[APPLAUSE]
I'll give you a hug.
That was my one hug for the evening.
I'm all out.
Thank you, Logan.
That was me.
I'm just going to get to it.
Yeah.
It's an honor to be here with Manuel and Andrew--
two writers who I've long admired,
and now, I get to work with and talk shit with, you know?
If you get a chance, I think, the "Wolves" track
by Selena Gomez sums us up, so give that a listen later on.
I'm a metalhead, but I do love Selena Gomez as well.
I think this is my, at the moment,
favorite story in the book, so I'm
going to read from it a bit.
It's called "A New Place to Hide."
It's the youngest story and has the youngest narrator,
so maybe there's something to that.
So it begins with a epigram from Epictetus.
"There was only one way to happiness,
and that is to cease worrying about things, which are
beyond the power of our will."
My puppy, here, is freaking out in her bag.
OK.
"When I began driving illegally as a sort of amateur chauffeur,
I was 13, and this dangerous time of my life
robbed me of my innocence.
No, I was gutted, my innocence excised.
My viscera was scattered across shimmering black pavement,
which was my only reliable guide through life.
I was a solitary but not lonely child--
a condition I hadn't arrived at on my own--
colonial violence, borderland divide and conquer
sentimentalisms, assimilated educational hierarchies of race
and class, exile, and abandonment--
all of it natured in me.
Put plainly, I spent my infancy and adolescence
on Dinétah, the homelands of the people--
my people, I suppose.
Eventually my idealistic and easily bored
parents moved us to Flagstaff, an idyllic mountain town filled
with the thrill quenching nostalgia of cowboys
and pioneering violence.
Most people being cowards, that violence was rarely
enacted individually, but in a dull herd,
dull mouthed bleating can easily turn
into a battle chant, the stomping of small hooves
a weapon of mass destruction.
The town felt like the edge of the world and was in fact
the Western reach of a holy land facing
a glacially paced apocalypse."
So I'm getting over a sinus infection.
I can't really breathe.
"Uprooted midway through the fourth grade,
I was thrust into a classroom of mostly white students,
we non-whites being a Black boy, two Mexican girls,
a half-Mexican half-Japanese boy, and me.
We were suspicious of one another, ignorant
of the factors beyond our control
that had brought us to such a setting
and all too willing to accept the tokenships
of our respective white schoolmate cliques.
The Black boy, always chosen first for any sort of sport,
basketball in particular, was called Muggsy Bogues, as if
anyone remembered the shortest player in NBA history.
And two Mexican girls, both first named V,
were dubbed diseased whores by the cavalier white boys
who cornered them into kissing and exploratory touching.
And no one knew what to make of the Mexican-Japanese boy, whom
everyone called Taco Sushi.
So he was ignored, which turned him
into a pariah and bully who focused his attacks on each
of us more than once.
I don't imagine he made it very far in life,
or has entered law enforcement, maybe taking
a menial position in politics.
As for me, I was the wild Indian, the redskin savage,
the other, the enemy, the target for rocks and gang ups, where
I was tied to a tree and burned with imaginary fire
amid cupped hand whooping, hands shaped into guns,
barrel fingers pointed silently at the sky.
This was the town--
a simulacrum of childish imagination and a
lie good enough to be mistaken for destiny.
At the helm of this fourth grade massacre
was Ms. Reinholdt, an older woman with skin like porcelain,
who I suspected was a runaway nun.
Her long pleated plaid skirts and dark billowy blouses
cinched at the neck reminded me of the teachers
back on the rez, who were all nuns.
She stalked across the front of the classroom between our rows
of desks with her chin held high, eyes darting
from student to student.
Her gray hair tied tightly into a bun
had the sheen of gunmetal.
She maintained a tone of authority sharpened
with quick "sits" or "quiets," though not one of us
was ever punished or made to feel inferior.
Instead we were assigned books to read,
along with short written responses for infractions
committed against the school policies
as interpreted by Ms. Reinholdt.
Such infractions might include whispering,
which burned God's ears, or dawdling, which gave Satan
the opportunity for influence.
So we must move, sit, or stand with purpose, with intention.
For the infraction of melancholy,
which amounted to a disregard for imagination, having
rebelled against participating in small group
activities for a week, I was assigned Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang."
This is true.
It was part true-- the only true part.
"The lettering pressed into the spine still iridescent.
I wrote about the car's large engine and horsepower, how
its four-seat touring design made it comfortable enough
to potentially sleep in and how its ability
to transform into a hovercraft or airplane
made it the ideal getaway car, which
afforded me the imagination to envision a world beyond the one
I lived in.
Places in the book like England or France,
place names without any shape or detail
in my young naive perception.
She collected my work and read it
standing there next to my desk, ignoring
for once the whispering of the white boys
at the front of the class whose commentary increased in volume
and pace, and so Ms. Reinholdt removed
a red pen from her skirt pocket, and with a couple of flicks
of her wrist added three check marks and three plus signs.
Dream as big as you can, she said.
Far beyond this place, and allow books
to guide your imagination.
At the end of that miserable year, which
was to be followed by many more, the growing urge
had been planted in me to get off that mountain
and never return, to exile myself further in hope
that it might bring about the possibility of happiness
or something close to it.
Sometime before my 13th birthday,
my parents separated without any legal formality.
Just announced their split in the opaline blue Peugeot
coupe that was in constant threat of being repossessed.
We were on our way home from a restaurant,
where we'd eaten quietly, silent fogs and a fog
covered archipelago.
My mother sat in the passenger seat,
staring out the window as if a missile or comet were
coming down at us from the endless sky.
'I'm done with all this,' she said,
palm pressed against the glass.
Young and beautiful, her well-kept perm a black crown
on her head-- she was a quintessence of the Naakai
Dine'é clan, hot-tempered, passionate, and whimsical.
The glossiness of her chocolate brown eyes inspired trust
and a bit of curiosity in any person she met.
It was her attention and affection
I often sought and was denied, not because she didn't love me,
but because she knew our lives together would come to an end.
She would move south and eventually
disappear altogether.
Janelle Manygoats just another name I'd say.
An innocuous meaningless name.
'It's been like that for a while now,' replied my father.
'A long time coming if you ask me.'
He gazed at the road ahead, perhaps
seeing endless possibilities, being
a reluctant and ineffectual parent, a philanderer who
would take up with another woman,
a singer of country songs in the bars
and nightclubs of Albuquerque.
He dressed like a clothing catalog cowboy,
ready to ride off into the sunset on the back of almost
any creature he came across.
Clifton Francisco, bastard son of a Spaniard priest.
His mother of the Ta'neeszani clan,
which means 'tangled clan,' I'm told.
And tangled he was--
a spineless tumbleweed adrift in the wind.
Once we were home, my mother told
me to pack my things, which wasn't much--
a mattress, a gym bag for my clothes and shoes,
some toys I rarely played with, and my stack of small books
from the school library.
When we left the reservation, all our belongings
had fit into the old GMC pickup we owned then.
And packing up on that day, it felt
similar to how it felt today.
We'd always been transient, ready to flee or move
at a moment's notice.
And I've always kicked myself for not somehow noticing
my lack of care and stability.
'This isn't happening because we don't love you anymore
or anything,' mom said, helping me pack.
'We must correct what's not been right.'
'OK,' I said.
I went to live with my cousin, who in her early 20s
was pursuing a master's degree in mathematics
and teaching as a graduate assistant at the state
university in Flagstaff.
Her responsible nature was due in part
to our strict and thrifty grandmother,
who had raised her while her parents vanished
into their depression and the poison of its alleviation.
I was her, in a sense, her fondness not
at all veiled for me.
She had just purchased a newly built condo
in a blighted neighborhood, and that
was within walking distance of my junior high.
And her ads for a roommate had come to nothing,
so I filled the vacancy.
Based on her experience with her own parents,
she made an arrangement with my mother and father
that entailed a monthly allowance of 150 each,
with the stipulation that if they missed or denied
me these monthly payments, I would
go to the authorities, maybe the school counselor,
with a story of neglect and abandonment,
which wouldn't be so far fetched, so
beyond the stereotypical situation of young minority
parents ill-suited for heavy responsibility.
In this way, I was beginning to understand
how to pit expectation against the potential for profit.
And in this way, I was truly assimilated.
Father puffed out his chest, a bottom rung rooster.
'We will renegotiate these payments,' he said.
'When you turn 16, see if you're in need of money then too.'
Mother with her impeccable posture
sat in a chair pursing her red stained lips,
and she said, 'When you're 18, hopefully grown into a man
by then, the payments will stop."
For a year, the payments arrived on time, then
every other month, until they didn't arrive at all.
My parents, eaten up by their lives and the ravenous world."
So he's abandoned-- poor guy.
Meets a crew of girls.
His cousin's friends-- they're all kind
of rowdy and blasphemous, like, you know, good rez people are.
So he becomes a chauffeur when he's 13, and eventually
a drug mule, like any good chauffeur would be.
"My first chauffeuring gig went smoothly.
My cousin rode shotgun.
The sisters bent in the back seat with Birdy sitting bitch.
That's what they called it-- sitting bitch.
For what reason, I never knew.
Pre-gamed and ready with elated carefree buzz.
They shit-talked rivals whom I'd never met and knew
nothing about, the details of which engrossed me.
'That skank snagged out this bull rider
with a big ass cold sore on his lip
and then went and passed it on to her man.
She didn't even give a fuck.'
Or, 'I'll tell you what, if we see those hoe-bags,
I'm down to scrap.
Take off these hoops.
I don't care if I fuck up my nails.
Stoodis.' Rugged and rezed out, their infectious laughter
and swagger, not giving one fuck whom they offended.
This was something I wanted--
camaraderie and confidence, disregard, happiness.
It couldn't be real.
I dropped him off a block from the main downtown drag,
around 10:00, when all the bars started hopping and everyone
felt sexier and tougher, the air thick with big dick energy,
as the girls called it, and returned 10 minutes after 2:00
AM, parking in the shadows of a parking lot, alley, or street.
Sometimes one or two of them found
other ways of getting home or getting to someone else's home.
Other times one or two people I didn't know piled in,
and I hurried across town to be rid
of the commotion and weight.
A few nights, my cousin appeared alone,
her eyes furious as if she'd been crying,
her fists clenched and red with fighting.
Two nights, no one showed up at all, though when I got home,
my cousin was there, asleep, behind her locked door.
And one time, a man I'd never met came to meet me."
You can finish it at home for homework.
Thanks.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]