab me by the hands and spin me around the room! He was supposed to be my helicopter, my dump truck, my race car, my dragon and my dragon killer! Where was my father, the bastard, and where was the good man who should have been vainly attempting to take my father’s place in my life? I was always hungry for paternity, but during the summer of 1976, a matriarchal woman starved me. With difficulty, I still loved my mother, but she found blind acceptance from her white friends.

NOTICE OF HISTORICAL REVISION: During that particular time period, I probably hated my mother more often than I loved her.

What is it about Indians that turns otherwise intelligent, interesting, and capable people into blithering idiots? I don’t think every white person I meet has the spiritual talents and service commitment of a Jesuit priest, but white folks often think we Indians are shamanic geniuses. Most Indians are only poor folks worried about paying the rent and the light bill, and they usually pray to win the damn lottery.