The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Sherman Alexie
For Bob, Dick, Mark, and Ron
For Adrian, Joy, Leslie, Simon,
and all those Native writers
whose words and music
have made mine possible
Contents
Prologue
Introduction
Every Little Hurricane
A Drug Called Tradition
Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock
Crazy Horse Dreams
The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore
Amusements
This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona
The Fun House
All I Wanted to Do Was Dance
The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire
Distances
Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation
A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result
A Good Story
The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue
Imagining the Reservation
The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor
Indian Education
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Family Portrait
Somebody Kept Saying Powwow
Witnesses, Secret and Not
Flight
Junior Polatkin’s Wild West Show
There’s a little bit of magic in everything
and then some loss to even things out.
—Lou Reed
I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin
this journey with the light of knowing
the root of my own furious love.
—Joy Harjo
Prologue
An email exchange between Jess Walter and Sherman Alexie
From: Sherman Alexie
To: Jess Walter
Sent: Thursday, June 20
Subject: Twentieth Anniversary Lone Ranger and Tonto
SA: So I’ve been trying to write the intro to the 20th anniversary edition, but it feels too self-congratulatory, so do you want to have an email exchange about it and use that as the intro?
JW: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is 20!?! Your email sent me scurrying to my signed copy. I looked at the jacket photo and there you are, with the greatest Breakfast Club pro-wrestling warrior mullet of all time.
SA: The rez mullet! I also find my former haircut amusing in stylistic terms. It’s embarrassing now. But there’s always been a conscious and subconscious classist/racist edge to mullet jokes, especially when it comes to white guys with mullets. If one means to tell a racist/classist joke, then make it a good one, but I don’t actually think that many folks realize the cultural importance of the mullet in Native American warrior history. Take a look at Chief Joseph.
Unravel those braids, my friend, and you’ve got a legendary mullet, comparable to mine. The contemporary motto for the mullet wearer is “business in front, party in the back,” but the Indian mullet warrior motto was “I don’t want my hair to get in my eyes as I’m kicking your ass.” The Indian mullet motto, coincidentally or not, is the same as the motto for hockey mullet wearers. Somebody needs to do a study …
Looking at my hair through a slightly more serious lens, I think I wore such an exaggerated mullet as a means of aggressively declaring my Indian identity. And my class identity. When The Lone Ranger was published, I was being fêted by the publishing world while I was back living on the rez, after college. I was called “one of the major lyric voices of our time” but at the same time I was sleeping in a U.S. Army surplus bed in the unfinished basement bedroom in my family’s government-built house.
The contrast between my literary life and my real life was epic. Scary. Even dangerous. And it felt epic, scary, and dangerous for many years.
My mullet was an insecurity shield. My mullet was an ethnic hatchet. My mullet was an arrow on fire.
My mullet said to the literary world, “Hello, you privileged prep-school assholes, I’m here to steal your thunder, lightning, and book sales.”
JW: Yes, undoubtedly: Chief Joseph’s business in front carries more power and meaning than say, Brian Bosworth’s. (My own unfortunate mullet included a braided rattail—just in case I wasn’t white trash enough.) And in your author photo from that time there is a fierce, steady engagement in your eyes that reflects exactly that quality in the book—you are drawn in by the humor, the sorrow, and the anger over injustice, the steady and unblinking cost of admission. I remember so clearly the reviews you were getting, and especially that phrase from the New York Times Book Review’s cover story on The Business of Fancydancing—“one of the major lyric voices of our time”—but I couldn’t have comprehended the pressure that such praise brings, especially the identity component of it, and so early in your writing life. To follow those reviews with a book like Lone Ranger, is, frankly, kind of fucking remarkable. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction and garnered even more praise, but it must have felt like even more weight; every writer dreams of “stunning” and “dazzling,” but The Chicago Tribune writing, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.” What does a 26-year-old do with that?
The pressure of straddling two worlds comes through in Lone Ranger. In “A Good Story,” the gap is represented by the sweetest bit of postmodernist breaking of the fourth wall, in which you, the author, seem to be lying on the couch and your mother pleads with you to “write a story about something good.”
Another example of the disparate worlds you’ve suddenly found yourself straddling is one of my all-time-favorite stories, “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” which begins with a wonderfully apt epigraph from Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Your name, your boy’s name: Joseph. You almost seem to be staking out territory on the literary side of that divide, and having to defend yourself to both sides. That story also moves toward something I see in your work—a brotherhood in class, Thomas on the bus to prison with “four African men, one Chicano, and a white man from the smallest town in the state,” delivering them to “a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack.”
SA: And now I remember a New Yorker magazine party early in my career when I stepped out of a penthouse apartment elevator and saw Stephen King and Salman Rushdie hugging each other. What does a rez boy do with that visual information?
Oh boy, do I still feel like a class warrior in the literary world. In the whole world, really. These stories are drenched in poverty and helplessness.
We’ve talked about this a few times. I often make the joke that your trailer park poverty makes my rez poverty look good.
But that’s an overlooked part of these stories, I think. I grew up in the tribe called the Rural Poor, as did you, and I don’t think folks think of us that way. I grew up in wheat fields. I grew up climbing to the tops of pine trees. I grew up angry and ready to punch a rich guy in the ear.
So, yeah, realism is my thing in this book. Autobiography, too. Not an autobiography of details but an autobiography of the soul.
One thing: I wrote this book in the middle of a decade-long effort to believe in God. So it’s curious to see the uncynical God hunger in the boy I was.
JW: Oh man! That’s a littl
e more high-powered hug than you and I hugging at the LA Times Book Festival in 1996. I still remember, you said, “What are you doing here?” Then you introduced me to Helen Fielding, of all people. “This is Jess Walter, the second-best writer from Stevens County, Washington.” And we both laughed, because you and I knew that I was the ONLY other writer from Stevens County, Washington.
To my shame now, I grew up embarrassed about being bluecollar, a first-generation college student, a 19-year-old father. We usually think of passing in terms of race, but people try to pass as another class, too. I did that.
You, however, seemed to know—at least as a writer—to claim class as a subject, that literature belongs to the poor shits, too. Your stories are sneaky that way: They confront readers on that level; there’s a quiet insistence that THIS WORLD is as rich a literary world as London or New York, that Benjamin Lake can be as profound a place as Walden Pond, that Tshimikain Creek can have every bit as much literary resonance as the Thames.
But place and class are only part of the story. Many people tell me that they had no picture of contemporary reservation life, or even urban Indian life, until reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. To break Indians out of museums and movies and Chief Wahoo—that’s a legacy for any book. The book and Smoke Signals gave many their first picture of contemporary Native American life.
Autobiography of the soul is a great phrase. I remember someone on the reservation telling me back when I covered the Spokane Tribe and your book came up, “You know what that book seemed like to me? The news.”
So, what do you make of people who have called your work “magical realism”? I wonder if there isn’t a cultural gap in that phrase, a whiff of colonialism. I’m a big García Márquez fan and reading his autobiography is not so much different than reading his fiction.
SA: Describing my book as “magical realism” does make me feel like a witch doctor in blue jeans. I’ve got a friend who calls me Shaman Perplexy. I like that. Isn’t all fiction (and nonfiction) magical realism? Aren’t we all making shit up, and if we do it well enough, it can feel surreal? Anyway, I’m not nearly as much of a magical realist as Flannery O’Connor.
What is your favorite story in the book?
JW: What feels surreal to me are those stories of kids growing up on the Upper East Side, going to summer camp, then prep school, then choosing between Harvard and Yale … sci-fi.
“Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother …” is a huge story, dreamy and plaintive. I’m not surprised to hear you were contemplating your faith as you worked on this book. I have a sentimental sweet spot for the stories about basketball, especially “Indian Education” and “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore.” One of my favorite first lines is from “The First Annual All-Indian Horse Shoe Pitch and Barbecue”: “Somebody forgot the charcoal; blame the BIA.” But I think the story that moved me the most at the time was “This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.” When I went back to that story, I was amazed you accomplished all of that in 16 pages. That story was a novel in my mind.
Jess Walter is the author of eight books, including the bestseller Beautiful Ruins and The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award. He grew up in Spokane and on a small ranch bordering the Spokane Reservation. He and Sherman Alexie have been friends for twenty years.
Introduction
IN FEBRUARY 1992 Hanging Loose Press of Brooklyn, New York, published my first book of poems and stories, The Business of Fancydancing, and I figured it would sell two hundred copies, one hundred and twenty-five of them purchased by my mother. After all, it was a first book by a twenty-six-year-old Spokane Reservation Indian boy from eastern Washington. There was a good chance it would only sell twenty-two copies, seventeen of them purchased by my mother, the formalist, who constantly asked me why my poems didn’t rhyme.
“It’s free verse,” I said. “And some of them do rhyme. I’ve written sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. I’ve written in iambic pentameter.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the ba-bump, ba-bump sound of the heartbeat, of the deer running through the green pine forest, of the eagle singing its way through the sky.”
“Don’t pull that Indian shaman crap on me,” my mother said.
So my mother certainly wasn’t impressed by my indigenous rhetoric, but she would have been deliriously happy if I’d become a messianic doctor or lawyer (or a doctor or lawyer with only a messiah complex) and saved the tribe. In a capitalistic sense, that’s what the tribe needed (and still needs). But I was a former premedicine major who couldn’t handle human anatomy, and I knew far too many lawyers, so I chose the third most lucrative pursuit: small-press poetry.
My family was surprised, but they weren’t disappointed. Since I was one of the few people from my tribe to ever go to college, I was already a success story. My mother worked a series of low-wage social-work jobs for the tribe, and my father was a randomly employed blue-collar alcoholic. I made more money delivering pizzas than they did while working far more important jobs. I might have been considered a black sheep if I’d come from a more financially successful family, but my literary ambitions made me a white sheep, albeit a lamb who published in tiny poetry magazines like The Black Bear Review, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, Impetus, and Slipstream.
Don’t get me wrong. I was excited and proud to be a publishing poet (and still have copies of every journal where I’ve been published), but I also kept my day job as a program information coordinator (secretary) for People to People, a high school international-exchange program in Spokane. I knew that I would eventually return to college (I left three credits shy of my B.A. in American studies), get that degree, and then trudge through graduate school in creative writing. But I was in no hurry to do that. I just wanted to write my poems (and the occasional story) and live as cheaply as possible. I knew how to live in poverty, having grown up on an American third-world reservation, so my urban six-dollars-an-hour job was almost luxurious.
But a New York Times Book Review editor named Rich Nicholls changed my life when he noticed The Business of Fancydancing lying in an office slush pile. As he later told me, he thought the cover was extraordinarily beautiful—it featured a surreal photograph of a Navajo fancydancer that some readers wrongly assumed was my self-portrait—and that was the primary reason he picked it up and flipped through the pages. He assigned the book, as well as a few others as part of a survey of contemporary Native American literature, to James Kincaid, an English professor at the University of Southern California. My Hanging Loose editors were shocked to hear one of their books was being reviewed, because there are Pulitzer Prize–winning poets whose books don’t get covered in the Times. And more shocking, my book was part of a front-page review. Yep, right there on the cover of the Times Book Review was a photograph of some Indian guy on a motorcycle (I’m terrified of any vehicle with less than four wheels), and inside that review was Mr. Kincaid declaring me “one of the major lyric voices of our time.”
I was sitting at my desk at People to People when my Hanging Loose editor, Bob Hershon, faxed me an advance copy of the review. I read it once, ran to the bathroom to throw up, then returned to my desk to read one sentence again and again: “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”
As Keanu Reeves, the Hawaiian balladeer, would say, “Whoa.”
I didn’t believe I was one of the major lyric voices of our time (though I’m probably in the top 503 by now), but I guessed that review was going to help my career. In fact, that review tossed my ass over the stadium fence directly into the big leagues. After Kincaid’s compliments went public, I started receiving phone calls from agents and editors. Many phone calls. Dozens of calls. A Hollywood producer interrogated me.
“Are the film rights available?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I said. “But you know it’s a book of poems?”
“What do you mean, a book of poems?”
“I m
ean, poems, you know, with skinny lines, stanzas, mostly free verse, but some rhyming stuff, too. My mom thinks they’re pretty cool.”
“You mean poem poems?”
“Yes.”
“Do your poems tell a story?”
“Most of them are narrative.”
“That’s good, that’s good. Could you send me a copy of the book?”
“You haven’t read it?”
“No,” he said. “But I read the review. The review was great.”
Dozens of agents and editors loved the review (though I wonder how many of them had read the book), and they all wanted to know if I wrote fiction.
“Well,” I said to them. “It’s not just a book of poetry. There are four short stories in there, too. And a lot of prose poems.”
“But do you write fiction?”
“I have a manuscript of short stories. There must be thirty or forty stories in it.”
“But do you write fiction?”
I didn’t realize that “fiction” was a synonym for “Sure, we’ll publish your book of obscure short stories as long as we can also publish your slightly less obscure first novel as part of a two-book deal.”
I was terrified by all of these big-time agents and editors, and especially of one particular agent, who enjoyed more fame and fortune than any of her clients did.
“Send me the manuscript today,” the famous agent ordered.
Bullied, terrified, and naive, I sent her my manuscript of short stories, glacially printed out by a five-hundred-dollar Brother word processor.
“You’re not ready,” she said after she’d read them. “I’ll take you on as a client, but we’re going to have to work on these stories for a year or two before I send them out to publishers.”
I was shocked. I had been dreaming about immediate fame and fortune.
“But wait,” I said. “I thought I was one of the major lyric voices of our time.”
“According to the manuscript I’ve got sitting in front of me, you’re not even one of the major lyric voices on my desk.”