7
The Irish Pup
It was past midnight when we reached the Hardens’ tiny apartment near downtown Los Angeles. It was Christmas. Marilyn worked as a telephone operator. Her husband, my Winnebago boxing mentor Bosco Harden, was on leave from the Navy. Mom made a fuss over their new baby, Lakota Ann, and we all sat up talking for hours.
My mother had to return to work and Dace had to resume high-school classes, so they went back to Vallejo after a week. Bosco and Marilyn asked me to stay for another two weeks—until he had to report to his ship. I didn’t look forward to returning to my parents’ home in Vallejo and I enjoyed the Hardens’ company, so I stayed.
As the new year of 1959 arrived, it occurred to me that I was fortunate to have left the dope world behind. It was true that in some ways drugs had forced me to grow up. I had met many different kinds of people, learned a great deal about human nature, and certainly dressed better when I had all that drug money. But I was realizing how stupid I had been to have wasted most of three years getting high. All these years later, looking around at how drugs have devastated an entire generation in the inner cities, I also realize how vicious and cruel it is to sell them to youngsters.
I decided to stay in Los Angeles and make something of myself. I went looking for work, determined to find a white-collar job, something with a future. To my surprise, within a week I found a position at General Petroleum, a subsidiary of Mobil Oil, in its five-story building—then one of the tallest in the city—on Flower Street, downtown. I began as a mail-room messenger, taking home a little less than two hundred dollars a month. That was more than enough to live on, and I liked the fact that I had to wear a suit and tie.
My job was to deliver the dozens of telegrams that arrived daily from all over the world to General Petroleum executives, mainly those in a fifth-floor inner sanctum. It was a suite of offices guarded by huge oak doors, a hushed place with indirect lighting, plush carpeting, and wood paneling. Because those messages contained highly confidential information, they were sealed in pink envelopes. My instructions were to deliver them to the addressees, usually the president or one of several vice-presidents, but not to their secretaries. If the executive was there, I waited until he came out to accept the telegram. If he was gone, I went into his office to put it on his desk. Those were elegant suites, each with a private washroom and luxurious leather sofas. Outside most was a veranda with a sun umbrella and patio furniture. I recall thinking to myself, someday, someday I’m going to have all that. When I got into an elevator and the beautiful secretaries coming to work looked right through me, I thought to myself, someday.
I worked hard, and soon I was promoted to mail boy, responsible for a route that covered two floors. My boss, a Chicano, had come up through the ranks. He had memorized the whole building and could sort a cartload of mail without even looking at the boxes. I watched him, committed the interoffice box layout to memory, and soon learned how to do it almost as well. I knew I was a real mail boy when I learned how to let my cart roll slowly down the corridor while I ducked into the front end of an office—dropping incoming mail into “in” boxes, emptying “out” boxes—and emerged from the rear door just as it arrived. Very soon, I could do my two floors in nothing flat. Then I took the trouble to learn every route in the building. After only about six months with the company, I was promoted to head mail boy.
While I was delivering the mail, I zipped through offices, never stopping to chat. There were a lot of pretty girls in that building, but without booze or drugs, I was still too shy to talk to them. I often accepted invitations to parties thrown by my coworkers, but as the only Indian, I was never completely comfortable at those get-togethers. I began to look for other Indians to hang around with. In a place as big as Los Angeles, Indian people were scattered all over, so just about the only place for social interaction was a bar. Bosco had a few navy buddies who knew where to go—the Irish Pub, just west of downtown on Pico Boulevard, an Irishman’s place that featured a Navajo band on weekends. We Indians called it the Irish Pup. I was only nineteen, but for a few bucks I got a fake ID. Soon I was going there every weekend, drinking enough to get my courage up, and dancing with girls. I was already a good dancer, but now I could really cut a rug. Between sets, I bellied up to the bar and played Santa Claus, buying everybody drinks. Of course, most Indians are Joe Generous anyway, and people often bought me drinks in return. Many times, I went to the Pup almost broke and drank all night on the kindness of friends and acquaintances.
When the Navy posted Bosco to a ship based in Japan, Marilyn decided she couldn’t take California any longer and moved back to South Dakota. I got a room in a residential hotel near the Third Street Tunnel, not far from where I worked. It was a run-down neighborhood, but I found a cafe where I could get three eggs, hash browns, toast, and coffee for thirty-six cents—including a penny for tax. I ate there often.
Usually the only time I saw other Indians was on weekends at the Irish Pup. Then one evening when I was walking home from work in my suit and tie, a car passed me, then braked to a halt. It was full of young men and women, some of whom I knew from the Pup. Someone asked, “What are you doing all dressed up?” They were surprised and impressed to learn that I had a suit-and-tie job. They were headed to a softball game and invited me to come along.
That’s how I really got to know the Indians from Oklahoma, many of them Kiowa, but also Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ponca, and so on. They were laid-back, fun-loving people who liked to joke around. They made friends easily. As I met more and more Indians, I began to ask, “How did you get here? Why did you come to LA from the reservation?” Most of them said, “Relocation.” What the hell was relocation? Eventually, I learned that the Eisenhower administration had come up with yet another plan to depopulate Indian reservations. The idea was to integrate Indians into urban ghettos so that in a few generations we would intermarry and disappear into the underclass. Then the government could take the rest of our land and there would be no one left to object. I didn’t quite grasp all that at the time. I understood only that reservation Indians were being offered transportation to several cities around the country, plus job training, and housing and employment assistance.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, relocation was sending a steady stream of Indians from all around the country to Los Angeles and other cities. Most of the newcomers gravitated toward the Oklahoma Indians. Aside from my brief stay in Winnebago, that was the first time I had had a chance to become friends with Indian people from other than Sioux nations. Learning to appreciate other Indian cultures would have a profound effect on my life, but back then I knew only that I felt a strong bond of kinship with those guys from around the country. I began to hang out with them. We didn’t want to spend twenty-four hours a day in a bar on weekends, we liked to get out. We went to Elysian Park to play softball.
After the games, we hung around to party. Construction had just begun on the Dodgers’ new stadium in Chavez Ravine. The hill that eventually was leveled to become the stadium site was the one we called Beer Can Hill. LA cops were still somewhat human then; they pretty much left us alone. All during 1959, we went up there to sing and dance around a drum, Indian style. Some of the people who hung out in the Indian bars sponsored dances, which many folks called powwows.
In Los Angeles at that time, we Plains Indians were the most aggressive about preserving our own culture. Our dances are unique to our region, and we have our own style of singing. The Plains Indians—Sioux, Arapaho, Kiowa, Cheyenne—held all the dances. The songs and dances reflected our own culture, but we also invited other Indians. They were often lonesome and those were Indian events, so they came around. To be polite, we asked them to sit at the drum. They began to learn our songs—and that started the downfall of our Plains Indian culture.
It is our songs, not our languages, that have always been the most important part of our cultural heritage. We have songs for everything. They tell us where we came from and why, where we’re going and why. Songs tell us everything we need to know to be a human being and a proud member of our nation. We never should have allowed other Indians to learn our songs. After a generation of mixing them with those of other Indian cultures, the Plains songs have been corrupted. They are our songs, so I resent it.
Even worse, because of “powwows,” many Indian nations have all but lost the songs and dances that were unique to their nations, which are just as beautiful, if not more so, as those of the Plains. Starting in the 1950s, city-dwelling Indians have gone to powwows where they can dress up for a few hours a month to play Indian, as if that can somehow “justify” their Indian blood. The rest of the time, they are lost in the maze of white society. The powwows give them an excuse to sell out. At powwows, they dress in any style, borrowing from other Indian nations without understanding the meaning of the traditional garments, without knowing why they are worn. There is no discipline and therefore no pride. Since the powwows began, the Indian nations have become weaker year by year. They have become caricatures of their own traditions, unrecognizable as communities, as nations, almost unrecognizable as Indians.
I had no sense of that in the late 1950s. To me, the dances were camaraderie, fellowship. It never occurred to me that the Hopi sitting next to me, the Navajo across the drum, and a Santo Domingo joining in the harmony would ever forget their own melodies, or that their children would imitate—badly—Plains Indian dress at the cost of their own traditions.
Although I played basketball and softball and clung to what little Indian culture I could find in Los Angeles, I hated my life and was usually angry at myself. I didn’t feel things so deeply when I was high, so the bulk of my spare time was devoted to drinking. In California, the bars close at 2:00 A.M. Sometimes after closing the Irish Pup, we would go to Santa Monica and party on the beach until the Columbine and the Ritz, skid-row saloons near Third and Main in Los Angeles, opened at 6:00. Other times, we would go to a cafe parking lot across the street from the Ritz and drink in our cars until the bars opened and we could go back to drinking, shooting pool, and brawling. When the Irish Pup opened at noon, we would head back there and start all over. I know many whites believe that Indians can’t hold their liquor, but that’s bull. Our problem is that we just don’t know when to stop. I often went to jail for drinking during that time of my life, but it was only a ten-dollar fine, and I was always released the next morning.
As much as I hung around bars and socialized, I remained very self-conscious socially. Although I was almost twenty, I appeared to be maybe sixteen, tall but very skinny and rarely needing to shave. When I began to meet girls at the Irish Pup, it was usually in the company of several men in their twenties, guys who knew just what to say to them. We sat around talking to the girls and to one another, drinking beer with half-pint jugs of whiskey hidden in our boots, periodically going to the bathroom to sneak a snort. Between the booze and the camaraderie, I lost most of my inhibitions, but I was still too fearful to make the first move. It helped that girls often asked me to dance, but without the know-how or guts to pick up a girl or ask her for a date, drinking and dancing in a bar were all I could do with girls.
Then one night, a pretty Kiowa-Apache came into the Pup. In contrast to the blue jeans and plaid shirts that were our usual outfits, she was dressed very stylishly. She was in the company of several white people, all of them wearing fashionable clothes—they were slumming. She marched right up and asked me to dance. I couldn’t believe it. We left the bar together and I spent the night with her. She was the first girl to pick me up that way. After that, it happened a lot. There were times when I went to parties, drank so much that I passed out, and woke up in the arms of a woman I couldn’t even remember meeting. All that boosted my confidence. It made me start looking at myself. I began to realize that I must be fairly good-looking if so many women found me attractive. Even so, I never believed anybody who complimented me. I thought it was a lie. I have been this way all my life. I suppose it is mainly because my mother, trying to make me behave, continuously condemned me for almost everything I did or said. By the time I was a young man, I believed her. I was bad, and no girl could ever truly care for me.
I spent most of my free time in the company of other young men, imitating their behavior. One of them was Randy White Shield, a Kiowa-Apache. After we became friends, the two of us and some of our friends moved into the Kirby Hotel. One of those pals was LaVerne Reinhardt, a Lakota from the Lower Brule Reservation in South Dakota. We called him Dad or the Old Man because he was thirty-six years old and we were all in our twenties.
We chose the Kirby because it was then the place where the BIA sent all the young single Indian girls arriving in the relocation program. We called ourselves the Kirby Cats—a pack of wolves hovering to pick off pretty Indian women.
Except for me, the Cats were all guys who could really rap down to women, especially Randy. Usually we met the Kirby girls collectively, hanging around the television set in the lobby. We steered lonely newcomers to the Irish Pup, where we would see them later, dance with them, and see what happened next.
One day as I was checking my mail in the Kirby’s lobby, I saw the backside of a girl going up the stairs. She was short, a shade less than five feet, with a sensational figure and long hair falling to the middle of her back. I ran up the stairs, following her to the second floor. Sensing me behind her, she hurried to her room and closed the door. Next door was LaVerne’s room. When he was there, he always kept his door open. I asked, “Who’s that girl in the room next to you?” The Old Man said he didn’t know her, but she had moved in a day earlier and was in school. It was October and still fairly warm out, so I hung around his doorway until she finally opened her door to get some air. Then I just strolled into her room and introduced myself.
In those days, when an Indian met another for the first time, usually the first thing they did was ask, “What tribe are you?” When I asked her, she said, “Sioux.” Her voice was soft and she was very shy, like me.
“Where are you from?” I said.
“Cheyenne River.”
“Oh, do you know my cousin, Madonna? We call her Donna.”
“I went to school with her, we were in the same grade.”
Her name was Twila Smith, and we discovered that we had much in common. She was a Minneconjou Lakota and her father, like mine, had been an automotive mechanic and had worked for the BIA on the reservation. I didn’t realize it until I started to write this book, but Twila was the first girl I ever talked to and tried to get to know romantically whom I hadn’t met in a bar or while I was boozing—the first one I could talk to without having had a few drinks first. At the time, however, I was just thrilled to be talking to a pretty girl who seemed to be interested in me. Aside from her sensational looks, Twila was very smart, a strong woman with a great sense of humor. Soon she was teasing me. I found that very refreshing. I had never met a girl like her. I was fascinated.
Many years went by before I learned that our meeting was not entirely an accident. Twila had seen me around, heard some of the Kirby girls talking about me, and told friends that she hoped I would call on her. She knew I was in the lobby when she made her entrance. I asked her to go out on Friday evening, when she didn’t have schoolwork. Twila joined the other Kirby Cats and me at the Irish Pup, and I discovered that she was a very cute little dancer. From the moment Twila joined me on the dance floor, I knew we were going to be together. Before meeting her, I hadn’t even been looking for a girlfriend. I had been happy to go out with the boys and enjoy bachelorhood. But Twila was different. She got me all worked up. That night, I shared her bed for the first time. I wanted to be with her every night, but she had homework and I respected that. We spent a little time together every day, but although we hugged and kissed, it was two or three weeks before we went to bed again.
ABOVE: Twila in Los Angeles, about 1960. (Author’s collection)
The very first time we had made love, Twila conceived. When her pregnancy began to show, the BIA racists in Los Angeles tried to make her stay and give birth there—they were trying to depopulate the reservations. They told her that giving birth at the Cheyenne River Reservation would mean one strike against the child. Twila refused to listen. She decided to go home, where she would be among her family when the baby came. Then the BIA began to pressure her to give the baby up for adoption. Twila played the game to get train fare back to South Dakota, but she had no intention of giving up our child. When she was about six months pregnant, she took a leave of absence from Sawyer School of Business, where she was taking secretarial courses, and went home.
I had very mixed feelings about all that. I was awed by the prospect of parenthood, and I wasn’t ready for it. I had begun to get over my fear of pretty girls, but I really wasn’t ready to settle down with just one. I was relieved when Twila left town, because then I wasn’t reminded every day of all the responsibilities of impending fatherhood. With her gone, I could continue to chase all the other pretty girls in town.
That was exactly what I did, along with the other Kirby Cats. When Bosco Harden got out of the Navy, he broke up with Marilyn, moved into the Kirby, and became one of the Cats. By that time, we had begun to call him Bos. To this day, I consider him the best boxer and fighter I’ve ever seen in action. Unfortunately, like most Indians of our generation, he was never able to deal with his drinking problem. For years, pretty much all Bos did was get loaded and fight. It’s very sad, but in my experience the old guys who fought well as young men never give it up. When Bos got older, he got beat up a lot. Cirrhosis of the liver killed him at age fifty-five.
Fights were common in Indian bars when I was a young man. Whites sometimes came to those bars, but we Indians fought only among ourselves. My generation was the first in nearly a century that was not completely shaped by boarding schools. We were far more rebellious than our parents’ generation, but we were still so dominated by white culture that it never occurred to us that we could win a barroom brawl with anyone except ourselves. Most Indians sense white power the first time they see whites on an Indian reservation. They are the teachers, police, BIA administrators, priests, and nuns.
Whites are always in a position of authority over Indians. By adulthood, we had the attitude that we can’t fight city hall and we damn sure can’t fight the whites, because they’re running it. The only one you can fight is yourself. Even today, the whole colonial syndrome continues to oppress people in Indian country. Nowadays it isn’t manifested in physical fights between factions as it was in the 1960s. Instead, colonialism expresses itself in backbiting and in foulmouthed, rumor mongering self-deprecation and co-deprecation of our fellow Indians. Sadly, the colonized Indian today has been rendered totally impotent, and prefers pointing fingers to taking initiative—and responsibility.
In the early 1960s, the Indians I knew in Los Angeles took all their frustrations out on one another after drinking. Sometimes it was brother fighting brother, cousin fighting cousin, husband fighting wife. A lot of us, myself included, truly thought all that drinking and fighting meant we were real men having a hell of a good time. Often I got so drunk I didn’t know I had been beaten until I got up the next morning with my face swollen. Other times, my friends would tell me about it. Although I woke up in an alley a few times, I never was beaten as badly as I had been that time in Sioux City.
I knew that I might get beaten badly, but I can never recall feeling fear. Thinking back over all the years that followed, all the beatings I survived, all the times I was arrested, I’ve never been scared. When I was little and my mother said, “Get in here,” and I knew I was going to get a strapping—that scared me so much I would avoid going home for as long as I could. When the day came that Mom didn’t scare me anymore, I had been beaten so many times I no longer feared anyone. Lately, it has come to me that when I put aside fear, I won the ultimate victory. I think most whites will never know that feeling, because Eurocentric male cultures teach people to fear the unknown. As long as you suffer fear, you cannot experience true freedom.
As much as I enjoyed my weekends, I was beginning to resent the five days when I had to be someplace, dressed just so and taking orders. Work, I had discovered, was the curse of the drinking class. But even if I stayed at General Petroleum for thirty years, I knew I still would be working in the mail room without more education. When I learned that one of those mysterious notations on my paycheck stub meant I had been paying unemployment insurance, I quit. It was August 16, 1959. I had worked for eight and a half months, and I thought it was time to kick back for a while.
Without working, I was getting twenty-seven dollars a week in unemployment. My room at the Kirby cost $10.50 a week, which left me enough to eat and party. Then I learned I could sell my blood for four dollars a pint. Officially, I could sell only one pint every six weeks, if I could pass a test which involved the speed at which my blood clotted. Someone told me that if I ate a lot of raisins the day before, I could pass the clotting test anyway. Sometimes I sold as much as four pints of blood in six weeks, going to a different clinic each time.
After I spent a few months of skimping by on unemployment and friendship, LaVerne Reinhardt, the Old Man, told me of an opening at the place where he worked, a little company in North Hollywood that manufactured swimming-pool heaters. The employees included all sorts of people—blacks, Japanese, Mexicans, French, an Englishman, and even a few Russians. I started at $1.75 an hour, more than I had made as a mail boy. The Old Man and I were at the front end of the assembly line, putting the controls together. We worked so well in tandem that we were always way ahead of the rest of the line. Sometimes after only a few hours of work, there would be stacks of assembled controls and nothing left to do. We got a few games going. The black guys were into marbles but none could beat me, so after a while I couldn’t get up a game. Then we went to quick card games or shot dice, and for a time we played horseshoes, but LaVerne was so good that no one wanted to play against him.
Soon I was making enough to get a car. Not long after that, driving drunk, I ran a red light and smacked into another car, wrecking my ’49 Ford. Even worse, I injured the people in the other car—two Hungarian freedom fighters, recent arrivals from Budapest. I was arrested. The judge, who was of Japanese descent, gave me a lecture about being too young to drink. I had no choice but to listen, but it was obvious that the judge didn’t know a thing about being an Indian in a big city. Too young to drink? None of my friends thought so, and neither did I. I was sentenced to ten days in jail, so I called LaVerne and asked him to tell the boss I had quit. When I got out of jail, in December 1959, I went back on unemployment.
As Christmas approached, I put on one of my suits and caught a Greyhound to Vallejo to visit my mother. I spruced up at the bus station, then got a taxi. When I walked in, there was Dace, just as I had hoped. He looked me over in my suit and tie and seemed very happy for me. As far as he knew, I had flown the nest and become successful. What he thought of his big brother was important to me then.
After Christmas vacation, I borrowed my parents’ new car and went back to San Leandro High. Two years had passed since I had graduated, and I wanted to see Mrs. Levine again. More, I wanted her to see me. I walked in wearing my best suit, really shining. A thin black fuzz decorated my upper lip, and my naturally wavy hair was combed straight back. Mrs. Levine, who had recently had a baby, was taking some time off. I was very disappointed. I got a six-pack of beer and went to see Alan Michaels. We went into his backyard, where he rolled a joint and offered me a hit, but I said no. I drank beer while he toked up. Then we went over to Sam Sjoquist’s apartment. He was the guy who had introduced us to heroin, and he was still a big-time dealer. Alan, who had several joints with him, bought a bunch of pills. We were planning to go out for the evening, so I said, “Why don’t you just leave all this stuff here while we go out?” Sam and his partner said, “Good idea, you never know what could happen.” Alan and I climbed into my parents’ car and took off. We didn’t get fifty feet. Five cop cars screamed up to block the street, surrounding us. Following orders, we put up our hands, got out, and assumed the “position,” with arms outstretched against the car. The San Leandro Police captain who had threatened me during the party drug raid a year earlier came up. He said, “I said we were going to get you, didn’t I?”
The police searched us very thoroughly. They ripped open my pack of Lucky Strikes, made us empty our pockets—and found nothing. They tore up the car, deflating the spare tire, removing seats, hubcaps, and door panels, ransacking the trunk. They went under the hood to tear out the sidewalls, back wall and fire wall. There were no drugs at all, of course, so they finally gave up and took off, leaving behind the horrible mess that had been a car. Fortunately, Sam Sjoquist and his guys, who had been watching, lent us a car for the night and hired someone to put my mother’s car back together. She never found out about the destruction.
If the cops hadn’t totally ruined my day, they made me wonder why they went after Alan and me but hadn’t busted Sjoquist’s place, where they could have gotten all of us. I concluded that Sam or one of his guys must have set us up, because the police had rolled up dead sure that they had nailed us.
I later learned from Alan that a year earlier—just a week after I had impulsively jumped into Mom’s car to go to Los Angeles for the holidays—the biggest drug bust in northern California history up to that time had gone down. Police had arrested the mysterious San Jose Mexican who had provided me with weed. They busted everybody I knew in the dope world, including Alan Michaels. They took in dozens of people I didn’t know, including low riders, Hell’s Angels, the white dealers we called pill poppers, and dope dealers from six other counties. Alan had gotten out of jail just a few days before I returned, and so had Sam Sjoquist. I had been incredibly lucky—or at least I thought so then. Now I know the Great Mystery had other plans for me, and they didn’t include going to prison on a narcotics rap.