Exit Interview For My Father

EXIT INTERVIEW FOR MY FATHER



· True or False: When a reservation-raised Native American dies of alcoholism, it should be considered death by natural causes.

· Do you understand the term “wanderlust,” and, if you do, can you please tell us, in twenty-five words or less, what place made you wanderlust the most?

· Did you, when drunk, ever get behind the tattered wheel of a ’76 Ford three-speed van and somehow drive your family a thousand miles on an empty tank of gas?

· Is it true that the only literary term that has any real meaning in the Native American world is “road movie”?

· How many times, during any of your road trips, did your children ask you, “Are we there yet?”

· In twenty-five words or less, please define “there.”

· Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent you broke your children’s hearts, collectively and individually, six hundred and twelve times, and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?

· Without using the words “man” or “good,” can you please define what it means to be a good man?

· Do you think you will see angels before you die? Do you think angels will come to escort you to Heaven? As the angels are carrying you to Heaven, how many times will you ask, “Are we there yet?”

· Your son distinctly remembers stopping once or twice a month at that grocery store in Freeman, Washington, where you would buy him a red-white-and-blue rocket Popsicle and purchase for yourself a pickled pig foot. Your son distinctly remembers that the feet still had their toenails and little tufts of pig fur. Could this be true? Did you actually eat such horrendous food?

· Your son has often made the joke that you were the only Indian of your generation who went to Catholic school on purpose. This is, of course, a tasteless joke that makes light of the forced incarceration and subsequent physical, spiritual, cultural, and sexual abuse of tens of thousands of Native American children in Catholic and Protestant boarding schools. In consideration of your son’s questionable judgment in telling jokes, do you think there should be any moral limits placed on comedy?

· Your other son and your two daughters, all over thirty-six years of age, still live in your house. Do you think that this is a lovely expression of tribal culture? Or is it a symptom of extreme familial co-dependency? Or is it both things at the same time?

· F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a superior mind “is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.” Do you believe this to be true? And is it also true that you once said, “The only time white people tell the truth is when they keep their mouths shut”?

· A poet once wrote, “Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.” Can you tell us, in twenty-five words or less, exactly how much we all hate mathematical blackmail?

· Your son wrote this poem to explain one of the most significant nights in his life:




Mutually Assured Destruction



When I was nine, my father sliced his knee

With a chainsaw. But he let himself bleed

And finished cutting down one more tree

Before his boss drove him TO EMERGENCY.



Late that night, stoned on morphine and beer,

My father needed my help to steer

His pickup into the woods. “Watch for deer,”

My father said. “Those things just appear



Like magic.” It was an Indian summer

And we drove through warm rain and thunder,

Until we found that chainsaw, lying under

The fallen pine. Then I watched, with wonder,



As my father, shotgun-rich and impulse-poor,

Blasted that chainsaw dead. “What was that for?”

I asked. “Son,” my father said. “Here’s the score.

Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”

· Well, first of all, as you know, you did cut your knee with a chainsaw, but in direct contradiction to your son’s poem:

(a) You immediately went to the emergency room.

(b) Your boss called your wife, who drove you to the emergency room.

(c) You were given morphine, but even you were not stupid enough to drink alcohol while on serious narcotics.

(d) You and your son did not get into the pickup that night.

(e) And, even if you had driven the pickup, you were not injured seriously enough to need your son’s help with the pedals and/or the steering wheel.

(f) You never in your life used the word “appear,” and you certainly never used the phrase “like magic.”

(g) You think that “Indian summer” is a questionable seasonal reference for an Indian poet to use.

(h) What the fuck is “warm rain and thunder”? Well, everybody knows what “warm rain” is, but what the fuck is “warm thunder”?

(i) You never went looking for that chainsaw, because it belonged to the Spokane Tribe of Indians, and what kind of freak would want to reclaim the chainsaw that had just cut the shit out of his knee?

(j) You also agree that the entire third stanza of this poem sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song, and not necessarily one of the great ones.

(k) And yet “shotgun-rich and impulse-poor” is one of the greatest descriptions your son has ever written and probably redeems the entire poem.

(l) You never owned a shotgun. You did own a few rifles in your youth, but did not own so much as a pellet gun during the last thirty years of your life.

(m) You never said, in any context, “Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”

(n) But, as you read it, you know that is absolutely true and does indeed sound suspiciously like your entire life philosophy.

(o) Other summations of your life philosophy include: “It’s all wasted days and wasted nights.”

(p) And: “If God really loved Indians, he would have made us white people.”

(q) And: “Oscar Robertson should be the man on the N.B.A. logo. They only put Jerry West on there because he’s a white guy.”

(r) And: “A peanut-butter sandwich with onions—damn, that’s the way to go.”

(s) And: “Why eat a pomegranate when you can eat a plain old apple. Or a carrot. When it comes to fruit and vegetables, eat only the simple stuff.”

(t) And: “If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don’t want to dance, then you’re going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango.”

(u) And: “I really miss those cafeterias they used to have at Kmart. I don’t know why they stopped having those. If there is a Heaven, I firmly believe it’s a Kmart cafeteria.”

(v) And: “A father always knows what his sons are doing. For instance, boys, I knew you were sneaking that Hustler magazine out of my bedroom. You remember that one. Where actors who looked like Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura were screwing on the bridge of the Enterprise. Yeah, that one. I know you kept borrowing it. I let you borrow it. Remember this: men and pornography are like plants and sunshine. To me, porn is photosynthesis.”

(w) And: “Your mother is a better man than me. Mothers are almost always better men than men are.”

Sherman Alexie

from his new book WAR DANCES
Posted over on The New Yorker