Buckskin Cocaine Page 5

  That’s when she got pregnant.

  When she told me, I’d just gotten home from a long day and all I wanted was to wash the coffee smell off of me and turn on the TV. When I opened the door to the bathroom, she was sitting on the toilet and crying. It took me thirty minutes to get it out of her. When she told me, I was so happy. I figured she was only crying because she figured that I’d be really unhappy about it and she’d stop when I told her that wasn’t the case, that I couldn’t wait to have a baby with her. But that wasn’t it at all. She started shaking and screaming and she threw the tester, the thing sailing out of the bathroom and into the living room. She kept screaming what about me? What about my life?

  We spent nights arguing, taking turns crying, smoking. I would pull the American Spirits out of her mouth as soon as she lit them, this making her furious, causing her to hit me in the arms, hard.

  About two weeks into this, I came home one night out of the blowing snow. The walk had been miserable and work had been non-stop. I had Chinese takeout in my hands, and as I unlocked the door I thought for sure that she would be gone, that she was somewhere getting rid of the baby, having someone cut it out of her. I walked in, my Chucks squeaking on the floor, imagining the horror of it but there she was, sitting on the couch. I stopped and put the takeout down. She smiled. And I knew. She stood up and fell into me and I thought it would be like a Wipe, with the last few weeks moving aside to make room for our new, better lives as parents.

  For a few months it was OK. Actually, it was kind of beautiful with her pregnant and me in the grocery store buying her things to eat like in the movies, the light of the television at night covering her body like a blanket as she ate the ice cream or peaches or pickles that I’d brought her. And there were her friends coming over and smoking outside and handing us knitted things and my grandmother excited over the phone. And the appointments where they told us that we were having a girl and both of us looking at each other and crying, hoping the baby would have the other’s eyes.

  And then months later Teegan was born and I felt like I’d never felt before. Important. Like I really finally counted. But that’s not how Sara felt. She wouldn’t really take care of the baby, wouldn’t breastfeed it. Wouldn’t get up with it when it cried. I fed it. I got up with it. And after a few weeks she started to disappear, leaving me to wonder where she was all night, the baby crying, me smoking in the dark, haunted and strange. I’ve never felt so alone or scared in my life. And I knew then one day she’d be really gone, like I was filming her from a truck, a Tracking Shot, her body getting farther and farther away until the fade to black and the Credit Rolls.

  When that finally happened and I accepted that it was happening, the apartment so empty, even with her things in it, I decided to go home. Move back in with grandma. She hadn’t been back to the apartment in months, and I was behind in rent, in bills, and her cell phone had been disconnected for a long, long time. None of her friends knew where she was. Or at least that’s what they told me, though I was never sure.

  My dad had never been around much and my mom died when I was really young so I’d been raised by my grandmother. She spoke more Creek than anything, though for some reason it never really took to me. I feel bad about that. That’s why I always have it in my movies. English and Creek always seem like they’re giving my life a kind of Double Exposure feel, you know?

  Once I got home I felt better. Sad and defeated and angry in some ways, but more like I was able to be a dad. I loved Teegan so much. Every time I looked down at her soft long brown eyes and kicking legs as I changed her diaper on the old red couch dad used to sleep on, I was filled with love. I thought that my life beyond that was over, that I’d never do anything important, never make any movies, never leave home. But grandma kept pushing me, telling me she’d take care of Teegan if I wanted to go to college. And it took me a while but I did. I tell you what though, I don’t believe in relationships anymore, that’s for sure. Women are awful. They just want to use you. So now I use them. I mean, like the man says, “bitches ain’t shit but hos and tricks,” right? Just kidding. But not really.

  I’m just grateful for my grandmother. I mean, she’s everything. She’s so traditional, and she’s raised me right, and now, I mean, when I can’t be there, she’s raising Teegan right too. Actually, Teegan’s learning Creek, which is so cool. I hardly understand the two of them when I get home.

  Sometimes Teegan doesn’t want to see me and she pushes into grandma’s legs when I come through the door, hiding her face. Sometimes she bursts into tears and rushes at me. Kids are weird. Grandma always tells her to cut it out. I don’t know why she does that stuff. But when she does, or when I’ve been away for a long time, I try to Flashframe all of the good times with Teegan in my head, like, when I read her stories by the big black stove in grandma’s living room when she was too little to understand, but sat in my lap staring up at me anyway. Or when I picked her up the first time that I’d been away for a while, at college, and she smelled like frybread and violet, that old lady powder that my grandma uses. That always makes me feel better. I mean…I feel bad that I’m not there, but honestly, I’m there a lot. And when I’m not, I’d rather be at home. I mean, it’s just that what I’m doing is important. And it might end someday. But I’m sure it won’t.

  George and I just get crazy when we’re together, though the whole industry is crazy really. It’s not our faults. I mean, when you’re at a party and Tom Cruise shows up and like, everyone’s doing coke and you’re surrounded by all of these thin, hot white chicks drunk as shit, I mean…I always feel like my head is the camera, and we’ve like, decided on a really shallow Depth of Field and everything around me is out of focus except for what’s right in front of me. And I just try to have another drink, and another, because otherwise I just don’t think I could handle it.

  And then there are the Indian parties. In Santa Fe mostly, but sometimes in Minneapolis or Denver when there’s a big Indian film festival or we’re screening for a Native audience. Honestly, those are more fun. George hates them. Calls them the sage burning, hoka heyyyy crowd. But we’re treated like fucking royalty at those. Tall, yellow-brown, beautiful Indian women the kind I never grew up with are everywhere, and we’re treated like everything we do is special, sacred, like what we’re doing will never end. The only part that sucks is that all of those chicks are either looking for you to cast them or they’re done with being a model/actress and they’re searching for a Native husband. And like I said, I’m not into that. I’ve got enough responsibility in my life, and I’ve already got a kid. And that’s what these chicks want, an accomplished Native dude who they can have accomplished Native babies with, and man, they think I’ve got what they want, but I don’t. The funniest thing is when they’re like that with George. I mean, he makes it totally clear that he’s in it for the coke and to get laid but these women will just go wild over him. After a few days, the shit completely hits the fan. Because he has no problem with getting all over one chick the first night we’re there and a totally different one the next. And those chicks like nothing more than to compare notes. Luckily, we’re usually out of there before there’s blood. Though one time these two chicks George boned were at a party together and they were like, best friends or something or at least they acted that way. Then one of them points to George. And that crazy bastard, he’s busy hitting on number three. He doesn’t even notice the impending cloud of feminine doom gathering above his head. Pretty soon both of them, one of who was our ride there, are yelling at him, their pointy maroon nails getting all too close to his eyes. Both of them were practically twice as tall as him too. He’s just shrugging and saying nothing but I’m on the phone, calling a cab. Nothing gets to that guy. He doesn’t care about any of them. He’s like a freaking machine. There was this one girl though…a ballet dancer. I didn’t like her, because she thought she was so funny and smart and George just wouldn’t quit running after her. It really irritated me. I mean, we’re a team, tha
t’s the way it is. Bros before hos, right? Not to sound sexist or anything.

  Women give birth. That’s hard. So I respect them for that. And like I said, it’s my grandmother who really saved me. My dad was a giant douche. I hated it when he’d come around, all drunk and stupid. We’d have to listen to him go on and on about shit I didn’t care about, the government, his drunk friends and their stupid antics, pounding Bud after Bud until he passed out on the couch, the stink of him moving through the whole house until he’d wake up sometime the next day, shower, eat and disappear again, the back of his greasy Metallica t-shirt the last thing I’d see of him. What really used to piss me off the most was when he’d go on and on with advice for me, about women or life. I have this Montage in my head. It’s me, sitting on grandma’s old grey couch opposite to the old red couch he used to like to sit on when he’d come over: me at five nodding, me at twelve nodding, me at seventeen nodding, always silent. One time I woke up and came out into the living room. Grandma wasn’t up and I remember going over to the couch and staring down at him. The unmistakable smell of urine was radiating off of him in waves. I remember looking down at him. I think I was like, thirteen or something. All I could feel was pure hatred. I just wanted him to disappear. He didn’t even move.

  George isn’t like that. He’s the hardest worker I know. And he sticks by me, pretty much no matter what. And he’s fluent in Navajo. I never heard my dad speak one word of Creek. He didn’t even want to. Grandma talked about what a rebellious kid he was, how much he wanted out. How much he hated being Creek. Hated Oklahoma. I don’t get that. I love Oklahoma. It’s my home. George says he loves it back home too. We really understand each other, or at least that’s how I feel. I feel like I am Oklahoma, that it’s the only place where I’m real. And George, he’s real close to his parents, his family, his whole community. Shit, his dad’s a medicine man. And I respect the hell out of that. It’s just so real. It’s like when we’re together, it’s a Two-Shot, walking, talking, partying, helping each other with our movies.

  One of the best times George and I had together, if it hadn’t been for that stupid ballet dancer getting in the way, was this one night in Santa Fe. I was showing my new film and he was debuting his new short. We were staying at the Hotel Santa Fe and they had set us up with everything we might need and there were Indians who loved film flooding the streets. I remember eating at Geronimo where we’d had dinner with Gary Hollywood and Robert Redford and a bunch of Hollywood Indians from every buckskin flick I’d ever seen and thinking that this was a dream. That this was not real. After, we walked out into the streets of Santa Fe, and it was dusty, and lovely and the whole night was alive with the sounds of bars and restaurants serving beautiful Mexican food and the adobe buildings and the church were glowing in the desert as the sun went down. George was walking next to me, a circle of beautiful Hollywood Indians surrounding him, laughing at his dirty jokes, and he just looked at me and I knew he was thinking the same thing and he pulled a little baggy of mushrooms out of the pocket of his jeans and I took one even though I never did shit like that and then soon, it really was a dream. The whole night was, it was floating out in front of me, the colors of the night like a Klimt, shimmering and gold. Everyone was laughing and I felt as good – no better – than I ever had with Teegan’s mom.

  I even remember feeling OK about my dad, that he had had it hard and that I had to understand that. That he was just the way he was. I looked over at George in that waking dream, and saw my dad smiling at me, a Bud in his hand, his favorite Metallica t-shirt on his skinny little back and I laughed. And he laughed back, his fat little stomach rolling out in front of him like a ball bouncing. And then it was George laughing and yet it was still my father and that didn’t bother me at all. I felt a blazing fire on my right and I turned and there was a Virgin de Guadalupe in the window of a shop. The light was overwhelming. I put my hand over my eyes to shade them and walked over to the window and it was lit up like daytime in the desert, this big metal sculpture with my grandmother’s face at the center of all of these metal flames that were blowing in a soundless desert wind. My eyes started to adjust and grandmother smiled and I felt this beautiful feeling, this electricity in my heart, in my whole body and I went down on my knees and she put her hand on my head and I prayed in Creek, though I don’t know how.

  I don’t even remember getting to the Cowboy but suddenly I was there, underground, looking at the crowd like I was a Wide Angle Lens, everything was coming to me at once. Then it was as if there was some sort of Cross Cut, because I didn’t remember going to another bar but suddenly we were somewhere else and George was talking to these three coked up Nav chicks. And across the room, leaning against the long wooden bar, was the ballet dancer. She was with her little poet friend, this guy who me and George hated, and I prayed George wouldn’t spot her but he did. He waved her over and one of the three chicks who was really already nuts over George and the most coked up of all of them eyed her like a snake. In fact she turned into a snake, a big black one and I remember backing away from her, bumping into someone and spilling my drink. The snake hissed at me and I shuddered.

  All I remember next was the snake yelling at the dancer and the dancer telling her calmly, “fuck you.” Then we were outside and two chicks and a snake were shoving George into a van. A few minutes later the dancer came out of the bar. I realized that she was my only ride if I wanted to get back to George because I had no idea where my wallet was. She asked me if I wanted a ride. I said yes, George texting me the whole time, half indicating that he didn’t want her there and half indicating that he did. But when she tried to call him, of course he wouldn’t pick up. She lit a cigarette and I asked for one and we rolled the windows down enough to let the smoke out. She told me that he’d chased her down the night before and begged her to come up. Otherwise, she didn’t have a place to stay. I resisted the urge to feel sorry for her.

  Once we got to the hotel it was more booze and more drugs and the three chicks saying pissy things to the dancer and the dancer rolling her eyes, sitting cross-legged in the corner of the room in the old Southwestern style hotel chair and sipping her gin and tonic like she was in a fucking Bond movie. I was really coming down by that time from the shrooms but with the help of some coke I felt good again, like partying all night. The dancer was clearly tired of the whole thing, not even taking any of the coke and slowly sipping on her one gin and tonic for what seemed like hours. Finally around 4AM I took two of the chicks my room to fuck and left George with his dancer, the third one stumbling to her room down the hallway, looking less like a snake at this point and more like a lost and wounded puppy in her shiny black heels. She was the one who would have been George’s if the dancer hadn’t tracked him down. I’d thought about taking her too but she seemed too fucked up to do anything.

  The next morning I felt like dying and so I sent the two chicks back to their room so that I could be sick alone. I spent the day getting sick and sleeping and watching TV, and when George started texting around six to come out, I texted him that there was no fucking way that was going to happen and went back to sleep.

  The film festival ended with the usual bang and whimper and George posted a bunch of arty pics of the chicks we screwed on the internet and then got in trouble with a girl he’d told he loved in Durango, some Ponca chick who he’d met a year ago screening his film there at the college. After the festival ended, I went off to another university to screen my new film.

  I keep asking people how they like it because it seems like, I dunno, like they like the first film more and like, well, the general response is kind of different. I even asked the dancer about the film on the way to the hotel because even though she’s a stupid bitch, she does have a Masters and everything and I figured her opinion sort of mattered. I remember she was kind of quiet for a while, smoking her Marlboro thoughtfully and then saying, I thought it was fairly well done. Whatever that means. What does she know anyway, she’s a fucking ballerina.

>   I know George is a little pissed about the fact that I got money for another full length feature film and I know we’re not spending as much time together lately, but…we’re still friends. It’s just that I’m always busy. It’s not my fault I’m getting work. The weirdest thing though is that ever since that stupid ballet dancer left town, he’s gotten all buddy-buddy with that loser Mark Wishewas, the wannabe filmmaker who also dated that stupid dancer. I don’t get it. All he did was complain about him and now they’re filming something together. It’s like some Double Exposure nightmare.

  The thing that really pissed me off though, I mean, not like it’s that big of deal but like, when my dad died, it’s like he didn’t even give a shit. I mean, I don’t give a shit either, like I said my dad was a jerk. But when I got the call, we were at some party in LA at some crazy producer’s house. It was one of those hilariously just like in the movies white mansion deals with a giant pool that looked like it came with chicks in bikinis in it. We were having fun, drinking expensive multicolored drinks and talking with a ton of producers and actors and directors and I was freaking out because I recognized so many people. And of course George was swimming in women.

  About two hours in I could feel my cell vibrating in my pocket. I was tempted to ignore it. It was still early in the evening and things were getting wild and beautiful and I was feeling that feeling of just, I don’t know, glory. But I had felt a little tug at my heart when the phone had first started vibrating. When I pulled it out, I could see it was my grandma, who never called. I excused myself and walked into one of the empty rooms in the back and sat down on the bed and felt strange and sick. And then grandma told me he was dead. That he had died by drowning in his own puke in an alley. And I felt so angry and ashamed and I told her I’d be home the next day and hung up.

  I walked back into the party, changed, feeling deflated and sick and like the punch had just gone out of things. George was still surrounded by women, and they were laughing and he had his hand on one of their long, tan thighs. The white lights that were strung up everywhere that had looked so lovely and mysterious a few hours ago now looked ghostly and they filled me with a kind of unnamable feeling, almost nausea. I told George that we had to go. He ignored me for a bit and then looked at me impatiently, irritation crumpling his little purple lips. He just kept saying for me to wait, to chill out, that he was having fun. And I kept saying that it was important, that I really had to go. He just kept brushing me off like a douche and finally I was forced to yell that my dad had just died from choking on his own vomit outside of a bar in Tulsa and could we please go? And the girls around him got silent. And then George rolled his eyes. Just a little. Just for a second. But I saw it. He handed me the keys to the rental car and told me that he’d get a ride home. I ripped them from his small hand and walked out of the party, people yelling and laughing and drinking all around me, feeling sick and confused and angry and hating those people, just hating them.