State Fair, Part 49

by Rudolfo Carrillo

Imagine for a second it is the future and you leave the Earth behind. Your spaceship is well-equipped though, and it is easy enough to make contact with your handlers back at the watermelon ranch.

Maybe one day, when you've started to lose track of the distance between Lomas Boulevard and Jupiter's inner moons, when the days melt into one long dream of calabacitas, you decide to give headquarters a bell. You ask them if it has been raining lately. When the words, "yes, a lot" crackle and hiss through your specially designed bio-engineered headset, you reply, your sense of time and space kindly reconnected. And you say to the folks in Burque, who are just about a billion miles away by now, "Have you all been to the State Fair yet?"

That is a supposed vision of the future, just to sorta float around the idea of ubiquity, sabes? Besides being the preeminent event in this town three-hundred years from now, it is a well-known fact that the fair is a culturally weighty aspect of our beloved military outpost in the desert. Among citizens, visitors and wanderers, it remains a source of many highlarious and culturally relevant anecdotes.

With that in mind, here are some vignettes, highlighting over forty years of engagement with the gaudy and sublime moving object that rises up yearly from semi-trailers, champion vegetables and twangy guitars echoing in the rodeo hall.


i.

The old man would set aside three days to see the fair. It was good as hell to get away from Gallup. We would stop at the Dairy Queen in Grants for lunch. In nineteen-seventy-five we crested Nine Mile Hill while Kung Fu Fighting played on the radio.

We had a room at the Hilton and drove over to the Fairgrounds in the morning. The other Rudolfo liked to park the car under a big mulberry tree behind the Wine Cellar, which was a bar in Fair Plaza. He said it was a special parking place that belonged to his mysterious business partner. He called this man Sabu. That wasn't his real name and he wasn't from around these parts.

I ended up eating way too much fry bread to compensate for the anxiety such knowledge brought. I refused to get on the tilt-a-whirl with my brother and sister because I felt weird. But I was okay with all of that. Later on, I met a gal named Lisa at the hotel swimming pool. We shared a cigarette and she told me all about California. Her mother had an Arabian horse.

ii.

Some friends of mine at art school thought it would be really ginchy to enter some of their work in the fine arts competition at the nineteen-eighty-six New Mexico State Fair. They wanted to show off the idea that not all artists in New Mexico were painting pictures of this or that church or elsewise carving eagles and cutthroat trout out of tree trunks.

One fellow, a formidable sculptor by the name of Stanley Olivarez, submitted an intricate, highly crafted kinetic sculpture. The only reason I can't describe his work in more detail is because of Rob Hawkins. Hawkins' submission caused me to forget about any other work of art on display at the fair that year.

Hawkins had been trying to get into grad school and was known for coming up with ideas that were guaranteed to infuriate his professors. So, Rob asked if I would drive over to the fair with him to deliver his piece. We parked under Sabu's tree and Hawkins opened the trunk.

He grabbed a dirty old basketball, the right half of a rotten pair of Converse All-Stars and said, let's go dude. Inside the exhibit hall, Hawkins set the ball on the shoe, filled out the paperwork and winked at the judges on the way out. He won a second place ribbon for that concoction. Olivarez got top honors and sold his work for some decent feria, but I still can't remember what his sculpture looked like.

iii.

They used to have a paint-ball booth on the midway. Some dude dressed up in a gorilla suit would come out of nowhere and folks would shoot at him. I went to the paint-ball booth with Rob Hawkins after he picked up his award, after a camera-jockey from the local newspaper took his picture.

Hawkins looked me over like he was trying to decide whether he could trust me or not. He bought thirty rounds of paint-balls with his award money. Then he let loose on the gorilla suit. He said between clicks that he had been rejected by the MFA program at UNM. After about a minute of that, the dude in the gorilla suit ripped his mask off and told Rob Hawkins he would come over and kick Rob's ass if he kept aiming for the head. Hawkins gave the finger and zapped the dude right between the eyes.

The chase that ensued followed along, past the Asbury Cafe and through Villa Hispana across San Pedro and over to Sabu's secret parking spot and magical mulberry tree. "Kung Fu Fighting" was playing in the background. Rob Hawkins climbed up into the tree and disappeared in flash of postmodern mumbo-jumbo.

His former target wandered back to the midway office, took what pay was coming to him and spent the rest of the day wandering though the fair eating roasted turkey legs and tiny donuts.

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Two Interludes from the Heart of Fringecrest

by Rudolfo Carrillo

The staff of Things in Light, dogs, ghosts and ghosts of dogs included, are listening to the Jefferson Airplane tonight. One of the Carrillos is piping Crown of Creation through a computerized audio output device. We are just getting buried in the first side, in case you want to know, and that activity is a perfect opportunity to test out the new shiny white keyboard on the G4 in the corner. As is our custom, two random observations or incantations follow.

***

I.

The episode of Star Trek available for consumption tonight by Albuquerque residents in possession of a specific brand of satellite reception equipment is an episode called "Errand of Mercy". It's about how the Enterprise was dispatched to a faraway world to prevent further atrocities from being committed by a ruthless, militaristic empire composed of dark men with pointy eyebrows, metallic sashes and murderous methods.

Anyone who's been to an American studies conference knows that teevee shows like that were meant to serve as commentary on the conflict the USA had with a horrible bear-shaped thing called the USSR, back before anyone at all had a computer at home. This was when telephones were big, heavy affairs with cables and dials and a thing called a trunk connected the continents together.

On that faraway segment of the space-time continuum, our nation was at war, not so much with the bear but with the ideas the bear had spread to its neighbors. Instead of having to confront the bear itself, it was widely thought to be adequate to fight his far-flung followers, to make blood sacrifices of them in a country and among a culture that neither the bear nor his American adversary really understood.

Eventually the bear died from an ironic combination of neglect and greed. Meanwhile on this week's iteration of Star Trek, Kirk goes on and on about justice and the price of war and whatnot. As usual, Spock does most of the heavy lifting. Somehow, better angels prevail and war is averted. At story's end though, one of the swarthy enemies of civilization remarks that a war between two superpowers, on a planet and among a culture neither understands, would have been glorious. Pretty locochon, eh?


II.

When I was growing up in Gallup, New Mexico, there were three movie theaters. One of them was a drive-in called the Zuni. The other two were sit-down joints in the middle of town. The two film houses, El Morro and The Chief, were only a half a block apart in the generally enforced reality that bound them to the earth, but they might as well have been separated by a distance comparable to what one would experience flying to the moon on an Orion III space plane. 

I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Zuni. It was the late show and the rest of my family, except my infant sister, was asleep in the old man's Pontiac Executive. I gave her some Similac and she laughed mysteriously near the end of the film, during the Starchild part.

El Morro was dark and wooden with red velvet curtains and a clock that glowed in the dark. One Saturday I watched Soylent Green down in the front row.  I spent the next month terrified whenever I accompanied my mother on her errands. I was convinced that large government bulldozers would appear at any moment to scoop up the hapless patrons of the California supermarket.

That all sounds really bitchin' and nostalgic, but the shitty thing was the Native population of Gallup didn't really get to go to either the Zuni or El Morro. They all went to the Chief. The classism and racism that supported this example of segregation was quiet and efficient, de rigeur. The town soaked in the oil of despair. The Chief was Gallup's symbol of the dire consequences of colonialism.

The Chief was a stormy place. There were no rules under that roof, but ashen clouds over it. The fare was grindhouse (kung fu and violent horror, mostly) and in-between shows hard rock crackled through the sound system. I am pretty sure the Chief closed down the same summer we left for Albuquerque. I don't know what happened after that, but I reckon things got better when some corporation or another built a multi-screen megaplex on the north side of town.

***

Now we are just about finished listening to Crown of Creation. Everyone here at Things in Light agrees side one is where it's at. Especially the opening track, you know, "Lather." It's also been clearly reckoned that, when read aloud, both of the brief narratives included here have a sense of completion about them. Plus which, it rained this afternoon, and we want to walk around in the dark in Fringecrest, listening to the plants and trees rejoicing.

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Doña Trujillo: There’s a place in the desert outside of Hatch

by Albino Carrillo

            There’s a place in the desert outside of Hatch, New Mexico that you knew about.  Wild mallow, sagebrush, lots of cottonwood and pecan growing along the irrigation ditches.  We’d been there when we were both younger.  I probably didn’t even talk to you then.  Seriously.  Your mom had become estranged from the rest of us.  I don’t know why.  Then one day we told her that Ruby Martinez had died in fire—a terrible way to go, out in her mobile home while Mosca was away getting some feed for the goats.  Some said he done it:  after all, 12 years before he had set up an ingenious method of killing her with a booby-trapped door, some wire and a shotgun.  He was stupid enough to try it out and ended up losing a lot of his gut.  Blood everywhere.  She thought he was trying to kill himself.  Can you believe it?   They sent him up to Santa Fe.  Five years for nothing.  When he tried to pretend he was insane, they got a hold of some letters he’d written to his brother. 

             I wanted to take you out here to see the land your grandfather used to farm.  He couldn’t get it right:  every year the field would flood, and we’d be left with rotten melons or drowned alfalfa.  When the well he dug went dry, he started fixing people’s toilets and sinks, sometimes he’d dig a well for someone.  That’s why there’s all the plumbing in the barn now.  He was the only one the neighbor could count on.  There were always the pecan trees and the pigs and goats to get by.  By the time John was born, we’d lived in two different double-wides:  dad finally found a spot that didn’t flood.  We even had a patch of lawn on the shady side under some old hickory trees.  The bugs were always a problem:  their numbers would swell in August with the heat and the vapor rising from the fields cut into the dry, yellow New Mexican desert. 

            I didn’t know if you’d make it out here.  Your mom told me that you and your new girlfriend were driving from Phoenix to get away from the heat.  I know there’s a road that cuts out from Deming through the wild llano:  there was a town halfway between here and Deming … just a bar actually, and a couple gas pumps.  Since the Union Pacific line ran right along that highway, you could stop to see the long trainloads of cotton, pecans, and cattle streaming toward from the border, their hungry crews sometimes stopping the 120-car train with five engines humming like giant bugs right by the road so they could eat a burrito and have a Budweiser before continuing to Radium Springs then north to Albuquerque.  You and me are like brothers and sisters separated in that old way:  you know, your dad was one of 7 kids in his family growing up on that melon farm in Las Cruces.  I’m so glad you made it out here.  We can smoke a joint in the arroyo here, under the bridge.  When you and John were kids, you’d go out there to shoot bottles and bats and even crows who hung out in the telephone wires overhead. 

            Well, my mom asked me to tell you that they think John was high and drunk when he got into it with the cops.  It went like this:  you know, he’d been driving between here and Silver for that job.  Working for the mine is a big deal, you know?  It beats fuckin’ doing nothing here in Hatch—yeah, um there’s the Orquiz warehouse and the highway department picking up dead dogs and towing cars from the interstate—working at the mine at least provided pay, and a change of scenery.

            You’ve gotta know, right away, that the accident itself was crushing … He didn’t have a chance.  Your dad got us the names of some good attorneys in Silver and in Cruces.

            John had been stopped before, for DUI, holding, and even got roughed up in the juzgao a couple times.   It’s just so hard to think he’s gone.  When he’d drive down to Tucson to see me, he seemed like he’d grown up and he was ready to live.  “Hey, I know you,” he’d say, like I was his sister, and not his mom.  There was something in the way he said it that I knew he was angry and incomplete, mostly because of me.  What kind of life did he have in Hatch?  What I remember most is that long drive through nothing between cities:  erosion, sandstorms, maybe one thunderstorm in the summer boiling over Elephant Butte, drenching the valley in one violent amethyst passage from heaven. 

            The last time you came out here your mother was still alive and actually talked to us.   I’d been living in South Dakota with John’s dad.  Remember, ese?  We came down to see you guys when you were only ten or eleven.  Your dad was working in Gallup and your mom wouldn’t talk to me because I had given John up to my mom the way my mom had given up your mom to Nicanora.   But there wasn’t any indifference on my part—see, I loved John and wanted him to be safe in Hatch.  That’s why I brought you out here.  His grave sits alone in the yellow dust day after day. You can see the Deming Mountains from there, and when the sky is really clear, you can see the whole Mesilla Valley folding out along the Rio Grande.

             What I wanted to tell you was about the darkness I found in my heart after John died.  His life never allowed me to see it.  That was the joy of life.  But since I didn’t have much to do with him as a kid, that darkness grew and grew in me.  And in him.  I knew this when he started drinking and drugging.   I knew this when he’d fight with dad and when he’d come back with loaded guns—you know I love my dad and can’t accept what your mom says.  But John hated him.  Even when they were out in the field at the end of the day shutting off the irrigation pumps, even when they were sitting in the kitchen eating the fresh tortillas and beans my mom had cooked.   They say John hated the world and that he was a petty criminal, a drunk, a pothead kid from the fields who was just following through on the path hewn by some guys just like him … His friend Rich had been in and out of jail just like him, and they’d known each other since fifth grade.  So it all added up to shit, mijo:  the fast pick-up trucks, the beer, the long highway drives for no good reason other than to get wasted and go fast on some farm road.  Maybe it was the speed, the acceleration, that freed him up from who he was and who he couldn’t be.  I can see him now flooring the old Ford 150 on the interstate, unaware of the darkness around him, slowly becoming tuned to the darkness inside that beat the hell out of him when he slept, when he dreamt.

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Things in Light Podcast #25: Monkey Business Mix

Things in Light is pleased to present our twenty-fifth podcast, Monkey Business Mix, featuring Nuevo Mexicano recordings — old and new, covers and originals — by Treadmill, Veery, Whiteshell Girl and Turquoise Boy, The Glass Menageries, Fort Hobo, Chinese Love Beads, The Drags, and Luxo Champ. See the full track listing below.

TiL #25: Monkey Business Mix from ϟ▲ϻ▲и✝ђ▲ ▲ииɇ on 8tracks Radio.

1. Treadmill - Shock the Monkey (Peter Gabriel)
2. Veery - Too Late for Love (Def Leppard)
3. Whiteshell Girl and Turquoise Boy - VI
4. The Glass Menageries - River of Secrets
5. Chinese Love Beads - Ballad of a Brown Beret
6. Fort Hobo - Sandman
7. The Drags - Iron Curtain Rock
8. Luxo Champ - Monkeytime!

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