“Hi, Granny,” I say, “This is Hank.”
“You boys going to sweat today?” Granny says. “Boy it’s sure going to be hot.”
In the middle of my chest, the lightbulb. Big Ben’s always gung-ho for a sweat lodge. Then when it comes time, Little Ben’s the one who’s got to step into a hot dark hole in the afternoon. Ephraim knows how scared I can get, and when I look over at him, he takes a puff on his cigarette. His eyes look at my fear like it was just another part of the day.
THE REASON YOU go into a sweat lodge is so you can go back to the womb. The dark, the heat, the water hissing on the rocks, the smoke; it all comes together to put you back in a place where you’re naked and it’s cramped and hard to breathe, so you can come out the other end with the feeling of a new beginning.
That afternoon, under the dome of cross-hatched willows covered by hides and canvas and heavy blankets, Hank and I sit, our skimpy white towels wrapped around our middles, knee to naked knee. When all the hot rocks are handed in and put in place into the fire pit, Ephraim reaches up and pulls the flap down. So sudden the pitch black. The pitch black, and then from out of the black, the sparkling pile of smoky red rocks only inches from my bare feet. An arm’s length from my face.
The problem is I’m not in a womb. I’m in a pressure cooker.
At first I think the pressure cooker is my hangover, so I’m bearing down, the heat crackling down my back. I inhale deep and when I exhale, try and blow the shit out. But then it’s my claustrophobia kicking in and panic starts and when panic starts, that’s what it is, panic. The flickering lightbulb in the middle of my chest is a blaring fire alarm and I can’t run and I’m totally fucked.
Between a rock and a hard place. We’ve been invited by Ephraim to participate in a Shoshone ritual and I’m trying hard to pray and be holy and respectful. I’m inside his sweat lodge, a place specifically designed to force you to confront the ghosts inside you. And believe me, the afternoon after the morning I left my big sister’s house, I have some old ghosts to confront.
Plus, I’ve brought Hank. Hank’s never gone into a sweat lodge before and he’s looking to me for what to expect. Just what I need. To be a fucking role model. And believe me, it’s no consolation that Hank, his white towel now wrapped around his head, has his whole naked writhing body smashed up against mine. Both of us, our mouths eating dirt and grass, trying to get to the last bit of oxygen.
Lying there, the heat crashing down, in the dark, can’t breathe, the terror. Just as I look, a big rock clunks down into the fire. A burst of heat against my face and shoulder and everything stops. Deep in my chest, my heart, an old rag doused with gas, is the fire. This time, it isn’t a word claustrophobia, or some blind fear. This time it’s an Idaho Shit Storm, and the guy without a dick at the bottom of hell is back. Little Ben The Most Miserable of All.
Terror like that, when you feel it, time can go on forever.
1972. MY FIRST job was working as a counselor for Social Services at Idaho State University. Don’t ask me why, but my boss made me advisor of the Indian Club.
Those first days on my job mostly I wanted to hide. So I gave myself the job of alphabetizing the books in the Indian Club’s library. A big room in one of the oldest buildings on campus. The safest place I could find. Tall ceilings, big windows you could sit in, hardwood floors that creaked. Morning sunlight coming in. My morning cup of coffee. That’s where I ran into a copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
That particular morning, I was standing on a stepladder, putting books onto a high shelf alphabetically, my job, but the copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in my hands had taken me over. I was halfway through it, couldn’t stop, and I was out of breath. There was nothing else in the world but me hunched over that book. The heartbreak of it.
A memory: on the yellow school bus number 24, when I was ten or eleven, I’d wanted to sit in a seat but the Indian woman in the seat behind was saving it for her friends. She was a big woman who always wore a long blue wool coat. Her hair in a page-boy. Big red lips. Both her hands were spread out wide across the top of the seat. She was in high school. No way in hell that woman was going to let me sit down.
“You big fat slob!”
That’s what I called her, what my mother called them, Indians. Big Fat Slobs.
The woman didn’t say anything back. Just gave me the evil-eye staredown.
Years later, there I am in the Indian Club Library, standing on a stepladder, lost in an old staredown, big fat slob on my lips, the heavy orange book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee cuffed between my wrists and elbows – America’s racism, my racism, the shock of recognition, going through my head, making my heart sore.
It took me a while to realize that a young Native American man, a big hefty guy, had walked into the room.
“Where’d you buy them pants?” the young man, Ephraim, had said.
Them pants. The famous green corduroy pants. Seventies’ cut, high waist, sans-a-belt, bell bottoms. Tight at the top, loose at the bottom. No pockets on the ass.
Now when people ask me how I got so into Native American spirituality, I just tell them green corduroy pants.
Eight months later, it’s Indian Days at Idaho State and Ephraim has his tipi set up on the quad. I am wearing my green corduroy pants. When I duck down and pass through the flap of canvas, when I stand up again, I’m in a whole different world. First time in my life in a tipi. Buckskin, beaded backrests, buffalo hides, stacks of Pendleton blankets. A fire in the fire pit. So much to look at I quit looking. The feeling I have is I am home with someone in their beautiful house.
It all goes by in a blur. Ephraim shows me how to always walk to the left, where to sit. I sit and he picks up his long pipe with gold threading on it. Ephraim takes a whittled piece of stick, puts it in the fire, lights the end of the stick, then brings the fire to his pipe and lights it. Smoke pours out of the pipe, out of his mouth and nose as he offers the pipe to the four directions. The whole time he’s whispering prayers in Shoshone. When his prayers are finished, Ephraim hands the pipe to me. The pipe to me is like any tool when it’s in my hands. It doesn’t work. A lot like my dick. But I am trying with the pipe and I smoke the pipe and move it around in the four directions in some kind of way like Ephraim did and I guess I’m praying, too. After I hand him back the pipe, we share a cup of tea. A special herbal tea.
Then: “Are you ready for this?” he says.
Ephraim’s eyes have a slant that makes you think of Cleopatra and the Egyptians. Dark brown, a touch of copper. Long black hair down to his shoulders. A curl in that hair, the French in him. That day his hair is braided and he’s dressed in his finery. Beaded moccasins, leggings, porcupine breastplate, turquoise necklace, turquoise bracelet, silver hanging on him everywhere. More French in the shape of his smooth nose. How his lips fold out longer than you think they should. The way how they point up in the center like a Kewpie doll’s.
“We’re going to make a promise now,” he says. “In blood.”
Ephraim and I, we could talk about just about anything. Art history, Walt Whitman, Vietnam, Carl Jung. Fort Hall and the reservation where he was raised. Tyhee, where I was raised. Him an Indian kid on the reservation on one side of the boundary. Me a tybo, a white boy growing up on the other. Not more than ten miles apart our whole lives. We talked about our fathers, our mothers, and most especially, the history of the West and the story of his people. Racism. I really loved it the way he put up with all my dumb white-guy questions. But what we were really talking about, we couldn’t talk about. Neither one of us had the words. And if we did, our lips just couldn’t form them.
Over the years, Ephraim and I’ve had some good laughs over them green corduroy pants. How they looked, what they meant. The way we were innocent like we’ll never be again.
Blood brothers. No way we could do that these days. Body fluids are different now.
THE PROMISE. IT took us a while and a bunch of cigarettes to decide what we wanted to pro
mise each other. I had some trouble with the word love but I figured I was just a white guy and needed to get over it.
What we came up with was this: no matter what happens, I will keep you with love in my heart. I’ll help you out whenever I can. I will be kind. I’ll respect you and the choices you make. If I don’t agree with you, I may tell you I disagree, but I won’t stop loving you. This sharing of blood marks this promise and makes it real. I’ll keep this promise until I die.
Propinquity. It takes everything I have. I let this big Indian chief guy take hold of my right hand. He lays my hand wrist up onto his knee. He picks up the bowie knife, pulls the knife out of its sheath, lays the shiny silver blade across my wrist.
That’s when things start to change. He starts to giggle.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he says.
It was his gay nerves, that was his problem. But of course we weren’t gay yet.
Plus his bowie knife was dull. Maybe it’s the herbal tea spirit, but it ain’t long and Ephraim and I, a couple of misplaced Idaho boys, we get to laughing so hard, we can’t hold still long enough to get the knife anywhere near a wrist. Laughing around inside the tipi that day’s when I first fall in love with him, my blood brother, Ephraim. Never knew I could laugh like that ’til then.
Must have taken us hours, but finally, my wrist looking like a hand saw had been to it, raggedy pieces of skin sticking up and shit. One clear line of blood bubbling up, and Ephraim’s wrist, how I finally couldn’t stand it and leaned into the knife hard, maybe a little too hard, the yelp out of me when I saw the pain in Ephraim’s eyes, finally. Finally we each had a proper line of red blood and we pressed our wrists together, blood flowing into blood, and we promised.
To hold each other in our hearts.
To help each other when we can.
To be kind.
To agree to disagree.
With blood.
With love.
INSIDE THE SWEAT lodge, forever it’s only dark, only hot, smoky, and there is no air. Inside the pressure cooker there is no breath. No sound. Nothing moves. Not my belly or my hand or my legs. My mouth is full of sand. I wonder if my eyes are open, then I’ve forgotten how to open them, or what open eyes are like. Finally a glow, something shiny, deep, and alive.
From where my head is on the ground, the fire pit is a huge mountain of lava glowing red. The whole world is red and is on fire.
Something then that creeps over me, or out of me. It’s a sensation from down low, although how my body is, inside or out, up or down, I don’t know. It’s when it comes up over my back, crosses my shoulders, that it’s in my head.
Fear is no longer a word that can say it. Not panic, not claustrophobia.
I am the Most Miserable of All, the cockless man at the bottom of hell. I’ve always been in hell. Was born in hell. Raised in hell. I’ve always been alone down here in hell. Where there is no hope and the Catholic Fuckers in heaven are laughing. I’m crying, and I’ve always been crying. It’s the only way I know how to gather myself up into a self, to be.
So much hope in a hard-on.
So far from grace.
Terror like this can go on forever.
Out of the dark a hand grabs a hold of mine. Ephraim’s across the fire pit, so it has to be Hank’s. As if that hand can see in the dark it slaps flat palm to palm into mine. Holds my hand in a death grip. I squeeze back.
Fuck is this ever going to end.
There’s a loud sound and a bright light and the bright light is the sun and the flap is open and there is breath. The way that moment is dramatic. The fresh air and the sun rushing in. I take a big deep breath of that air, then look over close at Ephraim. At first he’s just part of the bright, then his eyes. They’re scared a way I’ve never seen them. And his lips, how he doesn’t know what to do with them. Sweat coming off him in buckets, chest going up and down. And Hank. There it is, Hank’s hand still sucked onto mine. He’s leapt up onto his knees. His face pushing out into the open air.
“Something is really going on,” Ephraim says. “It ain’t ever got this hot before!”
I’m slow slow to breathe again, and when I do, I feel the scorch. Another breath and the mountain of lava is gone and I’m not that guy in the bottom of hell. I’m me, Ben Grunewald, the luckiest guy. Another breath and I’m still me and the world starts to move again. Relief or love, fresh air in my lungs, whatever it is that feels so good. Outside there’s a killdeer bird. Gusts of Idaho wind through the open flap.
Breathe and listen to what you can hear. The water on the rocks. The steam. It makes me smile that I can hear the steam. The rocks in the fire pit so red they’re pink or purple, or some new color altogether.
The Most Miserable at the Bottom of Hell is gone.
Breathe and the world’s right there for you to see. The terror’s gone that covers it up. In front of my eyes, dirt real and flesh and my eyes can’t get enough.
My brother Ephraim. His dark eyes with the lick of copper in them, the Asian lids exotic Cleopatra. The two hundred pounds of him. The sweat on his skin. His sunburnt muddy arms. His red neck. My Indin brother’s a redneck.
Hank’s hand in mine is still a vise grip. He looks over at me a look. Mud on his face, in his hair. For a tiny moment, all in the world there is worth seeing is burnt into those black eyes. He squeezes my hand even more, then lets go. Lays his head down on his muddy towel. He wraps his body into a ball, his back to me, his eyes looking up at the sky and the sun. All flesh and muscle, the long black curls of his hair, the way in marble Michelangelo did hair. Skin white as marble. The slant of sun across his shoulder, mud on his shoulder, mud on his back, his ass. Drips of sweat making pools on the earth. The slow way air comes in and out of his chest.
We keep the flap open the rest of the afternoon. Something unheard of, really. That a sweat lodge can be that hot. Breath and then breath and then breath, one long sweaty afternoon inside a cave looking out, watching the sun go down. Ephraim and Hank and me. The wind, the killdeer bird, breath and breath and breath. Cramped and naked coming out the other end.
LATER, FRESH AND new, cleansed by fire, we’re showered and dressed. I’m sitting in a blown-out blue-green lawn chair next to a sagebrush as big as the Ford Pinto. There’s a tall cool drink of water in my fist. I’m wondering where fear goes when it leaves. My eyes look for it, the way terror lays on things, hides behind, but I don’t look for long. I know where terror goes, somewhere inside your breath, so I take a long drink of cool water, swallow. When I take a deep breath, I’m safe and the sun is in my eyes so I have to squint and I don’t even remember terror anymore, and really what’s the big deal about some Catholic nightmare version of me.
Hank pulls up a stump next to me. He’s sitting lower than me and I have to look down. Hank leans forward on his haunches, breathes in deep the sagebrush and the sunset. Once more there he goes again, he slaps his hand into mine, holds my hand tight. I set my glass of water down.
His face in the low gold sun. I think maybe he wants me to look at his face in the sun, so I do. His hair combed back off his forehead, his cheeks burnt red from sweat lodge heat. Under that, his skin a color I’ve never seen in Manhattan. Moments go by and I’m all of a sudden not sure what’s going on and maybe there’s something I should do. That’s when I get it. Hank’s trying to get his mouth to work right. I look away then, because it’s too much, what I can see, but Hank pulls my hand in close.
“That’s someplace I’ve never been to,” Hank says. “Thought I’d been everywhere.”
Hank makes a point of looking his eyes full on into mine. It never ceased to startle me the way Hank and I could look at each other. That golden sun making his face glow. Too long he looks, but I don’t look away. He’s still trying to talk.
Finally: “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Thank Ephraim,” I say.
“I will,” Hank says, “but still, you brought me here.”
“You’ll neve
r be able to repay me,” I say.
That jumps Hank’s chest up. He’s laughing now or so I think. That’s when he does something, then I don’t know what the fuck to do. He takes my hand and places my hand on his shirt, above his heart. Laughing or crying, really it’s hard to tell. Whatever it is, Hank can’t talk.
After a while I figure I’ll talk.
“What was it?” I ask. “That was so new?”
Hank just keeps holding my hand on his heart. Under his T-shirt, his marble skin, his chest hair, his nipple. I’m trying to keep thinking about his heart.
“Right now,” Hank says, “I don’t know how to say. But I’m working on it.”
ON THE PICNIC table under the Chinese Elm, the feast Ephraim’s mother and grandmother have made. Fry bread. Roast beef stew with potatoes and onions and tomatoes. Corn on the cob. Coleslaw. A big pitcher of purple Kool-Aid. White paper napkins and silverware on a red checkered tablecloth. The shadows going long. The dogs at our feet. Grandma’s put her teeth in and her crazy little pet monkey Charlie Brown’s on her shoulder eating fry bread. Ephraim’s mom. How his face is hers. Two copies of my book, two of Hank’s, on the table, signed, to Rose, and to Granny. We’re brushing away the summer flies. Mosquitoes at sunset.
GOT TO GO pal.
Over the past thirty-six years, I’ve said got to go pal to Ephraim a couple of times. And he’s said it to me. We’ve been through some tough times, him and me. My divorce, our sexuality, coming out, blood brothers, and for a while there we thought, maybe even another kind of brother as well. And then there was the new gay designer disease that everybody was freaking out on.
But we’re together. We’ve always had our promise. The ritual of that promise. And we’ve always come back. And we always will.
Hank and I never made a promise like that. By the time it got to us, 1988, cutting our wrists and sharing blood, all hope was gone and it wasn’t safe.
I Loved You More Page 19