This is Entry 9 of an ongoing serialized memoir.
Start at the beginning → Superpower
Following Tail’s advice, I’ve begun to structure my lockdowns to avoid just sleeping through them. Meditation in the morning. Workout during the prelunch lock down. Reading before dinner.
Tail confounds me.
At one moment he’s talking about the greater forces that have brought us together - pledging me his eternal allegiance. The next, he is threatening to knock me down for saying I prefer Honey Buns over Little Debbie Ho Hos.
Self-declared patron of the pod - I can’t tell if he actually commands respect or if the rest of the pod just let’s him be.
Still, the younger Lakota refer to him as “Kola” which sounds like a form of respect.
Tail relishing his role of Jailhouse Lawyer dispense all kinds of advice. Plea bargaining, sentencing, anything, he’s got an opinion to offer — but his advice comes with a cost.
At meals, when the guard’s backs are turned, trays get passed to Tail as he collects his debts. Food is the currency and he stuffs what he can’t choke into his striped uniform to eat later.
Back in the safety of our cell, Tail is like a magician feigning surprise as he produces cakes or cornbread from his socks, a carton of milk from inside his underpants, fake butter spread for movie night. Even something as small as sneaking a bit of illicit food tastes that much more like freedom.
When Tail doesn’t wear a shirt, I can see the smoothed over, puffy red scars that cover his scapulae. Many of the Lakota guys have these marks. The mark of the Sun Dance. Tail dribbles out details.
Days without food or water.
Leather thongs strung through the chest or back.
The participant then leant back and suspended until the skin rips through.
Or tethered to buffalo skulls and trudging forward with the horns spinning and biting into the earth.
The opening of the body.
The clarity of pain.
You want to see God, boy?
Sundance.
Brutal.
Beautiful.
A passage to adulthood.
Jail feels like its hollower cousin.
Another lockdown. I climb up to my upper bunk perch and nestle into half lotus. I’ll pull my bed sheet over my head to block out the florescent light flickering overhead. Maybe Tail chuckles when he catches a glimpse of me from below. This strange Asian man hidden beneath a sheet. A ghost trying to hide from his fate.
I can feel Tail restlessly pacing around as he often does - rustling plastic wrappers, snacking on his crumby snacks and flushing the toilet incessantly. It actually drives me a little bit crazy. After a spell, I can feel him settle down and then, completely out of the blue, he starts a guttural chant that builds and then relents. The words hanging hauntingly around the cell as they reverberate off the cinder block walls.
I pull a corner of the sheet away and peer down. Tail’s perched on the stool scars shining like a dark angel - wings clipped and banished from heaven. His elbows rest on his knees and he sings into the open bowl that his body forms. I let my eyes fall back to closed allowing him this privacy and soon my breath rises and falls on the undulating path of his song. The verses repeating in a tongue that I don’t recognize but still remember.
Through that narrow pane of window, I can feel the sky go from clear to dark while Tail continues his song unrelenting. A flash of lightning. A crack of thunder. By now I’ve opened my eyes and have pulled the sheet off fully.
It’s hailing outside. Falling with such ferocity that the street below has turned white. I can hear it tap tapping as the wind sweeps bands of hail across our window.
A thousand footsteps marching.
The roar of a crowd.
The fluttering of wings.
A murmuration.
For an entire week, I haven’t heard a sound from the natural world. The walls and glass too thick for the wind or the patter of rain much less the song of a bird. Just the white noise of the forced ventilation, the jangling of keys, the drone of the television, the clicking of locks, the tick tocking of time.
Another crack and I’m riding that wind as it covers the world outside in white. As the room rumbles with thunder, I’m quietly crying for the first time since long before my arrest.
Tail continues to chant away on the stool below. His eyes closed in concentration. Tears mixed with sweat, follow the furrowed line down along the edges of his mustache, through the cleft of his jowls, and then fall to the floor.
Tails slows to a finish and smears away the snot and tears with the back of his hand. He puts his glasses back as the blackened sky clears to blue. The dusting of hail melting to reveal the black asphalt beneath it.
Tail rises and leans against our narrow window and watches the world come back to life. That, cuzin, was a wocekiye migasu olomon.
A wind prayer.
My people told me that they would send me an eagle and I just saw it.
He takes in a breath and turns to look up at me in my perch.
That means we are going to be ahh-lll right.
Still half draped in my sheet, I nod dumbly and stare past Tail out onto the wet street.
In Paul Pritchford’s Healing with Whole Foods, he talks about mindfulness when eating and recommends chewing each mouthful of food thirty times. Masticating the starches until they become sugars. Slowing the meal down by resisting the temptation to swallow. It’s how some concentration camp survivors made it through mass famine.
Because the food on our scratched plastic trays never feels like enough, I’ve begun to do the same - rendering the already mushy chicken a-la-crap into a saliva slurry before forcing it down my gullet.
Thirty chews.
Not of my choosing.
O a pe - this hour
Muza Tidra - Iron Door
Wa chi Tanka - to have hope
Yu shka - to be set free
Wakan Tanka - Great Creator
Wo Lakota - to have peace among men
Ina - Mother
A Te - Father
Tunkashila - grandfather
Wo che kya Oloman - prayer song
Wa Su - hail
Ma Ga Gu - Rain
An Pettu - Day
Unchi Maka - Mother Earth
Kola - friend
Ho Mitakye Oyasin - All of my relations
I’ve asked Tail to teach me some words in Lakota. He relishes in the role as a gruff taskmaster - growling out the words until I get the pronunciation right. Like the snap of a ball hit off the sweet spot on a racket or the click of a puzzle piece snugging into place — there is a feel to the words when sounded correctly. A tone that I can feel in my chest.
Maybe language at its heart is just prayer. Reverential soundings trying to encapsulate the raw beauty of life on Earth.
I keep a running list of words amongst my sheaf of papers sandwiched inside Moby Dick. When Tail tells me what Kola means, I look up at him and squint.
I think that that was the name of the drug dog that they used on me.
Yeah, probably was.
Fuckers.
Click there to go to the next installment —> It’s On You