Alistair Bane - Home

 

 

I was standing on a sidewalk in Southwest Denver looking up at big gray house on a hill. I was buying my first home, and this was the one I wanted. It was in my price range. It had big yard for the dogs I rescued and fostered. Now, my realtor seemed a little bit concerned and kept repetitively describing it as an extreme fixer upper. [audience laughter] But I wasn't worried, because I watch a lot of HGTV. [audience laughter] Besides, the work it had taken to get to this place in my life was a whole lot more work than this house needed. 

 

There was a time in my life that I thought I'd never have a home of my own. Not just in terms of being able to afford the brick and mortar of a house, but in the sense of finding a place where I felt safe and like I belonged. I'd grown up with two very different parents, an Eastern Shawnee father, a strict Irish Catholic mother, both of whom drank too much and argued too much. The only common ground they seemed to be able to find was disappointment in the fact that their son was queer. 

 

I had left home early. I drifted. I felt like I made more mistakes and progress in life. But when I turned 18 and became a legitimate official adult, I felt like maybe it was time to try to make my life something better. I was going to school during the day, working at Rock 'n' Roll bar at night, which at the time seemed like a very legitimate job. I had my own room to live in and rent by the week, transient hotel. 

 

To be honest, some of the residents at that hotel scared me. Not in terms of them being tougher than me, because I was a pretty tough kid. But when I look in the faces of the older residents, sometimes I think that maybe once a place like this in the life it represented got ahold of you, it wouldn't let go. Maybe all my efforts were just in vain. But there was one person who lived at that hotel that believed I could do anything I wanted in life. 

 

His name was Rex, and he lived in the room across the hall from me. I met him one night about 03:30 AM when I was coming home from my job. He was standing in the doorway of his room. He was a tall, thin native guy. And right away, I really liked him. He had his own fashion scene going on where he was dressed like he came straight out of 1970s, and he reminded me of the pictures I'd seen of aim at the Wounded Knee siege. He said, “Hey, Kola, where are you from?” When native people ask, where are you from, we're asking, who's your tribe, who's your family? We're looking for connection, because relatives are what make you rich. 

 

I told him I was Eastern Shawnee. And right away, he started talking about some of our famous leaders from the old days, Tecumseh, Tenskwatawa, Nan Halima the Warrior Woman. He said, “Coming from people like that, I bet you feel strong. I bet you feel like you can do anything you want in life.” I didn't actually feel that way then, but when he said that, I wanted to feel that way. 

 

Over the next few months, I'd run into Rex when I was coming home from work maybe two or three times a week. And there was something about him that I just felt like I could open up to him and tell him all my dreams, tell him what I was afraid of, tell him things about my childhood I never told anyone before. I can remember one time I told him how it hurt to have my parents reject me for being queer. And he had said, “There's stories about people like you from the old days. They said that you had power, that you could ride into battle and not get hit by bullets, that you could talk to and see the spirits and help people. You got to start believing in yourself, and you've got to get out of here.” 

 

It was nice to have somebody that cared about me that way. I've heard it said that words are medicine, and we choose every day to be good or bad medicine to each other. And Rex's words were good medicine for me. I slowly started to believe in myself. There were better places to live and jobs that had meaning for me, because I was helping people. And eventually, I found myself in Denver, buying my first home, putting down roots. 

 

The day came for myself and my dogs to move into my new house. While I started work inside, the dogs began excavating the backyard. [audience laughter] In dog terms, they had almost immediate success. [audience laughter] They unearthed an old bicycle tire, ancient cow femur and even a mildewed Barbie doll from under the deck. [audience laughter] If you rescue dogs, they're forever grateful to you. So, the dogs gifted me these things. [audience laughter] I gratefully accepted them and waited till the dogs fell asleep to throw the things away, so that I wouldn't hurt their dog feelings. [audience laughter] 

 

Meanwhile, inside, work was going a little slower than I had predicted. In the excitement of wanting to buy this house, there's a lot of damage I hadn’t seen. For one thing at about shoulder height in all the rooms, there were these dents and cracks in the drywall and doors. One night, I was walking around surveying all the damage. I'd walked down the upstairs hall to this bedroom that was painted the bright fuchsia pink that only happens when you tell a child, “You can pick the color out yourself.” [audience laughter] 

 

On the interior of the door were the kind of stickers that little girls love, glittery unicorns and Hello Kitty. And on the outside of that door were more of those marks and dents. I said out loud, “What in the world caused all this?” And this memory surfaced of when I'd been a teenager I thought I'd met a man who was going to love me and keep me safe, only to find out that the opposite was true. I could remember ducking his fist and hearing it hit the drywall behind my head. 

 

I looked down at my own hand made into a fist and matched it to the dents in the door. And as I did, I could almost hear and see a man raging and pounding on that door and imagined a child inside that room, fearful that if that door gave way, he would take his anger out on her. I bought this house, so I could shut out all the darkness I knew the world was capable of. And now, I felt like that darkness had just been waiting there for me to arrive, and I was angry. I decided I was going to erase it, starting with that room. 

 

For the next three days, I got up at dawn, I worked late into the night, plastering, drywalling, painting, flooring, hanging a new door until the room looked like blank and new. The last night, I was almost done, I just had to paint a little bit more in the closet. As I reached down to paint by the baseboard, I noticed some small writing. It was in the looping cursive of a child, and the words said, “Help me, help me, help me, help me.” It was a tiny, almost silent plea you make when you stop believing anyone is listening. 

 

I thought of the Barbie doll that my dogs had found, and I wondered if that doll had been that little girl's only friend in comfort, and I'd thrown it in the trash. I felt almost an irrational panic. I ran outside, dumped the trash onto the driveway, began rummaging for the doll. I found her. I carried her inside to the kitchen sink, I pulled off her mildewed clothes, began washing her. I trimmed the ruined ends of her hair and gave her a short but stylish haircut. [audience laughter] I got in the car. I drove to the 24-hour Walmart. I didn't care if it was weird for a grown man to be Barbie doll clothes shopping at midnight. [audience laughter] 

 

I found an outfit that was the same fuchsia pink as the paint had been in her room, so I knew she'd approve of it. I went home, dressed the doll, she looked almost new again. I found a piece of cardboard and wrote, give me a home with a smiley face on it. I carried her down the hill to the retaining wall by the sidewalk. I set her there, knowing that every morning children walked past my house on their way to the elementary school up the street. I was hoping one of them would find her and be happy to have a new friend. 

 

That night, I tried to sleep, but it was difficult. I was anxious to see if the doll would be gone in the morning. But I also kept thinking way, way back all those years ago when I lived at that hotel when I needed a friend and Rex had been there for me and what our conversations had meant to my life. Way back then, I was curious about Rex, because I never met anybody that kind. And so, one week when I needed to pay my rent, I asked Bill, the desk man, what he knew about Rex. 

 

Bill had worked at that hotel since 1968, and he knew everything about everyone who had ever lived there. He lived for gossip. I said, “Hey, Bill, what do you know about that guy, Rex, who lives across the hall from me?” Now, Bill had worked at a transient hotel long enough that nothing ever shocked him. But for some reason, when I had asked about Rex, Bill got really pale. His eyes got really wide. He leaned close to the plexiglass that separated him and the money from the rest of us. He said, “You seen him?” I was like, “Yeah, he lives across the hall, so I guess I seen him.” 

 

Bill stood up and motioned for me to come around the corner to the door of the office. And when I got there, he grabbed my coat and pulled me inside. He said again, “You seen him?” I said, “Yeah, he lives across the hall. I talk to him all the time when I come home from work. What are you tripping about?” And that's when Bill told me, he had said that Rex had moved into the hotel in 1972. He had been a really good, kind hearted guy, but he had a rough life and he was an addict. Not long after he had moved into the hotel, he had OD'd and died in his room. 

 

Bill had said that over the years when he tried to rent that room, people would come down to the front desk freaking out, saying, that they woke up and saw some native guy watching them sleep. Bill had said to me, “You know, I didn't know if they were just trying to get out, paying their bill or if they were crazy. But you, kid, you're pretty sane and you're telling me that you've seen him and you talked to him.” I had said, “Yeah, he's my friend.” I think Bill had never been so terrified in his life, but I had never felt more safe and loved, because I knew it was true what my people said that we never walk through this life alone. [audience cheers and applause]

 

The next morning in Denver, I woke up in my new home. I put on a coat and I ran down the hill to see if the doll was gone. She was, and that made me happy. It might have seemed crazy to some people that I cared that much about a doll that belonged to a little girl that I had never met, but I believe that acts of love and kindness could ripple out across this world and touch someone far away. And maybe they could even ripple from this world to other worlds and back again. I looked up at my house. It did not have what HGTV calls curb appeal yet, [audience laughter] but I was proud of it, because I was making it into a home where I would never let anyone feel alone or afraid again.