The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: All I Wanted To Do Was Dance Summary & Analysis

Victor drunkenly dances with a Lakota woman at a bar in Montana. He is dancing with “the one hundredth Indian woman in the one hundred dancing days since the white woman he loved had left him.” Victor loses sight of the woman, blacks out, and eventually wakes up in the backseat of a Grasshopper—a riding lawnmower—“heading back to Arlee.” Victor says that “all [he] wanted to do was dance.”

Victor experiences a memory or vision of his former girlfriend; she stands by a river, and she is “so white his reservation eyes suffer.” She asks Victor if he has ever heard of Crazy Horse, and then she disappears. Victor, unable to sleep, watches the sun come up. He goes about his morning routine listlessly.

Victor becomes lost in memory, and experiences another recollection of his ex; in his memory, they are in bed together, and she describes a party she attended a few nights ago. “I could really get addicted to cocaine,” she says, though confessing that she did not try any at the party.

Victor, having returned to the present moment, sips his morning coffee, and tells himself that he’ll go running later that day. Instead, though, he turns on the television, and watches as a “pretty blond woman” delivers the local news. Suddenly overwhelmed by his hangover from the night before, he runs to the bathroom and throws up. He returns to the living room and continues drinking his black coffee. He remarks to himself that there is “nothing more hopeless than a sober Indian.”

Victor remembers being eight or nine years old and “fancydancing in the same outfit his father wore as a child. The feathers,” Victor says, “were genetic [and] the fringe was passed down like the curve of his face.” In the memory Victor looks out into the crowd at the powwow and sees his mother and his father; they wave. Victor notes that they are both drunk. After the dance, Victor eats fry bread and drinks Pepsi. His parents fall asleep together, drunk, beneath a picnic table.

In another memory of his past, Victor recalls being drunk on a night out with his white ex-girlfriend. She urges him to stop drinking, but he insists on one more beer again and again. At home, Victor is unable to sleep, and he cries, twists in bed, gets up, and punches the walls. In the morning, he pretends to sleep while his girlfriend readies herself for work, wondering when she will leave “for good.”

In the present, Victor works odd jobs in order to make ends meet. On paydays, he stands in front of the beer cooler at the Trading Post, staring for hours at the bottles. Once, he remembers, he bought a case and “drove for miles with the bottles beside him on the seat,” tossing them one by one out the window where they shattered on the road.

After another sleepless night, Victor counts his spare change, and takes it to buy a bottle of wine from the Trading Post. As Victor is about to take a drink, a stranger approaches and advises him to let the wine breathe. Victor offers him the first drink; the stranger accepts, and tells Victor that it’s his birthday. Victor urges him to take another drink, and the stranger drinks “half the bottle with one swallow.” The stranger returns the bottle to Victor, but Victor insists he keep it. Victor walks home, hoping that “tomorrow he[’ll] be dancing.”