My blogosphere friend Vague recently lamented in her blog how the act of studying literary analysis has sucked her very love of literature dry. Indeed, my memories of studying the rhetorical discourse of multicultural colonialist interpretation was this: literature in general was wrong because it always had a political failure somewhere. Shit, everything has a damn failure somewhere, political and otherwise.
My answer to this dilemma, once I realized that lit theory was a regurgitation of Greek philosophy blended with other philosophical ideas and some really fancy words (and a hearty dash of the new PC way to "think"), was to graduate with my B.A. and then aimlessly drift about the country for four or five years. I was disillusioned. Really disillusioned with the ideas that had once so held my imagination and my critical thinking. So after all that, I tried aviation mechanics school for awhile. That's another story though.
After college, and as I reignited my curiosity for the "real world", I lived in such charming places such as East St. Louis, Il, St. Louis, MO, Granite City, Il, Albuquerque, NM, Corrales, NM and SOMEWHERE along that road, I learned to love literature and writing again. I learned that it was more about the often aberrant nature of things we encounter. And how we make sense, or don't make sense of these things. Sometimes we simply need to distill them. Reorganize things for ourselves so we learn how to live with and grapple with this tangled mess of a life.
While living in New Mexico, it was there that I REALLY started writing again. I was also hanging out at a Zen monestary, working as a gang youth counselor and interning on a flight crew flying canceled checks from Albuquerque to Denver on nightly midnight runs. When I found the time, I would also go skiing and fly fishing. I saw the Chaco Canyon, Ghost Ranch, White Sands, Los Alamos, I was attacked by a coyote on the Navajo reservation, did a stand off with a mountain lion three days into a backpacking trip down the Gila river, and casually shook a coiled rattlesnake off of my bare foot once. A lot of things happened there.
None of them easy to boil down into any kind of thinking Eagleton or Spivak or Derrida or DeMan had ever prepared me for. No, I was more of an electric wire then. Ready to receive its current. And I did my job faithfully. Recklessly even.
Once I was hired as a secretary. I lasted two weeks but was fired because I was incompetent. So I collected my $300 and headed to Juarez, Mexico with my friend. It took a day and a half to make it. Straight driving. You have to understand. I was also grieving. A guy I was seeing, a Cherokee horse trainer who had taken me on moonlit rides by the Rio Grande, had just been stabbed and killed in a barfight a week prior. Some white bikers made a comment to him, he made one back and within seconds he had twenty stab wounds. But that's neither here nor there. It was however, the impetus for the trip. A road trip, in that classic American sense, so I could make sense of things.
So we finally reached El Paso. A dry arid place. Hopelessly, they had attempted strip malls and clean, brass-rail Mexican food joints in the middle of the wild sparseness. We ate at one of these places, then parked the car and walked to the border. Faces peered out at us from behind the wooden slats of the cheap apartments only a hundred yards from the bridge.
We crossed at dusk. The dusty streets crowded with Mexicans and drunk Americans. We bought tequila shots for $0.25 all night in a cantina where the small, sparkling gold-colored glasses drifted around on a slow carousel with miniature horses. There was a dark hole in the ground for the bathroom near the back.
We drank more and more and then finally pushed on. Further into darker streets away from the lights. We had little care for our self-preservation back then. Things had turned hard for both of us. Somewhere else we drank even more. Hands reached out of the darkness to grope us. We ignored this and stumbled on.
It was probably around 4am when we finally made it back to the border. A man had followed us. "Hey, senoritas? Where you going, eh?"
We found the lot where my car was parked, but forgot where the gate was. The guy had now caught up with us, he was starting to paw my friend. Drunkenly, I hoisted myself up and over the chain link fence, she did the same, him grabbing her ass the whole time. On the other side I turned and cursed him in Spanish and he laughed.
We had planned to spend the night in the car, but we didn't. I drove over a treacherous mountain called Mt. Bliss or some other misnomer like that and we slept in the car in what looked to be a strictly trimmed suburb. Around 8am, a white man in his 50's with a crew cut and clutching hedge clippers was pounding on our window and shouting for us to leave. With three hours of sleep I drove to a coffee shop where we drank a pot of caffeine and decided on a shortcut back to Albuquerque.
Between us we had about $100 left. I was especially keen on the shortut as someone I used to know in aircraft mechanics school had a girlfriend who worked at the Carlsbad Carverns. Of course I'd never met her, but I was suddenly seized by the idea, that she would LOVE to meet me. Like a surprise visit. You know, in a place hundreds of miles removed from anywhere in civilization.
So off we went.
And so we drove for a long, long time. Antelope galloped alongside of us. Dead rattlesnakes littered the road. Cacti stood sentinel in strange twisted forms looking like tall, arthritic demons with canes. And it was hot and my car had no AC. So we had the windows down and had to shout to one another to be heard over the music which was playing the same thing over and over and over. I think it was Johnny Cash or something.
About a hundred miles into it, we realized we'd not seen one other car. Not one. And it was the middle of the day. Just the heat wavered sky, cacti, antelope, jackrabbits snakes and sun. And then, out of nowhere, these two people.
I saw them first, having the better eyesight.
The man was wearing a suit. Jacket, shirt, shoes, and a tie; the works. Except the tie was loosened from his throat so the knot fell down across his chest. He still had on his jacket. His face was red. I don't know if it was from the exertion of hiking in the midday heat (it was easily over a hundred that day), or if he had been out there for days and he was sun burned.
The woman wore a business skirt, pumps, nylons and had her hair drawn back into a bun. Her glasses were askew on the bridge of her nose. She also had on a sweater. It was white if I recall. A white sweater with a white blouse and a floral pattern skirt. Then again, memory is a really deceptive thing, isn't it? Perhaps this was only a mirage. Something conjured out of our exhausted wandering down a route that was turning out to be anything other than a shortcut.
I do remember both of them were carrying something. He was carrying a briefcase, she was carrying a satchel or a large purse. Naturally, we slowed our car, prepared to offer them water and (after gaging their mental health, perhaps a ride). But the whole time we approached, and then slowed, they never once looked up. They kept walking and either looking at the split and cracked earth or somewhere out into the heat washed horizon.
I tapped my horn drew alongside them. Nothing. I think more than anything else, this lack of response, even more than the way they were dressed was the thing that was the most unsettling. What were two people doing, hiking a desert road in the middle of the barren wastelands of New Mexico, dressed as if they were going to a business meeting? Yet, they carried no water we could see nor did they want anything to do with us.
We left them there. In our rear view mirror, they slowly receded, never turning around to look at us or wave us back. And in the next hundred miles, we never saw a car on the side of the road, or a road splitting off from the one we were on, or another car traveling in either direction. Just that land and its unforgiving sky.
TO BE CONTINUED..... PART II - ROSWELL
Recent Comments