By Heather O’Neill
From Vol. 1 No. 5, 1999

(inside the living room of Daddy’s cramped apartment.)

Daddy: You need some different clothes. You look like a motorcycle tramp with your
shirt pulled so tight over your belly like that. You should go to the drug store and see if they sell barbeque chip perfume, for that look.
Stella: I never knew there were so many stars in the sky until I went to New Mexico. I didn’t know buildings could block out something that far up in the goddamn sky. It goes to show you never have any idea about what you are missing out on. I would look up at them for a whole twenty minutes in the back of Geronimo’s pick up.
Daddy: Was he Jewish, only Jews give their kids pretentious names like that.
Stella: No he was Cherokee. And it was a nickname, besides. Wasn’t mom part Cherokee. She told me that she was once. She said that was why her hair was so naturally straight.
Daddy: She was always jealous of your curls. She lied about everything. I saw the completely wrong girl coming. She was very pretty though. She could put the French in the word Belle. Now she looks like shit too to go along with her indecent personality. That’s very ordinary actually, to lose big. To lose all around the block, if you are going to lose at all.
Stella: You never meet full blooded Cherokees anymore. One of my girlfriends down there told me that. He was beautiful, too. All the girls were jealous of me.
Daddy: What girls. There are no girls in New Mexico. Your brother thinks all the real girls are on the boulevard now. He told me they are the only women with nice breasts left on the planet. You kids today can’t value anything that doesn’t have a price tag hanging off its nipple.
Stella: He was six feet tall and his hair went down past his ass like a record player.
Daddy: What the fuck are you talking about.
Stella: I mean it was as black as a record. And he looked good in tight dark jeans.
Daddy: If he had bought you a plane ticket home, you wouldn’t have been mugged on the Greyhound. You wouldn’t have that permanent scar under your eyebrow.
Stella: It was worth it. Those were the best three months of my life. And three is a lucky number.
Daddy: There are alot of lucky numbers. There are alot of guys out there too. It is only what you imagine them to be that they are. Guys themselves aren’t worth a dime. Trust me. It’s not worth getting hung up on any one of them. (pause) So are you going to have a little half-breed baby.
Stella: I wish. I wish it was his baby. I wish I was going to have a little Cherokee baby running around chasing buffalo and smoking tobacco out of bird feathers. I would love to put my lipstick all over his cheeks for when he went to war.

(cut to an eleven year old Native boy smoking a rolled cigarette and hustling on the boulevard)