Bozeman, Montana, Fall Quarter 1977.
It’s been two months since Mom lay on her bed in our apartment, contemplating how close she’d come to dying. But summer is coming to an end, and Montana State University is about to begin. I’d packed the blue luggage and the bright blue trunk she’d given me as graduation presents, ready for my airline flight early the next morning. We speak little as she drives me to the airport, three miles from our home. She walks me to my gate, and as my flight is called, she hugs me, her hands shaking against my back. Although she turns quickly to walk away, I am aware of the tears that stream down her face. Within a half hour I am on the way to Bozeman, Montana, having gained last-minute admittance to Montana State University. MSU is only 150 miles away, but Mom’s self-described nervous breakdown had robbed her of any sense of confidence that she could drive there and back.
A friend picks me up and drives me to the new apartment that I’ll be sharing with my roommate, Collette, five years my senior. It’s a two-bedroom space located just two blocks off campus. It takes me only a few hours to move in, and the end result is stark: my room is white, devoid of everything except a window, a twin bed, and a thirty-dollar unpainted white pine dresser that I’d purchased an hour earlier from Kmart. The living room has the basics, but it is brilliantly clean, having been built only a month before.
After getting settled in, I walk to the dorms and watch the students move in, their parents, the ones who drove them perhaps thousands of miles, hauling box after box of clothing, rolled up posters, lamps, chairs, cheerful bedding, everything to make their dorm room like home. I catch the lump in my throat that my family wasn’t able to do that, and I feel another layer of difference.
I am uncomfortably aware of my role as a statistic: I am American Indian; I am from a “broken home”; one of my parents was an alcoholic; and one of my parents had mental-health issues. I am outside the norm in that I am going to college. But I no longer dream of going to Oregon State University and becoming a marine biologist. That dream went out like one of Dad’s match flames. Because of the divorce, Dad had rescinded his offer to pay for college, arguing that now that he had his own bills to pay, he can’t afford to. Now I am major-less, and I have no idea what else I will do. I have no plan B.
My nonmajor is being paid with my Individual Indian Monies. What I don’t know, because no one has told me, is that I could be doing this degree for free, according to treaty agreements signed in Montana. By the time I am told this, three years later, I will have become so assimilated in the dominant, Indian-intolerant culture that I will have too much “pride” to apply for “charity.” Too many people have reminded me that Indians are government subsidized. Those same people have forgotten about the blood that has soaked into the plains, the hundreds of millions of acres of land that tribes were forced to sign over, the goodwill gestures that never got delivered: the food, the clothing, the housing, the respect. But for now I don’t know these things. And even if I did, I would never be confident enough to state them publicly. For now I know only that I have some tribal money and no direction.
Collette, my roommate, is in her last year of architecture. She is freckle-faced, pale, with strawberry blond hair and green eyes. She is also linearly brilliant, focused, and self-confident. I imagine she probably acted like a grown-up since she was five. Her frustration at my immaturity is audible, her questions asked in a lispy, judgmental tone. “What time did you drag in? And who’d you bring with you?”
I should have said, “It’s none of your fucking business.” But I am the mouse caught in her feline gaze. Like the queen of hearts, she demands submission and I give it to her. Within a few weeks we actively avoid each other.
There are fifteen thousand students at MSU, and they wander like ants across campus, into and out of buildings, of classrooms. It is so easy to fall between the cracks, and I’ve become invisible in the falling. I don’t show up for class, and no one cares; maybe they aren’t even aware that I’m absent. I am uneasy and unprepared for this foreign and competitive environment. In high school I didn’t have to be competitive. My grades had been above average. I scored well in English, reading and writing voraciously; I scored badly in math. I inhaled my social studies and anthropology classes.
Anthropology, in particular, talked about other brown people who lived seemingly forgotten lives, but in modern-day times. As I moved through textbooks, watched videos, or looked at artwork, I saw living human beings. In a video about the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest, I watched as a man, dressed in a red loincloth, poled his boat up the Amazon River, his black hair cut blunt above his ears and eyebrows, a ring through his nose. A page in the book I purchased for my Introduction to Anthropology class showed a woman wrapped in brightly colored cloth, her neck elongated by gold rings, smiling at the camera, her hair tight against her scalp. Kodachrome made all the difference. These people weren’t living lives in shades of gray, forgotten, like in the black-and-white photos I was used to seeing, the ones that hung in history museums. Those photos showed people hunting with bows and arrows or sitting, unsmiling, in front of canvas tenting, clothed in their traditional dress of leather shirts and leggings with headdresses of eagle feathers, while blue-coated, mustached, and bearded soldiers stood nearby. Those people were history, long dead, nearly forgotten, except for this small window that collapsed time. But the color photos made the clear distinction between alive and dead, remembered and forgotten. Most important, when I looked at color photos, I was reminded of what I was: not white.
Although anthropology drew my attention, music drew my heart; that was where my talent lay. I had played violin in orchestra, sang second alto in choir, and tried out for background roles in musicals. Science, however, seemed the best path, if I were to follow Dad’s footsteps. It was a discipline I understood, especially biology; it had defined so much of my world growing up on wildlife refuges.
But here, at Montana State University, I am in a special level of hell. I’d never learned how to study. In high school I could scan the reading material quickly, but here my textbooks are written as if I’ve paid by the word, their fonts small and crammed together, filling sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters, and sections, marching endlessly before my eyes until they become blurred and nonsensical. Too many words place ideas high above my head, out of reach and vaporous, and I feel their concepts float away, unmoored and lifeless.
Parties are my saving grace; these I can understand. And there are tons of them: the prefootball parties, the football parties, the postfootball parties. And then basketball season will start. I join these parties, in the dorms, in people’s houses, and drink Rum and Cokes, 7 and 7s, peppermint schnapps, and straight shots of tequila chased with salt and lime and cheap beer. The more I party, the more lifeless the concepts become.
But then I don’t care about concepts, because I’ve found the bars. The disco bars with their migraine-producing concoctions of blaring music and flashing lights that shudder and dance beneath my feet. Or the cowboy bars, where I two-step or country swing to the twangy sounds of Waylon and Willie. These experiences, dark and smoky, are served up in equal parts frenetic energy and numbing alcohol and chased with more shots of tequila. All seem to wear away the sharp edges of living in a chaotic world where families disintegrate and people judge; the quiet kind of judgment, the no-dates-until-I-was-a-senior kind of judgment. I know mothers are uncomfortable with their sons dating American Indian girls. We’re seen as kind of trashy. And no matter how white I was raised, the color of my skin always seemed to warn that I could be one of those trashy girls. These were the pains I sought to numb, but I misjudged the medicine. It doesn’t completely take it away. In fact, it allows newer, sharper edges to be cut. So the dancing becomes frenzied, the shots are tossed back in increasing proportions, and the edges grow rawer. Here with the lights flaming into my vision, I don’t have to deal with Dad’s alcoholism or his anger that always boils just below the surface. In fact, I don’t have to deal with him at all. A toast!
Here with the drums pounding a tattoo in my chest, I don’t have to think about Mom or her undiagnosed bipolar antics (Dr. Haw had diagnosed her as having a fear psychosis) and her escape from reality, leaving me to experience the fallout. In fact, I don’t have to think about her at all. A toast!
Here, among the dozens of sweating bodies, eyes closed to let the music take me to my caves of unconsciousness, I don’t have to be an outsider. I am drinking and dancing with a crowd of people who don’t seem to care who or what I am. A toast!
Rebellion, angry and rapacious, rules my world. But unlike my friends who have experimented with this under the roofs of their parents, I have no safety net. There is no one to catch me when I fall, and the falling is dangerously self-destructive. I am no longer a “nice girl,” I no longer care about doing the “right thing,” and I throw off responsibility like a hair shirt that’s grown too small.
Because I just don’t care.
A toast!
The phone rings. There’s a party. It’s well underway when I arrive. I am handed a rum and coke and watch people drift in and out of the room the same way they seem to drift in and out of my life. I look at the guy sitting next to me, to my left, older, clean-cut in a preppy sort of way.
“Who is he?” I ask the person to my right.
“He’s the RA. It’s weird he’s here. He’s not supposed to be; he’s supposed to break the party up.” He throws me a lopsided, drunken smile and reignites the conversation with the girl sitting next to him.
Preppy looks at me, a smile leftover from the conversation he has just exited still on his lips. His eyes are blue, and I can tell, although he looks at me, directly looks at me, he doesn’t see me. In fact, I do not exist until I ask where he’s from. Then his smile crawls away, and he leans toward me, his gaze withering and sacrosanct. “Don’t talk to me,” he says quietly, for my ears only. “I hate Indians.”
I pass Fall quarter, barely.
At night, after the bars close, I walk. It is winter and the snow dances on the briefest of air currents, lifting itself high, threatening never to return to earth. The vapor from my breath escapes through my nose, crinkling the membranes that crack as if they are nearly frozen, and becomes a column beneath the conical light of the streetlamp. The breath disappears when I sidestep out of the light and into the cloaking darkness.
Tonight I am with Jon. He is engaged, but I’m not interested in his engagement. I’m interested in his warmth. We hold hands in his pocket, our fingers intertwined like a Celtic knot. For miles we walk on the sidewalks of town, the snow creaking beneath our boots. It is so cold our voices are muted, frozen in place while we talk about our high schools, our classes, the relationships we had or are trying to have, or the relationships we are leaving or trying to leave. We bury our chins deep into the down collars of our coats as we caution ourselves and each other about the invisible bumps that lie in the road ahead. The sky overhead is navy blue, almost black, broken only by the stars that shimmer like a million grains of glass that have been shattered on a velvet sky. We pull our hands apart and shove them deep in our own pockets, moving platonically in the easy companionship of lost souls in search of illumination.
Jon and I never go to the hot pots together, those hot springs located on the Gardiner River, just inside of Yellowstone National Park; he is engaged. So I go with other people. It doesn’t matter if I’ve known them for years or minutes. And we go only after midnight, most often after the bars close their doors. I catch a ride several times a month to those sacred pools that slough away the heavy weight of my world. We travel over Bozeman Pass, down through Paradise Valley, until we arrive at the forty-ninth parallel that intersects with the Gardiner River and the geothermally heated water it contains.
Standing in the thin veil of steam, I strip down as fast as possible to keep the frigid air from entering my ever-constricting pores. I alternately jump from one foot to the other as my feet freeze on the rock-hard soil. I cover my nakedness with thin arms as I pick my way carefully to an area that allows me to slide into the water. The intense heat opens my pores, now confused and tingling to the point of pain.
Soon a doobie is passed, held above the water as it makes the rounds, its sweet smoke inhaled and held in lungs already at capacity at nearly seven-thousand-feet elevation. As the stars become brighter and the world stops spinning, our talk becomes whispers carried away by the rushing water just a few feet away. A man screams; the spell is broken.
“You scream like a girl,” someone yells, and laughter erupts. Evidently a male has decided to prove his masculinity by swimming across the river, its frothy rapids ice cold. His movements are frantic and jagged in this narrow river, where the water runs fast. The night is split with the booming voice of another person: “I imagine his balls are up near his ribcage right now.” The roars of laughter eventually fall off as the man completes his mission, and the world slows down just a bit more.
I slide over to the lap of Andrew, unknown before this evening, and wrap my arms around his neck. I shut my eyes and savor in the joy of being held, of feeling someone’s arms around me, of skin touching skin, of connection.
As people drift away, their cars growling their departure in the predawn hours, Andrew and I stay. Maybe it is the dawn, maybe it is sleep deprivation, maybe it is the heat that has entered our bodies and changed the chemistry of how we see the world, like in an oversized sweat lodge. But what we see is magic, the Disney film kind of magic of a plant emerging from dark soil, and a flower unfolding from the slender stem. What we see is a dark-blue dawn quietly replacing the black-velvet night, and the seam, that boundary that separates land and sky, glowing gold in the rising sun. We watch as formless shapes come out of the darkness and take form, sagebrush, healthy and large, and deer grazing the trampled grass beneath the snow. The same happens for us, to us, as the veil of steam lifts, and suddenly there is no hiding place and our bodies become illuminated and visible. Self-conscious, we are efficient in our dressing, finding ways to give each other privacy, looking to the sky, the ground, in opposite directions. I shiver and suck the iced air, sharp and bitter, between my teeth, while my fingers, shriveled and clumsy, button my jeans and zip up my coat. I climb into Andrew’s red Mustang, knowing that when I get back I will have enough time to grab breakfast, catch a couple hours of sleep, and start all over again. I will also probably never see Andrew again.
I fail Winter quarter.
It is March, and I’ve taken a job at the student union, serving up lengths of a three-foot-long submarine sandwich, fifty cents an inch. This allows me, absent of alcohol or other substances, to watch the people around me, the people I come into contact with. To most people I’m on the edge of invisibility, just the girl who hands them their food. To me, their choices reveal much. There are the boys, young, typically good-looking, and clean-cut and dressed in nice shirts and jeans—the engineers; they order three or four inches. There are the typically blond sorority sisters, hair and makeup always in place; they order one to two inches, because they have to watch their figures. There are the jocks, taller and bigger than anyone else, bigger than life. If they’re together they jostle one another, calling attention to themselves, laughing loudly; if they are alone they are introverted, barely meeting my gaze. They always order six inches and up.
One day a man comes through, red haired, fine boned, a trimmed beard. His voice is soft yet defined. And he smiles. Every day he smiles at me, and he watches me the same way I’m watching everyone else, but more overtly. Last week he told me he is studying film and photography and wants to be a director. That seems a good choice for him, and I see him as such. Today his request for three inches is followed by an invitation: “Do you want to go out this Friday?”
I’m not sure how to respond. This question is so formal, so gentle, so unlike anything I’ve experienced since high school, which by now seems like a lifetime ago. There is no suggestion to go to the bar, to join a party. Rather it will be dinner: his place. I’m shy, without an agenda of friendly chat about sandwich sales, so my answer is a quiet, “Yes.”
I wish I could say it works out, but it doesn’t. It is awkward for me, and being awkward for me makes it awkward for him. Our ages are too different—he is twenty-seven; I will be nineteen next week. He is old; I am immature. The dinner is good, but I don’t like wine. I don’t like kissing, and our conversation is stilted in stops and starts of inadequate beginnings and unfinished endings. I leave, knowing I won’t see him again. And I don’t. He finds another kind of lunch to have from that point on.
Or there is the thirty-year-old guy who washes dishes in the kitchen behind the counter where I work. He’s friendly, efficient, perhaps a little off-kilter, but I can’t place why. The chatter is easy, but then one day he’s gone. I will see him in a few years at a convenience store–gas station, where he is the manager. We will recognize each other and catch up, just like old times. And I think for him he feels a sense of achievement.
Or there is the biology-lab teaching assistant, who looks exactly like Gen. George Armstrong Custer, who sweeps his silky blond hair off his temples, gelling it into place, letting his curls fall gently to his shoulders. His Van Dyke beard and mustache are always extraordinarily trimmed and never look scruffy, a tip of the hat to the man he emulates. As I talk with him, as I tell him about growing up in Red Rock and the trumpeter swans that my dad brought back from near extinction; as we discuss the east-west direction of the Centennial Range and its role as a fault line that transfers heat, keeping the lakes warm enough for the swans to live year-round; as we speak of so many things, I can’t help but wonder if he sees the irony. That he, who goes out of his way to look like General Custer, finds it odd that I, an American Indian girl, is talking with him at all.
The gale-force winds of March and April commence. I am restless. I move from group to group without staying long in any one place. Now it’s old high school friends; now it’s people from the rival school; now it’s guys who do five-finger discounts, who lift leather jackets from expensive stores and drive Jaguars and Peugeots. I don’t know if I’m doing the moving, or if I am being forced to move because I won’t give up the party lifestyle. Either way I don’t last very long in any one place.
I fail Spring quarter.
Two weeks into June I receive a very official letter from the dean, who without preamble states that I am now on academic probation. I would, he explains, be given one more quarter with which to apply myself to prove my abilities. In the meantime, he suggests, I should take the summer to seriously think about my interest in further pursuing a college education. I’m so happy my parents will not be informed of my errors in judgment, especially my dad. Because somewhere along the line I have become a “goddamn-crazy-drunken-war-whoop.”
In June, within the week after school ends, I pound the sidewalks of Bozeman with the briefest of resumes, having almost no job experience. I am shocked when I land an interview and even more so when I am hired within fifteen minutes. My job will be to sell jewelry in a store that deals in “fine” American Indian jewelry and assorted gems.
The store is small and on the far edge of Main Street. Inside two glass cases stand apart, segregated. One case is filled with boxes lined with black velvet, showing off the traditional jewelry of the southwest: Navajo, Hopi, and Zuni silver hold colorful stones of turquoise, coral, mother of pearl, and abalone. There are necklaces, rings, watchbands, and bolo ties, along with earrings sitting in perfect rows, their bright, multicolored designs gleaming under the daylight lamps. The other case holds precious gems, their colors exploding in the real sunlight that pours through the store’s windows. I am told to tell people that the cut is the most important aspect of gems. That will determine how it throws and refracts light. I have no illusions as to why I’ve been hired. What could be more compelling than to buy American Indian jewelry from a real American Indian? If my boss only knew.
But I am not compelling. I am shy. Painfully so. And the symptoms begin as soon as a customer walks in. I blush with their first “hello,” and my replies are jagged and filled with stutters, if they are audible at all. To make it more comfortable for all of us, I begin to ignore people, allowing them to peruse in silence. This works great for me, just not for the store owner—they rarely walk away with an item purchased from the store. At month’s end the owner hands me a check and says, almost apologetically, “This isn’t working out well for either one of us. Best of luck in whatever you decide to do next.”
However, I don’t do anything next. I just do more of the same.
In July I land with a group of people who change the course of my life. Two of them have names of the ancient Greeks: Cornelius and Thaddeus. Marty becomes known as Illius so he won’t feel left out. And then there is Herb; yes, it’s drug related. Evidently, Herb had been on the two-strike rule, which had landed him in this town. His first strike was being angry with his folks for denying him access to a concert and then accidentally driving his car into a tree at a relatively high rate of speed, breaking his jaw in three places. His second strike was getting caught selling pot at his high school. Tempers flared; a break was needed. He would, his parents decided, leave his California home to live with his brother, who attended college in Montana. As his mom walked him to the airline gate, she whispered in his ear, “I know you’re going up there for the summer. Why don’t you just plan on staying there.” That last sentence was a statement, not a question.
This group is not a bar-crowd group, unless the bar includes a pool table. Outdoorsy and active, they race bicycles, run marathons, climb both bare and iced rocks, and cross-country ski. They are musical and like to cook fresh foods, regularly imbibe, smoke pot, and drop acid. I learn to do a lot of these things, except the last. I have no doubt acid would land me in the psychiatric hospital. I do know my limits, although they seem pretty expansive.
And I discover important information along the way. I discover that smoking hash causes me to ride my bike erratically. I can stay in the middle of the street only if I bounce off the cars on either side. This lasts several blocks, and then I’m fine. I discover that sleeping with a lot of men has consequences beyond babies. One night after the bars close, I run into Meredith, a quasi-friend of several people in the group. She’s eighteen and has been having sex since she was fourteen. She’s lost count of the number of boys she’s slept with. Today was her third and final cervical cancer treatment: a strong treatment of liquid nitrogen, which burns the cancer cells off her cervix. She will need to have regular checkups for the next three years. “Does it hurt when they burn it?” I ask. “Not much,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “But I’ve made a lot of changes. I stopped drinking, and I don’t have sex with anybody now.”
I discover that Strawberry Hill does not have a road that crosses the Bridger Mountain Range. But it looks like it does from afar. So Herb and I try to locate the mythical road after a particularly solid night of drinking beer with a pot chaser. The two-track we follow is barely visible as we climb his Chevy Nova high into the darkness, far away from the city lights, far away from the moon. The suspension no longer protects us from the jolts of a disintegrating road. But it is the mud pond that gets us, the one we see in our headlights. Herb hits the gas, hoping for speed to carry us to the other side, but it doesn’t. We come to an abrupt halt in the bumper-deep slime. I open the door and the slime sits just below the running board. So we sit and drink what is left of our beer, listen to Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” on the college radio station, and talk, waiting for the sun to rise over the valley. We get out when the hillside becomes visible. Herb’s long legs are able to reach the hood, and he jumps to safety. My legs are not so long, so I jump to the edge of the pond and mud oozes around my ankles. Tired, defeated, we walk down the hill, catching the attention of an old rancher, who listens to our story with a twinkle in his blue eyes. “Well,” he offers, “if you kids can wait until tomorrow, I can get my truck with the winch on it and haul you out, but I can’t do it before tomorrow.” He writes his number on a small piece of paper and tells us to call the next day before noon. He then drops us off near the interstate, and we walk the rest of the way to town. Herb’s brother blows a gasket when we ask for a ride back out there and tells us to find another sucker. He isn’t going to pull us out of our stupidity. But our sometimes friend, D.W., does, after a promised six-pack.
I discover that hypothermia is probably the best way to die if you have an option. Cross-country skiing has not been an easy sport for me to pick up. When the snow is good, I am not bad. When the snow is bad, there are few worse. We ski on a spring day when the overnight snow has accumulated significantly and piles heavily on the shaded trail. In the morning the twelve-mile trail is easy; by two in the afternoon it starts to melt; by three the wax no longer works. I put on the red wax, but now I’m tired. By four the sun lies low on the horizon, and the top layer of the trail turns to ice. Suddenly, I can’t stay upright; the skis keep flying out from under me, and with each fall I land harder on the packed surface until, three miles from the car, I lay down bruised, battered, and exhausted. I am numb and my senses are no longer accepting new information, or at least interpreting it. I watch Herb ski off easily in the distance, his slushing growing quieter. In fact, everything is quiet. I look above me at the cerulean sky, and it seems endless. I am so tired. And the shivering that started a couple of miles back is worse. And my eyes close of their own accord. Sleep threatens to drag me under, and I’m vaguely aware the shivering has stopped.
“What are you doing?” That’s Herb’s voice. I can’t tell if it’s near or far. It sounds far, but it’s too much work to open my eyes. But I force them open anyway and am surprised that he’s standing directly over me.
“Just resting for a few minutes,” I say. My thick tongue wraps around my words, making it difficult for them to come out. I close my eyes again without meaning to.
“Well, you can’t rest here; you’ve got to get back to the car.” I knit my eyebrows; his voice is surprisingly authoritative. I’ve never heard this voice before.
“I’m really tired. I just need to sleep before I get back to the car.”
“That’s not a choice,” Herb insists, and he puts his arms beneath my armpits and helps me up. The skis shift beneath my feet, sliding dangerously over the snow, and all I want to do is lie back down. The shivering is back with a vengeance, and I shake uncontrollably all the way to the car and all the way home, even with the heat turned on full blast. When we get to the house, Herb pulls a hot bath for me, and only then, after what seems like a long time, I stop shivering. Hypothermia is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t hurt. You just fall asleep. Yep, that is the way to go.
But probably my most profound self-discovery is that even a boyfriend can’t protect me from myself, as I, one night in a drunken craze, dance into a polka band. Thaddeus immediately takes me outside, and we stand quietly for a moment. And he looks at me with his hazel eyes, the color of aspen leaves in August, and his golden hair fringes beneath his ski cap. And he says, gently, but with a certain forcefulness I can’t disregard, “You know, not everyone drinks to the point you do.” He pauses then, his eyes never leaving mine. There is no judgment; it is just a statement. But I’m too embarrassed to thank him for his caring. I look at the ground and nod. I hear him say, “Just think about it,” before I hear his footsteps walk away.
In December, during Winter quarter, I receive a letter from the dean informing me that I am now on academic leave. I am not able to return to school for a full year.