No Drugs or Alcohol Allowed

No Drugs or Alcohol Allowed


at the Spokane Tribal Centennial Celebration
but Seymour is a goddamned genius and our native
hero so he walks in first with an empty bottle
right past the guards and then I take a big drink

from the fifth in our car outside the gate but I
don't swallow and I walk past the guards smiling
a tight-lipped smile holding the whiskey in
and then I spit it into Seymour's empty bottle

and Lester follows me doing the same thing and after
a few trips we have a complete fifth and I guess you
could say we won again but it was only Indians versus
Indians and no one is developing a movie script

for that and it's too bad because I think Seymour looks
exactly like Charles Bronson when he was younger and
still muti-ethnic instead of a little man with a big
gun, but Seymour hates everything white so I don't tell

him what I think and we're too busy selling drinks from
our bottle for a dollar a shot which is good money
which is the kind Seymour calls Crazy Horse Money and it
means we can do whatever we want and twenty dollar bills

and hips and stick game all mean the same thing until we
begin to sober up and go broke which is exactly when
Seymour decides to fight every white man at the powwow
and there are dozens with cameras and a film crew from

a local city covering the events for the local news, so
Seymour attacks them with a broken bottle, breaking it
again over the head of a prominent concerned reporter
who files a live report highlighting the renewed rivalry

between whites and reds although it's still the same
because Seymour alias Crazy Horse gets the shit kicked
out of him by a softball team from Spokane, all of them
white, coming out to the reservation to win

the softball tournament and walk home with the $1,000
prize money, but Seymour survives that, only spends a
night in jail, and they don't even put it on record
because there is no law against Crazy Horse anymore

all of those were written off the books when he was
killed a long time ago but white people don't realize
he came back to life and started his own cable television
channel and began the reeducation of all of us who spent

so many years skinless, driving our cars straight off
cliffs directly into the beginning of nowhere.


Sherman Alexie..........from The Business of Fancydancing