Gangs, violence, drinking take toll
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BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star
PINE RIDGE, S.D. — He planned to go fishing with his friends.
Instead, 17-year-old Mike Goodman got blanked on malt liquor and woke up this June morning in someone's living room.
He didn't know where he was.
Just that he was on the floor and there was a woman he didn't know sitting nearby.
Your grandma lives up the road, he remembers her saying. You fell off a chair, passed out there.
Oh, yeah. I remember now.
But he didn't.
He walked up the hill, past his mom's place, and stopped at the pink ranch house with the big wooden cutout of Betty Boop on the front. His grandparents took him in, again.
"They're pretty cool," Mike says, standing on their front porch watching cars go by.
He waves at some, his friends. He watches others with narrow eyes, his enemies.
He wears a blue North Carolina jersey and baggy jeans. He's lean and tall, a handsome kid about 6-foot-2. His head keeps bumping a bug zapper hanging from the porch roof. Dead bees bounce around.
Mike points out a security camera over his head. His grandparents, he says, are about the only people in town with one of these.
Cedric Goodman is an accountant. Leona cooks and looks after her grown kids and her grandkids. Inside, the house smells of French toast and syrup. There's a wall clock with a picture of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane.
A herd of buffalo-shaped dream catchers dangles from the living-room ceiling, to catch bad dreams.
His grandparents share a wire backyard fence with Mike's mom, their oldest daughter.
Last night, they called the cops on her, told them she'd been neglecting her kids again and drinking with her 15-year-old son Christopher, Mike's little brother.
A white car drives slowly past the pink house.
It's the muscular older brother of a girl who says Mike hit her at a party about a week ago. Mike doesn't remember.
"I don't trust myself when I drink," he says. He's trying to stop.
He and his friends used to fish a lot in the summer. They'd fish at the dam 12 miles east of here on the Denby River. They used to shoot hoops, too, and play baseball.
That was when he was about 13 and still dreamed of being a cop, being happy, making his mom love him and Christopher and Missy enough, he says, to stop drinking and locking them in their rooms.
Missy is 19 now. One night a few months back, when she was big and pregnant, he had to pull his mom off her. She was banging Missy's head on the floor and punching her belly. She stepped on Missy's baby, 22-month-old Rhiannon.
Missy was sober. Mom was blanked on Camo silvers — the malt liquor that makes her really crazy. They'd been arguing over family photos.
Mike called the police.
He laughs now, thinking about wanting to be a cop.
"I dropped out of high school at the beginning of this year. I had only 2½ credits. I dropped out mostly because I had too much enemies. Or maybe I was just too lazy or something."
A cat hisses at another that's getting too close.
This cat's a good fighter, Mike says, smiling down at it. It can even beat up the rez dogs that wander all over town.
Mike was in a gang, Tre Tre. The initiation ceremony was in someone's living room. Someone hit the lights and they all jumped on him and he came up bloody.
He was in seventh grade.
He quit Tre Tre three years ago. They're still his friends, he says, but they're too crazy.
He names off some rez gangs: Igloos, Wild Boyz, Outlaws, Kotton Mouth Kinks, 420-Alpha Dalpha, 840 Double High, Westside Crips, Eastside Tru, Northside Piru Bloods, Westside Playboys and Too Sick Kingz. The biggest one is the Aimsta Gangstas.
The Igloos live over that hill, he says, some 20 people to a house.
Just the other night, he had to stop Christopher from walking over the hill with a baseball bat.
Most kids he knows are in gangs. Girls, too. Even now that he isn't, he's careful.
He reaches into the pocket of his baggy jeans.
"I pack this big old screwdriver."
He no longer carries knives and chains. He knows chances are good he'll get stopped by the cops. The screwdriver is for when he gets stopped by enemies.
One friend, Donovan Elk Boy, was a pretty cool guy, a basketball player. Kind of quiet. Some gang boys picked him up when he was walking alone in the Northridge housing development.
They bashed his head with a baseball bat.
Mike saw him the day before. Donovan showed him the new Tre Tre tattoo on his left hand.
Before dumping Donovan's eighth-grade body in the Oglala dump, the gang boys had cut the tattoo out of his hand.
Then last year, his friend Lucien Janis got shot in the head. Lucien was blanked. Some guys drove up as he staggered out of a house about a block from here.
Mike and Lucien grew up together, played ball together, fished. His mom buried him the old way — the way he'd asked her to — wrapped in a buffalo robe.
His grave is in a cemetery beside the Denby Dam.
Mike waves at another friend driving by.
"I don't even try to compare my life to anything. I got problems. More than most, maybe. But most of my friends have problems, too."
Drinking is bad, he says, but sometimes it helps. Drinking can drown the screams of his baby niece, pleading over the fence for Grandma to come get her. It can blur the faces of the friends he's lost, and the fun they used to have.
And just yesterday, it did what he'd hoped.
It blanked him out for hours — until he woke up this morning on the floor.
It's all coming back to him now, like a bad dream.
"Yesterday, my mom saw I had $3 and she says, ‘I need that $3 because we're all pitching in.' I didn't do it, and my sister says, ‘Get the f— out then.' I looked at my mom and she's just standing there, looking down at the floor.
"I said, ‘F— this,' and I went."
Sometimes, he likes not remembering.
"It's really cool because I don't let nothing bother me. I just act like I don't care.
"When I was 13, I used to care."
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