It’s a Shit Hole off the interstate called the Fair Value Inn. It’s been closed down for several years at this point. The neighbors seemed to have persevered despite the controversy. The Grand Gateway Hotel was right next door. They found some national attention after the owner openly banned Native Americans from the property, stating that it was too hard to tell the difference between a good Native and a bad Native.
From what I hear, a Native made another Native’s head go splat in the hotel.
I guess they had enough capital to take the long way, and the Fair Value didn’t.
I’ve stayed at many places over the last several years. It got so bad that I taught myself how to sleep on the floor without a pillow or blanket. Always moving, always. You get tired after a while, but the world ain’t exactly set up for us. And by “us” I mean poor people, at least, that Goldilocks level of poor where the government has no resources set aside for your particular set of issues, and you yourself, do not possess the needed skills, education, capital, or support system needed to move forward.
I figure most people in my situation just get worse. I can see that being the case, very easily. I was lucky. I had an unexpected well, and that was art. I built a decent following over the years, and if things got bad enough, I’d just ask for help. And usually, there’d be something there.
Never enough to catch up, never enough to be prosperous, never enough to live comfortably, but enough to survive. And I guess that’s better than the alternative.
I am very envious of my relatives and their relationship to the reservation. My cousin’s family moved out that way a few years back. They’re based about twenty minutes away from where I grew up. Their community has at most fifty people. It’s technically a town, complete with a local government, gas station, restaurant, and bar. But it’s not much. Their grandma’s buried out there.
They went through the tribe and managed to buy a good amount of land.
They’re handy people with good heads on their shoulders. They can use the area and the tribe’s resources to great effect.
I ain’t like that, and I ain’t like them.
I grew up around ghetto people. I was ghetto. I drank. I got my ass beat, got maced, walked miles barefoot, covered in puke. I got in car wrecks. The good people from when I was young all left a good fifteen years ago. The good people who raised me have been dead for just as long. Home don’t feel good to me. Home always made me nervous. Always.
Even if the family was sober – that didn’t stop some ghetto shit from happening. Didn’t stop family from fighting. Damn near every knock at the door could feel like the end of the world. I used to walk at the track field, early as hell, before the morning shift people woke up, under bright prairie stars, and the distant sounds of cars would morph into hateful words, aimed at me.
That fear never really went away when I was in the area.
But when I left? When I left, when no one I knew would ever be near me, when I was far enough from everyone, yeah. The world was peaceful again.
Living on the reservation was surprisingly, one of the best places to be, if you wanted to become a decent artist. My relatives, my generation, we weren’t much. The ones who were a bit older than me, they were in and out of jail and prison. They were dead or begging on the street. The generation above them were more or less the same if not dead. And they thinned out quick as hell after that. Not many people making it to fifty-something. Fewer still passed sixty-something.
Even the good people died. The ones you didn’t expect. My uncle was one of them. Uncle Shadow. Shadow was half Ha Sapa. Half Black, half Native. But culturally, he was more Native than most of us. On the tribal council. Used to chop a truck bed’s worth of wood for community members that really needed it. Used to pay for propane out of his pocket to keep people warm. Spoke the language fluently, him and my aunt. They were great people and they raised a good family.
And he just died out of the blue.
Died, Covid Summer. We lost four of them, but I add an additional number to it. Grandma died. Then our uncles passed not long after. One of them was always sick. Used to piss blood. I remember that about him. Always in and out of the hospital, had a kidney transplant. He lived a rough life. When Grandma left, he quit taking care of himself. One night, he just died. Organs gave out.
And about four hours later, I got another phone call. It was my ma. She said that my other uncle offed himself. Drank a jug of vodka and rolled his vehicle. Said Grandma was the only person who ever loved him and he wasn’t gonna stay around if she wasn’t here.
That’s three.
Number four was Shadow. He passed about a month after my other uncles. He was barely passed sixty. Had a heart condition. Died quickly.
And when they brought his body back from the funeral home, a drunk driver going against traffic, swerved into the procession and killed one of my uncle’s relatives.
I say we lost five to be dramatic, but if we keep it to people I knew, then it was “only” four.
Shadow married my pop’s sister. She was a dispatcher for the tribal police. The school had her come in to do a scared-straight talk about drinking and driving. Left a hell of an impression. She told us about how they were coming back from the casino one day and saw the aftermath of a head-on collision. She called it in and stayed behind when the cops showed up. She helped clean up or some such.
Said they only knew how many people died in the car because of the amount of feet they found scattered.
My other uncle, the one who offed himself in the car – yeah, he witnessed a nasty one too. Out west, near where he died, there was a little rez community. A group of girls died in a car wreck, and he was one of the first people there. One of them went to school with us. That don’t mean much to the outside world. My buddy out here in Texas graduated in a class of 500. We graduated in a class of about 40, maybe.
They said it was a full car, one of them was pregnant at the time, said that a few of them were contorted and shoved under the dash.
Lotta people dying in car wrecks. There’s one that I don’t like to think about, one that happened when I was about eighteen. We lucked out. The car got hooked to a metal culvert under the road and stopped the vehicle from smashing into a creek. Judging by the way life turned out, I can’t help but think that the life I lived since is some sort of punishment. That there’s real blood on my hands. That in a different path, we died.
Isn’t that what they say about quantum-suicide?
No one ever really dies; they just split off into an alternate reality.
June 2017, when I got in the wreck that scared me sober – we rolled out in the country. The only thing that kept us from rolling down a steep ass hill was a mound of dirt, a suspiciously placed mound of dirt that had been there for as long as I can remember. Almost as if it was placed there to act as a bumper.
Anyways.
The reservation was a good place to practice making art, because the standards were so fucking low. I was finally sober, and I wasn’t going out into the world, “actin’ a fool.”
No more fights, no more wrecks, no more drunk tanks, no more threats of suicide.
I was in my shame hovel, and in my shame hovel, I painted.
And eventually I relearned how to draw.
See, I hadn’t drawn anything since 2010. It was 2018 by the time I restarted. It took damn near a hundred pieces to find my style. Each piece took about an hour and a half to make. I’m too lazy to do the math, but it took a good while. Maybe three months. And maybe another year to refine it into something interesting, and another several years to refine it further.
My family didn’t mind if I was in my shame-hovel painting. They didn’t mind if I stayed up late reading. Didn’t mind if I left in the middle of the night to drive empty backroads. Didn’t mind if I disappeared for few days, to stay at rundown motels in the tri-county area.
I wasn’t as bad as I used to be, and that was good enough.
A few weekends at nearby hotels turned to a few months in the city, and a few months turned to a few years, and a few years in the city turned to a few years out of state. All from painting. From making art. From talking to strangers and making friends. Life is currently not easy. The future’s always shaky. Things can fall apart as quickly as tomorrow, and I’ll be stranded a thousand miles away, and if that’s the path that making art gives me, then it’s the path that I’ll walk.
So, I’m at this rundown, shit hole ass hotel called the Fair Value Inn, off of I-90, in Rapid City, SD. The front desk lady is nice. She’s not Native but Aboriginal. From either Australia or New Zealand. She has an affinity for Natives, which is a repeating pattern I’d find on my stupid little journey. Sympathy for a forgotten people.
The room was cheap as shit, and that was good, because all of my money came from painting, and it ain’t a guarantee that I’ll make any sales this week. If all it takes to have a roof over my head is one or two sales a week, then I’m gonna take that offer every time.
The lady’s husband was a Native guy from the Oglala tribe. The couple were still traditional to a fair degree, more than us. They even helped me find a local butcher to get free bones to paint.
The Oglala Sioux Tribe, our sister tribe from out west, had some funding to help with temporary housing. If it was related to the pandemic or not is not too clear to me, as this was during late-winter, and it very well could have been a program to keep at-risk families out of the cold. What this translated to, is the Fair Value Inn having a shit ton of Natives, and the types of Natives that qualified for free housing, were not the types of Natives that I’d usually associate with.
The room itself was super simple. Tv and bed in the living room, a wall that jutted outwards, behind that a sink, and a bathroom door. The place smelled like cigarettes and mold. Cold as fuck. The nice Aboriginal lady said that there was a casino nearby. After 2am, it shuts down, and the hotel gets overrun by drunks. When that happens, you should ignore the knocking at the door.
She wasn’t wrong.
I’m not actively seeking it out, but I do keep an eye out for it. I never seen my life as a Native or my life as an artist portrayed in the media, not in books or movies, or the tv. The closest I ever seen was Ask the Dust by John Fante. That dusty ass book is about a hundred years old now and has a few silly sections. Halfway through there’s an earthquake and he turns into a rubble clearing manly man out of the blue, and at the end, his lady friend turns into a reefer junky.
Those parts aren’t at all relatable.
But the guy’s hustle, now that’s something that rings true nearly a hundred years later. It’s about a smalltime author who occasionally gets work published in some sort of literary magazine. A lot of his inner monologues are about the books he’s currently working on, the work he’s planning on making, or about his editor reaching out to him, to praise him for his latest book, telling him that his work is great, telling him that there’s a check on the way.
He does get paid every now and then too.
I ended up with a few customers that became my Hackmuth (Arturo Bandini’s editor). A few good people that became angels in exchange for paintings of colorful, rotting portraits.
I ain’t ever seen a movie about an artist set up in a trap motel, with a section of his room plastic’d off with shower curtains, so he can keep his security deposit while painting. Never seen the story of a sad man, terrified of the past and the future, never seen him channel that fear into paintings of rotting horned beings. Never seen a story about an artist scared of becoming homeless so he paints every fucking day. Never seen a movie about a vagabond artist, living hotel to hotel, car to campsite, car to hotel.
I guess it ain’t much of a story.
And I guess I don’t speak in a broken enough dialect to sell that story as a “Native story.”
It’s just a bit of survival, a path that no one is ever really forced to walk.
Rent was something like two hundred a week, maybe one-fifty. I got really into gesso boards, and really into having an art supply store about a quarter of a mile away.
Used to have to wait for a week to get the mail or drive an hour-twenty to get good paint and canvas.
I’d get up to take a piss or make some coffee. It wasn’t uncommon to see police lights through the hotel peephole, from about ten feet away. That hotel was bumping. Place was packed. There were new people staying on both sides of me damn near every week. I learned pretty quickly that it didn’t matter who lived next door, they were always annoying as shit.
Always up late, always drunk as shit, always arguing and fighting.
Felt like home, felt like the rez.
That was my first spot in the city, and it only lasted about a month and a half. One week, while paying for the next week, the desk lady said that the landlords were going to start pricing people out of their rooms because the weather was getting nicer. And in a few months, tourist season was gonna start, when that happened, room prices were gonna triple. She said I needed to start planning cause things were gonna change soon.
So, I started planning.
Covid Summer. A year before. I lived in a motel in Kadoka, SD. The place was offering monthly rates at 750 bucks. All bills paid. I figured I could sell enough art to make rent. I was right, and I made some good-to-great art that year. A lot of people know a painting from an album called Mildred. That thing was made while I lived in that motel. It sold to some random Canadian for a little over a hundred bucks, and I can guarantee you that they don’t know what they have.
So, Covid Summer, the funeral home back on the rez refused to drive any bodies back. If your loved ones passed, you had to get a vehicle that could fit a coffin. I was using the family’s SUV at the time. Ma called me twice that summer to borrow the vehicle. They needed a hearse and that Yukon was big enough if you took the seats out.
That’s what they did.
They brought back a few bodies and an urn that summer.
It was that that let me know, that I could very easily live in my vehicle if I had to.
And apparently, I had to. Because I didn’t have a job yet. And the most affordable spot I could find was on AirBnB. It was some dude’s vacant lot. No fence separating his yard from the lot, so he advertised it as a campground. The asking price was ridiculously cheap. I think I paid maybe eighty bucks for the month. And in return, I got a place in the yard, an extension cord, and the use of the shitter.
Eighty bucks for a whole ass month vs 200 a week?
And all I had to do was sleep in the haunted SUV?
Fuckin, why not?
I went fishing with the big homie at some point. Still cold as shit out but the water was thawing. I had some slides, plastic slides, good slides, but slides. These things were made of some rubber/plastic combo. One of the fishing spots was a river under a bridge. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I was walking all these hills in sandals without socks. And the rubber/plastic started to rub against my skin. After a few hours and a few fishing spots, this patch on my foot got rubbed raw. And, since my skin was so damn low to the ground, it got MRSA.
I worked at a nursing home for seven years and whenever someone got MRSA, it almost always ended badly.
At the time though, I didn’t know what the fuck MRSA was. All I knew was that my foot wouldn’t heal. It leaked pus, damn near all day, every day. And after a good week, the infected patch started to hurt like a mother fucker.
I moved to Rapid City for a reason.
It was one of the few cities in the country with Native healthcare. And it was pretty close, at about two and a half hours away.
The process to sign up was pretty simple. You showed up, gave your info, and then they got on the computer and pulled your medical files from your home-reservation’s clinic. You hang out for a solid few hours, give some info, and get patched up. The pharmacy is on site, and your meds are free. Whole damn thing’s free.
I wish Americans were Native Americans, so we could all have this level of care, without making us poor.
I held my head low when they asked me for my address, because I didn’t have one.
Yeah.
I was homeless.
Or. I lived in my car.
Lived in some dude’s backyard.
They gave me some antibiotics, a plastic tub, some saline solution, bandages, and some ointment. They said I was supposed to clean it a few times a day, and to put the ointment on the outside of the infection. I guess so it didn’t spread.
Airbnb, roommates – I don’t know man. The whole thing is weird to me.
I checked into the backyard. It was on the fancy side of the city. No real businesses for at least three miles around. One gas station, and just residentials, then a small strip mall – dentist office, meat market, sports bar, car wash, pizza spot, and then nothing for another two miles. The guy was real hands off about the whole situation. Said I can use the kitchen and bathroom whenever I needed to.
He was currently renting the living room out to some random, I saw that ad online too.
I had the option to use the shitter and shower, but I did my best not to. The whole setup was just strange to me.
Damn near two months at the trap motel and I never really got any good sleep.
First night in some internet dude’s backyard?
Since we were in a heavy residential area, with big ass houses and yards, since there wasn’t a lot of businesses around, the traffic would just die after about 9pm.
The two gas stations were too far away from the ghettos, so homeless drunks weren’t incentivized to hike all the way out to bother.
It was cold as shit. Cold as shit. But it was quiet, and I was used to the cold. And it was finally quiet so I slept a good sleep.
Behold A Red Horse 