My cousin got a certification in heavy equipment operations. I thought that that'd be enough for him to get going in life. He was mostly a good guy. Bit haunted but hey, we all are. The tribe gave him an apartment and all he had to do was pay the electric bill which averaged out to about fifty bucks.
He wasn't able to afford it.
He should've been able to make a good life for himself. I have two buddies that went on to drive the earth movers and they both made solid money from it.
My cousin couldn't keep things together.
Because that's what we do when we leave, we implode and end up back at grandma's.
The last time I saw him was at the liquor store about a decade ago. He didn't look like himself anymore. He lost a staggering amount of weight. Same with his teeth. He looked just "ooh-shi-kuh". He looked pitiful. We had a quick back and forth and I got the fuck out of there.
He'd be dead a few months later. I think it was diabetes. The diabetes is running rampant through the reservation. My neighbor used to drink a half gallon of whiskey every night with one of my relatives. Neighbor lost the toe-end of his foot.
There was a Native dude that had a job at the grocery store. He disappeared at some point. A few months later he was walking around town with crutches. They said the diabetes made it hard for him to feel his feet. It was winter and the house was cold. He tried to warm himself up against a space heater.
He couldn't feel it and ended up cooking his foot in his sleep, so they amputated it.
There's a style of booze out there and it has different names. The first time I drank, it was called Tilt. Tilt came and went and then we had Blast. Blast went out of production and then it was Joose.
Joose was an imitation of the big dawg, Four Loco. All were the same. Cheap as shit. Sweet as shit. Gross as shit.
I spilled a cherry flavored one on a black shirt. The chemicals stained the shirt red.
It's just sugar.
It's just sugar, chemicals, and cheap alcohol.
Sometimes when you're too far gone you get all of your calories from poison.
My uncle was an interesting fella. He was in and out of prison. He used to live in one of my dad's junked out cars. It was below grandpa's property line, down a little hill. Everyone knew that that's where he'd be if you were looking for him.
The guy was a lightweight and I think I judged him for it when I was younger. Now, at the ripe old age of thirty something, I understand it more. I can get buzzed off of a six pack. I can get drunk off of a twelve pack. And the hangovers mostly feel like a spiritual attack. That's not who I was at twenty.
At twenty something I could drink a traveler of vodka every night. If I was being more health conscious, I'd drink a case of beer instead.
I ain't that person anymore.
My uncle was an interesting fella. He used to let his forty ounces bake in the summer sun. You could see them resting on the trunk of that junked out car. He'd let them get all hot and skunky, and then he'd slam 'em in a few big shots.
The real world knows Colt 45's and King Cobra's as the cheap beers but that wasn't the cheap shit on the rez. We drank Hurricanes. If we wanted to get more drunk we drank Hurricane High Gravity for the extra 3 percent ABV. We also drank Joose. I'm pretty sure it was the Joose that killed my dad.
After I left home, a distillery based out of Kadoka South Dakota started making a vodka called Prairie Dog. It was about five dollars for a traveler and that shit was strong. They said it was 105 proof.
We lost three relatives to liver failure in quick succession soon after.
I'll be thirty three in March. I will have lived longer than most of my older relatives. People don't really know what's happening on the reservation because it's not the most engaging story. Chicago is famous for it's inner city gangs. Music and social media went and made friends of friends of gang members famous by association. These are gun running poets blowing each other's brains out at gas stations, and it's all recorded.
While they kill each other, fairly regularly, a few elect poets become temporarily rich. Carrying stacks of money and mounds of drugs and guns. The world will remember their names because of the music and stories they left behind.
The Black American's impact on American culture makes me envious. There's not a single section of this new world that doesn't have Black influence if not outright dominance. The Black American cannot be separated from professional sports, and they, by extension, have made many people extremely rich.
Music, art, poetry, politics, science, sports. The Black American has been able to become a force in the cultural zeitgeist and will likely maintain their position indefinitely.
The reservations are isolated from the world by vast expanses of open prairie. The lack of economic opportunity has more or less sentenced us to quiet deaths. We aren't elevated to the status of folk hero. Our triumphs and ills aren't received by anyone. We're closer to near-extinct animals with terminal diseases than we are to being human. We're not much different than bison.
You gotta go out of your way to find us.
The Black American is within spitting distance of the White world. They live side by side in every major metropolitan area. If you can dream it, you can make it. Geography is not an issue like it is for the Native.
We rarely make it out and if we make it out we don't stay gone for all that long.
No credit, no money, no rental history.
You are on your own and you will fail just like everyone else.
And you'll be just like your cousins, just like your aunts, just like your uncles.
You couldn't last in the real world.
The world is indifferent towards the Native American because we don't exist. We are taught about in textbooks. Movies and television normally mthologize us while placing us only in the early years of American history as a nuisance that needed to be conquered.
Mostly.
It seems to be changing with time.
Good luck to you.
I know of two Natives local to this Texas city that I currently live in. They are undeniably Native. I was at an open mic and a White lady went up after me. Her set was based around her being a "real" Native because her grandparents were some negligable amount of Cherokee.
Natives are everywhere in Rapid City. You might have coworkers who are Native and you likely went to school with us if you grew up in the area. When I worked in a warehouse there was a wealthy Native there who'd spread all kinds of conservative and racist bullshit about us to the White folk because they didn't know any of us.
They were convinced that all of us were wealthy like him. That we all somehow lucked into oil money or that our tribes all gave us money simply for being born. That wasn't true at all. All it would have taken to disprove that would be to look around as you drive through the city. Natives are the dominant ethnicity in Rapid's homeless population.
Cognitive dissonance. I don't know how you could believe we were all paid just to be alive while also littering the parks in homeless droves.
I never ran into real racism until I moved to Piedmont South Dakota. I had cultural whiplash. The Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation near Custer, South Dakota, was nice enough to accept my application for their artist residency and their annual artshow. As artists we were paid well, given a free meal from the onsite restaurant, and lodged in a massive basement apartment out in the country.
All I had to do was talk to the tourists once a week about Native America and answer any questions that passerbys may have while I made art in a designated space in their cultural center.
I moved all the time after I left home.
Hotels, motels, cabins, sheds.
I had a few brief breaks. My cousin let me rent a room in his place for the summer. I got a studio apartment out west on a campground, but only after and before tourist season. Lastly, there was the art residency.
Everything else wasn't too good.
No permanence. No home.
The residency was over on October 1st, 2022 and I had to get back to it. I got online and searched for anything, anywhere close to Rapid City. All I could find was a cabin rental in Piedmont. I think it was 250 dollars a week. The residency gave me enough cash to survive, long enough to get back on my feet, at least that's what I thought.
If you take the exit off of I-90 towards Piedmont you'll find a gas station on the south side. Next you drive east for less than a mile. You'll find a bar. Behind the bar will be a bunch of cabins. The place was affordable and I didn't need credit to check in.
The vibes of the bar were off and I'd figure out quickly why that was.
The owner was playing pool with some good ol' boys. The ad told me to ask for such-and-such. An old woman told me which one he was. He was a tall dude. Old white tall dude in a black leather vest and a cowboy hat. Dressed like a rancher and talked with a southern accent. He asked me if I had money and I said yes.
They must've been hard up for tenants.
He told me to get in his pickup and he'll show me a cabin.
No paperwork. No ID. Nothing. Old school. Just a cash exchange.
He had a carton of American Spirits. We talked about Florida on the short ride. He was a carpenter turned house flipper. He moved out to Rapid for tax purposes a few years ago and bought the campground. He didn't come off as hostile, but he wasn't exactly friendly either.
He was renting a cabin to a stranger who might be a piece of shit.
Maybe the suspicion was warranted.
The cabin was a cabin. Small as hell and poorly lit.
The cabin was basically a shed. The public shitter and shower was a good walk away. There was a pathway leading to the bar over a small bridge behind the cabin. He took my money and welcomed me before leaving.
I had a gash in my foot from a few weeks prior. I stepped on some broken glass and fucked my shit up. I was scared about it getting infected. No running water, no kitchen, nothing. Just an uninsulated shed. I sat out front on my ass and poured bottled water over my slow healling wound.
I'd be stuck on that campground for the next two months and it'd get colder than hell.
I say I'm sober but that ain't exactly true. From 2014 to 2017 I drank more or less daily. I drank to excess. I drank until I had to stop. I was only sober for a few years. Once I moved to the city I started to fall off the wagon in regular intervals. I was sober for three months. Then I'd fall off and things never really went well.
I only quit this summer, 2024.
It took panic attacks and nightmares for me to finally sober up for good.
What I'm trying to say is I had money and the property had a bar that was a short walk away.
I hung around for a few hours and got used to the cabin. I stayed at one when I first made it to the city. It took me four weeks of living in my car to be able to afford the security deposit and first month's rent.
I lived in the SUV and painted every day back then.
I still remember the last two sales that got me in.
I think the band was called Winds of Tragedy. The main fella behind that band saved me and I'll always be grateful for it. He licensed two images for a few of his projects and that was it. I was able to get a roof over my head.
The cabin that time was pretty nice. It was well insulated. You could hardly tell it was winter. You had to walk a good ways away to use the shower and shitter.
That was my first year in the city.
Second year I was in a new cabin.
I went to the bar and tried to catch a buzz. I'm a giant Native, if you didn't know. Six-three. Three hundo pounds, you know, average. I don't really make eye contact. I'm not all that good at being around people.
Love me some cheap liquor though.
Talked to a tweaker ass bartender. That guy was fun. The movements were obvious. The guy was fumbling with everything and had a wide eyed stare. I asked him openly about it and he said he got off the shit a year before. Apparently his doctors or whoever told him that it'd take a good seven years for him to get back to normal.
He said if he fell off the tweak wagon his brain wiring would get fucked up worse and he'd lose all of his progress.
The tweaker was comparatively nice.
The other bartender was a dickhead. Not only was he a dickhead but he was outwardly hostile. I lived in South Dakota my entire life. Sure there was racism but it wasn't overt or anything. Mostly it was glares. If not that, you'd get followed around while you shopped. I understood that. I was accustomed to that.
That second bartender's racism was different. He was pretty open about his political worldview, and that worldview was very much Conservative and anti-everything.
We talked about free healthcare and he hated it. We talked about unions and fair wages, he said he quit being an ironworker because they wanted him to join a union. He said that if he could get paid less to be a bartender he would because you get forward in life on hardwork alone and not increased minimum wages.
Somewhere along the way we talked about Natives and he wasn't really a fan. I can't remember the specifics and I don't want to create a racial encounter between us that never happened. But what I do remember was him saying if a whole pack of Natives "wanted to get froggy" he'd "use this".
He showed me a baseball bat that was under the cash register.
The landlord showed up and we started chainsmoking. He wasn't much better than his staff. That dude was racist as shit too and he was open about it. He was open about it because I was asking him about his views, openly. I wasn't offended or scared off by his beliefs, and I stood my ground on what I believed to be right.
We crushed a pack of spirits over the next hour or so.
He owned the bar and it had a smoking section.
I haven't had that since Memphis.
I knew I was in for a rough ride when I asked about Natives.
He said, "I don't usually rent to y'all and I will not rent to N-words."
Mans dropped the hard "r". Not once. Not twice. But several times.
I asked him what made Natives different. He said he respected Natives for how hard we fought against the government. But mostly he doesn't trust us because of bad experiences renting.
My cousin Will would have blown the fuck up at this racist fuck. He would've started shit and yelled and threw some hands.
I wasn't angry about it.
I knew that racism was a thing but I never experienced it like this. Not openly. Not brazenly.
And I didn't condemn the fella for thinking what he thought. Mostly because I'd be homeless if I did. But also because he didn't seem hostile to me.
I was a hunter years ago.
Not so much now.
And we talked about guns and hunting.
Growing up rural was enough of a commonality to keep a respectable relation between us. He mentioned some sort of gun with a heavy caliber that he owned. Said it could put a hole through a tree.
He didn't like Natives but he was never mean towards me.
Most of the staff was nice after the first night. Even nicer once I started paying rent on time. I wasn't surprised when the property got sold a year later.
*****
I felt like I was stranded on Pluto or Europa. Somewhere isolated and cold. Just far enough away from Earth. The interstate was an astroid belt and I could hear in the vacuum of space. I must've been somewhat good when I was alive because this part of hell wasn't outright torture but it damn sure wasn't enjoyable.
The winter came and I learned how to be cold. Colder than I ever been. The cabin was a shed and you could see the sky through the cracks in the walls. The shed was a tomb and no one brings flowers here or visits anymore. The tomb was colder than the communal shitter and I was burning through money.
I've been surviving off of art ever since the car wreck. If I make art I can keep moving forward. Problem is it got too cold to paint and I didn't know that that was possible. The acrylic wouldn't bind to the canvas or to itself. It became a beige mess and never dried.
Art wasn't paying enough so I started working at a warehouse part-time. My shift started at four in the morning. I liked working that early because it meant I would be inside when the real cold hit. Sunrise is colder than midnight. I'd rather be sweaty lifting heavy boxes than cold.
The first storm blanketed the area. Autumn's death rattle shook the world. It's winter now and I don't remember it being this cold.
I felt like I was on Pluto or Europa and my organs shut down leaving a pale frigidy througout my limbs. I wore as many layers of clothes as possible and wrapped myself up in blankets and plastic and stared at the ceiling for the next thirty six hours. The snow and ice came on my day off and I wish I could've been in the warehouse instead of in that shed.
Don't ever be an artist.
*******
I will never paywall my writings nor will I attempt to formally publish them. If you like what I do and would like to keep me from freezing, donate to paypal.me/sblackwolf