Sherman Alexie’s Substack Audio

I lose, I lose, I lose, I win, I tie. That's the shortest memoir I'll ever write. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

This poem is pre-approved by those in charge of truth. It won’t be disturbing. It won’t offend. It lives to serve you— to placate, flatter, and woo your politics. It’s an ode to your wounds, be they surface or bone-deep, ancient or recent. This poem is pre-approved by those in charge of truth and the definition of truth. Is truth a root? A tree? A starling in that tree? Does this birdsong bend and serve? Yes! It trills and thrills, it flatters and woos you, you, you, you, you. Do you feel soothed? This poem gathers lumber and nails to build a fence between what is approved and what is not approved. Your side is safe. The other side is a strange zoo. Look at those humans, so wrong in their wildness. Don’t feed them. Don’t reward their howls. Don’t let them woo and fool you into changing your mind. Those damn brutes are dangerous. Let this poem be your only friend. It will provide you those truths that you’ve pre-approved. This poem is a mirror. That’s your face. Make yourself swoon. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

At three in the morning, I was in the IHOP writing poems at a table sticky with generations of maple syrup when a brown guy with long black hair walked in. He looked Indian. I wondered if he was one of them wild warriors who never braids their hair. To them, a hair tie is challenging their hair’s sovereignty. The waitress sat the maybe-Indian at the table next to mine. I wanted to joke and tell him that he and I were now in the Indian boy section. I wanted to use a reservation accent. But, instead, I just asked him, “Hey, cuz, are you Inj?” He looked confused, even angry. He had no idea what I’d just said. He didn’t know that “Inj” is short for Indian. He didn’t know that “Inj” is one of those vaguely racist and friendly terms that Indians can say to one another. It was a password. It meant you belonged. This guy wasn’t Indian so he was unaware of Indian cultural means and mores. He was something other than Inj. And I was intruding on his peace. He stood and sat himself at a table twenty feet away from me.Hey, brown-skinned stranger, I’m sorry I offended you. I’m just an insomniac Indian guy who was looking for other Indians. I just wanted to eat pancakes, drink coffee, and tell each other Indian stories that would make us laugh so loudly that they’d kick us out of IHOP. Then we’d be laughing in the parking lot until the sun rose like a fiery Indian grandma and told us to get home, get home, get home. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

In 1986, there was a spring break Invasion of grasshoppers In Billings, Montana. Some ridiculous number Of those insects— 30 or 40 per square foot. I crunched across A parking lot to buy beer At a convenience store. Later that night, terrified, Alone, drunk, lost, I ran toward An orange light—a beacon— On the other side of an empty field. How many grasshoppers Did I kill as I chased Salvation? Dozens upon Dozens, I would guess. But it didn’t matter. Those grasshoppers Were as endless as time. Later, after a blackout, I found myself sitting In the backseat Of a cop car. Was I under Arrest? I didn’t know. I asked the cop what Happened and he said That he’d found me Sitting on a curb. The cop said I was shouting About the hordes Of grasshoppers. I asked the cop if I was going to jail And he said no, He was taking me back To my friend’s house. His parents called us, The cop said. They said You’d run away From a basement party. They said you were Crying. They said You were afraid. They said You weren’t dangerous. They said you were sad. And so the cop drove me To my friend’s house, where I stumbled up the stairs And passed out on the carpet In the attic TV room. Hours and hours later, I woke to the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the stereo. I’d pissed and shat My pants. My shirt Was painted With dead grasshoppers. I pulled pieces Of dead grasshoppers From my hair. An inch of dead Grasshoppers was stuck To the soles Of my basketball shoes. Too ashamed to face My friend and his family, I pretended to be asleep For hours and hours more Until, finally, my friend And his mother walked Into the room. You need help, The mother said to me. I know, I said. But it took me Five more years to get Sober. And I’ve been Sober ever since. But, a few times over The years, I’ve dreamed About that night. And, in those dreams I trip and fall in that empty Field, close my eyes, And take my last breath— Another Indian dead In the Montana dirt. But my body is never Found. Instead, The grasshoppers Lift me into the night sky And deliver me To an afterlife Where no human Has ever been. I'm lonely in heaven— A spiritual oxymoron. But, of course, I’m still alive. I was rescued that night, As I’ve been saved Many other times. I’m here, mostly coherent, Because of the love Of family and friends And strangers. It’s hard to believe That I’ve earned And deserve This grace and love. And it’s easy To conceive Of a life where, Unmedicated And abandoned, I live crazily On the streets. I’ve got cousins Who disappeared Into the maw of this Or that city. I could be like them. But, look at me, I’ve become The orange light And the Indian Holding that light. And, as I write This poem, I realize That I’ve encountered Only a handful Of grasshoppers In the decades since That Montana night. Have the grasshoppers Been hiding From me? What is The meaning of grasshoppers? I don’t know. But let’s pretend That grasshoppers Were the first creatures Created by God. Let’s assume that Every person was built From the lovely wings Of grasshoppers. It’s difficult to think Of grasshoppers As beautiful, Just as it’s difficult To think of humans as beautiful. But look at us. We are gorgeous. We are sin and forgiveness. We darken the sky With our collective flight. We are unified in our hungers. We swarm this life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

I was recently texting and reminiscing with my childhood reservation friend. He was the inspiration for Victor in our movie, Smoke Signals. He and I texted about joy and loss. And he reminded me of "corn-dogging,” a phenomenon that happened when we were kids on the rez.The rez bully boys would corn-dog you when they shoved things (fingers, fists, pencils, baseball bat handles, any projectile) into your a*****e when you bent over. It would always be through your pants so there was no penetration. But it was still as bruising and painful as hell. We bullied kids had to bodyguard for one another when we drank from the water fountains. How did I forget this terrible thing? Why did I forget this terrible thing?I asked other men, white and Indian, if this happened to them in their communities, in their childhoods, and they spoke of the varieties of pain that boys exclusively inflict on boys.Everywhere you go, men murder men.To help manage my bipolar disorder, I’ve been in Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT) for the last four years. DBT teaches us how to “synthesize and integrate opposites,” so I’m going to employ the opposite of rage and revenge, and reach for retroactive empathy.Nearly all of the worst reservation bullies of my childhood died in their twenties. So, here, I ask myself an unanswerable question—a question that I hope is kind: What was happening to those Indian boys that made them so violent and so ultimately doomed? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the endless high school reunion. Welcome to past friends and lovers, however kind or cruel. Let’s undervalue and unmend the present. Why can’t we pretend every stage of life is the same? Let’s exhume, resume, and extend childhood. Let’s all play the games that occupy the young. Let fame and shame intertwine. Let one’s search for God become public domain. Let church.com become our church. Let’s sign up, sign in, and confess here at the altar of loneliness. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Fifty years old, I look at my sixth grade class photo. I went to tribal school on the reservation. There were fourteen of us kids, twelve Indians and two white brothers whose parents worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA. I study my classmate’s faces and think about their fates.Dead in a car wreck.Another car wreck.A third car wreck.Overdose.Breast cancer.Daredevil foolishness.I don’t know the nationwide statistics but I think it’s crazy that half of my sixth grade class—half the Indian kids–died before we all turned fifty. And half of the ones who died left the earth before they turned thirty. One of them, Bobby, died on the night of our high school graduation.A beach party down on the river. Five minutes past sundown. Bonfire. Beer. Bobby was half-drunk and said he could swim across the river and back.We teased him. He was always claiming he could do stuntman feats. He once saw magicians on TV who caught live bullets in their teeth. Bobby said he could catch an arrow in his mouth. We gave him hell. Made all sorts of dick jokes about the arrow. But Bobby never attempted that magic trick, not with the bullet or the arrow. He just liked to talk.But something about him changed that night of high school graduation. His eyes were more orange and hot than the bonfire.I’m gonna swim the river, he said.B******t, we said.S**t on you, he said.Then he kicked off his cowboy boots and waded into the water.I’m gonna swim the whole river, he said.He said that we’d have to give him an Indian name when he returned.A warrior name, he said.That’s one of the traps for us Indians. The warrior trap. The peer pressure to be heroes riding horses all named Grief.We still thought he was kidding as he walked deeper and deeper into the water. We still thought he was kidding when he started swimming.But he kept going and pretty soon, we couldn’t see or hear him anymore. Dark-skinned boy. Dark-skinned river.We waited for ten, twenty, thirty minutes. After an hour, we knew he wasn’t coming back. They never found his body. We went to a funeral where there was no coffin.All these years later, I often take my kids to that same beach. You’d think I might have PTSD or something. But I don’t. Not much, anyway. You’d think I’d worry about my kids. But my kids aren’t foolish. They know how Bobby died.The whole tribe still talks about Bobby. We argue. Some Indians think he died on purpose. He was a sad guy, the first one to cry after two beers. His mother was a church freak and his father was cruel with words and crueler with fists.No way Bobby killed himself, some would say, he just thought he was Geronimo in a scuba suit.Maybe, maybe, they’d say, maybe he died almost on purpose.I thought the question would never be answered. I thought Bobby’s warrior name would always be Mystery.But then, one night on the beach, my daughter said Bobby didn’t want to die. I smiled. She was only seven. What did she know?I asked her what she meant.She said, Bobby took off his boots.She said he would’ve kept his boots on if he wanted to drown.It was a logical thing to say. My daughter saw something about that night that nobody else had ever seen.I don’t know what happened to his boots. But I remember them sitting there on the sand. I remember they looked like two open mouths—one of them whispering and one of them shouting.I think of that moment when Bobby knew he was going to drown.I think of him breathing in that water.I think of him floating down toward the bottom of the river. I think of him getting closer and closer to the beginning of time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Breakfast Meditation Feeling contrary, I discard the orange slices and keep the rind. I ignore the clock and calendar. I sit in one place and watch my mind meander.Flight Envy Those crows know my name but I don’t know theirs. They’re geniuses with wings but gravity keeps me landed and dumb. No bird is jealous of my opposable thumbs. Your Mask or Mine? At sundown and sunrise, my shadow is taller than me. None of us is the person we believe ourselves to be. Inheritance In mirrors, I look like myself. In photographs, I look like my father.Politics Dear enemy, I despise your rage because it sounds exactly exactly like mine.This next poem is a monosyllabic sonnet, a poem of fourteen lines with only one word per line. I first encountered this kind of contemporary sonnet in the work of Sidney Wade. My mono-sonnet poem is an Petrarchan sonnet, a traditional form with two stanzas—the first containing eight lines and the second containing six lines. First created in the Renaissance Era, and popularized by Francesco Petrarca, the Petrarchan sonnet is meant to present a problem in the first stanza and offer a solution in the second. In my poem, I ask a question in the first stanza and answer it in the second. Haunted Do I believe in ghosts? Only the ones that I create in my poems. To be grumpy, I’ll add that many contemporary poets write poems they claim are sonnets…but they ain’t. Many of those pseudo-sonnets do have fourteen lines, their only concession to the form, but sometimes they don’t even have that! Here’s the thing: a sonnet has rules. And you gotta follow the rules to call it a sonnet. That said, you can experiment with the rules, as I’ve done in many ways over the years. But my experiments still have strict rules that strongly echo the strict rules of traditional sonnets.Eucharist The grounds are the body. The water is the blood. You name it coffee. I name it magic and serious joy.My Big Brother Remembers The night they wheeled  Mom’s body out of the house, he sat by the front yard gate. Seven years later, he tells me that a thousand mosquitoes  bit him but he didn’t feel one. Benedictions in an Emergency The drowning man loves his breath. The borrower loves his debt. The insomniac loves his rest. I still love the ones who left.The next poem is a Shakespearean sonnet. Yeah, no pressure to perform here! Among other formal considerations, this type of sonnet relies on the Volta, the last stanza that is meant to be a rhyming couplet. This couplet “plays a pivotal role, usually arriving in the form of a conclusion, amplification, or even refutation of the previous three stanzas, often creating an epiphanic quality to the end.” My Volta has a slant rhyme that employs the same vowel sound. Social Contract Driving, I trust the unseen people piloting their cars as they travel toward me from the opposite direction on this two-lane midnight road where the only illumination is their headlights merging with mine. Climate Change I caught these salmon messiahs and they promised they’d swim forever wild or not. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Bug was missing a thumb; Mouse was missing an eye. We loved those reservation Indian guys so why can’t we remember their birth names? They drank themselves to death and became salmon constellations in the night sky. Bug was missing a thumb; Mouse was missing an eye. How’d they lose their parts? Nobody recalls though I remember Mouse often dabbed his face with a bandanna because his missing eye still cried. Bug loved to flip his thumb stump at us instead of his middle finger. And we’d laugh. Those two are forever enshrined in our father’s Drinking Buddy Hall of Fame. Bug was missing a thumb; Mouse was missing an eye. We loved those reservation Indian guys so why can’t we remember their birth names? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

* Prayer. * More prayer* Yet more prayer. * I don’t believe in God but I believe in prayer. * I know that’s a contradiction. * Question: So who’s waiting to hear my prayers?* Answer: I don’t know.* God was invented…* …by a caveman who’d been exiled by his tribe. * Wouldn’t you invent prayer if you were sitting on the plain guarded by one small campfire while your predators circled in the dark? * Prayer grew in size with each successive human—with every frightened human. * Are you frightened? I’m frightened. * Each prayer is made of billions of words—every word that has ever been said in any language—in every language. * I know how to say listen to me in my tribal language. Do you know how to say it in your tongue?        This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, Community,Here is the second draft of my short story in progress. My aim in this draft was to deepen the character development. I also wanted to establish that my story will jump back and forth in time. If you describe a friendship as being “lifelong” in the beginning of a story then you better cover the decades, right?If you want to take a look at the first draft then you can follow this link. Otherwise, you can just read the second draft below.Thanks,ShermanIn 1985, Paul and Gabriel were freshman at St. Cataldo University in Spokane.Paul was from a small logging community near the Canadian border north of Spokane, halfway between two smaller communities that would be ghost towns in fifty years. The logging business was terminally ill so a majority of the high school students received free lunch. But Paul’s father was the town cop and his mother was the school principal—small town royalty—so their only child could afford his noontime meal. Paul was modest about it. He had a few friends who were too ashamed of their poverty to even enter the lunchroom and claim their free food. But, sometimes, Paul surreptitiously gave a dollar to a poor friend so they could publicly buy their lunch, especially on Taco Tuesday. Paul tried not to be condescending or valorous about it. He didn’t want to be the Saint of Little Milk Cartons. He just wanted to be a generous friend.He was a baseball player—the only pitcher on his high school team that could throw a curve and the only batter that could smash home runs. There weren’t enough kids in his school to fill out a whole team so they consolidated with two other high schools. They were a terrible squad who only won six games in four years and all of those were 1-0 thrillers where Paul had pitched a shutout and hit a solo home run. He’d hoped a college scout might someday show up to watch him play. But that never happened. Maybe he could’ve played at a middling community college but he was never going to make the team at St. Cataldo, a baseball powerhouse who, over the decades, had seen twenty-two alumni play in the Major Leagues.Paul was only small-town good.Sometimes, at St. Cataldo, he wondered if he missed baseball more than he missed his parents. His nostalgia for his high school athletic heroics was so intense that he’d sometimes cry in the dorm shower. There was something about the hot water that released his closely-held emotions. He tried to limit his beer consumption because he’d invariably launch into drunken monologues about his pitching and hitting highlights and then suffer the morning-after embarrassment. He was lonely for the crowd—even for the five or ten townspeople who used to gather at the high school baseball field and politely clap when something good happened.Also, Paul didn’t believe in God.Gabriel grew up in a house with picture windows on Seattle’s Lake Washington. His parents worked for different law firms because they wanted their marriage to endure. They were devout Catholics so divorce wasn’t an option anyway, especially for lawyers who thought it would be even more sinful to use their legal skills to obtain an annulment. Gabriel was their only child, and thus suffered through the academic pressures exerted by parents who’d both escaped poverty by reading books. But they’d never expected or required him to attend church. By the time he was twelve and beginning to forcefully assert himself as an individual, he’d decided that he was going to be a reverent Catholic. He wrote a mission statement and read it aloud to his parents: “Dear Mother, Dear Father, I reject the idea of being a casual American Catholic checking in with God only on Easter and Christmas. I have therefore chosen to be a literalist. From now on, I believe in transubstantiation. Through my faith, I know that the bread and wine are absolutely the blood and flesh of Christ.”At St. Cataldo, he was one of the twenty or thirty students who, by intense family obligation or personal devotion, attended Mass every Sunday in the university chapel on the top floor of the old administration building. Over the generations, the college’s Jesuit priests had watched the students’ faith fade and nearly vanish, partly due to church corruption and crime, and partly due to the advancing secularization of the United States. Somehow, Catholics had become an endangered species at a Catholic university. So the Jesuits were especially grateful for the students who were as dedicated as Gabriel was.Also, Gabriel the Catholic had a lot of extra money. But his best friend, Paul, only had a few dollars more than just-enough.They were randomly placed in dorm rooms next to each other on the southwest wing of Agnes Hall. In 1985, there were no algorithms that paired roommates so Paul was predictably matched with a kid from a Montana farming town and Gabriel was matched with a dude from San Diego.City boy met city boy. Country boy met country boy. But friendship doesn’t work that way. Friendships don’t pay attention to the rules.Gabriel the Catholic and Paul were strangers on that first day of college, best friends by the end of the first week, and were on their way to being lifelong friends.If you’d asked them why their friendship seemed preordained, Gabriel would’ve said “God” and Paul would’ve said, “Luck.”At Christmas break, after their first semester in Agnes Hall, they switched roommates. There were no hard feelings. Everybody knew it was the right thing.Gabriel (never Gabe) had the only personal phone on the wing—a landline that was the most important technology in the dorm. There were community phones that accepted calls but you could only make outgoing calls to local numbers. So Gabriel the Catholic charged his wingmates to use his phone for any long distance calls. His parents paid the bill so it was all profit for him. One dollar for three minutes if you were calling your friends or family back home. Two dollars if you were calling your long-distance girlfriend. People in love were always willing to pay more, though Gabriel waived the fee when the call ended in a breakup. He liked to think he was a romantic. He was in a study group with a girl named Linda. They read the famous poem about the red wheelbarrow in the rain. Gabriel didn’t understand it. Nothing seemed to happen. There was no story. But Linda said, “It’s like the poem is a camera taking a picture.” Gabriel was stunned by her insight. It was the beginning of his love for her.Gabriel the Catholic also owned the only TV on the wing. A little color thing with unpredictable reception. It was almost exclusively used to watch The David Letterman Show and Saturday Night Live. But, in January, he was watching in the morning when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. He was alone at first but then Paul and ten or twelve boys crowded into their room to watch. They were young and dumb but nobody was young and dumb enough to make a joke. They allowed themselves to silently, seriously, and collectively grieve. And, soon enough, a few other boys and girls from other wings arrived to watch. Gabriel barely looked at the other kids. He was transfixed by the epic disaster. He knew it was the first time in his life that he’d witnessed something historic, a tragedy that he’d never forget. He whispered The Lord’s Prayer. He thought he might cry when they showed a photograph of Christa McAuliffe, the woman who was supposed to be the first schoolteacher in space.Then Gabriel heard sobbing. For a moment, he thought it was somebody on the television. Perhaps an astronaut’s spouse or parents. Or, most tragically, a child. But Gabriel realized that somebody was crying in his dorm room. He turned away from the TV and saw that it was Linda, his poetry study partner. Gabriel was surprised to see that she was weeping into Paul’s chest. How had Gabriel missed the beginning of that relationship? Had they been hiding it from him? How could he have missed the signs? Gabriel the Catholic saw Paul kiss the top of Linda’s head. Damn, damn, damn. Gabriel was angry but he didn’t feel that he deserved his anger. It was vanity more than anything else. He’d never declared his affection for Linda. Not to her and not to anybody else. Neither Paul nor Linda had betrayed him. And yet, Gabriel was suffering. He watched Linda wrap her arms around Paul’s waist—his skin separated from her skin only by a thin cotton shirt. Gabriel immediately recognized that his two friends had already been physically, emotionally, and spiritually intimate. It was an intimacy that would last for decades.Also, it was the official beginning of Gabriel’s unrequited love for Linda. He felt two kinds of grief.He turned back to the television as a reporter said, “In 1967, we lost three astronauts to a fire during a simulated launch, but this is the very first time we’ve lost astronauts during a real flight.”Gabriel enrolled in a creative writing class during his senior year at St. Cataldo. He took it so he could sit next to Linda, who was widely recognized as the best poet. That wasn’t a huge literary accomplishment. Professional poets and novelists rarely came out of St. Cataldo. Maybe two over the years. But it was still something to be proud of. She wrote with a vulnerability that mattered.But Gabriel, despite his hard work and editorial advice from Linda, wrote only one poem that he liked.“In this love triangle,” he’d written, “the opposite side is barely there. It’s written in pencil and she can erase it anytime she dares.”“That’s you,” Linda had remarked after that class. “That has to be you, right? But who’s the girl? It’s Margaret, isn’t it?”“Yes,” he said. He lied. “It’s Margaret.”Everybody knew the story about Margaret and Gabriel. They’d been part of a group of St. Cataldo students who’d sneaked into a huge abandoned building that had once been a mental hospital. It was said the ghosts were made of screams.“I’m scared,” Margaret said to Gabriel as they lagged behind the others.A few minutes later, they were making out in a small room. A few minutes after that, one of the other kids stepped around the corner and shined a flashlight on them.He and Margaret’s clothes were in a tender disarray. Buttons were unbuttoned. Zippers were unzipped. But no real sin had been committed. Gabriel brought it up in the confessional but even the priest shrugged it off.“Margaret is awesome,” Linda said after the poetry class.“Yes, she is,” Gabriel said.Eleven years later, Gabriel and Margaret bumped into each other at SeaTac Airport. They were both running late for their flights.After hurried pleasantries and a hug, Margaret asked, “How come you never kissed me again after the first time you kissed me?”Gabriel took a step back. He felt a heat that he couldn’t put a name to. Was it lust or embarrassment?“I don’t know why I didn’t kiss you again,” he said to Margaret. “I just thought I should be polite.”“Polite,” she said. “Oh, Gabriel, I’ve never been that Catholic.“She laughed and sprinted for her gate. Gabriel missed his flight and had to take the next one three hours later.At their twentieth college reunion in Spokane, which also happened to fall on the same day as Paul and Linda’s eighteenth wedding anniversary, Paul drank so much that he’d passed out in the driver’s seat of his Prius. Linda, fairly drunk herself, had already taken away the keys. There would be no drinking and driving.Gabriel sat in the small backseat. Damn, he thought, a Prius is so damn narrow.“He’s an alcoholic,” Linda said.“What?” asked Gabriel.“Paul,” she said. “Paul is an alcoholic. He’s already been to rehab twice.”Gabriel was surprised by that news. And hurt. Sure, he lived in Seattle, over three hundred miles away from Paul, but they’d emailed, texted, or phoned on a weekly basis for years. Gabriel tried and failed to remember when he’d been out of contact with his best friend for twenty-eight straight days, the standard length of rehab.“I don’t understand,” Gabriel said to Linda. “Why didn’t he tell me?”“Because of shame like the Northern Lights burning in the dark,” she said.Ah, thought Gabriel, she’s still a poet.“I didn’t know it was that bad,” he said. “I’m sorry.”“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Nobody really knows.”Paul was the baseball coach at his old high school. Though, some years, they couldn’t field a team because there weren’t enough players, even with a squad consolidated now from four different small high schools. Some years, there were seventh- and eighth-grade players who had to suit up. Among many other traditions, it seemed baseball was also dying in the small towns. Paul was also the science teacher, though he’d never studied science.Linda taught English. She assigned Shakespeare and Stephen King. Emily Dickinson and Dolly Parton.Because they were American, Paul had gained fifty pounds and Linda had gained thirty.Gabriel was also an American but he ran five miles every day and lifted weights three days a week. His disciplined slenderness gave him a special power and charisma in any American space. It made him, as a lawyer, more closely resemble the lawyers played by beautiful actors. His fellow Public Defenders nicknamed him Grisham, after the author who wrote novels about lawyers predestined to become movies about lawyers.But Gabriel didn’t feel powerful as he sat in that Prius with the drunk amd unconscious Paul and Sad-Eyed Linda of Clear-Cut Tree Stumps.“I’m so lonely,” she said.She turned around in the front seat and reached out her hand. Gabriel gently held it.“I hate my house,” she said. “I hate where I live. I hate my job. I hate this car. Everybody in town drives a truck but we’re limping around in this arrogant piece of electric s**t.”Gabriel was silent. He assumed that anything he might say would be condescending. He wondered if there was something to do. Was there a grand geature to be made? Then he arrived at a decision and would spend the rest of his life wondering if it has been an impulsive action or if it were part of a long-held subconscious plan. He leaned forward and awkwardly kissed the inside of Linda’s elbow. He didn’t know why he chose her elbow. Maybe it was oddly more intimate than kissing her hand. What was that book they’d read in college? Set in the 19th Century? The novel that he and Linda had studied together in a literature class at St. Cataldo? The novel where the rich man makes out with the exiled woman’s hand and wrist? There was a movie adaptation, too, where that scene was played by two superstars.Years back, Gabriel had taken a woman named Rachel to that movie on their second date. And she’d involuntarily sighed when the rich man’s lips met the exiled woman’s wrist. That sigh, so softly sensual, had greatly embarrassed Gabriel. And he instantly decided there wouldn’t be a third date with Rachel. His life was a series of second dates.Then he snapped out of his literary and cinematic reverie and realized that his lips were still pressed against Linda’s elbow. How long had he been kissing her? Two seconds or maybe only three? Such an infinitesimal time in the history of the world. But it was still far too long. And he might’ve sighed. He wasn’t sure. Dear God, he’d revealed too much. And he was still kissing her.Linda pulled back her hand. Her elbow. Gabriel looked at her. The word commandment echoed in his head. Then a full sentence, both as a set of words and as a criminal punishment, roared at him: Gabriel, you are covetous.In the dark car, Linda stared at him. Studied him. In her head, a thousand nagging but unasked questions suddenly had the same answer. Gabriel knew that she finally knew that he loved her.“No,” she said.Gabriel nodded his head. Linda nodded her head. They understood that nothing else would ever happen.“Let’s get Paul awake,” he said. “And I’ll drive you both to your hotel.”When he was ten, Paul saw a man cut his knee in half with a chainsaw. His father, the town cop, was driving the patrol car. Paul was sitting in the passenger seat and looking through the window at the same passing landscape that he’d traveled through all of his life. He looked up the hill toward Bucky’s trailer house. Bucky was the grandfather who’d been widowed thirty years earlier and was mostly ignored by his children and grandchildren. He was mean. He didn’t follow any rules, not the bureaucratic or social ones. So he was chainsawing wood to build an illegal bonfire when he lost his grip. The machine bucked in his hands. The teeth chewed into his knee. Bucky screamed in pain and fell, barely managing to toss the chainsaw away from him.And Paul, completely by coincidence, saw it happen. “Dad!” he yelled. “Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad!” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, community,Today, I’m embarking on a new project for you. I’m writing a new short story and, over the next week or so or probably more, I’ll be posting the various drafts until I arrive at the first complete rough draft. Yup, you’re going to see me writing out loud. I hope you enjoy this! So here’s the beginning.Note: This story has already been rewritten twice since I first posted it.In 1985, John and Gabriel were freshman at St. Cataldo University in Spokane.John was from a small logging community near the Canadian border north of Spokane, halfway between two other small towns you haven’t heard of. His father was the town cop and his mother was the school principal—small town royalty. Gabriel grew up in a house with picture windows on Seattle’s Lake Washington. His parents worked for different law firms because they wanted their marriage to endure. They were devout Catholics. Most of the students at Cataldo University were casual Catholics but Gabriel was like his parents. He believed in transubstantiation—the bread and wine were absolutely the blood and flesh of Christ. He was one of the twenty or thirty students who attended Mass every Sunday in the university chapel.John had a little bit of extra money. Gabriel the Real Catholic had a lot.They were randomly placed in dorm rooms next to each other on the southwest wing of Agnes Hall. In 1985, there were no algorithms that paired roommates so John was predictably matched with a kid from a Montana farming town and Gabriel was matched with a dude from San Diego. City boy met city boy. Country boy met country boy. But friendship doesn’t work that way. Friendships don’t pay attention to the rules.Gabriel the Catholic and John were strangers on that first day of college, best friends by the end of the first week, and were on their way to being lifelong friends. At Christmas break, after their first semester, they switched roommates. There were no hard feelings. Everybody knew it was the right thing.Gabriel (never Gabe) had the only personal phone on the wing—a landline that was the most important technology in the dorm. There were community phones that accepted calls but you could only make outgoing calls to local numbers. So Gabriel the Catholic charged his wingmates to use the phone for any long distance calls. His parents paid the bill so it was all profit for him. One dollar for three minutes if you were calling your friends or family back home. Two dollars if you were calling your long-distance girlfriend. People in love were always willing to pay more, though Gabriel waived the fee when the call ended in a breakup. He liked to think he was a romantic. He’d taken a Poetry 101 class, read Keats, and wrote a sonnet called “Ode to Lake Washington” that his professor said was “earnest.”  He was in a study group with a girl named Linda. They read the famous poem about the red wheelbarrow in the rain. Gabriel didn’t understand it. Nothing seemed to happen. There was no story. But Linda said, “It’s like the poem is a camera taking a picture.” Gabriel was stunned by her insight. It was the beginning of his love for her.Gabriel the Catholic also had the only personal TV on the wing. A little color thing with unpredictable reception. It was almost exclusively used to watch The David Letterman Show and Saturday Night Live. But, in January, he was watching in the early morning when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. He was alone at first but then John and ten or twelve boys crowded into their room to watch. They were young and dumb but nobody was young and dumb enough to make a joke. They allowed themselves to silently, seriously, and collectively grieve. And, soon enough, a few other boys and girls from other wings arrived to watch. Gabriel barely looked at the other kids. He was transfixed by the epic disaster. He knew it was the first time in his life that he’d witnessed something historic, a tragedy that he’d never forget. He thought he might cry when they showed a photograph of Christa McAuliffe, the schoolteacher who was supposed to be the first amateur astronaut in space.Then Gabriel heard sobbing. At first, he thought it was somebody on the television. Perhaps an astronaut’s spouse or parents. Or, most tragically, a child. But Gabriel realized that somebody was crying in his dorm room. He turned away from the TV and saw that it was Linda, his poetry study partner. Gabriel was surprised to see that she was weeping into John’s chest as he wrapped his arms around her. How had Gabriel missed the beginning of that relationship? How had his prayers for Linda’s affection gone unanswered? Gabriel the Catholic saw John kiss the top of Linda’s head. Damn, damn, damn. Gabriel understood that his two friends had already been physically, emotionally, and spiritually intimate. It was an intimacy that would last for decades. It was the beginning of Gabriel’s unrequited love for Linda. In that moment, he felt two kinds of grief.He turned back to the television as a reporter said, “In 1967, we lost three astronauts to a fire during a simulated launch, but this is the very first time we’ve lost astronauts during a real flight.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

In February, 1991, at halftime of a high school basketball championship game, my big brother, Arnold, rose from the audience when his name was called and hit a half-court shot to win a new John Deere riding lawnmower. The crowd was ecstatic. My brother has always been a popular figure in the Eastern Washington high school basketball world, first as a player and then as a fan. So he was being cheered by his family and many friends. But he was also being cheered by strangers because they were delighted to see my charismatic and overtly emotional brother celebrate his win. He jumped up and down. He ran around the court. A dozen friends mobbed him.I wasn’t there when he hit the shot. I didn’t learn about it until I saw the highlight later that night on the local TV news.“Forget the lawnmower,” the sportscaster said. “Give that man a car.”I telephoned my brother the next morning and asked him what he was going to do with the John Deere.“Giving it to Dad,” he said.Of course, he gave it to our father. Our family home sat on an acre of wild grass that required regular mowing. We had a manual push mower that took too much time and effort so that John Deere riding mower became a sacred machine for my father. It became a mobile church for him.Then, after diabetes shadowed my father’s eyes and left him unable to safely drive a car, he also used the mower as transportation to the tribal trading post.It’s reminiscent of the David Lynch movie, The Straight Story, where an elderly man, too impaired to renew his drivers license, motors his lawnmower across Iowa and Wisconsin to reach his estranged and terminally ill brother.But my father’s lawnmower journeys weren’t nearly as epic. The trading post is less than a mile from our house and my father would buy Pepsi and Three Musketeers bars, bring them home, and share his bounty with us.That’s a lovely story about my father and John Deere, right? A tale of luck, tenderness, and generosity with a measure of sadness about my father’s diabetes and his failure to take care of himself.While writing this essay, I remembered that I’d written a poem about my father and his lawnmower. I searched my files and found it. Sugar Town After diabetes shadowed my father’s vision and left him unable to drive a car, he’d pilot his riding lawnmower to the reservation trading post and buy Wonder Bread and generic maple syrup so he could make his slow suicide version of French toast. My poem mixes fiction and non-fiction. I’m fairly certain that my father never made French toast from Wonder Bread and maple syrup. But I think those two ingredients are funnier and more dramatic and depressing than soda and chocolate bars. The poem’s narrative is more interesting, I believe, because I fictionalized some important details. Then I wondered if I had also fictionalized details about how the John Deere riding lawnmower came into our lives. So I texted my brother to get his version of the story.So, okay, after texting with my brother, after hearing his story that contradicted mine, I made some observations:* The basketball coach at SFCC (Spokane Falls Community College) obviously cheated when he pulled my brother’s name from the hat three different times. He just wanted my popular brother to win and thrill the crowd again and again and again. But my brother still needed the make the three half-court shots in order to win three TVs. It was a series of cheats that led to a series of chances.* I think the half-court shots are cool. In the movie in my mind, I can see three quick cuts as my brother hits those three shots—a sports movie montage. I haven’t mentioned that my brother’s weight, during his adult life, has always been in the 300 to 400 pound range. He doesn’t look like an athlete. He looks like somebody who could never do something as skilled as hitting three half-court shots in multiple years. But he has never lost his superior hand-eye coordination. My brother, no matter his weight, has always been a good athlete.* But I still think that my fiction about the diabetic-driven lawnmower is more interesting than my brother’s basketball stardom. Yeah, I’m the kind of poet who’ll mostly choose sadness over joy.* I kind of doubt that my brother hit three half-court shots. That just seems impossible. He must be fictionalizing his life, too.* Good for him. We’re storytelling brothers.Does it matter that my brother and I have very different memories of his basketball halftime glory? Can’t both of our stories, however fictional, be true at the same time? It sounds like an oxymoron but good fiction must be true—or perhaps it’s better to say that good fiction must contain truth. Or Truth with a capital T if we want to go big about it.I think of a letter that the poet John Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817:…several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason…I certainly don’t mean to place myself in the company of literary giants like Keats and Shakespeare. But, in my writing and in my life, I try to operate with Negative Capability. I try to accept uncertainty and Mysteries (with the capital M).But I often fail. I wonder if I usually fail.So, as I continued to ponder that John Deere lawnmower, I still believed that my version of the story was true—more true that my brother’s version. So I texted my sisters. Sears? Sears? Is that what this comes down to? That my father purchased that legendary lawnmower at Sears? And, wow, I somehow turned that ordinary transaction into a half-court triumph? Can a lawnmower be a triumph? Or maybe “triumph” is the wrong word. Maybe I, the atheist Indian, should practice Negative Capability by quoting the Bible.…because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven. Luke 1:78This is not a story of triumph. This is about God’s “tender mercy.” And I laugh at myself yet again because all of my poems are about God even if I don’t believe in God. And I think of the human capacity for tender mercy. And I realize that my fictionalized poem about my father might be a tender mercy. Maybe all of my poems about my father are tender mercies. Tender Mercy Dear Father, I remember when your lawnmower broke down. I looked out the living room window and watched you turn the ignition key again and again but it just clicked and clicked. The engine ignored your efforts but you could not ignore our overgrown lawn. It needed to be cut. So you stepped off the riding lawnmower and pulled that old push mower from under the porch and wrestled that crude machine over the family acre and turned the wild grass into something almost tame. Then you looked up at the window and saw me, the child who shares your name. You lifted your open hands toward me and showed me the blisters on your fingers and palms. Dear Father, you died young of diabetes and alcoholism but I never doubted your love. No, that’s not true. Dear Father, I doubted you and I loved you and I wish you would’ve sobered up and lived another twenty years. But you didn’t. You chose an early death and I miss you, I say I miss you, I say it and I’ll keep saying it until I’m one of those elderly fathers who dies in his sleep and is (I hope) tenderly remembered and missed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

How do you know when you need to leave a place?No, the question is larger than that. How do you know when you need to escape?And even larger is the third and most important question. Do you possess the skills that will enable you to escape?In 1979, nearly all of our teachers at the reservation school were white.One of those white teachers, Mr. K, had been working in Wellpinit for over a decade. We had two kinds of white teachers on the reservation: the enduring ones who adored our collective joy and the ones who fled after a year because they couldn’t handle our collective sadness. Mr. K was a good guy. Very short. Prone to temper tantrums. Quick to apologize. A man who sometimes told stories about his childhood instead of teaching us.And he, for some reason, decided to form a Knowledge Bowl team to compete in the Spokane city regionals.According to their website, “Knowledge Bowl is an interdisciplinary academic contest that combines intense competition with the incredible skill of knowledge recall.  Team members work cooperatively to solve oral and written questions while teams race against each other to be the first to ‘buzz in’ and answer the question correctly.”None of us Indian kids had ever heard of Knowledge Bowl. But Mr. K was passionate about the prospect. So he choose six of us seventh-graders as the team and we hopped in a school bus and headed to Shadle Park High School in Spokane.We were late so we didn’t get to participate in the opening ceremony. We didn’t hear the official rundown of the rules. Instead, Mr. K had read the rules to us on the school bus as we’d traveled to Spokane. At the venue, we were quickly shuttled into a room where we sat at a table opposite six white kids—three boys and three girls. I don’t recall what school they were representing but they were all dressed formally. Blazers and neck ties. Cardigans and scarves. Shiny shoes. All of us Indians were dressed in T-shirts and Wranglers, the universal reservation outfit.We were designated as the home team so our advisor, Mr. K, was going to read the questions and decide which student was the quickest to hit the buzzer and attempt to answer.And then it began.Mr. K read the first question. I don’t remember the details but it had something to do with Roman Emperors. The other team immediately hit the buzzer and answered correctly.Our team, the Indian kids, looked at one another and shrugged. We didn’t know anything about Roman Emperors.The second question was a math problem involving a theorem that we’d never been taught. The white kids leaned together and watched as one kid did the problem with pencil and paper. He quickly had the answer and his teammates agreed with it. They hit the buzzer and won another point for being correct.Five questions. Ten questions. Fifteen questions. The white kids answered all of them correctly. We didn’t hit our buzzer even once because we didn’t have any idea about the answers. Math questions. History questions. Science questions.I mean, Jesus, they asked us which specific lab equipment we were supposed to use during an experiment to create some specific reaction. We didn’t even have a science lab at the reservation school. Not one goddamn Bunsen burner. Not one Petri dish. Not one flask.We were intelligent kids. We were studious. We had innate intellectual gifts. But we didn’t know anything. Our education had never really extended beyond the reservation borders.Twenty questions. Twenty-five questions. Thirty questions. We had no answers. But the white kids answered all of them correctly. They were like a baseball pitcher throwing a no-hitter at us. And we were the batters who didn’t even swing our bats.We were humilated. I choked back tears. We all hung our heads in shame.Then Mr. K said, “Okay, this is the last question.”I remember thinking, Please, God, let it be a question about Indians. And I also remember thinking, Oh, God, what if the white kids know more about Indians than us Indian kids do?“Okay,” Mr. K said. “This is a literature question. Who wrote the novel I, Robert?”For the first time, the white kids looked confused. None of us Indians knew about that book. I felt like hitting the buzzer and saying, “Robert Sherwood,” an Indian elder in our tribe.Finally, after another moment or two, one of the white kids hit the buzzer.“Yes?” Mr K said.“I think it’s supposed to be I, Robot,” the white kid said. “Not I, Robert.”Mr. K silently read the question again. Then he said, “No, it’s I, Robert.”“I’m sorry, sir,” the white kid said. “I don’t mean to contradict you. But it’s I, Robot. Written by Isaac Asimov.”Mr. K looked at the card again.“Listen,” he said and read it aloud. “This is a literature question. Who wrote the novel, I, Robert?”The white kids were nervously laughing. I looked around the room. Their white advisor was covering a smile with his hand. A few white parents were looking down at the floor. They couldn’t even look at the disaster that was happening.“I’m sorry again, sir,” the white kid said. “I really don’t want to insult you. But the novel is I, Robot, and the author is Isaac Asimov. I promise.”Mr. K was angry. He stood, walked over to the kid, and said, “Okay, you read it, and you’ll see.”The white kid didn’t want to do it. He was polite. He’d been raised to respect adults, especially his teachers. But he took the card.“This is a literature question,” he whispered. “Who wrote the novel, I, Robot?” Then he looked up at Mr. K and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but please see. It’s not I, Robert. It’s I, Robot. And the answer is Isaac Asimov.”Mr. K took the card back and read it again. And he finally saw that he’d been misreading it. But more than that, he’d just been by embarrassed by a kid—a seventh-grader who was smarter. I realized in that moment that, just like us. Mr. K hadn’t known the answers to any of the previous questions.I should have said, that on the reservation, we had a third kind of teacher: the ones who weren’t good enough to teach anywhere elseAfter the contest, we shook the hands of the white kids who’d thrashed us. They were good kids. I detected no sarcasm from them though I assumed they pitied us.We still had three or four more rounds to play against other schools but Mr. K walked to our bus and we followed him without hesitation. Then we got on the bus and traveled back to the reservation. Once home, I slumped into my bedroom and cried for a long time.Six months later, I walked into my first class in Reardan, the all-white school twenty-two miles from the reservation border.There were so many questions that I needed to be asked and I had to leave my tribe in order to find the people who could teach me the answers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

In 1992, the second time I ever visited NYC, I showed up in March without a coat. I’d somehow forgotten to bring a winter coat to NYC during winter. I grew up in Eastern Washington so I’d experienced real winters. My reservation is farther north than Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Fargo, North Dakota, so I know winter on a primordial level. And, yet, I didn’t take a coat to NYC in March.How did that happen?I think it’s because I was just as flabbergasted to be traveling to NYC for the second time as I had been for the first trip. Maybe even more so. Yeah, I’d graduated from college and was living in Spokane, but I was still mostly an unassimilated and naïve reservation Indian boy unprepared for the mythical city of New York, New York.During that second trip, I stayed in Brooklyn with Bob Hershon and Donna Brook. And they were incredulous that I’d forgotten to bring a coat. They were also greatly amused and told the story for years. I’m embarrassed, nostalgic, and proud when I remember that innocent and coat-less journey. Bob was one of my poetry editors at Hanging Loose Press. That March, 1992, they’d just published my first book of poems and stories and it had received an ecstatic front-page rave in The New York Times Book Review. It was a miraculous time—too miraculous, apparently, for me to remember something as simple as a coat to keep me insulated from the near-freezing temperatures.So I borrowed one of Bob’s coats. He was not a small man but I’m a big guy. So his coat didn’t fit well. The sleeves were a few inches too short and my shoulders strained the seams. The coat was also rather battered. He’d meant to dispose of it at least a decade earlier. “I don’t know why I’ve kept that thing,” he said.“It’s good that you have it,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d be an icicle.”It wasn’t even a winter coat. It was a trench coat with a liner. A torn liner. Bob offered to buy me a new coat—I didn’t have the cash and I didn’t have a credit card—but I declined because of pride.A day after I arrived in Brooklyn, Bob took me to the New York City Ballet. Yeah, that New York City Ballet, the one founded by George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Bob and I took the subway to Lincoln Center to watch Swan Lake. It’s something of a cliché that my first ballet was the only ballet I’d ever heard of—indeed the only ballet that most of us have heard of. It’s like a scene from a movie about an underdog minority kid venturing into the elite white world. And I, the poor brown boy poet, was wearing a trench coat at least a decade past its expiration date. But that didn’t matter at all. Certainly not to Bob. He was wearing simple clothes—chinos, parka, and plaid shirt. And not to me. I’d spent my entire life in blue jeans and T-shirts. You might think that I was being harshly judged by all the New York ballet fans in their peacockian finery. But they were New York residents too jaded and polite to pay attention to me. That’s one of the most valuable lessons you can learn in NYC. Despite your own insecurities and self-consciousness, you begin to understand that nobody is paying attention to you at all.Bob and I sat near the top of the theater. And, no matter my lack of knowledge, I thought then and still think now that those rafter seats were superior because I could see the entire stage at once without ever turning my head. Sure, I was missing the close-up witnessing of the dancers’ muscles but that would’ve just revealed them as extraordinarily fit humans and not the ethereal beings that they were portraying.And then the ballet began.The swans floated onstage and were as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen. I cried a little. “Oh, my God,” I whispered to Bob.He smiled and shushed me.And then two swans collided. Yes, they crashed into each other. The crowd gasped. One swan kept her feet but the other fell hard to the floor. They quickly recovered and returned to their dance. But there was still a slight murmur moving through the crowd. But it wasn’t the sound of voices. It wasn’t an audible noise at all. No, it was the weighted silence of people who were now existentially unsettled.In NYC, I once saw a homeless man panhandling with a pet rat on each shoulder, though I don’t know how domesticated those rodents might have been. On a subway train, I once saw a naked man spraying the air with a can of Lysol. Strange sights, I know, but New Yorkers have often and regularly witnessed even more shocking and unprecedented events.But nobody—nobody no how—had ever seen two dancers slam into each other while performing for the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center. They’d hit each other like a football linebacker tackling a fullback. To this day, thirty years later, I still worry about those dancers. Were they fired? I wonder if their careers ended that night and they’ve been teaching ballet to below-average adolescent dancers in Connecticut ever since. I dread the thought of a small dance studio where a bored father leans close to a bored mother, and says, “The teacher was a New York City ballerina…for one night.”But I wasn’t thinking about the future, or a cruel father’s imagined punchline, as I watched Swan Lake for the first time. I could only be confused by the collision that had just occurred onstage. I turned to look at Bob. I hoped that he had answers. But he was too stunned. I saw the confusion on his face. But more than that, I saw what can only be described as wonderment.In Bob, I saw the boy that he used to be. He was born and raised in Brooklyn. And, aside from the few years he spent in San Francisco during his 20s, he was a lifelong Brooklynite. He’d lived in the same brownstone for decades. In Bob, I saw the kid who’d played stickball in the streets. I saw the kid who’d often been terribly lonely and grew up in a difficult family with a wonderful sister. I saw the kid whose heart was broken when Los Angeles stole the Brooklyn Dodgers. I saw the kid who’d learned to ride a bicycle while dodging cars on a narrow pothole-mangled street.I saw the man named Bob internally speaking to the boy named Robbie.Then he noticed me watching him. He turned toward me. I’ve traveled to NYC at least fifty times over the last three decades but most of those visits just blur into one another. They end up feeling like one business trip endlessly repeated. And the more predictable and hyper-organized trips make me long for the pre-mobile phone days when I was always lost and needed the help of New Yorkers who were always happy to give the assist.Sometimes, in the big city, it’s good to be a confused nomad in search of guidance.So, yeah, my second journey to NYC remains special, even more special that my first journey. And it’s special because of that swan-wreck. It’s special because I sat in the balcony, wearing a borrowed and bruised coat, as the crowd was still murmuring, as Bob took my hand and became a father figure. As he became my poetry father.“Sherman,” he said with the kind of baffled wonderment— yes, I again say wonderment—that only a great poet can experience. He said my name like he himself had learned something new. He’d never seen two swans briefly share the same exact space and time. He was already writing his poem about it—a poem that he never actually wrote.And, yeah, I need to tell you now that I’ve never attended any other ballet. Why do I need to after experiencing that first one?“Sherman,” Bob said again and took a deep breath. Then he looked back at the stage where an odd miracle had just occurred, where the perfect had momentarily become a majestic imperfection.Where human arms had become swan wings and swan wings had become human arms again. Where there was magic and mystery and mistake.“Sherman,” Bob said as he tried to explain the world to me.“Sherman,” he said. “That never happens.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, everybody, my name is Thomas Builds-the-Fire.Thank you all for coming to my grandmother’s funeral. Grandma Builds-the-Fire. Her first name was Agnes. Hardly anybody knew that. Hardly any Indians knew it. Hardly any Spokane Indians knew it. She was always called by her full name—by Grandma Builds-the-Fire. Even I called her that sometimes. But, most times, I just called her Ya-Ya Fire. So, today, and maybe every day in the future, you can all call her Ya-Ya Fire. We give people names when they’re born so maybe we should give people new names when they die. I want to say hello to my friends and family—to my Indian real cousins and to the Indian cousins that I call cousins because our parents used to drink together.Remember when we were little kids and our mothers and fathers used to leave us in the cars while they went inside and drank in the bars until closing time? Remember how we’d reverse history and pretend our cars were big ol’ army forts, like in the 19th Century, and we’d be inside the forts, instead of outside the forts, and we’d be protecting ourselves against the United States Cavalry riding around us in circles like they were the villains and we was the heroes?Sometimes, it’s a good day to die. Sometimes, it’s a good day to be an Indian with a huge imagination. In my house, indigenous and imagination mean the same thing.I want to say thank you to all the white strangers for coming. It’s kinda weird you came to a funeral for an Indian you don’t know. But white people always get weird around Indians. That’s okay. We’re used to it.I want to honor all the tribal elders who are here today. A few of you are over 100 years old. You were born when World War I was still happening and now you come riding in here on your electric scooters. I sure like those eagle feathers you’ve tied to the handlebars.And I want to thank the cooks for making the venison stew. And I want to thank those deer for being too slow. Ay, jokes! I want to thank all those deer for giving up their lives so we can have a good ol’ feast.I want to thank Arlene Joseph for making her fry bread. As you all know, she makes the best fry bread in the world. But this time, she made enough for all of us. So there’s not gonna be a fry bread riot.And I want to thank Victor for being here. He came all the way from Seattle where he’s a rich urban Indian working for those orca tribes. Hey, Victor, you still owe me twenty bucks.Hey, Victor, do you know what bluffing is? It’s when I’m telling one story with my eyes and telling a different story with my heart.And I want to say hello to all the ghosts here—all the Indian ghosts from the last 15,000 years—who’ve come here to take my grandmother’s spirit to the next world.Yeah.Ya-Ya Fire was kind and funny and magic.She was 95 years old when she died. But she was never old. You all know she was one of the best basketball shooters on the rez, even though she was cashing Social Security checks. She’d go behind the old school on the rez, on that outdoor basketball court with chains for nets, and she’d beat everybody at playing HORSE. You know that game. I don’t play basketball but even I know that game. Where you take crazy shots and the other player has to make those same shots or they get a letter. Ya-Ya Fire would walk over to half-court and shoot five shots from way out there. And everybody would miss five shots and get five letters and spell out HORSE and lose.And it was funny how she’d shoot those half-court shots by leaning down, swinging the ball between her legs, and lofting it way far and way high in the air, until it came splashing into the hoop.When you shoot it that way, all the basketball players everywhere call it a granny shot. So it makes sense that my grandmother would shoot a granny shot.Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. My grandmother switched the game of HORSE to a game of SALMON. We’re a river tribe, you know, so we should be playing SALMON.But there ain’t no wild salmon left in our rivers. The Grand Coulee Dam took them all away. So maybe my grandmother should have been playing SALMON GHOST.But that’s a lot of letters to spell, enit? That game would’ve taken a long time. It would have taken forever. But maybe Heaven is a river filled with wild salmon and Ya-Ya Fire is swimming with them.Sometimes, it’s a good day to die. Sometimes, it’s a good day to breathe underwater.I’m gonna miss my grandmother so much. It makes me sad and angry. Hey, Victor, I think maybe you and I should drive to the Grand Coulee Dam and stand on that riverbank and flip our middle fingers at that giant grey monstrosity. If you squint, it looks like a gravestone. But, Victor, you can flip it with your two middle fingers and me with my two middle fingers. That’s four middle fingers. Just like the four directions. Except, Victor, you and I will be pointing all of our middle fingers at that goddamn dam.Sometimes, it’s a good day to die. Sometimes, it’s a good day to make an obscene gesture.Yeah, when I was thinking about what I would say at this funeral, I thought of two things.The first one was Ya-Ya Fire on her deathbed, telling me I had to take over her place in our tribe.And I said, “I can’t take your place. I’m not a grandmother.”And she said, “Oh, Thomas, you’ve been a grandmother since you were born.”I’m not sure what she meant by that. But maybe she thought I had some wisdom. And maybe I do. Just a little bit. After all, my grandmother taught me everything I know. And maybe it’s because Ya-Ya Fire and I lived in the same house for 55 years.When you spend that much time with somebody, maybe you become a little bit of them and they become a little bit of you.Maybe, now, I’m the grandson and the grandmother in one body.Sometimes, it’s a good day to die. Sometimes, it’s a good day to have two or more people living inside you.So I guess you can call me Grandmother Thomas now. And I’ll try to be the best grandmother I can be.And, you know, when I was thinking about the other thing I would say at this funeral, I thought about Victor.Hey, Victor, I’m gonna talk about you now.I remember when my cousin from the Colville Rez texted me and said that Victor got really mad during the powwow over there. He was verbally threatening everybody. He was threatening the cars. And the trees. And the dirt. Victor was telling the sky he was gonna kick its ass.I didn’t even know the sky has an ass. But I guess Victor knows things the rest of us don’t.Victor still won’t tell anybody why he was so mad. He’s keeping that secret. But he was so angry they called the tribal cops on him. The Colville tribal cops.And Victor just kept yelling when the cops showed up. People worried that something ugly was gonna happen. But Victor didn’t battle with those cops. Not with his fists. He just kept yelling but he didn’t throw a punch or anything when they put him in handcuffs, and pushed him into the cop car, and then drove him to the tribal jail. The Colville tribal jail.Sometimes, it’s a good day to die. Sometimes, it’s a good day to practice non-violent resistance on somebody else’s reservation.But the thing is, Victor was still wearing his powwow regalia with the beads and buckskin and bustle and jewelry and eagle feathers. Eagle feathers! So Victor looked like a warrior when he went to jail. Yeah, Victor went to jail like it was the 18th Century.But, you know, it was the 21st Century, so Victor should have taken off his powwow regalia. He should have made sure it was safe. He should have been more respecful. He should have put on that orange prisoner jumpsuit.But he would not change. For three days, Victor sat in jail wearing his eagle feathers. That broke so many cultural rules. It was blasphemous! But, Victor, you were a rabid raccoon raging.Come on, Victor, tell us why you were so mad. See, look at him just shaking his head. Hey, Victor, you gotta tell somebody someday!Anyway, Victor’s arrest wasn’t ferocious. They just led him into the cell and told him to calm down. They didn’t even lock the door! They kept him in jail with the idea of a lock.But Victor wouldn’t stop yelling. He took offense to the very notion that he be jailed for threatening people.He wasn’t drunk. He was sober and disorderly.He called it injustice. Indian against Indian. He called it racism. Indian against Indian. He said he wanted to bail himself out. And the cops said it would cost him 300 bucks.“That’s too much money,” Victor said.He called it class warfare. Indian oppressing Indian. He railed and railed against authority. He said that he would die in jail. He said that his cell was his coffin. And the tribal cops were the pallbearers at his funeral.“This is unconstitutional,” he said.He promised the cops they’d get demotions. They’d get fired. He’d win millions of dollars when he sued.Millions! Victor really thought he’d win millions from Indians! So much angry hope!And then one of those tribal cops got a Coke from the pop machine and offered it to Victor, and said, “Here’s your millions, Geronimo.”Oh, that got Victor even madder! He said, “I’m not Geronimo! I’m not Apache! I’m a Spokane Indian! I’m a Child of the Sun! Look up there! You see the sun burning? That’s my father and my mother! That’s who I am! That’s who I’m always gonna be! You’ll never take the sun away from me!”And, remember, Victor was still wearing his eagle feathers when he yelled all of that. And when he was done yelling, those tribal cops applauded. But it wasn’t good applause. It was mean applause.And then Victor demanded his one phone call.“You got nobody on our rez,” said one cop. “You got no cousins here. Who you gonna phone up?”So Victor called Ya-Ya Fire. He called Grandma Builds-the-Fire. She still had a landline, you know, because she was traditional.So he called her and he asked to borrow some bail money but she had no cash. She was broke. But when she hung up the phone, she turned to me and said, “We gotta bust Victor out of jail.”So we called up Lucy and Velma to give us a ride. You know their car only has a reverse gear. So they drove us BACKWARDS from the Spokane Rez to the Colville Rez.And we pull up in front of their tribal jail and Lucy and Velma open up their trunk and it’s filled with handdrums and drumsticks.So the three of us, Lucy and Velma and me, grab them and start singing and drumming as Grandma walks into the tribal jail and gives those cops those powerful grandmother eyes and she says, “I’m taking Victor home.”And those tribal cops just step aside. They know magic when they see it.So Ya-Ya Fire leads Victor out of that jail. And Velma and Lucy and I are drumming and singing, and Ya-Ya starts singing with us.And Victor, he starts war dancing. He’s war dancing! And he dances into the car and we all drive back to our reservation.And it all felt so huge. Like we’d all won something epic. We thought the whole world would be waiting for us. We thought we was gonna get celebrated by our tribe.But I think the most important things happen when it’s quiet. I think silence is the most magical thing ever.But I’m not always good at being silent.Later that night, I asked my Ya-Ya Fire what it all meant. I asked her, “What’s the moral of this story?”And she said, “Indians have changed so much. But as much as we’ve changed, we’re also exactly the same.”She said our skin had been peeled back but our spines are unbroken.I don’t know about my spine. But I know that Ya-Ya Fire had the strongest spine in the world. I know she was the most amazing person I’ve ever known. She glimmered like the sun reflecting off a wild salmon.Sometimes, it’s a good day to die. Sometimes, it’s a good day to be beautiful.Goodbye, beautiful grandmother, goodbye. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Once upon a time on our reservation, the only food in the house was a half-empty box of sugar cubes. My sisters and I rationed them for most of a day. They did nothing to quell our hunger, but we learned there’s sweetness inside every little hell. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

I was at a literary gathering in Seattle when the news hit that David Foster Wallace had killed himself. The sudden grief was palpable. Two of my friends, epic fans of Wallace, wiped away tears. They were two men mourning the death of their favorite writer—another man in such emotional and mental distress that he’d felt his only option was to suicide. I’d shared a stage with Wallace on a few occasions. He was an eccentric dude, obviously troubled, and seemed to wear his facial stubble and white bandana as a kind of armor—as a failed camouflage of his privileged economic class and educational attainment. But we all wear failed armor, don’t we? I liked him. He was polite offstage and somewhat condescending onstage. But I didn’t know him. I can’t tell you one thing about his private life—about his strengths and weaknesses as a person outside of his writing career. I doubt that he and I would’ve ever been friends. My writer friends tend to be the people who’ve spent significant time in blue-collar small towns.In literary terms, I think Wallace was extraordinarily talented. But I like his essays more than his fiction. I love his use (and overuse) of footnotes.As a person with mental illness—as a public figure with mental illness—I felt a chill of recognition when I heard of Wallace’s suicide. As a person with bipolar illness, I struggle with suicidal ideation. I don’t want to become the terrible news that rips into any public or private gathering.I mourned for Wallace and his family and friends. I mourned for all of Wallace’s fans.At that literary gathering, I comforted my two friends by asking them about their favorite Wallace-isms. They quoted and paraphrased various sentences, paragraphs, and pages. They spoke of the nights when they’d seen him speak. One of my friends spoke of the day when he spotted Wallace in an airport but was too shy to say hello. My friends’ fondness for Wallace’s books was equal to their grief.I left that literary gathering early, even though I was one of the writers being celebrated. I’ve only been to two or three writer gatherings in Seattle. I’d rather be playing basketball with my friends who have zero to do with the book world.I think that people assume that a famous writer like me spends most of his time among writers. Strangers—readers—often think they know me. And readers often think they knew David Foster Wallace. And I assume people think they know what kind of people grieved when Wallace died. Perhaps you, my readers, made assumptions about my two friends who wept on the night of Wallace’s suicide. And, when you saw the title of this essay, you might have also made assumptions about how I feel about Wallace and his ardent fans.And, yes, because I’m an American who graduated high school in 1985, this essay has me thinking of the last scene of The Breakfast Club. I think of Brian reading his letter aloud: “Dear Mr. Vernon…you see us as you want to see us…in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions…”There are many “convenient” ways to see books, writers, and readers. In this literary era, as in every other literary era, we have turned racial, ethnic, geographic, theological, and economic simplification into a sacred ceremony. But I’ll do my best to avoid participating in that ceremony.In the wake of Wallace’s death, that literary gathering in Seattle was filled with warmth, fear, and empathy. But I’m sure that the clumsy and cruel categorization as practiced by cruel and clumsy people would turn that tender moment into two white book bros weeping over the ultimate white writer bro while an Indian writer bro served as witness.It was more than that. Much more. It was about people mourning the death of a gifted writer. It was about the power of words. It was about the gorgeous and unabashed adoration of books. Yes, it was a love story. Note: This essay began as a comment on a Substack post by Freddie DeBoer, who wrote of the current culture war and “all of the b******t ways we sort and rank each other…” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

The dog, dying of cancer, Walked into the guest room Where I was trying to sleep. He wasn’t there because Of me. The rug on the floor Belonged to him. He fell asleep so I fell Asleep. Or maybe it was The other way around. Hours later, he woke me With his whimpers. I thought he was inside a nightmare, But, no, he was awake And in pain from The incurable tumors in his belly. I called His name and, being A good dog, he slowly Rose and walked to me. I scratched behind his Ears. I petted his head. I told him I was sad That he was hurting. But he seemed to be Offended by my pity. He walked away, laid Back down on his Rug, and passed gas. And, yes, I know That’s funny, almost Slapstick, but his body Was betraying him. The flatulence was foul. I’d been in the presence Of people dying of cancer. I knew that smell. The dog bent his head And body back at His ass, took in the odor, And growled, growled At Death, that terrible guest, Who was always looking To demand and impose. The dog angrily fled The room and I went back To sleep. The next day, My friends took their dog For one last walk That surprisingly became A run. The dog, near his Terminus, somehow found The strength to loudly Chase every bird For an hour or two. And then, exhausted, Had to be carried Back to his home. That afternoon, My friends ferried Their dog for his last Visit to the vet. They hugged him close As he was euthanized. My friends wept, Then came home, Went into their bedroom, And wept more Behind their door. I wanted to stay, But my family and friends Were waiting for me Back in my home city. I didn’t want to interrupt My friends’ grief, So I handwrote A condolence note, Illustrated it with A winged cartoon dog, And carefully left it On their kitchen table. It seemed childish To memorialize That beautiful dog With amateur art. And it still seems Childish all these years Later. But it was the only Thing I could think to do. Maybe grief turns All of us into amateurs. As my friends continued To weep, I packed my bag And took a yellow cab To the airport. I was Late for my flight, And was sure I’d miss it, But I made it onboard Moments before They closed the door. As the plane ascended, I thought about how Many times that I’ve visited All of my friends, for hours Or days, and then left Their homes. That’s how Life is supposed to work. Friendship celebrates Arrivals and mourns Departures. That’s when We learn how greatly Or inadequately That we love outside Of ourselves. As the plane Rose higher, I thought Of the friends that I’d lost To time and temper. As I’ve aged, I’ve lost Many friends to death. I’ve lost friends because Of their selfishness And I’ve lost other friends Because of my arrogance. And, O, as a child, I lost So many adored dogs To the violence Of my poverty town. My dogs were poisoned. My dogs were torn Apart by feral dogs. My dogs were shot By frustrated hunters Who didn’t get their deer. Some of my dogs Just disappeared. On that airplane, I politely remained Silent as I leaned Against the window, Looked down at a city Not mine, and counted The church steeples, And then I said a prayer For all of the dogs And all of their people. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, readers, subscribers, and potential subscribers,Here is an essay to give you a sense of what I’m doing in the newsletter—writing fiction, non-fiction, and poetry about what it means to be a 21st Century Native, Native American, and American—and a stumbling citizen of the worldIf you’re new to this newsletter, I hope you like what you see and will become a subscriber. If you’re already a free subscriber. I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber.Thanks! Here is the essay:Back in 1977, in Wellpinit, Washington, on the Spokane Indian Reservation, four Indian boys put on KISS makeup and pleather and lipsynced “God of Thunder” and “Beth” for the school talent show. The four boys were named Steve, Steve, Stevie, and Mike. I remember they had multiple strobe lights. That part I’m sure about. But I also remember fireworks and smoke machines. That can’t be true. I remember a spotlight for Mike when he sat on a stool and lipsynced “Beth,” that lonely and lovely ballad. There’s no way our reservation school had a spotlight. It was probably just three or four of the band’s roadies shining flashlights at Mike. But I was one of the roadies and don’t remember doing that. I do know that crowd went crazy for the Indian boys. Many of the Indian girls rushed the stage. Everybody, including the adults, was ecstatic.Back then, KISS was dangerous. Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, and Peter Criss were outlandish paragons. They were feared and loved in equal measure. Many Christians claimed that KISS was an acronym for “Kings in Satan’s Service.” KISS donated their blood to make the red paint in a comic book about themselves. So much ego. So much debauchery. So many decibels. They were worshipped. It was no different on our reservation. The audience mobbed Stevie, Steve, Steve, and Mike. It was almost scary. A crowd of Indian girls chased the KISS impersonators—boys they’d known their whole lives—into an upstairs bathroom. With the other roadies, I stood guard at the door. But I wanted to be one of those Indian boys in KISS makeup. I wanted and wanted. My envy was as outsized as the reaction to the lipsyncers. The Indian girls wanted autographs. They pushed me into the closed door. They pleaded with me. Somebody produced a notebook and the girls tore out blank pages and gave them to me. They wanted, wanted, wantedwantedwantedwanted. I took those tattered paper sheets into the bathroom as if I were carrying holy parchment. And the boys signed with their names: Stevie, Steve, Steve, and Mike. I took those autographs back outside to the girls. They screamed in delight then looked at the handwriting on the pages and ferociously protested.“Noooooooo, not their real names! We want them to sign the names of the band!”Or was it the other way around? Did the girls want the boys to sign their real names instead of the band’s names? Did four rez boys become rock stars by impersonating rock stars? Did four Indian boys somehow become icons while wearing costumes they’d probably purchased from the Sears in Spokane, Washington? In any case, I saw the real love in those Indian girls’ faces. I saw their mad adoration for rock stars in particular and rock stars in general. For the first time, I saw extraordinary passion in the religious sense. I saw beyond fandom into fanaticism. Some of the girls would end up dating some of those boys. A few married a few. But those romances didn’t happen because of that KISS performance. Or maybe they did. Maybe that’s the way they began.I don’t remember how that talent show night ended. I lived across the street from the school so I would’ve been back in my bedroom not long afterward. I doubt there were any rez kid shindigs later that night. Many of my schoolmates would become wild party-goers but nobody was like that in sixth grade. Too many of my schoolmates would eventually die in car wrecks. And it pains me to recall that one of KISS’s best songs, “Detroit Rock City,” is the first-person roar of a kid who dies in a car crash.I always laugh when the puritans claim that rock music is destructive. Of course, it is! That’s why we love it. And that’s why rock—true rock drenched in lust and rage—isn’t popular anymore. These days, even the liberals and leftists are afraid of sweaty electric guitars.Or maybe that’s just me being overtly nostalgic for the days when a timid Indian boy could pretend to be a stuntman.I only know that we were back in school on Monday morning, and Stevie, Steve, Steve, and Mike were back to being just popular reservation boys. They were widely admired for their KISS performance but it soon became just a warm memory.I haven’t seen or spoken to Mike, Steve, or Stevie for years but, after a long estrangement, Steve and I are friendly again. We often text each other. I’ll eventually send him this essay and he’ll certainly have memories that contradict mine. Who is more reliable? The actor or the witness? I don’t know. Our combined stories, with all the contradictions intact, only tell part of the story anyway.We’re all the unreliable narrators of our lives, so let’s celebrate the unreliable.Once upon a time on the Spokane Indian Reservation, four Indian boys briefly became superstars. I saw them being created in real time. I was there and I hope, by writing this essay, that I’m bringing that mythology back to life. I want all of you, my witnesses, to retell the tale of the four Indian boys who, for one night, became deities. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

On the day that Elvis died, Our mother took To the living room couch  And cocooned herself With grief. We, her children, didn’t react. We were accustomed To her displays of ostentatious Sadness. She always emerged From her days or weeks Of self-exile. She’d stand, Unfurl her wings, and fly Into a domestic rage. She’d wash dishes and vacuum With a soldier’s fury. The world is ending, She’d say. The world Is ending. She was addicted To the apocalyptic. We, Her children, would retreat To our bedrooms, practicing Neutrality as our mother fought Her latest skirmish with doom. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Last night, I picked up teriyaki from my favorite place and learned it was the last day for the owners—a married couple. They’d sold the business and were heading into retirement. I was surprised by the depth of my sadness. I wiped away tears. They’d been my teriyaki joint for twenty-one years. I asked them about their future plans. The wife said, “I’ll visit my sisters in Korea more often.” The husband said, “I’ll take two long walks every day.” I shook their hands and wished them well. They thanked me for being a longtime customer. Then I left. They were people that I barely knew, but still somehow love, and I grieve the loss. This is what happens as we age. Our doctors retire. Our bankers move to new cities. Our high school sweethearts pass away. I think of my siblings. Soon enough, one of us will be the only one left. Does anybody anywhere want to the one who has to turn off the last light? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

I almost drown there. Others did drown. But nobody swims That water anymore. Reclaimed by aquatic Plants and dragonflies, The lake is stagnant And iridescent. Or so My sisters tell me. I haven’t stood On that shoreline For decades. Sometimes, it feels Like my reservation Heart has become The lake—unclaimed, Overgrown, forgotten By the children Of the children Of the children Who grew up With me. I escaped From my reservation Forty-one years ago. But, sometimes, I wonder if I’ll Eventually return And be that Indian Elder who sits In a folding chair At every powwow And celebrates What used to be And what has become. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

—those instant coffee pouches made by the corporation us leftists pretend to hate —that cereal that rakes the roof of your mouth but makes you nostalgic for childhood —that can of mixed nuts that doesn’t contain peanuts because if you buy one that contains peanuts then it will contain about 70% peanuts because peanuts are cheaper, yes, but don’t taste anywhere as good as cashews, walnuts, almonds, and those little green ones —lactose-free milk because the ability to digest lactose is mostly a Northern European trait and you’re not Northern European —100% wheat bread, though you distrust anything that claims to be 100% of anything because it reeks of religious, political, and cultural fundamentalism —grape jelly, even though you read somewhere that the FDA allows a jar of jelly to have like 27 insect parts, and that’s disgusting, but all of us will be eating crickets, ants, and mealworms after the apocalypse, so maybe you should think of eating slightly infested jelly as practice for an unpredictable future —natural peanut butter, and yes, this contradicts your opinion of peanuts, but peanut is to peanut butter as tomato is to ketchup —AAA batteries, but wait, no, maybe you need AA batteries, s**t, okay, buy both types —a dozen eggs, but don’t check to see if any of them are broken because you like to gamble and it’s like playing the lottery or, God, don’t say this aloud, it’s like playing twelve simultaneous games of chicken —a box of those cheap cigars, which you never smoke but purchase maybe twice a year because they remind you of your late father —a bag of toilet paper rolls even though they are less expensive at Target but you have no plans to go to Target anytime soon so you might as well buy them here —a pack of Big League Chewing Gum because it reminds you of that walk-off home run that Joe Carter hit to win the World Series in 1993 —a bouquet of tulips to put on your mother’s grave, though she’s not dead, so you lean the flowers against your mother’s front door at 2 a.m so they fall into the house in the morning when she goes out to grab the morning paper, and you’ve done this maybe a dozen times since your father died, and it makes your mother laugh and mourn and feel beloved —make another list of everything you’ve ever forgotten to put on a grocery list and that will remind you of all the times you loved somebody who didn’t love you back. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

My tribe, the Spokanes, do a Happy Dance. Yes, It’s called a Happy Dance, and yes, we two-step In a circle to the powwow drum, drum, drumbeat, And then, with laughter and screams of delight, we rush Toward the center. We collapse the circle and become One mass of happy Spokanes. Then we reform The circle and rush back into the center again. We do this for an entire song! We do this many times Every year! Ah, listen to that glorious noise! Ah, watch that endless circle of indigenous joy! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

1. Seventeen months after I moved off the reservation, I traveled to London to promote my first internationally published book. 2. A Native American in England! I imagined the last Indian in England was Maria Tall Chief, the Osage ballerina who was once married to Balanchine. An Indian married to Balanchine! 3. My publishers put me in a quaint little hotel near the Tate Gallery. I didn’t go into the Tate. Back then, I was afraid of paintings of and by white men. I think I’m still afraid of paintings of and by white men. 4. This was long before I had a cell phone, so I stopped at payphones to call my wife. I miss the intensity of a conversation measured by a dwindling stack of quarters. 5. No quarters in England, though, and I don’t remember what the equivalent British coin was called. 6. As with every other country I’ve visited, nobody thought I was Indian. This made me lonely.7. Lonely enough to cry in my hotel bed one night as I kept thinking, “I am the only Indian in this country right now. I’m the only Indian within a five-thousand-mile circle.” 8. But I wasn’t the only Indian; I wasn’t even the only Spokane Indian.9. On the payphone, my mother told me that a childhood friend from the reservation was working at a London pub. So I wrote down the address and took a taxi driven by one of those London cabdrivers with extrasensory memory.10. When I entered the pub, I sat in a corner, and waited for my friend to discover me. When he saw me, he leapt over the bar and hugged me. “I thought I was the only Indian in England,” he said.11. His name was Aaron and he died of cancer last spring. I’d rushed to see him in his last moments, but he passed before I could reach him. Only minutes gone, his skin was still warm. I held his hand, kissed his forehead, and said, “England.” 12. “England,” in our tribal language, now means, “Aren’t we a miracle?” and “Goodbye.” 13. In my strange little hotel near the Tate, I had to wear my suit coat to eat breakfast in the lobby restaurant. Every morning, I ordered eggs and toast. Everywhere in the world, bread is bread, but my eggs were impossibly small. “What bird is this?” I asked the waiter. “That would be quail,” he said. On the first morning, I could not eat the quail eggs. On the second morning, I only took a taste. On the third day, I ate two and ordered two more. 14. A gathering of quail is called a bevy. A gathering of Indians is called a tribe. When quails speak, they call it a song. When Indians sing, the air is heavy with grief. When quails grieve, they lie down next to their dead. When Indians die, the quails speak. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, my name is Sherman and I’m addicted To my ghosts though I don’t know If it’s my bipolar but somehow dependable mother Or my alcoholic But somehow gentle father That I miss the most. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

In the United States, there are eight towns named Lone Tree. Two of them spell Lone Tree as one word— Lonetree— Which makes those small towns seem crowded And pushed together. In Fairview, California, there exists Lone Tree Cemetery, a name that makes sense at first When one considers the loneliness of grief, but On second thought, one must ask if it’s possible For the dead to be lonely when they’re buried In tight rows. In Illinois, there is a ghost town Named Lone Tree Corners, which seems contradictory. Does loneliness have corners? Does loneliness Take the form of rectangles, squares, And triangles? After all, a lone tree doesn’t Have corners. Or wait, a tree does indeed have corners When it is cut into lumber. And that geometric Fact leads into a curveball question: Does a tree die when it’s turned into lumber? Of course, I know that a tree, once felled, Stops being a living thing. But isn’t a tree Given an afterlife when its lumber is used to build A house? Decades ago, when I was twenty, I spent a New Year’s Eve lonely and cornered in my house— If a studio apartment can be called a house. The corners Were so close that I could almost touch opposite walls Simultaneously. I was alone because I’d been exiled By my mother. And she was so powerful That my father and siblings obeyed Her decree. Abandoned, I called the woman I fragilely loved who was in fragile love With me. Thirty miles away, she was at a party Crowded with her friends. “Hey,” I called and said. “Ditch those people and drive to the city. Let’s be together. Please, please.” But she was more Excited to be at that New Year’s celebration Than to be alone with me. I didn’t have a car So I couldn’t drive to her, and I kept asking over the phone— The landline!—if she would travel to me. She promised That she’d head to my apartment as soon As the party died down. “One minute past Midnight,” she said. “I’ll get in my Ford And speed to you.” I waited all night. I didn’t sleep. Instead, I watched a marathon Of standup comedy specials on cable TV. It’s astonishing to realize that a lonely person Can laugh for eight hours straight. It requires Resilience and curiosity. I hadn’t yet Learned how to write poetry, but please Let me revise history and lie To you. Well, let me begin with the truth. I was hungry but I only had one small box Of white rice. There was only enough left For one serving. And I decided to fry the rice. But I was young and dumb. I’d never really Learned how to cook. So I threw the raw Rice into the third-hand pan and fried it With butter and salt. I didn’t know that you need To boil the rice before you fry it. So I was shocked And distraught when I took my first bite Of the rice and felt the crunch, crunch, crunch Of what I hadn’t properly made. I didn’t realize That I could still boil the rice and maybe salvage The meal. So I just tossed the s**t Into the garbage can. And then I went hungry As I binged on comedy. And now, here, Let’s begin the revision: As I wept And laughed at the same time, I wrote my first Poem. I wrote about how it felt to be lonely In the city. I wrote about how it felt to be An reservation Indian boy trapped in the city. I theorized That every Indian is lonely in every city. I rhymed “diaspora” with “soul stolen by camera.” I wrote about the blind salamander that only exists In one cave pond in Texas. I wrote About unrequited love. I wrote about Aristotle’s Belief that the object of comedy is “the ridiculous, Which is a species of the ugly.” I wrote about feeling Ugly, about looking into the mirror and seeing A ridiculous Indian with ridiculous desire. I stuffed That amateur poem with all of the lonesome In my world. But, being as resilient And curious as I’ve always been, I ended That poem with gratitude: Dear God, I wrote. Thank you for teaching me what it means To be a frail man enduring a physical and spiritual Solitude. Thank you for the food That I couldn’t eat. Thank you for the woman Who didn’t keep her promise. Thank you For my mother and her rage. Thank you For my father and siblings and their fear. Thank you for the comedians who turned Their pain into punchlines. Thank you For electricity. Thank you for running Water. Thank you for the bed, blankets, And heat. Thank you for for teaching me How to turn my grief into poetry. Thank you for teaching me how to be The lone tree on the horizon. Thank you For that studio apartment. Thank you For making it a temporary monastery Where I accepted that to be alone Is to be human. And that to pursue Loneliness is a holy endeavor. To accept Loneliness is to accept vulnerability. I’m unguarded. I’m undefended I’m assailable. I’m an eagle feather in a hurricane. Thank you For teaching me that a city Indian’s loneliness Is beautiful. Thank you for rescuing me— No, thank you for teaching me that I’m nobody’s Savior. Thank you for the tribulation of leaving my reservation. Thank you for the cacophonous safety of silence And for teaching me that exile can also be asylum. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, everybody, I shall begin with one of my six-word stories: Tornado Comedy The atheist shelters in the church. The six-word story is a common writing exercise. It’s a lesson in being as concise as possible. There are a few best-selling anthologies of six-word stories. And there’s a website dedicated to six-word memoirs. The most famous six-word story was supposedly written by Hemingway but that’s probably an apocryphal attribution. Here is that story: For Sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. That’s a tragic tale told in miniature. These six-worders are a cool hybrid. They work in a strict three-act structure, like screenplays. They are often in iambic pentameter, simply because of the word requirements and the absence of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. So the six-word story is very much like poetry. The six-worders also rely heavily on that strategic pause between the second and third act. In poetry, that pause is called the caesura. In stand-up comedy, that pause is called comedic timing (Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife…please” is a famous example of the pause that gives the joke its punchline).So, hey, with all that in mind, here’s one more of my six-worders: Humans My ex-wife. My brother. They eloped. So, as a community exercise, I’d love to see you write six-word stories and post them in the comments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I don’t recall which particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food.My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player biographies, and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch's Pawn Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army, and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new novels at supermarkets, convenience stores, and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms, and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves from discarded wood and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the entire 27-book series by William M. James about a vengeful Apache warrior named Cuchillo. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.I can remember picking up my father's books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn't have the vocabulary to say "paragraph," but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and our adopted little brother.At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue, and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue, and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman is breaking down the door." I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "Superman is breaking down the door." The words—the dialogue—also float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door" In this way, I learned to read.This might be an interesting story all by itself. A little Indian boy teaches himself to read at an early age and advances quickly. He reads Grapes of Wrath in kindergarten when other children are struggling through the Dick and Jane picture books. If he'd been anything but an Indian boy living on the reservation, he might’ve been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity. He grows into a man who often speaks of his childhood in the third-person, as if it will somehow dull the pain and make him sound more modest about his talents.A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike. I fought with my classmates on a daily basis. They wanted me to stay quiet when the non-Indian teacher asked for answers, for volunteers, for help. We were Indian children who were expected to be stupid. Most kid buckled under those expectations inside the classroom but subverted them on the outside. They struggled with basic reading in school but could remember how to sing a few dozen powwow songs. They were monosyllabic in front of their non-Indian teachers but could tell complicated stories and jokes at the dinner table. They submissively ducked their heads when confronted by a non-Indian adult but would slug it out with the Indian bully who was 10 years older. As Indian children, we were expected to fail in the non-Indian world. Those who failed were ceremonially accepted by other Indians and appropriately pitied by non-Indians.I refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant. I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until I could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch, and in the few minutes left after I’d finished my classroom assignments. I read books in the car when my family traveled to powwows or basketball games. In shopping malls, I ran to the bookstores and read bits and pieces of as many books as I could. I read the books my father brought home from the pawnshops and secondhand stores. I read the books I borrowed from the library. I read the backs of cereal boxes. I read the newspaper. I read the bulletins posted on the walls of the school, the clinic, the tribal offices, the post office. I read junk mail. I read auto-repair manuals. I read magazines. I read anything that had words and paragraphs. I read with equal parts joy and desperation. I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life.Despite all the books I read, I am still surprised I became a writer. I was going to be a pediatrician. These days, I write novels, short stories, movies, memoirs, essays, and poems. I visit schools and sometimes teach creative writing to Indian kids. In all my years in the reservation school system, I was never taught how to write poetry, short stories, or novels. I was certainly never taught that Indians wrote poetry, short stories, and novels. Writing was something beyond Indians. I cannot recall a single time that a guest teacher visited the reservation. There must have been visiting teachers. Who were they? Where are they now? Do they exist? I visit Indian schools as often as possible. The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They’ve read my books. They’ve read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. "Books," I say to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

for Diane Here is the center of the circle And here we are, traveling away From the center. If God is real Then God created this whirlpool Force. O, my love, we spin Away from each other When we leave home for work Then we spin back to our table At the end of the shift. My love, My spouse, you are my center, And here we are at dinner With the lettuce and tomato. How ordinary! But I praise And praise these ordinary days. This knife, this cup, this salad! Hahahahahahahahahhahahaha! It’s just salad. How simple. But I give the most praise To these simple days When we tell the stories About this or that. It’s not the words that matter. It’s the listening. Talk to me, my love, Remind me again and again That everything we are now Began at that moment When we were strangers Greeting each other For the first time. “Hello,” you said. “Hello,” I said. We didn’t know the force Of our impending devotion Would push us against the tender Walls of the universe Then pull us back to the center. My love, we have shared Thousands of meals And we’ll share thousands more. So I give thanks for the tomato, Onion, carrot, radish, pine nut, Oil, vinegar, and lettuce leaf. I give thanks for our creation. I give thanks for everything That’s bright, centrifugal, and green. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Thirty years ago, while on summer break from college, I went to a small afternoon party at a high school friend’s apartment. I’ll call him Mark.  It wasn’t a wild party. We just sat around drinking beers and listening to music—mostly hair metal.A few hours into the party,  a white woman stopped by for a surprise visit. I’ll call her Melissa. I didn’t know her but my friends did. She smelled of cigarette smoke. Her clothes were too big, like she was a twenty-something still dependent on her siblings’ hand-me-downs. I recognized her instantly as being a Hillyard Hippie—one of the poor white people who lived in Hillyard, a  neighborhood in Spokane where most folks lived far below the poverty line. I had Indian cousins who’d married Hillyard Hippies so I was familiar with the type and gently pitied her, if pity can ever been seen as gentle. Imagine being a white person so poor that you inspire the sympathy of a poor reservation Indian. She looked lost and uncomfortable. I said hello and we briefly talked about the Motley Crue song that was playing. She said she couldn’t afford to buy their last album so she had to use her tape deck to record them off the radio.“I’m always a little too slow,” she said. “The DJ says he’s playing Crue and I run over to my tape deck and always hit record too late. So I’m missing a few seconds from the beginning of every song.”She smiled. Her teeth were chaotic, jagged and slanted at random angles, as if her mouth had been vandalized.I mention her physical appearance only because she, a few days later, told Mark, the party host, that I was the ugliest guy she’d ever seen. And then Mark told me.“Wow,” I said. “That hurts my feelings.”I thought of a thousand insults that I’d fling her way if she’d happened to show up at that moment. I’d insult her face and teeth. Her clothes. Her nicotine-thick body odor. Most especially, I’d insult her education and intelligence. I’d brag about my summa cum laude college grades and prodigal poetry. She was white trash. I was an indigenous pauper on his way to becoming a literary prince.“You okay?” Mark asked me. “You look pissed.”“I am pissed,” I said.“Yeah, that makes sense,” he said. “But she wants to date you now.”“She wants to date the ugliest guy in the world?”“She doesn’t think you’re so ugly anymore,” he said.“Yeesh, that’s big of her. What changed her mind?”“You were nice to her.”Then my friend told me that Melissa used to date Ted, one of the other guys at the party.“Ted destroyed her,” Mark said. “He cheated on Melissa with two of her best friends.”“Holy s**t,” I said. “You’re joking, right?”“Nope,” Mark said. “True story.”“Damn, two of them. That’s about the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”“Yeah, it’s way high on the s**t list.”I wondered if I could still be friends with Ted after hearing about that cruelty. But Ted moved to Texas not long after that day and I haven’t seen or talked to him since.“Okay,” I said to Mark. “He slept with her best friends. What does that have to do with me?”“Melissa didn’t know Ted was going to be at the party,” Mark said. “And she said she freaked out when she saw him. She wanted to run away but she just froze. And then you said hello to her. She was so grateful to you for protecting her.”“That’s it?” I asked,  “She falls in love with the ugliest guy in the world because I was nice to her for about forty-five seconds?”“That’s it,” Mark said.I wasn’t sure then what to make of that moment. I was thinking more about my vanity than about other people’s broken hearts.  But, all these years later, I wonder about Melissa’s poor white life. How badly had she been hurt? How lonesome was she? How hungry had she been? How forgotten? How ignored? How mistreated had she been that she’d seen my brief politeness as compelling kindness?I doubt that Melissa has ever escaped Hillyard. That neighborhood is a social and economic trap. I hear it’s been somewhat gentrified but those forty or so square blocks have always been more of a state of mind than a physical location. I wonder if she’s still alive. There’s a certain probability that she’s a meth addict with a dramatically shortened lifespan.And since she’s a poor white person from Spokane, I assume that she’s a Trump-supporter, whether or not she actually votes. I can see her wearing a MAGA hat. I doubt I’d recognize her if we passed on the street and I doubt she remembers the man she thought was the ugliest, if kindest, Indian in the world.And, yes, I would take gentle pity on her again. I’d take pity of her homely face primarily because she thought I was homely. I’d pity her politics. I’d try to convince her that oppression is just as much about economic class as it is about race and gender. All the while, I’d assume that she voted out of ignorance and miseducation rather than deeply-held beliefs. I’d operate as if her Christianity were the wrong kind of Christianity—as if her spirituality was inferior to mine, as if her saints were racist, misogynistic, and homophobic monsters.And, yes, I’m exaggerating about the combative and divisive nature of my politics. Because I grew up in small town Eastern Washington and still have friends and family who are conservatives, I think I’m far more moderate in my acceptance and tolerance of Republicans than a typical liberal/leftist. However, I also believe that I can be the same kind of condescending liberal a*****e as all the other condescending liberal a******s.Like everybody else, I think my politics are the best politics. I think every politician should govern like I would if elected.Yes, I think every conservative white person should have the same politics as a liberal urban elite Indian like me.So here’s the thing: I think Melissa might be more accurate about choosing her friends and enemies than I am about choosing mine. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Our kind neighbor saw a coyote on our block.Yeesh, Coyote, you trickster! Revealingyourself to a white woman but hidingfrom our house full of Indians—jealousIndians! I want to watch Coyote stealingChristmas packages from our porch.Yeah, yeah, Coyote, all you’re gonna findin those packages is books. Hey, Coyote,this trick’s on you! You might end upwith a slim volume of contemporary poetry!And who wants that? Hahahahahaahahaha!But, hey, Coyote, this day with the longestnight belongs to you. Our Indian housecelebrates solstice with a Mexican feast.If you like, stop by. We’ll save you a plate.Tell us that old story about the moon breakingyour trickster heart. Then you can sigh and fart. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

That mother orca still carries her dead baby Through and through the waves. Hear the rage and wail. Humans are thieves. We deserve this destruction and decay. All of us play roles in this bloody cabaret.“But no,” you say. “Not me. I’m innocent.” The earth doesn’t accept your pleas and claims. None of us get to borrow that orca’s grief. She’s the one who carries her dead baby Through and through the waves.“We can still save the world,” you declare. But it’s probably too late. We’re killing oceans. We’re killing reefs. We deserve this destruction and decay. All of us play roles in this bloody cabaret. Some of us think spirituality will save us. But cars don’t pray. So f**k Prius. F**k Tesla. F**k Leaf. That mother orca carries her dead baby through and through the waves, Through the shipping channels that deliver Silverware and serving trays To our front doors. We consume and sieve. We deserve this destruction and decay. All of us play roles in this bloody cabaret.Our empathy is only a shovel. Collectively, We dig and dig the graves. We recycle hymns and compost poems— So misplaced and brutally naive— While mother orca carries what we’ve killed Through and through the waves. Her ghost will watch us destruct and decay As we dance in this apocalyptic cabaret. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

For the last three years, while walking to work, I've passed the downtown bus station where a disheveled elderly man mutters to himself as he paces the sidewalk."Waiting, waiting, waiting," he chants. That’s all I’ve heard him say in three years.I don't know if he's homeless or mentally ill—I try not to live by assumption—but he’s certainly odd and has poor hygiene. My curiosity about his biography has grown over the years, but I'd resisted the urge to engage with him. Until yesterday. “Waiting, waiting, waiting," he chanted. "What are you waiting for?" I asked.Surprised, he looked at me. Rapidly blinked his eyes. Wiped his white face with his white hands. I wondered how long it had been since somebody had paid real attention to him. “My wife died," he said. “I’m sorry,” I said.“We were married forty years.”“That’s heartbreaking,” I said and felt stupid and cruel. Of course, it was heartbreaking. He didn’t need me to point that out. But I’ve never known what to say to the grieving people I love, let alone to distraught strangers.“My wife died of lung cancer,” he said.“I hate cancer,” I said. Jesus, as if anybody loves cancer.“My wife died of lung cancer but she never smoked,” he said. “My wife died of lung cancer but she never smoked. My wife died of lung cancer but she never smoked.”“When did she die?” I asked.“Twelve years ago,” he said. “But she's going to be on the next bus. The next bus. The next bus.”I don't know if he was completely delusional, if his wife and marriage were even real, but his eyes were blue hurricanes—destructive and devoted. “Next bus, next bus, next bus," he chanted.I have never loved anyone like that. Not my parents. Not my siblings. Not any of the people who’ve shared my bed. I don't think I could survive that kind of love. But I want it. I want to be ferociously waiting and pacing and chanting for somebody who may or may not be arriving.Don't you want to love like that? Of course, you do. Everybody's madness is the same madness. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

The next door neighbors, a young unmarried couple, had let their blackberry bushes overgrow their fence like lazy sentinels and drop pounds of fruit onto Jennifer’s lawn.The berries rotted and drew aggressive yellowjackets. During college, Jennifer had been wasp-stung on the lip at an English Department picnic and ended up in the ER with respiratory distress and a face so swollen that her skin threatened to split."I'm allergic to bee and wasp venom,” Jennifer had politely said multiple times to her next door neighbors, Marilyn and Charles. And they, seemingly chagrined, had always promised to take care of the problem. They were friendly, good for a driveway wave or hello. They weren’t the kind of neighbors who safeguarded an emergency pair of Jennifer’s house keys. But they were courteous enough to notify the neighborhood when they were going to host larger parties that might get a little loud—they had an extensive and enviable backyard and deck. Jennifer had never attended one of their parties. The crowd, like Marilyn and Charles, seemed to all be young and unmarried. Not Jennifer’s demographic. So she wouldn’t have been comfortable anyway. As homeowners, the next door neighbors were diligent about upkeep. Their house and lawn were in great shape except for those goddamn blackberry bushes. Jennifer was respectful each time she asked them to trim back the branches. But nothing changed. She had never been confrontational—her secular parents had nonetheless insisted on a perpetual and cloistered silence in her childhood home—so Jennifer could only fume silently.She’d thought to enlist the help of other people on the block. After all, there were five or six surrounding houses that were also besieged by the yellowjackets. But Jennifer was white and her careless next door neighbors were a Native American couple. Charles and Marilyn were from the local tribes. Coastal Salish. Orca and salmon people. Like everybody else in the country, Jennifer had seen the viral videos of white women harassing people of color. So how could she organize any neighborhood action without being seen as a racist? Without being filmed and then tried and convicted before the juries and hanging judges of Twitter? How could she make demands? And she absolutely couldn’t call anybody official to intercede. There was no such thing anymore as an ordinary dispute. Each current conflict, no matter how small, contained the weight of every previous conflict in American history. So Jennifer decided that the only safe thing to do was stay out of her dangerous backyard and wait for winter.But, on a Saturday September morning, Jennifer’s anger grew as she stood at her kitchen window and counted seventeen yellowjackets feasting on the fallen berries. She also drank six glasses of wine. Her house was clean. Three bedrooms and two baths. Her divorce was almost final. She’d left her husband for a man who’d then abandoned her after a few months. She counted two, three, four more yellowjackets. Then she put on two sweaters, a rain jacket, two pairs of jeans and gloves, and snow boots. Duct-taped her pants tight around her ankles and her sleeves around her wrists. She covered her head with a ski mask and goggles. She looked like a Knight of the Yard Sale. In the garage, she grabbed a shovel and bucket. Then she waddled out to those wild blackberry bushes.She quickly scooped up three shovelfuls of berries, along with soil and grass, and dumped them into the bucket. She’d fully expected to be stung at least once. Her mobile phone and EpiPen was sitting in plain sight on the kitchen table. She’d left the backdoor open. If needed, she was ready to run back into the house, inject the life-saving Epinephrine into her thigh, and dial 911.But she didn’t get stung and she took that as a sign from God. Or the Devil. Or whatever deity was in charge of vengeance. Or maybe, she thought, the yellowjackets themselves approved of her mission.Jennifer dropped the shovel and carried the bucket over to her neighbor’s house. She walked up their front steps and hurled the blackberry sludge against their front door. Then she jabbed the doorbell five, six, eight times.An irritated Marilyn opened the door.“What do you—“She saw the blackberry mess, look at Jennifer, and immediately understood what had happened.“What the f**k, Jennifer,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”Jennifer had wanted to issue some great proclamation or deliver some Shakespearean monologue about social obligations. But she could only repeat her most basic demand.“Take care of your blackberry bushes! Take care of your blackberry bushes! Take care of your blackberry bushes!”“Are you crazy?” Marilyn asked.“Am I crazy? Am I crazy? Maybe I am. Maybe I am, Marilyn. Are you gonna film me now and put me on the f*****g Internet? Are you gonna call me a racist?”“What are you talking about?” Marilyn asked. “I’m not gonna film you. I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re a goddamn a*****e.”"I get stung and I could f*****g die!" Jennifer said. "Do you want me to f*****g die?""You weren't f*****g worried about stings when you picked up those goddamn berries, were you?"Marilyn slammed the door shut. Jennifer roared back to her house. Over the next few hours, as she sobered up, Jennifer’s shame grew suicidally large. At some point, Marilyn and Charles cleaned their front door. And they left a handwritten bill for the cleaning supplies tucked beneath Jennifer’s welcome mat. She crumpled the bill into a ball and threw it toward the street. Over the next few weeks, Jennifer’s shame and anger became fraternal twins.Then, one month after the blackberry confrontation, Jennifer opened her mailbox to find a padded envelope addressed to the neighbors. A mistake by the mailman. She hesitated for a moment but then opened the misdelivered package to find a new wedding ring. Jesus, Marilyn and Charles, she thought. Who buys their wedding ring through the mail?Late that night, she took a ladder, leaned it against her fence, climbed up, and slid the wedding ring onto the tallest blackberry branch.There, Jennifer thought. If you cut the branches then you'll find your ring.Back in her house, she scrubbed her hands hard. She felt sticky from touching the blackberries and branches. She could still feel the weight of the blackberry bucket. She still felt like somebody was filming her.Jennifer wondered if she’d ever feel clean again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

He was a graveyard shift Deli employee Who constructed hero SandwichesFor other workers Up too early Or awake too late. He made BLTs For night watchmen  And ham & cheddar For the nurses On their midnightLunch breaks. One night, near Dawn, he made A triple-decker subFor a female cop Who wanted extra Onions. “Don’t screw Around,” the cop said.“Extra means extra. Give me shallots And scallions, too. Not just regular onions.”A gathering of crows Is called a murder. A group of eagles Is called a convocation.Look! There’s a shrewdness Of apes! So what do you call The enormous stack of shallots And scallions amassedOn a cutting board? It’s a Sob of Onions! His eyes profusely watered As he slicedAnd chopped All those onions. Their fierce fumes PermeatedThe deli. There was no way The cop should Have been ableTo tolerate such An overwhelming Sandwich, But she finished itIn 10 minutes, Gave him the thumbs-up, And said it was the best SandwichThat she’d ever eaten. Then she winked at him And became A nightly customer.Funny how, Thirty-two years later, He still remembers her. She must at least seventyBy now. He called her The Onion Cop Whenever he talked About herWith his fellow Sandwich makers. They teased him About being in loveWith her. He laughed And denied it. But he wanted to tell them That his affectionFor the Onion Cop Was more important Than romantic. He wanted to sayThe Onion Cop gave Meaning to his job. If he was to be Making sandwichesAt three in the morning  Then let him make A specific sandwich For a specificPerson. Let the sandwiches Comfort a stranger. Let them be armor When everything else isDangerous. These days, He only makes midnight Sandwiches at home With ingredients fromHis well-stocked pantry And refrigerator While his wife And children sleep Upstairs. Maybe, one night, He’ll make a sandwich With too many onions. Maybe he’ll whisperA declaration of affection For the Onion Cop. Maybe he’ll wonder If the cop was in love with himOr the sandwiches. He was a young man Made older By povertyAnd desperation. He was prone, Then and now, To surgesOf fantasy And materialism. He once wrecked His carBecause he was distracted By daydreams Of winning the lottery. He was sometimes crushedBy rage. He was a service Worker who, in the presence Of any attention, Became an actor. But, hey,Maybe he’s always been An actor. After all, Every fast food restaurant Is a stageAnd every worker is an extra Playing the role of Extra And doing it all For minimum wage. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

In every wall, I see a father-shaped absence—A Wile E. Coyote impact craterOf paternal loss. Can I really beA 55-year old son lonelyFor the father who died when he wasOnly 62? Yes, I can! And now, at my age,More and more of my father figures—allThose half-broken wise men who half-Replaced my broken father—Are terminally ill or they’re already dead.That’s how it works. If our lives go as plannedThen we’ll bury every father.And we love them as they love us.And we love them as they love usAnd Jesus, it’s raining in Seattle againAnd today I believeThat every other rain dropIs a damp tombstoneAnd that every other rain dropIs a small fatherTrying to nourish the world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

The man next door built a treehouse for his kids. More like a mansion. Three rooms, four sets of stairs. A bridge from one huge tree to the next. From the north, the structure looked like a wooden ship. From the south, it looked like a wooden dragon. From my bedroom window, it looked like Jesus had built it. And how can a mortal father like me compete with Jesus?The man worked for months on that treehouse. Meanwhile, I sat in airplanes and flew to archaic meetings in hotel conference rooms. More than once, I'd suggested to my boss that those meetings could’ve been conducted by conference call. Or by Internet streaming. Or by shouting into the wind. But the bosses wanted us minions to be collectively unhappy around conference tables in other people's cities.One night, on the road, in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I ordered room service. I ordered all five desserts on the menu: chocolate mousse, flan, banana split, cheese cake, and apple cobbler. I'm not a fat man. And I'm not thin. I carry twenty pounds too many. I’m ordinary. So it seemed extraordinary to become the kind of man who would eat multiple desserts in one sitting.When the room service man wheeled the cart into my room, I was shocked by the size of my shame. By my paranoia. I thought the hotel man was passing judgement on me. But he was as bored as any other professional. And it occurred to me that he must have seen far stranger things while working at a hotel.I was wearing all of my clothes, for one. Even my socks and shoes. I was probably a relief for him. I gave him no stories to tell.Room service included a 20% service charge, but I added another 20% as gratuity. And then I wondered how gratuity, the word, is related to gratitude. And it seemed to me that gratuity sported a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt, while gratitude wore a suit and necktie. And what about the service charge? There’s always a service charge. After the hotel guy left, I lined the desserts in a row, taking one bite of each, moving my fork left to right like I was pounding out a letter on an old typewriter. I ate everything in perhaps fifteen minutes.Later that night, nauseous and dizzy, I called home."I just ate all the desserts on the menu," I said to my wife."You're going to poop your pajamas," she said and laughed.I worried that she was right. So I grabbed a pillow and blanket and slept in the tub. I didn't want to risk shitting the bed and making a nightmare mess for the housekeeper. And no gratuity or gratitude would compensate for that.In the tub, I stared at my blurred reflection in the clean porcelain. But it wasn't really a reflection. It was more like my face was reduced to a vague brown moon.Imagine that.Imagine the night sky is white and the stars are black.Imagine that my wife and I are reaching our dark hands across the space between us. Imagine that it looks like our fingertips almost touch. Imagine her as a new constellation. Imagine me as a new constellation. And then remember that every star in the sky is light years apart. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Seen from satellite view, the abandoned Uranium mine on our reservation Is an earth-scar that’s shaped Like a haphazard guitar. The sound hole of this instrument Is the open pit Now filled with water Made turquoise By irradiated waste. I grew up six miles From that deadly place And only a hundred yardsFrom the road traveled By the transport trucks. I inhaled uranium dust— A thousand thousand grains—With every breath. None of us, especially The young, knew How dangerous it was.There’s no mystery here. There’s no need To find motive or alibi. Mr. Death is waitingAt the airport for his Lyft. He’ll eventually arrive At my front door. He’ll say he’s traveled far.He’ll play me a song On his radioactive guitar. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Hello, everybody,I posted a poem on my Instagram on Sunday about fatherhood and, as is my regular habit, I immediately started rewriting. So here is the original poem as posted and a few variations on the theme. I go into more detail on the audio version of this post but I’ll say here that it’s a beneficial exercise to dramatically change the tone and meaning of a poem simply by changing, adding, and subtracting a few words or lines. It demonstrates the enormous power of editing and revision. Also note that one can change the meaning and tone of a poem by simply changing the title.FatherhoodI still sometimes step on stray Legos that escaped their toy box and went solo two decades ago.After the Divorce I still sometimes step on stray Legos that escaped their toy box and went solo two decades ago.After the DivorceShe still sometimes steps on stray Legos that escaped the toy box and went solo two decades ago.After the DivorceThe mother sometimes steps on stray Legos that escaped the toy box and went solo three years ago.The Prodigal Son Returns HomeI step on Lego bricks that escaped my toy box and went solo two decades ago.After His Father’s FuneralThe son steps on Lego bricks that escaped the toy box and went solo two decades ago.Child’s FuneralI step on Lego bricks that escaped my son’s toy chest and went solo three days ago.Child’s FuneralI step on Lego bricks that escaped my son’s toy chest and went solo three decades or three years or three days ago. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Sugar TownAfter diabetes occluded My fathers’s vision And left him unable To drive a car, he’d pilot His riding lawnmower To the reservation trading post And buy Wonder Bread And generic maple syrup So he could make his slow Suicide version of French toast.Child’s BibleOnce upon a time On our reservation The only food In our house Was a half-empty box Of sugar cubes. My sisters and I Rationed them For most of a day. They did nothing To quell our hunger But we learnedThere’s sweetness Inside every little hell. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

the poisonouscan fool youinto believing they’re luminous This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

I visit my father's gravesite twice a year—on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death. It’s not done out of grief or love. It’s a cold regiment. I just want to make sure the man stays dead. Maybe your relationship with your father, here or gone, is better than mine. If so then you can pack your happiness into a suitcase and move out of my goddamn neighborhood.Okay, that’s not fair. My envy sometimes consumes me. There are millions of good fathers out there and I didn’t get one of them.So, twice a year, I buy a bouquet of flowers at the grocery store near the cemetery. Then I place ten dollars worth of blossoms on my father’s tombstone. I’m the only heir—the only surviving relative—so our bloodline ends with me. Our family tree will wither, fall, and be reclaimed by the dirt. In twenty years, I’ll be remembered only by a few friends. In forty years, I’ll be just a name carved into an unvisited grave marker. Nobody on earth will know that, for decades, I brought flowers to my father’s grave. Nobody will know about his cruelty. Nobody will know about my diligence. Last week, when I visited his grave, I saw that a wedding was happening on the other side of the graveyard. A wedding in a goddamn cemetery! And not some goth travesty, either. It was white tuxedo and white wedding dress.And so much laughter. So much joy booming across the distance.What kind of a******s hold a joyful ceremony—a celebration of life—in a cemetery? Who invites the ghosts of their ancestors to their nuptials?There were good reasons for me to hate them. Bad reasons, too. But I suddenly knew that wedding ceremony was populated by better people. Certainly better than my father. And better than me.I suddenly needed to know those celebrants. So I began my walk toward the wedding because I knew they would graciously welcome a stranger. And then I turned back and grabbed my father's flowers. I needed to bring a gift to that exchange of vows. I wanted to begin a journey with something new in my hands. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

Did you know that 90% of the world’s bees Are solitary? They live hive-less.I was stunned to learn this. Those hermit-monks— Winged and many-eyed—worshipIn solitude. What is their theology? Are they risen or fallen? I’ve decide to believeTheir churches are the flora And their gods are the pollen. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe

We called the industrial dishwasher The Pope because it often threw scalding water at us and burned our hands like we were minimum-wage heretics. I worked with Greg and Wayne, two white boys who’d grown up in trailer park poverty in Spokane. But, like me, they’d read a thousand books before they were ten and fought their poor-ass scholar way into college. The three of us washed dishes in the student center at Washington State University. I don’t know how many plates, cups, pots, pans, and utensils we scrubbed and disinfected during an average shift but it had to be in the thousands. It killed our backs. It killed our feet. It peeled the skin off our hands.Wayne was shy. A baseball-hatted cypher. But Greg was a monologue in rubber boots who always got the idioms wrong, as in, “It’s like six in one hand and six in the other.” As in, “If you don’t like the frying pan then get out of the kitchen.” As in, “Don’t throw the baby out of the bathroom.” I loved Greg. I loved Wayne. Though we only socialized at work. Greg had a wife and kids but I’d never met them. I didn’t know anything about Wayne’s personal life.I lived in an archaic apartment with a dead fireplace and electrical outlets that occasionally put on little fireworks displays. I ate instant oatmeal for two or three meals a day.In addition to washing the dirty dishes of the students eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, we also cleaned up after the many nightly banquets. And we’d learned that at least a third of the banquet plates would go uneaten. But we weren’t allowed to take the food home because of health codes.The waste was epic. There were nights when we threw away dozens of chicken breasts along with gardens of green beans and potatoes.But quiet Wayne, without us noticing, had been hiding five-gallon freezer bags in his deep work coat pockets. And he’d been filling those bags with food that we would’ve otherwise trashed. And he’d been smuggling that nutritional contraband out of the kitchen and back to his place.It was brilliant. We were poor students. The extra food was a f*****g gift.And so, for a few weeks, we secreted little feasts into our pockets. One night, I took home three prime rib steaks.But all good things—rare, medium, and well-done—have to end. We’d begun to carry home backpacks full of food. Our greed got us caught.We were fired immediately. We didn’t protest. We’d broken the rules. We weren’t criminals. Not really. But even if our food-burglaries had been crimes then I’d call them justifiable.Thirty-two years later, I’m still waiting to receive that last paycheck. I don’t know what happened to Greg and Wayne. The Washington State campus was relatively small but I never saw them walking to and from class. I haven’t seen them since our last day on that job. I hope, like me, they’ve found good work. I hope they have insurance for home and health. Maybe they earn real money now. I do. But I often think of those college days where my hands were so water-sotted that I once painlessly pulled a fingernail from its bed. I think of those cold winter walks home with bread rolls and roasted carrots in my pockets. I remember being heavy with hunger.Dear Wayne, Dear Greg, wherever you are, I hope you’re still able to bear the terrible weight of other people’s wealth. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit shermanalexie.substack.com/subscribe