MOUSE, played by Swil Kanim

Born on April 1, 1966, Mouse the Violin Player committed suicide on May 15, 2001. A member of the Spokane Tribe, Mouse's birth name has been lost to history, though a dozen other Spokanes swear his real name is Myron Four-and-a-Half Strings, while a couple of his white high school teachers called him the Indigenous Savant, and seventeen different Indian Health Service doctors over the course of seventeen years called him by a series of nicknames that included That Fat Indian Kid, Hey-You, Pony, Dog Boy, Horse, Old Paint, Red Boy, Little Chief, and The Fiddler on the Rez. Mouse learned to play violin by watching Public Television seventeen hours a day. PBS was the only channel his family could receive on their black-and-white television purchased in 1972 for 15 dollars from a garage sale at the corner of Division and Francis in Spokane, Washington. Mouse's mother and father, whose names cannot be revealed or spoken aloud due to certain unspeakable and unwritten tribal rules (living on a reservation is like living inside an Edith Wharton novel), were killed in a car accident when he was sixteen years old. He is survived by his best friends, Aristotle Joseph and Agnes Roth, and by his long-lost childhood buddy, Seymour Polatkin.