Four Paragraphs Referencing Wyoming Boulevard

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Here are some things about Albuquerque you might like to know.

There was a thing called the Wyoming Mall. It was indoors y todo and had a fancy movie theater in the middle. The film house was decorated in blue and various shades of grey. This was in direct contrast to other suburban cinema hideaways in the city. The other movie theaters in town were for the most part red and gold colored on the inside. All of them showed the latest in popular celluloid fantasies but the ushers at the Wyoming Mall Cinema had to wear bowties.

A small record shop stood beside the theater and a store called Yanamoto's next to that. At the former a man in thick-lensed glasses went on and on about The Animals and The Yardbirds. He made most of his money selling rolling papers and small stone pipes from Mexico that resembled carved onyx chess pieces. At the latter outlet, rare Asian imports were craftily combined with a vision of post-war SoCal, at once confusing and robust. It was possible to get lost in the kimono aisle; the smell of tiki lamps blazing away during daylight could be intoxicating.

If you walked past the hobby business and it smelled like model airplane cement, that was okay. The sign in the window said they only sold the junk with the purchase of a complete kit, something along the lines of the Queen Mary. Or a tricked-out '55 Chevy Belair, a P-38 Lightning, or a 1/32 scale, assemble-it-yourself diorama of Washington crossing the Delaware. Each boxed project cost about 20 clams, way steep for casual users. Mostly it was pretty square like that, except for the shortwave radio display. A dude with a flattop and shop glasses (like the ones what are considered hep by kids these days) would yell at anyone who tried to tune in Moscow or Havana.

The cafeteria was decent but lacked the dusky theatrics of the big dark Italian restaurant on the periphery of this lost world. Over there were 42 varieties of sauce, possibilities of sausage, pasta shaped like smooth orifices into another world. Primitive video games and mechanical fortune tellers beeped and clunked while Neapolitan art songs were piped through crackly speakers. It was moody, mostly lit by candles and colored lights. The tablecloths were the checkered kind. Sitting down at a table for bread and antipasto meant forgetting whether it was dark outside or light.

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A Gift for My Friends, at Thanksgiving: Future social experiments—Burque-style, yo

By Rudolfo Carrillo

If you want to see what a true West ghost town really looks like and ain't got the time to traipse up to Cabezon or Waldo, then try driving through Burque on Thanksgiving Day. That chore'll be easy enough; I wrote up some sort of experientially based yet mythically labyrinthine suggestions to help get you started next year.

Drop the clutch into second because you can drive around as slow as you please. Everyone else is inside eating. If you got a mechanical sunroof, call joyfully upon its pulleys of retraction, so as to allow the golden light of autumn pour into your vehicle. The sun is made from something beautiful.

No one will notice if you turn up the radio because the damn thing happens to be playing an obscure segment of the rocanrol album you dreamt of thirty-two years prior to the excursion suggested herein. If your vehicle happens to possess a graphic equalizer, make sure to set the controls toward an emphasis on those frequencies regarded as treble. Those are generally happy sounds.

Most of the trees have lost their leaves. Now they rustle around your head and on the sidewalks as you soar down Ridgecrest Drive, where folks are not even walking their dogs today on account of all the food to be et. Pinewood smoke is coming out of some of the chimneys, tangy and comfortingly aromatic. You ought to breathe some of that sentimental stuff in sometimes, I reckon.

That autumnal leaf rattling I alluded to works just fine in combination with hearing Down in the Park piping out of some good old Jensen coaxials, you might be apt to think, as you brush a big bronze mulberry remnant away from the windshield; you know it is dead anyway and are sorta hopeful that later on it will be gloriously and miraculously replaced by another just like it, but green and alive instead.

Before long, all that arcadian luxury gives way to storage depots of varying sizes. If you are so inclined, you might want to spend some quality time discussing the falling price of petroleum products with the attendant at the gasoline station. She's had a long day and the fumes are giving her a headache that only your mournful eyes can change into music.

It is always a good day to buy frozen things. They have key lime pie and goat cheese with spinach pizza at the main multi-purpose product storage warehouse. You don't have to stand in the queue forever, either.  It is as slow as it ever will be there, tonight, with Christmas music, slowly ripening bananas and the anxious, glittery dust of tomorrow's antithesis swirling around the heads and ankles of all the clerks.

Besides such victuals, I ended up with some dark as night utility pants plus a new blanket, colored to look like a zebra and guaranteed to keep out the cold. On the way back to mi chante, a big old crow swooped past us, making noises like an analog clock and showing off his silky wings. Later on we had snacks and were thankful for life and memory, for quantum entanglement.

In re-creating this scenario at your leisure and with individually defined, discrete and inventive variations, perhaps you'll find something meaningful, too—or at least a gray like rain clouds and hoary owl will hoot at you as you spin through our village at dusk in your Toyota Prius or something like that.

If you do see any local birds while attempting to recreate this magical holiday ritual, make sure you record the configuration of their wings as they relate to adobe walls or red chile ristras dusted with the new snow of the postmodern age. Send these observations to TiL as comments—broadcast them toward your favorite star as we pass into winter.

Otherwise, the outcome—poetically undescribed here and transmitted from a small light bulb-lit room on the broad and rolling plain between the river and the mountain—is contingent upon your ability to engage the naturally languorous and verbose time travel made possible by a spinning earth. A swirlingly expanding galactic cloud awaits.

Happy holidays.

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