Buckskin Cocaine Page 2
One night in New York, after I’d been feeling unusually tired and had just had another audition that I’d obviously blown, I wanted to party. And just my luck, Sheena’s boyfriend, who was an executive for Starbucks was in town and we were all invited to his loft in Manhattan. It was decorated like the inside of a cloud, white and silver. The carpet was thick and soft and bone white and the chandeliers were these strange, lovely things that looked more like sculptures than light fixtures. I was wearing something blue and silky and it was dripping off of me. I sat down on the couch and someone handed me a glass of Pinot and I leaned back, my tan arms looking like some sort of precious metal against the white, Italian leather of the couch. People were laughing, and I recognized an actor who I’d just seen in Woody Allen’s latest. I took a snort of coke and sipped at the wine and it felt magical, the music coming from the stereo like a dream. I felt invincible, like I was inside one of the chandeliers, like I was pure light. Like I was pure pure. I began to float. I don’t remember falling towards the glass table in front of me, my wine glass smashing against it, my nose gushing blood. I don’t remember Sheena calling 911 or the ride in the ambulance to the hospital, where I died, twice. I remember waking up in the hospital, talking to the doctor about all of the drugs, the booze, the late nights. I remember mom flying in from Minneapolis and crying and crying over my bed, my thin, warm white sheets making me feel like a ghost. I couldn’t understand it. I was in my early twenties, I was a model, I lived in New York.
Six months later, after mom had taken me home, after months in a room I hadn’t seen for years, after a suicide attempt, after counseling, after several hysterical breakdowns on the part of my mom, I was back at Red Stick, at a party at one of Sheena’s friend’s houses. He was a buckskin actor. He had been bragging all night about the latest Western he had been in, his long black braids glistening in the light, a joint squeezed in-between the fingers of his left hand. My friend Sheena was flirting with crazy Gary Hollywood because she was on shrooms, I was about half a bottle of white wine in, and there was George on the other side of the room, a glass of Patrón in his little hand. He didn’t recognize me at first. And then when he did, he smiled. I smiled back. My room in New York had been taken over by another model. She was Jamaican. She was eighteen. I had just turned twenty-five. But some friends of mine had hired me to do PR for a documentary and at least I was out of my mother’s house. George came over and told me I looked hot and I snorted and asked him to refill my wine glass. He did. I drank. I thought about all of the stuff mom had been filling my head with for the last six months in between feeding and feeding me, about how I wasn’t getting any younger, and did I want a baby, and that my modeling days were behind me, and if I got married how I needed to find an enrolled Native because I was just under half and if I had a kid, that kid wouldn’t be enrolled unless I did, and that whoever it was better not be a bum like the people I’d lived with in New York. Where’s Robert? I asked and it was George’s turn to snort. I didn’t ask. I drank more wine. And he asked me about my life and told me about his latest film, how it was about Indian boarding schools and I told him that my grandma had been to one and about what had happened to her there and then we ended up in a back bedroom and afterwards, I cried and though he pet my arm awkwardly I could feel how desperately he wished he wasn’t there. After about an hour in the dark, my eyes wide open, George got up, and quietly put his clothes on. For a moment I thought he might be pausing to see if my eyes were open or shut but he was only struggling to put on one of his shoes. After I heard the front door close, I got up, and wrapped the long, blue sheet around my body and walked through the now deserted living room and opened the front door. I stood at the door for a while, watching his car disappear down the road, into the desert, into the dark. It smelled like rain and I felt sick and twisted inside like a dark, dark, dying gangrenous thing. I closed the door and walked over to the kitchen and pulled a bottle of tequila out of the mess of bottles. There was blood on the counter where a dancer who George was going to throw me over for at another party in two weeks had taken the cork out of a wine bottle without a corkscrew and had ended up breaking the bottle and cutting her hand deeply. She had laughed and the men had rushed over to help. I went back over to the couch and sat down with the tequila and drank, hard. I lit up a cigarette and tried to push away the deep, wide darkness that was beginning to fill me. I stared at the empty white walls. There was nothing. My God, six months ago, I was in my early twenties, I was a model, I lived in New York.
Gary Hollywood
THE RED GRASSES. That’s what I remember. Threading my little brown hands through them on the hills in Oklahoma, my mother calling in Cherokee from the warm little cabin in the distance. The smell of smoking meats. It was so beautiful. But the memory is even more beautiful.
Even then, I knew I was born for blood.
When I drink, I drink for the pain. I drink because I can. Because there is so much blood filling my heart, it’s spilling over, I trip on the slick of it. Years ago, years before all of the lights filling my eyes, over and over, the images of me up there for everyone to see, I went to war. We all went to war then, we went because we thought we had to. Warrior warrior warrior, the blood said, but when I left Byron behind in the jungle, I knew what I was.
It was then that I first thought about my dying.
There were times that I thought I could hide in anger, in anger at this country, the things that it had done, the things that it was doing, the people in charge on every reservation, in urban Indian ghettos, in Indian territories. I was so angry it was wonderful. It fed the blood. I remember those days on the Oglala reservation, we were powerful in those dark hills, we were everywhere, like lights, like fireflies, which I’ve heard are disappearing now, like the bees.
People died there. That fed the blood too.
On the screen, I am terrifying, I am so terrifying that it is utterly beautiful, make no mistake. And I feel like someone should be proud. Look at me up there, my hair so black, my naked chest so brown, my eyes filled with stones. I look like a warrior. I dance, I sing, I fight. I am so beautiful in the dark.
The dark is where I live. God, it’s so cold.
When I was a child, my mother would hold me in her long brown arms and rock me in the big wooden rocking chair and sing me to sleep with songs in Cherokee by the little black stove. Dad would come in from work on the ranch and he would smell like big, wild animals and dust, like red red dust. I was half asleep and I could feel her chest rumble as she spoke. Everything was so warm, so beautiful.
Can’t I go back? I’m always trying.
I want to say that I’ve done good things. I have done a lot of good things. I have helped bring our language back. There are things in our words that are not anywhere else in this wide, green world, I know that. There is so much I refuse to leave behind, to lose. I have fought on those red hills. I have fought in the badlands. I have lost things. But there is so much that I lost before I was even born.
The good things sometimes justify the bad.
Sometimes everything is a song, a bird’s wing song, quiet so you can hear it. I can’t hear it anymore, but I used to when I was with her. But she’s something I lost too. It hurts too much to think about it, like there’s a black hole I was born with, pulling me in.
She had soft blond hair. So soft, like the wing of a bird. I was a child again in her arms.
I hit. I hit. I hit her. I hit her so hard and I hated myself. I can never forgive myself. I left him in the fields. I drink. I push it down.
There is no way back.
When I was in the jungle, I pressed her picture to my heart, my feet rotting in those boots in that deep, black mud and I ran, and shot, I killed so many people, they were everywhere and they were everything they filled up the sky. Byron was ahead of me. He was always leading. He was Ojibwe and he was my best friend. He looked behind to see if I had fallen, because I did once, and that’s when the explosions came. They came out of the ground,
as if something great and wide had opened up to eat us all. And I ran. I ran. I ran and Byron died.
There is no way back.
On the screen, I feel like I redeem myself, forget myself, I am beautiful. And the women who follow me because of it, giving me beautiful, pure white things to snort and sweet sparkling things to drink understand. When I finally feel like I am underwater and floating and laughing, they all look like her. They never look like Byron. Or my mother. I couldn’t live through that.
There is no way back.
Everything is a story, a dream, don’t you think? I do. I can see it all from here: the great red plains of Oklahoma, calling me like a song, like a bird’s wing, like my mother, calling me in Cherokee. Byron is alive. He lives in Minneapolis. My mother and father are proud of me, and they are still alive. She is still my lover. I live a life inside this cocoon of white and sparkling things. I drive around in a shiny, lovely thing, a thing that is like a panther that the women who love me are riding. I just have to keep pushing it all down. Until I crash.
There is no way back.
George Bull
FOR SOME REASON it’s the sound of the big, grey van door sliding shut on her face that dusty night in August that I can’t get out of my head. Not that I give a fuck. I mean, I was on speed and coke and that little coked up wannabe actress named Brianna that me and Robert had picked up earlier was screaming in Diné and in English about stupid fucking bitches and did I want any more coke. And then I turned off my phone cause you know what, I figured she shouldn’t follow me anymore. The dumb broad should just go the fuck home to the stupid house in Albuquerque she shared with that other dancer. It was my fault because no matter how much she pushed me away, I was always coming after her when I came to town. And then I acted like a fucking dick. But it was the industry, not me, and besides, she was always calling me a special Indian, and that pissed me the fuck off.
I’d met the goddamn broad a year back when there was some kind of stupid ceremony the Institute of American Indian Arts was holding. I went because I was gonna try to find this chick I’d met the night before at a party. It was full of Hollywood Indians, most of them poor as shit and sucking at the teat of LA, but one or two with more money than any of us could ever dream at. Her tribe had a fuckton of money and she was someone who could give that money to me so that I could film my latest, which I knew was gonna make everyone cry. It was a pretty short about a Nav chick being taken off to boarding school and the special Indians, as Olivia called them, loved the shit outta that shit. Course my full-length feature about someone accidentally fucking their cousin didn’t make anyone cry. Anyone but me that is.
I was also kinda hoping to get laid, or at least drunk. I was hung-over as fuck and tired too but somehow I always found the energy by the end of the day to start it all over again. The damn thing was at the hotel Santa Fe, which was, like every fucking thing in that town, filled with a bunch of pictures of deer and hawks and other Indian shit.
I was texting the hell outta Robert, but he wasn’t responding. That was the thing with him. He couldn’t party like an animal and get up. I may be a short, fat Nav dude, but I’m an animal. I will take every pill in the room, drink the bottle dry and fuck all night and get up the next day for breakfast with whoever I need to meet with. And it gets me things.
I looked around the room, spotting the cash bar in the corner. Fucking thank God. At half of these shitty things, some self-righteous skin gets it in her head that there shouldn’t be alcohol. Fuck that. Though I could see Gary was fucked up already, hovering around the bar and babbling like a newborn. Crazy fucker’s played the dude who’s gonna hack your neck off in more than half of every Hollywood piece of shit. He was swaying in one of his Miami Vice jackets, spilling bourbon all over the dingy grey-carpeted floor, some big-eyed billyganna broad with ten pounds of shitty turquoise around her skinny neck nodding like mad.
Anyway, there was Olivia in the corner, leaning against the yellow wall, drinking a glass of something that looked like whiskey or bourbon or scotch like some character from Mad Men in this bright green dress and I knew I had to get her attention, get her number. I figured she was another goddamn mixed-blood actress, with her long, yellow-brown legs who’d probably try to suck my dick for a part she’d never get because I only cast Navajos, but still.
I was cool. I went over to the table where they were pouring and got myself a shot of Patrón and sat down at one of the banquet tables. I always let people come to me. Olivia was standing around with this goddamn Nav poet, Luis. Could never tell if he was gay but everyone loved him. Fucking poets. He was laughing at something Olivia was saying, this big, genuine laugh and I felt even more anxious to get her number. I looked over at Luis to get his attention and nodded. He looked over at me and nodded back. When I kept looking over he sighed, hard, knowing what I wanted. He waved me over with his short, thin fingers.
I took a long drink of Patrón, the silvery-peppery liquid sliding down my throat, turning me on like a light. I set the crystal glass down on the table and looked around. The room smelled like sage and patchouli, which I hated. I sighed. Drank my glass dry. Went in for another and then headed slowly over to Luis, letting people stop me, kiss my ass. She watched me, looking at Luis curiously. He leaned into her light brown shoulder to whisper something and she raised her lovely black eyebrows, laughed a short laugh. I reminded myself to fucking kill Luis when I had the chance. What was this, goddamn Dangerous Liaisons or some shit?
“Hey,” I said to Luis. Olivia watched me, sipped at her drink.
“Hey,” Luis said in that deep, rich tenor of his. Fucker sounded like a Nav Tom Brokaw.
“How’s your girlfriend?” I asked Luis. He hated when people asked about her and I knew it. He narrowed his eyes at me, took a sip at his drink, which was a goddamn pussy ass gin and tonic.
“Good,” he said shortly. He turned to Olivia. “Like I was telling you, this is George. He’s a filmmaker. A great one.”
“Thanks Luis,” I said. “But I’m OK,” I said, watching Olivia. I didn’t want to sound too cocky, though I was already angling for a way to impress her.
“Olivia’s a dancer,” Luis said.
I remember rolling my eyes. I couldn’t help it. There were so many goddamn traditional dancers hanging around I felt like I was wading through a forest of buckskin half the goddamn time.
“Ballet,” she said, as if she could read my mind. She looked down at the long, green skirt of her dress and smoothed it. “Though honestly, I’m too old for it, and my tits have always been too big. Good thing I do other kinds of dance, and can teach.”
“Olivia,” Luis said, laughing and shaking his head. “Dirty.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I got that mouth in graduate school.”
“Sure you did,” he said, shaking his head. “I bet your aunties think you’re a bad one.”
Olivia paused and took a sip of her drink. “I lied. I got my mouth from them.” Luis roared and I tried not to but I couldn’t help it. It was fucking love.
A FEW HOURS LATER, after a long and ridiculous ceremony, where someone presented a very drunk Gary a flute for some reason I can’t even remember, I found myself trapped by this obnoxious Native chick named Lucy. Luis and Olivia had gone for a drink and when I looked up from my phone, there she was, right next to me, panting in my face. I swear to God that broad didn’t breathe. And she was at every event, without fail, her loud, ridiculous bullshit about how fucking Indian she was trailing her like a fart. I remember fantasizing briefly about lighting myself on fire. It took what felt like hours to get away from her, as she was yelling a steady stream of ayyyeees and lame powwow jokes at me without taking a breath. Right before she’d come upon me Luis and Olivia had gone for a drink run and spotting Lucy on their way back, took a major U-turn. I could only watch helplessly while they walked out an hour later, Luis looking back at me and whispering into Olivia’s ear. Fucker. But I had gotten her number and was texting her before she even g
ot out the door. I could see her slip her long hand into the pocket of that bright green dress and look at her phone. She laughed and showed Luis. I winced. I wondered if she would look back. She didn’t. I sighed and finished half of my drink in one gulp and started walking towards the bar, Lucy following me. I figured I’d stick around for one more hour and try to work the crowd, see if Gary Hollywood was into any money. See if he was drunk enough to find a way to get some of that money over to me. See if that billyganna with the pounds of turquoise knew anyone who knew anyone who would give me money. The dumb broad I’d been looking for hadn’t even showed up. But I was never able to break away to talk to Gary, who stumbled out into the night with his usual entourage, not long after Olivia had, yelling about how the night was young and he was thirsty, the arms and front of his pink blazer spotted with scotch. I looked over at the table where he’d been sitting, where amongst the glasses piled around the table and crumbled white napkins was the flute they’d presented him. I shook my head, laughed and drank the rest of the Patrón.