To Make Molehills of Mountains

I first participated in an Indigenous People’s sweat lodge, a religious ritual of cleansing and communion, while in rural Montana, where I had gone to support my friend, Domenico Manioc, in his fourth Sundance ceremony. My sweat lodge experience was anything but pleasant. Ten minutes into the ritual I felt a desperate need to urinate. As water continued to be poured onto the red-hot rocks shoveled into the unlit lodge, generating chthonic breath-taking steam, I began to feel faint and wanted little else than to make a break for the lodge exit.    

Despite my less than manly tolerance for the sweat lodge, I looked forward to being Domenico’s assistant for the Sundance. During the ceremony, practitioners of Indigenous spirituality put themselves through a grueling three days of nearly continuous dancing and chanting around the center pole of a beautifully constructed and decorated arbor, built once a year to meticulous ritual standards specifically for the sun dancers. At the climax of the ceremony, during which the dancers barely sleep, do not eat food or drink fluids and are exposed to the elements, many of the participants mutilate their bodies, bloodily freeing the flesh of their chests, which have been pierced with bird bones, from tethers attached to the Sundance arbor’s central pole.

There could be many reasons why believers undergo the Sundance. Some say they have life altering visions during the physically and emotionally taxing ceremony. For others it seems to provide ritualistic expiation from the travails of daily existence on the native peoples’ reservation. For people like Domenico, whose genealogy is only minimally native, Sundance is a test of the will and demonstration of commitment to the community he has adopted as his own.

Domenico already had scars on his chest and back from three previous Sundance ceremonies. The four scars on his chest were the result of his having freed himself from the center pole, tearing the skin over his pectoral muscles in the process. Domenico also had welts of scars on his back since he had also already dragged buffalo skulls.  These skulls are attached to the dragger’s back by tethers connected to flesh-piercing eagle bones. The skull draggers circle the arbor, which is the size of a small circus tent, and after circling it, skulls in tow, designated sun dancer assistants pounce upon the buffalo skulls while the participants continue their forward walking until the bones have been torn from the flesh on their backs.

The year I attended Sundance, Domenico, a profusely tattooed former gang member and now an Indigenous religion devotee and union carpenter, was going to be suspended, not from the arbor’s center pole with his feet on the ground and bones through the flesh of his chest, but from a gallows-like structure built specifically for him. Domenico was going to be hung more than a foot off the ground from thick twine attached to two large eagle bones pierced through the skin on his back. He was going to hang until gravity and his own considerable body weight tore the hooks through his flesh. When he finally hung, the skin on his back was resilient enough not to tear free from the eagle bones. He continued to hang while ceremony observers and other dancers marveled at the way the skin of his back stretched, like elastic, above his heft. When gravity was not sufficient to free him of suspension from the gallows, ceremonial custodians were ordered by a supervising shaman to pull Domenico down. Fortunately, the thick twine to which the hooks were fastened snapped before the hooks could tear through his flesh. Domenico was disappointed by this fact, but he had still endured an ordeal only very few sun-dancers experience. 

Needless to say, Domenico is a committed Indigenous spiritualist and has earned the rights to become the leader of his own sweat lodge. He’s a formidable character. Our friendship has lasted over ten years mostly as a result of our tolerating and appreciating each other’s differences. Even though I’ve done a good share of time in institutions of confinement, including four years at Patton State Hospital in California where I met Domenico, I’m for the most part a college-educated aspiring artist and mama’s boy. He’s a former LSD-consuming street ruffian, who now takes pride in his spirituality, his death-defying construction work ethic, and who can at best say that his “mama tried” to domesticate him, but that she failed to do so as a result of her less-than-kind methods and his own filial indomitability.

On an overcast Saturday morning, approximately a year after I had first attended the sweat lodge during my Sundance visit, I chose not to sit at home and practice the writer’s craft, and instead drove an hour and half to the San Fernando Valley to visit Domenico. I wore my best fitting and newish pair of athletic shoes as well as my favorite jacket, and shortly after arriving at the address I found myself lugging and stacking heavy firewood in a muddy drizzle, taxing myself physically for Domenico Manioc, a friend I felt had once again cornered me into attending a religious ceremony I was not psychologically ready to endure. Because I felt pressured to carry and move the firewood that is burned to heat the ceremonial steam-producing rocks, I was reliving the trauma I had experienced in Montana when Domenico had enlisted me and other attendees of Sundance to help with the cutting down and laborious transport of wood for a friend of his who lives on the Indigenous reservation where the Sundance took place. For two full days, Domenico had us toiling on steep hillsides felling trees, then tossing, rolling and carrying down heavy trunks to an awaiting trailer. We were motivated by the sheer brute strength he exhibited when carrying and loading the heaviest, pillar-sized logs onto the trailer. By the end of the second day, we were all exhausted and more than a couple of us felt boiling resentment against Domenico. But his roughneck humor makes one feel ingratiated for being of service to him. I also imagine his roughneck ways also make his acquaintances feel too intimidated to express their resentments toward him.   

I have long experienced what in psychiatric circles are called “thoughts of reference.” To a certain extent, I have become comfortable with thinking, for example, that a roadside billboard advertisement intended for a general audience refers particularly to me, or believing that a phrase or word in a conversation that does not involve me is specifically intended for my ears.

The Saturday morning I drove into San Fernando to see my adoptive brother, while privately excoriating myself for muddying my favorite shoes and causing wear as well as tear on my jacket, my back, and my psychological integrity, I heard Domenico say more than once, in the context of a verbal exchange he was having with a girl who was there to attend the sweat lodge ceremony, “abandon ship.” I had felt emasculated by the girl, who had given chopping ceremonial wood with an axe a try, while I had restricted myself to simply moving and stacking it. When I heard Domenico utter “abandon ship,” my mind took it as a referential thought.

In addition to my mounting physical discomfort and the conscientious reluctance I was experiencing, hearing those two words provided me with an excuse to not sit in the hot, steamy, uterine darkness of the sweat lodge for a second time. Despite knowing that I was going to disappoint, perhaps even irremediably anger, Domenico, and although I risked never again being invited to one of his sweating ceremonies, I went to my car, peeled and ate a banana, set the navigation app on my cell phone and drove the hour and a half back home, feeling simultaneously guilty and relieved for having done so.

It's common for people with mental health difficulties to catastrophize, or at the very least, exaggerate facts out of proportion. I know I do it a lot, and if it weren’t for my frequently untrustworthy mind’s tendency to make mountains of molehills, I think I could have something like complete happiness. Perhaps it’s the same way with Domenico. The thing is, sometimes the mentally disturbed can pull you into their distorted and disturbing ways of seeing things. 

When I was at Sundance, for example, I remember Domenico telling me to be wary of the clowns, or costumed pranksters who go around the camp grounds on the last day of the ceremony, collecting offerings and creating innocuous chaos. Many rumors circulate about the clowns and some children are told by their parents that beneath their sackcloth masks, the clowns have eyes of fire and the terrible faces of demons. According to Domenico, if one got caught looking at a clown, the clowns would swiftly and thoroughly kick the gawker’s ass. “Don’t look at the clowns, Jubu,” Domenico repeated to me on several occasions, emphatically adding, “they’ll fuck you up if you do.”

At one point, before the Sundance ceremony had begun, I thought I had caught Domenico lying to me. I accused him of lying about another one of the dancers who was part of our group from California. It turned out Domenico hadn’t lied, but because my mind was still under the impression that he was a liar, I wanted to physically check him. I believed that if I didn’t aggressively stand up to him, the clowns were going to give me a thrashing. 

Having gone through with the actions my mind and heart were telling me to do would have been disastrous. In all likelihood, I would have been kicked off the Sundance grounds for unruliness and Domenico would have had to answer to tribal elders and his other friends for bringing a hot-headed brawler to the ceremony. In the end, Domenico and I tearily made up for our differences, and when the clowns did start prowling the Sundance grounds, I made an offering of my hat, my hiking boots, and twenty dollars, all of which I arranged under a teepee-shaped tripod of large sticks I fastidiously bound together using a strip of red fabric. The clowns also ended up taking my baseball cap, leaving me exposed to the glaring sun of the Montana springtime. I was none to happy about losing my second hat, but it was fair game for the clowns. Their humorous antics, which included shooting people with blunted arrows from miniature bows and feigning copulation with each other, lightened the severity of some of the bloodier aspects of the Sundance.        

On my drive home from Domenico’s San Fernando Valley sweat lodge, after bailing out on what I thought would be another unbearably torturous experience, I worried that my actions would cause a rift between me and my friend. 

In casual conversation, Domenico can often be scathing about what he perceives to be other people’s shortcomings. As I drove, I figured I’d be another victim of his bullying vituperative. Ten minutes into my exodus, when I was on the freeway, the phone rang. The caller ID said “Domenico Manioc.” I feared answering, but I picked up the phone and used an index finger to slide the green answer icon to the right of the screen. As luck would have it, Domenico hung up before the call connected. I could have chickened out and decided to text him later, but I called him back. I knew I had some explaining to do.

“Jubu, where are you at?” asked my friend, whom had acted as an enforcer during his multiple times in jail. This meant he was charged with physically disciplining inmates who deviated from the jail gang shot caller’s disciplinary norms. If an inmate didn’t work out according to the proscribed regimen, if an inmate didn’t fight when expected to, or if an inmate was charged with dishonorable crimes, like graffiti tagging, Domenico was given the responsibility of doling out beatings and toughening up those who exhibited weakness. This was the man on the other end of the line. I needed to let him know that I didn’t feel disrespect or disloyalty toward him.

“I know this is going to sound crazy, Domenico, but at one point when you were having that conversation with the girl who was chopping wood, I heard you say ‘abandon ship,’ so that’s what I did,” I exhaled, thinking that since we both had been in the looney bin together, this would provide a valid explanation for my departure.

My exculpatory statement was followed by brief silence, an impatient “What?,” then a more emphatic, “What?” 

I proceeded to tell my roughneck friend that during sweats I felt out of place, that I respected native spirituality and could promulgate its views, but that I couldn’t put up with its physical rigors. 

Knowing that Domenico is staunchly anti-Christian, I went on to say, “During sweats I feel like I’m the odd man out. I feel about as comfortable sweating as you would participating in a Catholic Mass.” The comparison was weak. Eating a wafer and drinking a little wine is kids’ play compared to a round of sweating. I don’t think I made a convincing point to Domenico.

Then, knowing full-well that I lacked any and all intention to ever participate in a sweat lodge again, especially after this humiliating experience, I told him that maybe next time, I’d come prepared.

My insincerity was answered by another brief silence and then with what sounded like an equally insincere, “Okay, Jubu, thanks for coming.”

I couldn’t stop thinking of my conversation with Domenico on the rest of my drive to Orange County, and when I finally arrived home, I expressed my anger and frustration to my girlfriend and, later, over the phone, to my father.

My girlfriend thought I was, as usual, making mountains out of molehills. Maybe I was. Maybe Domenico didn’t find my unannounced departure from his holy sanctum as deplorable as I found it to be.

My dad had some sensible words to say, “We’ve got to make every effort to make life on this miserable earth as happy as we can for ourselves, son. You clearly were not enjoying yourself when you were toiling for your friend, and it seems that you weren’t going to find happiness in the sweating ceremony, either. You went with your gut. You did the right thing. If he’s a true friend, he’ll not judge you for it.”  

In the end, I convinced myself into believing that hard working, hard living guys like Domenico deserve a break, but I also came to the conclusion that Domenico shouldn’t try to enforce spirituality the way he enforced inmate discipline during his stints in jail. Being an enforcer of spiritual life often makes one an oppressor not an uplifter, and in today’s world where oppression in its many forms abounds, spirituality, rather than foment hardship, should bring levity and be a means to joy. I know that this is how I will regard all enterprises of the spirit from now on and I hope Domenico Manioc will come around to thinking so, too.