Adria Malcolm
It’s high-noon as we sit on the patio at Ex Novo Brewing Company, a giant beer and booze joint just north of downtown Albuquerque. I eye the place and see that everyone is going completely sideways. Is it heat exhaustion? Bath salts?
“Look at that one,” I say to my girlfriend, Rae, who is Yupik and Inupiaq—or, Eskimo to the uninitiated—then point to a white man sitting square in the sun, getting pinker and pinker by the minute. “Look at his eyes. Booze doesn’t do that—he’s losing it.”
Nearby, two wiggy blondes whoop it up under the brutal beams, dancing in an open field to no music at all. It’s a helluva scene all around, like a four-day summer music festival. I want to join in, but I’m here on business.
Get the story. He’ll be here soon.
We finally find some shade under a tree and one of those things that spritzes a cool mist on the back of your neck when Jeremiah Bitsui, the 41-year-old actor and entrepreneur, rounds the corner, shoving his phone into his back pocket. He apologizes for a spot of tardiness, then embraces me and Rae. “Let’s grab a drink!” I blurt out. “Yes, let’s,” Bitsui says.
We trundle into the packed taproom, and the eye-darting and whispers begin almost instantly.
All the booming conversations fall to an excited whisper. Jeremiah has one of the most recognizable faces in New Mexico and indeed throughout Indian Country. For more than 10 years, Jeremiah, who’s Diné, has played the role of Victor—first, in AMC’s Breaking Bad, and then its spinoff, Better Call Saul. The latter will air its series finale on Aug. 15. (He’s also starring as Hoski, the conflicted antagonist of AMC’s Dark Winds, but we’ll get to that later.)
Courtesy of AMC
The character of Victor is a stoic, scowling, unblinking beast hired by the vicious, throat-cutting cartel boss, Gustavo Fring. Jeremiah, the man, can relate. (We’ll get to that later, too.) Nowadays, though, he is all grins and good spirits. He’s the proverbial pal who’ll give you the shirt off his back in a rainstorm, and perhaps his pants, too, though I haven’t asked.
Until the age of 10, Jeremiah and his family bounced around the Navajo Nation, living in places like Tuba City, Chinle and Window Rock. The Bitsuis are a renowned rodeo family, even to this day, and he spent many years chillin’ in a trailer, even though he’s allergic to hay.
They then relocated to Albuquerque’s North Valley where, later, he would run with some pretty hard cats. Today, he again hangs his hat in the ABQ, and, on occasion, he’ll zip into Santa Fe whenever I can convince him to meet me for an hour of good-natured shit-talking and pool at the New Mexico Hard Cider Taproom, a de facto gin joint with its own scene of devil-may-care dancing and wide, wild eyes.
***
Rewind to Denver, a few years back when Jeremiah and I first met: He walked up wearing a pink polo and white cap. I met him, his mom, Ruth, and dad, Edison, the late renowned Diné rodeo rider. It was 9 am, and we were there for a charity golf tournament to raise money for some nonprofit in Indian Country. Jeremiah was the celebrity actor, and I, a Chicano and Oglala Lakota, was the celebrity word nerd—or, at least, the only Native reporter and pundit in a mainstream American newsroom they could find at the time.
I had hoped to be paired with Jeremiah, but instead I was pushed into a golf cart with a tall, 50-something white lawyer who represented Native tribes. The counselor said, “Here,” and handed me a can of ice-covered Coors Banquet from his cooler. “Ready?” he asked, chugging his in one swift gulp.
Jeremiah was in the cart ahead of us and shouted, “Alright, fellas. Let’s go!” He hit the gas and waved to his mom and dad like a good son would.
Adria Malcolm
It only took us a few minutes to get to the first hole, but by then my new golf buddy was on his third Banquet. “You’re up!” he barked, gesturing for me to hit first. “What kind of fucking shot was that?” the lawyer bellowed as I missed the ball entirely with a mighty first swing. “I’m a goddamn journalist!” I shouted back. “We can’t afford to golf.”
“Well, we can’t goddamn afford to lose!” he responded, housing another Coors.
Jeremiah walked over to me with a smile and shrugged off the white man’s grizzle. “Have you ever played?” he asked with a patient tone.
“If by ‘play’ you mean mini golf, then yes, many times,” I said.
He chuckled. “It’s alright. Just grab it like this...”
Jeremiah then showed me how to hold a driver and how to “lean my hips into it.” The lawyer chilled out after that. And for the rest of the day, between beers, he grew less dicky and more friendly. Perhaps he realized he was being a beer-soaked, cranky curmudgeon, and that we weren’t there to jockey for a green jacket, but for a good cause for the Natives on the land his people stole.
***
Jeremiah, once named one of Elle Magazine’s Most Eligible Bachelors, has that cheer-you-up, good-times impact on people, which makes it hard to believe that when he was growing up in Albuquerque, he saw plenty of types who weren’t far from the character he portrays on Better Call Saul.
When he was 17, Jeremiah got into a rap battle at a backyard Fourth of July party in Albuquerque. He admits he was completely out of his skull on drink that night. It wasn’t long, he says, before the rap battle escalated. Fuming that Jeremiah was winning, the other guy drew a gun and started firing. That’s when all hell broke loose.
People dropped their drinks and fled, screaming, while others clutched one another. One of Jeremiah’s homies grabbed him and dragged him away to a waiting car before they hit the gas. Someone yelled, “We need to go to the hospital! Now!”
Jeremiah says it was probably the drink or the adrenaline, but he hadn’t noticed he’d been shot twice. He took one in the thigh and another in the calf.
When they got to the hospital, Jeremiah tried to stand on his own but collapsed at the emergency room entrance. He finally woke up later on a bed to the sight of tubes in his arms and a beeping thing behind him.
And nobody saw anyone and nobody knew anything, because that’s the code, and you never stray from it. Even seedy Wall Street shills have their own code. The difference is those fat cat crooks will arrive in suits and ties and will leave with your pension.
When the boys in blue finally arrived and questioned the whole crew, they went with a story about bullets falling through roofs, which is true. In places like LA, Albuquerque and Oakland, soiled gangsters with guns will fire into the night sky on the Fourth of July, and what goes up must come down. Astonishingly, their plan worked.
The next day, Jeremiah decided to give up the tough-guy scene.
Part of that change was to leave New Mexico and head for Los Angeles, which he did as soon as he graduated from Albuquerque High. But his old life followed him like shit on his shoe. While in the City of Angels, considering college, Jeremiah was getting daily phone calls—threats—though, from whom he couldn’t tell you to this day. “Get in line,” he would tell whichever caller said they were coming after him.
Now, many years later, Jeremiah is a husband and a father of two, a celebrated actor, and even the owner of his own company, Bitco (the name is a combination of his last name and the word “corporation”), which works to clean up uranium-mine waste on the Navajo Nation. There are hundreds of these nasty, cancer-causing cluster bombs on and near the Navajo Nation due to back-in-the-day uranium mining. Many of the sites were abandoned long ago, with no attempt at remediation, leaving the people square in the path of a putrid pestilence.
Jeremiah’s grandmother, who never smoked a day in her life, died from lung cancer caused by what’s known as “downwinder syndrome”—when a person is exposed to carcinogens and radiation due to industrial environmental contamination. When I ask Jeremiah about the cleanup efforts, he says, “Thank God it’s happening now.” He hopes his company will go national some day. “It’s a real experience that we [Navajos] can relate to.”
Meanwhile, as Jeremiah’s company competes against white-owned companies to clean up the many messes white men made, drill-baby-drill politicians—those who admit it and those who don’t—continue to prowl these Indigenous, ancestral lands like a chubacabra, eager to sink and stain their fangs with the blood of soil, then skulk back into a pile of excuses and bullshit.
***
Most recently, Jeremiah starred as Hoski in Dark Winds, which George RR Martin and Robert Redford helmed as executive producers.
Back in June, there was a red-carpet premiere at the Violet Crown in Santa Fe. Jeremiah was on the road that night and couldn’t make it, so he asked if I wanted to attend. “Why not?” I thought. It’s a Native gig, so maybe they’ll have some of that good ol’ Diné frybread. “If nothing else,” I tell Rae, “it’ll at least give me a reason to pull out my ‘I Stand With Standing Rock’ shirt.”
courtesy of amc
When Rae and I arrive, the place is riddled with Native glitterati donning wide-brimmed, beaded hats, bolo ties and dark sunglasses. A bevy of white folks, drenched in turquoise, clutch that one free glass of chilled chardonnay. Wes Studi, the Cherokee actor and film producer, stands at the back and nods as someone gabs at him between bites of finger food.
Two drinks and about a dozen “hi-how-are-yas” later, Rae and I are ready to bail, but the entrance is blocked by George RR Martin’s hat, beard and hips. It was the only way in and the only way out, unless we wanted to barrel right through either the man himself or the emergency exits behind us. He’s deep into a conversation when I say, “Excuse me...George? Pardon.”
The fellow word nerd either doesn’t hear me or thinks I was a mad Game of Thrones fan vying for an autograph. “George, excuse me,” I say with a bit more gusto.
Nothing.
“George!” I finally bellowed. He turns and looks square at me with a bit of concern. “Just trying to leave, pal,” I say. He politely moves aside at about the time the rest of the Dark Winds cast floods out of a massive black SUV, each of them dressed to the nines in that beautiful, beaded Native way.
Rae and I repair to Boxcar, down the street, where we are wolfing down wings and a plate of bang-bang shrimp when I get a text from Jeremiah. “How was it?” he asks. “I should’ve bought a bolo tie,” I respond, later adding color to the story and telling him Rae had to tackle Martin to the ground because he said he wasn’t going to let anyone leave until everyone admitted in writing that Game of Thrones is better than The Lord of the Rings.
Courtesy of AMC
***
Back at Ex Novo, still sitting under the hose misting away, I ask Jeremiah: “Alright, what’s next now that both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are done?”
“There’s a movie I shot right in between filming Saul and Dark Winds,” he says. “It’s called Frybread Face and Me, directed by the Diné director, Billy Luther. This time, I play a very light-hearted character.”
He adds that for the past decade or so, he’s learned from the “best in the business,” Vince Gilligan, for example, the creator of Bad and co-creator of Saul. So, now, Jeremiah has taken on new roles: director, producer and writer. He’s got a few irons in the fire, but, sadly, he says, he can’t talk about toast while it’s still bread.
So, stay tuned.
We sit at the back of the brewery for at least 30 minutes talking movies, Indian Country and the mysteries of Roswell and little green men with a penchant for probing before none of us can take it anymore. The heat is too much. It beats us like a gong.
The pink man with the wild eyes has all but evaporated, I think to myself, and the dancing girls have spun off somewhere into the ether. The taproom is lively and getting more and more loaded by the hour.
Adria Malcolm
As we get up to leave and say our goodbyes in that “good ol’ Indian way,” a tall 20-something quickly steps out of the taproom and gingerly approaches Jeremiah, tapping him on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, but I had to ask...did you play Victor in Breaking Bad?” Jeremiah, ever patient and approachable, smiles and says, “Yep. That’s me.”
The blond boy, probably one of the whispering ones from earlier, immediately begins to fawn over Jeremiah and tells him how much he loved the show and his work. Behind that guy is a filled-to-the-brim taproom with folks nodding at each other in that “See, I told you so!” way while others shoot excited waves toward Jeremiah.
Indeed, in a world where the famous can be dicks, and where some shun fans like pricks, Jeremiah is a flip of a warm pillow to the cool side. He doesn’t let his celebrity go to his head; he’s had too many humbling experiences in his life and patience is in his blood.
“Our culture is to listen,” he says. “As a father, I’ve learned that one of the best things you can do is be present.” Jeremiah thanks the fan once again, waves back at the room, then leaves to go be present.
