I am writing to you tonight from another planet. The planet that I am on features, among other amazing and colourful attributes, trees that bear cold cans of Tecate as their fruit.
¿Absolutamente una tentación, eh?
Besides my observation of the absolutely strikingly and beautifully efficient means with which the blossoms progress from small bright metallic orbs into cold and frosty containers of liquid refreshment, there are many reasons why I am fascinated by this current location.
It is, among the other translucent and weightless things, calm and peaceful here. It is dark at night. Polillas covered in the iridescent mourning gowns of a fast life flutter by, seeking out the orbs of light that float just about everywhere. Occasionally, a bat swoops down, upon them.
Es maravilloso estar aquí.
Other notable features include rain that never stops (hence the constant fruition of the noble and fruity cans); grass that grows inward, toward the center of the planet; a feeling of utter surrender and tranquility described by the motions and shapes of the clouds overhead; the smell of electricity and burning in the air.
Interestingly, the telephonic devices used by the inhabitants I have so far encountered are joined by strings, which symbolize some sort of connection that I have not been able to quantify at this point in time. Those strings son significados, I am certain of it.
There is also a large moon covered in hopeful starlight, floating overhead.
There are some drawbacks, however. The wind seeps through the doorways and makes a dour mist in the twilight hours, the government has banned mirrors and all the buildings have been painted white.
¡Ay, como fregas!
When morning comes and while the sky turns the color of the creamsicles the ice cream man on your world, driving down your street (with ersatz calliope blaring) is selling, I will make my way past the remnants of a once great civilization to an ultra-secret location where I may transported back to Albuquerque, New Mexico – a location on the planet earth symbolized roughly by the coordinates 35° 6′ 39″ N, 106° 36′ 36″ W, but actually comprising some 469.5 square kilometers in and around that area.
I like it here, but I am told by reputable and unimpeachable sources that where you are, dear reader, that summer has ineluctably returned, is at its decalescent apex, all sublimity and fleshy flowers.
Let me tell you something about water. I am fascinated by its absence and here in the desert it has been a thing which I have both feared and revered. Its lack of abundance has been a guidepost in my life. A dweller of mesas and arroyos, water represents something that is both formidable and sacred to me.
My family moved to Albuquerque when I was twelve. Before that, we lived on the edge of the Navajo reservation. There was an arid beauty there, expansive and windblown. I remember being driven to small fishing lakes in Navajoland and not being able to believe that so much water could gather in one place.
Sometimes we would wander around those mesas and arroyos, drifting across them, finding waterholes and digging up clay from the ground.
We came into town often, shoppped at Trademart and ate at various restaurants around Gallup. On the weekends, we would drive to Albuquerque, to visit friends and relatives.
When we were young, driving through the town or this state, with my father (who was oddly enough, a sailor) at the helm of a car he himself would later categorize as a boat, my brother and I would hang our heads out the windows and scream in defiance of the water towers we passed. They were monumental and mysterious and spoke to something which was mostly unknown to us way back then: the gathering together of forces we had only seen during the isolated days of late summer thunder storms, that we had only waded through, shin deep, in murky rivulets and ponds. And here was that force, personified and unified, in mighty metal towers.
There are water towers in the desert; this place is ripe with them. The travels we took with him seemed to begin and end with those risen behemoths.
The towers loomed on this horizon and that and I suppose we imagined them to be a type of metallic creature, robots which might careen out of control at any time, drowning us with both malevolent size and liquid contents.
The old man would glance in the rear view mirror and laugh and cuss when he saw one approaching and my mother would turn up the radio.
I grew older and stopped screaming, but water maintained its elusive influence. By the time we finally moved to Burque, I remember standing at the edge of the Rio Grande, staring.
When I asked my father about this utterly strange phenomenon, a river that flowed, he would say that the world was a watery place, that my confusion was contrary to the way of the earth. Water was a precious substance and magical too, he warned.
And so, he also taught us to swim, mostly at pools around town. There was one at the Albuquerque Country Club. There was another at the Mountainside YMCA. Our favorite became a pool called the A-Pool. It was a public pool located near Pennsylvania and Menaul. It was shaped like a gigantic letter A.
To further pique our interest in that activity, he would make us watch the Val De La O show.
The Val De La O was a local tee vee show that was broadcast live on Saturday mornings, from the KOB studios, in the 1960s and 1970s. Besides providing entertaining Spanish music for my then young and beautiful parents to dance to, Val featured certain celebrities as guests. One of his occasional guests was Johnny Weissmuller. Weissmuller had been an Olympic swimmer who had risen to fame portraying Tarzan in the movies. By the time of my childhood, he had retired and sometimes visited Albuquerque.
My father hoped that Tarzan's recollections of his watery exploits would encourage us to become safe and strong swimmers, despite the lack of water all around us.
He was mostly right.
Years later, long after Val and his hilarious sidekick Mario Leyva (he was sort of like Cantinflas, sabes?) had taken their leave of the studios on Coal Avenue, I nearly drowned in the Gila River.
We had been camping with some other undergrads and decided to hike along the east fork. My brother warned me that the spring rains spelled treachery, but I ignored his admonitions. I decided to cross the swollen river.
In transit, I slipped on a rock, fell and was pushed under the torrent. The current was swift. I could not lift myself against it, and became submerged in it. It was surprisingly quiet down there. I began to see pictures of my life being paraded around the backs of my eyelids. When I had just about given up, I saw an image of a water tower rising above a dusty road. On the road, an old Pontiac roared along. And like that tower, which held water, I decided to rise. Like that car which sought out water, I moved, somehow resurgent. I more crawled to shore than swam, though.
My brother was standing there, screaming.
This is what he shouted, loud enough to be heard over the din of the water, which roared like a beast: "who in the fuck do you think you are, Tarzan?"
That night, back in the student ghetto, I dreamt of clay.
That’s not meant to be a revelation. It’s just a fact and I’m really not too worried about it. It’s always been in the background.
I’ve lived here for 36 years, and if I should be worried, please someone, chime in and let me know.
Right now, I’m more worried about my addiction to Piggy's chili-cheese dogs. That could end my life too, but probably in a slower, more agonizing way.
It’s funny (strange, not ha-ha) how the nuclear stuff seems be below the cultural radar in these parts. To be fair, there are strong feelings on both sides of the coin, among those that know about Albuquerque’s nuclear heritage. More often, the topic remains occluded by all the other things that fill up our lives.
It’s as if it were a subtext, visible to only the loftiest of wizards, even though we have a popular Atomic Museum and a good number of our citizens are involved in the nuclear industry.
I know that some of the information needed to understand all of this is out there, as someone once said. It’s intense information though, if not in quantity, then certainly in quality.
Nuclear weapons and most of the infrastructure that dances along, have played an integral part of this city’s development and have shaped the culture here, too.
Here’s what I know and also remember:
• My friend Doug Bedell had a father who worked at Kirtland Air Force Base. He told me that he had been out to Manzano Base, which was hidden behind Four Hills (in the linked to photo the base would be behind the large hill on the left). It was like a city within a city, he said. Very few people stationed there ever left. The area was surrounded by electric fences and patrolled by fellows with machine guns. The airforce closed the base in 1982, as it prepared to open a new, state-of-the-art facility to house the weapons.
• As a teenager growing up in the heights, I frequently dreamt of nuclear weapons. I would also sneak into my father’s home office to read his civil defense manuals. When I asked my mother about the nukes stored at the other end of the mountain, she would laugh and say that she thought we lived far enough away. I'm pretty certain that after questions like that, she would retire to the medicine cabinet for a 5 milligram valium.
• In 1992, the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex (KUMSC) became operational, in part to assist with deactivation and dismantlement activities taking place at Pantex, a nuclear facility near Amarillo, Texas. In part, this has led the facility to becoming one of the largest stockpiles on the planet.
• About five years ago, I stumbled upon a protest in front of the Atomic Museum. Several people, including some acquaintances of mine, were protesting because a Redstone rocket was being displayed in the museum courtyard. I remember thinking how scary it was that human beings used to sit on the top of such devices, trying to reach the stars.
• Next door to mi chante, there is a huge military base, un rancho grande, for the sake of comparison. They are doing research on nuclear weapons over there. They are storing nuclear weapons over there. Folks in high-tech jump suits and special boots work with the bombs everyday. Maybe they have nicknames for their favorite units, I dunno.
Anyway, I hope that everything is going well at that neighbor’s house, that there is ultimately a sense of quiet relaxation and not ticking expectation in those cold to the touch underground tunnels and rooms, where the specially clad people work. I want to eat my chili dogs in peace.
This essay was updated (links and some content) on July 4, 2012.
I grew up in the far northeast heights. I went to a high school that was named for a mythical city which supposedly was made from gold and precious jewels.
That metallic school, which was as heavy and hard to hold as any precious metal you can imagine, was populated with a diverse group of students. A fair amount of them were unconventional and untamed, eccentric dreamers and idealists. Thhy were young humans who could easily visualize, one supposes, the gilded future that awaited them. Whether that gold took the form of ingots or ideas, this tendency would serve them well for the most part, later on in life.
Some of the faculty was similarly quirky and exceptional. James Murdoch, the history teacher, wore a flat top and dressed in woolen suits during the winter. He had taught at the same school for years and years, though he had Ivy League cred.
When he was my instructor, he was near retirement, but still outspoken and exacting. Murdoch was a serious fellow, alright: required reading for his class included selections from Marcus Aurelius, Candideand Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. He gave long and passionate lectures on the subject of European history. He weaved Tuchman’s narrative into his inherently structuralist analysis and admonished those students - especially those could not readily draw a parallel between their experience and that of Cunegonde’s suitor - with impossibly intricate questions, as he walked up and down the aisles of desks.
The desks were filled with freaky and geeky kids, and he called upon his students respectfully, by their last names. The latter bit is a habit which I took up with due and appropriate solemnity in my second act, as a college lecturer.
Anyway, when Murdoch discovered that I had enlisted a few of my trusted peers to attend a meeting of the Young Socialists Alliance at UNM, had also and nefariously been seen at the local communist bookstore near Central and Maple, the name of which I cannot remember (probably from embarrassment or disappointment, the place was dark and shabby, in recollection), he asked to have a word with me, after class.
At first he spoke in technical terms, testing my knowledge of the nomenclature and theory, saying things such as, “a socialist, eh?" and "Fabian or revolutionary, Mr. Carrillo, Fabian or revolutionary?"
I told him that I was merely curious, while trying to hide the Lenin pin that until very, very recently had been adorning my shabby black cashmere overcoat.
Murdoch suddenly stopped stopped his inquisitive discourse and walked to the door, which faced towards the east, towards Tramway Boulevard. He opened it and said measuredly, with only a hint of awe in his voice, “So this is what you believe in...all this material, material that you believe to be the basis for everything, and ultimately the only thing perceivable in a measurable universe...you’re a materialist, eh?”
Then he sat and his desk and was quiet. An early springtime gust blew through the door and there were kids outside laughing and joking as they passed by and I could hear them.
Finally, after adjusting his tie and coughing loudly, he told me that it would be easy enough to hold fast to the tenets of Marx and his followers, as a young man. As I grew older, he said, I would surely come to reject them. This would happen he further stated, as surely as any atheist would invoke god, even if only reflexively, when confronted with the imminence of death.
Of course I tried not to listen to what he had to say, about the intricacy of human life and perception and experience and all of that. I tried to act aloof and disinterested, but what the old man said crept up on me, and got me to thinking about the unfathomable wonder of the universe, something I had to admit Marx neglected to talk about in his writings.
After our meeting ended, I decided to ditch school for the rest of the day. I enlisted two comrades and we split. We spent the rest of the day hiking up Embudito canyon. The mountain was snowy and there were deer and birds here and there and the wind was howling near the top. Again, I thought about what Murdoch said, what the man had rather implied, when he had opened up the door and pointed to the mountains.
Ten years later, I happened to pass through the Furr’s supermarket on Carlisle and Constitution. At that time, I had just taken leave of a post at UNM, in order to travel the world with my dear friend Kirsty, a British exchange student I met the previous year. I was at that Furr’s taking one last look at bountiful plenty, before plunging into the chaotic and impoverished world that lay beyond all the material and comfort to which I had become accustomed. I encountered James Murdoch in the dairy section.
Of course he immediately recognized me, and looking over his little round glasses intoned gravely, “Ah, Mr. Carrillo! One wonders, are you still a socialist, a materialist...perhaps also leaning heavily on Hegel’s dialectic and it's consequent assumptions?"
“Not so much, I said, but am of that influence. It's quite complicated, you know. I went hiking that day you lectured me and thought a lot about what you said. I am still thinking about it."
He was much older then, so I helped him load his groceries into his car. I shook his hand and he gave me a solid pat on the back. He drove off with one of Bach's fugues playing way too loudly on his car stereo, a weathered Mcgovern bumpersticker fluttering on the rear fender of his ramshackle Volvo.
Albuquerque 1991: a location on the space-time continuum now blowing around my memory like the Siberian Elm seeds lately clogging up the curbs and culverts of this city. It was an odd year, wasn’t it?
For me, it really was an odd year, even more so in the metaphorical sense than in the mathematical one; a year of radical changes, awesome events, and bright light.
That year led to summer and that summer led to an unfurling that comprises a now that is constantly peeling and peeling, revealing layers that are thin as an onion skin and as complex as any living and cellular structure you can imagine.
In that thin year, I lived north the university and it so happened that the weather did not get really cold until the end of January. There were patches of ice on the sidewalks near my house and near the apartment of my friend, Kenneth W. Seward.
Seward was a lighting designer whom I worked with at the University of New Mexico. I had recently graduated from Art School and worked at Keller Hall, in the department of Music. Seward studied in the Theatre department and held a part-time job at the concert hall. We had become good friends, collaborating on multi-media projects, discussing literature and music, generally encouraging each others reading and art-making.
Listen: Back then, Ken was dying of a brain tumor. At the end of the previous summer, he had come into my office and complained of numbness in his hands, a dark circumstance for a manipulator of lights and electricity. In my concern, I suggested he go to the student health center. One thing then led to another. By mid autumn, he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a deadly type of cancer.
By January he had lost the ability to walk and manipulate tools and therefore, to work. His parents were in California. He had become estranged from them because he was gay. He had loads of friends in Burque though, and everyone pitched in to help him. We all took turns keeping him company, taking him to UNMH, and finally, feeding and bathing him. When his parents finally arrived to make peace in February, I resignedly noted that his father looked more like Ken than Ken did. Kenneth W. Seward died in early March and they had a glorious memorial service for him in Rodey Theater. I kept a picture of him on the crew bulletin board at Keller Hall. In the picture he looked young and full of life, holding a crescent wrench in his hand, smiling up towards the bright lights that beckoned him.
Soon after Ken died, I broke up with my long-time girlfriend. She was a classical musician and played the clarinet. I'd like to believe that we drifted apart during Seward’s illness, but the truth was much simpler and profoundly more tragic. I was hip; she was square.
Spring came, anyway; it was warm again and the grass was green at the duck pond. I kept busy by painting large, abstract, confusing, loathsomely bright pictures and managing the concert hall.
Sometime in April or May, the news went around the Fine Arts Center that the Dalai Lama was going to be visiting the university and would be speaking at Popejoy Hall.
I knew little about the man. The organization Friends of Tibet had occasionally visited the college, had brought around a group of touring monks to entertain and perplex the patrons of art and music who haunted the foyer, mostly on the weekends. These followers of the lama performed traditional dances and chants and were magically entrancing to those who had the privilege of attending.
Coincidentally, my room-mate, David Sonenfield, a graduate student in Art History, was a devout Buddhist and filled me in on the concepts and events which related to Tibetan Buddhism and the consequent preeminence of the fourteenth Dalai Lama.
Somehow, through a bit of unexplainable synchronicity, it came to pass that the Dalai Lama and his entourage needed a place to camp out before his speaking engagement. These were in the days before UNM renovated the Fine Arts Center and much of it was a rambling old place. That included the Popejoy Hall green room, which was mostly a place where the technical crew hung out.
Owing to the fact that Keller hall was a genteel venue where chamber music was performed, its green room was chosen as a headquarters for the visitors. The Keller Hall Green Room was clean, quiet, well-furnished and looked out onto a small garden.
I remember when I informed my boss, the Chairman of the Department of Music ( a man with a doctorate of music, for crying out loud) of this decision, he was not exactly sure who the Dalai Lama was. Further, he seemed agitated and offended, in the most parochial tone he could muster, that a non-musician of unknown reputation would have access to all the glorious accouterments offered by the department.
“Well he did win the Nobel Prize", I said to that former band director from Portales New Mexico, with a vacant smile and a wink. And so began to make my preparations.
When the day arrived, the Dalai Lama was driven to the loading dock in back of UNM art museum, in a limousine. He was accompanied by advisers, a meteorologist with magical abilities, members of Friends of Tibet, and a small press corps. Though he had recently won the aforementioned notice of the Nobel Committee , he was not nearly as famous as he is now; the issues surrounding Tibet had just begun to creep into the public’s consciousness.
He was immediately whisked to the Keller Hall green room, where different dignitaries, including the President of the University, came and went, presenting him with fresh fruit and prayer shawls. The chairman of the Music Department sat in his office and glowered and grimaced. He left early that day, to hit the links one supposes.
Sometime later in the afternoon, I noticed that there was an empty space on the couch next to the lama, so I went over and sat down next to him.
He looked me over and said, “You are brave! Then he put his arm around me, said something in Tibetan to the monk sitting next to him and continued, “Don’t worry, he said, everything will be fine”. He laughed a deep and happy laugh, looked me in the eye and hugged me tightly, as a father might a favorite son.
Then motioned to one of his advisors and the two got up from their seats. The lama needed some time alone, to eat and meditate, the advisor told everyone in the room. The Dalai Lama waved at me, then retired to the downstairs lounge in Keller Hall. Later I was asked by one of his aides to join his procession over to Popejoy Hall. I didn’t have another opportunity to speak to him, though. He and his followers left soon after the event was over.
The rest of that spring and then the summer seemed to zip right on by that year. The old chairman retired. I finished a decent painting and then welded together a sculpture that held a bit of Ken’s ashes inside of it. In June, I got a tattoo from the legendary J.B. Jones. In August, David and I decided to rent out a room in the house we shared.
The ad we placed in the Daily Lobo was answered by a group of exchange students from Britain. They were named Rachel, Jo and Kirsty. They were beautiful and full of life and wonder. Two of them would end up living in the house. The third, a mystic wanderer from Wales, would, in the years to come, share a journey with me to the place where Nepal borders Tibet, to a river that climbed up a long valley into the kingdom of Mustang, the place where the lamas dwelt and walked among the buckwheat and dusty trails, in search of light.
My father was famous for cussing. He learned some of it in the Navy while diving for dead sailors and some of it later; writing outrageous memos for commissioned officers. This after the stress of pulling his cohorts out of ditched F4U-1As and subs with holes in their sides resulted in a coveted transfer stateside to beautiful San Diego.
Though he honed his craft while simultaneously participating in a team that unashamedly and with great violence forced a very brutal form of fascism back into its very own iron box, he had already learned quite a bit of cussing from his father, a pecan farmer named Albino Carrillo.
Albino cussed in the Spanish vernacular peculiar to the farmers of the mid and lower Rio Grande Valley. He cussed quite a bit, on occasion darkly singing his sometimes poetic damnations. He would cuss in order to express just about anything, but favored admonitions arisen from the frustrations borne of a leaky irrigation system or the joy of realizing a bumper crop.
My father heard it all and had whispered the same words among his friends. So, he too ultimately become bold in his usage, passing with severe pomposity, that seething passion and those damned words to his sons.
When translated, some the phrases seemed wildly obscene; some were more humorous than anything else.
One phrase, used to express extreme frustration, translated as, “How you fuck (with) my soul!” A lesser degree of ire could be expressed by comparing the object of frustration with the agitating action of an electric washing machine.
In fact, cuss-word laden references to machines had often signified the tenuous nature of the real lives of farmers and workers en el valle; and the phrase “a la máquina” reflected a general distrust towards machines and technology, which were typically, resignedly viewed as destined to fail at some unforeseeable point in the future.
My father used these loaded pistols to make his way through life, which he viewed as a struggle. Those words were weapons in his struggle; he half whispered the word chingao and smirked defiantly when informed that he had colon cancer.
Back in the Navy, he had added to stockpile, for full measure and towards his joy of variety in phraseology. Among my favorites: when he was particularly happy about something, the old sailor would say “I’ll be good and god-damned”. The cadence of this utterance became staccato when my father felt true and unrestrained joy, if something had gone inexplicably right in his world, like when his half-assed and duct-taped flashlight actually worked during a power outage.
Often, when he was really excited, he would mix English and Spanish together, creating original and sometimes highly vulgar exclamations. “Get your nalgas over here”, he would yell at the kids, summoning us to account for serious infractions, such as spending the day up in Embudito canyon instead if going to class.
Despite his salty leanings, he was an educated man who served in the legislature, read Foreign Affairs and liked to listen to Ravel and the Beatles. Late in his life, he would often drop by at my house and we would ride around in his Pontiac Firebird. We would listen to music and discuss politics. He preferred to refer to refer to republican politicians and union busters as a babosos and pendejos.
One day he came by on a Sunday morning and asked me to drive up to Sandia Peak with him, to admire the beauty of the summertime in the coolness of the nearby mountains. His lab results from the colonoscopy were setting on the passenger seat, so I read them on the way up the mountain.
He played Bolero and then Magical Mystery Tour as the car wound and wound upwards. When we arrived at the summit, the song Your Mother Should Know began to play. And I noticed that he was crying. He leaned on the steering wheel, looked over the mountain and as we turned into the parking lot near the Crest Trail he said, to no one in particular while grasping the universe with his thick voice, “Sonofabitch, life is beautiful”.
I moved to Albuquerque thirty-three years ago -- just in time to start the seventh grade at Eisenhower Middle School, just in time to enjoy the state fair. Back then, Eisenhower was in the middle of nowhere and the state fair was a lot more rustic than it is these days. Cows wandered through both of those environments and long-haired newcomers did too.
South of the school a large ranch dominated the landscape. The ranch house had pillars out front, just like a Greek temple. Whomever owned that faux plantation grazed at least fifty head of cattle in the general vicinity. West of that was my new home, which sat in the midst of some sort of ersatz garden.
Some of the other people who settled there had planted a wide variety of non-native trees, and as fall approached, the place was florid, even humid from the use of hundreds of automatic sprinkler systems that fed the false oasis.
The effect of this was ultimately unsettling, but only after a few years. At first, it was kinda cool, glancing back toward the new green suburb, watching water rush down the curbs while plodding through rocky paths, past abandoned cars; surrounded by an ancient and adjacent world that was not quite so familiar with water and its ability to provide succor.
One side of the arroyo was filled with sage and succulents and loose and dusty sand contained them, fragilely. When the hot wind came up as it did at the end of summer, it blew billions of tiny rocks onto the houses and covered some of the cars in a fine brown crystalline mess.
Someone had planted a willow on the other side and Kentucky blue grass, too. All of the houses had front yards like that. As a gloriously impossible grouping out there in the bright and distorting heat, they seemed to float a few inches above the seemingly barren and misunderstood desert that was their intimate neighbor.
The pavement on Eubank stopped at Montgomery Boulevard, but resumed and had been freshly leveled and painted at Spain Street. The large swath of desert along that street and between Eubank and Tramway had not been tamed, except for a small outcropping of custom homes on the north side of the ditch.
The roads leading there were meticulously maintained by them that used those oily paths and I was always pleased that there was such a well defined route back to civilization.
The Sandias loomed and there were no clouds, but lots of dust.
ii.
The subdivision itself was subdivided. A long concrete alley split it right down the center from east to west. One side was filled with homes whose character varied from modest to grandiose; within that spectrum, each home seemed surgically clean and tidy. Here was where the doctor lived, there the scientist, and here was a military family and so on and so forth. All of these factors contributed to the unsettling effect previously described. The streets had names like Van Christopher Drive and Rawlings Road.
On the other side of the alley, people worked on the cars in their driveways and blasted Detroit Rock City from stereos in living rooms that were entered through portals that seemed perpetually open because of things like a broken swamp cooler or big dogs that were at liberty to come and go, menacingly. Here's an example of a street name from there: Zambra Place.
The appearance of these new worlds (described poetically above and present to some extent, in much of my writing) in the lives of two familiar wanderers, sparked an experiential flame; it was only natural that my brother and I began exploring the vast eastern mesa. Occasionally, we crossed over to the part of our neighborhood that we had curiously concluded was a close and constant contradiction, too.
iii.
We caught lizards and then let them go. We zipped past the cows and up towards the mountainy forest, on dirt bikes that were often, but always temporarily, taken away because they caused us to bleed with abandon on a regular basis. Activities that ran up both the laundry and hospital bills were not things my parents were willing to tacitly tolerate and just added to the sense of confusion and irony that pervaded our little house in the fake forest.
So, anyway, we started wandering around the neighborhood, instead of zooming about with gasoline-powered abandon. And met a group of kids (on the other side of the alley, where else) that listened to Kiss and were not interested in school. They pretended to like us, but I knew something was not as it should be. They were never on campus and I don't remember meeting any of their parents. In retrospect, I suspect they had been constantly abused and chemically altered, with consequent negative results. When my brother started hanging out with one of their girlfriends, things quickly devolved.
One day all that stuff rose up kinda like the summer monsoon that would follow. Those skeletal freaks plotted and lured us out to a remote earthen dam with promises of a wild party. But, when we got there, the harbingers of chaos from the other side of the alley were there and itchin' for a fight. I immediately feared for my twin, whom I supposed to be as fragile as the desert itself.
After a sucker punch sent me sprawling to the ground, I grabbed my glasses and frantically looked to where my brother had been standing. He was busy taking on the freaky mob without my help. He had gained an advantage and was successfully lobbing rocks at them from the top of the dam. His nose was bleeding -- but he was laughing -- and blood stained his overalls. Scant seconds later, the attackers roared off on their dirt bikes.
They did not mess with us again and, by tenth grade, all but one had disappeared. When we returned to the mystically constructed and artificially sustained garden that day, my father noticed my brother's bloody clothes. He muttered something under his breath that was meant to convey his intent to take the motorcycles away once and for all.
Here is what he said, as bit his tongue, as was his custom: “Como fregas! Ya, no mas... you two try my soul.”
The next day, he sold the bikes to some guy from the South Valley; we did not cross the alley after that, but began to wander the desert again, this time with small rocks and arrows packed with the sack lunch tortillas that sustained our journey.
