My entire life fits into one small backpack.
I don’t know any other Native Americans, except the homeless Indians who wander around downtown Seattle. I like to run away from my foster homes and get drunk with those street Indians. Yeah, I’m a drunk, just like my father. I’m a good drunk, too. Gifted, you might say. I can outdrink any of those homeless Indians and remain on my feet and still tell my stories. Those street Indians enjoy my company. I’m good at begging. I make good coin and buy whiskey and beer for all of us to drink.
Of course, those wandering Indians are not the only Indians in the world, but they’re the only ones who pay attention to me.
The rich and educated Indians don’t give a shit about me. They pretend I don’t exist. They say, The drunken Indian is just a racist cartoon. They say, The lonely Indian is just a ghost in a ghost story.
I wish I could learn how to hate those rich Indians. I wish I could ignore them. But I want them to pay attention to me. I want everybody to pay attention to me.
So I shoplift candy and food and magazines and cigarettes and books and CDs and anything that can fit in my pockets. The police always catch me and put me in juvenile jail.
I get into arguments and fistfights with everybody.
I get so angry that I go blind and deaf and mute.
I like to start fires. And I’m ashamed that I’m a fire starter.
I’m ashamed of everything, and I’m ashamed of being ashamed.
This morning, as I count my zits in the mirror, I’m ashamed that I can’t remember the names of my new foster mother and father.
I’ve only been living here in this strange house, with its strange pink bathroom, for two days.
I can’t remember the names of my new foster parents’ two real kids, either, or the names of the other five foster kids.
When it comes to foster parents, there are only two kinds: the good but messy people who are trying to help kids or the absolute welfare vultures who like to cash government checks every month.
It’s easy to tell what kind of people my latest foster parents are. Their real kids have new shoes; the foster kids are wearing crap shoes.
But who cares, right? It’s not like I’m going to be here much longer. I’m never in any one place long enough to care.
There’s this law called the Indian Child Welfare Act that’s supposed to protect half-breed orphans like me. I’m only supposed to be placed with Indian foster parents and families. But I’m not an official Indian. My Indian daddy gave me his looks, but he was never legally established as my father.
Since I’m not a legal Indian, the government can put me wherever they want. So they put me with anybody who will take me. Mostly they’re white people. I suppose that makes sense. I am half white. And it’s not like any of this makes any difference. I’ve had two Indian foster fathers, and they were bigger jerks than any of my eighteen white foster fathers.
Of course, I assumed those Indian men would automatically be better fathers to me than any white guy, but I was wrong.
I had this one Indian foster daddy, Edgar, who was great at the beginning. He was a jock, a muscular machine. He took me to Seahawks games. We played touch football and one-on-one hoops in the park. He bought me books.
One time, he gave me this amazing remote control airplane, an F-15 fighter jet. I loved that thing. It was the most amazing gift I’d ever received. It must have cost three hundred dollars. Edgar bought one for himself, too, and we drove out to this remote airplane field in the Cascade Mountain foothills.
“I’ve been racing planes for years,” Edgar said. “So don’t take it too hard if you lose, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t plan on losing.
We piloted our planes around this circular course marked by flags and landed them on a grassy runway.
I beat him three races in a row.
“Wow,” he said. “Beginner’s luck is something else, huh?”
“I guess,” I said.
I could tell he was getting mad. And if I were a smarter kid or a diplomat, I would have let him win the next race. But I couldn’t do that. Who wants to lose?
“There must be something wrong with my plane,” Edgar said.
“You want to switch?” I said.
“Yeah.”
So we switched planes and I beat him two more times, landing my plane in the grass more quickly and smoothly than he ever would.
“There’s something wrong with this plane, too,” Edgar said.
“Yeah, the pilot,” I said.
Edgar took my remote control out of my hands, taxied my plane down the runway, lifted it into the air, and flew it full speed into a tree.
Crash.
I ran over to the plane, picked it up, and stared at the damage. One wing was broken; the rudder was bent; the miniature pilot was missing his head. I was scared and sad. But I couldn’t show it. I’d always been punished for showing emotion. It’s best to stay as remote as those airplanes.
“What do you think of that?” Edgar asked, and lip-pointed at the wreck in my hands.
“This is your plane,” I said.
Yes, Edgar had forgotten we’d switched planes. But I suppose it didn’t matter because he flew the other plane into a tree, too.
Crash.
He didn’t yell or cuss or get all crazy. Edgar calmly destroyed six hundred dollars’ worth of model airplane.
Crash, crash.
If we’d had twenty airplanes, Edgar would have crashed all of them, too.
So who cares if Edgar was an Indian or not? His Indian identity was completely secondary to his primary identity as a plane-crashing asshole.
Yes, that’s my life, a series of cruel bastards and airplane crashes. Twenty little airplane crashes. I am a flaming jet, crashing into each new foster family.
And here I am, for the twenty-first time, crashing into a strange pink bathroom in a strange house in a strange world, and all I can do is count my zits. How lame. The only positive thing I can do is change their name. Maybe I’ll start calling them spots, like the British do. That almost makes zits sound harmless, doesn’t it?
I can hear my new foster family. I don’t want to see them. I wish I could stay in this room forever. I wish I had a television in my bedroom. I’ve never met any person who is as interesting as a good TV show.
I never understood the people who think that TV is bad for you. I guess they’ve never seen the Discovery Channel. You can learn science, history, geography, and politics from TV. If you want to find some faith in human beings, just watch one episode of Storm Stories on the Weather Channel, and you’ll see heroic people risk their lives to save strangers.
I don’t understand human beings. I don’t understand the people who risk their lives to save strangers. I wish I knew people like that.
Everything I know about Indians (and I could easily beat 99 percent of the world in a Native American version of Trivial Pursuit) I’ve learned from television.
I know about famous chiefs, broken treaties, the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Indian wars of the nineteenth century.
I know all this stuff because it makes me feel more like a real Indian. Maybe I can’t live like an Indian, but I can learn how real Indians used to live and how they’re supposed to live now.
Jesus, I’m pathetic. I make it sound like I’m just a television addict. But I’m also addicted to books. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.
But there are no books in this bathroom or in my bedroom, and I’ve already read the books in my backpack a hundred times each. So I’m living a new life without new books.