When I was eleven years old, my parents split up. As normal as that sounds now this was the nineties and you don’t really see anyone famous going through that type of thing. For a while, I stayed with my Dad, he was pretty chill, he let me stay up til twelve and he always brought home some junk food. On my twelfth birthday, Mom didn’t show up, she was off in Indiana. Can you believe that? But Dad kept telling me, hey, hey, get ready to meet someone special. I don’t really know. He showed me this lady, beautiful… in kind of a trashy way. White, I’m talking colonizer white, I’m talking her ancestors probably killed a couple of mine. About a month later, they got married, had a big fancy wedding that for some stupid reason my grandparents on my Mother’s side went too.
She kind of sucked, fill in the gaps, after a couple of months I moved in with one of my aunts and uncles, and by the time I was fifteen I had moved in with pretty much every family member who was willing to take me in until ultimately I wound right back up at my Dad’s, and then later on, his parents. I hated living there, really every second of it.
This was when I first started growing my hair out, and one time I got the bright idea to fight my Grandpa. He yanked me by it, slamming me into the pavement. Yeah. About a month or two later, I met this guy: Merrick. Merrick was real mean to just about everybody except me. She was nice to me. She lived with a bunch of buddies, who I'd go on to call my family. One time, Merrick let me take their bed, and I went downstairs and caught Ajax and Chrissy going to town on each other, on the same cushion I laid my head on.
After a while, I told Merrick the truth about me, that I was a woman. They celebrated me, everyone celebrated me. I remember that little punk rock band we had, I was the lead singer, and, I performed in this grocery store parking lot in this wedding dress we found crumbled up into a ball, covered in mud and moss and blood in a ditch.
One night, Merrick and I were on one of our late night drives, we had late night drives every now and then, and this one song came on, Re-Hash by Gorillaz, came on. I cranked it up and kissed him. So began an insane relationship- we’d steal, we’d smoke, we’d drink, we’d do everything together. One night, our anniversary, we get an idea. There’s a little light bulb above Scott’s head, and he shoots me this devil-ish grin.
“Miss Yazzie,” He said. I batted my eyelashes.
“Yeah, baby?” I said.
“Let’s blow up a cop car.”
We went to the gas station, bought everything we needed for a Molotov, and passed by the police station. I was excited. The night was young, and it was moist. Save for one issue: On our way there, we passed by a cop car, the thing driving oh so slowly passed us, as if it could smell the dirt bag on us.
We decided to go ahead and go blow up something else, Merrick’s old garbage truck. His boss fired him without a two weeks notice.