Authors > Lisa Jones > Author Voices

If we didn't laugh so much we'd cry

Last winter I drove six and a half hours to central Wyoming, to my friend Stanford Addison’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. 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 winter freeze he had parked his car in the parking lot a couple of weeks ago, to the fact that a security guard told the local paper the guy took the money and took off running. He's probably still running down the highway. Eventually his 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.