Miss Orange’s e-mail spun me around in my chair. Oh, shit, I have done that, too!
My father was a failure. Worse, he was a brilliant boy—a star athlete, classical pianist, and jitterbug dance champion—who turned into an inert man—into inertia itself. He died broke. He died young, at age sixty-four of alcoholism. He hadn’t had a job in thirty years or more. He couldn’t keep a job. He once pretended to have a job. He’d pack a lunch in the morning and walk to his road crew job—to the garage a half mile away, where he’d meet up with his co-workers to take care of the reservation highways and byways. Then, at five, he’d walk home and let me eat whatever was left of his lunch. I loved those half-sandwiches more than any food I’ve ever had in my entire life. I mean—my father finally had a job. I was ecstatic at the thought of my father’s regular paycheck. We’d have cash at predictable intervals. Glory! Glory! Those partly eaten baloney sandwiches and that half-filled coffee thermos became my Eucharist. And, yes, my dad did work that job for maybe a week but then quit and pretended to go to work for another two weeks. So what did he do with all that real time spent at his imaginary job? He’d sit in one of the permanently broken trucks near the road crew garage and...do nothing.
Of course, I can now amateur-ass diagnose my father as being incredibly fucking depressed. When sober, that depressed man sat in his bedroom watching TV for eighteen hours a day. Then, at predictable intervals, he’d leave the house for days or weeks on drinking binges and leave his family—his young children—scrambling for money and food.
When he was gone on his drinking binges, I would sometimes cry myself, dehydrated and irrational, into the emergency room. When he was drunk, my father would drive and get arrested. He was once court-ordered into a ninety-day residential treatment program. Nine or ten years old, I was a useless wreck—a car fire—for three months. If my father had served his time during the academic year, I would have probably flunked out of grade school. Or maybe I could have anesthetized myself with homework and extra credit and binge-reading. In any case, I made it through those ninety days of loneliness and celebrated as I waited with my mother and siblings in the hospital parking lot. There’s a photograph of me throwing a fake karate punch at the camera. Yeah, I was star student of the Dragon Dojo of Indian Boys Who Don’t Know Fuck-All About Martial Arts. I had crooked poverty teeth. I wore government glasses. My hair was uncombed and unwashed. I was ecstatic.
My father was coming home! My father was going to be sober! My father was going to get a job and take care of us!
My mother had packed a celebratory picnic of baloney sandwiches, potato chips, and Pepsi. She’d been a single mother for three months. She had good reason to celebrate.
My big brother and little sisters and I played on the grass.
We were almost a normal family.
But then, only moments after that photo of me was taken, we learned that our father would have to spend another thirty days in treatment.
We were crushed. We wept. Our beleaguered mother drove us back to the reservation. Along the way, we kids ate those sandwiches and chips. And drank those Pepsis. No matter how sad we were. No matter how much we just wanted to cry. We were too poor to waste the food. And we’d gone without meals enough times to learn that you absolutely devour any food placed before you. That’s one of the ways in which hunger and loneliness can become inextricably linked.
Along the way, I also screamed at my mother.
I blamed her for my father’s alcoholism.
I blamed her for our poverty.
I blamed her for everything wrong in our world.
Other days, she would have fought back. But, on that day, she remained silent as she drove us home. That day, she absorbed my rage and didn’t respond with any rage of her own.
Throughout our lives, our mother had been the dependable one. After I was seven, she never went on drinking binges. She never opened up a canyon in her soul and silently disappeared into the dark recesses. She was always present for us. She made money by selling her handmade quilts and blankets. She worked regular jobs, too. Youth counselor, senior-citizen companion, trading post cashier, drug and alcohol treatment therapist. She rarely broke the material promises she made to us. She was industrious.
And yet, I have spent my literary career writing loving odes to my drunken and unreliable father. I have, in a spectacular show of hypocrisy, let my father off the hook for his lifetime of carelessness.
That is completely unfair to my mother. I know it is. And it must have caused her pain. But she never said anything. She never asked me why I didn’t write much about her. And if she had asked, I’m sure I would have evaded the question.
But I can answer it now.
I wrote so many loving poems and stories about my father because I never once doubted his love for me. He rarely expressed his love. He was not affectionate. But he was shy and soft-spoken and obviously wounded and childlike and exuded kindness. He was never mean, not once, not to me or my siblings, and not directly to anyone else on the planet. You will not find a person who remembers a negative interaction with my father.
I know that my unreliable father loved me. I can say that without the need to present you with further evidence.
But my mother? And her love? How do I define that? Well, damn, the world is filled with people who can tell you stories about my mother’s cruelty—about her arrogance and spite. And, sure, other folks, including my siblings, can tell you stories about her love and compassion.
But, as her son and as perhaps her most regular opponent, I remember only a little bit of my mother’s kindness and almost everything about her coldness.
Did she love me? Did my mother love me? When I gather up all the available evidence, I have to say, “Yes, Lillian Alexie loved Sherman Alexie, Jr.” But I can only render that verdict with reasonable doubts.
In 1983, when our cousin Eugene was shot and killed in a stupid alcohol-fueled tiff with his friend, I wept. And I say “tiff” because it was over the minor issue of who got to take the last drink from a bottle of fortified wine. My cousin died arguing over backwash. How could I not weep for that death and for the utter inanity of the way it happened? I sat on the bed in my basement bedroom and cried for hours. I loved Eugene.
“Junior, you’re a weird kid,” he once said to me. “But you’re weird in a good way. Nobody gets you yet. I don’t get you. But people are gonna get you someday.”