But that inexpertly constructed HUD house was still a spectacular and vital mansion compared to the nineteenth-century one-bedroom house where I spent most of the first seven years of my life. That ancient reservation house didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity when my parents, siblings, and I first moved in, along with an ever-changing group of friends, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.
I most vividly remember my half sister, Mary. She was thirteen years older than me and seemed more like a maternal figure than a sibling. Even more beautiful than our gorgeous mother, Mary was a charming and random presence in my life. She was profane and silly and dressed like a hippie white girl mimicking a radical Indian. In later years, I would learn that Mary’s randomness and charm—and her eventual death in a house fire—were fueled by her drug and alcohol addictions. I didn’t yet know that romantic heroes—famous and not—are usually aimless nomads in disguise. Mary’s father lived in Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, so she sometimes lived with him and sometimes lived with us and sometimes shacked up with Indian men who reeked of marijuana and beer or with white men who looked like roadies for Led Zeppelin. A mother at fifteen, Mary gave her baby, my niece, to our aunt Inez to raise. My niece is only a few years younger than me, and I still don’t understand why my mother didn’t take her into our home. My parents raised one of our cousins as a son, and my sisters would eventually raise another cousin as a daughter. So why didn’t our niece become our sister? I never asked my parents those questions. But, in writing the first draft of this very paragraph, I realized for the first time that my father, so passive in nearly all ways, might have said no to raising a granddaughter who was not his biological relative. I feel terrible for considering this possibility. Could my father have done such a thing? Could he have been such an alpha lion? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. So why didn’t my mother raise her granddaughter? I doubt that I’ll ever be able to answer that question. There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.
Before her death, my mother told me that she liked to sleep alone on a couch in her later years because she’d only slept in crowded beds and bedrooms for most of her younger life. I never would have thought of a lumpy couch as a luxury, but my mother certainly did. Sometimes, when I was little and afraid and screaming from yet another nightmare, I would fitfully sleep on a smaller couch in the HUD house living room near my mother’s larger couch.
Born hydrocephalic, with abnormal amounts of cerebral spinal fluid crushing my brain, I had surgery at five months to insert a shunt and then had it removed when I was two. I suffered seizures until I was seven years old, so I was a kindergartner on phenobarbital. I have alternated between insomnia and hypersomnia my whole life. I begin dreaming immediately upon falling asleep, a condition called shortened REM latency that can be a precursor, indicator, cause, and result of depression. I have always been haunted by nightmares. By ghosts, real or imagined. I have always heard voices, familiar and strange. I was officially diagnosed as bipolar in 2010, but I think my first symptoms appeared when I was a child.
For Christmas in 1976, when I was ten, I received a plastic Guns of Navarone battle play set with Allied and Nazi soldiers, cannon, tanks, and planes. I added my own Indian and U.S. Cavalry toy soldiers and manically played war for twenty-two hours straight. My parents didn’t stop me. They didn’t tell me to go to bed. My mania was accepted. In the context of my family, I wasn’t being odd. Rather, I was behaving like my mother, who would often work on her quilts for even longer sleepless stretches.
I often stayed awake all night reading books and writing stories and playing the board games I invented. If I was especially agitated and lucky, I would have a new graph-paper notebook and I would carefully color in thousands of squares, one by one, until I was calm enough to sleep.
I think I inherited my bipolar disorder from my mother. I believe she was haunted by ghosts, too. I also believe she has become a ghost, either as a supernatural being or as a hallucination caused by my various mental illnesses and medications or as the most current and vivid product of my imagination.
Thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.
“You slept on that living room couch for years,” my mother’s ghost said to me while I was writing this memoir. “You never used your basement bedroom until you were eleven or twelve. I had you sleep close to me because you had those seizures. And I had to keep you safe. And I had to give you medicine in the middle of the night. And because you were always scared.”
“That’s not how I remember sleeping,” I said. “I remember moving into the basement bedroom on my first night.”
“You used to wet your bed,” my mother’s ghost said. “You wet the couch until you were thirteen, I think.”
“I stopped wetting the bed long before that,” I said.
“Do you remember that I would lay down a shower curtain on the couch and then lay down your sheets and blanket?” my mother’s ghost asked.
“That was only in the old house,” I said. “Never in the HUD house.”
“It was in both places,” she said. “You had bladder issues even when you were awake. Do you remember when you drove to Spokane with your cousins for a birthday party? But you were too nervous to go into a house filled with city Indians you didn’t know? So you stayed outside in the car and peed your pants because you were too scared to go to the bathroom in a stranger’s house?”
I lied and said, “I don’t remember that happening.”
“I think you forget things on purpose,” my mother’s ghost said.
I do remember when the white men in gray overalls installed the first indoor toilet in our ancient nineteenth-century house, but I can’t recall when the place was wired for electricity and the first lightbulb was switched on.
When performing for crowds, I like to say, “When I was a kid, I shared an outhouse with sixteen Indians. But I only remember fourteen of them.”
That primitive house was infinitely better than the series of filthy highway motels and filthier downtown hotels in and around Spokane where we’d sometimes stay for days or weeks whenever my parents had extra money, or a temporary job, or needed a sad-ass sabbatical from reservation life.
My parents sold blood for money to buy food.
Poverty was our spirit animal.
Once, when he was only five or six, my big brother told my aunt that he was going to hock all of our furniture to the pawnshop, just like “Mom and Dad always do,” so he could buy Kentucky Fried Chicken.
My aunt, the white one, told me that story. My big brother doesn’t remember it.
He said, “That chicken thing sounds more like something you’d write in a book than something I would say for real.”