November 7, 2012 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • Page 15 Later, Russ was expostulating about how the media had first treated the Wounded Knee II protest he led in 1973 as a dangerous Indian uprising, and then reduced it to a joke -- when the menace to the Indians on the scene had only intensified. “They can say what they like, but the old people told me that they hadn’t seen the whites out there that scared since the Japs bombed Pearl...” The he remembered that the expedition photographer came from the same country as the camera. “I mean Japs-a-nese heroes fighting white oppression.” Russ started to blush. Abruptly, he shrugged his jacket over his head. “Forgive me, my sister, I forgot you were not actually an Indian. You definitely look like one, and that’s the best compliment I can pay to a person of any race!” “You can come out now,” she said to The Unforgiven. Nobody ever caught Russ flatfooted for long. Earlier in the day, we had arrived to find him conked out in a chair within sight of the door -- not a great idea -- and I coughed to wake him up. He stayed conked out. I kicked the leg of the chair and he jolted awake, saw me, and started to go into the flight-or-fight mode. Since Russ always preferred fight to flight, I thought quickly. “Hey Russ, you should be more careful -- this is John Koster country.” “John, I didn’t recognize you with that beard. Did you know I had a beard once?” “You did?” “Huhhhhn! White men stole it!” Russ had a phenomenal memory for odd details. He saw the outside of the daily newspaper where I once worked only from the street, but he never forgot just what it looked like. A year later, he called up to report his latest outrages and got a squirrely little guy how had probably never seen a real Indian. “Is John Koster there?” Russ demanded. “This is Russell Means!” “No it isn’t,” the guy said. “What do you mean it isn’t?” Russ roared. “You stole our land, you stole our buffalo, you stole our women. No, I can tell by your voice you’re not up to that -- and now you want to steal our existence? Look out the window! Can you see the bus stop? That’s me in the phone booth and I’m going to come upstairs and stomp you into the linoleum!” “No! No! I believe it’s you, Mister Means.” “Good. Koster ain’t around, huh?” “No.” “You know what that means? It means he’s out at a council meeting or he’s out somewhere cheatin’ on his wife. Tell him I said that! Better yet -- call his house and tell HER I said that. That’ll teach him not to be at the office when I make phone calls!” Another time, he lost my telephone number and had a police officer knock on my door as 3 a.m. and drop off his own very temporary number on a scrap of paper. These were the Nixon Years. There was already a tap on my home phone, and when I heard the knock at 3 a.m. I confidently expected to be killed resisting arrest. Another time, Russ asked Shizuko and me to write letters of recommendation when he wanted to apply for work as a counselor at a tribal government ranch for delinquent boys. On the way to the job interview, an Indian policeman stopped Russ at the border of the reservation. While they were arguing, the policeman’s son, who was hunched in the patrol car, shot Russ in the back with a .357 Magnum. After five transfusions and a week in the hospital, he took a ride back to New Jersey. “The bullet went through me so fast. . . all I lost was my spleen,” he told us. “But, my sister, I’m sorry I got blood all over that nice letter you took so much time with....but this whole thing has taught me a big lesson.” “What was it?” we asked. “That’s the last time I ever go looking for work!” A few years later, with the hazy cooperation of the CIA, Russ was in Nicaragua investigating Daniel Ortega’s murderous oppression of the Miskito and the other Indian tribes. “I thought this was the usual State Department hokum, but as soon as I got there I saw Russian helicopters shooting rockets into an Indian village, so I knew whose side I was on. I picked up an AK-47 and let ‘em have it and they shot back. I got a flesh wound from a rocket fragment on my stomach. It didn’t penetrate the abdominal wall, so I lived, but it made a mighty interesting addition to my collection.” Russ and some of his Lakota partisans threw in with the ethnic Indians of Nicaragua, in a loose alliance with the CIA and the Contras. Russ shortly added Marxist to the list of adjectives he used as curse words. Once I asked Russ how many kids he had. “Eight and two claimants,” he said. “Last time I was in prison, I started to get letters from a kid who asked me if I was his father. He said his mother told him his father was an Indian, and when he asked what Indian, she said it was that big, good-looking guy who was always on television making speeches. I didn’t know this girl from a hole in the wall, but I wrote back -- ‘Yes, I am your father. I loved your mother but we had to split up because my people needed my help.’” “Who’s the other claimant?” “She had another kid after the first one.” “Isn’t that out of character?” I asked. “Why would a man as filled with hate, as you are said to be, do something nice for white people?” “John, every kid needs a father and, at this stage of the game, it’s not going to do my reputation one bit of harm.” He died after owing me $100 for the past 40 years, but I expect I will survive. Knowing that our telephone will never ring again to tell me Russ Means is not dead is a little tough to handle, but as a consolation I remember one last anecdote. After “The Last of the Mohicans” came out 20 years ago, I told Russ I always knew he should appear in this epic, but I had expected Russ to play the murderous and psychotic Magua. Wes Studi had a field day with that part, especially the scene where Magua cut a white man’s heart out and ate it. Russ got to play the noble and paternal Chingachgook. “As usual, my brother, you’re missing the whole point,” Russ said. “What is the whole point?” I asked. “From our point of view, Magua is the hero of that movie.” “Hey there -- I bet you thought I was dead!” When you picked up the telephone at my house and heard that voice, you knew Russell Means wasn’t dead. Now he is, but the memories of the smiles and laughter we shared will keep his memory alive as long as my wife, Shizuko, and I are still lucid and our children are still perpendicular. On one of his trips to New Jersey, Russ and two of his bodyguards were driving a 12-year-old Chevrolet through the middle of Nebraska when they spotted a black man hitchhiking. This puzzled them. “We’d better go back and give him a lift before the rednecks kill him,” Russ said. They pulled a U-turn, and when the black man (a graduate student from Nigeria) saw they were Indians, he was afraid to get into the car. They dragged him in and drove off. The four of them had a jolly time discussing the evils of colonialism while they relentlessly rattled and smoked toward Verona, where Means had an offer of food and shelter. Somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, Russ decided to make a courtesy call to tell his hostesses he was about to arrive. “I parked the car alongside the road and ran over the road to use a pay phone,” he told me later. “While I was dialing, a truck driver pulled up and asked me, ‘Hey, Chief, is that beat up Chevy with the South Dakota plates yours? There’s two State Troopers over there with two Indians and a black guy spread-eagle on the side of the car.’” “I ran back over, made some noise when I was coming up behind them, because if I showed up sudden-like they probably would have got scared and shot me a few times, and I asked them what the trouble was. The one cop asked to see my license and registration. “Russell Means! Are you THE Russell Means?” “Here it comes,” Means thought. “Yeah.” “Listen, Mister Means, my son is crazy about Indians and he’s working on a school project. Would you let me take your picture with me?” What followed was a photographic fiesta. Before the State Troopers drove off, they invited Means to dinner if he was ever in their neighborhood. “My sister,” Means said to my wife as he was regaling us, “I want you to take my picture with a drink in my hand, sitting next to your husband and this nice young lady (his hostess) here.” “Why?” Shizuko asked. “So people know you’re a drunk?” That’s how the sister of a kamikaze talks to foster brothers who are known to be intemperate. “No....” Russ smiled, springing the trap. “It’s so those people who read of my alleged adventures in the Western press realize that it’s biologically possible for me to take a drink without double-parking my car and running into a pool hall to assault a white man!” He beamed with triumph when the flash went off repeatedly. Then he leaned over to me and whispered, “Make sure you crop out the white woman before you send the prints out West.” A smile at the end of the warpath Letters to the Editor Voting for Ben-David, Hermansen-O’Reilly, Vassiliou mentary schools in the district. The incumbent team only represents the Woodside Avenue School boundaries of the community. If the incumbents win, a total of five out of nine board members will represent Woodside Avenue School. This is disturbing when there is still talk about redrawing district lines someday. As a parent of children directly affected by the last redistricting, this fact alone should not be taken lightly. Finally, the incumbents continually take credit for fiscal restraint when it was in fact the governor and the New Jersey Legislature who took the initiative and mandated the two percent budget cap. The surplus they take credit for was actually an unanticipated lump sum of state funding last year. Luck played a major role here. The only claim they can honestly make is by staying under the two percent budget cap, they escaped voter scrutiny this year. Higher administrative salaries, newly created positions, and an expensive $1,000-a-day consultant, have continued to inflate the budget, all under the public’s radar. For example, the superintendent’s secretary’s salary now exceeds that of some of our top-performing teachers. Then there was the significant pay raise tacked on (May 22, 2012 public board (continued on page 21) Dear Editor: By moving the Franklin Lakes K-8 Board of Education elections to November, we now have a new dynamic group of quality candidates. From merely an observational standpoint, and as a former board member myself, one can easily surmise the message coming from the community: Change! I support the Ben-David, Hermansen-O’Reilly, and Vassiliou team for Franklin Lakes K-8 Board of Education Their qualifications outweigh those of the incumbents. They maintain objective insight, and seek to change the trajectory of the district. Shirley works as a director in compliance in the financial world for 29 years. She has an eye for numbers and budget scrutiny. Michael has a law degree, is a proven educator, and has the interests of the entire school community. Evros is a doctoral professor of science and is impartial in evaluating data and policy. He values a robust curriculum that prepares students for the future. Furthermore, they have kids attending all three ele-