THE UNBEARABLE CROWDEDNESS OF BEING LISA JONES
Number of US women named Lisa Jones: 4,262.
Number named Ann Smith: 2,991
(source: Whitepages.com)

My name is Lisa Jones. Not Lisa Jones the adjunct professor of nutrition at LaSalle University. Not the college basketball player. I run neither a home for the needy in Florida nor a Pilates studio in New York City. I’m not a realtor, anchor woman or a porn star.

Even among authors, a certain amount of individuation from other Lisa Joneses is in order: I did not write Bulletproof Diva (whose author, Lisa Jones, was hailed by the Boston Globe back in 1997 for writing “so vibrant and dynamic, her words create a kind of fierce music… a fabulous book.”) Damn! I wish I DID write that book. Its publisher called it chock full of “fierce black girl humor.” Lisa lives in New York City and even worked with Spike Lee.

Me, I’m of Swedish/Irish stock and am pretty much white as snow. I was raised mostly in Denver, went to college up the road in Boulder, worked briefly on used car lots, started practicing Buddhist meditation, and wrote a book. But so did ANOTHER Lisa Jones, whose book, Up: A novel (about car sales and love) won her a 2003 “Best Novel About a Car Saleswoman” citation from Westword magazine, Denver’s weekly newspaper. I got an e-mail from that Lisa Jones a few years back when I wrote a column about my boyfriend that appeared in the Denver Post. The by-line had caused some confusion among her friends, since she was, in her own words, “a big ole queer.”

So I’m the white, straight, married, suburban Lisa Jones. In the spectrum of things, I may be showing as the boring Lisa Jones.  But listen:  I have a fascination and love for the Northern Arapahos of Wyoming, in particular with a member of that tribe named Stanford Addison (whose name sounds like it belongs to some guy who graduated from boarding school with John Kerry and is now a  stockbroker, but actually belongs to a quadriplegic native healer and horse gentler.) He — and his extraordinary family — are the heros of the book I took six years to write and which is formally hitting the shelves on May 12 –  Broken: A Love Story.

Last winter I drove six and a half hours to central Wyoming, to my friend Stanford’s place on the Wind River Indian Reservation. I did the usual – hung around the kitchen table, chatting and drinking Folgers, then entered the sweat lodge for an evening-long ceremony. There were several breaks, which just about everyone spent lying on the floor of the lodge, gossiping and making jokes. During one of these, one of the men I knew best, a guy who happened to be white, said he was under investigation for stealing a woman’s $800 in winnings at the tribal casino.

“I probably should never have told the casino guys that I was living in their parking lot,” he said, letting loose a hail of laughter and installing himself as the evening’s entertainment. He had lived on the reservation for more than a decade, after burning his face and torso in a truck fire. His disfigurement made life in the white world unbearable. The white world tends to punish that kind of misfortune, while on the reservation people were more likely to laugh at it until he learned to laugh along. (Soon after he arrived on the reservation, a woman was having a hard time lighting the pilot light on the stove. “You try it,” she told him. “You’re already also burned up.”)

Anyway, that night in the sweat lodge, the conversation kept coming back to him and the details of his story, to the fact he was so broke (ha!) and out of friends willing to take him in (hahaha!) that despite the subzero winter temperatures he had parked his car in the parking lot a couple of weeks before, to the fact that after the robbery a security guard told the local paper the guy took the money and took off running. “He’s probably still running,” the security guard reported. In the sweat lodge, my friend’s story segued into another guy’s story about being kicked out of church because his friend brought a gun to mass. A gun.

Stanford once told me that on the Wind River Indian Reservation, people laugh so much because if they didn’t, they’d cry. Well. I hadn’t laughed that much in weeks.