The chip you carry has to do with being born and raised in Oakland. A concrete chip, a slab really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. As for your mom’s side, as for your whiteness, there’s too much and not enough there to know what to do with. You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You were both and neither. When you took baths, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub.
* * *
—
How you ended up getting fired was related to your drinking, which was related to your skin problems, which was related to your father, which was related to history. The one story you were sure to hear from your dad, the one thing you knew for sure about what it means to be Indian, was that your people, Cheyenne people, on November 29, 1864, were massacred at Sand Creek. He told you and your sisters that story more than any other story he could muster.
Your dad was the kind of drunk who disappears weekends, lands himself in jail. He was the kind of drunk who had to stop completely. Who couldn’t have a drop. So you had it coming in a way. That need that won’t quit. That years-deep pit you were bound to dig, crawl into, struggle to get out of. Your parents maybe burned a too-deep, too-wide God hole through you. The hole was unfillable.
Coming out of your twenties you started to drink every night. There were many reasons for this. But you did it without a thought. Most addictions aren’t premeditated. You slept better. Drinking felt good. But mostly, if there was any real reason you could pinpoint, it was because of your skin. You’d always had skin problems. Since you can remember. Your dad used to rub peyote gravy on your rashes. That worked for a while. Until he wasn’t around anymore. The doctors wanted to call it eczema. They wanted you hooked on steroid creams. The scratching was bad because it only led to more scratching, which led to more bleeding. You’d wake up with blood underneath your fingernails—a sharp sting wherever the wound moved, because it moved everywhere, all over your body—and blood ended up on your sheets, and you’d wake up feeling like you’d dreamed something as important and devastating as it was forgotten. But there was no dream. There was only the open, living wound, and it itched somewhere on your body at all times. Patches and circles and fields of red and pink, sometimes yellow, bumpy, pus-y, weeping, disgusting—the surface of you.
If you drank enough you didn’t scratch at night. You could deaden your body that way. You found your way in and out of a bottle. Found your limits. Lost track of them. Along the way you figured out there was a certain amount of alcohol you could drink that could—the next day—produce a certain state of mind, which you over time began to refer to privately as the State. The State was a place you could get to where everything felt exactly, precisely in place, where and when it belonged, you belonged, completely okay in it—almost like your dad used to say, “In’it, like, isn’t that right? Isn’t that true?”
But each and every bottle you bought was a medicine or a poison depending on whether you managed to keep them full enough. The method was unstable. Unsustainable. To drink enough but not too much for a drunk was like asking the evangelical not to say the name Jesus. And so playing drums and singing in those classes had given you something else. A way to get there without having to drink and wait and see if the next day the State might emerge from the ashes.
The State was based on something you read about James Hampton years after your trip to D.C. James had given himself a title: Director of Special Projects for the State of Eternity. James was a Christian. You are not. But he was just crazy enough to make sense to you. This is what made sense: He spent fourteen years building a massive piece of artwork out of junk he collected in and around the garage he rented, which was about a mile from the White House. The piece was called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly. James made the throne for Jesus’s second coming. What you get about James Hampton is his almost desperate devotion to God. To the waiting for his God to come. He made a golden throne from junk. The throne you were building was made of moments, made of experiences in the State after excess drinking, made of leftover, unused drunkenness, kept overnight, dreamed, moon-soaked fumes you breathed into throne form, into a place you could sit. In the State you were just unhinged enough to not get in the way. The problem came from having to drink at all.
The night before you got fired, drum class had been canceled. It was the end of December. The approach of the new year. This kind of drinking was not about reaching the State. This kind of drinking was careless, pointless—one of the risks, the consequences of being the kind of drunk you are. That you’ll always be, no matter how well you learn to manage it. By night’s end, you’d finished a fifth of Jim Beam. A fifth is a lot if you don’t work your way up to it. It can take years to drink this way, alone, on random Tuesday nights. It takes a lot from you. Drinking this way. Your liver. The one doing the most living for you, detoxifying all the shit you put into your body.