We head down Clark Street, our street, Farwell and Clark Street, F/C, site of lots of young gangbanger triumphs (and whoa, wait, we should clear that up pretty quick like--"gangbanger" here means "gang member," containing zero hints of any nefarious connotations implied by that rhymey and angular term that can mean so much sexually and violently and so little socially all at once) and also a library. A Chicago Public Library. Site of so much theft and pillaging, much pilfering, of knowledge, of words, and of Conan books. Definitely those. Oh. And a Beowulf. That's right. 'Cause fuck those Geats.
Sacred Smokes is a collection of loosely-related stories about an adolescence among the street gangs of 1970's Chicago. The narrator is Teddy, a bright Native American kid from the North Side. (One might expect that "Teddy" is a fictionalized version of the author, Indigenous Studies professor Theo C. Van Alst, Jr., but the book is billed, to the best of my knowledge, as fiction and not memoir.) Teddy has an ambivalent relationship the violence he both witnesses and employs in the city's turf wars. One story opens:
I had a friend named Idiot. One day I strangled him. Well, not to death, but close enough. That fucking guy. He was a relentless torment. Twice my size, wicked, and ceaseless. I just couldn't do it anymore, couldn't take his shit.
But elsewhere he begins to worry about how to extricate himself from the life he's grown up into:
And then one day after walking away from a nasty shit-talking fight with some of boys, which I won, of course. I sort of came to and looked around. I was alone, and felt it deeply, but I envisioned myself envisioning this moment, older and tired somewhere, maybe in a shitty suburb, or worse, maybe around the corner from right fucking here, and wishing I had come to that moment differently, and I knew the only way to make a difference was to re-envision myself. I didn't know then what I needed to do, but I knew this, all this, was fucked, wasn't for me, would kill me dead if I let it, and I wasn't ready to die just then. Not at that age. Not what that buzz, not with that smile on my face, not with that clear forehead, that long hair, that tanned brown skin, that girlfriend, that ice-cold quart of Old Style, that boombox, that song, that moment of sublime warmth, no sƃuıʞ, no cops, no crap, no fear. No way.
Eventually, Teddy gets his opportunity; caught in a bind by a couple of idiot cops he calls "Lenny and Squiggy," he accepts their offer: jail or the Navy. The cops seem to think of Teddy as a thorn in their side, not because he's merely a "gangbanger," but because he's clearly smarter than they are. Teddy's intelligence and powers of sharp observation are part of what make the book so fascinating, and his creative capacity. At one point, a "gangbanger" friend demands, "Tell us a story, Teddy," and he unfurls an improvised and highly-detailed vignette of a soldier at war. When he writes a vivid and jagged story about pursuing a rival gang member for an English class, he receives an A, along with a year of suspicious looks from his teacher. These qualities are influenced by Teddy's voracious reading habits; over the stories he reads Louise Erdrich novels, Cormac McCarthy ones, old Conan paperbacks, Vine Deloria, Karl Marx, Beowulf ("fuck them Geats"). Teddy devours these books and absorbs them, crafting a slangy-but-educated voice that gives the stories the bulk of their power and humor.
Structurally, the stories are very slippery. Teddy has a habit of slipping from one topic to the next in a way that might catch a lacksadaiscal reader (like me) off guard. In the space of a single paragraph he might remark that the gang member he's talking about resembles someone else he knew in the Navy, and that this someone reminds him of another story than the one he was telling. The stories often come full circle, but not always, and even by the end of each one it can become difficult to determine what it was the story was about, really, a quality that extends in some respect to the book as a whole. Sometimes this method works beautifully, as in the opener "Old Gold Couch," which--nominally, at least--is about his father's resolution to purchase a new couch with the coupons saved from thousands of cigarette packs. Other times, as in "Push It"--a story that ends with Teddy stumbling into a Salt-N-Pepa concert--it seems as aimless as the limousine ride that provides the story its loose structure.
I read Sacred Smokes as part of "Indijanuary," in which I read books by Native American authors until January is over, or I run out, whichever comes first. The role of indigeneity in Sacred Smokes is somewhat oblique. It certainly has no grand statements to make about urban life as a Native American, a la There There, and is probably better, realer, for it. Instead it reveals itself in small and surprising ways: "You dress like a Puerto Rican," his father tells him, to which Teddy replies, "Look at you, man. We live in the middle of the city. You wear western shirts and cowboy boots every day." Teddy's father is a drunk and a jerk, but one wonders if there isn't something to his aloofness from the city, the way he stands apart from it, while Teddy frets about the way he is swept up in it. And there is a kind of nostalgia for a lost possibility when he describes his Cherokee mother's birthplace in Tennessee, a place "where the houses are gone, along with our genealogy, which got stole by some Yankee fuck tourist out of one of the houses that the Feds turned into some kind of living museum or human zoo exhibit in the national park that sits where our land used to be, but the flowers remain, rectangular plots of flowers that still grow around the perimeters of long-ago houses that have burned into ashy pages of lost history." But I wouldn't want to push the thought too far; Sacred Smokes is too circuitous, and more interested in getting out and moving on than looking back.
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