Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Carol asked about recent confrontation. My grandmother died, displeased with my disre-
spect for her turd of a son, Old Mom's brother. Carol put a limp hand in the air, went snake-
eyed and then went inside. Twitching like a sleeping dog, she soon came out. “It's not your
grandmother. The Montana incident was real. You were standing on the spot where your fam-
ily was killed.”
“My family?”
“Your Indian family. You were there. You saw it. You felt it. But I can't tell if . . . I'm getting
something in business. What's going wrong in business?”
“Business couldn't be better. I walked away from a shitty lease deal on the Big Island, but
that was a good thing.” She went back in for a long stay, five or seven minutes, and came out
spent.
“It's hard to see, but I still get business and numbers.”
Ten days later the tax office called. In the next few months and the first sixty grand of legal
defense, we dodged a criminal charge and copped to seven misdemeanors, one for each cor-
poration. The partner had proven his genius twenty years before Wall Street worked the same
scam, borrowing from one corp to pay another in a shell game too slick for the human eye to
follow. Appearance and substance merged. Was copping to pleas the same as copping out?
The Feds were easy—come in from the cold, pay the tax and gain amnesty.
The State wanted blood. The house got leveraged in three days flat, because the State
doesn't want indebted property. With a huge mortgage in place, the house looked like a flawed
gem. I rented it out, then sold or packed everything from a life so swell it seemed like a setup
but didn't have to be if I could have been aware. I moved with my girlfriend to Seattle. The
partner became ex- like the ex-wife, no longer subject to ambient attitude.
The partner does not linger but serves as disclaimer to the love all around us. No genera-
tion is invincibly moral. The rough time felt spiritually genetic, descended from peoples who
died well, with a war cry—my people. The old tribe would have been proud, and so was the
current family.
Philip Roth called Native Americans the original
goyem
, but he wrote of urbane charac-
ters, constrained and self-obsessed. Philip Roth, “man of letters,” was not a man of action. I
sensed something else in native peoples, a warrior spirit linking generations on trails of tears,
and those warriors are
mishpocha
to me.
It felt like full circle from war resistance to war cry, and the love settled again all around
us.
