In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

The pressure of succeeding in college became too much for Alexie and he began drinking heavily to cope. He excelled at school and became a star player on the basketball team which was coincidentally called the Reardan High Indians. While in the short story collection they were in their teens Reservation Blues show the boys in their thirties.

Sherman Joseph Alexie Jr. (born October 7 1966) is a poet writer filmmaker and comedian.