8
Fatherhood and the “Hustle”
Early in the new year, 1960, I returned to Southern California and found an assembly-line job at a paint factory in south-central Los Angeles. It was terrible work, shoving empty gallon cans under the spigot of an enormous cast-iron vat that moved up and down the line on pulleys. Paint spilled if a can was a split second too late, but that line never stopped. I was very happy when I was laid off.
For a while, I collected unemployment. Then, talking to more and more Indians, I got the full scoop on relocation. One of the things I learned was that among the entitlements for those under a certain age was a job-training program that paid a living stipend plus tuition and books at a vocational school. I talked it over with Bos Harden, who was also out of work. We decided to go to our home reservations, apply for relocation to Los Angeles, and, when we returned, go to school.
I had only enough money for a train ticket to Las Vegas. From the station, I strolled over to the old Mint Casino downtown. Hoping to get lucky, I fed my entire fortune—sixteen cents—to a penny slot machine. Totally broke, I walked east out of town—and then I caught a break. An older Sioux, driving his wife and family back to South Dakota, offered me a ride. He fed me and took me all the way to Laramie, Wyoming, where I stopped to see my dad’s twin, Uncle Johnny. While I was there, Pops called to say hello to his brother. Dad was heading for South Dakota and had planned to take a shortcut via Casper, Wyoming. He said he’d change plans and come through Laramie to pick me up.
He was taking my twin brothers, Ted and Bill, to South Dakota. Despite her own experiences, Mom had decided that whatever might happen to them in a boarding school would have to be better than what had happened to me in a California high school. As far as she was concerned, I had headed down the wrong road and become a crook. She enrolled my brothers in the seventh grade at Bishop Hare Episcopal School in Mission, a white town on the Rosebud Reservation, east of Pine Ridge.
I told Pops I was heading back to South Dakota to get into the relocation program. He told me that Alvin Zephier, a distant relative who had been among my parents’ closest friends during the first year after their marriage, ran the relocation program for the BIA at Pine Ridge.
I got to Uncle Johnsy Means’s house just as the agency whistle blew, marking five o’clock, the end of the workday. Five minutes later Johnsy came home, washed his hands, and asked me to join him and his family for supper. Although he was actually my father’s distant cousin, I called him uncle because he was my father’s age. After I explained why I had come to Pine Ridge, Johnsy invited me to stay with his family until I could get on relocation. Uncle Johnsy and his wife were upstanding, relatively affluent people who had made careers working for the BIA.
The next day, I went over to the BIA to see Alvin Zephier, who had remained a good friend of my parents’. Even knowing that I had just come from Los Angeles, he promised to make sure I was accepted into the program and sent back there. He was doing me a big favor, because in those years, relocation applicants ostensibly were limited to three preferences among seven cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Saint Louis, Dallas, and Cleveland. Rather than just send people where they wanted to go, the BIA established quotas for each city. Many Lakota preferred Denver, which was closest to the reservations, but it seemed that the quota was always filled. In general, most people were lucky if they ended up with their third choice, unless they were willing to wait—sometimes years—until the quota for a particular city opened up.
Zephier cut through all the white tape and made arrangements to get me into Los Angeles, although he said it would be more than three months before I could leave. I came to know Pine Ridge Village—then and now a depressing place. The few government buildings there seem modern, but only when compared with the rest of the reservation, where everything else is fourth-rate or worse. The housing is abominable. The town itself, besides being dry and dusty, reeks of dispirited people who have given up and accepted poverty as their lot. In 1960, nothing went on at Pine Ridge except for the work of the BIA. Even the Quakers, once a vigorous presence on the reservation, had abandoned Pine Ridge because they could see quite plainly that Christianity wasn’t working for the Indians. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but now I wish the rest of the churches would join the Quakers and acknowledge that Christianity serves only to further colonize Indians and rob us of dignity and self-worth. The missionaries are not likely to leave us, however. Although they came to us preaching about the meek inheriting the earth, churches have systematically taken over portions of our land. Now they hold tide to much reservation acreage.
Coming from the restless energy of Los Angeles to the easygoing people of Pine Ridge was a big adjustment for me. There was no place to meet people my age except a local cafe, and I had to know someone before I was allowed to hang out there. I loitered at the busy intersection near the BIA offices, where people parked their cars or walked by to the BIA or the tribal government office. I hung around that corner all day for weeks, standing around with nothing to do and no one to talk to, until I met a woman I had known in Los Angeles. After finishing secretarial training there, she had got a job with the South Dakota Department of Welfare, which provided assistance to unwed mothers. I told her I was trying to meet people but didn’t know where to go. She introduced me to some young men who took me to Whiteclay, an infamous village of bars and liquor stores two miles south of the state line, in Nebraska.
Then and now, it is illegal to possess alcoholic beverages on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Then and now, the BIA looked the other way at its own employees, white or Indian, who drink in the privacy of their own homes. If the BIA police or the FBI caught anyone else with booze, they were arrested, tried in tribal court, and fined or jailed. That didn’t stop booze from entering the reservations, of course. There was money to be made in bootlegging, and people made it. Many bootleggers were highly situated BIA employees and tribal government officials, often aided and abetted by so-called law-enforcement types corrupted by easy money. In short, nothing much had changed since Feather Necklace’s time.
None of that was on my mind when I headed down to Whiteclay. The saloons and liquor stores were owned by whites who stayed out of sight and let Indians run things. I usually went to the Jumping Eagle Inn or to a bar across the street on Friday and Saturday nights, but stayed only until about nine. By then, I knew that wherever Indians drank, we ended up fighting among ourselves. I thought it was just part of life, a macho thing inevitable in a culture in which alcohol made people belligerent and nobody backed down.
After a few weeks, I made some friends. On weekends, I often hung out with Gabby Brewer, a tough guy who got in a lot of fights at Whiteclay, and with Pedro Bissonnette, only about sixteen years old, a very smart, very likable kid. Once I became part of their circle, I was pleased to learn that they didn’t argue or fight among themselves. Instead, we joked around and had fun. I didn’t drink very much. I never wanted to be gassed when I got back to Uncle Johnsy’s home, and I always tried to get back at a decent hour. Once I even decided to stay out all night because I was too high.
There is very little work on the reservation except for that provided by the BIA. Even most of the BIA jobs are dead ends, part-time or “temporary” positions, such as surveyor and mechanic jobs. The BIA hires people for six months, then lays them off for a day and hires them back for another six months. Pay is minimal, with no benefits, no possibility of advancement. No one can support a family on those wages, not even on a reservation. Yet the people who have those jobs are better off than most. That is why so many Indians today are economic refugees, no different than the Vietnamese boat people or the Mexicans who sneak across the border in search of decent jobs—but we are in our own country.
Nevertheless, as a twenty-year-old in Pine Ridge, I would have grabbed a dead-end BIA job in a Rapid City minute, if one had been available. None was, so rather than beg Uncle Johnsy for money, I scrounged around for work. Zephier steered me to a few people, all BIA employees. I cut their weeds and watered their lawns. I also did some farm work, throwing alfalfa bales up to a loft.
While at Pine Ridge, I found time to visit Eagle Butte, on the Cheyenne River Reservation. My new friends gave me a ride. I went to see Auntie Faith and Uncle Jockey—and Twila Smith. A week or so earlier, she had given birth to our baby, the prettiest little girl I ever saw, with curly black hair and creamy white skin, an infant version of Snow White. Until then, Twila and I had never seriously discussed marriage, and things were a little awkward between us. But we did agree to get in touch when we had returned to Los Angeles.
I had arrived at Pine Ridge in June, when the reservation was full of people. When school starts in September, almost everyone leaves and the village practically shuts down. Since I had been raised in a city, I found that autumn season even more depressing than summer, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. What I learned from my months at Pine Ridge was that contrary to what my parents had told me about their own generation’s reservation experiences, without a job and an extended family to fall back on, Pine Ridge was a discouraging place. When I left, I felt as though I were escaping from prison, and I swore I would never go back.
Just before departing in the first week in October 1960,1 suddenly came into some money—long-delayed unemployment checks totaling ninety-nine dollars, the payout on a claim I had filed in South Dakota against my California earnings. In addition, the BIA gave me twenty-four dollars for meals and expenses for the two nights I would spend on a train to Los Angeles. I had more than $120—worth about as much as a thousand dollars would be today.
Alvin Zephier drove me eighty miles to Alliance, Nebraska, the nearest place with a passenger rail station. I caught a rickety old train from there to Laramie, where I switched to a modern Zephyr that took me through Las Vegas to Los Angeles. It was a great ride, sitting in a domed lounge car and listening to the World Series on the radio. Bill Mazeroski, the Pirates’ second baseman, hit a home run to win the seventh game and the series. Along with everybody in the club car, I talked about it all the way to California.
When I got to Los Angeles, nobody from the BIA was there to meet me. If I had been a typical relocation Indian, ignorant of the city, I would have been totally lost, but I knew where the BIA office was on Broadway. I decided to walk there from Union Station, a half mile or so. Passing city hall, I saw a couple of my buddies lounging under a tree on the lawn. My pocket was full of money and it was a warm October afternoon, so I invited them to join me at the Columbine for a couple of pitchers of beer. Big Ruby from Oklahoma was tending bar. The customers included several other people I knew, and everyone seemed glad I was back—and doubly glad that I had cash.
It was five minutes to five when I got to the BIA office. The bureaucrats were enraged. It was Friday, and they were about to leave for the weekend—and I was going to make them stay late. They immediately threatened to send me back to the reservation. I would come to learn that BIA officials always threatened Indians with that. They were too ignorant to realize that after a few months in a big-city ghetto or barrio, many Indians were thinking to themselves, “Yeah, send me back.”
Those bureaucrats read me the riot act, and I played my role—dumb Indian. They were in such a hurry to fight the freeway home, drink beer, eat dinner, watch television, and yell at their kids that they didn’t look closely at my records. I never let them know that I had grown up urban and had been around that city making a living on my own for more than a year. Instead, I said, “You didn’t meet me. I got lost. Some Indians down on Main told me how to get here.”
That quieted them for a bit, and they said, “Okay, we won’t send you back.” Alvin Zephier had told me how much subsistence money I was entitled to—enough to sustain me for four weeks, even if they couldn’t find me a job or get me into school. I applied to Sawyer School of Business, but since I couldn’t start until the next term, the BIA was obliged to find me a job in the meantime. I let the officials know that I was aware of my entitlements, especially the cash. I also said I needed an alarm clock, work clothing, shoes, and everything else I could think of. A white BIA man took me to a hotel near Olympic and Figueroa—a real dive—and paid a week’s rent. There was a drugstore across the street where the guy could buy work clothes and a clock, but he wanted to go home. I said, “Just give me the cash. I’ll buy what I need.”
“You must bring in the receipts on Monday,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and took the money.
It was Friday night. I decided that the alarm clock and work clothes could wait, and I headed for the Irish Pup. At the bar, I ran into an old pal, Reynold Howe. He told me Twila and Sherry, our baby, had come to Los Angeles a few weeks earlier. They were living at 1515 South Figueroa, just down the hall from his apartment. I went over and walked in on Twila. She was ironing, and very surprised—but glad—to see me. A few minutes after I arrived, Twila’s door opened and in walked Bos Harden. He had been back in Los Angeles for a few weeks and was enrolled in an electronics school. He was already going with Twila’s roommate, a sweet Sioux girl whose name I no longer remember. With Bos was Randy White Shield, my partner from the Kirby Cat days. Randy had recently come into big money from an oil company’s settlement with his people in Oklahoma. He had lots of cash, and he had bought himself a ’59 Chevy.
Twila got a baby-sitter for Sherry, and we all went out and partied. We had a great time, ending up in Inglewood at the home of a Wisconsin Winnebago named Wally Funmaker, a good singer. The next night, along with Bos and Randy and their dates, Twila and I went to the Irish Pup and did the whole scene all over again. We took the girls home and went back on Sunday to pick up where we had left off. On Monday morning I said, “I’ve got to get to the BIA,” but someone said, “Have another drink before you go.” I partied through Monday and Tuesday. I partied for five days, and I spent most of my money.
By the time I sauntered into the BIA office at midmorning Wednesday, I had my story pretty well worked out. After signing in with the receptionist with my name, tribe, enrollment number, reservation, and reason for being there, I was assigned a counselor. He was a heavyset white guy in late middle age, outraged that I hadn’t shown up on Monday. He began by threatening to send me back to Pine Ridge.
I said, “Monday morning I did just what you said. I got on a bus at Olympic and Figueroa. I thought maybe it was the wrong bus, but I also thought maybe it was the right one. Before I knew it, I wound up in San Pedro. I didn’t know where I was, so I asked the driver and he told me it was the end of the line. I asked him how to get back to Los Angeles, and he said to go over there and catch bus number such-and-such, so I did, but it took me to Huntington Beach. Then they told me I had to transfer, but I’d forgotten to get one. I asked directions again and took another bus and by the time I got back here on Monday, it was too late to come in.
“Then I met some friends who told me my girlfriend and my daughter were here. I went to see them yesterday, because I thought that fatherhood was more important than coming here.”
The man asked, “Who is your girlfriend?” and wrote down Twila’s name. He bought my story and didn’t send me home. Then he asked, “Where are the receipts for the alarm clock and work clothes?” Still playing the dumb Indian, I said I had had them in my back pocket, but I was pulling out my wallet and getting on and off those buses so often that those receipts must have fallen out.
I could see that this had pissed him off, but all he said was, “Do you have an alarm clock?” I said, “Yes, sure.” Then a huge fat woman came into the office to teach me how to live in Los Angeles. She began with a telephone. She grabbed my right hand and shoved my index finger into the dial of a rotary phone and “taught” me how to dial. She told me about prefixes and made me practice dialing. I was thinking that those had to be the stupidest people I had ever met, but that was my first experience with government bureaucrats. In later years, I would come to learn that they all seem like that, all the way up to White House secretaries. While the fat lady was gripping my hand and showing me how to dial, I looked at her and the counselor. With all the sincerity I could muster, I said, “What will they think of next?”
My sarcasm went unnoticed, so the fat lady gave me timetables and route maps and told me about bus transfers. In those days before the oil companies and carmakers got the state to pave everything, Los Angeles had a public transportation grid of trolleys and electric buses. With transfers, you could go practically anywhere in Los Angeles County for a dime.
Then the BIA man asked me what kind of work I wanted. I said, “I want a white-collar job, like I had before I left.” That set him back on his heels. “You’ve got to take what we can give you,” he said. “Fine, as long as it’s a white-collar job,” I said. “That’s what I told Mr. Alvin Zephier at Pine Ridge, and he promised me that if I came to Los Angeles, before I enrolled in school, the BIA would find me a white-collar job.” I wanted an office position because I had decided I was going to a business school to become an accountant. I wanted to get rich, and the way I figured it, the fastest way was to learn all I could about money.
After the BLA’s four weeks of subsistence ran out, Indians were supposed to be working or in school. Since school was out for me until the spring semester, I went to the BIA office every morning to inquire about a job. Every morning, that is, except Mondays and Fridays. The BIA people gave me a lot of flak about that, repeatedly threatening to send me back to Pine Ridge. I kept giving them excuses, mostly that I was playing dutiful father to Sherry. In fact, that was bullshit, although I was seeing Twila regularly. The BIA couldn’t find me a white-collar job, and the end of the four weeks was coming up.
I moved from the flophouse hotel where I had been planted into somewhat nicer digs at 1515 South Figueroa, where I became Reynold Flowe’s roommate. Bos Harden also took a room there. Twila moved into an apartment near Union and Third, in the MacArthur Park area.
I wanted a job, but the BIA couldn’t get me one. Finally a petty bureaucrat told me, “Until we can find you a white-collar position, you’ll have to take a temporary job.” I went to Los Angeles Street to load and unload freight cars in 90-degree heat. When I got my paycheck that Friday, the supervisor said, “See you Monday.” It was too late to go to the BIA office, so I returned to work on Monday, worked another week, and got another paycheck. When the supervisor said, “See you next week,” I said, “I quit.” On Monday, I told my BIA counselor. He said, “What? You can’t quit! You’ve got to learn to be responsible, dependable. You can’t be an Indian. This isn’t the reservation.” He threatened again to send me back.
I said, “You told me this was a temporary job, but after two weeks it didn’t look temporary to me.”
After another week went by and the BIA couldn’t find me a white-collar job, the guy was desperate. My allocation had expired. He told me I had to take another temporary job, at a small company that made aircraft parts. I became a janitor, cleaning offices at 6:00 A.M., then going into the machine shops to sweep up. After two weeks, I decided that didn’t look much like a temporary job either. But that time, when I quit, I didn’t go back to the BIA. I decided to find my own job. Bos was working at the data-processing headquarters for Carte Blanche, the credit-card company owned by Barron Hilton. Bos told me about an opening for a sorting-machine operator in data processing. I arrived for an interview to find that more than a dozen people, mostly young men, had applied for the job. When people filled out applications in those days, they were asked to give their race—but there was never a box for American Indians. We were always told to mark “other,” but I refused to do that. Instead, I always wrote in big letters, “AMERICAN INDIAN SIOUX.” That’s what I did that time, too.
After giving my application to the receptionist, I sat down to wait. Suddenly my name was called, way out of turn. When I entered the data-processing supervisor’s office, he rose from his chair, shook my hand, and greeted me in Lakota. I replied in kind. He was from the Lower Brule Reservation in South Dakota, son of a Lakota woman and a white man. We chatted a few minutes about people we both knew, and then he said, “You can go home now. You’ve got the job.”
My task was to operate a sorting machine. I took punched cards, generated by accounting machines, and put them through the sorter. There was only one sorter and it was the fastest machine in that department, so I soon found myself way ahead of the accounting-machine operators. To keep my sorter running, I began to help the operators—but even so, I was always far ahead. I took cards from the sorter to a collating machine and taught myself to run it. After the collator, the cards had to go through yet another machine, and I learned how to operate it, too. Soon I knew every machine in the department, and at times, most days, I ran all of them by myself.
In short order, I had made myself practically indispensable in data processing—just as my dad had done with his welding at the naval shipyards. The supervisor liked me and understood where I was coming from, and almost anyone he might hire to take my place would know only how to run the sorter. I learned that I could often arrive late or call in sick on Mondays with no fear of getting fired.
In June 1961, I was notified of my acceptance by Sawyer School of Business. My boss arranged for me to be laid off so I could collect unemployment during the summer before school began. In September, I started accounting classes in downtown Los Angeles, the only Indian in a class of fourteen. A few weeks later, I was sitting in the Irish Pup with Don Lone Wolf, Randy White Shield, and a bunch of other guys, drinking, laughing, and having fun. At the next table, with his girlfriend, was a big, quiet Oklahoma Comanche who had been a boxing champion. Neither one drank. They usually just sat around, danced occasionally with each other, and left at about midnight. Suddenly the guy leaned forward and said, “You really think you’re smart, don’t you? I’d fight you if you didn’t have all your buddies.”
I don’t know why that Comanche was pissed, but back then, I got in many fights in just that way. Maybe people didn’t like me because I was having too much fun. I said, “Let’s go outside.” That was booze talking. I’d already drank enough to feel good—no matter that he was much bigger than me.
“You won’t bring your buddies?” said the Comanche.
“I won’t even tell them. It’s just you and me.”
We went into the alley. He was a boxer, so I tried to box him. Boom! He hit me with a jab, then boom, boom, a combination. It dawned on me that he was a good boxer. I abandoned the Marquis of Queensberry rules and switched to the old reservation windmill, both arms flailing punches. Down he went, pulling me over. My left elbow smashed into the asphalt, but I was too drunk to feel much. I jumped on top and was about to whale away on his face when he said, “No fair hitting when you’re down.”
That stunned me. I stopped in mid-punch, not quite believing an adult male would say such a thing. I hadn’t heard that line since grade school. I just stared at him. As I tried to clench my left fist to hit him, I found that my arm was a rag from the elbow down. He hadn’t realized I was hurt, so I said, “I’ll let you go.” I got up, turned around, and very deliberately walked back to the street, tucking my left hand into my pocket. I hoped he wouldn’t notice that I was crippled and wouldn’t try to get revenge by jumping me from behind. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but I walked on, never looking back until I was around the corner. He didn’t come after me, and I never saw him again.
I went back into the Pup, told my friends what had happened, and they took me to a hospital emergency room. I went under general anesthesia while a surgeon cut into my shattered elbow. When I left the hospital, it was in a cast. When the cast was taken off, my elbow would open only about ninety degrees to an L shape. My hand remained paralyzed, the fingers closed and thumb sticking out. The doctor said the damage was permanent. My left arm would be that way for the rest of my life, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Soon after that, I got a draft notice. I went back to the orthopedist for a letter that said I was permanently disabled. After an Army doctor read that letter, he made permanent my earlier 4-F classification—unfit for military service. It was probably the best thing that happened to me in my whole life, because my arm and hand were not destined to remain as they were. Every morning, I walked from my apartment in the MacArthur Park area down Sixth Street to Union Square and then a few blocks to Sawyer School. Every morning, I used my good right hand to force open my crippled left and stick a big, thick accounting book and an equally heavy tax book between my fingers. It hurt, but I walked all the way to school like that. Later I walked back home with the books in the same position. In between, whenever I was sitting down, I took my left hand and put it on my knee, forced the fingers open and the thumb over until it was gripping my knee. In that way I kept the fingers and thumb apart for hours.
After several weeks, I noticed that my left arm could open a little farther under the weight of those books. With a few months of continued “book therapy,” the arm was nearly normal. I regained much of the use of my fingers. Today, although my arm still doesn’t open completely and my left hand doesn’t work quite as well as the right, they look normal. During the years since all that happened, I’ve thought about the sequence of events many times. I’m convinced that all of it—the unlikely back-alley brawl with a previously peaceable man, the freak accident that crippled my arm, the draft notice and my subsequent 4-F status, my extraordinary recovery—shows the deliberate hand of the Great Mystery.
Again.
While I was in school and even before that, when I was working at Carte Blanche, I saw Twila frequently, often staying with her overnight. Soon after I quit my job, she told me she was pregnant again, with my child. I began to have the almost overwhelming feeling that Twila, Sherry, and the baby, soon to come, were my responsibility, that I had to claim my children and take care of them. I’m sure those feelings came from ideas and values implanted by my mother, who had always pushed me to take responsibility for my acts.
One autumn day, during the time when my elbow and hand were slowly recovering, I went to the apartment Twila shared with another young woman and asked to talk to her. We went into her bedroom and sat on the bed. Without preamble, I said, “Do you want to get married?” Twila was stunned, absolutely speechless. When, after several seconds, she didn’t answer, I said, “Do you want to get married? Yes or no?”
“Of course,” she said, big with a six-month fetus but glowing with joy. I’ve never seen anybody that happy in my life. While she ran to tell her roommate, I called my folks in Vallejo. Twila and I decided to get married on my twenty-second birthday, November 10, because it was the only time my folks could make it down. Within a few days, we got our marriage license and blood tests and went to city hall. The wedding was over so quickly and with so little ceremony that it hardly seemed that we were married. I was a little upset because for some reason my mother had excluded my dad from the wedding, forcing him to stay behind at Twila’s apartment.
After the wedding, Twila and I took a little apartment on Union Street. She was working as a secretary. I was getting seventy dollars a month from the BIA while I was in school. It was barely enough to live on. Then a month before Twila was to give birth, she had to quit her job. Making ends meet was very tough.
I was at a Saturday-night Indian dance in Inglewood on February 4, 1962, when someone called to say Twila had gone into labor at Queen of Angels Hospital. Bus and trolley service was very spotty after midnight and I had no car, so it was the next morning before I made it over to see my son. We named him Walter, after my father, and Dale, after my brother. Naturally, he is always called Hank, just like Pops.
I know now that our marriage was doomed from the start. Twila and I both tried to make it work, but I was too young and ignorant, far too immature to be a husband, let alone a father. When I began to hate myself too much to bear it, I went out and got so drunk I didn’t have to think. Within weeks of Hank’s birth, my relationship with Twila had deteriorated to the point that we seemed more like roommates than a married couple. On Friday nights, I would ask Twila, “Where are you going this weekend?” She would tell me, then ask, “Where are you going?” We tried to avoid each other when we went out. After a few months of that, I moved out, and we just broke it off. I was very disappointed in myself, in my failure as a husband, but all I had to do to forget about it was to party—something I was very good at. When I wasn’t drinking, I blamed myself for the breakup, feeling that I was probably the worst guy in the world. I can’t say now that I was a good, guy, but with hindsight, I now know that beyond mere immaturity, I had no idea of how to go about building a lasting relationship. I hated myself, hated what I was doing with my life and the many ways I had failed to measure up to my mother’s high standards and my own aspirations. I was filled with a fierce anger. I could contain it when I was sober, but my rage emerged when I drank. My constant brawling was an outlet, but punching someone out or getting beaten up myself did nothing to deal with the source of my anger.
As much as I partied, I was very responsible about attending school, more so than my classmates, many of whom never returned after Christmas vacation. One by one, the others dropped out. By late February or early March, I was the last of the accounting students. At that point, the instructors gave me reading assignments and take-home tests, which I read on my own. I made a little money playing chess in Union Square, I hustled suckers around barroom pool tables, and I looked for other scams to make cash.
Sometimes on Wednesday nights, when no one I knew would show up at the Pup, I went with a Chicana prostitute and pickpocket who worked the bars. I sat in a booth with my schoolbooks and a glass of draft beer. She was in the next booth hustling some old guy. While he fondled her thigh and kissed her, she slipped out his wallet and threw it to me. I would leave and meet her later. For prostitutes or B-girls to hang around a bar, they have to cut in the establishment—if they aren’t outright hired by it—so we had to give the bartender a cut before we split our share.
It was a matter of survival for me, but I remember asking the Chicana, “How can you do this—live this way?” She explained that she had a daughter in elementary school. “I’ve got to clothe and feed my girl,” she said. “I do what I must. These men work, and if they want to put their hands all over me, they have to pay for it. I’ll make sure they do.”
Thirty-odd years ago, when I was a bum, I could live with myself for having teamed up with a desperate Chicana pickpocket. It wasn’t pretty, however, when I rolled someone flashing a wad. I would usually get two pals, wait until the guy walked into the bathroom, then hit him very hard and quick so he wouldn’t yell or put up a fight. We would take his money and run. I never carried a weapon. I recalled that once after my dad had gotten rolled, his wallet came back in the mail, so I always dropped my victim’s wallet in a mailbox.
All the time I was hustling, I continued to do my schoolwork and I aced all my tests, because I loved accounting. I loved the freshly sharpened Number Three lead pencils, the twelve-column work sheets, debits and credits, amortization, profit and loss, financial statements. I loved gathering, disseminating, and analyzing information, and the final product. I loved it all. It came easy for me, even though we had no calculators or adding machines, much less a computer—everything was in the head and hand. It’s kind of sad to see all that go by the boards. Today there are people calling themselves accountants who don’t know a debit from a credit and can’t even add. God help them if the computer breaks down!
Aside from the tests and the few times when I needed help or counseling, I never went to the school. The teachers wouldn’t come in for just one student, so there was no point in my showing up. When I got my grades, they were straight A’s. My BIA counselor had promised that after I completed a year of training in accounting, I would get a three-month extension to take a computer course. Just before the school year ended, one of the BIA people learned I was the only one in the class and there was no attendance record on me. He called me in to find out why I hadn’t been going to school. I explained that all the other students had dropped out and there was no class to go to, but I had done all the work and had made top grades. The bureaucrat wasn’t impressed. He said, “These people want our money, so they’ll make sure you pass.”
“That might be true,” I said, “but I earned those A’s.” You can’t finesse an accounting exam. If the numbers don’t total, you’re wrong and you fail. The counselor said, “Too bad we didn’t catch this earlier. We’d have kicked you out of school for not going by the regulations. You must go to class every day—that’s the rule.”
With hindsight, it seems possible that if I hadn’t asserted my rights during the previous eighteen months and demanded my entitlements from officials at every opportunity; if I hadn’t taken every opportunity to jerk around and manipulate those BIA drones; if I had played the compliant, grateful Indian instead of the dumb Indian, those particular bureaucrats might not have insisted on enforcing the fine print. On the other hand, the BIA was then, and is now, overwhelmingly staffed by lazy, mindless people. They usually regard Indians as no more than annoyances who interfere with coffee breaks, lunch hours, and quitting time. Whenever they can enforce a rule that saves themselves work, they will. Moreover, behaving toward the BIA in other than the way I had was not in my nature then and is not in my nature now.
I attempted to reason with the BIA counselor, but it was like talking to a slow-brained prison guard. I was furious. Here was this program, devised by white planners in Washington and funded by Congress in good faith, and its objective was to get Indians off reservations and train them to enter the mainstream of American society. Yet a paunchy, balding, beet-red-necked, fifty-something asshole who wouldn’t look me in the eye ignored my grades because he wanted to enforce a regulation so he could knock an Indian out of training. That was his chance to make sure I would be a failure.
Infuriated, I asked to see his boss. He refused to call him, but he brought in all his peers, everybody in the office. They wouldn’t budge. I hadn’t gone to school every day, so I didn’t deserve any more training. I was out of the program, and my support stipend was terminated in June 1962. I looked for a job at which I could use my new accounting skills, but found nothing. After splitting up with Twila, I had lived with friends. Several of us had gotten together and rented a succession of cheap apartments. When my subsistence was cut off, I became homeless. I could have stayed with any of my friends, but I couldn’t pay my fair share, and pride prevented me from imposing on them. I also refused to call my mother for help. I decided that since I had gotten myself into this, I would get myself out.
In those days, the homeless were called bums and treated accordingly. Many a night, I slept under cardboard or at a construction site, getting up early so the workers wouldn’t find me. I spent my days trying to hustle enough money to get drunk, eat once in a while, and have fifty cents in my pocket when the bars closed at 2:00 A.M. Then I would go to an all-night theater. I learned certain ways to feel almost comfortable, resting my knees on one seat, my body on another, and my feet on a third. There was a trick to knowing how to lie there. After several nights, I learned it and got some sleep. At five in the morning, the management kicked all the bums out. I would go to a doughnut shop near Third and Main and get a cup of coffee and a doughnut for six cents. At six, the skid-row bars opened, and I started my hustle all over again. On Wednesday nights, a band played at the Irish Pup, and people I knew usually came around. Most of them would buy me a drink or something to eat. On weekends and once in a great while during the week, there would be a party, and I would be invited along. I would eat, drink, and sleep on someone’s sofa or the floor. Sometimes I would go home with a woman. It wasn’t that bad a life in some ways, but it was hell being without money.
Even so, I had some good times. Not long after school was out, I got my hands on a ’49 Ford convertible. I cruised around in that baby, pretending that beat-up old white car was a Cadillac. One weekend, a bunch of us crazy young guys got together and drove it to San Francisco and partied there. I met a tall, beautiful girl with sharp features, a Hopi named Betty Sinquah. She was on the relocation program, working as a secretary for a big insurance company and living with two or three other girls. I was very attracted to her, but I lived in Los Angeles, and I couldn’t imagine that I would ever see her again.
After returning to Los Angeles, I had little time to focus on romance. I was preoccupied with survival. There was an art to living on the street because the cops watched for what they called vagrants. You couldn’t remain homeless in those days. If you were convicted of having no fixed residence, they put you in jail for ten days or more. Around skid row, the LAPD staged the dragnets they became famous for in the 1950s and 1960s. They picked up everybody on the streets, among them people with unpaid traffic or parking tickets, those who had jumped bail or were wanted on arrest warrants, and sometimes felons who had fled other states. They filled the jail for the weekend. On Monday, everyone went before a judge. I wasn’t wanted for a felony or a parking ticket, so when I got picked up for “public drunkenness,” I would be out on Monday morning. I was picked up about two dozen times in the three and a half years I was in Los Angeles. After I became homeless, however, I quickly became more streetwise and rarely got caught in a dragnet.
Besides hustling around barroom pool tables, I gambled on the bowling machines that were in most neighborhood saloons then. I learned that more entered into the process than the score. I had to become an amateur psychologist, learning to sense when my opponent was so far out of pocket that he would quit if he lost another game. Then I would let him win one. The dynamics of the room, including the spectators, came into play—who was rooting for me, who wanted me to lose. Sometimes it was peculiar to see a bunch of Indians—my best friends—all rooting for the white guy I was playing against. They all had their side bets, their own little hustles, and there was no telling what kind of odds they had parlayed for themselves. All that happened kind of slick and low-key, off to the side, while I worked some guy, trying to take him for all the money in his pocket. Sometimes I got outhustled. Other times, I couldn’t find anyone to play for money, but I could take him for a few drinks.
Hustling pool and bowling machines wasn’t bringing in enough, so I got in with some guys who went around to liquor stores and markets with a shortchange scam. We cased stores until we found one where the cashier didn’t put large bills on top of the register while he made change—he put them in the cash drawer immediately. After we knew that was the normal way of handling bills in that store, my partner would take a twenty-dollar bill, write a phone number on it, and go into the store. He would buy some gum—it cost a nickel in those days—take the change, and leave. I went in immediately to buy another pack of gum, and paid with a dollar. When the cashier made change, I would say, “Hey, wait, I gave you twenty dollars.” He would usually say, “No, you gave me one dollar.”
“No, no, it was a twenty. There was a phone number on it.”
Then I would recite the phone number, and of course the top twenty-dollar bill in the register had that number written on it because my partner had given it to the cashier just before I came in. The clerk would usually apologize and give me $19.95. Just like that, we had doubled our money! I worked that scam over and over. There were lots of stores in Los Angeles, and in those days none had registers tied to computers that make you punch in the amount tendered before it makes change.
Once in a while one of my hustles paid off big, but whenever I got cashy, I turned into my dad—like Santa Claus, I would give my money away until it was gone. I’m still like that. Maybe I’m trying to make amends for all the things I did wrong when I was younger.
Another favorite scam, which I usually worked with Randy White Shield, was on a cafeteria. After we had sold our blood for four dollars a pint, we were ravenously hungry. Usually we’d had nothing to eat but raisins the day before. We went to a cafeteria like Clifton’s, where people paid on the way out. Randy would go first and load up a tray with maybe twelve dollars’ worth of food—chicken, meat loaf, baked potatoes and yams, whatever—about what fifty dollars would buy now. At the end of the food line, he got a ticket with that total, went to a table, and started eating. Then I’d come in, carrying a newspaper, and get a cup of coffee. I’d engage the woman at the cash register in a conversation. She was usually a Mexican or a black, so I’d ask if she was part Indian, and I’d say something like, “Are you sure I get free refills?” In this way she’d remember that I’d bought only coffee. Then I went to the table where Randy was eating, opened my newspaper, and started reading. When Randy had finished eating, he took out doggie bags for the leftovers, put them in a sack he’d brought with him, picked up my meal ticket and left, paying a dime. Meanwhile, I read and drank coffee, got a refill and drank it. Five minutes after Randy left, I’d pick up his ticket and give it to the cashier. I’d say, “Hey, what is this? What happened here?” Of course she would vouch that I had only a cup of coffee. Sometimes I’d say, “That guy must have switched receipts on me! He snookered you!” I’d pay a dime and leave. Then I’d meet Randy and we’d go to another cafeteria where I ate while he drank coffee.
I was homeless for only a few months, but I came to know skid row’s secret world in the most intimate ways. Yet in my head I was never a permanent resident. Unlike most other bums, I still had hope. I knew people with money, people who would have cheerfully given me whatever they had with never a thought of repayment. I concealed my situation from family and friends out of pride. If they had known I was on the streets, many would have insisted that I stay with them. I made sure I was always clean, washing at the bus terminal. A friend let me store my luggage in his basement, and there I changed clothes or picked up clean shirts and underwear. I drifted through my skid-row, don’t-give-a-damn days, knowing I would finish my education someday. I was in no hurry, not bothered that I didn’t have a goal for next December—or for next week. Someday, I knew, I would do my four years in college and start on my life in a cozy house with a picket fence.
As the months went by, however, I began to realize that I didn’t like my life. I tried to make myself think it was no big deal, but the lower I felt, the more I drank and partied to cover up my depression. Eventually I acknowledged to myself that I was a bum, and that station in life was my own responsibility.
Then one night I walked into the Irish Pup to find a letter addressed to me from the County of Los Angeles. The subject was child support for my two children. Twila, who was having a rough time financially, had filed for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and that had sent the authorities after me. I had no prospects for a job. I couldn’t support myself, let alone two children, so I decided it was time to leave Los Angeles.
All my possessions fit into three small suitcases and a hanging bag. Randy White Shield gave me a ride to the far end of the San Fernando Valley and dropped me on Highway 99, which leads north over the Tehachapi Mountains. Bos Harden came along for the ride. He had only a dollar, but insisted that I take it. Randy used his last money to buy gas, but he had half a pack of cigarettes, Parliaments. He gave them to me. We shook hands and said good-bye. I arranged my bags by the road so an oncoming driver couldn’t see that there were so many and stood there, hoping someone would give me a ride north.